The Hunger(15)

Your loving Edwin





JULY 1846





CHAPTER SIX





Good-bye, good-bye.

The words still rang in Stanton’s ears even though the rest of the wagon party, those bound for Oregon, had rolled away hours earlier, leaving the smaller group on the banks of the Little Sandy River. The wagons, over a hundred total, had raised a choking cloud of dust as they departed. Had Stanton imagined how eager they were to leave? Eager to put bad luck and the memory of the butchered Nystrom boy behind them? Eager to separate themselves from the fractious Donner party, as the California-bound group had come to be known? They’d said good-bye to Edwin Bryant and the small party of men who had elected to go with him a few days earlier, back at Fort Laramie, and already, Stanton missed his only friend.

Clouds floated in the sky, fluffy as cotton still on the stalk and so low that you would swear you could reach up and touch them. The plain stretched to the horizon, great patches of green and gold, and Little Sandy snaking through it. A gentle river, and, true to its name, not wide at all. It was hard to imagine anything bad happening here.

The rest of the wagon train was getting ready to have a feast, a kind of communal picnic. It had been Donner’s suggestion—of course—to celebrate the last leg of their trip. He’d plumped their egos good, told them their bravery in electing to take the Hastings Cutoff would be rewarded. They were intrepid pioneers, about to blaze a new trail through the wilderness; their names would go down in history. Stanton suspected the picnic was nothing more than a distraction to keep the others from questioning the decision. There was a rumor circulating up and down the line of aggressive wolves troubling the Indian populations in the territory ahead. The source was a prospector of questionable reliability, but given that there were still no answers in the Nystrom boy’s death, the story had everyone on edge.

“Shouldn’t we head straight out, like the main party?” Stanton had asked Donner when he’d heard about the plans for a picnic.

“It’s the Sabbath, a day of rest,” Donner had said, in a patronizing tone. “God will take care of us.”

“We can reach Fort Bridger inside a week if we push,” Stanton said. “We can’t count that we won’t be delayed down the road.”

“The teamsters say we need to rest the oxen,” William Eddy said, giving him a one-eyed squint. Stanton knew it for a lie. They’d barely covered six miles yesterday.

“You know what your trouble is, Stanton? You’re too cautious.” Lewis Keseberg was smirking, too, fingering his belt. One hand a couple of inches away from his revolver.

Eddy had laughed. “Cautious like an old schoolmarm.” He wouldn’t normally laugh at him, Stanton knew, but with Bryant gone, and Donner self-appointed captain, the power was shifting. Eddy and Keseberg, part of a pack of men Donner had made a point of befriending, were now acting like Donner’s unofficial deputies. And Stanton wasn’t one for taking on men who were looking for a fight, especially when the odds were so uneven.

Now, Luke Halloran’s fiddle started up in the distance. To Stanton it sounded plaintive, like a child’s voice calling out in need. It all seemed wrong: separating from the larger part of the wagon train, heading down this unknown trail, stopping for a picnic as if this were a church event when they should be moving as quickly as possible.

And of course, even though it was long-since buried by now, he still couldn’t shake the nauseating image of the dead boy’s mangled body, flesh picked down to bone, from his mind. It made the idea of a picnic feast all the more grotesque.

But still he forced himself across the encampment. He dreaded seeing Tamsen and wanted to see her, too; from a distance she seemed even more beautiful to him now, but also frightening, like a newly sharpened knife. In the darkness she softened beneath his fingers; she came to him like a kind of smoke that clung to your hair, your clothes, the inside of your lungs. Two nights ago he’d asked her if she was a witch, to have bewitched him so, but she only laughed.

Backboards set on trunks covered with gingham cloth made impromptu tables. Families dipped into their larders to make pies and carved up extra ham. Later, there would be dancing, storytelling. He accepted a bowl of Lavinah Murphy’s chicken stew—he didn’t think he could stomach any ham, he was so sick of it—and used bits of biscuit to sop up the gravy.

“You eat like you haven’t had a meal in a week,” Lavinah Murphy teased him. The Mormon widow was leading her brood—which included married daughters and sons-in-law all the way down to her own children as young as eight—west in search of a new homestead among those of her faith. “But perhaps you haven’t, with no woman to cook for you. Aren’t you tired of being a bachelor, Mr. Stanton?”

“I haven’t had much of a chance to find the right woman,” he said, forcing himself to swallow his impatience. There was no other way to win friends—and he had no hope of standing up to Donner if he could get no one on his side.

His answer only made the women laugh. “I find that hard to believe, Mr. Stanton.” It was Peggy Breen, a hand shielding her eyes against the sun. Doris Wolfinger stood behind her, like a pretty duckling shadowing its mother. Peggy was a big woman, sturdy as a draft horse, who had given birth to a half-dozen sons. Doris, on the other hand, was barely out of her teenage years, spoke almost no English, and smiled uncomprehendingly whenever someone spoke to her. He had to wonder what she was really thinking.