by Janet Fox
“My sister-in-law lives there,” she said. “I can ask if she would take you in.”
I rubbed my eyes hard before I lifted my head. “Take me in?”
“You’re a capable young woman, and if I made the right entreaties . . . she might work you harder than I have, but she’s not cruel. You’d have a place to live.”
I wrapped my arms around my waist. I saw no choice. I’d be serving but this was nothing new. I’d be dependent upon a stranger, a rich matron who’d take one look at me and make assumptions. “How can I leave my pa?” I murmured, speaking my thoughts out loud. “How can I leave him now? He needs me here.” My eyes smarted and my throat stung.
“I can help with that, if you’ll let me. I’ll see what I can discover. And I can keep you informed as to what’s happened to him.”
I met her eyes. “You’d do that?” I shook my head. “Why? Why would you care about me and my pa?”
Her eyes darted away. “In my years I’ve learned a thing or two.” I frowned. She went on. “I have no children.”
I gazed at her soft cheek in profile, thinking on this, thinking on her livelihood, her independence, her loneliness. I had to trust her. I had no choice.
And I had to have that box. I had to go to San Francisco, even if I had no idea where to begin once I got there. San Francisco, a city beyond my wildest dreams of a city, and me alone there. Where to find that Ty Wong, and how to balance my search with a servant’s necessary work. Would I find what I needed? This stranger, a missing box . . . and maybe even, with luck, someone to treat me right?
I doubted it. I squared my shoulders even as I pulled that shawl double tight around me, like a swaddling.
I had to trust that all things would be made plain in time. I had no other choice.
I might as well have been leaping off the cliff into the gorge of the Yellowstone, the great raging river and jagged rocks waiting for me at the bottom.
Mrs. Gale wrote a letter for me to carry to her sister-in-law. I packed in haste. Thus without further warning or mental preparation or shoring up of any kind, the very next evening I was on a train steaming west to San Francisco.
Chapter SIX
March 25–28, 1906
“California . . . His description of the beautiful
flowers blooming in winter, of the great herds of Spanish
cattle in lovely fields, of glorious scenery, and of the ideal
climate and blue skies, made me just crazy to move out there,
for I thought such a country must be a paradise.”
—Mrs. F. A. Van Winkle, interview,
The San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 1900
RACING.
My train: racing across the west, a great lumbering mechanical beast charging bullheaded toward the ocean and the edge of the continent and away from the snow-covered mountains, with me on board wishing I could turn myself right around and run straight back to the high rocky fortress of my youth.
My heart: racing with fear and an anxious dread at what lay ahead for me when this beast finally arrived in San Francisco. City of saints and demons—or so Mrs. Gale had said in one of her few choice descriptions.
My brain swirled with awful imaginings. The worst and most terrible was of my pa, hanging. Then there was Wilkie, his snake eyes devouring me. The box, which was hidden who knew where and which held secrets and choices of who knew what kind. That huge city waiting to swallow me alive.
While I packed my things—a quick task, in the face of my small collection of belongings—Mrs. Gale had painted me a portrait of San Francisco. She told me of Chinatown: “a precarious world unto itself. You’d be best to stay away. The Chinese call themselves ‘Celestials’ and we non-Chinese are ‘Demons.’” She also warned me against venturing into a vile place called “the Barbary Coast,” “where that name, Demons, is most fitting.”
Kula Baker pays careful heed to warnings.
Once on the train I tried to concentrate on the pleasant images I’d see in California. Mrs. Gale reminded me that I’d see the ocean, and I’d have that view best from the top of Mount Tam, “a more glorious place you can’t imagine.” I’d read about the ocean often enough, that blue and endless expanse. I’d read about what lay across it, about the Far East, with its rich embroideries that put my simple threads to shame. But as fast as I could think these soft pictures transformed: the ocean hid leviathans and serpents in its vast depths; the Oriental silks sported fire-spewing dragons.
