Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “A fresh, blank sheet of paper,” Ben said finally.

  She nodded. She wanted to leap into his lap and kiss him.

  “‘One should live one’s life as a perpetual experiment,’” Duff said.

  “Ah, my own petard,” Skaggs said, “and I am hoisted.”

  “As for our route,” Polly continued, “proceeding west from here happens to be out of the question. By the time we reached the California mountains, they would be impassable with snow. By an overland route, we could not arrive in California for nearly a year. And by then, the gold and land might be all taken up.”

  “But, Polly,” Ben said, “is that not a consideration in any event? Others will learn of the gold, and flock there. The competition will become fierce.”

  “Mr. Grafton believes he may be the only eyewitness from the gold country to cross back to the States so far.”

  Duff ’s hand was in his pocket, fingering his gold Saint Barbara’s medal. Saint Barbara was the patron saint of firemen and gunners—and all kinds of miners. “So,” he said, “we are blessed with a jump on pretty much everyone.”

  Skaggs’s skepticism was now starting to give way to curiosity, and speculation about how people in New York would react to the news. He began thinking out loud. “The smart ones will doubt the first stories. They’ll say it’s a puff, or a hoax. Once it’s been proved, though, they will get the mania. But to mount expeditions…it will take them a half year to round the Horn; even aboard a steamer or the fastest clipper, four months…” He stopped short. “But how do you propose that we reach California any faster from here, Polly?”

  “According to these two gentlemen,” she said, holding up two of Truman Codwise’s books, The Latter-Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide and The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, “it is possible to travel by ship, in the main.”

  “But, my dear, to return to New York and sail around South America, would, as I said—”

  “No—by means of a southerly shortcut. The steamer Omega, which brought us here, will pass again very soon on its return downriver. Then from St. Louis it is five days more to New Orleans, and then a week across the Gulf of Mexico to the town of Chagres in New Grenada. The isthmus crossing, by canoe and mule, requires only a few days. And at the port of Panama City, on the Pacific side, one awaits the arrival of a northbound ship—the books say even the occasional clipper or steamer stops regularly. To San Francisco it is three more weeks. If our luck holds, we should be in the gold region by November at the latest.”

  Skaggs had opened one of the books, and read the author’s name. “Lans-ford Hastings…Young Mr. Hastings was the expert guide who personally told Jake Donner about his shortcut over the Sierra Nevadas.” He slapped the book shut. “But why should I mend my reckless ways at this late stage? I am ready to be an American prince of Serendip. I am willing to become rich with you, Polly.”

  “But you,” Duff said, “are ‘indifferent to wealth.’ So you always claimed.”

  “Until now,” Skaggs replied, “I have lacked any good purpose for spending a large sum. Polly has her project to undertake—and I, sir, have formed my own scheme for squandering some of our hypothetical fortune. I wish to build a great observatory in El Dorado. Beyond the smoke and light of any city, where I shall take the first pictures of the moon and the planets and the stars through a telescope.

  “And I must say I find the…poetry of crossing the isthmus for gold irresistible—the very route the kahn-kwist-a-doors employed. Ho for California!”

  Polly wanted to hug him.

  “Cone-keest-a-doors,” Duff corrected.

  “And you, my brother,” Polly said, “shall be essential as an interpreter—if you agree to join the company.”

  Duff was nodding before she finished her sentence.

  No sign or word of affirmation was required of Ben. He already held her hand in his. He had crossed the whole United States and rummaged through a dozen desolate crannies in his quest for her, heedless of the discomfort, the expense, the odds against success. Of course he would go with Polly to California, or the Congo, or the North Pole.

  A THOROUGH PLAN was formed over the rest of the day and the next. They decided they had enough money to get to California. After Skaggs and Duff counted out less than a hundred dollars apiece, the men were slightly stunned when Polly announced her savings ($364), and in order to avoid even a slightly awkward pause Ben immediately announced his remaining capital ($296), and Skaggs almost as quickly informed them of the total sum—$837. The Omega, they learned, was scheduled to arrive Tuesday on its way to St. Louis.

