Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (32 page)

Coming out of the store, arms loaded with sacks of flour, Ginny whispered in her ear that he might be a Spaniard from New Mexico territory, though since neither of them had ever set eyes on a Spaniard, they couldn't be certain. Papa shook hands with the man, satisfied with the arrangement. At the last minute, the stranger turned his gaze on her, and she felt wind stream like ice water over her skin.

Once the wagon party left Missouri and its scraggly trees, they found enormous fields covered in flowering grasses that rippled like the surface of a lake. It was beautiful. Why couldn't they just stay here? Papa promised California would be even better. They journeyed on, the patient oxen pulling the wagons, one day like another, Antonio walking beside them with the hired help. There were other children in the party, but only one her age and he was too sickly to play with her. Ginny was too old, and baby brother Tommy too young; Patty had to amuse herself.

On a cool, sweet-scented morning at the end of May, she wandered off after breakfast to pick wildflowers. The women put out the cook fires and cleared away the pots and stacked everything back in the wagons, a chore Mama excused her from because she was still small. Before she'd had a chance to gather more than just a handful of flowers, she heard Papa calling her back to the wagon.

Wondering, she stepped up and lifted the canvas curtain. Inside, she found Ginny sitting on the floor, crying. On the wide bed she and Ginny shared with their grandmother, the old woman lay still. Mama knelt beside her, saying the words of old prayers Gran said every night with the children. Hands shaking, not knowing what else to do, Patty laid her small bunch of flowers on Gran's chest.

They buried Gran on top of a small wooded hill with her prayer book in her hands. Mama and Ginny cried, but she had an empty, hurting place inside now, and no tears came. She watched a flock of birds wheeling in the sky overhead and wondered about the journey ahead. It didn't seem right to go on without Gran.

The man called Antonio had helped dig the grave; now he stood apart from the mourners. She had to pass him on the way back to the wagons. He touched the tip of his hat to her when she looked at him. Right then, she felt the feather flutter in her chest that Gran called a goose walking over her grave.

"Gran was the first of so many deaths," Pat said.

The light from the gas lamp on the wall was not good for knitting, even with hands that didn't shake. She laid the needles aside on the oak dresser between a wooden doll and a tarnished spoon that gathered dust, forgotten treasures.

"People are born, they grow, they die," Antonio replied. "Like wildflowers."

She scowled at him.

He raised his hands, palms open.

Long after she'd reached safety, grown up and raised her own family, she couldn't forget the deaths. Even now, they haunted her nightmares on nights when the wind howled in from the ocean.

"I don't have the power to stop the inevitable," he said.

"Then what?"

"You knew once."

He gazed at her, as if it mattered to him that she would understand. And she did understand, at least partly.
"Sometimes God limits His own power,"
her Gran used to say when they were children,
"because He loves us."
But this man wasn't God. Needing something to do with her restless hands, she rose and went to the window. A workman, jacket collar turned up against the wind and swinging an empty lunch-pail, went by on the dark street below, whistling a Christmas carol. She tugged the draperies over the glass, shutting out the night.

"I was too young to understand," she said. "I thought you were magic."

The desert they'd entered seemed to go on forever, and the little water they found was warm and sour. The burning heat and the increasing hardship of the journey stripped away all courtesy, and quarrels broke out between the men over trifles. Game became harder to find, so there was little fresh meat. Last night, in the bed they'd once shared with Gran, Ginny—who always seemed to know the grownups' secrets—confided she'd overheard someone say they would never reach California. Patty knew they were wrong. Papa would get them there!

Antonio took no part in any arguments that broke out, polite to all he spoke with but not taking sides. He was always nearby, hat tilted to shade his face, listening, as if he were waiting for something to happen. He was there again this morning, walking beside the wagon where she rode on the tailboard.

Catching his eye on her, she spoke defiantly. "We
will
reach California!"

"Do you wager with me?" He looked surprised that she'd spoken to him.

Remembering Gran's lessons about Christian behavior, she said, "My family aren't gamblers, Mister!"

"A fair statement," he said. "Neither am I."

