Snow Mountain Passage (30 page)

Standing at the bar Jim feels a hand upon his arm, and here is Valentine with his sly, conspiratorial smile.

“Well, Reed, life is full of its surprises, wouldn’t you say? We knew the Californians had no stomach for the contest. Who would have thought our own marines would back down too? But in the end, it’s all the same.”

His jacket is loose. His hat hangs down upon his shoulders. His black hair is combed straight back. His face looks gleeful, as if some secret dream has unexpectedly come true.

“They were right about the horses, of course. On a ranch not far from here I have quite a number well secluded. Why don’t you come in with me? These are superior animals, well bred and broken. We can drive them inland and name our price. With your share you can mount the rescue team you’re going to need. I guarantee it. Then, when you’ve brought your family through, we’ll go into partnership. Out here it’s hard to find a steady man who knows what he wants.”

“What sort of partnership?”

“Why, buying, selling, trading. I know you’ve done some of that. It’s wide open now. There will be no more resistance in the north. Nothing stands in our way.”

Valentine once again seems to know his mind. Here’s what Jim is searching for, the money to hire men, to buy supplies for a month or more. But does he dare rely on such a fellow? There is something perverse about Valentine. He should be in disgrace today. Yet he seems to revel in all this. He has no shame. Wasn’t the militia formed to solve the very problems he and others like him had created? Jim remembers their first meeting, when Valentine told him no man alone could get through to Yerba Buena. Surely he knew that wasn’t true. Surely he knew what the Alcalde already knew. If Jim hadn’t listened to him, he might long ago have traveled north and reached the port. And yet … and yet had he done so, the battle would not have ended any sooner, nor would he have seen the orchards or this long, fecund valley. Or met the good Alcalde. Or met Bartlett.

Who can say, in hindsight, which route is the nearer or the better one? The route itself would seem to have a will, and each of us is bound to it.

With his cocky smile Valentine says, “Believe me, Reed, no one is watching now. California is like a bank with the front door open and the safe unlocked and the banker gone away on a year’s vacation.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Of course you do.”

“I like to know there’s a banker somewhere sitting at his desk. I want a county clerk who keeps the deeds and documents in order.”

Valentine throws his head back in a laugh of disbelief. “And yet with a single nod from the snowy head of our dear Alcalde, you’d gladly snatch up the mission’s keys and all the orchard lands …”

“Such fine trees deserve some care. Those lands belong to no one now.”

“And how did you come to know
that?”

“Well … as a matter of fact, from you.”

“That’s right! You learned it from me! I have gone out of my way to befriend you, Reed. And yet you would turn your back on me. An abandoned orchard is one thing, you say, but a surplus of horses is something else.”

“Everyone knows where those horses came from.”

“I suppose you disapprove.”

“By God, I do!”

“You draw a fine line. Too fine a line for me.”

“Don’t sneer.”

“You should have been a lawyer.”

“I’m in no mood tonight for mockery.”

“You have a very legal mind.”

“I have a family. Can you imagine what that means? I want some safety for them here. I don’t want a lawless land. I’ve had enough of that.”

“You are too cautious, Reed, far too cautious. The time is ripe. Ride with us and you’ll have all the money you need to bring your family out.”

His blue eyes glitter with amused and erotic intensity, as if he’s just told a bawdy tale among cigar-smoking cronies.

“Think it over, Reed. You and me and Carlos, we’d be quite a team.”

“Why Carlos?”

“Where we’re going he knows all the tribal leaders,” says Valentine with a rascal wink, as he moves out among the gangly dancers. “We’ll want to keep the tribes in line.”

In some nameless jig/fandango he begins to leap and strut, while the banjo strums and the fiddle whines and the harmonica hums and warbles. Valentine’s partner is one of the local women, bare-shouldered and vivacious. Her skirt flares wide. He does not so much dance with her as dance around her, grinning and prancing in the dusky light from candles and from the little tongues of flame inside the lamps.

