With no banks yet established up in Coyoteville, she cut out a secret storage area underneath the floorboards below her bed, stashing away her savings in several tin boxes. Even so, the smithy made her two solid locks, one for the floor hatch and one for her front door, to keep her future secure. She wore the two keys on a rope around her neck, tucked inside her dress, against her skin.
Elisabeth loved her little cabin. It was small and simple but felt more light and airy than Henry’s windowless place down on the river, crowded full with three men and a dog. She’d never before had her own place, and this little cabin was her very own. Not given to her by anyone. Not shared by anyone. Not owned by anyone but her. She carved a wooden sign and burnt the words—Split Rock Books and Prints—with a hot poker the way Nemacio had burnt the snake design onto Nate’s crutch, and hammered the sign proudly above the door. Millie over at the Stamps Store lent her a ladder and a hammer but asked twenty-five cents for the nails.
“I hate to charge you, but they’re hard to come by,” said Millie.
“How about I make you something in exchange?”
Even with a comfortable savings, she didn’t want to pay for the nails. She needed to keep frugal. The high prices of ordinary goods in California could break a person, and she didn’t want to go belly up within her first year on her own, crawling back to Nate in defeat.
“Oh, fiddle. Why don’t you make me any old sign or picture you want. Mr. Stamps doesn’t have to know about the nails,” whispered Millie, tucking them discreetly into Elisabeth’s pocket.
Elisabeth didn’t make Millie any ordinary sign but rather inked up another print of Split Rock instead, telling her about the special place where she’d sat many days listening to the river, drawing strength. Millie gushed over the picture, hanging it in her bedroom above the store.
Millie was a marvel, helping customers with patience alongside her husband while keeping an eye out for three-year-old Joe Junior pulling on her skirt behind the counter. Whenever Joe Junior got into something, Millie managed him without missing a beat, redirecting his attention away from the delicate or sharp objects causing offense. One time Elisabeth saw little Joe hiding high up on a top shelf in the store, blending in with the boxes. He winked down at Elisabeth, mischievous, putting a finger to his lips. When he teetered, she yelled, and little Joe Jr. jumped down into Millie’s arms. Mr. Stamps gave him a swat on the bottom and scolded Millie.
“Keep an eye on him, woman,” said Mr. Stamps.
Elisabeth wondered why it fell on Millie to watch the little one when both husband and wife worked equal side by side in the store. It seemed four eyes were better than two, but Mr. Stamps couldn’t be bothered minding his own son while working, leaving all the responsibility to Millie. She felt grateful, at least, for not having Millie’s burden.
Elisabeth got her book shipment with the help of James Porter. When he brought back several crates from Sacramento and San Francisco, she set up the books on shelves she’d fashioned from planks of wood balanced on the crates. Mr. Porter skittered around her in circles like a squirrel, watching her work.
“You need help?”
“Nope,” she said, positioning each stack of books two inches apart.
“Anything I can do, say it. I’m your man,” Mr. James Porter said, flinging about his hands.
She figured Mr. Porter meant something other than books, but she ignored his intentions, quite sure she could handle the advances of man like him. Wiry and quick-witted, Mr. Porter was more amusing than attractive, hiring himself out as an all-around-everything fixer in just about every enterprise in Coyoteville, from trading and banking to couriering and surveying claims, and any other matter, as long as it wasn’t digging in the dirt. He wore a full brown beard with a thick, bushy mustache that clear covered his lips. She wondered how he ate clean. But under all that face hair, Mr. Porter had kind, eager eyes, and all the townsfolk relied on him as he was known as honest and earnest with concern for helping out his community. He even helped Luenza slaughter a pig when Stanley took off on another digging spree, not charging anything but a single pork supper and a few dram of whiskey.
Elisabeth finished setting up the shelves and paid Mr. Porter his ten-dollar fee plus the cost of the books. She thanked him over and over, making him feel far more necessary to her than he really was.
