The Sons of Dan — Book Two: The Prayer Circle

The wind came down off the mountains before the sun did, sliding along the frozen ruts of the trail and finding every gap the canvas top could not close. Rebecca Allred sat with her back against the wagon box, her shawl drawn tight, and held her son against her chest where the cold could not reach him so easily. He was small still, small enough that his whole fist closed around one of her fingers and did not let go, and his breath came out in short white clouds that dissolved before they rose past her chin. She did not sing to him. She had learned on this trail that singing used up warmth a body could not spare. She only held him, and watched the oxen's breath rise in the gray dark ahead of the wagon, and waited for the camp to stir.

Jacob moved past her toward the front wheel with a hatchet in his hand, checking the ice that had crept up the spokes overnight, and he did not look at her long. He never looked at anything long these days, not the wheel, not the fire, not his own wife's face. He looked, and moved on, the way a man checks a door he already knows is locked.

That night the company made camp in a stand of cottonwoods bent low with old snow, and the men gathered close around the fires the way they always did, close enough that the light showed the frost on their beards. Someone had a Bible out, reading by the fire the way half the wagons did most nights, a verse or two before the watch changed, and the voice moved without much thought through the begats and blessings until it reached the words about the tribes, the sons of Jacob each given his portion, each named in turn.

"Dan shall judge his people," the reader said, "as one of the tribes of Israel."

A man across the fire from Jacob went still. He was broad through the shoulders, a blacksmith's build going soft now with the trail's hunger, and Jacob knew him the way a man knows an old scar, by feel more than sight. Elias Whitmer had not looked at Jacob directly in three weeks of shared road, had kept himself to the far wagons and the far fires, and now he looked up across the flames and finished the verse before the reader could.

"Dan shall be a serpent by the way," Whitmer said, low, "an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels."

Nobody else at the fire thought anything of it. It was scripture, spoken the way scripture got spoken on a night like any other. But Jacob felt the words land the way a man feels a hand close on his arm in the dark, and he looked across the fire and found Whitmer already looking back at him, and neither man said anything more. Neither man said the name that both of them were thinking, the name from Far West and the courthouse floor and the paper nobody would sign. The reading moved on to the next tribe, and the fire popped, and somewhere behind Jacob a woman hushed a child, and Whitmer bent his head back down to the flames as if nothing at all had passed between them. Jacob turned back to his own fire a moment later, and did not tell Rebecca what he had heard, and did not know yet whether that was mercy or cowardice either.

By the time the valley opened out below them, the worst of the winter travel was behind the company, though the ground it left them on did not look like much of a mercy at first glance. It was a wide, bare basin ringed by mountains still capped white, cut through by a handful of creeks running fast and cold off the snowpack, the soil pale and cracked in places where the last year's drought had baked it hard. Jacob Allred walked the ground the first week the way he walked most things now, without hurry, turning up handfuls of dirt and letting them run through his fingers, judging what the earth would give a man willing to work it.

He and Rebecca built the cabin the way most families did that first season, log on log with the chinking still green when the first frost came, a single room with a dirt floor they beat hard with the backs of shovels until it held. Rebecca kept the account of what they had left, a short list now, and what they would need before the ground could feed them, a longer one. She worked beside Jacob on the ditch they dug from the creek to the low field behind the cabin, her sleeves rolled and her hands blistered same as his, and in the evenings she mended what could be mended and did not ask him what troubled him, though she watched him close enough that Isaac, at ten years old, took it for the ordinary way a wife watched a tired husband.

Isaac carried water that first summer, and stacked what wood there was to stack, and learned the valley the way a boy learns any new ground, by the places a person could hide in it and the places a person could not. He watched his father the way boys watch their fathers at that age, without much judgment yet, only noticing. He noticed that Jacob did not talk much of Missouri, or of the trail, or of anything before the day they had crossed into the valley, and when other men at the settlement spoke of those years, the mobs and the militia and the winter crossing of the river, his father would find some reason to walk off toward the ditch or the timber line, and come back later saying nothing about where he had been. Isaac took this for the plain fortitude of a man who had buried enough and did not care to dig it up again for conversation. It seemed to him a reasonable enough way for a father to be.

The settlement grew that first season the way such things grow when there is no choice in the matter, ditches widening into a network of them, a bowery of poles and brush going up on the square for meetings, a scattering of dugouts and log rooms spreading along the creek bottoms as more companies came down out of the canyon through the fall. Jacob worked from can-see to can't, the way most men did, and in the evenings he sat outside the cabin with his pipe unlit in his hand, more often than not, looking west across the ditch toward the mountains, and Rebecca would sit beside him and neither of them would say much of anything, and Isaac, watching from where he sat mending a harness strap by the last of the light, thought this too was simply how a man rested after a long day, and did not think to wonder what it was his father was watching for.

Word came through the settlement in late autumn that another company was down from the canyon and making camp along the lower creek, tired stock and thin provisions, the same story every company told by the time it reached the valley floor. Jacob walked down with two other men to see what help could be spared, a sack of flour split three ways, a few pounds of dried meat, whatever the settlement could give without cutting too deep into its own thin margin. Isaac went along, mostly for the walk and the chance to see new faces, and stood near the wagons while the men talked in low voices about the road behind them and the winter ahead.

A man came around the side of one of the wagons leading a lame ox, broad through the shoulders, his beard gone gray at the edges since Isaac had last laid eyes on any stranger worth remembering, and Jacob went still beside him the way a man goes still when he has stepped on a plank he did not know was rotten. Isaac looked from his father to the stranger and back again, and saw something pass between the two men that had no name he could put to it, a look held a beat too long, neither of them speaking, neither of them offering a hand. Jacob turned away first, said something short about the flour needing to be measured out before dark, and walked back up toward the ditch without waiting to see if Isaac followed.

Isaac stood a moment longer by the wagons, watching the stranger lead his ox off toward the picket line, and told himself it was nothing, the way a boy tells himself most things are nothing when he has no better word for them yet. He did not know the man's name. He would not learn it that season, or the season after. But he carried the look on his father's face back up the hill with him all the same, turning it over the way a man turns over a stone he has no reason yet to distrust, and said nothing about it to anyone, not even sure himself what there was to say.