He raised his head from the page, and it seemed to me then he looked like John the Baptist, with his craggy face and scraggly beard and his hair pushed out and firelight glinting in his gaunt and red-rimmed eyes. He read the verse again.
“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight.”
He read it again.
And then again.
He must have read it ten times, until his wife ran out of patience and called at him to move on to the next verse.
By that time Patrick may have been a little demented, talking to himself as much as to God. He had a bad case of kidney stones. Sometimes he would curl into a ball and lie there in silent agony until the pain passed. Eventually he would sit up and smile like a fool and talk about the sunshine, even though a bitter wind might be howling overhead. Looking back, I can see that we were all a bit demented from the hardship and the lack of food, seeing things and hearing things. I don’t think this takes away from the regularity of his devotions or from what Virginia heard, the passion in his voice that spoke to her own deep need.
With her feet frostbitten she had to crawl around the cabin. She was so weak she believed she was going to die at any moment. Each day when she woke up she did not know whether to give thanks that she was still alive or ask to be taken soon and get it over with. Two or three times, when Patrick was out of the cabin, Peggy Breen took pity on Virginia and slipped her bits of meat. Those precious morsels surely saved her life. Saved her body, that is. Something else saved her spirit.
Our family would all sleep huddled and mashed up together, holding close to mama and to one another. One of those nights is still vivid in my memory, when I heard a voice right next to me. I thought it was a dream voice. I opened my eyes in the blackness and lay still and listened, and I knew then it was Virginia, close by, kneeling on the blankets and speaking quietly.
“Please, God,” she was saying. “Please send us a rescue. Please, God, send somebody to help us escape from here. Please send us a rescue. Please, God, let me see papa again, and I will be a Catholic. I promise. I will always go to Mass, and I will live a good life. Only, please send somebody to help us escape from here. Please, God. Please, God. Please.”
I wondered if mama was awake to hear this too. Our family was Presbyterian, and you weren’t supposed to give any kind of credit at all to the Catholics. If papa had been there to hear such statements he would have put a stop to it right then, even though part of her prayer was to see him safe and sound again. Papa’s mother, who had come from Scotland and grew up in Ireland, had taught him never to trust a Catholic. Their persecution, she used to say, was what drove her to leave for America. Maybe this had something to do with why papa and Patrick never did like each other much. They were both born in Ireland, where the Protestants and the Catholics hardly ever get along. Being my father’s daughter, I have to confess that I too had my suspicions, at age eight. To this day I have never set foot inside a Catholic church. But in my mind, looking back on what I heard that night in Virginia’s pleading voice, it was not the Catholic part that got to her. It was the yearning toward something larger than yourself that you can put your faith in. That is the thing. Your faith needs a place to put itself. I remember envying Virginia the radiance that soon came into her eyes. Whatever she had heard in Patrick’s voice gave her something to hold on to. It persuaded her that someone was out there with us, listening. After that she prayed with him every day, saying Catholic words out loud in that deep forest of pine and snow-laden Douglas fir where such words had never before been heard.
I envied Virginia then. I envy her even now, as I think back. She was fourteen and had found God and trusted Him to get her through. I was still too young to believe in something as large and vast and invisible as God. I could only believe in mama and papa and Salvador, and when mama left a second time, as she soon would do, they’d all be gone.
—PART THREE—
ANGELS
Yerba Buena
A CIVILIAN ONCE again, Jim rides alone between timbered foothills and the glassy bay. He has thrown away the buckskins he wore last summer and through the fall while they crossed from Laramie to Sutter’s Fort. He wears Mexican boots, homespun trousers, a government-issue jersey shirt. His rifle hangs in its scabbard by his leg. His Spanish hat has a round, stiff brim. His dark beard and moustache are recently trimmed. A jacket is strapped behind his saddle. In the middle of the day it’s too warm for a jacket. A very unwintry winter sun—a molten gold piece in the southern sky—warms his shirt, moistens his chin, makes his beard itch. He reaches up to scratch it, thinking, Strange weather.
