The Hunger Read online

  The weather would turn soon enough, even if the heat was so oppressive at the moment that they could hardly imagine it ever letting up.

  Stanton’s gaze skipped over the ground. “Their tracks are plain enough. Despite what he says, it should be easy enough to follow them.” They led to a pass completely obscured by forest, dark and impenetrable, the trail swallowed up behind a wall of growth. Above the ranging forest was a wall of imposing white-capped mountains. The majority of the wagon party came from the plains and had never seen mountains like these. “California must lie right behind,” Patrick Breen had said breathlessly, unable to imagine that the country could go on for much longer. Stanton knew that the few existent maps, sketchy as they were, said Breen was wrong. But he wasn’t going to be the one to say so.

  “Is that smart?” Franklin Graves asked. Everyone turned instinctively in his direction; people seemed to listen to Graves. It might’ve been because of his imposing size; Graves was a large man, made broad of back by long hours in the fields, building up his farm. “Not if Hastings says it’s not safe. He must’ve had a reason for warning us off.”

  “We can’t just sit here on our asses waiting for his permission.” That was Snyder, the Graves family’s teamster. Stanton noticed that Reed flinched at the sound of his voice. Odd.

  Donner’s eyes moved nervously from Keseberg to Eddy, to the wheel tracks in the dirt. “We have an Indian boy who knows these parts. We could keep going,” he said, testing the idea before the crowd. Stanton didn’t care for the look on Donner’s face, like a man who had swallowed a pebble but would rather choke than cough it up and reveal his mistake. Donner had fought hard to make himself party captain, seemingly without thinking about the difficult choices that came with the position.

  “I been having trouble with the axle on one of my wagons like it is,” Graves said. “Can’t risk it.”

  “We should send a couple men ahead to find Hastings and bring him back,” Reed said. “He got us into this mess, he can damn well get us out of it.” Reed squared his shoulders. He was sweating in the sun. Stanton didn’t know why he always suited up like he was going to a courthouse. “I’d like to volunteer.”

  “You? What makes you think he’s gonna listen to you?” Keseberg called out. “Hell, nobody listens to you.” This got some easy laughs. Keseberg reminded Stanton of the schoolroom bullies who’d made games of plucking wings off dragonflies or crushing ants beneath their feet.

  “I’ll make him listen.” Reed tried his best to sound confident. “Though I’d like another man to ride with me. Safety in numbers.” No one needed to be reminded why.

  A wind turned over dry leaves in the silence. Last night there had been poker games, drinking, storytelling, and who knew what had gone on inside the tents. Few men would want to leave such comforts to ride blind through unknown territory.

  The cowards. They were only too happy to let Reed shoulder all the risk. He couldn’t let Reed head out on his own with no one to watch his back. Stanton stepped forward. “I’ll go.” He deliberately avoided Keseberg’s eyes; he knew well enough what Keseberg thought about him. “I’ll ride with Reed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER THAT EVENING, Stanton tethered his saddle horse at his campsite and built a fire. Then he unhitched his oxen and drove them to the meadow to graze with the other livestock, nodding to the men who had taken up watch for the night. In the distance, Franklin Graves and one of his boys drove their oxen through the meadow, and when Franklin turned and caught sight of him, the look on his face reminded Stanton of the rumors he’d caught wind of back in Fort Bridger, the unpleasant speculations whirling about him. Keseberg had given him the truth—you could count on Keseberg for the truth if it was unpleasant—that there were some in the wagon party wondering whether Stanton might not be just a little off, a little lonely, a little crazy, a potential danger to the others. When Bryant had warned that the Nystrom boy’s murderer might be some twisted individual living among them, little did Stanton imagine that he’d be a suspect. No one had gone so far as to accuse him—no one was willing to take it that far, it seemed. But still, Stanton knew the human mind was susceptible to insidious influence, especially when people were hungry, tired, and afraid. He remembered how his neighbors had been only too willing to believe the worst about him when Lydia died . . . Had these people, the ones who knew him from Springfield, finally discovered the story of Lydia? And if they had, how long would it be before they began to turn on him?

