Snow Mountain Passage (43 page)

To make such a journey you could take horses clear around the bay and skirt the delta, going by way of the San Joaquin and Livermore valleys, which might mean a week or more, depending on the weather and the width of the streams. Or you could take one of the ferrying vessels.

We had crossed many streams and creeks and rivers. But I had never been on open water. From Sonoma landing we took a cutter down through the curving creek, past the marshland, out onto the broad blue bay. For the first time I felt the tidal pulse, the flowing in and flowing out of waters pushed by oceans I had yet to see. The briny smell was like perfume. I can smell it now, from my front porch, and it lifts my spirits still. Off to the right of us Tamalpais humped against the morning sky, holding back a cotton wall of fog. The mountain seemed to cast a shadow across the water. But it wasn’t a shadow. The sun was overhead. It was a swarm of seals as closely packed as kelp. A world of seals had darkened one whole corner of the bay.

I remember a lone gray gull with a white beak, hanging on the wind as if suspended from an invisible cord. We moved along, but the gull didn’t move. It hovered, watching us pass, and it seemed wondrous to me. I studied it for as long as I could, amazed by how it used the wind to hold its place in the air.

As I look back, each moment of the sailing was like that. By age nine I had come to see that each hour of my life was a wonder. Life itself was a precious gift. And simply being warm. I was still a long way from taking warmth for granted, or sitting in the sunshine, or having a dress to wear that was not wet and stiff with ice, and having food before us whenever we were hungry. Any form of food filled me with gratitude. To this day I will not waste a morsel if I can help it. Each morning I give thanks for the gift of my life.

That afternoon we anchored at Yerba Buena cove. The fellow who rowed us in was a Mormon. It seemed like half the people there were Mormons. With a challenging eye he asked papa what he thought about the town’s new name. Papa said he couldn’t say unless he knew what it was. He’d run into the fellow once before, the first time he crossed the bay to take care of some business at the port. He already knew the name but acted like a newcomer, just leading the fellow on.

We all got a lecture then. We heard this boatman scoff at Washington Bartlett, formerly the mayor. Before he sailed back to New England with the fleet, he had renamed the town San Francisco. To match the name of the bay, Bartlett said. According to the boatman, a lot of people didn’t like it, and some never would.

“Every town on this whole blamed coast is named after a Catholic,” he complained, “from San Diego clear on up!”

We stayed overnight in a rooming house papa knew about. He showed us the hall where they held the meeting to raise money for the rescue and told us who was there. The changes in the town amazed him. In just eight months the population had doubled, he said. It still wasn’t much to look at, by today’s standards, but it was the biggest town I’d seen in over a year. There must have been fifteen ships offshore. Two years later, of course, the bay would be filled with ships from every port on earth, and the town spreading every which way, up the hills and out toward what they call North Beach, and clear over to Mission Dolores. Wharves would poke into the bay like the fingers of a giant hand, as crowds poured in looking for the nuggets that would make them rich.

I’ve heard people say the Gold Rush made California the kind of place it is today. Why do you think it’s called the Golden State, they will say. I suppose they’re right. But as I look back, the towns were already filling up with dreamers and schemers, my papa, James Frazier Reed, among them. The day we stopped in San Francisco was still four months before James Marshall came into Sutter’s Fort with the little sack of shiny flakes and flecks and pebbles he had taken out of the American River. It was September 1847, and already there was a current in the air. I can’t help thinking if it hadn’t been the Gold Rush it would have been some other kind of rush. There was a look in the eye of every person you saw of something on the verge and about to burst forth. You could see it in papa’s eye after we had climbed the hill from the beach, as he stood in Portsmouth Square counting the buildings he hadn’t seen before. He’d lost a hundred animals and three loaded wagons and most of his money. He’d lost a lot of his pride too and his stubbornness. But he had not lost his drive or his will. He was not too old to start over. The fact is, there were no two ways about it. In those days you could not take out much time to lick your wounds. It was start over or die.

