The play was performed in the dimly lit hall. All the parents had been given candles with little paper collars and the little flames winked and failed and were relit deep into the darker recesses of the building. My mother was up near the front. I could see her face lit up by the candle and the expression which had gone from a settled bored look to a deeper, pure malice.
Penelope sang, “Do you thee what I thee?”
And I sang in response (and to the same tune) “Baa baa baa baa baa baa.”
After the song was finally over, we were to file out of the hall past the parents and reassemble outside, then we were to go back in for cider, donuts, and cookies. Penelope led the way. We were all singing. I saw her pass my mother and my mother’s tilting candle, and then whoosh! Penelope transformed from Gabriel to Lucifer.
Penelope wasn’t injured. My father pulled the wings off rather quickly, burning his hand. He stamped out the flames while Penelope looked on, her big blue eyes blinking in an unintelligent, uncomprehending way. My father was a hero. As various parents massed around him and Penelope, I sneaked outside. My mother was illumined by a much smaller flame, her cigarette, and seemed quiet enough. I went up to her and held her hand.
“Are you mad at me?” she said. And I could see that she was genuinely worried, that somehow she felt she had failed me.
“No, Mommy, no,” I said. And I felt more love for her at that moment than I’d felt for anyone before. More love than I thought was possible. I was grateful that she’d made it out of the hospital for the play, but as I held her hand in mine, I had a surging sadness: the hospital would always be there, threatening her, threatening me, and all our moments of joy were just brief flares of light in an otherwise uninterrupted gloom.
As the cab pulled up to the cottage, Arthur and Johnny came running out of the house. Johnny was in a T-shirt and Arthur in his socks, despite the fact that it was twenty degrees outside. The driver slammed on the brakes. Johnny rolled onto the hood of the car, as if he’d been hit, and Arthur pulled me out of the car. He hugged and kissed me warmly and Johnny came over and hugged us both. It was eleven A.M., the guys were already wasted, and I was so happy I thought I might start crying.
“Come inside,” said Arthur. Johnny was paying the driver. “We have a surprise for you.”
The house was decorated, but not for Christmas. There were streamers everywhere, balloons on the floor, taped to the beams. I could see a cake on the table, and most surprisingly of all, a white dog lying on the couch wearing a foil party hat.
“What is this?” I asked. “Whose dog is that?”
“It’s your dog,” said Arthur.
“My dog?”
The dog came over wagging his tail. He looked a bit concerned, but seemed eager to please. I took off the party hat and scratched his head.
“You don’t know, do you?” said Arthur.
“Know what?”
Johnny and Arthur looked at each other and started laughing.
“Katherine, it’s your birthday.”
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “What’s the date today?”
“December sixth.”
“Right. It’s my birthday.” I looked around the room—balloons, crepe streamers, cake. I was twenty-three. “Get me a drink.”
“You like the dog?” asked Johnny.
“I love the dog.”
“What you going to name him?”
I looked at the dog’s face. “I’ll name him Kevin.”
“Kevin?” yelled Arthur from the kitchen.
“He looks like a Kevin. Where’d you get him from?”
“I,” said Johnny, “rescued him.”
“From where?”
Arthur came in with a bourbon and ice for me. “He rescued him from some guy’s back porch and nearly got shot in the process.”
“Kevin was not happy. He had no water. He had no food. Is that any kind of life for a dog like this?”
“No,” I said. “But some would term your rescue a theft. This is a hunting dog. A lot of people around here keep them chained up outside.”
“What do you hunt with a dog like that?” asked Johnny.
“Birds mostly. Maybe rabbits. They point.” I cupped the dog’s head in my hands. “I’m pretty sure Kevin’s an English setter. And what a beauty. Look at that big square head, those jowls. Has he tried to go back?”
“To that trailer? No way,” said Johnny.
“It’s hard enough to get him off the couch.” Arthur squatted down and patted the dog. “He likes eggnog. He likes asparagus.”
“But what he really wants is some meat, isn’t it, Kevin, a nice marbled rib-eye with onions.”
