California Gold

by John Jakes

  “You mean that when I have money, I’ll be one of the takers?”

  The Indian replied with a grave nod. “You are a good man to help an old Indian beaten and cast aside. But even for you the answer is yes. It is the only way. It is California.”

  First Hellman and that lawyer tried to darken his dream, now this tragic old man, huddled in this shack with his bitter memories. Silently, with fervor and a little desperation, Mack swore he’d prove them wrong.

  In the morning he started off again, following the main line of the railway. Soon the scorching sun dried the countryside, and about midday, he saw through the heat haze a line of forty or fifty men working on the roadbed with picks, shovels, mauls, and tamps.

  Mack drank from the canteen, which by now contained just one tepid swallow, then slung it over his shoulder and approached the section gang. Most of the men were bare to the waist and sweating so hard their bodies looked oiled. The work gang included about a dozen Chinese, smaller and more wiry than the whites. He noticed that the two groups didn’t speak to each other.

  A collie ran up and down the roadbed, frisking and barking. A burly worker swung at it with his pick. “Get outa here, Ruff. O’Malley, control your damn dog or I’ll kill him.”

  Another worker whistled and yelled and the collie lay down in the shade of a flatcar on a spur track. The dog panted for a few seconds, then jumped up and ran off again.

  “Ruffo, ven aquí!” a man shouted. Mack looked in his direction. Dressed in a heavy black suit, the man was standing beside a mule-drawn wagon. The collie chased over to him and lapped at a pan of water he’d set out. Mack noticed now that the man had a clerical collar, which explained his unusual dress.

  The wagon was full of barrels, and Mack guessed they contained water. He walked toward the man, ignoring hostile stares from the track gang. “Buenos días, desconocido,” the priest said.

  “I don’t speak Spanish. Do I look like I should?”

  The priest folded his hands. “On the contrary. My assumption is that you’re a newcomer.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  With a disarming smile, the man replied, “Your nose. Your cheeks. Pink, and peeling away. Also, your clothes—well, forgive me, but they have a certain, ah, well-traveled look.”

  “You’re exactly right—about them, and me.”

  The priest nodded agreeably. “I addressed you in Spanish out of habit. It is my native language, and spoken widely in California. If you plan to stay here long—”

  “Permanently.”

  “Excelente. May I humbly suggest that a study of español would be courteous, and to your advantage?”

  Mack scrutinized the forthright priest. He was perhaps twenty-five, with a massive, square-looking head, a low forehead, and broad nose. His suit showed blacker patches where he’d sweated through. His wide dark eyes reminded Mack of the old Indian’s. Mack couldn’t decide whether the priest was Mexican, Indian, or mestizo—both.

  “It’s a hot day for traveling,” the priest went on. “You’re welcome to a drink.”

  “Thanks, I just ran out.” Mack gave a thump to the canteen hanging over his shoulder.

  The priest tapped the barrel nearest the wagon’s dropped tailgate and handed him the dipper. The water was hot, and after a careful sip, Mack emptied the rest on his head. The priest laughed.

  “Thanks very much,” Mack said. “I’m on my way to San Francisco.”

  “From where?”

  “Pennsylvania. My name’s Macklin Chance.”

  “Welcome to California, Mr. Chance. I’m Father Marquez. Diego Marquez. Unlike most of these good men sweating for the Southern Pacific, I was born in this state.”

  Mack started to hand back the dipper, then hesitated. “Wait, I thought this was the Central Pacific.”

  “Originally. Two years ago the owners formed a holding company to control their various assets. The name of the holding company is Southern Pacific, but now they’re calling the railway by that name also. The Big Four, those four outlaws, chartered their holding company in Kentucky because the railway laws are lax there. Almost any outrage against the public or the workingman is permitted.”

  “And you bring water out to these men?”

  “Someone must. The company doesn’t consider it their responsibility.” He whacked the dipper against the barrel, disgusted. The priest seemed to do everything with sharp, vigorous moves.

