Snow Mountain Passage Read online

  Jim says, “We’d better do it now.”

  Keseberg puffs out his chest and begins to prance back and forth, slamming a fist into his palm, pop pop pop, as if he has been condemned to the firing squad and has now been denied his final request.

  “And I’ll go with you.”

  “I said I’d do it!” Keseberg cries. “My word is good!”

  Jim says, “You’ll need someone to hold your horse.”

  On the ride out, Keseberg refuses to speak. The sun is setting as they come upon the scaffold, about a mile from the wagons and near the bank of a small creek winding toward the Platte. There are other signs of recent encampment, ashes, close-cropped grass. The scaffold is made of four slender poles stuck into the earth, supporting a platform of woven branches lashed with thong. Laid out upon the platform are the remains of a chief. Feathers fall against his black hair. His shield and lance are with him. On the bare soil beneath the scaffold, bleached buffalo skulls are arranged in a circle.

  As the two men sit on horseback regarding the corpse, the wind around them gradually falls off. Across the prairie Jim can see wind moving, but right here the nearest grass is still. The surface of the creek is slick and motionless. The sky is suddenly sprayed with crimson, while underneath its gaudy panorama, the space in front of them seems lit by some separate and brighter column of afterglow. On his arms the hairs rise. Under him he feels the mare tremble.

  He instructs Keseberg to wrap the robes across the corpse exactly as he found them, to duplicate the look as closely as he can. As he watches, holding both sets of reins, the horses begin to twitch and rear, as if another animal is nearby. Jim squints toward a grove downstream, sees nothing.

  All four are eager to get away from there, the men and the horses. As they lope toward the wagons, Keseberg still won’t speak. At last Jim says, “Before we set out tomorrow I’ll call a meeting of the council. I’m going to propose that you be expelled from the party.”

  He waits. When he hears no reply he turns and sees the blue eyes inspecting him with scorn.

  “You have put the lives of everyone at risk. But we may be less at risk if you fall back. Do you understand my meaning?”

  Keseberg’s voice is low and harsh. “I have never been spoken to like this.”

  “Well, I am speaking to you like this. I know George Donner will support me. You can resist, if you choose, but I assure you that others on the council will agree. In this wagon party you are no longer welcome.”

  “You are going too far,” says Keseberg.

  “Maybe you’d rather leave tonight and avoid an embarrassment. It’s your choice.”

  “I believe in discipline, Mr. Reed. But you have gone too far.”

  In a dramatic burst of horsemanship, Keseberg spurs ahead, kicking up a long plume of dust. Jim gives him plenty of room, lingering in the twilight, to let the dust plume settle, and let his own blood cool down.

  * * *

  A FEW MORE minutes pass. From the deep grass beyond the clearing, a Sioux brave sits up on his haunches and watches them ride away. He wears a buckskin tunic, arrows in a quiver. He creeps close enough to touch the robes and sniff around the edges. There is a faint white smell. Nothing has been cut or marked. He has never seen such a thing. If the Pawnee had stolen these robes, they would never bring them back. They steal for the insult. They scatter the skulls and throw the body down and defile it.

  Who are these men? He could have killed them both and taken their scalps, first the one who held the horses, then the bright-haired one whose scalp would be highly prized. He could have gone back with the scalps and reported that he had found the thieves. But now they have returned the robes. Why? It is very strange. What kind of people would do this, take away the buffalo skins, then bring them back?

  When he can no longer see the men, he stands for a long time listening. Voices come toward him on the wind, distant sounds of women and children. In the near-dark their fires light the sky. It is a village. A village of tents that move. All day he watched them passing along in their white tents. Between one rising and setting of the sun he has seen four villages of white tents, and many horses and many animals like the buffalo, with sharp horns, and men who drive the animals but do not shoot them, though some carry rifles. Are they warriors? They do not have the look of warriors.

  Where do they come from? Where are they going?

