Impatient With Desire (16 page)

A
ll that just to get us here. All that grief and confusion and chicanery and betrayal and carelessness and death just to get us here to these dull, thudding, stuporous, barely noticeable deaths. Our teamsters lay in their shelter deathlike, and when life left there was hardly a difference. Mrs. Wolfinger might as well have been a ghost for all the life she brought us.

All of this we bring with us. “We will carve out a new country,” we shouted, not realizing that the new country will be no more and no less than the worst and the best of us.

I log deaths. Accidents. When death stalks, do some people go out to meet it? Why do some people lie down and die? How far can a person be pushed until she stops caring about others? I am a schoolteacher doing life and death sums.

W
hen I used all the pages and the end flaps, I went back and found many spaces I had squandered on earlier entries. You can write a whole book in the margins, Betsey. After I carefully cut my journal’s leather cover into strips, its linen underflaps yielded me a vast expanse if I wrote very, very small. I thought it would give me a pang to cut my journal cover, I held off all this time, but it was easy after the Bible. I carefully slit the binding threads. Set the pages aside. Sliced the leather cover into strips. I was so excited when I discovered I could turn my journal ninety degrees and write in between the lines of earlier entries. I trust you can read it, Betsey. I know I should put dates. The days are so alike it is easy to lose track. I try to insist the children mark the calendar, but it is a willed action. I don’t care. If I wanted to find out something, I could figure it out from the calendars. Why would I want to? During the day I keep us all moving on a narrow path, one step at a time, with the possibility at any moment of someone plunging over. It consumes all my energy to keep them, to keep myself, from looking down into the abyss. Sometimes I think I cannot get through one more day. The thought of my waiting journal keeps me going through the cold and the dark. To let go of time and season and place is exquisite freedom for me. I have never known such freedom. The abyss is still out there, but I pick up my pen and like Icarus I soar.

A
nd then another day passed with nothing but water.

I couldn’t coax or prod the children to get up.

Eliza looked at me, her eyes great in her thin face. “I want another flower, Momma.”

“There are no more, Eliza,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She kept looking at me, pleading wrestling with sadness in her face, then she closed her eyes.

I felt something in my heart turn to steel. “Sleep, my little baby,” I said. “Rescue is coming soon.”

O
ne little scrap of the blue calico I had tied on the pole whipped in the wind like a flag shred. Jean Baptiste pulled the pole out of the snow and laid it on the ground.

He and I dug until we reached a body wrapped in a quilt.

“You carry Mr. Shoemaker to the trees,” I said. “I will come as soon as everyone is asleep.”

W
hen I was certain everyone was sleeping, I slipped on my cloak and started to leave.

“Tamsen,” George whispered, startling me. I turned around. “If anyone wakes,” he said, “I will keep them inside.”

I was walking into abomination, and he was at my side walking with me.

Jean Baptiste was waiting by the tree. We built a small fire and, in its shadows, knelt over the figure on the ground.

I unwrapped the quilt. Jean Baptiste gasped, looked as if he might falter.

“He is dead, Jean Baptiste. We are alive.”

For a long, silent moment, I looked at the body, not sure if I was gathering my strength or praying or both.

“But, Mrs. Donner,” Jean Baptiste said, “if we take part of his body, his spirit will never rest.”

“God will help him and us, Jean Baptiste.” I leaned down and said, “Thank you, Samuel.”

With one stroke of the cleaver, I cleaved the breastbone.

Removed the heart and lungs.

I
set down bowls of stew, and Georgia and Eliza gobbled.

Frances looked at the chunks of meat suspiciously and then at me.

I looked steadily back at her. If she asked, I planned to tell her Jean Baptiste had found an ox in the snow.

She took a spoonful and broke the gaze, and her eyes went blank. She continued to spoon stew into her mouth mechanically, her arm completely detached from wherever she had gone.

I offered George a bowl. He shook his head. “Save it for the children,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks before he turned his face away.

Dry-eyed, I ate a bowl of gluey ox hide, remembering the December night when Joseph Reinhardt staggered into our shelter and said he was going to Hell.

We’re already in Hell.