Johnny closed his eyes tight then opened them wide. “I better have another drink,” he said, “before I start seeing things.”
“I think that’s the definition of a real drinker,” I said to Arthur. “A drinker is someone who drinks to keep from hallucinating.”
Johnny came in, smiling. “An alcoholic is someone who drinks more than you.”
“Then there are no alcoholics,” I said, draining my glass, “only people with unrealized ambition.”
“Last night,” said Arthur, laughing, “Johnny here tried to convince me that he drank because of his religion. He said,” Arthur looked at him, “that he had to, what did you say, ‘connect with your totem?’ Something like that.”
I smiled at Johnny, interested. “Your totem?”
“Yeah, it’s like this animal, you know,” he turned to Arthur, who was laughing harder. “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”
“You get fucked up,” said Arthur, “and next thing you know, you’re a lion.”
“Mountain lion,” said Johnny. “Glad to know you were paying attention.”
“Why do we always transform into something wild?” I asked. “Look at Kevin.” Kevin raised his head and looked at us solemnly. “Couldn’t we turn into Kevin? Scratch a bit, find all the warm spots, sniff some crotches.”
“We already do that,” Arthur said. “What’s the point in transforming?”
“I,” I said, lighting a cigarette, “don’t sniff any crotches.”
“You,” said Arthur, “are not domesticated.”
We began cooking shortly after that and by three-thirty had a turkey, sweet potatoes, a pot of gravy (my specialty), Pillsbury crescent rolls, and broccoli. We were also too drunk to be hungry, but still sat down at the table picking at the meat. It felt good to sit around food, even if you weren’t eating it.
“Thank you,” I said. “I think this is my best birthday ever.” And I meant it. I picked a piece of breast meat, dredged it through the gravy, and gave it to Kevin. “I love my dog. He’s perfect. This day is perfect.” Then I noticed, through the window, ash floating through the air. At first it was just a few flakes, floating here and there, but then a gust blew horizontal past the window, and I saw the first cresting wave of what I knew was snow. “Snow!” I yelled. “It’s snowing. Snowing now.” I took my wine to the window, stunned as always by the miracle of it, hoping to buried under and buoyed up by the stuff, hoping to be saved.
21
When I was in fifth grade, I came home with a list of paper topics that my teacher, Mr. Henryon, had given us. It was for American history, one of my favorite subjects, and I remember my enthusiasm for starting the work. My mother drifted over to the kitchen table, where I was contemplating the list.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Paper topics for history,” I answered. She picked up the page and read down the list.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I think I’m going to do Lewis and Clark.”
“Why?”
“Because they were great discoverers,” I said, feeling less sure about my choice.
“Don’t do them. Lewis in particular is a disappointment. You know he killed himself.”
“He did?” I took the page back. “Maybe I’ll do Joseph Smith.”
“The Mormons? I don’t think
so.”
“What should I do?”
“The Donner Party. Now that’s a good story.”
“Is it?”
“Scary. And wonderful.”
I researched and wrote a phenomenal paper, at least I thought so. It was from the point of view of one of the Donner children, Eliza Donner, and was filled with flesh and despair. Mr. Henryon questioned my research methods. “History,” he said, sympathetically stroking his beard, “has a need for places and dates. This is all very dramatic, and, well, compelling, but I don’t know about its accuracy.”
“But the dates are all written about anyway. That’s plagiarism, dates and places,” I argued. My paper, “The Donner Disaster,” was the first of my academic failures. But the story stays with me. In my mind’s eye, those Donners lurk behind every snowbank. The Donner Party members are journeying to sunny California. They are escaping poverty, religious persecution, the oldness of the East—now a little Europe—with all its entitled landowners and businessmen. But hunger cannot be escaped, because hunger isn’t in the Sierras. It’s in every party member, that little void always threatening to overwhelm. The soul is not what defines us as people, but this bottomless hunger. This hunger is our soul. The experiences of the Donner Party are our experiences as people, abstract furies registered concrete. The snow, instead of blanketing us over, lays us bare.
