“I want more than a bowl of rice,” she said.
“Jesus, ’Lizbeth. Have you no pride?”
“Plenty enough.”
“How much did they give you?”
“I earned it.”
“Earned it, did you?”
Standing outside the store, her insides growled angry and her bones screamed for a soft, plush chair after so many months of traveling and sleeping on the ground. She wanted to stop bickering so they could sit and eat. Instead she flickered hot like a flame, burning back at him.
“I’m not a girl to turn down work,” said Elisabeth, her voice dripping heavy with sarcasm.
“Sewing for all those men?”
She looked toward the lit window and started biting her thumbnail. She knew a good wife should be honest, and she truly wanted to be a good wife. A terrible guilt ate at her that she’d dragged Nate all this way with promises of joining her father resting fat and happy on a prosperous gold claim. She’d never expected he’d abandon them. Leave them with nothing.
“And a bit of reading,” she said, still not looking at him.
“You took money for reading?”
“I earned it, Nate.”
“Damn it, Elisabeth! Don’t be naive. For your own good, you gotta stay away from those men. They’ll take advantage,” said Nate, seething through clenched teeth.
She knew she shouldn’t argue with her husband but was having a hard time staying quiet. Fourteen years older, Nate had taken on the role as her protector soon after they’d married, insisting his greater years made him more knowing. In the beginning, she relished having someone else care enough to help make her decisions. But during their long journey west she’d come to understand that Nate didn’t always know best, like that day they’d arrived in San Francisco on the roiling tide of thousands of other intrepid souls.
When the Humboldt sailed through the Golden Gate, they’d huddled together on the bow holding hands, weary and dizzy with hunger. Hundreds of ships filled the harbor full, lined up side by side, left abandoned by whole crews jumping off to join the gold frenzy. Elisabeth and Nate had climbed like rats from ship to ship with the rest of the passengers, hauling trunks over bows and sterns to reach the sandy shore. As fingers of fog streamed overhead, she’d wanted food and a bath. Instead, Nate had wasted nearly sixty dollars on gold-digging supplies: a pick, a shovel, a pan, and a handcart. She’d pleaded with him to return at least the pick and shovel, explaining her father surely had sufficient supplies at his claim. Instead he’d boiled up a single shrunken sprouted potato for dinner. For her bath, he’d found an old tin bucket half-buried in the sand and went to find fresh water while she pitched their tent on a barren dune behind a bush, scrubby and small. When he returned with a bucket full of tepid water and a cleaned rag, she’d seethed, trying to wash her grimy mosquito-bitten self as the San Francisco wind swirled sand through the tent flaps and stuck to her wet skin, while he stood outside, holding the canvas ties closed against the gusts, yelling that they’d recoup their investment in no time.
So far, she’d seen no recouping of all the money he’d spent unwisely. They’d been grubbing around for scraps of food for weeks, ever since her father left. She was starving.
“How much you get?” he asked.
“What?”
“How much did you get off ’em?”
She hesitated. She could barely reconcile her understanding of fair value back home being completely at odds with the astonishing condition of financial matters in the West. She’d been shocked counting out the coins when Nate relieved himself behind a tree. Eighteen dollars! Those men had given her eighteen whole dollars just to sit near her, plus the two dollars she’d stuffed down her boot for sewing Mr. Colton’s shirt. She knew Nate would surely have trouble making sense of this new economic reality, too, and would struggle at seeing her new value out here.
“How much did they give you?” he asked again, giving her arm a little shake.
“Eighteen,” she said, wiggling out of his grip.
In the dim light cast from the windows, Nate’s mouth went slack.
“Come again?”
“I earned eighteen dollars.”
“For reading? And sewing? Well, I’ll be damned.”
Unable to tell if he was mad or pleased, she shifted nervous on her feet.
“Enough for a square meal for us. And a bath.”
“Eighteen dollars, you say?”
“I can make more, too, I know it. I’m not waiting around for you anymore. I aim to work.”
“Hand it over,” said Nate, holding out his palm.
“What?”
“The money.”
“I can manage it,” she said, holding her chin up and pursing her lips.
