Impatient With Desire (6 page)

I
was too upset to write last night.

We heard a noise outside, and it was Milt and the Reeds’ cook, Lizzie. It was a terrible disappointment to see them. I could barely hide it as I led them to the fire and fixed them a cup of hot water.

“Lizzie gave out the first day and went back,” Milt said.

“Oh, Mrs. Donner, it was terrible,” Lizzie said. “The wild beasts howled…” She started howling herself.

“On the fifth day Virginia’s feet froze and we turned back,” Milt said. “When I couldn’t carry Virginia anymore, Mrs. Reed and I dragged her. Then she crawled. Thank God we came back. The storm that night would have killed us. The Breens took in Mrs. Reed and the children.” He looked from George to me, then back to George, and said, “I’m sorry, Uncle George.”

Milt is 28 and very strong, but George says that even as a boy he was all limbs, and he has never outgrown that touching gangliness. His hands were red and mottled on the cup of hot water, and I stopped thinking of my own disappointment and started thinking of his.

“Please don’t make me eat hides, Mrs. Donner,” Lizzie said. “Mrs. Reed told me to live or die on them. I can’t stomach hides, I can’t…” She started wailing again.

I looked at her, Betsey, and all I could see was a fleshy version of her standing outside the Reed family wagon, pouring a cascade of luscious wild blackberries onto huge, steaming golden biscuits, ladling mounds of fresh cream on top…

“Please, Mrs. Donner,” she begged. “Just give me a bit of meat.”

“If we had meat, we would be eating it, Lizzie,” I said. “I wish to God we had more hides.”

She slept on a hide by the fire and fretted all night long.

This morning, I was braiding Eliza’s hair and keeping my eye on Lizzie, perched uneasily on a stool, wringing her hands.

Elitha, who never misses her daily tobacco puffs, was telling a Bible story to Frances and Georgia. “And when Daniel was taken out of the den of lions, not one mark was found on him…”

On his platform, George, wrapped in blankets, talked intently to Milt. I heard him say, “Jean Baptiste and I figure we can relay the children…”

Leanna, who considers Elitha’s smoking disgusting, unless she can have a puff too, was shaking out bedding. Through a gap in her blanket, I saw Mrs. Wolfinger lying perfectly still on her rack, her little, gulping sobs constant as ever.

“Not one mark at all, because Daniel had trusted in his God. Then the king rounded up all the wicked people”—suddenly Elitha burst out—“who had
done
this to Daniel like Lansford Hastings and cast
them
into the lions’ den, and they did not even reach the bottom before the lions fell upon them and crushed all their bones to pieces—”

“The important part, Elitha,” I said, “is that Daniel lay down with the lions and rose up unharmed. And he did that with the help of God. Just as we are.”

Suddenly Lizzie cried, “God has cursed us for leaving that old man on the trail. We’re all gonna die. We’re cursed, cur—”

I flew across the room, seeing the children’s scared, shocked faces before I grabbed Lizzie, her cries cutting off abruptly, her face stunned as I propelled her to the stairs and turned to Milt. “Milt, you and Jean Baptiste take Lizzie back to the lake camp now.”

After they left, I finished Eliza’s hair, Elitha finished her
story, and Frances, Georgia, and Eliza went to their platform to play their card game. An hour later, Frances shuffled the cards, dealt them out, looked over at me, and asked, “Is that true what Lizzie said, Mother?” Her tone was matter-of-fact, so accepting it pierced my heart.

“No, Frances,” I said. “God doesn’t curse people. People do that to themselves.”

T
he nearly impenetrable Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert behind us, John Snyder dead, James Reed banished, he and Walter Herron specks on the horizon, and then the specks too gone, we waited in dismay and agitation for the rest of the company to catch up with us. George, very much the Captain then, looked sternly around the campfire at the tense, defensive faces. “Reed said it was self-defense—”

“It was, Uncle George—” Milt began.

“It was murder,” Graves said, “and we were lenient.”

“Snyder attacked him—” George began.

“You weren’t there, Donner.”

I searched the crowd again, interrupting the chorus of arguments. “Where’s Hardcoop?”

The faces turned guilty, eyes averted, except for William Eddy, who said, “Ask Keseberg. Or Breen or Graves.”

