A cross stuck out of the patch of touched earth.  Momma sniffled as Reverend Peter read the psalms.  The words droned on, and he said the wind picked them up and carried them to God.  We needed help on our journey, as did Papa on his.  He said Papa was up in Heaven now, but Papa used to tell me parents never left their children.  My brother Joshua wrapped Momma in his arms, and she cried more.  I wanted her to know he wasn't gone, just changed.  He was something else, watching over us.  Like a butterfly, said Papa, coming out of its cocoon in a different form.  The cross reminded us the body was a caterpillar.

Moses sat on my shoulders, and I clutched tight his tubed legs blotched with brown.  I didn’t cry because his button eyes, black as the space between stars, watched all the goings on, and he would protect me from what was to come.  Auntie stitched him for me before we left for Oregon, but he said he was from some far away time when the best land wasn’t out west past the desert.  He knew a lot, almost as much as Papa, and he was stronger than any gunman.

Night engulfed the trail, and for a while we sat around fires, singing songs to God.  When all was embers, we went to our wagons with leather pulled over them, and lay down to sleep.  Through the darkness echoed a wail like a coyote’s, but less regal.  Momma’s form trembled under her stiff blanket a few feet away.  Her pillow stifled the noise, but it came to me, and I looked at Moses.

“He was her map, so losing him left her lost,”  His voice was of an old crow who flew through youth.  “And when you don’t know north from west from east from south all the grass looks the same.”  I couldn’t see his buttons, but they watched me with sadness.  His back hunched over, so I sat him up out of respect.  He seemed older in the dark, and the stitches crisscrossing his body stuck out more than they should.  He was torn apart and put back together a hundred times, and when the moon came out he felt the pain of all of them.  He couldn’t even grow hair anymore.

“You’re my map.” I said, and hugged him close, letting my hair fall on his head so he could pretend he was young again.  A lullaby vibrated from his cloth chest, and I drifted off to dreams.

In the morning, Momma and Joshua weren’t in the wagon.  I snatched Moses and jumped down, kicking up a cloud of dust.  The campsite hummed with people preparing for the day’s trek.  My family sat in a circle with others, eating breakfast.  The smell of bacon drifted past the oxen chewing cud and men chatting about their plans for the West.  My stomach screamed because it had been empty since Papa was cocooned.  I wandered through the commotion and stood by Joshua for a few moments.

“Food.” said Moses, and broke my trance.  He was the wind whispering in my ear.  Folks got scared when he talked in public, but he knew when it was necessary.

“Food?” I mimicked, sticking out my hand like he wanted.  Joshua smiled and ripped off a piece from his loaf.  I would have told him I wanted bacon, but the bread was already in my mouth and the crunch calmed me.

The wagons rolled forward, and the crosses walked away behind us.  How alone Papa would be from then on, darkness and silence his only friends.  He could lie by the others and laugh at passersby, but he couldn’t see them.  

No, he wasn’t alone because he wasn't under dust.  I kept forgetting because the crosses looked like men holding their arms out for a hug.  God was merciful to allow for cocoons.

Joshua and the men swung onto their horses to guide the cattle, and watched us women and children walking alongside.  I fell in line next to Momma, whose swollen red eyes pointed west.  Our hands clasped each other, but I led her as much as she did me.

On my shoulders bounced Moses, scanning the horizon.  He could walk as easy as any of us, but he needed to focus.  If he didn’t, dead Injuns would raise from the prairie on every side and kill us.  He told me so.  No one else knew he was carrying us to Oregon, because if they did he would have to leave.  A chill ran down my back as I thought of skeletons adorned with feathers and face paint clawing at me.

I scratched at my dress raking into me wherever it could.  Dust caked in the flaps as part of the fabric.  Whether it started white or polkadot or flowered, it faded brown.  Momma spent more time washing dresses than she did cooking or walking so now she left them how they were.  The valleys of her face were filled with dirt also, so the only difference between them and the mountains was color.

Buffalo chased each other from horizon to horizon, crossing the path behind us.  When I spotted them I though they ran from a awful monster beyond the south, but as they disappeared I knew there was a field of the greenest grass beyond the north.  Countless times they circled the world, and never knew when they came to a place they had been.  Everywhere was new, because by the time they came around again seasons wrecked and revived.  They thought we were strange, going west where all ended in ocean.  Only the sun could go this way without stopping.  

A river came up in front of us, running against the buffalo.  Water thumped on rocks and frothed white.  The men grumbled about losing daylight, and Momma said I needed to keep my dress up.  At last the endless walking was over, and an adventure was afoot.  I smiled back at Moses, but he clung to my neck and watched the water with a blank face.

