Make Me a City Page 4

  She looks across at Cicely. “Still sleepin’ the sleep of the just?” The sleep of the just is a new expression she has borrowed from Isaac. It is the kind of saying Gray Curls would like too.

  Cicely smiles. She swats away a fly from Juba’s forehead before planting a kiss on his chubby black cheek. The baby stirs but does not wake. One of Eulalie’s hands has dropped to her belly. She takes a deep breath, enough for both of them. There is a scent in the air, coming off the baked earth, that starts her hunger pangs. How she longs for real food, and more of it. Anything but the turnips and potatoes they’ve been eating, day in day out. Tomorrow, she thinks with sudden gaiety, from tomorrow everything will be different.

  She sneaks another look at the path leading back to the Fort and tells herself that looking again will do no good, and may even put a curse on his coming. If he does not arrive soon, they will run out of time. Mrs. Heald wants them back at the Fort as soon as possible. Much still needs to be done in preparation for the journey. Eulalie knows what Mrs. Heald is like. Stay out too long, and she will send someone to look for them.

  Even if Isaac doesn’t come, she tells herself, she should make the most of this time away from the Fort. Tempers in the barracks room, where they are confined, have become more frayed than ever since Captain Heald announced that Fort Dearborn was to be “temporarily vacated.” Tomorrow, the whole garrison, together with those few white settlers who live at Echicagou, are to travel in convoy to Fort Wayne. Everyone is on edge. There have been scareful stories circulating about surprise Potawatomie attacks, about the horrific ways in which they scalp their victims, about what they do … and this is communicated only by the boldest women, and only in frightened whispers … about what they do to those they take captive. Eulalie, as usual, has kept her own counsel. She tries not to show her fear. She tells herself that she, unlike everyone else, has Isaac to protect her.

  She kneels beside Cicely. “He’s having your smile,” she tells her. “I never seen it before. But today it’s clear as a bell.”

  “Thank you, miss.”

  She admires Cicely. Despite her circumstances, she already seems wise and grown up. Even Mrs. Heald talks to her differently, with more courtesy than she usually employs to address a slave. Eulalie wishes she felt wiser and more grown up herself. Sometimes, she fears Isaac might change his mind. One day, perhaps he will see through her, judge her to be like all the others, nothing more than a frivolous, untried young woman.

  “Don’t worry, miss,” says Cicely. “I’m sure that Doctor he gonna come.”

  She feels herself blush. “You think so, Cicely?”

  “As sure as sugar is sweet.”

  That assurance is a comfort. She joins Cicely in gazing at baby Juba as he sleeps and is filled with a feeling of inexpressible wonder at the miracle of a child. It seems incredible and yet it is true, that this same miracle is happening inside her now, that every moment of every day her own babe is taking shape, with new eyes and hands and feet. Such an extraordinary thing, and now the process has begun, nothing can stop it. Even if Isaac cannot come today, what is one lost hour when they have years together stretching ahead of them? She feels a surge of excitement at the prospect of tomorrow’s journey. All will go well, and within the week they will be in Fort Wayne, officially married in the church. As soon as Isaac’s duties allow, they will make the trip to St. Charles. He says there is even a chance he might be posted there. She cannot wait for them to meet, the two most important people in her life, Isaac and Gray Curls.

  “What’re you thinking, miss?”

  “Whether it be a boy or a girl,” she says.

  Cicely reaches across and places her hand beside Eulalie’s, on her belly. Closing her eyes, she begins to chant something in her own tongue. Eulalie feels drowsy. She hears the roll of the river, insects circling, the occasional crack of a twig. The chant rises to a crescendo.

  Cicely opens her eyes. “That one a boy, I reckon. Will you go tell ’im today, miss?”

