Indeed, from the start he had feigned sympathy for their sect—he knew they would be more welcoming of a potential convert than of some mere infidel wage laborer. His charade (or camouflage, as he conceived it) was that of a lay friar passing one season in a monastery, seeking enlightenment but without orders and not permitted—grâce à Dieu—to sing in the choir.
He no longer sought out Priscilla for conversation, since he had learned from her all she knew concerning Benjamin Knowles. Rather, he spent each of his idle, dark winter hours contemplating the moments of that ultimate encounter. He considered himself intimately acquainted with Knowles by now—members of his own family aside, on what person had he ever lavished more thought? And so the justice exacted must be accordingly intimate and correct…
He also avoided Priscilla because she unnerved him. Was it the elfin eyes? Was it such dovish innocence in what he knew to be a whore’s body? Or was it because she reminded him of his unfulfilled obligation to Pinkerton, who had given him so much of his own trust and Prime’s money to find her? That still rankled like a bad toothache. But at least Monsieur Pinkerton, Drumont reassured himself, would never learn of his duplicity—that he had traveled and then lived alongside Priscilla and Billy Whipple for months and never proffered Prime’s deal to them, made no attempt to entice or force the girl to return to New York…
Yes, encounters with the girl—why, even thinking about her—made Drumont pensive and nervous, and no possible good could come from that.
61
February 9, 1849
the American River Valley, California
DUFF HAD WALKED east for an hour at a quick pace, close enough to the river to hear its soothing roar. But when he reached the notch in the hills where the stream widened, he had not finished his rosary, so he did not turn around and retrace his steps to Ashbyville, as usual. The sky had cleared. He would give Polly and Ben some more time alone. So he kept walking north, into the woods, as he finished the prayer.
He hiked for hours. He passed through a long, dim canyon and finally into the next valley, beautifully honeyed with late-afternoon light. I shall not want.
The temperature was warm, maybe 60 degrees. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Duff stopped at the edge of a grove of oak and pine high on the hillside and lay down, looking left into the sun, creation’s ultimate and essential blaze, destroying and creating at every instant, a ball the size of a million flaming earths. In his view, the sun was God’s perfect achievement—not this wet, mucky, complicated earth, teeming and festering with too much life.
With no river running through it, this valley was much drier than Ashbyville’s. He had not eaten since breakfast. A jackrabbit raced past and Duff suddenly imagined himself as Christ in the desert, fasting alone in the wilderness of Judea with the beasts. Then he remembered that it was there that Satan had appeared to Jesus to tempt him…Duff recited the Lord’s Prayer and crossed himself.
As the blazing orange touched the western horizon, Duff whispered “Amen” and glanced up into the boughs of the nearest pine tree. He saw some kind of mistletoe momentarily taking on the sunset hues. Or so he thought at first.
No; it was the butterflies.
He stood. The monarchs, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, resting and waiting on every branch of every pine he could see, the way they had covered the slope of the Mexican volcano two winters ago. He had been led to this valley, another of the monarchs’ winter roosts, by God.
With his head cocked all the way back, he twirled around in wonderment, looking up. Delivering me from evil, leading me not into temptation. Though I walk in the valley of darkness, I fear no evil, for you are with me, you are with me… Duff dizzied himself with his whirling, knocked his shin against a rock, and stumbled forward, scraping his face hard against a stump as he fell to the ground.
“Hallelujah,” he cried out loud. With his right hand he felt twigs and needles and pinecones caught in his hair, like a crown of thorns. He touched his wet left cheek and then looked at his dripping red fingers. “This is my blood,” he said breathlessly, and made the sign of the cross again, “shed for the forgiveness of sins. Hallelujah.”
“Sir? Hallelujah?” called a female voice.
Duff, ecstatic, looked up into the sky, hoping to see an angel.
“Hallelujah…the name of you?” the voice asked again.
Now he turned and saw the Indian woman speaking to him.
