by Jess Walter
For him, these afternoons were dizzying and liquid, and he’d have continued that way the rest of his life, going to class and knowing that, twice a week, the lovely Amedea was coming to teach him. Once, after an especially intimate encounter, he made the mistake of saying, “Ti amo,” I love you, and she pushed him away angrily, stood, and began getting dressed.
“You can’t just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It’s how people end up married.” She pulled on her blouse. “Don’t ever say that after sex, do you understand? If you feel the urge to say it, go see the girl first thing in the morning, with her night breath and no makeup . . . watch her on the toilet . . . listen to her with her friends . . . go meet her hairy mother and her shrill sisters . . . and if you still feel the need to say such a stupid thing, then God help you.”
She told him so often that he didn’t really love her, that it was just a reaction to his first sexual experience, that she was too old for him, that they were all wrong for each other, that they were of different classes, that he needed a girl his own age—and she was so assured in her opinions—that Pasquale had no reason to doubt her.
And then, one fateful day, she came to his apartment and said, without preamble, “I’m pregnant.” What followed was an awful pause, as Pasquale experienced a moment of misunderstanding (Did she say pregnant?) followed by a moment of disbelief (But we almost always took precautions) and another moment when he waited for her to tell him what to do—as she usually did—so that by the time he came around to speaking (I think we should get married), so much time had passed, the proudly defiant Amedea could only laugh in his face.
Così ragazzo! Such a boy. Had he learned nothing? Did he really believe she would let him throw his life away like that? And even if he really wanted to—which he clearly didn’t—did he actually think that she would ever marry a penniless boy from a peasant village? Did he really believe that her father would allow such shame upon his family? And even if her father approved—and he would never approve—did he really think she would ever make a husband of such an aimless, unformed boy, a boy she had seduced out of boredom? The last thing the world needed was another bad husband. On and on she went, until Pasquale could only mutter, “Yes, you’re right,” and believe it. This had always been the mechanics of their attraction—her sexual seniority and his childlike agreeability. She was right, he thought, he couldn’t raise a child; he was a child.
Now, almost a year later, in the piazza across from her family’s big house, Amedea smiled wearily and reached for his cigarette again. “I was sorry to hear about your father. How is your mother?”
“Not good. She wants to die.”
Amedea nodded. “It’s the hardest thing to be a widow, I would think. I’ve thought about coming to visit your pensione sometime. How is it?”
“Good. I’m building a beach. I was going to build a tennis court but it might not fit.” He cleared his throat. “I . . . I have an American guest there. An actress.”
“From the cinema?”
“Yes. She is making the film Cleopatra.”
“Not Liz Taylor?”
“No, another one.”
She took the tone she used to have when she was advising him about other girls. “And is she beautiful?”
Pasquale acted as if he hadn’t thought about it until now. “Not much.”
Amedea held out her hands like she was holding cantaloupes. “But big breasts, no? Giant balloons? Pumpkins?” Her hands moved away from her body. “Zeppelins?”
“Amedea,” he said simply.
She laughed at him. “I always knew you’d be a big success, Pasquale.” Was that mocking, her tone? She tried to hand his cigarette back but he waved it over to her and pulled out a new one for himself. And they stood there smoking their separate cigarettes, not talking, until Amedea’s was all ash, and she said she had to get back inside. Pasquale said he had to catch his train anyway.
“Good luck with your actress,” Amedea said, and she smiled as if she meant it. Then she darted in her light way across the street, glanced back at him once, and walked off. Pasquale felt an itch in his throat—the urge to yell something after her—but he kept his mouth shut, because he had no idea what those words might be.
7
Eating Human Flesh
1846
Truckee, California
So there’s this guy . . . a carriage-maker named William Eddy, good family man, handsome, honest, but uneducated. It’s 1846 and William is married, with two little kids. But he’s dirt-poor, so when the opportunity comes to go to California to make his fortune, Eddy jumps at it. It’s the driving ambition of his time, his people, to go west. So Eddy signs on with a wagon train leaving Missouri for California. Over credits, this William Eddy and his pretty young wife are getting ready for the journey, packing up their meager belongings from their sod-and-log cabin.
The camera makes its way down a long line of wagons, filled with all of their belongings, herds of cattle moving with them, strung out for a half-mile leading out of town, kids and dogs running alongside. On the front of the wagon train we see: CALIFORNIA OR BUST. Swing around the other side of this wagon and we see: DONNER PARTY.
The trains were always named for the prominent families, but William Eddy’s the closest thing to a decent frontiersman on this particular train, good hunter and tracker, humble to a fault. The first night out, the men from the wealthy families meet to discuss the trip and William steps to the fire to say that he’s worried: they’ve gotten a late start and he’s not sure about this route they’re taking. But he’s hushed by the wealthier guys and he just goes back to his ragtag wagon in the back of the train.
The first act is all action, descent—trouble. Right away the pioneers hit bad weather and wagon wheels breaking. There’s a villain in the party, a sturdy German immigrant named Keseberg, who’s scammed an old couple into joining his wagon, but when they’re out past civilization, Keseberg steals everything from the old people and turns them out, forcing them to walk. Only William Eddy takes the couple in.
