Snow Mountain Passage (21 page)

As if to the others, yet somehow attuned to Jim’s uneasiness, Valentine says, “We have been looking in the wrong place. There are no troops within miles of here. If we find them at all, it will be in the mountains to the west.” With soft sarcasm, he adds, “Tonight our only company will be a few goats, and the old woman across the road, who waits patiently to see which of us will be first.”

He offers a laugh. But his joke wears thin. The others ignore it.

Under the vast limbs of an elderly fig tree they lay out bedrolls and build a fire in a pit where other sojourners have built fires. A bottle of aguardiente appears. After it has passed around the circle a couple of times they begin to talk, all but Valentine, who now maintains a dramatic silence. Whenever the bottle is offered he passes it on, while he stares at the fire with chin in hand, as if rehearsing for the role of a character whose complex fate weighs heavily upon him.

The others pay little notice. They are curious about Jim. Why did he leave his party? Why is he bound for San Jose?

With every telling of his story the desert has grown wider, the mountains higher, the snow deeper, the need for animals and food more urgent. Hearing of his hopes to mount a rescue team, the listeners glance away with hooded, guilty looks. They sip again, poke sticks at the edges of the blaze, and confirm Jim’s fears. We sure do feel for your kinfolk, they say, and it’s a terrible thing to admit, but when the whole Bay of San Francisco is on alert, who has a spare moment to think about people stuck somewhere three hundred miles away?

One fellow tells a story that he too has told and retold, about a firefight two weeks ago, below San Jose, where five brave Americans were killed and six Walla Wallas riding with them and twice that many Californians.

“What right did they have to stand in the way of our boys moving horses from the Sacramento down to help out Colonel Fremont? They had us outnumbered three to one, but our boys hunkered down and made ‘em wish they stayed home on that particular day. Served ‘em right, I’d say. Our boys wasn’t out to do battle, just driving this herd of horses from one place to the other.”

“Trouble is,” the lanky fellow says, “the greasers got no respect for human life.”

“Nor the Stars and Stripes, neither,” says the fellow next to him, who turns out to be his son. “Two times it was run up the pole there in San Jose. Two times in the dark of night they crept in and tore it down.”

“Thieving cowards is what I call ‘em.”

“Treacherous,” says the third, a stout barrel-maker from Indiana. “Lord, you have never seen such treachery!” And he recounts how all the towns had surrendered peaceably, even the new capital of Los Angeles. But the next thing you know, they turn right around and rise in insurrection. The word now is that Mexican regulars are sailing up the coast from Mazatlán or some such place, with artillery and fresh troops by the hundreds …

His tale is interrupted by the low, thick, insistent voice of Valentine. “Perhaps someone can tell me something.”

He still gazes at the fire. They all look at him and wait.

“When these troops arrive, what do they think they are coming to defend?”

The lanky fellow starts to speak but holds his tongue, as Valentine’s frowning face opens with a slow chuckle. It rises to a hollow laugh.

“Look around you. Look where we are camped. Look at these buildings. If you can call them buildings.” He reaches out, as if to embrace the compound. “
This
is California, gentlemen! Do you think it is worth defending? This is what happens when Californians are in command!”

He steps toward the fire with his hands on his hips, a defiant stance, as if waiting for someone to challenge him. Something about the old mission kindles his anger. Rubbing his wrists as if they itch or burn, twisting them inside his cuffs, he begins to pace.

“A thousand Indians used to work these grounds. Did you know that? Carlos was among them …”

He flings a hand toward the guide, who sits slightly apart, puffing on a corncob pipe. Carlos has not been drinking. Beneath the unbuttoned jacket he wears no shirt. His brown chest is smooth, the muscles etched. Intense eyes give him a warrior look, yet his manner is anything but warlike, with the pipe smoke curling upward. He doesn’t seem to know enough English to follow what’s being said, nor does he seem to care.

“And where are they now?” says Valentine, with accusation in his voice. “What happened to that multitude? I’ll tell you where they are. They ran away, as the family of Carlos ran away. They worked for the padres. They tilled the soil. They made the bricks. They pressed the grapes and ran the cattle. They worked for Spain. But Madrid was so far from Mexico, the Spaniards could not hold this land. The Church lost its power. The padres lost control of the Indians. And away they went. You can see what it has become! You can see how quickly it has been allowed to fall to pieces!”

