Emma Lee

Emma Lee of Lonely Dell

Emma Lee Q/ Lonely CJ)ell Emma stretched her legs, turned onto her back, and looked up at the wagon cover. The three little bonnets, suspended from the bow above her, glowed in the misty light like red lanterns, symbolic of her brave front during the preparations to move again, this time to the jumping-off place of the world. As they made the descent last night after dark, she wondered if they were not literally jumping off, into what depths she could not guess. Beside her, John D. breathed heavily. Crosswise in the upper end of the wagon, her twin daughters with little Belle between them, slept as though they rested on down under silken counterpanes. There was no sound from the other wagon, where Billy, Ike, and Jimmie were sleeping . They had pulled up alongside last night, not that boys nine and eleven were afraid, but she herself wanted them near. Eight people alone in all this big, lost country ought to stay close together. Day was breaking, and she was tired of the hard bed and was sore from all the bouncing and jouncing of the past week. Emma was pregnant again. "It's not that I'm getting old," she told herself. "No woman at thirty-two is really old. It's just that this young one I'm carrying is getting so heavy and active. When I try to rest, she starts to do her exercises." Emma would slip out and look over this place that was to be her home. She dressed quietly, stepped over the end-gate, and jumped to 56 .Juanita Brooks the ground. Sand! Loose, gritty sand, piled high against the tamarack tree and around the scrubby growth. And cliffs! In the uncertain light she could not tell whether they were red or purple. Whoever dreamed that cliffs could be this color? To the south she caught a glimpse of the Colorado River, about which she had heard so much. She had smelled it last night as they came down that last steep incline, a murky smell of arrowweeds and willows. She hesitated a moment between the river and the hill, and then chose the high road. She must get an overall view of this place. She followed the wagon tracks through ankle-deep sand, then up a steep slope to an almost perpendicular ridge which demanded hands as well as feet, up another slope to a second ridge. She was breathing so heavily that she decided to stop; there were at least two other ridges higher up, she remembered. The dawn was clear about her when she turned to look back-the east pink, with a thin piping of gold edging the mountain. So this was it! The sandy floor was spotted with desert brush, and there was a thin line of yellow-green where bare willows marked the course of the Paria Creek against the eastern bluff. A long isosceles triangle of cliffs was formed by the river with its stone buttress forming the base and two long bluffs coming together far, far to the north-barren it was as the second day of Creation, yet it seemed that God had tried to make up in color what He had left out in vegetation. Over it all was silence so heavy that it filled all the valley and rolled in tidal waves to break against her ears. Distance and rocks and emptiness and silence! She must not think of the home she had left. She must not! All the things she had put into that home-the doilies and samplers, the wool flowers under a glass dome, the spray of hair flowers in the picture frame, the furniture. Then there was her garden, the arbor with its heavy bunches of grapes, the flowers that always won prizes at the fair. She had a green thumb, the neighbors said. But what could she do here? She heard John call her name and saw him beside the wagon. How the sound carried! It was as if the very atmosphere, accustomed to