I clung to my hamper of food and drink, taking but a little due to my unsettled stomach. The train lurched side to side. I tried to sleep on the fold-out berth, hanging my wool skirt and jacket beside me, drawing the broadcloth curtain tight shut, but the night was long and haunted as the miles slipped past.
On the second day, I made my way to the dining car. I sipped an iced beverage at the table with its fine linen cloth and silk-shaded electric lamp, but this was a luxury I did not allow myself twice.
Not just for the expense. From the moment I stepped into the car, there were eyes on me. I was watched there, and I knew why. A native-looking girl in plain unfashionable dress in the dining car, sitting alone. I didn’t belong. But there was something else . . . I had the eerie sense someone followed me into the car. I lifted my gaze from my sweating glass, half expecting it to meet Snake-eyes Josiah Wilkie.
I squelched a shiver, gulped that drink, and hastened back to my seat in the second-class coach.
Before leaving Mrs. Gale, I’d looked at the maps of California and San Francisco in her atlas. Pa had taught me at an early age how to read a map. The great long bay that lay east of San Francisco was bigger than my Yellowstone Lake. And the Pacific Ocean to the city’s west, and Mount Tam to her north—I’d traced them with my finger over and over, making that map lay out in my head so I could watch it all unfold as we got close.
We hurtled and lurched through snow and narrow mountain passes and down onto plains all brown and frozen up, through spires of trees and out into flats that stretched into broad rolling hills, until after three bone-jarring days we entered the city and I pressed to the window to see the fields and homesteads at its borders and the waters of the bay for the first time. I tried to make myself ready for arrival as best I could, splashing my face with the lukewarm water of the tiny lavatory.
The train pulled into outskirts and tight packed brownstones and finally into the roundhouse, where we lurched and shifted in the darkness for some minutes.
That darkness, it was wicked. I pressed myself right up against my window, starting when the electrics overhead blinked once or twice and faces pulsed in and out of my sight.
At last we pulled alongside the platform, where the light flooded from skylights, the train squealing and belching to a stop.
I stepped stiff-legged from my coach, and a smell so foreign assaulted my nostrils that I drew up. Damp and mildewy. It reminded me of fishing at the lakeside in midsummer, but not so pleasant. And the air was chilly but not biting as it had been when I’d left Bozeman. It sank on me . . . heavy. Penetrating. It sank right into my bones and settled there.
My trunk and hatbox were hauled out of the baggage car and dumped without ceremony upside down, the hatbox ribbon chafed and dirty. I took the handle of the trunk and righted it and, there being no other clear means of transport, dragged it along behind me down the endless stretch of platform toward the station. Around me all was chaos: steam welled from beneath trains, people shoved this way and that, shouts and catcalls flooded the air, and engines roared to life in this great hall of trains and tracks; such confusion reigned that my instinct was to climb back onto the train and hide until I saw my high and silent mountains again.
Kula Baker does not shrink. Even in the face of chaos.
I dragged my trunk bumping and scraping into the relative peace of the station’s waiting hall—although it was a hubbub there, too, people crowding me and glaring at my trunk and me, and I stopped dead center in the hall in despair. There were
great doors on all sides.
Which way should I turn? I had no notion where I was. I tugged the folded note of Mrs. Gale’s instructions through the drawstrings of my reticule.
Miss Phillipa Everts, near the intersection of Clay and Jones streets. Find a coach to take you northwest from the station. Or take the trolley if you find a sympathetic soul to guide you.
Mrs. Gale hadn’t been back to San Francisco since she and her husband left some twenty years earlier; what if everything had changed? And despite the patient instructions Mrs. Gale had given me, I’d only half listened to her through my mental turmoil. I wasn’t truly sure what a trolley was, much less how to take one.
The back of my neck prickled, and I turned right around, feeling I was being watched. Nothing. Shifting crowds and shadows, that was all. Little spasms ran up and down my back, and I gripped my trunk handle tight, searching the crowds, coming up with nothing. Just that uneasy tremor.
