Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “Virtue may be its own reward,” Massett said, “but in Miss Hutchinson’s case, apparently an income of ten thousand dollars is also welcome.” He spotted someone he knew at the door, and waved.

  They turned to see an extravagantly dressed woman accompanied by two Indian girls with waists corseted and faces powdered white. Ben and Polly recognized the older woman as the brothelkeeper who had been pointed out to them in February by the Donner party boy—the countess.

  Now Duff could barely breathe, and he found himself silently reciting Genesis 18. The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and their sin is very grievous…

  “Do you know Irene?” Massett asked.

  Husband and wife shook their heads.

  “A very saucy and enterprising lady from New Orleans, Mrs. McCready is.”

  Duff, dressed as an Indian, looked at Mrs. McCready’s Indian girls, dressed as white harlots, and wanted to cry. If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes…

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, Duff took his bags to Polly and Ben’s room at the St. Francis. It already looked more like a home than their cabin at Ashbyville ever had. Polly had put out vases of morning glories and yellow monkey flowers and spread the Navajo bayeta on the end of the bed. Ben had tacked up Polly’s pen-and-ink picture of the jammed harbor next to the window containing the same view, and hung the Maidu bow and his makeshift quiver over the sconce by the door. Books neatly lined the top of the bureau. Duff was happy for Polly and Ben, embraced them both, and kissed his sister goodbye.

  He walked with his satchels the half mile to Vallejo Street, practically the suburbs. The Church of St. Francis of Assisi was a shed with a rough cross nailed to the front gable. The contest to organize churches was as fervid as the one to finish saloons and brothels—the Presbyterians had just beaten the Catholics, but the Catholics had celebrated their first Mass, well ahead of the first Congregationalist and Baptist services, and three months before the Jews would celebrate their first Yom Kippur. Apart from counseling Polly and Ben on carpentry and buying supplies for Hembem, attending Mass had been Duff ’s reason for this visit to San Francisco.

  The priest, a visiting French Canadian, spoke English. During his reading, Duff had the distinct feeling that Saint Matthew himself was speaking to him, and confirming that his new life with Yauka and her people in the woods was righteous and holy: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon…Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them…Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin…Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself…Verbum Domini.”

  It was the word of God. And it was nearly indistinguishable from what Yauka and Bayam and Kumisi and the other Maidu said about money and wisdom and birds and flowers and the folly of worrying. “Deo gratias,” Duff said as sincerely as he had ever given thanks. In his mind, Catholic teaching and the Indians’ philosophy became one that morning. When he sipped the blood of Christ from the cup, he imagined it was the toloache, the jimson root tea they drank from a stone chalice in order to commune with animal spirits, and then suddenly he realized—why had it not occurred to him before?—that the toloache might permit him to communicate directly with the Lord as well. It seemed so simple to him now, clear and bright as the deep blue July sky as he strode from the church.

  “Ragged little doghole, ain’t it?”

  It was a fellow his age, in the costume of a b’hoy—red flannel shirt, tight pants, thick boots—who had kneeled next to him for communion. Duff shrugged and kept walking.

  “I can say so, pard, because I helped build it myself in ’47. Army work.” He put out his hand. “Otis Waterman. I like your mountain-man costume.”

  Duff crossed himself, put down a bag, and shook Waterman’s hand. “Hallo.”

  “Colonel Stevenson’s Seventh New York Volunteers, retired. I’m a clerk now, in a land sales office. And,” he added very proudly, “an officer of the Society of Regulators—the old Hounds, you know.” Duff had seen their headquarters just south of the plaza, a tent they called Tammany Hall. It was filled with idlers spitting and drinking and cursing too loudly while they played with knives. It was, Duff saw, San Francisco’s version of New York’s Spartan Association, thugs posing as an urban militia. Fatty Freeborn had been a Spartan.

  “I work placers,” Duff said. “At Ashbyville.”

  “Did you know,” asked Waterman, “that it says D on your skin there? I noticed it when we were receivin’ communion. That’s a D.”

