Stan and Rosie came into the room then. Rosie had her eyes on the floor, as usual, but as she moved to the front door she turned her head slightly toward her grandmother.
“We’re going for a walk.”
She headed on out of the house without stopping. Stan followed her closely. I watched them pass through the doorway and when I looked back at Millicent I saw that she had been watching me.
“You don’t have to worry, you know.”
“What?”
“About him getting her pregnant. I could see it in your face.”
“Stan hasn’t had much experience with girls. Any, in fact.”
“Rosie can’t have children. She had her tubes tied when she was sixteen. She was in a home for disturbed adolescents at the time and she was very withdrawn. No one knew what was going to become of her and they said the operation would be for the best because sooner or later one of the boys there was sure to get at her. I had to say yes. What else could I do? She couldn’t take care of a child.” Millicent stared at the needlework in her lap and after a long pause said, “It was for the best.”
She spoke the words firmly then shook herself.
“You wanted to know if the journal says anything about this place. You can read it yourself if you like. It’s over there.” She pointed to a small set of shelves beneath one of the windows. “The gray one on the end.”
I took the book she indicated. Millicent started her needlework again and while she pushed and pulled the needle and its bright thread through the disk of cotton I sat in that quiet pale room and turned pages that had been written a hundred and thirty years before I was born.
The book was covered with coarse canvas. In places the depressions in the weave still held a residue of its original green color, but mostly the covers were faded to a grubby shale. Inside, the first two-thirds of the book had been damaged by water and were unreadable. The remaining pages were covered in a precise hand that gave little slope to its letters. The name Nathaniel Bletcher was printed on the inside of the back cover-Millicent’s ancestor, I assumed.
The Gold Rush had had its start in January 1848 when James Marshall found traces of gold in a millrace he was building on the American River at Coloma for a would-be land baron named Joseph Sutter. California was relatively sparsely populated at the time but that all changed over the next year as news spread around the world that a man could get rich simply by scooping dirt out of a river. By 1849 fortune hunters were pouring into the state from every part of the world, most of them heading north for the streams and rivers on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Nathaniel Bletcher had been one of them.
With so many men competing for claims it became less and less easy to earn a decent day’s wage with each month that passed, let alone hit the big time. For some men the solution to this problem was to head further inland, beyond the already established diggings, in search of a river or creek that had not yet been discovered and worked by others.
From the journal it appeared Nathaniel Bletcher had been forced, eventually, to adopt this approach. He’d begun his quest for gold on the Feather River where he’d worked a claim for a month without success before selling it and moving on to the Yuba. He prospected this river for three months, moving steadily toward the junction with its south fork. Many of the diggings he passed through had been rich strikes, but he came on them too late to pan anything like the amount of gold he needed to make himself a wealthy man. And so, finally, he abandoned the Yuba, bought a mule and supplies, and walked north into the surrounding forest, determined to keep going until he found his own untouched river.
It took him nine days and even then what he first found was not what he had been hoping for. The bright line of water that guided him out of the forest was already named and known-the Swallow River. To his disappointment there were men there before him and they were panning rich deposits. But there were not many of them and from talking to them he learned that they were the first to reach so far up the Swallow.
He spent two nights on the periphery of this newborn mining encampment, but the lure of his own personal El Dorado was too strong and on the third morning he repacked his mule and struck off alone upriver.
Though California’s population exploded as a result of the Gold Rush it was by no means entirely unsettled beforehand. Places had been named, some of the land had been mapped. Settlers who had known nothing of gold had hacked homesteads out of the wilds and, here and there, small hamlets had formed.
I turned the pages of the journal that charted Nathaniel’s progress upriver, looking for a place name or the mention of a settlement in the hope that I might be able to pinpoint what part of the Swallow River he had journeyed along.
For several pages there was little, just the outline of four days’ slow travel. Immediately beyond the encampment of miners the riverbed had lost its gold-bearing floor of sand and gravel and its water flowed instead over flat rock and jumbles of boulders, terrain poorly suited for the collection of gold dust. Nathaniel’s entries on these days were weighted with despondency and he began to consider cutting his losses and returning to the encampment. On the fourth day, however, he made this entry:
March 15, 1849
At last! The river has grown a little wider and I am camped this evening beside a shoal of gravel that yields good color. From noon to dusk I took two ounces with my pan. The gold is not heavily concentrated, but it is here! It is here! The surrounding land provides good reason for optimism. Upriver, above the tops of the trees, I can see a tall formation of rock that is surely quartz-bearing. It is greatly eroded and can have shed its minerals nowhere else but into the river which it appears to border so closely. Ahead of me the river curves and I cannot see the lay of it but I feel that I am at the ragged end of a great deposit. And of the multitudes who scrabble over this country it is I alone who am here to mine it. What will tomorrow bring? I will journey further. If my luck is good I will find the belly of this lode. If my luck is good.
