Snow Mountain Passage (9 page)

I do not judge them. It is not my place to judge. Only to remember. But still, I have to ask, looking back, where was that spirit of forgiveness on the day they were ready to hang him for killing a man he never meant to kill? Maybe we saw a glint of it, like the first glint of the late moon, when we moved the shreds of our belongings into one of the wagons of Uncle Billy Graves, and his old worn-out eyes followed me around like I was the last one on earth who could save his soul.

When we rolled away from there the next morning, mama could not bear to look at all she was leaving. Papa had built the Palace Car, but she had supervised the packing of the wagons. She had shepherded all her prized possessions from our yard in Springfield, down to St. Louis, and across the Mississippi River, and then rode with them while our oxen plodded clear across the Great Plains and through the Rockies, up and down every gully and ravine in the Wasatch Range, across eighty miles of Salt Desert, and now there was nothing left of all that caravanning but a hulk out by itself among the cinder cones and dry ridges. There was still not a tree in sight, just our wagon, sitting back from the riverbank, a solitary testament to something. To what? My father’s pride? The largeness of his vision? His fall?

While mama could not look, I could not take my eyes off the Palace Car. I sat in back, watching it get smaller and smaller, until a mountain spur blocked it from sight. I have imagined it standing like that for days and nights in the sand and in the wind, with the door flapping like the door of an empty saloon. The seats inside where no one will ever sit again are layered with sand and grit. Mama’s mirror gazes out upon the tan and purple slopes of ash and spill, sending those colors back until the Indians finally come upon this unexplainable structure. Cautiously they approach it, wondering what kind of creatures are these whiteskins who make a thing so large, only to carry it out to such a place, an empty place where no one lives, and set it in the sand.

“Perhaps a Great One has passed away,” says the scout who spotted it.

“No,” says another, “they are crazy. The things they do. All crazy. Walking all day with the sun so high.”

“Perhaps it is a trick,” says another.

“Yes. We should burn it before they return.”

They argue about what to do, and whether there is power in this huge tent, and can they be in danger if they touch it. And should they first take the parts and pieces that they like, or should they burn it all? And what if they do not burn it? Only a fool would leave it here and take nothing.

They circle and debate until the door is blown back by a sudden wind, and they see the mirror on the inside wall, the looking glass given to mama as a farewell gift. In the glass the Indians see their own faces. One by one they look, back away, look again, and tilt their heads, leaning toward it, peering. To have so many faces there inside the tent, this is indeed a kind of power. They look inside the door and see a clutter of bags and boxes the whiteskins left behind. They tear them open and find shoes and dresses and hairbrushes and shaving cream and medicine and books filled with pages of little black marks and coils of rope and empty drawers and a chamber pot and a pair of new suspenders and bedsheets and a flatiron and a brand-new stove.

At last the oldest warrior in the band takes the mirror from the wall with a whoop of conquest. Others scoop up bags and armloads of whatever can be carried, all whooping as the wagon is set afire. Once the flames begin to rise and lick, it goes fast, the wood is so dry. The heat is fierce and they back off, then leave it to ride away across the sand. And in this vision I am with them, on my own galloping pony. I am a desert Indian looking back over my shoulder at the flaming hulk that grows smaller as we ride.

W
HEEL TRACKS FOLLOW
the Humboldt south and west. The water here is bitter to the taste, harder to drink as the channel narrows. Far ahead he can see a faint edge of the long ditch it makes, like a pencil mark through the flatness.

The steady sun and the mare’s plodding gait encourage him to doze. But he won’t. He can’t. His wounds still sting, sometimes throb. His eyes burn from the scanning and the lack of sleep. He looks back at the young teamster behind him, punching boots into the crusty sand like a man cast up on an endless beach. Jim is glad they aren’t talking much. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to think. He wants to cover ground now, get where they’re going, and no telling how long it will take them, with one man mounted and one on foot, stopping five times a day to change places. But George Donner was right. A man alone is a sitting duck. Last week Bill Eddy was shot at, off hunting by himself, though he bragged that he was never in much trouble. For proof he brought an arrow back, rough-cut and primitive, not like the trim shafts they’d seen in the quivers of the Sioux. The bows of these desert tribes are small and weak and inflict damage only at close range. The great danger is at night when they come after animals—to injure, not to kill—hoping you’ll leave the wounded behind. Right now they can’t be far away, perched somewhere and watching, as they have watched all along the route.

