Snow Mountain Passage (40 page)

Papa and Mac took off all their own clothes and piled them outside, so they wouldn’t get infested with the things crawling around in the cabin. They filled a pot of snow and melted it down to warm water. They washed those boys, soaped their hair, rubbed them all over with kerosene from a bottle papa had brought along, and wrapped them in clean flannel so they’d be comfortable for a while.

Keseberg watched this in silence from his own miserable heap of bedding. I imagine he was like Patrick, with a headful of doubts and dreads, now that papa had returned. I have imagined him lying there with his thorn-punctured foot thick and purple from the swelling, the man who had tried to hang papa, had tied a gallows knot in the rope and in a blighted land where no trees grew had raised his wagon tongue, the same fellow who once stole buffalo robes from the funeral scaffold of a Sioux chief, filling our hearts with panic for days thereafter. Some have said this one selfish act brought on all the misfortunes that were to follow us clear across the continent. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe curses work that way. A man alone cannot bring down a whole wagon party, though certainly a man can darken the path of his own life. Was this perhaps on Keseberg’s mind? Did he feel the doom upon his shoulders as he looked up fearfully, wondering what papa and Mac were going to do?

He always kept a rifle near at hand. Maybe he thought of using it, or brandishing it that day. He would have had no other way to defend himself. I have imagined the rescuers, white and naked in the firelight, looming over him. Mac was six foot six, big-boned and burly. Papa was not a muscular man, but he was lean and tough, and he’d been eating every day. If they’d wanted to, they could have lifted Keseberg and carried him outside and buried him up to his neck in the snow and left him there to freeze. I have imagined papa considering something along those lines, and Keseberg bracing himself.

Papa said, “Lewis, can you walk?”

The haunted eyes grew round. He couldn’t speak.

“Just answer yes or no. Can you walk?”

“No.”

“Then can you take your clothes off?”

“Look here, Mr. Reed …”

He tried to sit up, but fell back wincing.

“If you can’t, we’ll do it for you.”

“Take off my clothes?”

“Can you stand at all?”

“Have mercy, please …”

“Which way can you move?”

“I can’t. My leg.”

“Have you a crutch?”

“A crutch?”

“Try sitting, then.”

“I’m not sure. Just leave me be.”

“We’ll help you.”

“I’m a frail man.”

“We can see that. We’re going to lift you now.”

Together Mac and papa got their hands under his back and shoulders, raised him up and began to remove his clothing. He was almost as bad off as the boys had been, evidently lying there for days.

“Please. No,” Keseberg begged.

“We’re going to clean you up a bit.”

“No! You can’t!”

The grimy coat came off, the scarves, the trousers, the layering of shirts, the long underwear that hadn’t been removed in weeks. I see them in that jumbled, fetid room, in the light of glowing logs, three pale men stripped of all their clothing. I see papa regarding Keseberg’s nakedness and still marvel that he could reach out to such a man. Seeing his foot and leg, papa knew they’d have to leave him behind. Maybe he saw another father there, a man with wife and children gone and nothing remaining but his hunger and his pain. With warm water he began to soap the bony limbs, while Keseberg sat hunched on his mattress. Choking back phlegm and spittle he begged them not to do it.

“Please. Please. I cannot bear this.”

“We need to clean you up.”

“But not you, Reed. Anyone but you.”

“Be still.”

“How can you?”

“We would do it for anyone. We all need cleaning up.”

Tears spread across Keseberg’s cheeks while papa bathed him and Mac oiled him with kerosene, just as they had bathed and oiled the boys, the same tenderness, taking care with each limb, attending to every inch of skin, the lice-infested places and places fouled with feces.

“Please, Mr. Reed. I cannot permit it.”

“Be still, man. We’re almost done.”

“I do not deserve this.”

Overcome, bewildered, he asked again and again, “How can you? How can you?” as they wrapped him in flannel and eased him back onto his bedding.

THEY LEFT SOME
food, as much as they could spare—a cup of flour, half a pound of beef—for Lewis and the bedridden boys and the widow hiding somewhere in the trees like a coyote waiting till these strangers went away. Papa left two men to help with the boys until another rescue party arrived. He expected them to show up at any moment, a contingent from the cargo team with more provisions brought up from the river.

