Snow Mountain Passage (19 page)

This is the part Jim wants to hear, about the land, how Sutter found it, and so much of it, countless thousands of acres. But the story has wandered into the night, with asides and anecdotes and laborious digressions. The brandy fumes have reached Jim’s brain and plugged his ears. He listens but can scarcely hear. He glances at Mac, whose eyes are slits, whose long torso is bent, in shadow. Only his face and arm are seen, a cupped hand beneath the chin.

When Sutter pauses to drink, Mac’s eyelids lift with great effort. “Good night,” he mumbles.

“What’s that?” says Sutter.

“Good night, sweet prince … and flocks of angels sing thee to thy sleep …”

The eyes have closed. In the half flight of flickering lamps, Mac’s wide, bearded face looks like the disembodied carving of a head upon a pedestal.

Sutter’s tale is all for Jim, who sits up straight blinking, blinking, straining to take it in. Words come toward him, in broken clumps.

“At Yerba Buena we hired a schooner …”

“… two weeks on the Sacramento River …”

“… a kingdom of savages, Mr. Reed …”

Jim’s body has filled with sand. Though he hears the voice, the words mean nothing. His eyes droop. His lids have a will of their own. They slowly close. His shoulders slump, his body folding like a sack of grain.

Jim’s chin falls against his chest.

M
ANUIKI IS WAITING
in the bedroom. She hears him talk. She waits to hear the voices of the others, and to hear the wide door creaking open as they leave. There is only Sutter’s voice, then his bootsteps heavy across the floorboards.

He falls against the bedroom door, lunges in, colliding with the bed, and she knows that once again his guests have been left dozing at the table. Still talking, he fumbles with his boots. He falls backward upon the mattress and lies there looking at the ceiling while he tells a story she has heard before but barely follows, too many words she does not know. Names she has no faces for. She listens to the sounds. She knows the word “commander” means a famous chief.

“When he buys my fort we can move away … just you and me … move to the farm, Manuiki … Ma … nu … i … ki.”

He rolls against her. She smells the reek of liquor on his breath, feels his hands upon her body, pressing, sliding. She knows his hands will soon be still. His voice is thick and getting smaller, going away, a thin voice breaking into pieces. At last it stops. The searching hands settle, one upon her bosom, one upon her neck. His breath goes softly in and out, and it is quiet in the upstairs room, quiet in the house, quiet in the compound and around the fort and in the corrals outside the fort.

One sound rises in the valley night, a husky groaning call from the village out beyond the grain fields, a chanting call of many voices, mixed with shouts and wails from the dance house of the village. She did not understand the story of the man wheezing next to her, but she understands this, the distant voices rising late. They touch her. They are not the chants and songs from the islands of her youth. But they have the same feeling, from the same place in the heart and in the throat, as they celebrate the new points of grass brought forth by the first weeks of rain. All day, all night they dance and chant and sing to the rain and the earth and the grass, and their song draws other voices. In Manuiki’s heart and in her throat she hears them. They gather in the air.

Her mother.

Her grandmother.

Her
tutu.

Her
kupuna.

She throws the cover back and steps to the window and opens it and listens to the voices from the dance house and other voices traveling across the water to speak to her in the long night. They call her back. She listens, and silent tears fall as she sees her mother on the day the chief told them Manuiki was to go with this man, John Sutter. Soon she found herself upon the water, bound for a place she had heard of in the voice of the chanter, bound for
kaleponi,
beyond the water, in the direction of the rising sun.

Sutter gave the chief a piece of paper, and the chief gave him ten kanaka, and they all came to the Bay of San Francisco, and up the wide river with nine white sailors, the kanakas rowing in the first boat and Captain Sutter in among them, pointing, talking. She thought he knew where they were going. Her mother told her white men must be wise because their boats are so large. In his own land, her mother said, this man must be a great chief.

On the river Manuiki saw that he did not know where he was going, and her fear was great. For days they saw no people, though white feathers hung from the trees. Clumps of feathers dangled from the branches, telling them the river people watched. One day the bank was filled with men painted black and red and yellow. She feared that she would die at the hands of the river people. But the captain went ashore and spoke and offered gifts. The kanakas lifted their oars again and rowed upstream, and at last the captain found a place to land. They made houses there from river grass, kanaka houses, island houses. The men found slender limbs to weave. Manuiki gathered grasses as soft as
pili
grass. In the heat they worked while welcome breezes came up the river with the salty smell of the bay and the sea.