“G
uess what I cooked today,” Elizabeth asked when we pushed open her kitchen door, a streak of flour on her plump cheek, turning back to her oven, without a question or how do you do about the mail-order parcels filling our arms, though our niece and nephews were nearly knocking us over with yells and hugs, barely able to contain themselves until I started untying string. Elizabeth set six steaming pies on a rack, wiped her hands on her apron, cut George half a pie, and said, “Last summer’s berries. I experimented with drying them…”

“Guess what I cooked today,” Elizabeth called to me from her wagon as I made my way to the prairie to botanize and sketch some new specimens. “You know those wild peas you and Mr. Stanton found? Leanna helped me make pickled peas! I saved you a bite. Jacob and the boys just gobbled them down. I said, ‘These are a delicacy.’ Might as well talk to the cat. They don’t care what I make as long as there’s enough of it.”

“Guess what I cooked today,” Elizabeth asked me this evening in a tone on the edge of hysteria, and then answered the question herself in the same bright shrill tone. “Shoemaker’s arm.”

She burst into tears.

Dry-eyed, I rocked her. “Shhh. Shhh. It’s the right thing you’re doing.”

“Do you really think so, Tamsen?” she asked, her eyes wide, as trusting as a child.

“I am certain,” I said and felt her body relax in my arms.

And I am certain. I also feel that something inside of me has changed irrevocably and I will never cry again.

A
nd now the great violation is done once, twice, and as many more times as needed, and all I feel is deep relief that the children are visibly stronger and an equally deep anger.

But anger at whom? Or what?

Not God. I used to feel confident and buoyed that God was guiding my every step, but now I falter too much for that to be true. I don’t think God is thinking about us, Betsey. Does that shock you? At first I prayed a great deal, and though I still pray, it seems clear to me that our hope lies in ourselves and each other.

Not George, though I flooded with anger when he said, How could I do this to you and the children? Of all the things men have kept from women, I have always chafed at their robbing us of the joy and risk of adventure, and for an instant, I actually felt like striking him. But that passed as quickly as it had arisen. George is the most equitable man I have ever met—though sometimes it seems to me that a man who simply acts like a decent human being gets undue praise. I leave it on record that this adventure has gone more horribly wrong than anyone could ever have imagined, and I bear equal blame, as I would have deserved equal credit had it gone right.

Am I just railing at life? Bad fortune? Although I have not eaten human flesh, I feel I’ve become a wild thing. If I looked into Grandmother’s mirror, I would see blood dripping from my sharp teeth.

M
aybe it would be better if I didn’t write my feelings down. The night we couldn’t get wood for two days and the fire went out and the cold went to our very marrow and the darkness seemed absolute, I scribbled all night long thinking, If I put down my pen, I will start screaming and never stop. Whenever my mind gets close to that place, I wrench it away. I don’t ever want to go there again.

Did I tell you that when Jean Baptiste came through the door with wood in his arms, we all sobbed as if he were carrying a newborn baby?

I cannot tell you how deep is my wish to share our experience here with you. With anyone outside these walls of snow. It’s more than a wish. It’s a compulsion. We may die here, Betsey.

My whole life my heart was big with hope and impatient with desire. When anyone ever went anyplace, I always wondered: What will they see? What is there that is not here? What waits for them that I am missing?

I cannot bear it if no one knows what has gone on here. What I have seen. What was waiting for me here that I have not missed.

1847

I
had a peculiar dream last night, Betsey. I was sailing along the water in the most tranquil way. I had been aboard a great sailing ship and gradually realized that I was now on a smaller boat much closer to the sea—perhaps a tender that the ship had provided for us. I lay in a cunning space, in bed but not asleep, this small boat gently bobbing along, rocking me, the water’s surface calm and serene. I looked over and saw George was next to me, though we didn’t talk or touch, the current bearing us along together. I cannot emphasize too much how peaceful it was.

I thought of the baby Moses sailing down the stream.

Occasionally I wondered, Am I on the great sailing ship? No, I would realize, I’m in this smaller conveyance, close to but not on the great ship. Even after I woke up, this was the first thing I wondered, until I realized I lay on my rack in the dark and everyone else was still asleep.

I lay there thinking about the dream, and after some time it came to me that those small cunning spaces George and I lay in were sarcophagi.

Was my body having a presentiment of my death? I thought almost in detachment.

It was only later that day that I remembered from my Greek that
sarcophagus
means flesh-eating.

T
he second relief came today.

James Reed came back, I knew he would if he were alive.

James Reed and three other rescuers started into Elizabeth’s shelter and recoiled. They tied scarves over their mouths and went in. Two came out and vomited in the snow. “Burn it,” James said. “Build them a new one.”

I saw James pull the scarf off his mouth and take a deep breath before he entered our shelter.

When I came in, he was bent near George’s face, speaking quietly. George looked at me. “Take the children and go with James. He says Commander Woodworth is due in a week with a large rescue party. I’ll go with them.”

