by John Jakes
“They’re a rough bunch, Father,” another printer said. “No need for a godly man to mix it up with the likes of them.”
“But there is every need,” Marquez said. “Are you manning a picket line?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to see it.”
Three pickets walked wearily back and forth outside the Times office on the northeast corner of First and Fort streets. It was a substantial building of brick and granite, dominated by a three-story turret at the corner. A bronze eagle with spread wings stood guard atop the turret, and a bronze plaque proclaimed the credo of the proprietor.
STAND FAST. STAND FIRM.
STAND SURE. STAND TRUE.
Mack tied up the wagon horse while Marquez introduced himself to the pickets. Presses grumbled inside the building, shaking the sidewalk. A guard on a stool in the gaslit foyer glowered at the new arrivals.
Marquez laughed at something a picket said, then walked to the doorway. The guard stepped up to bar the priest with his arm.
“What do you want?”
“I want to speak to the men in your pressroom.”
“No unauthorized visitors permitted. Orders of the colonel.”
“Then get the colonel down here so I can speak to him.” The guard didn’t move. “Summon him. I insist.”
The guard slammed and latched the door. A few moments later, Otis marched out, garters on his sleeves, ink on his thumb, lightning in his eye. Three hulking pressmen in stained aprons followed, though they stayed in the foyer, eyeing the pickets. Otis drew up at attention in front of Marquez.
“Who are you, sir?”
“Father Diego Marquez of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.”
“Here in what official capacity?” Otis sounded like a sergeant hectoring a private.
“None. I come as an individual, the messenger of my own conscience. I want to speak to your new printers.”
“Why?”
Marquez stood up to the hostile stare, the intimidating tone. “To tell them what they’re doing is wrong. They’re abetting an unjust cause.”
“Ah, so that’s it. That’s what you are—some communist. Well, sir, you may mount your filmy attacks in San Francisco and suffer no opposition—that town is a moral sinkhole, a nest of radical Democrats. But try it here and every decent citizen will mobilize against you. Stand away from my door.”
Marquez drew a breath. He looked strong as a great rock, braced there on his short heavy legs. “I will not be moved. I intend to go in.”
“Men!” Otis shouted, swinging an invisible saber, and the hulks in the foyer jumped out to the sidewalk. Marquez turned sideways and tried to slip between two of them. Mack yelled a warning, too late; one man pounded a fist in the priest’s gut, doubling him over and sending him to his knees.
Otis kept shouting oaths and incoherent orders, and another pressman ran over to kick Marquez from behind. Mack threw himself on the man’s neck and dragged him around. Astonished, the man put up his fists to defend himself. Mack feinted, drew the man off balance, then slipped past his guard with a left-right combination taught him by Corbett. The man’s eyes crossed, then he leaned over the gutter, cupping the blood spurting from his nose.
The pickets swarmed around Mack and Marquez to protect them. Mack shot his hand out to the priest and Marquez clasped it and hoisted himself up.
“Had enough?” Otis roared.
Marquez said, “No, I’ll be back, walking this line.”
“At your peril, sir. At your peril. Men, if any of them attempt to breach our defenses and invade the building, retaliate with force.” He pointed at Marquez. “I’ve memorized your face. Foment anarchy in Los Angeles and we’ll muster the entire town against you. You’ll be jailed, maimed, or worse—and that papist collar won’t protect you.”
“We’ll peel your brown greaser hide and hang it out to dry,” one of the pressmen added. He leaned over and blew spit in Marquez’s face.
Marquez’s fists flew up, but he fought them down and with visible effort contained his fury. The pressman laughed and went inside.
The priest turned and squeezed Mack’s arm. “Thank you for pulling that man off. Bravely done.”
The pickets decided to abandon their vigil for the night. “I’ll be back here standing with you the day after tomorrow,” the priest promised them as they crowded into the wagon.
“That would be Christmas Eve, Father.”
“What day more fitting? Our blessed Lord was Himself a just and militant man. Often at odds with entrenched powers. We’ll carry on in that spirit on His birthday.”
