Then Duff got the idea that Colton was speaking about this very assembly, the people in this amusement hall. Duff thought he had been lured into this Court of Death, where he would be sentenced and punished. He started to pray. Christ with me, Christ before me… Perspiration dampened his whole face and neck. Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me… His scar stung. Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit… He had the strong urge to stand and turn and peer into the audience to see if a shadowy hooded figure was sitting there among the people. But he could not bring himself to look, and stared at his lap and continued to pray—Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me—until out of the corner of his eye he saw the hand of the man on his left rise up quickly to strike him in the face, and he grabbed the man’s right wrist, thrust the arm back against the villain’s chest, and held it there fast…until he realized the sound filling his ears was not some apocalyptic storm but the crowd around him clapping. The show was over. The poor man next to him had simply wanted to applaud.
“Forgive me, sir,” Duff said as the frightened fellow scrambled out of his seat and away. “I—I misunderstood.”
It was after five. He needed to stop at the hotel for his bags and make it to the dock by six, but the crowd ahead of him was shuffling slowly through the galleries toward the single exit. With shaky fingers he tore open the little envelope of Blue Mass and swallowed all six pills and prayed that he might soon be free, and saved. Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me, Salvation is of the Lord, Salvation is of the Christ…
BEN WAS TAKING in the sights of Little Africa, the colored neighborhood, still savoring the excellent luncheon he’d had in a charming, shady restaurant garden. Never before had he gnawed meat directly off the ribs of any animal, never had he tasted catsup or any other sauce so spicy and sweet. As he passed a Negro daguerreian’s gallery and the fine showroom of a Negro cabinetmaker and looked at the Negro men and women and children of various classes passing by him—and stared back at the children who stared—he wondered whether it was every hour or every day or every week that they thought themselves lucky to be here, where they could work and shop and sleep as they wished, and not there, across the river, barely a mile south, where their cousins were being bought and sold for some hundreds of dollars apiece.
As he finally walked back across Cincinnati’s Broadway—into Little Bavaria, as Skaggs had called the downtown, for all the German talk and German signs—he noticed a couple, a young man and woman arm in arm, five paces ahead of him. She was taller than her escort. Ben watched the man chuckle at something she said; watched her gesturing broadly with her left hand as she spoke; watched the coil of blond hair touch her neck as she walked; and then saw she was wearing that dress, the yellow silk she’d worn when he’d first seen her, in the dining room at the Astor House.
“Polly! Polly Lucking!”
Rushing forward, stopping only a foot away from her, he saw that the young blonde in a yellow dress was…wearing eyeglasses and speaking German.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, very sorry. Um…entschuldigen Sie bitte.”
AT SIX, AS the starting bell rang and the side-wheeler Liberty blew its whistle, playing one of the notes in the calliope song of boats announcing their arrivals and departures, the reconvened travelers stood on deck, looking back on the city that had agitated each of them in his own way.
Ben felt drained by his foolish encounter with the German couple. Even when he was not consciously thinking of Polly, she lurked in his thoughts, exquisite and unavailable and taunting. Now he tapped his foot in time to the song being played on a pair of fiddles and a flute down on the public landing. There was no singing, yet in his head he sang the familiar lyrics—I had a dream the other night, when everything was still,/I thought I saw Susanna dear, a-coming down the hill—and in his mind’s eye he saw Polly Lucking walking down a hill. What hill, where? The musicians finished—I come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee—and paused for only three beats before launching into their next, a quickstep march.
Through the wide-open office windows of the steamboat agents Irwin & Foster, the young clerk tallying the day’s sums could make out only intermittent bars of the music from the levee. But in his head he filled in every missing note, for he had written both songs himself.
Duff knew the music of the march but not the title. If he had—“Santa Anna’s Retreat from Buena Vista”—he might have lost his grip on sanity then and there. He was watching a scruffy preacher pace in front of his riverfront mission, next door to Irwin & Foster, hectoring and inviting passersby—particularly Duff, in Duff ’s fevered imagination—to come inside and find Jesus. From the boat he could hear only some of the words (“…cowardly, the faithless…for murderers… and all liars… lake that burns with fire… the second death…”), but those were enough.