His rising voice is hoarse and urgent. Lit from below, his tufted chin seems large. His cheeks make upward shadows. The skin below his eyes seems wet, as if watered by the passion of this speech.

Jim takes a long pull on the aguardiente and watches Valentine, reminded of the desert, when men deprived of food and water became delirious and woke up raving in the night, or at midday for no reason would grab you by the shirt. You forgave them, knowing how near you were yourself to such an outburst. But Valentine is not delirious. He looks well fed. He’s a young man too, fit and trim. Jim glances at the others, who have listened without any show of wonder or alarm. Have they heard all this before?

Peering into the heavy branches overhead, Valentine says, “Do you know where you are, Mr. Reed?”

The question startles him. Where does it come from? Again, Valentine seems to enter his mind and know his doubts. Unaccountably he feels his arm hairs prickle.

“More or less,” Jim says.

“You may know that these mountains behind us are named for the devil. The Spanish called this range Diablo. Who knows why? They say a band of Spanish soldiers were defeated not far from here by Indians whose leader was a medicine man of strong powers. The Spanish claimed they were devilish powers. Do you think such things are possible?”

“Out here everything seems possible.”

Valentine regards him with an approving smirk. “Aha! A very good answer, Mr. Reed. The correct answer. But now tell me this! Why would someone establish a mission in such a place, named for the very father of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and built in a region that is named for the devil?”

Jim has no answer. He has never heard of such a thing. All this delights Valentine. His blue eyes gleam. He wraps his arms across his chest and rocks in the firelight.

“It is wicked to do this. They are a wicked people! All of them! Is it any wonder the Indians ran away? Any wonder that the mission is in ruins? The Spaniards thought the Indians were devils. The Indians thought the Spaniards were devils. We are certain that the Californians are devils. And the Californians? Who knows what they think? Perhaps these mountains are well named after all. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Reed? Each man can find here the devil of his own making.”

Valentine’s long laugh echoes across the broken tiles of the empty courtyard and the crumbling adobe walls.

J
IM
’
S SLEEP IS
fitful. Twice the fountain wakes him, and he lies on his back, gazing into the swarm of branches while he retraces the route. Again and again he revisits each mile, from the curve of the Humboldt, across the sand, along the Truckee, into the Sierras, over the summit and through to Bear Valley, trying to imagine the safest spot, trying to place them there, bedded down, somehow protected …

The third time he wakes, a predawn breeze has stirred the leaves. Little clicks and the overhead chatter of twiglets rouse him, and he is up before the others, walking out among the rows of trees, where a few pears and apples can still be seen, brown or mottled yellow, clinging to the gnarly limbs. Valentine is right. They haven’t been pruned in many years, nor has the soil been turned. His boots move through a dense mulch of fallen leaves, years of leaves decomposing, sending up a moldy hard-cider scent, half sweet, half vinegar, from the near-rot of windfall apples and bird-eaten pears composting with the leaves.

These hills are called Diablo, says Valentine. That doesn’t trouble Jim. He won’t let it trouble him. Hills are hills, and apples are apples, and a name is just a name. He breathes deeply, takes in the smell of trees and earth, all doing their work, a comforting and heady smell, floating on a subtle light. Though the orchard is in shadow and the sun still hidden, the air around him has come to life. He turns and sees that the bay and the slopes beyond the bay already catch the sun’s first rays and send them back to tint the limbs and yellow globes.

He falls to his knees and digs his hands down through compost until he touches soil. Out of the leaves he lifts it toward his face, a dark and crumbling handful, holds it close and sniffs, then inhales deeply. It brings water to his eyes, the moist and loamy cider scent of orchard soil. How can Valentine call this place devilish? There is something sacred about an orchard in late autumn, approaching winter, the silence of the leaf-stripped trees, the patience of the trees, turning inward. Trees in summer are sacred too, in another way, their limbs weighted with the produce that the miracle of fertility sends forth—fertility plus cultivation. The long rows stretch out around him, acres and acres of apple trees, pear trees, plum, and quince. Could it be the reason he has come this way? To feel this soil, unlike any he has known, to see these trees sprung out of the wilderness in perfect rows?

