Mulberry and Peach (9 page)

The airplane sprinkles coloured confetti and flies off down the river.

The boat, separated from us by the churning rapids, glides downstream to the sound of cheering and gongs.

‘Victory, victory, vic ... tory ... tory ...

The echoes of their cheers, the confetti swirl around us and disappear into the river.

‘There are thunderheads on those mountains,' shouts the captain. ‘It's going to rain. We'll float away.'

Dark clouds appear overhead.

Refugee Student, still dressed as the flower drum girl, snatches up a drumstick and pounds on the drum. The drum is thundering.

2 February 1970

 

 

CHARACTERS

PEACH, she tells the Immigration Service agent the story of cannibalism among a group of pioneers trapped in a snow storm for six months by Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains. With her letter she encloses the notebook Mulberry kept in Peking in 1949 when the city was under siege by the Communists.

THE MAN FROM THE IMMIGRATION SERVICE.

 

Dear Sir:

I'm heading west on Interstate 80, just leaving Wyoming's Little America. I found a ride in a camper going to Donner Lake when I was in the gas station diner. The owner of the camper, Mr Smith, just got back from Vietnam. As soon as he got back, he got married. The newlyweds are going to Donner Lake for their honeymoon.

This is the newest model camper trailer. It's a moveable house: living room, bedroom, kitchen. It has every kind of electrical appliance imaginable: refrigerator, stove, air conditioner, heater, TV, radio, stereo, vacuum cleaner. The camper is full of second-hand store antiques: Victorian armchairs with torn satin covers, cracked Chinese vases (made in the reign of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor in the Ch'ing Dynasty), filthy sheepskin wine bags from Spain, fuzzily engraved silver platters from Iran, rusty Turkish swords, chipped Indian powder horns. A picture of a naked woman wearing a man's tophat is painted
on the outside of the camper. She is kneeling with her back turned, head to one side looking over her shoulder, smiling. Her body is mapped in different coloured sections, labelled like a butcher's chart: ribs, loin, rump, soup, bone, chuck, shank.

Here I am, Peach, sitting in this honeymoon trailer writing you a letter. Mr Dark, you can see this trailer from far away. I'm sending you a map, too, to show you where I've been and where I'm going. If you want to chase me, then come on.

There are too many roads to explore. There are too many interesting things to tell you: changing scenery, changing climate, different animals (Wyoming's mountain goats, Utah's deer, wolves on the plains, foxes, jack rabbits ...), so many different people. The further west you go, the friendlier the people get. In the East, not even little children will pay attention to you, but in the West, even policemen wave! (Mulberry, who is scared to death of the police, would faint at that!) In New York, you're only another worn-out foreigner, like thousands of others.

I've found out that I'm not the only hitchhiker. All along the highway, many lonely people are standing by the roadside, trying to thumb a ride. Some cars stop for you, some keep right on going. If you catch a driver's eye, he'll wave (they always wave at miniskirted girls on motorcycles, or bored children in backseats about to fall asleep), lightly lifting his hand from the steering wheel, waving, then lowering his hand; drivers always wave that way: solemn and self-assured.

Of course, it's dangerous. Someone in Colorado said to me, ‘A woman hitchhiking alone! Didn't you see the newspaper yesterday? Several girls hitchhiking were killed; the murderer cut out their hearts and ate them, and then threw their bodies over a cliff. And then there was the male hitchhiker who disappeared; they found his clothes floating in the river, but they never found his body. There were some young people hitchhiking and . . .' I've heard a lot of those stories.

I just got a ride in Rock Springs, Wyoming during a blizzard with a very strange man. After I got in the car, he couldn't stop laughing. ‘Aren't you afraid of me, uh, Little Woman? Ha, ha, ha!' (He was even shorter than I am!) When he wasn't laughing, he was making strange noises: ‘Wu-wu-wu-', like a yelping coyote. Then he would slide next to me and say, ‘Do you know how porcupines have sex? Uh, Little Woman? Do you know how porcupines have sex? Wu-wu-.' The only time he stopped laughing was when the road got icy. Then he concentrated on driving. Waves of swirling snow billowed in front of us. His expression became serious. ‘I can't hear the tyres hitting the
pavement. That means black ice has formed on the road. This road will be the death of someone yet.' We struggled over that road all the way to Little America. From the distance we could see the huge billboard-

 

FOOD AND GAS

 

Before the car came to a complete stop, I jumped out and waved good-bye to the little porcupine. There was a nice diner at the gas station. The owner used to be a truck driver and had been stranded there in a blizzard many years ago. So he opened a rest stop on the very place. People passing through stop to eat and get gas. Inside the diner was all red; red walls, red lights, red carpet. But the tables were black. Blonde waitresses wove back and forth among the black tables. I sat down at an empty table near the door. A young couple at the table next to mine smiled at me; perhaps they smiled because I was a foreigner. We began to chat. They told me they were going to Donner Lake for their honeymoon. As soon as he started talking about Donner Lake, Mr Smith got excited, as if it were the most beautiful place in the world. Before he was sent to Vietnam, he went ice-skating every winter at Donner Lake.

He told me that Donner Lake is an important point between California and Nevada. Transcontinental highways pass through there. You can also get there by train. The trains have special equipment which protect them from being buried by avalanches. Or, if you want, you can abandon modern machines and get there on horseback, taking trails through the mountains to the lake.

