CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  “Let’s put away this nonsense,” my mother said, folding the paper and slipping it into her darning basket where several grey socks lay, wilted and holey.

  Last week Mom started mending socks for egg money.

  “We could never sell the mules. Why, they’re like family. Plus you know nothing about camels,” she said, rubbing her fingertips and wincing from invisible pinpricks.

  Dad frowned, his bushy eyebrows colliding.

  “Woman!” Dad said, taking her fingers to his lips. “Let’s not be hasty. At one time I knew nothing about mules. Don’t you remember when we first met?”

  The story is that my father showed up in town ready to gamble, a single man following the gold trail, good with a knife. Then he spent a grand total of one week out on the placer sands, found himself a medium-sized nugget, and bought himself a dozen pack mules and settled in for at least the last ten years.

  What my mother had been doing during all this is a little less clear. My mother is dimpled and pale. She doesn’t exactly follow the spirit of the other moms who rise before dawn to re-stoke the fire. Yet, when I ask her about what she did before Dad she says, “Being entrepreneurial.”

  I have never known my father to live a life of anything but everyday routine. He actually whistles when he’s out feeding the herd before dawn. The only residuum of any other life that I have ever seen is when he goes to the Boer’s to play poker and he rubs a shot of whiskey in his hair like some sort of outlaw. “Whiskey is the world’s best hair tonic,” he tells me with a slap on the shoulder.

  Like he needs hair tonic.

  “It’s settled then,” Mom said. “Oh, Chepé. Everyone will hire a camel train!”

  I was shocked.

  Dad looked alarmed. Mom reached out and patted his hand. She leaned in close and whispered, “The other day I swear I saw Ezekiel hanging around a pack of gleaners.”

  Gleaners were the mud-caked kids who spent their days following behind wheelbarrows and picking through discarded mullock heaps for gold flakes. I rolled my eyes in Mother’s general direction: that was pushing it too far. Dad peeked at me over his shoulder. I clanked my soupspoon a little harder against the side of my bowl and looked out the kitchen window.

  Outside, I could see the mules waiting impatiently for their midday feed. Beyond them was ten acres of green pasture. Sure, it was leased and located right beside the ditch men passed out in after a night at the pub, but we had lived here my entire life. The sycamore tree by the feed shed was perfect for climbing.

  Then Dad grinned and playfully slapped Mom across the backside with his sombrero with a familiarity I rarely saw anymore between them.

  Mom giggled.

  “Woo, Nelly,” Dad yodelled, faux-galloping in a tight circle around her like he was suddenly so goddamn excited that he couldn’t control himself, like when Pete the John threw his old rag doll up in the air and chased it around. “Saddle Up!”

  I was stunned.

  Saddle Up! is one of my dad’s typical phrases. It would be okay, except that he uses it to mean everything. Saddle Up! out of bed Zachariah, it’s 4 a.m., we’ve got to get out to the foal barn; Saddle Up! to the mules for a minute while I run into the Stilwell for a shot of whiskey which will actually mean two hours of you waiting by the horse trough; Kids kicked the crap out of you after you stuck up for your hee-haw mule dad, well son, there comes a time when a man just has to Saddle Up! ; I’m going to spend the next two months out on the trail while that Elliot Shows snickles around your mom, Saddle Up! while I’m gone, will you?

  All it took was one winter. Dad spent three days drunk in the stable before marching the mules over to Laumeister’s. An entire herd of forty mules in full tack is a grandiose sight, but my father at the front looked even smaller than usual. His white shirt, unbuttoned, flapped behind him like a flag. He opened Laumeister’s gate. “Ga!” he yelled. They scattered in. More than one tried to kick him in the chest on the way through.

  Dad spent the rest of the day at the Stilwell, and when he came home he reached around Mom’s waist and slipped a Gold Eagle into her apron pocket. Over Christmas we built a height expansion on the barn and by the time the snow started melting, Dad was no longer the sole owner of a mule train bought with a singular nugget, but in debt to a bunch of businessmen who had never even set foot on the Cariboo Trail.

