Snow Mountain Passage (39 page)

I thank the Lord I had lost the will to walk more than fifty feet at a time. After Mr. Glover left I never wandered far enough in her direction to see any sign of what was going on—though I think I must have known. Deep down I must have. I must have chosen not to understand the words Patrick and Peggy whispered on the other side of the blanket.

As I think back upon those weeks it seems as if the mountains themselves had revealed an appetite, as if somewhere among the snowy crevices and windblown granite slopes there were ancient and empty places that had to be filled, laying claim to what little energy and life force remained for us. It had a pull, and it had a voice, and you couldn’t resist it. When the angels came to visit I could not tell if they were heavenly angels or mountain angels, and it didn’t make much difference which, their music was so sweet. They would visit me at all times of the day and night, and before long I stopped hearing much of anything but their voices. They would come from far away like the flute notes of distant birds approaching, single notes I would hear before I saw the wings. Then they’d be all around, white-winged angels singing in a forest filled with silver light. Sometimes they wouldn’t sing. They would float and beckon, and start to drift away, and I would call out, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” And back they’d come, as if they’d just been teasing me, flirting and teasing.

Late one afternoon, outside the cabin, I saw an angel walking toward me through the snow. The sun was low and sending dappled rays through the trees. A silver light rose off the snow. I watched and waited for the wings to lift and listened for the sweet voice to sing. This time there was no song, and I couldn’t see the wings. The whiteness was a furry cloak. This was another kind of angel. Maybe it was an Indian angel. The face was brown. The hair was black. The cloak of white and gray was made of skins, and in his arms he carried some kind of bundle, like a gift. I knew then it was Salvador. Every day I had been wearing his abalone pendant to bring us luck, and here he was come back at last. When I called his name he stopped at the edge of the trees.

“Cómo está?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

I started to run toward him but a hand stopped me, a hand gripping my shoulder. It was Patrick.

“Who are you?” he called out. “What do you want?”

The visitor held forth his bundle, then set it down in the snow and moved back into the trees. He didn’t speak or make a sound. When he was gone Patrick went over there and found half a dozen roots shaped like onions. “Never knew there was an Injun within a hundred miles.”

“It’s Salvador,” I said.

“Salvador,” said Patrick with a snort. “What on earth would bring him clear back up here?”

I wanted to follow him, but the empty forest frightened me. I’d have to wait until he reappeared. I don’t know how long I waited. The days and nights all ran together. On one of those days I turned nine, though it wasn’t on my mind. All I thought about was food. We ate up the rations Mr. Glover left behind, then there was nothing. I sometimes chewed on bits of bark and pine twigs, hoping they might ward off the hunger pangs, which they never did. I was afraid to look at Tommy now. His face was like a skull. I know it snowed again and cleared up again. I noticed the weather less and less. Most of the time I sat by Tommy.

One day I felt compelled to get outside. Something was calling me up into the light, whether angels with wings or the white-robed visitor again, I did not know. Something was out there. I had to know what it was.

It took a lot of effort, climbing the snow stairs. I listened for the flute notes, the tender voices coming from the lake. I remember the sky was very blue when I stepped out onto the snow. The air was quiet. The figure coming toward me through the trees this time was dark and large. No wings. No furry robes. The arms were pumping, as if punching at the air, like someone running but in slow motion, fighting through the snow. And then a call came toward me.

“Patty!”

I knew this voice. It wasn’t Salvador. It wasn’t Mr. Glover. My heart stopped. I had been seeing so many things, hearing so many things, I closed my eyes. Again the voice called, “Patty?” like a question.

He was closer, his huge pack thrown down behind him, and his hat thrown down. I could see his face, his beard, as he lunged toward me, calling, “Patty! Patty! Is it you?”

I tried to run, sure he would disappear before I reached him. I tried to call out, “Papa!” My voice stuck in my throat. The snow had been melting. It was soft. I couldn’t lift my legs high enough to run. I fell forward. Then he was over me, lifting me. I looked into his eyes. As he held me his face filled with fear at what he saw, and that made me afraid. I threw my arms around his neck. He hugged me close against his coat, against his chest.

“It’s okay, darlin’,” he said, “we’re okay now,” his voice soothing away my confusion, his voice sweeter than all those others I’d been hearing.

