Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Eventually I stabbed the shovel into the rock and said, “I think I’ll heat some beans. Care for some?”

  “No. I don’t think so,” said Errol, taking up the shovel. I fixed dinner and set some on his stump for him. As I ate I watched his futile efforts at the shovel, then the bucket, then the rocker, then the shovel again. He stayed at the shovel then, with his breath puffing into the cold like the stack of a steamboat. I went to bed with him still at it, figuring he would exhaust his frustrations and retire in his own time. I fell asleep to the skeletal scrape of iron against bedrock.

  And in the morning I woke to it.

  I emerged from our tent but Errol was nowhere in sight. I could hear his work but not see him. There was the cradle, unmanned. In the place where I had last seen him was a large mound of dirt. Beyond it, a pit. I approached. Down at the bottom of the pit was my brother, shoveling earth as steadily as he had been six hours before. The hole was likely five feet deep and vaguely rectangular. The shape of it alone frightened me, but I composed myself and adopted an air of nonchalance.

  “Good morning, Errol,” I called. “Would you care for some breakfast?” I peered again into the hole. The sun was not yet very high and so Errol was mostly in shadow. His head alone was illuminated, and it seemed to hover above the darkness of the pit, disembodied. His hat was gone. I later found it buried in the pile.

  “I think I’ll make some flapjacks,” I repeated. “Would you care to take a break for some flapjacks, Errol?” His answer was a shovelful of dark sediment, flashing in the sunlight. It seemed there was nothing to do but what I’d always done. I fixed breakfast, and when I was through I tossed Errol a warm flapjack, only to have it ejected in yet another shovel load.

  My brother remained in his mine all morning. The Chinamen arrived ready to work, but I dismissed them. I stood near the lip of the pit, saying his name again and again and again, until his name went meaningless as a tong word. He never acknowledged me, only dug.

  I offered him water. He dug.

  I read him our sweet mother’s letter. He dug.

  Noon came. The hole was not so deep that Errol could not climb out—not yet—but it was deep enough now that even when he stood straight, my brother’s frame was completely subterranean. I might have lain on my stomach and reached down to touch the top of his head, but I did not. He dug. The ceaseless sound of his shovel on the rock penetrated my every thought.

  I flattered him. He dug.

  I taunted him. He dug.

  I bribed him. He dug.

  I told him we could go to San Francisco and nap in feather beds. He dug.

  I told him, finally, that we could return to Marjorie. He dug.

  By dusk the hole had gone narrower. It was now over seven feet deep. I sat near the lip, dejected and alone. I had no one but Errol here and I suddenly felt it was very important to touch him. I laid my belly against the cool earth, inched my way to the edge of the hole and extended my arm down into it. I called softly for Errol to pause in his task for just one minute, to reach up above his head and stretch his fingers toward mine. So I could test his temperature, I said. But he would not turn his face to me.

  Night fell, and with it came fury. I cursed him. I stood on the edge of the hole and shouted at him. Men came down to have a look at the commotion, and I ran them off. I shrieked into the pit. I said things I had never said to anyone. Things I have not said since.

  I must have slept that night, because I woke before light, shivering with frost, atop the mound he’d made. The scraping went on. The sides of the chasm sparkled with frost, too, and this brought me a strategy. I filled the bucket at the river, returned to the hole, and began trickling water down into it. “Errol,” I called. “I think the river’s coming in. Hear that? That’s the river, old boy.” He said nothing, but his scraping paused, I thought.

  “Don’t worry, Errol. I’ll get you out.” I tied one end of a rope to a tree. I refilled the bucket and poured it in. Then I flung the other end of the rope into the hole and called, “Grab hold, Errol! I’ll pull you up!”

  The digging persisted, but now there was a watery sound beneath the scrape of the shovel.

  That night I sat jiggling the rope, touching the notch my brother had left in my collarbone, saying I was sorry and could he please please please please grab hold.

