Prospects of a Woman

by Wendy Voorsanger

  Carving woodcuts with her father’s tools offered her something to do while cooped up in the cabin with three men during those long dark days of winter, and kept her thoughts off both her spectacular failure as a wife and her pitiful desire for Nemacio. Her first woodcuts looked crude, like rough scratches on wood with a penknife. But she read through The Art of Engraving on Wood buried at the bottom of Henry’s tool chest, then started over again with drawing. She experimented. With no tracing paper, she drew simple shapes directly onto wood with a tip of charcoal from the fire, and tested the various engraving tools, digging out triangles and squares. When she got the hang of basic geometry, she moved on to engraving pictures of the forest, plowing through the wood slow and careful with different-sized bruins to create rough tree trunks, then chiseling out the finer details of individual branches. The pinewood left her sticky with sap, so she searched for cedar wood while out hunting in the afternoons. She hacked large branches into flat blocks and scraped the small knots flat with the back of an ax. With the harder cedar wood she mastered more refined detail, giving her the confidence to try more intricate pictures. She carved an image of Álvaro’s guitar, but it looked odd, the strings curved cockeyed and the neck foreshortened, weird. She threw it into the fire. It was slow work but satisfying, too, putting her passion into something other than a man. Working with her father’s tools made her think he might’ve been proud of her, if he’d stuck around. Yet, she figured in the end, he’d probably not care a whit.

  Álvaro became a great source of joy for Elisabeth, with his bubbling generosity and goodwill. Impervious to the cold and the hard climb out of the river canyon, he went up to Coyoteville weekly, no matter the weather, to play monte at the El Dorado Hotel—Luenza’s El Dorado—always bringing back a sack of potatoes, beans, coffee, or even dried fruit bought with his winnings. Elisabeth asked him to find that paper explaining the women’s equal rights in the California Constitution, but he’d had no luck. One time he surprised them with a sack of fresh oranges, a lamp, and a jug of whale oil. He turned on the lamp, lighting up the cabin with his spirit.

  “Now you won’t cut yourself carving in the dark,” he said to Elisabeth.

  She jumped up, throwing her arms around him.

  “You’re the best. How’d you manage?” she asked.

  “What can I say? I’m good at monte,” he said, giggling to himself.

  Much shorter than Nemacio and roughly ten years older, Álvaro wore a round pudgy face, like a boy who hadn’t yet grown up, even with a full beard. She wondered what his mother fed him as a child. He kept a flask in his pocket, but no one said a thing about it. She loved hearing him go on, dramatic about his home.

  “I am not a Mexican. I am from España. I came to Alta California as a boy, but I am Spanish of the heart,” he said.

  They all four grew closer that winter, digging side by side. By January the weather turned moody, with sleeting rain streaming down heavy between bouts of snow dustings and blue sky, like Mother Nature couldn’t make up her mind. When the winter cold made it difficult for the Californios to keep warm overnight in their tent, Nate made space for them inside the cabin. Álvaro slept under the table next to Nate on the bearskin rug, and Nemacio slept in front of the stone hearth with his own blanket roll. They never asked why Nate didn’t sleep up on the bed with his wife, either out of respect or an understanding of the particulars of their marital situation. It was obvious Nate had no romantic interest in Elisabeth.

  What came before their time together on the river that winter made no difference. An urgency hovered over them, shifting the equilibrium of convention, requiring them to transcend their past expectations of a natural order. They were in the midst of an altogether different society emerging in California, where old rules didn’t apply. It demanded they move beyond stagnant roles, toss aside judgment, and open themselves up to inventing something altogether new. Done with convention, Elisabeth was ready.

  When the wet came down unforgiving, they hunkered inside for days in a stretch. Elisabeth carved and Álvaro played while Nate read to Nemacio. When a storm cracked Henry’s flimsy roof, streaming water into big puddles on the dirt floor, Nemacio patched the holes in the shingles and plugged the side chinks with mud to keep the water out. They survived the worst of that winter on food stores the Californios provisioned: salmon jerky, nuts, dried elderberries, and various roots and herbs. Whenever the sky stoppered itself, they ventured outside to dig pell-mell in the river, collecting some gold dust and a few nuggets, holding out hope for a big strike. Meanwhile, they stored all the gold bits in a tin.

