Snow Mountain Passage (31 page)

The foot couldn’t bear any weight at all. So Phillipine was doing everything. She brought in the wood and split the kindling. She brought in snow to melt for water. I helped her as much as I could. Their young child, Lewis Junior, was pale as chalk. He wasn’t quite a year old. Their daughter, Ada, age three, was sickly too and whimpering like her daddy. Poor Phillipine was at her wits’ end. I can still see her trapped inside that lean-to with Keseberg, who had often beaten her while we were on the trail, as everyone knew. She was only twenty-three, a small woman, and still pretty in spite of all she had endured. Every one of us had traveled a good way to reach this stark rendezvous at Truckee Lake, but no one in the party had traveled farther than Phillipine. She had left a prosperous town somewhere in Germany to follow her husband across the Atlantic Ocean and clear across North America, hoping to make some kind of new start in life, only to end up in this smoky igloo with one child dying and another sick, and a gloomy tyrant filling up the room.

If he had any feeling for her, it didn’t show while I was in their care. His own pain seemed to occupy his full attention. He was too frail to hurt her much, but she still bore her fear of him and served him as if to ward off beatings later on, if he got his strength back.

Once in a while he would speak to her in German, in a gruff, demanding voice. He never spoke to me. Not one word, the whole time I was with them. I thought it had something to do with papa. I knew the two of them had argued. On the day they tried to hang papa, Keseberg had carried the rope. I remembered that rope. I remembered his hungry grin. I thought he hated me for being papa’s daughter. Much later I would understand that he would have treated anyone the way he treated me. He didn’t want any stranger in his lean-to seeing him so helpless, nor did he like a stranger anywhere close to his stash of meal and jerked beef. All we had to eat, my brothers and I, were pieces of hide, which I boiled every day over Keseberg’s fire. Tommy would come from Breen’s cabin next door and join me to choke down some of the sticky gelatin, and then I would take a gob over to the Graveses’ cabin for James Junior. A couple of times, while the Kesebergs were eating, Phillipine passed me little bits of meat, and he looked at her as if she had just stolen all his money.

I WAS ONLY
with them four days, though it seemed like four months. One afternoon we heard a voice calling, “Help us! Help us!” a thin, cracking voice that would break your heart no matter who was doing the calling.

Phillipine and I scrambled up the ice steps and out into the snow, and there was mama stumbling through the trees, with Milt behind her carrying Virginia. I ran out and threw my arms around mama’s waist. She fell against me, just collapsed, and we both tumbled into the snow. I lay there waiting for her to move, but she didn’t. I wriggled out from under and said, “C’mon, mama, get up, get up. You made it back. You’ll be all right now, mama. C’mon, get up.”

She didn’t answer. I tried to lift her, but I had no strength. Thank goodness Phillipine was there. Between us we half raised her. By that time Milt had put Virginia down. He came and lent a hand, and we dragged mama to the cabin.

All three of them were near dead from exposure and exhaustion, too cold to talk, too cold to cry. Later on we would learn how they made it to the summit and a little way past, then lost the trail and wandered off for two days through drifts and crags. They had run out of food and slept three nights in the snow, tormented by the howls of timber wolves. One morning they woke up at the bottom of a bowl of snow. The fire they’d built had melted through the crust and made a hollow, and during the night they’d all slid to the bottom of the bowl. By sheer will they scratched and scrambled their way to the top. Virginia’s feet were frostbitten. She couldn’t walk. They saw then how impossible it was and so turned back. Providence had a hand in this, I know. If they had stayed one more night up there, or if they’d made it to Truckee Lake just one hour later, all three of them would have died in the worst week of blizzard we’d seen so far.

