Snow Mountain Passage (15 page)

“What’s that?” says Jim.

“Sounds like Indians,” one fellow says, “doing a harvest dance up there on the roof.”

They all laugh.

“Could be Mexicans,” the Scribbler says. “Maybe they have us surrounded. A hundred Mexicans pissing on the wall.”

“Rage and blow,” McCutcheon says, “you tornadoes and you cataracks. Spout till you have drenched our steeples and drowned our cocks.”

“The steeples, yes,” says the Scribbler. “Drench the steeples! But Lord, don’t drown our cocks!”

Another round of laughter. And another raucous round of drinks, then some quiet sipping as they listen a while to the first rain any of them has heard since crossing the Sierra, sobered by the new force of this downpour, wondering how long it will last and thinking of the roads they’ll have to travel tomorrow.

ALL NIGHT IT
rains and into early morning. Jim rises with a dull ache behind his eyes, steps out of the bunkhouse and feels a colder edge on the air. He steps past the outbuildings toward a clearing that opens to the east. The clouds have rolled on. Rain has cleansed the atmosphere. He can see for a hundred miles or more, and now he knows where the cold breeze comes from, sweeping across the valley. In the Sierras he sees snow where there had been no snow. Overnight the nearer and farther peaks have been blanketed with white.

A voice behind him says, “Strange weather.”

It is Sutter, in a thick walking coat and knitted hat, looking like a Swiss burgher on his morning constitutional in the shadow of the Alps.

“I have never seen it so low on the slope so early in the season.”

“What does it mean?” asks Jim.

“Who knows? Every year is different from the last. You learn to be careful about predictions.”

“Will there be snow across the entire range?”

“I think so. If the storm comes from the north, as this one did. It takes us by surprise.”

While the recruiters fan out south and west, Jim and Mac spend a day rounding up their gear, loading the animals with jerked beef and beans and flour—enough, they hope, to bring eighty people through one last week in the high country. While they work, they watch the snow line. Jim tells himself that even with this bad turn in the weather, time should still be on their side. Nearly a month has passed since he said good-bye. On his mind’s trail map he has followed their progress day by day. He calculates that they should have just about cleared the summit. At that altitude Margaret and the children would have had a hard night, a miserable night. But the worst part should be behind them now. He prays that this is so.

On the second morning after the rain Jim and Mac start north with thirty horses, one mule, and two of Sutter’s Indians. At dawn their caravan fords the American River, heading back toward Johnson’s Ranch.

D
UCKS
swoop in across the lake and settle, as they have done for who knows how many thousands of years. Wild ducks and geese mix with the gulls that float above the beach on shoreline breezes. The lake is inland from the beach, bordered with tules. They call it a brackish lagoon, half runoff from the wintertime rivulets and rained-on slopes, half salt water seeping under the sand. We have a boat moored down below the house, a little dinghy tied to our spindly pier. It will get you across the lake and back, and I have been out there a time or two, but I’m too old for boating. Sitting still seems to suit me fine. Late afternoons I watch the wind move across the water, and the odd effect it has.

You expect water by the ocean to be flowing toward the larger body. But here it seems to be the opposite. Sea wind keeps the surface moving inland, back the way it has come, and the movement gives the afternoon sheen a rippled look. The lake seems to jump with light, like a million tiny minnows out there leaping for joy, and the glare so bright you can hardly see beyond it.

The brightness burns my eyes. But I don’t mind. If I gaze right into it I can almost see papa moving across the lake, looking the way he used to look. After all these years I still expect to see him coming back, just as I expected him all the time we waited. Waiting for papa. Waiting for anyone.

If I gaze long enough I am eight years old again instead of eighty, and it is the day we finally reached the Truckee River, after two days of the emptiest country you have ever imagined. Things out there were so flat you could see the river coming for miles away. The line of trees was like a lifeline stretched across the sand. It was the first sign of hope we’d had in days, though some people wouldn’t believe it. We were all so maddened with thirst, this could have been another mirage. The animals told us otherwise. They smelled the water hours before we got there. Oxen that looked to be breathing their final breath were suddenly straining at the yoke. A horse bolted, the one carrying mama and my brother Tommy. She couldn’t hold it back, and they went galloping away ahead of us.