  Lover, Husband, Father, Son

  HIS HAIR IS thick and black and parted right of center. He wears a black moustache and beard. His skin is very white, from the collar down, from the wrists up, where it isn’t burnt by the sun. He has what they call the Black Irish look, meaning features common to the British Isles that have acquired a faintly Hispanic or Slavic line. According to the family legend Jim Reed has Polish in his blood.

  “We were nobility in Poland,” he has told his children. “It puts fire in the eyes, you know. We had stables filled with horses there, a large estate with gardens, rows of poplar trees. We drank French wines and ate imported cheeses. We came across to Ireland, oh, it’s hard to say for certain, some time back, late in the eighteenth century or thereabouts, so I’ve been told, rather than submit to the tyranny of the Russians, who wanted to take it all away, not only our lands and all our animals, but our dignity too. Be proud of that,” he has told them. “Be proud to move when it is time to move.”

  He barely knew his father. A fever took him when Jim was three. Ever afterward he has had a fear of fevers, and a fascination too. The excessive color that comes into the face to announce that the body is overtaxed, putting up resistance—this is a signal for alarm, and also a sign of life working overtime to declare itself. All her days his mother had a feverish complexion, whether ill or healthy, a brimming color that gave her a look of passionate restraint.

  Jim does not remember Ireland at all. But he remembers the Atlantic, the stormy crossing, nights of bitter wind and slashing rain and mountainous seas. His mother, who he thought was indestructible, fell sick and couldn’t eat. She was a small Scottish woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a sturdy Presbyterian spine. With her husband gone she had sailed for the States, as half her relatives had already done, to start another life, just her and the son.

  On the packet out of Ulster he was surprised to find himself holding her hands, touching her beaded brow, running for buckets. He watched his mother groan in the dim, dingy, claustrophobic bunk, terrified that she too would die and he would be left alone on the lunging ship. She clutched his hand, as if she had the same fear, as if without his hand she would slide overboard. He held her close and said, “When we get to America you’ll feel better, ma, I know you will.”

  IN THOSE DAYS the land that had called them was the youngest nation on earth. Jim Reed grew up as the nation grew, later on he would move as the nation moved. From Boston they traveled to Baltimore, then to Philadelphia, and from there down into Virginia. A lean and restless fellow, he finally struck out on his own and landed in Illinois, where he fell in love with a feverish woman.

  She was a recent widow whose husband had lost his life when cholera came creeping up the long, humid Mississippi valley like an invisible cloud. Margaret was her name. She was only twenty. The untimely death left her bedridden for weeks, like a wounded cat lying still, waiting to heal. During the season of her mourning Jim would keep the widow company. He knew her family, had often been a Sunday dinner guest. Next to her he felt a brotherly kinship, sometimes a fatherly kinship. At thirty-four he felt protective. He brought her books to read. They talked about her health and her parents and her brothers and other people in the town and whether or not she would go back to teaching school, which she had done for half a year, until her daughter came along.

  As Margaret’s strength returned, they would take short walks, and he would carry little Virginia on his shoulders, tickle her ankles and make her laugh. Once they all rode in a carriage out to his land, and he described the house and barns he planned to build. Neither of them would ever be able to
say precisely when consoling turned to courtship, when one form of intimacy led to the next. Margaret had large, watchful eyes and walnut hair that hung in curls beside her cheeks. She was lying on her bed in a robe and running a fever on the day he took her hand and asked her to marry him.

  “Maybe we should wait,” she said, “until I am entirely back on my feet.” Her face was glowing, pink and moist and vulnerable.

  “No,” he said, his eyes wide with eagerness and desire. “We mustn’t wait. I want to marry as soon as we possibly can.”