As Skaggs surveyed the northern sky, he hummed along happily with “Santa Anna’s Retreat from Buena Vista.” He had heard it played by the Broadway marching bands the night of the New York war celebrations (and cattle stampede), and at the time had despised it on principle—even more so after learning that it was composed by the suddenly ubiquitous Stephen Foster, age twenty-one. But just now, here on the Ohio River at twilight, as sober as his own father, Skaggs liked the music despite himself. He decided to think of it simply as Buena Vista—“good view.” And just then in the darkening blue expanse over the city, one star caught his eye and he remembered its name.
“Say, Duff? One night last winter you told me that vega”—vee-ga, he pronounced it—“meant…what was it, in Spanish?”
“‘Fertile valley,’” Duff replied in a monotone. “Vay-ga.”
“Right, yes, fertile valley,” and Skaggs just stared into the sky, smiling, and said nothing more.
“What?” Ben finally asked.
Skaggs pointed up at the star—“Vega”—and then spread his arms wide to indicate the Ohio and its green banks. “Vega presiding over our great American vee-ga, or vay-ga. A splendid buena vista, don’t you two grumps agree?”
42
August 5, 1848
San Francisco
FOR THE MOMENT, but just for the moment, no one in the States—no one—had any idea of what had happened in California these last months. No one knew of the discovery in the millrace on the Coloma River, and no one knew of the resulting money fever that had infected the whole region. The news of gold—gold for the plucking, trails practically paved with gold—was still moving east over the plains and across Panama and around Cape Horn only as fast as a horse or the wind. Some of the tales were exaggerated—alas, no special blue grease applied to the soles of one’s boots for a day resulted in several dollars’ worth of accumulated dust and flakes. But the essential, unbelievable news was true: the hills and creeks and rivers a hundred miles east of San Francisco Bay were riddled with gold, countless thousands of tons of gold, any single tiny ounce of which was equal to a very good week’s wage. The giddiest, most fantastical part of America’s dream—that practically unspeakable yearning for instant fortune, easy prosperity, and not merely liberty but no regulation at all—had finally, suddenly come true here at the far end of America. What’s more, the weather was mild and the natives docile.
On the bright afternoon of the first Saturday in August, a gang of sailors off the clipper Curious from Chile and the Sandwich Islands, their legs still shaky from the sea, set foot on a dock at the place from which they had first sailed. The day they’d left, a mere four months before, the Curious had been the only three-masted vessel in the harbor. Now a grinning boy fishing from the pier told them why eight big ships lay at anchor in the bay, apparently abandoned, and why everyone—“honest to golly, everyone”—had left town since May and gone into the countryside with shovels and baskets and pans. The seamen thought the boy was playing a prank, but ten paces later an old Mexican woma
n swore that everything he’d said was true.
When their ship had cleared San Francisco Bay at the end of March, the town was a bustling port town with several hundred inhabitants. Now it was all but deserted. They had never seen such a thing. It was breathtaking, simultaneously frightening and funny. Lord…shit…hell… the sailors mumbled as they walked the dirt streets looking in windows and knocking on the doors of empty stores and unoccupied offices. Skedaddled…Christ…ain’t never… The blacksmith’s and groceries and stables were closed. The saloons were closed, as were the City Hotel and the Portsmouth Hotel and Ellis’s boardinghouse, where they had stayed. It’s like the Indians came and kidnapped all the men…It’s like a plague struck, wiped ’em out…
In Kearny Street, they found the second mate of the Curious staring at a hastily painted “To Let” advertisement. The notice was for two houses—one over in Market Street, a mere $25 for the year, and the other a “farmhouse in the gold region near Sutter’s,” for $375 per month. The ship’s mate, a Cornishman named Hardison, earned $375 in an entire year.
