Impatient With Desire (17 page)

F
or days the storm raged. During a small lull, I made it to Elizabeth’s and watched her rock Lewis. I kept the fire going, listened to the wind roar. After a long time I said, “You rest awhile, Elizabeth. I’ll hold the baby.”

I took the dead baby from Elizabeth’s arms, laid it on a platform, covered it with a blanket.

I led Elizabeth to another platform, lay down next to her, and spooned her body.

“Mrs. Donner, Mrs. Donner.” Jean Baptiste shook me, fright on his face.

“Mr. Donner is frantic,” Mr. Clark said. “He sent us to find you.”

Sammy under Clark’s coat, the three of us linked arms and barely made it across the clearing to our shelter.

“Lewis died first,” I told George. “Then Elizabeth.

We brought Sammy over.” I placed Sammy next to George for warmth.

Before George woke, I took Sammy from his side, placed my nephew on an empty platform, and covered him.

“He’s dead,” I said to no one or anyone. “They’ll all be dead.” All night I paced back and forth. “They’ll all perish. They can’t survive this storm.”

Mr. Clark turned over on his pallet. “Try to rest, Mrs. Donner. When the storm breaks, I’ll go to the lake camp and see if Stone and Cady made it there with your children.”

I
rushed through the fresh snow, stopping every few minutes to check my compass, rushed on.

“Your daughters are in Keseberg’s shelter, Mrs. Donner,” Clark said. “Cady and Stone weren’t there. I only looked in the window. Go and stay with them until we can walk out. They may be in great danger. The German is a monster.”

“He wasn’t a monster before. We all came here strangers to ourselves. Oh God, let my daughters be alive!”

Clark’s voice pounded in my ears. “Daughters in great danger, great danger, great danger—” The snow came up to my waist, I fell, dug myself up, fell again, scrambled up, I could see my hands were bleeding but felt nothing. “Please God, please God, please God—”

Inside Mr. Keseberg’s cabin, the children sobbed in my arms.

“They threw us in here, Mother,” Frances said. “Don’t leave us.”

“I can stay until rescue comes,” I said. “Father sends love.”

I held my whimpering daughters as Mrs. Murphy babbled and screamed without stop.

“I will go mad too if she doesn’t die soon,” Mr. Keseberg said.

Little Simon Murphy had blood smeared on his mouth. A dead child was hung on the wall face to the wall. Its arms were gone. I know who it was, but I can’t bear thinking about it.

I
heard them, jumped up and opened Mr. Keseberg’s door. Bill Eddy and William Foster, arriving from the west, looked hopefully at me.

“I know my wife is dead,” Mr. Eddy said.

“We’ve come for our boys,” Mr. Foster said.

They read the news on my face.

“Our sons are dead,” Mr. Eddy said.

Mr. Foster cried out. Tears coursed down both his and Mr. Eddy’s cheeks, their grief so raw and deep I had to look away.

Inside the cabin, my daughters clung to me, letting go only to gobble the biscuits that Mr. Eddy gave us, Simon Murphy, and Mr. Keseberg. Mrs. Murphy was too far gone to waste a biscuit on. Mr. Eddy and Mr. Foster could hardly wait to get back outside to the fresh air, and to leave.

“Coming here,” Mr. Eddy said, “we passed James Reed. He and the entire Second Relief are in distress. Reed nearly died. The Breens are near death. The Third Relief has gone to succor those still alive.”

“I’ll give you fifteen hundred dollars if you’ll save my children,” I said.

“I’ll save your children or perish in the effort, Mrs. Donner,
but I won’t take any money,” Mr. Eddy said. “We’ll take you also and little Simon Murphy. Mrs. Murphy and Mr. Keseberg are unable to travel.”

“Wait till I go back to Alder Creek,” I said.

“That’s a fourteen-mile round trip, Mrs. Donner. There’s another storm coming.”

“I must release Jean Baptiste and Mr. Clark from their promise to stay till I returned. I’ll hurry.”

“Mrs. Donner, there’s no great hope of another relief coming in here anytime soon,” Mr. Foster said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Mr. Donner may have already died, but I can’t leave without knowing.”

They walked west as quickly as they could. Mr. Eddy carried Georgia. Mr. Foster carried Eliza. Frances and Simon stepped in the men’s footsteps. For a while, Frances tried to look back at me, but after she fell the second time, she didn’t try again.

I slowly started walking east. I didn’t look back.

I
t was nightfall before I lay down next to George. “Mr. Eddy and Mr. Foster took Frances, Georgia, and Eliza,” I said.

“They’ll be safe,” George said. “I told Jean Baptiste he had fulfilled his promise. He went with Clark.”

We lay there in dark and silence.

“We’re the only ones here.”

“I thought you had gone.”

“I haven’t fulfilled my promise yet.”

He never made a sound. If I hadn’t had my hand on his face, I wouldn’t have known about the tears.

