Luckily, hoards of customers came into her shop looking for books to pass the long winter nights. A few asked about trading printing services for mining certificates, but she only worked with the six customers who banked with John Langley at the Pioneer Bank and Trust in San Francisco after learning about his honest reputation. Many of the other men looking for mining certificates seemed shady, claiming they’d held shares in their name alone. She refused to trade certificates for those shares, charging them full price instead.
Trading for mining shares might’ve been gambling, but she had nothing to lose speculating with her own labor. If she remained patient, the shares might pay out handsome. Those men had planted a crop of stock certificates, and everyone, including her, waited breathless for them to grow. To her astonishment, grow they did. Investors in Sacramento and San Francisco, and even from back east, wanted a piece of the deep mines, buying up shares sight unseen, based on descriptions in her broadsheets. She followed the values of her mining stock prices in the Placer Journal and watched that tidy stack of mining certificates stashed under her floorboards increase in value by the week. The Porter Company Mine had gone up in value from ten to fifty dollars each, which meant the value of her twenty-five shares were now at $1,250! It wasn’t even a quarter of what Luenza earned in one night of feeding miners at the El Dorado, but it was all profit since Elisabeth’s only capital investment was in the paper and ink supplies to print up the original certificates and broadsheets for Mr. Porter, which cost much less than a chicken dinner. The opportunity to make something out of nothing in California was astonishing. With this much value, she’d need to eventually put her certificates, along with her savings, in a proper bank down in Sacramento.
Even with all her business success, the heavy snow draped a blanket of sadness over Elisabeth when she finally got a letter from Samuel, saying he was grateful for the money she’d sent over the past year and asking forgiveness for not writing sooner. Saying he’d been suffering from a heap of sorrow, with no words to tell of it. Gwen had finally done it. She’d killed herself, yelling “Henry, Henry, Henry,” running full speed at a window three stories up at the Worcester Asylum, breaking through and falling down onto the grass below. The doctors wouldn’t let Samuel see her body, with her face and neck and arms torn up terrible by shards of glass. Samuel wrote he was sorry Nate had left, saying he now understood being alone was a terrible situation for a wife to endure. He said he knew something was off about the man. She’d only written to Samuel about a cheerful marriage, never telling that she’d been the one to leave Nate, but he’d seen right through her lies. Too bad Samuel hadn’t shared his opinion about Nate before she’d married; it might’ve saved her loads of trouble and hurt. She crumpled up his letter and threw it into the firebox.
Looking out the front window, she couldn’t see even a little beauty in the white storm spinning severe, switching between freezing rain and heavy snow. Outside raged wild with fury as she hunkered, dumping whiskey down her gullet in an attempt to bury her guilt at leaving her mother all alone in Worcester. The wind flew mean through the town, rattling her front window, shaking her little shop, and ripping three holes in the roof. She only had one pot to catch the water dripping down into puddles on the wooden floor. When she opened the door to fix the roof, a heap of snow blew inside, and she heard Deer Creek running through town in a rising clatter of rocks and logs and sticks. Closing the door, she kept the fire blazing and waited for the tempest to settle.
That winter the snow fell in spits and spurts, coming down hard and heavy for a few days, then clearing defiant afterward into a crisp blue bird sky, with a strong sun melting the streets into a muddy mess. Luenza’s hogs ran feral now, wandering through the town, scavenging through the streets and sleeping on wooden walkways. Elisabeth told Luenza it wasn’t right, letting her hogs run the town, but she just laughed it off.
“Who’s gonna complain? No one who wants my bacon, that’s who,” said Luenza.
Those hogs had plenty of mud holes to slosh around in, with anguished men digging up the streets into muddy holes that froze overnight and thawed to a mid-afternoon muck full of hogs. The holes looked a strange sight, and Elisabeth found navigating the street in the winter difficult, twisting her ankle more than once in a pit and mudding her skirt up something terrible. One night she found three fellas digging, desperate for gold right under the corner of her porch of all places, seeming numb to the cold.
“What the hell?” she said, holding the lamp up in the dark.
“One last try at our luck, lady,” said a voice in the night.
“Not here you don’t,” she said, tossing the contents of her piss pot in their general direction as warning.
When the man didn’t stop digging she placed a boot on his shoulder and kicked him away from her porch. He stumbled backward into the mud. When he crawled up to his knees and started back to digging desperate with his hands, she went inside for her Hawken. She pointed the loaded barrel at the men, and they pleaded, saying they’d had it with looking for gold and wanted to get home to St. Louis.
“They ain’t no circus out here,” one of the men muttered on. “They ain’t no wild elephants, either. I never did see no elephants a ’tall. I’m going back home where I can see horses and cows and chickens and real things I know for sure. I’m done looking for that damn elephant.”