  Billy and Priscilla had decided they would join Truman Codwise and the Graftons in their wagon train west, leaving the following day. Billy had no intention of returning to the church, but he did ache to see his family again; he and Priscilla would winter in the Salt Lake Valley, earning wages helping the Mormons build their new city, and in the spring continue on to California and the gold fields.

  SKAGGS HUNCHED OVER his camera, looking down into his ground glass, the cloth covering his head. He ordinarily declined to make pictures of large groups, but sentiment demanded it that morning. A farewell portrait of Ben, Polly, Duff, Priscilla, Billy, and himself was required. For the picture, he had given Duff permission to return the big Colt’s pistol to his belt. And since they would be standing in front of Truman’s log cabin, he decided to use “all of our frontier props.” He had Ben assemble and hold his shotgun, and he brought out the Indian club for which he had traded his spyglass the day before across the river. (Skaggs had asked the Oto if his “squaw” had used it to kill puppies for their stews, as he had read in a book about the prairie natives, but the man had failed to understand, and only laughed when Skaggs barked like a dog, tapped his own head with the club, and pantomimed dying.)

  “Now, sir, to reiterate,” he said to Lawrence Grafton, “when I say so, remove the cap from the lens and hold it back here, careful not to nudge the camera a bit—and then the instant I finish my count to five—which will only be noises, since I cannot open my mouth—replace the cap swiftly and firmly. Are you ready?”

  Skaggs trotted from behind the camera over to his spot by Ben and held the Indian club with both hands, its stone head next to his, imitating the New York Knickerbocker baseball player he had once photographed holding a bat. “Everyone?” he asked. They each struck a pose and took a breath. Ben plunged his hands into his coat pockets. Duff turned his face to the right so the camera would not record his scar. Polly lowered her chin. Billy looked down at the top of his new wife’s head, and Priscilla, uncontrollably, briefly shivered in the late-summer sun.

  “Now,” Skaggs ordered, and started his count: “Mmm…mmm…”

  From a mile away, they heard the blast of a steamboat’s whistle, like a giant blowing with pursed lips into his giant’s bottle.

  “…mmm…mmm…mmm. Excellent, Mr. Grafton. Everyone may relax.”

  Their steamboat was arriving an hour earlier than expected. The anxiety of the pose had been replaced by the anxiety of a suddenly hasty departure.

  Polly dashed into the cabin to finish packing up. Priscilla waited an extra instant, squinting up at the sky with a perplexed look, then steeled herself and followed Polly inside. Duff put his revolver in his pocket and started dismantling the tripod. Even in this empty frontier, life’s natural meter was being upset and transformed by machines and schedules.

  “We lack the time for the picture to be developed, do we not?” Ben asked. “We must gather our things and make for the landing.”

  “We have time,” Skaggs said, “we have time. Duff? Into the shed. Light the spirit lamp and heat the mercury. I will break down the camera and bring the plate…”

  Within half an hour, chemical baths had been poured and used and rebottled, hands shaken, tears wiped away, affection professed, good luck and godspeed wished. The four travelers stood together at a railing on the Omega’s middle deck; Polly waved goodbye to Priscilla, who forced a smile
but looked sad and resigned; Ben examined and reexamined the tiny smiling face of his true love on the daguerreotype portrait, to which the salty chemical tang still clung; Duff watched three monarch butterflies flying together in a tight circle just over the bow, a tiny kinetic figurehead of orange and black about to lead him back toward Mexico; and Skaggs had just spotted a sign on the pier for Astor’s American Fur Company. “No escape,” he muttered.

  A FEW HOURS later they were steaming down the Missouri through the twilight, and while Skaggs retired to the saloon to drink coffee and smoke a cigar, the others lounged in chairs on the starboard side of the upper deck. They looked between and over the cottonwoods lining the western bank, across miles of empty prairie, at what they took to be the last vivid minutes of a remarkable sunset.