The long trek continued. They reached a place at the edge of the mountains where the steepness of the land forced the need for two teams of oxen to pull one wagon while the other waited its turn. To lessen the load on his wagon, Papa instructed his family to strip out everything not essential to their immediate journey.

"We're going to cache it, Patty," Papa explained. "Bury it in the sands. We'll come back for it once we're settled in our new home."

She didn't like the sound of that, but all the families were doing the same thing.

Ginny grumbled under her breath as she helped Mama sort: cooking pots to go on the trek, good china cups and plates they'd packed so carefully back in Illinois to be buried. Patty carried a set of six silver teaspoons that had belonged to Gran. Mama sighed over all these things as if she were giving them up forever, but Papa urged them to hurry. Little Tommy wailed when Mama took his baby toys to put in the crate with Ginny's books and Patty's dolls and the family's heavy bible.

It was hot, and sweat trickling down her neck made her itch until she was miserable and rebellious. Why did she have to do this? When Mama turned her back for a moment, she snatched her favorite wooden doll out of the half-filled crate and hid it in her apron. It was only four inches tall—What difference could one small doll make? Surely the oxen wouldn't feel its extra weight. Tommy cried louder; he was already out of sorts because he was cutting two big back teeth. To quiet him, she stole one of the little spoons and put it in his fist. Then she felt guilty at disobeying Papa, and for a moment thought of putting the stolen things back. Too late. Mama closed the lid, and two men came over to carry the family's treasure to its burial place.

One of them was Antonio. He took the last crate they'd packed—such a tiny amount lighter than it should be; nobody would know what she'd done.

The moment he lifted the crate, Antonio turned to her, raising an eyebrow.

But how could he know? Last summer, at the county fair before they'd left Illinois, there'd been a magic man in a tall black hat and a swirling cloak twinkling with stars who claimed to read minds. She'd been fascinated and scared at the same time. She didn't like to think Antonio could read her mind.

"What's it to you, Mister?" she demanded, hands on her hips defiantly.

"A game," he said. "Maybe you and I will play later."

"And that was all it was?" Pat demanded. "A game? You could have changed what happened. You allowed them all to die—"

"All men die in the end. I can't change that. I thought you understood."

"Who are you really, Antonio? What's your real name?"

"You know that too."

Tiredness swept through her and she closed her eyes, shutting out the lamplit room and the sputtering fire and Antonio with them. At first, it was all she'd thought about. Each time the snowflakes scurried down the steep San Francisco streets, or Mama was a little late bringing supper to the table, her heart had pounded with fear. On those nights, bad dreams took her in a blaze of whiteness, and she felt as if her bones were burning in a fire. Each time the wind rattled the windowpanes, she was back in a threadbare cabin on the frozen lake high in the mountain pass. Even now, the memory had power to terrify her.

"How was I different?" she whispered. "Why did I survive?"

"You amused me," he said. "A child, challenging
me."

Patty didn't understand why the men sent Papa away. There'd been a quarrel, just before they began to climb up the mountain pass; a man died because of it. The other men blamed Papa and sent him away. It wasn't fair! Without him, things started to go terribly wrong. They hadn't gone very far before the snow came and kept on coming, piling up in deep drifts that made pulling the wagons hard work for the oxen. Finally, they were forced to stop near the summit and make camp by a frozen lake. Then the animals began to die, oxen and horses, and food supplies ran low. Papa would've known where to find food. Papa would've shot deer in the forest and caught lake fish through a hole in the ice, things nobody else in the quickly snowbound cabins understood. The family needed him. They all needed him.

Now they were caught in the hard winter high up in the range, the wagons couldn't go any further until spring thaw, and Mama said nobody could get through to help them, not even Papa. Everybody had taken to wearing all their clothing at once, layer over layer, but still they shivered, and there wasn't enough to eat. Without Papa to take care of them, Patty and Mama and Ginny and little Tommy had to share a cabin someone else built.

"Why did Papa have to leave us?" she asked every day. "When will he return?"

Mama had no answer.

One day, after they'd been stranded long enough that the supplies the oxen had dragged up here had run out—the oxen and the horses long since starved or slaughtered for food—two women trudged through the snow to the cabin Patty's family shared with Mr. B's family. They carried a little food from their own dwindling supplies, a pinch of flour, a few tough strips of ox hide. It didn't help to think about food, but it was so hard not to. Thin broth made from boiled hides might be all they'd get today. Patty forced herself not to watch the bubbling water.