Donner Lake lies in the basin of a valley. It's surrounded by mountains several thousand metres high. In the summer the lake is a green mirror reflecting forests of willow and pine. Quail, grouse, and antelope live there. The pure lake water reflects mountains capped with glittering snow, brooks, wild-flowers, and granite slabs. In the winter, Donner Lake is the West's largest skating rink. The mountains echo with bells from the ski lift and with the skaters' laughter on the lake. Everyone there is relaxed and carefree, looking for a good time.

It was getting dark. The snow fell harder; gust after gust of whistling wind and swirling snow. Someone in the diner put a quarter in the juke box and several young people started singing along with the Beatles' ‘Blackbird'.

Mr Smith said that the wind and snow reminded him of the story about the Donner Party. I asked him what the Donner Party was. He explained that it was a group of California-bound pioneers who were stranded, snowbound by the lake for six months. After that, the lake was called Donner Lake.

This is the story: In 1846, ‘California Ho!' was a catchy phrase. The Gold Rush hadn't started yet and there was no overland route west. About one hundred people from the Midwest formed a group to go to California and Mr Donner was elected leader of the party. They started out in the spring, crossing valleys and deserts where there were no roads, pushing on through settlements of hostile Indians. When they reached Donner Lake it was the end of October. They found themselves facing towering cliffs. Winter set in earlier than usual that year. The oxen slowed down as they pulled the wagons, looking for grass under the snow. They could see that the pine forests on the mountains in the distance had already turned white. A blizzard was coming. They abandoned the wagons. They left the cattle to fend for themselves. They went on foot with the children and horses, trying to get through the mountain pass. It was hard for them to throw away the things they had brought with them. A tin of tobacco, a bolt of cloth: it took a long time to decide what to get rid of. They needed to rest. Then they started to climb the mountain in the snow. By evening they weren't far from the top. But it was too cold and they were too tired and they couldn't go on. They finally got a fire started and nothing could make them leave the fireside. They lay in the snow and fell asleep. While sleeping one of the men felt a weight pressing so heavily on his chest that he couldn't breathe. He woke and discovered he was buried in the snow. The people and the animals had vanished; around him was a vast expanse of whiteness. He yelled. Heads poked up through the snow. The animals were scattered. Snow blocked the pass.

They climbed down to the valley and built several small huts beside the lake. Again and again they struggled to cross the mountain and when they failed, they would climb back down. When the food supply ran out, they. ate wild animals. Later they couldn't even find wild animals to eat. Blizzard followed blizzard. They were starving and didn't have the energy to gather firewood. After one month, the snow
was piled up eight feet high, as tall as their huts. The winter had just begun. Some of them collapsed from hunger and cold. Some died. They tried to think of ways to escape. They used the U-shaped ox yokes to make snow shoes. Whether they tried to escape or whether they remained there, death was certain. Those who tried to escape struggled with fate. Those who remained were resigned to the will of heaven. Their fate was the same, but they responded differently. Some gave in and some didn't.

Ten men, five women, and two boys set out wearing the ox-yoke snow shoes. They spent several days climbing the mountain. Wind and snow kept coming and they were snowbound again. Later the place where they were stranded was called the Death Camp. Bitter cold, exhaustion, hunger. They lay in the snow beside the fire. Those who fell asleep had their hands burnt to a crisp. Several people died. Those who survived starved for five days. Then someone chopped off the legs and arms of the corpses and roasted them over the fire. As they ate, they turned their heads aside and cried. After two days, even those who had refused to eat human flesh in the beginning were eating it. There was only one rule: they wouldn't eat the flesh of their own kin. One girl stared wide-eyed at her little brother's heart which was stuck on a twig, roasting over the fire. A wife agreed that the others could eat her husband's corpse in order to save them from starvation. They cut off as much flesh as they could eat; the rest was made into jerky. Two men discovered deer tracks in the snow and they knelt down and wept and prayed, although they really weren't religious. They killed the deer and lay on top of its body, lapping up its blood. They sucked the deer dry and their faces were smeared with blood. (Too bad that Mulberry, who is scared by the sight of blood, couldn't have heard this story!) After thirty-three days, they finally reached safety. Only two men and five women were left.

Back by the lake, more people were dying. Others tried to escape. One mother set out alone so that her child could have her share of the food. They lived in the snowpit, subsisting on animal skins, bones, and rats. The children slurped spoonfuls of snow from fine porcelain teacups and pretended it was pudding. Everyone lay in his own little hut. Going to others' huts became an important affair.

A man named Boone kept a diary. He referred to the people in the other huts as strangers. The rescue team finally reached them in February. One woman, crying, asked if they had fallen down from heaven. Snow blocked the mountain pass and was still falling. A group of women and children, the sick and the weak, went with a rescue team.
Two men, three women, and twelve children remained at the lake. They didn't have the strength to leave.

When the remaining survivors at Donner Lake had eaten the last animal skin, they dug up the corpses of those who had died of starvation and ate them. In March, a second rescue team arrived. As the rescue team approached, they saw a man carrying a human leg. When the man saw them coming, he threw the leg down into a pit in the snow. At the bottom of the pit lay several heads so frozen that their faces were not distorted, torsos with legs and arms missing, chests ripped open, hollow where the hearts were dug out. Outside Donner's tent several children were sitting on logs, blood smeared on their mouths and chests. They were holding their father's heart, tearing off pieces to eat. They did not respond when they saw the rescue party. Around the fire were strewn bones, hair, and pieces of the limbs. The children's mother was lying in the hut. To save the children she told them to eat anything they could. But as for herself, she wouldn't eat her husband's flesh even if it meant she would starve to death.