The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

  He turned and saw a girl he recognized vaguely as Mary Graves. She was sharp-featured and very tall for a woman. He’d never seen her up close before. Her eyes were extraordinary, the gray of an early dawn.

  “You’re Franklin Graves’s daughter, then?” he said, although he knew it. He had noticed her before but it seemed she was always with her family, surrounded by her parents or a horde of little children clamoring for her attention.

  “I am,” she said. “One of them, at least.”

  The women’s chatter died off as the two began walking together almost unconsciously, simply drifting away from the others to head toward a stand of pines on the edge of the encampment.

  “I hope you don’t think me presumptuous giving you advice, Mr. Stanton, but you should just ignore them.” Her skirts fluttered with every step, grazing the wild prairie grass. She walked with a long, loping stride that reminded him of a young mare, fine and athletic. “They’re only teasing you. Married women don’t like to see a man by himself. I think it makes them nervous.”

  “Why should a single man make them nervous?”

  She laughed. “It is one of the mysteries of the world, I suppose.”

  “Edwin Bryant—did you meet Edwin?—had a theory about this. He thought it appeared to be a kind of rebuke, choosing not to marry.” As they walked, the picnic shrank to a miniature circus in the distance, a blur of movement and color, until all that was left was the faint drone of Halloran’s fiddle carried on the wind and the occasional shriek of a child’s laughter. People would talk, of course, if they walked too far together. But Stanton didn’t care, and anyway, he wanted to get away from the other women before he said something he regretted.

  It appeared that Mary Graves wasn’t concerned about gossip, either.

  She frowned in concentration. “Rebuking women, or the institution of marriage?”

  He hesitated, thinking it over. He liked the quick, easy way she spoke. So many women seemed to turn their words over in their mouths like sugar cubes, until you could never be sure of the shape of the original thought. “Both, I think.”

  “Some women might find it insulting, but I don’t. Not everyone is meant to marry,” she said. “Did you know that Lavinah Murphy married her fourteen-year-old daughter to a man she’d only known for four days? My stepsister was right about one thing. There aren’t many eligible women left in the party,”

  He shook his head. “Does this mean you’re spoken for, Miss Graves?” He had meant it mostly as a joke, but when her face clouded, the words took on a sudden, hollow seriousness.

  “My fiancé died recently. That’s why my family is headed west,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He felt as if she had been swept suddenly beyond a veil. “Leaving bad memories behind, then?”

  “Something like that.” She was still speaking casually, but for a moment he saw beyond the carefully arranged look of unconcern, and knew she was truly unhappy. “That could probably be said of nearly everyone in the wagon train.”

  “You’re right about that—still, I’m sorry,” he repeated. He had the wild and inappropriate desire to take her hand.

  “It’s all right. I didn’t know him very well.” So if she was unhappy, it was for some other reason. Mary Graves brought a hand quickly to her mouth. “That sounds even worse, doesn’t it? I’m always saying the wrong thing.”

  Stanton smiled. “That makes two of us. You’ll have to tell me the whole story now.”

  She ducked her head to pass under the low branch of a small pine. “It’s not a very good story, I’m afraid. As a matter of fact, it’s terribly common. I’m sure you’ve heard it before: dutiful daughter agrees to an arranged marriage to a rich man to pay off her father’s debts.”

  “Maybe you’re lucky things turned out the way they did, then,” Stanton said, and then, realizing how that sounded, hurried on, “I hope they picked a nice man for you to marry, at least.”

  “He was sweet enough to me. Everyone says we would’ve had a good life together. Still, who knows?”

  Her voice had a low, musical quality that made him wish she would never stop talking. “What happened?” he asked. When she hesitated, he added, “If you don’t want to tell me . . .”

