The Chinatown in Warrens was as large as her home village, and the sounds and smells were the same. There was even a small temple. But without any women or children, the men drifted in and out, always hoping that the next camp, the next job would be able to satisfy the false promises that had brought them to the Gold Mountains, and the Chinatown they created was an echo of their loneliness and disappointment, a hollow imitation of the villages they had left behind.
“It won’t last,” a voice said in Chinese.
Startled, Polly looked away from the twisting, swirling dragon to see Li Dick, the herbalist, deep in conversation with A Sam, the laundryman people called Mayor of Warrens.
“What do you mean?” A Sam asked.
“There’s trouble ahead.”
Polly looked at the smiling, cheering crowds lining the sun-washed street, the weathered buildings gaily festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, the creaking wagon beds made into colorful floats. What kind of trouble was Li Dick talking about?
“The Chinese coming in from the coast say the demons are trying to pressure the government into kicking us out,” he continued.
“They tried that in ’86 and we’re still here,” A Sam said.
“Those of us who weren’t burned out, beaten, or killed.”
“None of that happened in Warrens.”
“No,” Li Dick admitted. “But people and places change.”
Despite the hot rays of sun beating down on her, Polly shivered, remembering Charlie’s worried frown when he had read about the formation of Anti-Chinese Associations that vowed to force all Chinese to leave the Territory, her own agitation when news came of boycotts against Chinese merchants, laundries and stores in Chinatowns blown up, entire populations of Chinese marched out of towns at gunpoint.
Through all of it, there had been no real violence against the Chinese in Warrens, and now the troublemakers had turned their fury against a group of white people called Mormons. But she could not forget the resentful talk against the Chinese that had spilled out of the camp’s saloons. Could that resentment be simmering, waiting for an opportunity to explode?
Long strings of firecrackers burst in a series of ear-splitting explosions, signaling the end of the parade, and Polly found herself pushed away from A Sam and Li Dick in the press of the crowd headed for Warrens Meadow. But the uneasiness their words had evoked remained.
She looked for Charlie, but the men and women surrounding her were too tall, and she saw only stiffly starched shirtfronts, the backs of dark suit jackets graying with dust, frilly laces, ribbons, the bobbing heads of small children. There was a determined squirming: Katy, climbing off her father’s shoulders, wriggling to the ground and Polly’s side.
“Are you going to come watch me race?” she demanded, wrapping her sticky fingers around Polly’s.
Looking down at the candy-smeared face flushed with excitement, Polly smiled, welcoming a return of holiday spirit. “Of course. And you must help me cheer for Charlie in the horse race. Then we will go see the drilling contest, and after that you can help me get ready for the dance.”
While the men and women jammed into Charlie’s “dance hall” raised dust pounding schottishes, quadrilles, polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes, Polly laid out the midnight supper on the counter. With each dance, the air grew warmer, steamier, more redolent of sweaty bodies than perfume. Scarcely able to breathe, she left the platters of meat, bread, cakes, and pies, and worked her way through the crush of swirling skirts, stamping boots, and clicking heels to the window.
She pushed up the sash. Fresh air drifted in, and with it, the clink of bottles, the scratch of matches lighting cigars or pipes, for neither smoking nor drinking were permitted in the “dance hall.”
She turned, waved to Charlie, nodded at friends dancing past. There was Pony Smead, the justice of the peace. Miss Benedict, the young, good-looking school teacher all the eligible young bachelors were sparking. Three-Fingered Smith who had accidentally blown off his own finger and thumb. John Long, her former boarder, whose handsome face with kindly gray eyes and neat, well-trimmed mustache towered above his wife’s. Through the crook of his elbow, Polly caught Bertha’s impish wink, and she laughed, glad of the dance that had brought Bertha to Warrens.
