Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  The Mormon smiled again. “No, sir, you cannot. No coaches to there. This here is the end of the line. The States is over. To go on west, you need your own horse or your own wheels. That’s why it’s the frontier, don’t you know. Rough country. Indian country.”

  The sun had just set, the hour now entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, a phrase that fit Drumont’s own hungry, half-wild mood. He still had $229 in the envelope Pinkerton had given him, enough to reach wherever he needed to go, and to return. Knowles must think himself very clever, finding new ways to discomfort his pursuer at each stage of the chase. Drumont would be forced to ride a horse not for a day or two through the bunghole of America, but to gallop for a week or more through the very shit itself, his own ass a target for the arrows of savages. Well, he was a man of the city, a Parisian, but he was still a Corsican too—he could buy a goddamned horse and a saddle and a camp outfit, the tent and bedroll and knapsack and tin pans, the packets of food and a rifle and more powder and balls.

  He was a soldier. He was tough. And this was his purpose.

  The next morning, with the help of the postmaster, he wrote the briefest letter to Pinkerton in Chicago—a message from the battlefield—telling him the truth, or most of it, anyway no lies: Miss Christmas she go west now, far west, & I go after her for you as far as necessary, sir.

  As he trotted from the ferry landing on a track that followed the big river south along its western bank, he was encouraged by the matted grasses. When he reached the village called Bellevue (another encouragement) and passed a new mission church for Christianizing the natives (precisely like Algeria), he turned right onto the broad trail west and slowed the horse to a walk to watch the rivers mingle, the shallow blue waters of the Platte disappearing into the deep brown Missouri. The great John Charles Frémont himself probably stood at this very spot, Drumont enjoyed thinking, as he embarked on his explorations of America. Drumont decided he needed to feel the recoil and smell the sulfur and rejoice in his own tenacious manhood, so he pulled his pistol from its holster in the saddle, cocked it, and fired into the air.

  Whereupon the goddamned $115 Mormon mare whinnied and jumped and proceeded to gallop, very nearly dropping Drumont in the grass, and refusing to be reined in until she had run half a mile into the western wilderness.

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  early September 1848

  on the Mississippi River

  BEN WAS CONTENT to abdicate managerial duties to his dear-loved for the duration of the trip to California. Yet as hard as she pushed to waste no time and move on, all four were freed of the anxieties that had beset them for the last months. Ben no longer fretted about Polly, and Polly no longer fretted about Priscilla or her brother or Ben. Duff was happier traveling down rivers past civilization than moseying through towns and cities where unknown enemies might lurk. (On the docks in St. Louis, he’d exchanged a fleeting glance with an army lieutenant in uniform; Duff remembered him as the officer who had handed him a lemon on the beach at Vera Cruz after they’d landed the siege guns.) Skaggs endured the worst of the jimjams after his month of teetotaling, but the coffee improved as they got nearer to the jungles where it was grown.

  Skaggs and Polly had been to Washington, D.C., so they had seen slaves. Still, all four travelers were prepared to be appalled by the sight of gangs of them at hard labor deep in slave country, and their expectations were promptly fulfilled. They stared with pity and disgust at the sight of Negroes working on the levees and in the fields of Arkansas and Tennessee. And they could see dozens every mile as they steamed farther south, for the frenzy of the cotton and sugarcane harvests had just gotten under way. They wondered if they might chance to witness some special horror when they passed plantations and docked in cities like Natchez—a whipping, a beating, naked bodies manacled in carts, the choked sobs of husbands and wives sold apart on a slave block—but they did not. Observed from the deck of their shiny new side-wheeler at a fast and steady twelve knots, after a few days the fact of slavery mostly reverted to the abstraction it had been back in New York and London. By the time the boat reached Baton Rouge, they had become not indifferent but accustomed to the sights.

  Polly was relieved that they had to remain less than a week in New Orleans awaiting a schooner bound for New Grenada, and Skaggs was ecstasied that the shipping schedules required them to spend nearly a week in this loose, booming, Babylonish city.