In such uncanny warmth the place itself seems coated with a foreign light, though it should be familiar to him now. This is country the Volunteers crossed in driving rain—broad and open, with grand oaks standing singly and clumped in groves as far ahead as he can see. Their zigzag branches angle out over rolling lawns of new grass. The oldest trunks are checkered gray, with bark broken into rows and tiny blocks, like sleeves that have been shattered yet hold tightly to the trees. In front of him two elegant blacktail deer leap from an unseen gully and spring across the trail. Hawks float above the trees. Jim would like to linger here, lie back in the new grass and watch the hawks, let the sun bathe his face and neck, and ponder the mystery of flight, the mysteries of climate and unaccountable change. He cannot linger. Time is running out. Time presses down upon him and pushes from behind him like a posse on the trail of a fugitive.
Did he stay too long in San Jose? No. No, he had to stay. In the northern towns the trouble was over, yet no one knew what had happened farther south, whether Fremont’s battalion had retaken Los Angeles, or had arrived at all. What if they’d stalled again for lack of horses? They had four hundred miles overland to cover. What if they’d been cut down by hordes of Mexican regulars who had landed at Santa Barbara or somewhere farther down? And if they’d lost the south, what then?
For two weeks Jim waited. By boat he sent a letter up the bay to Bill McCutcheon, hoping it would find him in Sonoma or Napa, to tell him everything depended on the outcome of the southern campaign, but if all went well they could meet again within the month.
One afternoon a courier came clopping up the Monterey road and into the plaza, an exhausted fellow who’d been riding day and night. At the courthouse moat he slid from his horse. The marines revived him with whiskey while a crowd gathered to hear his parched and jubilant voice announce that Colonel Fremont had accepted a final surrender from the rebel Californians. Los Angeles had been reoccupied. American warships controlled the harbors.
Men fired their pistols at the sky, shouting, “Hallelujah!” and “Glory be to God!” as they headed for the cantina to toast the conquest, to brag, to dream of statehood. Both north and south the insurrections had been put down. Once again the United States had full control of the ports and towns, and this time they would not let it slip away. At the long, murky bar men outdid one another drinking to a nation that soon would spread from coast to coast.
The next day Jim took his discharge from the Volunteers. He has it in writing, tucked away among the papers in his flat leather pouch. A set of keys is in there too, the elderly keys to the gate at St. Joseph’s mission, presented to him by the Alcalde, who quickly granted his request to lease and work those fields.
Riding north, he nears the end of the long peninsula and stops for water at another mission, the one called Dolores, named for a stream winding toward it from the west. A salty edge is on the air. The stream winds past a cemetery and broken-down corrals, and flows on through wetlands and tules toward the Bay of San Francisco, two miles off. Jim dips his cup into the stream and drinks. He dips his canteen in and lets it fill and looks at the chapel, whitewashed adobe with a tiled roof. Round white columns frame its entry and support a fragile balustrade. Around it, sheds have fallen in. Where workers lived, the low walls are eaten away by rain and fog. The columns have a Roman look, reminding him of courthouses back in Illinois, though ther
e is something lonesome about four Roman pillars out here in such a windswept place, something odd. To the west, beyond the chapel, two matching conical peaks stand against the sky.
A few emigrant wagons are parked near the mission. Here and there tents are pitched. Jim chats long enough to find out where they’re from, what news they bring. Several are Mormons who arrived last year by ship from New York, hoping to found a new community in the far Far West. One cantankerous fellow says that with the last gobernador they had a clearcut understanding that the whole of Alta California could be theirs. He is blaming the United States for starting a war and spoiling their negotiations with Mexico.
These Mormons, Jim thinks, they are always blaming the United States, always eyeing enormous parcels of uncharted land they can lay claim to. He has heard their men take several wives at once, though why anyone would choose to do that is beyond him. They set themselves apart, call themselves “Saints.” Yet this man’s face doesn’t shine with a purer light. His tent is just as porous as the next fellow’s, his cooking pots blackened with the same soot. Jim is glad he reached Santa Clara Valley ahead of the Mormons, glad to hear this fellow say California may already be too far gone, already tainted and no longer worth his precious time.