When no one volunteered more, I looked questioningly at Margret Reed.

“Everyone had to walk to spare the oxen,” Margret said. “James was gone. We abandoned our last wagon. Everything. Even Mother’s rocking chair that Father made. She nursed all my brothers and me in it, I nursed all my children—” Margret started crying.

“Margret, gather yourself and tell us where Hardcoop is.”

But she kept crying and looking at the ground.

Finally Lewis Keseberg said, “He couldn’t keep up.”

And this is the story they told us in blurts, sobs, defiance, and defense. We could easily picture it.

A rocking chair sits in the sun. Margret Reed and her children cry as they walk away from their big family wagon that Sarah Keyes died in.

Ahead in the line, Keseberg finds the old Belgian Hardcoop hiding inside his wagon and angrily pulls him out.

“I won’t be able to keep up,” Hardcoop says.

“Everyone must walk,” Keseberg says.

Hardcoop, crying, goes to William Eddy, who’s helping with Graves’s third wagon. “Please let me ride,” he says.

“Wait’ll we get over this sandy stretch,” Eddy says, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

The sand sifts around the wheel rims. The men grasp the rear wheel spokes and try to wrestle the wagon forward. It doesn’t budge. Sweaty silt pours into their red, burning eyes, as they heave again.

Again.

And again, until it finally moves.

Then they start on the next wagon.

At the campfire that night, Eddy suddenly jumps up and says, “Where’s Hardcoop?”

Antonio, the Mexican herder, says, “He was sitting in the road when I came by with the cattle.”

Eddy and Milt Elliott, who share the night watch, build a large fire on the side of a hill, stoke it all night long, hoping that somewhere in the darkness Hardcoop will see it and take direction and heart.

At dawn, Eddy goes to Lewis Keseberg. “Hardcoop never came in. I’ll go with you to get him.”

“Go back?” Keseberg says. “Are you crazy?”

Eddy goes to Graves. “Lend me your horse to get Hardcoop.”

Graves shakes his head no.

Breen stands nearby with no already on his face. “Use your wits, Eddy,” Breen says. “We can’t risk our horses to lug in a dead man.”

The wagons roll on.

George managed to speak first. “Why didn’t any of you help Eddy?”

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

Margret Reed and Philippine Keseberg wept. Most looked furtive and ashamed. Only Mr. Keseberg looked steadily at me.

Inside our wagon, I opened the Bible the missionary gave us in Independence “for the heathens.”

I wrote,

I stopped writing and looked up. “I don’t even know what date to put. How long did it take him to die?” When George didn’t an
swer, I said, “We don’t know these people at all. Even Margret Reed is not herself. George! We’re starting a new country and already it’s tainted.”

George shook his head, as if still in disbelief. “We weren’t there, Tamsen. None of us knows what we’ll do until we’re tested.”

“I know I wouldn’t leave somebody to die alone if I could help it!”

We went to bed in silence. No matter how tightly I closed my eyes, all I could see was the same debased image: an old man crawling toward disappearing wagons.

P
erhaps the daughter someplace in Belgium will go to her grave wondering what happened to her father, or she may have stopped thinking about him long ago. Even if I knew her address, I could not tell her much.

He joined us in Independence, Missouri. I never heard his given name and never thought to ask. He was always called Hardcoop, never Mr. Hardcoop. From the beginning, everyone thought of him as an old man. Frances, Georgia, and Eliza called him Grandpa, as they have been taught to call aged people.

He was from Belgium, having one last adventure before going back home to live with his daughter. (Had he told her this plan? Did she prepare? Does she wait?)

He had been in the US for many years, had worked as a cooper—on the Trail he repaired our wooden water cask better than new. I thought later that maybe Hardcoop was only a nickname and not his real name at all.

He spoke English with a heavy accent; he and Mr. Keseberg conversed in German, Hardcoop told me the day he fixed our cask. “We don’t converse much,” he said drily. Then, though he was hardly taller than I, Hardcoop stood like a Prussian soldier, making me laugh as he imitated Mr. Keseberg: “I know German, French, and English, and I will soon know Spanish. I do not nor will I ever speak Flemish, which is a ridiculous language, and it hurts my ears the way you massacre English. We shall speak in German if we need to speak.”

Even I thought of Hardcoop as an old man, though he and George were nearly the same age.