  He found that watching drunkards in his sober state amused him now almost as much as being drunk had before, and that coffee seemed to enhance his animal charms and fortitude. He sent a letter to his brother Jonah in New Hampshire informing him of his new life—his temperance, his immigration to California, and his passion for astronomy. “I should be unspeakably grateful to you, Jonah, if you agreed to indulge me.” He had requested a loan against his eventual inheritance, asking that his brother order from New York a five-inch refracting telescope (preferably one made by Lerebours et Secrétan, Paris), lens (Merz und Mahler, Munich), and mount (Molyneux & Cope, London) and have them shipped to San Francisco.

  All four made good use of the metropolitan opportunities. In New Orleans, Ben and Polly shared a bed again. After he discovered that the city was wired to New York, he sent a message to his father’s Wall Street associate asking Mr. Prime to inform Sir Archibald, if he would be so kind, of his California plans. Anticipating wilderness living, Polly paid a seamstress to refashion two of her three dresses into overalls by cutting the skirts in half and then sewing them up as loose trouser legs. Duff shopped for the equipage Lawrence Grafton had said they would need at the mines in California—tents, stove, pick, shovels, pans, perforated sheet metal, hammer, jigsaw, work gloves, scales, tweezers. He also bought a leather holster for the Colt’s called a Slim Jim, made to clip over his belt, and buckskin shirts for himself and the other men.

  On their last day in the city, a hot Sunday, they heard music through the open windows of their hotel and crossed the street to a weekly market, the stalls and carts set up in the corner of a field. All the sellers and nearly all the patrons were Negroes, several hundreds of them, both slaves and free people of color. There for the better part of an hour Polly and Ben and Duff and Skaggs drank lemonade and ate bananas and warm little bâtard loaves and listened to a quartet—a fiddler, two banjo players, and a drummer—as they performed one or two familiar tunes in double time, and many others, simultaneously jovial and melancholy, of a type they had never heard. The cries of a vendor carrying a freezer on his head—“Ice crreeeam, ice crreeeam”—formed a chorus to every song.

  Polly and Skaggs had resisted the obligatory visit to the river end of Esplanade Avenue, on the opposite side of the Vieux Carré, to gawk at the buying and selling of human beings, and Duff said he had already visited on his own. But Ben was, on this last afternoon, insistent. After fifteen minutes of confused wandering, Polly asked a pair of young nuns on Rampart Street for directions, and one of the sisters informed them that the market was closed, of course, on Sundays—and the other added in a fastidious whisper that the Spanish used to permit the slave trade on Sundays. As the nuns walked on, Duff crossed himself.

  Each was as happy as he or she had been in years. As summer became autumn—a fact of which they were unaware as they crossed the 30th parallel and prepared to cross the 20th and then the 10th into the latitudes of perpetual August—none was burdened with any doubt about what they were doing, where they were going, or why.

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  September 1848

  the Platte River Valley, Indian territory

  PRISCILLA CHRISTMAS’S MOOD was blithe as well. No distraught soldier had arrived in Kanesville before they left, despite her premonition; perhaps she had misconstrued her own agitation at leaving Polly, or perhaps Duff was the soldier. Billy wondered if she had foreseen an Indian. Small packs of them—Pawnee, Lawrence Grafton said—regularly rode within sight of the wagon train, and last week an Oglala warrior had seemed very distraught indeed when his proposed trade—five buffalo rob
es for one of the Mormons’ brass trumpets—was refused. Perhaps Billy was right. In any event, she had had no more of her daydream shivers during their month on the trail, no gooseflesh divinations or skyward hunches at all.

  The Mormons were brittle and guarded people, to be sure, but no stranger than the people of Glee. Their drumming and trumpeting each daybreak struck her more as a frolic than the herald of a military maneuver. The day they left Fort Childs they passed a camped train that included wagons covered in blue and red and bright yellow canvas as well as the customary dirty white. The sight had delighted her, as if she had been surprised by a pack of clowns.