“We’ll go together then,” I said.

James’s gaze burned into me, and I looked back steadily until he broke the gaze.

James had tears in his eyes as he clasped George’s good arm. “Good-bye, old friend,” he said. “I hope to see you in California.”

George’s eyes were wet too. “Don’t they call California Paradise, James?”

Outside, James put his hand on my arm and spoke with urgency. “George will never reach the settlements.”

“I’ll get my niece and nephews dressed for travel,” I said.

I hurried the three children out of the new tent the men had erected for Elizabeth, the old one still burning nearby.

“I’m leaving Cady and Clark here, Stone at the lake camp,” James said. “One man for each tent to cook and as fast as possible resuscitate the enfeebled, so they might start in a few days with the Third Relief.”

“We’ll be ready,” I said.

There are fourteen of us left in the mountains, five at the lake, nine here.

W
henever I went to Elizabeth’s, the smell of sickness and unwashed bodies lying in their own waste hit me like a slap, but I thought that my tedious insistence that the children wash their faces daily in a bowl of melted snow, my emptying the slop pots daily, weather permitting, had kept our shelter well, it would be laughable to say orderly or clean, but given the circumstances, as clean as possible. Early on, I do recall wanting to get the children outside, away from the smell of unwashed bodies and sickness, but at some point I began thinking of us not like beasts as Elitha said but like bears burrowed in layers of smudged dirt, waiting for spring. It wasn’t until I saw James pause outside our shelter, pull the scarf off his face, and breathe deeply before he entered, that I realized our airless shelter must also smell disgusting. I suppose one can get accustomed to anything. I also realized that I have underestimated James’s sensitivity to George’s and my feelings. Or perhaps he has changed too.

We all came here strangers to ourselves.

T
his morning, washing the girls’ faces with a pan of snow, I said, “Mr. Reed said the Third Relief will be here this week. Maybe a day or two—” I looked up in surprise as Stone entered.

“Good morning, Mr. Stone. I thought Mr. Reed left you at the lake.”

“Where’s Clark and Cady?” Stone said. He seemed very agitated.

“Mr. Clark has gone hunting with Jean Baptiste. Mr. Cady is sleeping. Is there something wrong?”

Mr. Stone spotted Mr. Cady on the platform and roused him. “There’s a bad storm coming,” he said.

Mr. Cady immediately began throwing things into his pack.

“What are you doing?” I said. “You’re not leaving? Why are you leaving? Mr. Reed said Commander Woodworth is on his way.”

They exchanged a look of skepticism and continued packing.

“You can’t leave,” I said.

“We nearly died coming in here, Mrs. Donner,” Mr. Cady said.

“There’s not enough food,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s doubtful Woodworth will ever come—”

“I’ll pay you to deliver my children to their sisters at Sutter’s Fort.”

They looked at each other—panicky, calculating.

“Five hundred dollars,” I said.

Mr. Cady abruptly nodded.

I ran outside, crawled into the decrepit wagon just emerged, jabbed at the rusted cleat in the floor, finally unscrewed it, scooped up all the gold coins, ran back, and gave Mr. Cady the money. “I’ll pack their things—”

“No, we have to leave now,” Mr. Stone said.

“Better count the money,” I said, “make sure it’s correct. Frances, put more clothes on your sisters and yourself.”

I flew around the shelter, frantically gathering items, talking aloud to myself while the coins clinked faster and faster. “The scarlet cloaks for Georgia and Eliza, the matching hoods. Knitted on the Trail, remember? Where’s Frances’s cloak?” I stuffed three silk dresses, silver spoons into a bag. Put the cloaks and hoods on the girls. “You may wear my shawl, Frances, Momma’s big girl, and here’s your bluebird hood. Say good-bye to your father now.”

The girls stood by George’s platform, Georgia and Eliza completely bewildered.

“I love you,” George said.

“We must leave, Mrs. Donner,” Mr. Cady said.

I tried to adjust Georgia’s and Eliza’s hoods, pull the shawl closer around Frances. “It may be a while before I see you again, but God and your sisters will take care of you.”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” Frances said. “If we get lost, I’ll lead Georgia and Eliza back to you by our foot tracks on the snow.”

And then I had all the time in the world to watch the small scarlet and blue shapes trudge behind the men across the snow. Frances is 6 years & 8 months, Georgia 5, and Eliza two weeks shy of 4. “Good-bye,” I said, though they couldn’t hear me. “Good-bye,” I kept saying until my three babies disappeared among the pines.