  Edwin Bryant had given him good advice and he’d ignored it. He should’ve made more allies when he had the chance. The other single men had made themselves useful to one household or another, finding a place at family campfires or a seat in their wagons, like sickly Luke Halloran or the old Belgian, Hardkoop. Out here, you couldn’t afford to be on your own.

  And then, of course, there was still the problem of Tamsen, whose thin smile cut into him with a chill whenever they passed, the unspoken power she held over him lingering in her wake long after she’d gone.

  A stand of cottonwood striplings bordered the meadow, the farthest outcropping of the dark woods into which the previous wagon party had disappeared. Stanton imagined their wagons simply swallowed up, like sunlight absorbed by so many leaves. He pushed into the ragged little grove to search for enough dry wood to keep his fire going through the night.

  But he had only gone a few steps when he startled: Mary Graves was moving among the trees, having clearly had the same idea, and he was so pleased and surprised to see her he almost doubted she was real. But she turned when a twig cracked under his boots. In the half dark, he couldn’t read the expression on her face. But she nearly dropped the sticks in her arms.

  “Miss Graves.” He drew in a deep breath. “What a pleasure to run into you. I hope I didn’t startle you.” In truth, he was alarmed to find how often he thought about Mary Graves lately, as if all of his other thoughts were fallen leaves easily scattered.

  Mary still hadn’t spoken to him since her attack at Fort Bridger. But he was sure he’d caught her looking in his direction more than once.

  “Only a little,” she admitted now. “I’m afraid, after what happened . . .”

  “I’m so glad to see you looking well,” Stanton said quickly. She’d gone pale, and he hated to think he’d reminded her of the monstrous man at Fort Bridger. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to call on you.” Her father had been tailing her day and night.

  Her smile was tight but seemed sincere. “No need to apologize. I understand.”

  “Are you feeling better?” He wondered about the wound on her shoulder. It had been slight, but the man who’d attacked her had been filthy; it would be so easy for the wound to become infected and to fester.

  “Yes, thank you. It was nothing, a graze. Once my mother saw that horrible man’s condition, she made me bathe in vinegar and soda ash! I feel as though I’ve been scrubbed raw.” She laughed, running her hands over her arms self-consciously. “Actually, I’m glad to see you, Mr. Stanton. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I would’ve come earlier, but my father . . .” She stopped, blinking, and a sour taste rose in Stanton’s throat. So it was as he suspected. “Thank you for what you did that day, rushing to my rescue like that. It was very brave of you.”

  “It was nothing.” He had spent days thinking about her eyes and now he could barely meet them. “I felt almost sorry for him. There was something about the way Bridger handled him, the way he talked about him, that made me think of an animal in a zoo. It made me think . . .” His blood pulsed a little faster. He remembered the night Lydia’s father, drunk on whiskey, had joked about looking through the keyhole of his daughter’s bedroom to watch her undress. Stanton didn’t know why the association had come to him now. Maybe only that he sensed Bridger liked the power he had over his prisoner, liked to watch him chained up in that dark room, going slowly insane.

/>   The thought was so vile and so strong that he was momentarily afraid that he could transmit them to her, like a kind of contagion.

  “What is it?” Mary asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Before he could make up an excuse, he heard a shout. They turned to see Franklin Graves crashing through the brush. He looked first at Stanton but then turned to his daughter. “I told you I didn’t want you talking to him.”

  Although her father towered over her, Mary didn’t flinch. “And I told you he’s done nothing wrong,” she said evenly. “Besides, I meant to thank him for saving me. He did save me, as you recall.”

  Graves’s face was dark with anger. “Believe me, Mary, this man is no one’s savior. Now take that firewood to your mother, she’s waiting on you. Go on,” he added, and raised a hand as if he might hit her. Instead he pulled her roughly in the direction of the wagon train. “Get.”