  But her favorite sight of the whole month was the balloon. Priscilla had been the first to see it. She had turned round as her gaze followed a small flock of passenger pigeons flying east—she hoped to see one of the enormous flocks of millions of the birds, miles long, that Grafton had said looked “like a great arrow fired by the Lord.” When she spotted the shiny purple onion floating above the northeastern horizon, shimmering in the morning sun, she thought for the briefest moment that it was one of her hallucinatory messages, taking a startlingly crisp, clear new form. But it was a real balloon, as big as a bus, and after she called to Billy, he shouted down the line to the rest of the company, and soon scores of Mormons were waving and yelling at the sky behind them. The men in the basket, a pair of rich St. Louis excitement-seekers and their pilot, were many miles distant, unaware of the shouts as their balloon drifted north on the wind into the empty blue.

  Priscilla had grown to adore the emptiness. It had never occurred to her before that horizon and horizontal were, as she thought of it now, parent and child. These plains, here in their baked, brown heart west of Fort Childs, were the very opposite of New York City. The country was pure and clean and simple, devoid of people and buildings and money and fashion and rotten smells. Back in the Five Points, danger and misery were always present, and like everyone else, she had steeled herself to ignore the ghastliness; here in the vacancy of the Great American Desert—a phrase she pronounced gaily—the peculiar dangers (falling from a wagon, getting kicked by a horse or murdered by an Indian’s arrow) seemed slight and even manageable in comparison with those of the Sixth Ward. Even the puddles were different—instead of the city’s foul bowls of watery blood-and-shit soup, the puddles here were alkali pools that smelled like strong soap. The buffalo gnats that tormented almost everyone else did not bite Priscilla.

  Perhaps the frontier was the place she belonged. Perhaps it was the heavenly blue-and-golden emptiness of this country that had finally relieved her of her unnerving shivers and visions. She had never prayed in her life, and agreed with her father that the idea of “asking God for any favor is a damned sure path to disappointment.” But at the ends of some days this last month, after walking for fifteen miles between two seas of tall brown grass, looking ahead into the sky, hearing only the grass rustling and the burbling music of the train—wagons’ squeaks and shakes, oxen’s shuffling stomps and thousand tinkling bells—she would realize that her mind had been empty of thoughts for an hour or more, and wondered if those blank, languid, wide-awake spells amounted to prayer.

  On this cool late September afternoon, she was in a particularly good humor. Three days ago the featureless western horizon had suddenly sprouted a feature, straight ahead. And although they had not altered their route a bit, she found herself pleased that they were now traveling not on faith but toward a landmark they could actually see—“a thing yonder to draw a bead on,” as Billy had said. She had watched it grow taller every day, like the giant’s beanstalk in the story, only petrified, or like one of the turrets of the castle in Phantasmion. During the last three noonings, while the Mormons and their beasts had rested and eaten, she had drawn pictures of the rock.

  Now the tip of its afternoon shadow was touching the front of the train. As they grew close enough to see a herd of bison near the base, the tower’s true height became more apparent—over the last few minutes, the petrified giant beanstalk had grown. Priscilla smiled. She now reckoned it must be twice as tall as Trinity Church, which was the tallest building she had ever seen. Why, Priscilla wondered, was such a heart-robbing wonder called Chimney Rock? It was so much weirder and grander than any chimney. Why not Spire Rock?

  “Yo, Whipples!” shouted one of their fellow travelers from three wagons back.

  Priscilla and Billy, walking side by side, turned to look behind them. The two rear sentries, both holding rifles, were riding toward them, flanking a stranger who rode alone. He was an older man, maybe fifty, with sharp, high cheekbones and a long nose. His horse was panting, and covered in sweat.

  Drumont had let his hair and beard grow, thinking—like Inspector Vidocq—that a tactical change of appearance would improve his chances of catching Benjamin Knowles unawares. But he had not counted on the guards. The sentries had taken his guns. He was unarmed.

  As Priscilla’s eyes met Drumont’s, he touched the brim of his hat and smiled like an old friend.

