Snow Mountain Passage (5 page)

Snyder stands above him on the wagon tongue as if to get a better angle on the heads and bodies of the animals.

“Maybe you’re the one deserves a whipping, Mr. Reed!”

“Dammit, man, we’ll settle this on top!”

“I think we ought to settle it right now!”

Jim is like another ox that has failed John Snyder. With the whip end for a club, he lands a slashing blow across the forehead, tearing loose a flap of skin.

Jim staggers back, dazed, gropes at the wound and feels blood oozing toward his eyes. When Snyder leaps to the ground, swinging wildly, Jim ducks, and this time the whipstock catches Margaret, who has rushed in to intervene. She is pitched into the sand.

He hears his wife cry out. He hears his daughters calling, “mama!”

His right hand slides toward the Bowie knife he carries at his waist. Half blinded by the blood, he can’t see much, but he knows another blow is coming. He draws his knife. Crouching, with the Bowie held wide, he lunges toward the sound, just as Snyder makes a move. The broad blade, strong enough and sharp enough to whittle oak into an axle tree, cuts in below the collarbone with such force that two ribs are severed and the lung is split.

Snyder’s yell fills the little desert valley with his pain and his anger. When Jim pulls the knife free, Snyder keeps coming. Two more ferocious blows rip the scalp and drive Reed to his knees.

Milt Elliott and Uncle Billy are now close enough to get hands on Snyder, who will not be restrained. He pulls his powerful right arm free and raises it yet again, then lets it drop. As he turns to Uncle Billy his face goes blank. Beneath the dusty pallor, his ruddy skin turns whiter than white. He looks at Mary. His knees give way, and the old man catches him, eases him down into the sand. The shirtfront is red and wet.

“I am finished, Uncle Billy,” he gasps. “I am done.”

“No, sir,” Uncle Billy says. “No, sir, that ain’t true at all.”

Jim pushes a sleeve against his brow, to slow the blood and clear his eyes, looking down in horror. “My God!” he cries. “My God, I didn’t mean to do this!”

He hurls the culprit knife out into the blue curve of the river and drops to his knees. Margaret is behind him, her hair loose, streaked with blood and chalk, looking for some way to help, calling to Virginia and Patty to bring cloth, rags, anything. The daughters can’t move. They have watched it all. They stand and watch their father kneel beside the dying teamster.

More emigrants come stumbling down the slope. They press in close, though no one is certain what to do. Snyder is wheezing. Jim tears open the shirt and with his kerchief tries to cover the hole and stanch the wound. Blood from his forehead drips into the blood trickling from one corner of Snyder’s mouth. It is too much for Mary Graves.

“Murderer!” she screams. “Get away from him! Make him get away!”

He bends very close and says, “Forgive me, Johnny.”

Snyder’s lips part. He whispers, “I’m to blame,” words heard only by Reed, who shakes his head and shakes his head as if pestered by a cloud of flies.

“No, no, no,” he mutters. “No, no, no, no, no.”

He watches the lips for whatever might come next, while others who have clambered down the hill push in behind a man who says, “What was that? Did Johnny speak?”

Again the lips move, but nothing more comes. The eyes spring wide, as if large with revelation, then squeeze shut against the tearing wound and stay shut as the last bloody breath bubbles out of him and the head lolls.

Above Jim the voice of Patrick Breen, the Irish farmer, is like a preacher’s dire pulpit warning. “You’ve killed him.”

“He struck me first.”

“You ran him through,” says Uncle Billy Graves. “I saw you do it, man.”

With haggard eyes Graves looks around the circle and mimes the death blow. “That’s what he did. Jim Reed pulled out his Bowie knife and ran Johnny through.”

Jim brushes back the blood and tears and sweat from around his brows and eyelids. Through a blinking blur he sees a dozen faces watching him, filled with fear, suspicion, hatred, ready to condemn. He starts to protest, to defend himself, but his throat is so thick he cannot speak.

Uncle Billy hunkers next to the young man who would have been his son-in-law and takes the shoulders. Another man takes the feet. Jim reaches for the midsection, but Patrick Breen edges him aside and joins the two men as they lift the remains of John Snyder and begin to climb. As others fall in behind, they form a slow procession up the sandy slope and over the hill, leaving Jim and his family alone by the silent river.