  We have been gone for one week now. Our train consists of Barnard P. Miller, an inventor; Johnny-From-Town, the cook; a modest crew of a half-dozen camel leads; Elfrida Vipont who wants to become a schoolteacher; and twenty-five Bactrian camels.

  For the first time, Dad has decided to bring me along. “Imagine,” he had said. “The first Cariboo Camels. You and I are going to make history. Saddle Up!”

  As if history is something you can ride along on.

  Yet for one twinkling moment, I got excited. When the camels first came into our little gateway town, everyone flooded to see the spectacle. The camels are shaggy, two-humped beasts with very impressive lips. Their upper lip is split in two and the halves move independently when they graze, grasping at hay like hairy mittens. They browse the pasture like antelope, always moving. And they seem much harder to offend than the mules ever were.

  In the beginning everyone was gushing about the charms of the trail via camel. The camel’s thick slipper feet made no noise, and without the clip-clop of 120 iron-shod hooves hitting rocky ground, we were free to listen to the wind sighing in the bush. We wound up impossible cliffs, the smell of sage blooming in our nostrils. The camels carried us high enough to catch the vista beyond the gold-en-whiskered fields that filled in the rocky slopes along the trail. We raved about how much more weight we were bringing along; how fast we were moving; how much more purple-y the sunset seemed from up high; how well the camels had mastered the science of swimming; how they would eat anything, even the wild spurge that bloated other animals into walking gasbags. The camels seemed perfectly at home in the sandy benchlands. Plus they never needed to be watered; they were happy lip-shovelling bits of snow still thawing at the treeline. I was riding second on the trail and it was hard not to notice how tall Dad was, sitting ahead on the bell mare like he was on a moving throne. He was singing one of those folk songs that I didn’t understand the words to, his voice as meaningless and silvery as a bird’s. And I thought for one fat second how he had actually done a good thing by buying the camels. I allowed myself to imagine how everyone was going to flock to us for transport and how the B.C. Pony Express was going to go out of business and all the Stetson men were going to come and work for my dad and call him boss and he would get them all matching sombreros and the sombrero would be forever more considered the real cowboy’s hat.

  I lingered in that dream until we got to Soda Creek and came face to face with the first horses travelling in the other direction.

  Apparently Judge Begbie’s team started acting queer miles before they came upon us, their nostrils quivering in confusion. The moment we rounded the bend and his cayuse caught sight of the lead camel, it was all whites-of-the-eye and Begbie bolting through the bush, clinging to his saddle. We spent the rest of the day trying to locate the rest of his team. Dad unsnagged Begbie’s cloak from a low tree branch and apologized.

  “What were you possibly thinking?” Begbie demanded, shaking his finger in the camel’s general direction. He wrote Dad’s name on a piece of paper and slipped it into his travelling bible.

  After this, Dad started pouring whiskey into his water sack.

  I’ve started spending more time at the back of the train. I am actually beginning to feel a fondness for Lady, my mount. Often I don’t have to do anything. Instead, I rest my head on her foremost hump, pillow it under my ear and watch the clouds roll by to somewhere better. The camels walk with a two-legged stride, moving one side before the other, rocking back and forth. It’s the type of motion that’s easy to sleep to. Barnard is with me at the back. He tells me he’s bringing hydraulics to the gold rush, some sort of jet water turb
ine. He tells me how hydraulic canons blast the gold out of sand cliffs much faster than waiting for a stream to spit it toward a passive sluice box.

  “You can’t just go out there with a pan and hope a for-tune is going to float into it,” he says.

  Groan. This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed the fever. The way I see it, these gold men are basically delusional. They hit the trail hoping, with the very meat in their knees, to become rich, but most of them will only make as much money as a San Franciscan peanut peddler. The world these people live in is so slippery that they get all mean and lonely. There’s a missing piece inside where their people part should be. What’s there instead? A frozen pond, and in the pond a school of suckerfish, sucking at cracks in the ice in a desperate attempt to get to the air on the other side. It’s as if they ignored the part about striking it rich being dumb luck. Yes – that’s luck that is dumb, people. If I end up living the rest of my life in a world where the word “bonanza” elicits a hush in the room, so help me.