“Now how’s that gonna make me look, ’Lizbeth, if we go in there and all those men see my wife lay coins down on the table for my meal?”
In all her rush of hunger and impatience, she hadn’t considered his pride as a man who regarded caring for his wife a rather serious affair. After all, it was savings from his book-lending business that had paid their way west. She’d given all her mill money to Samuel for his schooling at Amherst.
They stood outside in the dark, faltering and tentative, an unease creeping in between them like a louse you can’t see, but making an itchy sore nonetheless. Nate sighed heavy and rubbed his temples with his fingers like he hurt. Feeling guilty, she emptied the coins from her skirt pocket into his cupped hands.
“For safekeeping,” he said, pocketing her money.
“Suit yourself,” she said, weary from their go ’round.
“You’ve a bit of dirt here,” he said, touching the tip of her nose, gentle.
She spit on her finger and rubbed the line of dirt off her nose. She knew her face looked freckled something awful from the California sun; Nate had said so a few days back. Still, she pinched her cheeks so they’d glow rosy and opened the door for herself.
Shannon and Cady’s served as an all-around everything place in Culoma Town. Dry Goods. Restaurant. Bar. That night the place was stuffed full of diggers from every creek, gulch, and ditch all around the American River Basin, enjoying a plate of food and a stiff drink after a long day prospecting. The tables and chairs set up on one side of the building served as a restaurant. A store took up the other side with bags of coffee beans in a corner, next to big barrels of flour and beans and pickles and dried apples. Shelves overflowed with tea canisters and jerky and sacks of potatoes. Pans. Rope. Tin cups. Boxes and boxes of nails. Hammers and picks and saws hung on the wall. Bolts of fabric and hats and pants filled up boxes on the floor, half-unpacked. The smell of new oak planks and fresh coffee rankled Elisabeth; she hadn’t had a decent cup of coffee since leaving Boston. An oak bar ran along the back wall, fashioned fine with a shiny brass footrail underneath.
Scanning the room, she recognized a few of the men at the bar who’d circled around her earlier in the grass, including Mr. Colton and Mr. Chana. To her relief she didn’t see the prune-face fella, Joe, who’d taken liberties with her leg. A man behind the bar noticed her and boomed louder than a foghorn.
“A lady in my establishment! ’Bout time they start rolling in!”
All the men turned ’round to look, and she flushed with embarrassment as Mr. Chana waved friendly in her direction. Dirty in her ragged gray working dress with a tear at the bottom, she smelled rank. She now regretted not dressing proper, but she’d been too hungry to walk all the way back to the claim to change into the emerald-green Sunday dress Nate had bought her the day after they’d married when he’d found out she’d borrowed the widow Avery’s old wedding dress for the occasion. She’d worn that old gray working dress every single day for the past four months traveling, keeping the fancy dress folded up neat in her trunk for something special. She only had the two dresses. She’d given up her corset altogether while walking across the Isthmus of Panama, making breathing the thick tropical air easier, so she probably looked slouchy now st
anding in Shannon and Cady’s. At least she’d tried to clean up a bit, washing her hands in the river as best she could without a bar of soap. Nate said wearing his woolen shirt and duck overalls was better than sticking out as a dandy putting on airs in a broadcloth suit.
The barman stood tall and imposing with hair running wild and long, even more unkempt than Nate’s. But a white beard sat atop his face close cropped. He introduced himself as Captain William Shannon, pumping Nate’s hand up and down and slapping him on the shoulder informal, saying how everyone was welcome in Shannon and Cady’s. When Nate introduced Elisabeth, Captain Shannon placed a hand on his heart.
“Thank you for bringing in your lovely wife, Mr. Parker. It’s pleasure for all of us, entirely.”
Nate didn’t seem to mind the men staring at her now. A wave of pride settled over his face, and he puffed up taller having her standing by his side like a special prize he’d won at the county fair.
“I assure you, Mr. Parker, I ain’t no Sunday man. This here ain’t no hog ranch. It’s a pillar of respectability in Culoma.”
“The only pillar,” called out one of the men at the end of the bar, laughing.
“Oh, calm yourselves. It ain’t like you never seen a lady before,” said Captain Shannon.