THE NEXT MORNING
we were on the water gain, tacking against a steady wind out of the south and west. As we neared the lower end of the bay I could see a green fringe ahead, with mountains swelling on both sides. Far away to the south the ranges seemed to meet. It looked like we were sailing into a flat-bottomed bowl. The fringe turned out to be a border of tule fields. Guadalupe Creek came out of the coastal mountains and flowed across Santa Clara Valley from south to north and wound through these tules for six or seven miles, among the sloughs and muddy islands. The wind was out of the north now. It ruffled the blue-green water and eased us along a twisting channel lined with stalks and tassels rustling in the wind.

As I imagine how we must have looked that day, coming up to the wharf, I am reminded of men we would see years later when there were streets in San Jose and San Francisco, men we’d known in the mountains. You would never be able to tell, from the tailored cut of their coats and fancy hats, the unspeakable things they had done to one another. As we stood on the deck, you would never have known what mama’s eyes had seen, or my eyes, or papa’s, or Virginia’s. We were just one more load of emigrants like those who’d been rolling and riding and sailing in for all these months, glad to be there and looking for a new place to set down roots.

A wagon carried us into the pueblo. We stopped long enough to pick up some provisions and three horses papa had bought and kept boarded at a livery stable. Then we rode on around the southern shore of the bay and up to the Mission of St. Joseph and pitched our tent underneath an old fig tree with limbs so thick and layered we almost could have got along without the tent. The ground smelled like figs and grass and sweet jam, though the trees had been picked clean. Papa had ferried down from Napa twice to get the fruit harvested, those acres of pears and apples and figs and quince. He had found his first nest egg hanging from those limbs. He got the fruit dried and sacked and hauled to the port and shipped clear across to the Hawaiian Islands to trade for sugar and coffee and coconut oil. Captain Sutter told him how to do it. He’d been out to Honolulu and knew half the people there, or so he claimed.

Once we had our camp set up, papa started mending walls and fences, puttering around the trees, clearing a place where he believed he would build a house once he had an uncontested title. Every couple of days he would ride into the pueblo, where he had been elected to the new town council. He was that kind of go-getter. They already had big plans for Alta California, which in those days stretched clear across to Utah. It could all be one big state of the Union, they told one another, with the capital right there in San Jose de Guadalupe.

At age nine, of course, I didn’t know all this. I was busy savoring each day. I think of it as the high point of our gypsy period, a golden time that came to a sudden and unforeseeable end.

I had started keeping a diary, as I’d seen Virginia do. There was a bulky apple trunk I liked to hide behind while I wrote out my little entry for the day. One afternoon, deep in concentration, I heard a scrape and peeked around the side of my tree and saw an Indian about fifty feet away, sitting on a horse. There were still Indians all through that country but we had not seen any close to the mission. It was odd for him to be there alone, like a man staring through a window who doesn’t think anyone can see him.

The air was still. The leaves around him hung in silence, the only sound a distant
chuck
of papa’s axe where he was cutting wood. A low adobe wall ran along one side of the old garden compound, with the orchard starting behind this wall, and that’s where he was, back in among the trees, studying our tent. He looked familiar to me, the way he sat so straight, the shape of his head and face, the black hair hanging beneath his hat, though the hat was different and the clothes too, high boots, a Spanish jacket. But the buttery light of late afternoon gave his brown skin a softness I remembered.

Nine months had passed since the Snowshoe Party left Truckee Lake. I still didn’t know all that happened on that trip. While we were at the fort I’d seen the wounded eyes of Bill Eddy. I’d seen Mary Graves, who once would glare at me but now looked like a prisoner released from solitary confinement. When I asked mama about Salvador and Luis she shook her head and looked away and said they’d been lost in the mountains. I knew “lost” could mean dead. I guess I also wanted it to mean they might still be “found.”

So I observed this fellow carefully, while he observed our tent and around it the dormitories and remnants of the mission garden and beyond that the old sheds and abandoned warehouses and mud-walled chapel with its deep-set window frames, and roof caved in, as if he’d been sitting on his horse for centuries watching things appear and disappear.

When I could bear it no longer I stepped out from behind my tree. Like a little test of my voice in the orchard quiet, I said, softly, “Cuidado, señor.”

