Trask - Don Berry

  Trask

  Don Berry

  1960

  Introduction by Jeff Baker

  For Pappy

  after the long journey finding what pleased him

  behind a ring of mountains

  Yam Hill District

  Oregon

  April 29 [1848]

  This day Stormy again and does not look like it will ever Stop, Mud almost to the Knees now ....

  I hear today from a Clackamas Indian there is some "Dam Fool" of a white man has got himself into trouble with the Killamooks down at the coast, which have a prety hard reputation. And who shd it turn out to be but my old Comrade Elbridge Trask that I free-trapped with out of Fort Hall. Well I am not surprised any but hope he does not get himself killd which wd be just like him. He was the most restless man I ever knew ....

  ——From the later journals of Osbourne Russell, 1845-1857

  Chapter One

  It had been fair. The sky all day was endlessly wide, and so pale it was without color; a veil of almost-blue stretched taut between the earth and sun. Toward evening the first clouds appeared at sea, rising tentatively above the edge of the world as though appraising the land ahead. Soon the soft mass stretched across the line of sea and sky as far as a man could see in either direction.

  The pale gold sun slipped down behind the clouds, silhouetting the tumbled forms against a sudden hot sky, pink and orange with angry red streamers. The edges of the great bank glowed for minutes, then slowly dimmed until all that remained were the giant shadows black and distinct on the sea, and moving toward the land.

  Storm, thought Elbridge Trask, and the growing tension in the air pleased him.

  He squatted on his heels on the first ridge of dunes and watched until the world at sea turned to shades of gray and black, broken only by the gentle white rollers coming up the long beach slope. Then he stood, stretching his arms wide against the sky, enjoying in the center of him this ending of the day. His body made a long angular shape as he yawned against the vastness of sea and sky and cloud.

  He turned his back to the ocean and half slid, half walked down the inland slope of the ridge. As he descended into the first depression behind the dunes the steady rumble of the surf became a higher-pitched whisper, the deep tones smothered by the bulwark of land.

  In the dusk the weather-stained skin of his face and hands was almost black; only slightly lighter than the jet darkness of his curly, close-trimmed beard. His eyes had a startling clarity in the half-darkness of his face, clear whites and pupils the gray of the sea in a storm.

  He walked with long, quick strides across the valley toward the next dune ridge, half an hour away. His head moved slightly from side to side as he walked, with the habitual watchfulness of a mountain man; a constant alertness of which he was not even aware, and which five years as a stable settler had not dulled.

  It was dark when he reached home, and the warm light from lamps inside threw yellow shafts out into the night; which the night swallowed without disturbance. The moon was behind the eastern range of mountains now, not yet visible but lighting the sky behind the twisted peaks with a faint glow like the ocean's phosphorescence. It would be full tonight, thought Trask, and that ought to be worth seeing. If the storm at sea didn't come in too fast.

  In some vague, internal way, two parts of him debated which would reach the center of the sky first, the great full moon or the storm. He had reached the point of betting with himself on it, when he laughed suddenly; at himself, and at all the foolish dialogues men have had with themselves since time began. He was still chuckling when he pushed open the cedar-plank door to his cabin.

  Hannah was there, at the small loom, patiently weaving the yarn she had spun in the afternoon; trying almost hopelessly to satisfy the endless clothing-appetite of a husband who didn't have the good sense to stay out of the brush. She looked up when Trask came in, and smiled. The flickering light from the fire softened her face, smoothing the harsh sharpness of her chin and high cheekbones, casting an aura of softness around the straight severity of her pulled-back hair.

  "What are you so happy about, Bridge?" she asked.

  "Arguin' with myself out there," Trask said, tolerantly amused at his own foolishness. "Which gets first to the top of the sky; moon or storm."

  "Storm coming in?"

  "Yes, it comes," Trask said. "Rain tonight."

