As if to confirm that he was serious, she saw Becky Hyatt coming back to her family’s camp with an apron full of the very things that Jamie was asking them to gather.
So out they went to hunt for buffalo chips. As she pried the first one out of the grass, Fortune congratulated herself on living the glamorous life of an actress.
It was enough to make her wish she had learned how to cook.
The train had its first accident the next day, when a little boy fell beneath the wheels of his family’s wagon. His cries of pain were horrible to hear. Even more horrible was the sudden silence that fell late in the afternoon.
Some of the men buried the boy that night. Fortune and her troupe had seen other graves along the way. They would pass hundreds more before the journey was over.
Though Fortune expected the tragedy to delay the trip, the next morning Abner Simpson headed them on their way again. Whatever grieving the boy’s family needed to do would have to be done while traveling. Sorrow alone, no matter how deep, was not a sufficient reason to delay the journey.
“It’s not decent,” said Fortune.
Becky Hyatt was walking beside her. To her surprise, the girl took a grimly practical position: “Decent or not, we can’t wait,” she said. “My pa says if we stop every time someone dies, we’ll end up freezing in the mountains.”
Mrs. Watson, too, had surprised Fortune by taking the boy’s grieving mother under her wing. She almost disappeared from the troupe’s wagon for the next several days, spending all her time providing companionship and support for the sorrowing woman.
It took twenty days in all for the wagon train to cover the nearly three hundred miles to Fort Kearny, the first settlement of any size after the beginning of their journey. The fort was a dismal place, but at least they were able to buy a few supplies that they needed, including some flour and some coffee.
Fortune was fascinated by the record the commandant had made of the people who had passed the fort on the westward trip—nearly fifty thousand people, a good third of them women and children.
On a cool, pleasant night in mid-May they camped near the Platte River. Fortune remembered one of the letters her father had read her from the newspaper, in which one of the earlier travelers had described the river as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
That was an exaggeration, of course—though not much of one, Fortune thought as she stood at the water’s edge. She watched the water rolling on, and wished that she could move as easily. She was beginning to think that the journey—and the continent—were endless.
She came back to the camp to find the men debating the truth of Abner Simpson’s claim that the Indians they had seen the day before sometimes ate grasshoppers.
Though Fortune was exhausted, sleep wouldn’t come. As she lay in the narrow wagon beside the snoring Mrs. Watson, a million thoughts were racing through her mind, most of them having to do with Jamie and Aaron.
Mrs. Watson gave a loud snort and rolled over, tossing an arm across Fortune’s shoulders.
“That does it!” she muttered. “I’ve got to get out of here!”
Scrambling to her feet, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, then climbed out of the wagon. When she turned and looked up, she caught her breath in wonder. The huge sky, so much bigger than she was used to back East, was blazing with stars. The vastness of it made her feel tiny, insignificant.
She turned in a slow circle, trying to take it all in. To the west, in the direction they were heading, a bar of darkness covered the stars in the lower quarter of the sky. Distant thunder rumbled, so softly she could barely hear it above the soft thrum of the insects. The wind from the west carried the sweet scent of the prairie in bloom.
I want someone to share this with, she thought desperately. It’s too beautiful for just one person.
Several wagons away she could hear some of the men hooting and shouting. She frowned. It was a sound she associated with saloons and drinking, and it made her think of her father’s death. The raucousness seemed a scar on the serene beauty of the night.
Moving quietly, she walked away from the shouting, heading for where Romeo, Juliet, and the rest of the team were tethered. The horses were grazing in a slow, lazy fashion. Other horses were nearby. Fortune enjoyed the sound they made tearing up the tender spring grass, the musky smell of their bodies.
“Hi, Romeo,” she said softly. “Hello there, Juliet.”
The gelding raised his head and whickered. Juliet, however, continued to eat, completely ignoring Fortune’s arrival.
“Oh, don’t be so uppity,” she said to the mare. At the same time she began scratching Romeo behind the ears. As soon as Juliet noticed the attention Romeo was getting, she crossed to join them.
