Sarah's Quilt

by Nancy E. Turner

  With my eyes half-closed, I looked down and slowly unwrapped the handkerchief on my finger. The blood had quit running and dried, and this time I left it alone.

  Chapter Five

  May 30, 1906

  Barstow was anything but the cool mountain town I pictured from the sound of its name. The half-day layover they promised us was not morning to noon, either, like I expected, but truly half a day—nearly twelve hours. We had to change trains, and in less than an hour, the first train pulled out. Trouble was, we were told to stay on board the second one, and so we didn’t have the freedom even to mill about the depot. There was no food served, nor toilets opened, for twelve long hours. They urged passengers to stay in their seats, as the railroad could not guarantee our safety in the town, nor would the conductors go get anyone who was not on board when they got ready to pull out.

  We spent a long day, hungry and miserable. Folks with children fared far worse, what with the crying and restlessness. A couple of poor mothers, desperate to soothe them and change diapers and such, braved leaving the train, despite the advice, but they managed to get back, none the worse for it. By the time we got moving, I was ready to go up front and shovel coal myself just to get this thing going down the tracks.

  Thirty-three hours later, the train stopped for good in a little town called San Jose. The conductor said there were no sound rails farther up, since the earthquake had made all the ground unstable. Anyone going to San Francisco would have to go by stage. Chess and I took stock of all the trunks of clothes and crates of canned food, then decided we’d need a whole stage just for us. We asked the freight agent where we could rent a wagon and team, but he said there weren’t any left. Everyone standing and everything rolling was gone west to the disaster area to help.

  This was something we hadn’t counted on. We needed our own wagon. Still, if we’d tried to drive our own team, it would have taken the better part of ten days to get this far. We parked our lot of crates and trunks on the depot platform, paid two dollars to the depot master to watch it, and promised him a dollar a day if nothing went missing.

  Chess said he wanted to get something to eat that didn’t taste like thumb soup. I laughed and asked him what that was. “It’s where you pour boiled water in your cup, and forget to take your thumb out first. A little salt and pepper, and it’s all right if you’re hungry enough.”

  “Lands,” I said.

  He whispered, “That was about the longest train ride I’ve been on in fifty years. Leastways, it wasn’t in some cattle car.” Then he took my arm in a way he’s never done before, gentlemanly, and we started walking toward the center of town.

  I said, “Reckon there’s someone in town still might have a wagon they’d lend?”

  “We’ll ask around. I’m thinking something else, though. That feller on the train set me to remembering some good-hearted men with a wagon of food coming into the prison. Men were starved, some of them, lots longer than me. Even the guards were starved. The gents trying to pass out the bread were just being kind, but pretty soon someone said he didn’t get one, and someone else said he’d got two. Before we knew it, a scuffle broke out, the horses spooked, and the fellows passing the loaves tumbled out, and one of them lost an eye. Other one died, crushed by sick, starving people just wanting something to eat. I’m hungry.”

  I saw a sign for a restaurant and nodded toward it. “There’s a place,” I said.

  PARTRIDGE HOUSE RESTAURANT it said in big fancy letters. Underneath that it said GOOD FOOD, FAIR PRICES. Two men tipped their hats, then went past us through its doors. Chess shrugged at me and said, “This place looks all right. Let’s talk inside, over some grub.” He opened the door and then followed me inside. We got a table right away because it was still early in the afternoon.

  While we waited for our food to come, Chess talked in a hushed voice. “I want you to listen to me, Sarah. I didn’t suspect how bad it was until they said there’s no transport to the city. Could be more like a war than anything you’ve probably ever seen. Most likely dangerous, too, to carry anything that looks like food.” The waiter brought us coffee. Chess poured cream and sugar in his and stirred it slowly. He said, “I’m saying we ought to leave that tucker here, for everyone’s good. And not at the depot, but in a hotel room. We’ll find your brother and his family and bring them here.”

  I stared at the tablecloth, thinking how pitiless it was to plan to hide food from starving people. I said, “I believe you. But then, it’s hard to believe folks would—”

  “People get desperate; that’s all I’m saying.”

