Impatient With Desire (8 page)

T
oday was the fourth day we were unable to go outside. Elitha, Leanna, and Frances were huddled by the fireplace, drinking cups of hot water, which I used to call “tea,” until the day Leanna shouted, “It’s only water! Call it water!” I was polishing George’s boots with an ointment we use for oxen udders. Rub and polish, my hand moved methodically, firelight flickering over his trail-worn boots…

“Again!” Eliza shrieked. “Hold on tight,” George said, and grinning at me, he took giant steps around Elizabeth’s kitchen in his gleaming new boots, Eliza on one foot, Georgia on the other, squealing in delight.

I looked up from the scarred and grooved boot in my hand. George was propped up on his platform, Georgia and Eliza lying listlessly under a blanket next to him. “Your turn for the lesson, George,” I said.

“I was born in North Carolina of…,” George began. His tone was flat, almost rote. His spirits fluctuate as often as mine.

“Did you know Mother there?” Frances asked.

A little laugh burst out of me, and it was so unexpected, such a rare sound in the shelter, that it startled us all and completely changed the atmosphere. When George began again, it was in his old voice. Even after all his years of traveling, he has never lost his soft and easy North Carolina accent. “You carry a perfect Southern
day in your words,” I told him soon after we met. I didn’t say that more than one woman has been led astray by a man’s voice.

How curious that I married two men from North Carolina, two men whose voices could charm larks from the trees. Tully and George were alike in other ways too, I was thinking…

“This is a few years before your mother was on this earth, Frances,” George said. “Now I was saying. I was born in North Carolina of Revolutionary stock—”

“I’m Revolutionary stock too,” I said. “My father, your grandfather Eustis, enlisted when the Revolutionary War began. He was 15. A sentinel at Old North in Boston, Massachusetts, the same place that gave the warning that the British were coming.”

“One if by land, two if by sea,” Frances said.

“You’re Revolutionary stock on both sides, children,” George said. “You can always be proud of that.”

It’s a fierce pride George and I have always shared. “Americans bow to no master,” I said.

George nodded and went on. “When I was 18, your uncle Jacob and I went to the land of Daniel Boone. Where is that, Elitha?”

“Kentucky,” Elitha said.

“On to Indiana,” George said.

“Then to Illinois,” Elitha and Leanna said simultaneously with George.

And after a tiny pause, the three of them said again simultaneously, “To Texas. All of us together.” They smiled at each other. It was almost playful.

“Back to Illinois again,” George said. “I buried two wives there, including Elitha and Leanna’s mother, Mary Blue.”

Elitha spoke next and with some importance. “Our mother, Mary Blue, and her sister, Elizabeth Blue, married Father and Uncle Jacob. Two sisters married two brothers.”

“Aunt Elizabeth is our double aunt, and Uncle Jacob was our double uncle,” Leanna said.

“Why doesn’t Aunt Elizabeth ever come here?” Frances asked.

“What were you thinking?”
I wrenched my mind away from Elizabeth’s words back to the boots and Leanna’s voice. “She’s busy with our double cousins,” Leanna said.

“If any of you ever decide to go back to Illinois,” George said, “you have family there who will help you. You have your half brother, George. You have your five half sisters…”

Springfield, Illinois, 1839

George, 53, and I, 38, strolled a bit ahead of Elitha, 6, and Leanna, 5, dragging sticks in the dirt road behind us. George gestured to them.

“Except for Elitha and Leanna,” he said, “my son and other five daughters are all on their own—”

I looked up at him in astonishment. “You have eight children?”

With a twinkle he said, “So far.”

“I understand you’ve recently returned from Texas, Mr. Donner,” I said. “You didn’t find it to your liking?”

“We put in one crop,” George said. “My brother and sister-in-law didn’t like Texas from the start.” He lowered his voice. “Leanna was only 3 when her mother died, and she has a special closeness to my sister-in-law, Elizabeth. By myself I would have stayed and helped claim Texas, but the girls wouldn’t have had enough folks around them.”

We walked in silence for a while, then I stopped. “In her last letter, my sister, Betsey, asked me if my wandering feet will rest this side of the grave. I might ask you that question, Mr. Donner.”

“My movings are over,” he said. He looked deep into my eyes. “I find no place so much to my mind as this.”

I held the gaze.

O
ur courtship was brief, and more was not needed. It still sometimes surprises me that I, who had never planned to marry, married twice, and to two Southerners, both from North Carolina, both steady and measured, with honey voices and quick laughs. I have no doubt that my two husbands would have liked each other—sometimes I think George is exactly the kind of man Tully would have grown into had he lived.

I never expected nor tried to find another man after Tully, who valued me as much as himself, but the afternoon I watched George build the stone wall where his farm faced the road, I knew I would marry him. He spread a tarp on the ground, a quilt over that, near an apple tree, and we ate fresh apples and talked easily.