Someone else said, “It’s a damn disgusting mess. Here’s that Otis, a card-carrying union typographer and printer ever since he was a boy in Marietta, Ohio—and he locks us out, and pits thugs against us. Why does a man do that?”
“Money,” Marquez replied. “The alchemy of money and property. It debases the gold of character. It destroys all but the strongest.”
In the back room of the local, Mack and the priest talked until after midnight. Marquez carried three well-thumbed books in his valise: a Douay Bible, Marx’s Capital, and a work called Progress and Poverty by Henry George.
“George was an editor on the Oakland Transcript. One day, in the hills, he had a vision, something like St. Paul’s on the Damascus road. It came to him that the principal cause of the gulf between rich and poor in California, indeed everywhere, is land monopoly. The person who works the land pays a high physical and financial price for mere survival. The person who owns the land amasses wealth without labor—at the expense of others. To redress that, George proposed a single tax on what he calls the unearned increment—the wealth created by rents, and the inevitable increase in land value.”
“I don’t like that idea very much,” Mack said. “I own an interest in some land, and I work hard at the same time.”
“Then perhaps you’re an exception. Whether you will be all your life…time alone will answer that.”
“I wouldn’t want some radical taxing me—”
“Don’t talk like Otis. And don’t condemn what you don’t understand. Read the book. It appeared in ’79 and it has never been out of print. George is in the East now. He has many followers.”
Mack fixed the title in his mind, said good-night, and rolled up in a blanket. As he drifted off, the priest was still sitting in the corner, studying his Bible by the light of a candle.
Early next morning, the two men drove toward the Pacific under a clearing sky. They crossed the new Santa Fe branch line to Redondo. As the wind freshened and the temperature soared, both shed their coats.
“I’ve brought some simple provisions, and two bottles from Buena Vista,” Marquez said. “Haraszthy’s own vineyard. We’ll celebrate the Christmas season like the outcasts we are.” He was jocular about it.
The two talked easily, acquaintance beginning to edge toward friendship. Mack described his enforced departure from San Francisco and his misadventures in Los Angeles real estate. The priest brooded aloud on his cause, and the increasing problems it created for him within the Church.
“Ah, well. So be it,” he concluded. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else but standing beside my brothers in Los Angeles.”
“The printers were right—things could get ugly there,” Mack said. “Otis thinks the open shop will attract a lot of new business and be the making of the city.”
“And never mind that workingmen must starve to build his metropolis.” They reached a crossroads. Marquez signaled the way: the coast road, south.
Dead or dying real estate developments rolled by one by one. LA BALLONA CREEK ESTATES: HOMES ON THE PROUD NEW HARBOR OF THE SOUTH! They crossed a bridge over a flowing tidal creek and Mack pointed seaward. “They dredged out there, serious about developing a harbor to replace Wilmington. The plans were good, but they failed anyway.”
They passed through Walteria, where two Chinese men were chopping up signs advertising a sacrifice property auction. They rode along t
he perimeter of the abandoned New Market Tract. They cut a corner of an apple orchard planted with five thousand young trees for settlers who would never pluck their fruit or savor their shade.
Late in the morning they passed a white boundary stone with a Spanish inscription. Mack heard the Pacific surf beyond thickets of palms and sea grape on his right. The late-season santan had blown out, replaced by an invigorating sea wind. Soon the wagon bumped southwest on a peninsula, and started over a series of low hills. When they surmounted the last, Mack reined up, awed by the breathtaking view.
The peninsula jutted into the Pacific, where a million needles of light bobbed on the blue water. Scattered about the peninsula, half hidden among the scrubs, Mack saw tiny wooden cottages. Squatters—perhaps fishermen. The end of the peninsula was dominated by a large adobe ranch house on a rise of ground that gave a commanding view of the land side as well as the sea.
“There it is,” the priest said. “Rancho de los Palos Verdes del Pacífico.” His dark callused hand swept in an arc, right to left, more than 180 degrees. “You see before you and around you the land of the Marquez family of Spain and Mexico. We have been passing through other sections for almost an hour.”