Virginia and I were walking. Just about everyone was walking, to lighten the wagonloads. I wonder how many of us could have lasted another day out there. But now we had those trees to guide us in, and what a welcome sight they were! When we finally reached the riverbank, people fell into the water with their boots and shirts and dresses on, like a whole crowd of children splashing and ducking in the sweetest water we had ever felt or tasted.

How sweet it was to drink our fill and then lie back on wet green grass and look up into the leaves. By that time it was the middle of October. Trees along the Truckee, alder and aspen and cottonwood, looked like they had caught fire, the colors were so bright and crisp. That afternoon Virginia and I began to gather autumn leaves, just like we would have done back home. There was every different kind of yellow, pale yellow, chalky yellow, lemon yellow, lime-tinted greenish yellow. Some leaves had a persimmon tinge, and some were red as blood. Sunlight coming through these leaves made an actual glow above the river, and the light dancing on the water was like the light out here dancing across the lake today. It was strange and wondrous water, moving in the wrong direction.

For three weeks our guide had been the Humboldt, winding through the desert from east to west. Now here was the Truckee flowing the other way. To my young eyes the river was flowing backward, and this added to the magic of that afternoon. Somehow it pushed the light right at you. I remember how the yellowy persimmon light reflected up onto the faces, so that everyone looked younger and fresher, their faces shining like saints, as if we had finally arrived at the golden place of all our dreams.

We saw tracks of hare and fox and deer along the river. Pretty soon Bill Eddy came back with nine geese to pluck and cook. We rested there a whole day, and drank and drank, and didn’t want to leave. But we had to. Time was running out. So on we went, along the eastward-running river. I guess it was a day later we met some men on horseback riding toward us. We had just come around a bend. It was afternoon again. We were heading toward the sun, with light filtered through a blaze of autumn leaves. All the air around the river seemed to shine, and right in the middle of that light we saw a figure in the lead. The glare was so bright you couldn’t see who it was, but I knew who it was, and I started running along the bank.

Every day I’d expected to see papa come riding into view. I didn’t know how far it was to Sutter’s Fort, a day, or a month, or a year. But he had already gone off twice—once while we were crossing the Wasatch, and once while we were crossing the Salt Desert. Both times I’d watched and waited, and both times he’d come back.

Virginia had spotted him too. We were both running along the riverbank calling out, “Papa! Papa!”

Even after we got close enough to see that it wasn’t him, I wouldn’t believe it. The man on the horse looked shorter than papa, and thicker, and wore glasses, and a silly-looking derby hat. But I kept trying to make him look different than he looked. I waited until I could see his face, and I tried to make it into papa’s face, find a way to see papa’s eyes and mouth and beard, and only gave up when I heard the folks who’d run along with us begin to call out, “Charlie! Charlie! By God, it’s Charlie Stanton! He’s come back! Thank the Lord! Look at them sacks, look at them mules! God bless you, Charlie Stanton!”

Men and women crowded in to grab his hand and throw their arms around him and kiss him and call his name, and mama was right among them, wanting to know if Charlie had seen papa anywhere along the way. Charlie looked at her and grinned and said, “Yes, ma’am. We had breakfast at Bear Valley.”

“Where’s that?” she said.

“Day or so past the summit.”

“You mean he made it across?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And he was all right?”

“Fit as a fiddle, Mrs. Reed. He looked just fine.”

Her thin shoulders dropped, as if a load of wood she’d been carrying for miles had just dissolved. She sank onto the riverbank and sat with her face in her hands. She was wearing the hat she’d worn all the way across the plains, whenever the sun was out, a Shaker-style hat like so many of the women wore, made of leghorn straw and curved almost like a hood so it held in all her hair. The ribbons underneath her chin were trimmed with red roses. I don’t know how it had lasted so long. The worn-out sweetness of that hat, the rose-tinted sweetness of the dangling ribbons, made me want to weep. Virginia went over and put her arms around mama. I did too, imagining she felt as brokenhearted as I did then, though I was wrong about that. Through her fingers the words came spilling. “Thank God.” She said it over and over. “Thank God. Thank God.”

