“Are you always so angry?”
“Who’s angry? I’ve got no arm and my wolves are dead and it’s so cold my dick has curled up inside me so that it looks like I’ve got a second belly button between my legs. This is me in a good mood.”
She gives him a mirthless grin, the best bedside manner she can manage. “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you come here to hurt us?”
“No.” It is the truth. “No, I don’t want that at all.”
She wraps the bandage tight and offers it a gentle pat. “I believe you.”
And maybe she does and maybe she says something to Lewis, because Colter wakes the next morning to find him standing nearby. His long, thin figure towers over him, like one more tree in the dim-lit forest. He has been avoiding Colter, and maybe that has something to do with guilt or maybe that has something to do with fear, since back in the day, on more than one occasion, Colter crushed him against a wall and made him eat dirt and told him to stop being such a book-eating puss.
But now he’s here to talk, Colter can tell, give him the eye-to-eye, make it clear where he stands and figure out where Colter stands and see if they can find a balance. He looks different than Colter remembers him. Not a boy, but a man, and maybe not a man at all. His forehead is marked with weary lines. His firm mouth beneath the black beard he has grown seems to suck on something bitter. But it’s his eyes—the blue-gray eyes, like cold moons—they glint with some curious power and make Colter shrink back a bit and feel small and chastened, aware of his defeat in a way he had never felt when jailed.
“How do I know,” Lewis says, “that this is not all some convenient lie to keep you alive?”
“Swear it.”
“On what?”
“Your father’s grave.”
Something splits open in Lewis’s face and just as quickly resolves itself. “You put him there. Swearing on his grave means nothing.”
“It means everything. Don’t you see? Don’t you see why I’m here? The old man is why.” He is not one to show any emotion beyond anger. He sometimes jokes that the last time he cried, a pebble fell from his eye. And then a rat came along and tasted the pebble and died. But he feels something now, cracking the edge of his voice and dampening the corners of his eyes. “Don’t you see that the old man was like a father and I did him wrong?”
Lewis doesn’t say anything for a long time. Snow falls and melts on his face and dribbles down his cheek.
“You could have killed me,” Colter says.
“I could have, yes.”
“But you didn’t. You let me live. A part of you must want to believe in the good. There’s some good in me once you get past the shit. A man can change, Lewis. You’re living proof of that.”
*
They complain about following the river. If they cannot canoe it, then why bother? Why not bear west more directly? Gawea tells them, more than once, that with the constant clouds, she cannot guide them using the stars, and with the vast gray sameness of the snow-swept plains, their maps are made useless. The river is their known conductor, the channel that will lead them. This is the way she came and this is the way they will go. And the water, even when scrimmed with ice, attracts life. Their best chance in finding game is to follow its course. The water will eventually thaw, and when that time comes, perhaps they will find more canoes and take to paddling again.
Questions. They have so many questions for her. And the way she must answer them, always guarded, always worried she will forget or contradict one of her half lies, exhausts her. No, no one ever goes hungry in Oregon, and yes, there are pastures busy with sheep and cattle, pens with pigs, houses with hens, just as there are fields of corn and oats and barley and soybean and wheat, orchards of apples, tangles of blackberries. Hops for beer, grapes for wine. No, there isn’t a wall. There isn’t a curfew. There are ever-expanding towns and cities with roads threaded between them, the ligature of a larger organism. In the Sanctuary, they were trapped. Because of this, because they were walled in, they considered time and construction vertically, a layering—but out west, people have a horizontal perspective, spreading their fences and buildings outward. “Everything is bigger there.”
This keeps them going. The dream of what awaits them. And sometimes she can’t help but believe in it too. That everything will be better when they arrive. They trust her. This pleases her and hurts her. At night, they all cram together for heat. York always manages to tuck in beside her and she often wakes up to find his arm around her. She does not knock it away. The closeness feels good.
*
Clark asks them to stay strong, to cheer up, look alive. She really believes, in the same way sailors and astronauts must have when launching themselves into an unknown darkness, that they have some higher calling, that their survival and whatever they discover might profoundly affect others, the future. “Gawea did this on her own. We can do this together. We’re in this together.”
That includes Colter, who is now strong enough to hike alongside them, cursing the cold. They will not give him a gun, not yet, not until he’s proved himself, and he complains about this too, but with a hand tapping his bandaged stump and a smile cutting his face. “I’m unarmed. You’ve unarmed me, you fucks. An unarmed man’s worth as much as a teatless heifer in thirsty times.”