by John Jakes
It was mass insanity! And Amanda had fallen victim to it. Why, she’d even considered hiring four Chilean whores for the second floor until he talked her out of it, convincing her it wouldn’t be suitable with young Louis on the premises.
As further proof of the way her wits had deserted her, Amanda was actually treating the miner’s request seriously. “You really want to ride through one of my windows?”
“I sure do. I struck pay dirt and I want to celebrate. I got the dust to pay for the privilege”—he reached back to slap a saddlebag—“plenty of it.”
Israel headed inside. No doubt she was just being courteous to the young fool—
He pulled up short at the sight of her face. Lord God in heaven. She was considering it!
With a cool smile, she said, “Your fun won’t come cheap, Flaxtop.”
“I guessed not, ma’am. How much?”
She pondered. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars for the window—there’s no plate glass manufactured in the United States, you know. It’s imported from Europe. Add another two hundred and fifty for general damage. The Sixty Rod will be on the house.”
Even Billy Beadle gaped. Israel performed some quick calculations. Allowing for freight charges, Amanda could order a new window from the east coast for maybe five hundred, repair some broken furniture for a hundred or a hundred and fifty. Her terms were outrageous; but she’d presented them with an absolutely straight face. His stomach started to hurt.
“You’re sayin’ a thousand?”
“One thousand,” she repeated. “If that’s too steep for you—why, Merry Christmas.”
She pivoted away from the miner. Israel marveled at the way she bluffed. It worked.
“Hang on! I—I guess I can afford it. You got yourself an arrangement, ma’am.”
Amanda acted unruffled, as if what was happening was an everyday occurrence. “Fine. We’ll give our guests a little holiday entertainment with their suppers. Billy, you carry those bags inside. Weigh out the equivalent of a thousand dollars. Flaxtop, you wait right here until I move a few tables.”
The miner slapped his mule’s neck and uttered a long, piercing yell. Louis appeared, drawn by the noise. Amanda spoke to Israel. “We’re out of Thirty Rod. Walk over to Dennison’s Exchange and see whether they’ll let me have twenty gallons.”
“Sure they will,” Israel said. “Your credit’s good all over town.”
Amanda swept back inside. Billy Beadle chuckled, started to unstrap the saddlebags. The mulatto glanced at Louis.
“You walk along with me to the Exchange.”
The boy’s face fell. “I want to see him bust the window.”
“I said you come along! It isn’t fit for a youngster to watch grown men act like fools—” Muttering gleefully to himself, the miner paid no attention. “You watch enough of ’em, you’ll start behaving the same way. Come on, now—I’ll need help rolling the cask through the mud.”
He said it harshly, still upset by the way Amanda had taken advantage of the tipsy miner. He yearned for the old days: Yerba Buena quiet and mellow in the sun; a relaxed pace at the tavern; a few slow-moving residents hoeing potatoes in the square—
What the devil had come over her? What was driving her? He was afraid he knew the answer.
“Clear away, boys, clear away!” he heard her shouting inside. “Move your legs, mister. We’ve got a customer coming in by a different route. Billy? Hurry up with those bags!”
“Come on,” Israel said, with such a savage gesture that Louis shied back. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy stepped down from the plank sidewalk. Instantly, the mud hid the soles of his boots.
“You’re gonna miss a real fine show, Mr. Coon,” the miner said. Israel grabbed Louis’ hand and didn’t look back.
I mustn’t let it twist me up, he thought. I’ve listened to every dirty slur ever invented for a black man. I’ve watched the Hounds beat up Frenchmen and rip down the tents of the Chileanos on Aha Loma, and I haven’t let any of it bother me too much because I’m a free man. I can walk away any time I want.
Maybe I will. She’s not the same woman anymore.
ii
Israel tugged the boy’s hand, pulling him to the left. “Watch your step!”
Louis had nearly stumbled into the top of a cast iron stove. The rest of the stove had sunk into the mud produced by the December rains.
Neither man nor boy was much surprised by the sight of the stove top. Discovering that charges for shipping heavy freight to the diggings were astronomical, the gold-hunters who came by ship discarded all sorts of personal goods in the public thoroughfares. Speculators who attended the beach auctions and bid on the cargos of the incoming vessels sometimes had to take every item in a shipment when they wanted only part of the shipment. The unwanted merchandise was abandoned in the same places the would-be miners left their heavier belongings. Rotting sacks of flour, expensive commodes, unopened cartons of dress shirts—you could find damn near the whole residue of civilization buried in the winter slime of San Francisco’s streets.
One of the stove lids lay in the mud just beyond the sunken obstacle. Angrily, Israel flipped the lid over with his toe. “I bet when Jason and his Argonauts went hunting the golden fleece, they never left a trail of garbage!”
As the boy and the Negro crossed the square, the noise remained constant. Men and women laughed in the bars. A brass band blared “Deck the Halls” from the lobby of the Parker House. Barkers shouted from the entrances of the gambling tents—“Come on in, gentlemen, come on in and try to find the little joker! Here’s the place to get your money back!”