The evacuation was even more widespread than they could imagine. The whole of Upper California had become a vacuum, nearly all human energy suddenly and irresistibly concentrated into a few miles of the American River Valley, as if God or Satan had flipped an electromagnetic switch. From down in Monterey up to Bodega Bay and over to Sonoma, abattoirs and mills and farmhouses sat empty and silent, and livestock wandered loose through untended fields. Half the solders in northern California had walked away from their garrisons without leave and gone to the mines. During the last three palmy months, hundreds of sober and steady yeomen had abandoned their plows and hammers and routines and walked in a single direction, as if hypnotized.
In Washington Street in San Francisco, no sooner had several more awestruck similes been hazarded by the men of the Curious (Like if Jesus Christ his damn self showed up and walked on the American River…Like everybody went and got killed in the war) than they encountered a sailor some of them recognized—rather, a former sailor, not five days back from China and already provisioned for his own mining trip up to the Sierras. He told them the newest news, which had arrived in just the past few days by U.S. mail from the south. The war with the Mexicans was officially finished, a treaty signed. All of them there were now standing in good American dirt.
“Wait—by mail?” said the boatswain of the Curious, as if by challenging this puny and mundane surprise he might rein in the gargantuan one.
“What mail is that, fella?”
“Mm-hmm,” said the man, “since spring, army’s had a pair of riders running pouches between here and San Diego, back and forth every two weeks.” He snickered. “But that one last week, that’s the last of ’em, they say. ‘Suspended.’” He nodded, but the new arrivals appeared not to understand. “The gold,” he said, as if that word should explain everything.
And in California in the topsy-turvy summer of ’48, it did.
on the Ohio River
WHEN BEN AWOKE, he could just see his watch face by the dawn’s early light—five past five. When he walked out to the bow, he was surprised to find Duff sitting on the deck, his knees pulled up to his chest, staring straight ahead. He had torn his KEEP GOING WEST! handbill into tiny bits and collected them into a neat pile between his feet.
“Another early riser,” Ben said.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Duff said just loudly enough to be heard over the engines. “I didn’t sleep.” With a quick motion he scooped up the bits of paper and shoved them overboard. The breeze scattered them as they fluttered toward the water. “Some hours ago, we passed a steamer with its boiler blowed, some killed, it was still bellowing smoke, and an undertaker had already got there with his wagon, three in the morning selling coffins for five dollars. Just past Louisville, I saw a big mess of dead fish. Too many to count, maybe a hundred, maybe more. Big ones. Carp, I think.
“‘Cast the net over the right side of the boat and you will find something.’ So they cast it, and were not able to pull it in because of the number offish…So Simon Peter went over and dragged the net ashore full of one hundred fifty-three large fish.
“Some little critter, a muskrat or a mink, maybe, was holding on to a great big fish with both front paws, like it was his life raft. I hope he didn’t get scooped up in the paddle wheel, but I couldn’t see for sure what became of him. My cousin Flan nearly choked to death on a carp bone the same summer he drowned…”
Ben sat down next to him and listened as Duff went on like this, intermingling his chronicle of the night with Bible stories and memories of childhood. Once Ben realized he was not expected to make any reply, he observed the river traffic and the beginning of the day on both banks.
They passed a rowboat filled with five pale, nearly blue-skinned boys and girls dressed in tatters, the two oldest holding fishing poles over each side. Such a blue country, Ben thought: the faces of these poor children, Duff ’s pills, the tint of book pages and swill milk, the exceptionally bright blue skies. Presently they overtook a hundred-foot-long flatboat loaded with eight-foot-wide rolls of (bluish) paper…and then passed two others coming toward them, one heaped with hams and bales of buffalo robes and tobacco leaves, the other crowded with caged chickens. One of the boatmen from the chicken boat was floating in the river on its port side just upriver from the birds themselves, naked, gripping an iron bracket with one hand, soaping his furry face and shoulders with the other as he was dragged along. His long, thin, sudsy wake in the center of the river was making the notional border between Indiana and Kentucky fleetingly real.
