Snow Mountain Passage (42 page)

In the valley called Napa, north of San Francisco Bay, Jim and Margaret have pitched their tent downstream from the ranch house of the miller. They have watched the bodies of their children bloat with unfamiliar nourishment, then watched the bloating subside. The children are looking normal again, normal youngsters who romp and scamper as the springtime juices rise into limbs reborn. The mother and the father need an hour to themselves, and so one sunny afternoon they set out hand in hand across the meadow.

The air is balmy. The sky is clear. Jim carries his coat. He wears his wide-brim Spanish hat at an angle. Margaret doesn’t wear a hat. Her hair is bunched loosely in a knot. The miller’s house is far behind them, under oaks, in the lee of a sheltering hump of a hill. His mill stands beside the creek. Beyond the house, outside their tent, Patty sits upon a stool with her brothers at her feet. She is the teacher, they the pupils. Underneath the burly, twisted limbs the boys take turns reading, spelling out words they do not know.

As soon as Jim and Margaret walked away, Virginia passed the reader to her little sister and slipped behind the tree to peek into a thin volume of stories taken from
The Lives of the Saints.
She steals this chance to read in secret, knowing how papa would disapprove. Virginia is true to her mountain vow, inspired by Patrick’s incantations. She believes his praying saved them, and she still repeats the prayers learned in the wintry cabin. Before long she will marry an Irish Catholic, a handsome fellow ten years her senior, and Jim, the outraged father, will take down his shotgun and threaten to shoot him on sight for robbing the cradle. The bride and groom will have to flee on horseback and hide until his Irish temper cools. But that is many moons away.

Today, while Virginia relishes the persecutions of thirteen-year-old Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr, Jim and Margaret walk through a meadow quilted with flowers. The miller’s house is out of sight. Underfoot the earth is spongy, so fecund you can almost hear the grasses growing blade by blade and tiny blossoms opening wider to the sun.

As if to gather in a bushel of the fragrant air, Margaret throws her arms out wide.

“Is there a lovelier place in all the world?”

“There can’t be many,” says Jim.

“We ought to stay right here, you know.”

“Perhaps we will.”

“We ought to settle here and never leave.”

“First I want you to see another valley, down the bay.”

“Can it possibly have flowers as magnificent as these?”

“I guarantee it. I have a spot picked out, right beside an orchard, with a view to take your breath away. We’ll take the children there. You’ll fall in love with that place too.”

“On such a day as this, James, the mountains are nothing but an awful dream.”

“Well, that is all behind us now.”

“Yes. On such a day there is no need to speak of it. I don’t ever want to speak of it.”

“On this very day,” Jim says, “our lives begin anew.”

While they walk he slips an arm around her waist and tugs to pull her closer. She resists the tug but lets his hand linger. Through the cloth he feels the flesh that has filled out around her ribs and hips. He savors it. With wonder he presses it, explores the flesh, grateful for this fullness that has finally returned. He would rather not remember what he felt there when they met in the snow. But her waist reminds him and will always remind him of her frail voice calling as he ran to her and how she stumbled and collapsed and could not rise. She had to wait until he raised her, and how light she was, with no body there, it seemed, nothing but the skeleton. If he held too tightly he could break her into pieces. His arms around her back could feel sharp ribs and spine, as if underneath her cloak the skin and muscle had dissolved. Something passed from her to him, like an electric current, and he knew then what had been done and what it cost. In her fleshless ribs he felt it, and in her eyes he saw it. Protruding bones gave them a mad, unearthly look. Horror and grief filled him with nausea, and he, too, nearly lost the power to stand. He wanted nothing more than to keep her in his arms and carry her down the mountain to Bear Valley and on down the canyons to warmth and food and safety. He could have carried her all the way, without a stop. But she pushed him back, saying Patty and Tommy were still waiting at the lake, saying this with a terrible warning in her voice, as if the children spoke through her, with that call of frantic emergency that is different from every other cry and can never be ignored. He had to leave her, and leave Virginia, with what provisions could be spared, trusting Glover to lead them out.

