Sweet Sarah Ross

“An oriole?” She shrugged. “A Baltimore oriole. It’s the first embroidery pattern little girls learn where I’m from. After the alphabet, of course, and the usual flowers.”

“That’s right,” he said, his voice low and lazy, “you’d rather be in Baltimore. Do I assume that’s where you’re from?”

She heard his questions as conversational, a way to fill the spaces of time that were as empty as their stomachs. She hesitated over her usual impulse to pretty up her background, but the coziness of the campfire, which contrasted with the vast ocean of emptiness around them, prompted an honest response.

“From a farm just east of Baltimore,” she said. “It’s at North Point on the Chesapeake. I have many friends in Baltimore, though, and often go into town for one reason or another.”

“And now you’re on the road to Oregon,” he observed. “What did your family grow on the farm?”

“Years ago—well before I was born, that is—it was tobacco. When the Maryland farmers were undersold in that market by the Virginians and Carolinians, the profit seemed to be in the staples, corn and kale and the like. More recently…”

He finished her statement. “More recently there was no profit to be had in anything.”

She stared into the flames and watched a succession of miniature jewel gardens grow and die. It was pointless to deny the obvious. No one left a home when it was comfortable or a business when it was profitable. The original colonists hadn’t been landed gentry or moneyed merchants when they had left England, and their descendants weren’t fat cats leaving the East, either. The word depression had been circulating in The Baltimore Register with ever more frequency, along with installments from Samuel Parker’s guidebook to the Oregon Territory.

It had taken only a recent letter from Laurence’s wife, Cathy, reporting on the success of their apple tree farm out west, for Morgan and Barbara to decide that they had worked too hard for too long to have so little. Before Sarah knew it, the Harris family was packed up and ready to go. They were the first in their neighborhood to leave the old soil for greener pastures, but every farmer and shopkeeper in and around Baltimore had heard the enticing reports of the Oregon climate and the timber.

Sarah was of a mind to tell Mr. Powell that she had not been obliged to undertake this journey because she was poor. Oh, no! Mr. Powell should know that she had a very fine trust fund on which she could live in the style she deserved and which had been provided her by the widow of her father, the illustrious General Robert Ross of the British army.

Now, Mr. Powell didn’t need to know that she wouldn’t come into the money before she was twenty-five. Neither did he need to know that Mrs. Ross had threatened to close the account after those catty British “ladies” had tried to ruin Sarah’s reputation when she had visited Mrs. Ross two years before. And he certainly didn’t need to know that Morgan and Barbara had refused to borrow a penny against the future of that money and that their refusal hurt her in a peculiar sort of way. She knew, however, that to say any of this would leave her open to embarrassing questions.

She looked up and repeated, “No, there was no profit to be had in anything.”

If she thought she was going to avoid embarrassing questions, she was mistaken. Powell, who was thoughtfully chewing his berries, asked next, “You’re traveling with your sisters, no?”

“That’s right. I have two.”

“Older? Younger?”

“Both younger. Helen is sixteen and Martha is fourteen.”

“Which makes you—”

“One and twenty, Mr. Powell.”

“Hmm. I see.”

There was something in the way he said, “I see,” that made her think he saw nothing at all. She knew what he was thinking, and it was exactly what that hateful Mrs. Fletcher had said when she had met Sarah. Upon inquiring about Sarah’s age, Mrs. Fletcher had smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I see, my dear. You must have suffered a disappointment in love. No? Well, why else would a woman of your age be accompanying her parents to begin a new life on the other side of the continent?”

Sarah could restrain her vanity no longer. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Powell,” she said, “that I turned down a very good—no, an excellent offer of marriage hardly more than a month ago, and so you needn’t think that I came on this trip because…because I was unable to situate myself or anything of that sort!”

Her vanity was hardly appeased when Powell asked, “Why didn’t you find a way to stay with one of the many friends you have in Baltimore, if you didn’t choose to be traveling now?”

Because none of her friends had turned out to be true friends. After Sarah had turned silly William down, she found that the doors to the houses of Olivia and Isabelle and Claire didn’t open so readily or so widely for her anymore. Never mind that they were as stuck-up as they were rich. And they had been jealous of her from the start. Oh, yes, jealous.

She said primly, “I don’t like to impose,” and had to swallow her pride to see the smirk of understanding cross her companion’s stubble-darkened face. It was difficult to determine which was the more unpleasant circumstance to bear at the moment: her exhaustion, her hunger, the memory of being so thoroughly snubbed, or the company of this impossible man.

“And you, Mr. Powell?” she asked, gathering together the tired remains of her dignity. “What brings you to these inhospitable parts?”

“The U.S. government. I’m a surveyor.”

The vision of a precise surveyor jarred against her continuing image of him as a man-beast. She was surprised into asking, “Your studies in surveying informed you of how to trap and skin a rabbit and how to build a fire from sticks and iron pyrite?”

He shook his head. “A year of being in the field has done that for me.”

