Why Go West?
We open with a family of Missouri farmers in the 1840s, thinking about heading west to Oregon. The patriarch, Elijah (Lije) Evans, here speculates.
He didn’t guess he would join up for Oregon, for all that he would be proud to have a hand in it, to build up Uncle Sam and stop the British. Missouri was a good-enough country. A man could live, even if not fat, if he had a mind to work. He could live and fight fever and trade at the store and hope maybe someday to buy himself a nigger and so have more time for doing what he wanted to do. It wasn’t that he wanted a passel of niggers and a big house and fancy horses, like some had in the cotton country in the south of the state. Maybe he didn’t want even one nigger. He was a slave man himself, but still, come right down to the quick of it, he didn’t know as one man had the right to own another, black or white. It was just that he wanted something more out of life than he had found.
When reading The Way West, it’s easy to get hung up on the language of the period being portrayed, and the celebration, to a certain degree, of Manifest Destiny and the supremacy of the white man, but it may be worth tolerating these things in order to see the currents and ideas that lay beneath them. Because this is a novel less about characters, their words and their actions, and more about the world writ large that those characters, words, and actions represent.
And nowhere is this device more apparent than in the book’s exploration of the reasons for people going west in this period.
In town, Evans gets into a discussion with several men at the general store on that same subject, who are determined to get Evans to join the company they are organizing to head west.
“Look,” Tadlock said, using his hands like a man who stood for office. “There’s a better reason yet, to my mind.” He paused to let the words sink in. “Is it our country of England’s? You want it to be British?”
“Hitchcock does, but not me.”
“Well, what’s going to decide it? People, that’s what. People like you and me. If we’ve got gumption enough to settle there.”
The blood had climbed to Tadlock’s face. In this temple Evans could see a vein stand out. His words had a ring to them. In spite of himself, Evans was moved.
“They say fifty-four forty or fight,” Tadlock went on. “By God, we won’t have to fight if enough of us are on the ground!” He let his voice fall. “It would be a proud thing, Evans, for you and your children and their young ones, too, saying Pa or Grandpa helped win the country. Or do you want to sit in a chair and let others make history?”
Tadlock pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. “That’s all -- except to say again we want you.”
“What do you think,” Mack asked.
Evans read in Fairman’s face the hope he would say yes.
“You’re bunchin’ up on me.” Evans looked from face to face, and saw them all solemn and waiting, even McBee’s. Almost before he knew it, he said, “Tell you what. If Dick Summers goes, I will.”
“Good enough.”
McBee said, “‘Y God, shake hands.”
They had another drink -- all except Tadlock and Fairman -- and then Evans went and untied his mule. Riding home, he told himself he had let the whisky talk, but still he wondered what he would do and still didn’t wonder, either. It was as if the course had been set all along, and he had been playing that it wasn’t, acting like he could say yes or no. He would go if Dick went, and maybe, by hell, he would anyway. Free men, brave men in a great, new nation. A new way of things. Soil good. Hunting good. Climate good. No fever. Hurrah for Oregon! He wouldn’t figure too much why it was he went. The head got tired, figuring. He would just go because he wanted to, for all sorts of reasons. He would go if he felt the same as now after the fire died in him.
Evans is more or less directionless, easily swayed to action by the will of others or by the whisky he drank. But the introduction of and connection to Dick Summers is important -- the same Dick Summers who appeared in The Big Sky as a kind of moral foil to Boone Caudill, and who, near the end of that book, abandons both Caudill and the west for the life of a farmer in Missouri.
But some of the other men in that general store meeting have their own reasons for heading west. One is Charles Fairman.
Fairman signaled a goodbye and set off for what he called home. It was two rooms in a ramshackle house, but better, at that, than a tent. He doubted that Tod could have survived in a tent, the way the fever raged in him. He had to have shelter and care -- but more than anything he had to have the high, dry air, such as people said you found in the valley of the high Platte, in the mountains, in Oregon, where there was no fever at all.
Looking around him, seeing the cabins breasting into the mud, feeling the wetness in the air in spite of the high-riding sun, Fairman wished they could start at once. Independence was as miasmal as the lowlands of Kentucky. Sometimes he wondered why his father had left Virginia, to travel through the Gap to the canebreaks of Kentucky and, by stages, to the Ohio. Virginia was healthier country. At any rate his father had admitted as much in his later days, when the push of adventure had died in him and old, remembered things filled his mind. People didn’t yawn and stretch there, he said, and stand slumped as if they couldn’t move.
Tod is Fairmain’s son, an asthmatic and sick with fever, who needs to go west, not for adventure, as his grandfather had done, but for his health. That quest will end in tragedy, however, as young Tod Fairman will die on the trail, a victim of a rattlesnake bite. While he is lying in his death throes, with Dick Summers and the others doing their level best to rescue the young man with their folk and Indian remedies:
Evans let himself down and put his hand to his neck that was stiff with stooping, and for what seemed a long time they sat there, out of talk, while Dick chewed fresh root and Evans dipped the rag in the heated milk that Mrs. Mack kept bringing back. From outside came the wordless murmur of voices.
Judith’s far-off voice picked up by and by. “He was what we were going to Oregon for.”
Fairman broke in sharply, “Was!”
“I mean is, Charles. Is.”