He rides on, thinking of the Mormons, thinking of “his” valley, and of Valentine too, of the money he might have made selling horses. It would have been easy money, the first of many lucrative schemes, according to Valentine, on the night the pueblo celebrated the final conquest, when they drank together one last time. Yes, it would have been easy to scheme and laugh with him and ride out on one more escapade. Drinking with Valentine was like being single again. He drew you in, made you a comrade, made you remember an old recklessness still yearning to be let loose. But Jim looked into Valentine’s blue and glittering boyish eyes and knew he had traveled far enough with a fellow who so delighted in plunder and seemed entirely untroubled by the enemies he made.
Why should Jim share the many enemies Valentine gathered in that last campaign? It is too great a risk. Someday he will return to the valley of Santa Clara and to the Mission of St. Joseph. He can’t say when. But someday. The sooner, the better. He carries a piece of paper signed with the Alcalde’s flourish. He carries the heavy iron keys. Pressing his hand upon the pouch, he feels the keys outlined against his ribs.
He follows a well-worn wagon track that cuts through scattered scrub oak, tangled thickets of wild currant, gooseberry, rambling rose. He sees cattle grazing, a far-off adobe ranch house. Three miles beyond Mission Dolores he tops a hillock. Ahead of him the cove called Yerba Buena is a little crescent scooped from the inside edge of the peninsula. Thirty or forty buildings hug the crescent, upslope from a narrow beach. The slope rises toward a bare dome that protects the cove from hovering fog. There are no piers, no fortifications. From all Jim has heard, from all the talk of “imminent danger” and a headquarters for “the Northern Department,” somehow he expected more. Compared to this shoreside village, San Jose is a metropolis. A bay so broad and long, he thinks, deserves a bigger town.
Out beyond the cove, the navy ships and merchant ships and schooners rest at anchor on placid waters. From this vantage point they could be toy boats floating in a tub. Between the cove and the ridges of the farther shore, out beyond the ships, there is a rocky island capped with what looks at first like new-fallen snow. Centuries of seabirds have left their droppings, countless wild geese and pelicans and cormorants and gulls. They swarm around the island, lifting off in great flocks, landing together on white escarpments, to flap and squawk and scan for prey, and soar away again.
THE MAYOR’S OFFICE is a two-room adobe that joins one of the hotels, a block uphill from the beach. When Jim walks in, Bartlett pushes his chair back and reaches a hand across the polished desk. A wide grin lifts all the planes and angles of his carefully barbered muttonchops and handlebar moustache.
“Welcome, Mr. Reed. I’ve been hoping we’d meet again.”
“It’s good to be here at last.”
“Can you beat this weather? I’ve never known a day in February to be so warm.”
“I’m starting to think a fellow needs two sets of clothing with him, year in and year out.”
“The hotel bartender says tomorrow or the next day there could be hail.”
“Well, it’s good to see you indoors for a change, with a bit more than an oak tree over your head.”
Bartlett laughs a hearty laugh. “We did get wet, now, didn’t we, Mr. Reed?”
“Not as wet as the Californians.”
They both laugh. Bartlett offers Jim a chair.
“They’re not as frightful as some would make them out to be, you know. During my captivity one fellow taught me to twirl a lariat.”
“So you’re a vaquero, too.”
Bartlett’s eyes glint with youthful well-being, perhaps with mischief. Above his head he turns an invisible rope. “I believe I could be, with a little practice.”
He is a small man, stoutly built, with the posture of a good cadet, though he wears no navy braid or brass. He was appointed to the post last summer, when the Americans first claimed the bay. Once ashore he stored his lieutenant’s uniforms and adopted the look of a prosperous banker. A tailored coat hangs over the back of his chair. He wears a ruffled shirt, a vest of maroon satin, with sleeve garters to match. He enjoys these clothes. It is like a costume. He enjoys the job. The town is small, a village, and his duties are light now that the insurrection has been put down. In the next room there are more chairs and another polished desk, where he hears cases and settles complaints from local citizens.
