The Hunger Page 9

  He’d found a satchel of dried herbs beneath his pillow a week ago, after the last time they’d been together. When he burned it, it released a choking smoke, sweet and dizzying.

  Stanton crouched so he could look the boy in the face. “Listen to me. What’s your name?”

  There was a wary look in his eye. “Thomas.”

  “Thomas.” That sounded familiar; perhaps he’d heard the boy’s name at Fort Laramie. “First thing in the morning, you’ll take me to where you left Edwin Bryant.”

  The boy stiffened, terrified. “I cannot do that, sir. It was days and days from here. I don’t even know where he is.” He wasn’t going to let wild horses drag him back into the wilderness. That much was obvious.

  Donner put a hand on Stanton’s shoulder. “Don’t waste your time worrying about Bryant. He’ll be all right. He knows about Indians and their ways. He stands the best chance of surviving out in those mountains, better than the rest of us.”

  Stanton stood, twisting away from Donner’s hand. “Edwin is out there by himself, most likely lost. We can’t just desert him.”

  “He left us, don’t you remember, when he headed out on horseback?” Donner said. “It seems to me he made his choice already. I have more than one lone man to worry about, Stanton. There are eighty-eight people in this wagon party, all of them depending on me. You can head out to look for Bryant if you want, Stanton, but the Indian is staying with us.”

  Stanton knew, deep down, that Donner was right. Even if he managed to round up a search party, the wagon train couldn’t afford to wait. They’d lost too many days already.

  And there’d been no letter from Bryant. Nothing at all.

  He thought of Mary Graves scrambling backward in the dirt, the buck of his revolver as he shot her attacker, what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been there.

  He thought of Tamsen—the fine line of her mouth.

  He thought of loud Peggy Breen, too, teasing him along the trail, and of petite Doris Wolfinger, with her pale, delicate hands.

  He thought of the countless children whose names he still didn’t have straight in his head, even after all this time.

  He couldn’t head after Bryant, he saw that now. He couldn’t risk what might happen to the others if he didn’t return.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Springfield, Illinois

  March 1846

  Vertraust du mir?”—do you trust me?—Jacob Wolfinger asked his new wife, Doris, as they lay side by side in their narrow bed on the night before their journey.

  Doris had been nervous to come all the way from Germany for a husband she’d never met, with whom she had only communicated by letter. But she’d been relieved to find that, though older than her by many years, Jacob Wolfinger was good-looking enough, and even though he was only the steward of a wealthy man in town, helping to run his many businesses, Jacob was richer than he’d even let on—and most exciting of all, he had a dream.

  And though California seemed so far away from the American cities Doris had heard of—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—it also seemed impossibly exotic. Doris was not afraid of a journey. She was only nineteen. Her whole life lay ahead of her.

  “Ja,” she answered, taking Jacob’s hand in hers. Slowly, she placed it beneath the hem of her nightgown, so that his fingers trailed lightly against her knee. She felt herself flush at the boldness of it.

  Though she had been timid when they’d first wed, she had by now come to enjoy her husband’s affection. It made her feel as though the matchmakers back home had been right all along, that they’d known far more about love than she did. Shivers tickled up and down her legs and torso as he touched her. Her stomach fluttered with anticipation. She had given herself up to the unknown, had trusted in the future, had allowed the ocean waves to carry her west, and into this man’s life. And that trust had been rewarded.

  But that night, after he had lost his hands in the tangle of her hair and gasped quietly in her ear, neither of them could sleep.

  He rolled toward her. “Du solltest dies über mich wissen.” You should know this about me.

  Doris stiffened at the words. She disliked moments like this one, when she was reminded suddenly of how little she really knew about him. But especially now, when they were just on the brink of heading off into the wilderness together.

  He had already used their savings to commission a wagon complete with a big canvas canopy, two pair of oxen, two sets of complicated harnesses. He’d already given the general store a list of the provisions they would need. The money had been spent. There’d be no going back.

