The Furies

by John Jakes

  The two miners reached for him. The loner stepped away from the bar. Israel heard the cock of a pistol, then the miner’s voice.

  “You two stay out. And that goes for everyone else. Let them settle it.”

  Slobbering curses, Felker tried one more slash with the rope, bringing it up and over his shoulder. The end snapped against the hanging lantern, knocked it off its hook, sailed it behind the kegs where it broke and spilled oil that ignited a second later.

  “Jesus Christ, a fire!” one of the monte dealers shouted as flame spurted up the canvas wall.

  The canvas caught almost instantaneously, the whole rear wall of the Exchange turning to flame. Israel held Felker’s throat, taking satisfaction from the way the man’s eyes were starting to water. He applied more pressure, the heat from the canvas popping sweat onto his yellow face—

  He wasn’t choking Felker alone. He was choking the drivers who had beaten his mother so that she died before her time. He was choking the owner who had sold Cissie. He was even choking old President Polk, who had turned a sleepy little village into a stink hole—

  Felker’s eyes bulged. Time held still for Israel, the hate in him almost intoxicating. The fire reached the tent’s side walls and ceiling. A pole behind the bar became a column of flame, gave way—

  Louis shouted, “Israel!” as the ceiling started to buckle.

  Israel let go, shoved Felker backward against the kegs. The bald man fell, flailing. The lone miner seized Israel by the shoulders, pulling him away.

  “The ceiling’s coming down!”

  The patrons had started a wild trample for the street. Somewhere a bell began to clang. “Go on, Louis!” Israel yelled, shoving the boy out of danger as the miner leaped away too. Israel stumbled against a rickety table that collapsed beneath him, tumbling him to the dirt floor—

  A third of the canvas ceiling ripped and fell, enveloping Felker. He shrieked and disappeared in roaring flames. Lying on his belly, Israel screamed too when scorching canvas struck the backs of his outstretched legs—

  “Burned that white man to death!”

  “—own damn fault—”

  “Get moving, get moving!”

  The distant bell grew louder. Sobbing, Israel dug in his elbows, dragged himself out from under the canvas. His trousers smoldered, caught fire. He rolled over, thrashing the backs of his legs in the dirt. Overhead, another section of canvas tore loose—

  “Boy, help me!”

  That was the lone miner. Israel felt hands at his collar, vainly tried to focus his eyes. All he saw were leaping tatters of flame and, deep in the center, a charred, crawling thing that bleated like an animal as it died, Felker—

  Hands hauled him along. His head banged against the ground. The ceiling glowed red-orange. He wondered whether he was going to hell for murder—

  The flames disappeared in total darkness.

  v

  When Israel regained consciousness, he was lying in the mud of Portsmouth Square. He was dimly aware of people milling against a backdrop of glaring light. He heard loud crashes as the fire swallowed frame and canvas structures near the Exchange.

  Bit by bit, his awareness returned—bringing pain that consumed him from his thighs downward. He writhed, groaning.

  “Lift his legs, lift his legs! Where’s that damn lard they sent for?”

  He thought that voice belonged to the miner who had pulled him out of the blazing tent. He felt hands on his brow, then a cheek pressed to his forehead.

  “You’ll be all right, Israel. We’ll get you fixed up—”

  The words grew incoherent as Louis broke down and cried.

  “Stand back! Here come the pumpers!”

  If he hadn’t been in such agony, Israel might have laughed. San Francisco’s fire equipment was worthy of nothing but laughter, and no one had taken steps to remedy the situation, even though people were extremely conscious of the hazard posed by the town’s shoddy buildings. He thought he saw spokes blurring as men dragged one of the hand-driven pumpers toward the conflagration. Was it the antique from Hawaii, or the old wreck from the east that President Van Buren had once used to water his garden? Odd, Israel thought, odd how your mind works when you’re hurt bad—

  “I think we got him out soon enough,” the lone miner said, sounding far away. “I hope so. Let’s turn him—”

  Israel screamed when men rolled him over, tore away the remains of his trousers and began to smear lard on his calves.