“You know why I’m here,” Jim says.
“Indeed I do.”
“The men in San Jose have forwarded a petition on my behalf.”
“So I’ve heard. The Commandant received it yesterday.”
“And he’s the one I need to meet.”
“I’ve already told him I expected to be seeing you.”
“For that I am most grateful, lieutenant.” Jim lifts the flaps of his leather pouch. “I have other documents, you know, that might support my plea …”
Bartlett waves his hands as if the room is filled with smoke. “My goodness, Reed. No more documents. I have paper enough to last me several years. Everyone knows your name by now and why you’re here. Everyone knows you were with us on the plain at Santa Clara. It’s just a matter of finding the best way to go about this.”
“The best way?”
“We’ll start with the Commandant, of course. This time of day he should be at the customhouse.”
Bartlett drops his voice, glances through the door, as if an eavesdropper might be lurking. “He has a good heart, Reed. But be forewarned. He is not known for his boldness of approach. This job of mine is heaven, compared to being on board certain ships under the command of certain officers who shall remain nameless. Later on we’ll retire to the hotel saloon, just you and I. We have some catching up to do.”
As they step out onto the porch of the mayor’s adobe, Bartlett spots the Commandant heading toward them from the beach. He has just come ashore. Jim watches him with high anticipation. For two months he’s been trying to reach this man, and here he comes, plodding up the hill as if called to an appointment made long ago.
He looks to be about Jim’s age, give or take a year, a lean man, tall and very thin, his neck a wrinkled tube. His cheeks are high and hollowed out. His naval jacket hangs loosely from narrow shoulders. He walks as if his shoes pinch, planting each foot, lifting it before it bends.
When he reaches them at last, Bartlett makes the introductions. The Commandant shakes Jim’s hand but will not look at him for long. The weary eyes graze Jim’s face and swing toward the water. He seems glad to have a reason to stand still.
“Yes. Yes,” says the Commandant. “Good job, Reed. You’ve found us. Excellent. Excellent. As you can see, we’re settling in. Bartlett here, he’ll bring you up to date. He’s a busy fellow. But then we’re al
l busy, aren’t we, Bartlett? Busy as beavers. At this very moment I’m on my way to the customhouse. A bit of business there. Come along, Reed. Perhaps we can find a place to sit and talk things over, though the accommodations leave a great deal to be desired. It’s rustic. Exceedingly rustic. Before we dropped anchor here I had no idea what we’d be in for. The skies are lovely, as I’m sure you have observed. Those hills we see across the bay are called the contra costa, ‘the other shore.’ Last evening as the sun set, the color there was quite astonishing. Still, one sometimes feels we have arrived at the very ends of the Earth. Will you be long in Yerba Buena?”
“No longer, sir, than I have to be.”
Again the Commandant glances at him. Jim sees his eyes are filled with fear, though fear of what is hard to say. It’s also in his voice, a deep and practiced voice, round and resonant, yet lacking in conviction. If he speaks deeply enough—this voice seems to say—he will believe what he is saying. As the Commandant steps out across the plaza he pats his hands up and down his jacket front and upon the seat of his trousers.
“I have your petition, Reed, sent up by courier. It’s in my pocket here. Or perhaps it’s lying on my desk. I must say they make a case on your behalf, they surely do, some of my own officers among them, along with leading citizens of the pueblo. You evidently made a fine impression. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to say that I remain troubled by the outcome there, deeply troubled that the Mexicans got off so easily. We needed something more, as I believe my orders repeatedly conveyed. We needed a resounding victory!”
Jim would like to say, “Why weren’t you there?” but holds his tongue, trying to like this man on whom his future may depend.
“Well, sir,” Jim says, “they did surrender. And they did lay down their arms.”
“And now they run around loose again. I see them in the streets and on the roads. Is that a victory? We need to let them know who rules the West! We should have pursued them when we had the chance. When they retreated from the field of battle, when we had them on the run, we should have seized the advantage and trimmed them down to size!”
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