Now the apples are gathered in, and I can tell which are which and what they are to be used for. In one crate is some most unappealing-looking fruit, speckled and brownish and squat. This is a variety called Ashmead’s Kernel, and the trees were shipped over from England. It is renowned for its delicious flavor. Another variety is Winesap, which I know already. It is a lovely red color and a good keeper, either in sacking for a few weeks, or cut into rings and dried in the sun to keep right through the winter. It makes excellent pies. The last is Northern Spy, which I think an odd name. It comes from New York State, and is so juicy that it is nigh on useless. It dries away to nothing, and would bake away to nothing as well, giving soggy pie crust and not much else.
But this juiciness is the whole point of it. With some help from Jacob, John has spent the summer constructing a cider press and now, while we are quilting, John and his eldest, John Junior, and a couple of other boys I know from the school are heaving the crates onto the mule cart to be carried away to the press, and the barrels filled with apple juice brought back, to be left to ferment.
When the quilting is finished for the day, and our friends have departed, Minnie takes my arm and asks me to stroll along with her a little. Minnie has been pretty quiet all afternoon, and I can tell something is worrying at her. We take a turn or two up and down, and I ask her about her plans for the next spring.
Our picnic being such a success, Minnie is thinking of inviting other folks to come and see the apple blossoms for a little fee. They could picnic under the trees if they wished, and maybe they would like to walk over to the cider press and purchase some of John’s cider.
My brain flies away with me, and next thing I have turned Minnie’s little idea into a whole Apple Blossom Festival. I make one suggestion after another as to what could be done, most of them pretty silly, I guess: fire-eaters and jugglers and all sorts.
Minnie seems hardly to be listening, and suddenly she says, “You know it is John Junior’s birthday in a week or so—well, when my sister in Virginia sent me the last lot of periodicals, she sent me a bank note for ten dollars.”
“That’s a deal of money!” I say, not knowing quite where the conversation is headed.
“Oh—no, it was for all the boys’ birthdays, not just John Junior, and to buy them Christmas gifts as well,” she says, absently. “But the thing is—it is drawn on a Virginia bank. John went to cash it at the Wells Fargo. They took it, but the teller said to him, quiet-like, for John is in and out of there and the fellow knows him, that if he had any more notes drown on a Southern bank, to cash them quick, for Virginia money—all the paper money in the South—is going to be worthless after the election. Can this be true? What does it mean?”
We are back at the house now, and she stops walking, and turns to face me.
“I know that the South is threatening to withdraw from the Union if Mr. Lincoln becomes president. But surely—I never thought it meant there would be a war!”
Minnie and I go into her kitchen. I lift a pair of muddy boots off a chair and put them over by the back door, and collect up Minnie’s knitting off the table from where it sits in a muddle of plates and crumbs, and put it into her work basket. Minnie sets the kettle to boil. Then we sit down together at her kitchen table and continue our conversation over the teacups.
It is unthinkable that our Nation should be so divided against itself that North goes against South into battle. Being so very far away on the other side of the country I guess we would not be caught up in the fighting—I pray to God we would not—but near enough everyone here has family back East. Minnie’s family is in the North, and she has three brothers there, but her sister’s husband is from the South. Will brother fight brother-in-law, hand to hand on the battlefield? How should it be avoided?
Our conversation leads round to the election again, and we return to a topic of conversation our quilting bee had been discussing earlier in the afternoon: a woman’s right to vote. This had arisen due to an article that was in Minnie’s latest edition of Godey’s Magazine—the very one that came with the ten-dollar bank note.
Being something hampered by my size, for the new baby will be here in only a few weeks, I was not working at the quilting frame but sitting to one side, putting the finishing touches to a cover for the new baby’s crib. The pattern is called Little Red Schoolhouse, except that my schoolhouses are not red at all, but each a different color.
After a while I grew bored with it, and Godey’s Magazine being at my side, I thought to read something aloud.
