by Stacey Lee
“I am sorry,” I tell the man in a shaky voice, dropping to my knees.
“Let him go, Sammy,” Andy murmurs.
West tugs on my rope. “Sammy.”
I ignore them. The man speaks to me. “Shhh.”
Cay and Peety turn their horses around to watch.
“Sir?” I breathe.
“Shhoo.”
“Shhoo,” I repeat hoarsely, hoping he wants my shoes, but dreading the other thing he might be asking for. His eyes drop to my belt, and I gulp. “Shoot?”
Andy gasps. The man blinks.
“Blink once for yes and two for no,” I say, my breath coming faster.
He blinks once.
“Are you sure?”
Another blink.
“Really sure?”
Another blink.
I cover my mouth with my hand.
My hand shakes as I take out the Dragoon. I put it on full cock and raise it to his head, the place where Peety showed me how to put down a horse. What if it is not the same place for a human? The man closes his eyes. A white band of skin circles his finger where a wedding ring should be. I bite down on my trembling lip and wrap my left hand over his.
Then I let him go, and stand back. All I need to do is shoot once. No one survives a bullet in the head, right?
But I cannot do it. That would be murder. My eyes find West’s. I have not gone there since—
I shut them and my tears jump off the slope of my cheek. When I look again, West is winding the rope around his arm as he approaches me. His eyes do not leave mine until he takes my gun, aims, and fires.
33
“DON’T SEE WHY HIS FOLKS DIDN’T SHOOT HIM themselves. Woulda been kinder,” says Andy as we sit around our fire.
We spent the day traversing the foothills of a vast mountain range that stretches to the north. Tonight, we nest in a valley of pink granite rock shot through with black veins. The rocks crop out in odd formations like giant knobs of ginger.
“Could you do that to your daddy?” asks Cay.
West stares at nothing. “I could.”
“Me, too,” says Andy. “If it meant he didn’t have to wait there and suffer in the sun like that. Just downright cruel.”
I hug my knees tight to stop my hands from wringing themselves dry.
“In my religion, you go to hell for doing that,” says Peety.
“Which? Leaving him or shooting him?” I ask.
“Murder is a mortal sin. Still, mercy killing probably okay.”
“Speaking of murder, I got an interesting bit of news for you,” says Cay, squinting at me as he pulls something from his pocket. I go still as a forest animal hearing a twig snap. He unfolds a piece of newspaper. The firelight allows me to see through it and read, backward: WANTED.
My stomach clenches. He knows.
Cay zeroes in on me again. “One of the pioneers at Independence Rock gave me this Wanted Bulletin. It’s kinda interesting. Guess who’s on it?”
I put my head between my knees, not wanting to guess. Andy grabs the paper. She does not read much, but she scans the pictures. She gasps and the paper crinkles in her tight grip.
“It’s the Broken Hand Gang,” says Cay, reaching for the paper again. His hand hangs in the air for a moment before Andy realizes it’s there. She hands the paper back, then clasps her hands together so tightly her fingernails blanch. Her wide eyes hop to mine.
“They finally drew a good picture of them,” says Cay, turning around the paper and holding it up for all of us to see. “Three of them, at least.”
The top of the page reads: BROKEN HAND, $200 EA, DOA. He points to the first man, who has a broad forehead and hawkish eyes. I put him around twenty years old. “This one’s the leader, which makes him the index finger.” He taps the next picture, a boy who couldn’t be more than twelve, with a long face and a nose like a miniature butternut squash. “This one’s the pinkie, ’cause he’s the wee one.”
Cay taps his finger over the third picture of an older man. “This one’s the thumb, all wrinkly, the kind of man who always gets the odd jobs. You know, like opening pickle jars.”
The fourth and fifth ones are blank squares.
“Just read the caption, dummy,” says West.
Cay turns the paper back toward himself and reads: “‘Wanted for murder of two innocents: Amelia Dearborn, a baby, and Cedric Dearborn, 37 y.o.; AND, seven counts of aggravated assault and robbery. Last seen at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Armed and dangerous.’”