  We traverse a narrow shelf along the karst landscape of Marble Canyon. In here, even the shadows are hot. The camels start moulting. Every so often we dismount and pull thick odorous carpets from their necks and thighs. We watch as puffs of it sail over the four-thousand-foot cliff only to be picked up by nesting eagles. We are about two miles outside of Pavilion when Sparky falls off the edge.

  I was fond of Sparky, an adolescent camel with a pen-chant for lip hurling. Lip hurling is one of the few playful skills the camels seem to possess, whereby they regurgitate a wad of half-digested grass and use their lower lip like a sling-shot to fling green pulpy piles at the bony back-ends of camels ahead in the line. Once, I thought I almost saw Sparky smile when one of his green wads splatted Phoebe, an exceptionally bony female, right above the tail.

  We spend the night in an open cave drilled deep into the rocks while the crew retrieves him. The cliff is about forty feet up to the sky, and somewhere below, past the corkscrew trail, froths the Thompson River. We wouldn’t have bothered to get him, probably, if Barnard wasn’t so adamant about wanting Sparky’s hide for his hydraulic tubing. He was practically drooling over the prospect that camel hide could be a more durable alternative than cow. In the morning he fastens the skin to poles so it doesn’t curl while it dries. Then he drapes the entire skin over the side of his mount. He looks outrageously happy as he rides, as if he thinks he is the recipient of some grand prize – like Sparky falling over the cliff was all for him. He looks back at me with a grin and asks if I would like him to make me a playing ball out of the scraps.

  We have lived a chain of anxious days. Everybody is irritable and looking for someone to blame. Everybody is looking at my father, blaming him. We’ve met with three more horse teams and so far all of them went wild with the smell and the sight of the camels. And I’m starting to think that Elfrida Vipont might not be who she says she is.

  Last night I saw her coming out of the cook’s tent. Every night she spends at least an hour elaborately washing out her bloomers and hanging them from tree branches on the out-skirts of camp. Her stockings twinkle like they’re impregnated with gold dust. No schoolteacher would wear twinkly stockings. Elfrida is a large woman and her bloomers are impressive. When the wind picks up and momentarily inflates them, I can see at least five whole camels through the leg hole. Even on the trail Elfrida wears dresses with large bustles so her bottom rises out like a shelf, but I suspect it’s just accentuating what’s already there, underneath, like it’s not all window dressing. I’m certain she has strong meaty thighs, like a foaling mare. For someone who wants to be a schoolteacher, she rarely speaks to me, the only youngster. So far, the only encounter we’ve had was when she told me her name, and then from somewhere in the folds of her massive bearskin coat, fished out a penny candy, dusted off a few shiny black hairs, leaned in, and passed it over.

  Criminy. How young does she think I am, anyway?

  We’ve been three weeks on the trail and we are now deep in a hemlock forest. We stop in Spuzzum to pick up a piano. They’re paying $1 a pound upon delivery. “Fools,” my father says. He straps it onto Bull’s back in a makeshift diamond hitch so it rests between his humps and I watch him ignore the fact that it lurches wildly from side to side while he walks.

  The path is littered with windfall and movement is slow even on the back of lanky-legged camels. We follow the game trail of deer and goats and come across watering places where springs gush from rocks. It’s like we entered a different world where it’s dark, moist, and even the air smells like dirt. Brown beard lichens dangle down from branches and the camels sample them endlessly. They spend mornings peeling long strips of bark off the trees with their front teeth, lip-folding it into their mouths where it begins its circular digestive journey. We have to be on guard at all times lest a sailing blob hits us on the back of the head. Their ears twitch even though their faces remain deceptively sleepy. They seem to be enjoying the spongy ground on their feet. They chat to each other, “blo-blo-blo.”

  Despite the abundance of greenery, last night the camels ate the cook’s washing soap and sucked clean his jar of sour-dough starter. For breakfast we get nothing but three-day coffee and a hard nail of bread. Johnny-From-Town spits angrily on the ground and rifles through what’s left of the food.

