The Hunger(31)

“It was nothing.” He had spent days thinking about her eyes and now he could barely meet them. “I felt almost sorry for him. There was something about the way Bridger handled him, the way he talked about him, that made me think of an animal in a zoo. It made me think . . .” His blood pulsed a little faster. He remembered the night Lydia’s father, drunk on whiskey, had joked about looking through the keyhole of his daughter’s bedroom to watch her undress. Stanton didn’t know why the association had come to him now. Maybe only that he sensed Bridger liked the power he had over his prisoner, liked to watch him chained up in that dark room, going slowly insane.

The thought was so vile and so strong that he was momentarily afraid that he could transmit them to her, like a kind of contagion.

“What is it?” Mary asked. “What’s wrong?”

Before he could make up an excuse, he heard a shout. They turned to see Franklin Graves crashing through the brush. He looked first at Stanton but then turned to his daughter. “I told you I didn’t want you talking to him.”

Although her father towered over her, Mary didn’t flinch. “And I told you he’s done nothing wrong,” she said evenly. “Besides, I meant to thank him for saving me. He did save me, as you recall.”

Graves’s face was dark with anger. “Believe me, Mary, this man is no one’s savior. Now take that firewood to your mother, she’s waiting on you. Go on,” he added, and raised a hand as if he might hit her. Instead he pulled her roughly in the direction of the wagon train. “Get.”

Stanton felt his anger rushing down to some deep, sharp point, as if it were flowing down the blade of a knife. Another father who hated him, resented him—and maybe even envied him. “I don’t know what I’ve done to give you cause to dislike me—”

Graves didn’t let him finish. “I don’t ever want to catch you talking to my daughter, do you hear me? I know all about you. I know what you did in Massachusetts.”

Massachusetts. A word like the first hiss of flame, ready to flare up and consume him at any moment.

At least Mary was too far off now to hear it.

Graves smiled narrowly. “I see you know what I’m talking about. You can’t lie your way out of it, not with me. George Donner knew that girl’s father, you see. That girl you got pregnant and deserted. He told me you ran off in shame after she killed herself.”

Stanton felt as though he’d been hit. This was the moment he’d been dreading and, perhaps, waiting for since they all left Springfield. Sometimes he wondered if the rumors would follow him to the ends of the world. Maybe he would always have to carry them along, like a shadow. A horrible twisted lie that was his burden to bear to the end of his days.

It was his fault, after all. He’d known that Donner and Knox were associates. It was how he’d ended up here in the first place, caught in an endless spiral that seemed determined to keep his past alive. It was just that he hadn’t expected George Donner to tell anyone about Lydia. And, of course, Donner didn’t know the whole story; he only knew what Knox had told him, which was, of course, the whole problem.

Emboldened by Stanton’s silence, Graves took a step closer. Stanton could smell his breath: close and wet and rotten. “How old was that girl, anyway, when you got her that way?”

He wanted to throw a punch at Graves but somehow managed to stop himself. He couldn’t speak. The words swelled in his throat to close it, until he felt as if he might choke—long ago, when he made his promise to Lydia, he had gotten into the habit of swallowing the truth. He hadn’t said anything when it had happened, hadn’t let himself be moved by the vicious things his Massachusetts neighbors said about him.

“So you won’t even try to deny it?” For a split second, Graves looked almost disappointed, as if he’d been angling for a fight. “I don’t want you near Mary. She’s not going to throw herself away on a no-account like you. If I ever see you talking to her again, I’ll tell her what I know about you.”

So he hadn’t told Mary already. One small mercy.

And in this world, Stanton thought, that was increasingly the only kind of mercy to be found.



* * *



? ? ?

THE TRAIL HASTINGS HAD BLAZED was ugly, barely wide enough for a single wagon. As he and Reed followed it past a landscape of felled trees and jagged stumps, Stanton fell into the rhythmic sway of his horse’s back and tried to keep his mind from swinging back to Mary, to the fight with Franklin Graves, and to the memories he’d resurrected of Lydia. Maybe, after all, Graves was right about him. He was hardly an ideal suitor. He doubted he knew the first thing about pleasing a young woman. After Lydia, it seemed he couldn’t keep away from new widows and unhappy wives. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to stop himself, as if the need to bury his misery in them over and over again was the only way for him to survive.

And besides, he certainly couldn’t provide Mary with the kind of wealth and prospects her father was apparently seeking.

He recalled Lavinah Murphy teasing him at the picnic about taking a wife. Don’t you get tired of being alone, Mr. Stanton?

She had no idea. The aloneness ate a hole through him. Sometimes he worried that the loneliness had taken everything, that there was nothing left of him at all on the inside.

They stopped the first night to make camp as the sun was sinking behind the hills. Stanton was surprised when Reed came back with a rabbit. It was scrawny and small but it was meat. “Where’d you find that?” he asked, impressed that Reed was able to catch anything, let alone manage to do it so quickly, when they’d seen so little game since Fort Laramie. Even in the thick cover of the woods, there was little birdsong. It was as if the lush growth were a painted setpiece, a convincing impression of life built out of sawdust and paint.