His body jerked, and this startled the horse. His features changed so quickly, I cried out. The smoothness turned hard and angry. It was a stranger’s face. I ran to the wall and through the gateway, calling to papa, just then bringing an armload of kindling up to the fire pit behind the tent, where mama cooked. Beside him James Junior and Tommy came dragging branches.

I said, “There’s a man here, papa.”

“Looks like two men, darlin’.”

I turned and saw another rider, leading a string of horses along the far side of the orchard. He was a white man with a black chin beard, in a fancy riding jacket and buckskin pants. He carried a pistol at his waist, a rifle, a powder horn, and a Bowie knife. The Indian had a rifle too and a big knife in his belt, and he wore the kind of cap I’d seen marines in San Francisco wearing, flat and blue with a narrow bill. Everyone carried weapons, of course. It was the white man’s voice that fed my apprehension, mocking, insinuating. As he came up beside the wall he said, “Good evening, Reed.”

“I told you not to bother me out here.”

“We’re only passing through.”

“You thought I was joking.”

“Not you, Reed,” he said with a high laugh, too loud, it seemed to me. “You wouldn’t joke about that.”

“Then be on your way.”

“If I refuse, will you bring my name before the council?”

“Don’t provoke me.”

His horse was restless, snuffing and jerking, pawing through mulch as if it wanted to leap the wall. Both riders were straining at their reins.

“You and the Alcalde are plotting the future,” he said. “Large plans are afoot, or so I hear.”

“These days,” papa said, “everyone has plans.”

“Yet I am not part of them.”

“Is this what you came to tell me?”

The commotion brought mama round from where she’d been cutting up some meat.

“Is this Mrs. Reed?”

Mama nodded.

“Abner Valentine,” he said with a bow over his pommel and a smile of excessive courtesy. “It is my great pleasure and honor. Your husband and I rode together on the plain of Santa Clara …”

“Yes. I’ve heard about that.”

I’d heard about it too. I’d heard papa talk with other men about the battle and heard the way they spoke of one called Valentine. He had become a notorious figure who roamed the hills and valleys, a man who hated Mexicans and possessed vast horse herds somewhere inland. They made it sound as if he’d rounded up every animal west of the Mississippi. No one claimed him as a friend, but you could tell they reveled in the stories of his exploits and his treachery. As is the case with most notorious figures I have happened to run into, he was a disappointment up close, smaller than I expected him to be and something of a dandy.

He sat in his saddle with an expectant smile, as if waiting for mama to say more about what she’d heard, or perhaps invite him to come sit with us, which is what she would have said to almost anyone else who rode up out of nowhere this close to dinnertime. She just watched him, the way papa did.

As if he had some claim on all this property, Valentine looked around and said to mama, like a landlord, “I congratulate you, ma’am, you’ve made quite a pleasant campsite.” Then he said to papa, “I need a brief word with you. Is there a place where we can talk?”

“Tomorrow will be fine. In San Jose.”

Valentine shook his head with a bitter smile, almost a sneer. “I’m finished with the pueblo.”

Now papa’s face was tight. “What’s your business, then? Get to it, and be on your way.”

“You disappoint me, Reed. I was hoping you’d be in a more sociable mood. Under the circumstances I can make a long story short. You remember my friend Carlos …”

“Indeed I do,” said papa. “Buenas tardes.”

With a curt nod the Indian muttered, “Buenas tardes.” He wasn’t looking at papa. He seemed to be looking right at me.

Valentine said, “Carlos has come to collect his money.”

I could feel papa bristle. He took pride in never owing any man for long. “And what money is that?”

Valentine spoke to mama, as if enlisting her support, but with an edge of syrupy sarcasm. “It’s a matter of history. I once told your husband all these trees were for the taking. But I was wrong, and I apologize. Carlos asks me to remind you that his father was an orchard man for the padres. All these trees were planted by his father, who tended them, nurtured them as he nurtured his own sons. Now Carlos would like some compensation, that’s all. It’s not a lot to ask.”

Mama looked at papa. With the color rising through his beard, papa looked at Valentine. Whether or not Carlos understood what had been said on his behalf, you couldn’t tell. He still looked at me, his lips parted, as if he’d seen a ghost.