Evans stared at his hands, and then Judith cried out, cried the breaking cry that he had been wishing for and couldn’t stand now, and he saw the thick and sickly matter bleeding from the boy’s closed lids and knew that he was dying.
The plaintive cry of the mother, already losing her son to the tyrannical mindset of the past tense. It is as pure as pathos can possibly be.
And there are others, with other seemingly personal reasons for going west, but each motivation is writ large with Guthrie’s pen against the archetypes and the pressing, not-consciously-understood drives of the time. Later, out on the trail and heading towards the actual West, this nebulous drive will coalesce and become even clearer, both to Evans, through whose eyes we most clearly see this evolution, and to us.
Again he felt greatness, smallness and greatness both among such wild riches. And, seeing the train winding behind him, he thought with pride of it, of the onwardness of its people, of their stubborn, unthought-out yondering. It wasn’t a thing for reason, this yondering, but for the heart, where secrets lay deep and mixed. Money? Land? New chances? Patriotism? All together they weren’t enough, but as a man went on it came to him how wide and wealthy was his country, and the pride he had talked about at first became so real he lost the words for it.
And it will finally solidify into a kind of certainty.
It was bound to be settled, he knew now. No keeping it from being. People would come west and more people would come west, as he had himself, not thinking exactly why but knowing just the push of feeling, as if God Himself had willed it. He could see them, wagon after wagon, train on train, winding up the Platte, toiling up the mountains, fording the protesting rivers. Some of them would sicken and some of them would die, but the great company would come on, for the thing was greater than any grief. The pictured line caught a man’s imagination. It made him wonder. It made him somehow big.
For them all, it is all about the future, a future of big and unknown possibilities.
All except Summers -- who is not going west for the first time. For Summers, this trip back west is a trip backwards in time -- back to his unclaimable past.
He hadn’t let himself think, back there in Missouri, how much of the old mountains there was still in him. He had butchered hogs and tended crops and dickered for oxen or mules and laid down at night by Mattie, shutting out the thought of beaver streams and canyons opening sweet to the eye and squaws who had comforted him and gone on, joining with the lost and wanted things. Popo Ashia, like running water.
He was a mountain man underneath, and always would be, even if he went to plowing and hoeing and slopping hogs again -- and there was no place in the world these days for a mountain man, and less and less of it all the time. A few years more and a man fool enough to trap like as not would stumble on to a picnic. The buffalo were thinning, for all that greenhorns said that three calves were dropped for every cow killed. In not so long a time now people in the mountains would be living on hog meat, unknowing the flavor and strength of fleece fat and hump ribs. Unknowing either, how keen an enemy the Rees and the Blackfeet were. He almost wished for the old Rees, for the old Blackfeet that the white man’s pox had undone. They had given spirit to life; every day lived was a day won.
Well, he had set out, hunting old things remembered as new, and he would go on hunting, finding a kind of pleasure in awakening memory, feeling the heart turn at the proof in mountain or park or river that, sure enough, once he had played here, once he had set traps and counted beaver and spreed at rendezvous and seen the wild moon rise. At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger -- were they just names for his young time?
Summers shook himself. Christ, a man could moon his life away! Better to make the most of what was left. There wasn’t anything in feeling sorry for yourself.
As the trip progresses, Summers will have more and more of these moments of reverie.
If he sniffed, he smelled the smoke of quaking asp, and, looking, saw the little fire and him and Jim Deakins and Boone Caudill seated around it while meat cooked on roasting sticks. If he listened, he heard the old voice raised at rendezvous, the hearty, young, old voices that laughed at age and change, the voices rich with strength and whisky, shouting over horse races or the Indian game of hand, the full and easy voices good-tempered by the squaws. Smoke of campfires lifting slow, hi-ya, Bill, and hi-ya, Buck, tepees white against the green, horses frisky in the mornings, coyotes singing in the nights, bright blankets on soft shoulders, held around young breasts, and young country all about, high valleys, beavered streams, good hunting, youth on the land, youth in the loins, and youth and youth and youth to youth, and who’d have thought then it would pass?
Youth. For Dick Summers, going west is a lens back to his youth, but one that is cloudy -- difficult to see and impossible to reclaim.
Day by day and night by night bits of the old years had come back to him, flashes out of the long-unremembered, out of the pushed-aside, out of the clutter of mind, brought to him by the sight of hill and water, by doing what he’s done before. Drying meat -- and he was with Jim and Boone again, fresh-crossed from the Powder to the Wind, eating old bull blue with winter while they talked about spring hunting. Topping the pass -- and it was a soft day and the cactus was blooming red and yellow, and he had said, “Them’s pretty now,” and old Etienne Provot had spit and answered, “Pretty goddam prickly, I’m thinkin’.” Seeing the Wind Mountains, harsh-rising on his right hand -- and he green then, unbelieving he rode on top of the world, asking, “Is this it, sure enough?” The Green again -- and his first sight of it, and beaver so thick you could shoot them in the eye, and everybody gay like in a child’s dream of finding pretties.
He lived in the now time and in the then time, passing talk with people like old Weatherby, guiding, advising, hunting, joshing with Brownie or with Lije, while gone days and gone folks filled his mind. “Summers!” Oh, Summers! You goddam old coon! Ain’t see you since we stood off the Rees. How be you? Fat, I’m thinkin’.” Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back. “Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol’ bastard, and if you got a dry, here’s whisky.”
