Impatient With Desire (10 page)

A
s our departure date drew closer, George and I were giddy with anticipation! It really was going to happen! We were going to California!

On one side of the general store, George and Jacob picked out tools and farm implements, George waving his hand at the knives, whetstones, axes, shovels, crowbars, awls, chain, nails, and practically crowing to Mr. Par sons, the storekeeper, “Tar to grease our wheels, and these to grease our land negotiations with the Mexicans!” “Aren’t you worried they might kill you and your family, Mr. Donner?” Mr. Parsons said, shaking his head when George said, “Worried? This is Manifest Destiny!” “Some folks say it’s just plain plunder,” Parsons mumbled. “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” George said, more amused than challenged. He gestured toward the huge pile of tools and implements. “We’re paying for the land, Parsons,” he said. “Why, you can’t stop movement any more than you can stop ripe fruit falling from the tree. And who would want to? You might just as well say Christopher Columbus should have stayed home. Now we’re going to need at least a dozen more shovels…” While across the store, just as exhilarated, Elizabeth and I chose bolts of silks, satins, laces, velvets for the Mexican ladies, and muslin, bright cotton prints, red and yellow flannels for the Indians.

Mrs. Parsons leaned across the counter and lowered her voice. “Can’t you talk your husband out of this, Mrs. Donner?”

It took me a moment to get my wits back. “Mrs. Parsons. I
want
to go to California. Mr. Donner and I are certain it will be advantageous for us and for our children.”

Mrs. Parsons harrumphed and turned to Elizabeth. “Aren’t
you
afraid to take your children into the wilderness?” Elizabeth was taken aback too,
so I finally answered, “Fear didn’t build this country, Mrs. Parsons. Remember, just a few years ago Illinois was wilderness.”

Now when we recall that day, George sees that Jacob hung back, leaving all the decisions to him, that Mr. Parsons shook his head, not in fear, as George had thought, but much more in censure, as if our whole enterprise was misguided or folly, and I see beyond Mrs. Parsons’s clamped lips that Elizabeth was fidgety, almost querulous. She gestured to a bolt of red velvet. “Isn’t that a little dear for the Mexican ladies?” I ran my fingers down it. “They won’t be able to resist it.”

Today Leanna picked up the bolt of red velvet and started to rip it. “Don’t use that until we use everything else up,” I said.

Working almost silently, the melting snow freezing our hands, George working with only one arm, we balled up linsey, muslin, and some iridescent green silk to stuff the holes in the ceiling. Where we’ve taken the hides off, the melting snow drips in. We are eating the roof over our heads.

When pain shot again across George’s face from the effort, I pulled back Mrs. Wolfinger’s curtain, put balled up silk in her hands, and pointed to the ceiling.

Afternoon

I looked up and saw Frances peeking at Mrs. Wolfinger through a gap in the blankets.

“Frances, come away from there,” I said. “Give her privacy. That’s her place, this is ours.”

Frances came over to the table. “Why does she cry all the time?”

I heard the omnipresent mewling come from behind Mrs. Wolfinger’s blanket then, only because Frances had called attention to it. Most of the time I don’t even hear it.

“She’s a long way from home,” I said. “We all have each other. She has no one.” I wrapped a strip of linen around a smooth stick, dipped it into a pan of warm water, and laved George’s wound.

“And she doesn’t understand our language,” George said.

“Don’t you speak her language?” Frances asked.

“I studied standard German with my brother’s tutor for only a term,” I said, “and to his regret, your father’s parents wanted their children to speak only English. Mrs. Wolfinger speaks a dialect we barely understand.”

“Why don’t you teach her English?” Frances said.

“I tried, but she doesn’t seem interested in learning.”

Frances watched us for a while, gradually making her way back to Mrs. Wolfinger’s blanket. I pretended not to notice how, very slyly, she slipped inside.

I have no idea what transpired, but for a blessed moment the crying stopped.