A little spittle settled on the captain’s bottom lip as he talked to Nate.
“Ignore them pikes. They’re a harmless bunch taking in the sights. Your fine woman here being the most fetching sight they’ve seen all year.”
Nate beamed and Elisabeth bristled as Captain Shannon yelled over to the men at the bar again.
“Bend an elbow, boys. A nickel a shot for the next half hour. Or a pinch of your pockets. Whatever you got.”
Captain Shannon nodded for his barman to pour up, then showed Nate and Elisabeth to a table. Elisabeth sank down in the chair, her hips relaxing back into the smooth wood, hankering for bite of food. When the captain poured water into real glasses, she knew she’d been right to let the men stare for money. She was going to eat a proper supper. The captain sat with them while supper cooked, sharing rumors of recent strikes in and around the river, listing off digging spots he’d heard were paying out. She followed the conversation, learning the names of gulches, ravines, and streams while the men at the bar stole glances, making her feel far more pretty than she was in that old working dress. She’d take what she could get. It’d been too long since she felt pretty, with Nate always saying he was far too exhausted by all the unfamiliar travel and the digging for married loving.
“Tell me about your travels,” said Captain Shannon.
Nate told of how they’d boarded a clipper in Boston nearly five months back, making their way down the Atlantic, then across the Isthmus of Panama, and up the Pacific.
“You must be a brave woman, Mrs. Parker, agreeing to come out west,” said Captain Shannon. “All that hard travel getting out here, with only your husband to help you along. It must’ve been difficult for you.”
She didn’t tell him how the travel itself hadn’t been nearly as difficult as the uncomfortable discord growing between her and Nate since they’d arrived.
“We came out here to find my father. Henry Goodwin. Know him?” Elisabeth asked, not knowing exactly why.
Nate kicked her under the table, like she shouldn’t have mentioned Henry. Like the shame of him running off with that Indian girl was something they should keep a secret, or forget altogether. Captain Shannon leaned back in his chair and slipped his stubby fingers through his suspenders.
“There’s a Henry comes in here for a whiskey pinch now and again. People call him ‘Big Bear,’ and that’s not on account of his ursine resemblance,” he said.
“Goodwin?” she asked.
“Never did know his family name. This Henry dared a grizzly. Come away with a huge gash on his face, and a bear head. Showed up here in Culoma Town with that bloody head slung over his shoulder, boasting. Been called Big Bear Henry ever since.”
“A trapper, then,” she said.
“All them old mountain men are trappers,” he said.
“My father worked for the Hudson Company. Came out here trapping in ’47.”
“There ain’t no Hudson men around here no more. Just diggers. But that Big Bear Henry’s a dabster, all right. Traps skins like nobody. Trapped up the whole valley when it was only Sutter and those Mormons. When I opened my store last year with only a broadcloth and a board laid up on barrels, Big Bear come in welcoming me with a passel of cottontail as holdings on a rye account. He offered to skin ’em right then, whip me up a rabbit robe, of all things. I told him I don’t open no accounts on rabbit skins. I deal in cotton and silk, for dressing lovely ladies such as yourself, Mrs. Parker. I’m fixing things up in here finefied for when the ladies arrive. My customers don’t want no bunny skins.”
“We had an apple orchard. It caught the blight,” she said.
Elisabeth explained that her father had fought the fire blight, pruning and washing the trees till his hands bled. But the disease wormed its way deep into the roots, cracking the trunks open with black ooze until the branches bent down to the earth. When all the Pippins and Baldwins shriveled into ugly nubs, he took up work with the Hudson Bay Company, saying it was the only way to support his family. She left out the part of him loving on the Indian girl.
“Big Bear Henry might be a lapper, but he’s no family man. Lives up on there on the North Fork with his squaw.”
Her heart fell at hearing about her father traipsing that Indian girl all around town proud for everyone to see.
“He ever find gold on his claim?”
“Heard he made a decent strike. Never short of money when he came in here.”
Captain Shannon’s barman placed plates filled with roasted chicken legs, boiled potatoes, and salted beans on the table. She dug into the greasy leg, chewing off nearly half before tasting the beans, salted and seasoned delicious with bits of pork and onion. The supper tasted like heaven.
