The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

  Keseberg shoved Reed to his knees. “We were fools to follow this man. Dragged us over the mountains and through that desert. I told you all that he didn’t know what he was doing, but you wouldn’t listen to me! And now he’s up and killed a man—”

  Donner finally stood up. “Who?”

  “The teamster John Snyder.”

  Mary was immediately relieved: She didn’t like Snyder. Nor did Donner. No one did. There were some people in the party you could probably kill and there was a chance you’d get away with it; Mary had to admit that her own father might even be one of them. And unaccountably, she found that she felt sorry for Reed, a man her father hated.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Donner asked, with genuine puzzlement. He looked over the assembled crowd as if surprised to see them there.

  “You’re our fucking leader, aren’t you?” Keseberg said. “Or were,” he spat. Mary was surprised. He had once been one of Donner’s staunchest defenders. But a man like Keseberg didn’t know loyalty. “He just killed a man in cold blood. Didn’t give Snyder a chance to defend himself. What do we do with him?”

  “Murder’s a capital offense,” Samuel Shoemaker said, as though anyone needed reminding.

  They might have acted like George Donner was still the party captain, but it was James Reed who had been leading the wagon party for weeks and they knew it. He’d done the brutal, dirty work, found a trail through the desert and listened to their bickering and complaints. He had served them selflessly, kept his calm in the face of panic and loss, and yet now they were talking about stringing him up. If only Charles Stanton were here. The thought came to Mary automatically, but once she noticed it, she didn’t mind it warming somewhere in her chest. Stanton would talk sense into them. He wouldn’t let them hurt Reed.

  The longer Stanton was away, the more Mary came to inwardly rebel against her father’s admonishments and her own hesitations. Without Stanton’s calm presence, she felt even more keenly how he’d been the only truly sensible person among them.

  She knew he had terrible secrets that ate at him from within, and that these were things she ought to know about a man before she’d be willing to trust him, but she had begun to realize, too, that only a man with a conscience could be so seriously afflicted by his own past as to show it in his every gesture—the apology in his shoulders, in his voice, in the way he avoided eye contact with her despite the tension, the good tension, she knew they both felt.

  “That may be true within the sovereign territory of the United States of America,” Donner was saying now. “But I remind you all that we are outside that territorial limit. We are no longer governed by U.S. law.” His eyes went to Reed. What, she wondered, could he be thinking? Reed had fought him from the start and had displaced him at the head of the wagon train. But Donner only shook his head. “If you kill this man, you will be in essence taking the law into your own hands.”

  “You’re talking a lot of fucking nonsense as far as I’m concerned,” Keseberg said, smiling crookedly in a way no one could mistake for friendly. “I’m talking biblical law. He killed John Snyder. He deserves to die.”

  As hideous a person as Keseberg was, people seemed to listen to him. He had a kind of power over them.

  As for Mary, her own voice felt stifled in her throat. She needed to say something, but caution held her back.

  She had always been a practical person, to a fault. She wished sometimes she were passionate, that her beliefs came pouring out of her unfiltered and uncensored.

  Perhaps it was those qualities Stanton had been drawn to in Tamsen.

  Mary kept quiet. She was glad, at least, that some of the others did not agree with Keseberg. “I’m not going to kill a man unless a judge orders it,” Milt Elliott finally said. “We don’t want to do anything that’ll get us in trouble later.”

  “Banish him.” Tamsen spoke up suddenly. Everyone turned to her with a faint rustling of cloth. Despite everything that had happened—despite how much people despised and distrusted her now—she held her head high and was unafraid to make eye contact. To Mary, she looked almost regal.

  Something twisted in Mary’s stomach at the sight of her. People were still afraid of her, that much was clear. Peggy Breen and Eleanor Eddy told anyone who’d listen that the woman was using her witchcraft to draw the life from George Donner like a succubus. And then there’d been the incident with the fire. Mary didn’t buy into the worst of the rumors—still, she saw that Tamsen was taking a serious risk now, in speaking up for Reed.