A
FTER THE TEAMS
are untangled, Milt Elliott pulls the Palace Car around and parks it. He raises their small camping tent, and Margaret collapses there, stretched out under canvas, unable to speak. Snyder’s whip handle caught her on the shoulder but didn’t break the skin. The blood in her hair is Jim’s. The girls sit with her, while he falls to the sand and leans back, propped against a wagon wheel.

Woozy, near nausea, he places his hands upon his thighs to steady them. He shuts his eyes, hoping to God this will be the last death. They come in threes, it is said, and this is the third. How can one company have such a string of hard luck? You lay your plans, you try to guard against every hazard you have heard about, then you stand there and watch the fates have their way with you. How could he have stabbed a man like Snyder, a man he has relied on all these weeks when others began to lose their will? Could he have backed away from the whipstock? No, Reed thinks. No, I had no choice. He gave me no choice. I wish to God he had …

He sees again his harnessed oxen squirming to evade a manic beating. He hears Patty’s voice say, “papa.”

He opens his eyes and she is standing next to him, offering the canteen. He takes it and drinks. He would like to drink it all.

“How’s your mother?”

“She fell asleep.”

Next to Patty, Virginia waits and now moves in for a closer look. “These wounds need dressing.”

Jim says, “Can you do it?”

“If you’ll tell us how.”

The girls are brave. They follow his instructions and bring a basin full of water, a sponge, a pair of scissors, some clean cloth. He bows his head. It is an act of surrender, and he has no trouble bowing before his daughters. He knows the gashes are deep. He needs someone to care for him, and they are eager, holding back their fears.

Around the bloody edges Virginia snips his thick, dark hair as close to the scalp as she can cut it, while Patty holds another pan to catch the clippings. As Virginia dabs lightly with the wet sponge, to clear away crusted shards of dust and clot, Patty holds the pan of water close, watching it turn pink. When Virginia drips iodine along the seams and swellings and closes the forehead flap torn loose, Patty rubs her father’s neck with tiny hands. When it comes time to lay the gauze, she presses aside all the loose hairs around his wounds.

Finally Virginia wraps a clean kerchief over his head, knotting it behind. He raises his eyes to look at his daughters, and only then do Virginia’s tears burst forth. In her stricken face, no longer girlish, womanly now, and far too soon, too soon—never had he expected this—he sees his wife. Jim takes her in his arms and says, “I should not have asked so much of you,” and then sees Patty, standing back, not weeping, though plainly yearning that she too might be swept into her father’s large embrace.

“Patty, hon. Sweet Patty. Here.”

He flags one hand, and she steps toward him, a running step, her body stiff against him, and he is thinking of the last time he held them both at once.

He is thinking of their grandmother, Margaret’s mother, who was too old to undertake such a journey, seventy and ailing, and yet she refused to stay behind and so set out, as if she were still a pioneer. She lasted until the end of May, expiring near the Big Blue River, where they buried her by an ever-flowing spring. Then he remembers the second death, the sickly fellow from Missouri who joined them late, too late, after they’d left Fort Laramie and all the bickering began. He had lost the power of his legs, and one wondered how he’d come so far, and why, since he could no longer ride or walk, had neither friend nor family, and should have stayed put at one of the forts. But he too refused to be left behind and begged for passage. He spent the last days of his tubercular life gasping and spitting inside George Donner’s wagon, giving up the ghost just as they reached the white desert south of Great Salt Lake, where he was buried in pure salt. They dug a pit until the moisture came seeping from below. Again Jim sees his face, in the moment before they nailed shut the coffin lid and lowered him and began to cover him with shovelfuls of salt. His name was Luke. He was a Mason, they discovered, carrying in his trunk Masonic emblems—a white apron, a medallion—a gaunt and bearded man, twenty-five and looking fifty, his face a shaggy specter in that blinding sea of white.

Poor Luke, yes, he was ready to let life go. But Snyder? No. He was fit, supple, full of vinegar, reminding Jim a bit of himself in his younger days. And what about today? Will he have to watch Johnny’s handsome face disappear? Under scoops of volcanic sand? Who has the makings of a coffin now, out here where nothing grows?

