Impatient With Desire by Gabrielle Burton Page B

Donner. How glad I am that I went to Springfield. Had I stayed where I was, repeating the same familiar life day after day, a narrow house would have been my home.
    And so my road, which began in Massachusetts, went to Maine, back to Massachusetts, to North Carolina, to Illinois, to meet with George Donner’s road at that juncture, the two of us then wending our way together on the California Trail almost two thousand miles west, is now temporarily stopped by ill circumstances. We have spent nearly three months trapped in the mountains with rescue yet to come.
    Later
    It occurs to me that when I write down George’s and my history for the children, I may be revealing a belief or a fear that I may not be there to tell it to them.

John Landrum Murphy, 16, d. Jan 31st 1847 at the lake camp
     
    This morning I bundled up Frances, Eliza, and Georgia, anxious to get them outside, really to go outside myself, away from the gloom and the smell of sickness. “Come, children, we’ll walk Uno and visit Aunt Elizabeth.” Elitha was sleeping, and when I asked Leanna if she wanted to go, she said, “No, thank you, Mother.” I know from my own hardheaded mistakes that she suffers as much as Elizabeth or more. I heard my stepmother say, “Pity the instruction experience gives us can so rarely be transferred,” and I let Leanna be.
    Uno, all bone and rib cage, frisked in the snow and started digging. Halfway across the drifts to Elizabeth’s shelter, Georgia stopped to stare at a foot sticking out of the snow. Samuel Shoemaker, one of our drivers, 25 years old, the first young man to go. I took Georgia’s hand, guided her on.
    As always the snow soaked our skirts, weighing them down—if we raise them, our stockings get soaked—and we had to struggle some, the children stepping into my footprints, but the brisk, sunny day and the exercise perked them up. Eliza hummed a little singsong, “We’ll see Uncle Jacob and Aunt Elizabeth and all our cousins.”
    I stopped just outside the hole leading into the ground. “Uncle Jacob doesn’t live here anymore, Eliza, but we’ll see the rest.”
    On the flight of snow stairs leading down into the ground, Eliza grimaced. “Bad smell,” she said. She wouldn’t budge. “Come out here, cousins,” she called. “Out here.”
    A feral-faced child, my niece Mary, 7, came from behind thehanging canvas, squinting in the light. She reached out a dirty hand to Eliza. Eliza recoiled, darted behind me, and began crying.
    Mary started crying and disappeared behind the canvas, where someone else was crying.
    I looked at Frances, who without a word took her little sisters’ hands.
    “I’ll take you home and we’ll have a lovely tea party,” Frances said.
    I watched the children and Uno trudge back across the clearing.
    Disappear underground.
    I don’t want to go in either, Eliza, I thought, walked down the snow stairs, and pushed aside the canvas, calling, “Elizabeth,” but of course no one answered.
    She was crying, and her children lay without moving on their platforms, while I stirred up the fire, untied a blue calico handkerchief, and poured bits of bone into a watery broth.
    “These’ll thicken the soup,” I said. No flicker of interest from anyone. It crossed my mind that I might have saved them for my own family.
    I gave my niece and nephews small pieces of bark and twigs of pine. “Chew on these. They’ll make you less hungry.”
    My nephew William kept his back to me. “William, go out and help Jean Baptiste retrieve the wood.”
    Each storm Jean Baptiste must climb higher up the trees to cut limbs that hurl down into the snow and have to be dug out and dragged and chopped.
    “William.”
    He reluctantly got up and started toward the stairs.
    “Where’s Solomon?” I asked.
    “Gone,” Elizabeth said.
    “Gone? Gone where?”
    “He set out for the settlements this morning,” William said angrily. “I wanted to go, but Mother wouldn’t let me.”
    “Solomon said,