Gone West
Authors: Kathleen Karr
DESTINY’S DREAMERS
BOOK I: GONE WEST
by Kathleen Karr
For Larry, who made
the whole journey
with me.
Nauvoo, Illinois
“I’m kicking you out until morning. Git!”
The man was on the short side, gray-haired and plump, the standard image of a kindly country doctor in his mussed frock coat and frayed shirt. He didn’t look a bit like a devil-following, harem-keeping Mormon.
“Your wife is going to be fine,” was added as an afterthought. “She just has to work at the baby in privacy. Come after breakfast and I’ll hand her back to you, along with a fine youngster.”
Johnny Stuart hesitated in the late afternoon sunlight, running a hand through his curly black hair, feeling the worry pump through his long, lean frame. He badly wanted to stay~to hold Meg’s hand, to comfort her in her time of trial. But there was Jamie to look after, and the horse and wagon, too. He finally turned and walked away from the doctor’s house, into the sun easing down over the Mississippi.
Nauvoo spread around him, its fine houses leading up to a grand church sitting on the highest point of the city~a golden angel on its steeple, sunstones and moonstones decorating its facade like chubby gargoyles. He didn’t take in much of it, though. His heart and mind were back with his laboring wife.
What if something were to go wrong? If something happened to her? No. She was strong. It would take more than the birthing of a first child to stop Margaret McDonald Stuart. She flashed before his eyes, the flaming red hair, the spirit in her eyes. His wife was a fighter. She’d be fine. Still . . .
“Pa?” His six-year-old adopted boy was tugging at him.
“Yes, son?”
“Ma’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
He tried to sound sure, as sure as if it had already been written in a book. Books were definitive. They had all the answers. “Yes, and you’ll soon have a little brother or sister.”
Jamie took his father’s word as gospel. He always did. “Well then, I’m hungry. Didn’t have any dinner today. And it’s past suppertime.”
They went to look for supper, wandering along the street that faced the river. There was a little place there that seemed to be serving food, and it wasn’t a saloon. Mormon’s didn’t seem to go in for them, either. Johnny led the boy in and they had steaming bowls of stew and mugs of chilled milk. He was shifting in his pocket for a few coins in payment when he noticed something through the window. Jamie was watching now, too, the ring of milk around his mouth shaping it into a big `O’ of interest and surprise.
“A mob of men coming, Pa. And they look angry.”
Johnny peered more intently through the pane of glass by their little table. It was a mob. An angry one. Maybe twenty-five, thirty men, armed with muskets, clubs and rocks. They filled the street before them, facing a building opposite with the words “Times and Seasons” neatly painted on a sign. It didn’t appear to be a healthy situation by any stretch of the imagination.
Johnny’s first reaction was to throw coins on the table and grab the boy by the hand. Get him away from this street. Fast. He’d been told Nauvoo wasn’t a good place to be stopping, but when Meg went into labor on their wagon, with the next nearest help too far away, Johnny wasn’t fussy. He’d heard about this Mormon city in their travels. It was in the middle of some kind of war with its neighbors. It had to do with the killing of the Mormon’s `Prophet’ and leader, Joseph Smith, back last summer. The doctor had seemed all right, though. And the rest of the city was quiet and peaceful, not to mention clean. It had to be the cleanest town Johnny’d ever been in: no pigs and garbage in the streets, and the streets themselves laid out in cobbles~not mud~straight as a razor, at right angles to each other. It would’ve been a good place to sell books if he hadn’t Meg and the baby worrying him.
“Pa, I don’t think I want to go out there. They’re shouting now.”
“Hush, Jamie. We’ll sneak behind them. They’ve other matters on their minds besides us.”
They were out of the little eating place, edging into the shadows around the corner of the building, the river spreading out behind them, beneath the bluff. It was a good drop down, maybe fifty feet or more. Johnny pushed Jamie closer to the wooden slats of the wall so there’d be no danger of his falling. He made a quick survey around them. They couldn’t slip behind the building. It was sitting on the very brink of the cliff. Maybe they’d best try to make themselves invisible right here until the ruckus passed over.
“Down behind that bush, Jamie, and leave room for me!”
The shouting increased while they made themselves as small as possible. Figures were jostling at each other, fists and clubs raised in anger. The fighting had spread over the whole street. Johnny put an arm around the boy and hugged him close, feeling his heartbeat speed. Words whose meaning Johnny didn’t understand flew past his ears. Then a rock, thrown askew, grazed his head. Johnny pushed Jamie’s head lower and felt for his own. His hand came away wet with blood. He glanced up in time to dodge another missile, feeling as besieged as a medieval fortress. He had to remind himself that this was Illinois in 1845, not something he’d read from the exploits of King Arthur.
Crashing glass brought him back to reality. That and the men storming the shop across the way. Before Johnny could piece together what was happening the mob was out again, hauling a heavy piece of equipment. The last rays of the setting sun glinted on the object, twinkling from a little brass finial atop it.
“It can’t be,” Johnny whispered.
“What can’t be?”
“
Ssh
. Keep your head
down
. It is. It’s a Ramage Press. They’ve broken into a newspaper office!” Eyes wide, oblivious to the dark stain of blood creeping down his cheek, Johnny watched the heavy wood and iron press being hauled across the street, toward them.
Johnny shrunk closer into the shadows behind the bush, gripping Jamie for total silence. Those men couldn’t be doing what it looked like.
They were.