“You’re a gem! Truly, I don’t know how I could’ve managed without your help,” she said.
Peppering him with questions about the happenings in San Francisco, she figured being in the know would help her business succeed. She listened in for clues as he rambled on about his travels in the valley.
“Sacramento flooded again,” he said, standing too close.
“Terrible,” she said, taking a step back to lean against the open doorframe.
Elisabeth made it clear to Mr. Porter and everyone else in town that her husband, Mr. Nathaniel Parker, worked their claim down on the North Fork of the American. She kept things cool yet sweet between all the fellas she met, including Mr. Porter. She intended to grow a respectable reputation, giving nobody reason to talk. Even so, she had an instinct that to succeed she’d have to crawl along the sharp edge of flirty modesty. She was learning how to gain respect with her intelligence and capability, yet flash bits of feminine weakness, however feigned, during moments when she needed a spot of help.
She ushered Mr. Porter out the door, saying she had to get working. He promised to come back to check on her the next day.
“Give it a week, Mr. Porter,” she said, holding the door open wide. “So you’ll be impressed with my progress when you come back.”
She was toying around, yanking him along. No one could compete with the likes of Nemacio.
To Elisabeth’s relief, her monthly bleeding arrived. She’d a been wrecked getting pregnant, seeing as how Nemacio had gone back down to the river without even saying goodbye. She was still fuming that he’d chosen Nate and the claim over her. But now she stewed in a mix of melancholy at being without him. To keep from thinking about him or her fake marriage or Álvaro dying, she dug into work. Staying up long past dark each night, she read all her new books by candlelight so she could explain the stories to customers. One Saturday, she began Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, reading it straight through without sleeping. She couldn’t understand why the story centered on revenge rather than love. Catherine clearly should’ve married Heathcliff, since she loved him. Marrying Edgar was only a foil because she couldn’t handle Heathcliff’s power over her. Obviously, it wasn’t his lack of money or his lack of manners. Everything after bled revenge. Disappointed, she read it again, savoring the most romantic parts. She imagined the rest, filling in her dreams by placing herself inside the pages of the book. Sometimes she touched herself, but after Nemacio loving her on the Uva, her hands seemed a poor substitute. His loving had spun her core, tilted it right yet lopsided too. She longed for his passion again, but she knew she’d not return down to the claim, scrounging. Loneliness was her price of freedom from Nate.
That fall, her book sales started off slow. To get more folks interested in spending their gold on books, she walked around Coyoteville each morning while the miners and shopkeepers readied for the day, introducing herself and showing off her books, the same way Nate visited the boarding houses back in Lowell. All cleaned up in her pretty yellow dress and warm green eyes, she greeted the men, explaining the characters first, then the story. She soon learned there were plenty of educated fellas around the American River basin, and plenty uneducated ones, too, wanting to better themselves with opportunity not available to them back east. Once she got a customer hooked on a story, she’d tell the price, between three and five dollars for a novel. Poetry sold for little less, but a large volume like Shakespeare sold for considerably more at ten or twelve dollars. She had a generous policy of buying back the books once a customer read the novel through, but at half the price. She never lent a book, like Nate had; it wasn’t practical with everyone shuffling around
between town and claims at the least little rumor of a new strike.
Once she got up and going comfortable, Elisabeth sent five hundred dollars to Samuel at Amherst College overland on the Wells Fargo Stage with a letter explaining she’d settled in Coyoteville. It’d be a fortune for Samuel, compared to the money she’d sent from her millwork back in Lowell. She told him to buy their mother a new winter sweater, saying a woman wants something fine no matter where they’re getting on through life. She promised to send more money soon, saying they’d expanded to book selling. She left out the parts about Nate’s buggery or Henry’s leaving, having no heart yet for honesty. She considered writing that Henry had died, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie either, using up all her lying on letters to Louisa May. Either way, she worried Samuel might tell their mother the truth about Henry, breaking her soul complete and tipping her toward trying to do away with herself again.