Long before they met, Polly and John had heard about Bertha’s pretty brown hair, light blue eyes, and fun-loving ways from her proud older brother who boarded with Polly whenever he was in Warrens. Yet it was quite by accident that John and Bertha became acquainted. He had stopped in Florence on his way back to Ireland to see his mother. Bertha was there with her father who had traveled from Grangeville to trade his farm-cured ham and bacon for gold dust. There was a dance. The two met. Three months later they were married, and last spring John had brought his bride to set up housekeeping at a cabin near the Little Giant Mine where he worked.
Though separated in age by seventeen years, Polly had felt an immediate, special kinship with Bertha, and they visited daily, with Bertha making the mile journey into Warrens in winter on skis.
The set ended and Mary Dawson spun to a stop beside Polly. She sank onto the bench pushed against the wall. “First the parade, then the races, the drilling contest, tug-of-war, and now this,” she gasped. “If you hadn’t taken Katy off my hands so I could rest up, I don’t know how I’d make it.”
Her baby, swaddled in shawls and tucked out of harm’s way beneath the bench, whimpered. “Oh no, not now,” she groaned.
Polly swooped down and picked up the baby. “You rest, I take care of Henry,” she said. The baby, burbling bubbles, grasped one of Polly’s shiny gold buttons and smiled.
“You’re a lifesaver!”
“That’s what old Mr. McGuiness tells me,” Bertha giggled. “Swears the medicine Polly gave him for his rheumatism makes him feel twenty years younger.”
Polly laughed with her. “You know he just like the whiskey in it.”
“Get your partners,” Rube Bessey called.
Bertha and John swept back onto the floor. The music started and a nervous young man approached.
“Oh no,” Mary groaned again. “I can never turn down the ones just out of diapers.”
Polly, bouncing the baby in time to the music, chuckled as the pimple-faced boy dragged Mary onto the floor. Eyes riveted to his feet, his arms pumped up and down like bellows, and Polly could see him counting steps under his breath. Snatches of talk drifted through the window.
“Looks like the district’s about mined out.”
“Said that years ago when we voted to let the Chinamen in.”
“And now most of the money in circulation is theirs.”
The words brought back Li Dick’s somber warning, her own fears of a simmering resentment, and suddenly Polly realized that in this brightly lit room alive with music, laughter, and goodwill, there were no Chinese except herself.
No matter how often it happened, the realization caught her off guard, leaving her feeling cut adrift, acutely alone. She hugged the sleeping baby to her, hungry for his warmth, his innocent trust. But the baby, not hers, only underscored her loneliness.
Leaning down, she tucked him back under the bench and slipped outside.
As Polly climbed the hill to her special place beneath the grove of pines that surrounded the cemetery, the men’s words and Li Dick’s warning became less real, but she knew from experience that the feeling of loneliness would take longer to subdue.
Since her freedom from Hong King, she had determined never again to suffer the ignorance in which he had kept her. She had become knowledgeable of Western foods, customs, and laws, a part of the community, counting the dancers, the men on the porch outside the “dance hall” as friends. Yet she was a stranger to them. Just as she was to Li Dick and the men of Warrens’ Chinatown who could not forgive her past, her choice of Charlie for a mate.
A twig snapped, and she shrank back into the shadows. Hidden behind a bush, she listened to boots tearing through brush, the rasp of labored breathing.
“Polly, wait up. It’s me, Charlie.”
She stepped out into the open. The same kind of wordless communication that had brought Charlie out of the dance to find Polly flashed between them, and they climbed silently. When they reached the top, they turned and looked down at Warrens.
Directly below and to the left, cabin windows glowed honey yellow, splashes of color flitted across the squares of light, and music blared from Charlie’s “dance hall” as the camp celebrated. But to the right, in the Chinatown beyond the musical murmuring of Warrens’ Creek, no band played, and the only sounds were the ordinary ones of heavy irons banging on clean clothes, the rattle and scraping of beans for fan-tan.
A thrush on a nearby branch began its night song. The soft, low notes rose higher and higher until they became a strong, beautiful melody. And then, without warning, the song ended, leaving a sad, ringing trill that accentuated Polly’s loneliness, a loneliness Charlie’s caring presence could ease but not entirely vanquish.
