Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  I said, “Salvador es mi hermano también.” He is my brother too.

  Carlos lifted his gaze and looked at me for a long time, right into my eyes. He blinked once. Twice. I saw Salvador then, inside his eyes. I knew with certainty that they were brothers, and that all of them had once lived here where we were standing, the sons, the father, the mother too, a family much like ours, living in one of the shacks now falling to pieces, while the father laid out the orchards.

  At last he said quietly, “Si. Es un regalo. Es la suya.” It is a gift, it belongs to you.

  Something rose out of his throat then that was not Spanish, and it was not English, nor any language you could name, unless it be the most basic language we can utter. His head tipped back and a low groan came forth that swelled to a howling wail. My arm hairs prickled and the hairs on the back of my neck stood out. I’d heard this same sound once before, on the morning we woke just below the summit, covered with snow. I looked at papa. His eyes were wide in a way I saw only that day and never again, his whole face naked.

  The long, lamenting call became a word, the first word of a chant, as the voice itself began to crack and weep, and what I heard was Salvador coming through his brother. It was the same mournful and piercing voice, filling the orchard and all the air around the mission, as over and over the words were chanted, and we knew something then we did not know before. We knew something about what had been harvested from those rows of trees, though no one mentioned it, on that day or any later day. Papa knew then, though he never said so out loud, that we would not remain any longer on the mission grounds, as he had envisioned. Someone else would have to take over the orchards, someone who had not heard the voice of Carlos wailing for his brother.

  His chant finally dwindled and fell off into silence. Abruptly he turned his horse and began to trot away.

  Valentine called, “Donde va?”

  He waited for an answer, then shouted, “Carlos! Donde va!”

  Carlos stopped and turned in the saddle, his dark face again a mask. “Voy a buscar mi padre.” I’m going to look for my father.

  He pulled off his vaquero’s jacket and threw it on the ground. He threw down his marine’s cap, so that his black hair swung loose. As he moved off through the trees his horse broke into a gallop and he was gone.

  I heard Valentine murmur, “Cabrón.”

  Papa said, “Will he be back?”

  “No telling what he’ll do. A dangerous fellow in the best of times.”

  “Will you see him again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You tell him the man who killed his brother is way up north. I couldn’t begin to say where. It was none of our doing.”

  “You need some protection here. Perhaps you’ll invite me to stay the night.”

  With a nervous, incredulous laugh papa said, “You think we’d feel safer with you around?”

  Valentine looked wounded by this remark. Then he revived his cocky smirk. “If you need me I won’t be far away. The Indians are a vengeful people, but different from the Mexicans, who lack patience. Give me a thousand dollars to split with Carlos, and we’ll call it square.”

  Papa raised his rifle and cocked it. “Good-bye, Valentine.”

  “Forget about Carlos. Forget about the Indians. With them or without them we’ll do quite well. But don’t forget my offer. It’s always open. Why fritter away your talents on the council when there’s so much more to be had for the taking? Ride with me, Reed.”

  Papa didn’t speak. They looked at each other until Valentine turned and trotted over to his string of horses. He led them back the way he’d come, past the trees, toward the hills beyond the mission.

  That evening at dinner nobody said much because papa was so pensive. Next morning two of his horses were gone. He figured it was Valentine, something he’d do for his own amusement, hoping we’d read it as an Indian warning and Carlos would get the blame.

  Papa didn’t go after him that day, said he’d catch up with him sooner or later, though to my knowledge he never did. Papa was not a vengeful man. He did not feel compelled to settle every score. If he never saw Valentine again, I heard him tell mama, it might be worth two horses. The fact was, papa didn’t have much time just then for getting even. After he’d finishing cursing Valentine and his devious ways and the day they’d met, he said we were going to leave the mission grounds and move closer to town.

  “We’re too exposed,” he said. “Anything could happen.”

  Mama didn’t disagree. Overnight we’d had a heavy rain. It was the first of October. The tent was soaked through and all our bedding.

  “The children will be better off,” he said, “where there’s more folks to help us keep an eye on things. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

  He didn’t say the name of Carlos or of Salvador that day or on any later day, nor did mama, nor did we ever see Carlos again or hear any word of him. It was as if he and his brother and Luis had never existed, as if they had been added to all the names and places and trials and tribulations mama and papa hoped to leave behind.

  “Let us never speak of those months,” mama told us all, soon after we’d come out of the mountains. “Talking cannot change the past. What’s done is done, and life goes on.” While that is surely true, it is also true that the places you have been stay with you, whether you talk of them or not.

  BEFORE THE RAINS came again, he rented us an adobe cottage across from the pueblo church, on what is now Market Street. It wasn’t much, one room with a dirt floor and a hole in the ceiling to let smoke out, and one door made of stiff cowhide like the door William Johnson had at the edge of his wilderness. The Alcalde put papa in touch with an old-time ranching family like his wife’s, and papa paid them cash for a sizable tract of pueblo land. Come spring he took off for the goldfields along with all the other men in San Jose. By the end of summer he was back with enough to build a big adobe ranch house, close to what was soon to be the southern edge of town, where he thrived until the squatters moved in.

