Tamsen Donner Commits Horrid Acts with Her Husband

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