The Hunger

  Only now did he close his eyes and imagine Mary’s face. He coaxed it up from the darkness of his mind and held it, let it burn there like a star, his final memory.

  The gun was small, and fit nicely between his teeth.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The remaining seven members of Forlorn Hope were halfway up the next ridge when they heard the shot ring over the valley.

  By then, Mary had stopped screaming. She stumbled only once. Then she kept walking, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of blinding snow.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  God had abandoned them, Tamsen knew. She only wondered how long they’d been left to the mercy of a godless world—had it been so since the very beginning? Had it happened the night she took Jeffrey Williams, the family doctor, as her first lover, or long before then? Had the devil followed her all this way? Or maybe the devil was in her, and had been since the day she was born.

  Maybe it was the devil who was keeping her alive.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NIGHT HE WAS BITTEN, Solomon Hook, Betsy’s son by her first husband, had been taking a tin cup of hot water to the watch-standers. Until that moment, it had been a peaceful night at Alder Creek. Tamsen and the rest of the family heard his cry from inside the tent and went running out into the cold and wet to find him on the ground, a shadowy figure darting away toward the woods.

  Tamsen screamed and when Walt Herron pulled a rifle and shot in the creature’s direction, she didn’t feel any kind of vindication, only a new depth of terror. There could be no denying that something deadly and inhuman was out there, inching in on them.

  Jacob rushed his stepson into the tent and Tamsen looked to the boy’s wounds while Betsy stood to the side, crying into her hands. A foul smell clung to the boy from the creature like a miasma, a bad omen. The boy didn’t look too bad but there was a tear on the side of his neck that worried Tamsen, and even as she cleaned the wound, she sensed something was wrong.

  Solomon revived the next morning and by afternoon, it was as though nothing had happened. He went with Leanne to gather firewood, scooped snow in a bucket to melt for water. He had a good appetite. He seemed indefatigable.

  By night, his cheeks were red and hot to the touch. He was damp with sweat.

  The next morning, he rushed about, knocking his brothers and sisters over in the cramped tent. When Betsy chided him, he rushed out into the cold without his coat or mittens and wouldn’t heed their demands to come back inside. He wouldn’t let Tamsen check his wound or put on a fresh dressing.

  His eyes were bright and dancing, his mouth crooked in a strange, faraway smile. The memory of Halloran pulsed in her mind. It frightened her but she didn’t know how she would explain it to Jacob or the boy’s mother. She decided to say nothing and keep an eye on him. He was, after all, a teenaged boy. Children recovered quickly.

  But every hour he got worse. More agitated, more aggressive, more manic. Tamsen saw Halloran in everything Solomon did and said, the hostility and impatience. She was tense in his presence, waiting for him to snap. The moment came when he lunged toward little Georgia, one of Tamsen’s daughters. Quick as a hawk, she darted between them and shoved Solomon away. Jacob’s eyebrows shot up while Betsy rushed to her son’s side.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “You could’ve hurt him. He’s injured, or have you forgotten?” But Tamsen had seen the look of horror flash on Solomon’s face. He knew what he had almost done. It was his last cogent human thought. He dashed out of the tent before anyone could stop him and disappeared into the night.

  It took two men to keep Betsy from running into the darkness after him.

  That was the beginning of the end for Betsy. She was mad at everyone at first for keeping her from trying to save her son. “He was beyond saving,” Tamsen tried to tell her, but Betsy refused to believe her.

  “We got to find him. He can’t survive out there on his own,” Betsy pleaded with her husband. She was clearheaded enough to know she couldn’t go after him alone, at least. “Whatever’s out there, they’ll kill him. They’ll rip him to pieces.”

  He was seen two nights later. One of the sentries—the luckless Walter Herron again—was attacked when he strayed too far from the bonfires. The creatures scattered into the darkness when John Denton, the second watchman, arrived but not before Denton saw wild-eyed Solomon Hook with them, a clumsy wolf pup at his first hunt. There could be no mistaking it, Denton swore on his life.

  Betsy wailed and threw herself at Denton, calling him a liar, but Denton stood firm. “Your boy’s . . . changed.”

  Tamsen swallowed. “He’s become one of them.”

  No one argued with her.

  They understood how it worked now.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Christmas: Dawn, low on the horizon, was just visible on either side of the smoke blackening the sky from the fire.

  Mary wouldn’t have known which day it was if her sister Sarah hadn’t told her. Mary had lost the knotted thread three days ago; she had left Stanton behind, she had heard a gunshot, and she had simply let the thread fall, and let her thoughts fall with it, her memories and hopes.

  She was an animal now. She rose when they told her, followed the person in front of her like a mule on a pack train, sat when they were done for the day. When she was thirsty, she would melt snow in her mouth. The ache of hunger had transformed into a different pain: She couldn’t eat, she would never be hungry again. There was something bestial in her stomach, a terrible pain ripping her apart. She couldn’t feed it.

  Sarah wouldn’t stop talking about the Christmases on the farm in Springfield. “Do you remember the year Mama made matching dresses for us out of that red calico? Didn’t we think we were something special in those dresses? I wore mine until it fell apart and she used the skirt panels in a quilt.”