In the end, it will become too much for poor Dick Summers. After crossing the continent, after reaching their destination, and after beginning to build the new future that had pulled them all the way from Missouri, Summers begins to look east, back into the past that he can always chase but never quite catch.
Evans couldn’t find anything more to say. It seemed he couldn’t think beyond the feel of loss, beyond the knowing that it was a shame for a man like Dick to waste himself. What was it in the past that pulled him back, that put the lines of wanting in his face sometimes when he didn’t know that anyone was looking? Trapping? Indians? Buffalo? The wild and empty country? Evans could understand a love of them. He liked open land himself. But still a man must live ahead. And such things didn’t count for much compared with Oregon and the life now opening up. Besides, those times were gone or going.
When Dick turned back, Evans asked, “Don’t it mean nothin’ to you, Dick, for Oregon to be America’s?”
“You’ll tend to that, Lije. I kind of want to see the Popo Agie again.”
Evans didn’t ask what or where the Popo Agie was, or why Dick wished to see it. It didn’t matter now. What or where or why would be just words to go along with other words that, hearing, he couldn’t quite make sense of. “See you in the mornin’, anyhow,” he told Dick as they walked back to camp.
“Sure thing.”
He didn’t though. Before he roused, before any others did, Dick had slipped away.
Men and Women
So crossing the continent, and what it means for the future and for the past, is one of Guthrie’s great themes in The Way West. Another is the differences between men and women and, especially, how those differences manifest and perceptually change on the long journey across the country and back and forth in time.
Here is Dick Summers, early in the novel, thinking about his dead wife -- the aforementioned Mattie.
She hadn’t been a well woman, not ever since he’d known her, but yellow and drawn out by fever and sick to death once before, when she’d slipped the young one he had planted in her. But for all that, she had been a good woman, not smart-looking or playful or gentle on the outside, but hard-working and wishful of good things for him. Was she alive now, she would follow the cow out in the morning to find where the young wild greens were growing, and so boil him a kettle of them along with a piece of fat meat. It wasn’t exactly the fever that killed her; it was just as if her strength had run out. She had taken to bed and died in two days, knowing all the time she had to die and looking at him with fever-shiny eyes -- and neither of them able to say anything to each other but little, puddling things like never seen a nicer spring or wonder if Lije Evans sold his place yet so’s to go to Oregon. He had seen old horses die like that. He had seen them go and lie down and give up and look at you with slow eyes while life leaked away.
Just like an old horse. A beast of burden. Something a man acquired in order to perform needed work, and something he might come to love in a way, the way one might offer love to a partner, a friend, a brother.
And later, looking upon her in her death pose.
They had scrubbed Mattie and combed her hair and laid her out with her arms crossed on her chest, and she looked like death-by-fever, as Summers had known she would. For a long minute he looked down at her, hearing Mrs. Evans breathe by his side and feeling the woman waiting for his words. He saw the new dress they’d bought and saw the hands worn and ingrained with dirt in spite of scrubbing and the color of old fever on the brow and cheeks. The hair, now that he came to look at it, was whiter than he remembered. He wouldn’t see her any more, dyeing homespun with bark or copperas or indigo, or sewing, or making candles, or mashing flint corn for starch, or looking at the sun mark on the kitchen floor to tell what time it was. All that was left was the still, shrunk body, and come morning it would be gone, too, and it would be like Mattie never lived except as he remembered her.
She had been his woman. She had shared his bed and kept his house and done her full share and more of the work and been a good if not exciting wife in all ways, and he ought not to be wanting to get away from what was left of her, from the yellowed skin and sunken eyes and the sober-sided look she always wore.
She was a good wife. She shared his bed and did her chores. As wise as Summers is, it is remarkable how dim his view of women is. He sees their quiet strength, but he doesn’t understand it.
But when we head out on the Oregon Trail, we will see more of this quiet strength, and see it through a variety of different perspectives. One of the first shifts in view comes from one of the hired hands -- and man named Higgins.
Higgins had to smile to himself. People tickled him, especially maybe men when it came to women. Like now when the wagon train had been corralled. Like here on the Platte bank where the men had drawn off so’s to be able to take up the subject of what Byrd kept calling manure. Manure, that was it, or buffalo chips or dung. To most of them, even to some of them that used the word regular, it wouldn’t be fittin’ to give it the name it was known by best, since women, although absent, figured in the argument. In something like the same way people talked nice in the presence of a corpse.
The question was, with wood getting scarce was it right and proper for the women to cook over fires made of buffalo chips? A tomfool like himself might think the women ought to have some say in the answer. But no. The husbands would decide and go back to their wives, serious and wise, and tell them what was right. How would they say it? Higgins wondered. How would Mr. Byrd inform his lady? “Ma’am, for want of wood we’ll have to use the waste of buffaloes.”
Higgins has a much different view of women that the other men.
Higgins eased himself down on the ground. It struck him that Byrd and some of the others, for all that they knew better, stuck to queer ideas of women, not liking to think of them as flesh and blood and stomach and guts but as something different, something a cut above earthly things, so that no one should let on to them that critters had hind ends. Higgins didn’t set himself up as a judge of women, though a pewter tinker like he used to be did learn some things, but still he bet they’d think all the palaver funny. Women had harder heads than men liked to believe. Even Mrs. Byrd did, probably.
