The Hunger(40)

Cambridge, Massachusetts


My dear Edwin,

I am sending this letter to Sutter’s Fort as you suggested in the hope that it reaches you at the other end of the great Oregon Trail. I am not surprised that you are partaking in this grand American adventure, my friend, as it is surely in keeping with your bold and inquisitive nature. I am envious and wish I could join you, but I am a realist and too accustomed to the comforts of civilization to undertake such a challenge. Besides, I find that my new post here at Harvard University is enough of an adventure in its own right and so I will be content with that.

We arrived in Cambridge from Kentucky two months ago. Tilly found us furnished rooms in a lovely house on Prince Street and has already fallen in with a group of professors’ wives and does not think she will miss the Kentucky wilderness too much. We were pleased to read in your last letter that you are engaged. I am of the firm opinion that a man is better off wed than alone in the world.

But let me get to the real reason I am writing, an experience that you may find very interesting and in keeping with the theories you have formed and are so intent on pursuing. I recently had the opportunity to meet an English physician visiting Harvard as part of a professional exchange. His name is John Snow, a quiet man with an impressive high, broad dome of a forehead and piercing eyes radiating intelligence. We met at a departmental tea and after discussing a recent smallpox outbreak far west of Boston, he confessed to me that he was not convinced that conventional thinking that bad air is responsible for the spread of disease is correct. He is investigating other possible causes. He feels there are too many inconsistencies in the miasmic theory and that another, yet-unknown culprit is to blame. He has come to question the very nature of disease and how very specific, very different diseases can pass among us silently before springing suddenly to life and—in the case of some diseases, such as cholera and typhoid—erupt into epidemics. He even spoke of the way in which disease might travel invisibly, carried by people or creatures who show no signs of having it at all.

It was wild, interesting talk, to be sure. And he was so full of new ideas—and yet seemingly not so far from some of the things you proposed during our time together—that I began to think that if I could ever speak to anyone about our experience in Smithboro, it would be him. It was a risk, of course: I questioned the political wisdom of such an act but I, for one, had been haunted by Smithboro for too long and it was burning up within me, desperate for release.

And so I sought private conference with Snow and told every detail of our singular experience, withholding no detail no matter how bizarre. At the conclusion of my story, he sat stunned. I asked him whether he had ever heard of a case similar to this and he mumbled that he had not. Then I asked him by what means would it be possible for us to have witnessed what we did, and he beheld me gravely. “What you are describing is nothing but pagan superstition. Don’t you realize that?” he said in his thick, strange accent. “Let me remind you that we are men of science. I advise ye to look to the natural world for your explanations, not to the unnatural one.”

I fear I have made a grievous mistake; if he tells the rest of the faculty, they might think me horribly superstitious, and it will surely damage my reputation.

But his repudiation has made me see the light. Edwin, I advise you to abandon this quest you are on, seeking out tales of Indian deities who transform from one form to another—man by day and animal by night. Whether the answer to the mystery can be found in the natural world, as Snow insists it must, I cannot say. The beauty and frustration of nature, Edwin, is that it is infinite in its variations. You should not hold out false hope; it is entirely possible that we will never have answers.

I have gone on long enough. If you will not heed my advice—and I know what a long shot that is—for God’s sake do not take any unnecessary risks. Please take the advice of an old friend who wishes to see you again: Buy the soundest horse you can afford, do not travel alone into unknown territory, keep your doctoring kit well stocked, and carry a loaded firearm with you at all times.

Your dear friend,

Walton Gow





CHAPTER SIXTEEN





It wasn’t me, Elitha. Tell your stepmother it wasn’t my fault.

Halloran’s body hadn’t yet been returned to camp before she began to hear him—faintly at first, carried to her in snatches, as though on bits of phantom wind. Then louder, more insistent.

Please. Tell her. Tell her I’m sorry.

Elitha put her hands over her ears and she didn’t care who saw. She tried bargaining with Halloran when she was alone, but he didn’t seem able to hear.

She couldn’t speak to the voices. She could only listen.

Please. That monster that wrestled Tamsen to the ground wasn’t me. I couldn’t stop it, but it wasn’t me.

The voices had only gotten worse since Fort Bridger. The only one she knew clearly was the voice of Luke Halloran, who for a week had moldered in the wagon, hovering between life and death. She knew now that the others were dead, and they mostly spoke gibberish. Only once in a while could she make out a word. Sometimes it was like coming in on the middle of a conversation, as if she were the trespasser in her own head and not the other way around.

She had tried to confide in Tamsen. She knew her stepmother believed in strange things, things beyond nature. She had seen Tamsen carefully braiding together stems of rosemary for protective charms, and muddling wolfsbane and lavender to daub behind her children’s ears, to keep demons from preying on them.