I chanced upon an article written by a learned professor of medicine at a college back East, printed in reply to another article concerning the movement for women’s suffrage. This professor was adamantly opposed to the idea.
He said that a woman’s brain is proved by science to be less developed than that of a man, and does not have the same capacity for logical deduction. Moreover, it is a known fact that the workings of a woman’s body each month weaken the mind. Experiments are being conducted to see if this is related to lunacy—lunar meaning moon, and lunacy describing the way in which the inmates of the Bedlam asylums experience delusions once a month when the moon is full.
In short, it concludes, women are incapable of rational thought, prone to madness and delusion, and therefore incapable of managing their own affairs. Under no circumstances should they be given the power to vote; rather, they should be thankful to be married, and grateful to their husbands for so cheerfully shouldering the great burden of their care, and making such decisions for them.
The article is greeted with a mixture of reactions. Some with derision—Mrs. Gerald for one, not married and running her own business perfectly well; and some with nodding agreement—Isobel Davies, who seems to have hardly set a foot outside her father’s house before her marriage, and appears incapable of formulating a thought without seeking her husband’s approval on the matter.
Of all folks to get fired up about this, I would have thought the least likely to be Mrs. O’Donoghue, a quiet woman and head of the Ladies’ Church Committee, but now she speaks out pretty plain.
“Am I deluded,” she asks, “in thinking that the drapes in my parlor reek something horrible so that they have to be taken down and aired out on the washing line? Or am I correct in logically deducing that it is because my husband has smoked a cigar in my parlor after I have taken myself off to bed, when I have expressly forbid it?”
This is obviously a sore point with her. She is very proud of her house and keeps it shiny as a new pin. All the same it is greeted with a gale of laughter.
I reply, “Is it a sign of madness brought about by your woman’s condition, that upon this discovery you would like to hit your husband over the head with the frying pan? Or is it the perfectly justifiable action of a sane, but furious, woman?”
We are laughing so much that at first we don’t notice John and the boys come into the barn; when we do, we laugh even more. The poor fellows scramble themselves back out into the open air as fast as they are able and I say, “Well, I guess as far as they are concerned that proves the point!”
It was all so very lighthearted; but now, sitting in Minnie’s homely kitchen, she worrying about her family, and me thinking of Jacob’s two grown sons from his first marriage, that are away in Washington serving with the Navy, with wives and children to provide for, I think that perhaps having the vote is a fearsome responsibility and that our frivolity is something misguided.
If I was asked whether it is fair, that men can vote on issues that affect their lives and those of their families, but women cannot, I would say no, most decided. I don’t believe for one moment that women are deluded and irrational. But we have soft hearts, that much is true.
If we voted, perhaps we would be guided by our hearts, to keep our own menfolk safe, when our conscience tells us to choose the hard path, and vote another way entirely. Would we vote for our men in particular, or mankind in general? Would a woman in Connecticut think her son’s life a fa
ir exchange for that of an unknown black slave, eight hundred miles away in Georgia?
I cannot help but be reminded of Mr. Reed: our little band of folks sitting round the fire and voting to send him away into the wilderness.
If being given a vote means I must decide whether to send a man to his death, I do not think I want it at all.
40
Next morning we awoke but Mrs. Murphy did not; she had been blessed with a peaceful death in the night. The camp, once so filled with people it was almost a little town, was deserted. Our cabin, so crammed with bodies at times there was hardly space to move or sit, was silent and empty. Of the sixty folks or more who had been here once, now there was just Mr. Keseberg and me.
I set water to heat, and then I took Mrs. Murphy’s filthy clothes from her, and Mr. Keseberg stripped away all her bedding and took it, and her soiled clothing, out of the cabin and burned it.
