Impatient With Desire Page 7

  “They elected me Captain—”

  “Captain? All the Captain does is select campsites and set the morning departure time. Did you endanger us all just to be Captain? Do you always have to be so agreeable? I can’t understand how you—”

  George’s voice was cold. “It’s done now. From now on, we’ll be known as the Donner Party.”

  I was so upset I couldn’t sleep, Betsey. George was awake too, he tossed and turned.

  I lay still as a rock.

  The perfidy. How could he? Just that morning, at our campfire, we had been in agreement…

  “I’m leaning toward taking the shortcut,” George said.

  “After what Mr. Clyman said?”

  He looked at the Weber Mountain peaks, capped with snow. “July nineteenth, and look at those peaks. I thought I knew all kinds of country. I’ve seen drought, locusts, even a tornado, but I don’t understand this strange land at all.”

  “That’s why we should take the established route.”

  After a moment, he nodded. “I guess you’re right. I just want us to get to California the fastest we can. I don’t feel comfortable with this weather.”

  Yes, I’m right, I raged inside, and it’s wrong that the women don’t have a vote, he knows that.

  I knew if I spoke, I would say ugly things.

  I lay there angry and afraid.

  Jan 18th 1847

  When I think about Lansford Hastings now, I feel almost detached, someplace in these terrible months his shoulders grown too weak to bear full responsibility for this nightmare.

  We prepared carefully. That is some consolation to us. Information about ’44 was widely available, and the great successes of ’45 continued to filter back. Scarcely a week went by in our months of planning without another newspaper dispatch come directly from the new country, and I would be surprised if more than a half dozen of the scores of letters scribbled by those already en route escaped our eager eyes. Allen Francis brought each letter to our reading circle before he even published them in the paper.

  Our eagerness was always tempered with prudence, because we of ’46 were the first families on the Trail.

  It’s strange, Betsey. Things I hardly thought about in the rush of those days come back now, the smallest detail etched clearly, as if it had been stowed somewhere carelessly in haste to emerge slowly and completely in confinement.

  February 1846 Illinois

  Outside our window, it was snowing heavily. Inside our cozy farmhouse, George piled more wood on the fire, and set the chairs in a semicircle around the hearth. Allen Francis and I were looking through a new book, I can feel the heft of it in my hands this second. My sister-in-law, Elizabeth, Elitha, and Leanna put refreshments on the table. They were using my good rose-patterned china. George’s brother, Jacob, was half dozing in an easy chair, as usual.

  “What will you read this week, Mother?” Elitha asked.

  I held up the book, and read its title, “Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44 by John Frémont.”

  She wrinkled up her nose.

  “This is history in the making, Elitha.”

  “I’d rather Dickens,” she said.

  Jacob glanced up. “I’d rather my feather bed.”

  “We might fight Indians, Uncle Jacob—” Leanna began excitedly.

  But Jacob had already sunk back, his mouth gaping open. I wanted to shake him, but I concealed my annoyance and said, “Let’s hope not, Leanna. We’ll wait a few minutes more for Mr. and Mrs. Reed—”

  I didn’t see Frances in her nightgown tiptoe to the table, reach for a small cake, and knock off the china cup, but I heard it hit the floor and break.

  “Frances!”

  Now I see her face crumple, but then, I knelt down, picked up the cup and its broken handle, looked at it with distress.

  “You know you’re never supposed to touch my china, Frances. That’s all I have from my mother…”

  Frances started to cry.

  “Crying isn’t going to fix it, Frances,” I said. “Don’t touch my china again.”

  I might have gone on haranguing her, but the door burst open with a whoosh of wind and snow. James Reed waved a book and shouted, “Hastings discovered a shortcut!”

  Behind James, Margret tried in vain to restrain him. “James, your boots. The floor—”

  “No one worries about snow in California, Mrs. Reed,” I said.

  “Hot off the presses!” James said. “We can save three hundred miles!”

  Then everyone gathered round him, talking at once. In all the hubbub, Georgia and Eliza ran out in their nightgowns and yelled happily with everyone else. Even Jacob perked up.

  Jan 19th 1847

  Today 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.

  George Building His Wall, 1839

  Our 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 engrossed 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.”

  Jan 22nd 1847

  In 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.

  Jan 26th 1847

  Jean 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.”

  Thomas Eustis Dozier d Sept 28th 1831 at home in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Beloved son of Tully and Tamsen Eustis Dozier.

  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.

  Personal History for the Children

  When 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 tha
t, 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.”