  At last it had happened: the coded scar on his right cheek, the army brand that meant DESERTER, had been deciphered.

  Duff stared at his accuser. Waterman wore no jacket and was apparently unarmed. Duff ’s pistol was in one of his bags. What did this foul b’hoy mean to do? And why was he smiling?

  Waterman touched the Maidu tattoo on the top of Duff ’s right hand, a bar and two dots in a row just above the knuckles. “In the telegraph alphabet, that there, dah-dit-dit, is a D. I was an apprentice operator for a year at Magnetic Telegraph, just before the war.”

  71

  July 6, 1849

  Ashbyville

  HE HAD SOLD Badger a few ounces of mercury when the boy came to visit; he had given directions to a score of new miners heading east down the Middle Fork; he had made a friend of an army lieutenant come to map the gold district for Washington; and yesterday an impertinent Boston twerp named Shepley had appeared to inspect the bit of Ashbyville that Ben and Polly had apparently offered to sell him for forty-five ounces. Yet except for those few minutes or odd hour here and there, Skaggs had spent the previous two weeks alone. And he’d found the experience entirely and shockingly agreeable. He did miss his conversations with Ben and his playful cuffing of “the Lucking kids,” as he still thought of Polly and poor Duff. But after twenty years of incessant companionship and chatter, he felt as if he’d been freed from a cramped cage in which he had been a performing dog.

  Instead of turning every twitch of his brain into some hasty squib that he tossed at anyone within shouting distance, he rediscovered the pleasures of writing out his thoughts—about the “large but trifling cost” of his $2,812.50 observatory in the woods; about “the twenty-seven-year-old rays of starlight” he was attempting to capture on a daguerreotype plate, and the Capricornid meteor showers that “entertained and inspired” him night after night, like “a camp meeting but the way such a spectacle ought to be—beautifully real and entirely benign brimstone from the heavens, with no Christian sermons at all”; about Duff ’s “flibbertigibbety swings between all-happy bliss and relapses of the deep dark blues”; about California as “a crucible for the very best and worst in our reckless American character”; and about his plans to take a photograph, in color, of the next transit of Venus across the face of the sun, as an old man in 1882.

  And two days earlier—on the Fourth of July, for the first time in his life a day without explosions or speeches—he had rewritten and finally finished in one sitting his essay about the modern perception of time. He’d been inspired by a definition he’d happened across in his dictionary between relapse and relax: “relativity, n.: a thing not absolute or existing by itself.” From that germ, he’d written, he had “concluded or, rather, intuited” that the recent miracles of breakneck speed had “simply begun to unblind us to the essential relativity of all perceptions and all measurements.” And this morning he had decided to stitch together all of his new writing into a real book, “a history and philosophical memoir” called Wonderstruck: The World in a Freak, or, A Former Cynic’s Chronicle of Our Fantastic Modern Times. Perhaps Ben and Polly’s publishing house would make it their first title.

  And he had taken to dressing outlandishly, because it amused him, and because there was no need to dress otherwise. On this particular Friday he had pulled on one of Ben’s shredded archery-tar
get shirts and Polly’s billowy blue silk pants, which extended only to his knees and which he left unbuttoned. (She had taken none of her refashioned trousers and overalls to San Francisco, having decided that as long as her gender was outnumbered a hundred to one, she did not wish to invite extra attention from men in the streets.)

  Skaggs found the long midsummer days paradisiacal—a few hours writing, a few hours digging and washing, an hour fishing or hunting turkeys with Ben’s English shotgun, an hour walking, an hour eating, an hour napping, a few hours rereading old numbers of Scientific American and The Literary World, and on clear, balmy nights (six out of seven), a final few hours on Mount Aetna gazing up through his lenses into the brilliant night. It was heaven.

  “I hear you approaching, paleface!” he shouted out to Duff, who had just climbed to the top of Mount Aetna. “By now I should have loaded my musket and taken aim.”

  When Duff appeared at the open door of the observatory, Skaggs was there to give him a hug. The man wearing blue silk short pants and a target on his back hugged the browned white boy wearing only a leather breechcloth and moccasins. Skaggs was not in the habit of hugging Duff, but he was about to raise a fraught subject.

