Алма Катсу - The Hunger

He fell into step beside her. “Like you said, it’s a common tale. Barely merits repeating.”

“I told you my story. It only seems fair.”

He wasn’t sure he could manage as well as she had. “I’ve been in love once.”

“Were you engaged to be married?”

Even after all this time, thinking of Lydia still brought an ache to his chest, like the first deep breath of cold air. “Her father didn’t like me. Nor could he bear to lose her, as it so happened.”

She stared at him with those wide, gray eyes. Like the sky heavy with clouds, or the flint-gray of a Boston ocean. “Did he want her to end up an old maid?”

“I don’t know what he wanted for her,” Stanton said shortly, realizing too late that they were on dangerous ground, edging too close to the truth. “He never got the chance to find out, in any case. She died at nineteen, far too young.”

Mary drew in a breath. “I’m sorry.”

His conscience would let him go no further. He’d made a promise when he was young that he would never tell anyone Lydia’s secret. As pointless as the promise seemed from a distance of fifteen years—to a dead girl, no less—he couldn’t bring himself to break it. Besides, there were things he had done that he regretted, a long and twisted chain of deceit dragging behind him all these years, impossible to explain to anyone else without seeming like a monster. His heart seemed to be beating five times its normal rate. “It was terrible,” he said. “I’m afraid I still can’t talk about it.”

Mary looked troubled. “I didn’t mean to cause you pain,” she said. Her hand skimmed his arm, like the touch of a passing bird.

“It’s all right,” he said, but it wasn’t. His throat was closing, the memory choking him.

Mary was looking at him very closely. “What’s this?” she asked at the same time her hand passed from his arm to his neck. Her fingers landed briefly on his neck, on the scratches he knew were there: Tamsen’s newest marks. “You’ve been wounded. It looks as though you’ve been attacked—”

This time her touch wasn’t pleasant. It burned. Without thinking, he pushed her hand away.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Please don’t.”

She took a quick step backward, as if a wall had come up suddenly between them. Before he could speak, before he could say a word, her name rang out on the air, clear and clean as a bell.

She spun toward the sound and, with one last look over her shoulder at Stanton, darted back toward camp. She moved with surprising quickness, flashing between the trees like a shaft of sunlight, and then gone.

Four barrels of flour.

James Reed pried the lid off the barrel with dusty handprints and peered inside. Half full. A knock on the side of the next three barrels confirmed that they hadn’t been touched yet. Five hundred pounds of flour, then, give or take. An anxious knot formed in his gut. They’d started out two months ago with nearly eight hundred pounds.

He made a mark on the scrap of paper in his hand.

He looked into the next barrel. Sugar, nearly half empty. Eliza Williams, the hired girl, was making too many pies and cakes for the children.

When he finished taking inventory, he climbed over the backboard and dropped to the ground. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the dust off his palms, then after a second’s hesitation scrubbed both hands hard. Gave the handkerchief a sniff before putting it away.

Only then did he squint at the full list of figures, forcing his hands to be still and firm. He’d been checking on his family’s stores every few days since they’d set out from Springfield. They were going through their supplies at an alarming rate. But no good ever came of worrying, unless there was an action to be taken.

So. First thing, he’d have a talk with Eliza. No second helpings for anyone, not even the children and certainly not the teamsters, who didn’t think twice about wasting food. He skimmed the numbers a second time. Had he miscalculated how much they’d need for a family of seven? It was the six servants who threw off his math: the men were gluttons, eating for the pleasure of it without a care to how much it cost their employer.

Still, he knew they were better off—far better off—than many of the families on the trail. Publicly, everyone acted as though there was no problem, but he suspected that secretly some people were beginning to panic. Even those who had taken on more provisions at Fort Laramie had counted on there being more game along the trail. After Fort Laramie, everything seemed to have disappeared, from rabbits to prairie dogs. They were at the end of the traveling season and perhaps earlier pioneers had picked the surrounding area clean.

More likely they figured they could depend on the kindness of their trailmates if they ran out of supplies. Well, they’d be disappointed if they came to James Frazer Reed for a handout. Christian charity could only go so far.

He’d tried to talk Donner into putting him in charge of provisions for the entire party last night. But of course no one listened. No one understood how much danger they’d be in if food ran out higher up in the mountain passes. The signs were all there, if anyone would bother to see.

“Give you authority over my supplies?” William Eddy had only laughed, spitting tobacco a few inches from Reed’s boot. “I don’t think so. If we let you tell us what we can eat and how much and when, we’ll all end up skinny as skeletons. Skinny as you .”

Reed had ignored Eddy but he’d been tempted to pull out his piece of paper and shake it in Donner’s face. “We’re down twenty-five beef cattle since Fort Laramie and that was less than three weeks ago. If we didn’t eat all of them, somebody is stealing them. At this rate we won’t have two dozen head among us by the time we get to California.”

Foolishness and pleasure, that was what the members of the wagon train wanted. Look at the Donners’ big barge of a wagon, stuffed with feather mattresses and all manner of unnecessary comforts. The hired men gambled their wages away every night around the campfires, losing their pay before it was even earned. People danced around the roasting carcasses while Luke Halloran played the fiddle. And a picnic , what was the reason for that? An excuse for George Donner to stand on a tree stump and make a speech to get elected new party captain. Two cattle slaughtered just for that, to reassure them there was nothing to worry about: Look at how much there is to eat, plenty for everyone.

It was meant for a diversion, too, Reed suspected: It was whispered up and down the wagon train that Tamsen Donner had been seen wandering at night, caught in places she shouldn’t have been. She was a witch, some of the other women said, could vanish and then reappear in a different place, could fly on currents of air like the fluff of old dandelions, could charm a man just by breathing on him. Reed didn’t believe in that nonsense, but one thing was clear: She was stepping out on her husband, and making George look foolish just when he needed the wagon train behind him.

Reed straightened up, sore from crouching in the wagon among the barrels and big burlap sacks filled with bran and dried beans, hogsheads of vinegar and molasses. As he stretched, Donner trotted by on his horse, waving his hat in the air.

“Chain up!” he shouted. His big face was pink from exertion. “Time to move out!”

How he hated the sound of Donner’s voice.

But just as Reed turned to say something, he saw two of the Breen boys crawling on hands and knees from under one of the wagons. They were pale and unsteady on their feet, moaning as though they’d been beaten.