I took a cloth and washed her, looking with great pity at her wasted limbs and treating her as gentle as I would a child. I washed her hair and combed it out for her as it dried, and then I braided it and twisted it round her head in the way that she had liked. I relished the task, sad though it was. I had felt so very helpless in the face of Mrs. Murphy’s suffering. Soft words and handholding were all I’d had to offer her, and much of the time I had screamed and raged at her, suffering agonies of self-loathing as a result. But now I could do her some real kindness, small though it was, and restore her to some dignity.
When Mr. Keseberg came back in, we lifted her body, as light and frail as one of the children’s, and wrapped her in a quilt, and laid her on one of the beds. We would not bury her in the snow. She had such a fear of the wolves that it seemed more of a kindness to leave her safe indoors.
She lay peaceful at long last, in that quiet room, with her little bits of possessions around her. Her spoons and forks washed clean and laid out on a cloth on the hearth; her own tin cups hanging from nails in a neat row nearby. Her knitting had been laid aside when her sight grew too poor for it, a pair of socks in blue worsted yarn, one complete and one with the heel waiting to be turned. Now I found her work basket and laid it by the fireside, so it looked like she had just stepped away from it for a spell, and would be back at any minute to finish what she was about.
* * *
When this was done, and the cabin was as tidy as I could make it, Mr. Keseberg and I took what food remained, and left that grim place for the last time. He shut the door behind us, and we climbed to the surface of the snow.
How silent and empty the landscape was. An unbroken blue sky arched over us; the great lake slumbered beneath its virginal blanket of snow. We could have been the only two people left alive in all the world. And the sun shone on us, pitiless, and showed us what we were.
Mr. Keseberg was a stooped and limping echo of what he had been before. He was not much over thirty, but looked twice that age: the once-gold hair silvered, the once-bronzed skin mottled white. Even his very eyes seemed to have faded to a washed-out gray, set deep in their sockets, with pouches of skin beneath. But still I saw him the way he was the first time I laid my eyes upon him, a broad-shouldered, swaggering fellow, with thick fair hair curling onto his collar, and his eyes the color of violets when they met mine.
As for me, I had been a skinny, ragged wretch of a girl when I met him. A starved, bedraggled drab of a woman was what I was become. But I didn’t care. I took his hand, and went into his arms; and I kissed him.
Maybe I had dreamed of starlight and sweet music; childish, girlish fancies. Those days were long behind me. I thought we would die here, that was the truth. I did not believe help would ever come. And I did not wish to die alone.
His arm around me, my hand in his, we walked together to the Breens’ cabin, so clean and neat compared to where we had spent so many long days. We gathered in firewood and built up a great fire, and heated water on it and washed ourselves. And there we stayed, sleeping at night in each other’s arms. No one to see us. And no one to judge.
* * *
A week passed, and another. Mrs. Donner never came to join us and the rescue, promised so very faithfully with Mr. Eddy’s handshake given on it, never came either. I took a grim pleasure in knowing that I had been right to mistrust him. Every hour we looked again to the horizon in the hope of seeing some rescue. Every night I counted up our dwindling supplies of food. And then one day—yet again—it was all gone.
I reproached myself most bitterly, and Mr. Keseberg, too.
“We should not have lingered here! What were we thinking? We should have left when we could. Better to have died on the mountain than face the only choice that is left to us. Die, or commit the last, unforgiveable sin!”
I had thought of it before, when the little Donner girls came to us. I had thought of it again, when George Foster died. But that was to save others. This was to save myself, and I could not do it.
The cabin door was open. I could see the sky, a vast, high arc of the palest blue, cloudless. The weak sunlight shining on the snow made it glitter and sparkle. It was too pretty a day to speak of such dark things.
Eat human flesh? I couldn’t even say the words aloud.
“I have made my choice.” My voice shook. I was as frightened as ever I had been. “I would rather die than eat such food. But—but—I beg you. Give me an easy death. Don’t let me suffer.” I turned and looked Mr. Keseberg full in the eyes. His face was grave, and still. “It is all I will ever ask of you.”