  “Ma, Ma—this way!”

  That was Louis. With a great effort, Israel lifted his chin from the dirt. Sure enough, elbowing and pushing, there was Amanda—

  Oh God, he thought, she’s getting mud all over that pretty yellow dress.

  Unconcerned, she hiked up her skirt and dropped to her knees beside him. Through his pain, he felt an almost overpowering happiness. She didn’t care about her fancy dress. She cared about him. Maybe he’d been too hard on her—

  He started to cry, just like Louis. Even the agony of hands patting lard on his legs didn’t bother him now—

  Somewhere out of his field of vision, the lone miner asked, “Ma’am, does this man belong to you?”

  “No—that is—he works for me—dear God, Israel, what happened?” She stroked the side of his face. He felt the roughness of that old, worn bracelet of rope. “Louis—someone—tell me what happened!”

  A half dozen voices babbled at once. To Israel, the men around him were no more than fire-etched silhouettes. But Amanda’s face was visible. He saw her flame-lit eyes widen when the miner grabbed her arm.

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? Let go of—”

  “Where’d you get this piece of rope, woman?”

  “Damn you, let go!” She started to punch the miner.

  “Where did you get it? What’s your name?”

  Curious, Israel thought, his pain so intense that it actually numbed and soothed him and sent him drifting back toward sleep. Most curious, the way Amanda Was staring into the dark where the miner must have been standing. Her face had the strangest expression—

  “My name’s Amanda Kent. I don’t see why you—”

  “Amanda—”

  Very strange, how that miner sounded as if he were about to weep too.

  “I’m Jared. Jared Kent—”

  Israel heard no more.

  Chapter IV

  To See the Elephant

  i

  JARED ADAM KENT COULDN’T remember when he’d celebrated a more remarkable and joyous Christmas day.

  He didn’t feel the least bit tired. His occasionally crippling rheumatism—a legacy from the years of trapping with Weatherby in the cold streams of the beaver country—hardly bothered him at all.

  He should have been exhausted. He was already weary when he reached San Francisco after the long ride from the mining camp called Hopeful located all the way up on the east branch of the north fork of the Feather River. He hadn’t slept a single minute since glancing up outside the burning saloon and seeing a woman whose face stirred a memory—a woman whose wrist, circled by a worn bit of rope, brought a miracle he’d never dreamed he’d witness.

  In the first hour after Amanda’s mulatto had been dragged from the flames, Jared barely said half a dozen coherent words to his cousin. They’d wept and hugged each other for a couple of minutes, but things were too frantic for much more than that.

  Amanda saw to Israel’s removal to his shanty behind the restaurant she owned. Then she summoned a doctor. The sleepy physician dressed and bandaged the Negro’s burned legs. He dosed the groaning man with brandy, assuring Amanda that although Israel would suffer pain for a few weeks, as well as the unpleasantness of skin sloughing away, in his professional opinion Israel would eventually be good as new.

  With that problem attended to, Jared and his cousin spent three quarters of an hour surveying the damage done by the fire. It had leveled several blocks surrounding the Exchange before being brought under control. Booming gamb
ling houses such as the Verandah and McCabe’s El Dorado had disappeared into smoldering ashes. Had the wind been blowing in a different direction, Kent’s would very likely have burned too.

  Amanda introduced Jared to a man named Sam Brannan who apparently owned a good deal of real estate in the town. Brannan predicted San Francisco could expect many more fires in view of the building boom and the flimsy nature of most of the construction. He suggested that volunteer fire companies be organized, and better pumping equipment secured. Amanda pledged financial support of such a program. But Jared somehow had the feeling her heart wasn’t in the promise.

  Finally, toward midnight, they returned to her place, to begin building a bridge of words across the years since 1814. They talked all through the night.

  Now it was Christmas morning. Jared was relaxing in a chair by a back room window, with Amanda’s handsome, swarthy young son curled up at his feet.

  Jared wiggled his nose. “Smells mighty good, Amanda. My, you’ve come a far piece in the world. I’ve never met anybody else who had a French cook.”