She was perhaps thirty, and stood with a younger woman behind a large rock a few yards away. In their arms each held a conical basket like those Jack and Badger used to wash gold, but these baskets were filled with acorns.
The younger woman touched her left cheek and nodded toward Duff. “Ow,” she said.
Duff stood up, smiling. He pointed to his wound and said, “Ow, yes.”
Each of the women had three short straight scars on her chin, and two more fine scars running from the corners of her mouth toward her cheekbone, like a child’s drawing of a smile. The younger one talked quickly and quietly to the older, and as she spoke she pointed out the rough oval scar on his right cheek, the new gash on his face from which blood still dripped, and, most curiously, the spots of blood with which they had just watched him ritually daub himself—one on his forehead and three more in a row across the top of his buckskin jacket.
Maidu boys, when they became men, painted their faces and went into the mountains to listen for the lessons of the kakeni, the animal spirits. But these women had never seen any of the sakini—the “ghosts,” as they called white people—decorate himself with paint or scar his skin like a real person, like an Indian. The girl wondered if he might be a trapper affiliated with one of the foreign tribes who lived way up north or east of the mountains, a so-called French Indian. But her aunt said she had never seen a Paiute or Kla-math or any other Indian scarred like this boy, with a red-hot knife on the cheek…and decorated with real blood instead of red paint, on his clothing as well as his head. This was nothing she knew. Maybe he had eaten jimsonweed, the young one said, and was suffering delusions. No, replied the other, he was probably drunk, or simple.
Duff took their curious and wary chatter as concern for him and his injuries. They were like the women of Jerusalem on the road to Calvary, and like Jesus he wanted to reassure them. He took out his leather purse, which he held up in front of him. “You may have my money,” he said. “Do not worry about me.” They said nothing. Jack had told him that most of the Indians knew Spanish better than English. “No se preocupe de mí,” he said, and shook his purse. “Mi oro está para usted.”
He is offering gold?
“Soy bueno. Soy su amigo.”
This confused and bloody young white man is saying he is good? the older woman said to her niece. That he is our friend? Both women smiled. He is a sweet boy, the girl said to her aunt, and proposed that they lead him to the pond to wash his wound, and that she chew some leaves of a certain herb to make a salve for his cut…
“Le traeré a las aguas,” she said to him, pointing at his cheek. I will take you to the waters… “Para lavar la sangre.” To wash the blood.
He crossed himself again. She leadeth me beside the still waters. She restoreth my soul. “Mi nombre es Duff. Soy Duff.”
The whites’ bizarre f sound the women always found amusing, the way they’d found the soldier chief Frémont’s name funny when they’d first heard it. “Usted es Duh-vuh,” the younger one repeated with a giggle. “Duh-vuh.”
February 10 and 11, 1849
Ashbyville
DUFF HAD NOT returned to Ashbyville Friday night. Skaggs reminded Polly that her brother had stayed in the woods after dark in the past, and that at this point he could feed himself for days on berries and mushrooms.
But when Duff had still not returned by Saturday noon, Ben walked to Jack’s camp and two others nearby; he had not been seen. Ben and Polly and Skaggs then spent the remainder of Saturday walking in widening semicircles around the edges of Ashbyvil
le, calling out his name. It was another warm day, but Polly was not reassured.
On Saturday night it rained. Polly cried, apologized to Ben for stinting on sympathy for the deaths in his family, and then cried some more.
Sunday morning she lay on their bed in the cabin, fully dressed, eyes closed, wide awake, hands folded over her stomach, praying for Duff ’s safe return. She wondered whether the Sabbath would give more power or less to her prayer, or if it mattered at all. If Duff did not return by midday, they had agreed, Skaggs would ride to Old Dry Diggings to post word of his disappearance, and Ben and Polly would walk together to search the other side of the hills to the north.