“Nevertheless, I don’t suppose when you chose such a…a respectable profession that you ever imagined finding yourself captive to bloodthirsty Sioux squaws.”

“I’ll admit,” he said, “that I never imagined the surveyor would be regarded as the Indians’ worst enemy.”

“How so?”

“The hunters they dislike. The pioneers, too. But the man with the magical instruments who looks at their land—just looks!—and works for the Great White Father back in Washington…this man they hate. And, perhaps, rightly so.”

“Speaking of the Indians,” she said, looking nervously over her shoulder into the blackness, “I’m wondering whether this fire, as useful as it is for scaring away the hungry animals, might not alert any unfriendly humans to our presence.”

“Right again, Miss Harris, and I’m none too pleased about still finding myself in Sioux country. So before I set about making the fire, I gave a couple of owl hoots, since to the Sioux, the hoot of an owl is the sign of death.”

“That was you?” she replied, amazed. She had heard an owl a while back and, unlike a Sioux, had been comforted by the familiar sound of it. “You seem to have learned a lot of skills in a relatively short time.”

“Since boyhood I’ve been able to hoot well enough to get answers from owls.”

“Where are you from, Mr. Powell?”

“Everywhere, Miss Harris, and nowhere.”

Thereafter the conversation didn’t flourish, and she was inclined to think that they were protected as well as could be expected from their predators, whoever and whatever they might be.

After a while, Powell got up and left the campsite. Sarah felt a leap of panic at his departure and had to suppress a desire to ask him if she could accompany him. After all, he hadn’t followed her when she had had occasion to disappear once or twice behind a bush during the course of their long walk, nor had he said a word about it. Still, it was dead of night, the prairie wolf was stalking them, and this was Sioux country. She glanced at his bed of leaves and thought it was distressingly far away from her own bed. However, to suggest making his any closer to hers was unthinkable.

So she drew herself away from the fire and fairly crawled back to her bed. She lay down on her back, intending to turn on her side, but once down, she couldn’t move another muscle to turn over. She was captive to the leaves, imprisoned in a body that was not dead but not fully alive, either. With every sense stretched well beyond tiredness, she lay there with her eyes open, her gaze lost in the snarls of the wood and leaves above her head.

The shadows hidden in the branches mingled with the sneaking glow of the dying fire to create weird mind pictures of prairie wolves, of Sioux warriors with feathered arrows cocked in drawn bows. Of William down on one knee, taking her hand in his, begging her to be his wife. Of the flick of her wrist, that one, brief gesture containing both her surge of triumph and her loss of desire to ever see him again. Of English aristocrats paying her extravagant compliments in darkened corners and then pawing her breasts. Of hoot owls.

The next thing she saw were the sun’s rays breaking through the branches above where she lay. She sat straight up, draining the blood from her head. She was woozy from bad dreams and the realization that the sun was already well up in the sky. She ached everywhere in her body, but mostly in her heart, and when she looked around and saw that Mr. Powell’s bed of leaves was empty, her aching heart nearly failed her.

She wanted to call out for him, but didn’t dare. A moment later she was glad she had kept quiet, for she saw fresh sticks neatly laid for a new fire a few feet away from the previous night’s fire. At the base of Mr. Powell’s tree she spied a folded white shirt, a pair of moccasins, her laceless ankle boots, a laced pair of men’s boots, a few rolled-up strips of white cotton and the torn shawl, atop which glinted a small object she recognized as her scissors. Relief sloshed through her, and she was able to conclude that Mr. Powell was at the spring, most likely bathing.

Given that, she decided to wait for his return to the campsite before going to the spring herself in order to wash. The evidence of the newly laid kindling suggested that he might have found some meat to cook. She was so cheered by the possibility that she decided to make herself useful. She got to her feet and hobbled across the campsite to retrieve Mr. Powell’s shirt and her scissors. Then she hobbled back to her bed, sat back down, opened her reticule and began to mend the tear in the upper left front panel of Mr. Powell’s shirt.

She engrossed herself in her task and was, perhaps for the first time in her life, soothed by the activity of threading her needle, of setting tiny stitches, of snipping finished ends, of making inyisible knots. She saw the head of a delicate golden orange bird come to life beneath her fingers, sprout a wing, perch on the beginnings of a leafy branch. She let her thoughts roam where they willed. They fixed, pleasantly, on the happy reunion she would soon have with her mother and father and Martha and Helen.

Mr. Powell returned to the campsite. She didn’t look up at him, absorbed as she was in her handiwork. She heard the small sounds of him lighting the fire and the subsequent snaps and crackles of the flames. Presently the aroma of jackrabbit drifted over to her and brought a watering in her mouth.

“I’ve roasted meat on a stick for you,” Mr. Powell said to her at one point, “and placed it away from the fire on these rocks. You can have it when you’re hungry.”

“I’m hungry now,” she said, still not looking up.

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, “but you’re right not to hurry, since we can’t move out of here for quite a few hours yet.”