Years after I wrote that paper, I found that my mother had saved it, put it in the same folder as my birth certificate, passport, and immunization record, and the envelope containing curling locks of my normally straight hair. I took the paper out. Mr. Henryon’s writing, large, generous and frank, stalked the margins in jovial deprecation, but the comment that struck me was written at the bottom, in my mother’s own feathery, light script. A question.
Why not write about Lewis Keseberg?
Which of course made me wonder, “Why write about Lewis Keseberg?” Keseberg was another Donner Party survivor—a middle-aged man—and not the first choice for a fifth-grade girl to focus on. I put the paper back in the folder and logged the comment as yet another of my mother’s crazy compulsive missives. She had also written “take 4” over the advised dosage on the bottle of Advil. But the question would not sleep. Finally I went to the public library and checked out a book, History of the Donner Party, which I had checked out five years earlier. It was summer. My mother was in the hospital. I felt, despite the archery day camp (which had needed a record of immunizations, particularly tetanus) desperately alone. Somehow, I felt that by rereading the book through her eyes I was with her, in her company, feeling her hand on my shoulder as I turned the pages.
I imagine Keseberg with the snow howling around the corners of the cabin, wondering if it was still April or if the winter had pushed into May. The year, 1847, was receding into the past and taking Keseberg with it, recording him as a monster, a man who stayed behind to outlive the others and take their money when they could no longer hold it. He was the only survivor at Donner Lake, perhaps the only one of the Donner party left, but he had received no news from the camp at Alder Creek, which was seven miles away.
Mrs. Murphy had recently died. The pot was boiling and Mrs. Murphy’s naked body was sitting in the chair. The wind set the door to a beating rattle. The snow hissed outside, sifted through the cabin planks, and collected in powdery drifts in the corners. Snow settled on the cold withered legs of Mrs. Murphy, dusted her hair, filled the crevices of her mutilated body. She was missing an arm. Her eyes stared out just to the left of the door and Keseberg thought maybe he should adjust the chair so she would be looking more at it, less at nothing.
Keseberg stirred the pot. Maybe he was wondering about Alder Creek when he heard the moaning outside, as if the crazy Irish had brought with them their banshee. Because a crazy Irishman would need something like a banshee screaming to tell him death was near, when all a German needed was to look at the amount of food divided by the amount of people divided by the amount of days, et cetera, et cetera.
But now there was a pounding on the door and Keseberg realized, with some bewilderment, that he had a visitor. Tamzene Donner entered the cabin. She was soaked to the bone. Sometimes the snow gave beneath you and you found yourself deep in water. Is that what had happened? Maybe she had fallen in the lake.
“Mrs. Donner,” said Keseberg.
“He is dead,” she replied. “He is dead and he told me to go get the children and make sure they have enough to eat. He told me to do that.” Tamzene Donner sat at the table across from Mrs. Murphy. Her skin was blue and her skirt frozen in swirls, like the drapery in Renaissance paintings. She blinked scattering snow from her eyelashes onto her cheekbones. Keseberg gave her a cup of hot water. “He told me to give them the silver,” she said.
“What silver?” asked Keseberg.
“For the children,” whispered Tamzene, lowering her voice, “for them in California.”
Keseberg wondered if George Donner had died. He was moved with pity. It passed quickly, which saddened him.
“A bear came into the cabin. It sat at the foot of George’s bed,” said Tamzene. “The bear said I should eat it. Then it took George’s ax and split its head open. I ate the brain.”
“A bear?” said Keseberg. He looked at Tamzene’s hands and noted the blood on the cuffs of her dress, blood that even this endless wash of snow and her near drowning had not removed.