Thunder rumbled, closer now than when she had left the wagon.
“Must be nice being a horse,” Fortune said to Romeo, pointedly ignoring Juliet. “Less to worry about.”
Juliet blew out a gust of air, causing her lips to flap.
Fortune laughed. “Well, there’s no need to be rude if you don’t agree! I just meant it seems as if it would be easy to have so many of your decisions made for you. You don’t have to worry about which way you’re going, or who you’re going with. That’s all taken care of.”
“It does make life easier, doesn’t it?” asked a husky voice behind her.
Fortune spun around. “Aaron!”
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked. His words were oddly slurred, and Fortune’s delight at seeing him faded as she found herself trying to fight down the feeling that she heard something menacing in his voice.
“Just sore from walking all day,” she said, forcing a laugh.
“And not even a little bit lonely?”
He stepped closer. His breath was rank with the smell of cheap liquor, and Fortune realized that he had been part of the wild group she had heard back at the wagons. “Not lonely at all,” she lied. “I like the solitude.”
“‘S funny,” said Aaron. “Beautiful night likes this, you’d think a…a pretty girl standing out here by herself would just be longing for someone to share it with.”
“I was looking at the stars.”
Aaron glanced up. The sky was darkening as the cloud bank moved in from the west, but overhead, and to the east, the stars were still as brilliant as ever. “They’re beautiful,” he said, taking another step closer. “Just like you.”
“But I’m getting cold now,” said Fortune. “I think I’ll go back to the wagon.”
Aaron took her arm. “Stay a while,” he said softly. “Maybe you don’t mind being alone, but I don’t like it. I want some company. I’m lonely, Fortune.”
He sounded on the verge of tears. But she had heard drunks cry before, and the sound did not raise sympathy in her. “I really have to get back,” she said, shaking her arm free of his grip. “Mrs. Watson might wake up. She’ll be worried if I’m not there.”
“Don’t worry about her. She sleeps like a log.” He took her arm again and pulled her around so they were face to face.
Fortune was glad that it was too dark to see him clearly—or for him to see her. She felt as if she were being torn in half. She had yearned so long for him to show her some attention, some affection. Yet the moment had been ruined by his foolish drunkenness.
He pulled her closer, slipping his arms around her.
“Don’t,” said Fortune, turning her head to avoid the smell of the liquor. “Aaron, don’t!”
“Listen to me.” His voice was desperate, his eyes flashing. “No. Don’t listen. Words are…stupid. They cut you.” Tightening his arms, he drew her toward him, moving his lips toward hers.
Fortune struggled to break free of his grip.
“Hold still!” said Aaron roughly. “You’re such a…tease, bouncing back and forth between Jamie and me. I get sick of…I want to…they said…”
He stopped talking and tried to kiss her. Though part of her longed to respond, she was revolted by the smell of the alcohol. T
urning her face away, she hissed, “Let go of me!”
When he didn’t relax his grip, she tried to tear herself from his arms. “Aaron, let go!” she shouted. With a burst of unsuspected strength, she finally managed to wrench one arm free. When she did, she slapped his face so hard it made her hand sting.
Romeo, startled by the sudden movement, shied away from them. Juliet whinnied nervously.
Aaron gasped in astonishment. He put his hand to his mouth, which was bleeding. He stared at her for a moment, then turned and stumbled into the darkness. She heard him start to vomit, and the sound made her own stomach twist with nausea. But her contempt for his drunkenness was tempered by memories of her father’s occasional “nights out,” and she wondered if she should try to help him back to the wagon.
After a moment she followed his moans into the darkness. He was on his knees, shaking.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry sorry sorry. It was a mistake. I can’t…they don’t understand. My fault, my fault…”
Putting his head in his hands he began to weep.
Fortune reached down to help him to his feet. “Come on. We’d better get back to the wagon before this storm hits.”