  Because of all the excitement, Amanda hadn’t bothered to change her mud-spotted yellow gown. She was seated on the piano bench, hands in her lap, and he had to admit she’d amply fulfilled the promise of beauty she’d shown as a child. She was slender but full-bosomed. Her dark eyes were as lively as ever. And the gray in her hair seemed to enhance her beauty, not detract from it.

  Jared’s mind could hardly hold all that she’d told him in the breathless bursts of conversation before dawn. Her life with the Teton Sioux. Her marriage to a Spanish trapper. Her difficult experience in Texas. The Mexican officer, Cordoba—and Louis’ birth. Then her migration to California, and now sudden prosperity brought on by the discovery of gold—

  Still, all night long, he’d sensed she was holding something back. At those times, her eyes had a hard glint difficult to reconcile with the sight of the happy, self-assured woman seated opposite him, or the memory of the young girl he’d last seen at Stone’s River in Tennessee—

  “Felix is a jewel,” she said. “He came from Paris. He keeps talking about going to the gold fields, but I make it worth his while to stay here. He’s cooking something special for dinner. Eggs and oysters. It’s quite delicious, the way he spices it. Oh, Jared”—laughing, she hugged her knees—“this still seems like a dream.”

  “If it is, I hope we don’t wake up before we eat. I’m damn near starved to death.”

  “We’ll sit down the minute Billy finishes nailing boards across the broken window.”

  From Jared’s feet, Louis asked, “Could we sing a Christmas carol first, Ma?”

  “Why, yes. Though with Bart gone, we’ve no one to play.”

  “Who’s this Bart fellow?” Jared asked.

  Louis glanced questioningly at his mother. From the front of the building, the steady beat of Billy Beadle’s hammer thudded. At six in the morning, Amanda had taken what Louis said was a most unusual step. She’d ordered the burly Australian to hang out a sign announcing that Kent’s would be closed the entire day.

  Still smiling, Amanda told her cousin, “His full name’s Barton McGill. He works for a New York ship line. Captains one of their cuppers. I guess you could call him my gentleman friend—”

  “He’s from Charleston,” Louis put in. “We don’t get to see him often.”

  “Well”—Jared stretched luxuriously, then leaned back in the chair; the mellow December sun highlighted the few strands of yellow still visible in his white hair—“I’d be happy to have him here to share this wonderful day. I wish my son were here too.”

  “A Methodist minister.” Amanda shook her head. “I can hardly believe it.”

  Jared’s expression was tinged with sadness for a moment. “I couldn’t either when he first broached the idea after his conversations with Reverend Lee. Then I got to thinking. There’s a peculiar streak on my side of the family. Rebellious. The Fletcher blood, your mother used to call it. I expect Jephtha inherited it from me. So it was probably natural for him to strike off in some unexpected direction.”

  “Where is your son, sir?” Louis had missed all of the night’s conversation.

  “In Lexington, a little place in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He and his wife, Fan, have had four children so far. Three have survived. All boys.” He ticked them on his fingers. “Gideon was born in forty-three, Matthew a year later. Annabelle lived only two weeks in forty-five. Jeremiah came along fourteen months after that.”

  “Is Jephtha happy in Virginia?” Amanda asked.

  Jared frowned. “If I read his letters correctly, no. His last one came on a packet just before I left Oregon. Gloomier than ever. It’s the chattel slavery question that upsets him. He’s loyal to his wife and her people—they’re southerners. And when the Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery five years ago, he stayed with the southern faction. But what he sees of the system torments his conscience. Of late, unbearably.”

  “Well, we’re a long way from those problems out here,” Amanda said. “Though one of these days, I expect I’ll be right in the middle of them.” She gazed at her cousin. “Eventually I’m going back east.”

  Jared noticed the way young Louis began to fool with the loose sole of one of his boots. The boy was frowning. Amanda went on.

  “I want to see our old home. That’s one of the reasons I’m working so hard to make money.”

  Jared flexed his fingers, examined his swollen knuckle joints. The hard glint had returned to her eyes. It bothered him.

  “You didn’t mention that last night—” he began.