The wagon train arrives in Utah, at the halfway point, strung out, weeks behind schedule. At night, the party’s cattle are scavenged by Indians. William Eddy is the best hunter, so he kills game along the way. But bad luck and bad weather continue to plague them, and they have to pay for taking this questionable route when everything breaks down on the great salt flats. We pan over this cracked, hard soil, the trail of wagons strung out for miles, cattle starting to fall dead, the settlers forced to stagger across a desert, family by family, horses walking blindly—the foreshadowing of the dissolution of society, everyone turning slightly feral except William Eddy, who retains his human dignity to help the rest of the party get across.
Finally, they make it to Nevada—but it’s October, weeks later than any group of pioneers has ever tried to make it through. The snows usually come in mid-November, so they’ve still got a few weeks to cross the Sierra Nevada Range, at the Wasatch Mountain pass, and they’ll be in California. But they must hurry. They walk and ride all night, hoping to make it.
Now we’re up in the clouds. But these aren’t fluffy clouds. They are dark and ominous, black masses of foreboding. This is our Jaws and these clouds are our shark. We’re tight on a single snowflake. We follow it down through the sky and see it joined by other flakes. Big. Heavy. We watch that first flake fall, finally coming to rest on the arm of William Eddy, dirty and unshaven. And he knows. His eyes go slowly to the sky.
They are too late. The snows have come a month early. The Donner Party is already in the mountains, and the snow is blinding—not just flakes . . . curtains of snow fall, making the passage more than difficult. It’s impossible. Finally, they enter the mountain valley, and there it is, right before them: the pass, a narrow gap in two rock walls, so tantalizingly close. But the snow here is already ten feet deep and the horses sink to their chests. Wagons bog down. On the other side of that pass is California. Warmth. Safety. But they’re too
late. The snow makes the mountains impassable. They are in a bowl between two mountain ridges. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. Doors on both sides have slammed shut.
The ninety people split into two groups. Eddy’s larger group is closer to the pass, along a lake, while the second group, with the Donners, is a couple of miles back. Both groups rush to build shelter—three shanty cabins at the lakeside camp and two cabins farther back. At the first camp, near the lake, William Eddy has built a cabin for his wife and his little son and daughter and has allowed other stragglers to take shelter there, too. These cabins are really just lean-tos, covered with hides. Still the snows come. They quickly realize they don’t have enough food to last the winter and so they start rationing what cattle they have left. Then a blizzard comes and so much snow falls that the pioneers come out and realize their cows are buried. The pioneers poke sticks in the snow trying to find their dead cows. But they’re just . . . gone. And still the snow falls. The fires in their cabins keep the snow melted around them and soon they have to build steps up into the snow around their cabins, twenty-foot walls of white surrounding their shacks so that all you see is the smoke from their fires. Days pass horribly, desperately. For two months they live at the bottom of these snow pits, on starvation rations. They try to hunt but no one can kill any game except . . .
William Eddy. Weakened by hunger, he still goes out every day and manages to shoot some rabbits and even a deer. Earlier, the wealthy families wouldn’t share their cattle with him, but Eddy shares his meager game with everyone. But even that food is running out as the game moves down from the snow line. Then, one day, Eddy comes across tracks. He follows the tracks desperately, until he’s miles from camp. It’s a bear. He catches up to it and raises his rifle weakly . . . shoots . . . and hits it! But the bear turns and charges him. He can’t reload, and, nearly starved to death, he has to fight the bear with his rifle stock. He beats the wounded animal to death with his bare hands.
He drags this bear back to the camp, where the people are getting increasingly desperate. William Eddy keeps saying, “We’ve got to send a team for help,” but no one else is strong enough to go, and he’s obviously too worried about leaving his family behind to go himself. But now the game has gone down from the mountains, and the snow keeps falling, and finally one night he talks with his wife, who begins the film as a quiet woman, someone who has suffered life more than lived it. Now she takes a deep breath. “Will’m,” she says, “you’ve got to take those who are strong and go. Get help.” He protests, but she says, “For our children. Please.” What can he do?
What if the only way to save the ones you love . . . is to leave them behind?
By this time the pioneers have eaten all of their horses and mules and even their pets. People are making soup out of saddles and blankets and shoe leather, anything to flavor the snow water. William Eddy’s family is down to a few scraps of bear meat. He has no choice. He asks for volunteers. By then, only seventeen people are strong enough to try: twelve men and boys, and five young women. They make crude snowshoes out of harnesses and reins and start out. Right away, two of the boys turn back because the snow is too deep. Even with snowshoes, the rest fall two feet with every step.
Eddy leads his party of fifteen away and they struggle; it takes two days just to make it to the pass. On the first night, they camp and Eddy reaches in his pack and—like a blow to the gut—he realizes his wife has packed the remaining bear meat for him. It’s only a few bites, but her selflessness destroys him. She has sacrificed her share for him. He looks back and can just see a curl of smoke from their camp.
What if the only way to save the ones you love . . . is to leave them behind?