  Ben considered how the limpid void of the landscape earlier in the afternoon—exactly like the pictures by Bodmer and Catlin—had become a lurid J.M.W. Turner sky of blazing orange on gray-black, with low clouds that seemed to ooze along the horizon. But it would be pretentious to say it, so he kept quiet and stared.

  It reminded Duff of the night before he’d fought the Battle of Buena Vista, looking out at the line of bivouac bonfires along the desert horizon. And he also thought of what Truman had mentioned the other day about the new name of their Iowa county, Pottawattamie, after the Indian tribe they had displaced—Pottawattamie, he had said, meant “makers of fire.” But Duff decided to keep his thoughts to himself, for fear of sounding like an absolute bug for flames and war. And if it was some kind of message to him from the Lord, he should keep that private too.

  “I do wonder why it is,” Polly said, “that not only the colors of the sunset here are so much more vivid, but the glow lingers for such a long, long while there at the horizon.”

  “Let such magnificence dawdle,” said Ben, still a little giddy three days after their reunion. “Let beauty be dilatory.”

  “No, ma’am, and sir, if I can inter-trude, that ain’t a sunset nohow,” said a large man wearing a big bushy beard and leather shirt sitting near them. He was a bison hunter who had spent the last several years living up north at Fort Pierre, and was trembling with excitement at the prospect of talking to a well-dressed white woman. “The sunset is all done now, sometime since. That there’s your fire on earth, maybe ten miles out. That’s your whole prairie burning. That’s what it starts at doing this time every year, when the buffalo grass gets dry and drier. If there weren’t this good east wind blowing back of us, we’d be smelling her stink awful good now.”

  They were acknowledging this new information with murmurs and nods when Skaggs came up the stairs and joined them. The stranger, embarrassed that he had just said “smelling her stink awful good” to a woman, used Skaggs’s arrival as cover to stand up and slink away.

  “Ignis fatuus,” Skaggs declared as he took the hunter’s empty chair, his brain now stoked with a quart of strong coffee. “The great American night-fire, Duff! ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night,/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ Oh, would that we could take a photograph of that. And capture those true reds and oranges!”

  “I suppose that some of the grasslands need to burn,” Polly said, “in the natural order of things.”

  “What is the proverb, Duff, your epigram,” Ben asked, “‘Annihilation is creation’…?”

  “Destruction and creation are the cycle of life. But it isn’t mine. It was our daddy’s.”

  Ben thought of his own father’s red and lively face as he said goodbye on the steps of Great Chislington Manor, and then recalled again Tryphena’s dream that she had rushed outdoors to recite: Ben a child in a fantastic America, playing with other children among Indians and fires…and the shiny yellow orbs scattered on the ground.

  He would have to write Tryphena from New Orleans and recount everything he had seen, and tell her that he was on his way to California to collect pieces of gold from the ground.

  47

  September 4, 1848

  Iowa

  DRUMONT HAD SPENT several of his army years in Algeria, freeing white Christian slaves, pacifying Berbers, exterminating pirates, and making it a département safe for French settlers. He hadn’t enjoyed Algeria.

  Iowa was like Algeria. Or anyway, after nine days traveling five hundred miles in a primitive coach, the thinly inhabited western half of Iowa reminded him of the dreary Algerian interior—dusty, windy, and hot, towns of a few souls called cities, houses built out of earth and straw, trenches that didn’t deserve the name “road,” unsmiling suspicious faces, no wine to be had. He had even seen a goat roasting over coals. And the Indians—he had spotted seven, some of them dressed like people, in shirts and trousers and skirts—might as well have been Arabs.

  No surprise that this used to be France, he thought, and no wonder Emperor Napoleon sold it to the Americans. But at least Iowa was more green than brown. Gabriel Drumont had no idea how bleak and utterly Algerian the landscape ahead would become.

  He could not find anyone who would sell him a horse to ride the last rugged seventy miles to his destination. The first yokel he’d asked had understood him to be looking urgently to pay for “the cheap whores, the good cheap whores, to ride her hard and come fast,” and had circulated this misapprehension to everyone in his village and its environs. Which was just as well. Drumont and horses had never really trusted each other.

