Snow Mountain Passage (7 page)

William Eddy says, “If you can see your way clear, we could watch over Margaret and the young ones, me and Milt could.”

He is baffled now, cannot comprehend this. Has he traveled so far, simply to ride off and leave them in an empty and unforgiving place?

With pressure on his elbow Margaret guides him, while they walk together across the sand, beyond the wagon, until they’re out of earshot, entering a little pocket that swallows voices, a patch of desert that is the quicksand of all sound.

Her voice is soft. “Billy Eddy is right.”

He looks at her, unable to speak. Is she as deranged as the rest of them?

“You have to ride ahead,” she says.

“I will not!”

“It’s our best chance.”

“Leave you here?”

“They’re crazy, James.”

“We’ll hold them off until this settles, then—”

“Then what?”

“We’ll push on.”

“The whole party?”

“Come morning they’ll see the sense of it.”

“Any one of them could kill you, James. Is that what you want? Keseberg would do it with his hands, you know he would.”

“He wouldn’t live to brag about it.”

“Look at him. Look at Graves. They resent us. There’s murder in their eyes. They would love to do you harm, and now they have their reason.”

“We’ll push on alone.”

“How can we?”

“We’ll just hitch up.”

“We lack the animals to go it alone. The first hill, we’d be stuck again.”

“Dammit, Margaret. This is my wagon party. I have to see it through!”

“Ride ahead, then.”

“That leaves you at their mercy. It’s unthinkable.”

“They won’t harm us, once you’re gone. I’m sure of that.”

“It’s me, then. It’s me alone they despise.”

She looks away.

“It’s the trail, James. The trail has addled every one of us. Bill Eddy sees it. Please listen. Go. As quickly as you can.”

“That’s running.”

“Not if it’s the wisest way. You think I want you proud and bullheaded and lying in the sand like Johnny? You think the children want to remember you like that?”

“I’ve never run.”

“Milt is here. Bill and Eleanor Eddy are like family now. If you ride ahead, one man alone can make it through to the other side and find some help and send back more food, and horses. It could end up a blessing for us all. It has to be, James. You know I’m right. We want you alive.”

He studies her face, her mouth, around her eyes the lines of wear. What has he done to this woman? The months of endless travel have added years of age. And how can he leave her here, and leave the children? They call her frail, but she is not, nor is she deluded like the others. Her eyes are clear. She is his anchor and his rock. His heart fills. His throat fills.

She waits, giving him time.

“I never wanted this for you,” he says. “I never imagined it.”

“No one could have imagined it.” Her eyes brim. “Just tell them, James. Tell them that you’re riding ahead. Please. For my sake. Tell them now.”

For a long minute he stares out across the sand, where heat currents wave and distort the view. In the far distance a low ridge of hazy violet quivers as if about to detach from Earth and take flight. He shakes his head and looks again, and still it quivers. He walks back toward the men who would expel him, his judges and his jury.

“If I do this,” he calls out, “I will take a horse and a rifle and a supply of ammunition.”

They too have been talking among themselves. Now they look at one another. They look at their wives, whose lips are pursed, the faces closed.

“No weapons,” says Keseberg, with his scornful smile. “We need every weapon for the trail.”

Margaret exclaims, “My Lord!”

“And he can carry no food,” says Graves. The white-bearded elder’s face is burdened with the weight of such decisions. “There’s none to spare.”

“With our children going hungry,” says Elizabeth Graves, “we can’t give food to murderers.”

“No one can survive out here alone without a gun,” says Margaret, who finds herself a party to this monstrous proposal. “That’s certain death.”

“It will be God’s doing, then,” says Patrick Breen piously, “not ours.”