Then a cloud withdrew and the sun slanted in arched windows in the high walls above, and I lifted my eyes heavenward and took a breath. I could navigate. Years in the woods hadn’t taught me how to fold a napkin or use the right fork, but I knew northwest by the light of the sun.
I dragged my trunk, which seemed to have grown heavier by the minute, out of the biggest doors in the place, doors that faced westerly. Where I stopped again, once more befuddled and overwhelmed.
Chapter SEVEN
March 28, 1906
“San Francisco is a mad city,
inhabited for the most part by insane people
whose women are of remarkable beauty.”
—Rudyard Kipling, 1889
THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO WERE A BEDLAM, A WILLY nilly confusion.
For one thing there were horseless carriages. Automobiles. I’d seen only the one in Bozeman. Here they were everywhere, crisscrossing the roads, making terrible noises, belching and coughing, braying like sick mules. People paraded by me on foot, of course, men, women, boys—lots and lots of boys. How, I marveled, did those boys ever get schooling, all running wild through the streets as they were?
The most fashionable women wore the largest hats I’d ever seen, far larger and more adorned than those I’d admired in Bozeman. I reached up and touched my plain little out-of-season out-of-fashion straw boater, embarrassed.
And mixed up in all this madness, horses pulled everything from small one-seaters to laden wagons, and these, too, were weaving in and out among the people and the automobiles, the horses leaving behind their own fragrant residues.
But most astonishing to me were the trains that were not proper trains but single cars running on tracks embedded in the paving. These must be the trolleys Mrs. Gale spoke of. People jumped on and off them at random—these trolleys never stopped, or so it appeared. Two or three boys, laughing themselves silly, hung off the rear bumper of one passing close by where I stood.
In every direction buildings and smoke and noise and confusion and signs and color and people rose up around me, and a raw stench of mixed soot and horse sweat and fish and damp wool.
I gawked like a perfect fool.
“Miss! Help you, miss?” He was tall and gangly, the boy who stood now at my elbow. “This way, miss! Have a cart right here, waitin’ right for you!”
“I . . .”
He already had my trunk by the handle, wrestling it from my grip.
I let go. He heaved the trunk into the back of the cart, and behind it tossed my hatbox and picnic hamper, and then he clambered up on the bench quick as you please, leaving me to fend for myself. I yanked up my skirt and clambered up next to him.
He slapped the reins and the cart took off at a pace, and I grabbed the seat with one hand and my hat with the other.
“Don’t you want to know where I’m going?” I shouted, for the noise around me seemed deafening.
“Oh, I ’spect you’re headed for Nob Hill, ain’t you now.” He turned toward me and flashed a toothless smile. “Sure.”
“I’m going to Clay and Jones streets. Clay and Jones. Not Nob.” I held on tight as we wove between two turning carriages. “What’s Nob?”
“You? Clay and Jones?” He looked me up and down. “I’ll be. Dressing countrylike and all that. You’re a Nob snob after all.”
“Clay! Jones!” I shouted. “Not Nob.” I bristled at the “countrylike,” and tucked my old boots under my skirt. I figured three days on a train might be enough to take the starch out of any gentlewoman.
The boy smiled again, but this time kept his eyes forward. “All’s the same to me.”
At least I could tell from the sun in the clear bright sky we were headed west.
The cart moved at a clip, the boy managing to maneuver the horse between all the honking, bell-clanging, screeching, mechanical contraptions and the people. He turned the cart deftly more to the south, a quieter street, and moved at an even more rapid clip.
At one point I caught a glimpse of water again—the bay, for the hills rose behind—but it went by in a flash between the tight packed buildings, and I held on to the wagon seat for dear life.
“I’m going to the home of Miss Phillipa Everts,” I shouted. “Do you know her? Where she lives? On Clay?”
“Can’t say. But, oh, sure. We can find her. You bet.” He spit off to the side. The cart lurched around another corner, and we entered a terrible place.