  Taking a risk where Mary had not.

  “It’s God’s place to judge him, not ours,” Tamsen said. “For those of you who think this is too lenient a punishment, just remember: A man can’t survive out there on his own. Sending him out is as good as a death sentence.”

  Keseberg glowered at Tamsen. Mary caught the look. “Most of you mighta only thought of John Snyder as a servant. That he was only good for driving the oxen and doing what he was told. But he did his part. We owe it to him.”

  Donner frowned. “We need the facts. Do we know why Mr. Reed did what he did?” Before Keseberg could answer, Donner raised a hand to shut him up. “James?”

  Reed swallowed. His eye was nearly swollen shut. “You all saw what he was doing, and you know the kind of man he was. He was a liar, hoping to ruin lives with his lies. He came at me—I, I had to defend myself.”

  “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” Keseberg cuffed him, shoving him down on his hands and knees again.

  “He could get a wild hair up his ass and speak out of turn,” Walt Herron said. Walt had been the closest thing Snyder had to a friend. “But like Keseberg said, that’s no reason to kill him.”

  A murmur went through the crowd. Mary turned and saw a momentary disturbance in the knot of people before she saw Margaret Reed shove her way into the clearing.

  She spoke directly to Donner, as though the others didn’t matter. “Don’t kill my James, I beg you.” She was a small woman, and sick, apparently. But there was still something fierce about her, something hard-edged as a blade. “He’s done a terrible thing, I don’t disagree. He’s killed a man and he deserves to be punished. But I ask you to consider the circumstances, and all the good he’s done for the wagon train.”

  “Good—what good has he done? He nearly got us killed in the desert,” Keseberg said.

  “We would’ve had to face that godforsaken miserable desert no matter who was leading us,” Lavinah Murphy chimed in, with a determined air about her. She had pushed her way toward the front as well and stood just behind Margaret now and slightly to the right, like a soldier behind a captain. As a mother of thirteen, the lone woman in the wagon train leading a family, Lavinah was well respected in the group, though there were some who whispered about her Mormon beliefs.

  Keseberg looked taken aback. Mary wasn’t sure she’d ever heard anyone stand up to Keseberg, and perhaps the man himself hadn’t, either.

  “James got us through, didn’t he?” Margaret demanded. “No one died, even though we all thought we might.”

  No one objected. What she said was true.

  “Killing him isn’t going to bring the man back,” Margaret went on. “Listen to me, every one of you, before you make your decision. I don’t know why James did what he did, but I beg you to consider the whole man and see if you can’t find it in your heart to be merciful. I was a new widow, sick, with four mouths to feed. James Reed married me when no one else would. He’s provided a home for my children, put a roof over their heads and food on the table. He’s treated those children as though they were his own. Only a man of remarkable generosity and kindness would do such a thing, don’t you think?”

  Mary felt tears welling in her eyes as she listened.

  “He worked his fingers to the bone for the children of a man he never knew,” Margaret said, her body shaking visibly, but her jaw and stanc
e firm. “What kind of man does this? I beg you”—she walked the perimeter, looking each man in the eye—“find some other way to punish him, yes, but don’t take his life. Spare my husband.”

  There was a long silence. Reed had been hanging his head during this speech, perhaps rightly aware that a wrong word would be the end of him, but now Mary saw him wipe his face against the shoulder of his jacket, and she wondered if he was trying to swipe away tears of his own.

  Mary could hear the wind hissing in the distance. She could hear her heart drum a beat in her throat, in her head. The sun seemed to glare down on them like a lidless eye.

  Donner finally asserted himself. “He goes with nothing—no horse, no food.”

  It was as if all Margaret’s strength deserted her at once. With a small noise of shock, she collapsed beside her husband. It was impossible to tell whether she was relieved or upset, but she cried over him as though something in her had been split open.

