As for her father, he was much subdued after the clash with Whitney, mixing with the rest of the travelers less than he had, and when he did so exchanging only the blandest of pleasantries. In the safety and secrecy of the wagon, however, he continued to pore over the plans for the building of Everville, scrutinizing them with greater intensity than ever. Only once did she attempt to coax him from his study. He told her sternly to let him be. It was his intention, he said, to have Everville by heart, so that if Pottruck or Goodhue or their like attempted and succeeded in destroying the plans, he could raise the shining city from memory.
“Be patient, sweet,” he told her, then, his sternness mellowing. “Just a few more weeks and we’ll be over the mountains. Then we’ll find a valley and begin.”
In this, as in all else, she trusted him, and left him to pore over the plans. What was a few weeks? She would content herself in the meanwhile with the triple mystery of dreams, things unsaid, and the business between men and women.
In a tiny time they would be in Oregon. Nothing was more certain.
* * *
II
But the heat went out of the world even before August was over, and by the end of the third week, with the Blue Mountains not yet visible even to the keenest eye, and food so severely rationed that some were too weak to walk, the word had spread around the campfires that according to friendly natives, storms of unseasonal severity were already descending from the heights. Sheldon Sturgis, who had led the train thus far with a loose hand (some said that was his style; others that he was simply weak and prone to drink), now began to hasten along those who were slowing progress. But with a growing number of frail and sickened pioneers, mistakes and accidents proliferated, adding to the delays that were an inevitable part of such journeys: wheels lost, animals injured, trails blocked.
Death became a fellow traveler sometime in early September, that was Maeve’s belief. She did not see him at first, but she was certain of his presence. He was in the land around them, killing living things with his touch or his breath. Trees that should have been fruitful in this season had already given up their leaves and were going naked. Animals large and small could be seen dead or dying beside the trail. Only carcass-flies were getting fat this September; but then Death was a friend to flies, wasn’t he?
At night, waiting for sleep to come, she could hear people praying in the wagons nearby, begging God to keep Death at bay.
It did no good. He came anyway. To Marsha Winthrop’s baby son, William, who had been born in Missouri just two weeks before the trek began. To Jack Pottruck’s father, a beast of a man like his son, who suddenly weakened and perished in the middle of the night (not quietly, like the Winthrop child, but with terrible cries and imprecations). To the sisters Brenda and Meriel Schonberg, spinsters both, whose passing was only discovered when the train stopped at dusk and their wagon went unhalted, the women being dead at the reins.
Maeve could not help wonder why Death had chosen these particular souls. She could understand why he had taken her mother: She had been very beautiful and gracious and loving. He had wanted to make the world the poorer by removing her, and himself the richer. But what did he want with a baby and an old man and two withered sisters?
She didn’t bother her father with such questions; he was fretful and beset enough. Though their wagon showed no sign of failing, and their horse was as healthy as any in the train, it was clear from the look in his sunken eyes that he too knew Death was an unwelcome outrider these days. She began to watch for the horseman more clearly, hoping to reassure her father by identifying the enemy; to say, I know the color of his horse and of his hat, and if he comes near us I’ll know him and frighten him off with a prayer or a song. More than once she thought she caught sight of him, weaving between the wagons up ahead, dark in the dust. But she was never certain of any sighting, so she kept her silence rather than give her father an unverified report.
And the days passed, and the cold deepened, and when finally the Blue Mountains came into view, their slopes were white down below the tree line, and the clouds behind them black and bruised by their burden of ice.
And Abilene Welsh and Billy Baxter, whose antics in the summer had been the subject of much gossip (and clucking from Martha Winthrop), were found frozen in each other’s arms one morning, touched by death as they enjoyed each other’s company away from the warmth of the fires. Even as they were being buried, and Doc Hodder was speaking of how they would be eternally united in the Kingdom of the Lord, and those sins they might have committed in the name of love forgiven, Maeve looked up at the gray heavens and saw the first flakes of snow spiraling down. And that was the beginning of the end.
* * *
III
She gave up looking for Death the Outrider after that. If he had ever accompanied the wagons on horseback, as she’d suspected, he had now put off that shape. He had become simpler. He was ice.
It killed many of the travelers quickly, and those it did not kill it tormented with intimations of the state ahead. It slowed the brain and the blood; it made the fingers fumble and the feet numb; it stiffened the sinews; it lined the lungs with a dusting of frost.
Sometimes, even now, with so many people dead and the rest dying, Maeve would hear her father say: “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” as though some promise had been made to him that was presently being broken. She did not doubt the identity of the promise-maker. Mr. Buddenbaum. It was he who had filled her father’s heart with ambition, who had given him gifts and told him to go West and build. It was he who had first whispered the word Everville. Perhaps, she began to think, Whitney had been right. Perhaps the Devil had come to tempt her father in the form of Mr. Buddenbaum, and filled his trusting heart with dreams for the pleasure of watching that heart broken. The problem vexed her night and day—never more so than when her father, in the midst of the storm—leaned over to her and said: “We must be strong, sweet. We mustn’t die, or Everville dies with us!”