  But Jacob insisted that he could not bring her along with him until he had confessed all his sins. He sat up, pulled out a bottle of local-brewed obstwasser from a drawer by the bed, and began to tell her the story of Reiner, the confession tumbling out of him haltingly.

  “Reiner?” She had never even heard him mention the name before.

  It had happened six years earlier, almost to the day, Jacob said. He met a fellow German immigrant passing through town. The man, called Reiner, had come to Springfield to visit his nephew, whom he had not seen in a long time. Reiner knew how to make folk remedies from the old country, he’d told Jacob. He was a bit of a snake oil peddler, Jacob supposed, but he’d seen an opportunity. All Reiner needed were the ingredients . . . If Jacob helped him, Reiner promised to give him a generous cut of the profits.

  It was easy, Jacob explained to her now, since his employer had trusted him with keys to all his establishments, including the apothecary.

  “You stole from him,” Doris said. The truth sank in her gut. This was her husband’s sin—and perhaps an explanation for his unexpected wealth.

  “We took very little,” he assured her. “A few packets of powders and a few dozen glass bottles. Nothing that would even be missed.”

  “So what was the sin, then?” Doris asked.

  Jacob paused and would not meet her eye. “Reiner sold the tonics to people in Springfield,” he explained, “and then he disappeared. Some say he went prospecting out west. But the people who took the tonic started to get sick. One of them died. A young woman.”

  “Well,” Doris said with a tremulous voice, “the woman had been sick to begin with, right? Maybe the illness was responsible for her death, and not the medicine.”

  Perhaps, Jacob agreed. Perhaps. “The woman who died . . . Her family was furious. They tried to find the peddler who’d sold her the fatal tonic, but with no luck. No one knew of my involvement, of course.”

  “And no one ever shall,” she said, taking his hand again and squeezing it.

  “Except,” he said quietly. “Except that I believe—I believe there may be a connection between the woman who died and one of the families traveling west with us. I live in fear of being discovered on our journey.”

  “A connection?”

  “George Donner may not have known the woman who died, but I am fairly certain his wife, Tamsen, did.”

  Doris considered the man next to her. She was disappointed, suddenly and cruelly. And the fact that they would be traveling with a family he had wronged—that seemed a bad omen, a very bad omen.

  “Don’t worry, Jacob,” she said, though it was as much to ease herself as him. “Try to put it out of your head.” But Doris herself could not do so. She had always been taught that the punishments for one’s sins worked in mysterious ways. That sometimes even small misdeeds could have great, unforeseen consequences. A lie—and a person’s life—hung over her husband’s head like a dark, spreading shadow. It was a very bad omen indeed.

  But complete faith had rewarded her so far in her short life. So she lay awake that night, looked at the stars through their little apartment window for one last time, and resolved to have faith still.

  After all, what other choice was there?

  AUGUST 1846

  CHAPTER ELE
VEN

  Biscuits. He was sure to want biscuits. Everybody liked biscuits.

  Elitha Donner paused, her hand poised above the cold Dutch oven. How many could she take before someone would notice the missing leftovers? Two, three? Father was always blaming missing food on the hired hands—nothing but stomachs on two legs, he called them—so there was probably no need to worry. She settled on two and placed them in the center of her calico square. Next to them she put a hard-boiled egg from breakfast and ham trimmings. The ham was a bit moldy but still edible if you were hungry enough, and poor Thomas was surely hungry.

  She tied the fabric into a little bundle, nice and neat. She’d have liked to give him something good to drink, too, but they’d run out of cider weeks ago. Her eye fell on the hogshead of beer. She wondered if she could carry a cup all the way to the shed where he was being kept.

  Then: a burble of voices outside the door. The words were masked but she could make out the speakers by tone: Father was talking to Tamsen, Aunt Betsy trying to be the peacemaker the way she always did.