That turned out to be impossible. They hadn’t gone ten feet before the rain began to fall with a force that astonished Fortune, pounding against her so hard that it hurt. Nothing she had read of the fierce prairie storms had prepared her for the reality of this one. Lightning cascaded across the sky like the wrath of the gods made real. The thunder that accompanied it seemed to shake the earth itself.
When a bolt of lightning sizzled down terrifyingly close to them, Aaron threw himself to the ground and covered his head, whimpering in distress. Fortune looked at him in disgust. It was all she could do to keep herself from kicking him and shouting, “Get up, you drunken fool!”
She stopped, frozen, realizing that she had seen her mother do that to her father once.
A wave of sickness washed over her, and she fell to her knees herself. The rain continued to pound against them. She pushed the horrifying memory away. Using her hands, she found Aaron’s shoulders, then his head. Putting her mouth close to his ear, she shouted, “Aaron! Aaron, get up and come with me. We have to get back to the wagon.”
It wasn’t until she stood and began to pull at him that he finally staggered to his feet again.
The darkness and the pounding rain made it impossible to see more than a few inches ahead. They tripped and stumbled along, and it was only by luck that they managed to find their way back to the campsite rather than go wandering off across the prairie.
She left Aaron at the door of the men’s tent. She was too tired and filled with despair to be amused by the cries of dismay from the others when he stumbled, soggy and dripping, into their midst.
Splashing through the puddles, she climbed over the back of the wagon. It was wet in there, too, the painted cloth cover insufficient to withstand the full fury of the storm.
Even so, it was home—or as much of a home as she had at the moment. The sound of Mrs. Watson’s snoring, so annoying such a short time before, suddenly seemed oddly comforting.
Stripping off her soaked things, Fortune climbed into her makeshift bed. Pressing her face to her blanket so that Mrs. Watson would not hear, she cried herself to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
It was three days before either of them spoke of what had happened. Fortune was riding beside Aaron at the front of the wagon—something she had avoided entirely the previous two days—when he said, “About the other night…”
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
Aaron nodded, and fell silent. Fortune glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He was staring straight ahead, his jaw set. A moment later he tried again. “Listen. I just want to say I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do.”
She relaxed a little. “I’m sorry I got so mad,” she said.
He shook his head. “You had every right.”
They rode in silence for another moment, then he reached for her hand. She let him take it. Yet the gesture didn’t make her nearly as happy as she wanted it to. Her feelings for him, once so clear, were now as muddy and churned as the road beneath them.
Turning her head, Fortune began to study the vast prairie that stretched away on all sides of them. As always, she was amazed at the flowers, sweeps of red, orange, and yellow that looked like schools of multicolored fishes swimming through an ocean of grass. Life seemed to pulse around her—the hawks that circled overhead, the insects that buzzed and swarmed over the grasses. She knew there was more life, too, life she was less apt to see, like the coyotes that sometimes prowled the edges of their camp at night, the rattlesnakes she had been warned against, the red deer the men sometimes shot and carried back to camp.
She had been revolted the first time she saw Jamie clean and gut a deer; it was the only time in her life that she had been forced to come face to face with the reality of the meat she ate.
Her squeamishness had evoked some teasing from Edmund and Aaron, and also left her thinking about some of the other women she had met on the journey—women like Becky Hyatt’s mother, who had been killing and cleaning animals since she was a child.
Eventually Fortune slipped her hand from Aaron’s and scrambled back into the wagon to talk to Mrs. Watson.
The red-haired woman sat serenely on a chair she had wedged between two chests, looking like a queen in exile. She had a book in one hand and was quietly turning the pages, as if the bounce and bump of the wagon had no effect on her at all.
Fortune sat on the rounded top of one of the chests next to her and waited for Mrs. Watson to notice her. When it became clear that she was so absorbed in her book that she wasn’t going to, Fortune asked loudly, “What are you reading?”