  Stanton felt his anger rushing down to some deep, sharp point, as if it were flowing down the blade of a knife. Another father who hated him, resented him—and maybe even envied him. “I don’t know what I’ve done to give you cause to dislike me—”

  Graves didn’t let him finish. “I don’t ever want to catch you talking to my daughter, do you hear me? I know all about you. I know what you did in Massachusetts.”

  Massachusetts. A word like the first hiss of flame, ready to flare up and consume him at any moment.

  At least Mary was too far off now to hear it.

  Graves smiled narrowly. “I see you know what I’m talking about. You can’t lie your way out of it, not with me. George Donner knew that girl’s father, you see. That girl you got pregnant and deserted. He told me you ran off in shame after she killed herself.”

  Stanton felt as though he’d been hit. This was the moment he’d been dreading and, perhaps, waiting for since they all left Springfield. Sometimes he wondered if the rumors would follow him to the ends of the world. Maybe he would always have to carry them along, like a shadow. A horrible twisted lie that was his burden to bear to the end of his days.

  It was his fault, after all. He’d known that Donner and Knox were associates. It was how he’d ended up here in the first place, caught in an endless spiral that seemed determined to keep his past alive. It was just that he hadn’t expected George Donner to tell anyone about Lydia. And, of course, Donner didn’t know the whole story; he only knew what Knox had told him, which was, of course, the whole problem.

  Emboldened by Stanton’s silence, Graves took a step closer. Stanton could smell his breath: close and wet and rotten. “How old was that girl, anyway, when you got her that way?”

  He wanted to throw a punch at Graves but somehow managed to stop himself. He couldn’t speak. The words swelled in his throat to close it, until he felt as if he might choke—long ago, when he made his promise to Lydia, he had gotten into the habit of swallowing the truth. He hadn’t said anything when it had happened, hadn’t let himself be moved by the vicious things his Massachusetts neighbors said about him.

  “So you won’t even try to deny it?” For a split second, Graves looked almost disappointed, as if he’d been angling for a fight. “I don’t want you near Mary. She’s not going to throw herself away on a no-account like you. If I ever see you talking to her again, I’ll tell her what I know about you.”

  So he hadn’t told Mary already. One small mercy.

  And in this world, Stanton thought, that was increasingly the only kind of mercy to be found.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TRAIL HASTINGS HAD BLAZED was ugly, barely wide enough for a single wagon. As he and Reed followed it past a landscape of felled trees and jagged stumps, Stanton fell into the rhythmic sway of his horse’s back and tried to keep his mind from swinging back to Mary, to the fight with Franklin Graves, and to the memories he’d resurrected of Lydia. Maybe, after all, Graves was right about him. He was hardly an ideal suitor. He doubted he knew the first thing about pleasing a young woman. After Lydia, it seemed he couldn’t keep away from new widows and unhappy wives. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to stop himself, as if the need to bury his misery in them over and over again was the only way for him to survive.

  And besides, he certainly couldn’t provide Mary with the kind of wealth and prospects her father was apparently seeking.

  He recalled Lavinah Murphy teasing him at the picnic about taking a wife. Don’t you get tired of being alone, Mr. Stanton?

  She had no idea. The aloneness ate a hole through him. Sometimes he worried that the loneliness had taken everything, that there was nothing left of him at all on the inside.

  They stopped the first night to make camp as the sun was sinking behind the hills. Stanton was surprised when Reed came back with a rabbit. It was scrawny and small but it was meat. “Where’d you find that?” he asked, impressed that Reed was able to catch anything, let alone manage to do it so quickly, when they’d seen so little game since Fort Laramie. Even in the thick cover of the woods, there was little birdsong. It was as if the lush growth were a painted setpiece, a convincing impression of life built out of sawdust and paint.

  Reed smiled faintly as he flayed it, jerking the skin off the carcass in a couple of tugs. “Lucky, I guess. Found a spring down by those boulders, too. I’ll get water for the horses once I get this rabbit over the fire.”