But he would not.
“We have traveled so far together, and fought for our lives, and the lives of those we loved. I will not give up! I will not give in! Others made the choice. You know it, however much you might pretend you do not! They did it. So can we. I am going to live, whatever it takes, and you are, too!”
He took up a knife, and an ax, and led me outside.
* * *
The snow was melting faster each day. As it did, the bodies that had been buried had begun to appear; an arm sticking up from the surface one day, a foot, another. But the first body that had come full to the surface was that of Landrum Murphy.
His eyes were closed, and he simply looked to be asleep, although he was as white as the snow that had covered him. It was a terror to look at his still face.
“I cannot do it! I cannot! We must not do this thing!”
“We will! We must! His spirit is gone. What remains is nothing. Meat, that’s all—no more than a deer, or a bear. If you cannot help me, then turn away; but I am determined.
“We will eat as heartily as we can this day. And tomorrow we will obtain more meat, and take it with us and leave. Mrs. Donner is not coming. I think she must be dead. If we are going to cross the mountain, we must do it while we still have the last remaining strength to do so. And we will cross the mountain, and arrive in California, and start our lives again.” He took my hand in his. “Together, if you will have me.”
I turned away from him. I took a deep breath, trying not to think how Landrum had pulled my hair and teased me, and the feel of his lips on mine.
Then I turned back. I would not make Mr. Keseberg undertake this dreadful deed alone.
Landrum was no more than a skeleton with skin covering the bones. There was no flesh on his limbs. The meat was on the inside—liver and lights, kidneys and brains and the marrowfat in the bones. To find it meant searching for it.
Mr. Keseberg lifted the ax above his head. Down it came with a splintering crunch, and Landrum’s head fell apart in two pieces. Mr. Keseberg laid the ax aside. Reaching in with his hands, he pulled the brain free.
I drove my knife into the wasted, shriveled skin of Landrum’s stomach. I sliced it across, and then another slice upward, and folded back the flesh to show a great mess of innards, white tubes all crammed together. I dug in with my hands and pulled the innards free, so they snaked across the snow.
Then I cut out Landrum’s liver and kidneys, retching and gagging at the sight of them in my hands.
I
cooked brain, kidneys, and liver with the marrow-bones, using the last withered scraps of onions that remained in the sack, and the last spoonful of oatmeal; a pinch of salt and pepper. All against my will, my nose twitched with the smell of it cooking in the pot. When Mr. Keseberg ladled it out onto my plate, it was rich, with a dark gravy. I ate it. One plateful and then another. I could not help myself.
I lay awake all that night. Nearing dawn, I up and out of the cabin, and vomited into the snow.
Next morning, Mr. Keseberg took a knife and cut up the remains of the cooked, cold brain, and handed the plate to me. I took up a slice in my hand, smiling at him. When he was turned away, I dropped it back into the pot.
“We cannot leave without knowing what has become of Mrs. Donner. And I feel so very much stronger that I shall go to Alder Creek, and if she still lives, I will fetch her back with me.
“Do not come with me. It might be that our paths would cross, and she arrive in our camp, and we in hers. Stay here and rest your foot as much as you can.” I took a deep breath. “You were right. About taking as much—meat—as possible, to see us on our way. While I am gone, you can get more.
“I promise you”—and I kissed him—“I give you my solemn vow. I will return.”
But this last was a lie.
There was nothing for me in California. No family to welcome me. No home awaiting me. Nothing but to say good-bye to my last friend in the world, and continue on my own once more. For despite what Mr. Keseberg had said, and how, for just those few hours, I had chosen to believe him, I knew he did not mean it. He said it to deceive me, and to save me. For he loved his wife, I had seen it all along. He loved his child, too. And at the last, he would not leave them.
I had eaten that dreadful food once, and to no purpose. Come what may I could not eat it again.
When Winter Comes Page 25