Women had harder heads. And although its is only Higgins who believes this at the beginning of the trail, by the end, everyone will come to understand it.
Raw or not, the women did their part and more. They traveled head to head with men, showing no more fear and asking no favor. Becky. Mrs. Patch. Judith Fairman with her load of grief. Mrs. Mack. Mrs. Daugherty. And, yes, Mercy too. They had a kind of toughness in them that you might not think, seeing them in a parlor. So, on a trail, women came to speak and men to listen almost as if to other men. It was lucky for the pride of men that few traveled with their wives to Oregon. They’d never quite believe again a woman was to look at but not to listen to.
The woman’s voice is strong in this novel -- and it has important things to say.
Miles. Distance. Distance was the enemy, not Indians or crossings or weather or thirst or plains or mountains, but distance, the empty, awesome face of distance, the miles on wrinkled miles of it, the levels and hills and hollows and bluffs, unconquerable by the slow turn of wheels or the creaking step of oxen. There was no end to it, not even any shortening. Morning and night it was there unchanged, hill and cloud and sky line beyond reach or reckoning. Sometimes she wondered at the stubborn, crazy courage of men who thought that day on day would add to Oregon.
“It seems so far,” she said to Rebecca.
“Don’t it though?” Rebecca tossed a twist of clothes into a basket. “Tell you what helps, though. Don’t think how far. Just think one day at a time.”
“And one piece of underwear at a time, and one shirt?”
“I declare, Judie, you are wore out!”
Judith felt the quick, inner spasm of tears and wrestled it down, ashamed but close to crying still at this excitement of self-pity. She turned her face away, to Toddie who was punching at the ground with a stick. “I wish I was more like you, Rebecca.”
“Like me?”
“Things don’t seem to bother you.”
“An’ I never feel broke down or sad or anything?”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I walk on my lip, it’s drawed so low.”
“No one would ever know.”
Rebecca’s breath came out in a little explosion. “Don’t ever think that what you feel ain’t felt by all at one time or another. I get down in my mind, and then I think I got a good boy and a good man, and I ought to be praisin’ the Lord. You got a good man yourself, Judie.”
There it is -- the universal again -- don’t ever think that what you feel ain’t felt by all at one time or another -- and also the eternal -- not day after day adding up to something, but day after day after day -- again and again and again. These women are different creatures -- different from both their men, and from the perceptions of their men.
His eyes went to Rebecca, sitting silent, giving in silence of her strength. It came to him that women suffered deeper and endured longer and understood better than any man. In grief and death men were only children, as he was himself, and had to lean on the motherness of the Rebeccas of the world.
Some will see this strength, this difference -- Higgins and Evans and a few others. But some remain forever closed to it, trapped by their own passions and their own understandings of what men and women are and what they should be to each other. And just as the trail will reveal a new relationship to some, it will harden the existing orthodoxy in others.
Drive, plod, push, tug, turn the wheels. Eat dust, damn you! Eat mud. Swim in sweat and freeze at night. Work the sun up. Work it down. Keep rolling.
Watch the stock. Fix the wagons. Unload, load, unload. Sleep dead like a brute while the wheels keep turning in your head, and then get up and go. Drive, plod, push, tug. Damn the dorbugs. Damn distance. Damn gullies, streams, trees. Keep going. Three cheers for Oregon.
Fall into bed at night and feel your wife’s warmth and know her back is turned. Know it and not care, except deep in you where you keep your hates. Let the knotted muscles melt. Let your mind drift. Let women come into it, like the girl, Mercy McBee. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. All right, so is he. Let sleep flow over you, if you can.
And so we are introduced to Curtis Mack. First in his mind, and then in dialogue with his wife.
Curtis Mack didn’t talk to Amanada, not as man to wife, or encourage her to talk to him. Not these days. Not, he hoped, ever again. They said what had to be said. And sometimes she tried the idle things, weather or mud or dust, and he answered shortly and saw the hurt in her face and was glad of it, and that was all.
It would be all, he told himself as the train rolled on toward the Little Blue and the tension built up in him. He wouldn’t bemean himself again. Let her save it, and to hell with it! He wouldn’t beg as he had begged that night after they had crossed the Kaw.
Spring had been in the air, and a night bird cried outside the tent, and a breeze played along the canvas, and he wanted her, as so many times before.
“No, Curt,” she said. “Please!”
“It’s been a long time.”
She pushed his seeking hand away. “Please.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“You know.”
“You’ve never been that way yet.”
“I could be -- and then having no doctor or anything.”
“You’re just using that as an excuse.”
She didn’t answer.
“You never have really wanted to.”
“I know you think that.”
“You think it isn’t ladylike, I guess. A lady isn’t interested.”
“Curt!”
“Back home you never wanted to. It’s always been a case of rape.”
“That isn’t true.”
“It’s close enough.” He was silent for a long minutes and then, with the urgency mounting in him, he let himself plead. “Please, Amanda. I’m sorry. Now please.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ve been patient, but I can’t go on forever. Please.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid.”
The edge came back into his voice. “You mean not ever, while we’re traveling?”
“I don’t know.”
“My God! You’re going to quit being the half a wife which was the best you ever were. Is that it?”
Her voice was small. “I can’t help it, Curt.”
“You mean you won’t.”
She was crying, crying softly, the sobs shaking her. Now, more than ever, he wanted her, wanted the hot, wet cheek against his, and the wounded mouth, and the body yielding and being comforted -- except that it wouldn’t be.