“I remember one time a man bring a performing monkey to my village,” Polly said. “The man divide the audience in two and give each side one end of a rope to hold. Then the monkey walk carefully back and forth between the two sides. At each end, he stop a little bit, but he cannot stay, and so he walk again until he so tired, he fall.”
She pointed down to Warrens, so clearly divided into two camps. “Sometimes I feel like that monkey.”
TWENTY
A cloud of pungent steam burst from the kettle of herb tea as Polly lifted the lid and sniffed professionally. Just right. She replaced the lid, eased the kettle into a basket padded thickly with straw and newspapers, and bustled around her tiny kitchen assembling the rest of the things she would need for her patient, Mary Dawson’s girl, Katy. Coconut candy. Porcelain spoon. Doll.
Bertha took the doll and spoon, wrapped them in an old washed out salt sack, and passed the bundle back to Polly who placed it in a nest of straw above the kettle.
“After you finish at Mary Dawson’s, would you come over to my house and help me pick up the stitches I dropped in the sweater I’m knitting for John?” Bertha asked.
“Sure,” Polly said, clamping down the basket and opening the door.
“Good. Then you can show me how to cook my rice properly. John says it still doesn’t taste like yours.”
Polly smiled at Bertha, so slender, frail, and anxious to please. “I think it’s time we play a trick on John. I will come make the rice for your supper tonight, but you don’t tell him. Then we see what he has to say.”
Laughing, they set off at a leisurely pace, enjoying the September sunshine, the comfortable silence of good friends.
As they neared the Dawson cabin, Bertha pointed to the teams of Chinese miners working the flatter spaces of Warrens Meadow, their picks and shovels clanging on bedrock, the gravel rattling in sluices beside neatly stacked tailings.
“I wish John worked above ground like they do,” she said.
Polly thought of the one time she had gone down into a mine, the feeling of being buried, the sound of dripping water, the smell of burned powder and bad air, the rats. “He make more money,” she comforted. “And he is a foreman, not have a dirty job like the muckers.”
“He says miners, whether they’re foremen or muckers, die young and quick or old and broke, so he’s used the money he saved for his trip to Ireland to buy a farm near my father’s.”
“He quit his job at Little Giant?”
“Not yet. We’ve got to save up some money first.”
Polly dug the toe of her boot into the rich black soil beneath their feet. “This dirt is the real gold in these mountains.”
“That’s what John says.” She hesitated. “Polly, anyone can see you love the soil. Why didn’t you start a farm instead of a boarding house?”
“Warrens is snowbound six months a year. The growing season’s too short.”
“Sell the boarding house,” Bertha said impulsively. “And Charlie can sell his saloon. That will give you enough to buy a farm in Grangeville. Near us.”
Polly laughed. “Charlie love gambling too much to leave his saloon, and I love Charlie too much to leave him.”
Mary Dawson, eyes red and hair uncombed, greeted them at the door. “Oh Polly, Bertha, thank God you’ve come. I’ve tried everything I know and she’s still burning up. I’m afraid the baby will catch it.”
“Don’t worry,” Polly soothed, setting down the heavy basket on a table piled high with bottles, dishes, pans, and uneaten food. “I use this tea many times and it always bring the fever down.”
While Polly unpacked and poured the herb tea into a bowl, Mary rocked the fretting baby and picked ineffectually at the clutter.
Bertha took the baby and led Mary out of the room. “You rest now. Polly and I will take care of everything.”
Polly slipped the candied coconut into her apron pocket and carried the bowl of tea into the curtained alcove behind the stove. How small the child looked under the pile of heavy quilts. And how flushed. She laid a hand on Katy’s forehead. Hot as a cookstove after a day of baking.
The child’s eyes fluttered open, green and fever bright. “Polly? I want Polly.”
“Polly is here,” she said, brushing the tendrils of damp hair from Katy’s face. “And Polly bring medicine to make you feel better.”
Katy pushed her face into the pillow. “No. No more medicine,” she whimpered.
Polly sat down beside her. “You get better, I take you to fly kite.”