“How much of this peninsula did you own, Diego?”
Memory haunted the priest’s eyes.
“All of it.”
The rambling ranch house of gray adobe, unpainted oak, and redwood was an enormous U, two stories high. The arms of the U pointed inland and a veranda ran around the entire house on both floors.
Marquez showed Mack through. There were twenty-eight rooms, this one equipped with six clay ovens for baking, that one filled with silent looms that had once woven blankets and carpets, another for cellaring hundreds of bottles of wine, several for general storage, and the remainder living quarters for a large family. In most of the rooms, spiders spun in the ceiling corners and rodent droppings littered the hard-packed earth floor. The spartan kitchen, the parlor, and one bedroom with three commodious beds were less dusty.
“This was a self-contained world,” Marquez explained as they walked. “You get some hint of that from the extent of the house. There were many other outbuildings, however. Stables and barns, sheep-shearing pens, a tannery and rendering plant, an underground cave for storing ice from the mountains. At one time, before the Anglo revolution, the adobe supported ten thousand longhorns, three thousand sheep, and a herd of one thousand blooded horses. New England ships put in along the coast, and we did a brisk trade in tallow and hides—California bank notes, they were called in those days. To the east, in the fields, we raised corn, beans, peas, lentils—everything the adobe required. The well in the quadrangle brimmed with sweet water. Now it’s cloudy and stinks of salt.”
A short distance from the adobe, Marquez rigged a snare. Within an hour a fat jackrabbit hung upside down by his rear leg. Marquez killed and slaughtered the rabbit without apology, then set Mack to work at the chopping block, dicing onions and yellow peppers from his provision bag.
While the sun set on the Pacific, the two men sat in sturdy wooden chairs on the second-floor veranda, resting their heels on the rail as the unseen surf below the bluff boomed rhythmically. Marquez uncorked the first bottle of Buena Vista white. The wine was warm, but crisp and delicious.
The priest rolled the barrel-shaped glass between his palms. His eye roved to the red horizon, where a steam packet churned north against the half-circle of the sun.
“My grandfather entertained the young sailor from Harvard Richard Henry Dana on this porch. My father died at this house. When the Anglos and their courts and judges stole our land, something twisted in his head.”
“A friend in San Francisco told me the story.”
“That he became an outlaw? Terrorized the southern counties for six years, killing gringos?”
“Yes.”
Bloody light tinted Marquez’s face. “They cornered him here. The house was built on this rise of ground so that strangers riding up the road were completely visible. They cleared trees and brush from the roadside for that reason. My father saw the posse coming and put his silver pistols away after he counted forty riders. He went into the courtyard bareheaded, unarmed, to face them. He stood shouting at them as they rode up. He said this was our family’s home—our family’s land—he would never surrender it…”
Marquez’s voice fell so low, Mack almost couldn’t hear it above the surf.
“They counted sixty-one bullets in his body before they buried him.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“At first I was in my room. I was ordered to hide, but I crept out. I saw the Anglos wheel their horses around him. I saw them shoot. They laughed; they were enjoying themselves. I saw my father fall, while the bullets kept striking. His body leaped and twitched on the ground…” He swallowed. “I saw everything.”
A great condor wheeled and swooped out of sight below the bluff. Mack was so moved by the emotion in the priest’s voice he couldn’t speak.
Marquez sat with the untasted glass tight between his palms, watching the steamer diminish and disappear. The sun was down and the water flashed with sulfurous reflections from the clouds.
“There is so much cruelty in the world. So much injustice. I have faith that the ways of our Lord Jesus Christ are the right ways. And yet—sometimes—often—they do not prevail. At such times, to my shame, my wrath rises up to defeat my reason, and my faith wavers. I waver—”
His voice broke. Mack saw the tracks of tears on the priest’s broad dark cheeks. Marquez sensed the scrutiny, turned his head away, and quickly drank his wine.
