The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.12 BT + FS

The Sowersby family consisted of the mother, the father, and two daughters. That was fairly small for a Mormon clan. One daughter was his own age. Her name was Frances, and she was lovely and funny and appeared to be bearing up under the travels on the prairie like she was born to it. Her younger sister was named Mattie, and she was probably no older than seven or eight. She was a strange girl, rather dark and moody, but she had taken a liking to Billy. In fact, he wished Frances would look at him with those same worshipful eyes.

It would be foolish to fall for Frances, Billy thought, as he looked out over the rolling plains and the lazily snaking river that hugged what could be a hundred wagons down below. After all, they would likely cross the Wasatch mountains with the Sowersbys, but they would not settle in Utah. After a day or two, just long enough to restock their wagon, they would head West. And Frances would stay behind.

Billy had asked his father if they might stay in Utah a bit longer, to give him some more time with the girl, but he had said no. Jonathan Travers figured they had plenty of time to make it out of Utah, through Nevada, and over the Sierras before the snows closed the northern route to California, but he wasn't willing to take any chances. So he told Billy that they would have a day or two to rest in Salt Lake, but no more.

As he paused his climb to catch his breath, Billy could just make out his mom on the prairie far below. He imagined she kept looking up the side of the granite megalith, shielding her eyes and trying to pick him out on the face of the rock. He didn't know if she could see him, or if she could discern which one of the dozen other men clambering over the rock was her son. But knowing his mom, she'd keep watch until he was safely back in camp.

As he climbed, he marveled at the names and dates scrawled from one end of the granite edifice to the other. He had assumed that most of the travelers would not venture too far up the granite slope, either from fear of heights or haste. But now that he was nearing the top of the incline, he realized that very little of the huge rock mountain had been immune from pioneer graffiti. The tool of choice appeared to be a chisel, or just a hunk of broken rock. But there were also many names written in what looked like simple black axle grease. He had found one sheltered cave with a half dozen such grease inscriptions. Obviously, the artists hoped the cave would shelter the names and dates from the weather.

Billy had opted for a chisel. He wanted to make sure that his family was immortalized here for centuries, and not lost after a season or two of hard summer rains and the baking sun. His father had agreed.

"It seems a shame," Jonathan Travers had said the night they arrived, rubbing a calloused thumb across one already faded grease inscription from 1846. "I mean, it's a shame that they couldn't take the time to make their marks proper. Whos't know they passed by in a hundred years?" Billy saw the wistful look in his father's eyes and knew that he was speaking of far more than the grease marks on the rock.

Jonathan Travers had big dreams of making his mark in the world, and Billy had absorbed much of that ambition. Even at just fifteen, he not only imagined his father becoming the most successful man in all of California, he also saw himself as the inheritor of a great legacy. Even though that legacy was yet to be built, Billy felt that it was already his for the taking. The elder Travers had that effect on his son, as well as upon most people who met him.

Last night his father pulled him aside before supper. "What do you say, Billy? Should we put the Travers on the map here in the middle of the Nebraska Territory?" He had already pulled a cold steel chisel and hammer out of the toolbox on the side of the wagon. "Should we make sure they always know we were here?"

"There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow," his mother had said, tugging on his father's shirt sleeve the way she always did when she wanted to distract him from an obsession. "Tonight we just need to fry up some of that salt pork and have ourselves a good evening meal. You boys have been living on way too much jerky and warm water for the past couple days. It's going to be a beautiful night. Let's make a fire and enjoy it."