AFTER THAT MAMA
was different. After she thawed out, the craziness left her. I never saw that look in her eyes again. She knew there was no way for any of us to leave that place, and there was nothing else to do but wait. It was a kind of waiting that was different from giving up, and in my mind this is a very big difference. When a person gives up, the spirit goes out of the body, a last gleam goes out of the eyes. By this time we had all seen someone die that way, not only from lack of food, but from hopelessness. They say this is what happened to George Donner’s older brother, Jacob, in the camp at Alder Creek. He just stopped eating, sat for days with his head in his hands, and finally gave up the ghost.

Given what faced us after she came back, I don’t know where mama found her reserves of hope. With half the hides gone from the roof, our cabin leaked so bad it was useless. We had to move in with somebody else. In that little snowbound world we were suddenly destitute, begging for shelter where there wasn’t near enough to go around. Keseberg had nothing but a lean-to. The widow Murphy still had eleven in her cabin, plus Bill Eddy’s wife and their two children. The cabin next to ours was filled up with fourteen members of the Graves clan, and Elizabeth was delirious half the time, calling out for her husband and accusing people of all manner of deception and treachery. Every day or so she would accost mama and demand payment for those two scrawny cattle she had sold us. Her eyes had sunk back into her skull. “You owe me!” she would cry. mama would walk away from her, and Elizabeth would shout mournful predictions into the wind. “Am I supposed to wait until my children waste away? You owe me, Margaret Reed! And God will punish you for all your sinful deeds!”

Mama knew she would not last five minutes in the same cabin with Elizabeth. So it was Patrick Breen who took us in, Patrick who had not wanted to see papa hang but had allowed him to be banished into the wastelands of Nevada. He said he’d let us in on two conditions. First, he did not have room to take Milt Elliott, who would have to fend for himself. Second, the Reed children should never have to see what the Breens had to eat. Patrick was a prudent man, who had seen right away what the future held in store. He had slaughtered all his cattle early, and jerked the beef, and started in eating the hides before his stock of beef was gone. As the third month of our isolation began he still had some beef and a bit of flour and some tea. “It’s our family’s food,” he told mama. “It’s God’s will that a man feed his own family first. But I would spare your young’uns the pain of watching others eat.”

Their cabin was sturdier than the others, built back in 1844 by another bunch who got stranded at that same spot. It was bigger than the others too, though not by much. Sixteen feet wide and twenty long, with a fireplace and chimney at one end. The Breens and their seven children were already packed in there like cordwood, and along came the five of us, filing through his doorway with our bedding and our patchwork bundles. A sheet was hung midway between the walls. On nights when we dined on snow water and the foul-tasting glue of boiled hides, we could not see their meat, but we could smell it, and we could hear their jaws working, as they muttered among themselves.

Some have written of Patrick Breen’s penurious ways and called him selfish and heartless for hoarding food while all about him people were slowly starving to death. Others have praised his generous spirit during those dark weeks, as a man who did as much as he could do with what he had. “Be thankful for this shelter,” mama would tell us. “Without it we would all be frozen stiff.” Still, you have to wonder what it does to a man, watching another’s children shrink while his own have food—especially in such close quarters. By that time we were so skinny there was no flesh on our lips. We could see the line of one another’s teeth behind the skin. I remember once I counted Tommy’s teeth while his mouth was closed.

IN THE BREENS’
cabin there would be two or three days at a time when you couldn’t get outside. We’d just sit tight, mama and the four of us kids, Patrick and Peg and their seven. As long as the fire was going, we could stay warm. The piling snow was a good insulator. It held in other things besides the heat, of course. Lice liked the warmth as much as we did. We all had lice in our hair and in our clothes. And the smells—I don’t want to linger on how things smelled inside that cabin with fourteen of us in a space the size of a chicken house, and Peggy’s youngest only one year old. It is just awful to think about now, with no way for anyone to bathe and sometimes no way to get outdoors to do your business.

We did a lot of sitting and scratching and waiting. mama would read to us when she could, though her headaches had come back and might keep her laid up for half a day. Somewhere along the way Patrick started reciting a Thirty Days Prayer. He would recite it both morning and night. The Breens were the only Catholic family in the party. Something about the dim light and Patrick’s voice made his cabin feel like a church, a little chapel in the wilderness. His readings had an eerie power that worked on me, and I know they worked on my sister, Virginia.