“I came to get you so that you can bring the silver to the children.” Tamzene told Keseberg where it was buried and Keseberg promised to collect it for the children. The relief parties sent out were made of mercenaries. They thought more of carrying a bolt of calico back through the Sierras than a lame child. These men, these heroes, took fifty percent of all the valuables they found. But this silver Tamzene spoke of was buried back at Alder Creek, and Keseberg was lame. His foot had not healed; he had stepped on a shard of wood at Goose Lake, back when the sky was full of birds and all one had to do was poke a hole in the heavens with a shotgun to have the food raining all around. Although the spike of wood had finally worked its way through—Keseberg found it poking from the top of his foot—he was still lame. If he could walk, he would have crossed the mountains long ago.
“I will do what I can,” said Keseberg.
“I saw the masts,” she said, “bobbing from the ships. I saw the ships again.”
“I think you saw the tops of the trees moving in the wind.”
“No,” she said. “These were the ships of Newburyport filled with rum and sugar and pineapples. They were rising high, high above me. They were . . .” Tamzene Donner looked deeply at Keseberg, then grew quiet. Later she screamed. Later she confessed that she had eaten her husband and when she was finally still, there was such a silence about the cabin that—despite all that Keseberg had endured—he felt the ache of loneliness.
Keseberg makes it to California, tries his hand at a few things—including a short stint as a brewer—but most often fails. In 1877 Keseberg’s wife, Philippine, dies at the age of fifty-three, thirty years after she set out with the Donners. At that time, only four children, all daughters, of Keseberg’s eleven children still lived. Two had married and moved away. The other two were idiots and their incessant howling made it necessary for Keseberg to live far away from his neighbors. And that’s the last we hear of him: Keseberg living with Bertha, who cannot speak and “would leave her hand to roast on the fire if he did not pluck it out” and Augusta, who only stops howling to stuff her mouth, and weighs well over two hundred pounds.
In that first onslaught of winter in Maine, I thought of Keseberg, and Bad Billy, and all the toothy things leaving their prints upon the snow, their gnawing hunger and snuffling, their breathing silenced by the fierce wind flung from tree to tree—the high hiss of spruce, the low groan of oak, the final crack of a dry birch laid to rest. Keseberg was a survivor. He made it out of the mountains, out of the horrible of winter of 1847. But he never escaped his fame as the Cannibal Keseberg. I wondered why Keseberg was made
out to be such a villain. He suffered as much as everyone else, maybe more. Lewis junior, only an infant, had been one of the first of the Donner Party to die. Philippine escaped the hell of Donner Lake in an early relief party, which took her and Keseberg’s three-year-old daughter, Ada, with her. And Ada was still in the snow when Keseberg made his crossing weeks after. He saw the little girl’s dress poking through the snow. Her face was probably well-preserved, having been packed in ice.
So why hate him? He does nothing but survive. Isn’t this just another great American tale?
22
I awoke to the gentle boom of snow sliding off the roof. The wind picked up splattering raindrops against the window. Arthur and I were asleep on the couch. I was in my underwear and he wasn’t wearing anything at all, huddled up against me under a tiny stadium blanket. The morning was done with. I figured it had to be close to two P.M. The dog came over, curious, needing to go out. I’d forgotten about the dog. I’d forgotten most everything, it seemed, except for a few flashing images of Johnny, stark naked, spinning on the back deck. I remembered his hair whipping around, his eyelashes crusted over with snow. He said he wasn’t cold. He was alive.
My jeans were lying by the couch. I couldn’t find my shirt, so I put on Arthur’s and tucked the blanket around him.
Kevin gave me a desperate, high-pitched whine.
“All right. I’m hurrying.”
I pulled on my duck boots, which, without socks, were clammy and far too big. I put on Arthur’s Army surplus coat, which I supposed had been intended for some polar defense. Who defended the poles? In the second world war, there were a few Japanese soldiers stranded in Alaska, bravely occupying American territory. No one bothered to get rid of them. I’m not sure how they even knew they were there. I imagined the Japanese recruiting officer. “All right boys. Everyone for taking Alaska, over here. Everyone for Hawaii, over here.” The coat smelled like a wet dog, which I realized was the collar that was made out of dog or some close canine relative. There were cigarettes in the left pocket, and a lighter in the right. I headed out.
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