The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  When my mother finished reading all the bad things she could find about Chagres, she laid Joseph Ware’s book down with a contemptuous rustle of taffeta and observed that, “It certainly seems explicit.”

  “Oh, pshaw,” replied my father. “I hadn’t the least notion of going by that route anyhow, though it would scarcely discommode a man with a degree in Systemic Surgery from the University of Edinburgh to ward off a few mild vapors. These fellows get carried away, all writers do it. Let somebody sneeze and they try to turn the place into a pesthouse. I’d like to bet—”

  Taking a grip on the register, I held my breath, for I knew what was coming.

  “Yes, to be sure, bet,” said my mother in the iciest kind of tone; then she went on to give out what betting and drinking, only she called it gaming and tippling, had done for our household, and if I had been my father, I would have gone down in the preserve cellar to live for a few days, I would have felt that low.

  To upholster her argument, she left the room and came back with “the ledgers,” a pair of big blue books she officiated over with as much pomp and mystery as if they had been the Bank of England. According to her figures, we owed money to nearly everybody in town, and it was all my father’s fault. The minute she paid up in one place, she said, he skipped in and ran us into the hole somewhere else. And what was most bothersome was his new system, very sneaky, of picking up cash and putting it on charge accounts, all unbeknownst to her.

  Watching him, I felt so sorry and sympathetic I would have run out and raised the money myself, if I’d known where to look, but I didn’t own anything of value outside of my stuffed water moccasin, and the string of bear’s claws I had bought off a Choctaw trader, and my deersfoot knife, unless you’d care to count Sam, but there weren’t many people would have acquired him, he smelled so.

  In one way, the whole situation seemed unfair. Here my mother laid out money by the cartload to the Presbyterian Church, with special donations to something called “Foreign Missions,” which was in a yellow envelope—for the Chinamen, you know—and not one cent of it would do a particle of good to anybody we’d ever be apt to meet, and would likely work a lot of harm, getting the Chinamen stirred up and dissatisfied with their religion and not knowing which way to turn. And only last fall when I dropped in my nickel along with a message saying it was to help pay the transportation of a Chinese preacher over here, to even things up and give us a chance to compare notes, the Reverend Carmody brought it back to my mother and I got a licking, for something they represented to be “impertinence.” But it was nothing more than ordinary common sense except they didn’t have the good judgment to see it.

  “Melissa,” said my father when she was done, “it’s even worse than you think. I can’t to save me remember why, but I made a note of hand for five hundred dollars at old Parsons’ bank, and now they want to call it in.”

  My mother sat in stunned silence.

  “I was down at the Courthouse this morning,” he went on, “and one of my connections there, a man very close to the County Clerk, if you know what I mean—”

  “Mr. Axelrod, the County Clerk?” she asked in a low voice that sounded tired out and humiliated.

  “I didn’t say so. This connection of mine informed me that a number of creditors were banding together with the intention of obtaining an attachment. Now that illustrates what I have often said to you, Melissa, and, yes, I’ve tried to bring it home to Jaimie, too—that it pays for a man to keep up his friendships. If it hadn’t been for this highly placed connection I mention, I’d never have known what those fellows were up to. As it is, I have consulted legal counsel, and if I should absent myself to go gold-seeking, there is nothing on this green earth they can—what’s that?”

  I’d heard it too—one or more men on horseback had reined up at our gate and were dismounting; I could hear the horses switching around in a half-circle the way they do after they’ve shucked off their load.

  My mother got up and went to the window. “I imagine it’s Mr. Parsons and a delegation of creditors. Very probably come to give you a last chance to straighten out your affairs. All the decent people in this city have tried time and again to help you turn over a new leaf. Reverend Carmody—”

  “Never mind,” cried my father, with a leap toward the kitchen. “If they have papers to serve, they’ll find the bird flown. Tell them I’m upriver tending a woman that’s down with chicken pox. Put them off for just twenty-four hours and they can address me care of General Delivery, Upper California.”