  “No, that’s all right.” She snapped a twig off the nearest branch and crushed the pine needles absently between her fingers, releasing the smell of resin. “Two weeks before the wedding, he went out deer hunting with his friends and was accidentally shot. The friends carried him back but there was nothing anyone could do for him. He died the next day.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  She turned. Stanton knew the expression on her face; it was guilt. “Do you know something even worse? The friend who was responsible, he was torn up with grief. Practically went insane with it. I was shocked, yes, but I barely cried. Do you want to know the God’s honest truth, Mr. Stanton? I was relieved. Relieved.” She mustered a tiny, bitter smile. “That makes me a perfect monster, don’t you think? I should have been upset—for my father, if not for poor Randolph or his family. Without the money that would have come from the marriage, my father was ruined. We had to sell everything. Father couldn’t stand the thought of starting over in the same place, proving himself to the same people all over again. I put the idea of moving to California in his head. So whatever happens to us, whatever waits for my family in California, riches or ruin, I’ll be responsible.”

  “You, a monster? Nonsense. I think you’re a remarkably honest person,” he said, and she smiled again.

  “Perhaps. Or maybe I feel the need to confess my sins to someone.” She turned and continued walking.

  “Are you always so forthcoming with strangers?” Stanton asked, as he followed her. The camp was far behind them now, the voices and music faded away to almost nothing.

  “I’m still in mourning. When you’re in mourning, people will let you say just about anything—haven’t you noticed?” She turned briefly, raising one eyebrow. Her profile was long and sharp, like something that might have been formed with a scalpel. “Now it’s your turn. There’s a reason you’re not married already, Mr. Stanton. Are you going to tell me why?”

  He fell into step beside her. “Like you said, it’s a common tale. Barely merits repeating.”

  “I told you my story. It only seems fair.”

  He wasn’t sure he could manage as well as she had. “I’ve been in love once.”

  “Were you engaged to be married?”

  Even after all this time, thinking of Lydia still brought an ache to his chest, like the first deep breath of cold air. “Her father didn’t like me. Nor could he bear to lose her, as it so happened.”

  She stared at him with those wide, gray eyes. Like the sky heavy with clouds, or the flint-gray of a Boston ocean. “Did he want her to end up an old maid?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted for her,” Stanton said shortly, realizing too late that they were on dangerous ground, edging too close to the truth. “He never got the chance to find out, in any case. She died at nineteen, far too young.”

  Mary drew in a breath. “I’m sorry.”

  His conscience would let him go no further. He’d made a promise when he was young that he would never tell anyone Lydia’s secret. As pointless as the promise seemed from a distance of fifteen years—to a dead girl, no less—he couldn’t bring himself to break it. Besides, there were things he had done that he regretted, a long and twisted chain of deceit dragging behind him all these years, impossible to explain to anyone else without seeming like a monster. His heart seemed to be beating five times its normal rate. “It was terrible,” he said. “I’m afraid I still can’t talk about it.”

  Mary looked troubled. “I didn’t mean to cause you pain,” she said. Her hand skimmed his arm, like the touch of a passing bird.

  “It’s all right,” he said, but it wasn’t. His
throat was closing, the memory choking him.

  Mary was looking at him very closely. “What’s this?” she asked at the same time her hand passed from his arm to his neck. Her fingers landed briefly on his neck, on the scratches he knew were there: Tamsen’s newest marks. “You’ve been wounded. It looks as though you’ve been attacked—”

  This time her touch wasn’t pleasant. It burned. Without thinking, he pushed her hand away.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  She took a quick step backward, as if a wall had come up suddenly between them. Before he could speak, before he could say a word, her name rang out on the air, clear and clean as a bell.

  She spun toward the sound and, with one last look over her shoulder at Stanton, darted back toward camp. She moved with surprising quickness, flashing between the trees like a shaft of sunlight, and then gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Four barrels of flour.

  James Reed pried the lid off the barrel with dusty handprints and peered inside. Half full. A knock on the side of the next three barrels confirmed that they hadn’t been touched yet. Five hundred pounds of flour, then, give or take. An anxious knot formed in his gut. They’d started out two months ago with nearly eight hundred pounds.

