Polly scratched at her sheet with a new nib, first drawing each of the nearest ships, whose names they could read—the Panama, the Ringleader, the Radiant, the Metropolis, and the Phantom, with their fluttering ropes and rolled-up sails—and then fragments of the others ranked behind for almost a mile, a riot of verticals and horizontals in layer upon layer, foremasts and mizzenmasts and bowsprits and jibbooms. They were nearly all empty of men, and bobbed together on the high tide. It was a great American ruin, another instant ruin, sad and funny, unprecedented and amazing.
While Polly drew, Ben counted. “I believe there are one hundred eighty-seven,” he said. “More than in the Invincible Armada.” England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada had been Ben’s favorite military history as a boy.
“And look there,” Ben said to Duff, pointing in the opposite direction, toward Signal Hill. “A big ship of the line.”
Duff turned to look, and he shuddered. The two rows of open gunports along the hull—a dozen black squares on each lower deck—formed a 200-foot-long jack-o’-lantern’s grin. Yea, he said to himself as he touched his forehead and then his heart, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—he touched each shoulder—I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. The ship was the USS Ohio. Duff had seen it two years earlier in the Gulf of Mexico, firing broadsides from those 42-pounders onto Vera Cruz.
“Very big,” he said, turning his back on it and then excusing himself to go shopping before the stores closed.
Although Skaggs had warned Duff away from patent medicines (“brandy and cocaine by the quarter pint at ten times the fair price”), the coughs and fevers and rashes among his new people at Hembem persisted, and Duff had faith only in pharmaceutical cures manufactured in the States. Indeed, he and Yauka believed that his arrival in their valley had been fated. The Indians had started to call him nuestro médico, “our doctor” in Spanish, and even sakíni yomi, the “white medicine man” in Maidu. So in addition to advising Polly and Ben about crooked joists and plumb walls and water-soaked eaves, he had come to buy more medicines in San Francisco, where they were cheaper. And hopeful-looking remedies such as Trask’s Magnetic Ointment were not even available in Sacramento City. Duff spent an hour filling his valise with little bottles and tins and boxes.
Duff ’s appearance—deeply tanned but clean-shaven, blond hair falling to his shoulders, hatless except for a cap of twine netting from which a topknot poked out like a pony’s tail, necklace of wooden beads, doeskin serape, moccasins, the four brown bars and two dots scarred neatly across the tops of his hands—was strange even for San Francisco. But for all the curious looks he attracted, he believed that his costume and coiffure made an excellent disguise. Surely no one there who might have known him in Mexico—not the officers who’d sentenced him nor the men who’d whipped and branded him, not even his fellow soldiers—would recognize him in his transfigured state.
IT WAS DARK by the time he rejoined his sister and brother-in-law in the saloon at their hotel.
“Did you find all of your medicines?” Polly whispered. She had told him that a few doses of Blue Mass and laudanum might alleviate the anxieties that seemed to overcome him in cities.
He nodded. And as soon as she glanced away he crossed himself, for he hadn’t bought either of the drugs she’d suggested.
A pair of miners had just introduced themselves to Ben—an Australian fresh off a brig from Adelaide (“three months of vomiting and revomiting, aye?”) and a blustery red-haired lawyer from Boston named Shepley who already had 117 ounces, he said, mined in three months near Volcano. But his placers were cleaned out, and he was looking for somewhere new.
“Ashbyville?” repeated Shepley, who wore a red bandanna and a mustache waxed to resemble two letters S pushed end to end. “Of course—the famous lady of the Middle Fork. The Brook Farmers! Mr. and Mrs. Knowles,” he explained to the Australian, “have established a peculiar camp on the American River sometime since, socialism in the hills, if I understand correctly.” He smiled. “May I ask how many have joined you?”
What Polly took as mere condescension or political antagonism, however, was salaciousness. Unbeknownst to all of Ashbyville’s citizens except Skaggs, miners elsewhere referred to the camp as Assville and Middle Fuck.
“We have had a membership large enough, sir,” Polly replied, “to take well-nigh seventy pounds of color from our little stretch of the American.”
Duff very quickly crossed himself twice—to atone for their greed and her pride. The strangers wondered if he was feebleminded, or suffered spasms in his right arm. His attire inclined them toward the former.
“A successful and contented lot up there, are you?” said the grinning Bostonian.
“We have been indeed, very pleased,” Ben said, “and for that matter, we might have taken another seventy pounds had we wished.”
The fellow furrowed his brow and made a puffing noise. “If you had wished?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ben answered calmly. “Our particular terrain lent itself to the construction of a long flume, and together with our use of quicksilver to recover gold which would otherwise—”
“Ben,” said Duff, swatting his arm and then crossing himself twice—anger, greed—with the same hand. “The patent.” Their application to Washington was still pending.
“Our productivity,” Ben finished, using a word none of his listeners had heard before, “was exceptional, as a result both of our technical innovations and our unusual spirit of cooperation.”
Shepley now looked serious, and intrigued.
“Well,” said the Australian, raising his glass of porter, “share and share alike. To Ashbyville, then, aye?”