No one was in any mood to get wet, and the sky was turning orange so we stopped and made fires for dark.  The songs weren’t as feverish as the night before, because no one died and we weren’t as helpless.  God did what we asked, and everyone was too tired to praise.  I didn’t show the same ingratitude to Moses.  Without him we wouldn’t have even left Missouri all those eons ago.  He’s easier to thank because I can see him.  You only rely on something invisible when you have nothing else.

“Why do they need cocoons?”  I lay under the blanket on a bed of dust.  The sky was black, and all outside the wagon was quiet.  Moses sat on my stomach, his bald head veiled in shadow.  He perked up at my question, because he knew I knew the answer.

“So the caterpillar can become the butterfly.”  Unending patience flowed through his stitching, but he tired of repeating himself.  He misunderstood.  I knew the one had to change into the other, but it was just a hole and a pile of earth.

“But why can’t the caterpillar do it on its own?”  Maybe it needed a curtain to happen behind because folks got scared, like when Moses talked in public.

“Needs a reminder not to fold up its wings and crawl back into its old skin.”  Night air seeped in under my blanket and chattered my teeth.  Images of the painted skeletons returned, this time with maggots and slugs crawling in their eye-sockets and around their ribs.

“How can the Injuns come back if they’re buried too?”  I hoped he wouldn’t have an answer, and be at a loss just this once.  For this moment of ignorance I would have sacrificed all his protection.  The dead would stay so forever if he didn’t answer.

“It’s a reminder, not a command.”  My stomach rolled around and swallowed my heart.    Terror gripped me because the cocoon was only a please and thank you, and some people weren’t polite.  They only weren’t rising up because Moses was here.  

“How do you keep them down?”  My throat trembled, not like I expected.  I wasn’t afraid of how close the skeletons were, but of the force keeping them away.  He was friends with the dust and burier of Papa.  If Papa was still here, he couldn’t be.

“I am a command,” said Moses, like a solider who bears a weapon’s power against his will.  His circle eyes stared into me as if he was sad, and I pulled him close.  The lullaby echoing from his cloth chest was an evil laugh, and I fell into nightmares.

When I woke, the mist washed away my fears, and I came out into the blinking sun.  The breakfast circle was nowhere, so there was nothing to feed the beast roaring in my belly.  We all made arrangements to cross over.

The cattle went first, wading through by the help of Joshua and the men.  Some stumbled in the current, and flecks of red sparkled the water just past them.  They whined and breathed in chunks.  In the middle of the river, all I could see were their heads, and the men jumped on their horses to keep above the surface. 

Some of the men stayed on the opposite shore with them, but Joshua and the younger ones waded back.  They grabbed the leads of the oxen who pulled the wagons, and took them forward.  My family’s left one, a hunk of muscle seething under a matted black coat, snorted into the dust, and needed to be whipped to move.  What I called adventure was torture to it.  Fur soaked up all the water, and it had to carry the wet around.

As the horses’ hoofs thudded into the current, I remembered I left Moses on my blanket.  Momma said I didn’t need him, and it would be easier to go through without worrying about “that doll.”  She spoke in the hushed tone she used when embarrassed.

From where I stood I whispered “See you soon,” to him.  I imagined him nodding and looking at me with a solemn smile.  Buttoned or not, his eyes sweated in the sun.  I was never in the wagon during the day, and the tarp trapped heat.

The oxen shuffled into the water, us women and children watching from one bank and the older men from the other.  The whining wasn’t as loud as with the cattle, because these were more broken in, and suffered in silence.  Our wayward ox splashed around so it wouldn’t have to lug the whole river behind it.  This annoyed our right one, who kicked into its tar fur.  In response, the first jammed its hoof into the second, and they threw kicks back and forth at each other, staring straight the whole while because of the yolk.

This fighting made the pair unstable, so when a wagon wheel caught a rock, they stumbled down.  The yolk broke off from the load, but not before the wagon they pulled fell over also.  My throat clotted up, trapping a scream.  Moses wouldn’t make a noise for fear of scaring everyone, but he was terrified.  I closed my eyes and saw him floating on a crusted blanket raft as the tarp filled with water.

Momma yelped and covered her mouth with her hands.  Everything we were going to settle with was in there, and now it was ruined.  She turned her back to the wreckage, facing east, and sniffled.  Joshua looked back from his horse with a bunched up forehead.

A form drifted out of the fallen wagon, face toward the riverbed.  Moses.  His limbs lay limp, and the the water whipped him around, trying to avoid the rocks.  I took a step forward but Momma stopped me.  He had to come back because without him we wouldn’t make it to Oregon.

My lungs squeezed into themselves and forced out words which weren’t mine.  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand.”  I slammed my fist into her arms, but she wouldn’t let go.