Outside in Ashbyville’s “piazza”—the rough benches surrounding the star-shaped stone fire pit—burning logs hissed and popped as the two men read, wrote, nibbled dried beef, and occasionally chatted about fathers and brothers and the various bulletins of civilization.
“To tell the truth, I am surprised at the ache I feel,” Ben said, “but he was a lovable monster, my father. And he certainly lived the very life he wished to live.”
“The last time I visited home,” Skaggs recalled, “I asked mine if we might carve ‘Happy at Long Last’ on his stone when he passed. He thought that for once his jackanapes son was being sincere, and tears came to his eyes.”
On the fat redwood stump between them, beneath a river stone, lay the stack of new Alta Californias, thoroughly perused, crinkled, and folded into thick quartos and octavos.
They had already discussed the newspapers’ accounts of the counterrevolutions that were retaking power across Europe as swiftly and ineluctably as the revolutions had grabbed it away. The democrats had been defeated now in Milan, Budapest, Berlin, and Vienna as well as Paris and Prague. The social quakes and blazes whose beginnings Ben witnessed last February—not even a whole year ago, he marveled—were already stilled, quenched, dead, gone.
Ben was writing a letter. Skaggs was deep into his new book—Eureka, the freshly published edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s astronomy lecture from last February. Now and then he sighed or shook his head and then read a passage aloud, all but shouting Eureka each time. “‘He who from the top of Aetna casts his eyes leisurely around’—Aetna, the man writes!” Skaggs said, pointing up toward his half-finished observatory. “From Aetna he is ‘affected chiefly by the extent and diversity of the scene. Only by a rapid whirling on his heel could he hope to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness.’ Is that not a lovely idea? Is that not how I have attempted to live my life? A rapid whirling panorama!”
And this oneness that Poe imagined, Skaggs explained to Ben, was quite literal at the creation of the universe—a primordial particle which exploded outward in a trillion trillion pieces, flying in every direction and filling the vastness of empty space with matter. Every speck of the universe—“you, me, Polly, Duff, the gold, the guano, biscuits, guns, New York, New Hampshire, Saturn, its moons, everything”—unfolded from that single, infinitely dense particle eons ago. “And furthermore,” he said excitedly, “as a result of the magnetic attraction of every atom of matter to every other atom of matter—”
“I understand gravity, Skaggs.”
“Well, Poe theorizes that gravity must finally pull all of the matter back together, like a steel spring or a sheet of rubber stretched tight, and all of it, snap, returning to that original, all-consuming, all-containing speck.” He made a tight fist and held it in front of his face. “Creation…annihilation,” he said, slowly opening and closing his hand.
“Your man Poe sounds like Duff Lucking.”
“He suggests that all of it—the universe, and time itself—is not infinite, but rather a kind of…blossoming…” Skaggs opened and closed his fist again. “And withering.”
“Perhaps the flower of the universe continues to bloom and die and bloom again.”
“Yes! Perhaps it does. Is that not an awesome picture of existence?”
Ben nodded, and returned to composing his reply to his brother Philip. In order to rekindle his sense of offense, he reread Philip’s second letter.
“I now have the unhappy duty to inform you,” Philip had written, “that another of our clan has been snatched from us—my beloved and angelic Tryphena is now an angel in fact, having succumbed to the Bengalis’ horrendous plague.” He had gone on to describe in detail his initial lack of alarm at her symptoms—at her stomach cramps (“a most frequent female complaint”), at her damp skin and diarrhea (which had afflicted Tryphena for a few weeks, he recounted, as a result of his withdrawal of her opium supply). He’d thought of the cholera only when she’d vomited all over the breakfast table at Great Chislington Manor “on the first day of hunting season. Tryphena faded and left us the next day—among the very first to be stricken by what is becoming an epidemic,” he’d added, in a kind of boast. “In the mere weeks since, many thousands more have been snatched away from the Thames and across the Styx by this Asiatic fiend.” Surely he’d filched that last fragment of bad poetry directly from the Times.
