Jim gazes until his eyes burn. He dips his hat to shield his eyes against the blazing light. From somewhere behind him he hears a voice.
“Don’t turn around.”
As he reaches for the rifle in its scabbard by his saddle, he hears the click of a hammer cocked.
“Don’t do that either.”
Jim waits. How did someone get this close?
The voice says, “Where do you come from?”
“John Sutter’s fort.”
“You’re American.”
“That’s right. I have a letter of safe passage.”
“From Sutter?”
“From the lieutenant in charge of the garrison there.”
He hears the man spit.
“An idiot.”
“That may be so,” Jim says, “but he commands the valley of the Sacramento now.”
He hears a low, sardonic chuckle.
“I’m going to turn around. I mean no harm here.”
“Hands away from the body, please.”
The fellow sits on a fallen tree trunk as if posing for a portrait, one boot propped on a rock, a dark hat tipped to shade his eyes. His jacket has a vaguely military cut, though it isn’t military, the collar high and circular, a tapered waist. A rifle in the crook of his arm points toward the ground.
“I’ll look at that letter now.”
He has a black tuft of chin beard and across his cheeks unshaven stubble. A thin mocking smile tells Jim he is being toyed with, in some little game this fellow seems to enjoy. He holds a hand out, palm up, not like a highwayman, but like a creditor collecting on a debt.
From the leather pouch slung inside his coat Jim withdraws a smudged and flimsy folded page. He has noticed movement beyond some trees. Now three more men ride toward them, leading half a dozen horses. They all carry rifles, wear wide-brimmed hats and heavy coats similar enough to seem like uniforms, though they are not. Dust and grime are embedded in these coats and in the bulging beards. They look as if they have been traveling on horseback for months, or years.
They watch but do not speak, as the one on foot returns Jim’s letter. The hat brim has been pushed back, revealing fixed blue eyes, implacable eyes that hold him with a haughty gaze. Do they taunt him?
“Meet Mr. Reed. He’ll ride with us a while.”
Is this an order or an offer? The fellow mounts one of the horses and waits for Jim to mount. The riders bunch around him as they set out together on the downslope trail.
For a couple of miles they ride without speaking. Has Jim been captured or befriended? He can’t quite tell. There is something menacing about the leader’s face under the shadow of his tilted brim. In profile the tufted chin protrudes too far. Jim considers making a run for it, but knows he won’t. Not yet, at any rate. Where would he run to? He studies the three in overcoats. He is sure he recognizes one of them, a tall and lanky fellow.
After a while Jim mentions Fort Laramie. The fellow nods. He was there in July. And yes, he thinks the name Reed might ring a bell. A younger man, riding next to him, nods and grunts. “Ain’t you the ones fell so far behind?”
They all know something of the story, the last party on the trail in this year that a thousand wagons made the crossing. Scraps and bits of lore and gossip have traveled through the passes like burs and seedpods in the furry coats of animals, to spread out into the valleys where the emigrants have gathered.
These men too are land-seeking settlers, now plunged into a struggle with the scoundrel Californians who cannot seem to get it through their heads that the newcomers are here to stay and not about to be pushed aside or trifled with.
The lanky fellow has a wife and three children parked down below. “Most everybody rode south with Colonel Fremont,” he says, “but some of us had to stay behind to protect the families.”
Two weeks ago he joined the volunteer militia out of San Jose. This patrol of four is about to give up the search for a band of troops rumored to be forming in these mountains. Stock has been stolen, so they’ve heard, though whether by Californians or by Indians, it’s hard to say.
Jim looks at the string of unsaddled horses.
“So you found the animals but not the troops.”
The man grins and looks away. “Let’s say these critters been repossessed.”
“They’re wily, them greasers,” the younger fellow says.
“Chickenshit’s what they mostly are,” says the third.
“They could be clear to Mexico City by now.”
Jim hears these things from the men in overcoats, not from their jacketed leader, whose name is Valentine. He keeps a brooding silence on the trail. The way he rides reminds Jim of someone. Though aloof, he sits in the saddle like a performer who insists that you notice him.