  She found it difficult to keep her womanly privacy cooped up with the men, having to make many trips back and forth through the cold to the privy. It wasn’t too smelly since the Californios put a bucket in there filled with cedar chips and pine needles to throw down the hole to keep things fresh. One day, she found a tiny wooden box tied with a red ribbon hiding behind the bucket. Inside was a stack of buckskin pieces, soft and rectangle. Seeing they’d be too thick for ordinary wiping, she realized they must be for her monthlies. Shocked by such a thoughtful gesture, she knew it wasn’t Nate, and wondered if Nemacio or Álvaro had made them. Of course, she couldn’t ask; she was too embarrassed to even thank them.

  She learned to carve well that winter, balancing a sandbag with the woodblock on her lap, turning and turning while holding gravers and chisels to outline different animals she saw around the river basin—a bunny and fox and deer and that sad marmot with its grimace. She experimented with different-sized tools, little by little teaching herself how to cut out all the surrounding parts. When her hand slipped stabbing the bruin into her finger, a painful gash opened. She had to lay off engraving for two whole weeks waiting for the cut to heal, going antsy with boredom and angry at the cold for keeping her cooped up in the cabin. When she started engraving again, she didn’t stop, putting in long hours practicing different ways of holding the tools to create the perfect line. She wanted to create an engraving worth printing on paper, but her creatures still turned out clumsy and all alike, the fox with the deer face, the bunny with the marmot body. Frustrated, Elisabeth threw block after block of botched carvings into the fire.

  “There goes another one,” Nate said, looking up for a moment to watch the block catch fire.

  When he returned to writing in his notebook, she didn’t let his comment go.

  “No need to get so snarky with my effort to make something better,” she said.

  “None intended, darling,” he said, dripping with sugary meanness.

  Nemacio stopped their quibbling before it got going.

  “What are you going after?” Nemacio asked.

  “Something I can print,” she said.

  “Why not start simple?”

  “I want to make something beautiful.”

  “Simple is beautiful.”

  She bit the inside of her lip thinking on that principle. She didn’t want to make another odd, lopsided picture. The nature in the canyon seemed so complex yet with perfect symmetry and balance, like the ospreys with their different-sized feathers laying into a flat line of even wings. Or the green pine tips splayed up against a blue California sky. Or the pine cone swirling around into itself getting smaller and smaller, each scale hiding a little seed. She’d taken a pine cone apart, pulling off all the scales from the bottom one by one, examining the pieces until the top alone looked like a wooden rose. She could never capture that natural beauty.

  “I’m not sure how.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said, confident.

  For some reason she believed him. Infused with his confidence, she carved, slower and more deliberate, with fewer lines. An image seemed to bubble up from some mysterious wellspring buried deep inside her. Split Rock—that special place where she loved to sit by the river. Only six lines for the rock, split down the middle. And a few more lines gouged in varying sizes for the water, flowing into a swirling eddy with one tiny twig caught up in the c
alm. It looked almost too simple, and maybe not worth printing on paper. To her it was beautiful, and far more meaningful than sewing a straight seam on a pair of pants.

  Engraving kept her mind off that Californio, a bit. Having Nemacio sleeping in the cabin that winter wound her up something awful. Practically everything he did aroused her imagination, running it wild with lust. Watching his hands chop rosemary at the table. His thick lips moving sensual as he read aloud. Those silky curls dripping wet after a rainstorm. Smelling his coat hanging on the peg nearly brought her to her knees. Even his feet drove her crazy, long and wide and a beautiful brown compared to Nate’s ugly single white skinny foot warming up limp on the hearth. At night when the lamp went out she heard Nemacio breathing, thick and soft. Heard him stir awake. Heard when he’d drifted off to sleep on the floor.