  He made a mark on the scrap of paper in his hand.

  He looked into the next barrel. Sugar, nearly half empty. Eliza Williams, the hired girl, was making too many pies and cakes for the children.

  When he finished taking inventory, he climbed over the backboard and dropped to the ground. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the dust off his palms, then after a second’s hesitation scrubbed both hands hard. Gave the handkerchief a sniff before putting it away.

  Only then did he squint at the full list of figures, forcing his hands to be still and firm. He’d been checking on his family’s stores every few days since they’d set out from Springfield. They were going through their supplies at an alarming rate. But no good ever came of worrying, unless there was an action to be taken.

  So. First thing, he’d have a talk with Eliza. No second helpings for anyone, not even the children and certainly not the teamsters, who didn’t think twice about wasting food. He skimmed the numbers a second time. Had he miscalculated how much they’d need for a family of seven? It was the six servants who threw off his math: the men were gluttons, eating for the pleasure of it without a care to how much it cost their employer.

  Still, he knew they were better off—far better off—than many of the families on the trail. Publicly, everyone acted as though there was no problem, but he suspected that secretly some people were beginning to panic. Even those who had taken on more provisions at Fort Laramie had counted on there being more game along the trail. After Fort Laramie, everything seemed to have disappeared, from rabbits to prairie dogs. They were at the end of the traveling season and perhaps earlier pioneers had picked the surrounding area clean.

  More likely they figured they could depend on the kindness of their trailmates if they ran out of supplies. Well, they’d be disappointed if they came to James Frazer Reed for a handout. Christian charity could only go so far.

  He’d tried to talk Donner into putting him in charge of provisions for the entire party last night. But of course no one listened. No one understood how much danger they’d be in if food ran out higher up in the mountain passes. The signs were all there, if anyone would bother to see.

  “Give you authority over my supplies?” William Eddy had only laughed, spitting tobacco a few inches from Reed’s boot. “I don’t think so. If we let you tell us what we can eat and how much and when, we’ll all end up skinny as skeletons. Skinny as you.”

  Reed had ignored Eddy but he’d been tempted to pull out his piece of paper and shake it in Donner’s face. “We’re down twenty-five beef cattle since Fort Laramie and that was less than three weeks ago. If we didn’t eat all of them, somebody is stealing them. At this rate we won’t have two dozen head among us by the time we get to California.”

  Foolishness and pleasure, that was what the members of the wagon train wanted. Look at the Donners’ big barge of a wagon, stuffed with feather mattresses and all manner of unnecessary comforts. The hired men gambled their wages away every night around the campfires, losing their pay before it was even earned. People danced around the roasting carcasses while Luke Halloran played the fiddle. And a picnic, what was the reason for that? An excuse for George Donner to stand on a tree stump and make a speech to get elected new party captain. Two cattle slaughtered just for that, to reassure them there was nothing to worry about: Look at how much there is to eat, plenty for everyone.

  It was meant for a diversion, too, Reed suspected: It was whispered up and down the wagon train that Tamsen Donner had been seen wandering at night, caught in places she shouldn’t have been. She was a witch, some of the other women said, could vanish and then reappear in a different place, could fly on currents of air like the fluff of old dandelions, could charm a man just by breathing on him. Reed didn’t believe in that nonsense, but one thing was clear: She was stepping out on her husband, and making George look foolish just when he needed the wagon train behind him.

  Reed straightened up, sore from crouching in the wagon among the barrels and big burlap sacks filled with bran and dried beans, hogsheads of vinegar and molasses. As he stretched, Donner trotted by on his horse, waving his hat in the air.

  “Chain up!” he shouted. His big face was pink from exertion. “Time to move out!”

  How he hated the sound of Donner’s voice.

  But just as Reed turned to say something, he saw two of the Breen boys crawling on hands and knees from under one of the wagons. They were pale and unsteady on their feet, moaning as though they’d been beaten.