Later on, the lanky fellow tells Jim he was among those who made it to Fort Bridger in time to join the party led by Lansford Hastings. “I guess we come through just ahead of your bunch,” he says, with a grim, commiserating nod. “And I don’t have to tell you it was a tough old road. We lost some wagons. Just barely made it, if you want to know the truth. Then come to find out this fancy new republic he claimed he would lead weren’t nothing but hot air, since the United States Navy had got here first. But we did make it through, I’ll give him that.”
“And where is he now?” Jim asks.
“Long gone.”
“Gone where?”
“On south with the rest of ‘em. Some kind of officer, is what I heard. That Hastings, he don’t miss a step. I’d wager he’s halfway to Los Angeles.”
Jim feels the stab of envy. It irks him that Hastings is there while he is not, riding with Fremont’s battalion. It irks him more that the man has escaped interrogation. Jim has imagined him in some California town filling other heads with far-fetched promises. Jim has imagined finding him and throwing a rope around his neck and walking him up to that ridge above Bear Valley where they listened to the empty snowfields, so that Hastings might contemplate the miseries he led them to.
Part of him would head south right now in pursuit of the battalion, while part of him listens to the fellow pilgrim who followed the prophet from Fort Bridger and made it all the way across with his family intact. Could it be that Jim has misjudged Hastings and his cutoff? He wonders, as they ride, and he resigns himself to waiting. The war can’t last forever. In this uncertain land, in such uncertain times, he’ll have to wait a while longer to learn who to hold accountable for the suffering and the setbacks on the journey he thought he’d planned so well.
Valentine
THE SUN IS about to touch the farther rim of mountains when another rider overtakes them. He comes up from behind at a gallop, wearing high boots and the tight-waisted jacket of a Californian, although he is not a Californian. His face is brown, his cheekbones high, an Indian face, and on his head a wide blue cap, flat-topped and circular with a short bill. Sitting tall and straight, he rides next to Valentine, says a few words in Spanish, then drops back.
They have crossed a table of land between the tawny foothills and the bay’s dark curve, and now they come upon a low compound of tattered buildings. San Jose Pueblo still lies half a day’s ride south, beyond the bay. This is the Mission of St. Joseph, or what remains of it. Valentine decides they’ll spend the night here.
Along one side of the road, a lopsided row of adobe huts, half brick, half mud, are melting back into the soil from which they rose. They face a chapel, a long, squared-off barn of adobe brickwork, covered with flaking whitewash. The peaked roof is made of earth-red tiles, though many have slipped loose and lie broken. There is no bell tower, no steeple, no cross rising—only a door in the windowless facade, held loosely shut by a padlock on a rusty chain.
With a cryptic nod Valentine says, “There is the true enemy.”
Jim looks at him. “The Church?”
“Neglect. Indifference.”
Though the mission looks abandoned, in one of the shacks they find a woman who is willing to prepare so
me food, a very short woman, well under five feet, dark and round and hunched, with a braid of silver hair down her back. When Valentine speaks to her in Spanish about the food, her eyes grow bright. To the men he says, with a leer, “Her bed is too small for all of us together. But she will take us one at a time and guarantee our satisfaction.”
The men chuckle. The woman and a granddaughter of ten or so scurry around a cooking fire. The floor is dirt, swept and hard-packed. There is one small window. On the low benchlike table they set out platters of tortillas, beans cooked with beef chunks, and chili colorado. The men eat with their fingers. They eat as if they haven’t seen food in weeks, hot juice running across their hands, dripping onto the platters. They joke about the lack of forks and spoons.
“My daddy never even saw a fork till he was nine,” the lanky fellow says, “then it was just for pitching little bitty bales of hay in this field that was owned by a midget.”
It is near dusk when they lead their horses past the outbuildings that surround the chapel and through an unlocked gate in the low adobe wall. They pass long porticos outside the empty dormitories, collapsing sheds where thatched roofing has been torn by wind, and warehouses where olive oil and dried fruit and grains and wines were once stored. Staves lie scattered where the barrels fell apart among the shards of broken jugs. Rickety looms stand idle, gray with cobwebs and rotting yarn. Farther in, there is a courtyard covered with debris, twigs and limbs and birds’ nests blown from trees, strewn around a gurgling fountain, and beyond that the long-neglected vineyards and olive groves and orchards.
