Comity

The wagon tipped, rolled over on its side, catching Richard Comity beneath a front wheel and a large rock jutting from the ground, crushing his chest.

Bit held her breath. It couldn’t be happening. Yet it did. And Richard lay beneath the wheel of their wagon and needed help. She ran, the long skirts and tall grass holding her back. It seemed an eternity before she was beside her husband.

"Mrs. Comity," the leader of the wagons said. "Mrs. Comity, he will not live through the day."

"No he will not. The same thing, I am thinking," Bit said quietly. There was no sorrow in her voice, no strain on her face.

"We'll stop the night here while he dies. Then we'll bury him before we go on," the man said.

"Aye," she said. "We stop the night, then bury him." Her voice was as soft as the wind drifting quietly across the land.

They laid Richard Comity out on a smooth place above the south side of the stream, above the place they had already crossed. Bit sat beside him, laying her hands in his hair, letting the curls turn about her fingers. An ache lay deep inside her, an ache she was sure would never pass.

"I am dying," Richard said softly and his body heaved and though he restrained the cough, blood trickled from the side of his mouth. Bit wiped the blood away gently.

"Aye," she said. "It is dying you are, I think. Yet, I would not have it so."

“When I am gone, do not let them take the horse, nor the oxen nor the wagon.. You must keep them by, save them for yourself and Morgan. You will need everything we have brought for the new land."

*****************

Martin appointed four men to take up shovels and prepare a place for burying

"I want him buried there above the trees. Perhaps he will hear the wind when it blows and the water when it flows. It is not so far as it seems. And there is time. Long the day is yet. There is time," Bit said.

The men looked at each other, then looked at her standing there, her arm about her son's shoulders, she so tiny and he so young yet so tall.

They turned and without a word walked down the stream to the clump of cottonwoods standing beside the stream with willows below dipping into the water and dug the grave and laid away Richard Comity..

The next morning, the men gathered the cattle, yoked the oxen to the wagons, and tied the horses behind the wagons, and prepared for the next march.

When they came to Bit Comity's wagon with her oxen, she came and stood by.

"No," she said. "No. You take not my wagon, nor my oxen, nor my horse, nor my two cattle. Here with me they remain."

"No, ma'am," said Martin. "We can't allow that. Come along with us proper, as any woman should. Your man is in the ground and you are a comely woman. You will find another in the valley to take his place."

"Wrong you are, sir," Bit Comity said. "I choose where and when I go or stay. You will take neither me nor any of my things. The wagon will remain here with my oxen my horse, my two cattle, and me. Remove my cattle from the herd and turn them back upon the grass beside the water. Neither I nor mine will leave this place."

*****************

The next day, Bit said to Morgan, "We will first lay out the place for building."

She walked about a shallow depression that lay between two of the rolling undulations of plain looking at each part of it. The depression ran north and south, rising a bit at the south and dropping off into the river at the north. At the top of the rise on either side, the rolling of the grassland became indistinct, seeming to level off into a vast flat.

"We will build here," she said finally

Bit chose a place back from the river some twenty yards. The talus at the bottom of the broken rise was easy at hand, as were the stones of the river. It was almost level with some drop off toward the river and some rise to the south. The whole was lightly rounded and they would have to build up the outside edges, especially the corners, to create a flat floor approxi­mately fourteen feet square.

Bit Comity went about her building in an unhurried way, and thereby doing more each hour of each day than one watching would have expected.

Bit Comity laid the walls some eighteen inches wide or more at the base for that was how she remembered the walls of the cottage in Wales. The result was