Uncle Billy and his son come sliding down the hill again with another yoke of oxen in tow, to pull their wagon free. Without a word they work the lines, move the animals into place.

Jim calls out, “I’ll see you soon with some boards!”

Graves turns but still doesn’t speak.

“I’ll take them off my wagon!” Jim calls. “Johnny will need a casket and a proper burial. Me and Milt will bring it up.”

Graves is dusted with chalk, from hat brim to boots. His voice is chalky too, dry and choked and distant.

“We don’t need no part of your wagon, Reed. You can keep your boards.”

He watches their team haul the wagon up and over the brow of the sandy slope, then shuts his eyes against the light, against the throb within.

Patty says, “Does your head feel better, papa?”

“Sit with me, girls,” he says. “Don’t nobody talk right now. Just sit here with me till my strength comes back.”

W
HEN GEORGE AND
Jacob Donner and two other families pushed ahead, that left Jim in charge of the rear contingent. And who now will take his place? Something has to be decided. Everyone feels the need for a meeting, though no one announces it. They unhitch their animals. They slake their thirst. They tell their children to sit still and keep out of the way. One by one they move out from the wagons.

It is still early afternoon. The sun is bright. The scorched terrain looks as if at any moment it could burst into flame. But the air is not so hot now as it was a few days back. They stand in the sun and look at one another, derailed by this turn of events, twenty people who have come so far together stand in the midst of a treeless desert, strangers again, more estranged than before they met, estranged and abandoned. The Donners are out of sight somewhere ahead of them, and behind them there is no one left on the long trail, no one between here and Fort Bridger, three hundred and fifty miles east. Each family wishes they had never seen the other, yet by this isolation and by this killing they are bound. They have all been wounded today, a little community of the wounded, who need some kind of atonement.

The silence is broken by a heaving sob from Mary Graves. She stands behind her father, her pretty face bent with anguish.

He says, “John Snyder was a mighty good man.”

Grunts and nods encourage him to continue. His voice breaks, in part from grief, in part from fear of speaking. In Illinois Graves was an able farmer, the father of ten, good with his hands and a good provider, never one to speak out like this, but with the Donners gone, he is the elder here. He is nearly sixty, and since all his children travel with him, as well as the husbands of two older daughters, he presides over the largest clan.

“I have lost a driver,” he says at last. “And a good friend. Mary here … she has lost … She is hardly twenty, and now she has lost more….”

“It’s a crime against nature,” says his wife, Elizabeth, who stands close to the sobbing daughter.

A burly fellow named William Eddy speaks up. “Did you see it happen?”

“I see the life gone out of John’s body,” the mother says. “I see Jim Reed with blood running down his hand.”

William Eddy asks again, “But did you see it happen?”

“I saw it all,” says Uncle Billy, indignant, coming to his wife’s defense. “I was watching from the hill. I saw Jim pull out his Bowie knife and shove it in Johnny’s chest like he’d just been waiting for the chance to run him through.”

Patrick Breen the Irishman speaks up, an ardent Catholic and another family man, with seven children in his party. “We can’t have a killing,” he says. “We can’t let one man kill another.”

This starts heads nodding again.

“A man who has killed another has to pay,” says Breen.

“That’s right,” says Graves. “If you ask me, Jim Reed has it coming to him.”

“He’s a willful and overbearing man,” says Elizabeth Graves. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be stuck out here.”

A dozen voices swell in loud agreement, the loudest among them that of Lewis Keseberg who stands with his hands on his hips and his hat shoved back. His blond hair is matted across his brow.

“In Independence,” he says, “I saw a man kill another man in a bar with a knife. And the very next day they hung him.”

Patrick Breen says, “I heard about that fight.”

Uncle Billy likes this idea. “An eye for an eye,” he says.

Keseberg smiles with the confidence of a scholar. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It is the code of Hammurabi, and it must be our code as well.”

“You ask me,” says Uncle Billy, “Jim Reed deserves a hanging.”

William Eddy takes his hat off and slams it against his leg. He was a carriage maker back in Illinois. He has a thick, square body and a face that looks hewn from oak. Disgusted, he challenges the circle with his eyes. “If George Donner was here, you people wouldn’t have the guts to talk about a hanging.”