Sophie's Journey - Chapter 33
Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie appeared on the prairie, gray against the morning sky. Sophie saw the adobe walls, the timber stockades, the American flag hanging in the still air. Her shoulders ached in the harness. Her feet burned in shoes tied with twine. Still, she felt something move in her chest. Hope.
"Mother," Peter said, his voice faint with exhaustion. "Is that Fort Laramie?"
"That's the fort," Sophie said.
Emma stumbled beside the cart. Her feet were swollen and bloody. She kept her eyes down. Anne and Otto rode in the cart, where Sophie had placed them after miles of walking.
The company straggled toward the fort in ragged columns. Four wagons rolled behind them-the Independent Wagons, they were called, owned by families who had paid their own way, not part of the handcart company proper but traveling in its shadow for safety.
Sophie had watched them for weeks, their oxen growing leaner, their teams faltering in the same sand which swallowed the handcart wheels. Now the oxen moved at a crawl, heads low, ribs showing through patchy hides.
Brother Levi Savage walked past her, his eyes focused on the fort's walls. He did not look hopeful. He looked like a man confirming a suspicion.
"Brother Savage," Sophie called. "They'll have supplies for us, won't they? The Church would have sent-"
"They'll have what they have," Savage said, not breaking stride. "And they'll have reasons for what they don't."
The gates to the fort opened. Inside it smelt of horse dung, woodsmoke, and the putrid air of too many men in one place. Soldiers watched from the parapets, their faces curious and pitying. Sophie hated that look. She had seen it in Florence, in Iowa City, in the eyes of merchants who sold overpriced supplies to Saints who did not know better.
Captain Willie rode ahead on his horse, his back straight despite the exhaustion she had watched accumulate in his face for weeks. He dismounted at the commissary office and disappeared inside. The company waited within the dusty yard, too tired to sit, too hungry to rest.
Sophie unhitched herself from the cart and gathered her children in the shade of the palisade wall. The wall was warm from the sun. Anne reclined against it, her eyes closed, her breathing light. Emma sat on the ground and unwound the rags from her feet. The blisters had broken and bled again, the skin raw and weeping. Sophie looked away.
The sun ascended in the sky. Soldiers brought buckets of brackish water. Sophie made her children drink slowly, though they wanted to gulp. A trader in a greasy buckskin coat walked past the carts, looking for something to buy, but there was nothing left.
Then Captain Willie emerged. Sophie knew before he spoke. His jaw was set. His hands hung at his sides. He looked like a man who had lost an argument with God. The Saints surged forward. Children huddled against their parents' legs. The four Independent Wagon families stood apart, their faces already guarded.
"The supply depots are empty," Willie said. No preamble. No softening. "The Church wagons that should have met us here were never stationed. What stores came from the Valley were unloaded at Deer Creek, further west, or turned back when the early companies passed. No flour is waiting for us. No beef. No shoes."
A murmur ran through the crowd, not quite a cry. Too many had learned to swallow their grief.
"But we aren't without resources," Willie continued. "I have spoken with the sutlers. The military commissary holds small stores. I have traded what I could-personal effects, trinkets, silver spoons-to purchase what they would sell."
He motioned. Two men rolled barrels into view. Sophie counted. Two barrels for five hundred people.
"A small quantity of flour," Willie said. "And two barrels of hardtack. Hard bread. It is not enough. It will never be enough. But it is what we have."
Sophie looked at the barrels. She did the math in her head. Miles, rations, days. Two barrels. Peter slipped his hand into hers. His fingers were cold and thin.
"Additionally," Willie said, "the Independent Wagons can proceed no further. Their draft cattle are lost or exhausted. The four wagons will remain here at Fort Laramie to await the Hodgetts Wagon Company, which follows behind us. They will not travel with the handcart company beyond this point."
A voice rose from the wagon families-a woman's protest, quickly hushed. Sophie turned to see a man in a broad-brimmed hat helping his wife down from their wagon seat. Their children hung onto the tailgate. The man looked at Captain Willie with something worse than anger. Resignation.
"We cannot wait for them," Willie said. "We cannot carry them. The handcarts move light, or they do not move at all."
Sophie remembered the broken wagons left in the grass west of Florence. Families had walked away from what they could not carry. Now it was happening again.
Standing forlornly by the supply wagon, Sophie saw the young widow, Sister Empey, holding her nine-month-old baby, Sarah Jane, close to her chest. Her three older children, William, James, and little Mary Ann, were hanging on to her skirt, their eyes empty and staring. Her face appeared gaunt, her eyes hollow-looking from widowhood, but her voice remained steady. "What of the flour? What of the ration?"
Willie looked at her. Sophie saw the cost of what he was about to say written in the lines around his mouth.
"A meeting," he said. "This evening. All heads of family. We will divide what we have. And we will discuss... adjustments."