Duff crossed himself once more.
“You have spoken of Ashbyville in the past tense,” Shepley said. “May I ask why?”
THREE NEW DRINKING establishments opened for business that Saturday in San Francisco, which was unremarkable in 1849, although the twiddle-twaddle around the plaza had it that those three licenses were the 1,999th, 2,000th, and 2,001st issued by the city fathers. Given the week’s favorite estimate of the population—11,000—that implied nearly one saloon for every five permanent residents. Of course, permanence was a fluid concept in California.
A group of four singers outside Dennison’s Exchange were improvising an ode to this latest civic achievement, sung to the tune of “O, Susanna.” “San Francisco, oh, one for every five,/To booze upon the plaza is the ideal life for me…”
Ben and Polly and Duff, having finished dinner, passed them on their way into Dennison’s. The lead man in the quartet, catching sight of Polly, invented a new verse. “Oh my goddess, oh, we’re lonely as can be/If you loved us we’d surely die from apoplexy.” The singers laughed.
Polly ignored them. Duff hated them. As Ben paid the admission fees he nodded good-naturedly. “A fair try, boys, even if it does not quite scan.”
Polly and Ben had wanted to have a look at Dennison’s—as well as the Parker House, the El Dorado, and the Bella Union, all clustered within fifty yards of one another around the intersection of Washington and Kearny streets—because the big hotels and gambling halls were what currently passed for theaters in San Francisco.
The interior of the first floor was both splendid and rustic. Three of the walls were plain pine boards painted bright yellow and dark red in alternating vertical stripes, so that the whole room appeared to vibrate, and the fourth wall was simply a hanging canvas curtain, a rough patchwork of four topsails. The windows had no draperies, but from the ceiling trusses hung a dozen banners embroidered with the mottoes and nicknames of states (EMPIRE, HOG & HOMINY, WOLVERINES, LAND OF STEADY HABITS) and epigrammatic fragments (NEVER FADING BLISS and FREEDOM & DESIRE). Six big pink glass chandeliers also hung from the ceiling, each holding a hundred candles.
Hundreds of men were packed tight around the buckskin-covered gaming tables. Twenty drinkers at one end of the main liquor bar were transfixed by the narrow six-foot-tall glass
tube mounted in the shadows behind the bartenders. Inside the tube, sparks moved rapidly in a spiral pattern up and down and around the glass, the effect produced by an electrical charge from a generator cranked by an Indian boy crouching on the floor.
One of the bartenders, the spinner of the fortune wheel, and two of the card dealers were women who looked like (and had been) schoolteachers in the States, but with the slightly wry, incredulous expressions of women earning this week what they had made all last year as teachers. Each of them sized up Polly with a quick look—and vice versa—as she walked with Ben and Duff to a table. Here and there were other women, seven among the whole crowd, each accompanied by a man (or two or three) and all dressed and painted in the overscrumptious fashion of their profession.
Duff stared at one of the whores, a Creole wearing a bodice cut lower than any he had ever seen in his life. His scar had not stung for months. In the woods, at Hembem, it never stung. Now he imagined its fire spreading up and encircling his right eye. “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully,” he whispered as he crossed himself, “has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”
The canvas back wall was tied open to catch the breezes, but the room was still hot, and many of the men were cooling themselves with ladies’ fans. Polly gave hers to her brother to hold in his right hand and disguise his signs of the cross. At the twenty-one table a few paces away, an elated, redcheeked boy of twelve was betting five dollars on each hand. Every time he won, several miners leaned over to tap his head for luck. He wore overalls in a gaudy floral print.
Duff ’s lips barely moved, and his murmur was inaudible over the noise. “Let the children come to me, do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
The boy made Polly think of Priscilla. She wondered if California might suit her—might suit her too well, she worried, glancing at one of the doxies at the faro table. Twenty ounces a man. Lord. Would Polly ever manage to conquer her lust for money? She thought of the verse from the Sermon on the Mount that her mother had quoted so often, about the sin of sheer desire, of lusts in one’s heart. Twenty ounces every day, or twice or three times in a day if one wished. But perhaps the figure had been an exaggeration.
For his part, Dennison’s reminded Ben of the loud, sodden gambling sprees in the London clubs, which he had never much enjoyed. Those long nights had reeked of this very mixture of tobacco and liquor, glee and looming melancholy, energy and torpor, captivity and liberty. The atmosphere was gay to the point of mania, a strenuous pleasure-taking. The differences, of course, were the absence of women and the conformity of dress in the parlors of Pall Mall. There was also the democracy of San Francisco: anyone could plunge into this melee if he had a couple of pinches of dust or a friend with a bit extra. There was even a colored man drinking at the bar. (Ben was unaware of the house policy concerning Negroes—they got a free drink the first time they came but were told firmly never to return.)
A brass gong was struck loudly, followed by four beats of a bass drum, then the gong again, more drumbeats, and the gong a final time. The volume of the general gabble diminished, although not the gamesters’ cries variously blaming and thanking the dice or the cards or God. A man about Ben’s age wearing a white jacket had climbed onto a low scaffold in the corner and began addressing the crowd in a theatrical shout.
