On the way across to Hannibal, Duff leaned over to sniff at Skaggs’s face. “No, I have not been drinking, Father Lucking—but just now even that disgusting rum treacle,” he said, nodding toward a man with a tray selling cups of cherry bounce, “tempts me sorely. No, gentlemen, what you witnessed back there was once again the frazzled result of Timothy Skaggs denied the calming effects of strong drink. Teetotaling makes me dangerous.”
45
August 26, 1848
Iowa
BEN HAD BEEN more steadfast than ever as they’d traveled without pause for three days across the state of Missouri, confident that he was on the verge of finding Polly at last. He had thought of the pleasure she’d taken in his prints of the western plains, his Bodmers and Catlins, and then realized he was following those artists’ very routes west along the Missouri River. Perhaps they had painted the hills and valleys of Humblebee. Humblebee! Cheerfully anticipating their imminent reunion, he had even grown fond of the name.
But now it was a bad joke. Humblebee had ceased to exist. Their final destination was defunct, a mirage at the end of the road.
Skaggs had said he was beginning to imagine they were the victims of a three-card monte game rigged by God, where their chosen card—Polly Lucking, the queen of hearts—repeatedly disappeared at the last moment. And while they would continue the search, Ben’s hope and determination were flagging badly. For the first time, he felt the expedition was foolish and doomed.
They were on yet another stagecoach, rolling north on yet another rutted rural track toward a frontier camp of pious fanatics, this time entirely on the say-so of a snaky stranger. “You boys are the second eastern crew this week come to see that damned place,” the small man at Hemme’s Landing had told them. The others, he said, had been a pair of young women, “one real young,” and a young man—“Mormons traveling incognito, if you ask me; I believe both gals was married to the fellow, the way they do it, you know.” His descriptions of the women sounded like Polly and Priscilla. And back at Glee, Danforth had said that the man accompanying them was a young Mormon…
So off Ben and Skaggs and Duff had set for Iowa. What if Polly had converted to Mormonism? What if she had married? And what if she was not there at all? Where would they look next?
When Skaggs spotted a big beaver’s dam in a stream alongside the road, and thus had a new excuse to attack the late John Jacob Astor—“his compulsion to murder beavers, that’s what’s driven America west, there’s our manifest destiny, a thousand a day killed every day for fifty years by his damned American Fur Company”—Ben asked him to “try to be quiet awhile, please.”
As they finally rolled into Kanesville, his new pessimism fed on itself. It was a big place, and its thousand new log cabins looked identical. Night was falling. It was a fresh opportunity for disappointment. She could be anywhere. Or elsewhere.
But nearly every one of the town’s inhabitants was a Mormon, and most of them had lived together for years in Nauvoo, and in Missouri before that. Strangers were notable. Thus the second man Ben asked about the whereabouts of a young Mr. Whipple sent them directly to the cabin of Truman Codwise.
There was no answer at the door. One of the neighbors thought that Codwise, Whipple, and their visitors—“the two women”—had gone off that day for a wedding ceremony, but another had heard that the visitors had left for good.
The cosmic confidence trick continued: she had been there an instant ago, now she was gone. And so, exhausted from their travel, the three sat down on the ground behind the cabin to wait. Hours passed. None of them spoke. Their hopelessness grew. Before long, it was dark, the insects’ summer lullaby was playing, and then all three were asleep, using their bags as pillows.
Chicago
“SIR, I HAVE twenty-one dollars from what you give me,” Gabriel Drumont announced as soon as he entered the sheriff ’s office at the courthouse. When Allan Pinkerton sent a deputy to his boardinghouse to wake and fetch him, Drumont had assumed that Pinkerton thought he had absconded with the thirty dollars in expense money.
“A week and a half in Chicago on nine dollars? Scrupulous, monsieur, thank you. And altogether reassuring given the assignment which we—which you—must now undertake. You must immediately go west, to Iowa. Miss Christmas was bound for a town at the far end of the state called”—he brought the paper in his hand close to a lamp—“Kanesville. She intends to marry there before the end of the month.”