I still couldn’t talk. With my face pushed into the thick, scratchy wool of his coat I sobbed and sobbed. He held me until I got my breath and found my voice.

“I’m so hungry, papa. I’ve never been so hungry.”

“I know, darlin’. I have something for you that we baked last night.”

He set me down and fetched his pack, where he had a little cloth bag. He brought out a tiny biscuit about the size of a thimble. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. “Here ya go, darlin’. Just bite off a little bit. Eat it real slow.”

I ate that and he gave me another one. I could see the bag was full of these biscuit morsels. My heart swelled with new love for him.

“I knew you’d come back, papa.”

“You knew I wouldn’t leave my little girl behind.”

“Did you see James Junior and Virginia?”

“Yes, we did. By now they’re safe and sound in California.”

“Have you been to California, papa?”

“I sure have, darlin’.”

“Is it far away?”

“Hardly any ways at all. Where’s Tommy now?”

“He’s down below, papa. He’s sleeping. He sleeps most all the time. I tried to feed him whenever I could. But after a while …” I started to cry again. “After a while there wasn’t any more …”

The days and weeks of tears I hadn’t been able to feel came gushing forth. Again he picked me up and held me close and I felt his body shaking next to mine, like the day by the Humboldt when we cut away his hair. Then he put me down and gave me another biscuit and told me to sit still while he went below.

I sat there nibbling, each crumb a precious gift, until papa climbed back up the stairs carrying Tommy, so small against his coat he looked like a doll. Papa had been crying again, and he was trying not to. He didn’t have time to cry.

Patrick had followed him and stood at the top of the stairs. I don’t know what had passed between them in the darkness. Maybe nothing. They watched each other for quite a while.

Papa said, “I thank you, Patrick, for giving shelter to my children.”

“It hasn’t been easy here.”

“I can see that.”

“We’ve got our own.”

“I saw your boys up past the summit. They’ll be all right. Glover’s a good man.”

“They’re good boys too.”

And there they stood, meeting again, two men from Ireland who never cared much for each other in the best of days. For the first time in all these months I felt sorry for Patrick. He looked so shrunken next to papa, who’d left the company in disgrace and had now returned, weary from the climbing but in good health and vigorous after five months of constant motion, while Patrick had been mostly waiting, stiff from sitting and from nursing his kidney stones. In his eyes there was a look I now understand. His fear was that he’d be left behind, that papa bore some grudge and would rescue us but no one else. Knowing Patrick, the way his mind worked in those days, this is probably what he himself would have done, if supplies were short and there were weaker ones to contend with. The night Milt Elliott starved to death, Patrick still had meat in his cabin. Maybe he was afraid papa would find out about that.

At last papa said, “Get your family ready. We’re starting back right away, with everyone who can walk.”

He had brought along a bundle of flannel wrappings. He broke off some pine boughs and spread these on the snow, wrapped Tommy in flannel, and laid him on the boughs in the sun, saying, “It’ll be good for him.”

I have met people who still imagine we spent every minute of those months up to our necks in drifts and blizzards while we scavenged for firewood and scraps of food. Well, we had our share of blizzards, and there were more to come, but we’d had our share of sunshine too. And this was such a day. Though thick clouds had gathered at the summit, right around us the daylight was bright and clean. You could see every needle on the pines. Faraway jagged ledges of granite looked so sharp you could cut your finger if you reached out to touch them.

Three more men had come through the trees in their thick coats and snowshoes. You couldn’t tell by their hairy faces who they were, though one was so tall and broad he had to be Bill McCutcheon. The other men didn’t linger. They headed off toward Alder Creek, where the Donners were. I waved to Mac, and he waved a little wave to me. He didn’t move any closer. He stood back, waiting, while papa gave me two little biscuits to feed to Tommy and told me to stay right there and if the weather changed at all to wait for him down below. Then he joined Mac and they moved off toward Murphy’s cabin.