  “Seems like there isn’t a hell—a lot of water in California,” Mack observed.

  “There is if you search in the right place. Come share what little shade we have.” After he scratched the mule’s ears, Marquez peeled off his heavy coat, leaving only his collar and black dickey tied at his waist. He wore no shirt, and enormous tufts of hair were visible under his thick arms. He looked like a bull, Mack thought.

  Marquez hunkered down on the other side of the wagon, squinting across the simmering plain toward the hazy coast range. Up on the line, picks and tamps chunk-chunked, mauls rang on the heads of new spikes, men swore monotonously, and a stubby foreman wearing a side arm paraded, hectoring the workers.

  “Water is a fascinating California topic, you know,” Marquez said. “One reason is we always have too little because of the short rainy season in the winter. Another is that water’s potential benefits remain largely unappreciated. My first ancestor in California was a Castilian soldier. He marched from the Baja with the expedition of Portolá and Father Junípero Serra in 1769 and ’70, and left a diary that has come down in my family. My ancestor declared this whole place worthless for farming because of its aridity. Most of the original Indians thought the same. But it isn’t worthless. The friars, for all of their other limitations and crimes against freedom, knew that much. With their maize and barley, olives and wine grapes, they saw the miracles water can work in this soil. They taught that lesson to a few Californians who have remembered.”

  “But there still isn’t much water.”

  “Not here. But have you seen the high country of the Sierras? There, the melting snowpack creates waterfalls and in the spring turns ordinary streams into torrents.”

  “I wasn’t doing much sightseeing when I came through the mountains. There was a blizzard.”

  Marquez’s eyes flickered at the callow sarcasm. “I’ll tell you this, my young friend. If that water could somehow flow down to this great Central Valley, this earth would bloom like a garden.” His frown sculpted deep lines beside his nose, making him less benign—fierce, even. “But it would be a garden watered with the sweat and blood of those forced to toil for others—for starvation wages.”

  Without thinking, Mack shook his head, and Marquez reacted quickly. “What do you disagree with, my views about water or those about labor and capital?”

  “You took me wrong, Father. I don’t know enough to disagree with either one. I shook my head because…well, back east, among Irish miners, I saw priests all right. But none like you. Here you are, out in the wilderness alone, serving water like a slave…it’s kind of puzzling.”

  “Not at all. I’m from San Francisco, with a roving commission to minister to workingmen. Pope Leo the Thirteenth has been publishing numerous letters to address the concerns of workers around the world and encourage ministries like mine. He even suggests a limited approval of trade unions. The Holy Father does not go far enough, in my opinion, but then my opinions are those of a minority. A tiny minority,” he emphasized, smiling. “Tell me,” he said after pausing to look at Mack more closely, “why did you come all the way from Pennsylvania?”

  Mack didn’t want to be taken for greedy. After a moment’s thought about phrasing, he said, “To better myself.”

  “How? With wealth?”

  The challenge annoyed him. “Yes.”

  “Perfectly understandable. This state is blessed by wealth in many forms. Great natural beauty. Tillable land. Even this sunshine, which seems such a curse in the summer. It helps the real estate men sell building lots to shivering touri
sts. Still, many who search for wealth here never find it.” His brown eyes stayed on Mack’s. “And some who do are quickly corrupted if the search becomes obsessive.”

  All at once Mack didn’t like the young priest. He knew what he wanted and what he didn’t. He didn’t want anyone trying to be his conscience. He didn’t want the Hellmans, the old Indian, or some Catholic father with strange radical ideas throwing dirt on his dreams.

  He was thinking up a suitable reply when a long screaming whistle ripped from the east. Up on the line, the stumpy foreman dragged out a big silver watch. “There she is, there she is, stop everything,” he shouted.

  The men rushed to form a military line beside the track, hoisting tools to their shoulders as if they were rifles. The train sounded like an avalanche as it approached, churning up towering dust clouds. The whistle blew again and the bell rang. The noise agitated the collie, which raced back and forth yapping.

