The Hunger Page 14

  She thought, then, of the Nystrom boy. She hadn’t been allowed to see the boy—hadn’t wanted to—but she’d heard the rumors. She thought of the hunger Luke Halloran’s voice had described. But Halloran couldn’t have been the evil spirit of the Washoe tribe. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Is that why you ran?” she asked.

  Thomas hesitated. Then he nodded. “I was frightened,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, then reached out and placed a hand on his arm, letting the blanket fall away from her. Now he didn’t feel cold. He felt hot, burning hot. “I don’t blame you,” she said.

  He turned to her. They were very close in the dark. “Are you frightened?” he whispered. He placed one finger on the inside of her wrist, and she shivered now for a different reason. His breath brushed her cheek. His eyelashes were long and soft-looking, like the feathers of a bird.

  His lips felt funny against hers—not bad, just unexpected. A little wet, a little cool, and soft. Her first kiss. Her heart jumped in her chest at the thought. It seemed harmless; why did preachers and parents get in such a tizzy about it? He kissed her again, as though he knew she wanted another. This time, he was more assured, and something lifted inside her. She pictured her soul like a bird, a soft-breasted robin trying to take flight.

  They remained in each other’s arms for another minute, Elitha basking in a secret happiness that she wanted to last forever even as she knew it wouldn’t, and then she slipped away from him.

  If she was gone too long, her father or stepmother would come looking for her.

  * * *

  • • •

  HER SKIRTS WERE STILL WET from the river and slapped against her ankles as she pushed back through the woods, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even care if Tamsen yelled at her for mucking them up.

  As she came into a clearing, she nearly ran into John Snyder and Lewis Keseberg, two of her least favorite people in the entire wagon party. Just as quickly as it had come, her good feeling was snuffed out, like a flame extinguished by a hard wind.

  Both men were carrying shovels. Before she could pivot, they’d spotted her. Snyder got directly in her way. He was as solid as a buffalo and he had the same wild eye, rolling it so you saw a lot of the white. “Well, if it ain’t Donner’s girl running wild around the camp.”

  Keseberg looked her up and down in a way that made Elitha uneasy. “What you doing out by yourself, girl?”

  Watch out. Halloran’s voice occurred suddenly and strongly in her head, and for the first time it felt not like an intrusion, but a friend. She remembered what Thomas had said. Maybe the dead are trying to warn you.

  She decided to sidestep Keseberg’s question. They wanted to think she was just a dumb girl, so she’d act like one. “What are you two doing with them shovels?” she asked.

  “We just finished burying Halloran,” Snyder said. “Can’t leave him around to stink up the place.”

  Keseberg took off his hat. There was something wrong with his face, though she couldn’t say what, exactly. It was like a sculpture of a face, made all of hard stone. But in certain lights, you could see the cracks.

  “Oh, I was just coming to say a prayer for him,” she said.

  “Trying to make up for what your mama did?” Something ugly showed beneath Keseberg’s smile. “You’re too late, anyway.”

  “It’s never too late for prayer,” Elitha said, trying to pass around them. But Keseberg grabbed her by the forearm.

  “You’ll do no such thing. Your mama wouldn’t want me to let you go off by yourself at this hour,” he said. His grip was strong, and damp and too warm.

  “Let go of me.” She tried to pull away but he held on a minute longer, twisting it just enough so that she let out a little yelp. Snyder liked that. He laughed. Keseberg, too.

  “You ain’t a child, you know. You’re as good as a woman. That means you shouldn’t be out by yourself. There are men might take it a certain way, might think your blood is running hot.”

  She was just about to call out for help—maybe Keseberg’s wife was in shouting distance, though of course it wouldn’t matter if she had been, the woman seemed helpless—when Keseberg let Elitha go. He gave her a little push so she stumbled before regaining her feet. “If you ever want a nighttime stroll, you just let me know and I’ll come and take care of you,” he said.

  That made Snyder hoot again, and the sound of their laughter burned in her ears as she ran.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Springfield, Illinois

  April 1846

  The bite of cherry pie leaked its scarlet juices down Lavinah Murphy’s chin, and she quickly reached for a napkin. Undercooked, it was—too thin and too red. She’d have done better but wasn’t about to tell Mabelle Franklin that. They were throwing this going-away picnic for her, after all.

  She’d only hauled her whole clan up to Springfield a year and one month ago—just after her husband’s death—but in that year, she’d grown restless.

  The Franklins understood. They felt it, too. The fear in the eyes of people in the market, sometimes, even here in Springfield, where people were said to be more tolerant. She heard the whispers. Though people pretended this country could be home to anyone willing to make their own way, it wasn’t true. They treated you differently if you didn’t share their beliefs. Same God, but a different book. They looked at you funny; they didn’t trust you.

  Well, Lavinah didn’t trust them, either.

  “Another piece, Mrs. Murphy?”

  She shook her head and looked down to see that the pie had stained her hands. A coldness gripped her momentarily. For when she’d looked at her hands she’d seen not the cherry filling, but blood. Her husband’s.

  “You must be mighty nervous for the journey?” Mabelle went on. “I don’t know how you do it. You’re so brave.”

