Sweat trickles down my temple, my shoulder pressed into the corner of the wagon, my neck stiff. I roll my shoulders back, unknotting my sore muscles, and blink away from the morning sun that looks like the yolk of a fowl egg cracked against the distant hills and smeared across the sky.
“Fell asleep in the wagon,” Pa says up to me from where he’s harnessing Odie. “Didn’t want to wake you.” He pats Odie on the shoulder, and dust rises from her mane. “There’s dried apples on the seat for breakfast.”
“Where are we?”
“Nearly to the halfway bridge.” He climbs up to the wagon seat and takes the reins.
I don’t know what thehalfway bridgeis, but I hope we’ll reach it soon. I hope it means we’re close to the next town.
The day is dry and hot, unbearable, same as yesterday, and Pa begins humming a tune as we make our way across the scrubby, barren landscape, his voice deep and wandering, sometimes singing a few words of a song that seem more like stories stitched together. Tales about windstorms and dry summers without rain and lonely roads with only the moon to guide the way. They areroaming songs, he tells me. Sung by ranchers and those who travel the outer roads, like Pa. I never knew him to sing in the valley, as if these tunes can only be muttered while on long, dusty roads. Never while staying put.
I rest my head back against the seat, listening to the easy way he slips from one song to another, a rhythm that sways with the teetering wagon.
We pass three solitary homes, all abandoned, windows flung open or boarded up, fence posts leaning sharply, pushed over by heavy winter winds, leaves caught in doorways. In front of a tiny square house with a toppled chimney stands an oak tree with a rope swing hanging from the lowest branch. Idle. No breeze or children pushing it up toward the sky. I had a swing like it once back in the valley—a slab of notched wood and scratchy, fibrous rope—but the rope broke some years back and Mom never fixed it. I was too old for it anyway.
“Where did they all go?” I shake my head as we pass several homes built beside a low-lying pond, but no trace of people, no eyes staring out through dusty windows, no voices behind doorways. Coughing, wheezing. The whole place deserted.
Pa pauses his humming to flash a look at the last empty house we pass, a yellow flowering tree growing through one of the broken windows. “Consumption took them.”
I never imagined it would be like this, that so much would be hollowed out—only remnants of those who once lived in these towns. “Other people could live there,” I say, craning my head to watch as the small shell of a town fades behind us. “Move into those homes.”
Odie takes a half step over a mound of rocks, and the wagon jolts. I grip the side of the seat to keep from toppling to the ground, but Pa doesn’t even flinch; he’s used to the jarring sway and totter of the wagon—he knows these roads by heart. “People stay away from this area,” he says once the wagon has righted itself. “Even scavengers don’t come this far.”
“Why?”
Pa’s eyes seem to twitch, an uncomfortable slant to his mouth. “Because there’s nothing left.”
My palm finds the mark on my neck; my chest pushes out a long breath of air. “Does your tonic really help them?”
“It gives relief.”
“What about all the things it says on the wagon? Heartache and hair loss and tooth loss and warts?”
Pa smiles—actually smiles—and even his eyes take on an unusual, flickering brightness. “It doesn’t cure all of those things, but some.”
“You lie to people about what it does?”
Pa laughs, a quick, hearty sound, like thunder rolling along the belly of storm clouds—as if it’s something he hasn’t done in a long time, and the feeling has shook loose something in his rib cage. “They used to call people like mesnake-oil salesmen. Someone who sells snake oil and makes promises it can’t deliver.”
“What do they call you now?”
“Someone who brings them hope.”
A cold wind whips down from the west, and on up ahead, I can see the wash of gunmetal-gray clouds, the wisps of rain spilling down to the low, grassy hills. It hasn’t reached us yet, but we’re heading straight for it.
“Pa—” I say, feeling chilled by the sudden cold against my face. “What are scavengers?” One of the women back in the wheat town asked if we’d seen any on our path.
He exhales, the corners of his eyes pinching. “They’re people who steal things from others.”
“They’re dangerous?”
His mustache twitches. “Yes.”
“They’d steal from us?”
“Yes.”
I rub my palms up my arms, the sky heavy with moisture, turning as dark as the river when it froze in winter.