The river people stood and watched the grass houses rise, until the captain fired his cannon. Then they cried out and ran away….

A clatter breaks her reverie. She hears a door open. The two men stumble down the stairs. She sees them veer across the compound and find the barracks and stagger inside, scolding the doorway and the darkness. It is quiet again around the fort.

She knows that tomorrow these men will be gone. But where do they go? Where do they come from? So many men moving. How far do they ride? The tall one, she can tell, has a body made of iron. But he will not ride far. He has a sickness. So many men are sick. The older one has a good spirit, but there is too much hunger in his eyes. These white men, their eyes never rest. Their eyes burn.

She sees her father on the rocks, hurling his net to gather in the fish. Her father’s eyes are liquid. Steady pools. She sees her mother.

She hears the tribal voices in the night, the groans and shouts and keening wails. The river is low. The salty, fishy smell of the sea drifts northward from the bay, and she knows how the island voices reach her. They come with the water. She knows now how the voices will return, and how she will follow them. One day. This river flows into the bay, and the bay opens into the sea, and the sea is a wide, wide road….

T
HE SHORTEST ROUTE
is downriver. But Sutter’s vessel left four days ago, his schooner loaded with wheat and emigrant families, wives and children bound for the coastal valleys. Nothing else sails for a week, they say. Perhaps two. Or three. Jim can’t sit still that long. He is like Sutter trying to reach California from the Columbia River in midwinter. He has to keep moving, even if it means taking the long way round.

He’ll ride on down past the maze of delta lands where the two great rivers converge and feed mountain runoff into the bay. It is large enough, they say, to be an inland sea, a two-day sail from one end to the other, a bay so wide and deep, he has heard, that whales cavort as if it is their private swimming hole. He’ll skirt the lower edge, by way of San Jose Pueblo, then head north up the long peninsula to the port of Yerba Buena where the U.S. forces have their anchorage.

He leaves Mac hungover in the bunkhouse, Mac who wakes with a moan and swears before God and all the hosts of heaven that he will never taste another drop of liquor until the day he dies. He is going to join the Temperance Union and help other men to put away this vile habit.

“And I am your earthly witness,” says Jim, whose tongue is thick and head seems filled with broken ice.

They’re splitting up. Mac will ride across the valley, through the coastal mountains to Sonoma, where there’s another U.S. garrison. Ranchers out that way might be willing to help, according to Sutter.

Mac looks gray, perhaps from drink. In the predawn chill Jim heard his cough, a deep, wet, wracking early-morning cough.

“Where’ll we meet up?” Mac asks.

“Hard to say. Back here, most likely.”

“You mean the fort?”

“Or could be Yerba Buena.”

“I haven’t been there.”

“Nor have I,” says Jim.

“Where in Yerba Buena?”

The way his head throbs, Jim can barely think. “You stay put in Sonoma. I’ll send a letter when I can.”

“A month from now.”

“Good.”

“That’d make it Christmas Day.”

“Or thereabouts.”

“Sooner, if you can.”

“Yes, sooner,” Jim says. “Sooner would be fine with me. But in the meantime you lay low right here a day or two. You hear me? You need the rest.”

Jim should take his own advice. Slumped in the saddle, he sees nothing until the sun is halfway up the sky. He does not note the shriveled grin of the decapitated Miwok bearing witness from his perch above the gate, nor does he note the Nisenan sentries standing guard in threadbare jackets, shouldering their ancient muzzle-loaders. He sees nothing but the ten feet of trail in front of him, sometimes puddled, sometimes damply dry. The rains that began a month ago have continued off and on. So far, the flat earth has soaked up most of it.

As the sun climbs, as his head clears, he begins to notice the fecund land, the many oaks, the fields of wild oats, with stalks as high as his stirrups. He has been told to watch for grizzlies, but has seen none yet. He sees a herd of elk grazing like cattle, a thousand animals, perhaps two thousand, spread across the plain, elk as thick as the largest herd of buffalo they spied back in Nebraska. Some bulls have wing-shaped antlers scooping outward. Where water stands in marshy wetlands a multitude of geese come rising from beyond a tule forest. They lift and rise, white geese with black-tipped wings, their slender necks extended as if invisible leashes pull them toward the sky.