Over at Alder Creek George Donner was failing now and too far gone to travel. He had said his good-byes to his children. He was ready to say good-bye to his wife. But Tamsen still insisted she would never leave her husband alone. To this day I wish she had come with us. She was a woman with ambition. She wanted to open a school in California. She was smart and brave and still strong enough to make the crossing. George begged her to go. So did papa. But she said no, her duty was there by her husband’s side. All papa could do was leave another man at Alder Creek.

On the morning we started out it hadn’t snowed for quite some time. You could see old tracks through the forest and cut along the edge of the lake. This time I was not going to be sent back. I was going to make my own way or fall over dead trying. Papa carried Tommy in a sling and gave me a hand when he could. Other men had younger ones to carry. In our party there were fourteen children. The grown-ups, Patrick and Peggy and Mrs. Graves, were so feeble they could barely stagger along. Papa hoped to be over the pass that first day. We only made two miles, about as far as Mr. Glover got before he split our family up.

The next day was a little better. We made four miles, which brought us to the end of the lake and the foot of the pass. But now we were a day behind, and food was already running low, after what they’d left at the camps. A cold south wind cut through us. Clouds were heaping high around the peaks. Papa knew what a risk it was, starting for the summit under such a sky. But there was nothing to go back to. The only hope lay ahead of us, hope that we’d meet the next rescue party before our supplies ran out, and that the darkening skies would get no darker.

Papa sent three men ahead to bring food back from one of the stashes higher up. That left four men from the rescue party and seventeen very weak survivors. I don’t know how we climbed that pass. I thought I was already cold. It got colder as we climbed. Every step was agony for me. Whenever I fell someone would pick me up. “C’mon, little darlin’,” papa would say, “we’ve almost got ‘er licked.”

I don’t remember reaching the top, though we did, sometime after noon. I wish I’d looked back. I’d spent so much time watching that pass from down below, I deserved a moment to turn and see where we’d been for all those weeks. At the time I couldn’t see anything but the next step and the next step and the next…. In my mind now I can pause and look out from that high promontory that had stopped us in November and nearly stopped us that day in early March. I gaze down from the summit at the icy ring of Truckee Lake, the one they now call Donner, and it’s odd to think that neither George nor Jacob ever got anywhere near the lake that is named for them. For that matter, they never got within a day’s ride of the famous pass that has made their name a household word—neither George nor Jacob nor Jacob’s wife, Elizabeth, nor Tamsen, who nursed her husband to the end. It tells you something about the way things get remembered. Hundreds of others climbed out that year and got through the mountains in pretty good time. But the party they have named it for is the one that almost didn’t get out at all. If they asked me, I would have named the pass for someone else. Maybe I would call it Charlie Stanton Pass. He and Mac were the first ones from our party to cross. Charlie crossed again to bring back those mule loads of provisions that got us out of the desert. He crossed it a third time before he lost his life trying to lead the Snowshoe Party to the other side. Isn’t that the kind of grit you name some place in the mountains for? And by saying this I don’t mean to take anything away from Uncle George, since he was a capable leader until his wagon broke down and he tore his hand open building a new axle. But it does make you stop and wonder about how things get named.

Our campsite was underneath some trees. The men spread pine boughs across the snow and got a fire blazing up from big logs they laid crisscross. I was too tired to eat. I fell asleep and slept until snowflakes and a howling wind woke me, and here it came, the storm we’d all been dreading, a ferocious blizzard that caught us totally exposed way up there at seven thousand feet with nothing but our blankets.

Everyone was yelling in the darkness, weeping and crying out and praying to God for mercy and salvation. The men rushed among the trees with their axes to gather more wood. If the fire went out we would surely perish.

