Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  IV. DECEPTION AT ANGEL’S CAMP

  So it was that we arrived at the diggings penniless and without any equipment. Our first stop was the general store in Angel’s Camp, which was at that time a log house rudely thrown together with mud. There, we had no choice but to sell our burro to the store’s proprietor, a Swede who denied us a fair price, saying she was an Arkansas mule and not of the sturdier Mexican stock.

  God had tested my brother with a wicked temper and a walloping hook. It was a test he often failed back home, bloodying Ohio noses and blacking Ohio eyes for no good reason I could see. I was worried he might put his pique to use here, where we had no one. I discreetly reminded by brother that we were not in the East anymore and that this man was likely the only merchant in the entire county. Inwardly, though, I envied the way my brother could make a man cower.

  So, in the first of many injustices in the territory, we sold the jenny to outfit ourselves with a fraction of the very supplies we had dumped in the Sierra: an iron pan for the outrageous sum of sixteen dollars and a shovel at the ungodly price of twenty-nine. We also purchased two red shirts, two pairs of smart-looking tan pantaloons, a tent, a sack of flour, and a shank of dried pork.

  Errol sent another letter to Marjorie, which contained many standard fabrications as to our good luck and our promising claim and the clement passage overland, which despite accounts to the contrary was entirely manageable for a lady. I scribbled a postcard to our mother, telling her only the truth: that we had arrived, and that we were alive. Outfitted, we hiked three miles to the American River and established our humble camp at a sandbar where the fat-pocketed Swede had told Errol there was gold for the picking.

  I had envisioned the diggings a place of desolation and solitude—such was the portrayal in the literature on the subject—and so I was rather dismayed to find that the American had other forty-niners populating her banks. By their accents I made out Southerners and Yanks, Pikes, Limeys, Canadians and Keskydees. By sight I identified Mexicans, Negroes and Indians. A Pike who claimed he had been a riverboat captain in St. Louis informed me that the Negroes were former slaves—fugitives, though he didn’t say the word. The Indians, he said, were current slaves.

  Whether white or colored, every man wore the same red work shirts which Errol and I had so recently purchased, though most were by now a sort of purple with filth. Their pantaloons had gone a snuffy black. Some had added sashes about the collar for a touch of the dude, and most of these were all but shredded with wear.

  The only deviants from this diggings uniform were two Chinamen who worked the claim adjacent to ours. I had never seen a Chinaman before and I fear I gazed quite rudely at them. The two—a father and his son, whose age I estimated to be around thirteen—wore billowing yellowish frocks gathered in a queer fashion. They panned not with iron but with the same type of pointed bowls of woven straw they wore as hats. Beneath those brims were their curious slit eyes and skin so hairless and smooth as to appear made of wax. But strangest of all were the snakelike black pigtails gathered from a snatch of hair at their napes and falling down their backs. The boy’s descended past his shoulders impressively. But it was a sapling compared to his father’s, which was so long that when he stooped at the river its tip dipped into the green water and swayed there as he panned.

  We staked our ten-by-ten claim and worked it twelve hours a day for two days, Errol at the shovel and me at the pan, then, after Errol called me a duffer, another ten days with me at the shovel and Errol at the pan. Rumor had the territory brimming with gold so handy that men had gouged their wealth from the rock with a pocket blade or a spoon. In truth the work of extracting color was of the spirit-defeating sort, a labor which combined the various arts of canal digging, ditching, stone laying, plowing, haying and hoeing potatoes. The law required us to work our claim every single day, including the Sabbath, lest we lose our rights to it. Thus we toiled in the freezing river and under the burning rays of the sun from dawn to dark, day after miserable day. When finally we went to bed I could not sleep for the pain coursing along my back and between my shoulders. Even Errol complained, his obstinate nature overridden by the numbness in his hands from rotating the pan all day. When I did sleep, I woke shivering and soaked in heavy dew. Soon I was rousing myself by scratching my body and scalp bloody where I’d been munched by fleas and lice, which the forty-niners called quicks and slows. Added to this misery was the constant terror of those dark mountains looming behind us, sheltering cougars and grizzly bears and other unknown beasts that I sometimes heard moving through the forest in the night.