They move on. For days and days, the fifteen walk, making slow progress across craggy peaks and snowy valleys. Blizzards blind them and stop them in their tracks. It takes days to go a few thousand yards. With no food except a few bites of Eddy’s bear meat, they grow weak. One of the men, Foster, says they must sacrifice one of themselves for food for the others, and they talk of drawing lots. William Eddy says that if someone is going to be sacrificed, then that man must be given a chance. They should pick two men and have them fight to the death. He volunteers to be one of the men. But no one moves. One morning, an old man and a boy are dead of starvation. They have no choice. They build a fire and eat the meat of their companions.
But we don’t linger on this aspect. It’s just . . . what it is. People hear Donner Party and they think cannibalism, but almost all of the survivors said the cannibalism was nothing . . . it was the cold, the despair, these are the enemy. For days they walk; only William Eddy keeps them from descending into chaos. More men die and the party eats what it can, and still the group walks, until there are only nine left—four of the original ten men and all five women. Two of the surviving men are Indian scouts. The other living white man, Foster, wants to shoot the Indians and eat them. But Eddy won’t let him and he warns the Indians, who manage to escape before Foster can kill them. When Foster finds out, he attacks Eddy, but the women break up the fight.
And why do the men die and the women survive? Because women have more body fat to live off of, and are lighter, so they use less energy walking through snow. It is the great irony: muscles kill men.
Eighteen days. That’s how long the rescue party walks. For eighteen days they stagger through forty-foot drifts, ice so hard it cracks their skin. They are seven skeletons in tatters when they finally descend below the snow line. In the woods, they see a deer, but William Eddy is too weak to lift his gun. It is wrenching—William Eddy finally sees game, tries to shoulder his rifle, and fails. He just drops the gun. And walks on. For food, they graze on bark and wild grasses, like deer. And then, William Eddy sees a curl of smoke from a small Indian village. But the others are simply too weak to move, so William Eddy leaves them behind and goes on himself.
Remember, this is before the Forty-niners and the real boom in California. The state is virtually empty. San Francisco is a town of a few hundred people, called Yerba Buena. Now we’re tight on a cabin at the edge of the mountains. We pull back to see it, idyllic and peaceful, a stream running in front, little patches of snow. We go wider and wider, so that you see this is the only civilization for miles. And there, in the corner of the frame, are two Indians holding up this figure. Now we go closer again, and we see, between the Indians, this gaunt creature, practically a skeleton, wild beard, barefoot, his clothes just tattered rags, staggering to the cabin . . .
. . . is William Eddy! The ranchers get him some water. A bit of flour, which is all his constricted stomach can handle. His eyes well with tears. “There are others . . . in an Indian village near here,” he tells them. “Six.” A party is sent off. He’s done it. Of the fifteen who went for help, William Eddy has brought Foster and the five women to safety and told the ranchers about the others back in the mountains.
But the story’s not over. First act, trek into the mountains; second act, descent and escape; third act, the rescue. Eddy has left seventy people up in the mountains, waiting for help. A rescue party is raised, forty men led by a fat, smug cavalryman named Colonel Woodworth. Eddy and Foster are too weak to help, but Eddy wakes momentarily in his bed to see dozens of men riding past the frontier cabin.
When his fever finally breaks, days later, he asks about the rescue party. The ranchers tell him that Woodworth’s men are camped only two days away, waiting out a snowstorm. A small rescue party of seven made it back to the Donner Party, but they nearly died crossing the pass and were only able to bring a dozen or so people out because of the deep snow and the weakness of the trapped pioneers. Even being rescued was a great danger; several more died on the way across the mountains. After a long pause, William Eddy speaks. “And my family?”
The rancher shakes his head. “I’m sorry. Your wife and daughter were already dead. Your boy is still alive, but was too young to walk over the pass. They left him in the camp.” William Eddy rises from his bed. He must go.
His old enemy Foster also left a son behind, and he agrees to go with Eddy, even though they are weak still.
At a camp, miles from the pass, Woodworth tells Eddy a spring snowstorm has made it too dangerous to attempt—but Eddy won’t take no for an answer. He offers Woodworth’s men twenty dollars for every child they will carry over the pass. A few soldiers agree and they press on—and are nearly killed traversing the pass they’ve just crossed weeks earlier. Finally, Eddy and Foster and a handful of men stagger back into the Donner camp. It’s a scene from hell. Bodies cut up in the snow . . . pieces hanging like sausages in a deli. The smell . . . the despair . . . gaunt survivors unrecognizable as humans. William Eddy can barely muster the strength to walk to the cabin he built months earlier, where he and Foster left their families.
Foster’s son is still alive! Foster cries as he holds his boy. But for Eddy . . . he’s too late. His son died days earlier. William Eddy has lost his whole family. He goes into a rage and stands above the villain, Keseberg, who may have eaten the children, this man who is nothing more than an animal. Eddy looks down at this beast. He steps forward to kill the man . . . but he can’t. He falls down and stares at the sky again, at the very sky that dropped that first snowflake on him. And his head goes to his hands. Foster steps forward to kill Keseberg for him, but a voice comes from the heap that is William Eddy. “Leave him,” he tells Foster. Because Eddy knows that this evil lives in all of us, that we are all animals in the end. “Let him be,” he says.