Elisabeth held her lantern up to their faces, seeing them haggard and thin and sick. Maybe drunk too. One man had a horrid, raspy cough and a spittle of blood on his chin. She backed up, feeling sorry for the lot. Perhaps they’d had no luck. Or perhaps they’d had luck but spent it through doing whatever foolish men do. You never could tell a man’s story out here just by looking at him. She figured them dim-witted and set out a pot of hot tea and a basket of pears, saying they could sleep up on her porch out of the rain.
“But no digging, damn it! That’ll ruin my foundation,” she said, bolting her front door.
Inside, Elisabeth opened a jug. She’d taken to drinking whiskey regular that winter, without the help of coffee to get it down. An evening medicinal to help with the uncontrollable dreams and loneliness and lingering anger over Nemacio staying away. She was sore at herself for spending her savings on drink, knowing it wasn’t wise, but she couldn’t help it, drinking up a dram or three when nights folded gloomy around her. She liked falling into bed clouded and fixed drunk so nothing came to her but dead sleep, however muddied and hollowed out like the frozen holes in the streets. The balance of her mind wasn’t off-kilter like the men who’d hanged themselves for no good reason, or her mother. She wasn’t crazy, just wallowing weak in an all-consuming ache, hoping to mute her loneliness.
By sunrise those dim-witted diggers were gone, and she washed piss off the side of her store and filled in the holes by kicking in mud and tamping it down, wondering if they’d started the long journey to St. Louis yet. Wondering what makes a person happy. Even with her own business and all her savings, she hadn’t yet discovered. She’d accumulated nearly six thousand dollars hidden in a yeast powder tin box under her bed, a lifetime sum for a princess back in Concord. But in California it wasn’t much savings at all, and could be spent through within a year on basic supplies if she wasn’t careful. She’d turned into a greedy woman, wanting more than a fleeting slice of sweetness out of life. When she started stealing little sips from a hip flask during the day while engraving blocks of wood, she smacked with a terrible self-loathing.
She was already half-drunk by noon when James Porter came into her shop one day with a bottle of red wine he’d picked up at the Solano Mission. He uncorked the bottle and poured her a cup. She smelled it and turned up her nose.
“It’s not my drink,” she said.
“You might grow to like it,” he said, mistaking her for a temperate woman.
She took the drink, and they clinked their cups at nothing in particular.
“You ever thought of marrying?” Mr. Porter asked.
Sipping the w
ine, she sized him up as being like a brother, even though he looked pleasant, tall and well kept, without any awkward smells or manners. But he moved nothing inside her, no matter his kind attentions.
“I’m already married, you know that,” she said, leaning up against her table to balance herself.
“Your man doesn’t care for you proper, letting you stay up here, working all alone.”
“Some thing, you tossing around judgment at me.”
“You ever thought about getting yourself another man?” he asked.
“Oh, dear God, I don’t need another one,” she said, her lips let loose with drunken honesty.
“Do you fancy being a hermit woman, is that it?”
“A hermit? No,” she said, holding out her cup for more wine.
The wine tasted sweeter than whiskey, and slower to slip into her blood, but warm and lovely. She liked it.
“A fine woman like you shouldn’t go to waste,” said Mr. Porter.
“How does a woman get a divorce?”
He smiled hopeful, telling her how to file a claim with the Accolade down in Hangtown.
“You could say he’s neglectful. Impotent.”
She peered at him, feeling the wine take over her mind.
“You need someone to love you,” said Mr. Porter.
“That’s not what Emerson thinks,” she said.
“Who’s Emerson?”
“Ne te quaesiveris extra.” She said the words mushy, flinging her tin cup around, sloshing wine onto the oak floor.
“You talking Latin?”
“Do not seek for things outside of yourself,” she said.
“Sounds like the makings of a lonely life.”
She hiccupped, and Mr. Porter shifted his feet uncomfortable, clearing his throat.
“Listen, Elisabeth,” he said, stepping close. “You and me, we’d be good together.”
He turned pitiful now, and Elisabeth felt sorry for his fruitless efforts. Still, he proved too easy to toy with, not at all challenging her intellect or passions. She gulped down the last of the wine, teasing.
“Oh?”
“Darling. I’ve hoped for this,” he said, grabbing her close.
She felt him harden through his pants as he kissed her wet, pulling up her skirt, fumbling in between her legs before she knew what was happening. Her reflexes were slow on account of the wine, and from the whiskey she’d been sipping on all morning, and she let him rub her privates through her drawers for a while, curious to see how it felt. Nothing. Only irritation he acted so clumsy. She pushed him away, and he stepped back, dejected. The wine stuffed up Elisabeth’s nose, making her impatient and tired. She wanted Mr. Porter out of her store. She tried to explain, calm, knowing she owed him nothing. Even so, she didn’t want to hurt his pride.
“You see, here’s the way of it, Mr. Porter. I’m not so fine a woman. Certainly not worthy of a man like you. Trust me. Take your bottle of wine and move on. Go find yourself a woman who needs a man.”
Elisabeth handed Mr. Porter back the empty tin cup, and he took it with his head hanging low. Without another word, he corked the wine bottle, walked out the door, and never came around again.