Pinkerton had that evening received an urgent message by telegraph from Samuel Prime in New York. One of Prime’s men in New York had learned from Miss Christmas’s father of her marriage plans. Prime, of course, was determined to prevent the wedding, and had authorized Pinkerton to offer the girl a cash sum to cancel her plans and return to New York, where he would see to it that she and their newborn child were well cared for. Prime was willing to reward the fiancé, one William Whipple, for his cooperation—and also suggested, conversely, that if necessary Pinkerton and Drumont should provide Whipple with the details of Priscilla’s whoring past.
“We has time to reach the…Iowa? To Kanesville? Before the marriage?”
“Scant time.”
“Is Benjamin Knowles travel also with her?”
“My single report on him is from Terre Haute, a stage office, more than a week ago, accompanied by two men.”
Pinkerton handed Drumont a pasteboard portfolio. In it were a Frink & Walker stagecoach ticket, maps of Illinois and Iowa, and an envelope containing $350—2,000 francs, a year’s pay—in banknotes.
“That should cover your traveling expenses and any necessary…bonus payments to Miss Christmas and her young man. I am informed that the final stretch through Iowa is a very rough track indeed. Therefore, when the going gets slow you ought to buy a horse and take leave of the coach. You ride, of course?”
“I have ride.” But not since he’d left Algeria sixteen years ago, and never very well.
Kanesville, Iowa
THEY HAD RETURNED to Kanesville well after midnight. The new bride and groom and Truman Codwise were asleep. Polly awoke, and was making her way in the moonless dark to the privy when she noticed the bodies in the dirt of the backyard.
For an instant she wondered if the bodies were dead, since Truman had talked more than once about assassination plots against the Mormons. But even in the darkness the position of the nearest body was familiar—knees pulled up almost to his belly, each hand wedged tight into the opposite armpit, the funny, knotty way her brother had always slept.
In his first startled moment of wakefulness, sensing a face and body hovering above him, Duff plunged his hand into his pocket for his revolver.
“Duff…?”
“Sister!”
“How on earth…” she said as he scrambled to his feet and embraced her.
The two others awoke. Skaggs remained supine, but raised himself on his elbows as if he were lolling in his bed at home.
Ben, farthest away from Polly, slowly stood but did not move toward her. He needed to give her a moment to adjust to this remarkable new fact.
Polly saw him over Duff ’s shoulder. She stepped back from her brother.
“What brought you here?” Ben said. He had planned to say I love you unconditionally when he first saw her.
“Our friend Billy Whipple…it is complicated.”
Both spoke softly, just above a whisper.
“We have waited since the afternoon,” Ben said. He had intended his second sentence to be, I cannot bear to lose you again. “I dreaded that I had lost you again.”
“We needed to drive some distance, and returned after a dinner—after dark. It was a wedding.”
Ben’s stomach turned.
“Priscilla has married,” she added. “A good young man.”
Ben walked to her. Seconds passed as they stared at each other in the darkness.
“You have come a very great distance,” he said, “in search of your arcadia.”
“And not found it yet
, alas, but you, I, you must have, I…I thought I had seen you for the last time.”
“I felt sure that I would find you, Polly.”
“Priscilla had one of her…sensations that you were coming. I thought it was only, nothing, a dream.” She took a deep breath. “I am still so amazingly startled to see you standing here before me in the flesh.”
“But not displeased?”
She smiled and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand as she shook her head no. “Not displeased. Not displeased at all.”
Then they collided into each other’s arms, both trembling, both squeezing tight, as if for dear life.
Duff was so happy for them both that he had difficulty swallowing. Skaggs, still on the ground, was looking up at the stars contentedly, smiling, drawing the lines of the constellation Lyra in the air with his forefinger.
“I love you,” Ben whispered in Polly’s ear.
“Oh, dearest, and I you,” she replied. “And I you.”