  During this period we dredged only meager flakes, not even an eighth of an ounce per day. These I stored in an empty mustard jar. On the thirteenth day my shovel hit foreign material, making an audible metallic tink. Errol and I both started. I reached into the hole with my hands to dig but Errol pushed me aside. He scratched at the hole zealously and finally pulled up an empty whiskey bottle, proof that our spot had already been excavated.

  Errol swore and whipped the bottle into the river. He kicked our iron pan in after it. I plunged into the water to retrieve the costly tool. I returned ashore intending to scold my brother, but I was met by a look of such anger and shame that I could not speak.

  “We’ve been had, Joshua,” he said. “We’ve been taken on a damned ride.”

  He set out in the direction of Angel’s Camp, cursing and swinging at every shrub and low-hanging branch along the way. I gathered our shovel and pan and followed him, wet to my waist, goldless California dust making mud on me.

  At the Swede’s, Errol directed me to follow him inside and not to speak. A hearty fear came over me, and I was glad we had no weapon between us. But my brother removed his hat and greeted the Swede cordially. “Say,” Errol said, after trading some pleasantries, “we came up empty at that bar down the way.”

  “Eh?” said the slippery Swede from beneath his mightily waxed mustache.

  Errol asked whether we might have better luck upriver or down, creekside or in the dry hills, in soil yellowish or redder, and the Swede dispensed advice freely.

  “One more thing,” Errol said to the Swede. “Has the coach been by? With the mail?”

  The Swede laughed. “You’ll know when it has, boy.”

  Outside, Errol was visibly glum. “It will come soon,” I said.

  “Have you seen it?” he asked excitedly.

  “No,” I admitted. “Only it’s bound to.”

  Errol scowled. “Fetch our things and find me upriver.”

  “But he said downriver.”

  Errol took me by the shoulder. “Consider that man our compass, Joshua. He says downriver, we go up. He says hillside and we stay on the banks. Understand?”

  V. LUMP FEVER

  And so we moved upriver, and upriver farther three days after that. From there we were ever on the move. In years hence I have come to believe that the rotten Swede’s deception combined with the maddening stories I have described infected Errol with a specific lunacy. Lump fever, it was called at the diggings. It left my brother perpetually convinced that gold was just a claim or two above our own, that the big strike was ever around the bend. He was mad with it.

  What agitated him further were the Chinamen, who followed us whenever we moved. We would establish a new camp, and sure as the California sun they would relocate to our old claim. The Chinamen moved in the night, it seemed, for when we woke it was as though they had simply materialized at our abandoned claim. I thought them humorous, with their pointed hats and billowy frocks and pigtails. But they made Errol nasty with agitation. He would emerge from the tent each morning and immediately look downriver to where the tongs were already up and working the patch we’d left. “It’s an ignorant strategy,” he said often. Indeed, we never saw them pull anything of value from those worked holes.

  Errol and I had panned flakes enough only to partially repleni
sh our stock of meat and flour. The rest of what we needed we bought on credit. Each morning and night I fried a hunk of pork in the same skillet we used to pan the river. After, I mixed flour in the grease to make a gray, pork-flecked porridge. I was a lacking cook, I admit, but that pork would have bested the fairest housewife. Pickled, cured, or fried, the swine of California was the stinkingest salt junk ever brought around the Horn.

  Errol sloughed off weight. One morning I watched him from behind as he rinsed his dish in the river. He had not yet donned his shirt and the way he was bent caused the bones of his hips to rise from his trousers in startling iliac arcs. He reminded me of a bloodhound we had once, with the same scooped-out space where meat ought to have been. This socket movement was hypnotic, so much so that I felt compelled to run my thumb along one of those bone ridges. When I touched my brother, he jumped.