His eyes roam. A layer of dry grass covers the basin, autumn dry, almost white. Clumps of sage show here and there. To the west, low ridges make a jagged line, and beyond them another line, another world of ridges below the arching sky, and now between the ridges and the river he sees something else. Bluish white. Is it moving? Is it water? Nothing that size is marked on any map.

He sees a shimmering lagoon, blue and seductive under midday sun. It looks to be bordered with beaches, and a darker border of what could be trees. He can’t tell. Perhaps a row of enormous stones. If it’s water the scene is blurred by undulating glare. A few weeks back he would have galloped toward this miracle, as he did more than once in the Salt Desert when water appeared on the hottest, driest days in the history of human life. He knows this lake is an illusion. Yet he studies it as he rides, as if still half persuaded it might be real.

He remembers the white flats and the rider who appeared to him when he thought he was entirely alone. It was another day like this. He’d left his family, to ride ahead in search of water. He remembers hooves crunching through crusted salt, like walking on icy snow, the salt thick and grainy, stretched out flat as a table, and the fierce light burning his eyes, when he saw another rider on another horse maybe fifty yards off, heading in the same direction. When Jim called out, the man didn’t answer. Then a second rider was moving along at a similar gait, just beyond the first. When Jim raised his arm, both riders raised their arms. When Jim removed his hat, to wave it, both riders raised their hats and waved. More waving riders appeared, a whole platoon, wearing identical hats and beards. He saw then that they were all pictures of himself, reproduced by some bizarre alchemy of heat and light.

In his moment of amazement he turned to see how far he’d come from the family wagon, where Margaret and the children waited under canvas, in the heat. He turned to see his wagon shimmer and quiver and pull apart in the middle like a stretching gob of white taffy and divide itself into twin wagons, which lifted, floating, to divide again and again, until he saw a distant row of wagons like islands above the sea of salt.

That was while they were following the cutoff that should have saved them fourteen days but cost them thirty, and five wagons, and many cattle, and one human life. Though Lansford Hastings had promised to lead them across, he was already gone when they reached Fort Bridger. Sixty wagons answered his call and away he went, and the Reeds and Donners were on their own, pushing through the uncharted Wasatch Range, out into the blinding desert east of Great Salt Lake.

As Jim watched his family and his wagon subdivide into a dozen wagon-shaped balloons, the terror of that blighted place had gripped him fully. It was not the terror that comes upon you when water is gone and you feel your final body fluids drying up. Nor was it the terror when sight is burned away by days of glare and the searing whiteness turns black. This was a knowledge that the place could not be trusted. Deceit was embedded in the place itself and fed there and billowed around you like an invisible gas.

As he rides south and farther west beside the Humboldt, an inland sea calls out to him, the oasis of his wildest dreams. And the same fear wells up. What kind of land would trick you and deceive you day after day after day? And what kind of man is Hastings, who would fill such a land with promises as elusive as these floating pictures? His wagons are out ahead of Jim now, a few days farther along this trail. Jim is gaining on him. He can tell by the campsites and the trampled riverbanks. When Jim catches up with him, there are many questions he would like to ask this prophet and self-appointed leader of the multitudes.

He lets his eyelids fall. For quite some time he rides like a man asleep, lulled by bridle clink. When he opens his eyes the ridgeline has turned indigo. The lagoon is gone. In the far distance he sees that the long ditch the river makes is also gone, and this is not a trick of desert light. The sun is low. The glare is off the sand. In the nearby channel there’s still a smear of water, but it doesn’t seem to move.

The next morning they reach a sump of still and shallow pools slimed over with a yellowish residue. The air smells like some foul mix of sulfur and tar and fresh cow dung. Beyond these pools, parched terrain goes on for miles across the region the Mountain Man talked about, the legendary “Sink.”