Hunger and exhaustion had her teetering on delirium now—sometimes she would imagine herself on the ship coming from Liverpool, clinging to the icy deck with her fingertips; sometimes she was back in Ireland, eating grass and roots to keep her belly from aching—but in times of lucidity she wondered if perhaps this was some kind of test; Buddenbaum’s way of seeing whether the man to whom he’d given the dream of Everville was strong enough to survive. The notion seemed so plausible she could not keep it to herself.
“Papa?” she said, grabbing hold of his coat.
Her father looked round at her, his face barely visible beneath his hood. She could only see one of his eyes, but it looked at her as lovingly as ever.
“What, child?” he said.
“I think maybe—maybe it was meant to be this way.”
“What are you saying?”
“Maybe Mr. Buddenbaum’s watching us, to see if we deserve to build his city. Maybe just when we think we can’t go on any longer he’ll appear, and tell us it was a test, and show us the way to the valley.”
“This isn’t a test, child. It’s just what happens in the world. Dreams die. The cold comes out of nowhere and kills them.” He put his arm around his daughter, and hugged her to him, though there was precious little strength left in him.
“I’m not afraid, Papa,” she said.
“Are you not?”
“No I’m not. We’ve come a long way together.”
“That we have.”
“Remember how it was back at home? How we thought we’d die of starvation? But we didn’t. Then on the ship. Waves washing people overboard to right and left of us, and we thought we’d drown for certain. But the waves passed us by. Didn’t they?”
His cracked, white lips managed a tiny smile. “Yes, child, they did.”
“Mr. Buddenbaum knew what we’d come through,” Maeve said. “He knew there were angels watching over us. And Mama too—”
She felt her father shudder at her side. “I dreamed of her last night??
?” he said.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Always. We were floating, side by side, in this calm, calm sea. And I swear, if I’d not known you were here, child, waiting for me—”
He didn’t finish the thought. A sound like a single blast of a trumpet came out of the blind whiteness ahead; a note of triumph that instantly raised a chorus of shouts from the wagons in front and behind.
“Did ya hear that?”
“There’s somebody up here with us!”
Another blast now, and another, and another, each rising from the echo of the last till the whole white world was filled with brazen harmonies.
The Sturgis’ wagon, which was ahead of the O’Connells’, had come to a halt, and Sheldon was calling back down the line, summoning a party of men to his side.
“Stratton! Whitney! O’Connell! Get your guns!”
“Guns?” said Maeve. “Papa, why does he want guns?”
“Just climb up into the wagon, child,” Harmon said, “and stay there till I come back.”
The din of trumpets had died away for a moment, but now it came again, more magnificent than ever. As she climbed up onto the wagon, Maeve’s skinny frame ran with little tremors at the sound, as though the music was shaking her muscles and marrow. She started to weep, seeing her father disappear, rifle in hand. Not because she feared for him but because she wanted to go out into the snow herself and see what manner of trumpet made the sound that moved in her so strangely, and what manner of man played upon it. Perhaps they were not men at all, her spinning head decided. Perhaps the angels she’d been gabbing about minutes before had come to earth, and these blasts were their proclamations.
She started out into the snow, suddenly and uncontrollably certain that this was true. Their heavenly guardians had come to save them, and Mama too, more than likely. If she looked hard she would see them soon, gold and blue and purple. She stood up on the seat, clinging to the canvas, to get a better view, scanning the blank snow in every direction. Her study was rewarded. Just as the trumpets began their third hallelujah, the snow parted for a few moments. She saw the mountains rising to left and right like the teeth of a trap, and ahead of her a single titanic peak, its lower slopes forested. The perimeter of the trees lay no more than a hundred yards from the wagon, and the music she heard was coming from that direction, she was certain of it. Of her father, and of the men accompanying him, there was no sign, but they had surely disappeared among the trees. It would be quite safe to follow them, and wonderful to be there at her father’s side when he was reunited with Mama. Wouldn’t that be a blissful time, kissing her mother in a circle of angels, while Whitney and all the men who had scorned her father looked on agog?
The opening in the veil of snow was closing again, but before it did so she jumped down from the wagon and started off in the direction of the trees. Within moments, snow had obliterated the wagons behind her, just as it had covered the forest ahead, and she was following her nose through a blank world, stumbling with every other step. The drifts lay perilously deep in places, and she several times dropped into drifts so deep she was almost buried alive. But just as her frozen limbs threatened to give up on her, the trumpets came again, and the music put life back into her sinews and filled her head with bliss. There was a piece of paradise up ahead. Angels and Mama and her loving father, with whom she would build a city that would be the wonder of the world.
She would not die, of that she was certain. Not today, not for many years to come. She had great work to do, and the angels would not see her perish in the snow, knowing how far she had traveled to perform that labor.
And now she saw the trees, pines higher than any house, like a wall of sentinels in front of her. Calling for her father she ran towards them, careless of the cold and the bruises and her spinning head. The trumpets were close, and there were bursts of color in the corner of her eye, as though some of the angelic throng, who had not yet picked their instruments, were clustered about her, the tips of their beating wings all that she was allowed to glimpse.
