Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [186]
“Could be buffalo, I have heard of them traveling and making great sounds.”
Again the noise, like brakes of wagons magnified, shrieking in a hurry to stop. Or cart-drivers shrieking at their animals to start again. But it turned out to be worse than stampeding buffalo. The two women followed the echoing noise and within a few minutes stumbled into an encampment of Christ bellowers, where folks shouted their faith to the heavens.
“Jesus, Lord, I am so lonely!” the preacher called out around a blazing fire, and the dozens gathered around him shouted that same call up to the stars towards which the sparks whirled up on the wind, but fell back, falling short of heaven.
“Jesus, Lord, I am so thirsty!”
“Jesus, Lord, I am so hungry!”
“Jesus, Come down, Lord, and take me in Your arms!”
“So these are Christians?” Liza said. “I have never seen so many of them all together at prayer. They make a louder noise than the Jews, but their music is bland. The Jews are closer to the Africans, I think. I like that. They kept me as a slave, but I like the sound of them.”
Even as they chanted and shouted, these Christian folk stared at the two women, the only dark faces in the crowd. One man in particular, a dried-out string-bean of a devout whose skull seemed to be trying to break through the skin on his head and face, could not take his eyes off Liza. Remembering her father all to well, she knew the look. However this man appeared to be somewhat crippled. He had suffered a terrible back injury in an attempt to cross the mountains a few years before, he told her later over a bucket of stew (and lost his wife to the cold and snow as well).
Once he spoke to her, in his own oddly grotesque way, he reminded my mother of the Charleston doctor who had given her so much help in life, and she took on the job of caring for him (in exchange, of course, for a place in his wagon).
It did not take long before the Cherokee woman began to resent this.
“That old man,” she said, around the devotional fire one night, “he is coming between us.”
“He’s giving us a place in his wagon,” Liza said.
“I don’t want a place in his wagon. I want to stay here. Someday I hope to go back East and live with my people.”
“I understand that,” Liza said. “But I can’t go back.” Liza pressed the woman close and whispered to her, “I need a way west. He has the wagon.”
“Use him, use me,” the woman said. “You will do anything, won’t you?”
Liza took a deep breath and took in the woman’s words.
“Yes,” she said.
The woman said nothing and turned to walk away.
“I’ll miss you,” Liza said.
“I’ll miss you, too,” the woman said.
“But one thing I will miss more?”
“What’s that?”
“The life I would have led if I stopped here and turned around and headed back toward the big river.”
Without a word, her once-companion walked away. It was the middle of a brightly sun-filled prairie afternoon and yet Liza could have sworn she saw a storm cloud following her friend directly above her head and she heard rumbling again, whether the storm or the ramblings of buffalo or more Christians gathered to testify to their faith, deep deep rumbling across the plain.
***
In dozens of wagons, the pilgrims traveled the southern route, preferring a desert crossing and less foreboding mountains to the tall peaks that stood directly to the west. In the next few weeks together the old man proved much less of a good companion. He wanted to talk about Jesus while Liza wanted only to reach the ocean where she might live freely, without ties to anyone or anything that could enslave her to one way of thinking or one way to live. The two ways of thinking seemed opposite and troubling to her. But her good samaritan had arrived at the end of his life whereas she hoped she stood on the verge of beginning again. That hope did not keep her from sinking now and then into deep despair. The further west they traveled the more difficult the old man found breathing. She sympathized with him. Up in the mountains, however more forgiving they were than the high peaks to the north, her own breath came