  Now the waiter came with food and refilled the coffee cups. As the waiter left, I leaned over the table toward Chess. “Think the hotel will let us leave the food in their storeroom?”

  “No. I think we should take a room, just like we were living in it.”

  That went against my grain, and I was bound to argue with him over it. “Pay for a room but not stay there?” Waste money? Now, of all times?

  Chess put his hands on the table and leaned toward me. “Look, Sarah. You know what a woman will brave just to change a diaper. Imagine what she’d do to feed those babes.”

  I knew fear, and defending your own, but I’d never seen my children hungry. What worse torture could there be for a mother? I said, “Then I reckon we should take a few clean things for the children to wear and a few apples and those hard cookies. Just as light as possible.”

  He nodded and said, “I’m already feeling the rain in my bones, and I reckon it could be muddy traveling, and hard. I’ve seen a town burnt down. It isn’t a clean fire, not like a cookstove. Everything turns black, even your skin. Worse than a coal town. Wear the worst clothes you’ve brought.”

  We spent the next half hour without another word. Chess finished off his steak and worked on the remainder of his coffee cup. He kept peering around suspiciously, as if he was really afraid of something, and it unsettled me more than I could say.

  I was mad as a wet hen that the hotel manager wanted payment in advance for a whole week at a time. He said too many people fleeing the fire had taken advantage of him and he was not given to trust anyone else. It was not until we got everything stacked into the two rooms we took, and paid for two weeks in advance, that I could rest. The traveling money I’d brought that was supposed to last us a month, if needed, was half gone, and we’d barely begun.

  When I laid my head down to sleep that night in that paid-for bed, I watched the curtains stir, and I heard something crackling. At first, it frightened me, such an unusual sound, and I leapt up and looked out to see if something was on fire. Rain. Not just a sprinkle, but a gully washer. A river poured down, as if up in heaven someone had tipped a trough right over us. It came without wind or storm or thunder, just rain, flowing straight down. I opened the windows so that the smell of it could perfume the room.

  I reckon, the world over, a good deal of human tribulation is connected to water, either too much or too little. The stagecoach would leave at five o’clock in the morning. All I could do for now was shut my eyes. Time enough tomorrow for tomorrow’s sorrow.

  The next day, during the eleven-hour stagecoach ride, rain drummed on the tin roof and seeped in the walls of the stage. Everything was damp and stuffy inside. The rain quit, and the sun came out between heavy banks of clouds just as we came to the edge of what had been San Francisco. Other people riding with us may have been a bit annoyed, but I had to lift the shade and look out. The fresh air felt good, even if it was damp, compared to the staleness inside the coach, and as the road wound toward the depot through ever-thicker mud, the mules slowed.

  The whole scene was too big to see all at once. Curves in the road made it seem as if I were on a merry-go-round, a tableau passing before my eyes. The sad state of what I saw was too much to take in, as if the understanding of it all had to come as slowly as the trip to get here. Chess had tried to tell me, I suppose. My eyes opened wide and my chin wanted to drop. As the stagecoach slowed, other peop
le opened their shades, and we stared like children at a circus. Pitched in the mud, which was itself thicker and more beat-up than I’ve ever seen, rows of tents or sheds built of every imaginable material covered the near ground like a crust. Soot coated everything and everybody, even horses and dogs scavenging for food. In the distance was a great ruin; smaller, blacker, wider for sure than Pompeii in the pictures I’d seen in books.

  Nothing prepares a person for the smell. A blanket of odors hung in the damp air, so thick I could taste it. It was part smoke from a hundred little fires, animal manure soured by rain, and human waste, sharp and sickly. Now and then, something vinegar-y and powerful as rotted wood clung to the inside of my mouth. Then it came to me. It was the rot of death. Surely, though, it was just from animals that had died. Surely they were burying the people.