Hurdy-gurdy music poured from buildings whose thin walls seemed on the verge of collapse. Wretched women leaned over windowsills, their faces so painted they were distorted. Men lurched and staggered, drunk in broad daylight. I turned my eyes away from the sight of those low bodices and leering smiles.
The boy stopped the cart. “There you are!” He flashed a huge gaping grin.
I shook my head. “What? No. That’s impossible.”
He pointed.
A dance hall raked sidewise; a scanty-clad woman, her back propped on a sign, sat smoking a fat cigar. I turned back to the boy, narrowing my eyes. “Where are we?”
“You look! It’s right there, right at that corner.” He waved his hand. The sign read Clay Street, all right, but this was not the Clay I expected. Then, since I made no move, he jumped down and came round to my side of the cart and took my arm, yanking me down to the street. “There you go.”
I smoothed my skirt with my palms and tried to pin back my hair. “No. This isn’t right. It can’t be.” Curls tumbled out beneath my hat, and the loose hair occupied my hands and fell over my eyes.
“Sure is.” He flashed me his toothless grin, hopped back onto his cart, slapped the reins, and was off before I could blink.
My trunk! “No!” My shout landed dead in this noisome place.
All my things—everything I owned in the world, my belongings were all in that trunk, my trunk that was still, with my hatbox and hamper, in the back of his cart.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Thief!” I ran and flailed, heart pounding, stomach lurching. “Stop him!”
I tried to run after him, but he moved that cart so fast through the staggering populace I was sure someone would be crushed, and before even a block I was trying to press through a crowd myself, helpless, watching as the cart carrying all my worldly goods turned a corner and disappeared.
Chapter EIGHT
March 28, 1906
“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low
and vile of every kind . . . Licentiousness, debauchery,
pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation,
misery, poverty . . . and death, are there.”
—Lights and Shades of San Francisco, Benjamin Estelle Lloyd, 1876
I SLOWED AND SWALLOWED THE LUMP THAT FILLED MY throat. Smells assaulted my nostrils, and I pressed one gloved hand against my nose and mouth. The crack of glass mixed with the raucous music. I didn’t know which way to turn.
A man came up from behind me and gave a firm squeeze to my backside.
I whirled, aghast, and he lurched backward, which didn’t stop hi
m leering and moving back in on me. “Just wanted to know how much you’re charging. Pretty thing, you are.”
“Be off!” I shoved him away, my voice shaking. A titter floated down from one of the windows looming over the street.
He muttered something unrepeatable, and then said, “You come back here at dusk. Maybe then you won’t be so uppity. Native girl like you shouldn’t be uppity anyhow.” He glowered at me as he stumbled away.
I clutched my reticule tight to my body and pushed down the middle of the stinking street, moving as fast as I could, running, in fact, back in the general direction from which I’d been driven.
Within a few blocks I was able to slow down, as the passersby were less threatening and better dressed and the number of bawdy houses and saloons thinned and disappeared. And as I slowed, the shock of what had happened set my body to shaking all over.
I hadn’t been in San Francisco an hour, and already I was robbed and abandoned. Touched in disgusting familiarity. A victim. And what an idiot I was. Shouldn’t I have known better? Mrs. Gale had warned me about the Barbary Coast. Named after the place of pirates, somewhere in Africa. Barbarous, that’s what it was. Filled with pirates.
No police stood around this neighborhood. And except for his gap teeth, how could I even describe the boy robber? I’d been hoodwinked but good. Was this what it was like, when my pa and his gang stopped a coach or a train, was this how a passenger felt when liberated of her possessions? The heat of shame crept up my neck.
I straightened my back, set my jaw, moved my trembling legs. My anger was mostly directed at myself. Stupid me, taken in by a robber, stupid, stupid, stupid.
I pressed on, following the growing crowd of pedestrians and coaches onto a larger avenue. I might as well have been in the buffeting current of the Yellowstone River, pressed this way and that and helpless against that current, alone and lost and stripped of most everything I owned.