Three weeks later, when they met again at the ranch across from Sutter’s, Jim was the shrunken one, the bent and nearly broken one, with Patty on his back, her spindly legs hanging past the sling—his knees swollen, his fingers throbbing, his body burned and bruised and cut and suddenly overwhelmed with a deeper weariness than he’d ever known. For a month he had not slept three hours in a night. But only then, as he saw Margaret standing by the fence gate, with Virginia and James Junior, did he allow himself to feel it. The whole five months caught up with him as he surrendered to this bottomless fatigue. He looked then as she had looked when he met her in the mountains. In the eyes that wanted to welcome him and welcome Patty, he saw the mirror of what they had all endured. He couldn’t speak. Somehow he climbed off the horse. For twenty-four hours he slept.

Since that day, little by little, he has recounted to her his pilgrimage through Alta California. And Margaret has listened, but has yet to tell him much at all. Glover has told him that taking Patty and Tommy back to the lake camp was his idea and that Margaret wept afterward for two full days. She is like someone badly wounded in a war, who cannot begin to tell you how it was. Her eyes are sometimes bright with tears about to spill, sometimes as hard as steel, aimed at him as if they would slice him into strips. He can’t read these eyes, what form of pain they carry, or anger, or bitterness, or shame. He watches her handle each piece of bacon, each scoop of flour as if it is the last, to be treasured and honored and defended. Twice she has appeared to him in dreams, looking as she looked when they met in the mountains, her shrunken face, while his hands feel the ribs protruding. Twice in the darkness his eyes have sprung open, and he has reached out to touch her, to test the thickness of her flesh.

This afternoon the flesh across her waist is soft. Beneath it her back is tight. Inside the stand of redwoods, fallen leaves and tiny russet needles are softly layered. Many seasons have made a brown cushion here. Bars of sunlight fall through higher branches to dapple the ground. Jim lays out his coat, and they sit side by side, not talking. So long since they’ve been alone, a thousand things to talk about, and Jim does not know what to say. As he looks up into the mote-filled dome, he feels fingers easing through his dark hair, where sun rays light the scalp.

She touches half-hidden scars, probing for the place she last saw on the day it was torn open, the day his blood spilled. The welts are hard and smooth. Her touch is careful. Her brows squeeze with worry. He doesn’t want to speak. He wants to sit very still, with her hand upon his scalp. If her fingers remain there long enough the scars will recede and disappear.

“Such a blow you took that day,” she says.

“And so did you. He knocked you to the ground.”

“Mine was just a bruise. This must have been a long time healing.”

“It’s come around. I don’t feel it anymore.”

She pulls the hand away and locks her arms around drawn-up knees, as if waiting for something. But for what? For me, he thinks. She is waiting for me to justify myself.

“Margaret …” he begins.

She looks straight ahead. “You mustn’t apologize, James.”

“If I could have that one day back …”

“What you did there, you had to do.”

In the shady grove her voice is soft, almost a whisper. Somehow her voice releases him.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he says.

She shakes her head, her voice hoarse, and lower still, as if rising from somewhere else, from subsoil waters where the trees are drinking.

“Each one did what they had to do. And that is all I am ever going to say. I have thought about this. It is all anyone can say. Do you understand me? You saw our cabins, what we were reduced to. You saw the winter in those mountains. We are not the ones to judge. Only God can judge such times. If we spend our days judging one another we will never be able to continue with our lives.”

She waits a while, as if waiting for him to speak. But he cannot. His throat has closed, his chest is filled with heat. His eyes are brimming. So are hers, when she eventually turns to face him.

In a lighter voice she says, “Do you believe in miracles, James?”

Now something glints through her tears. A flicker of some younger Margaret?

“Perhaps I do,” he says.

“Then touch my head.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you feel like touching. Tell me what you find.”

She leans toward him, lets him draw her head in close, while he presses his hands against her hair, here, then there. Each touch for him is a gift, a little ecstasy. He feels like laughing.