46
August 27, 1848
Kanesville
THE NEXT DAY was Sunday, so for most of the morning the five gentiles and Billy Whipple had Truman’s cabin to themselves for their reunion. The mood was mellow and lazy.
Ben and Duff were restored to primordial states of happiness, gazing at Polly’s tanned face whenever she spoke, chuckling as Skaggs hunted in vain for “even a smidgen” of coffee or tea. One of Joseph Smith’s divine revelations had proscribed not only tobacco, wine, and liquor for his Saints, but all “hot drinks.” So they sipped water and elderberry juice as they chatted. Billy Whipple remained silent while Skaggs told his stories of Mormon Illinois—how he had bought a coffee and a pint of whiskey at Smith’s own grocery in Nauvoo, and about the “reassuring number of drunkards” he’d been surprised to find rambling that city’s streets.
Priscilla told them that Truman Codwise and Lawrence Grafton had invited Billy and her to join the train of fifty-eight wagons leaving Kanesville on Wednesday, bound for the Salt Lake Valley. After Skaggs asked the boy to reveal to “the present company, confidentially,” the secret Mormon handshakes and passwords necessary for admittance to heaven, “in case we die before your erstwhile coreligionists have converted us,” Billy excused himself for a walk along the river, and Priscilla joined him. Whereupon Polly gave Skaggs a familiar look—chastising but not unamused—that warmed him as much as any steaming pot of tea.
She turned to her brother. “Mr. Grafton is a veteran of the war—of the regular army. And there are many more, he says, dozens, living here in this place.”
Duff ’s smile had frozen, as if his own face were now an instantly outdated daguerreotype image of itself. He was trapped. His scar stung.
“They all served together in Mexico,” she continued, “in their own Mormon Battalion.”
“Ha!” Skaggs barked. “Perhaps the most cynical of Polk’s numberless cynical transactions. But these Mormon”—he paused, looking around as if someone might overhear—“mercenaries made a cute bargain. I understand they fulfilled their devil’s deal as combatants by avoiding combat entirely.”
Polly was nodding. “Mr. Grafton told me they went from here to California and left service a year ago without taking or firing a shot.”
“They…they never marched all the way south?” Duff asked, exhaling a great gust as if he had been holding his breath. The hot lead ball spinning directly toward his head suddenly veered off.
“No, he never crossed the Rio Grande, he said, and never knew anything of the true war down there.”
Duff listened to the shot plink away harmlessly. The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts. “I should look forward to meeting Mr. Grafton.” In fact, he felt a confusion of emotions, admiration of the fact that these Mormon troops had neither seen death nor caused it in Mexico, but also both envy and contempt for such innocence of battle—as well as plain relief, of course. So I am helped, and my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him.
“He is quite certain,” Polly said, “that God protected them.”
“I wonder precisely how the Lord chooses,” Skaggs asked, “as he looks down upon our wars, which men should survive and which must be eviscerated. Does he employ a bureau of angels to consider the merits of each case, or does he make certain decisions by wholesale—‘five hundred Mormons, saved.’ Oh, the medieval, deluded, poor white trash of this nation…”
“Mr. Grafton,” she said, “is an intelligent and well-spoken man, and he is English also.”
“Is that so?” Ben asked. “And why did he remain in California for an extra year?”
Polly collected her thoughts. “A whole company of them stayed. And in the spring, they found gold. Pounds of gold, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. In their ‘foothills,’ he says.”
“Ah yes, of course,” Skaggs cried, “of course these flamed followers of Joseph Smith say they’ve discovered gold! Just as young Smith happened to find God’s own golden tablets lying in the dirt near his New York cottage. The grand delusion continues.”
“No, Skaggs, this gold is quite real. I saw a handful of it, which you can look at for yourself. And Billy says that Lawrence Grafton is the straightest, most honest man he has ever known. He swears the gold is plentiful, for the taking, in country that no one owns.”