  He needed to lance the great boil, to hear the confession.

  “Welcome home.”

  Duff saw the pallet on the floor. “You have brought up your bed.”

  “One hot night I dozed off, and when I awoke, the breezes through the open dome were delicious. A perfect place to sleep, perchance to dream.”

  Duff handed him the latest editions of the Alta California, now published thrice weekly, and apprised him of Ben and Polly’s latest San Francisco plans.

  As he spoke, Skaggs saw now that the scar did indeed resemble a D.

  “Have you taken your ‘hundred-million-million-mile portrait’ yet?” Duff asked.

  Skaggs intended to make his first stellar daguerreotype of Vega, a million times as distant as the sun.

  “Oh, until the damned clock drive arrives, it’s simply no use attempting it.”

  “Because the star moves across the sky, like the moon.”

  “No, because our little ball of water and rock moves across the sky.”

  “The Maidu say that everything was water until a turtle asked God to make the sun and stars and land and all the rest.”

  “So does your Bible say the same. Except, I believe, for the part about the turtle. ‘And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’”

  Duff ’s eyes shone. “Yes. Yes.”

  “Are you hungry?” Skaggs asked. “I still have three good eggs.”

  “I must go. It’s late, and at dawn the kaui-tson starts.” Each July, the Maidu began burning acres of dried grasses, both to fertilize the ground and to roast unlucky grasshoppers, which they harvested from the ashes for food.

  “Ah, the great annual burning,” Skaggs said, declining tonight to make his “tasty crispy cricket corpses” joke, or to tell Duff again that the difference between crickets and grasshoppers is that the latter “have their ears in their crotch.” Instead he glanced up through the open dome. “The moon is full, and you know the way back home like a wolf to his den. At least stay with a lonely old white man for a few more minutes to talk.”

  And so they sat down together on the bench.

  “Have you stayed put here since we left you?” Duff asked.

  “I took Jenny Lind to get the mail and buy sugar and barley and eggs—and for a splurge, a tin can of oysters.”

  Duff inhaled sharply, as if to speak.

  “Do not ask how many ounces I paid,” Skaggs said. He paused. “I received a letter from New Hampshire, from brother Jonah.” He touched the envelope on his desk.

  “Another already? That must cheer you.”

  “And surprise me. Jonah Skaggs would never invest forty cents on postage unless he was very keen to tell me something.” He paused again. “And my friend Taylor at the Tribune has written as well. It seems Greeley has dispatched him here—to chronicle this, us, all of it, California, better late than never. So after Bayard arrives, I shall have another chum in the neighborhood.

  “And speaking of new company, while I was out at Auburn I spent two lovely hours with a fine fellow who’s camped up on Bear Creek…”

  “Auburn?” The only Auburn that Duff knew was the prison in New York, the place he had imagined as his Calvary. “What do you mean, ‘at Auburn’?”

  “Uh-huh—the boys at North Fork Dry Diggings have decided to change the name of the camp—henceforth it shall be Auburn. A civilized, townish, post-gold-fever name, I suppose.”

  Duff wanted the subject to change. “Tell me about the miner you met. Your new friend?”

  “Not a miner at all—a surveyor and mapmaker, actually, from Massachusetts. Mr. George Derby. A very witty Yankee, here to draw a proper map of El Dorado for the government. For the army. And he understands these machines”—he waved at the telescope—“at least as well as I do.”

  “For the army?”

  “An officer in the Topographical Engineers, Lieutenant Derby, West Point. In fact, he sailed from New York for Mexico the same time as you left, in ’46, and fought at Vera Cruz as well…”

  Yea, the shadow of death, fear no evil.

  “…wounded at Cerro Gordo, he said, in the great final charge against the Mexicans. Now, Duff, you were at Cerro Gordo, if I recall correctly.”

  An army officer. A West Point mate of his own despised Lieutenant McClellan. An engineer. At Vera Cruz—and hit at Cerro Gordo. Perhaps it was one of his own shots that had struck him. This lieutenant might well recall the name Duff Lucking.