Relived at no longer bellyaching for food, Elisabeth now lived quite comfortable between her book sales and savings, eating supper at the El Dorado almost every afternoon, and enjoying a hot bath once a week at Dukhart’s Bathhouse, with lavender soap from France she’d bought from Millie over at the Stamps Store. Still, ambition nudged at her, and she worked at engraving. She paid Mr. Porter to get her a dozen boxes of tracing and printing paper and more ink from San Francisco. She started drawing out images with charcoal on tracing paper before carving them into wood she’d sanded over and over until smooth. Practicing and experimenting with various techniques, she daubed ink over the block and centered paper atop, even. Placing a smaller block over the paper, ink, and block, she smacked a mallet across in sections. She screwed up quite a bit, inking uneven and smushing up ugly images. But she kept at it week after week, washing her block images clean, and starting over again, all the while selling books. She wasn’t discouraged, telling herself that learning wood engraving was simply another trade passing through her hands, like tending apples, working a shuttle at the loom, sewing shirts, and panning for gold. With long hours of practice, she improved, thinking her wood engravings and prints of rocks and trees and squirrels worthy of selling.
To advertise her printing services, she created a simple broadsheet printed with the words Split Rock Book and Prints, putting it up around town. Within a week, the advert brought in such a flood of book business that she raised her prices, asking nearly quadruple what she’d paid the publishers in New York and double what she paid Mr. Porter. She figured it entirely fair, since she held the distinction of being the only bookseller in Coyoteville, or anywhere else in the placers besides Sacramento. And that town was still flooded. Besides, everyone else charged outrageous prices for their goods and services, why shouldn’t she? Still, no one wanted to buy her pretty pictures. So she suggested to the sawyer, Mr. Lockwood, that she make him an advert in exchange for his pine scraps to make her book blocks.
“I got enough business,” he said.
“You’ll get more with an advert.”
“Show me first, then I’ll decide if a trade is fair.”
Elisabeth created a simple wood engraving of the Lockwood Mill with curly flourishes, a large L and a saw cutting through a tree. It looked simple, but it took her nearly a week and four blocks to get the image engraved just right. Then she went through a quarter stack of paper, figuring out how get the inking even. When Elisabeth presented Mr. Lockwood with a dozen copies of her first printing, he held the sheet up, rubbing his fingers over the dried ink as if he’d never seen anything like it before.
“My own business, right here in print. It’s fine, Mrs. Parker. Fine. I’ll give you all my scraps.”
Mr. Lockwood tacked his broadsheet up around town, spreading the word about his business and Elisabeth’s woodblock engraving and printing services at the same time. Before long, customers came from mining towns all over the American River Basin for her advertisements engraved on wood and printed up. Mostly she created simple pictures with just a few words, as she found lettering the most difficult. But she created both a simple block-type style and another flourishing style, each kept on tracing paper and extra blocks for new projects.
Consumed by long days of selling and engraving and books, Elisabeth sometimes went two whole days without aching for Nemacio. She pushed the dull disquiet into the distant corners of her bones, striving to secure her own slice of happiness. She enjoyed suppering with Luenza, who’d sent all the way from England for a proper nanny to mind her three boys, teaching them to read and write, and keeping them safe so she could attend to her hotel and restaurant. A rich woman by any standard, Luenza acted as the honorary mayoress of sorts, holding court at the El Dorado, offering up opinions about all the coming and goings of the growing town, and earning a reputation as a generous, heavy-hearted woman who spoke her mind, taking liberties, and never asking permission from anyone, least of all a man. She even kept a drove of filthy hogs out back in a big pen, being no law against holding pigs in town. Besides, Luenza knew how to set a perfect table, complete with succulent ham slices, so no one dared complain about her or the hogs.
Elisabeth learned from Luenza, watching how she spoke to customers, ordered her bar men around, and walked with a sure, heavy-footed stride. Her tone alone made men step in line.