They circled around a bearded, wild-eyed fellow in parson’s weeds. Clutching a Bible under one arm and exuding a smell of gin, the man bellowed at them, “Divine services tomorrow morning! Eight sharp in the tabernacle just a few steps up Kearny. Divine services unless there’s news of a strike tonight!”
“Thimbleriggers—cheap women—rum sots—trash!” Israel declared, his yellow face changing as he and Louis passed from shadow into the blaze of lanterns. Everywhere, men walked or ran or staggered—going to perdition!
He guided Louis around a signboard on a pole at the edge of a particularly sinister-looking mudhole. The sign bore the words:
THIS WAY IMPASSABLE!
Below, in a rougher hand, someone had written:
not even jackassable
“You surely don’t like San Francisco anymore, do you, Israel?” the boy said at last.
“No, sir, I don’t. They say we have twenty-five thousand people, and that’s twenty-four thousand five hundred too many. You no sooner blink an eye than somebody reports one more camp opened up, with fool names that are an insult to the English tongue. Gouge Eye—Whiskeytown—Mad Mule Gulch—Murderers’ Bar—people’ve lost their minds even when it comes to christening towns! Old Polk should have kept his mouth shut.”
“What’s the president got to do with it?”
“Why, Louis, if President Polk hadn’t stood up when Congress opened its session a year ago—”
As he spoke, his eyes were never still. He saw half a dozen rats prowling over a heap of garbage. Heard a passing miner make reference to his color. A Peruvian in rags loitered in the shadows, watching him and stroking the edge of a knife across his thumb. Every time he ventured out these days, it felt like Mississippi again. He needed to arm himself.
“—if he hadn’t blabbed about the gold Colonel Mason sent to the Philadelphia Mint in a tea caddy, it might have been a lot longer—years, maybe—before the country got excited about California. Polk should have just gone out of office quietly and let Taylor take over—but no, he had to pop the cat from the bag. They say he always wanted land. The whole continent under one flag.
I don’t object to that, but I do object to him giving the fever to every rascal, fool and failure on three continents—”
Without a smile, Louis said, “I told you most a year ago that Ma had a bad case. You didn’t believe me.”
“I know. Proves how wrong a man can be.”
“Know something?”
“What?”
“I don’t like it either. I mean, here it is Christmas and we don’t even have a holiday pine with some candles on it. And nobody’s got time to make presents—we’re too busy fixing to serve dinner all day tomorrow—” The boy sighed. “I try not to think about it too much. Most of the time that’s easy. I’m so frizzled out from working, there’s nothing on my mind but sleep.”
“We keep on this way,” Israel said, “we’re liable to wind up the richest folks in the graveyard.”
“Not Ma. She’s tough.”
“Tougher all the time.”
“She wants to go to Boston something awful, I guess.”
Israel didn’t answer. The boy only knew the surface reason Amanda worked so hard. The mulatto, on the other hand, had heard her speak at length about Hamilton Stovall—not only about how he’d gained control of Kent and Son, but how he’d ruined her cousin’s life. He believed Amanda had kept that latter part of the family’s history from her son.
The man and the boy reached the large canvas tent whose signboard read DENNISON’S EXCHANGE. Like the other establishments around Portsmouth Square, it poured noise into the Christmas Eve darkness—and, from outside, it shone like one immense lantern. Suddenly men yelled in the distance; glass shattered.
Louis spun. “Oh my Lord, she really let him do it!”
Israel refused to look. His face was as bleak as his thoughts. It’s that Stovall driving her. Stovall and those books McGill brings in. She doesn’t see what it’s doing to her, either—and what it could do to her boy.
To speak to Amanda on that subject would have been overstepping. Israel could argue with her about the advisability of women on the second floor—even though that too concerned Louis, that was business. But he didn’t dare intrude in more personal areas. After all, she was his employer—
A white woman.
Once, he’d practically been able to forget about that. But gold had drawn men to California. Men who bore hatreds. The source—the way they’d been taught, or the lack of any teaching at all—didn’t matter. Either way, they were dangerous. He’d begun to feel the fear again—
He heard the tipsy young miner, Flaxtop, saying coon. The memories tumbled one upon another. The crack of the whip at the gin house. The feel of it flaying his back while he clenched his teeth and struggled to keep from crying out. Cissie’s screams as she lay with her belly in the hole, taking her punishment—
Confused and angrier than ever, he jerked Louis through the entrance to the Exchange. His yellow face looked thunderous in the hazy lantern light.
He knew he was in a bad temper. Told himself so—and that he ought to simmer down. He made an effort—
Then he saw who was on duty behind the bar.
iii
The preceding year, San Francisco has been plagued by ruffianism unusual even for a boisterous frontier town. The source of the trouble was a group of men once called the First New York Volunteers—the last word hardly being appropriate since most of them had been forced to join up or languish in eastern jails.
The Volunteers had been shipped to California to reinforce Kearny during the Mexican trouble. When they arrived, the fighting was over. The unit had disbanded, and some of its members had drifted north a few months after the discovery of gold.
In San Francisco, the men boastfully called themselves the Hounds—because they roamed the streets in packs, harassing women and foreigners with obscene remarks and their favorite weapons: slung-shots and metal knuckles.