Another man would have forced her to him. He would have taken her, yes or no. A wife without desire still had a duty. But he wouldn’t do it, not Curtis Mack, late of Buffalo, New York, who was built of soft stuff, who had to recognize, beyond his fury, that something stood in her way that he couldn’t understand. The recognizing made him madder. Why would God put beauty in a woman’s face and give her full breasts and fine thighs and then withhold warmth?
“If you had been a real wife,” he said, “we’d have stayed in Buffalo.”
She didn’t try to answer.
“Why do you think I quit business and started west?”
She kept silent.
“To quit stewing, that’s why. To get things off my mind.”
“You exaggerate so.”
“That was at the bottom of it.”
Her answer was more crying.
“What you want for a husband is a damn monk.”
She cried out, “Why do you say those things? We love each other. We have so much to live for.”
“I’ll never ask you again,” he said, and hated himself, not for the lie he had spoken but for the weakness in him that made it a lie. He had said the same thing before, and then she had come to him, and he had forgotten resentment and lost his fury and, relaxed in the warm and rumpled bed, had spoken his love for her. He had asked forgiveness and laid the blame on himself for times like tonight’s. Soft stuff, Curtis Mack, weak, unstable and -- all right -- sensual. Was anything wrong with sensuality? What was wrong was her tyranny over him. What was wrong was that he couldn’t help himself and was light-spirited or surly, depending on the grant or refusal of so small a favor.
He said, “You drive me to other women.”
“I don’t mean to, Curt.”
“I can’t help looking at them and thinking. I’ll find another woman, too.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“What do you care? You don’t want me.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Want, hell!” He lurched over in bed. “You ought to have married a steer.”
Lying there, hearing her soft weeping, feeling with a fierce pleasure the spasms of her body, he told himself he would find another woman. He wanted to be faithful, and she made it impossible, and so he would throw his restraints aside. He would get out of the mold he’d been cast in. People like his parents, lecturing him about sin! People like preachers, like old Brother Weatherby, preaching against evil! People like these emigrants, fixing lashes as punishment for fornication and adultery! All the men lustful and all fearful, one of another, wanting to save what they had for themselves but maybe to sneak a little on the side. But suppose a man had nothing, or next to nothing?
He would find himself a woman, he would wrench loose from the morality that had been ground into him. He swore it to himself, resisting, while he swore, the doubt that he could, pushing aside the forethought of a conscience so guilty it might unman him.
The night bird still called outside, and the breeze still played along the tent. He heard the sneeze of a horse and the distant mooing of a cow. And steady to his ears came the sweep and mutter of the Kaw.
Wow. There is a lot of truth in that dialogue and Mack’s inner thoughts -- truth about men and about women and about their sometime inability, not only to see eye to eye, but to even communicate their need, their fear, their love.
Mack will do as he threatens. He will find another woman -- the aforementioned Mercy McBee, a girl not yet eighteen.
“You came,” Mr. Mack said softly, as if not quite believing that she would. His hand cupped itself on her elbow, guiding her away from the camp, upstream from it, where people didn’t pass on their way from tents to fort and back. “Beautiful night.”
She said a bare “Yes,” her throat full with beating blood and breath. “Ain’t it dangerous out here?”
“Not so close to the fort. I have a pistol besides.”
They walked along and the hand on her elbow slid on her arm and found her hand, and she let him have it, feeling the fingers work against her palm and the thumb warm on her knuckles.
“I guess you think I’m a million years old, Mercy.”
“No.”
“I feel young, anyhow. Tonight. As young, maybe, as you.”
“I don’t know nothin’, Mr. Mack.”
“Nobody does.”
A tree stood black at the edge of the river, and he stopped her there and said with what seemed to her an in-held anger, “Nobody wants to.”
The river made a murmuring by them, and a breeze joined with it, stirring the leaves of the trees. The music took up, far off, and far-off voices sounded. The distant fire was one of the big stars, burning on the ground.
“Nobody wants to,” he said again and let go her hand and turned and brought her to him. She cried out silently while his mouth came hungry to hers. Is it right, Mr. Mack? Is it all right? You’re older. You know. I got a feeling it ain’t right. It ain’t right, but you said nobody knows. Her hand laid back the curl from his forehead.
Ground under her, and hands seeking, older, wiser, dear hands; and the music and the dance calls fading in the roar of blood and stars misty with the heat of breath, and pain in her like a blade and pain and pain and eager pain, and the music lost and the sky lost and all lost but this but this but this. The stars wheeled back and burst and lit the sky with trailing fire.
Afterwards she wanted nothing but to cry, nothing but to lie and cry while the night and the music and the voices came again. She felt his hand on her, urging her to sit up.
“I’m sorry, Mercy.” There was such a misery in his voice that the weight of it bowed her over. “A man’s a fool.”
“Don’t you be sorry,” she whispered. “It makes it worse if I know you’re sorry.”
“You’re a dear girl.”
She bent her head against him, wanting gentleness, wanting comfort. “I knowed it wasn’t right.”
“I’m to blame.”
“It’s bold to say, but it was liking for you done it.”
His arm tightened on her, but he answered. “It can’t be love, Mercy. Don’t you see, it mustn’t be love?”
“I know.”