  Having him so close turned her wicked, and touching herself in the dark became a sore temptation taking all her strength to resist. She ran her palms along her thighs outside the bunny blanket back and forth each night to warm up, then stopped. If she started on herself, she’d likely not be able to quit, moaning with pleasure and waking the whole cabin up with her fit of shame.

  17

  “He who is in love is wise and becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object of beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”

  The rain quit in early spring, and the sky opened into an innocent blue with not a cloud of interference. Elisabeth couldn’t believe a clear sky had been capable of releasing such a winter drenching only a few days before. The blueness and the sunshine overhead warmed up the river gorge, making her think of honey and hope. When a robin started tittering and the woodpeckers started knocking on tree trunks, she knew spring had arrived.

  Nate had been clever taking on Álvaro and Nemacio as partners. They’d helped them get through the worst of the winter without starving and proved themselves expert miners. With the spring melt, Nemacio acquired three foot-wide planks and a sheet of iron from the blacksmith in Culoma. He and Álvaro fashioned an elaborate Long Tom, hammering the wood into a rectangular sluice with a sloped bevel. They pierced holes in the iron sheet and nailed it to the bevel. All the while, Nate tottered around, growing more comfortable with his fancy snake crutch, hollering out directions about this or that. Álvaro and Nemacio had worked a Long Tom before at the Spanish Diggins. Nate knew nothing about toms or sluices, other than what he’d seen back at Chana’s claim, but still bossed them around like a know-it-all, saying, “What you really want to do is . . .” She supposed his bossing made him feel important and useful after losing such a substantial part of himself. The Californios didn’t complain but listened polite like Nate was offering up valuable information they’d never heard before.

  Nemacio and Álvaro carried the Long Tom north of the cabin to a gravel bar with a flat of quartz underneath they hoped led to a deep vein of gold below. They set the sluice beside the river on a square wooden box and angled it downslope with a flange all around. She stood at the head of the Long Tom, christening it formal like a sailing ship with words from Emerson.

  “Man (or woman),” she added, in earnest, “is his own star; and the soul that can render an honest and perfect person, commands all light, all influence, and all fate.”

  She poured the first bucket of muddy water into the Long Tom, and everyone cheered. Álvaro hooted, Nate circled his crutch in the air, whistling loud, and Yellow Dog barked and barked like he knew they were embarking on a marvelous feat of fortune. He jumped up and down, sniffing the contraption, looking inside, trying to lick the water out. That’s it! She’d name him Tom. A perfect name. She patted Tom on the head.

  Nemacio said a blessing in Spanish she didn’t understand and crossed himself. Álvaro made the sign of the cross after and dumped in more buckets of gravel. She hoped this magical contraption might offer up enough gold to give her freedom. She didn’t yet have a clear plan, but that long winter cooped up in the cabin with Nate had made it clear. She wouldn’t stay living down on the river with him too much longer. She didn’t love him. She had no idea of what she’d do, or how she’d live on her own. Maybe she’d move up to Coyoteville. Learn business from Luenza. She only knew she had to get away. She couldn’t stand being around Nate anymore. Couldn’t stand the sight of his grubby face and greasy hair and floppy stump. It took all her strength not to act rude griping at him, and she was sick at herself for being such a terrible nag of a woman. She was still young and dreaded thinking about spending the rest of her days wilting away with a husband who couldn’t love her proper.

  Nemacio and Álvaro did all the heavy work that spring, breaking and crushing up the quartz rock and carrying it in buckets into the Long Tom. Elisabeth added buckets of water and moved the rock and mud around with a shovel, sifting and examining the find, and pushing the smaller rocks and gravel bits through the holes in the metal plate like a big flour sieve. Nate sat on a stool at the end of the Long Tom collecting the smaller bits as they streamed down, swishing the dirt in a pan, looking for something shiny. He slid the larger chunky rocks aside into the pile of sludge to reexamine later. They labored tireless, each suited for their specific job, finding rhythm. Working the Long Tom proved backbreaking, but it let them sift through the rock faster, so they didn’t complain, even when spring rain showed up. They knew the rain would only last a few hours then escape behind white puffy clouds plastered against a brilliant blue sky for another day. Through bouts of rain they crushed and sorted and separated as much dirt in a day with the Long Tom as they had in a whole week with the rockers and pans. Day after day they kept up, even as their bones screamed weary.