  “Who’s on that train, the President?” Mack asked Marquez.

  “You would think so. Anywhere on the line in California, men at work have orders to stand at attention when that train passes.” To show what he thought of this he spat on the ground between his dusty rope sandals.

  Tremors rose from the ground; Mack felt them in the bones of his legs. The collie jumped high in the air, barking. The train was less than half a mile away. It consisted of a single passenger car shimmering with varnish and gilt, a tender, and a Stevens 4-4-0 locomotive with a huge headlight box and balloon smokestack. Eighty-eight tons of wood-fired power, it was a black behemoth, whose passage shook the earth and whipped up a cyclonic cloud of dust and debris.

  Ever afterward, Mack saw a series of flashing images.

  A jackrabbit, hopping high on the other side of the track. The collie barking and dashing to chase it. The burly man, the one bothered before, angrily swinging his pick down as the dog passed by—a mean-tempered swipe that deeply gashed the dog’s flank. Mack heard the yelp above the rising roar. He flashed a look toward the looming train as the dog limped a couple of steps, then fell sideways against the near rail.

  “Ruff,” the dog’s owner shouted, already out of ranks and running toward the fallen animal.

  The foreman pulled and cocked his side arm. “Stand fast, O’Malley. You know the governor’s order.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Mack yelled, bolting forward, with the priest a step behind. The leviathan was almost on them, rumbling the earth and sucking up great clouds of dust. As O’Malley pulled the collie off the track, he somehow lost his footing and toppled backward. Mack’s warning shout went unheard; the cowcatcher struck O’Malley and tossed him into the air in front of the onrushing engine. It sliced his head off, hurled his body aside, and flung a great fan of blood along the trackside. Mack caught a flash of large gilt letters on the side of the engine—EL GOBERNADOR—and a similar decoration on the tender—S.P.R.R. A lacquered coach hurtled by, all windows empty save one. There, an obese man with a chin beard raised a hand to acknowledge the workers at attention. As suddenly as it came, the special train was gone, leaving a settling rush of torrid air.

  Mack rocked back on his heels, bug-eyed. It had all happened so fast that he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. But the face of the passenger was already seared into his memory, and the red heap on the gravel shoulder was certainly real. It came to him that his face was wet. He rubbed it and stared at his fingers: red. There was also red stippling the faces of the three other men nearest O’Malley. The collie kept whining, trying to rise but unable to.

  A worker advanced cautiously to the body. “Jesus, where’s his—?” He choked, fell to his knees, and vomited uncontrollably.

  Marquez walked up onto the track and eyed the disappearing train, his dark face almost purple. “God curse them—the poor man never even had a chance for last rites.” He noticed Mack and threw a bandanna to him. “Wipe off that blood.”

  Mack scrubbed and scrubbed, feeling he’d never get clean. “Who was that fat bastard?” In the silence, the collie’s whine was much louder.

  “Governor Leland Stanford. One of the four who built this railroad.”

  “The damn engineer must have seen that man next to the track.”

  “Surely. But he was going too fast to stop even if he wanted to.”

  “Stanford must have seen the blood flying.”

  “I doubt it, but what if he did? What’s it to him if some day laborer loses his life? When he and his partners pushed this railroad through the Sierras, it happened hundreds of times. One more thing: That train never stops—not for anything or anyone.” Marquez glanced past Mack’s shoulder and covered his mouth a moment. “Do you have the stomach to help me with the body?”

  “You going to bury it?”

  “No, there’s a town about five miles from here. I’ll take the remains there and try to locate relatives. I must do it soon, or what’s left of him will rot in this heat.”

  “All right, I’m ready,” Mack said with a gargantuan swallow and a prayer that his guts wouldn’t come heaving up.