Much later I would understand that her relief that day was mixed with something else. From the gentle way her shoulders shook, I could feel it, though I couldn’t yet speak it. Much later I would learn that as often as she had prayed for papa, she had cursed him for bringing such a fate upon his family, cursed him because she was the one who had to talk him into leaving the wagon party, cursed him for the looks she had to take from those who now held her responsible for Johnny’s stabbing, and cursed herself for ever marrying such a man. That day by the Truckee she trembled with gratitude and shame.

We all wept with her, but not for long. Mama soon stood up and wiped her eyes and said with a brave smile, “C’mon, let’s see what those mules are packing.”

Everyone else was drifting toward the mules, eager to unload the sacks. Charlie told George Donner what they were carrying, and George took charge of passing out the provisions. We ate biscuits for the first time in many days, and boiled beans, and some pieces of a rabbit somebody shot. With all the water flowing by, Milt and mama made coffee again that night, to drink with dinner. Coffee still tasted bitter to me, but I already loved the smell. Somehow it stood for the comforts of regular life. To my eight-year-old nose, the smell of coffee underneath the trees along the riverbank meant things were almost ready to be normal again.

* * *

NOWADAYS IT
’
S HARD
to imagine how isolated we were out there. Charlie brought the first news we’d had from anywhere in many weeks. There weren’t any roads, no mail or newspapers, or telegraph lines or telephone. This was even before the Pony Express. The whole government could have fallen and Washington, D.C., gone up in flames and we would never have heard a thing about it. Our one and only link with the rest of the world was Charlie Stanton, and he brought back a whole lot more than food. He brought back stories of the place we’d all been imagining. I would say he brought back our faith that such a place was actually somewhere up ahead and waiting for us. He restored our belief in something we had almost stopped believing in. He had been to California, and here he stood, human proof that a person could get there and live to tell the tale.

He was a hero in every way but one. What in God’s name—some people wanted to know—had possessed him to travel in the company of these two redskins? Even if they’d helped him get through the mountains, did we really want to let them join our party, after all the trouble we’d been having with the desert tribes?

Along the Humboldt we’d lost dozens of cattle, and it hurt us bad, slowed us down, doubled the work for the teams that had survived. In hindsight I suppose you could see the Paiutes had about as much right to our cattle as we did to the buffalo herds back there on the plains. Of course, you could not have told that to any of the families whose animals had been shot at. You would have died with those words in your mouth. If thousands of buffalo were running around loose, why it stood to reason they must belong to ANYBODY WITH A RIFLE. But these cattle here, well, they are different. They all belong to US.

Papa’s shadow hung over the presence of Charlie’s two Indian companions, the way it seemed to hang over everything that came along to divide up our company. I would not say papa was partial to Indians, but neither did he despise them on sight, the way some folks did. Just a couple of nights before the stabbing, he had let two Indians creep in close to our campfire, gaunt and underfed and making friendship signs.

Uncle Billy raised his voice in protest, as did several others, but papa wouldn’t listen. He let them hunker next to our fire. Pretty soon they began to talk, as anyone would, on a cold night—sit by the crackling flames and talk. They might have done this before, with other wagon parties, since they knew a few words of English. With sign language they were trying to explain something about the trail farther on, when some sparks from the Graves’s family fire suddenly leaped into the blanket of dry grass that spread out from where we’d camped. In no time a sheet of fire was flashing and licking all around. It was a frenzy there for the next few minutes. While some folks stamped their boots and some flailed bedclothes and some ran to the river with buckets, the two Paiutes sprang into the fire. They had skins wrapped around them. They rolled across the burning grass with a speed that could scarcely be believed. They jumped up flailing and seemed to be everywhere at once.