  Tonight there is a storm coming in as we rush to set up our tents. Dad’s acting distant. Dark bags rim the bottom of his eyes. He fiddles for a moment with his sleeping roll and excuses himself to go out to secure the camels. The rain curves the tent in toward me and I can feel how wild it is outside; how we don’t belong here. I can sense unseen animals, angry with us, the intruders. The thunder rolls closer, a bassy bottom to the splitting shot of falling branches. The camels moan like tired dogs and shriek when the thunder strikes. I huddle in my sleeping roll. In the irregular flashes of lightning, I see Elfrida’s silhouette through the canvas tent skin, calmly shedding her bearskin coat. Then I watch my father’s unmistakable form stumble into her front tent flap. He’s taking long drinks from a bottle. Even over the thrum of rain I can hear her. “K-oh,” she clucks, and winds him into her full body with a curve of her arm. She pats his head and leans her pillowy bosom to his ear, her k-oh’s spilling out softer, croonier. One of the camels lets out a long, low spine-shivery bellow. Good Lord deliver us. I fashion two large lumps out of my canvas roll and plunk my face in the middle.

  The next morning we wake up and everything looks the same except brighter and greener, and sometime during the storm the camels ate Elfrida’s last pound cake. “Stupid beasts,” she says, and looks one of them in the eye with her nostrils flared. The camel continues to chew its soapy regurgitate and I think for one spectacular moment that she might get it right in her gaping hole of a mouth.

  We are only a couple of days away from Rocky Ridge when we run into a mail rider. The stallion bucks, and letters and envelopes are tossed into the trees. We stop to help him pick everything up but even as we do, we all know that the camels are doomed. Dad has decided to take an alternate route.

  It takes us almost an extra week to get to Wallula Gap, a rugged, frowning canyon, and sit at the edge of a river staring at a narrow Jacob’s bridge. It appears to hang almost mid-air, a frail crib work resembling the woven sides of a willow basket. We are now days over schedule. My dad eyes the piano. He steals a sideways glance at Elfrida.

  The toothy black slag making up the walls of Wallula Gap is slick with moisture from the churning river fifty feet below. He must see something in my face because he comes over.

  “Town’s just on the other side of this canyon,” he says.

  As if I didn’t already know it. As if this offers some sort of reassurance. But I can see it in his eyes, the bleary look of hope and desperation. It’s the familiar look of convalescence – the one that comes right after gold fever.

  It’s hard not to notice, in the abundant forest under-growth, how out of place the camels look. They remain dusty brown despite the moist morni
ng dew. Even in the crisp air, they regard the bridge with a heat-enduring indifference. They are old world and Muslim conquests in a land that’s ripe with new possibilities.

  I look down at the frothing river foam at the bottom of the Gap. This is a stupid chance and we all know it. As usual, Dad’s mount has eaten around and around the base of her tree until nearly strangling on her gradually shortened rope. She looks over at us expectantly, her cheek flat against the trunk, her eyes bulging.

  Dad made his decision months ago and now he can’t turn around. He already sold the mules. There’s nothing to go back for except Mom, her expectations, an empty tack barn, and a large debt. Lady shifts impatiently beside me.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say, slapping him on the back. “Saddle Up!”

  Dad looks up beneath his sombrero, a large smile on his face. Somehow he has even failed to notice that the camels don’t use saddles.

  He grabs his mount’s reins and patiently untangles her, chastising her gently. One by one the camels step on, the train growing longer and longer, like an uncoiling serpent. The rafters start swinging from side to side with the shifting steps while below the water rushes, picking up alluvium and transporting it to someone standing downstream with a pan in his hands. I shove my face into Lady’s hump. It’s all dumb luck, I think, and then I hear the clink of Dad’s mare’s bell as she climbs the bank on the other side.

  Linda Rogers

  THREE STRIKES

  I like baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. How clear is that – rules, cut and dried, a perfect covenant, à la grisette, Jonathon Swift’s poeticized/satirized ho, a piece of jerky in her little grey dress?

  And, thy beauty thus dispatch’d

  Let me praise thy wit unmatched

  Set of phrases, cut and dry

  Evermore thy tongue supply.