He dropped under the current with a wink and a plop.  The water rushed on like he was never there, and a package of Papa’s tools floated by.  I felt the dead Injuns rolling in their cocoons because the command was gone.  They ripped at the earth above them like a butterfly would, except they were still caterpillars.  Go to sleep, go to sleep and never wake up.  Why couldn’t they take the reminder?  He would return and smite them for bothering us.  It might be too late by then, at the rate they were folding up their wings.  We would all be butterflies when he got here.  Come back.

My hand flailed into Momma’s nose, and she yelled the name of God.  I wriggled free and ran to the river bank.  Joshua shouted something, but the hoards were coming and the ground shook, so I dove in.

The surface closed over my head and everything was mud.  No matter how hard I stroked, the water knocked me around so I didn’t know the difference between the sky and the bottom.  From the blur, a black circle emerged, and I grabbed at it.  A fingerless arm reached out to me from below, but we were ripped away from each other by a flick of the current.

What little light I could see vanished.  I think I hit my head.  Black reigned for a long while, except for the the points of white shining far away in all directions.  This must be how stars felt, with no one to keep them company.

From everywhere there came the sound of gurgling, and drops pattered my face.  My eyes opened and there were only stars above.  All else was dark, but I felt a rock under my back and water rushing all around to pin me there.  I coughed up the whole river, and a lot of myself too.

I rolled over, and plunged back into the foam.  After struggling, I got hold of a clump of earth and pulled myself to the eastern bank.  My stomach rumbled, and I remembered hunger counts sleeping hours as much as waking ones.

In the dim light I stumbled north, against the river.  Moses was south, but I would collapse before I found him.  Relief kept me going.  I could go to Oregon like any other girl without an ancient power weighing me down.  They would all be waiting on the other side of the river for me to come back.  Momma lost enough already and wouldn’t go on without me.  

By the time I reached the path, the sky was fire and my shadow stretched across the water.  Forward and back it snaked, but the air was silent, and no one was there, not even an ox.  They gave up the search quick, if there was one to begin with.  After all the loss one more didn’t matter.  Or they were never there, and I wandered out of Missouri on my own.

For the first time, I noticed the infinity of the plains.  Even with a path cutting through, everything looked the same and the end might as well not exist.  I could walk until my legs gave out but I wouldn’t get to Oregon.  Maybe with a spare pair, and another and another, but even then I would need to fill my stomach.

The river sparkled in the new light, and I stooped to drink.  A mermaid looked back at me, except the water was too shallow.  A big red welt marked my forehead, and I splashed it like Momma taught.  My eyes were caves where bats lived.

As the world brightened I knew I had to get somewhere safe before the Injuns came.  Nothing held them in their holes now, and they were hungry.

Toward the rising sun I shuffled, back the way we came from.  The dust slithered into my throat and I hacked it out, but more filled in.  The particles settled on my lungs and heart so each breath sounded like an old man’s.  There weren’t any of those with us, this wasn’t the place for them.  They got sick too easy and went too slow.

Plumes wrapped around me and froze everything but my legs.  The Injuns gathered forces so I walked as fast as I could, but the sun hardened the dust.  I was crusted all the way through, or at least my rags were.  I used to think they were some other color, but they were always brown.

The string of buffalo came down from the north.  They didn’t run circles around the world, just got to the northern end and turned around.  I remembered my lessons now, there was a sea up there too, not just to the west.   We weren’t strange because of our direction, only because we never came back.  We went as far as we dared and stopped.

Papa’s cross hobbled down the path.  It raised its arms for an embrace, and bounced at my speed.  No, I hobbled to it.  It was empty, don’t forget.  He was off in some other form, wherever he was.  Momma and Joshua and the others lost him like they lost me, so he was somewhere else.  If I knew where, I would go.

“Hug me.”  The voice was Moses’, but he was all the way down the river.  His button eyes looked at me from inside, and said to give into thirst and the grumbling of my stomach.

The Injuns rumbled to greet me from the east, and a whirlwind swirled around them.  They were supposed to come from the prairie, they didn’t understand roads.  What did Moses know anyway?  He said they wouldn’t have cattle and horses and wagons with them like we did.  Either he lied about them or about himself.  Maybe he was just as old as Auntie said he was.

At the base of the cross I lay down and curled my legs to my chest.  The suffering would soon end, whether through death or life.  They were coming with their hopes and losses before them, and lives left behind.  Not so different from us, except we started out first.  He wasn’t there to hold them back anymore so they surged after us in hoards, even though they thought they were chasing Oregon.  The west moved ever-westward, so no one but butterflies caught up.

I cried for Papa then.