Marquez opened the kitchen shutters. They squeaked and creaked and one rusty cast-iron hinge tore out of the adobe. He gazed sadly at the shutter a moment, then let it hang.
Dusk gave way to night. The air was mild, the sound of the Pacific soothing. The second bottle of white wine stood between them on the hand-hewn plank table. Marquez was more relaxed now, the sharp edges of memory dulled by the wine.
“Delicious,” Mack said. He forked up some of the rabbit the priest had stewed with the onions and peppers, some flour, and seasonings. “I have a friend in San Francisco, a news reporter, who wouldn’t approve of me enjoying this. She hates the slaughter of animals.”
Marquez wasn’t offended. “I learned to hunt before I learned to read.”
Mack brought up the priest’s favorite subject again, the labor situation in California. Marquez said, “It isn’t ideal, not even in San Francisco, a town people think of as a workingman’s bastion. The truth is, class strife has split San Francisco for decades.”
He spoke of a Jim D’Arcy and his followers, called Sandlotters because they held rallies in vacant lots. He mentioned Denis Kearney of the Workingmen’s party. “Both of them purported to speak for the laboring man, but both were bigots, and their organizations protectionist. They wanted jobs secured at the expense of those they considered beneath them. Kearney’s slogan minced no words: ‘The Chinese Must Go.’ Despicable,” he said with a shake of his head. “But perhaps I expect too much of people. Perhaps that’s why I’m so uncertain about my course. What it is, what it should be…”
He sighed and poured wine. “What of you, my friend? Are you still certain of your direction? To better yourself with wealth—wasn’t that how you put it when we met?”
“Absolutely. I want some of that money and property that ‘debases the gold of character’—isn’t that how you put it?” He saw Marquez smile. “In fact I want a lot of it,” he went on. “When I have it, I won’t be stingy with it. I grew up poor. I remember what it’s like.”
“Laudable,” Marquez murmured; “if somewhat unrealistic.”
“You don’t believe a man can be rich and decent too?”
“If you are, you will be one of the rare ones, Mack. One of the very rare ones.”
His eyes said he really didn’t think it possible.
Mack slept that night in one of the three beds, in a cor
ner. On one wall above him hung a pair of huge Mexican spurs, handmade of silver, with sharply pointed rowels and silver conchas decorating the old faded leather. From a niche in the other wall, a Madonna with gentle hand upraised beheld the room. A nice pair of symbols of the priest, Mack thought.
In the morning Marquez repaired the shutter and they drove back to Los Angeles. It scarcely seemed like Christmas Eve, with the temperature so warm and the wind picking up again, fierce and gritty from the mountains.
Mack squinted into the blowing dust that revealed and then hid Los Angeles on the plain. “I thought we were through with the santan.”
“But nature is never through with us. Perhaps it won’t last long. It certainly isn’t usual this time of year. One would say it’s a bad omen—if one were a native, given to traditional superstitions.”
Marquez was smiling as he poked fun at his own background. Mack smiled too. He liked the priest, except for his tendency to establish himself as a conscience for others.
“Thank you for accompanying me,” Marquez said when they neared town. “I need to check on the property occasionally. You made the trip less onerous.”
“Thanks for that excellent dinner. Even if you did kill a rabbit.”
“I am nothing if not a Californian. Merry Christmas, my friend.”
“Merry Christmas, Father Diego.”
The santan howled. The men leaned forward on the seat, trying to protect their faces from the worst of it. The air filled with debris and dust, dark as some evil twilight.
That same afternoon, Wyatt woke on the floor of the office, and retched at the smell. Suddenly it came back, all of the wine drunk up the previous night…and then falling, rubber-legged, face-first, into his own vomit.
The runty owner of the Newhall mercantile store had started him on this latest binge, riding out late yesterday with a deputy and insisting that the San Solaro account be cleared up. It was several months in arrears. Wyatt had smothered the visitors with charm, but it hadn’t worked. The storekeeper said he would file a lien. Bastard.