A twinkle of light caught her eye where the cabin wall met the floor. A snowflake, driven through the cracks by the fierce wind, turned to ice as it touched the cold floor. Like a tiny diamond, she thought, no bigger than the one in Mama's wedding ring. For a moment, the snow diamond made her forget how hungry she was. She wondered how long it would last on her finger, a pretend wedding ring, like the one she dreamed of having one day when they reached California and she was grown up. She didn't have the energy to put it to the test.

While the tough hide cooked, the four women sat by the small fire that never managed to heat the whole cabin, their faces grown hollow, heads bent as they whispered together. Patty heard her mother gasp, and saw her hands fly to her mouth. She understood that some of the things they talked about were too dreadful for children's ears, perhaps even worse than what Ginny claimed to overhear.

Turning her back to the women, she took the wooden doll out of her pocket and smoothed creases out of the white apron it wore. She pretended the doll was getting ready for her wedding.

"Of what use is a wooden doll?" a voice said out of the shadows. "You can't eat it."

She hadn't noticed Antonio come into the cabin. Sometimes he came inside to share the warmth of the fire and nobody told him to go away. Hardship made everybody share what they had, even with a hired man. Back to the cabin's wall, his face in deep shadow, he squatted close to the floor.

"I wish you'd been sent away instead of Papa!" she said, lowering her voice so Mama wouldn't hear.

"As do many men," he agreed.

"Do
you
know why he had to go? Mama won't tell."

"It wasn't his time."

"I don't understand you. Why must you speak in riddles?"

"Such a young child to demand all my secrets!"

He teased her, she felt sure, like Papa did sometimes. But there was a warning in his tone that she decided not to test.

The two visitors went away. It was Christmas, Mama told them this morning, and they'd sung a hymn with her in honor of the Savior's birth. But there'd be no feast this year; they were lucky to have the boiled hides. The fire crackled and spat, and smoke filled the cabin. The other children had no patience to wait, setting up such a noise of crying and pleading that Mrs. B gave in and served them a spoonful of thin broth straight from the boiling pot.

When Mama judged the broth ready, Tommy opened his mouth like a tiny bird, and Mama dribbled a little liquid in. He'd lost all his baby fat, and his cheekbones stood out. Neither Mama nor Mrs. B took any food for themselves. Patty hadn't seen them eat for two days now. Ginny told her yesterday they couldn't go on like that without eating for very long.

She'd chewed a tiny strip of still-raw ox-hide—so tough it made her jaw ache—when she noticed Antonio was still there. There was a calm about him that drew her to squat down beside him. He was a very odd man! Outside, the wind howled like a live thing, rattling the walls and clamoring to come inside. She shivered in cold that the little fire couldn't drive away.

"If only Papa would return," she said. "He'll bring food and rescue us."

"And if he doesn't?" Antonio asked.

"I shan't give up, if that's what you think. My family aren't quitters, Mister!"

Mama glanced across the room at her, frowning, and she realized what a loud voice she'd used.

"Not ever," she finished in a whisper.

"'Ever' is a very long time. Even now, some are thinking the unthinkable."

The door of the cabin swung open in a burst of wind. Mr. B came inside. He leaned against the wall, snow sparkling in his beard, catching his breath; his eyes glittered in the firelight as he looked from the cooking pot to the smallest children, huddled together on the bed. Then Mr. B's gaze fell on Tommy, asleep now in Mama's arms.

"Some of us won't survive," Mr. B said. "We should make plans."

"No," Mama declared. "We are Christian people. Never that!"

Sudden pain rocked Patty, hot and sharp, fiercer than the ache of hunger. Something evil had entered the cabin with Mr. B, and she trembled with fear.
"A man died and they took an axe to his body!"
Ginny had told her that morning. Of course she hadn't believed it. What was the point of cutting up a dead body? Would doing so make it easier to bury in the hard snow-pack?
"You argue too much, silly goose!"
Ginny told her and wouldn't say any more.