The Hunger(28)

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.