Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “Do you know Newton’s Third Law of Motion?” Ben suddenly asked Skaggs.

  “I believe I do—pendulums, billiard balls, the kick of a shotgun…”

  “Yes, but I’ve just realized now that the Third Law explains the political events of this last year as well. It explains Europe. ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ You see? A season of revolution, a season of counter-revolution. Hope running ahead of itself, then the despots reasserting themselves with equal force. The monarchs run off, then they return. Blossoming, withering, just as—” He suddenly stopped, and stared.

  Skaggs was so startled he bobbled and tossed his book to the ground. Ben gripped his pen like a dagger.

  An Indian stood at the doorway of the cabin Skaggs and Duff shared. He had a deer’s face placed in front of his own, a stole of knotted rabbit-skin strips over his shoulders, and a white paste smeared on his neck. His hands and wrists were bloody. He held a bow and arrow. Ben, thinking he was about to attack Polly, or perhaps already had, stood to grab a log from the fire and charge, battling him to the death if necessary.

  “Hallo there,” Skaggs shouted.

  Suddenly Polly rushed outside, her feet bare, her eyes wet. The Indian was no Indian but Duff, dressed in a Maidu costume.

  He removed the mask and in a rush of words, as animated as they had ever seen him, recounted his last forty-eight hours. After he lost his way, he discovered a flock of butterflies roosting in a stand of pines, and then he’d fallen and cut his face, but two Maidu women had appeared. The beautiful young one, Yauka, had placed a warm green poultice from her mouth on his cheek, and then they’d taken him to their village, Hembem, which consisted of a dozen conical huts—huts called hu, he said, made from slabs of bark with beds of pine needles, like the miniature forest cottages Polly and he had built in the Clove Valley for the imaginary gnomes. Only thirty of the Indians currently lived at the village, mainly women and children and the very old.

  Most of the men and many of the women were off at the mines. And nine others from their village, Duff said, including Yauka’s fiancé, had been killed three years ago in a massacre of one hundred Indians by Kit Carson and Frémont’s soldiers and their gang of Indian hirelings from the east.

  “The place was magical,” he gushed. “It was the Peaceful Valley, just like in my book Old Hicks, the Guide—‘graceful creatures shut out, by their steep hills in this enchanting recess.’”

  Skaggs snorted.

  “I envy you your adventure, Duff,” said Ben.

  “Are you hungry?” Polly asked.

  “No! Before we left for the hunt this morning there was a feast—acorn soup and acorn bread and fried deer tongue…And crickets. I ate a cricket.”

  “This is hunting attire, then,” said Ben as he touched the rabbit fur on Duff ’s shoulders.

  “I impersonated a deer to draw in other deer. And it worked! We killed two bucks. That is, we drove one over a cliff, the other Bayam and Kumisi killed, with arrows.” He held up his bloody hands. “Bayam is Yauka’s younger brother, and Kumisi is a cousin. In return for my gold, they gave me the costume, the bow, and these as well.” From the ground behind him he picked up a small red blanket woven with zigzag black stripes.

  “The bow and arrows are a gift for you, Ben.” Ben had told Duff about his boyhood love of archery. “The blanket, the bayeta, is for you, Polly. The moccasins are yours, Skaggs.”

  Ben rubbed the Indian cloth between his fingers like the textile manufacturer he used to be. It reminded him of the red baize Knowles & Company had produced in Manchester. (In fact, this very blanket had started six years ago as Knowles & Company baize, dyed red with imported Mexican cochineal, then exported from Manchester to Bilbao, and then from Spain to Mexico, where a Navajo Indian in Sonora had unraveled the cloth and re-wove the threads into this bayeta. The Navajo had traded several blankets to a Mexican for aguardiente, and the Mexican, now mining in California, had in turn traded this one to a Maidu for a pinch of gold.)

  Rolled up in the blanket were twelve arrows. Ben took one and fingered its sharp, carved stone head. Shooting at targets in England, he had fired arrows with small, soft brass points. Polly went to fetch the bottle of benzoic acid and a sticking plaster for Duff ’s wound.