S
OMETIMES IN THE
very winter of the year we will have a run of warm days here, five or six in a row, when it seems like spring has come along three months too early. The fruit trees in our yard will start to show their tiny blossoms, pink and white, and someone who has not lived here long, someone who recently arrived from Ohio or Alabama will shake his head and say it’s an enigma and perhaps a crime that nature would deceive these poor trees, get their hopes up and call forth these innocent shoots so soon, only to have the frosty nights come back and nip them in the bud.

What such a person has not yet discovered is that the trees know more than we know about how they are to get along in such a place. Somehow they do just fine. They take advantage of the warm days, and get through the frosty days, and in due time the fruit comes, the pears and the apples and the plums and tangerines.

If we get a warm day in January, we have to learn from the fruit tree to let some little bud of expectation peep forth. It’s not a trick of nature. It’s a gift. I’m past eighty, but I’m not too old to get outside on such a day, sit on the porch and let the light call things into the open. A warm day like this makes it easier to think back on the cold weeks of 1847 when our cabins were sometimes under ten feet of snow. Even though I was there, it’s hard to believe we had to cut ramps and ice steps to climb out of the cabins and get back up to the light. We were like Eskimos, I guess, but with our igloos down there below the surface. One day we’d have falling snow. The next day a roaring wind would come and a blizzard that penned us in for a week or more. When it was over we might have five new feet of snow to dig through. Then the sun would be so bright and the sky so blue you couldn’t look at it. You’d have to shut your eyes and let the tears run down your face and give thanks. It amazes me now, in spite of all we’d lost, how often we’d find something to be thankful for.

After a week went by and the Snowshoe Party did not return, as the earlier exploring parties had, we gave thanks that they’d made it across. At least that’s all you heard anyone say about it. No one would mention out loud that they might have got lost in one of those storms that kept us underground. It was too awful to think about. So mama and Milt calculated how much time it would take them to get back with a rescue team. Everyone had some kind of vision of their route, since Charlie Stanton had many times described his travels to Sutter’s Fort. He had figured six days to get from Truckee Lake to Bear Valley and three more to make Johnson’s. The next question was, How long would it take them to return? The first trip had taken him a month. He’d had mules to ride, of course, but then he’d also had twice as far to go. “If he’s lucky,” I heard Milt say, “he might cut that time in half.”

“Depending on the weather,” mama said.

“Depending on a lot of things,” said Milt, his crooked jaw working back and forth.

Everyone was counting on Charlie and Bill Eddy and the Indians. Some folks had given up on papa. If he was coming back, they would say with a scowl, he’d have been here by now. In my own heart I had not given up on papa. I still expected to see him any day, pushing through the trees. Meanwhile, I had another hero standing in reserve. His name was Salvador. I had his abalone amulet around my neck. Whenever the sun was out I’d keep an eye on the pass above the lake. I did not know if they would come together, or one at a time, but I knew they’d come.

In the first part of January, something happened to mama. She didn’t think she could wait for papa any longer, or for the Snowshoe Party, or for any other kind of party that might be coming toward us from the west. She was going to hike across the mountains herself, she said, and bring back help.

It was a crazy idea. We all begged her not to go, but she was frantic. We were nearly out of food. She couldn’t see how any of us could make it through a winter on the pitiful scraps remaining. Before the snow fell so thick and fast, we would sometimes capture the tiny field mice that crept into camp, and roast them, and make a soup. For a while mama had doled out strips of beef the size of your forefinger, each little strip a meal. About the time that was running out, she told us she had trapped a rabbit. It was already skinned, she said. That night each of us kids got a paw, and it was good, I have to confess. It was skinny but succulent. We sucked every last speck of meat off the little bones. We sucked the bones and held them in our mouths for a long time. The next afternoon I noticed that our dog, Cash, had been gone all day. I asked Virginia if she had seen him. I asked Tommy. We all asked mama if she had seen Cash. She couldn’t answer. She turned away as if she’d heard a noise somewhere. So we knew what she’d done, and I scolded her. I said I’d rather die than eat off the rest of Cash’s body. Virginia joined in. She was crying. “He came all the way across the plains with the family,” she said. “It’s like killing one of us!”