  “You’ve gone a beanpole,” I stuttered.

  He held the spoon he’d been washing at my eye level. The reflection was a skeletal version of myself, bug eyes and bony nose. I reached up and touched my whiskers, scraggly thin and clumped with filth. I was unsettled by my reflection and pushed the spoon away. I resolved to shave as soon as we could afford a whetting stone.

  Throughout that day and others I considered that reflection. Its most unsettling aspect was not my thinness or my griminess, but my new resemblance to Errol. I’d somehow acquired his nose, his jawline, his seriousness about the eyes. He and I had never looked particularly similar before, but we did there, in the agony of starvation and ceaseless labor. The territory had twinned us.

  VI. AUGURY AT AN AGREEABLE SLOUGH

  Lump fever took us into November. We would shovel and pan, shovel and pan, shovel and pan. And without fail Errol would get to looking upriver, and we would have to pick up our stakes and start anew. At the rate we were moving, we would retrace our route eastward to Ohio by spring, a notion I would have found more than acceptable, were we not certain to die on the way.

  Eventually we came to a sunny slough where the water was shallow and slightly warmer than we were accustomed to. We had barely begun our endeavor when, without a word to me, Errol began to pack our things.

  I was crazy with fatigue, perhaps. Instead of packing I retrieved the mustard jar where I kept our flakes. On it I had pasted a strip of paper which I had marked from the bottom up with the names of foods available in camp: flour, salt pork, pork stew, pork and beans, roast beef and potatoes, plum duff, canned turkey with fixings and, at the very top, oysters with ale or porter. We had never eaten above pork and beans and I reminded him of it.

  “Let’s work this bar a while,” I begged him. “A week, say.”

  Errol stood and looked to me. He made a sad clicking with his tongue. “This is not the place.”

  “We’ve been at it less than a day.”

  He resumed gathering our few things, including that evil keg of salt pork.

  “Errol,” I said.

  “We haven’t the time,” he shouted. “Men are getting rich around us!”

  “A cradle, then.” I had read of men using rocking boxes during the rush down in Georgia.

  Errol scoffed. “The Swede’s asking a hundred dollars for one.”

  “We’ll build our own. Work twenty times as much rock through it.” I held the mustard jar, shaking it like a babe’s empty rattle. “This is the place.”

  Errol hovered over his ruck where he was rolling it. “You’re certain?” I knew what he was asking by the way he asked it. He harbored such reverence for my visions that it changed the way he spoke. “You’re certain?” he repeated.

  What I was was homesick and hungry and bone tired. But my brother made no allowances for these. “I’m certain,” I said.

  Errol dropped his sack and clapped me on the back. “Ho, ho!”

  A more decent man would have been troubled to see his own brother go giddy at such a lie. But my conscience was waylaid by his gratitude, which caused a sudden sting in my heart. I had long known my brother had brought me to California not for my strength or my intellect or even for my company. He had brought me so that my auguries could make him rich.

  I’d never found the fact troubling; it was in keeping with the way he’d been to me as long as I’d been alive. But what comfort it would have been, I thought now, if but once on this long, torturous journey he had intimated that he wanted me along to help him, because we were brothers. Brotherhood had never been on his mind, and for the first time I hated that it wasn’t. I hated that he considered me of use only when the visions overtook me. And in this thinking I saw his cure and mine: I would find our gold. I would tunnel my way to his affections. I would make him love me in the way of brothers.

  I removed my spectacles, pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “I have seen it,” I said. “Oh, I have seen it.”

  VII. A CRADLE AND ITS TROUBLES

  Back home we could have built a cradle in two hours for two dollars. But lumber was scarce and expensive, so we had no choice but to cut our own. From the Swede I procured a saw, a hammer and some nails, all on credit. Errol and I worked steadily at the cradle for three days, a lifetime in the gold hills. Once he took a step back to assess our work, the crude box set on rockers. “I must admit,” he said, “I never imagined I would be caught a bachelor fashioning a cradle in the womanless wilds.” I knew about the branch of juniper he’d notched, a notch for each of the thirty-six days since he’d dispatched his last pitiful letter to Marjorie. But he seemed in good spirits as we worked, and I softened toward him. He had a winning way about him when he chose.