All we had for light were short pieces of kindling that we kept burning on the hearth like little candles. She would sit next to him while he read and hold up one of the pieces of kindling so he could see the pages. He had a high, reedy voice with an Irish lilt to it. After all these years I can still hear Patrick reading:

Between prayers Patrick would read passages from the Bible. Sometimes he would read the same verse over and over and over again, as if trying to commit it to memory. One day he was reading from the story of John the Baptist.

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight.”

He raised his head from the page, and it seemed to me then he looked like John the Baptist, with his craggy face and scraggly beard and his hair pushed out and firelight glinting in his gaunt and red-rimmed eyes. He read the verse again.

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight.”

He read it again.

And then again.

He must have read it ten times, until his wife ran out of patience and called at him to move on to the next verse.

By that time Patrick may have been a little demented, talking to himself as much as to God. He had a bad case of kidney stones. Sometimes he would curl into a ball and lie there in silent agony until the pain passed. Eventually he would sit up and smile like a fool and talk about the sunshine, even though a bitter wind might be howling overhead. Looking back, I can see that we were all a bit demented from the hardship and the lack of food, seeing things and hearing things. I don’t think this takes away from the regularity of his devotions or from what Virginia heard, the passion in his voice that spoke to her own deep need.

With her feet frostbitten she had to crawl around the cabin. She was so weak she believed she was going to die at any moment. Each day when she woke up she did not know whether to give thanks that she was still alive or ask to be taken soon and get it over with. Two or three times, when Patrick was out of the cabin, Peggy Breen took pity on Virginia and slipped her bits of meat. Those precious morsels surely saved her life. Saved her body, that is. Something else saved her spirit.

Our family would all sleep huddled and mashed up together, holding close to mama and to one another. One of those nights is still vivid in my memory, when I heard a voice right next to me. I thought it was a dream voice. I opened my eyes in the blackness and lay still and listened, and I knew then it was Virginia, close by, kneeling on the blankets and speaking quietly.

“Please, God,” she was saying. “Please send us a rescue. Please, God, send somebody to help us escape from here. Please send us a rescue. Please, God, let me see papa again, and I will be a Catholic. I promise. I will always go to Mass, and I will live a good life. Only, please send somebody to help us escape from here. Please, God. Please, God. Please.”

I wondered if mama was awake to hear this too. Our family was Presbyterian, and you weren’t supposed to give any kind of credit at all to the Catholics. If papa had been there to hear such statements he would have put a stop to it right then, even though part of her prayer was to see him safe and sound again. Papa’s mother, who had come from Scotland and grew up in Ireland, had taught him never to trust a Catholic. Their persecution, she used to say, was what drove her to leave for America. Maybe this had something to do with why papa and Patrick never did like each other much. They were both born in Ireland, where the Protestants and the Catholics hardly ever get along. Being my father’s daughter, I have to confess that I too had my suspicions, at age eight. To this day I have never set foot inside a Catholic church. But in my mind, looking back on what I heard that night in Virginia’s pleading voice, it was not the Catholic part that got to her. It was the yearning toward something larger than yourself that you can put your faith in. That is the thing. Your faith needs a place to put itself. I remember envying Virginia the radiance that soon came into her eyes. Whatever she had heard in Patrick’s voice gave her something to hold on to. It persuaded her that someone was out there with us, listening. After that she prayed with him every day, saying Catholic words out loud in that deep forest of pine and snow-laden Douglas fir where such words had never before been heard.

I envied Virginia then. I envy her even now, as I think back. She was fourteen and had found God and trusted Him to get her through. I was still too young to believe in something as large and vast and invisible as God. I could only believe in mama and papa and Salvador, and when mama left a second time, as she soon would do, they’d all be gone.