  Stop, Mary wanted to say. But she didn’t want to speak, either. She couldn’t stand to hear her own voice, unchanged, carried on the stillness of a world that no longer held Charles Stanton.

  Since she’d abandoned Stanton, her sister had taken care of her as though she were an invalid: Sit here, not too close to the fire, try to sleep. Keep hold of the end of my blanket and follow me. Sleep was elusive. It was the only thing she looked forward to—oblivion, a silence so complete she didn’t have to think about what had happened.

  Sometimes during the day she would startle into sudden awareness—When had it started snowing? When had they passed into the peaks?—and she’d realize she’d been dozing as she’d walked.

  On and on. They had inched their way over the summit, where winds were so strong the snow blew sideways, and were now working their way down. It was difficult to know how many days had gone by because they were all the same, just mile after mile of snow. Luis had fainted several times in the past three or four days. Most mornings, her father was too weak to make it to his feet and had to be lifted or carried and set upright, staggering on like a corpse compelled by witchcraft to walk.

  Now, on Christmas, he could go no farther. He fell to his knees several hours before nightfall, and could not be brought again to his feet.

  Through the haze of the campfire smoke, Mary saw her sister and brother-in-law bent over her father. Their voices, too low to hear distinctly, tickled the edges of her consciousness. Luis and Salvador, the Miwoks, huddled miserably together under the same blanket, like skeletal birds interlinked by a single ruche of feathers. They seemed to be living off of leather scraps they trimmed from their clothing, chewing and chewing to soften it in their mouths and make it last.

  Sarah broke away from her husband and came to sit beside Mary. For a long time she was silent.

  “Papa’s dead,” she said at last.

  Mary tried to reach down, to pull up some thread of sadness or regret. It was as if the mountain cold had reached into her center and
frozen her through the core. “We have to bury him,” she said.

  Sarah shook her head. “We must keep moving.”

  But it was as if something had snapped in Mary. She held her ground. “I’m done,” she said. “I want to go back to the rest. There are too few of us now. They’ll pick us off, all of us. We have no chance.”

  Sarah gripped her sister’s shoulders between icy fingers. “There’s no way back now, Mary. We’ve come too far.”

  “We put the others at risk,” she said, realizing now that it was true. “We wanted to march ahead to seek help, but we’ve cut the party down in size. The shadows will come for them as they’ve come for us. Don’t you see? We separated ourselves into smaller groups, made ourselves easier targets. We doomed ourselves, and by doing so, we’ve doomed the others, too.”

  “Mary,” her sister was saying, and she was shaking her, hard.

  Or was it the cold causing her to shake?

  She could easily picture lying down, letting the snow swallow her up. Surrendering to the cold. Numbness spreading to her fingers and toes, ears and nose, throat, and finally her chest.

  But she hadn’t imagined it. She was lying down.

  Sarah had gone somewhere. Maybe she had never been there—maybe none of them had.

  Snow fell on Mary’s eyelashes, stiffening them, tiny icicles fracturing the firelight. Or was it sunlight? Somehow morning had come. There was no hunger left in her—no feeling at all.

  The snow was dazzling, endless.

  Sarah appeared before her, lifted her, forced her to her feet, and took her hand.

  They trudged on, into the blinding light.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Springfield, Illinois

  September 1840

  It was sudden and overpowering: the smell of burning hair. Acrid, unearthly.

  Tamsen screamed . . . and dropped her curler on the floor.

  Quickly, she doused it in water and breathed a sigh of relief as steam rose and the iron tong cooled.

  She was nervous, distracted. Luckily, she hadn’t lost much hair, only singed a few strands.

  She had risen early to get ready for the ceremony, but in truth, she hadn’t been sleeping anyway. It was as though she could feel the weight of the rest of the house sleeping around her. She’d grown up here, and now it was her brother’s home. Every night, he lay in the big four-poster bed just through the far wall. If she listened hard enough, she imagined she could hear him breathing, hear him thinking. Was he having the same thoughts that she was?

  For as long as she’d been back, sleeping in this old room, she’d been haunted by memories that seemed to have been burned into her skin since she first left.

  Beauty, at least, was her solace. She tried again with the tongs. Back in North Carolina, she could always find someone to help fuss with pomade and tongs, someone who enjoyed fawning over her and receiving her attentions, but here in Illinois she had no women friends, no female admirers who looked up to her, as if hoping her beauty and intelligence would somehow rub off on them. Here, in her brother’s home, she was on her own.

  Tamsen chose her second-best dress to be married in, a blue wool challis with a pleated bodice and full sleeves. Her best was a sage-colored broadcloth, but green was unlucky for weddings. Ever since she had read of the English queen’s wedding in Godey’s Lady’s Book a few years back, she had dreamed of a white dress if she were to remarry. It wasn’t the expense that had stopped her—George Donner had offered to send to Chicago for any dress she wanted. But marrying George Donner meant she would be living on a farm and would not have many occasions for a white dress. It would be a highly impractical purchase.

  Still, that wasn’t the reason, either. She knew that one extraordinary thing was bound to make the ordinariness of her life all the more painful.

  Besides, she didn’t feel clean enough on the inside for white.