  Stanton had been wary of heading out with Reed, whom he suspected of having his own reasons for wanting to take a break from the party: Stanton knew a man with a secret when he saw one. But now that they were away from the fray, Stanton relaxed a bit.

  The two men caught up with Hastings’s wagon party the next day, following their meandering trail through the trees. It looked to have been charted by a drunk, spur after spur ending abruptly at a cliff. Standing at the edge, Stanton could see the canyon far below them, which promised a way through the mountains. But there was no apparent path down to reach it.

  They rode up on the wagon party halted dead in the woods. The scene was of frenetic work, the men either swinging axes to clear a path or using the oxen to haul the felled trees out of the way. The wagons remained in a line backed down the trail, bottled up in place. Oddly, there were few women and no children about: no campfires burning, no cooking or clothes washing taking place. A couple of men stood lookout, too, perched high on rock outcroppings, rifles nestled in the crook of their arms. Maybe, Stanton thought, they’d had trouble with Indians along the way.

  A big, red-faced man, stripped to the waist, lowered his ax in midswing when Stanton and Reed rode into the clearing. Stanton didn’t like the way the men on lookout notched their rifles into their shoulders.

  “We’re looking for Lansford Hastings,” Stanton called out, when they were still far enough away to make for a difficult target. “Is he with you?”

  The men exchanged wary looks and didn’t answer.

  Reed spoke to fill the silence. “Our wagon party is a couple days back. We took the cutoff, just like you, but all we found was a note from Hastings, warning us not to follow.”

  One of the men laughed darkly. “Then he done you a courtesy, friend. Count yourself lucky and turn around.”

  “We have nearly a hundred people waiting back at the trailhead,” Stanton said. “We need him to guide us.”

  “Look.” The red-faced man hefted his ax. “He ain’t good for much, but we need him to get us out of this goddamned forest. We ain’t about to let you have him.”

  It was a strange thing to say. Stanton and Reed exchanged a look.

  “We only want to talk to him, that’s all,” Reed said. Finally, the men gestured for them to come forward, and the sentries lowered their rifles. They walked single file between the long string of wagons. Stanton peered through gaps in the canvas and saw small frightened faces, children huddled together, silently eyeing him in return. Something had happened. That was clear.

 
“So, why the sentry?” Reed asked, his voice friendly. “Have you had trouble with Indians?”

  The red-faced man wiped his brow with a bandana. “We got trouble, but it ain’t been Indians. We got an animal tracking us, maybe more than one. Been on our tail ever since we left Fort Bridger.”

  “Surely you don’t have to worry they’ll attack in broad daylight?” Stanton asked. But almost immediately he realized that the tree canopy was so thick it could’ve been dusk.

  “Mostly they been picking off our livestock at night, and we can’t afford to lose any,” the man said. “But now some of the dogs have gone missing, too. Maybe they run off, hard to know.”

  Stanton was uneasy. He scanned the trees pressing close on either side of them.

  Reed cleared his throat. “You said Hastings wasn’t worth much—what did you mean by that?”

  “He’s lost his nerve, is all,” said the man with the ax. “You’ll see for yourself.” He jerked his chin toward a wagon set a way back from the others. The canvas opening had been laced together with leather strips. It looked as if Hastings had sewn himself inside. Stanton had never seen anything like it. He gave Reed a questioning look, but Reed just shrugged. It was clear their escorts didn’t intend to go any farther. The man planted the ax between his feet and leaned on the handle, looking faintly amused.

  Stanton went forward, wishing he could shake the feeling that they were being watched—not just by the other men, but by the forest itself.

  “Lansford Hastings?” Stanton climbed over the toe board. A scuffling noise came from inside the wagon. “Don’t shoot. My friend and I have come to speak with you. We just want a few minutes of your time.” There was no reply, but no further noises, either, which Stanton decided to take as a sign of acquiescence. He had to unlace the leather strips to climb under the opening in the canopy. Reed followed him.