She seemed as excited as she had been about winning the role of Florence Dombey. She was on fire. A large Carolina parakeet, bright green with a yellow head and orange mask, flittered through an open window and quickly out, and then back inside with a partner, landing on the sill.
“But the digging of shafts and grinding out of the ore,” Ben said, “is all a laborious and unpleasant business.” He had once been dispatched to Cornwall to inspect the arsenic and copper mines in which Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham had an interest. “It requires considerable capital and machinery.”
“But not this gold,” she said, “not in California. Mr. Grafton says it is simply lying in the sand and the streams, in the mud and rocks, sprinkled practically everywhere. Available for any ordinary person to collect, working for himself. Beyond a shovel and a sieve, Mr. Grafton says, no great engines are necessary. No capital is required.”
She glanced at her brother, knowing that he would be intrigued by the prospect of an enterprise independent of bankers.
“A finders-keepers game, eh?” Skaggs asked.
“How extraordinary,” Ben said. As a boy, his favorite biography had been The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, especially the passages about sailing up the Orinoco River in search of the golden city. “El Dorado.”
Duff did not know the phrase, but he knew Spanish. “‘The…the golden one’?”
“Yes,” Polly replied evenly to all three of them at once. “Democratic fortunes, available to any and all willing to work. Mr. Grafton says there is more gold in two or three small valleys than all of the several hundred men there could manage to pick up and carry away in a year or more.” She looked around at the faces of her friend, her brother, and her beloved. “We could take as much as we wanted for ourselves. And we could establish our own good and just community on those empty common lands.”
“We could if we were in California,” said Ben. “But is California not as far from here as New York is in the opposite direction?”
“Yes,” she answered, “exactly right, it is no farther than New York. If we intend to make so long a journey, why travel backward? Why retrace our steps?”
For a long while, the only sounds were the crickets outside and the nervous peeps of the parakeets. With their coloring, it seemed to Polly, the birds might have been emissaries from California, awaiting a decision.
She exchanged another look with her brother. They were both thinking of their father, and his serial thralls to financial fevers and schemes during their childhood. When Polly and Zeno Lucking went to Washington, he had been so impressed by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that he had impulsively invested his remaining hundr
ed dollars—the savings he had not already invested in the last Hudson River whaling fleet, and in the proposed Hartford & Poughkeepsie Railroad that would have passed near the Luckings’ house. But apart from his peculiar passion for buried treasure, the problem with their father’s tragic hopefulness, Duff and Polly believed, had been his unfortunate timing. He had invested in whaling and canals a decade too late, and in the railway a decade too early. The time for this California gold seemed precisely right; perhaps it was the destiny of Zeno Lucking’s surviving children to redeem his miscalculations and fulfill his dreams.
“I am in favor of ‘What is now proved was once imagined’ and all that, and I do not enjoy playing the fogy,” Skaggs said, “but, Polly, my dear: you have searched for perfection all summer long. Up to now, in vain. So have we searched for you—and here, mirabile dictu, found you healthy and reasonably sane. You now suggest that we gamble our remaining capital to travel to California, and create there some sort of…communist settlement, our own wilderness utopia that does not survive by growing wheat or making butter or selling pewter cups and slouch hats, but…by gathering gold?”
She nodded. It did sound foolish, she knew. She wanted to yell at him.
“The four of us, goldfinders,” Skaggs said, using a slang term for men who empty privy pots. “Deep in shit again, all right.”
Now she wanted to punch him.
“You know, of course,” he continued, “there are no steamers or railroad trains or stage lines across”—Skaggs waved a hand toward the river and beyond—“that. It would be a trek of fifteen hundred miles across desert and mountains. Civilization—and I use the word advisedly—ends right here.”
“But exactly, Skaggs,” she said. “Why should we not proceed to a wholly new place? A place far beyond what is, beyond the Mormons and the anti-Mormons, beyond the priests, beyond the upper-ten snobs and the revolutionist shouters, beyond the Whigs and the Democrats, beyond this world, a place of plenty where we might fashion our own world.”
Heyday: A Novel Page 52