At night the place is ghostly. The fountain splash is like a light burning, as if someone just stepped away and might return at any moment. Jim peers into the falling darkness.
As if to the others, yet somehow attuned to Jim’s uneasiness, Valentine says, “We have been looking in the wrong place. There are no troops within miles of here. If we find them at all, it will be in the mountains to the west.” With soft sarcasm, he adds, “Tonight our only company will be a few goats, and the old woman across the road, who waits patiently to see which of us will be first.”
He offers a laugh. But his joke wears thin. The others ignore it.
Under the vast limbs of an elderly fig tree they lay out bedrolls and build a fire in a pit where other sojourners have built fires. A bottle of aguardiente appears. After it has passed around the circle a couple of times they begin to talk, all but Valentine, who now maintains a dramatic silence. Whenever the bottle is offered he passes it on, while he stares at the fire with chin in hand, as if rehearsing for the role of a character whose complex fate weighs heavily upon him.
The others pay little notice. They are curious about Jim. Why did he leave his party? Why is he bound for San Jose?
With every telling of his story the desert has grown wider, the mountains higher, the snow deeper, the need for animals and food more urgent. Hearing of his hopes to mount a rescue team, the listeners glance away with hooded, guilty looks. They sip again, poke sticks at the edges of the blaze, and confirm Jim’s fears. We sure do feel for your kinfolk, they say, and it’s a terrible thing to admit, but when the whole Bay of San Francisco is on alert, who has a spare moment to think about people stuck somewhere three hundred miles away?
One fellow tells a story that he too has told and retold, about a firefight two weeks ago, below San Jose, where five brave Americans were killed and six Walla Wallas riding with them and twice that many Californians.
“What right did they have to stand in the way of our boys moving horses from the Sacramento down to help out Colonel Fremont? They had us outnumbered three to one, but our boys hunkered down and made ‘em wish they stayed home on that particular day. Served ‘em right, I’d say. Our boys wasn’t out to do battle, just driving this herd of horses from one place to the other.”
“Trouble is,” the lanky fellow says, “the greasers got no respect for human life.”
“Nor the Stars and Stripes, neither,” says the fellow next to him, who turns out to be his son. “Two times it was run up the pole there in San Jose. Two times in the dark of night they crept in and tore it down.”
“Thieving cowards is what I call ‘em.”
“Treacherous,” says the third, a stout barrel-maker from Indiana. “Lord, you have never seen such treachery!” And he recounts how all the towns had surrendered peaceably, even the new capital of Los Angeles. But the next thing you know, they turn right around and rise in insurrection. The word now is that Mexican regulars are sailing up the coast from Mazatlán or some such place, with artillery and fresh troops by the hundreds …
His tale is interrupted by the low, thick, insistent voice of Valentine. “Perhaps someone can tell me something.”
He still gazes at the fire. They all look at him and wait.
“When these troops arrive, what do they think they are coming to defend?”
The lanky fellow starts to speak but holds his tongue, as Valentine’s frowning face opens with a slow chuckle. It rises to a hollow laugh.
“Look around you. Look where we are camped. Look at these buildings. If you can call them buildings.” He reaches out, as if to embrace the compound. “This is California, gentlemen! Do you think it is worth defending? This is what happens when Californians are in command!”
He steps toward the fire with his hands on his hips, a defiant stance, as if waiting for someone to challenge him. Something about the old mission kindles his anger. Rubbing his wrists as if they itch or burn, twisting them inside his cuffs, he begins to pace.
“A thousand Indians used to work these grounds. Did you know that? Carlos was among them …”
He flings a hand toward the guide, who sits slightly apart, puffing on a corncob pipe. Carlos has not been drinking. Beneath the unbuttoned jacket he wears no shirt. His brown chest is smooth, the muscles etched. Intense eyes give him a warrior look, yet his manner is anything but warlike, with the pipe smoke curling upward. He doesn’t seem to know enough English to follow what’s being said, nor does he seem to care.