And the day after that:
March 16, 1849 Half a day’s travel and the same of panning. The dirt is richer and I feel an excitement of the kind the hunter must feel as he closes with his prey. I am near. I know it. Tomorrow, perhaps, just a little further along the river, my fortune will present itself. Though I was lucky enough tonight. As I prepared my supper a trapper happened across me. Praise God that I had stopped my work and that my equipment was stowed out of sight. He travels downriver with beaver pelts and dried meat and took me at my word, I think, when I lied that I was looking for land to homestead. I bought some meat from him and we shared the meal. I asked for a description of the river ahead. There is, he said, a landmark known to those who have traveled this way but a few hours from where I write-an unusual length of river, curved so roundly that it bears the name Cooper’s Bend, as if it followed one side of a giant barrel. The river is quite broad and slow here, he said, with a bed of gravel and sand. Though I am lonely for company I was glad when our meal was over and he left to continue his journey downriver for I could not have much longer contained my euphoria. The place he speaks of can be no less than what I seek. All things point to it. The form of the land about, the slowness of the river, the composition of its bed. What treasure must lie trapped within it! I will leave at first light. He seeks to trade with the men I encountered five days previous and he may mention my presence here. Miners are suspicious men and some of them perhaps will not believe a tale of homesteading.
This entry finished at the bottom of the last page in the book. I had become caught up in the narrative and I felt a pang of disappointment that the outcome of his quest had not been recorded. I held the book open in my hands for a moment, wondering what had become of the man, and as I did so I noticed jagged lines of paper along the inside of its spine. It looked like three pages had been torn out.
I put the book back on its shelf.
“The last few pages are missing.”
“Are they? I never noticed. But then, as I said, I h
aven’t looked at it for years.”
“What happened to him?”
She laughed. “What happened to your great-great-grandfather?”
“I don’t even know who he was.”
“Exactly. I know he was supposed to have been reasonably well off. Whether it came from gold or not I couldn’t say.” She looked tiredly about the room. “I know his money didn’t stick around too long, though. Our family’s been in this area since Nathaniel came up that river and I don’t think a single one of us ever was what you would call even comfortable.”
“Have you ever heard of a place called Cooper’s Bend? He mentions it in the journal.”
“Yes, though there aren’t many people still alive who know it by that name.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here. That piece of river at the bottom of your father’s land. That’s what used to be called Cooper’s Bend till folks took to calling it Empty Mile-after all the gold was mined out, I guess.”
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment. I’d come here hoping to find out why my father had bought the land. An old journal would have been an exciting place to discover the secret, but I had read nothing there that might explain the land’s importance to him. The only whiff of meaning came from the mention of gold, but what of that? Any gold there might have been in the Swallow River at Empty Mile, along with all the gold in all the other Californian rivers, was long gone.
Millicent smiled patiently at me. “Does any of that help? A couple of months after his first visit your father came back by himself and asked to read the journal again and then, not long after that, he and his friend showed up to dig some fence post holes.”
“I didn’t see a fence. Where did they dig?”
“Down in the trees at the bottom of the meadow. Made such a racket I went down to have a look. They had this thing like a big corkscrew with a gasoline engine that they held between them. Bored right into the ground. Looked like a crazy place to do it, right in the trees. I don’t know how they thought they were going to string wire through all that brush. But then, your father didn’t look too much like the practical type, and I don’t think they drilled more than a handful of holes anyhow.”
“When was this?”
“Three or four months ago.”
“And you don’t know who this friend was? You didn’t hear a name?”
“No. He was a redhead, the sandy type. Tall, thin.”
I took my cell phone out and brought up the photo Gareth had insisted I take of him. Millicent nodded.
“Yes, that’s him.”
“My father didn’t buy the place until a month ago. Why would he be digging fence holes on land he didn’t own?”
“Perhaps he was getting a jump on things.”
“Who owned the land before?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you show me where the holes are?”
Millicent went to the front door, pushed open the screen, and pointed to a spot in the trees at the bottom of the meadow.
“Go straight in from there, you should find them.”
I thanked her and walked down across the meadow.
The first hole I found was about twenty yards in from the start of the trees and I’d seen it before. It was the hole my father had stood pondering over the day he brought Stan and me to Empty Mile for the first time. By walking parallel to the meadow from this point I found two others.
Although I’d never put up a fence I guessed the holes were about the right diameter but everything else about them looked wrong. They were too widely spaced, at least twenty-five feet between each, and they seemed overly deep, they went down about four feet. And what was the logic of erecting a fence on uncleared land?
I left the belt of trees and walked back up the slope to take a look at the log cabin. It was reasonably large for that type of building and had three bedrooms. Through the window of one of these I saw Stan and Rosie. They were standing in the middle of an empty room. She had her arms around him and their faces were pressed together, kissing.
I knocked on the door of the cabin and waited. A few seconds later Stan and Rosie came out and I told him I had errands to run and that he could stay at Empty Mile while I took care of them if he wanted.