  He leaned to kiss her, and she turned aside, as if to say, Whatever has afflicted me might be contagious. He touched her chin and brought her face around and placed his lips upon hers, as if to say, I have no fear of it, my love is so much larger than my fear. She allowed it then, she allowed the kiss. She allowed his eager hand to touch her neck, to slide across her shoulder and push the cotton robe aside, to roam the pale and lustrous flesh. Her eyes opened as if for the first time, as if she were new on earth, and regarded him as if he were the first creature she had seen. He had never observed eyes at such close range. Threads of light glinted around the small, dark centers. Her arms opened. Falling back against the pillow she drew him into her circle of heat. She whispered his name and seemed to swoon, with a little moan, barely audible. Jim swooned too, as her lips melted into his, as she surrendered her mouth and the sweet tips of moisture all around her mouth.

  IN TIME HER fever subsided. But other ailments followed, one upon the next. While she ran her household wisely, neighbor women called her “frail.” Ten years and three children later, when she and Jim began to dream of moving farther west, she suffered from headaches that could cripple her once or twice a month. Whether the cause was a lingering grief, or the stresses of childbirth, or some irritant rising from the soil or drifting down from the trees or from the spore-generating coats of animals, no one could tell. Her headaches became a mystery often wondered at, never solved.

  On the days of her confinement, after the worst had passed, he would read aloud from books and articles he had collected about the distant shoreline and the western trail. She would lie back and listen, as if to folktales of ancient and improbable events. He read from Thomas Farnham, from John Bidwell’s diary, from the accounts of Captain Fremont’s second expedition. He read from The Emigrants’ Guide, by Lansford Hastings.

  “Close your eyes,” he said to Margaret, turning down the corner of a page so he could come back to these lines and study them. “Just close your eyes and picture this.”

  The purity of the atmosphere is most extraordinary and almost incredible. So pure it is that flesh of any kind can be hung for weeks together, in the open air, and that, too, in the summer season, without undergoing putrefaction. The Californians prepare their meat for food, as a general thing, in this manner; in doing so, no salt is required, yet it is sometimes used, as a matter of preference. The best evidence, however, of the superior health of this country is the fact that disease of any kind is very seldom known. Cases of fever of any kind have seldom been known anywhere on the coast…. All foreigners with whom I have conversed upon this subject, and who reside in that country, are unanimous and confident in the expression of the belief that it is one of the most healthy portions of the world.

  He looked up from the page and saw that this passage had revived her. She was gazing at him with amusement. In her eyes he saw a playful doubt. “Can there really be such a place? Do you think it’s possible?”

  “This Hastings is no fly-by-night. He’s a lawyer from Ohio. His book was published in Cincinnati.”

  She laughed like a child delighted by a nonsense rhyme. “People say outlandish things in books, James.”

  “But he has been there. He has been there twice. He led one of the first emigrant parties. He has visited all the principal towns. Think what it could mean! A place without fevers. Without mosquitoes. Or malaria. In our county alone, how many have died of malaria since the last rains?”

  “It’s something to think about, all right.”

  Now he sounded like an attorney arguing a case. “I can’t see that he makes any claim for himself. He isn’t trying to persuade us to invest money in some far-fetched scheme. He describes what he has seen. Why would anyone lie about matters of health and well-being?”

  “Well, yes,” said Margaret, sitting up on the couch. “And when you think of it, what would be the point?”

  “There you have it! There wouldn’t be any point. You see what I am trying to say? Suppose we could travel to a place where you would never have another headache? Isn’t that worth considering? I am just thinking out loud….”

  “What else does it say, James? What does it say about the towns?”

  He read some more. He read accounts of places called Sonoma, Yerba Buena, San Jose de Guadalupe, Santa Barbara—all free of pestilence, surrounded with pasturelands and sunny valleys where anything would grow. There were harbors and vineyards and limitless supplies of water, and this was not ancient history or some half-cocked brand of wishful yearning. Weren’t these things Lansford Hastings had seen within the past three years? Jim read some more:

  A great variety of wild fruits also abound, among which are crab-apples, thorn-apples, plums, grapes, strawberries, cranberries, whortle-berries, and a variety of cherries. The strawberries are extremely abundant, and they are the largest and most delicious that I have ever seen, much larger than the largest which we see in the States.