“Could I see that?” I ask. He hands me the paper and I study the pictures up close. A series of smaller photographs checker the rest of the page accompanied by one-line captions. My eyes hastily sweep the pictures, but I don’t recognize any other face. Then the last entry. There’s a photo of a Chinese woman.
I don’t hear the rest of the conversation as I read silently: “Young San-Li: wanted for MURDER in the first degree of Mr. Ty Yorkshire of St. Joe, Missouri, and THEFT of a slave. 15–25 y.o., Chinese, long black hair, black eyes, dangerous. Reward: $500.”
I’m gasping in air now, and I put my head between my knees again to calm myself. The only saving grace is that my “picture” is not my picture at all. It seems no one had a picture of me to print so they pulled one of some Chinese woman in her twenties smoking a cigarette. She poses in a clingy dress with a slit, a cheongsam.
Picture or not, they’re after me. Now, thousands of pioneers and Argonauts know to be on the lookout for a Chinese girl. Mercenaries will be clamoring for a shot at the prize, which is easily enough to sustain a living for the next few years. I won’t be able to go to the Parting. It’s too risky. Mr. Trask will be lost to me, and so will Mother’s bracelet.
Father, I was so close. I held the butterfly in my hand, but a gale swept it away.
Andy nudges her knee against mine. West, on my other side, takes the paper from me. I don’t want him to see it, but I cannot protest without making things worse.
“That a friend of yours?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“No?” West starts laying out his rope. “Well, sleep with your irons cocked.”
After the boys fall asleep, Andy and I head to a sluggish brook for a minute-bath. Afterward, we huddle together on a thick pile of pine needles, teeth chattering. The moon is an ivory sliver that barely emits light, so high and out of reach. I want to unhook it from the sky and hold it in my hand, where it might do some good.
“That picture didn’t look like you.”
“Chinese is Chinese.”
“So what’d it say?” she asks.
“Wanted for murder and theft of a slave. Five hundred dollars if you can catch me.”
She stares into space and her lips start moving. Then she tilts her face toward me and licks her dry lips. “You’s almost worth the same as three of the Broken Hand Gang.”
“Isn’t that a comfort. Three for the price of one,” I mutter. “We can’t continue on the trail. We’ll go straight to the falls. No one will find us there.”
My head pounds so I pinch my left hand below the web of my thumb and index finger, the way my father taught me to take the edge off headaches.
Andy rests her chin on her knees. “I think we should separate.”
“What?”
“The boys would help you. You could go with them to the Parting. They’d keep you safe. After you find Mr. Trask, you keep on with him to California, and then you’s home free.”
“He’d be harboring a fugitive. So would the boys.”
“They already been doing that before the Wanted Bulletin came out.”
“But now I’m being hunted in earnest. After all they’ve done for us, I can’t put them in such danger.”
She frowns as she fingers the Indian bead on her bracelet. Her bony elbow digs into my arm as she scoots c
loser to me. “When I was picking the fields back on Frogg Farm, the owner’s sons thought they’d have some fun with me. Stuck me in a corn maze with a pair of rabid bloodhounds.”
“Devils.”
“I’ve never been so scared in my life. I could hear the barking and knew the dogs was coming for me. I raced down a row of corn. Sometimes I saw spaces between the stalks like missing teeth, but I didn’t take ’em. Then my legs started shaking, and I fell. I saw a dog loping toward me, drooling ’n ’crazy.”
Her face tightens and she shudders. “Only thing I could do was duck into one of the spaces. And then another. Soon enough, I got out to find Tommy’s weeping face.”
She twists her body toward me. “You see, I was running so fast, I passed up the spaces even though they was the exit. You’s in that maze. You got spaces around you. You want to run until the dogs bite you dead?” She raises her voice, and I shush her.
“I am thankful the spaces saved you,” I say. “But spaces don’t have to worry about jail.”