She sat for what seemed a long time leaning against him, circling the question that lay fearsome ahead. Her voice was small with fear when she asked it. “Will anything come of it, Mr. Mack?”
He answered quick. “I don’t think so. I’m sure it won’t.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“I haven’t anyone to hold but you.”
“You’ll be all right. I’m sure.” He drew his arm from around her shoulders. “We better be getting back.”
“I don’t care to dance no more.”
“I’ll follow along and see you’re safe to your tent then.”
“Seems like I don’t want to do nothin’ except set here by you.”
His hand came back and lay kind on her shoulder. “We better not stay any longer.”
She got up and straightened the dress with the flouncy collar and went to him and bent her head against his chest, holding to his shirt with her hands.
“Mercy!” he said, while his arms came around. “Little Mercy!” There was misery in his voice still but also a beginning of something else again, together making a kind of wild torment that she found assurance in. “I’m crazy. I’m not good for you, Mercy. Say no! Say no for your sake! But we could see each other tomorrow night?”
There’s truth here, too, truth about men and women, and the forces that drive them, attracting and repelling at the same time.
Wisdom Beyond Godliness
So we have this grand theme of going west, of going forward into the future with hope and ambition, and we also have the on-going exploration of gender roles, of men and women either coming to understand the inner selves and strengths of the other or demanding that each be what the other needs but can’t communicate. And layered over all of this, this and more, is Dick Summers -- the man who seems to stand apart with a secret wisdom.
Early in the novel, at the impromptu funeral for Summers’s wife, we are introduced to a minister. And we see him, initially, through Summers’s eyes.
He was tall and old and lean-looking, and hollow at the temples, and his face showed weather and worry over sinning. He had slicked himself up and put on a black coat that didn’t go with the faded jeans cloth of his breeches. He held his hand out. His voice was old, too, and cracked -- cracked maybe, Summers thought, from calling on sinners to come to Jesus.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
Summers took the hand without speaking.
“My name is Weatherby, Joseph Weatherby, Brother Summers. I come from Indiany.”
“That’s all right.”
The cracked voice said, “I feel that the Lord has guided me here, to his house of grief.”
The words rolled out of his mouth, full-shaped and extra ripe, as if being offered to the Lord. “Do not grieve. God works in mysterious ways.”
At another time, Summers would have had to smile to himself. Preachers and medicine men -- they were cut from the same cloth. They made out to know what nobody could. Companyeros to the Great Spirit. But he didn’t smile now. He just looked into the faded blue eyes and the old face, and knew it for a fact that Weatherby believed what he said.
It’s the first glimpse into the wisdom that Dick Summers represents -- a wisdom that transcends that of both preachers and medicine men, a wisdom that comes from the heart of man, nourished by the natural world that sustains it.
Later in the same scene, while Weatherby is preaching, Evans will observe Summers.
What with one thing and another, Weatherby took a long time talking to God, time enough for an ant to crawl from the toe of Dick Summers’ moccasin a distance of two ax handles, not counting the backings up and the side trips along spears of grass. Evans sneaked a look at Summers while the preaching was going on and saw his head hardly bowed and his eyes empty with distance. He wondered whether Summers believed in God at all. Not that it made any difference. Any God worth praying to would know Dick Summers was a good man, even if he didn’t bow and scrape and make little of himself and beg for blessings regardless. Evans didn’t guess Summers ever would beg for anything, not even from God.
Indeed. At this early stage I am hoping that Dick Summers is the Pathfinder I was aching for in The Big Sky, and could never find in Boone Caudill.
The people on the wagon trial with him will begin to recognize this. Indeed, it is one of the reasons they recruited him to be their guide. Even Weatherby will see it.
Dick Summers had attended, on request, to interpret the questions and answers that Weatherby anticipated. He had listened, grave as any Indian, except that, now and then, an inward smile seemed to lie in his gray eyes. A godless man was Summers, good in his way but godless, with the suggestion about him of a superior knowledge and of private reservations caused by it. Weatherby resented the suggestion -- there was only one knowledge, and it was love of God -- while admitting in fairness that there was nothing of the disputer or the braggart about Summers. He was companionable, kind, even overly generous, and capable as any company could wish, and Weatherby remembered often to thank God for sending this sinner among them. It almost seemed to him that if he could make Summers see, he would have done his work for the Kingdom of Heaven.
To Weatherby, Summers’s innate wisdom is a challenge, but for others, like Tadlock, this natural wisdom will be threatening to the order they are otherwise trying to create.
He had the feeling that Summers contaminated the company with his casual independence, his backwoodsman’s uncertain respect for authority. Summers knew the trail. He was a good guide, and expert hunter, a watchful scout, a never-sleeping sentinel. He was all of these, Tadlock had to admit to himself, but he was also a man hard to manage or impress, a man admired for his Indian graces and rude skills and so imitated in attitudes.