“I’m very fond of stone fences, Mr. Donner,” I said. “They’re unusual in this part of the country.”

“My father is fond of them too,” he said. “When I was a boy, he talked often about them. He was a militiaman in New Hampshire, and they saved his life more than once.” He laughed. “Anyone can build a stone fence in the East. It’s much more of a challenge here.”

A large pile of stones of all sizes lay next to a cart filled with more stones, some he had wrested from a fallow field, others left over from the new statehouse in Springfield. He went regularly to Springfield to hear the Members of the Legislature speak, and asked if I’d like to accompany him sometime. After mentioning with amusement that one well-known Member was a charlatan and a windbag, he wasn’t sure which was worse, he became en
grossed in the work. I must admit I quickly stopped correcting my papers and became engrossed in watching him.

He looked carefully at the partially finished wall, looked at the stones that ranged from perhaps five pounds to fifty, then back at the wall, before selecting a stone from the pile. He lifted the huge boulders easily—and I have always admired physical strength manifested with grace in a man—yet he chose the smaller stones with a craftsman’s care, testing the heft of the stone in his hands, feeling its planes and grooves, before choosing the place on the wall he wanted it to be, several times trying one, two, or three places before being satisfied. He checked both sides of the wall for precision. “Each stone should cast a shadow,” he said. He didn’t build the wall in order—in some places it was a foot high, two feet in others—the stones determined its order. “It’s really an art, Mr. Donner,” I said. “It’s pretty simple, Mrs. Dozier,” he said. “One over two, two over one.” He was in no hurry nor rush—I would come to understand that he cared more about the building than the completion—and my heart said, I will cast my lot with this calm, deliberative man who cares about the fit and rightness of things.

A month later when he asked, “Mrs. Dozier, could you ever see your way into a future with me?” I answered readily, “I am already there, Mr. Donner.”

I
n the beginning of course we were on ground level, but now we are underground inside walls of snow. We’re not sure how much snow has fallen—twenty feet?—but from the poles Jean Baptiste thrusts into the ground, we estimate the snowpack at twelve feet. Near the opening of our shelter, we began with three carved snow stairs, and now there are eleven. George figured out an ingenious plan. After a storm, I pace out the number of steps from “the fireplace” to our “front door,” then Jean Baptiste, whose stride is not much longer than mine, scrambles up through “the fireplace,” paces out the same number of steps across the roof, shovels till he reaches our snow stairs, and then we make more stairs as needed. It sounds easy, but it often takes much of the day because George can no longer shovel and we all move slower now.

Now that Shoemaker, Smith, and Reinhardt are dead, Jean Baptiste is the only one left in the teamsters’ shelter. Many nights he sleeps on a hide in front of our fire. I think he is more lonely than afraid. Sometimes when I glance up, he is looking at me and quickly casts his eyes down. His eyes are sad, and you can read every feeling he has on his face. I would prefer to be alone, but he does not bother me. Still, it is a relief when he goes to the lake camp for a day or two.

J
ean Baptiste brought the sad news that Lewis Keseberg, Jr., is dead, the baby I delivered at Alcove Springs, Kansas, the day Margret Reed’s mother, Sarah Keyes, died. I pulled back the wagon cover and said, “You have a son, Mr. Keseberg. The first American born on the Trail! What a lucky boy he is!”

In the ever-growing list of
Deaths
, I recorded today the pitiful short span of
Lewis Keseberg, Jr., d. Jan 24th 1847
at the lake camp. The baby who leavened our grief over Sarah Keyes’s death and was a symbol of our future.

Before I knew it, Betsey, that dashed hope of the future spun me to dashed hopes of the past.

1831

Our son Thomas was born Oct 1st 1830, and a more beautiful little boy you never saw. Perfect strangers comment on how bonny he is, and the more people coo at him, the more frequent his smiles, until any passerby who bends down will be greeted with a smile that even the hardest heart could not resist. With his red hair and brown eyes, he doesn’t favor anyone on our side at all, but is a template of his father.

“If he lives,” I told Tully, “I very much desire that he have a Northern education.”

My head down on the Bible, I felt a little tugging on my skirt, and Eliza said, “Why are you crying, Momma?”

“I was thinking of Baby Lewis Keseberg and my little Thomas and all the children,” I said.

She crawled up into my lap. “Poor little children,” she said.

“Eliza, you are my comfort child in my troubles,” I said. All my children are comforts to me, but Eliza, only 3, besides being so attuned to Georgia’s moods, is almost preternaturally sensitive to others’ feelings. It is a gift that will be both blessing and sorrow for her.

My children are alive. I have five
living
children to care for. What is wrong with me? I have never felt so vulnerable. What luck? What luck? I hear some part of myself calling, and the unbidden answer comes, No luck, no luck. The sorrows of the past mark us and stay in our hearts, but I must pull myself together to prevent sorrows of the future.