  He saw that she was not pregnant. She was pretty, he thought, in a wan, raw way, but worth Prime’s huge expenditure of lust and money? Chacun à son goût. To each his own.

  She felt no apprehension at all. The man looked tired and confused, but hopeful, even convivial. She felt sorry for him.

  The train, of course, kept moving as they had their interview. Priscilla climbed up to sit on the lazy board of Truman’s wagon as Billy and the stranger walked alongside, Drumont leading his horse. The moment he learned that Ben Knowles was not there among them, and was instead a thousand miles away, en route to California by sea to dig gold, the Frenchman’s eyes widened and then shut, his neck and shoulders slackened but his jaw tightened, as if he were at once relaxed and agitated. Priscilla had never seen muscles express such disappointment. And then he was silent for a while, as if deep in thought.

  “Your baby, he is inside the wagon?”

  “We have no child, sir,” Billy said. “We have only just finished our honeymonth.”

  Now he looked even more lost.

  “But, sir,” Billy asked, “surely you have not come all this distance simply to reunite with Ben Knowles, did you, sir?”

  Drumont was so certain he had finally reached his goal that he had neglected even to imagine what he might say under this circumstance, how he ought to dissemble. He was no Inspector Vidocq.

  “No,” he finally said. “I did not. No…”

  He was thinking and calculating as quickly as he could manage. If he were able to bribe the couple with Prime’s cash and take the girl back to Pinkerton in Chicago, and then to Prime in Manhattan, he would earn his fee, enough money to start a life in the Caribbean…or to sail from New York to California, where Knowles was now fixed in place at last. But it would take him another two months to make his way back out of this godforsaken Algeria to New York…and then, shit, six months on a ship nearly to Antarctica.

  No. He had already crossed the Atlantic. He was already halfway across this empty continent. Only a thousand miles remained between him and Knowles’s final destination. Drumont would keep Prime’s remaining cash for himself. And he would continue west with these natural fools, and make his way directly to California, right now, by land, on the back of this excitable goddamned mare. It was not ideal or pretty. It was a soldier’s decision in the heat of battle.

  “…come to America for going to California also, like Benjamin. For the gold”—he pulled a ten-dollar coin from his pocket—c’est de l’or? Yes? Now I get gold.”

  “Traveling by yourself?” Priscilla asked. “From all that I understand, that is not wise.”

  “They say the Indians never attack a train proper,” Billy explained, “only the stragglers, or individuals on the trail alone. And besides, you can’t reach California this year for sure.”

  “Not in this year? Why? It is not so far.”

  “It isn’t the distance,” Billy said, “it’s the weather. Winter’s coming. You passed no othe
r wagons on your ride out here, did you?”

  No, he had not. Theirs was the last Mormon train west in 1848, and no prudent emigrants for Oregon or California had jumped off across the Missouri since June. The first snows would fall in a month in the Rocky Mountains, and the Sierra Nevadas would be snowed in by the end of November. Priscilla and Billy were going to spend the winter in the Great Salt Lake Valley, they told Drumont, but in the spring they planned to leave for California to rejoin the others—yes, including Ben Knowles—in their golden camp. If the Mormon elders agreed to it, perhaps Mr. Drumont could join the wagon train and then winter in Deseret. They would surely pay a fair wage to a strong, experienced man to assist in building their utopia…

  L’utopie. Why was this new insanity infecting every sort of person everywhere? The radical swine in Paris wanted to remake France into their own disorderly utopie—along with rich, reckless British boulevardiers like Knowles and his laughing friend. New York City was filled with shouting German utopistes. Pinkerton (who wasted his time assisting runaway slaves) had told him the woman, Miss Lucking, had left Knowles to search the back settlements for her little utopie. And now these Protestant fanatics. As the whole world goes mad, Drumont thought, I am a member of a dying breed, one of the last completely sane men on earth.

  “Thank you very much,” he said as he shook Billy Whipple’s hand and smiled up at Priscilla. By accompanying them he would be adhering strictly to his assignment from Pinkerton and Prime, would he not? “I should be very much happy to join with you to the Salt Lake.”

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