The men professed an affiliation with a splinter political party in the east, the American party, which had sprung from an earlier group calling itself the Native American Association. The title capsuled the group’s purpose, and that of the party which emerged from it—to keep America the exclusive preserve of those white Protestants who had been born there. Members of the party had secret rituals, passwords and handshakes—never revealed when they were questioned: “I know nothing.” An eastern editor—Mr. Greeley, Israel believed it was—had contemptuously christened the party Know-Nothing.
For months, the local counterparts of the Know-Nothings had occupied a tent headquarters at Commercial and Kearny. The tent, its nickname, Tammany Hall, also borrowed from the east, was gone now, torn down as the result of a public outcry when the Hounds invaded Little Chile up on the hill called Alta Loma the preceding July. The Chilean immigrants had been beaten, their women raped, their hovels demolished—and San Francisco had finally risen in outrage. Amanda had contributed fifty dollars to help organize a company of volunteer peace officers who razed Tammany Hall and drove the Hounds out of town.
Officially, they were gone. But some had come back. One, a bald, blue-chinned man named Felker, had found employment as a bartender at the Exchange.
Israel approached Felker warily. He was sure the man would recognize him. Amanda had once used her Colt revolver to back down three Hounds who tried to come into Kent’s for a meal; she wouldn’t allow the hooligans on the premises. But an offense to one Hound was an offense to all.
Felker was busy telling a story to a trio of miners leaning on the bar. “—and so the nun says to the priest, let’s fuck now, Father, and you can hear my confession later.”
Scurrilous jokes against Catholics were a staple of the Know-Nothings. Two of the bearded miners laughed.
The third, dressed much like the others but standing a little apart, fiddled with his whiskey cup. The man’s blue eyes registered his dislike of the story.
Israel stepped between Felker’s cronies and the loner. Behind him, Louis watched the conclusion of a three-card monte game. The pale-skinned dealer raked in a two-thousand-dollar bet from his glum victim, whose loss the watchers cheered and applauded.
Felker kept talking with the two miners. The lantern hanging from the canvas directly above him cast an oily light on his bald head. The thin, weathered loner scratched his almost pure white beard and studied Israel, then Felker, who continued to ignore the Negro. Israel in turn scrutinized the miner from the corner of his eye. The man’s long hair showed a few streaks of yellow among the gray. He was a decent-looking sort. And Israel guessed he might need help handling Felker.
He was correct. The bald man wouldn’t even look at him for the better part of two minutes. Finally, struggling to contain the anger that had been building within him during the evening, Israel slapped a palm on the bar.
“Felker.”
A slow, almost smug smile tugged up the corners of the bartender’s mouth. Behind Felker, Israel saw a knotted rope hanging from a nail in one of the tent poles. When patrons grew too rowdy, men who tended bar used such a rope as a substitute for a ship’s cat.
“Merry Christmas,” Felker said in a sarcastic way. Israel started to dig in his pocket, then remembered he was supposed to put the order on credit. Felker misinterpreted the move, reaching across the bar to fasten a hand on the mulatto’s forearm. “I know the rules around town say a nigger is entitled to one drink in any public place. But the rules are suspended when I’m tending the store.”
Israel’s hand clenched. He jerked free of Felker’s grip.
“I came to buy twenty gallons of Thirty Rod for Kent’s. We’re out.”
“So am I.”
His stomach starting to hurt again, Israel pointed to a keg on a cradle “Doesn’t appear that way.”
“Empty.” The balding man shrugged. “You try somewhere else. Niggers give this place a bad odor. ’Course, I have a pretty keen nose. I can smell coon twice as sharp as any hunting dog.”
That brought a snicker from one of the two miners on Israel’s right. He knew he should leave. Perhaps on a different evening, he would have. But everything that had happened tonight had made him testy.
“All right,” he said. “But first I’ll have a whiskey.”
“No,” Felker said. “No, you won’t.”
“Isra
el, I think we’d better go along,” Louis said.
His brow hot, Israel drew a coin from his pocket. Felker seemed to be bouncing up and down, almost expectantly.
“Pour me one, Felker.”
“I said no.”
“Pour me one or I’ll pour it myself.”
Dennison’s Exchange grew still. The racket from the street only heightened the silence as the mulatto and the white man stared at one another.
iv
For a moment, Israel didn’t believe what he was seeing. Felker shrugged again, as if giving up.
The two miners had stepped back just a little in case of a confrontation. The lone miner, hunched over his drink as he had been ever since Israel and the boy walked in, watched the bartender. Felker wiped his hands on his apron, started to turn and reach for a cup—
Israel’s astonishment slowed his reflexes. He wasn’t prepared when Felker grabbed the rope from the tent pole, whirled and lashed at Israel’s face.
The rope’s knotted end nicked Israel’s left eye, made him yell in surprise. Blinded and enraged, he shot his hands out to fasten on Felker’s neck.
Israel gripped hard, his height helping him lean halfway across the bar. Felker squealed, hit at him with the rope. Israel heard Louis pleading with him to let go, then caught the sound of men rushing forward. But the flick of the rope on his eyeball had shattered his control. He choked Felker harder—