  “I gave them the two ounces I had with me,” Duff confessed, a little bashfully. “Yauka told me that I am a llano.”

  “You understand the Indians’ lingo now?” asked Skaggs.

  “Llano is Spanish,” Duff said. “It means level ground, but…about a person it means steady and humble and trustworthy.” He blushed. He was smiling.

  “Ah, right,” said Skaggs, recalling something from his visit to North Fork Dry Diggings, “your Spanish. At the saloon on Friday I was speaking with a Mexican gentleman whose English was better than serviceable—a gold-hungry Mexican judge, up from the city of Hermosillo. After a few mescals he got into a tussle with one of the Americans about the war—about the Irish deserters who switched sides and fought for the Mexicans. St. Patrick’s Battalion?”

  Duff wanted to disappear. The truth was catching up. He clasped his hands in front of him, and watched Ben pull the bowstring. He thought of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper: One of you will betray me.

  “Judge Suárez made the mistake of toasting the Irish renegades, but he called them by a Spanish name…”

  “Los San Patricios…”

  “No, no, he called them the ‘Legión de Extranjeros.’ And I recalled that evening last spring, the night of the victory parades on Broadway, when I played my practical joke, poking my walking stick into your back, pretending I was an armed Mexican. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “…And I believe something like la Legión de Extranjeros was a phrase you whispered to me that night…”

  Duff thought perhaps he should simply turn and bolt, run back into the woods to Yauka’s hu and never come back.

  “…‘The Legion of Foreigners’ was Judge Suárez’s translation.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And so I fail to understand why you spoke that phrase to me in New York…”

  “It was a Mexican phrase, during the war.”

  “Rain,” said Ben, holding his palm out to feel the drops, and Skaggs felt one, and both men raced to the benches to collect their papers. Polly hurried Duff inside to receive his antiseptic and bandage.

  62

  late February 1849

  Ashbyville

  THE RAINS OF February made it impossible to mine more than two or three days in a week.

  Duff had finished helping build the observatory (which he sometimes called the chapel), so he spent his days of leisure at the Indians’ village, huddled in Yauka’s hu. He watched her grind acorns, taught her and her brother English, and learned about the Maidus’ ceremonial fasting and ingestion of toloache, jimson root tea, which they believed enabled them to communicate with spirits. It sounded to Duff like a Lenten first communion, in which receiving the Holy Eucharist actually connected one with God. He had stopped cutting his hair, and started parting it in the middle. And at any appearance of the sun, Polly noticed, he turned his face skyward to brown his skin.

  Skaggs read astronomy books, and now awaited the arrival of the telescope itself from New York, and the dome from Mexico.

  Ben had his new private diversion as well. Polly had painted four concentric circles on the back of one of his thick white work shirts, which they wrapped around two feet of scrap lumber. She used charcoal for the outside ring, blue and red tempera for the next two, and for the bull’s-eye she mixed gold dust into a spoonful of collodion, the clear chemical jelly Skaggs used to coat daguerreotype plates.

  He took up archery with the same single-mindedness he had applied as a boy, but now with the muscles of a grown man. For an hour at least twice every day, at dawn and before dusk, Ben shot half a round—seventy-two arrows. On days when the rain made it impossible to work, he would shoot two or three rounds. They had
mounted the target on the huge oak at the western end of the camp, forty yards beyond the tents, so that even in downpours he could stay dry by shooting from just inside the canvas, then run to pull his arrows from the target and replace them in his quiver—Skaggs’s spyglass case. After a week he had hit the bull’s-eye so often that it needed regilding, and the following week Polly resorted to yellow tempera instead.

  Ben had become an archer again. The biceps of his right arm bulged, and his three string fingers were callused. He thought about trying to kill a rabbit or turkey.

  Polly felt she had drawn every inch of Ashbyville twice, and had acquired no new pastime. She started to admit to herself that she missed crowded sidewalks. She missed furtive glances at strangers and wondering who they were and where they lived and what they thought. She missed the theater, and music. She missed shopping. She missed the sunlight and shadow on fine big stone buildings, and the sound of church bells. She missed the society of women. She missed the city’s sense of endless permutation and infinite possibility.