  I guess you could say the squatters shared Valentine’s view of life out west. A lot of forty-niners and disgruntled argonauts, once they learned there wasn’t near enough gold to go around, went out looking for land, any parcel that appealed to them, whether claimed by someone else or not. It rankled them that some folks had got here early and made a stake. Squatters and drifters broke John Sutter, when they overran his fort, then burned down his country house. Some others took a dislike to Abner Valentine, who had become a wealthy man. When he tried to run them off, they set fire to his barn and stables, and he was trampled to death by his own horses, trying to put the fire out.

  Squatters nearly broke papa too, setting up tents, refusing to budge. One morning he looked out our kitchen window and saw a man he’d never seen before plowing the field right beside the house, getting ready to put in his own crop of wheat. It took papa years to drive off such fellows, cost him thousands, with many trips to court.

  When I met my husband and got married, we lived there at the ranch, bringing up our children. It was after mama and papa and my husband had all passed away that we lost it, in a crooked deal engineered by a lawyer papa thought we could rely on. One day we had a house and land we’d occupied for thirty years, the next day it was gone. It makes you wonder if we were supposed to own any land at all in that valley. I was widowed by then and had to move my family into a smaller place. Like mama starting west in the middle of her life, I had to begin again. But that is another story, one I’ll save for another time.

  Suffice to say, having raised my children and left those Santa Clara Valley years behind, I have been the one to complete this last little leg of our long passage, over the final ridge of the Coast Range, and end up perched here at the farthest edge. I watch surf splash upon the sand beyond the rail line that carries all the shoppers and travelers and beachgoers back and forth along the busy shore, and I think of the pouch papa used to carry. I have it here inside my son’s house, on a shelf in
a closet, with the papers still intact. It’s about all we have left to show for the mark he made—his name on a street sign in downtown San Jose, and this pouch full of letters and deeds and agreements, some in English, some in Spanish, the pieces of paper large and small he collected along the way.

  I think of mama and papa buried in San Jose, and grandma buried in Kansas beside the emigrant trail, and the generations of my forebears buried here and there across the land, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, as well as overseas in Ireland and Scotland and Poland and who knows where else. For a century my people moved, and I have stayed put longer than most. Still a newcomer, of course, compared with those who used to live around the borders of this lagoon taking shellfish from these beaches. Yet seventy-five years is long enough to feel connected to a place. The way a plant will suck up water from the soil to quench its own thirst, we nomad humans suck up something from wherever we decide to stop, and it feeds us. It feeds us. If only we could find a way to inhabit a place without having to possess it. It’s possession that divides us, fills the squatter with resentment, sets a man against his neighbor, turns lawyers into millionaires.

  Around our shoreside lagoon, flocks of waterfowl still congregate, geese and ducks and cormorants, reminding me that a hundred years ago there would have been a tribal gathering place around here somewhere, with so much wild game flying in, and all the clams and mussels and abalone to be collected too. So many lives were lived here before we arrived, and surely their spirits are among us, along the shore, in the mud of the lagoon, hovering above the water, perhaps the very spirit of whoever found this luminous piece of shell I hold. It could have come from our bay out there, where shellfish cling to rocky ledges, gathered up who knows when. It is like an old photograph of some long-gone time, of how the world looked years and years ago, though it is better than a photograph. It moves. It has its life. I move my hand just slightly, and the pearly colors move. The tiny curve of light shifts across the surface like a river finding its way to the sea.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Remembering Frazier Reed II of San Jose, who generously shared his recollections, and with thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation for a Bellagio residency that made it possible to begin the work.

  About the Author

  James D. Houston is the author of Continental Drift, Love Life, and The Last Paradise, honored with a 1999 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Among his several nonfiction works is Farewell to Manzanar, coauthored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, based upon her family’s experience during and after the World War II internment. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received the Humanitas Prize, a Joseph Henry Jackson award for fiction, a PEN/Library of Congress Story Award, a California Book Award, an NEA writing grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency. He lives with his wife and three children in Santa Cruz, California, in the house where Patty Reed spent the last years of her life.

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  ALSO BY JAMES D. HOUSTON

  NONFICTION

  Farewell to Manzanar (with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston) 1973

  Open Field (with John R. Brodie) 1974

  Three Songs for My Father 1974

  Californians: Searching for the Golden State 1982

  One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is in the Canoe 1985

  The Men in My Life 1987

  Catching the Light: Remembering Wallace Stegner (anthology) 1996

  Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport

  (with Ben Finney) 1996

  In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey 1997

  FICTION

  Between Battles 1968

  Gig 1969

  A Native Son of the Golden West 1971

  An Occurrence at Norman Burger’s Castle 1972

  The Adventures of Charlie Bates 1973

  Continental Drift 1978

  Gasoline: The Automotive Adventures of Charlie Bates 1980

  Love Life 1985

  The Last Paradise 1998

  Copyright

  Flamingo

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia

  First published in the USA in 2001

  by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  First published in Australia in 2002

  This edition published in 2010

  by HarperCollinsPublishers. Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  Copyright © James D. Houston 2001

  The right of James D. Houston to be identified as the moral rights author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  James D. Houston

  Snow Mountain Passage/ James D. Houston

  ISBN: 978-0-7322-7356-9 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 978-0-7304-9352-5 (ePub)

  1. Donner Party – Fiction. 2. Overland journeys to the Pacific – Fiction.

  3. California – History – 1846–1850 – Fiction. I. Title. 813.54

  813.54

  Maps copyright © David Lindroth, Inc. 2001

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