Borne by invisible hands, she was ushered beneath the canopy of trees and there, where the snow could not come, and the ground was soft with pine needles, she sank down onto her knees and drew a dozen heaving breaths while the sound of trumpets touched her in every part.
THREE
It was not music that finally picked her up, nor the hands of the invisible throng. It was a shout, which rose above the trumpet echoes, and filled her with alarm.
“Damn you, O’Connell!” She knew the voice. It was Whitney. “God in Heaven! What have you done?” he yelled.
She got to her feet and started towards his din. Her eyes were not yet accustomed to the gloom after the brightness of the blizzard, and the further from the edge of the forest she ventured, the darker it became, but the rage in Whitney’s voice spurred her on, careless of what lay in her path. The trumpets had fallen silent. Perhaps the angels had heard his rants, she thought, and would not float their harmonies on tainted air, or perhaps they were simply watching to see what human rage was like.
“You knew!” Whitney was yelling. “You brought us into Hell!”
Maeve could see him now, moving between the trees, calling after his quarry into the shadows.
“O’Connell? O’Connell! You’ll burn in a lake of fire for this. Burn and burn and—”
He stopped; swung round, his eyes finding Maeve with terrible speed. Before she could retreat, he yelled: “I see you! Come out, you little bitch!”
Maeve had no choice. He had her in the sights of his rifle. And now, as she approached him between the trees, she saw that he was not alone. Sheldon Sturgis and Pottruck were just a few yards from him. Sturgis was crouched against a tree, terrified of something in the branches above him, where his rifle was pointed. Pottruck was watching Whitney’s antics with a bemused expression on his oafish face.
“O’Connell?” Whitney yelled. “I got your little girl here.” He adjusted his aim, squinting for accuracy. “I got her right between the eyes if I pull the trigger. An’ I’m going to do it. Hear me, O’Connell?”
“Don’t shoot,” Sturgis said. “You’ll bring it back.”
“It’ll come anyway,” Whitney said. “O’Connell sent it to fetch our souls.”
“Oh Jesus Christ in Heaven—” Sturgis sobbed.
“Stand right there,” Whitney said to Maeve. “And you call to your Daddy and you tell him to keep his demon away from us or I’ll kill you.”
“He hasn’t—hasn’t got any demons,” Maeve said. She didn’t want Whitney to know that she was afraid, but she couldn’t help herself. Tears came anyway.
“You just tell him,” Whitney said, “you just call.” He pushed the rifle in Maeve’s direction, so that it was a foot from her face. “If you don’t I’ll kill you. You’re the Devil’s child’s what you are. Ain’t no crime killing muck like you. Go on. Call him.”
“Papa?”
“Louder!”
“Papa?”
There was no reply from the shadows. “He doesn’t hear me.”
“I hear you, child,” said her father. She looked towards his voice and there he was, coming towards her out of the murk.
“Drop your rifle!” Pottruck yelled to him.
Even as he did, the trumpets began again, louder than ever. The music clutched at Maeve’s heart with such force she started to gasp for breath.
“What’s wrong?” she heard her father say, and glanced back in his direction to see him start towards her.
“Stay where you are!” Whitney yelled, but her father kept running.
There was no second warning. Whitney simply fired, not once but twice. One bullet struck him in the shoulder, the other in the stomach. He stumbled on towards her, but before he could take two strides, his legs gave out beneath him, and he fell down.
“Papa!” she yelled, and would have gone to him, but then the trumpets began another volley, and as their music rose up in her, bursts of white light blotted
out the world, and she dropped to the ground in a swoon.
“I hear it coming—”
“Shut up, Sturgis.”
“It is! It’s coming again. Whitney! What do we do?”
Sturgis’s shrill shouts pricked Maeve awake. She opened her eyes to see her father lying where he had fallen. He was still moving, she saw, his hands clutching rhythmically at his belly, his legs twitching.
“Whitney!” Sturgis was screaming. “It’s coming back.”
She could not see him from where she lay, but she could hear the thrashing of the branches, as though the wind had suddenly risen. Whitney was praying.
“Our Lord, who art in Heaven—”
Maeve moved her head a little, in the hope of glimpsing the trio without drawing attention to herself. Whitney was on his knees, Sturgis was cowering against the tree, and Pottruck was staring up into the canopy waving wildly: “Come on, you fucking shit! Come on!”
Certain she was forgotten, Maeve got to her feet cautiously, reaching out to grab hold of the nearest tree trunk for support. She looked back to her father, who had raised his head a couple of inches off the ground and was staring at Pottruck as he fired up into the thrashing branches.
Sturgis yelled, “Christ, no!,” Whitney started to rise from his kneel, and in that same moment, a form that Maeve’s bewildered eyes could not quite distinguish from the branches—it had their sweep and their darkness—swooped upon Pottruck.
Whatever it was, it was no angel. There were no feathers here. There was no gold or scarlet or blue. The beast was naked, of that she was reasonably certain, and its flesh gleamed. That was all she had time to grasp before it picked Pottruck up and carried him off, up into the canopy.