Walking to the council meeting, Tadlock found himself wishing resentfully that he had Summers’ frontier lore to go along with his own impulse for order. It was Summers who suggested, along the Little Blue, that horses be tied to the branches, not the trunks, of trees. That way, he said, they wouldn’t break the bridle reins. Summers could lure buffalo cows to him by imitating the call of a calf. He could put an arrow or a ball into a cow and leave life enough in her to drive her close to camp, thus eliminating the chore of packing in the meat. And who but Summers would think of tying his horse to the horns of a killed buffalo while he butchered? Summers could handle oxen, mules, horses. He could, it seemed, smell game and water and Indians. He was deadly with rifle and bow. He struck the quickest fire. The manner in which he rounded the wagons into a corral at night was simple and effective, though it did lack military style. For himself, Tadlock would have preferred a method he had been told about, by which the train divided into equal sections, with an officer for each, and made smart right-angle turns and formed a square. Still, he had to admit, Summers’ way was good. Damn the man, anyhow! He was competent -- though outwardly modest if somewhat insolent -- and independent as a hog on ice! Why couldn’t a man of wider view, of great education, possess that wilderness wisdom? Small a qualification as it was, it still would promote the recognition of leadership.
For someone of a more philosophical bent, Tadlock’s question seems like something important. Why shouldn’t someone of a wider view, or a greater education, not possess Summers’s wilderness wisdom? The two things -- wilderness wisdom and civilized intelligence -- they’re not mutually exclusive. Are they?
We’ll catch another glimpse of these differences out on the trail, where there is and will be death. At a hastily prepared funeral for one of their own, we will see three men, each reacting as his inner understanding would dictate.
First up is Lije Evans, whose thoughts come upon him while looking at his son, Brownie.
Brownie stood on his other side, in his face a boy’s wonder at the hard way of things. How could a man explain it to his young one, who expected goodness and fun not just all the days of his life but all the days of his life forever and ever? He could say it was the will of God, which it probably was, but that was like saying he didn’t understand, which he didn’t. So saying, he felt ignorant and poor-suited as a father and had to catch what comfort he could in knowing that death was an accident in the minds of the young. It came and was done with and wouldn’t come again except maybe far off, at a time too distant to worry about.
Evans is confused. He does not understand death.
Next up is Weatherby.
Bring comfort to the bereaved, Brother Weatherby was praying. Let them accept Thy will. Let them find comfort in Thee and be strengthened by Thy loving strength.
Weatherby is a man of God. He embraces death, as he does all things, as the whole and perfect will of the Almighty.
And then there’s Dick Summers.
The crowd drifted off, going back to their wagons to ready for the start. Evans and Dick filled in the grave and carried what dirt was left and dumped it in the river. “If God’s so goddam loving-kind,” Dick said while he shook the dust out of the canvas. “He’s got a queer way of showin’ it.”
“I reckon you got to take God or leave Him, whole hog or none.”
“You can have Him. This child wouldn’t care for none.”
Hearing Dick, Evans knew something about him he hadn’t quite known before. Dick was tender and tough, both, and the one explained the other when you came to think about it.
Summers is angry. Ready to do battle if needed. His attitude almost reminds me of Ahab: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
And this wisdom, it seems most pronounced whenever Summers interacts with Weatherby, almost as if Guthrie is purposely setting up a counterpoint to the revealed wisdom that is otherwise the province of men of the cloth. Here, they are discussing a spring that has been poisonous to animals.
“Best to wait for the train,” Summers told Weatherby. “Got to angle down the slope and push the critters by some springs that it seems like I remember to be pizen. They’re God’s doin’s, too, I reckon.”
A cloud came on Weatherby’s face. “They’re there for a purpose, Brother Summers. You may be sure of that.”
“Fer the purpose of killin’ stock?”
“Doubt not the wisdom of God.”
“What I’m doubtin’ is these here springs.”
Weatherby bent his head. “I wish you would see, Summers. You’re too good a man to be lost.”
“Past savin’, parson. Best keep your wind for the Injuns. There’s a heap of ‘em in need of grace.”
“But you think that’s no use?”
“Don’t recollect sayin’ so. They’re strong for medicine.”
“Medicine. I keep hearing medicine, as if God and the way of salvation were just superstition.”
“Maybe you can learn ‘em that a cross has more power to it than a medicine bag.”
Weatherby sighed. “Your lightness makes me sad. It saddens God, too.”
“I didn’t aim to damp you. You’re all right, parson. As fer God, He don’t have to stand between us.”
Guthrie is almost hitting the reader over the head here, but then this little section, where almost all is revealed.
Summers saw the wagons down, slanting them one way and another so the pitch wouldn’t be too steep, and rode back to the herders and helped with the stock, thinking about Weatherby and his notions as he rode. Was there a scheme to things after all, and the present just a little part of it, and a man so small he couldn’t see it whole? Indians. Fur hunters. Farm hunters. What next? Was it all a stream that went somewhere, that had a sense too big to understand? Aw, the hell with it. He was getting like Jim Deakins, who was dead now and maybe savvied how it was but, living, always wondered. If there was a scheme, it was messed up mighty sorry.
The scheme of things. It brings to my mind another famous passage from Moby-Dick.
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!
Summers here becomes philosophical, like his friend Jim Deakins once did, but Summers cannot sustain it, cannot wrap his mind around the scheme that would answer for all the things that he knew and he saw. And then, tellingly, Guthrie gives us this.
The bottoms were shank-deep in grass, and flowers waved, and chokecherries were opening, and the women and children that weren’t already down from the wagons got down, a sudden frolic in them, smiles on their faces and little cries on their lips, and the men studied the grass and kicked up the soil and followed the rimmed valley with their eyes and allowed this would be fine farming country if only it wasn’t so far from things.