  When morning came I gathered the heaviest rocks I could carry and assembled them in a pile near the lip. I was desperate. I intended to brain my brother, climb down the rope, tie it around him, climb up the rope and then pull him up. Giddy images of his wilted body dangling from the rope passed through my mind at the moment I noticed a strange sound. It was silence. The absence of shovel on bedrock.

  I approached the hole, bracing myself for the sight of my brother’s dead body at the bottom. Instead, he sat quite alive with his back against the earth wall, as if resting after a morning’s work and not three feverish days spent burying himself alive. It was noon and the sun was beaming directly into the hole. I could see his scalp burned pink where his hair had gathered in clumps, and his blistered, bloody hands. He had removed his boots and one was half-submerged in the water I’d poured upon him. The rope was well above where he sat, curled like an animal in a waterlogged den.

  Then he began to sing. It was the first I’d heard his voice since he declined the now-crusted beans still awaiting him on the stump. The song was a popular one, and he sang it with an unsettling bounce:

  Hangtown gals are plump and rosy,

  Hair in ringlets, fists of posy,

  Painted cheeks and jossy bonnets—

  Touch ’em and they’ll sting like hornets!

  “That’s a fine tune,” I said when he was done. I don’t know why I said it, except that it was.

  Errol looked up at me, finally, squinting against the light. His face had gone gaunt and grimed and socket-hollow. He did not look like himself. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abigail.”

  That was our mother’s name.

  “I’m Joshua,” I said. “Joshua. Your brother. Say Joshua.”

  “Sing me ‘The Old Oaken Bucket.’ You know that one, Abby?”

  “Joshua!” I cried.

  Errol reached his hand across the shaft and scraped some soil from the wall opposite him. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abby girl.”

  I threw myself at the pile of rock and attempted to lift one. I intended to throw my boulders down upon him, smiting him as would the God of that hole. I did not care, at that moment, whether I stoned him to death or buried him alive. But the Lord had taken my strength. I only lay in the dirt and wept.

  “Do you know ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’?” whispered Errol.

  “No,” I said through my tears. “How does it go?” And then I passed into darkness.

  XVI. A TROUT

  A promise unkept will take a man’s mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold. I know that now. But this was years ago, when I was young and felt the whole world of Errol’s collapse was mine to bear. It is strange telling you this, because the boy I was feels so far away from the man I am now. I know I ought to consider that distance a blessing, given the darkness and the difficulty of the time I have described here. But it brings me no comfort to think how far I have traveled nor how much wiser I’ve become. Because though I was afraid and angry and lonesome much of the time, I was also closer to my own raw heart there in the territory than I have ever been since.

  I woke at the Chinaman’s camp. It was dusk. The boy sat near me with a tin cup. Behind him was his uncle, sitting on a stump near the fire, and behind him was the dusky blue Sacramento valley with fires and lanterns burning here and there.

  “Where’s Errol?” I said. “Where is my brother?”

  The boy handed me the tin cup. “Where you think?”
He frowned, as if disappointed in himself. “He is in the earth, still.”

  “Is he digging?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Singing?”

  “No.”

  I got up and walked upriver to the hole and looked inside. Errol sat in the muddy water with his legs folded to his chest, alive and shivering. He had removed his shirt and tied it about his head. I jiggled the rope and called to him, but he did not answer. He was apparently through digging, and his hole had not gained any more depth. Yet he felt farther from me than when last I saw him.

  I returned to the Chinaman’s camp and sat looking from the boy to his uncle. The old man was cleaning the blade of his jade-handled knife on his robe and chewing a stalk of grass. I wanted him to say something. I felt if he spoke he would have a way to end this thing. But he said nothing. And the yellow stalk of sweetgrass bounced in his mouth.

  The Chinaman sheathed his knife and stowed it in the folds of his robe. Then he reached into a bucket beside him and brought up an enormous rainbow trout. It was dead, but freshly dead, shimmering still and with that gruesome pout that dead fish have. Fish were rare on our part of the river, so many were devoured by men upstream. It was a lovely creature, and I knew the tongs must have traveled a long way to catch it.