  It sounded too good to be true. But Jim and Margaret wanted it to be true. They wanted to believe such a place could exist somewhere on Earth. They told themselves that of course getting there would take a bit of work. If getting there were easy, well, wouldn’t such a place have long ago been overrun?

  And so they talked themselves into it, little by little, though Jim did most of the talking. He had a rising lust for this journey, this pilgrimage, while Margaret could not suppress the hundred doubts that soon sprang up to hover around the plan. What about the house? What about the furniture? The children? Their schooling? What about the many friends and relatives we leave behind? What if we need a physician out there?

  Jim listened. He made promises. He made lists. He collected maps and articles from newspapers in St. Louis. He wrote to merchants for advice on what to bring and what to buy en route. He conferred with George and Jacob Donner, farmers in Springfield, prosperous men, like him, and past the time in life when you set out to make a new mark in the world. They had no real reason to leave their fields and holdings, yet they too were willing to make the leap. High risk was in the air. High stakes. High promises. Jacob Donner, in poor health and pushing sixty, was ready to gamble on the outside chance that he could find a land free of arthritis, kidney stones, and hot sweats in the middle of the night. His brother, George, liked to pontificate about “larger opportunities,” quoting James Polk, who had said in his inaugural address that our dominant place in the Far West was only a matter of time. Britain was about ready to let go of the Oregon Territory and cede it to the United States. California surely would be next, according to the president, who had advised Mexico, for its own good, to get out of the way.

  These Illinois men felt history gathering like a wind, like a river current that could not be resisted, and upon it they would be borne west like gamblers on a riverboat—though they would not be traveling as so many gamblers before them had, in the singular, as men alone.

  Jim Reed knew all the famous tales of trappers and explorers setting out for the farther shore. Meriwether Lewis. Kit Carson. Lansford Hastings. Jedediah Smith. As a younger man he had known that kind of itch. The Mississippi was about as far west as he could have imagined at the time, the last frontier, they said, before you stepped off into Indian Territory. He had crossed the Alleghenies to the Ohio and worked barges to the mouth, then started up the valley of the Mississippi, talking to settlers, getting the lay of the fertile land, on past St. Louis, where they still spoke French, until he reached Illinois and found a jo
b in the lead mines. It was dirty and dangerous. Every day or so a man passed out from poisons in the air. But Jim lasted long enough to get some money ahead, and he moved again, to Springfield, in the middle of the state, where the land was richer, where he leased himself a farm and found a wife.

  He was feeling it again, that itch, that hunger to move, but it was not a young man’s hunger now. He did not imagine setting out alone, to push ahead and stake a claim. He was a husband and a householder. He saw them all together on the long trail west. It was a husband’s dream. A father’s dream. He imagined them arriving in California together, as a clan. Already he saw the house, the rolling acreage, his sons and daughters galloping home in time for dinner.

  One by one he took them aside, to explain the plan and where they would be going. The man who had never known his father had become the father of four. He spoke first to the boys, because they would be easy, too young yet to make demands—James Junior was five, Tommy three. The girls, he knew, would want to negotiate. Virginia was nearly thirteen, slender and pretty and good in school. He figured, rightly, that she would let her classes go for a while and agree to almost anything if he promised her a new pony. He leaned toward her to savor the kiss, as she threw her arms around his neck. He told her they would ride together across the plains, with the wind in their hair and herds of buffalo thundering in the distance.

  He could not foresee what his younger daughter would want or say. She was a mystery to him, and thus his favorite, their first child together, his firstborn and named for his mother, Martha Jane, though everyone called her Patty. From infancy she’d had a bold look, as if wise beyond her years. “A sage,” said Margaret’s mother, when Patty was still in the crib. “This child’s bound to be a sage, or a fortuneteller. Over in Virginia where we come from, I once saw a child had a look like this from an early age, and she had second sight.”