  She slipped past the door to the parlor. It was funny living in someone else’s house. Everyone acted as though it was normal to be sitting on the Vasquezes’ furniture, using their linens and blankets, eating off their tin plates and cups. Treating everything as though it belonged to you, while the real owners were just on the other side of the fort. Elitha heard Mr. Vasquez had moved his family to one of the empty sheds. All those little kids sleeping in a chicken coop, and here they were pretending to be so grand.

  It felt like they’d been at Fort Bridger for decades, though in truth it had been only a few days, not even a week. But in that time it had gone from July to August and the nights were hotter than ever. Both Donner families were packed under one roof. You were always running into someone, squeezing through doorways, sleeping four to a bed, and woke drenched in sweat. There was barely room to breathe. It was even worse than it was on the trail. At least living out of the tents you could move about as you pleased and let the dry air cool your skin in the evenings.

  And then of course, there were the voices. She’d always heard them, but they had taken on more urgency in the past month, first at Fort Laramie, and now here. Not the voices of the other members of the wagon train laughing and arguing at all hours. The voices no one else heard. The ones that had told her to read those letters at Ash Hollow in the first place. The same ones that told her to avoid the wild man in the chicken coop, chained up like a dog—the one who’d attacked Mary Graves.

  But even from afar, she heard him, too. He had a voice, just like the other invisible voices, that reached her in moments of stillness and shook her to her core.

  Tender thing, the man’s voice whispered in her mind, from afar. Come here, his voice whispered.

  Though she was curious, she kept away. The others may have thought Elitha was a dummy, but she was not.

  No one noticed Elitha slip out. No one ever cared what the stepdaughters did—that’s what she and Leanne were called, even by Father. As long as they didn’t embarrass Father and Tamsen and their chores were finished, they were free to do what they pleased. They were supposed to be invisible. And Elitha had gotten very good at it.

  So good she was able to slip unnoticed between wagons, in and out of the woods, even walk among the livestock left to graze at night, petting their wet noses and their sleek hides. She reckoned that she probably knew more about the other people in the wagon train than anyone else. She knew that Patrick Breen got drunk and fought with his wife nearly every night, and the widow Lavinah Murphy paid an awful lot of attention to her sons-in-law, in a way that made Elitha uncomfortable. She knew which hired hands lost the most money at cards and which went off to the woods by themselves to pray for their safety before the wagons started off in the morning.

  She’d seen her stepmother clamber out of Stanton’s wagon all by herself, with Father nowhere in sight.

  She hadn’t told Father yet about what she’d seen. He might choose not to believe her, after all, and she couldn’t help but be scared of her stepmother. Besides, it didn’t matter. Any half-wit could see that Mr. Stanton was in love with Mary Graves.

  It was a clear night. The moonlight bathed the courtyard in blue-gray light. A crisscross of whispers tickled at her mind, and she knew they were not really whispers but voices. She tried to clear her mind and focus. From the buildings she heard the sound of muffled voices—real ones—the occasional stab of a voice raised in anger. Another argument, perhaps between the Eddys and the Reeds.

  Quickly, she made her way to the barns, where most of the men had decamped to get out of the rain. She saw the glow of lanterns through the gaps in the boards, heard hoots of laughter. Put any two young men together and before long they’d be questioning each other’s smarts, whether they’d ever been with a girl, the size of their peckers.

  This, too, she had noticed and observed.

  Thomas the Indian was being kept in the next building, little more than a shed, dark and lonely looking. He’d been banished there by Jim Bridger, the man who owned the fort. You’d think Mr. Bridger would be impressed after what the Indian boy had suffered, making his way back all by himself, but no, Mr. Bridger had been as mad as if he’d caught Thomas trying to burn the place down. Cuffed Thomas hard on the head a couple of times until Mr. Stanton stepped between them. The boy had looked lean, almost fragile, his long dark hair falling over his glittering eyes. But when he’d glanced up and caught her gaze, she saw that he was anything but frail. The intensity in his eyes, in the way he held his jaw firm, in the tautness of his muscles, stopped her totally, as if she were the one who’d been hit.