“Is anything different?” she says at last.

“The hair and head of my same sweet Margaret.”

“It must be true, then.”

“What must be true?”

“What they say about the climate.”

“What who says?”

“My headaches have gone away.”

“Just now?”

“Entirely.”

“You mean this minute?”

“Sometime back, I think. I can’t say just when. Only this moment did I realize … we’ve been so occupied … but it has been days, perhaps a few weeks!”

“My dear, this is wonderful news.”

He watches her mouth twist and open. Her mouth wants to laugh. She tries not to, as if she does not deserve to laugh. But she can’t repress it. Like brook water it ripples forth, almost a reckless laugh. He laughs with her, remembering a picnic long ago in Illinois on a springtime riverbank, just the two of them, before Patty came along.

“Can you believe it, James?”

“Of course I can believe it. And I tell you what. We should announce that a marvelous cure has now been found …”

“Don’t make a joke of this.”

“I’m not joking.”

“It’s a blessing. A great blessing.”

“Of course it is. All I’m saying is that we must advertise and follow the example of the infamous Lansford Hastings. Three months in the Sierras and your headaches will be forever cured …”

She pretends to be insulted, starts to rise up from their loamy couch. Jim grabs her wrist and pulls her closer still. In the shaded grove they laugh again, old lovers with a secret.

She says, “We must be quiet.”

“No one will find us here.”

“The children scurry everywhere. They are like forest creatures.”

“I have watched them. They never roam this far from the ranch house.”

“So you have planned this out ahead of time.”

“I simply share with you what I have observed.”

Her eyes begin to glow. In her cheeks high color rises, as if she runs a fever. He kisses her forehead, her eyes, her crimson cheeks.

“Softly, James.”

His hand slides across the skirt, bunching it against her leg.

“Be gentle,” she says.

“Such a long time …”

“I know.”

“So very long.”

“I know. But please …”

“My heart’s so full.”

“And mine too. But I beg of you …”

“My love …”

“Gently. Please.”

“Love. My love. Is your heart as full as mine?”

“Yes, oh, yes. But please, James, please … remember.”

F
OR
some people a desert is the magic place. For some, it is the mountains. For some, the sea. It’s good for the soul, they say, to live within view of one or the other of these great sources of inspiration. In all these years I’ve only been back to the mountains once, and I didn’t like it, for reasons anyone could understand. As for the desert, one look in that direction, my eyes begin to sting with sunburned salt, my throat goes dry as an empty riverbed. So I have ended up here in a seacoast town right next to the ocean, which thus far has never hurt me.

I told that to my son when he bought this house and insisted I move in with him. There are many rooms, mother, he said, a garden, a wide front porch. You won’t have a single thing in the world to do, he said, but enjoy the view, and you won’t have to lift a finger. Though I was comfortable where I’d been, I knew coming here would bring me that much closer to the sea. And so I came. And each day now it gives me something. I never know quite what to expect. You have to wait. You have to watch.

This afternoon a storm moves toward us across Monterey Bay. You can see slate clouds gathering, edging out the puffy white ones that have hovered since dawn. The water takes its color from the sky, gray as metal now, but not a gloomy gray. The surface has a grain, like tree bark. Each scoop and ripple catches light, a thousand specks of light thrown across the water from a patch of silver way out there past the point.

Somewhere behind the cloud cover, bright sun is shining down to make that one stretch molten. There are no downward rays, as you might expect. Under a dark sky, at the far edge of the metal-colored bay, this silvery patch has its own special life. And in the very midst of it I see a wave lift, like a huge fish coming to the surface, as if drawn up into this one bright region of the water. It rises, it peaks, the white foam leaps forth, and it occurs to me that certain moments in your life can be like this wave, singled out and fully lit. A year later, or five years later, or seventy-five, you regard them as if they are still happening. I think in particular of the day I saw Salvador again, in the mission orchard, or thought I did, wondering why he had followed us such a long, long way; and I think also of the day, a few weeks earlier, when we left Napa Valley and started south for San Jose.