  “For Mister Errol,” said the boy.

  Then, at the sound of the boy’s voice and the gutted shimmer of the trout in the blue dusk, the providence of the thing burst upon my mind. I saw Errol climbing up out of his hole and sitting beside the Chinaman’s fire, saw us four scooping soft, steaming handfuls of fish to our mouths. It was no augury, only the visions of my own hopeful heart.

  The skin of the fish sizzled wonderfully, emitting a stirring aroma as we cooked it. Surely the meal would return Errol’s mind and deliver him the strength and will to reach up and take hold of the rope. I watched it fry, feeling that the rest of my life was lodged in that trout.

  With the cooked fish I approached the hole. It was dark now and the moon had risen. The night was clear and the gibbous moon so bright I expected to see its reflection dancing in the water pooled at the bottom of the pit. But there was only darkness. I called to Errol.

  “I fixed you dinner,” I said, holding the tasty rainbow over the hole. I could not see him but I heard the earth crumble a little as he shifted, heard some stones hitting the water. “Errol, will you come up and have some trout?”

  He said nothing. No matter, I thought. I was convinced that all he needed was to see the thing, to lay his hand on its soft fish belly. He would eat it, head and all, and return to me. “Look out below,” I said, and dropped the trout into the darkness.

  I listened at the hole for some time and heard nothing. I returned to the Chinaman’s camp to wait. The boy tossed pebbles into the river and we three sat listening to the sound of them dropping into the water. “He’ll die down there,” I said, for I had just realized it.

  I spent that night in the China camp, stretched out on a flat sandy spot near the embers of the fire. Before sleep I resolved that at dawn I would descend into the hole, fight Errol into submission and bring him up. He would return to me.

  No sooner had I fallen off than I was awoken by the mournful roars of a grizzly.

  I sat up and saw the bear, standing on its hind legs, staggering toward me. It bellowed and I scrambled along the ground away from the beast. He came at me. I saw in my mind the purple innards of General Scott strung along Tuolumne Meadow and my bowels spasmed.

  Through sheer dumb habit I brought my spectacles to my face, and with them saw that the grizzly was no grizzly. It was my brother, naked and covered head to foot with black mud. His arms were raised over his head. He carried something there, as though to an Old Testament altar. He came closer. Moonglow shone upon his lips, blistered and cracked and bloody and trembling. The nail of one of his big toes was missing.

  He thrust the trout into my hands. He had not eaten a bite of it. He bellowed again, and this time I understood the word.

  “Gold!” he said again, pointing to the fish.

  Another man would have identified this as the raving of a lunatic. But I was dazed and accustomed to heeding my brother and did so now. I examined the mangled, mudded fish. I ran my hand along its sides and lifted its fins. Once I saw one I saw them all. Thousands of tiny gold flakes lodged amongst its scales.

  The Chinaman and his boy emerged from their tent. The Chinaman was bare-chested, the first I had ever seen him so. Errol pointed a filthy, trembling finger to where he stood.

  “You!” he bellowed. Errol charged at the Chinaman, toppling him to the ground. The boy shouted. Up came the sounds of fist on flesh. When the men rose, Errol had the Chinaman by his throat. The Chinaman’s eye was cut. He scratched frantically at Errol’s hands where they held him.

  “You had it all,” Errol said.

  The Chinaman stomped and kicked at Errol but Errol did not flinch. I stood in horror with the trout in my hands as Errol dragged the Chinaman to the river. The two descended into the slow, dark water. The Chinaman flailed wildly now, sputtering. Errol lifted the Chinaman slightly and then plunged him under the water.

  I dropped the trout and ran into the river. Water filled my long johns and pulled at them. A shape flashed at my side and then past. It was the boy, plunging toward the place where his uncle was being drowned.

