Snow Mountain Passage (14 page)

“We will drink to your beauty.”

She laughs a small laugh, half pleasure, half disgust.

“You make fun of me.”

“I don’t make fun. Here. Drink a toast. Then we will try them on.”

They raise their cups. Manuiki sips and squinches her face. With glittering eyes he watches her. After she sips again, he lifts one earring and attaches it and stands back for a better look. She runs into the next room, where a small mirror hangs near the door, tilts her head, swings sideways.

“My special kind,” she says.

“You see? I don’t forget. We will drink again, then try the other one.” He has followed her, with the bottle and the cups.

“I have work,” she says.

“We all have work. Life is work. You must sometimes give yourself a little vacation from your work. Here.”

This time she doesn’t grimace. Her eyes, too, have taken on a glitter. When he fastens the second earring, she lolls her head and lets his fingers graze her neck.

He says, “Let me see you from the front.”

She turns and lifts her black eyebrows as if awaiting the answer to a question. When he reaches to take her by the waist, she steps away.

She says, “You like the Indian girl too much.”

“She is nothing.”

“You like too many Indian girls.”

“I only like you.”

“Then why keep her?”

“Why do you flirt with the miller?”

“I do not flirt.”

“Why do you flirt with the blacksmith?”

“We only talk.”

“I saw you making eyes again.”

“You say I cannot talk?”

“If you spend all your time making eyes at the blacksmith, what am I to do?”

“Keep the Indian girl.”

He glares like a stern pastor. “Did he give you a present?”

“No.”

“If he did, I will have him flogged.”

Her eyes expand with fear, and it arouses him. Why are Hawaiian eyes so maddeningly expressive? His mouth curves in a thin smile. “I am a very jealous man. If this continues, I will have both of them punished, the blacksmith and the miller too! I will have them flogged and thrown into prison. I will have the blacksmith hanged! I can do it, you know!”

He says this with an exaggerated fury, swelling out his chest like a rooster. He starts prancing back and forth across the room in a way that makes her giggle.

“I have executed many men. I will execute this blacksmith without mercy if I see him so much as glance at you one more time. He will hang by his neck, and his feet will kick like the feet of a baby in a crib, and then all the world will know that Manuiki is my little bird and mine alone!”

Now she is laughing. He hands her the brandy cup. Again they drink together. Above the rims of the cups their eyes meet. This time when he reaches for her waist she does not step away. His hand slides toward her buttocks, a heavy, calloused hand grasping at the skirt, bunching it so the cloth slowly rises to reveal her thick calf, her thigh, her solid haunch. She wears nothing underneath. As his hand moves across the bare dark skin, she makes a face of mock disappointment, gathering her brows.

“Augie,” she says. “No need to sneak.”

She unties the sash, lifts the dress over her head and lets it fall.

C
LOUD COVER
has rolled in from the north, bringing an early dusk. In the still air, voices carry. From many yards away, Jim can hear their exclamations. He opens the door, and the voices subside as the heads turn, as if by sudden command. The room is lit by one kerosene lamp. Half a dozen men gang around a low table where cups and a jug have been set out. With pen in hand one fellow hunches over a sheaf of paper. Jim knows these men, or knew them once, knew them in what now seems another life—all fellow travelers on the trail west, though at first their names don’t come to him.

His hesitation is matched by theirs, the eyes remembering yet unsure. He has changed so much, thinner now, older and shaggier.

McCutcheon is the first to move. He hulks near the door, as if prepared to make a quick exit, so tall and broad he alone fills half the tiny room. Lunging toward Jim with an outstretched hand, he barks his head on the ceiling but doesn’t seem to notice.

“Goddam, Jim! When’d you get here?”

“I just rode in.”

“Goddam!”
says McCutcheon, furiously pumping his hand. “Good to see you, Jim, I swear it is!” The broad face opens in a silly grin. “And you do come most carefully upon your hour!”

These last words are from a play, Jim knows, though he couldn’t say which one. When Mac is excited he will quote from the Bard, or spout something that sounds like a quotation. Jim never knows how to react to this. Mac himself seems surprised by these words and the pleasure he finds in speaking them. He has a big voice, a boyish face that quickly fills with color.