“Seen him lately?” Elisabeth asked the captain in between bites of beans.
“Seen who, darlin’?”
“Big Bear Henry.”
“Not since early spring.”
Captain Shannon called over to a man sitting by himself at a table near the window, reading a Bible of all things.
“Don Gabilan, you seen Big Bear around?”
The man looked up from his Bible and tipped back his wide-brimmed hat, slowly shaking his head no.
“I’m surprised you’re still around, amigo. I thought you’d a gone back to the Gabilans by now. Stop those Americans from stealing your family ranch.”
“Not yet. Soon, maybe. Soon.”
Don Gabilan didn’t wear a serape like the other Californios she’d seen coming up the trail on horseback. He wore a black woolen vest over a white shirt, pressed neat with a black necktie, pulled taut. Smooth and brown, his face had no whiskers, only long thin sideburns. He was the cleanest thing she’d seen in months.
“Don Gabilan here’s a fancy ranch man,” said the captain.
She’d heard about those old aristocratic families. Descendants from the first Spanish settlers who’d come out nearly a hundred years ago spreading Catholicism to the Indians by building a trail of missions. Mixed in with the Mexicans and Indians too. She heard they were wealthy. Extravagant. Lovers of art and music and all sorts of other unseemly vices. And they owned all the land in California. Controlled all the ranching and farming. Ran the government. They held onto their power with a sense of refinement, hiding their low opinion of the incoming Yankee foreigners under a heap of courtesy.
The captain walked over to the Californio, gripping his hand, familiar.
“Out slumming, amigo?” asked the captain, laughing hearty.
“Sí, El Capitán. Like you,” he said in clear English, with only a slight accent.
The captain pointed to a pen in front of Don Gabilan.
“May I?”
“Of course,” said Don Gabilan.
<
br /> The captain picked up Don Gabilan’s magnificent metal nib pen, turning it over in his fingers, appreciating the tiny bear carved into one side of the bone handle. When Captain Shannon showed the pen to Nate, that Californio set his dark eyes on Elisabeth. He didn’t gawk like the men at the end of the bar but smiled with his eyes mischievous like he was about to start something. Her face flushed hot, and he kept looking and looking deep into her eyes until he nearly burned a hole right through ’em, and she couldn’t stand the honesty of it a second longer and finally looked away. She straightened up in the chair and put down her chicken leg, wiping the grease off her chin with her fingers. She sipped water from her glass delicate, acting like she was the lady she wasn’t. When she caught a glimpse of her own rough hands with dirt caked underneath her ragged nails, she placed the glass down harder than she’d meant to, nearly breaking it. Disgusted with herself, she hid her hands below the table wishing she could buy new gloves.
“Care to part with it?” Captain Shannon asked Don Gabilan.
“I’m here for supper. Not business,” he said.
“Can’t blame me for trying, with the all that finery you always got on you. I’m a business man, amigo.”
She took little bites of her beans now, spooning them slowly into her mouth, careful not to appear too ravenous in front of Don Gabilan. Nate inhaled his meal, then sucked the chicken bones clean. After, Captain Shannon cajoled him to enjoy a drink at the bar.
“Let your woman finish her supper in peace!”
“Maybe one rye,” said Nate, standing up.
She flashed Nate a nasty look, hoping he wouldn’t drink up her earnings. When Captain Shannon turned to her, she reached out to shake his hand like she would’ve meeting a new mill boss back in Lowell. He hesitated, leaving her hand hanging in the air so long a wave of foolishness crashed over her. When he finally reached out, taking only the tips of her fingers, she let her hand float like a dead fish supposing it more ladylike.
“Pleased you’re here, Mrs. Parker,” he said, patting the back of her hand.
Nate joined the men at the bar, making merry. Slapping backs. He seemed to forget completely that most of those men had flocked lascivious around her earlier in the day. Annoyed, she tapped her foot, hoping that Californio might pay her some attention. But when she looked over, Don Gabilan had already gone. Disappointment spread through her like a hot rash as she pulled “Self-Reliance” out of her pocket to read, alone.
Prospects of a Woman Page 3