Clark asks him why in God’s name he would do that.
He hoods the blanket over his head and tightens his grip on it, making a kind of bonnet. His face is lost to shadow except for the sharp white nose peeking out. “To give people hope, of course.” He has an acidic way of speaking that shrinks his audience into something so small and insignificant he might flick them away. He explains that the mayor has no doubt claimed they are dead, and who knows what dismissive lies he invented to excuse them away. If they are indeed journeying this far for more than themselves — if they plan to return someday and bring down the wall — then they need to give people a reason to hold out.
York tongues a fish bone from his mouth, pulls it from his lips, and flicks it into the fire. “Going back. Damn. With all the miles we’ve traveled, with all the miles still waiting ahead of us, that is the last thing I want to think about.”
Lewis ignores him. He will send the letter to Ella and she will find a way to spread the news to others.
Clark says, “If anyone sees that owl, she’ll be dead.”
“I’m sure that’s a risk she’ll be willing to take.”
Reed says, “If you’re sending a letter, I want to as well.” He feels Clark’s eyes on him. “I have a— I have some people I’d like to let know I’m all right.”
“You said it yourselves. A letter risks lives. The more letters, the more lives. One will speak for us all.” Lewis rises and excuses himself. He is tired. He must rest. He toddles to his bed now, twenty yards away from their campsite, a willing exile. He uses his staff to keep his balance and to stir the fire he keeps for himself. He adds two logs to it. With a rusty stiffness he lowers his body to the ground. He wobbles there a moment, fighting sleep, but instead of crushing his head into a pillow, he reaches a hand into his satchel and extracts a piece of paper followed by his quill and inkpot.
Reed follows and watches from a short distance as Lewis begins to write — no doubt composing the very letter he mentioned, wishing to send it off before they can question him further. His pen slashes the paper with a speed unavailable to his legs. This is how he will always be swiftest, on the empty page, not the open plain, in his mind and not his body.
But before he finishes the letter, his chin drops to his chest, his posture curls. Sleep overtakes him. A minute passes. Then he startles awake and folds the letter in half, and then in half again, and again, until it is a tiny white square.
The owl perches on a nearby stump. He crawls over and kneels beside it. The action seems to exhaust him. He slumps against the stump, resting his forehead against it like a man praying at an altar. He wakes when he loses his balance, when his body begins to slide. He reaches for the owl and toys with a lever. Its breast swings open to reveal a small cavity into which he fits the letter. By this time all his energy is spent. He curls his body at the base of the stump and succumbs to sleep.
Reed sneaks a sheet of paper and uses the still-wet quill to compose a message. He pauses twice when Lewis stirs or hitches his breathing. His words splotch and the paper tears in his hurry. Then he folds the letter into a small square and seals it with pitch from a split log and tucks it into the owl’s breast for Lewis to send skyward when he wakes.
Chapter 25
THE THIN MAN told Gawea he would personally escort her from Utah to Oregon, where Aran Burr awaited her. It was a long road and he would protect her, so long as she obeyed him. He kept her wrists bound and her mind drugged with an opiate, so that she wouldn’t escape or attack him. She was so numb she didn’t feel his hands on her during the night, and during the day she saw the landscape they traversed in a hallucinogenic blur. They rode through forests that had burned down to blackened lances and others electric with the yellow-and-red music of fall. They rode across glinting fields of obsidian that looked as though the night froze and fell and shattered. They rode through striped canyons with whitewater foaming through their bottoms. They climbed cinder cones and buttes and stared out at the way they had come and the way they might go.
Sometimes animals followed her. A jeweled cloud of bees. A parade of humpbacked foam-mouthed bears trundling in a long line. Marmots poking their heads from their warrens to whistle their greeting. Vultures and eagles and crows drafting air currents, spinning in the sky, surrounding her with rippling shadows. A cluster of antlered deer encasing her like a basket that bore her north and west.
She was followed, too, by dreams she could not shake. In them a man visited her, the man named Aran Burr. She could never see his face — but she could see enough of him to know he was old and bent, his bald head ringed by long white hair that tumbled down his back. He spoke in a whispery, papery voice. He told her she was special. He was special too. They could be special together. If only she would come to him, if only she would listen. Come, he said. Come to me.
She wondered if he was a ghost, like the ones Oma used to tell stories about who would drown you in a lake or lead you deep into the woods until you were lost. Burr made her startle at shadows. He made her nerves feel like twigs snapping. At first she clapped her hands to scare his voice away. Dug in her ear, shook her head as if to scrape out a mosquito. Then she began to listen. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to teach her how special she was.
Then, in the Cascades, the thin man’s horse lost its footing. They were crossing a slope of scree at the time. The horse tumbled down the hill and took him with it. The ensuing rockslide mangled him. So did the horse, its body rolling over him, bending his body the wrong way. Gawea waited a long time. Long enough for her head to clear. Then she climbed down the hillside and retrieved the keys to her handcuffs and collected the provisions from his saddlebags and whispered good-bye to the lame horse before braining it with a rock.
At this point, she felt she had no place in the world, so she kept moving, following the voice, the voice of Aran Burr, her only beacon.
She could always sense people long before she encountered them. Trails and roads cut the ground. Stumps sprinkled with sawdust appeared. They made a mechanical storm of noise with their hammers and saws. They stunk the air with their paint and oil and cooking. Some lived in small clusters — giving her some sense of what life must have been like before her father was killed and her mother taken — walled villages with pigs rooting in pens and smoke rising from chimneys. Sometimes, at night, to antidote her loneliness, she would walk unseen among them. She opened and closed their drawers. She stood over their beds and smelled their stale breath and listened to them make love or murmur their way through dreams. She pretended herself, just for a moment, part of a family.
More than anything, that was what she wanted, family. Burr seemed to offer her that. She feared him. She still fears him. But in him she found a mirror, someone who resembled her. Though his hair was a silvery white, though his bones were warped and his skin spotted, they were the same. When they first met, he took her hands in his and said, “You’re like me.”
With these words he repaired her loneliness. He made her feel like she belonged somewhere. She remembers the first time they sat together, in leather chairs in a library full of light, and when she squinted at him, unable to see him clearly for the blazing sun, he asked if the light bothered her. “A little,” she said, and he held up his hand and the shutters slammed shut and in the darkness that followed he laughed until he coughed and then said, “Now you try.”