Impatient With Desire (14 page)

W
hen I came back from Elizabeth’s, I saw immediately the cupboard door was open. My heart plummeted.

I didn’t even need to look inside for those meager rations I planned to parcel out until the next rescue.

The children had eaten every last scrap.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything, although Frances hid under her cover half the day. When I was composed enough, I drew the cover back. Her face was tearstained, and fear and sorrow were in her eyes. “I told Georgia and Eliza no, I told them—” She began crying again and blurted out, “I ate some too, Mother.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “You’re hungry, Frances. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

All we have now is the pan of tallow I cut into squares.

I instructed Jean Baptiste to take Frances, Georgia, and Eliza outside and march them around the clearing. “No matter the weather, you must take them twice a day,” I told him.

I was equally stern with the children. “You must learn to keep your balance on the slick, frozen parts,” I said. “You must know how to wade through drifts and slush. Rescue is coming soon, and you must be ready.”

While they were outside, I bathed George’s arm. As I swished the cloth in warm water, there was a little
ping
. My wedding ring had slid off and hit the bottom of the pan. I quickly fished it out and put it in my pocket, but George saw. I continued to bathe his arm. The infection has spread to his shoulder.

“It took the snowshoers thirty-two days to reach the first settlement,” I said. “Of the fifteen who went, seven survived. Two of the men and all five women. Charles Stanton died. Dear Mr. Stanton—”

I was too choked up to go on. George put his other hand on mine. “Stanton was a brave man,” he said. “Twice he went ahead to help us. Many men would have kept going, but he came back each time. Once he was over the mountains and all the way to Sutter’s Fort and he came back to help us, even though he had no family here.”

The Bible was open to
Deaths
on the table beside us, and I stared at what I had recorded:

I looked at George and my voice cracked, but I finally got it out. “Most of those who perished gave their bodies so that others might live.”

“No,” George said.

“As might we—” I began.

George struggled to get up. “I’ll find the cattle under the snow.”

“Wait till I bandage your arm,” I said.

“How could I do this to you and the children? How could I—”

I stared at him, suddenly flooded with fury. “I wanted this as much as you did,” I said. “I wanted this
more
than you did. For better and for worse, George Donner, we did this together!”

G
eorge’s eyes and mine were wet, and Elitha was sobbing, when we drew away from our home in Springfield, but once the die was cast, we all turned our eyes to the future. Those first six weeks were filled with excitement and happiness and hope. Every day the weather grew finer, the sky bluer, the sun sparkling off our gleaming white wagon covers, our lead yokes Brindle and Bright, Old Sock and Blue, and the other oxen yokes effortlessly pulling along our mighty wagons, at night we danced and sang, and each day we joined more wagons coming from every direction, all of us racing to Independence to meet our destiny. Even Sarah Keyes’s death, though sad, seemed a natural part of the order of things.

Did I write you about her burial, Betsey? I think about all the burials so often I can’t remember if I wrote you or just talked about them with you in my head. No matter.

Our first burial

Sarah Keyes was our first death. You remember I told you she wouldn’t be parted from Margret Reed, her only daughter? She was 70 and an invalid, and the stay-at-home gossips had a field day with that. “Dragging that poor old lady into the wilderness. It’s a sin. James Reed thinks he can defy nature itself.”

If there were hushed conferences inside the Reeds’ house, Sarah Keyes’s wishes were ultimately deferred to, and James had
his furniture factory build a special wagon to make his mother-in-law as comfortable as possible. A double-decker with a level raised for her bed, spring seats, a tiny sheet-metal stove vented through the top. Oh my, Elizabeth coveted that stove.

“They’ve never seen a wagon like this crossing the plains,” James said, and George said, “I think you can safely say that, James.”

The big wagon, built to ease and pleasure an old woman, was so relatively grand it caused resentment almost from the beginning and, though people would probably deny it, certainly played a part in James’s banishment from the train—leaving Margret and the children behind to abandon the wagon and most of their possessions in the second desert. But on the April morning we left Springfield, cached wagons and banishment undreamed of, her sons carried Sarah Keyes out of the house and placed her in the gleaming wagon on a large feather bed, propping her up with pillows. One last time they implored her to reconsider. They knew and she knew that it was the last time they would see each other. Sarah Keyes’s eyes were full of tears as we drove out of Springfield, and she had her little granddaughter hold up the wagon cover to have a last look at her old home, the way I turned around from the front seat of our wagon to have a last look at ours.

Springfield, Illinois, to Alcove Springs, Kansas. 470 miles. Sarah Keyes had less than six weeks with her daughter, but I think if she had had that knowledge before she left, she would have made the same decision. That May day, our first death, was sad, but Sarah Keyes was old, and her time, perhaps hastened a bit, was near. A baby, Lewis Keseberg, Jr., was born the same day she died, reminding us of the cycle of endings and beginnings, tempering our grief with hope. No one dreamed that death was rushing to greet so many in that crowd of mourners. “It seemed hard to bury her in the wilderness and travel on,” Margret told me later, “but Momma’s death there, before our
troubles began, was providential, and nowhere on the whole road could we have found so beautiful a resting place.” All the emigrants turned out to assist at the funeral; the men hewed a coffin out of a cottonwood tree; a minister said words; a young Englishman, John Denton, chiseled sarah keyes Born In Virginia and her dates on a large, gray stone. She was buried under the shade of an oak, the stone placed at the foot of the grave, and Charles Stanton, the children, and I planted wildflowers in the sod.

Not nine months hence, Mr. Tucker told me that on their way coming in to rescue us, they passed Charles Stanton, frozen to death alone in the snow with no one to mark the passing or bury the body.

But on May 26, 1846, there was still time for ceremony, and Sarah Keyes, surrounded by family, friends, and members of our company paying our respects, was laid to rest by the Big Blue River.