  I hung on long enough to see who it was, and sure enough it was old string-bean Parsons, looking uncommonly smug and self-satisfied, together with several others, all having as much fun as if they’d set a pack of hounds onto a cat. They didn’t produce any papers, though; my father had been wrong about that. What they wanted was for my mother to place him in something called “moral chancery,” which was to say, put him on probation like a mischievous child, with no drink, no cards, nothing but hard medical work and a schedule of paying off his debts.

  Looked at squarely, this didn’t appear too outrageous, particularly for a skinflint like Parsons, but their injured and gleeful way of telling it made me boil up with resentment for my father, who for kindness and understanding and real humanity was worth a hundred like them, with the Reverend Carmody thrown in for luck. I’d known him to labor all a hot summer day in a dirty run-down shack to ease things for some nice old darky woman who could as quickly have paid him as she could have been elected Governor.

  Well, this Parsons mooned on, enjoying the sound of his complaints, and finally he worked himself up into such an aggrieved and sanctimonious state that he made the blunder of thinking my mother was on his side. “I know you won’t take offense, ma’am,” he said, “when I ask you to keep this conference private. My depositors would take it amiss to know that I had extended leniency to a man of Doctor McPheeters’ kind.”

  When I saw her face, I didn’t bother to wait for the answer. Mr. Parsons may have been, as people said, a good and crafty banker, but in the present instance he had sadly misjudged his audience. I heard afterward that my mother drew herself up to her full height, and she was by no manner of means short, and blistered this pious delegation with a defense of my father that more or less left them groggy, and ended up by suggesting that on any future visits they use the trade entrance instead of driving up to the gate. Mr. Parsons thereupon showed his true and natural colors by fishing out his papers, which had reposed all along in the pocket of his jacket, the miserable hypocrite, only he hadn’t got anybody to serve them on, my father being absent, being, in fact, crouched just then in a thick patch of cockleburrs that lay behind the house.

  I knew he was there, because I saw him when I went back to collect up a hatful, thinking something ought to be done to make Mr. Parsons feel he wasn’t neglected.

  “Is that you, Jaimie?” he whispered.

  “Yes, father.”

  “Have they left yet?”

  “They’re trying to.”

  “What’s that you’re doing, son?”

  “Picking cockleburrs.”

  “Whatever for, my boy?”

  “For Mr. Parsons and his friends.”

  There was a little silence; then I heard him begin to laugh. After a minute or so he took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I’m proud of you, son. It’s little attentions like these that make people remember you and want to come back. Always bear in mind that nothing’s too good for a guest.” Presently he began to laugh again, and he was still at it when I crawled out, loaded up with some of the nicest burrs in our patch.

  When the party rode off, I was behind a tree, pretty much in the dark, though there was light enough to follow the action. Anyhow, what I couldn’t see I could hear well enough. It often works out that way, I’ve noticed: when one set of senses lies down on the job, another reports in and takes over.

  By a lucky chance, Mr. Parsons’ stalli
on seemed to be the one most briskly affected. After backing up several feet, it paused to scrape his right leg against a shaggy-bark hickory, which is the very worst kind of tree for that sort of accident, then it ran fifteen or twenty yards down the side of the road and stopped with its forelegs spraddled out, shooting Mr. Parsons over its head into a gully of moss. Up till then, I had no idea he could be so chatty, and to tell you the truth his remarks gave me a fresh outlook on bankers, and made me appreciate them more than before. Even so, his statements were pale and sickly compared with those of Mr. Whitmore, who was mounted on a roan mare, because he and this mare separated almost immediately, in such a way that Mr. Whitmore was left in an awkward position upside down on our gate. Of the entire delegation, the only one that showed any skill as a rider was Mr. Crawshaw, on a big gelded buckskin, and to his credit he stuck on for several miles down the river road, or as far as the farmhouse of a family named Thornton, which picked him out of a ditch, but when he got home, around dawn, they said his clothes and hair were so caked over with mud and brambles his wife had to use a trowel before she could make a positive identification.