  They unloaded the water barrels and laid O’Malley’s remains in the wagon under a tarpaulin. Twice Mack almost vomited because of the blood, the buzzing flies, and the smell. Somehow he and the priest got through it, with the white-faced foreman offering feebly to help at one point. Marquez gave him a withering look and the foreman slunk off to goad his disheartened men back to work. On its feet, the collie whined, limping badly.

  The slow-moving wagon started toward a crossroads about half a mile south of the right-of-way. Mack walked along beside it. “Tell me about Stanford and his partners, Father.”

  “As I said, their construction work in the mountains took the lives of hundreds. If ten died, they hired ten more; human beings were like parts of a machine, replaced without a second thought. Does that make them killers? I don’t know. I do know they are men like no others. In this state they are gods. And they didn’t build their line as a sweet, altruistic gesture. They were little shopkeepers in Sacramento when they hired poor Theodore Judah, who was a fine, visionary railway engineer. They didn’t care about Judah’s beautiful patriotic dreams of a country united by steel rails; they merely wanted to control the freight traffic to the Nevada mines. Judah exhausted himself before the scheme was even well started—he, too, died in their behalf. In the course of their magnificent undertaking, for which they took enormous moral credit, the four of them acquired huge land holdings, and repeatedly tricked and cheated the United States and California governments. At the same time, each of the four amassed one of the greatest personal fortunes on the planet. Does that make them criminals, or merely successful businessmen?”

  Marquez shook the reins, turned the wagon left into the crossroads, and there reined the mule for a moment. “I know my answer. One day, those four will be found guilty at the bar of history. I am impatient for it. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you something a prudent man should keep in mind while in California. There is some doubt as to who wields more power here, Almighty God or the railroad.”

  Mack stared up at the priest’s sunlit face. Only the takers…and those they take from. He had to keep hoping that wasn’t really how it was. He had to keep hoping the gold wasn’t the kind his pa found—pyrites, fool’s gold.

  He raised his hand. “Father Marquez, you’ve been kind.”

  The priest’s handshake was vigorous and strong. “I hope you find what you are looking for, Señor Chance, and that when you do, it will not disappoint you. Thank you for your assistance back there. I won’t forget. Go with God.”

  He clucked to the mule and the wagon creaked off in a dust cloud. As Mack watched, he heard barking. O’Malley’s dog was limping along the dusty road in pursuit of the wagon. The collie fell but got up and kept coming.

  Mack whistled to Marquez. The priest turned, saw the dog, and slowed the wagon to a crawl. With a brief smile and a wave, Mack turned west on the crossroad.

  6

  A WEEK LATER MACK stood on the mole at Oaklan
d.

  It was shortly past noon on a brilliant, cool day. He flung his arms out and his head back and laughed, heedless of the properly dressed passengers hurrying down the wharf in back of him.

  God, he was here. Finally here. He smelled the sea, sweetly perfumed by salt and fish. Little bright sails of pleasure craft brightened the Bay, and a stiff Pacific breeze put curls of white on the water.

  And there it was on the other side, rising in patterns of light and shade on the steep hills: a city of substantial commercial buildings and pastel-and-white residences, pretty as decorations on a cake. On his right, the Bay swept around the land and kissed the sea. In the channel a rusty old steamer equipped with side-wheels as well as masts plowed outward between scurrying fishing boats. That part of the peninsula revealed golden hilltops with a few trees, open spaces not yet heavily built upon.

  He lowered his arms, but the intoxication remained. He had no job, no money, and no prospects for either. But he had hope, boundless hope, on this sunny afternoon by the Bay. It banished the doubts and bad memories that had piled up on his journey.

  Farther down the two-mile-long wharf, a steam whistle announced the departure of the next Southern Pacific ferry boat, a white floating castle crowded with gentlemen in suits and cravats, ladies with parasols, and a number of shabby poor people who kept to themselves.

  Mack strolled down toward a white booth. People eager to catch the boat rushed by, careful not to touch him, for his beard was very long, and he’d last bathed on Wednesday, coming over the coastal hills that were losing their emerald color as summer drew near.