The Hunger(44)

She’d heard stories of an older man, too, the man’s uncle, who years earlier had stayed for a while with his nephew. People in town had been afraid of him. They made him seem like a monster in their stories, saying he’d been involved in some kind of mysterious tragedy at sea, and had even suspected he had some role in the death of a poor consumptive woman who’d been taken in by a tonic-selling con. They said the older man had always smelled faintly of blood, like the way it lingered in the shed after you’d done your butchering.

Lavinah tucked her head down and headed home to resume preparations for Wednesday. A long journey was waiting. And freedom, like the kind the founding fathers had written and dreamed of, freedom from fear, lay on the other side.





SEPTEMBER 1846





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN





James Reed could almost think that the worst was behind them.

They emerged from the Wasatch Mountain range at last, trudging out of the cottonwood-choked canyons with bloodied, blistered hands and aching backs. The descent was their reward, gentle and long, an easy stroll for exhausted animals and men alike. Relief among the travelers was palpable; people spoke optimistically of the worst being behind them.

Until they came upon the first patch of dry, white land.

It began as a glare in the distance, so pale, so singed of growth, that it looked as if a mantle of snow had covered the land horizon to horizon. It stank. Puddles of stagnant white water lay like open wounds across the otherwise parched landscape. The water was unpotable—they learned that after a cow tried to drink it and took ill.

There had been a fluke hot spell during Reed’s first year in America. He had been ten years old at the time but he still remembered it vividly. He had been living on a tobacco plantation in Virginia where his mother worked as a laundress. He earned money working in the fields with the slaves, topping the tobacco plants in the spring, picking mature leaves in the summer.

It was backbreaking work, and that summer it was unbearable. Having grown up in the cold, wet Irish countryside, James had never known heat like that. The fields shimmered. Rows of green undulated in phantom vapor. At least one slave died before the weather broke. Because Reed’s mother had asked the field boss to keep an eye on her son, he was sent home every day after the noon meal. He felt guilty resting in the cool of the servants’ quarters in the big house while the slaves, he knew, would work until the sun went down.

Now, decades later, he dreamed of the cool tiles of those shaded hallways. Of water poured from clay pitchers. Of shadows and porcelain and ice.

Here, there was nowhere to escape.



* * *



? ? ?

THEY HAD CALCULATED, from reports and accounts they had heard from the few travelers who’d taken the Truckee route before, that they would cross the desert in a day.

But a second day came and went. Then a third. The Murphys’ cattle, starved and mad with thirst, wandered off in the middle of the night. The party did not have the strength to go after them. They moved in silence, like a long parade of the dead. No one had the spit even to argue.

On the fourth day, the wind picked up, creating small dancing funnels of dirt and salt crystals. The children, roused for the first time in days, clapped. But the wind kept blowing and the little funnels swelled and grew and became whipping, snakelike things, pegging them with stones that split their canopies, blinding them and roughing their skin, and they began to cry.

Most of the wagons had just enough water for the humans. The cattle panicked. They bellowed as they went insane, and the sound was like nothing Reed had ever heard.

It was on the fifth day that Noah James, one of Reed’s teamsters, came to tell him his own oxen were dying. They doubled back, heading into the blowing wind. Half a mile later, they came on the Reed family wagons. Two of the three teams were floundering, thrashing in the sand. At least one of them was already dead. The rest danced spookily in the confines of the harness.

“Do we have water?” Reed asked, though he already knew the answer.

James shook his head. “Not enough to make a difference.”

“Unhitch that animal, then. And that one as well.” Reed pointed with his whip at another dying animal, and, when he saw that his whip was trembling, quickly dropped it. “We’ll just have to pull with the animals we’ve got left.”

“With respect, Mr. Reed, you’ll wear the others out faster if you do that,” James said. “They won’t make it another day.”

“What do you propose we do, then?” Reed’s mouth was full of dirt. His eyes were full of dirt. He knew James was right, but he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear the idea of leaving their wagon. If he did, he would no longer be able to pretend.

It wasn’t about California anymore. It wasn’t about where they were going at all. It was simply about survival.

George Donner’s wagon pulled up. Donner had been a shadow of himself ever since Hastings’s betrayal, and Reed had been glad of it—the party had become more efficient without his blustering tendency to make light of Reed’s concerns.

Donner looked at Reed and then away. “You can store some of your things with me,” he said. “You don’t have to thank me,” he added, and Reed felt his chest hollow with sudden gratitude; he would not have been able to bear to say thank you, and he felt that Donner knew it. Anyway, both men understood that Donner owed Reed for taking over after the Hastings incident.