I’m wasting too much time. Stuck here with Pa, waiting for him to sell his last crate of tonic.
I chew on my cheek and walk to the edge of the wooden boardwalk, a nervous fidget rising up my spine, my fingers tapping against my thighs as the midday sun makes shreds of the shadows, when I notice a man wandering up the street through the crowd, wearing dark overalls, a straw hat, and his left leg dragging behind him with each step. He’s ringing a bell, a high-pitched tolling sound, and I walk closer to the street—watching him.
“The cure is near!” he shouts, voice echoing up the busy street. He rings the bell over his head, as if summoning cattle to the trough, but no one seems to pay him any attention. “They will save us!” he shouts. “They will bring the cure, and our sickness will be rid from our bodies.” He makes a sweeping motion with his free hand, from his chest up tothe sky, as if something were leaving him—the sickness evaporating. He marches up the street, ringing his bell and continuing to shout. “They are coming!” he calls. “They will save us, the cure is near!”
A few people slow to watch him, but only for a moment or two before continuing on their way. And then I see the brand pressed into the flesh of his upper arm.
The starburst.
Just like the men back at the miners’ camp. My stomach knots, sudden and tight, as if a fist has just clenched around my chest and begun to squeeze.
Those men are here.
In this town.
I whip around to Pa, who is sliding a coin into his pocket from a recent sale. “That man,” I sputter, voice shaking, eyes starting to water.
He glances to the road, then back to the crate of tonic—only two jars left. But I know he saw the man, heard him shouting up the street. “Don’t pay him any mind.”
“But he’s one of them! He had the brand.”
Pa nods, straightening up and placing a palm against his sore back. “Yes, but he’s only a messenger. Some in their group travel from town to town, preaching about cures and other nonsense.” He grumbles, but I notice a twitch at his temple, a hidden fury he doesn’t want me to see. “Most locals don’t listen to them.”
My hands coil into fists at my sides, anger pulsing behind my eyes. Back at the miners’ camp, I had guessed there were a dozen men, at most. But now I wonder if there are men like them in every town. Every outpost.
“We could go after him,” I press. “Find Odie.”
But Pa shakes his head, eyes glancing up the street. “No, Vega. That horse is long gone, and probably nowhere near Fort Bell.”
I stare up the street, where the man slips into the crowd. Simply amessenger. A Theorist branded like the others, but not one of the men who was with the group that took Odie and all of Pa’s tonic. “He was talking about a cure?” I say, keeping my eyes on the crowd, listening to the last echo of the bell ringing through the air, a pitch that echoes across the buildings and up to the blue, cloudless sky.
Pa leans against the wall of the barbershop, running a hand down his beard, looking exhausted. Like he doesn’t have the strength to worry about a horse who he’ll never see again. To explain to me all the reasons why it’s better to let things be, to not ask questions, to keep quiet and out of trouble. “Lots of people talk about a cure.”
A cure.The word plays against my mind.
Do they think there’s a cure for the consumption?
Instinctively I touch the back of my neck, my fingers trembling.A cure.As if it were that easy. As if a simple tonic, like Pa’s, could rid it from our flesh. Herbs and river water. Paste and clay. “I thought you said the Theorists believe everyone will die?”
“They do,” he answers, looking away from me. “But nothing is as simple as it seems.”
I squint at him, wanting to ask what he means. But a woman walks by, a horse saddle slung over one shoulder, a wad of tobacco in her bottom lip, and she stops to peer into the crate, asking Pa about the tonic. I can hear the low rasp in her breathing, the gravelly exhale. She’s sick, just like the others.
Likeallthe others.
I turn back to the street, the man long gone, but a worryingthrob pulsing behind my eyes. A scrabbling itch under my skin.They think there’s a cure.
The sun finally sinks beyond rooftops, and the woman with the saddle buys the last two jars of tonic, just before dark settles over the town. Pa is quiet, peering down into the empty crate—he will never sell another jar of tonic.
I want to tell him I’m sorry again, as if it were somehow my fault, but I keep the words stuffed down. They won’t fix anything. And I suspect he doesn’t want to hear them.
He hoists the empty crate up into his arms. “I got us two rooms above the Buffalo,” he says. “It’s a saloon.”
The boy who I traded with for the postcard said he stole boots and the spur off a dead man behind the Buffalo Saloon.
“Most of the hotels are full—it was all I could find.”
“Okay.”