“Miss Winslow has been particularly attentive and kind to me in this time of need. Lord and Lady Brightstone also attended the funeral, which pleased me greatly,” Philip continued,
and they seem to have recovered from the tragic madness concerning Lloyd’s unnecessary and ridiculous voyage thanks to the French. (Even on his deathbed, Father asked that you be informed of this latest news.)
In fact, Ben had known nothing until now about the discovery of Lloyd Ashby’s misplaced remains—his father’s own letter on the subject of Ashby, written just before he’d taken ill, had arrived at Sullivan Street after Ben left the city. Ben found his brother’s choice of words—“ridiculous”—callous and glib even for Philip.
Precisely why & how he wound up in Shanghai, of all places, I do not understand still, though I suppose the disorder in France was frightful. It was one of our Foreign Office laddies, by the way, who finally discovered him packed and hidden in a back room somewhere in the French concession—tattered and rank and nearly unrecognizable, as one might imagine. Lord Brightstone arranged to have him shipped home aboard a clipper bound for London round the Horn.
And why had Philip waited “weeks” to inform Ben of Tryphena’s death? Because he was primarily writing to his brother in America not for reasons of sentiment, but of commerce.
After desecrating the memories of his late wife and Ben’s late friend, Philip had gotten to the point. “Captain Owen of the barque Caroline informed us that you and your companions have arrived safely in California to establish a mining business.” Philip and some business associates in China had a scheme to “round up and transport” thousands of “tractable young Chinamen” to California to work as “two-guinea-a-month contract labourers in the gold mines.” And they wished to engage Ben to act as managing agent for this enterprise in San Francisco.
Furthermore, Philip said, “the Jardine Matheson fellows in Hong Kong”—employees of his late wife’s family’s firm—wanted Ben’s help in “opening a new market” among “the natives & half-breed Spaniards in California and other Western territories, who seem as likely as the Celestials in this connection.” That is, Philip and his associates wondered if they might profitably sell Bengal opium to Indians and Mexicans in America, as they had done for years to the Chinese in China, where they had bred several million addicts. “Imagine, if you will,” Philip had written, “opium clippers carrying chests from Calcutta to San Francisco—from the Indians of India directly to your red Indians.”
Philip had intended this last line as a stroke of wit. But the satire of Ben’s brief reply would escape Philip entirely:
My dear brother,
I was most interested to receive yours of September last. I shall always remember Tryphena fondly. However, your remarkable and farcical far fetched farsighted plan to export Bengali opium and Chinese slaves to California seems premature, given the primitive state of our mines at present, and the great industry of our local Indians a
nd Mexicans at finding gold on their own account—a spirit of industry which a regular opium habit would, I suspect, countervail if not destroy. Therefore I must regretfully regrettably respectfully decline your offer of employment.
Please give my most affectionate regards to our sister.
Yours,
Benjamin
Rereading his letter, Ben decided to add a postscript that he knew would give Philip conniptions of envy and disapproval.
P.S.
Our own modest gold mining enterprise, employing four unskilled laborers, has in only four months turned a profit of more than £1,000 (and winter is said to be the least productive season). We call our little settlement Ashbyville—should the opportunity arise, you might inform Lord and Lady Brightstone of this commemoration. Finally, brother, I wish to ask you the favor of subscribing a £10 donation on my behalf to my friend Frederick Engels, to be sent in care of Ermen & Engels in Manchester.
Ben held the paper in front of his lips and blew on the wet ink. The letter from Engels in Geneva had been an urgent request for donations to support the democratic newspaper he was publishing in Cologne, “a small but essential barricade” against the resurgent oppressors in Prussia and beyond. Engels had just heard of the rush to California for gold, which he admitted in his note to Ben was “a confounding fact, not provided for in our Manifesto—that is to say, the creation of large new markets out of nothing.”
Heyday: A Novel Page 61