29
March 1852
Dearest Louisa May,
What a joyous day indeed, receiving your latest letter! Your words greet me at a high time celebrating your hard-won rewards, as well as my own, earned through temperance and self-discipline. I congratulate you on the publication of “The Rival Painters” in the Saturday Evening Gazette. Your success is overdue and much deserved. As you say, five dollars is a meager sum for your literary labors, but more will surely follow now that you’ve opened the door with a smash. I admire your resolution to build a solid foundation for your family in ways your father cannot or will not. Your efforts must feel a great burden weighing down your shoulders given what little he contributes to the household. I’ve no doubt you will manage with grace.
But dear LM, it pains my heart to hear you continue railing on about your father, given that his lectures on the Conversations on Man, which you say both sexes attend, and not just the transcendentalist. Surely his lectures will spread enlightenment on the nature of conventions and expectations throughout New England, after more than a spell, perhaps. Small minds creak open slow. I do not deny your frustration with the particular principles which force him to shirk his familial duty, I simply encourage paternal gratitude. Try to find an understanding in the steady compass of commitment guiding him, even as he contributes paltry toward your financial necessities.
All families suffer from shortcomings, even mine. Of course, I am continually blessed with our prosperous claim, which allows me the fulfilling work at the Split Rock Books and Print Shop. With hard work, we’ve earned beyond expectation, allowing for us to send for my mother, who is recovering well from her exhaustion at the Worcester Sanitarium. I suspect she will soon make the long journey west where she will enjoy the healthy California sunshine alongside us. Consumed with classes at Amherst, Samuel is a great beneficiary of our labors. I do not understand why he holds no interest in leaving his studies in banking to join the new economy of California. Perhaps he will change his mind in time.
Oh, how I wish you might someday know my friends Luenza and Ginny and Millie! And Nandy too. They are women working with a pure exuberance far beyond their present circumstances should rightly allow, and without fear. In knowing them, I have discovered how an independent occupation gives a woman strength of no equal measure. In accordance, I’ve come around to the idea that we must all live our own truths, no matter how uncomfortable those truths strike our loved ones. I extend that ideal to my husband, who is living his truth for the first time, even if that truth lacks the cherished conventions of most marriages back in Massachusetts. In knowing as much, I understand that man, too, is at his very nature as equally vulnerable as we women. In searching for acceptance and compassion, I take lessons from his remarkable emancipation. California has taught me that we all deserve to fulfill our dreams, women as much as men. In my observation, men already know the value of pursuing happiness, when the ideal has yet to take hold in the minds of women. We must find our worth anew by escaping the noose of traditional living, which confines most women. This act in and of itself will bring us happiness, where there was none before. So you see, LM, I’m finished with my old thinking, and now address my desire as each opportunity presents, however dangerous, while attempting to convince myself the notion isn’t selfish, just as you and all women on this earth should do likewise.
I await word of how you receive my new frame of thinking, along with more stories written by you as both Flora and out of the shadows as the brilliant Louisa May Alcott.
Your bookselling and engraving friend in California,
EP
30
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
Spring arrived early, bursting forth a spray of orange poppies all over the foothills, and the women sat outside Ginny’s place again, enjoying Sunday coffee and conversation. Their voices and laughter traveled like a sweet song on the cool morning breeze through the quiet town not yet recovered from a Saturday night of equal measures revelry and despair.
“Let’s toast to another article added to our list of equal rights,” says Luenza, reading from the Mountain Democrat. “Article 2633, Sec. 2. Divorces may now be granted from bed and board, or from the bonds of matrimony.”
“May many a woman now be released from the yoke of an unhappy coupling,” said Elisabeth, holding up her cup as a toast. “As no longer the property of our husbands. Free to start over, fresh.”
She took a long drink of her morning medicinal.
“As long as we prove fault,” said Luenza.
Luenza read off the list of faults like a legal expert.
“Impotence. Underage consent. Extreme cruelty. Desertion or neglect. Fraud. Habitual intemperance. Conviction of a felony. Adultery. I got Stanley o
n a few of those for sure,” said Luenza.
Elisabeth found it difficult to find fault in Nate, even after all that had gone on between them. She’d come to understand he had no control over his peculiar predilections with men. She’d never tell the truth about his buggery. She didn’t want to shame him, and besides, the truth would brand him limp, setting him off an outcast and putting his life in danger. In fairness, she couldn’t accuse him of impotence either, since they’d consummated their marriage on their wedding night and a few a times after, however unsatisfactory. She hadn’t been underage at nineteen when they married, and extreme cruelty certainly didn’t apply, either. Nate wasn’t cruel, save for marrying her as a foil in the first place. A judge wouldn’t likely deem Nate neglectful of providing the common securities of life, given his amputation after the snakebite. He didn’t lack temperance. Didn’t treat her with force. He wasn’t a felon. And he hadn’t deserted her, either. Technically, she had left him. Adultery seemed the only option. She just wanted out of the marriage. She wanted her freedom.
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