  Horses will nearly always behave like that if you place burrs under the saddle. There’s no use trying to reason with them; it’s a prejudice that likely goes back a long way, and could be explained if anybody had the time to sit down and puzzle it out. As for me, I felt that I had helped out all I could for the moment, so I climbed on up the back stairs and went to bed.

  Chapter II

  Early the next morning my father and mother were at it hammer and tongs, trying to work out what to do. It was my mother’s claim, not complimentary, that he was too addleheaded to look after himself on any kind of journey longer than ten or fifteen miles. “Jaimie would have a better chance of getting to the gold fields than you,” she observed.

  “Then let me take him,” cried my father, darting to a curtained east window of the house and peering out with great caution. On the theory that Parsons would probably try to wriggle through the shrubbery, perhaps carrying his papers in his teeth, he had all the shades drawn upstairs and down. Except for the kitchen, where Clara and Aunt Kitty were stationed, for intruders, with an encouragement to use skillets if necessary, the place was as dark as a tomb.

  “Why not?” he demanded, having satisfied himself that the azaleas along that side were free of enemy activity. “One year, two with bad luck, and we will return to this astonished city, laden with the treasures of Golconda, respected, envied by all, denied credit by none, including Goldswaithe the tailor—confound his parsimonious hide—he refuses to release my trousers, with or without the new patch—and, in a word, solvent forever.”

  Not wishing to overhear what was none of my business, because there are few things lower down than an eavesdropper, I had stretched out on the floor behind the sofa with a book, only a few minutes before. I was reading in it here and there so as to shut out the sound of the voices, but it was an uphill job being a sort of championship long-winded poem by a man named Milton, though if any of the lines ended in rhymes I failed to locate them, about a group of angels that talked all the time and couldn’t make up their minds whether to settle down in heaven or in the other place.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t quite drown out the conversation, so when I realized what my father was saying I sprang up in a hurry and told my mother I had to go.

  “You’ve got to let me,” I cried. “You’ve said yourself my eyes are as snoopy as a hawk’s at seeing what I shouldn’t, and if it came to finding gold—”

  “Jaimie is enrolled for next autumn at the Male High School,” she said crisply, directing her statement at my father.

  Well, there you were. I was already educated to the point of absurdity, but no, she had to have more. Here we saw the perfect example in my father, who had been hauled up as a boy in Scotland and put to doctoring over the plainest kind of objections—he had run off twice and burned down part of a schoolhouse another time—and he’d been miserable ever since, because he wanted to be a smuggler, you understand, like everybody else along that coast, and engage in a respectable trade that brought in a steady living. He used to swear, and I believe it, that if a person had normal curiosity all they needed to teach him was how to read and make change. As he said, though, he didn’t much mind knowing Latin and Greek, because he often got tired of cursing out medicine in English.

  My mother spoke up to announce that she had talked everything over with Professor Yandell, a know-it-all up at the University who had all the ladies blathering over him at teas. “Jaimie’s studies will include Rhetoric, Belles Lettres, the Classics, and Modern Languages,” she said. “We can decide on the University course later.”

  Now I knew I had to go. Not only the Male High School, but another round on top of that. There wasn’t any sense in it. By the time I got out, I’d be too old to do anything except retire, and you didn’t need an education for that.

  “Jaimie’s not the type,” said my father. “Maybe you’ve forgotten the unholy ruckus he had with Mental Arithmetic at the Secondary School. You’re trying to turn him into a milksop—you’ll break his spirit.”

  Tossing her head with a considerable show of firmness, my mother replied that, if she could help it, I would be fitted to take my place in “the cultural life of Louisville, and share in the city’s advancement.” Well, I thought, if you ask me, they’ve gone too far with this Louisville already. It was overdeveloped and blown up with commerce and business so you could hardly get across the streets any more without being run down by teamsters. Why, they had eight brickyards in Louisville in 1849—I saw it in a bragging pamphlet that was got up by some merchant or other that seemed to have a good deal of time on his hands. There were three pianoforte manufacturies, too, and three breweries, two tallow-rendering houses, an ivory-black maker—for use in refining sugar, you know-eight soap and candle factories; three shipyards; two glue factories; and four pork houses that slaughtered upwards of seventy thousand hogs a year.

