the family flintlock, which he now leveled at the desert darkness, and he imagined that small man grabbing not his sister but the beautiful girl of his dreams, standing among willows as he’d first seen her, hanging wash. In his night reverie the savage had already sneaked up on William and slashed his gallant throat before snatching Lucy by the elbow in the river willows. Her scream brought Jeremiah to the clearing where the Indian’s horse waited, and as the villain tried to throw the girl onto the stallion’s back Jeremiah brought him down, clean as any hare. Oh, Jeremiah, she cried before fainting in his arms. It’s all right now, he said, carrying her to her wagon. You’re safe, my dear. You’re safe.
“Hey, old man.” It was William giving his shoulder a shake. “You’re off duty.” Jeremiah opened his eyes. Will and David leaned over him in the moonlight, chuckling softly.
“Works better if you stay awake,” David whispered, “but we won’t tell the cap.”
“You have my word,” William said, “as a Southern gentleman.”
THE NEXT MORNING the boy heard thunder in a cloudless sky. Being a good fifty yards off to the side of the noisy train, trying to befriend Badger Smith’s mangy dog with a rabbit bone as it slunk through the sparse grass and prickly brush, his ears had an advantage. In fact, the dog’s tiny round ears lifted before the boy heard the faint rumbling, though nary a cloud showed across the miles and miles of blue. The moccasins his mother kept trying to patch to accommodate his growing feet had just developed another toe-hole, and the bare appendage made him think of the body he and David had found, which led by association to the snagged scrap of black fur. And that black fur, and the dog’s nervous gaze, connected thought to the black stream between the train and a towering butte.
Buffalo! The dog barked, and Jeremiah shouted and ran to the wagons, finding William astride his stallion.
“I’ll be damned,” the young man said. “I’ve never seen them before. Hop up behind me, old man, and let’s tell the captain we have meat on the hoof.”
Jeremiah placed his hands on William’s broad shoulders and thought of the girl’s fingers resting on the man’s body as she danced with him, and thought of the pleasant smells of tobacco and corn whiskey trapped in the fabric of the gentleman’s waistcoat. His own clothing consisted of long underwear, one pair of stained and faded pantaloons, and one shirt, each made of sacking last winter by his mother, each far too small. Even his one buckskin coat, which he wore only in the coldest weather, came to his elbows. The stallion galloped smooth as a dream, and soon he and Will were directed by the captain to alert some of the cowhands far in the lead.
Will gave a high-pitched yelp as he rode, which made the boy shout with joy. The black beasts were coming near, a voluptuous river of monstrous power, a natural force wild as a raging storm, and it wasn’t until the man had reached the first cowboy that a sense of danger crept up the boy’s spine. The beasts’ heads were overlarge, their movement swift but erratic, rocking and weaving as they flew forward; a malevolence in their aspect touched some ancient source of fear, and it spread among men and beasts, causing the cattle to stampede, walleyed, clumsy and slow in comparison with their wild ancestors, directly toward the covered wagons. For a moment the cowboys shouted and whipped at their stock, and then the black herd was among them like a flood. Will and Jeremiah took to riding with the flow of mad stampeding, the stallion following some instinct for self-preservation. The monsters’ wool, even the tip of a horn, brushed against the boy’s bare leg, and once the horse began to rear on its hindquarters, but Will brought its head down immediately.
They were caught in a roaring current, a tiny boat on a river’s rapids, and heading straight for the emigrant train. Men and women were scooping youngsters and dogs and tossing them into the covered wagons before leaping aboard themselves, but at least one frantic woman ran among them, apparently unable to locate her child. Jeremiah and William charged toward them like turncoats who’d joined invading marauders. The boy thought for sure the river of monsters and cattle would crash directly through the wagons and crush his family, but he was sore relieved to see the beasts weave among the wagons nimbly, with much more grace than he’d imagined possible for such creatures. Only one wagon got hit, its leeward wheel buckling, and almost as soon as the stampede had passed through the pioneers the herds spread out, and William was able to reverse their course.
He rode directly to Lucinda’s wagon, and Jeremiah’s heart fair burst through his chest to see her there, alive and beaming from the buckboard beside her dour father. But that great relief was suddenly darkened by the keening moans from a group of women nearby, and even as William dismounted and took Lucinda in his arms the girl’s radiant smile turned to a gasp of alarm.
It was the young mother they’d seen running among the wagons. Her toddler had been seized and carried to safety by a girl from another family, but the mother’s body was crushed. There was no other way to describe it in Jeremiah’s mind: all flesh and bone were ground into the soil like apple pulp in a cider press.
The emigrants pressed around the young father, a boy not much older than Jeremiah. The tragedy seemed somehow in keeping with the experience of these older women, even though Jeremiah couldn’t imagine their ever finding a corpse so grotesquely misshapen. The young father kicked the earth, hollered, collapsed, cursed, and the ladies corralled him while they organized the men in preparing a proper burial site.
And so Jeremiah was called upon, once again, to read a passage from the Book as the sun set among the citadels of sandstone rock to the west, and he looked to the wretched young widower kneeling on stones and pawing at the sand near his wife’s grave, and to his grim father and anxious mother, and he opened to Job:
“Why is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than hid treasures?” He paused as the wind swept the hair across his eyes. “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, whom God has hedged in?” And he could hear women sniffling and a strange guttural moaning, which, he realized, came from his father. Jeremiah’s voice seized, and he struggled to finish: “For my sighing comes as my bread,
and my groanings are poured out like
• SEVEN •
7 AM
water swirled about the mare’s shanks,
sparkling in morning light among the canoe-shaped willow leaf shadows, sending its cool breath upward as Jeremiah led her against the gentle current and across at a shallow ford. The other side was dark with Spanish pines and sweet with the rot of their needles. Man and horse picked their way through forest until he could smell the sulfur of the underworld. Momentarily the redwood shakes of the Springs Hotel caught the morning light through the evergreen branches, and Jeremiah emerged onto the wagon road leading to it. He circled its vegetable garden and came around to the main building. The moment he encountered a view of its grand pillared porch, his eyes seemed drawn like metal filings to a magnet by the intense gaze of the man sitting in a wicker chair.
There were two remarkable features about this man’s visage: foremost were those eyes, which blazed preternaturally from beneath dark and pronounced brows like primeval torches within a cave; second was the silver beard, which grew like no other man’s in Jeremiah’s acquaintance, sprouting from chin-tip and jowls in thin strands and combed into an odd triplicate flag to the shoulders and sternum. Either the man shaved his cheeks bare near to jawline and along the chin sides or the good Lord had burned that flesh clean of fur; regardless, the effect was at once boyish and aged in an odd, preening fashion, the cheeks smooth as youth, the mouth and chin entirely obscured in age, and the whole flag of gleaming whiskers (which had seen much combing over the black ministerial frock) flaring out to a triplicate, stylized silver mane from shoulder tips to breast. Beneath it a series of gold necklaces, of some arcane or occult import, flashed.
Jeremiah tipped his hat to the man and murmured a salutation, but the other merely