Not sleeping and on the verge of calling out for the busy couple in the loft to keep quiet was a woman who had strained her back. She’d been too eager earlier in the day to help her horse negotiate the steep descent into the valley and had fallen awkwardly. She sat up in her cot and flexed her spine, hoping not to wake the woman at her side. The pain shot down the outside of her left leg and cramped her toes. She crossed her fingers, willing it to go, and in a while the pain disappeared…

Not sleeping was the ferryman, who, having heard the rain, knew that he would have to drag himself from bed too soon, call his four sons, and go down to the crossing to fasten the raft more securely and farther in to the shore before the water surge. Not sleeping were the baker and his daughter, who had just got up to start preparing flatbread, ash cake, and pea loaf for the morning, enough dough and cornmeal for at least one hundred and sixty passengers, who’d need to eat before they were ferried on the raft to the east bank of the river and yet another day of lugging to the coast…

Not sleeping was a woman who had been alarmed by travel and by travelers — all her life — and was not much liked by anyone she met, but who had been much more terrified of staying put where she was born while all her family and neighbors emigrated east, fired up by boredom, hope, and poverty. Now she was sick from too much wayside grain and drinking sullied water for more than a month. She’d rather breathe her last than gag anymore, she’d told her husband: “I should have stayed at home.” He’d said, “You should have.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and tried to belch the colic out…

Not sleeping was a tall man from the plains — not quite a giant, except to boys — who had to go out, barefooted, in the cold to the town palisade for the second time that night to urinate. He would have worn his goatskin coat if he’d not traded it that day. He was standing with his trousers down and pissing apple juice when what had come out of the lake with such a show just moments previously arrived without a sound and almost without a shape to overwhelm whomever it could find, the wakeful and the slumbering.

This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth.

One

Franklin Lopez had not been sleeping in Ferrytown, though he’d wanted to. He’d not been sleeping anywhere, in fact. Couldn’t sleep. He’d weathered such pain the day before that he’d been forced to consider what anyone (other than his brother) who’d seen the wincing recoil in his limp or examined his inflamed leg had already told him, that he shouldn’t walk another step. Certainly he shouldn’t walk downhill on such a long and hazardous gradient, unless he wanted to damage his knee beyond repair and put paid to any hopes of getting to the coast and boarding ship before the worst of the fall storms. He and his brother, Jackson (named for their parents’ small hometown on the plains), had left the journey rather late as it was. Too late, perhaps. The prairie tall-grass had already whitened and buckled. Apart from nuts and mushrooms, there was little free food to be gathered at the trackside. The first rains had arrived, and soon the winds and snow would get to work. Traveling would become more hazardous and then impossible. Only the ill-prepared, the ill-fated, and the ill-timed were still strung out thinly along the previously busy route, hoping to make the final sailings before ice and squalls shut down the sea, and anyway made shore-to-ship or ship-to-shore impossible. The wayside going east was already littered with the melancholy camps and the shallow graves — soon to be torn up by wolves — of those whose bodies couldn’t take the journey, those who had been fatally chilled by wading through rivers, those who had starved and weakened, those who had been thrown by their horses or poisoned by their suppers, those who had been crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

Feet failed first; nothing could prepare the feet for this. Then the stomach gave way, soured by ditch and pond water and the usual makeshift meals of hardtack, jerked meat, pine nuts, and scrapple — and, in the brothers’ case on one occasion, a stew made from a hand-caught rabbit too diseased to run away, with nettle tops as greens. And if the stomach survived that, then the less sturdy travelers were betrayed by bones and joints, starting at their knees and working upward, pain on pain, through hips, up spine, and into the shoulders and the neck until there was nothing left to sour, fail, or be betrayed except the soft pith of the head. Once summer turned and limped away, its sack crammed full of leaves, the route was challenging. Within a month, the weather would have mugged the final stragglers and the roads and ways would be empty again, untrodden till spring.

So Franklin understood that he could not readily afford to waste much time nursing such a slight injury. But neither could he afford the purchase of a horse or passage on a wagon where he could rest his leg. What should he do, then? Cut a stick and limp down to the coast? “Just put up with the pain,” as Jackson advised? Carry on regardless, let nature take its course? He’d tried the stick, the putting up with pain; he’d trusted nature’s course. His knee got worse. So finally he conceded. He’d have to find shelter and stay exactly where he was, high in the ridges, to sit out the swelling. It was an exasperating setback and something that he was slow to tell his brother. But what other choice was there? His knee was too bloated to bend and too painful to take any weight. The flesh between his ankle and his thigh was sausaging with every step he took. The skin was stretched and cloudy. One more afternoon of walking could lame him for a month. A day or two of rest might rescue him. Besides, this injury was not a failure that he should feel ashamed of, no matter what the stiff expression on his brother’s face seemed to suggest. He’d done better than some to get so far — more than sixty testing days of walking from the battered, weather-poisoned village of his birth — without much damage beyond the usual aches and pains, the usual broken skin, and this damned knee, he told himself. He’d be a fool to take any chances now if he wanted to enjoy the undulating rewards of the sailboat deck, and then to put ashore this year in the other place, whatever that might be, with his pith intact enough to make a good start.

“It’d be crazy to take the risk, Jacko,” he told his brother at last, coloring with self-consciousness as he spoke. He was still prone to being seized by sudden, girlish reddeners whenever he least wanted it.

“Only the crazy make it to the coast” was the older man’s reply. Yes, that was the wisdom of the road: you had to be crazy enough to take the risks, because the risks were unavoidable. “Well, then, Franklin Lopez? You say.”

“I’ve said.”

“So say it again.”

“Well, do what you want, if you’re the crazy one. I’m staying here till it’s good enough, my knee.”

“How long’s ‘till’?”

“Three days, four days, I guess.”

“I guess a month!”

Franklin knew better than to argue with his volcanic brother. He did not even shake his head. He watched Jackson mull over their problem for a few moments more, his eyes half closed, his lips moving, his fingers counting days. “That knee’ll snare us here a month — if not a month, then half a month. Too long,” Jackson added finally. “By then the winter’ll be on us like a pack of wolves. You hear me, little brother?” Little brother? Less in everything. “You sit down now, then that’s the end of it. We’re carrion.”

This was their final argument, the last of many, with Franklin daring to protest that his “crazy” brother should press on to the coast without him (but not meaning it — who’d want to be abandoned to the winter and the woods, to be buried, along with the trail, beneath layers of mud, leaves, and snow, even if it meant a few days free of bullying and censure?) and Jackson insisting that he’d stick by his infuriating, timid, blushing sibling till the last if he really had to (but resenting Franklin’s physical weakness, his infuriating, girlish laugh that seemed to buckle his whole body, his dreaminess, his hypochondria, and saying so repeatedly—“That bitching knee’s not half as bad as you make out,” and “Where’d we be if every time you got a touch of charley horse you wanted three days’ rest?”—until Franklin said, “Ma’s hearing every word you speak”).