  And if you were looking for steam machinery, they had twelve foundries that made the best on the river, or so the pamphlet claimed. There were rope factories, flouring mills, oilcloth factories, three potteries; six tobacco stemmeries, a paper mill, and a new gas works that lit 461 street lamps over sixteen miles of main. Not only that, it had a gas holder measuring sixty feet in diameter and twenty-two feet high. People used to ride out Sundays to look at it, but the superintendent said it was a nuisance because he couldn’t keep the children off. In the end, they were obliged to hire a watchman, but he was bullyragged so steady that he sort of went out of his head, so to speak, and they had to place him in a hospital that made a specialty of such cases.

  Another thing they had, not mentioned in the pamphlet, was an epidemic of cholera, and it was this that finally convinced my mother and sent me on the journey to California. My father brought it up toward noon; he had just remembered it. It was lucky for us he did, because two cousins of my mother’s New Orleans plantation clan had died of cholera when she was small, and you only had to mention that disease for her to get the nervous jumps.

  “Two more deaths reported yesterday,” he went on cheerfully, “and not down on the river this time but right smack in the middle of the Fourth Ward, not a stone’s throw from this house.”

  She was shaken, and he recognized the signs, for he observed that, “Hannah’s well out of it—we’ll have to write her to stay on in Cincinnati for a few weeks.”

  Hannah was my sister. She was off visiting, as she most always was.

  My mother went over to a window and stood looking out awhile, holding the drawn curtain a little way back. “All right,” she said at last. “Jaimie can go, but only until the plague [she never could mention cholera by name] has run its course. Let it be understood that he will return next autumn in time to begin at the Male High School.”

  I remember those words very well. She didn’t know any more what she was asking than my father did, and that was about as little as
possible. A good many classes have assembled and graduated since that morning, and they did it all without me. Neither can I say I’m sorry; we learned some things you couldn’t find out at the Male High School if you were to go there for two hundred years, which I estimated was about the time it would take me to finish up, if I buckled down and worked at it.

  First off, my father dashed upstairs and came back with some little shiny books he’d gathered up on the sly and said they must be his “Journals.” I have them here now—they are of duodecimo size, as they call it, in brown hand-sewn leather, and filled with a lacy kind of handwriting, very tiny, that often traverses a page in two directions, the one set of slants on top of the other at right angles, so as to save space. This crisscrossing of lines was popular with the period, but such pages are vexatious to read, and require the use of a glass.

  No matter how much trouble, these Journals are interesting, and filled with excitement. Practically any place you read, something good is about to happen tomorrow. The same is true of his letters, only more so. Nobody ever lived that could touch my father for producing perky and misleading letters, and he himself acknowledged, one day when we were nooning at the foot of Independence Rock, that their tone was somewhat “crouse an’ canty,” which he said was the phrase of a Scottish poet named Burns, who had written a good deal of material about small animals. Here at the foot of one letter—to my sister Hannah—is a grainy smear of gold dust affixed to the page with mucilage. All is now black with age and weather; at only a spot or two do pinprick glints of yellow shine through to bolster up his tale. But I was there, and I chance to recall that this particular dust was washed by an Ohio man, and came to us in exchange for a pair of surgical shears, with which he intended to set up as barber at a Feather River camp. In those weeks, you could have thrashed out our clothes with a flail and not found a grain of dust, for my father had taken to “crevicing,” a system he’d picked up from a friendly oracle with the Wolverines. The rotary motion of pan-washing made his head swim, he said. This crevicing was just the thing: you walked up a dry creek bed with a knife and a spoon and dug nuggets out of gold pockets in the shelves. “It’s as simple as opening a bank,” he went on. “Any fool can do it.”