  After a month ripping up the gravel flat, their luck turned. They started finding larger bits of gold. Shiny and yellower than she’d remembered seeing when Chana held it up in front of her face. With the price of gold at twenty dollars an ounce, filling the poke only a third full added up to a square meal for all four of them at Luenza’s for a week. Nemacio restaked their claim perimeter fifty yards up-and downriver from the quartz flat with tall sticks, making it clear for other diggers to keep off.

  When fellas passed through the claim Elisabeth still smiled sweet but no longer asked if they needed sewing or mending; it wasn’t worth her time to stop digging. Their Long Tom system brought out curious neighbors, as well as claim jumpers from downstream. Twice, Nemacio and Nate banded together against jumpers, brandishing the Hawken and saying their claim was off-limits. On one occasion, five interlopers confronted Álvaro, saying he had no right to dig in America.

  “You’re an illegal. You gotta pay the assayer your foreign miner’s tax.”

  Nate hobbled over to stand ground with Álvaro.

  “We’re all Americans here,” said Nate.

  “You can’t work no slaves on your claim,” said the claim jumper. “California is a free state.”

  Álvaro looked as if he’d been struck, then started laughing and laughing and slapping his knee. Nemacio didn’t find the men funny and threw his pan down with a clatter in the river rocks.

  “You’re the foreigner, you filthy gringo,” said Nemacio. “I was born here.”

  The claim jumpers started yelling then, hollering and spitting.

  “They’re my partners, you idiot! Now get off my claim,” said Nate.

  A gang of gruff-looking men they’d befriended up Sweetwater Creek calling themselves the Sweetwater brothers came downriver to see about the ruckus. They stood in solidarity with Nate and Nemacio and Álvaro, telling the claim jumpers to scram. Two Sweetwater brothers even pointed rifles at the jumpers, and Elisabeth worried things might get rough. Fortunately, the shifty men moved on to find other diggers to bully.

  Afterward, digging life on the North Fork of the American took on a steady rhythm, with pleasant camaraderie flowing through the canyon among the other miners claiming a dig. Together, Nate and Nemacio emerged as leaders, introducing themselves to nearby neighbors staking out new sp
ots in the American, and in the creeks and gulches flowing in, and the shallow placers, too, up and down from the Goodwin Claim. Most folks in this stretch of river were friendly, more interested in working hard rather than getting worked up over a few Californios. The river required a leveling, with no one fawning over the rich or flouting the poor. In fact, you couldn’t tell one from the other down on the river. All that mattered was the digging, and digging demanded a sturdy lot. California swallowed up weaklings.

  Nate made a huge effort getting to know all the men up and down the river. After a long day of digging, he’d slowly hop along the trail with his one leg flopping, talking to all the diggers, showing great interest. He disarmed men with his self-deprecating manner, introducing himself as Gimpy, and laughing big at himself, then he’d ask where they’d come from, getting familiar fast, calling them buddy and partner and chief, and asking opinions of things he already knew, flattering. He showed great ability to create cooperation among the men, organizing them into the North Fork Committee Mining District. They held meetings to discuss property boundaries and markers, the spring river conditions, the types of rock surrounding their claims, and new mining methods. He persuaded the committee to work together building a single ditch, with each group taking turns on it diverting off water at different hours of day, so as not to muddy up each other’s claims downriver with slag. Nate encouraged civilized agreements among the men, enforced by no laws, striving for honest cooperation instead of dishonesty and deceit. The men agreed, believing the tide of teamwork would lift them all.