W
hen I was 6, my mother died. Betsey has told me that I became withdrawn, that even Father couldn’t console me. I remember nothing of that, regrettably nothing of my mother either, except that her hands were small like mine. I can look at my hands now and see my mother’s hands turning the pages of the books she read me.

A little over a year later, Father married Hannah Cogswell.

Shortly after that country road walk with George, I invited Elitha and Leanna to a tea party. I used my best rose-patterned china cups, and served sweets and savories. They sat erect and reserved in their Sunday dresses.

“Do you have a picture of your mother?” I asked.

Elitha opened the gold locket she still wears about her neck. I examined the picture of Mary Blue, a young, pretty woman with lively eyes, who died in childbirth along with the infant.

“You both carry her face,” I said, closing the locket. “You favor your aunt Elizabeth too.”

“Aunt Elizabeth is our mother’s sister,” Leanna said, looking straight at me.

“Sometimes an aunt can be like a mother,” I said.

We sipped tea for a while.

“My mother died when I was 6,” I said. “My stepmother loved me as if I were her own child.”

And I’ve loved Elitha and Leanna the same way.

I was educated in Newburyport, Massachusetts, mainly by
my brother William’s tutors. My maternal grandfather, Jeremiah Wheelwright, had been a schoolmaster in the 1700s, and education was highly valued in our household. That grandfather, whom I never met, served in the Revolutionary War under General Benedict Arnold—not yet a traitor. He died at 46 of exposure to cold, something I try not to think closely about.

I have told my daughters, “You come from illustrious people, but they are on the Atlantic Coast and you are on the Pacific, so your future depends upon your own merit and exertions.”

I was a quick learner and avid student. I would be rich now if I had a penny for every time a tutor or Father said, “If only you’d been a boy, you’d go to Harvard, you’d be this, you’d be that…” They meant well, but the remark always riled me inside. The mind is like angels, neither male nor female, and I’ve never understood why people find that simple fact so difficult to grasp.

George is not bookish and makes no pretense to be, but he is my superior in temperament. I have struggled my whole life to tame my quick temper and curb my impatience. I have told our daughters to look for a steady temperament in their future mates. A man subject to sudden shifts in mood may be romantic in a novel, but makes a difficult husband who will require more care than their children.

I started teaching when I was 15. I taught mathematics, geometry, and general subjects.

“I heard you once taught surveying to a group of surprised young gentlemen, Mrs. Dozier,” George said on that Springfield country road.

“It’s been my general experience that gentlemen surprise far too easily, Mr. Donner.”

“Not this gentleman,” George said, and though I merely replied, “Good,” my heart was smiling.

When I was 18, I traveled to Maine for a teaching job. There
were nine families there, and I had twenty scholars. I enjoyed myself highly and might be there still had not the regular schoolteacher unexpectedly recovered from his illness. Back in Massachusetts, still deep in recession, I cast about for teaching jobs and was compelled again to leave home and Betsey and Father, though not at such a great distance as before.

Then in 1824, when I had just turned 23, with Father’s and Betsey’s blessing I answered an advertisement for a teaching job in North Carolina, sailing there on a great ship at a time when many people thought that respectable women didn’t travel alone. For the benefit of those who may wish to follow my example and encounter similarly ignorant people today, I leave it on record that, far from considering me an outlaw, people of all stamps on that ship from the Senator, Author, & Southern planter treated me with attention & respect. In my lifetime people have sometimes wondered at my conduct, but they have never despised me. And I never shall be despised. Most people, properly so, are quite indifferent to me. As Betsey once sagely told me: Others think much less about us than we believe or fear, because they are almost always thinking about themselves.

It was in North Carolina that I buried my first husband, my son, and a daughter almost at full term in 1831, and struggled on alone, able to survive only because I had a profession. My brother, William, was living in Illinois, and after his wife died in 1836, he asked me to emigrate there to take care of and educate his children. I went—leaving a school worth five hundred dollars a year—because I knew how he suffered, although William acted as if he were doing me a favor. My surroundings were of little concern to me. Much to my surprise, I met and married George Donner. How glad I am that I went to Springfield. Had I stayed where I was, repeating the same familiar life day after day, a narrow house would have been my home.

And so my road, which began in Massachusetts, went to Maine, back to Massachusetts, to North Carolina, to Illinois, to meet with George Donner’s road at that juncture, the two of us then wending our way together on the California Trail almost two thousand miles west, is now temporarily stopped by ill circumstances. We have spent nearly three months trapped in the mountains with rescue yet to come.

Later

It occurs to me that when I write down George’s and my history for the children, I may be revealing a belief or a fear that I may not be there to tell it to them.