  With the cradle finally assembled, we saw that it would indeed move more rock, that neither of us had accounted for just how much rock it was capable of moving. The problem was that the cradle required constant rocking in order for the gold to be captured in the riffles while worthless sediment passed them by. For a day we tested different arrangements. First we had Errol rocking away while I attempted simultaneously to dig the pay dirt, scoop it into the hopper and pour river water over the sediment so that its finer particles might be strained through the canvas apron. Inevitably I would run out of either sediment or water and have to fetch some more, at which point the slurry would stop streaming and our momentum would be lost. The cradle, ingenious a device as it was, depended on a steadier rocking and pouring than we two alone could maintain.

  Errol, seeing the imperfection of our new method, became frequently agitated, and would often curse me, take the shovel from my hand and push me to the handle. Attempting to man both the shovel and the bucket on his own, Errol would see quickly what I saw: our operation was a man short.

  “This won’t do,” he said finally. “We’re just rinsing the soil.”

  I nodded.

  “We need more hands,” he said.

  I might have made that observation twelve long and fruitless hours earlier, were I not sure he would smash up all our hard work in a fit. “What about the Chinamen?” I said.

  Errol shook his head. “I won’t split with them.”

  “And what’s our choice? Split nothing fifty-fifty. Fifty-fifty salt pork and gruel? Fifty-fifty sleeping on the ground?” I cast my shovel to the ground. Now I was agitated, and from the corner of my eye I saw the elder Chinaman pause. “Do you know what we owe that Swede?”

  Errol returned me the shovel. “You don’t become a man of society by keeping quarters with Orientals.”

  VIII. THE FIRST COACH

  When we rose in the morning the diggings were deserted. I trudged sleepily up and down the bank in my long johns. The place had gone a ghost town. Upriver each claim was abandoned, pans half sifted, the wooden handles of shovels jutting like masts from where their heads had been thrust into the soil. Downriver was the same, except for the Chinamen, who worked on, same as ever. I approached the father, aware that Errol was following.

  “
Where’s everyone gone?” I said. I pointed to the manless claims. “Where are they?” The Chinaman began to speak in the tong language, which I had never heard. The sound was bizarre and impenetrable.

  Errol interrupted him. “Has there been a strike?” he said loudly.

  The Chinaman pressed his lips together, then began to speak again, slowly. And again, the language was entirely incomprehensible.

  “A strike! A strike!” shouted Errol, hopping and flailing his arms in the general direction of the mountains. “Has there been a strike, you old fool?”

  “No strike,” came a clear, effeminate voice beyond the commotion. We turned to see the boy standing on the banks, holding his pan of woven straw. “He say, ‘A coach. In the night.’”

  We stared like idiots.

  “Mail,” the boy said.

  Errol took off.

  “Thank you,” I said to the boy. “You know ‘thank you’?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I dressed and followed Errol along the trail to Angel’s Camp. Out front of the Swede’s a monstrous crowd was gathered around a stagecoach. There were men in numbers I had never seen, hundreds of men not only from our fork of the American but from all of Calaveras County and Eldorado beyond. They were the roughest specimens I have ever seen, and nearly every one of them brandished a revolver or a musket.

  The driver of the coach had climbed atop the cab and was arbitrating the rowdy crowd from that position. In his hands he clutched a distressingly small bundle of letters. Errol attempted to pry his way to the heart of the crowd. He pushed between men, struggling to get within shouting distance of the coach. Surely without thinking he shouldered past a ruffian at least half a rod tall with a beard grown down to his chest. The man—a Southerner—informed Errol that he had occupied that spot since before sunup and that he was unlikely to forfeit it to Errol or to anyone. For proof he showed Errol his Bowie knife.