  “Yes.” She can feel her lip trembling. She touches the necklace at her breast, for luck. The truth is that she cannot wait to tell Isaac about the baby, now that she’s certain. And why not tell him, too, that Cicely is sure he will become the father of a son? She imagines how he might react, with one of his slow, gradual smiles—the best ones always seem to come like that, as though they have traveled from somewhere deep inside him. By the time the smile surfaces, his whole face has been filled by it. His mouth widens, the lines of his teeth show, his eyes narrow and sparkle, dimples appear in the middle of his whiskered cheeks and often too he will begin to chuckle, though he confines that chuckle to the depths of his throat, as if he knows he shouldn’t really be doing that as well, because this is only meant to be a smile, but he simply cannot stop himself. Yes, that is how she hopes he will react to the news, with one of his slow, gradual smiles.

  She looks up and something catches her eye across the river. Their old home is partly visible through the screen of Lombardy poplars. The sight of a man crossing the front porch pains her.

  * * *

  When Eulalie heard that “Uncle” Jean Lalime and his wife wanted her to keep house for them in Echicagou, she had been reluctant to go. Who else would be able to care for her grandfather in his condition? In the end, though, it was Gray Curls himself who persuaded her she should take the opportunity. She had to start living her own life, he said, and not be held back by his. The more he insisted and the more she reflected, the better she came to understand that, despite what had happened in the end, Echicagou still held fond memories for her.

  It was where she grew up, where she had been happy. She could remember everything about that great house: the smoothness of the long corridor beneath her bare, skidding feet; Gray Curls dozing in his rocker on the porch; and the golden shine of the biggest copper kettle she had ever seen. There was the smell of freshly baked bread, the clucking of hens, the cedar-scented soap that got into everything and her grandfather’s kinnikinnick tobacco, sprinkled with “grains of paradise” brought all the way from Africa. With the Lake to the side, and the river in front, the house seemed to float like a magic island at the center of the world. When she reminisced like that, even her cousin Waubansee, she decided, had not been too cruel. And it was only when they left, when they got to St. Charles, that everything went wrong. Pneumonia took her mother; some kind of ague her grandmother. And her father? She hardly saw him. He would disappear for weeks, and come back drunken and irritable.

  The position with Uncle Jean would only be temporary, Gray Curls assured her.

  On her arrival in Echicagou, she discovered that Uncle Jean had moved house, having sold their old residence to Mr. Kinzie, a fact he made Eulalie promise on a Bible never to reveal to her grandfather. After only a few months had passed, Uncle Jean was dead, stabbed eight times in the back by that villain who was now crossing Gray Curls’ front porch. Reports of Indian incursions led to orders that all settlers should move into the Fort, and that was where Eulalie had stayed since the winter, waiting for her father to take her back to St. Charles. But he had never arrived.

  “Miss? You’s all right?” Cicely follows her gaze and shakes her head. “Oh, you mustn’t go thinking of that man no more.” She speaks softly but firmly. “When you the wife of Dr. Isaac, he don’t matter never again, ain’t that right?”

  She agrees that it is right.

  “And don’t let nothing never bring you back to this place. Promise that?”

  She promises Cicely she will never return to Echicagou. That is easy to do. But although she knows there is good sense in what Cicely is saying about Mr. Kinzie, the truth is that she does not think she will ever be able to forget him completely. There are very few things she has not told Cicely, but the full story about Mr. Kinzie is one of them.

  Juba splutters awake and Cicely gathers him in her arms, rocking him back and forth. She begins to sing that song again, “Walkin’ All the Way to Heav’n.” Eulalie closes her eyes and
hums along. The melody lulls her and as a rare breeze fans her cheeks, she forgets about Mr. Kinzie and her childhood in the old house. Instead, she dreams of the future. She and Isaac are seated in the second-floor parlor of the house on Jefferson Street in St. Charles, above Gray Curls’ trading store, carriages passing by in the street below, the walls bright with paintings and the air thick with his pipe smoke. He is telling them one of his stories, about where he’s lived and who he’s known and what he’s done. Like Cicely, she rocks their newborn son in her arms.