  I did not see it immediately, only saw the boy launch himself at Errol and cling to his backside. Errol screamed and released the Chinaman and the Chinaman surfaced, gasping for air. Errol flung the boy off him. It was then that I saw the jade-handled knife still in the boy’s hand where he’d been tossed, and that Errol had a long gash across his bare haunch. Errol twisted to examine the wound and as he did so it opened and out rolled a rivulet of black blood.

  The Chinaman and his nephew stood on the bank, checking each other for wounds. The boy was trembling. I approached them. They watched me a moment, then fled.

  Errol looked from the gash to me. He motioned for me to come to him, but I could not. “You see,” he said, serenely. “It’s so clear. They had it all along.”

  I fled. I could not endure the fact of his believing, believing, believing beyond the rotten end. That’s all I can say about it.

  XVII. EPILOGUE

  When I finally came upon San Francisco Bay, it was so dense with abandoned vessels that their masts made a leafless forest atop the water. I found work as a torch boy for the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, and with them I fought the Christmas Eve fire of 1849 and the Saint Valentine’s blaze. When finally I had earned enough money I bought passage aboard a thousand-ton sidewheeler called Apollo, where I was the only human cargo among sacks and sacks of gold bullion. Eventually, I disembarked in Boston Harbor. I intended to return to Ohio from there, but it was many years before I was able to meet my mother, the woman whose son I had abandoned in the wilderness. I went to church, and to school. By the time I had the courage to see her I was a grown man.

  While in San Francisco, I read in the California Star that in Angel’s Camp two tongs, father and son, had been captured by a mob of citizens and tried for the crime of robbery and attempted murder. They were hanged, said the report, though I knew that would be their fate the night I sat hiding in the woods above Sacramento, listening to nocturnal beasts moving through the scrub, when the snow ring around the gibbous moon triggered my final augury. As to last words, the Star reported that the tong boy recited a passage of Homer.

  In the years following the rush, it became fashionable for Easterners to decorate their parlors with gilt-framed daguerreotypes of forty-niners. In these years I’ve seen many such portraits of Argonauts posed proudly with pan or pick or troy scale, their whiskers cut back in a semblance of civility. Each time I encounter one I hope to see my brother in it, although I know it is unlikely he ever had himself pictured off. And it is a false art,
I realize. Most of the men used props on loan from the portraitist. Some were models sitting before drop cloths in New York City. But a great deal of what I like about those faddish daguerreotypes is that they show no trace of the darkness I remember of the diggings, none of the loneliness or the madness or the hunger. Even the pistols in the men’s belts seem tucked there in jest. I’d very much like to see my brother there someday, in his red miner’s shirt with his hat tipped back, a fresh sash at his collar, brandishing a fine new pickax and a lump. I’d like to see him poised at the center of a gleaming gilded frame, as if color was every bit as bountiful as we’d been told. I’d like to see him posed with his endless belief and at last surrounded by bright soft gold. And maybe if I saw him there I might see the Argonaut believer within myself, too, for we looked so similar in the territory.

  What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, N.T., and said only that the lode had a hold of him.

  VIRGINIA CITY

  We were at a house party last night, Danny, Jules, and me, leaning over a low, sticky coffee table playing Texas Hold ’Em like always, when Danny mentioned that his parents got married in secret up in Virginia City, in the back room of some casino, to escape the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d never told me this in all the years we’ve been friends. Jules got stuck on it, saying over and over again, “What? That’s so fucking crazy!”

  Danny leaned back and got all quiet and smug the way he does when he knows he has something you want. “You can still see the room.”

  And Jules said, “You guys, we have to see this place. This means something. Iris?”

  And I was drunk or high or both by then, so I said, “Yeah, sure. We’ll drive up there.”

  I meant it then but didn’t this morning, when I woke up to the underwater thuds of a fist pounding on the window of the only bedroom I’ve ever had. I cracked my blinds to see Jules straddling a furrow of my mom’s failed vegetable garden, her fingers folded into metal horns, yelling, “Virginia City! Fuck, yeah!” Danny stood behind her bleary-eyed, holding a Mountain Dew. When Jules gets stuck on something she doesn’t let it go. I used to love that about her.