T
he Wolfingers, Joseph Reinhardt, and Augustus Spitzer joined our company in Independence. This is what we know about them.

Mr. Wolfinger, (first name?), 22–26?, had a well-equipped wagon and sturdy oxen. His new bride, Doris, had gold earbobs and a trunkful of brightly colored silk dresses that she changed often, once twice in one day, giving the gossips frequent occasion to wag their tongues. She was 19 but seemed much younger, a girl really, a very pretty girl who may not have had pretty things before. I enjoyed her simple pleasure and thought it a good thing she had a trunkful of those silk dresses, because silk soaked up stains and had to be sweltering. I brought worsted dresses, which didn’t show soil or wrinkles, but oh, how they also retained the heat. The children’s linsey dresses were much cooler—indeed, on the hot prairie, I often wished I had linsey. Odd for me now to recall being too hot, and odd too to write about Doris Wolfinger’s trunkful of dresses, rotting now in one of the deserts, when for so many months she has worn the same tattered, stained, soiled red silk dress, even sleeping in it.

The Wolfingers camped adjacent to Lewis and Philippine Keseberg’s two wagons, and next to them was the wagon shared by Joseph Reinhardt and Augustus Spitzer, both around 30, partners in a never specified business. Most people referred to them all as “the Germans,” although Philippine Keseberg told me that her husband, Lewis, said the other Germans were common and forbade her to associate with them.

Once I walked by their wagons on my way out to the prairie to botanize, and Mr. Wolfinger had a proprietary hand on Mrs. Wolfinger’s shoulder, while she held up her new wedding band to catch the sun’s glints. It made me smile, but nearby, Mr. Reinhardt and Mr. Spitzer looked at the Wolfingers with sour envy. Mr. Spitzer swigged a flask of whiskey and handed it to Mr. Reinhardt, who spied me and tried to cover up the whiskey bottle. “Good day, Mrs. Donner,” Mr. Reinhardt said in a fawning tone. Remember, I wrote you then, Betsey, “We have some of the best people in our company, and some too that are not so good.” Really, I despise sneaks and toadies, but I disliked more Mr. Spitzer’s bold stare, challenging me to chastise him, as if his vices were of concern to me.

Mr. Stanton and I have found the wild tulip, the primrose, the lupine, the eardrop, the larkspur, and creeping hollyhock, and a beautiful flower resembling the blossom of the beech tree, but in bunches as large as a small sugar loaf, and of every variety of shade, to red and green…

Phlox Carnea

“I told him it’d be just like the old days,” George said.

He has said this more than once before, and I didn’t answer. On my lap was a journal page I had ripped out and ruled into small squares, drawing a different trail flower on each: another card game to distract the children. I cut out the squares and watched George stare deeply into the fire.

“The old days,” he said again and looked over at me. “He didn’t want to go to Kentucky. He couldn’t wait to get home from Texas. I dragged him to Illinois. He never wanted to try anything new.

“He and his first wife lived with us for a year before she insisted on getting their own farm.

“I used to plow his fields after I did mine.”

I knew about the first wife and the fields, but the rest was news to me. I nodded, and the words burst out of George in a torrent, as if saved up for fifty years.

“My little brother. Ever since I can remember, he was bigger and stronger than I was, and he used to pommel me every other week, and I
still
felt responsible for him.

“Once I heard my mother say to her sister, ‘Jacob and George are night and day.’ I puzzled for years as to exactly what she meant.

“Before she died, Mother said, ‘George, you watch out for your little brother.’ It just seemed a natural request to me, and I promised, but now I think about it: Jacob was fifty-three years old!”

He talked for a long time, this happened in Texas, that happened in Kentucky, I should never…, and I just listened. From the first day I met him, Jacob was incurious and peevish, but I’ve kept my opinion to myself. Sometimes I had to force myself to be pleasant, and I did. You poke at blood ties at your own peril. As you well know, Betsey, I’ve lost my temper more than once with William, but woe betide anyone else who ever says a word against our brother.