  Something makes her open her eyes. A few feet away, dressed in his bright blue silk coatee, stands Isaac. A gun hangs at his shoulder. In one hand he holds a fresh cutting of elk root plant. With the other he reaches forward, to help her to her feet.

  * * *

  He leads the way from the riverbank toward the sandhills. She follows in a happy trance, holding up her damp skirts as she walks. Sometimes, instead of taking a step, she skips. Patches of yellow and blue wildflowers shine as bright as his coatee in the brilliance of the sun. She squints, the light is so strong. Prairie grass, tall and wavy, tickles the backs of her hands.

  She has warned Isaac of how little time they have. Perhaps that explains his haste. Even so, she is disconcerted by how often he checks behind, to see they are not being followed. She does her best to reassure herself. Has she met anyone stronger or more capable than Isaac? At Fort Dearborn, even Captain Heald regularly defers to him. But first we must ask Dr. Van Voorhis. Send for Dr. Van Voorhis. Dr. Van Voorhis will know. Dr. Van Voorhis will decide.

  As she watches his tall, lanky figure striding through the grass, clearing a path for her, as the trample of their footsteps and the chatter of cicadas and the midday heat establish a rhythm, she begins to feel better. But then there comes another troubling, dizzy turn. She wonders if this might be another daydream, that one day she will awaken and find that Isaac is not real, that she has made him up like a childish story, that nothing has ever happened, that no seed has been sown, that no baby boy is growing in her belly. After a while her head clears again, leaving only a sense of amazement that a man like this could have chosen her. How painful it has been, these last few months, to listen to the women chatter about him in the barracks room and jest about which of the unmarried girls would one day be the lucky one. She cannot wait to see the looks on their faces when they find out.

  In the lee at the top of the first sandhill, she finds him waiting for her. There is such vitality to him. He is crouching. Hair springs out of his round black hat, gathered in a bundle about the neck. His shoulders press against the coatee that enfolds them. She cannot imagine he will ever grow old. He is like one of those beings you hear about in stories who have been granted everlasting youth. His skin is fresh, his expression is playful, and behind those dark eyes resides such courage and intelligence she is assailed by a renewed sense of disbelief that he should be hers.

  “Let’s try another way,” he says, grinning as he takes her hand, and the next moment she is on her backside and they are sliding down a sandy slope. Her poor skirt. At the bottom is a patch of hard earth. They lie on their backs and giggle until he takes her in his arms and she clings to him as his lips press against hers, and there is sand everywhere but she does not care because she feels giddy to the point of madness that so much life and love and luck could be hers.

  He is telling her something, a quotation from an English writer, that the taste of her lips is like lunacy and like poetry and like love, like all three of them together, and that it is the best taste in the world. And she replies that of course it must be all three, because everyone knows he’s a poet, and he must be a lunatic to love her. “And, of course, you’re a doctor too.”

  “And your husband,” he says.

  She is pleased to hear him say that again. She will never forget how he put it, the day they were wed beneath the giant cottonwood tree. He knew all the words. Because there is no church in Echicagou, he had said, and no priest, because we are apart from civilization, let us take our vows in the open, with God as our witness. In the name of God, I, Isaac Van Voorhis take you, Eulalie Pelletier, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. Will you take me for your husband?

  Tenderly, he squeezes her hand. The next moment she is lifted to her feet, and they begin to run through the grass.

  * * *

  She arrives behind him and out of breath. He has already removed the branches that conceal the bed of dried cottonseeds and shriveled brown leaves they have gathered in the natural hollow at the center of the tree’s misshapen trunk. Giant silvery-gray ridges form three-quarters of a circle, each protruding root as solid-looking as a piece of masonry. She stumbles and has to reach out to stop herself from falling. A piece of bark peels off in her hand and she makes a show of giving it to Isaac. “Mix this with basil and a dash of wild onions,” she says, “and you can make a tea that, though bitter in taste, will heal aching bones.”