Jim surveys the miles ahead. It is unnatural for a river to disappear like this. Back where he comes from, a river always flows into a larger river, the way the Ohio meets the Mississippi, to merge with waters flowing down into the Gulf, where they spill out to join the waters that gird the Earth.

When water flows in and nothing flows out, it is like a room with all the doors and windows shut. Breath itself cannot escape. Arriving at the very end of water overwhelms him, makes this desert loneliness lonelier than any he has known. The gift of water slithers away into the sand, while all around them he sees nothing but crooked backbones of dry ridges, and the broad plain patched with white, quilted with the skeletons of long-dead grasses.

He says to Walter, “Where does it go?”

“Where does what go, Mr. Reed?”

“The water.”

Walter studies the rim of mountains. “‘Bout like a horse pissin’ in a dry field, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Horse can piss all day. The field just soaks it up.”

They cross the sink and toward evening see a puff of smoke rising from an empty slope and figure it must mean Indians. Yet there is no fire, nor any sign of camp. They ride toward the smoke, watching it rise, white and filmy, tall as a tree. Jim sees it is not smoke. It’s a tower of steam, a geyser spurting from the dryness.

They come upon a cluster of pools bubbling, spilling fluid across the sand. He thinks, This must be where the river comes back. The water travels all these miles and passes through some furnace down below. And is it yet another trick? Steal away your water, then give it back in pools and chasms of percolating steam that will probably burn your whiskers off?

Wispy plumes are wavering from holes in the earth, a hundred or more, bowls and fissures, some as small as a wash pan, some as wide as a barn door, rimed with yellow, or with white, crusts and coronas of mineral deposit. There are seeping pyramids of scarlet and purple, with steam curling as if from the barrel of a purple cannon aimed at the sky.

They roam around and find a pool that isn’t boiling. It’s warm, but calm, and potable. They drink until every cell is saturated, and let the mare drink, and then make camp. Walter lashes her to a clump of dry but deeply rooted sage, so she won’t wander into a rocky pool and break a leg.

The air cools quickly once the sun drops out of sight. At four thousand feet, as darkness falls, the air is cold, but the steam is warm, and the ground so warm they don’t need a fire. The heated earth is soothing. It’s unnerving, too. This warmth coming toward them from who knows what source, it’s uncanny. What kind of fire can send up steam and send these geysers twice as high as a man’s head and make these freakish cones and spires?

As night spreads across the desert, the plumes make a hundred gauzy flags. Walter sees something out beyond the plumes. He has traveled with the party all the way from Springfield, single, restless, a steady fellow most of the time, but uneasy here. Seeing things. One dark, frosty night not long ago, when the Paiute wounded five of Donner’s oxen, Walter was on guard duty. Now he sees those same marauders creeping through the steam. He isn’t sure how many. Five? Six? A dozen?

Both men leap from their bedrolls, peering into the empty night. Jim sees nothing but vapor. Walter sees figures dancing in the steam, hears their groaning, night-piercing song. He shouts back, with threats and curses. When he lunges for the rifle, Jim grabs him and shakes him hard until the shouting subsides.

Afterward Jim has to calm himself. In the silence he thinks that no Indian would hazard such a place at night. He listens. There is nothing to hear. No wind. No voice. From time to time a whisper of releasing steam, which somehow makes the silence more complete. He would like to sleep. He needs the sleep. But his eyes won’t close. The silence keeps him awake. He concentrates on it, as a way to ward off fear. No creatures here. No creature noise. No insect hum. No wind. The silent sand. The sprawl of stars in a silent sky, while vapor ascends and vanishes.

How has he ended up in such an empty and forsaken place, after all these weeks and months in the crowd of travelers, the loading of wagons, the cutting of trail, the settling of arguments, the abundance of mealtime, even as the food ran low, his daughters always there, his sons, his wife. His wife. His wife. He sees her standing by the wagon when he mounted, preparing to depart. Gazing at the sprawl of stars he hears her voice again.

It has to be, James. You know I’m right. We want you alive …