“The spaces can think for themselves, when they ain’t making bad jokes. One space in particular would pick the seeds off a strawberry for you if he knew you’s a girl.”
I shake my head. “It could never work. Chinito should stick to Chinitas, remember?”
“Cay was the one said that.”
“But West agreed with him. And anyway, I can’t continue putting them in danger. Here’s what I think. Once we find the trail again, we’ll keep our eyes open for Calamity Cutoff. The night we find it, we’ll leave the boys a note, then double back.”
It’s the coward’s way to leave, but I don’t see any other choice.
• • •
The next day, we continue riding over the floor of granite. We have not seen a major trail since leaving the cholera man. My eyes keep flitting to Andy, walking beside me. We’ve hardly spoken all day. She burnt the breakfast for the first time this morning and singed her sleeve in her haste to lift the pan off the fire.
Now she’s lost in her own world, not steering much, just letting Princesa drift where she wants to go. After last night’s talk, I can’t help feeling I need to keep an eye on her, as if she might disappear at any moment.
She senses me watching and gives me a brief smile that fails to reassure me.
When Cay turns us into a rocky incline, West protests. “We need to be going west. This ain’t right.”
“I know,” says Cay, holding the map before him as we continue to march forward. “We’re still on the shortcut. Have I ever led you wrong?”
Andy and I exchange worried glances. Tiger personalities can make hasty decisions and have trouble backing down. Father always blamed President Van Buren’s Tiger nature for the Panic of 1837 when he wouldn’t recant a decision not to interfere in the economy. Still, I remind myself that like all cats, Tigers do have a good sense of direction. I wiggle around in my saddle and try to relax.
We travel all day without seeing a single person, let alone the Oregon Trail. The mountain range that started off on our right now seems higher on the left side.
In the late afternoon, we reach a running stream full of fish. We follow it to a dumpling-shaped clearing hidden by dense foliage. Cay orders a shade-up and consults his map again. Then he refolds it.
“You sunk us, right?” asks West in a voice that doesn’t sound surprised.
“There’s a first time for everything,” says Cay, a little sheepishly. “Tomorrow we’ll just turn around.”
“We should make you sing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ hombre,” says Peety.
“That would be more of a punishment to us,” says West.
We release the horses to graze. I shake out my boots, one by one, and try not to take our wrong turn as a bad sign. Andy watches me as she glugs from her canteen. At least no one will find us up here. But what if we overshoot Calamity Cutoff? Though I’ve traced Cay’s map into our journal, it won’t help us if we don’t know where we are.
Andy pinches me. “Go on, look. It’s like the Garden of Eden.” She crouches to inspect a bush of yellow flowers.
I peruse our slice of the world and grudgingly agree. The trees grow high enough to shield us from view. Were it not for the storm in my mind, I might sleep well tonight, pillowed by a lawn of pink clover and lulled by the tinkling stream. I draw in the fresh air and detect the smoky scent of cedar.
“No fig leaves and lots of snakes.” Cay sniggers. “Wish we had us some hens for sinning.” He looks at Andy and me when he says this, so we both grunt in approval.
Cay goes to lie down by the stream. “I could use a nap. I’m dragged out.” He tilts his hat over his face.
The fact that we are lost does not concern the boys, skipping stones in the water, or the horses, happily chomping heads off the clover. I park my bottom in the shade of a solitary fir, the tallest tree in Eden. Father told me they use fir in railroad ties because it’s so strong. I inhale its sweet piney scent and try to quiet the unrest in my mind.
Andy squats in front of me. “No one knows His plan but Him.”
• • •
In the morning, Cay does not want to wake up. I put my hand on his temple. He stirs at my touch. Hot as a pepper.
Andy and I are about to fetch water when Cay starts to heave. When he finishes, we help him to a spot by the stream, which will carry away his sick. I pour him a cup of water from my canteen and tilt it into his mouth.