Far from things, from markets and stores and churches and soldiers and law and safety and all. Far from the way that was their way. Summers put himself in that time of first seeing again -- the river and its branches swimming with beaver, and berries ripe, and Old Ephraim bloody-mouthed from the eating of them, and not a sound except the sounds of nature and no white face, and the sun great and the moon great, and the world his and no one to say him nay.
It is the natural world, and it is what Summers represents, the source of his wisdom. And the others, the farmers and the preachers, they are civilization, they are the markets and stores and churches and soldiers and law and safety and all, and their wisdom comes from those things. One is their way. The other is the way.
There is a revealing scene late in the novel, after the wagon train has elected Lije Evans to be a kind of sheriff. They recognize early on that they need laws to govern themselves, and they also need a law enforcer, and they choose Evans. Tadlock violates one of their agreed-upon rules and, eventually, Evans has to fight him.
Evans never had hit a man before. Never in his grown life had he struck out. Now, seeing Tadlock’s hands lift and rage darken his square face, it was as if it wasn’t him that swung but someone kin to him and far off in his feelings.
The swing missed and left him open, and Tadlock struck twice, the short and heavy blows of one who knew the use of fists. Evans swung and missed again and felt the double hammer of the practiced hands.
The blows shook him. They jarred his brain and struck lights in his skull and dizzied his aim and step, and he knew he fought clumsily, flaying out at air while his feet staggered under him. His strength was no good to him. The slow strength that could lift an end of a log that two men couldn’t hold was no good; it worked wild and awkward, leaving face and belly open for the stunning fists.
A lick landed high on his cheek and nearly knocked him over, and when he found his balance he stood rattled and let Tadlock work on his face before he could think to go after him again. He heard cries like little echoes around him and in the wheel of sight saw the men ringed about and the Indian watching, his hands rope-held behind him, and, farther out, the women pushing up and Becky at the front of them.
Blow and blow and lick and lick, and the brain stunned and the eye dimmed and his fists forever off the mark, and in his mouth the salty leak of blood. He was strong and he was right and he was beaten. But bore in! Bore in and swing and meet the swings and stand as long as could be! Stand for Becky! Stand for Brownie! Stand for what he knew was right!
He was standing yet. He could stand some more. It came to him as Tadlock’s fists battered at mouth and jaw that he could stand a long time. He could stand forever. There wasn’t power enough in Tadlock’s arms to lay him out, or wind enough in his belly. Here was Tadlock backing off, mouth working like a landed fish’s, blood in his unbruised face and sweat on it, and in his eyes the peaked owning-up of doubt.
Who is right? Who is wrong? And what decides between the two? In Evans’s fight, in the metaphor of this scene, it is the one who stands, stands against the blows of opposing force. That is the one who is right.
The wild fist found its mark, and Tadlock spun half around and tried to get an elbow up before the next lick hit. He lunged for footing and set himself and got his two blows in and staggered at the answer to them. With all his power Evans swung at the boned line of his jaw.
Tadlock didn’t falter and then melt. He slammed backwards all at once, head and shoulders and butt and heels, and moved a little and lay quiet with blank, half-opened eyes.
Evans pulled in a breath and looked around the circle, at Brewer and Holdridge and Daugherty and the rest, and then he walked to the Indian and untied him.
He didn’t see the Indian slide into the brush, for Rebecca tugged at his arm as the rope came loose. “Come on, Lije.”
“What?”
“Your face is a sight.”
“That don’t matter.”
“I’ll doctor it. Come on.”
He stood uncertain while the world steadied around him, the trees getting fixed again by the river, and the people singling themselves out, and Rebecca’s face not just a blur but a face with eyes that held pride and pleading both. He saw Mrs. Tadlock was bending over her man, and Weatherby bending with her, and the men watching out of questioning and guarded faces. Nellie grazed beyond them, grown used to the elk across her back.
Rage dies in him, and the pride of rage that had made him glare his dare at them men, and he said, “We best see to Tadlock first. I didn’t aim to hurt him bad.”
Afterwards he felt cast down but somehow wholer than he had been. It wasn’t fun to beat a strong man down. It left a wound upon the winner deeper than blackened eyes and broken lips. But still he had had to take his choice, and he had taken it and stood by it, and the taking and the standing made him a wholer man.
When Dick came into camp, he said, with a quiet grin in his gray eyes, “I hear you done the needful, Lije.” But Evans didn’t have to have Dick’s words to feel solid in the right.
Evans has found his own wisdom, his own understanding of his place in the order of things. And it is here that I begin to think that perhaps Dick Summers isn’t really the Pathfinder I want him to be. One after another, as the novel progresses, they look to him for answers, but Summers rarely has anything concrete to offer them.
Answers, Summers thought while he waited. Brownie wanted answers. Always people wanted answers, the full and final, everlasting answers, not learning that answers answered only for the time, and none too well at that. His mind followed the idea along. What seemed true and right today was changed tomorrow. It all depended. On time and age and accident, and were your bowels all right. Brain and bowel went together, brain and bowel and body heat and the dream dreamed the night before. The brain made up its mind according but gave the credit all to self, standing high and prideful with its answer, not thinking that what it was thinking wouldn’t be thought but for some outside partnership.
Dick’s wisdom may be beyond godliness, but it is not so much in providing the answer, but in offering the surest way of finding it -- almost like the way that the scientific method takes precedence over any conclusion it may help determine.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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