“I ran into Charlie on the trail,” Jim says, watching the grin grow wider.

“Then the company made it through,” Mac says. “They’re all here!”

In his eyes there is an unnatural luster, whether from drink or a lingering malaria or the spark of hope, Jim can’t tell.

He shakes his head. “I’ve come alone.”

The wide grin fades. “What about Amanda?”

“Holding up just fine, her and the baby both.”

Mac’s feverish eyes absorb this news, Mac the huge young father from Missouri who hasn’t seen his family for six weeks at least. Jim wants to tell him more, tell him why, but he can’t. Not now. Other men push forward to grab his hand with cries of astonishment and welcome, men who only recently made the crossing. They swell anew with the kinship of survival.

The fellow at the table has shoved his chair back and reaches to shake his hand, and here is a face Jim remembers well, lean and handsome, though darker now. Weeks of sun and short rations have given him an Indian look. Jim is glad to be meeting him again, a reporter, a scribbler, a note-taker, a man always looking for his notebook. He gave up a good newspaper job in Louisville to join the great migration and claimed he was going to write a book about it. Jim hopes he’ll write about one memorable day when they drank together on the banks of the Platte.

It was the Fourth of July. The whole wagon train took out some time to celebrate Independence Day. There was a parade, back there in the middle of nowhere. Exuberant weapons were fired into the air. Jim opened another bottle of his ten-year-old brandy, and they toasted the seventieth birthday of the Republic, toasted the Founding Fathers, who had the nerve and the will and the vision to claim this land for their own and all future generations.

Was that only last July? It seems a century ago, and Jim has not seen the Scribbler since. He was in a party of single men who left early and rode ahead on horseback. Lord, how Jim would like to sit down and hear this man’s story, his opinion of the Hastings Cutoff, maybe find out where the prophet has gone. But there’s no time for catching up, not with today’s news hanging in the air. The war they thought had been won is in danger of being lost, unless every able-bodied man comes to the aid of Colonel Fremont, now preparing to march on the Mexican rebels and take care of them once and for all.

The Scribbler refills the cups on the table. In Jim’s honor he toasts again the Declaration of Independence, and toasts the men who have gathered in this room.

“To the new Founding Fathers, who have come this far west to complete the job they started back in 1776!”

“Hurrah!”

“To the Founding Fathers!”

“Hurrah! Hurrah!”

“And we cannot fail,” cries Bill McCutcheon, with flushed face and burning eye, “if we screw our courage to the sticking point!”

The Scribbler lifts a cup. “Very good! To the sticking point!”

He is the one who called this meeting, in a rush of national pride. Now he is writing again, hunched over the sheaf of paper as he drafts a pledge that all men present will begin immediately to recruit volunteers to ride in the California Battalion. In the companies they assemble they will serve as officers, and at the earliest moment they will join Colonel Fremont.

As the sentences flow from his pen, the others watch his moving hand. It’s a heady proposal. John Fremont is a legend, a Marco Polo, a Napoleon of the West. No one in this room has met him. Only the Scribbler has seen him, and then from a distance. But all have heard the stories and read his book, or had parts of it read to them. In their bones they know why he is called the Pathfinder. He blazed the trails they all have followed. If Fremont wants to lead a charge down to Los Angeles, what American man who loves his country would not be proud to follow? Last summer, wasn’t he behind that show over in Sonoma, the Bear Flag business? Didn’t he run the Stars and Stripes right up to the top of that goddam Mexican flagpole?

The Scribbler was in Yerba Buena on the day Fremont sailed for Santa Barbara with a hundred and fifty men. They were going to retake that town, commandeer some horses, and ride on south. But now comes this courier to announce that they didn’t make it. The battalion had to turn around when a northbound ship told them not a horse remained in Santa Barbara. All the ranchos down that way had been raided and stripped. So Fremont sailed back to Monterey, where he is forming up to take his battalion overland. He needs all the horses and all the men he can find.

“What in hell has got into them greasers anyhow?”

“Damned if I know.”

“We been too easy on ‘em, that’s all. It’s time to rise up.”

“How many did they have down there?”