“The flatboats look like arks, don’t they?” Duff said.
“I have never seen an ark, but I suppose they do.”
Their steamboat was closing in fast on another side-wheeler just as the river twisted sharply to the left and narrowed, forcing their captain to slow down until they were barely moving at all. For ten minutes Ben watched a pair of swineherds busily working on the shore. Using four of the countless stumps as posts and a hundred yards of rope as fencing, they had made a temporary pen for the little herd of hogs they had been driving to town. Another man arrived with a wagon, on which he had a press. One of the hogs had died, and they had butchered it there in the dirt by the river where it fell. The fifty pounds of fatty remains, still raw, had been shoveled into the machine. The two bigger men were pulling hard on the lever at the top of the press, turning dead hog into instant lard. If you stuck a wick in the center of that enormous cube, Ben wondered, how long would such a whopping American candle burn?
“And this little pig did not quite make it to market, did he?” It was Skaggs. “Good day, gents! A salutary peep for you, Mr. Knowles, eh, at our beautiful and sublime land?”
One of the swineherds was tossing bloody bones into the river.
“Hallo, Skaggs,” Duff volunteered. He sighed. “Hallo.”
“On this fine western morning, you’re not still blue, are you, Mr. Lucking?”
“This isn’t the West,” Duff said, springing to his feet. “The West is the Rocky Mountains, and Oregon. In the West, there’s next to no people.” As he stood, the right pocket of his coat swung pendulously and clanked against the railing. It was his Colt’s revolver.
Before long they were docking at Evansville. A steamboat in the next berth was loaded so heavily that the water was only inches from the lower deck. The top deck was filled with twenty identical new wagons, built narrow and long like the flatboats, but with both stern and bow canted inward. They were painted blue, with rear wheels much larger than the front. Over the bed of each one were a dozen tall bentwood hoops forming a kind of swooping archway. Ben would need to write Tryphena Knowles and tell her that one of the moments from her dream that final morning in Kent had come true: croquet wickets as big as garden sheds floating down a great American waterway.
“Conestoga wagons,” Duff said. “Those are going to the West.”
43
August 11, 1848
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br /> Chicago
THE CHICAGO POLICEMAN’S thick Glaswegian accent was making it rough for his visitor to understand him, and the young deputy sheriff was in turn struggling to make sense of the Frenchman’s English. In the new America, filling with foreigners, it was a typical encounter: two adults both slightly shouting at each other, smiling intently, eyebrows arched, as if conversing with a child or an idiot. Each time Gabriel Drumont and Allan Pinkerton managed to achieve a moment of mutual clarity, they were pleased. So far, it was understood by both that Mr. Samuel Prime had wired Pinkerton concerning his new arrangement with “a former Parisian gendarme and apprentice of the famous E. F. Vidocq” and that in addition to Miss Priscilla Christmas, Drumont was searching for his friend, a Mr. Knowles, who might be accompanying her.
“I have read Vidocq’s Memoirs,” Pinkerton said, “and admire it very much.”
“Yes. Also me.”
“He is…a hero.”
“Un héros, yes, also for me.”
“You are employed by his Office of Information?”
“What?”
“Vidocq’s detective agency? You? His bureau of rand-send-ya-ma?”
“Ah, le Bureau des Renseignements. Moi?” It was one thing to lie when necessary to ordinary people, people who mostly wished to be told lies and anyway had no knack for distinguishing truth from falsehood, but he worried that this intelligent American flic might have a sixth sense for detecting fibs. So Drumont would tell a careful version of the truth. “I now do not work with Monsieur Vidocq. He do not now…s’est retiré, he do not work with his bureau now. I do not see him in more from one year, not after his wife die. I am a détective privé, for myself all the time, like him, private detective.”
Heyday: A Novel Page 48