  He folded his long body into a chair before the fire and watched the flames in silence. Hannah went back to her weaving, and the only sound in the cabin was the soft susurration of the shuttle and the crackling of the fire. After a while he took a pouch of tobacco from the mantel and filled his pipe. He contemplated it with pleasure before lighting it, because it was the single possession he was proud of. A Norwegian pipe, a meerschaum long since stained rich red-brown. It gave him pleasure to think of the different lands his pipe had seen before it came to his hands from the ill-tempered captain who owned it. Norway, where it was made, and England certainly, and all the coastal countries of South America, going around the Horn. And the last stop before Trask himself had gotten it had been Oahu, in the Sandwich Islands.

  Many countries, many peoples all speaking different languages, many ports, and rivers and mountains of a different shape . . . There were things to see in the world, he thought, if a man could but get to them. The sailors manning the trading ships got to them, but it wasn't right somehow. Trask had tried that when the world first opened up for him; had gone to sea for two years from his birthplace in New England. But it wasn't right.

  You dropped your anchor and—barring bad weather—were gone again in weeks. You never got to know anything beyond the trading ports, and only the surface of them. It was not enough to satisfy a man in his belly.

  Trask sighed, and picked a coal from the fire with tongs; lit the pipe; and soon the cabin smelled of the harsh fragrance of his tobacco. The only way you could know was to live in a land, and walk it, and plant it and harvest it and see it in storm and calm until you got the rhythm of it into your belly. And then you looked up and there were another five years gone: where? But it was better, he thought, than not knowing.

  He stood and went to the door and stepped out. The moon had risen above the mountains and lost the reddish cast that made it seem the mirror image of the setting sun. It was rising high and fast, as if intentionally to beat the storm to the sky's peak.

  "I believe the moon's going to win," Trask said, watching.

  Hannah smiled at her loom. "You're as bad as Wakila and his all the time mammook itlokum." Wakila was the Clatsop youth who occasionally cut Trask's firewood. He used every earned cent gambling on the itlokum game, and usually lost; but cheerfully.

  Trask laughed at the comparison. "No," he said thoughtfully after a moment. "Itlokum is gambling with men; this is gambling with gods."

  "Well," Hannah said dryly, "best to get good odds, in that case."

  Trask looked around sharply, but Hannah's face was turned away and he could not see her expression. She went about weaving impassively.

  "All right," he said, "poke fun. Man can't even get a little poetic with some cultus klootchman have to bring him down."

  He stepped outside the door. Even as the moon approached its zenith, the storm began to make itself felt in the air. The soft wind from the ocean brought an almost invisible mist and the smell of salt. The grasses of the Plains flattened themselves and pointed toward the mountains in the east, silver in the light of the moon. They whispered softly among themselves, and near the beach their trailing tips drew tiny tracks on the sand, like the marks of a forgotten language.

  Soon there came from the ocean side the outriders of the storm; lean gray shapes spearing inland silently through the sky.

  There was
a restless tautness in Trask's chest as he watched them come like the spare hunting dogs of the storm, smelling out the land ahead. A wedge of mist sliced across the moon and turned black in silhouette. Suddenly the moon seemed smaller. Gradually, as more of the low-sliding shapes attacked, her light grew dim. The surf, always heard faintly over the seaward ridge, seemed quieter now, waiting.

  Trask watched the combat joined between moon and storm, and the inevitable defeat of the peaceful moon, with excitement. He knew and would not try to deceive himself otherwise—that the thing existed in his own mind alone. Sometimes it angered him to become entangled with the impersonal forces of the world in this way, in this imagined way, but it was not a thing he could control. He was a part of it and his participation in the moon and storm excited him; and he could feel the pulse of it in his neck.

  And he wished to tell Hannah about it, but there were no words for it that he knew of; and it embarrassed him to try.

  When the moon had become no more than a diffuse glow through the mist, he went back inside the cabin, relit his pipe and sat before the fire again.

  "Well, we'll get the rain all right tonight," he said.