He did not say the word reduction. He did not need to.
They held the meeting amid the dusty parade grounds while the sun set. Sophie left her children with Marianne, who sat against the wall with her shawl tight. Sophie remained at the back of the crowd, arms crossed against the cold. Captain Willie climbed onto a crate. A sack of flour was at his feet. A lantern cast his shadow on the wall.
"Here are the numbers," he said. He had forever been a man for numbers. "We have four hundred and twenty miles to the Valley. Perhaps more, depending on the route through the mountains. We have what flour I purchased today, plus the remaining stores from Florence. At sixteen ounces per person per day, the flour lasts until..."
He paused. Sophie watched him do the math in his head, the same cruel arithmetic she had performed a hundred times in the dark hours of the night.
"Until we are still three weeks short of Salt Lake," Willie finished. "At best. At current pace, with the sand and the weather that Brother Savage tells me is turning, we will run out of flour on the Sweetwater. Or before."
Peder Mortensen stood near the front, leaning on his cane. He did not speak, but Sophie saw his jaw tighten. Five, she knew he was thinking—five deaths, and more to come.
"The alternative," Willie said, "is to stretch what we have. Reduce the daily ration now, while we still have stores, rather than reach empty sacks with mountains still ahead."
He lifted a tin cup. "Twelve ounces. Per person. Per day. Starting tomorrow."
"And the children?" someone called.
"Children under twelve," Willie said. "Eight ounces."
Twelve ounces. Sophie sensed the number settling in her stomach like a stone. Twelve ounces. Sixteen ounces had barely kept them standing. Sixteen ounces had not saved Jesse Empey. Twelve ounces was not enough.
Sophie closed her eyes. Emma was six. Otto was two now. Anne was four. Peter was ten, nearly eleven. “Eight ounces of flour per day. How can my children survive on eight ounces?” she said to no one in particular.
"Captain Willie," Captain Siler spoke from the front. "The people are already weak. The sick."
"The sick will get what the sick get," Willie said, cutting him off, his voice harsh with exhaustion. "I am not choosing between the strong and the weak, Captain. I am choosing between a slow death and a faster one. Twelve ounces stretches the stores. Twelve ounces gives us a chance to reach the relief wagons that must be coming from the Valley. Twelve ounces-" He stopped. His shoulders dropped. When he spoke again, his speech was hardly audible. "Twelve ounces is all the math allows."
"And if the relief wagons don't come?" Peder Mortensen asked. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "If the Valley sent nothing, or if what they sent is frozen on the other side of the mountains? What then, Captain Willie? What do your numbers say about twelve ounces in a blizzard?"
Willie looked at him. For a long moment, the two men held each other's gaze- the captain who had taken them into this, and the Dane who had counted every step of the way.
"Then we die closer to Zion than we would have," Willie said. "And that is the only mercy I can offer."
Sophie walked back to her children in the dark. Lanterns lit the packed earth. A soldier laughed at a card game. The sound appeared far away.
She found Marianne where she had left her, still staring at nothing. The children slept in a quilt nest. Peter had his arm around Emma. Anne and Otto curled together, small and quiet.
"Twelve ounces," Marianne said, not raising her eyes. "It is a death sentence, Sophie."
"It is our daily bread," Sophie said. "And our daily bread is all we are promised."
Marianne laughed, a dry, cracked sound. "You sound like Captain Willie."
"I sound like a woman with four children who need to reach the mountains before the snow." Sophie sat next to her, her back against the palisade wall. The wood was cold through her dress. "Where is the flour?"
"By Captain Willie's tent. Under guard."
Sophie nodded. In the morning, she would take her cloth bag and get her portion. She would divide it carefully. Peter would get a little more because he pulled. Emma, Anne, and Otto would get equal shares. She would mix the flour with water, make a paste, and watch her children eat slowly, chewing each mouthful many times, trying to feel full.
"Do you remember Gentofte?" Marianne asked suddenly. "The market days? The bread stalls?"
"I remember," Sophie said.
"So much bread," Marianne whispered. "Piles of it. Warm and brown and cheap. We walked past it to buy passage on a ship. We left bread behind to come here, to this fort, to twelve ounces of flour."
Across the yard, Sophie saw Captain Willie moving among the carts in the dark. He stopped at each one, his hand on the wood, his lips quivering in prayer or counting. He had bartered his spoons and trinkets, the small things from England. He had bought two barrels of hardtack and a sack of flour. He called it hope.
She watched him until he disappeared inside the darkness of the supply wagon. Then she lay down next to her children, pulling the worn quilt over them all, feeling Emma's thin ribs rise and fall against her side.
Twelve ounces of flour. How had it come to this? Sophie closed her eyes and prayed the only prayer she had left: “Lord, save my children.”
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