  We got off the stage at the small depot building. The depot platform seemed to be the only dry footing between here and the rest of the world. Hard to imagine how rain-starved and parched my land at home was. We were surrounded by a group of people clamoring to get on the stage before they’d even had a chance to change the horses. At one corner, two men shoved and pushed, cursing each other, trying to be first to climb on, just to ride on top with the rain-soaked luggage. Soon as they unhitched them, the horses plodded to their stalls without being led there, exhausted. Two men pulled the fresh team into place, and within five minutes, they pulled out. I stiffened like a post, standing on the floorboards, sorting it all. “Harland said they had a tent in the hills, east of town. The town—what was the town—seems to be mostly west of here.”

  “We’ll start at the east side of it,” Chess agreed. He passed me the lighter of our two carpetbags. We stepped off the platform into the mud. A few steps away, a ragged pile of feathers was crushed into the mud, trampled and nearly buried. It was impossible to tell if it had been some lady’s fine hat or a chicken. He said, “Clouds are back. Can’t tell where the sun is.”

  I looked for a shadow to get our bearings and see which way to start walking. After a minute, a cloud shifted, there was a faint lighting of the air, and the merest shadow appeared in front of us. Without a word, we both headed eastward, back to the depot and beyond it. Around the corner of the depot, I saw a scene I’d never imagined as the stage came in from the south. A ripple of small foothills swelled like a billowing sheet before us. In the lower land before the hills, a line of neat army-type tents gave way to a jumble of sheets and tarps, overturned wagons and tilted boards. It appeared as if some giant child had gotten tired of playing with his toys, dropped them down in the mud, and mashed them. I drew a deep breath. “Well, there’s no way to start but to step up to it,” I said.

  He said, “Manners aside, I reckon. I’ll take the lead, and you hold on to me.”

  The odor of death gave way to the sharp and tangy smell of the outhouse—and the whole hill was an outhouse. A food tent was set up. They were serving out bowls of something that appeared to be along the lines of Chess’s thumb soup. A man in a police uniform sat at a desk in front of another tent, talking to people who were filling out papers of some kind. He hollered at us to come write down who we were searching for and any kind of identification marks that would be on the bodies. He passed Chess a little paper and a bit of pencil, and Chess handed it back to me.

  As I wrote, Chess said, “Sir, our folks are alive. Do you have a list of live folks?”

  The policeman said, “This tent is for deceased or unknowns only,” and he reached over and tore up my paper, an angry look on his face. At first, I felt purely insulted. Then what I saw was a man tired to the bone of his foolish task, probably hungry, too, getting people to write how many freckles their sister’s cousin had on her arm or whether their grandpa had three gold teeth or four.

  We walked a good two miles, Chess hollering Harland’s name, me cutting off the path into tents and between cardboard shacks, asking people face-to-face. At midday, the clouds parted and sunshine brightened the scene, but it only made the vision more ugly. People with carts moved up and down, crosswise of us, carrying soup in big cisterns that they ladled out at each tent. By the time we came to a little wide place in the tent rows, our clothes were mud-caked to the knees. Every time I stopped moving, my feet sunk into the mire. The sun was going down.

  Chess said, “We best start back. We can cut down that row there. Spend the night at the depot at least. How are you getting along?”

  “Fair,” I said. “Shoes stuck to the ground.” I took a deep breath. My face felt hard and cold. “Let’s look some more.”

  He sighed and looked around before he answered. “Down where we came in was all scuttled up. We don’t want to go back the way we came and waste time. They’re starting evening fires. Reckon there’ll be light enough for an hour, before we need to get back to the depot.” As he said that, however, the clouds again parted and the sky brightened, giving the appearance of some kind of providential approval. If the clouds stayed open, we might have two hours to search.

  On we marched. Babies cried. Dogs barked and fought over scraps. We hollered away like barkers at the street market. Then we made the crest of another small hill. “Lord a mercy me,” I said. “Look at that.”

  The sun was going down into what had to be the Pacific Ocean, and heavy mist made it out all blurred. I wiped my eyes, but it didn’t change. In front of the sunset, painted in gold light, was a sprawling ruin of what had been a city. This scene had been hidden from us by the closeness of the hills through which we searched. But from here, it was a picture image right out of that Collier’s magazine. Some buildings were standing, but most were not. Smoke curled up from places, even after all this time. Some were just a wall or two, with open windows, the sky gaping through them. Whole areas were black and flat, and like animals rummaging through the trash heap at home, people searched through the wreckage, stooped and bending. Over it all, in a far-off bank of clouds that hid half the sun, lightning flickered.