  She shrugged, gazing past him to the sunlit window.

  “It’s something I decided a couple of years ago—” Her stem look softened. “We can discuss it after dinner.”

  Louis tried to redirect the conversation to a more agreeable topic. “Was your wife really an Indian, cousin Jared?”

  “A Shoshoni.” He nodded. “A fine woman. She was called Grass Singing.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “I wish I’d been able to make a pretty life for her”—he cut off the thought, much as he’d cut off an earlier frustration by leaving the failing farm in the Willamette Valley in the late summer of ’48—“but all in all”—he spoke for his cousin’s benefit now—“I have very few regrets. I sired a son to keep the Kent name alive—without ever imagining you’d be doing the same, Amanda. For a long time, I made enough money to five just the way I wanted. I loved the fur trade until my partner, Elijah Weatherby, died. His passing took some of the joy out of it—maybe because it made me realize I was getting old. Then business dropped off. I thought raising wheat in Oregon might be a good thing to try. I was wrong there. Like my father, I wasn’t cut out to be a farmer—”

  A sadness touched him. His imagination showed him dim pictures of the house on Beacon Street from which he’d fled after setting fire to the printing house and shooting the man who had helped Hamilton Stovall steal Kent’s. He could look back on all of that without anger. Once, he’d harbored hopes of revenge. But they had been burned out of him by distance, and time, and his gradual acceptance of the life he’d made for himself in a land he found beautiful—

  Aware of Louis and Amanda watching him, he resumed. “I sold the farm when Oregon got the news of the gold. I always did like seeing new sights, and Captain Sutter handed me a perfect opportunity. I tramped down the coast on foot and went straight to his fort. There, I heard about a strike in a new camp called Hopeful, so that’s where I headed. I’ve done pretty well, too. That is, the Ophir Mineralogical Combine’s done well—”

  Louis said, “Ophir what?”

  “Mineralogical Combine.” Jared grinned. “Fancy name for a pretty grimy operation. There are three of us in it. We each had adjoining claims along the stream. The first men on the site agreed no claim would be larger than a hundred square feet. By putting three together and building ourselves a cradle to speed up the processing of the dirt, we see mo
re color than we would if we worked alone. Color means the yellow color of the dust or flakes,” he added in an aside to Louis.

  Amanda inquired about Jared’s partners.

  “One’s an Englishman. He was a draper over in Liverpool. The other man’s a little Baptist storekeeper from Georgia. He came across the mountains with a wagon train. He’s the one who slapped on the splendiferous name. He said that in the Bible, in King Solomon’s time, Ophir was a land famous for apes, ivory, peacocks—and gold. We’re getting a fair amount of it, but we could get a lot more if we could hire decent help.”

  Louis raised his eyebrows. “You mean some of the men in the diggings don’t have claims?”

  “The ones that are too lazy. They’ll pick up a few dollars for day wages, then go on a weeklong tear. We’ve tried hiring a few Pikes. Every one of them’s proved to be worthless.”

  “What’s a Pike, sir?”

  “Originally it meant a fellow from Pike County, Missouri. Now the name sticks to anybody with small education and a big temper. If a man says he’s a Pike, you can be halfway certain he’s running from the law, too. There are a lot of men of that sort in the diggings. They even make up tunes about ’em—”

  Leaning back, he began to wave his hand to and fro, smiling at Louis as he croaked in an off-key way:

  Oh, what was your name in the States? Was it Thompson, or Johnson, or Bates?

  Louis clapped in delight. Amanda looked impatient.

  Did you murder your wife, And then run for your life? Say, what was your name in the States?

  “I’ll have to teach that one to Captain Bart—”

  Amanda interrupted. “How much gold are you mining, Jared?”

  “Lately it’s averaged out to near twenty-four, twenty-five hundred dollars a week—”

  He was startled by her look of intense concentration. “You could wind up a millionaire.”

  “Sure—in about thirty years.”

  “Thirty! I calculate nine or ten.”

  “You forgot my partners. It’s share and share alike.”

  “Yes, I did forget that.”