They were going to toss the press into the river. A press like that was worth upwards of seven hundred dollars. He knew. He’d priced them out. A press like that was the answer to a man’s dreams. His dreams. Dreams of heading farther West. West with his books, and the type for the press he’d already purchased. He’d been scrimping for a year to buy a Ramage press to go along with that type and knew he wouldn’t have the price scraped together for another ten. Not with his family to feed, and a new baby to look after.
With grunts and oaths the heavy mass of finely tooled iron was heaved over the bluff.
Slursh
.
It was swallowed by the accepting Mississippi.
Johnny waited for rough cheers to die down, waited for the mob to disperse. It didn’t. Instead, his ears caught a familiar crinkling sound, and his nose the smell of smoke. They were firing the newspaper building! The smoke thickened around them and Johnny tried to protect the boy from it. Only when the human sounds had ceased did he dare to pull himself from hiding, to move closer to the edge of the drop.
Through the smoke over the river he spied concentric circles vibrating around a few bubbly belches of air. They hadn’t heaved the press too far out. That was good. He marked the spot in his mind~there, with the big boulder nearest it. He already knew what he had to do. Would Dickens, his horse, be strong enough to help? Would Jamie?
Johnny waved smoke from his eyes and swiped at the blood on his face, managing only to spread it over firm cheekbones and along a square-cut chin. He tasted of it and grinned. Like a conquering warrior, like one of his Highland ancestors, he wanted to let out a shattering cry of victory.
Instead, he closed his eyes and prayed for guidance. A weight rose off his shoulders to disappear into the smoke and water. God had truly brought him to this spot for a reason. The
Times and Seasons
office was still smoldering. The newspaper was as good as dead. And Johnny Stuart had the identical salvage rights of any man picking up debris from a sunken steamboat. He opened his eyes with a final prayer that total darkness would quickly fall, bringing the anonymity of night. He gathered Jamie to him in a hug.
With a press like that his waiting would be over. His family could make for Oregon when the last snows melted in the spring. Johnny leaned over the bluff a final time to watch the river’s currents wash out all traces of the press. It was safely hidden beneath the waters. In the morning he’d have his wife, a new baby and a future.
“I’ve made a list of travelling supplies we’ll be needing, Meg.” Johnny raised his head from the scrawled sheet before him at the table.
Maggie smiled as she rocked peacefully in her chair, baby Charlotte at her breast. Johnny alone called her
Meg
. It was an endearment between them since they’d first set eyes on each other ten years back.
“One hundred fifty pounds of flour,” he enumerated. “Fifty pounds of bacon, a keg of prunes, ten pounds of lye soap, a rifle and powder~” he stopped with a worried frown. “That’s just for starters, and doesn’t take into account a wagon and oxen.”
“We made it to Independence before the worst of winter set in, Johnny. The Lord is still looking after us. We’ll manage somehow.”
Johnny glanced around the one-room log cabin they’d just rented for the season on the edge of town. It looked bare with only the board table and benches for decoration, and a big bed, with Jamie already asleep on a little trundle bed pulled out from beneath.
“It’s going to be cold, love. We’ll need cords of wood for the fireplace, and a cradle for Charlie~”
“Stop fussing, Johnny. Charlotte can sleep between us for a while yet. It will keep her warmer. When I get our pots and dishes spread around, this will look as close to a home as we’ve ever had.”
Johnny pulled his elbows from the table and got up to throw a log on the fire. He stood for a moment in its glow, shoving wild curls from his forehead. “And there’ll be books to order from Cincinnati. I’ll have to send a list by steamboat. I never expected to sell as many that last hundred miles~”
Maggie laughed. “I think the baby helped~having her coo and grab at your stock like she did every time you opened the side of the book wagon in front of a farmer. Of course you’ll need more books, Johnny. Imagine going West without books!”
Johnny pulled the hand from his curls and banged it into his other fist. “I’ll have to find a job! There’s money enough for restocking, and maybe even the new wagon and animals, but for the rest . . .”
Maggie bent to kiss Charlotte’s silken red head. “Stop fussing and come to bed, Johnny. This is only our first day on the edge of civilization.”
That it was truly the edge of civilization was born home upon the Stuart family as they made time to explore the town. It seemed like one huge wagon-building establishment. Oxen fattened on grass along the rims of the settlement, and exotic people filled its streets. There were scruffy wilderness men aplenty, but it was not them which caught an easterner’s eye.
“Ma! Pa! Look!”
“What is it, Jamie?”
Jamie pointed. “A real, live Indian! With a blanket and feathers and everything! Walking nice as you please down the street!”
Maggie turned her head toward the proud nomadic face with its sun-darkened skin. Remembering herself, she gently took Jamie’s pointing hand in hers. “It’s not polite to stare or point, just because someone’s a little different from us, son.”
“I’ll say he’s different!”
After that it became easier. Braves and squaws and papooses were all over the place once the noticing began. The tribes camped outside of Independence, surviving by trading animals with the westering emigrants. There were Foxes, with shaved heads and painted faces, and Shawanoes and Delawares. But most of the Indians were of the Kansas tribe. And it was Kansas children that Jamie began bringing home.
It was well into November when Jamie flung open the wooden cabin door, letting in gusts of Missouri winter. Maggie looked up from the cornbread she was pulling from the reflector oven before the fire. His cheeks were rosy, his young body strong. And he was almost twice as tall as when she’d found him more than two years ago~abandoned and half-starved, fighting off street pigs in the winter snow of Cincinnati. She shook away that painful memory.