F
ROM
our front stairs it is only five minutes to the beach. This morning I went walking early. I walked along the hard-packed sand under a high fog, the kind that stills the wind. The sea was glossy, smooth as silk. Waves were rising up so smooth and sharp, they looked like silver cutouts. Offshore all along here there are beds of kelp, where whole forests of slick leaves and bulbs and limbs sway just below the surface. As a wave lifts, the kelp appears like the broad shadow of some great bird flying through the fog. But you look up and there is no bird anywhere. There is just the shadow, the ghostly shape that seems to slide across the water as the wave moves on toward shore and rises and curls over and breaks and disappears.

That’s what held me this morning, the way they disappear.

I couldn’t tell you how long I stood there, watching the waves, each one its own thing and finely edged, moving through the silky water, shining, leaping into a noisy burst of spray, then all of a sudden, it was over. It was just … gone.

You have to wonder at this, at the way it disappears. After so much buildup and clatter, it comes down to a slick of foam oozing toward your feet. And then not even that.

What I mean is, you get to my age you have to ponder such things. When you’re younger, of course, looking at the Pacific Ocean, chances are you just dive in. You get past eighty you can stand on the beach till noon if you take a mind, or you can sit here on the porch and watch the water all day long.

It has sent me back again to the time of the crossing and the day our world would change forever. I can see now that a big wave had been rolling and rising and gathering force. After papa killed John Snyder it all came clattering down around us, and something disappeared. I could not have said quite what. But before you knew what happened, something you imagined would always be there was simply gone, sucked right on down into the desert sand.

I had never seen papa hurt the way Snyder hurt him. When we dressed his wounds he was close to weeping, but trying not to let us know. His head was bowed. I had to turn away from the gashes in his scalp. When I touched his neck I felt his whole body tremble. My sister finally broke down, crying for all three of us, since papa would not let us see him cry, and me, I couldn’t. I felt like running. I could see us running along the trail ahead of the wagon party and making our escape before whatever was coming next. I did not know what that would be, but I already felt it rolling toward us.

That night after the opposing sides had backed off a ways, after we had fixed dinner and cleaned up the camp and made ready for bed, I saw papa walk out alone toward the riverbank. I was filled with the greatest fear I’d known up to that time. Grandma used to sing a song, a mournful ballad about a fellow who jumped into a river and drowned. I thought that’s what he was going to do. I didn’t know the Humboldt right along there was only two feet deep. I slid out of my bedroll and followed him down to the bank. At that hour, with everything as quiet as it only gets in the desert, you could hear the water slithering along like a snake on its belly, that slow, quiet hissing.

When he saw me next to him, he reached out his arm and drew me close, and I asked him if he was going to go away.

“I don’t know, Patty.”

“I saw what happened, papa. Johnny started it.”

His voice cracked when he said, “That he did, darlin’, that he did.”

“If you go away, I’m going with you.”

“Mama’s going to need you more than ever, darlin’.”

“Milt and Virginia and James Junior can take care of mama all right. But who will take care of you?”

“I’ll do just fine.”

“Please take me with you, papa.”

“I didn’t say for sure I was going anywhere, did I?”

“But if you do.”

He picked me up and held me and pointed toward the east where the sky was glowing as if a forest had caught fire somewhere beyond the nearest mountain. Then the first glint of moon showed at a ridgetop, and we watched it swell up, round and yellow and nearly full, and spread its silver light across the long, long desert.

He and mama stayed up talking half the night, whispering under the camp tent. The next morning John Snyder was buried in the sand in a shroud, with one board below his body and one above, to discourage the coyotes. After the burial, papa climbed onto his mare and said good-bye.

I have already compared that river to a snake, and it was not by chance. Every river I have ever seen goes curving and looping from where it starts to wherever it ends up. The Snake River, which I have not seen, is one example. The Humboldt is another. For a while it was called the Mary’s. But that is one they could just as well have called the Snake, in my opinion, instead of naming it for a fellow who never even saw Nevada. It makes an evil mark through a devilish place, and I am glad I have not had to go anywhere near it since the time we made the crossing. We had to stand by that river and watch papa ride out on a starving horse with his head wrapped in a bloody kerchief and his hat split to fit around the bandage. He was wearing buckskins then, like some of the other men, trousers and fringed tunic, so elegant when we left Fort Laramie, all smeared and dark now with firesmoke and sweat, and nothing in front of him but sand and chalk and bare mountains. I can tell you it was the hardest day of my life up to that time, and the hardest day for mama too, though we would all have worse days before that trip was done.