Katy twisted back to face Polly. “A dragon kite?”
Polly, nodding, dipped the porcelain spoon into the tea.
“As big as the one you made for Mike?”
“Bigger,” she promised, holding the spoonful of tea in front of Katy’s swollen, blistered lips.
Katy swallowed the tea. Her face puckered. “I don’t like it.”
Polly dipped the spoon into the tea, then turned it so the handle touched Katy’s lips. “Watch the muddy brown water go down the sluice box into the gully,” she said, tipping it so the liquid poured through the curved handle into Katy’s mouth.
Katy giggled. “Again.”
Polly obeyed, again and again, until the herb tea was almost gone.
“No more,” Katy said, sliding under the quilts.
Polly reached into her pocket and took out a piece of coconut candy. She laid it on her lap where Katy could see it. “For you when you finish.”
The child peered into the bowl. “Okay,” she agreed grudgingly.
Swiftly, Polly administered the rest of the tea and popped the candy into the child’s mouth. While Katy sucked contentedly, Polly brushed out the tangled hair and changed the soiled nightgown.
She pinched the child’s cheeks lightly with both hands. “Now you sleep, and when you wake up, I give you surprise,” she said, tucking the child back under the quilts.
Watching the tiny, fever-ravaged body relax into sleep, Polly felt a familiar flash of regret that the children she nursed so lovingly were never her own, and she began a lullaby her mother had sung, beating back the shadow on her happiness with song.
Above the melody, she heard the whirring and honking of geese flying overhead. She imagined the birds dipping and soaring with her song, keeping their perfect wedge-shaped formation as they flew south for the winter.
She loved the winter. The pure whiteness of the snow. The trouble-free months of isolation from the outside world. The funny, strange activities. Like the Hocum Felta Association whose members each took turns trying to be as funny as possible while the rest of the club attempted to remain poker faced until, finally, someone’s mouth would twitch, issuing short, sharp splutters which eventually exploded into helpless laughter.
Hoofbeats thundered outside, breaking Polly’s reverie, drowning the quiet inside sounds of Bertha tidying the kitchen, Katy’s uneven breathing, Polly’s song.
The pounding hooves stopped. A door burst open. Slammed. And suddenly a white-faced
Bertha was standing beside her, saying, “Come quick, Charlie’s been shot bad.”
TWENTY-ONE
Too stunned to speak, Polly allowed Bertha to lead her outside, Benson to pull her up behind him on his sweat-soaked horse. He kicked the tired beast into a gallop.
Shot bad, Bertha had said. What did that mean, Polly wanted to ask, but she did not dare, for the exhausted horse told her Benson had looked elsewhere before he found her. How long had it been since Charlie was shot? What if she was too late?
She had to talk. Anything rather than think of Charlie lying in a pool of blood. Dying. Possibly dead.
“Where?” she asked.
“In the head.”
Polly closed her eyes, shutting off the images and thoughts his words conjured. “No. Where is Charlie?”
“In the saloon.”
The drum of hoofbeats, her own loudly beating heart, and screaming fears made it impossible for Polly to hear properly. “Where?” she repeated.
“Saloon. The room in the back.”
He had said saloon. The room in the back. But who would shoot Charlie there? And why?
As though she had spoken the questions out loud, she heard Benson shout, “Johnny Cox did it.”
Johnny Cox? That didn’t make sense. Or did it? She remembered how Cox had swaggered into camp the night before with his poke full of dust from a cleanup on Crooked Creek. Intent on a bust, he had gone straight to Charlie’s saloon to drink and play poker. But after he had lost two hundred and fifty dollars, Charlie had refused to play another hand until Cox sobered up. Had Cox thought Charlie was trying to cheat him? Denying him a chance to win his money back? She had seen men get shot for less. And she knew Cox was a bad man to fool with. Yet she could not believe he had shot Charlie. Not when he had asked Charlie to watch out for him. To make sure he didn’t lose his whole poke.
Thousand Pieces of Gold Page 11