  She didn’t just mean the preparations for the trip, Lavinah knew. She meant all of it.

  A woman raising a large family on her own was a curiosity in a town like this. But she couldn’t very well have stayed in Nauvoo. Not after what happened. Menfolk killed, family driven out of their homes. And Joseph Smith’s assassination. These days it seemed wherever Mormons lived together, somebody was trying to drive them out.

  “It just seems a shame,” Mabelle said. “Not to be among your own people.”

  Didn’t she understand? It was safer that way. Other Mormons meant more trouble.

  “I’ll have my family,” she replied. “And that will be enough for me.”

  As soon as it was seemly, Lavinah slipped away. She wasn’t upset with these people, but she knew what some of them thought. That she was choosing her own safety over God.

  As she strolled the pasture, she looked back at the Franklins’ yard. Smiled to see all her friends gathered there—what she saw made her heart full to bursting. The golden fields, the pale blue sky. Women’s skirts billowing in the afternoon breeze, full like the sails of ships on the horizon. Children—including five of her own, and three her grandchildren—playing hide-and-go-seek in the corn field. Springfield was a lovely town, a peaceful town—and in just a short time, it had come to feel like home. But who knew how long the peace here would last?

  Urgency moved her to the far side of the hayfield, away from the merriment and noise. She spied a farmhouse just beyond a rise, weathered gray and sagging. The family that lived there was also leaving with the wagon party on Wednesday. Lavinah had met the husband once or twice. A disagreeable man, only recently married. Funny name, what was it—Kleinberg? No, Keseberg, that was it. She shivered beneath her shawl, remembering the perpetually angry scowl, eyes that could make your blood stand in your veins.

  She’d heard stories of an older man, too, the man’s uncle, who years earlier had stayed for a while with his nephew. People in town had been afraid of him. They made him seem like a monster in their
stories, saying he’d been involved in some kind of mysterious tragedy at sea, and had even suspected he had some role in the death of a poor consumptive woman who’d been taken in by a tonic-selling con. They said the older man had always smelled faintly of blood, like the way it lingered in the shed after you’d done your butchering.

  Lavinah tucked her head down and headed home to resume preparations for Wednesday. A long journey was waiting. And freedom, like the kind the founding fathers had written and dreamed of, freedom from fear, lay on the other side.

  SEPTEMBER 1846

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  James Reed could almost think that the worst was behind them.

  They emerged from the Wasatch Mountain range at last, trudging out of the cottonwood-choked canyons with bloodied, blistered hands and aching backs. The descent was their reward, gentle and long, an easy stroll for exhausted animals and men alike. Relief among the travelers was palpable; people spoke optimistically of the worst being behind them.

  Until they came upon the first patch of dry, white land.

  It began as a glare in the distance, so pale, so singed of growth, that it looked as if a mantle of snow had covered the land horizon to horizon. It stank. Puddles of stagnant white water lay like open wounds across the otherwise parched landscape. The water was unpotable—they learned that after a cow tried to drink it and took ill.

  There had been a fluke hot spell during Reed’s first year in America. He had been ten years old at the time but he still remembered it vividly. He had been living on a tobacco plantation in Virginia where his mother worked as a laundress. He earned money working in the fields with the slaves, topping the tobacco plants in the spring, picking mature leaves in the summer.

  It was backbreaking work, and that summer it was unbearable. Having grown up in the cold, wet Irish countryside, James had never known heat like that. The fields shimmered. Rows of green undulated in phantom vapor. At least one slave died before the weather broke. Because Reed’s mother had asked the field boss to keep an eye on her son, he was sent home every day after the noon meal. He felt guilty resting in the cool of the servants’ quarters in the big house while the slaves, he knew, would work until the sun went down.

  Now, decades later, he dreamed of the cool tiles of those shaded hallways. Of water poured from clay pitchers. Of shadows and porcelain and ice.

  Here, there was nowhere to escape.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY HAD CALCULATED, from reports and accounts they had heard from the few travelers who’d taken the Truckee route before, that they would cross the desert in a day.

  But a second day came and went. Then a third. The Murphys’ cattle, starved and mad with thirst, wandered off in the middle of the night. The party did not have the strength to go after them. They moved in silence, like a long parade of the dead. No one had the spit even to argue.

  On the fourth day, the wind picked up, creating small dancing funnels of dirt and salt crystals. The children, roused for the first time in days, clapped. But the wind kept blowing and the little funnels swelled and grew and became whipping, snakelike things, pegging them with stones that split their canopies, blinding them and roughing their skin, and they began to cry.

  Most of the wagons had just enough water for the humans. The cattle panicked. They bellowed as they went insane, and the sound was like nothing Reed had ever heard.

  It was on the fifth day that Noah James, one of Reed’s teamsters, came to tell him his own oxen were dying. They doubled back, heading into the blowing wind. Half a mile later, they came on the Reed family wagons. Two of the three teams were floundering, thrashing in the sand. At least one of them was already dead. The rest danced spookily in the confines of the harness.

  “Do we have water?” Reed asked, though he already knew the answer.

  James shook his head. “Not enough to make a difference.”

