Tamsen Donner Commits Horrid Acts with Her
Husband
…the cabins, by order of Major Swords, were fired, and with
them everything connected with this horrid and melancholy tragedy were
consumed...
– Edwin Bryant, with the
Eastward-bound army after conquering California, 1847
The
tent, canvas from the wagon,
a
pebbly texture sagging
with
ice, crackling
in
the cold night air.
Wind’s
monologue. Dead-cold trees.
From
within,
Tamsen
and her dying husband
watched
the layer of canvas
fearing
its failure, the loss
of
that distinction between inside and outside.
Storms
lasted ten days at a time.
Starving
so,
skeleton
shows through.
Now
the body is the shape of
what’s
inside.
After
he died,
she
stroked his body, the bones
and
the tendons like wrapping twine
around
his femur, radius, and ulna.
She
dressed him. Then
undressed
him, needing
his
clothes herself.
He
lay naked, under a threadbare quilt
(midwest
quilting socials,
bills
sewn into the squares).
She
removed the blanket
and
wrapped herself in it,
gazing
and not
gazing. Was she still
the
woman who married him?
Was
he, in death,
the
man she married?
Tamsen
licked his wrist, remembering.
She
used her teeth,
as
when he used to bite
little
purple marks into her neck.
She
nibbled along
the
inside of his arm – she felt most familiar
with
this part of him, what was visible
as
he worked,
what
touched her
when
he held her face
to
kiss her.
A
penknife was all that was needed
to
slice out a curve of pink
as
if melon from its rind.
Her
tongue
ran
across the inside
of
the inside of his arm.
Its
damp baby-pink
surprising
beneath the brown
paper
bag skin
as
if here
was
the man she married. Here
was
the untouched part.
She
savored the hope of him,
in
the hard white desert of winter -
his
release from the packaging of his body,
and
for her, a surrender
to
the inside - the outside layers collapsing
inwards,
heavy
tent
walls sagging.
Silence
pressed
upon
her. She chewed slowly
to
make him last, her eyes
closed
in pleasure.
by Karen Terrey
Published in Sierra Nevada
Review