  Reed’s heart jumped in his chest. The boy killed a month ago came to mind, that pale face frozen as though in sleep, the terrible image of a torn-up body. Were the Breen boys sick? Suddenly one and then the other threw their heads down and began to heave violently. The smell was medicinal, overpowering, and unmistakable.

  “Hey. You.” Reed crossed the distance between them before they could run away. “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? Don’t try to deny it. I can smell it on you.”

  Both boys—they couldn’t have been older than ten—turned sullen faces toward him. “It’s none of yer business,” said one.

  The smell of vomit and whiskey was so foul that Reed resisted the urge to hold his handkerchief over his nose. He doubted the boys had gotten the liquor from their father: Patrick Breen would whip them to within an inch of their lives. “You stole the whiskey you drank away, didn’t you? Who did you steal it from? Out with it.”

  They glowered at Reed. “We ain’t telling,” the scrawnier, dirtier one said.

  Reed was tempted to give them the back of his hand but thought the better of it. People had started to stare.

  “Why you bothering them kids?” Milt Elliott, a teamster for the Donners, shook his head.

  “It’s none of your nevermind,” Reed said.

  “You ain’t the boys’ father.” This from another of the Donners’ men, Samuel Shoemaker.

  “Their father’s probably lying facedown in a ditch himself.” The words came out before Reed could stop himself. He cursed his sharp tongue. He could imagine how he must sound to this crowd, many of them hungover themselves from dancing half the night away. His palms started to tingle. He could feel dirt gathering in his eardrums, in his nostrils, beneath his fingernails. He needed to bathe. “Look, I’m only trying to find out where the boys got the alcohol.”

  “Are you saying it’s our fault the boys got themselves drunk?” Elliott said, raising an eyebrow.

  “No. I’m just saying that we must do a better job keeping track of all our supplies.” He shook his head. He would try again. “We might want to lock up our spirits, for example—”

 
Tall and angular, always hovering like an ominous scarecrow, Lewis Keseberg pushed his way through the crowd. Reed could’ve predicted it; Keseberg always seemed to be spoiling for a fight. “You’d like to take our liquor away, wouldn’t you? You’d probably chuck it in the Little Sandy when nobody was looking, every drop of it.” He jabbed a finger into Reed’s chest. “If you try to lay so much as one finger on any of my bottles, so help me God—”

  Sweat began to collect on Reed’s upper lip. He glanced around but didn’t see Keseberg’s wife or child anywhere. Seemed Keseberg kept anything humane about him behind closed doors, and there’d be no plying him with reminders of family and decency. Still, Reed couldn’t let Keseberg push him around in front of all these other people; they’d decide he was a coward. But Keseberg was notoriously unforgiving. No one gambled with him anymore, because he never forgot who cheated, who liked to bluff, and who always held pat. Remembered which cards in the deck had already been played, calculated which were likely to come up. He apparently had a memory as sharp as a blade. He was also a half foot taller and thirty pounds heavier.

  He was standing so close that Reed was sure Keseberg would notice that he was not right.

  Reed imagined that his own secret—the badness in him—was so strong that it could be seen or smelt if you got close enough. It was like the fine trail dust he could never quite be rid of, traces of his sins on his hands or his face, seeping up from under his clothes, no matter how hard he tried to wipe it away.

  He reached for his handkerchief again.

  “Keep your hands off me,” he said, hoping his voice wouldn’t shake. “Or—”

  “Or what?” Keseberg only leaned closer. Sharp as a blade.

  Before Reed could answer, a huge slab of a man stepped between them: John Snyder, Franklin Graves’s hired driver. Probably the last person any reasonable man would want to tangle with.

  Snyder narrowed his eyes but there was a playfulness in his smirk. “What’s going on here? This little man trying to tell everyone what to do—again?” Snyder liked to call him little man, a reminder that he could push Reed around whenever he felt like it. “I thought they told you last night that you’re not going to boss us around.”