  And would it be so bad if he failed to reach rich Prime’s little fille de joie, Miss Christmas, until after she’d married? She was only a job, a means to a wage. It was the English demon for whom he had spent three weeks vomiting into the Atlantic and traveled five thousand miles. And he was closing in at long last. He needed to keep his eye on the prey.

  At the last stage stop, the new team had been harnessed and the driver was ready to heeyah by the time Drumont stepped back up into the coach and sat down next to the talkative man who had ridden with him across Iowa. When the man asked if he was constipated, since he had taken “pretty near a quarter hour in that outhouse,” the Frenchman answered that, no, his “pistol chamber was empty,” which made the man cackle, since he thought that was a funny foreign way of saying one had successfully shat. But Drumont was only telling the plain truth: before he arrived in Kanesville, he wanted to reload his London pistol with the fresh powder and caps he had bought at Fort Des Moines.

  When he first saw Fort Des Moines spelled out, the name had intrigued and amused him: Fort of the Monks? It reminded him of the tales his priest on Corsica used to tell about the Crusades. And the old American chatterer in the coach had said that the town of Kanesville was inhabited almost entirely by thousands of Latter-Day Saints, members of a bigamist religious sect embarked on some kind of pilgrimage to their promised land in the American desert. Out in these parts, Drumont thought, Americans were daft with piety, like the Crusaders—or like the damned Mohammedans, in Algeria.

  It was late in the day as he began to walk the dirt streets of Kanesville. He had the pistol cocked in his right pocket, his hand on the butt and his forefinger on the trigger guard. Who knew where or when Knowles might appear? It did not take long for the news to circulate that a Frenchman was looking for William Whipple to give him money he was owed. And so less than an hour after he arrived, Drumont was told by someone that Billy Whipple had indeed married Prime’s beloved little cocotte—“Yup, Christmas,” the young man told him, “that was the girl’s name.” And much worse, Drumont learned, “Whipple and the new wife and all the rest of them have left here for good.”

  “They go?”

  “Uh-huh. They surely did, may the Lord protect them.”

  “They go when?”

  “Wednesday last.”

  Drumont took a moment to translate and count the days. Mercredi…merde. It was now Monday. Five days ahead of him. He should have stolen a horse in Iowa. Vidocq would have done so. “To where they go?”

  “Why,” said the young man with a smile, “to Zion,
of course.”

  “Zion, this is your desert holy place, far to here?”

  “Yes, sir, real far. Ten weeks’ travel with the best luck, fourteen or more without it.”

  “She travel, Miss Christmas, with…uh, um…” Drumont patted his belly. “Un polichinelle dans le tiroir… the duck in her oven?”

  “She is not with child. Not that you could see, anywise, not a bit. Skinny little girl. Pretty, but skinny and pale.”

  So Prime’s great abiding vision was so much misinformation; the fugitive pute was not carrying the fool’s sperm-blossom. “And the man with them, from England? The English friend travel with Miss Christmas and Whipple also?”

  “The Englishman?” This fellow had never spoken to Ben Knowles during the three days the gentiles had stayed at his cousin’s. Lawrence Grafton came from England, however. “Sure he’s with them, and his wife, they’re all driving together. Last train of wagons this year.”

  “Putain de merde!”

  “Are you cussing at me, mister?”

  Drumont was tempted to answer this cow-eyed American by shooting him in the face. But he wouldn’t squander his rage on this cretin; it must be used against the vile and devious Benjamin Knowles.

  “No, only I have anger to lose my English friend. Not to you.”

  Drumont’s obligations had not been canceled. For all Prime and Pinkerton knew, Priscilla Christmas was still pregnant and unmarried. And for all Drumont knew, she and her husband might be persuaded, either with the carrot or the stick, to end their week-old marriage. Besides, she fucked for money; why wouldn’t she stop fucking for money? His unending need to find Knowles could still be served by his unfinished assignment to find Priscilla Christmas. “It is possible I go for them in a coach from here? To follow?”