“How do you get ’em to respect you?” Elisabeth asked.
“Run your business honest and respect yourself. Then everybody else will too,” said Luenza said, pulling out her logbook.
She showed Elisabeth how to tally up her sales and expenses, and told her not to let anyone cheat her.
“And don’t give the lookers a discount. You’ll be sorry for it later,” she added.
Luenza didn’t seem worse off without Stanley, who stayed down in the diggings most days now, even though he still hadn’t found any gold.
“He’s just grubbing down there. I don’t know why he even bothers, when he can have all this,” she said, sweeping her hand around the main dining room of the El Dorado. “Don’t even know what a husband is good for anymore.”
Elisabeth was touched when Luenza gave her a valuable oil lamp as gift for no occasion at all, saying it’d come in handy during the long winter nights ahead. It reminded her of when Álvaro brought a lamp to their river cabin that past winter.
Luenza introduced Elisabeth to Ginny O’Rourke, a woman running a pie shop out of a tent up on Prospect Hill. Coming up toward Ginny’s Place, the smell of warm baked apples flooded Elisabeth with memories of her mother and the apple orchard, and her legs nearly gave way right there in the middle of Coyoteville. She leaned on Luenza for support.
“You all right?” Luenza asked.
“Mmmm hmmm,” she said, nodding.
Ginny O’Rourke sat in front of an open fire with her legs propped up on a stool, her face white as a cloud, with bright orange freckles scattered uneven. Her cheeks puckered up severe, like she’d eaten a sour lemon. She wore a shock of stringy red hair, and a navy skirt and a clean blouse, pressed crisp.
“Now we got a regular tea party,” said Ginny.
She grinned, and her pucker face gave way to a mouth with a large gap from a missing front tooth. Elisabeth wondered what befell the woman to lose it.
“Gotta get supper ready. The men’ll be coming in from the diggings soon. I’m just here to make introductions,” said Luenza.
“I already heard about the book lady in town,” said Ginny with a thick Irish tongue.
“Good things, I hope,” said Elisabeth.
Ginny shrugged.
“You here for a slice?”
“I can never say no to pie,” said Luenza.
Luenza handed Ginny a few coins and grabbed the pie with her bare hands, then walked back down to the El Dorado taking big bites of warm apples, yelling back over her shoulder.
“Be nice, Ginny!”
“You want some pie?” Ginny asked Elisabeth.
Even though she could afford a slice, Elisabeth wasn’t about to bleed her savings out on luxuries like pie. Denying
herself seemed the right thing, for now.
“No. Thank you. I can’t afford to waste my money,” she said.
“Pie is never a waste, is what I say. Although it looks to me like you can’t afford a full dress either,” said Ginny, looking her up and down.
“No need to insult me,” said Elisabeth.
“Seems you’re the one’s insulting my pie,” said Ginny.
“My dress might look silly to you, but I’ll have it easier than you walking the muddy streets come this winter with it hemmed above my ankles,” said Elisabeth.
“Don’t twist your britches. I’m just telling it like it is,” said Ginny.
“You’re just telling it like you see it, without knowing, is all. I don’t have the patience for you,” said Elisabeth, turning to leave.
“Don’t be so quick. I’m only funnin’. I don’t mean nothing by it. A few months back, I looked like you, skin and bones in an old dress.”
“This is a new dress!”
“Now I’ve got the money for three skirts and two blouses, and filled out nice,” Ginny continued, slapping her thigh. “Baking over a thousand pies a month. Can you believe it?”
No. Elisabeth could not.
“I drag my own wood off the mountain and chop it myself, never having so much as a man to take a step for me in this country. Making fruit pies and coffee, is what I do. I also got a plan for milk. I’m thinking a dollar a pint. But that bloody cow is slow getting here on account of that damn flood down in Sacramento.”
Prospects of a Woman Page 19