Much later I learned that Mac already knew what had happened to his little girl. Maybe that’s why he’d kept his distance. Maybe he was mourning so much he didn’t want to look at me and Tommy. Up beyond the summit, when they ran into the first rescue, Mr. Glover had explained how the cabins were laid out and who was still alive. Mac learned then that Harriet had been dead a month. I have often wondered how he took this news. Did it shock him? Or had he known it all along? Had he known in his bones that such a young one couldn’t last, and had he let her go long before he stood there with Mr. Glover and his men and the survivors, mama and Virginia among them, listening to the rushed accounts of what they’d find? I don’t think the news would have stopped Mac in his tracks. But neither would he have let her go ahead of time. No. He wasn’t that kind of man. His heart was too big. He might have bowed his head and thought about his wife waiting down at Sutter’s. But he kept on coming. That is what strikes me, as I think back. With nothing up ahead but grief and hardship, Mac kept on coming. He was like a man possessed. By the time they started off toward Murphy’s cabin he seemed to be bounding across the snow.

After a while Tommy said, “Who was that man?”

“The big tall man?”

“The man with the biscuits.”

“It’s papa, Tommy.”

“You sure?”

“He told us he’d come back, and he did.”

For I don’t know how long Tommy’s eyes had been so glazed over you couldn’t tell if he was seeing anything at all. They lit up now with the faintest shine.

“He brought this for you.” I held one of the biscuits to his mouth, and he took a small bite. I watched him swallow it. He took another bite.

“You sure it was papa?” Tommy’s voice was as fragile as a dried leaf, his body as light as breath. “Is he really here?”

I told him yes and held the biscuit to his mouth, watching him bite. I ate another one myself, real slow, and watched the path they had cut, praying they would come right back. I had almost forgotten about leaving that place. With papa there my hope was born anew. It was hard watching him go away again. I didn’t want to be left alone for long with Tommy. I didn’t understand why they had to go to Murphy’s, and I had no idea what awaited them. The fact is, many years would pass before it all came clear to me, what they found at the widow’s and what they did.

Everything that happened during those weeks took years to find out about, it seems. With the weather and the deep snow and the general fear and suspiciousness, you hardly ever knew what was going on anywhere but in your own cabin. Afterward it all depended on who you talked to and how much you thought you could believe, since they would always put themselves and their families in the best possible light, as people usually do. Some folks never talked at all, so stunned by what befell them, or so ashamed, they kept their silence to the grave. The men from papa’s rescue party—the first ones to hike over to Alder Creek that day—they claimed they saw some of the Donner youngsters sitting on a log with blood running down their chins, eating Jacob Donner’s heart and liver. As you might expect, when this got down to San Francisco Bay, the paper jumped on it and bugled it around the world, just as they would today if they had the chance. Sell as many papers as you can sell—that comes first. Along the way, if someone happens to get the story right, or one-third right, well, that is welcome icing on the cake. Yet those same youngsters, after they were old enough to tell their stories, they would say they couldn’t remember any such thing. My friend Eliza Donner, who was four at the time, says the bodies of the ones who’d died at their camp were buried under so much snow no one had the strength to dig them out, even if they’d wanted to. They were like the cattle who’d been lost and covered, according to Eliza. That’s why it took so many years to piece those weeks and months together. To this very day you will hear people arguing until they are blue in the face over things they themselves could not have seen and that none of us will ever know for sure.

You take the Murphy cabin. We’ll never know exactly how things looked or what had happened in the days before the second rescue came, though by all accounts it was worse than anyone had imagined. Papa found Milt Elliott’s cut-up body outside in the snow. He could tell who it was by the face, which had not been touched. Other parts were gone. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch what such a sight would do to him. How do you look at the face of your most trusted hand? How do you look at the faces of those who cooked his flesh? When Mac and papa appeared in the cabin, widow Murphy fled. She ran out into the snow, laughing like a madwoman.

Lewis Keseberg was in there, and William Eddy’s boy, James, alongside Foster’s son. They were both about Tommy’s age, in about the same condition, or maybe worse. No one had been looking after them, even though the widow was little Georgie Foster’s grandma. They hadn’t been moved or been out of bed for days, both wrapped in filthy blankets, covered with lice, and calling out for food. If things had gone another way, that could have been me and Tommy. If the Breens had not taken us in the second time, this is where we would have ended up. Maybe papa knew that. Maybe he saw Tommy in the face of Bill Eddy’s boy. Maybe Mac was seeing little Harriet.