  Meanwhile, Keseberg gave Tamsen another hard stare before spitting on the ground at her feet. “Get him out of here before I kill him myself,” he said, pushing his way curtly through the crowd and causing Lavinah Murphy to stumble as he did.

  Mary rushed toward them then, knowing that if she waited a moment longer, her chance would be gone. As Tamsen lifted Reed to his feet—miserable, stunned, still bleeding—Mary came around and wrapped an arm under his weeping wife, helping to lift her to standing. Tamsen caught her eye, and Mary felt something pass between them, something like understanding. She suspected that Stanton, should he ever make it back to them, would disapprove of any sort of bond between her and Tamsen. For some reason, though, this thought pleased Mary very much. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from Stanton, but it wasn’t his approval.

  After that night—James Reed folding away into its darkness forever, without a single protest, which unnerved her more than anything else had—Mary moved in with the Reed family to give them help. She pitied Margaret—now twice a widow—and it felt good to be of use.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Springfield, Illinois

  May 1840

  James Reed had made it all the way to the livery stable to fetch his saddle horse before he realized he’d forgotten his new hat. Walking back to his office, he could picture it hanging from a peg on the wall: broad-brimmed like a Quaker’s, made of black brushed felt with a narrow band of plain brown leather. He could wait until tomorrow and ride home bareheaded—having left the old one, rotted from sweat, at the haberdasher’s—but the lapse of concentration bothered him. It wasn’t like him to be forgetful. It wasn’t like him to ride through town hatless, either, and he dabbed his brow with his handkerchief self-consciously at the thought, then twice more.

  When he swung open the door to his office, however, he was surprised to see the new junior clerk, Edward McGee, sitting behind his desk, an open ledger in front of him. McGee looked up.

  It was he who should have been startled, but instead Reed felt like the one who had been caught where he shouldn’t be.

  McGee’s wavy hair was a light gold, his eyes were dark and uncommonly beautiful. At the time, those eyes had not looked guilty but full of a kind of knowing that made the boy seem older than he was. He had the same long, sharp nose, the sculpted cheeks and jaw of the young Irish lords Reed had seen from a distance as a child.

  “McGee, isn’t it?” Reed said as he closed the door behind himself. “You’re the one who replaced Silas Pennypacker.”

  McGee ran a hand through his hair.

  Reed cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It seems you have mistaken my desk for your own,” he went on.

  A youthful grin crept across McGee’s face, lighting him up. Then he quickly corrected it, once again giving Reed a knowing look, as though the two of them were sharing a secret. “I beg your pardon, sir. It isn’t what it looks like—Mr. Fitzwilliams sent me to find this. He told me exactly where it was kept. I disturbed nothing else on your desk, sir.”

  “And did Fitzwilliams direct you to open it as well?” he asked with a curt nod toward the ledger.

  McGee looked Reed steadily in the eye. “I wanted to make sure I had the correct volume. The accounts can be confusing sometimes.” The young man was incorrigible—and lying, certainly.

  Reed felt a pang of alarm as McGee rose from the chair—taken aback by his tall build, the way his shirt pressed firmly against the muscles in his chest. There was an energy about him, something Reed couldn’t quite pinpoint, that made it seem like he was going to reach out and touch Reed.

  Reed held still, waiting for it.

  But instead, McGee retrieved his jacket and moved toward the door.

  For some indefinable reason, Reed couldn’t let the clerk leave just yet. He remained where he stood, blocking McGee’s way. “Why don’t you take a seat, Mr. McGee, and have a glass of whiskey with me? Perhaps I can help explain the ledger to you.”

  McGee did not retract his bluff, if that was what it had been. He stayed and made himself comfortable as Reed poured two generous shots of whiskey from the bottle he kept in a desk drawer. They sat in chairs by the window, the fading afternoon sun falling across McGee’s lap, tracing fingers of light over his jaw. He seemed to be perpetually grinning even when he spoke, and Reed found he often lost the thread of McGee’s words as he stared at the younger man’s mouth.