Cay whispers something to Peety. Then Peety puts Cay’s arm over his own broad shoulders and helps him over to a dense shrub dotted with white flowers, stretching as high as the horses. When they return, Peety is shaking his head.
“Choro,” Peety tells me, and when I don’t understand, he translates “diarrhea.”
All the blood leeches from my face. These are the signs of cholera, the deadliest disease on the prairie.
34
I CHECK EVERYONE ELSE’S HEALTH AND HEAR NO complaints.
But by midday, we realize Peety and Andy are not fine after all. They also come down with the fever, vomiting, and choro. As Andy vomits for the third time in an hour, I start to wonder if the shortcut we took was Calamity Cutoff, and if I caused this by shooting the cholera man, even though I didn’t pull the trigger.
How could I ever think I would outrun my bad luck? It is like a plague, spreading its contagion to those I hold most dear.
Since West and I have not spoken for nearly two weeks, words no longer come easy, but we work together to pull the others’ bedrolls closer to the river, next to Cay.
“We should dig holes,” I say, rummaging around for spoons since we don’t have shovels. We find a spot behind the shrub with the white flowers to dig our latrines. The flowers smell like oranges and freshen the air. We scoop up spoonfuls of earth. Father made a special blend of rehydrating salt for dysentery that he believed would also help the pioneers with cholera. No one ever returned to tell us if it worked or not.
“Cholera isn’t always fatal,” I say without much conviction.
“At least we got a stream,” he says at the same time.
We pause in case the other has something more to add. Then we both start up again. West stops to let me finish.
“Father had a remedy—”
“What’s in it?”
My digging slows as I try to remember. “Half a teaspoon salt, six teaspoons sugar, four cups water—”
West throws down his spoon. “Hell.” He glares at the mound we’ve scraped together so far, the size of a grapefruit. Then he starts clawing the dirt with his hands.
An hour later, we have three holes and two broken spoons. We kneel by the stream to wash. When Cay moans and clutches his middle, West grimaces.
“For stomach pain, we used blackberries and pepper,” I say. “There was a bush yesterday that Palom—”
“I think I remember the direction. I’ll fe
tch ’em.”
“The thorns can pierce your gloves.” I dry my hands on a cloth. West picks up the other end to dry his. “Maybe use your fishing spear to knock them off.”
“I know what to do,” he says gruffly.
Now our hands meet in the middle of the cloth, and we both let the other have it. He plucks it out of the air before it drops to the ground.
“Might be gone for a stretch,” he says, like nothing happened.
“They’ll be okay. I’ll help them use the necessary.” I decide that is what we should call the holes.
“They got to use it a lot. What if you—”
“Don’t worry about me,” I snap, crossing my arms over my chest.
He closes his mouth and looks at Franny, standing next to us. Her ears start to pull back. We bore her. As he straps on his rifle, I hold Franny’s reins, willing the remorse on the tip of my tongue to leap out of my mouth. But nothing comes.
Fixing my stare on his shirt buttons, I notice that one looks different from the rest, a replacement for the one Sophie ripped off. I drop my eyes to his belt buckle, an even worse place. Shake it off. How can I think of that at a time like this? I refocus on the only freckle he owns, a solitary speck on the smooth curve of his cheek.
I soften. “I know you are afr—worried.” I switch words, remembering the chicken threat. Boys do not like to be seen as fearful. “But I’m stronger than I look.”
His brow wrinkles as he takes in my fingers, hopelessly entangled in the leather straps and getting tighter the more I pull. Turning my back to him, I hiss out my irritation at my nervous habits, which lurk like uneven floorboards, waiting to trip me up.
“Sammy.” That tone again, two parts exasperation, one part resignation.
I shake my head as I wiggle my fingers free and hand him back the reins.
“I know you are,” he says. He swings his leg over Franny and clicks his tongue.
• • •
For the rest of the day, I alternate between patients, feeding them the mix, and helping them to the necessary. I throw dirt into the holes after each use. I mix the salt, sugar, and water, praying I got the ratios right. Then I steep pepper in the kettle.