He weakened fast in the Wasatch. One day when the men were wrestling with a huge boulder, he nearly pitched over. “Bumbler!” snarled a teamster a third his age. Ashamed, Hardcoop approached me. “I need to rest a little,” he said. “I can watch the children.”

“Can you sit with Mr. Halloran?” I asked. “He’s not well.”

For two days, Hardcoop sat with Luke and cared for the young man as tenderly as ever I could. He said he had twin grandsons Luke’s age that he hadn’t seen since they were little boys. “I will be glad to see them,” he said. “I hope they’ll be glad to see me—”

“Hardcoop! Get out here!” angry voices called from outside our wagon. “You too, Halloran.”

I wrenched the curtain back. “Go away,” I said to the fuming men.

“We’ve made six miles in five days!
Get out here now, shirkers, or we’ll drag you out!
”

Luke Halloran, deathly pale, and Hardcoop, red with shame, climbed down.

Lewis Keseberg stared steadily back at me, unashamed.

William Eddy said that since Hardcoop had paid Keseberg to ride with him, Keseberg had a particular responsibility. Well, didn’t he? The others too! Hardcoop was a member of the Party!

The Party.

“We shouldn’t have gone ahead,” George said again last night. “I’m the Captain. I should have been with the company.”

“Were we still a company?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

I’ve lived years on farms, and know incontestably that the strong survive, the weak die off. That is the way of nature, but
I used to argue that we can improve on nature, or at least not be as brutal as nature. I don’t have the luxury of theoretical debates anymore, nor am I as sentimental as I once was. Although I want to believe I would have gone back for Hardcoop, I realize now that Mr. Keseberg knew his first imperative was to save himself and his family before a sickly paying passenger, and he was the only one of us to baldly admit it.

My dearest only sister,

Jean Baptiste came into camp empty-handed and discouraged again, and it took me some time to buck him up. He just left, everyone else is finally asleep, and again I can think what I want and write what I please. I ran out of writing paper some time ago and began writing you here in my journal. I think I am always talking to you anyway. It helps me sort out the muddle in my head. What would Betsey Poor do, I ask myself, and see you standing there in your snug clapboard in Newburyport, calm, unshaken, in the midst of your hectic family life. You were as much a mother to me as a sister after our dearest mother in the world departed from us, and your wise counsel guided me again after our dear stepmother died. I often speak of Aunty Poor to my daughters, and they know you and my niece and nephews as if they had seen you many times. “Ask Aunty Poor if little Will’s ear is better,” one or the other will say or “Tell Aunty Poor to bring her Elizabeth here to play with me.” It is my dearest hope that they and I will see you, Mr. Poor, and your dear babes in person this side of the vale.

Will you ever read the pile of letters I have already written you or this journal? Will you ever know how I long for you to be here with me?

Were you here, dear sister, hopes would be doubled, burdens halved.

My beloved husband grows weaker each day. We do not speak of it, nor have we ever spoken about the accident on my 45th birthday, when our wagon tipped over.

There is much we do not speak of, Betsey. Fear lies so close to the surface it cannot be fanned.

I am fortunate in that I have always been able to hide my feelings successfully.

Tonight I want to tell you about my sister-in-law, Elizabeth. She and I have never had an intimacy like ours, but we are close in age, and married to brothers. Those things were sufficient to forge a bond, I thought, even though Elizabeth was more interested in cooking than I am in books. “Guess what I cooked today” is how she greeted me daily for seven years. But Elizabeth is far superior to me in patience, a saint really. I could never have lived a second with her husband, Jacob, a complaining, whining man from the day I met him. George used to describe a Jacob so robust in body and spirit that, until this trip, when Jacob blossomed before my eyes, I wondered if it were just something he wanted to believe about his brother. I must admit that I’ve also most unkindly wondered if Elizabeth’s extraordinary patience with Jacob was just gratitude for his presence.