From Millicent’s place I drove straight to Tunney Lake. Marla and I had reached an unspoken agreement to act as though the night with Jeremy Tripp had never happened, but that didn’t mean I had the same agreement with Gareth.
He was sweeping the steps to one of the cabins when I pulled into the parking lot. He looked up from his broom as I approached.
“You took your time. I thought you’d be back last night.”
“She told me what you have on her.”
“Mmm… busted for hooking. Nasty.”
“You prick. Why would you do something like that?”
“Um… money?”
“You’ve got the other girls for that.”
“Johnny, I want to be friends with you. This thing with Marla, it’s between me and her. It’s part of our history.”
“You haven’t lived with her for ten years.”
“You’re pretty self-focused, you know that? So what if it’s been ten years? She took my fucking future. I mean, honestly, Johnny, can you blame me if sometimes I feel like treating her like a cunt?”
Gareth took a deep breath, sighed it out, and steadied himself.
“Look, you’ve been away a long time. And while you were away our lives went on without you, and maybe they got a bit twisted, I admit it. I know I shouldn’t still hate her so much, but sometimes… I don’t know, I just get fixated.”
“Blackmailing someone into prostitution is beyond fixated.”
“She was hooking on her own way before I ever got involved.”
“What difference does that make?”
For a moment I thought Gareth was going to puff himself up again but he nodded and seemed to let go of something.
“Okay, you and Marla are obviously back together. I wasn’t sure before, but things are different now, I can see that. You shouldn’t have your lover being forced to do other men. I actually thought about it a lot after you left and you’re right, it can’t go on.”
“So you’re saying, what?”
“I’ll leave her alone. Call it my gift to you. I won’t make her do it again. I promise.”
I wasn’t really sure what to say to this. I’d expected a prolonged argument, a screaming match, even a brawl. His about-face took the wind out me and I stood there just looking at him for a moment. Gareth laughed.
“Dude! I’m not a complete shit. What do you think, I’m going to be this evil force forever fucking up your life? Like every day it’s gonna be, Sorry, Johnny, but Marla’s got to work tonight? Come on!”
“He made me watch.”
“You watched? Oh, man, I’m really sorry. That must have been shitty. I had no idea that would happen. Look, I’m finished here. You want to hang around and have a beer?”
What I wanted was to meet up with Marla and tell her how I’d convinced Gareth to set her free. But for Marla’s sake, keeping Gareth friendly seemed like the smarter choice right then, so I said yes to the beer.
Gareth got the drinks from the kitchen in the bungalow and led me out to the barn. David, his father, was seated in his wheelchair in the far corner working on something with a drill press. He waved distractedly as we came in and kept on working. We sat in the large open doorway, facing back toward the house. At intervals, behind us, David’s drill whined against metal.
Gareth nudged me and made his eyes wide. “Hey, you hear about Patricia Prentice?”
“Stan and I were the ones who found her.”
“Really? Holy shit!”
“Stan was delivering some potted plants.”
“What’d she look like?
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Was she wearing clothes? Was it, like, a total mess?”
“She looked dea
d, Gareth, okay? Just dead.”
Gareth held up his hands. “Dude, just asking.”
“Well, fuck…”
“Okay, okay…” Gareth leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I’m glad you came up today, Johnny. I need someone to talk to. Something’s going on between that asshole Marla did last night and Vivian.”
“Jeremy Tripp?”
“Yeah.”
I knew damn well there was something going on-I’d caught her coming out of his shower-but there was no way I was going to get mixed up in it. Gareth shook his head sadly.
“I go around to see her and she’s coming back across the road from his place. I call her on her cell and she doesn’t answer, or she’s around there practicing archery. Archery, for fucksake! I mean, Jesus, man, I love her.”
He took a gulp of his beer.
“I can’t believe it, you know? Two women in my life, the only two relationships that have ever meant anything, and both of them turn to shit.”
“Why would Tripp pay for Marla if he’s seeing Vivian?”
Gareth shrugged. “He’s rich. Fuck, all I need is a little time to turn this place around, to get some decent money together, and I’d be able to keep her. I know I would.”
He looked away and cleared his throat, then changed the subject.
“How are you doing about your dad anyway?”
“We’re coping.”
“When I read the paper I felt bad. Ray was a neat guy. We got to be pretty good friends.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, about a year ago I was panning up near Malakoff and he was there too, on the same stretch of river. We started talking, we had the gold thing in common and I was your old buddy so we got along pretty good.”
“Oh? He never said.”
“Yeah, we used to meet up and go panning. Or we’d go to Elephant Society meetings together. I tell you, I was freaked when he disappeared. The cops didn’t find anything?”
“No. But I wanted to ask you something. Did you ever go out with him when he was working? When he was doing his real estate thing?”
“No.”
Empty Mile Page 14