  One night during a long silence at supper, she looked around at her compatriots. She was very fortunate, she knew, and very fond of all of them, but the quiet meandering and murk of ordinary life in Ashbyville had grown somewhat tiresome. Skaggs had been right. She was spoiled. She sighed.

  “You are bored, my dear,” he suddenly announced, “and boredom becomes boring for those in proximity to it.”

  “Skaggs,” Ben snapped.

  “I am simply—”

  “Timothy is not wrong,” Polly said, “I have been a terrible mope. Forgive me.”

  “And allow me,” Skaggs replied, “to propose a miracle cure.”

  February 28, 1849

  San Francisco

  THUS POLLY AND Ben and Skaggs found themselves one morning a week later making their way slowly along San Francisco’s plaza, from the Excelsior Restaurant toward the wharf. All three were bathed in hot water, dressed in well-laundered clothing, full of good food—poached eggs! fresh sausage! corn cakes with maple syrup!—cooked by strangers and served on china. Ben and Skaggs had not worn neckties nor Polly a dress since they were last here, the day they had landed in California. Ben had shaved for the first time since Christmas, and Polly had perfumed herself with lavender and rose. Walking on springy twelve-foot-long timbers suspended a few inches above the muddy slough of the street was like a game to them, not a chore, they were all of them so pleased to be in a city. Every so often, blue sky showed itself and the sun shone.

  Since November the winter weather had pushed thousands of miners out of the Sierras and into San Francisco for days or weeks at a time. The quiet, nearly deserted town of last fall was now filled with several thousands of people, every second one of them shouting. Three men no older than twenty, one a brown-skinned, blue-eyed Kanacker from the Sandwich Islands, stood together in the mud singing “Buffalo Gals,” in celebration of…who knew what? On the next block, a hatless bald man in a new suit and bare feet sat on the windowsill of a new house, giggling and wiping away tears as he held a six-ounce nugget in front of his face.

  It reminded Ben of Paris the day after the monarchy dissolved. It reminded Polly of the Bowery on a Saturday night in the spring. Skaggs thought of his father’s dreadful damnation of cities with an air of the permanent carnival. He wished his father could see this.

  But it was not all a spree, and that is what made it unlike anything any of them had seen. If San Francisco was loose and sybaritic, it was also a kind of go-aheadish Yankee paradise. Those men not gallivanting were hard at work calculating, bargaining, weighing, selling, hauling, and building with an intensity equal to that of the holidaymakers around them—“like a Shaker with a week left to live,” Skaggs said about a grunting carpenter with a sledge in one hand, an awl in the other, a ruler in his pocket, and a screwdriver between his teeth. Everywhere the air smelled of milled pine. A city was arising—instantly, all around them, even as they walked through it. Twenty-three houses would be finished by the end of the day, and twenty-six others started the next.

  “It is as if they are all in some great contest,” Polly remarked.

  “Not ‘as if ’ they are in a contest,” Ben replied. “They are in one.”

  The seeds of a permanent and substantial place—a wharf, tenscore houses and stores, even a school—had been planted a few years earlier, when Yerba Buena was just another Mexican port, before the gold. So now it was a bona fide town, not a camp, despite the hundreds of tents pitched everywhere. The temporary structures were plainly annexes, transitory shelters for people and mules and cargo while a true city was being assembled. New settlements back in the hills had comical names, like Second Garrote and Growlersburg and Rough and Ready, because their inhabitants understood that all the shanties and lean-tos might be abandoned next month and vanish next year, as soon as the ground was denuded of gold. But San Francisco—for all its makeshifty, brabbling, brangling rudeness—was already filled with a great pride in its own existence.

  They passed the new post office—where a line of customers snaked around the block—and approached the pier at the water end of Clay Street, where several hundred others had already gathered to watch a celebrated ship put into port. They moved to the edge of the crowd, most of whom gave Polly a glance or two on account of her gender, a third glance on account of her race, and still another for her face and figure. A white woman! A pretty young white woman in fashionable silks! At some of the men who frankly stared, Ben stared back, and Skaggs actually scowled until they smiled or looked away.

