True Sisters by Sandra Dallas

Author:Sandra Dallas [Dallas, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 9781617939259
Google: cmwCmSB1KXQC
Amazon: 1617939250
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-03-14T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

October 20, 1856

Nannie Macintosh made her way out of the tent, past a group of Saints sleeping under a shelter. She stepped on something in the dark, and glancing down, she made out a man’s arm under her shoe. She mumbled an apology, but he did not respond, and Nannie thought that she had not awakened him. Then she realized the arm was as solid as a rock. He was dead. He had frozen in the night.

She did not shudder. Just a few months ago, she would have been horrified at stumbling over a dead man, at the unbreathing quiet, but there had been so much death along the trail that it no longer moved her. Once, she had awakened each morning filled with joy. Now she was grateful just to wake at all. Nannie wondered if the man’s wife felt as she did, because the woman snored beside her husband, her arm carelessly thrown across his body. Perhaps she did not know that he had died. Let her sleep, Nannie thought. The rest would do her more good than the knowledge that her husband was no longer among the living. Nannie wondered if there were others in the tent who slept that same eternal sleep.

She shivered as she walked through the snow, which was still falling. It had settled over the carts, until they appeared like great white humps of sheep, reminding her of those she had seen in the fields of Scotland. Andrew had left the cart in a protected place, and now Nannie wondered how she would find the vehicle. They all looked alike under the powdery white. Other Saints were up before her. Some had started fires with fuel they had saved from the night before, but they were hard put to keep the flames going. Men used flint to start the fires, but the women were not so adept at that and preferred lucifers. Just as soon as one flared up, however, the wind blew it out, and the women were reluctant to light another of the precious matches.

It ought to be morning by now, Nannie thought, glancing back in the direction of the river, but the dark had thinned only a little. She scanned the carts, clapping her cold hands as she looked for her own vehicle, but she could not see it in the winter gloom. She and Ella and Andrew had been among the first to cross the river, and they had left their cart near a stand of willows. They’d thought the trees with yellow leaves still clinging to the branches would be easy to spot in the morning and would give the cart a little protection, but even trees were difficult to make out in the snow now. Nannie trudged along the lines of vehicles, remembering what a soldier at the fort had told her—that people grew disoriented in the snow, confused about direction, and fell down and froze to death, although they were not ten feet from safety. The storm did not seem to be that bad now, however.

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