“Welcome and good evening, kind gents—and good ladies.” His English accent had been diluted almost to American. He joshed about being “a San Franciscan from the old days,” since he had arrived from the States “nearly two months ago.” And he said that he had been “recently over in police court—where I sang, I did.” A good many of the crowd laughed and hooted. In fact, a week earlier he really had performed songs and humorous imitations at the little courthouse across the plaza for two hundred people who had paid three dollars apiece—a performance already legendary as the city’s first professional theatrical event. “And tonight, for a fraction of the cost, you shall be subjected—that is, treated—to a few ditties sung by the one, the only, the formerly British and only very slightly annoying Mr. Stephen C. Massett. Later I shall offer up my rendition of Colonel Frémont teaching Spanish to President Taylor…”
“Stephen Massett!” Polly said. They had never met, but she knew the name. He had performed roles as an actor in New York, and Skaggs had known him in Buffalo a decade earlier.
“Apparently only Duff and I,” Ben said, “lack acquaintances and old friends in our new city.”
Duff crossed himself—this time not to atone for any sin, but to amplify his constant prayer that God keep his path clear of acquaintances from the army.
“…first tonight you shall hear a song, hot off the presses and arrived in the mails this week, a ballad from the beloved Hutchinson Family…” Duff and Polly exchanged a smile. The trumpeter and guitarist began to play. “It is entitled ‘Ho! For California,’” Massett said, which provoked curiosity and excitement in the room. Even the gamblers looked up from their cards and dice and wheels.
“We’ve formed our band and we’re all well mann’d
To journey afar to the promised land,
Where the golden ore is rich in store,
On the banks of the Sacramento shore.
“Then, ho, brothers ho!
To California go.
There’s plenty of gold in the world we’re told,
On the banks of the Sacramento.
“Heigh-o, and away we go,
Digging up the gold in Francisco.”
At the end of the first verse, practically everyone in the hall—shocked, flattered, elated—was not only listening but giggling, humming, clapping, and stomping in time to the music. Men rushed from the street to the door to see what had provoked such an uproar.
“As we explore that distant shore,
We’ll fill our pockets with the shining ore…”
The crowd hollered. Some men punched their fists in the air. One fellow sprinkled gold dust on the grinning, upturned face of a friend.
“And how ’twill sound, as the word goes round,
Of our picking up gold by the dozen pound.”
At this line, almost all five hundred stood and yelled hurrahs. Massett performed a little jig on his platform, waiting two bars before he continued.
“Oh! the land we’ll save, for the bold and brave
Have determined there never shall breathe a slave…
Let foes recoil, for the sons of toil
Shall make California God’s Free Soil.
“Then, ho! Brothers, ho!
To California go.
No slave shall toil on God’s Free Soil,
On the banks of the Sacramento…”
A good fraction of the crowd applauded the antislavery sentiment, albeit with less enthusiasm than the celebration of easy wealth. At the bar, the Negro acknowledged a few friendly glasses raised in his direction.
“Heigh-o, and away we go,
Chanting our songs of Freedom—oh!”
When the performance finished, Ben introduced himself to Massett as a pal of Timothy Skaggs’s and brought him over to their table to discuss the idea of starting a theater. Massett complimented Polly on her performance a few years back as the merchant’s ingenue daughter in Fashion (“so nicely unaffected”), and Duff on his authentic Indian look. He told them that nothing in New York had changed since they left—Chanfrau had celebrated his 250th performance as the heroic Mose Humphreys onstage, and was about to “get even richer in yet another sequel, if you can imagine.” Massett smiled. “The new one is Mose in California—I swear it.”
Ben saw Polly catch the nub of a new plan. He was excited simply watching her think.
“I knew Frank,” Duff said in a monotone, sounding neither proud nor envious. “We ran with the same machine.” He stared into a middle distance as he parsed this news.
“Well,” Polly said, “should we not ge
t up a production of Mose in California here, at a theater? Look at this audience! Look at how your California gold song stirred them up! Imagine three acts of Mose at the mines!”
Massett agreed that the play would cause a sensation, and sell thousands of tickets at three or five dollars apiece. “The trick would be finding a real b’hoy to play Mose.” He turned to her brother, which startled Duff. “Do you also happen to be a veteran, Mr. Lucking—?”
“Yes.”
“—of the New York theaters? Yes?”
“No, no, I never acted. I do not act.”
Ben and Polly talked some more with their new acquaintance about the kinds of shows that might succeed in California, and Massett mentioned that he too had seen the Hutchinsons perform in the Park last year during the Springtime of the Peoples.
“Have you heard the latest news about little Abby Hutchinson?” Massett asked.
He had retrieved Duff ’s full attention.
“A fellow just out from New York told me that our sweet young fighter for freedom and justice has married, and married well—a member of the stock exchange.”
Duff ’s face fell. He was bereft, horrified. “Abby, she…she marrieda…Wall Street man? A banker?”
Heyday: A Novel Page 67