  “You will soon know more than I do,” he says, smiling. “The bark also makes good horse fodder.”

  He has not told her that before. She will remember it. She sits down and removes her hat, letting her hair fall loose. He takes off his boots and stretches out beside her. Normally, they begin to make love at once, but today he props himself up on one elbow. He touches her necklace. “Copper,” he says. “The leaves are finely wrought.”

  “It’s Potawatomie,” she tells him. “Belonged to my cousin. Wabaunsee.”

  “The one that went back to the tribe?”

  “Yes.”

  With his forefinger, he flips through the copper leaves—she has counted twenty-four of them—and they tickle as she feels them part at her neck like the pages of a book.

  “They are the scales on a dragon’s tail,” she says. “It’s an old Potawatomie story.”

  “About Nambi-Za?”

  “Yes, that’s probably the one.” The truth is that she cannot remember. It is another of those stories she must ask Gray Curls to repeat. She had forgotten about the existence of the necklace until she came upon it this morning, wrapped up at the bottom of her trunk. “He gave it to me the day he came to St. Charles to tell Gray Curls he was a brave, and was his grandson no more.”

  Wabaunsee did not really “give” her the necklace. He left it behind. Doing that, she decided, was another way—and a cruel way—of saying he had cut himself off forever from Gray Curls, who had given it to him in the first place. She did not want her grandfather to know, so she hid the necklace and kept it for herself.

  “I cannot wait to be gettin’ into Fort Wayne,” she says, running her fingers through his hair. “Mrs. Heald says Cicely and me, we’re to travel in the wagon with the youngsters. We’re to be keepin’ them in order.”

  “That will be a good place to be.”

  His tone disturbs her. “The journey troubles you?”

  He shakes his head. “Everything is settled,” he replies. “We set off after breakfast.” He lies down on his back, hands behind his head.

  She wonders if he does have worries, but is not telling. Mrs. Heald has told them that the details of the route have been agreed with the Potawatomie chiefs, and that any rumors circulating about their departure being dangerous must have been planted by cowards or spies. Only yesterday a group of Miami braves arrived, with a famous American captain, and they would be coming with them too. “As if,” said Mrs. Heald, “we do not already have quite enough of our own soldiers to protect us.”

  “Take a blanket with you to sit on,” advises Isaac.

  She stretches out beside him. “Or I shall need that elk root, mixed with alcohol?”

  He grins. “It’s a long ride. We’ll all be sore by the end of it. That’s why I was looking out for some today.”

  She peers up through the leaves of the cottonwood tree, a vast tangle of green triangles with their tips as sharp as needl
e points, and spends a few moments looking into the pale blue sky beyond. How serene it looks, how perfect, and how very distant.

  He plays with her earlock curl. “You never said where the idea for this came from.”

  “A picture,” she says, “hanging in our old house ’cross the river. They say I looked at it for hours. You’ll be seein’ it in St. Charles. Then you can tell me which you like the more, her curl or mine.”

  “I can already tell you that.” He rolls over and kisses the nape of her neck.

  She stretches the skin tight, and he kisses her there again. The necklace tingles, making her shiver. She wants to weep for happiness.

  “Will you wear this in the church?”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  She places her hand on her heart. “I promise you everything,” she murmurs.

  This is the second promise she has made this morning. She’s sure of that. But she is struggling to remember what the first one was.

  “We don’t have much time,” he says, as he begins to undo the top button of his coatee.

  “I know. But wait on,” she says. “Wait on … please.…” She sits up. She knows it is unfair to leave Cicely on her own, and what if Mrs. Heald has already sent someone looking for them? She knows it is madness to linger, today of all days. But that is what she wants to do and so, dang the consequences, that is what she will do.

  “I have news,” she whispers, her lip trembling.

  He pulls away and looks at her.