To my amazement and George’s deep pleasure, Jacob grew in strength and vigor in the first few months on the Trail. He and George rode ahead to scout camping sites; they hunted buffalo, racing at full tilt to present the bloody humps to Elizabeth and me. But he flagged noticeably in the Wasatch, and after the axle broke and the chisel slipped and gouged George’s hand, he just gave up. One day at the table in their shelter, he laid his head down on his arms and wouldn’t get up. Elizabeth was frantic. George tried to rouse him without success. “Jacob, listen to me. Milt Elliott is here. He and the others are going to walk over and bring things back. I’ve made a list of things we need. Jacob. Jacob.”

Only once did Jacob respond. He lifted his head and said, “I’m sorry, George.”

“My hand is nearly good as new,” George said.

“I let you down again,” Jacob said.

“You’ve never let me down, Jacob,” George said, but Jacob never spoke to anyone again. He just laid his head on that table,
leaving Elizabeth, and seven children, to drag the oxen hides in, search for wood, keep the fire going…I couldn’t help thinking that a second husband had abandoned her.

But I will never forget that Jacob was the one who pulled my baby Eliza from the overturned wagon. When he lay motionless on his platform that last day, I whispered in his ear, “Thank you for saving Eliza. I will always be grateful.”

I hope somewhere in his being he heard me.

My dearest sister,

I don’t know what it’s been like for others, but this is how it has been for me. It didn’t really penetrate for some time that we were stopped here. In the beginning, I was concentrating on George’s wound, what a wound like that means in our debilitated condition, planning how we’d keep it clean in the difficult trail conditions. That first snowstorm lasted eight days, and although George and I agreed that the shelter was sturdy enough, that firewood was plentiful, and that we could butcher all the oxen we could find, it still seemed a temporary delay like all the other ones along the Trail, and we were just waiting for it to be over so we could go on. One day, I whispered, “Oh my God,” and it was part prayer, part sinking realization: We are trapped in the mountains.

Perhaps I knew it all along and it was just a matter of accepting it.

We’re not the first. In ’44, as Patrick Breen so often reminded the men at the campfires, a young man from the Stevens Party had to spend the winter in the mountains. We knew his name, Moses Schallenberger, as well as an old acquaintance. Does it strike anyone else as morbidly amusing that the Breens claimed the cabin that Moses built? That young man from the Stevens Party of ’44 was a cautionary tale for all the emigrants of ’45 and ’46—as we have become another cautionary tale to be told at campfires from now on, hurry hurry—but for us here in the mountains he has become a tale of hope, because we know it’s possible to survive.

It’s only in the middle of the night that doubt comes.

But that’s not true either. My feelings change a dozen times in the same day. I keep us all on a strict schedule to keep a tight rein on them.

What is hardest for me, Betsey, is having no one to tell my fears to, so they can be shared or assuaged. George and I talk all the time, but I cannot burden him with my fears. They would pull him down, and he is already struggling. If I didn’t have you to tell everything to, I couldn’t bear it.

I struggle too. Sometimes I feel almost a hatred for Mrs. Wolfinger. She is alone in a foreign land, the man who brought her here murdered by her compatriots. But she has built a country of one inside. I tried to teach her English, but she stayed mute, willfully mute it seemed to me after a while. I don’t have the energy to take care of everyone. Because I insist she contribute, she gathers firewood sullenly, immediately retreating behind her curtain. She makes no attempt to keep clean. She comes out only for her bowl of hides, and I have begun to resent every bite she takes. I know some of what she feels. After Tully died, I wanted to lie down and die. But you have to pull yourself together. Or lie down and die and stop taking food out of my children’s mouths.

God forgive me, I am becoming cruel. I do not want to be the kind of person I’m becoming.

“None of us knows what we’ll do until we’re tested,” George said.