Elizabeth’s first husband, James Hook, and father of her two oldest sons, Solomon and William, abandoned the family in 1834. As modern as Springfield felt itself to be, it was still frontier, an arduous place for a woman alone with a farm to run and two little boys to raise. Elizabeth filed a suit for divorce, and George, who married her sister, Mary Blue, in a double wedding the same day Elizabeth married James Hook, testified on her behalf. Elizabeth married Jacob in 1835. All of this happened before I came to Springfield, but of course, in a small town you soon hear everything. Elizabeth and I have never spoken about her divorce, but I have always tried to convey that my sympathies are entirely with her. George says that, before Elizabeth married James Hook, she was “lively and gay.” And Leanna says that sometimes, when they cook together, Elizabeth laughs. I have never been privileged to
see that side of her. Although usually amiable to me, she holds herself private, and there is a brittleness about her. Who can blame her?

I’m sure I wrote you about all the months that Elizabeth and I prepared together for the trip. But maybe I didn’t, and either way, it helps me pass the hours. More important, I find that, when I revisit the past, it often reveals something quite unexpected—too often some humbling or unpleasant truth that seems clear as day now. Those were joyful months of anticipation for me, and for Elizabeth too, I thought. Almost every day on our way back from town, George and I never passed their farmhouse to go on to ours without stopping to show the mail-order packages that had just arrived.

My arms loaded with parcels, Elitha, Leanna, Frances, and Georgia on my heels, I pushed open their kitchen door, “Elizabeth!” George had Eliza astride his shoulders and an armload of bolts of silks, satins, laces, and velvets.

Our niece Mary and four of our six nephews accosted us with noise and hugs. “Aunt Tamsen! Uncle George!”

“Aunt Elizabeth,” Leanna said, pecking her aunt’s cheek at the oven and immediately donning apron and pot holders to help her.

“Look what came!” I said.

“Just the first load,” George said. “I’ll be meeting myself coming and going to town all day long.”

“Guess what I cooked today,” Elizabeth said, handing Leanna steaming pies to put on cooling racks. “Blueberry pies. At this time of year!”

I tore open the first mail-order parcel, filled with bright blue and red calico handkerchiefs, glass beads, brass finger rings, spyglasses…“Peace offerings for the Indians,” I said.

A little chill passed through the room, and Elizabeth’s eyes shot to mine. Indians were one of the Trail’s biggest fears.

“Oh, aren’t you afraid, Mrs. Donner?” Effie, the hired girl, said.

“Mother’s not afraid of anything,” Leanna said, but Effie, eyes wide, continued. “The savages kidnap white women, pass them around…”

“Hush, Effie,” I said. “You read too many penny novels.” Quickly I opened a second parcel addressed to T. E. Donner: filled with watercolors, oil paints, rulers…

“More school supplies,” George said. “Now what is that?”

“That’s apparatus for preserving botanical specimens,” I said.

George turned to the children. “Your mother came into my cornfield looking for specimens. And I’m the specimen she found.”

Elitha and Leanna rolled their eyes good-naturedly: they’d heard this joke before.

I pointed to a box. “Open that one, George.”

Inside the big box was a pair of gleaming leather boots. George beamed.

“Handmade in Boston,” I said. “Size twelve and a half. If we have to ford any creeks, we can ride in them.”

Of course George had to put on his new boots right then. His childlike pleasure gave me pleasure. With the children taking turns riding on his feet, he strode around the room in his new boots. “Wait’ll Jacob sees these,” he said.

“He’s out in the barn with the teamsters,” Elizabeth said. “Wait.” She handed George a half a pie.

George took a big bite and declared, “Elizabeth, you are the best cook in the world. Except for my wife, of course.”

“I set a good table,” I said, “but it pales next to Elizabeth’s.”

Elizabeth beamed and said, “And my apprentice is going to rival me.” Leanna beamed, and George left, trailed by a pack of nephews.

“We’re taking ten pounds of sugar apiece,” Elizabeth said.

“Take twenty,” I said.

“Twenty apiece? We’ll have enough to feed an army. I could make pies every day. Well, I hope you think ten pounds of salt apiece will be
enough. Children, keep the ruckus down! Who wants to take pies out to the barn?”

Leanna was whipping cream for the pies, Elitha already immersed in one of the new books. The other children, in happy chaos, adorned themselves with rings and bracelets. “When I finish this, bet I can get more bracelets on my arm than you,” Leanna said to her cousin Mary, who had bracelets up to her elbow. Frances peered at them all through a spyglass.

“I will,” I said, taking the two pies from Elizabeth—

Georgia is whimpering, I must stop.