  "You've got the fog in your beard," Hannah said, and watched the firelight sparkle from the tiny drops caught in the beard's curly darkness.

  2

  The main body of the storm broke against the Oregon coast shortly before midnight. The whispering of the wind in the grasses increased in pitch until it was a keening wail; and the sound lay flat and tense across Clatsop Plains. At the mouth of the Columbia the probing fingers of the wind lashed the water into white froth over the bar, flicking the tops of waves and casting white nets of mist toward the land.

  Clatsop Plains lay at the northerly end of the storm, a coastal prairie stretching twenty miles south of the mouth of the river. It was made of three parallel ridges, as though the god Kahnie himself had taken three fingers and drawn grooves along the coast from just south of Astoria to the base of the mountain called Neahseu'su. Several miles inland from the whipping gray water of the Pacific, the coast range began abruptly; sweeping up and away from the Plains as the combers swept up from the surface of the sea.

  A gray wall of rain stalked across the beach slope and slammed against the first ridge and moved down into the depression beyond. At the south end of the Plains the wind and water drove against the double-peaked massiveness of Neahseu'su and ran from the seaward face in heavy rivulets back into the breakers below. The sea churned and rolled at the base of the cliffs; withdrew; surged up and crashed against the rock again.

  The top of the mountain was gone in cloud. The base, rising out of the sea, made its own white shroud in the destruction of waves. On the mountain's bulky body trees swayed back to make room for the wind; and deer wakened wet and frightened and snorted gently in the night. Does moved to windward of their fawns and lay back down again, eyes open and wary, and bucks lifted their muzzles into the wind and shook their antlers and pawed at the wet ground.

  As the first rain splatted against the seaward side of his cabin Elbridge Trask wakened in the night and lay still. A glow from the dying fire still cast a redness on the beams above his head, and he watched this and listened to the rain around him. There was a faint sense of victory in him, that he was warm and dry; the notion of a minor skirmish won with an unnamed enemy, the contest gone unnoticed except by him. He smiled slightly in his satisfaction.

  Hannah too had half wakened, and watched the face of her husband through almost closed eyes. It was not a handsome face, even in Hannah's eyes, and it had never occurred to her that it would be good to have a handsome husband. Elbridge Trask's face, like his body, had been scored and carved by so many forces in his thirty-three years that it was essentially without age, as human faces go. The great hawk nose had not changed in the six years of their marriage, nor the heavy ridge of eyebrows, nor the myriads of wrinkles around the clear gray eyes. The only thing that changed was his beard, and it was sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, depending on how long it took to talk him into letting her trim it. She saw no reason he should ever change at all; he was now as he had been and would be until he died. The gentle erosion of time would have no more effect on him than the rain had on the rocky face of Neahseu'su; it would take the earthquake of death to change him.

  Elbridge Trask shifted slightly in bed, watching the beams glow red and listening to the cold, flat sound of the rain. He felt, as he shifted, the sudden hot length of his wife's body along his side, and he smiled again. That, too, was a part of his victory in the world. He closed his

  eyes and let the rain's tattoo drum him back to sleep again.

  3

  The storm had spent itself by morning and the day dawned clear. Trask wakened to the smell of bacon and coffee, and painfully forced himself to squeeze his eyes open. The sun was not yet over the skyline of the coast range, and the light in the cabin was gray and cool. It was not

  later than five o'clock. Hannah stood at the stove, turning bacon slowly in the pan.

  Trask muttered something indistinguishable, cleared his throat and blinked sleepily.

  "Morning," Hannah said, smiling.

  Trask sat up in bed and tried to fight his way to wakefulness. "What're you doing up so early?" he asked.

  "Thought you would maybe want some breakfast," Hannah said.

  Trask nodded.

  "You've been going out so early lately . . ."

  "I just go down to the beach for a while," Trask said.

  "That's what l thought."