  He made her think of a storm in summer, and though others might say it was a fool-headed thing to do, she wanted to run out into that storm, to feel its raindrops that, she somehow sensed, would fall gently against her skin.

  She peeked around the corner. William and George, two of Uncle Jacob’s boys, were guarding the shed. The boys were only meant to call the alarm if Thomas tried to escape, but William, twelve, and George, eight, took their jobs seriously and carried sticks and switches. Elitha knew they’d be easy enough to get rid of: William had started to show interest in girls—even his own cousins—and George could be counted on to go wherever his brother went.

  So she walked straight for them, not even bothering to conceal the calico square in her hand. “Hello,” she said. “Mary Graves is taking a bath at the water trough. She’s stripped down to her bloomers.”

  That was all it took. They were off with hardly a backward glance.

  She was alone now with the boy, and her pulse thudded in her ears. She pushed the narrow barn door open and stood in the doorway while her eyes adjusted to the dark. It smelled of old hay and chicken feathers. “Hello?” The blackness remained still as the surface of a pond. “I—I brought you something to eat.”

  Something stirred. Slowly, she blinked, and Thomas emerged from the shadows, though he kept half hidden, staring at her in a way that was both curious and aloof. Something in Elitha’s chest fluttered.

  “My name is Elitha Donner.” She held out the package she’d brought. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  He didn’t move. She put the bundle down on a bale of hay and backed away. After a long frozen minute, he approached. But he didn’t leap out or creep forward like some wild thing, the way she imagined he might. Instead he stepped politely toward the bundle and opened it with careful, practiced fingers. His posture was as straight as a governess’s.

  “I made those biscuits myself. I would’ve brought some honey to go with them but I couldn’t think how . . .”

  He had already started to eat, studiously, though his hands shook, betraying how starving he must have been. His politeness made Elitha want to squirm. Maybe one day, she thought, she’d invite him to join the family for a meal. Neither Father nor Uncle Jacob liked to skimp on food (though for t
he servants it was another story). Sunday dinners back at the farmhouse meant chicken stew and dumplings, buttered green beans and corn bread, fresh cold milk and cream over berries for dessert.

  But she knew it was a fantasy. Tamsen had called Thomas a filthy heathen. He would never be one of them.

  But looking at him now, she thought the opposite. He stopped eating and glanced up at her, his eyes two dark pools. Something flickered across them, and she felt suddenly embarrassed by the way she’d been staring at him. She was so used to watching people, to being ignored. It was unsettling now to be seen back.

  Unsettling and wonderful.

  She blushed at him and smiled. He gave her a slight nod. She took the tankard when he’d drained the beer—she tried not to look at the way his throat bobbed as he drank. She was pretty sure Thomas smiled, just a little, when he handed the jug to her. That was her reward.

  It was enough.

  That and her realization that, for a moment or two, the voices in her head had gone silent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They found the note pinned beneath a small rock on the top of a boulder, fluttering like a white flag of surrender. Stanton felt something in his own chest rise and then gutter in response.

  Donner read it out loud: “Way ahead rougher than expected. Do not follow us into Weber Canyon.—Lansford Hastings, Esq.” The wind tugged at the paper in Donner’s hand, as though a ghost were trying to snatch it away.

  “What the devil does that mean? I thought this man knew the trail.” Keseberg spat. “He named it after hisself, for crissake.”

  A strange mood had infected the party since Fort Bridger. It was understandable, given the bizarre incident with Bridger’s prisoner and the stories told by the Paiute boy, Thomas, but still, it left Stanton uneasy. They were teetering on a knife’s edge: He feared that without Hastings’s help, they would soon turn on each other. Impatience crackled in the air. Everyone knew they were racing time now.