Again he smells the soil and imagines the abundance. In his mind he sees the year turn, he sees the pruned limbs sprout new buds. He sees the pears and plums spring forth, burdening the limbs. He sees his children climbing among the branches, and scurrying between the rows to gather windfall fruit.

A
FTER BREAKFAST,
as they ride down the slope, Jim asks aloud, to anyone, “Who owns those orchards now?”

The other emigrants look to Valentine, whose answer is a muffled laugh.

They follow one of the many streams that flow toward the bay, bordered with sycamores and willow thickets and fields of high mustard. The plain is turning green with the shoots of new grasses. Ancient oaks are everywhere but set apart from one another, growing singly. Spaced among the trees, the longhorn cattle stand like distant statues.

“No one,” says Valentine at last. “The finest land for miles around, and no one gives a damn. Would you like the mission orchards, Mr. Reed? They can be yours for the asking.”

One arm stretches forth, as if he is this valley’s first citizen, as if to say, “All of this I present to you!” Again he laughs at the exhilarating folly of such a place. These missions, he tells Jim, once had lands that went on forever. Now it’s all in the hands of the ranching families. But alas, the ranchers don’t like to work for long among the fruit trees. They prefer to speed up and down the valleys seeing to their cattle. To cultivate an orchard would mean getting off your horse. “A man on foot,” he says, “is thought to be no man at all.

“If I were an orchard lover I would seize the chance and sit myself down upon that land with some loaded rifles and claim it by right of occupation. Of course, I am like all the rest of them now. I have been in California too long to accept any task that separates me from my beloved horse!”

With an exuberant cry he removes his hat, whacks the animal’s rump, and gallops away. The trail bends around a grove of oaks, and Valentine disappears, his hat held high, as if he leads a parade along a boulevard filled with admirers.

By the time they catch up to him they are near the pueblo, which can’t be seen until they’re almost upon it. The first buildings are low ranch houses set out by themselves, with plots of vegetables and corrals made of tilting limbs, chickens running loose and tethered goats, the yards littered with cattle bones and skulls.

Now Valentine and Jim ride ahead of the other four, and Valentine’s manner has changed. They ride almost shoulder to shoulder, at a slow trot. He speaks softly, intimately, telling Jim he has a rancho of his own, beyond the town, with corrals and a flour mill. He knows exactly the man to talk with about those orchards, the vineyards, the other mission lands. It is not like the old days, he says, when you petitioned for a grant of such and such a size and then, in order to receive it, became a Catholic and a citizen and swore allegiance to Mexico. That time is gone. The rules are changing every day. Perhaps there are no rules.

A sly and covert glance from Valentine tells Jim this history lesson won’t come free of charge. With an apologetic grin, he confesses that he recognized Jim’s name on the letter of safe passage. Not long ago he met the men who signed the proclamation at Sutter’s Fort, when Jim accepted a lieutenancy in their half-formed platoon. He wants Jim to ride with him. Valentine leads this local militia unit, and tomorrow they’ll be riding out again, this time toward the western mountains, taking more men. He needs thirty to police the town and thirty to ride. He could use another lieutenant.

Is this a request? Is it an offer? Or an order? Jim can’t quite tell. Yet from Valentine it is somehow a flattering proposal, as if he alone can fully appreciate Jim’s qualities of judgment and patriotic zeal.

As for Yerba Buena, he adds seductively, there is no point in trying to get through. Not now. Half the American fleet is anchored there, it’s true, but the port will soon be under siege, with these Californians in revolt and more troops on their way from Mexico. A man alone bound for Yerba Buena would risk his life, and all for what? No one at the port or in the town can think of anything but holding their position.

“Whether here or there, Mr. Reed, you would be conscripted. And we need you here. You ride well. You keep your own counsel. You do not drink too much, as these other buffoons are inclined to do. In the end, of course, the United States will prevail. There is no doubt. Then the men you hope to find will be more than ready to lend a hand. I guarantee it. I know this place. I know them all. The travelers. The families. The officers who now preside over Alta California with their fleet marines at the ready. I know the high-handed rancheros and the little
mamacita
who heated our tortillas last night. I know them, Reed. I know their hearts.”