“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.