“Four or five hundred, is what I heard.”

“What about us? How many’d we have?”

“Three hundred or thereabouts.”

“Well, damn their eyes!”

“I’m ready to pick off a few.”

“I have shot some buffalo on the way across. I’d sooner shoot me a greaser.”

“I guess you’d have to chase him a whole lot farther.”

“Haw haw haw.”

“You’ll get your chance, boys,” the Scribbler says. “Quicker we head down there, quicker they’ll know who’s running the show.”

Jim empties his glass and fills it again and raises it high but he holds his tongue. He has been in this territory less than a week. He has yet to see a Mexican. What he knows of California is the eighty miles between here and Bear Valley, where there are four ranches held by Americans and Germans, and forty clusters of earth-covered domes, and this fort watched over by the shrunken face of a beheaded Indian, and inside the fort a room filled with men whose eyes remind him of the day he stood by his wagon facing those who wanted to string him up or die trying, that reckless readiness to shoot or lynch or ride headlong into the night. He knows the mood. He feels it rising in himself.

He looks around. They are mostly single men, without families to consider. Perhaps it’s just as well that Margaret and the children are somewhere else. It occurs to him that if the wagons did not make it through the mountains, if somehow they found a sheltered spot where they might last out the winter, it might be a gift in disguise. For them. For him. It is turmoil here, with armies clashing, the towns under siege. He could join up with these men and ride south and start to make this runaway region a safer place.

He isn’t sure. He cannot speak. In his silence the others see strength. It tells them something. They remember how he used to prance at the head of the wagon party on his racing mare. He has the air of a leader, a willingness to take command. At forty-six, Jim is the elder in this room. He has a seniority they respect. It seems foreordained that he walked in when he did. They want him to take charge of their uniformed company. Again they raise their glasses.

“To Captain Jim Reed!” they cry.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!”

“By God!” says the Scribbler. “I would ride anywhere on earth with this fellow! I swear it!”

And oh, how this appeals to Jim. To lead again. To be a captain. To surrender to the fervor and the ferment. What a tonic, after where he’s been and what he’s left behind, the long, silent, dusty days and the tedious passage of collapsing wagons. Here at the fort, large matters are at stake. His nation’s honor is at stake. He has seen the waterways and the bottomland and the boundless herds of game, seen enough to know that he must sooner or later join the fight to secure it all for the nation it rightfully belongs to. And here—tonight!—he can become the officer in charge of a company that will march with the California Battalion. There is glory in that sound, and he is tempted.

He says, “How far from here to Monterey?”

“Four or five days on horseback.”

“I’d say six,” says the Scribbler.

Jim says, “How about Los Angeles?”

“No telling. Could take a month. Depending on weather.”

A month to Los Angeles? A month to get back? He is tempted. Tempted. But he can’t say yes. It’s too soon to be a captain. Too soon to fight. The wagon party is not going to stop. They have no idea what awaits them here.

Jim wags his head, to clear away the brandy fumes, and tells them what is in his heart, tells them he has to ride north again, not south.

“I cannot speak for Mac,” he says, “though I suspect he will be riding that way too. Of course, we’ll look for recruits as we go. If we can sign them up, why we sure will.”

The Scribbler isn’t satisfied. “A lieutenant, then,” he cries. “I will put you down for a lieutenancy. And whenever you join up with us, Jim, there’ll be a place! What do you say?”

“Ay,” says Jim. “That’ll do just fine.”

There is another round of drinks, a round of toasts to the offices they have created for themselves.

“To the lieutenant!”

“Hurrah!”

“And congratulations!”

“We salute you, sir!”

“Salutes to all!”

“Bravo! Bravo!”

Now Jim is shouting with them, toasting, drinking deeply. The brandy makes his eyes wet with patriotism and comradeship. They begin to brag and boast, drinking to deeds past and yet to come. Their shouts and noisy promises drown out the patter of rain that starts to fall upon the fort, a light rain at first, soaked up by wood and thirsty soil.

Gradually the sound becomes a clatter, as the puddles form and rain spills off the roof to splash down into the puddles. Soon water falling on the roof is like a drum, and the outside splatter is so loud they stop to listen.