  McGee told him how grateful he was for this job—the business of real men, he’d said—after a failed apprenticeship with an actor. At first, the story seemed far-fetched to Reed—perhaps even fabricated—but as he learned more about McGee’s childhood in New York, the father who had been distant and cruel, and then the loss of both parents to illness, he began to soften toward the young man. There was a darkness in McGee’s past, that was certain—something he wasn’t telling Reed. But Reed didn’t pry. He wasn’t interested in the details, only in the way McGee looked at him—like he was a light in all that darkness. It seemed impossible.

  “But enough about me,” McGee said then, though he didn’t seem at all ready to stop talking. “My background is hardly worse than what anyone might read in the news.” He laughed, and the sound caused Reed’s stomach to flip with anticipation. He crossed and recrossed his legs. “I read every newspaper I can get my hands on,” McGee went on. “Do you enjoy the news, Mr. Reed?”

  “Me?” Reed frowned into his whiskey; he had no desire to answer questions. He felt once again caught, exposed. “I suppose I follow the news as much as any other businessman.”

  This prompted McGee to reel off a series of delightfully horrific stories he’d read recently. How bodies were still being found two weeks after a terrible tornado had struck Natchez Trace and that Christian ministers were protesting the opening of some scandalous play in Philadelphia. Then a strange tale about a German ship that became stranded at sea and how, as the weeks without rescue dragged on, passengers and crewmen had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Edward’s eyes glowed as he heaped on detail—describing how they gutted a corpse in a lifeboat on the open sea, cracked rib bones apart to suck out the marrow—and Reed wondered once again whether Edward might be making it up. But why would he—merely to prolong the moment? Was he also reluctant for their time together to end?

  “I was wondering, Mr. McGee, if you might care to join me for dinner? I was just on my way to the chophouse up the street.” Where had this idea come from? He had been on his way home to dine with his family. Margaret and the children were expecting him. Yet it seemed very important that this conversation with his new junior clerk not end. “They do a very fine lamb with mint jelly. You have my permission to crack the bones for the marrow, if that is your wish.” Reed had made a kind of joke—something he didn’t usually do. He was surprised by that.

  He was surprised later, too, when he realized he’d never remembered to bring home his new hat.

  The inevitable started that night, because Edward McGee
really had seen something in Reed with those searching eyes—had discovered, or sensed, the secret that lay deep within James Frazer Reed. He knew what Reed wanted, probably well before Reed had admitted it to himself.

  The change occurred over dinner brandy, the liquor relaxing Reed, lowering his reserve. He let his gaze linger on the clerk, who did not look away. At one point they both reached for the bottle of brandy and the young man’s hand rested on Reed’s. It was only for a moment, but that was enough. Reed would remember that touch for the rest of his life.

  The next six months were bliss. Reed turned into a besotted schoolgirl. To think he had gone so long in life without love.

  They passed as business associates, Edward acting as Reed’s private clerk. It was only natural, wasn’t it, for a man’s assistant to accompany him on business trips out of town, to long lunches at the club, to work late in the office? They carried on right under everyone’s noses. Reed was amazed that they got away with it.

  Edward had even mentioned the possibility of the two of them running away together. Going to California to start a new life. Reed could let go of all his responsibilities: Margaret and her brood, his business, his large house and grounds! Sure, he’d worked hard for these things but did he really want them? Didn’t he want freedom instead?

  Reed had been a striver all his life, desperate to leave the poverty of his youth behind. And yet he could not choose freedom. It didn’t seem real. It seemed an illusion. And he couldn’t bring himself to leave his family behind. It was something he simply could not explain to Edward, who had no family to speak of.

  You’re afraid to be happy, Edward said to him reproachfully. You don’t trust me.

  But Edward was wrong. Reed did trust him. Far too much. And that was the root of all the trouble.