I
was 28 when I met Tully Dozier, not exactly a blushing girl, but the first time I saw him, I knew we would marry. My landlady, the very aptly named Mrs. Folsom, introduced us in her parlor. Mrs. Folsom, at 68,
was
an aging, blushing girl, a woman so filled with romantic notions that were she not so kind and generous she’d have been intolerable. This was the fourth young man she’d waylaid me with in her parlor, the other three barely into long pants.

“Miss Eustis,” she called as soon as I opened the door and started toward the stair. “Please join us.”

I stood in the doorway through the introductions, a current of electricity flowing between Tully and me so strong that Mrs. Folsom and her other boarders might as well not have been present. I could hardly cross the room and sit down on the settee. I suppose the others conversed, but I simply willed myself to keep my eyes off Tully, and he told me later it was the same for him. How much time passed I don’t know, and no verbal signal passed between us, but suddenly he stood up, and as if we were attached I immediately stood up and we walked together out of the room. Mrs. Folsom was beside herself with rapture.

We married three months later. It seemed an eternity to wait.

When Tully died on the grief of my first son and my first daughter, I thought I would die. I very easily could have said good-bye to this earth.

My heart will be pierced when George dies, but no matter how empty or weary I feel, I know now I will not die.

Tully was my first love, the love of youth, and I could never again feel such profound anguish, because the secret of my anguish was my own naïveté.

George is the love of maturity. We came to each other with our eyes wide open and surprised ourselves, finding a fresh, eager space in our tested and scarred hearts.

L
ast night George pulled my compass out from beneath the platform and handed it to me. “You’ll need this,” he said. “I rescued it from Georgia and Eliza.”

I turned the battered case over in my hand. “I never told you where I got it,” I said.

“Yes, you did. Your father brought it from the West Indies.”

“That’s true. But there’s more.”

Then I told him about the day Father came home from sea with his leather trunk full of presents, and after everyone had gone to bed, I tiptoed into William’s bedroom, past his bed, where he was sleeping soundly, to his desk, and took the compass, and left the conch shell.

“No one ever said anything about it. I was grown up before I confessed to William. He didn’t even remember it.”

“You’ve made good use of it,” George said.

His remark pleased me enormously, Betsey.

A conch shell cupped to a little girl’s ear. Hear the Caribbean Sea. The trade winds. Maybe those warm, blowing winds and the compass needle moving as Father slowly turned around, West of the West, there is a country of the mind, planted the seed for my adventurous spirit and wanderlust.

What does it matter? It is the way I am.

Sometimes, Betsey, I remember your question that I asked George: “Will your wandering feet rest this side of the grave?”

I never answered your question, but George did.

“My movings are over.”

I
took great care when I slit the threads, but all the pages are loose. Last night my journal slipped from my hands and fell to the floor. Pages everywhere. I put them back in best order I could.

I
’ve always thought that few people have ever seen me as I saw myself, as I really am. It never seemed important as long as I knew who I was. Now as the layers peel off relentlessly, each revealing something unexpected, I’ve discovered I’m not the person I thought I was. Or is it that I have become a different person? How many layers are there? What if the last layer peels off and instead of some essence refined and distilled and finally revealed, there is nothing there? Perhaps that is what death is. Or will my soul be there? as I really am

It will be a relief to find out.

Two weeks later

I
sit at George’s bedside and knit. I am knitting a stocking. Sun comes through the canvas opening. Once, Eliza was there and a sunbeam fell on her lap. She carefully closed her apron around it and brought it to show me, so puzzled when it was gone. It is so quiet and peaceful here, Sister. Everything is unrushed. We have all the time in the world. The only sound is the tiny click of my knitting needles.

“You should have gone with the children,” George said.

I put a finger to my lips. “Shhh.”

Hooves pounding the ground, mouth frothing, I’m coming, I’m coming, I jump off the horse, run in the farmhouse. “I finally found the doctor in Gulfport, he’s on his—” I race past the sobbing hired girl to the still shape on the bed. “Oh, Mrs. Dozier, it was terrible. Mr. Dozier called for you over and over. He died calling your name.”

Near the Christmas tree, I bend over Tully, my beloved husband, and weep.

I knit all afternoon until the stocking is nearly finished and I am nearly at the end of my wool. George is watching me. “I never wanted to be one of those waiting women,” I said.

At the Harbor young and old women and the children wait silently, tensely, watching the sea as the rowboat moves toward us from the ship farther out in the harbor. I tug at my mother’s skirt.

“I always wanted to be one of the ones on the ship,” I said. “Going out. Coming back.” George smiles and watches me knit. “And so you have been,” he says. I smile, finish the skein of wool, unravel the stocking, wind the wool in a skein, and begin to knit again.