“Why, Fortune!” Mrs. Watson seemed genuinely pleased to see her. She closed her book and looked at the cover. “It’s called Frankenstein,” she said with a shudder. “Most gruesome thing I ever read. Gives me the shivers. Written by a young woman not much older than you, believe it or not. It’s about a scientist who builds a new man out of the parts of dead people!”
Fortune blinked in astonishment at such a revolting idea. “If it’s so horrible, why are you reading it?” She looked at the book as if it might bite her.
“Oh, I love to have the shivers. Besides, it’s how I get away from all this bouncing and jouncing. I can pretend I’m not here at all.”
As if on cue, the wagon rolled over another bump, sending both passengers an inch or two off their seats. Mrs. Watson put her hand against her back and groaned. “Sometimes I think that even if I do live to see California, my spine will have been ground to powder by the time we get there.”
“Maybe you should walk for a while, as the others do,” suggested Fortune.
“The sun would be devastating for my complexion, chicken. I don’t know how you can stand it out there yourself. If you must walk, I wish you would stop taking off your bonnet. You’re doing terrible things to your skin.”
“I’m sure,” said Fortune. “Even so, I prefer it to being cooped up in here.”
She paused, uncertain how to talk about what was on her mind, afraid Mrs. Watson would laugh. She wasn’t even sure she should talk about it.
Mrs. Watson looked at her closely. “Are you all right, chickadee?”
“What? Oh, certainly. Only…Mrs. Watson, did you ever have…man trouble?”
She did laugh, but it was a friendly, confiding laugh. “What woman hasn’t? It’s the curse of our sex. Also the blessing. What’s bothering you? Aaron, or Jamie? Not Edmund, I hope. Silly little peacock.”
Fortune made a face. “Not Edmund! Aaron, mostly. The other night…”
She fell silent, unable to tell the story.
Mrs. Watson looked at her, but said nothing. The wagon bounced and bumped along. Finally Fortune spoke again. Hesitantly at first, then overcome by memory and anger and sorrow, she poured out her story. She included Aaron’
s apology, but didn’t mention the way he had just taken her hand.
Mrs. Watson shook her head, and Fortune could tell that she was delighted to be consulted in this matter. “There, there, love. Men do that sort of thing every once in a while. At least, a lot of them do. The thing to ask yourself is, does it happen all the time, or was it just a mistake? We all do make mistakes, chicken—even us women. Sometimes we even mistake strong feelings for love.”
“What do you mean?” asked Fortune suspiciously.
Mrs. Watson shrugged. “You need to be on your guard, Fortune. Right now you have to figure you’re sort of like a mouse in a roomful of hungry cats. You may not be much, but you’re the best thing around.”
“Well, thank you very much!”
“Don’t be a goose. I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, what a smart mouse would do is play the cats off against each other. As long as they’re fighting over the mouse, they won’t be trying to catch it.”
Fortune thought for a moment. Finally, timidly, she asked, “What if the mouse wants to get caught?”
Mrs. Watson smiled. “Ah, now that’s different. First you have to choose your cat.”
Choosing to ignore the implication of that statement, Fortune said nothing for a while. She began to study Mrs. Watson’s face and realized that her expression wasn’t merely serious; it was almost mournful.
Yet there was a veil behind her eyes, as if she were shutting out the world—or holding something away from it. Prompted by something she didn’t quite understand, Fortune asked, “Did you ever have a dream, Mrs. Watson?”
“Once,” she replied, her voice soft and husky. “For a while.”
“What happened?”
Mrs. Watson’s eyes grew dark, and her face seemed to close in on itself, shutting Fortune out somehow. “It’s a long story, dear,” she whispered, “and I’d really rather not talk about it.” She paused, and stared past Fortune at the light filtering through the wagon cover. Suddenly she straightened her spine and said, almost fiercely, “But I will tell you one thing—something I know, as sure as I know the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Once you figure out what you want, you’re a fool if you don’t fight for it with all your heart and soul.” She paused. The mask of cheerfulness she usually wore returned. The memory, whatever it was, had been pushed back into hiding.
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