“Sam says if it’s all right with you, they’ll bury your husband at dawn, before we pull out. And tonight Sam and I will sleep under our wagon.”
Jenna nodded and climbed down from the wagon to do what she must. She’d gone only a few yards when Ruthie danced up. “What’s wrong, Jenna? You look all white and funny.”
She knelt before her stepdaughter and struggled to compose herself. “Ruthie, I want you to find your sisters. I have something important to tell you all.”
* * *
“Dead?” Tess screeched. “What do you mean Papa is dead?”
Eleven-year-old Mary Grace began to sob.
“I mean...” Jenna began. She glimpsed Ruthie’s stricken face and the words froze on her tongue. She swallowed hard and knelt before them.
“Your father has been killed. Accidentally shot by...well, it doesn’t matter who.”
Tess swayed forward and Jenna reached up to support her. Mary Grace wrapped her thin arms around her middle, but Ruthie just stared at her with horrified blue eyes.
“You...” Jenna’s voice broke. “You girls can see him if you wish. He’s laid out in the Lincolns’ wagon.”
“I don’t want to see him,” Mary Grace sobbed.
Jenna folded her into her arms. “You might want to, honey. You will want to have seen him after we leave in the morning.” She pressed her lips shut and walked them over to the wagon, where she stood with them beside their father’s body in the fading light.
“Papa don’t look dead,” Ruthie said after a time.
“Doesn’t,” Tess snapped.
“Well, he do—doesn’t. He looks like he’s sleeping.”
Jenna patted Ruthie’s thin shoulder. “Let’s remember him that way, as if he is just...asleep.”
At her side, Mary Grace jerked. “How come there’s no blood or anything?”
Jenna drew in an unsteady breath. “Well, Mrs. Lincoln said the...the bullet hit his temple, so there wasn’t very much bl—” Her voice choked off. What could she say to them?
“Come on,” Tess said, her voice tight. “Let’s go back to camp.” Without waiting for Jenna, she herded her younger sisters outside and started across the compound.
Dear God in heaven, what should she do? The girls had resented her from the moment she had married their father, and now she was solely responsible for them. By the time they reached Oregon they would hate her.
A cold chill snaked into her belly. And they would hate her baby.
The following morning, Sam Lincoln and four other men dug a grave and laid Mathias to rest. Jenna watched them, her hands curved around Ruthie’s narrow shoulders, while Mary Grace and Tess looked on in stony silence.
Reverend Fredericks read some verses from the Bible, something about there being a time for everything under the sun. Then clods of earth thudded onto the blanket-wrapped corpse of her husband. It was an awful sound, terrible and final. Jenna clamped her jaw shut and pressed her palms over Ruthie’s ears.
Finally the last shovelful of fresh earth was heaped onto the mound and her fellow travelers drifted back to their wagons. Ruthie stepped forward and laid a ragged handful of scarlet Indian paintbrush on her father’s grave. Jenna’s heart lurched as if cracking into two jagged pieces.
“Come, girls,” she managed. “We must pack up our things.”
Ruthie turned her face into Jenna’s blue homespun skirt. “I don’t want to leave Papa here all alone.”
Tess leveled a venomous look at her sister. “Then you’re nothing but a big baby.”
Jenna fought an urge to sharply reprimand the girl, but concentrated on wrapping her hands around Ruthie’s quivering frame. She had never disciplined Mathias’s daughters, and besides, what good would it do now?
“Tess.” She addressed the girl over Ruthie’s blond curls. “That is unkind. Your sister, all of us, are hurting. You know how hard it is to leave your father here.”
Tess bowed her head. “Sorry, Ruthie. You’re not a baby, I guess. Come on, Mary Grace.” The two older girls walked off, leaving Jenna standing by the grave with her youngest stepdaughter.
She stared at the wildflowers, wishing she had thought to gather some as well, but she’d been so busy frying the breakfast bacon and rolling up the bedding inside the wagon there had been no time. And anyway, Mathias would not care. The flowers were really for Ruthie, a way to say goodbye.
Jenna closed her eyes briefly, then turned toward their camp. She felt numb, unreal, as if this were happening to someone else.
Emma Lincoln stopped her. “Jenna, at the meeting this morning, Sam asked the men for a volunteer to drive your wagon. In about half an hour the man will come to hitch up your oxen. If you’d like to be alone for a while I could take the girls in our wagon.”
Jenna studied the woman. What a kind soul the trail master’s wife had been, right from the very beginning. How she wished some of that generosity of spirit would rub off on Tess!
“No, thank you, Emma. I am quite all right.” She wasn’t, really. She dreaded the days ahead, but she could not admit this to anyone. How would she manage without Mathias?
A blade of anger sliced into her belly. Mathias had talked and cajoled and pushed until she finally agreed to join the wagon train and come west. And now here she was, embarked on an unwanted journey she had no choice but to continue; once a wagon train started out across the prairie, there was no way to get off. No way to go back to Ohio.
Another woman, Sophia Zaberskie, thrust a loaf of fresh-baked bread into her hands. “You eat,” she grated in her perpetually hoarse voice. “Keeping belly full makes to heal.”
Jenna pressed Sophia’s meaty arm. Sophia should know; she had lost one child to cholera before the emigrant train was even under way, and another child, a boy, died two weeks later when a wagon wheel rolled over him and crushed his chest. If Sophia could survive, so could she.
She took Ruthie by the hand and walked to their camp. Tess and Mary Grace looked up but did not speak, both keeping their faces resolutely turned away from her while she moved about packing the skillet and the Dutch oven inside the wagon. Tess grumbled at her request to fill two buckets with springwater and dump them into the water barrel strapped to the wagon box; Mary Grace walked listlessly at her sister’s side, kicking at stones.
When the last of their belongings were stowed away, Jenna surveyed the tangle of ropes and harnesses and wood oxen yokes stashed under the wagon and her heart sank as if weighted with lead. She had no idea how to hitch up the team. Mathias might have taught her. Why hadn’t he?
It was hard to accept that he was gone, that he would never again snap at her for forgetting to fold a blanket in his particular way or serving him dumplings with his stew when he preferred biscuits. She knew she had been a disappointment to him; she often felt small, as if she didn’t matter.
Ruthie’s small hand patted her skirt. “Jenna, are you crying?”
“N-no, honey. I’m not crying, just feeling a bit sad.”
“Me, too. Tessie won’t talk to me and Mary Grace is too busy. And I’m scared.”
Jenna went down on her knees before the girl. “I’m a little scared, too. But we will be all right, just you wait and see.”
A shadow fell over her. “Mrs. Borland?”
She