I carefully cut a piece from the bolt of red velvet and made a ribbon to wear my wedding ring around my neck. No one mentioned it, and I thought it just as well they hadn’t noticed.

A little while ago, George reached across the table and traced the ribbon with his index finger down to the gold ring, circled it, and smiled at me. The most tender, bittersweet smile. My eyes welled, I had to turn away.

In our farmhouse, it’s nighttime. Supper and dishes are done, but it’s not yet bedtime. A fire is burning, the lamps are lit. Everything seems to glow, bathed in an almost golden light. Leanna threads the drawstring through a leather bag she has made for her best marbles. George roughhouses with Georgia and Eliza, tossing them into the air, each shrieking and begging for another turn. Before dinner Frances and Leanna mischievously braided his hair into a score of tiny little black braids shot with silver that, to the girls’ delight, he wore all through supper and hasn’t taken out yet, really how could one not love a man like that? Elitha, by the fire, is buried in her Dickens, oblivious to all the happy noise. Near the table where men’s, women’s, and children’s clothes in various stages of completion are laid out, Frances stands on a hassock and fidgets in a half-made dress. I sit on the floor, pins in my mouth, pinning Frances’s hem. “The trip will take five to six months,” I say, “so we’ll leave a deep hem for growing.”

Today, eleven months later, I let out the last of the hem and Frances’s little spindly shanks were still exposed. She has grown like a weed, but only vertically. I looked at this child forced to endure so much beyond her six years, and I thought my heart would break.

“You’re going to be tall like your father,” I said.

T
he morning after the men voted to take Hastings Cutoff, all was chaos and confusion at the “Parting of the Ways,” as the majority of wagons lined up to take the regular route and our nineteen wagons lined up separately to take the Cutoff. At the campfire, I was nearly scouring the finish off the coffeepot with sand when Luke Halloran said earnestly to George, “I have money, sir.”

“It’s not a question of money, son,” George said. “I’m sorry.”

“Please, Mr. Donner,” Luke said.

George shook his head and turned away. Kneeling next to me, he whispered, “Thrown out of his wagon. T.B.,” he mouthed.

I watched the dejected young man, and for an instant I was back in North Carolina, bent over Tully, feverish on his bed, a Christmas tree nearby.

“We can put Mr. Halloran in the third wagon,” I said.

“The children—,” George began.

“I’ll keep the children away,” I said.

And when George still hesitated, I spit out, “That boy is sick and totally alone in the world. He needs to get to California fast. He needs a shortcut far more than any of us do.”

George and I locked gaze a moment, then he got up. “Halloran,” he called. Luke turned around, and George nodded. Luke’s face became ecstatic.

Day after day, trying to outrun his sickness, trying to hold on until the famed California sun could heal his poor lungs, Luke grew weaker. He was an object of pity at first, until the men
turned mean in the Wasatch, and stood outside our wagon yelling at him and Hardcoop, “Get out here now, shirkers!” I opened the wagon cover, looked at their faces contorted with rage. “Are you mad?” I said. “No, they’re right, Mrs. Donner,” Luke said from behind me, and he and old Hardcoop staggered out. Time and again over those endless hills, Luke climbed out, stood there racked with consumption, trying to help as much as he could with the unloading, the pulling of the ropes, everything he did not enough and hastening his own decline.

On August 29th, George pulled the oxen out of line so Luke could die without jars and lurches. His head lay in my lap; his face, just into manhood, flushed red in a mockery of good health. I stroked his hair, trying to soothe him. He never took his eyes off mine, until shade by shade, barely perceptible, the light went out of them.

That night, we came into camp with the body. “He came from County Galway, Ireland,” I said. “He opened a general store in St. Joseph, Missouri. His health was good until three months ago.”

George opened a letter and read, “I bequeath everything to George and Tamsen Donner, who took me in.”

James Reed wasn’t the only one who smiled slightly.

When George opened the battered trunk, stenciled
LUKE HALLORAN
, I heard a long, low whistle behind me. Much to everyone’s amazement, including ours, we saw $1,500.00 in silver coin and full Mason regalia.

“One of your fraternal brothers, James,” George said.

“I’ll conduct the funeral according to the Masonic ritual,” James said.

The next day on the white alkali salt flats in the wilderness, the men dug a grave next to a fresh mound—
JOHN HARGRAVE
tarred on a wooden board—from Hastings Company, which we
were trying to catch up with. “Well, at least we know that Hastings exists,” Patrick Breen said.

We wrapped Luke Halloran, 25 years old, in clean sheets and a buffalo robe, and the men proceeded to lay him to rest in a bed of almost pure salt.

“Isn’t anybody going to make him a coffin?” I asked.

“He’s already delayed us too much,” muttered a teamster, and another said, “We shouldn’t have stopped at all.”

“The day we don’t stop to bury our dead will be a sorry day for us,” George said.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Donner,” Patrick Breen said. “That’s almost pure salt. Those bodies will still be preserved on Judgment Day.”

Even though the “dry drive” was still ahead, we gave Luke Halloran a full day. Now when we look back and see that that full day might have gotten us over the mountain pass before the snow made it impassible, it’s hard to understand that so few of us objected to taking the time.

Still…With all our troubles, this was our first death since Sarah Keyes in Alcove Springs. Luke had been in our wagon, and George was the Captain. We had made it through the Wasatch and welcomed a rest. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one shaken by the bitter quarreling in the Wasatch. A burial similar to one at home would be proof that we were the same people who had started out, good people, our values intact. James Reed, a Mason, officiated at the full Masonic funeral he would want for himself.

Now I think we were all whistling in the dark.

I did not yet know that a death, noticed and special, would one day strike me as a triumph.