The Hunger(99)

“I thought you were like me for a while,” he said. “I heard about you back in Springfield. How you lured Doc Williams into your bed, them other fellas, too. I said, there’s a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it.”

“I’m nothing like you,” she said. Her mouth was full of the taste of iron.

“You’re more like me than you think. We take what we want, you and I. We do what we have to do.” He smiled at her, but he was wrong. No one knew that the thing she had wanted for so long that the wanting had cleaved her in two had made her unable to love, almost unable to feel.

No one knew who had first held her heart, and never let it go.

Not even Jory.

For how could she tell her own brother that it had always been him?

“No,” she said now. “I do not take what I want. I am not like you at all. Everything—everything I have ever done has been for others. Has been so my children can be safe. And I’ll prove it to you.”

“What are you saying?” Keseberg asked.

“I’m going to help you,” she said.



* * *



? ? ?

SHE REMAINED IN HIS CABIN. If she left, if she saw her daughters one last time, she knew she might lose her resolve. That it might break her. So she made him promise never to tell them that he had seen her. Never to speak of what happened next.

That night, after Keseberg had got the fires going, Tamsen mixed together the last of her sleeping herbs—lavender, chamomile, mint, and a few final drops of laudanum. She stirred them into melted ice from the lake’s surface and drank them down, waiting for the sleep to come.

As she began to drift off, Keseberg approached her. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep, like I promised,” he said, and she knew he would keep his word.

“You’ll make sure,” she repeated again anyway. “You’ll make sure it’ll go to them first. You’ll make sure it’ll go to the girls,” she said.

He nodded.

He settled across from her on the floor, waiting, cradling the ax in his arms.

Her eyes fluttered closed and open, closed and open. The cabin was gone. She saw instead those wheat fields outside her brother’s window. The sweep of late summer sky bending low and wide and blue over the swaying grain—waves and waves of it. A whole sea made of gold. She heard children laughing. She sensed the flicker of a feeling she hadn’t known since her own childhood. And at last, she slept.





EPILOGUE




March 1847


James Reed was halfway across the ridgeline when the big bay gelding buckled suddenly underneath him, floundering in the deep snow. For a moment, Reed was afraid they would both go down.

The footing had been treacherous every inch of the way from John Sutter’s fort. If it wasn’t heavy wet snow, it was slippery mud higher than the horses’ fetlocks. A wet, miserable time of year. But there was no choice. Putting off the rescue operation until it got warmer was out of the question. He was afraid he’d already waited too long.

Reed urged his reluctant horse on. A string of men on horseback and supply mules snaked behind him.

Seven days out from Sutter’s, the snow was now chest-deep on the horses. It was clear they could go no farther on horseback; they’d be better off traveling on foot. This meant they could take far fewer of the precious supplies he’d worked so hard to gather, which troubled Reed but couldn’t be helped. The rest they strung up in the trees to use for resupply on their return. The bundles, swaying high in the branches, looked like misshapen insects’ nests. In that moment, he made himself a promise: When they came back this way, his family would be with him. Margaret, Virginia, Patty, little James, Thomas.

It was the promise of this reunion that had kept him going through his hard months of exile. He wouldn’t have lasted a week if his stepdaughter Virginia hadn’t snuck out of camp to provide him a horse and supplies for his journey. Clever girl. Only thirteen years old and she knew what to do. A cloth bundle contained food from their diminishing store: dried beef, currants, hard-boiled eggs, and the last of the family’s beer in a canteen. He had fought back tears as he thanked her.

“You was always a good daddy to us,” she said to him as she handed over the reins.

When Reed had arrived at Sutter’s Fort in late October, a cold wind was already blowing from the north. Sutter’s Fort was sprawling and strong, with thick adobe walls and cannon—no hole-in-the-wall like Jim Bridger’s place. Sutter had a couple dozen Paiute, Miwoks, and Mexicans working for him, and a steady stream of nearby settlers came in every day for supplies, the post, and the latest news.

Reed had been delighted to find Will McCutcheon at the fort, nearly recovered and working for Sutter to earn his keep. Between the two of them, they talked Sutter into lending them two mules and a few supplies, though Sutter warned them they wouldn’t make it over the mountain.

He was right. The winter had already arrived at the higher elevations. They made it nearly to the pass before they had to admit defeat and turn back.

“The pass will be snowed over until February,” Sutter had told him, and so, when the California Battalion came through the fort signing up men to fight for independence from Mexico, Reed joined them. He had been in the militia during the Black Hawk Wars. He knew how to soldier.