For all our tears and our remorse and guilt, once we smelled the next pieces cooking over mama’s fire—the skimpy legs, the ribs—we ate up every last morsel. There wasn’t much left of him, either. It still amazes me how Cash survived that long with nothing to nibble on but bits of bone and bark and who knows what else. But mama made that dog last a week. And I learned then that hunger has no boundaries. For me, at age eight, this was no different from what others would be doing in the days ahead. Cash had become a member of the family and we stood in line, James Junior and Tommy and Virginia and me, while mama served up his ears, his neck, his tongue, his very eyes.

After that we started eating hides, which boiled down to a gummy gelatin that was the worst-tasting mess I have ever tried to swallow. First you’d have to cut a hide into squares about a foot across and burn off the hair and scrape it down with a knife, then boil the pieces for hours and hours. Some people couldn’t eat it, no matter how hungry they were. It would make them gag and retch. What was worse, for us, the only hides we had were ones we’d used to cover the cabin. Not only were we reduced to eating this undigestible glue, we would soon be eating the very roof from over our heads. That’s when mama decided to try and hike out. If she took Virginia and Milt, she said, they could go for help, and it would also mean three less mouths to feed.

She had no idea what it would take to cross those mountains in January. All the food she had to carry was a few last strips of jerky she had stored away. James Junior and Tommy and me, we pleaded with her to take us too. We ganged around her, wailing and pulling on her skirts. She said we were too young to do the climbing. She said she was doing this for us.

“I’m going to bring you all back some bread,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like some warm bread to eat?”

I had forgotten what bread tasted like. All I wanted was to go wherever mama was going. How could she take Virginia along and not take me too? I hated Virginia.

“You have to be strong,” mama said to me, “to take care of Tommy and James until I get back. You’re the big sister now.”

“If I’m strong,” I said, “why can’t I go with you?”

“We won’t be gone long, Patty. We won’t be gone any time at all.”

The way she said this, my hatred for Virginia turned to terror. mama was past arguing or thinking clear. Her eyes were wild. While we three young ones stood and watched, she and Virginia and Milt moved out through the trees the way we had watched papa move out across the flatness of the hot, blank desert. I don’t have to tell you what it felt like to be that age and have both your mother and your father disappear into country that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Her crazy look was the same look I’d seen on the face of Elizabeth Graves the day Uncle Billy left with the Snowshoe Party. I realize now I knew something about Elizabeth Graves I had not known before. I knew where her screams had come from, though I myself could not yet scream.

Mama had parceled us out among the other families—James Junior to the Graveses, Tommy to the Breens, and me to the Keseberg cabin. We had never been split up like this, with the whole family broken into pieces. mama had told me to look out for my baby brothers, but they, too, soon disappeared, carried away to the other cabins, and I was alone, shivering in the snow, too scared to descend into Keseberg’s cave. No one had seen him for weeks. Maybe he was dead. I imagined his corpse lying down there in the darkness, and I could not move. Finally his wife Phillipine came up the snow stairs and said something in German and beckoned with her hands. Her eyes were full of grief, but she had a sweet and motherly smile, so I climbed down the steps behind her.

In the dim light I could see him lying under a pile of filthy blankets. His face was to the fire and his eyes were open, but he did not speak. I slunk down next to the wall, as far from him as I could get, which wasn’t more than a few feet, since their cabin was smaller than ours, just a lean-to built against one side of Breen’s cabin. I watched him a while, thinking maybe he had died with his eyes open. Then I saw his beard move. His blond beard had grown down to cover his throat. He was wheezing like an old dog underneath the porch. Later on, when he got up from his bed to relieve himself, he groaned and whimpered. The thorn he had stepped on, way back by the Humboldt, had festered until his foot was too big to fit inside his boot. It was dark and swollen and wrapped in rags. He could barely hobble across the room, let alone get up and down the stairs. I heard him pee against the wall. He staggered back to the bed and fell into his heap of blankets.