She had put one husband in the grave. Now she had followed her second husband to the very end of the world and was surely imagining that she could be widowed again, at thirty-two. She looked as if it had been her who took the knife blow to the chest, not Snyder, as if it was her life that flowed into the sand beside the river. I know now that she wanted to fall down and quit right there, but she braced herself against the wagon, so she would not seem to falter. She had decided to be strong for the rest of us, and I have to say that from that day forward she was strong in ways none of us had seen before. As I have said, the stabbing of John Snyder changed all our lives.

That evening she made up a packet of jerked beef and biscuits. Where it came from, I still don’t know. She wrapped up some powder and percussion caps too, in defiance of the terms of banishment, and passed them to Milt Elliott, along with papa’s rifle. Under cover of darkness he and Virginia followed the river trail on horseback. They rode all night, caught up with papa, and got back to the wagons before dawn. I know she hoped papa would take her with him, to be his horse-girl companion, as she’d been all the way across the plains. I had wanted him all to myself. So did she. But he knew better than anyone else what lay in store for him.

After he sent Virginia back with Milt, she cried without letup. She cried until our wagons came upon the place where they had found him camping. There were the markings of the fire he had built, and scattered around it were the loose feathers of a bird he must have shot the next morning—which was his way of telling us he’d already made good use of the rifle and found himself something to eat. Mama said we would build our family fire on the same spot, as if the place held some of his spirit, or perhaps by making a fire there we would send our blessing forward to travel with him. Or perhaps it was just a family’s way to keep the flame of hope burning from one day to the next, touching papa’s campfire spots and, when we could, gathering one feather of a bird that had helped keep him alive.

A few days later, when we caught up with the advance party, we learned that he spent a night with the Donners before moving on. So we knew he made it at least that far along the Humboldt. They gave him another packet of food to carry and a partner to travel with, a young teamster who no longer had a team to drive with all the animals and wagons we had lost. Crossing the desert was too risky for one man alone. The Donners couldn’t spare a horse, but they could spare a teamster. So papa and his new partner had one horse between them. They made a lonesome sight, I heard George Donner say, heading out at dawn, one mounted, one on foot. Getting through to the Truckee River would be the test, he said. “Then there’s water again … and after that … the Sierra Nevada.”

George Donner had white hair and a deep, captivating voice, like a preacher’s or like an actor playing King Lear in a huge empty theater. The way he said “Sierra Nevada” made it loom in my mind. Before long I would learn that it means “Snowy Mountains.” But I didn’t know any Spanish yet, so I didn’t see snow. What I imagined was a soaring palisade of stone and timber that could only be crossed with the blessings of God and many angels. That night I prayed for all the angels in heaven to watch over papa, wherever he was on the long trail to California.

NUMEROUS PEOPLE
have observed that our journey that year was a fateful journey. In hindsight anyone can see signs along the route and find a dozen or a hundred times when things could have gone some other way. Of course, they did not go some other way. Things never do. Things always go the way they’re going to go. And I still have to wonder how much of it was fate and how much of it was papa’s nature.

Every party on the trail had a hard time somehow or another. Everybody ran low on water and threw out furniture and shot oxen for meat and had arguments that would set one clan against the next. Our party, of course, had a special talent for arguing and disagreement. I can see that now. Surely there has never been a more mismatched bunch having to spend half a year trying to get from one place to the next. I suppose you can call that a kind of fate. It wasn’t anything papa had planned ahead of time, though he was at the center of it all.