“And where are they now?” says Valentine, with accusation in his voice. “What happened to that multitude? I’ll tell you where they are. They ran away, as the family of Carlos ran away. They worked for the padres. They tilled the soil. They made the bricks. They pressed the grapes and ran the cattle. They worked for Spain. But Madrid was so far from Mexico, the Spaniards could not hold this land. The Church lost its power. The padres lost control of the Indians. And away they went. You can see what it has become! You can see how quickly it has been allowed to fall to pieces!”
His rising voice is hoarse and urgent. Lit from below, his tufted chin seems large. His cheeks make upward shadows. The skin below his eyes seems wet, as if watered by the passion of this speech.
Jim takes a long pull on the aguardiente and watches Valentine, reminded of the desert, when men deprived of food and water became delirious and woke up raving in the night, or at midday for no reason would grab you by the shirt. You forgave them, knowing how near you were yourself to such an outburst. But Valentine is not delirious. He looks well fed. He’s a young man too, fit and trim. Jim glances at the others, who have listened without any show of wonder or alarm. Have they heard all this before?
Peering into the heavy branches overhead, Valentine says, “Do you know where you are, Mr. Reed?”
The question startles him. Where does it come from? Again, Valentine seems to enter his mind and know his doubts. Unaccountably he feels his arm hairs prickle.
“More or less,” Jim says.
“You may know that these mountains behind us are named for the devil. The Spanish called this range Diablo. Who knows why? They say a band of Spanish soldiers were defeated not far from here by Indians whose leader was a medicine man of strong powers. The Spanish claimed they were devilish powers. Do you think such things are possible?”
“Out here everything seems possible.”
Valentine regards him with an approving smirk. “Aha!
A very good answer, Mr. Reed. The correct answer. But now tell me this! Why would someone establish a mission in such a place, named for the very father of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and built in a region that is named for the devil?”
Jim has no answer. He has never heard of such a thing. All this delights Valentine. His blue eyes gleam. He wraps his arms across his chest and rocks in the firelight.
“It is wicked to do this. They are a wicked people! All of them! Is it any wonder the Indians ran away? Any wonder that the mission is in ruins? The Spaniards thought the Indians were devils. The Indians thought the Spaniards were devils. We are certain that the Californians are devils. And the Californians? Who knows what they think? Perhaps these mountains are well named after all. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Reed? Each man can find here the devil of his own making.”
Valentine’s long laugh echoes across the broken tiles of the empty courtyard and the crumbling adobe walls.
Out of the Wilderness
JIM’S SLEEP IS fitful. Twice the fountain wakes him, and he lies on his back, gazing into the swarm of branches while he retraces the route. Again and again he revisits each mile, from the curve of the Humboldt, across the sand, along the Truckee, into the Sierras, over the summit and through to Bear Valley, trying to imagine the safest spot, trying to place them there, bedded down, somehow protected …
The third time he wakes, a predawn breeze has stirred the leaves. Little clicks and the overhead chatter of twiglets rouse him, and he is up before the others, walking out among the rows of trees, where a few pears and apples can still be seen, brown or mottled yellow, clinging to the gnarly limbs. Valentine is right. They haven’t been pruned in many years, nor has the soil been turned. His boots move through a dense mulch of fallen leaves, years of leaves decomposing, sending up a moldy hard-cider scent, half sweet, half vinegar, from the near-rot of windfall apples and bird-eaten pears composting with the leaves.
These hills are called Diablo, says Valentine. That doesn’t trouble Jim. He won’t let it trouble him. Hills are hills, and apples are apples, and a name is just a name. He breathes deeply, takes in the smell of trees and earth, all doing their work, a comforting and heady smell, floating on a subtle light. Though the orchard is in shadow and the sun still hidden, the air around him has come to life. He turns and sees that the bay and the slopes beyond the bay already catch the sun’s first rays and send them back to tint the limbs and yellow globes.
Snow Mountain Passage Page 16