  “I was there.”

  Duff felt once again as if he were being hunted and haunted and pricked and probed and tested.

  And this time, for once, he was not imagining it. Skaggs was determined to unburden him of his secrets.

  “I should like to invite Lieutenant Derby here for dinner one day. You shall meet him yourself.”

  Duff stood. “I don’t need to know him. It has gotten very late. I need to go.”

  Skaggs stood and, facing his friend—his rescuer—put his hands on his shoulders. He wanted to hug the boy again. “I know what happened in Mexico, Duff. I had begun to put two and two together some time ago, but—but now I know your mystery.”

  Verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.

  “My brother is a lawyer with the firm of Pierce & Minot in Concord—with Frank Pierce, General Pierce.” He glanced toward the letter from New Hampshire. “General Pierce informed Jonah of your”—treason—“reversals, and your months with the St. Patrick’s Battalion, and your capture, and your trial. And your”—mortification, lashing, branding—“punishment.” Now he strained to avoid any glance at the big red scar—the D, for deserter—on Duff ’s cheek. “I know all of it, Duff.”

  Shadow, death, fear, evil.

  Skaggs tightened his grip. “You need not suffer any more torment over this, boy, or intrigue to keep it a secret. It is the past. It is unhappy history. You are a moral man, Duff, and you are plainly no coward. Whatever was your rationale for”—deserting—“forsaking the army at Vera Cruz and joining the Mexicans, well, I have no doubt whatsoever your decision was wholehearted, and excruciating, and irresistible.”

  Streams of tears were running down Duff ’s cheeks. “Do my mother and father know?” He saw the flicker of confusion and fear in Skaggs’s eyes. “I mean my sister—Polly and Ben.”

  “I am no snitch. I leave it to you to tell them what you will. For now, you have my love and forgiveness.”

  Duff ripped himself from Skaggs’s embrace. “No, no, no. You are no priest. I don’t require your forgiveness. God can forgive me, God has forgiven me.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Duff started to sob.

  He was now under the impression that Skaggs knew all of his secrets.

  “I did it for t
hem, you know, for those wretched, unarmed Mexicans we were slaughtering. Slaughtering. We bombed their churches! Worse than slaughter, because the burned and blasted lived on, my God, for hours and hours in that dust and heat, crying and bleeding, bugs all over them. Women and children, oh, the children—two babies. A lieutenant ordered me not to waste my rounds and powder on the dying, on ‘ordinary Mexicans,’ he said, but I, I had to disobey. I had no choice. Did I?” He was not really asking the question of Skaggs. “They moaned and suffered so terribly. I shot the first one, a man, and the woman on the ground next to him thanked me as I reloaded, maybe his wife, maybe not, Gracias, señor, and then I shot her, and then reloaded, and then the next. Then I found the others. Point-blank, every one in that block. The most of them thanked me if they could speak. Point-blank, so it was painless. For them. Afterward I was covered in blood. I was soaked red. If the lieutenant had seen me then, he would have known, he would’ve checked my powder and counted my balls and then ordered a court-martial. So I was good as dead already. I did it all for them, those poor Mexicans, only for them. It did me no good at all.”

  He took a deep breath and now looked straight at Skaggs to address him directly.

  “It is a relief to me that you know everything, Timothy. But you must understand that I burned the distillery because of the swill milk—because of the babies they murdered, such as Grace and William, may they rest in peace.” He crossed himself. “And the brothel in Mercer Street, to free the women imprisoned there, to end the degeneracy. It was the same too with Freeborn’s shack—to punish him for the horrors he visited on poor Priscilla Christmas. And the sugarhouse burned, well, that was to repay the Primes, and it was on behalf, too, what was it…for the proletarianites, all the workingmen enslaved by the bankers who own such places.

  “The blazes were all for others’ sakes, you know—once for you, Timothy, for you as well. Do you remember the winter you became so very angry at Greeley and his paper? Their punishment was on your behalf.”