The thing about Aubrey is this: he gets terrible mean. I don’t think he’s always been so but Margaux says yes, he was from the outset, and she doesn’t understand why I allow him to keep creeping into my bed when we make camp. Aubrey is big enough, she says, her eyes like little sparking sapphires, to take care of his own self. Do not trifle, she tells me, with cruel men.

And Aubrey is certainly big, a whole head and a half taller than me, a good palm above the second tallest man traveling with us, brawny and powerful. I am not afraid of him. He scares most everyone else. Certainly the children, when they allow him around. For the most part people try to keep Aubrey busy and put his hard muscles to good work, making wheel axles and hauling logs to start our fires. Aubrey is wild, I tell Margaux, because they make him wild. If you treat a man like an animal, he’s likely to turn into one. We don’t start off bad, I tell Margaux, and she says that Aubrey was one of a kind like that. I don’t like to argue with my sister. She always picks up her hairbrush and runs it through her yellow curls when we fight, and she does it so hard that little gold springs come free and fill up the bristles. It makes me sad because her hair is so beautiful, and there is so little of anything beautiful out here. Here, it is mostly hot or very cold. It is day or night, quick, silent, and the night is when Aubrey comes to me, and when I let him crawl on top of me. I reach for him after sometimes, but he curls up into himself. I look at the moon which always hangs low in the valley and I wonder if we will ever make it to the sea. There is a lonesomeness in me that is getting bigger every mile. I feel sad and I can’t put a finger on it. Aubrey? I say to his huge back. Are you awake?

Don’t you ever quit your questions? he says, spitting the words out at me, even though I haven’t asked nothing else yet. Go to bed.

What if I had a baby in me? I say, one night, just to get him to talk back to me.

He doesn’t talk to me. Not at first. He does roll over, and he gives me an eyeball that is dark and nearly as black as the sky. I think he is going to hit me. I don’t have a baby, I tell him. Quick.

You’d better never have one, Aubrey says. Or you’d best get rid of it before I do.

I don’t know why I let Aubrey have his way with me. I feel bad for him, I suppose. I always had a soft spot for broken creatures. I used to collect gimp rabbits and snapped-winged bluejays back at our farm when I was a girl, thinking I could nurse them into health, love them back into wholeness. Also, Aubrey can’t shoot a gun near as fast as me, and when he found that out, early on in the trip, I thought he’d just about die of humiliation. His face burned red. I just been practicing a lot, I told him, trying to make him feel better. It was true. I had shot a gun since I was toddling age. You’s probably a witch is all, Aubrey said. He told everybody else I was a witch, too, but no one believed it. When I found him sulking by the fire all by himself that night, I said he should go to bed and forget it. He said he didn’t have no blankets to sleep in. He was resting right in the dirt with the rattlesnakes. I couldn’t let him go to bed with rattlesnakes. That’s why I let him in my bed. That first time. It was in the back of our wagon, under some rough wool covers. I know that’s no good reason to get mixed up with any man, because they’re bad with a gun, but it made sense that one night and then I couldn’t get that mean fool to leave.