  Trask stood out of bed and stretched himself. He fumbled into his heavy muslin shirt and grabbed a pair of pants from the foot of the bed.

  Hannah brought him coffee and he sat sipping it, watching the wisps of steam curl up from the cup.

  "This is real coffee," he said finally.

  "Yes."

  "Where'd you get it?"

  "Oh, places," Hannah said. "Had it hid from you."

  "You got more than this?"

  "None of your business," Hannah said firmly. "You let me run this house. You'll be back on barley coffee tomorrow."

  Trask shrugged. Coffee this morning, barley tomorrow. If that's how it is, that's how it is.

  "You get your bacon now," Hannah told him.

  The two sat down at the table Trask had made when they first moved into the cabin. Made of the same material as the house itself, split cedar planks, the top was scarred and pitted from the years' hard use.

  Trask finished his bacon and leaned back, savoring the flavor of the coffee. Hannah leaned forward across the table, her face serious.

  "Bridge," she said quietly, "I want to talk to you."

  "Kwonesum mamook wawa, " Trask said. "Always talking." Hannah did not laugh, or fend off the comment, and Trask brought the front legs of the chair back to the floor, his face sobering. "All. right," he said.

  "Bridge, what's troublin' you?"

  "Nothing," he said. "There's nothing."

  "There is," Hannah said.

  "Not if I say not."

  "Bridge, every day for the past week you've gone down to the beach at dawn and then again at sunset."

  "Like to watch," Trask said.

  "That's what you do when you got something in your mind, Bridge, don't you know that?"

  Trask shook his head.

  "Every time you get something in your head to do, you start going down to the beach like that."

  Trask sniffed and turned the cup around in his hands, watching the faint tendrils of steam. "Maybe so," he admitted finally. Hannah leaned back in her chair. "What is it, Bridge?"

  Absently the man tucked the ends of his beard under his chin.

  After a moment he said, "I don't know, Hannah."

  "You sure? Or just don't want to tell me?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know," he repeated. "Something. Something about—the land, maybe. I don't know."

  "It's good land here."

  "Not for wheat. You can't grow wheat i
n this soil."

  "About the only thing. Everything else grows."

  "Wheat's important," Trask insisted. "We got to pay too much for flour."

  Hannah did not answer, and after a moment Trask raised his head to meet her eyes.

  "Hannah," he said, "you're making me argue something I'm not ready to argue. Suppose it isn't the wheat. You're making me make up reasons where I don't have any reasons yet. I got to think this out more."

  "All right, Bridge. But you tell me, will you? When you know?"

  "If I can, Hannah. There's lots of things I can't say . . ." He lowered his eyes to his cup again.

  Hannah leaned forward across the table and put her hand on his arm. "You don't have to tell me anything about why, Bridge. You know that. All I want is for you to tell me what you want me to do, all right?"

  Trask nodded slowly.

  "Because I can't do the right thing if I don't know what you want, Bridge." Hannah stood suddenly and busied herself at the stove. "You see Wakila, you better get him to come up and cut us some more wood," she said.

  "All right." Trask stood and drained the last of the coffee, throwing his head back to let the still warm liquid trail down his throat. He wiped his mouth and mustache on the back of his sleeve, with the oddly precise gesture of a bearded man, and put the cup back on the table.

  He turned at the door and said, "l should be back around noon."

  "All right. You aren't working today."

  "No."

  Hannah nodded. "All right."

  "l'm going to the beach for a while. Then I'm going over and talk to Solomon, maybe."

  Hannah looked up in surprise, then nodded slowly. "That might be a good idea, Bridge."

  "It might." He closed the door behind him and set off in the direction of the steady murmur of the breakers on the beach.

  4

  In this spring of 1848 the twenty-mile stretch of Clatsop Plains held over forty families. Trask had seen most of them come. He had been among the first to settle on the fertile prairie, in the fall of 1843. Almost five years, he thought. Henry Hunt and Tom Owens and Tibbets and me, we were about the first.