  My face felt cool and wet from the mist that clung to us, and when tears spilled from my eyes, they felt warm. The sun settled lower every second, and now the town’s remains turned blacker, like silhouette cuttings, against the yellow sky.

  Chess stood behind me, watching. He said, “Reckon that’s the ocean beyond there?”

  “I think so,” I said. I shifted my carpetbag to the other hand. It was starting to get mighty heavy.

  “Never seen an ocean.” After a long time, he said, “We’ll find ’em tomorrow.”

  I took his hand. By the time we got back to the stage depot, we found that about a hundred other people had the same idea of trying to find dry footing for tonight’s roost. The depot master was giving every one of them the boot, too. And we hadn’t brought gear to sleep out. Hadn’t planned on the wet ground, either. Chess tried to talk to the man, but he wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t letting anyone sleep there, he said, not after what had happened night before last—not putting up with that kind of thing here. This was a decent place, and he was a God-fearing man.

  He had a short-barreled shotgun in his hands. The man was dead set on his mission, and we weren’t going to find purchase there, any more than the other folks had. We stepped off the platform. The depot master pulled the shutters.

  We could see his shadow against them, and then the light went out inside. What did he expect us to do? Go beg a place to lay our heads amongst the poor folks on the hill? Mist was seeping toward the low area where we were. I’d seen fog now and then at home, but never like this. This was like some live thing, creeping forward like a snake, sliding around things and people, filling the air. I began to shiver. We drew ourselves into the darkness, moving toward the stables. The crowd wandered away. A couple of children huddled on the floor, close to the horses. One of them looked up as we came nearer, then held his finger to his lips, begging for silence.

  “Look there,” Chess whispered. Next to the depot, under a tree, was a coach almost like the one we rode in on, but about half the size. Someone
had covered it with a tarp. “Looks like a dry roost, if it’s not full of vermin and someone ain’t got to it first.” Chess peered all about and lifted up the tarpaulin; then he tried the door latch. It gave. He motioned toward it and said, “After you.”

  I followed him, feeling like I was breaking into someone’s house. Repaid by Providence for our sneak-thieving ways, crawling in where we didn’t belong, the tarp caught my shoulder and covered me with water and mud, some of which went down my collar. I stepped in, fearful of coming face-to-face with some critter wanting shelter, too.

  I heard a racket in the distance that sounded like thunder. Sure enough, after a bit there was a little streak of lightning that lit up nearby, and we could see why this stage was unused. The whole ceiling had fallen in, broken somehow, and the tarpaulin was keeping out the rain. Thankfully, the little box seemed empty except for us and a couple of crickets, which we invited to go hunt for their dinner outside.

  I stared into the darkness. Chess made some noise. “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “A feast fit for kings, I’d say,” he said. “Hold out your hand and I’ll give it to you in the paper it’s wrapped with. No telling what filth is in the mud we’ve handled.” He put a cookie in one hand and a piece of jerky in the other.

  I tried hard, but I just couldn’t eat. A drink of water was all I wanted. After a time, I folded the papers over the cookie and meat and put the food back into the bags.

  “We’ll find ’em,” he answered without hearing my question.

  Like an echo, I said, “We’ll find them. Surely we will.”

  In the morning, fog covered the earth so densely, it seemed as if those heavy clouds from yesterday had spent the night on the ground with the rest of us. It surely felt as if the sun didn’t rise until nearly ten o’clock. By that time, we were as dirty and wet as the refugees on the hill. Chess was slowing like an old clock that wouldn’t keep its winding. The commotion all around, the cold, wet air, horrible stench, and walking through mud that seemed to be going uphill no matter which direction we took made it harder with each step to have the breath to call their names. The odd thing was, now that we’d been through the rows and jumbles of tents and shanties a number of times, mostly lost, I might add, it began to take on a sort of order. Leastways we recognized where we’d been and where we hadn’t.