  “Unhitch that animal, then. And that one as well.” Reed pointed with his whip at another dying animal, and, when he saw that his whip was trembling, quickly dropped it. “We’ll just have to pull with the animals we’ve got left.”

  “With respect, Mr. Reed, you’ll wear the others out faster if you do that,” James said. “They won’t make it another day.”

  “What do you propose we do, then?” Reed’s mouth was full of dirt. His eyes were full of dirt. He knew James was right, but he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear the idea of leaving their wagon. If he did, he would no longer be able to pretend.

  It wasn’t about California anymore. It wasn’t about where they were going at all. It was simply about survival.

  George Donner’s wagon pulled up. Donner had been a shadow of himself ever since Hastings’s betrayal, and Reed had been glad of it—the party had become more efficient without his blustering tendency to make light of Reed’s concerns.

  Donner looked at Reed and then away. “You can store some of your things with me,” he said. “You don’t have to thank me,” he added, and Reed felt his chest hollow with sudden gratitude; he would not have been able to bear to say thank you, and he felt that Donner knew it. Anyway, both men understood that Donner owed Reed for taking over after the Hastings incident.

  Margaret wept when they unloaded their wagons and sorted through their things for the valuables to keep. The children were silent and uncomplaining, and dutifully piled their toys on the ground to be abandoned. At the very bottom of the pile was a saddle he’d had made special for Virginia when she got her first pony. The buttery leather was tooled with flowers and vines on the skirts. It had nickel conchos on the latigos like a fine adult’s saddle. It had once made him proud. It proved that he’d been a good father, capable of bringing his children joy.

  Now, staring at it, he could hardly make sense of its shape or the life it had belonged to.

  “Even Addie?” Patty Reed asked, holding her doll up for her father to see. It was a rag doll with a bisque head, dressed in fabric scraps and a bit of lace tied around its waist as a sash. The doll might only weigh ounces, but ounces added up. Eight ounces of cornmeal versus eight ounces of calico snippets and bisque. Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

  “I’m afraid so,” Reed told her. He was surprised to feel a sudden tightness in his chest, watching his child place her doll in the dirt, carefully, as if it were a true burial.

  The transfer was done in an hour. Already the wagons to be abandoned were no more than ghosts. Reed shot the remaining oxen in the head so they wouldn’t suffer any further, and he imagined, though he was not fanciful, that he saw in their eyes a final flicker of relief.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The sandstorm started innocently enough. White flakes swirled on the air, and Stanton thought they were almost pretty in their delicacy. But by dusk on the sixth day in the desert, the wagon party was forced to stop. Traversing this great emptiness was bad enough under clear skies. Trudging through a blizzard of hard sand was suicide.

  The cloud of sand and salt had shaken the wagons like the swells of an angry sea. No one bothered to try to pitch a tent or set up a campsite; everyone bunkered in the wagons. Stanton wrapped a blanket over his shoulders and wedged himself between barrels inside his wagon, where he would have to sleep upright in the tightly packed space, full of household belongings. He hadn’t bothered with a lantern. There was nothing he wanted to see. Outside, bullwhips of sand hissed where they scraped over the canopy. The day had covered him in a fine crust of salt. It was on his skin, his lips, even in his eyelashes. Salt lined the inside of his nose and roughed his throat so that it hurt, even, to swallow.

  Suddenly, Stanton heard the crack of a gunshot at the same time the board behind him shuddered. The wood exploded into splinters inches to the left of his head. He dropped to his stomach as best he could in the cramped space, trying to figure out wh
ich direction the shot had come from, the front or back of his wagon. From the back, surely. He picked out the sound of rustling, now that he knew to listen for it. Whoever had shot at him was still out there in the dark, cowering by the left rear wheel.

  Stanton moved carefully toward the front of the wagon, hoping the sandstorm would conceal the noise of his footsteps. He slipped over the side and dropped, landing in the tangle of empty harness on the ground.

  The sandstorm absorbed the moonlight. All Stanton could see was the silhouette of a man headed toward him. He hadn’t made many friends in the party, but this was more than hatred, Stanton knew. This was hunger. He was an easy target, with a wagon of his own and no children. Whoever it was wanted to raid his remaining supplies and didn’t care if he left Stanton for dead in the process. The storm provided the perfect cover.

  Before Stanton could pull his gun from its holster, the man tackled him, knocking him to the ground. The whirling sand obscured details and made Stanton feel as though he were wrestling a faceless phantasm—one, however, who reeked of whiskey. Stanton managed to jerk aside when the man plunged a fist toward his face, and heard a knife blade strike loose sand beside him.

  They rolled over and over in the sand, scrabbling for advantage, fighting not just each other but the wind, a giant hand hurling them through the dark. The man was insanely strong but slowed by alcohol, and Stanton got two punches in for every one he took. But his sides ached and he felt like he’d swallowed a pound of grit. He caught the man good in the ribs, though, and heard him cry out, and then Stanton was sure he recognized the voice. Lewis Keseberg.

  Maybe he knew he was caught, or maybe he’d just had enough. He stumbled backward, reeling, and staggered off into the storm.