They stayed up all night feeding the fire, papa and Mac and the others on the rescue team. They used pine limbs to build a kind of windbreak, where the snow piled up as the storm kept coming, all the next day and into the next night, sleet and pelting snow and a wind more terrible than all the wolves in the Sierras yowling right beside your cabin. We’d run out of food, and you could hardly move, it was so cold. The men were exhausted and knew they needed rest. The second night they set up a watch to keep the fire going. Papa took the first round. He was nearly blind from working all day in the wind, half frozen, and weak from exposure. He couldn’t stay awake. He not only fell asleep, he fell into a coma. Mac must have been the one who found him. His voice woke me, shouting, “Jim! Jim!”

Mac was kneeling there, shaking papa hard. He slapped him in the face. “Jim, my God, man!” He slapped him again. “Wake up! Wake up!”

Papa didn’t move. The fire was down to a few embers, with snow blowing so thick you couldn’t see. Mac was frantic. He leaned his head back and cried to the heavens. “Goddam this wind! Goddam this cold!”

His voice scared me. I tried to sit up. I said, “Is papa sleeping?”

Mac put his head close to mine and shouted, “Stay under them blankets, Patty! Stay next to Tom! Don’t move till I get back!”

He disappeared into the raging darkness, and I lay there shivering, praying for papa to roll over and get up. It had been bad enough watching him ride off into the desert. It was ten times worse huddling under that awful wind, not knowing if he was alive or dead, and the snow piling up around me. It was the worst night of my life, by far, with nothing to do but lie there and wait for Mac and the others to bring the fire back.

Later on I found out one of the men had split his hand trying to grip an axe. His fingers were so frostbit and swollen they just broke open. After that it was mostly up to Mac. He got the fire going again that night. Once it was roaring, he dragged papa in close to the heat and rubbed his face and arms until some circulation came back and his eyes blinked open. Then Mac was so tired and near frozen himself, he sat down by the fire and it burned through four layers of shirts before he felt the heat. His back was scorched and blistered, but it wasn’t a time you could stop and worry for long about a blistered back.

The next morning, when the storm let up at last, they knew we had to push on, whichever way we could. Papa and Mac knew this. Patrick Breen, he saw it another way. All during the storm he had stayed beneath his blankets with his family, praying. Now he told papa he wasn’t going to move ahead. They would stay right where they were until another rescue party came along. Papa said anybody else in these mountains would have been caught in the same weather and there was no telling how long a person might have to wait. But Patrick had his mind made up.

“We’ll stick it out,” he said. “We’ll hold fast.”

“We need to stay together, Patrick. You have no food. No shelter here.”

“We’ll hold fast.”

Was Patrick crazy? Was he stubborn? Was he just tired of fighting the elements? Or tired of taking orders from papa? Or did he figure the next leg of this trip would be too hard on his younger children? Peggy had been carrying their one-year-old. One boy was three, another five. It was an awful decision to have to make. Every man was hurt, burnt, cut, limping from frostbite, weak from not eating. Papa still had trouble seeing. He blinked and squinted and rubbed a hand across his face like he was being assaulted by mosquitoes. Patrick too was nearly blind, his eyes half shut. He sat beneath his blanket like a mendicant monk, with his knees pulled up close, facing straight ahead, as if something out there reassured him.

“Yessir. We’ll hold fast, that we will. Right here by these logs where it’s warm.”

One more time I see them, under lifting clouds, at the place that would come to be called Starved Camp. And I think of how they’d looked when this journey was still new, back in Kansas, after we had crossed the Missouri, their wagons loaded and pulled along by fat oxen and their herds of cattle strung across the plains. Here they were, two stubborn Irishmen, and nothing left but the clothes on their backs, frozen stiff, arguing again about who should stay and who should go. It makes you wonder about what causes one person to stay put and not budge, what drives another to plunge ahead, and why any of us keep on going at those times when your whole being says you ought to just roll on over and give it all up.

Papa knew we had no time to spare. He asked the others to bear witness that Patrick had decided to stay here with his family, out in the open, of his own free will. After he and Mac and the men had cut up three days’ firewood, we started off again, hoping to reach Bear Valley or meet the ones papa had sent forward, or meet the cargo team, or at least get to a cache of food. Mac carried Tommy. Papa wanted to carry me, but I saw he couldn’t stand up straight. He could barely walk. I told him I would be all right. Though I didn’t know it at the time, none of them believed I would get very far. I didn’t know how bad off I was.