  A large ship had passed through the Golden Gate into the bay. Ben, seeing its canvas unfurled, cocked his head and listened. He heard no thunder of six hundred horsepower from across the water. The engines had given out. The brand-new SS California, the first vessel of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, would come inside the kelp under sail, not steam, her pair of thirty-foot side wheels mere ornaments.

  Ben and Skaggs had seen this ship before, in the Manhattan dark between midnight and dawn, from above, hours before its launch, looking down last spring from a rooftop at the shipyard in Avenue D where it was built.

  The three of them watched the streams of passengers scramble off the gangway—four hundred people from a vessel built to carry two hundred, men (and six women) from the States as well as South America, every one of them fevering for gold. Ben and Skaggs and Polly felt like California old-timers.

  They had timed their trip to San Francisco to coincide with the ship’s arrival not as sightseers, however, but to collect a certain cargo.

  No one stopped them as they made their way into the hold, for the crew of the California was already deserting, despite the remarkable wages they had been offered to stay on.

  Polly was the first to spot the crate.

  “My God!” Skaggs cried. “Dear, dull, cautious Jonah actually did it! Bless you, Jonah!” He looked around. “A crowbar.”

  “Perhaps first we ought to get it ashore—”

  “No, we must jimmy it now.”

  He found a chisel and began to attack the lid. They had never seen him so determined. When they finally pried open the box, Skaggs cleared away the wood shavings inside like a ravenous man digging for food, then stopped short. He was breathing heavily. He stroked his prize softly, slowly. It was a tapered mahogany tube the color of toast and as smooth as butter, ten feet long and half a foot in diameter at its wide end. The brass fittings at the eyepiece shone like…gold. The telescope had arrived.

  “Good Lord. Have you ever in your lives seen a more beautiful thing?”

  “It is very handsome,” Ben agreed.

  “Why, it is perfection.”

  “We are pleased for you, Skaggs,” said Polly.

  “My God,” he said, looking up, as if he had surprised himself by winning a dare, “I shall be an astronomer.”

  Skaggs had his treasure.

  the American River Valley

  DUFF WAS BEGINNING to see that his life had a scheme impose
d from above. Why, for instance, had he taken up Sam Houston as his boyhood hero? Now he knew why: because Senator Houston had run off to the frontier as a young man to join an Indian tribe, to take an Indian name and an Indian wife.

  He spent every hour he could at Hembem, hiking over the hills to it in the afternoon and returning for his next appointed workday only at dawn. He no longer washed with soap, since Yauka found the smell unpleasant—instead, he used a certain onion to cleanse himself. He trimmed his beard with a glowing hot stick. And with an obsidian splinter he had cut the tops of his hands—a line and two tiny circles on each—and rubbed the cuts with burnt nutmeg to darken the scars.

  He wore moccasins all the time, laced up over his ankles like half boots. He no longer chewed tobacco, but smoked it in a wooden pipe. He played tunes on a four-holed elderwood flute. On his trips to and from the village, he stopped to gather chervil and lamb’s lettuce and the first tender shoots of columbine and larkspur.

  While Polly and the others were in San Francisco, Yauka surprised Duff by giving him a special necklace she had strung. That night as they lay together he started counting its wooden beads.

  “¿Porque estas contando?” she had asked him.

  “…twenty-three, twenty-four, momentito, twenty-five, twenty-six…”

  And when he’d finished counting—“…one hundred sixty-two, one hundred sixty-three, one hundred sixty-four, my Lord, one hundred sixty-five”—he sat up and made the sign of the cross. The necklace Yauka had made happened to be a perfect rosary, one bead for each of one hundred and fifty Hail Marys, another for each of the fifteen Our Fathers.

  San Francisco

  SAN FRANCISCO WORKED wonders on their moods. Seeing a busy harbor and being among houses and hubbub again—“just enough civilization,” as Skaggs called it—made all three of them merrier than they had been in a while.