Not even Katherine.
If one should find themselves hiking through the lush Central Valley of California, be sure to stop by one of the many homesteads and taste the fabulous offerings of California agriculture: oranges, almonds, and a multitude of other fruits native to warmer climes. The Golden State’s harvest is bountiful and plentiful. You will find hospitality aplenty as well.
—General Augustus Redmond, 1875
—KATHERINE—
Chapter 42
Notes on the California Trail
We walk.
It seems to be all we do for a very long time. Juliet warned us, gathering everyone up after our meeting, laying out the challenges, the cost of this endeavor. Many had their concern about the toll such a pace would take on the elderly and young, while others had seemed unsurprised that there was yet another burden to be borne. I do not think there was anyone who, in their hearts, ever believed that the trip to Haven would be easy, but that did not mean it was not upsetting to hear how brutal the journey would truly be in the aftermath of the fall of Sacramento.
And yet, the reality of it pales in comparison to anything we were told.
Each day, we wake as the sun is barely cresting the horizon, over homesteads and fields, mostly fallow this early in the year—that is, if we are lucky enough to even get to sleep the previous night. We break our fast with a meager meal of cold beans and head out, walking as fast as the oxen can be coaxed to go. The trees change from leafy beeches and cottonwoods to towering pines, but the muddy, rut-marked road remains the same.
We are far from the only travelers on the trail. Every day we meet more people, some fleeing the ruin of Sacramento, others from towns that had the misfortune to be in the path of the dead’s march to the sea. Pale-skinned Chinese, brown-skinned Californios, and white people convinced that something better waits for them just around the next bend.
It is the white folks who seem to be taking the new surge of undead the hardest.
“They just came out of nowhere; we were lucky to make it out with our lives,” I overhear a woman say in Abbottsville as we are purchasing what we hope will be enough supplies for our trip into the mountains. Jane dropped her bounty in the first town we had stopped in, some little nothing of a place that didn’t even have a real name, her grisly payday filling the coffers of the wagon train—but that town’s general store’s wares were not sufficient for our needs. Abbottsville’s stores are better stocked, but that, we find, brings its own challenges. The place is filthy with people who believed that they had been safe from the undead plague out here in the west. The cost of the supplies are three times what they should be, but the upcharge is not due to the fact that we are Negroes—it is the demand.
Everyone is heading north, although not for the same reason.
“I heard the Chinese were behind the infection in Sacramento, so they could charge more for their protection teams,” says a white man with a mean look to him and a sidearm I would bet money he has no idea how to use. As I wait to pay for my purchases, the man has the temerity to say to me, “Me and mine are heading up to Oregon. No Chinamen, no darkies. Did you know the Oregon Territory has made Negroes illegal?”
“Pray tell me, sir, how does one make another person illegal? That does not sound very Christian.”
He has no answer for me besides a dark look as he walks off to harass some other poor woman. If I slip an extra prayer into my nightly communion with the Lord that the man should get some comeuppance, well, that is no worse than such a man being allowed to bring children into this world.
But other than a few hostile travelers competing with us for scarce resources, our hardships are caused more by the journey itself than anything else.
Jane purchases new clothes for her and Tomás, warmer clothing that will be necessary for the colder temperatures of the mountains. I watch her spending time with the boy every evening, helping him sound out words in a book of poetry she picked up. The boy works hard to please Jane, and I even catch her smiling at him a time or two as he figures out a passage on his own.
Though I could never have foreseen the eventual benefit it does seem that accompanying Jane on her foolhardy adventure to Sacramento served its purpose. With Gideon in the wind and so many reminders of Jane’s old life around her now, and the possibility of her family being in Haven, she has regained a measure of her old self. I have seen momentary flashes of the friend I knew, warm and kind and jovial, and I know that it is but a matter of time before she quits her quest for vengeance altogether and becomes the girl she once was. Well, if not the Jane McKeene of old, at least a close approximation.
My heart nearly bursts when I think upon it too long, whether from despair or joy, I am not quite sure. But I hope to never again see the cold stare of the woman who shot a man and seconds later began to casually rifle through his pockets, as though his death were as remarkable as a sneeze.
I pray Jane is finally on the road to once more being her fierce, loyal, frustrating self.
One of the ladies in the wagon train knits Jane a scarf and Tomás socks to wear under his boots, which are a tad too big. When Jane offers to pay her, the woman blushes prettily and waves her off. I think maybe she is a bit sweet on Jane, who does cut a dashing figure in trousers and broadcloth, the falchion strapped across her back and a pistol hanging low on her hip.
Jane has no shortage of admirers on the wagon train.
When we stop in the evenings, exhausted from the days’ labors, Mr. Stevens finds his way to Jane’s side more often than not. She is surprisingly tolerant of his attentions, to the point that I finally inquire, after a week of hard travel, “Jane, you do know the man is courting you, right?”
Jane pauses, mouth agape, a spoonful of beans halfway to her mouth. Whatever manners she might have learned at Miss Preston’s have evaporated; she eats more like a farmhand than an Attendant. She never was much one for etiquette, and the wildness of these lands has only encouraged her to be more herself.
She slowly sets her spoon back on her plate, using the remnant of her left arm to keep the dish from toppling.
“What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Stevens. The man is courting you.”
“Don’t be a ninny, Kate. The man is doing no such thing.”
We sit in a grove a short ways from the well-worn Siskiyou Trail. It is a spot that looks to have served as a refuge for a number of travelers, complete with a firepit and a small surplus of firewood left by the previous visitors. Because of the trials and tribulations during our trip our wagon train now counts only a hundred souls, as people opted to stay in towns along the way. An entire group of our wagon train broke off and decided to head to Eureka, turning west at a fork in the road despite Louisa and Juliet’s counsel. With our hundred we count a meager four wagons. Most of the oxen teams have been doubled up as people sold the beasts off for extra cash. We would make better time with more oxen, but fewer mouths to feed is always a good thing.
“Stevens ain’t looking for a wife at all,” Jane continues, nearly upsetting her plate with the force of her spoon smacking the bottom. “That man loves the sound of his own voice too much. He doesn’t want a wife—he craves an audience.”
“Believe what you want, Jane, but I know what I see.”