  Through the window, the wheat fields of her brother’s farm were bowing and rising like the tide of a golden ocean. The sky was a perfectly clear cerulean. Her heart swelled. It was so beautiful, the gold gently reaching up to kiss the blue. It made her want to cry. When she next came to Jory’s farm, it would be as a visitor, a stranger. Another man’s wife—again.

  When Tully died, her brother had begged her to come to Illinois, pretending it was to help him, though really she knew it was his way of helping her. He didn’t want her to be alone.

  But she was. Marrying George wouldn’t change that. She would always be alone, in her heart. Her first marriage had proven that.

  Being back here, with the brother whom she’d tried to forget, proved it, too. How she ached with everything she could never say.

  Jory was suddenly in the doorway, as if conjured by the heat of her thoughts. His broad shoulders looked a bit squeezed-tight in his best suit of brown wool, the one he saved for Sundays. “You’re a vision, Tamsen.” She noticed a slight strain in his voice, and her breath leapt in her chest.

  Of course, it was natural for him to be emotional on a day like today, wasn’t it?

  “The wagon is ready whenever you are.” He cleared his throat. She watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall. She thought how funny that word was—Adam’s apple. Hadn’t it been Eve’s?

  To avoid his eyes, piercing and bluer even than her own, she stared instead at the stubble along his jaw and nodded.

  She stood up and followed him to the door, then took Jory’s hand as he helped her into the wagon, and in the warmth of his palm she felt an impenetrable sadness. She didn’t want to let go, but forced herself to as she slid next to him on the bench. He placed a cloak across her lap to protect her from the morning chill.

  The wedding would be held in the Donner farmhouse since it was nicer and bigger than her brother’s. Jory’s three children—two girls and a boy, none older than eight—sat in the wagon bed behind them, whispering among themselves as if they sensed their aunt’s tension but did not understand what it meant. Jory had asked Tamsen to come west for the children’s sake after their mother had died. I can’t raise daughters on my own, he had written. They need a woman to bring them up right. What Jory had not said outright, but she could tell from his letters, was that he wanted badly to see her, too. He had been devastated by his dear Melinda’s death.

  They’d tried everything within their power to save his wife. When the only doctor in the area said nothing more could be done, Jory had given most of their savings to a traveling merchant, a smiling German who claimed his tonics would cure her.

  He was nothing but a snake oil peddler, Jory had written bitterly afterward. We did just as he told us but it was no good.

  Tamsen was ashamed to admit the way she felt when she first got the news of Melinda’s death, so near to the timing of her own husband’s. Ashamed to admit that it had felt, for a moment, like fate. Ashamed to accept the way it broke her open all over again, the idea of seeing her brother after all these years apart and separately married.

  Ashamed that her first thought was that the snake oil peddler, the scam artist from Germany who’d led, however indirectly, to Jory’s wife’s death, must have been sent by the devil himself to torture Tamsen, to reawaken long-buried thoughts.

  Jory had not been wrong to make the request, of course. Tamsen had been at ends after her first husband, Tully Dozier, had died. It was hard to be a young widow in a small town—men assumed things about women who had known a man’s attentions and suddenly had to do without. There had been incidents. All of them heady and exciting at first, but then ultimately empty.

  Still, when Jory’s invitation came, Tamsen was torn. She planned to tell him no, but the bolder part of her heart had agreed—for his children’s sake, she told herself.

  Now, she watched as Jory’s strong hands flicked the reins over the horse’s back, nudging her into a trot. He stole a sideways glance at his sister. “You’re prettier
than a picture today, Tamsen. I hope George Donner knows what a lucky man he is.”

  “I’m sure he does.” She forced a smile.

  Jory fidgeted with the reins. “Are you sure this is what you want, though? It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  “Now, where is this coming from?” She tried not to sound upset.

  “You don’t know this man, not well. It’s only been three months.”

  No, she certainly didn’t know George Donner well—but she’d never know any man as well as she knew Jory. He ought to realize that.

  “I know enough.” Tamsen knew that her future husband had means: two large farms that belonged to him and his brother Jacob. Fruit orchards—apples, peaches, pears—and cattle. A nice house on eighty acres.

  “He’s so much older than you. Do you think he can make you happy?”

  She didn’t answer. The question felt far too weighted. She wondered if Jory could possibly sense that. But if he didn’t—if he didn’t understand why it hurt when he protested her marriage—then he couldn’t possibly feel the way she did.

  And Donner—he would give her security. A roof over her head, a place in a community, money in the bank. With George Donner, her life was set, her worries would be gone. He was handsome, too, in his own way—though she wasn’t moved by his looks, hadn’t felt excitement rise in her when he’d been bold enough to kiss her.

  Nothing like the tingling sensation she felt now, in anticipation of turning this new leaf—and leaving everything else behind.

  “I know what’s best for me,” she said quietly. “George Donner is best for me. It’s not like I can just live with you forever,” she added.

  Jory cleared his throat. Something flashed across his eyes, and she wondered what it was. “All I’m saying is you shouldn’t be in such a rush. I’m sure you could do better. And I know the children will miss you.” He paused. “We all will.”