It is a paradise of creatures here, deer and elk and cranes and pigeons, jackrabbits, geese beyond the counting. With his eyes Jim sees it all. Yet he does not see. His mind roams other country, unable to take much pleasure in this great show.

As his head clears, the weight of their predicament comes bearing down upon him. Margaret and the children trapped. George and Tamsen too, and their five girls. Charlie Stanton. Milt Elliott. Bill and Eleanor Eddy and their two young ones. The whole company stuck somewhere and no way for him or anyone else to reach them. Not for weeks, John Sutter says. Nor can he find a horse to borrow, buy, or steal. No able-bodied men. And had he twenty men, or fifty, what difference would it make, when the snow gets deeper day by day?

He wants wings. He wants a catapult. He wants to vault across the snowy ridges. He can’t sit still. Yet what can really come of this trip to Yerba Buena? How long will it take, in the middle of a war? And who, after all, is this nameless naval captain? A friend of Sutter’s? No. A man Sutter has
heard about
and, in midnight drunkenness, salutes.

What a lame, half-baked, and slippery plan. Jim feels his control of things sliding away. He needs an outcome up ahead, a clear goal to set his sights upon. There’s no future now, none he can see. He sees only his past mistakes. Old doubts push to the surface as he rides. Like bad dreams he hears again the voices of the women in the company, the voice of John Snyder, too, as he brandishes the butt end of his whip.

You’re the one got us into this.

Maybe you’re the one deserves a whipping …

An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

It’s your doing, Reed.

It’s all your doing …

They fill the air around his head, voices louder than the honking from the cloud of geese. Margaret’s voice is now among them.

They won’t harm us,
she says, standing next to him in the sand, with the armed accusers waiting,
once you’re gone.

Once you’re gone …

Is it possible? Could they have all been right? Was he the culprit? Would he bring such a fate upon himself? Upon his family?

He can’t listen to these voices. He did his best. What more can you ask of any man? Hasn’t he always strived to do his best?

He hears Mac’s cough, sees again the fever in the young man’s face, and is relieved to be riding on another trail, away from Mac’s heated eyes, as if he could ride away from fever itself. In this land where sickness is unknown—according to Lansford Hastings—it is everywhere. Fevers. Agues. Aches. Cramps. Boils. Rheumatism. Sudden blindness. Coughing in the night. Why did he ever open that book and listen to such concoctions? Back in Springfield the winter’s fuel would now be stacked, the house snug against the weather. The laughter of running children would be his music.

Hearth music.

Holiday music.

THREE DAYS SOUTH
of the fort, where the marshlands narrow and the river finally shows its shape, he swims his horse across the San Joaquin. On both sides tules are higher than his hat, a riverine world of tule stalks as thick as axe handles. He rides through them, bearing west across a plain rutted deep with trails cut by the abundant herds—more elk, more deer, more antelope. Vapor rises from the damp terrain, covering it with a skin of steam. In the distance he sees a pack of wild horses grazing, dream horses whose legs are lost in vapor.

When they notice his approach they bolt toward him from a quarter mile away. There could be two hundred in this herd, maybe more—inquisitive, apocalyptic horses galloping through steaming grass, until they’re close enough to see it’s just another human, atop another horse. They wheel, lunge back the way they’ve come, then abruptly stop, swarming, restless horseflesh. The sleek heads swing and snort and turn to graze again, snouts disappearing in the steam.

The land begins to undulate. The broad plain wrinkles westward, makes a rise. Grasses thin out, where the soil gets shallow. Off the trail and up a slope he sees a line of bones, longer than any skeleton he would recognize. He rides toward it, climbing, and finds a bleached pattern laid across the grass as if it fell from the sky. Too long to be a cow’s remains. Or an elk’s. The oblong shape, the skull, the ribs have the dimensions of a giant fish. Perhaps a whale. But how? There must still be a hundred miles between this spot and the ocean shore.