I
stop awhile at Old Hill Cemetery, where so many Eustises and Wheelwrights lie, go up State Street past Tracy Mansion, how proud we were that Nathaniel Tracy entertained George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Benedict Arnold, a hero then, and
our
grandfather Jeremiah Wheelwright, to Market Square to hear Father clear as day tell us again of the thrilling night they burned the Revolutionary tea, take Federal down to Old South Presbyterian, with Paul Revere’s bell and its whispering gallery, you whispering on one side and I on the other until Mother said, That’s enough, onto High Street past Knapp House, where we peeped in the windows to see the hand-painted wallpaper that came all the way from Paris, France, past Cushing House, remember, he sailed with Father, stop for a moment to admire Lord Timothy Dexter’s house and its splendid cupola, and then, hurrying now, I go around the bend and up the hill to your freshly painted clapboard and there you are, Betsey, your kettle on, eagerly waiting for me.

I
found an ox in the snow.

Such a long time since I’ve eaten meat. At first I gagged and thought I would retch, but I was able to swallow and keep it down. I’ve had no problem since.

George ate a little too and kept some of it down.

T
oday I sketched the mountains. Utter silence and solitude, Betsey.

I lift mine eyes to the mountains.

I looked up from my paper. Nearly sunset, an extraordinary golden light filling the sky. Bright and muted shades of gold luminous across the darkening blue. Gold glowing on the snow-covered mountains.

I was rapt.

This echoes the magnificence of our souls.

When I came in, I said, “Where we cut the trees off for firewood, the trunks are beginning to emerge. Spring is coming.” And, after a pause, “Would you like to go outside tomorrow?”

The unspoken “for the last time” hung in the air. George looked intently at me, as if gauging both our strengths.

“Very much.”

I went out and covered up a partially exposed body.

G
eorge leaned heavily on me. In fits and lurches, we proceeded to the log where Jean Baptiste used to prop Georgia and Eliza wrapped up like sausages.

“This is like lugging an ox,” George said. “Sure you can manage?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re a stubborn woman.”

“You knew that when you married me.”

“That’s
why
I married you.”

I helped him sit, sat next to him. He breathed in the fresh air deeply. He looked at the sky in amazement. It was the most vivid blue and seemingly without horizon.

“Now there is a sky to write home about,” he said. “They’ll never see a sky like that in Illinois.”

I nodded in agreement. We sat in silence awhile, then I said, “We don’t have the crowding out here either.”

Sister, we laughed heartily.

Sitting companionably in the vast expanse, we might have been the only two people alone on the earth together. I knew that behind us lay the shadowed detritus of almost five months of survival, but our view was spectacular and uplifting.

George broke the silence. “I find no place so much to my mind as this.”

I turned to him in astonishment.

“You and the children will see things I can’t imagine. I’m glad I was part of the beginning,” he said. “If I’d stayed home, I would’ve just gotten older and older. I would’ve always wondered.”

I took his hand and barely breathed out the question that has filled my mind. “Was it too big a price?”

“It’s a terrible price,” he said, “and it’ll never stop costing, and it’ll all be worth it. This country is so much bigger than any of us.”

Then he looked into my eyes and said, “Wasn’t it the biggest, damndest, most thrilling adventure ever, Mrs. Donner?”

“Yes, Mr. Donner, it was.”

1846

Thousands of buffalo thunder across the plains, the ground shakes, the sounds rumble through our legs, days off we hear them coming.

The Sioux are on the warpath with the Crow, the fort manager says, they are not happy with the whites either. Off we go in general alarm, quickly overtaken by two hundred Sioux Indians in full war paint. They break into a file of two so that our wagons must pass through them. Elitha and Leanna, if anything happens to Father and me, take our weapons. Eliza, not one peep. We hold our breaths. They take the green twigs held between their teeth and toss them at us. What does it mean? George whispers. I think it’s a gesture of friendship, I say.

There’s the smell of salt air in our journey, George, we’re on a great voyage of discovery, how I wish Father were still alive, I know he would under stand.

Mountain men and strange geography and the Irishman fiddling and you and me dancing till the dust flies.

Carving our initials into Independence Rock, where so few have gone before us and so many will come after us.

A 4th of July such as there never was or will be again! Happy 70th birth day, America! Picnic tables groan with food, Elizabeth bakes a dozen gooseberry pies, ex-Governor Boggs orates about Manifest Destiny, that means we’re called upon to do this, children, I say, the land waits for us to make it bloom, he’s saying that this move west is the best thing ever
happened to this country, and we’re the ones doing it! George says. This is for all the Springfield boys, Allen Francis said, handing George a bottle of whiskey, but don’t touch it till Independence Day of July. Sharp at noon, you Californians turn your faces east. We’ll face west and drink to this great country with you. We carefully calculate the time, turn east, and raise our whiskeys and lemonades to our friends in Springfield keeping watch over the East while we open up the West. To the East, to the West, soon to be one United States of America! George says, and we cheer. Then we turn west and cheer again and again until our throats are hoarse from our cheers.

Just the vastness and wonder of our journey and our land. Unlimited possibility, and we a part of history and
knowing at the very moment
that history is happening and
we
are helping to make it.