Bugs Pomeroy knelt by his friend and wept.
Henry Parker mounted his horse and left.
———
Within a month there were dozens of them. Carving a crude path through the landscape, they brought the wheel to Mathilda Springs. They brought horses, pulling wagons full of equipment and beer. They built structures and gouged the earth. They rocked the landscape with explosives. They shat in the stream. They raped women and beat the men for sport.
Bugs persuaded the Wanqong to hide in the hills until it was all over, and he promised to tend the dams and keep the larvae safe through the winter and gather the cocoons when the time came. He said he would change the hearts of these white devils. But the white devils laughed at him, stole his gin, and burned his books.
One morning toward the end of winter, three miners came upon Pomeroy wading in the pool upstream, tending to the larvae. He had hoped the white men would never find this spot—they seemed utterly uninterested in exploring the countryside—but here they were. Bugs had just done minor repairs to the lower dam, and the temperature of the water was perfect. The little wigglers were happy and healthy. Pomeroy had brought a pail so that he could take some of the pool’s water to the men in hiding. Drinking the pondwater during larvae season was an important ritual.
“You’re naked,” one of the white men shouted at him. “Look at him, he’s naked!” he shouted to his mates. “That water hot?” he asked Pomeroy.
“Warm,” Bugs answered.
The men grinned. “A hot bath,” one of them said. “I could use a hot bath.”
“No!” Pomeroy cried. “This pool is not for bathing. You bathe in the mud pool, wash in the stream.”
But the men had already stripped to their underwear and were sloshing loudly into the pool.
“No!” shouted Pomeroy. “You’ll disturb the larvae!”
The men stopped. “There’s worms in this water?”
“Worms! Christ!” They beat the surface of the water, laughing loudly and killing hundreds of larvae with each blow.
Pomeroy gently scooped a few hundred larvae into his pail and rushed out of the water. He sat on the bank and bitterly watched his enemies splashing each other and destroying his dreams, their filth fouling the water, their cruel behavior wasting life.
He spent the rest of the day, after the invaders had left the pool, carrying pails of water down to his stone hut. He filled and sealed jar after jar. These little fellows might not survive in jars, but one had to take precautions, just in case one’s worst fears came true.
Which they did. The next morning when he returned to the sacred pool with his pail, he found a dozen white men splashing in the water, polluting it with their dirty bodies, and with soap. Those poor, sweet, unfortunate wigglers! Pomeroy could not bear to watch, but he could not bear to leave, and so he had to watch. He watched them dismantle both the upper and the lower dams to increases the flow and make the water hotter. That was the last straw. “You’ll kill them!” he shouted. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”
They laughed at him and splashed him with their soapy, filthy water.
A fierce wailing came out of the canyon, and black people appeared suddenly from behind rocks and bushes on either side of the stream. The pool was surrounded by the angry Wanqong. The entire community, and they were holding stones the size of oranges.
The white men sloshed out of the water and gathered their clothes in haste. The Wanqong allowed them to pass, and the whites ran down the canyon trail to the camp, shouting.
The Wanqong gravely approached the water to assess the damage and then, using the stones they had brought as weapons, they set to repairing the dams. Pomeroy warned them that they must go back into the hills and hide, but they ignored him and worked. Of course. Why should they trust him?
Little Nqong approached him and smiled. The child was six years old now, but much taller than he should have been. From his size he looked almost ready for circumcision, but he was clearly still a child. The child asked if he could visit with Libby, his best friend, whom he hadn’t seen for weeks.
Livingston Pomeroy sadly left the Wanqong at their labor and walked down the canyon, one hand holding the full pail, the other resting on Nqong’s head.
Bugs and the children were having tiffin outside his stone hut when they heard the explosion. It was the loudest noise he’d ever heard, and it echoed for minutes. Then another, even louder. The children clung to him and whimpered, and he tried to soothe them, but the grief he felt would not allow his voice to speak words. He hurried them into the hut and then ran down to the stream. Mathilda Creek, named after his dear, dear wife, once such a lovely yellow color, was now a rich orange, turning rapidly darker, darker to red, carrying clumps of dead worms and scraps of human flesh. Up the canyon he could hear gunshots and laughter.
Livingston Pomeroy sat stunned on the dirt in front of his stone hut. Libby and Nqong held his hands and tried to comfort him. All three were naked and crusted in warm mud.
Henry Parker, the captain of the New South Wales Mining Company expedition, stood before him in his black boots. He was holding the reins of a tired nag. “I have a horse and wagon for you, Pomeroy,” he said. “My men have work to do, and you’re in the way. I want you and your child out of here by sunset.”
Pomeroy looked up at him and said, “Children.”
“Children, then. Start packing.”
“Did you kill them all?” Pomeroy asked, in a meek, whining voice that made him ashamed. He felt so utterly, utterly ashamed. Of being so timid. Of being a white man. A white mouse.
“Every man jack,” Henry Parker said in a voice full of pride. “Every mother’s son. And every mother’s daughter and every mother and every black-arsed bugger in the valley. The whole festering lot of them were busy rebuilding that dam of theirs, which we needed to blow up anyway. That killed off the wogs, who were even more in the way than the dam. Now we can get on with our work, and you can get out. Start packing.”
After Henry Parker had left them alone, Livingston Pomeroy said to the children, “They didn’t kill them all, you know. They think they did, but they didn’t.” He went into the hut and came out carrying a sealed jar, which he held up to the afternoon sunlight for the children to see. Little yellow larvae wiggled in their pale yellow water. Bugs Pomeroy cradled the jar to his chest and hummed a lullaby, a defiant grin on his face. “They didn’t kill them all,” he repeated in a fierce whisper.
That’s when his daughter Libby knew for the first time, though she was only nine years old and had no real standard for comparison, that her father was quite bonkers.
———
They packed. Pomeroy placed three wooden crates on the floor of the wagon and set his glass jars carefully in place, padding them with clothing to keep them apart. He then filled the crates with more clothing, gear, and provisions, then laid a board across the top of the crates.
Libby dressed Nqong in one of her yellow frocks; despite the difference in their ages, the frock fit perfectly. The children climbed up onto the wagon. Pomeroy took the reins in his hand and led the horse away from the hut he and Libby had called home, through the camp full of jeering miners, and out onto the crude road built by the New South Wales Mining Company. Before leaving Mathilda Springs, they looked back on the ugly carcass of what had once been a beautiful valley.
Another small explosion rocked the valley, and he watched his stone hut rattle, crumble, and become a simple pile of rocks.
It didn’t matter anymore. He had all that mattered. All that was left. As the shadows lengthened, they left Mathilda Springs behind them, going downstream and downhill until they reached the steaming confluence, where they turned their wagon, with its fragile cargo, south.
———
They camped that evening on the grassy bank of the warm river. Pomeroy unpacked the entire wagon and gently removed the glass jars one by one. He set them in a shallow spot in the stream, where the gentle water could keep them
warm through the night. The tops of the jars were above water, and he removed their lids so the precious larvae could feel the night air.
“Now they can breathe, you see,” he told the children. “Now they’ll be snug and warm all night long.”
“But what will they eat?” Libby asked him.
Nqong added, “I think they’re hungry.”
“We’ll fix them a nice breakfast in the morning” the old man said. “Come along. It’s getting dark, and I’m getting chilly. Let’s get us all some blankets, shall we? Look, children, there’s the evening star!”
———
Fifty-four years later, looking back on that most terrifying, uprooting day of her entire life, and remembering it in clear detail, Livingston Pomeroy, Jr. recalled the exhaustion of that moment, and the resignation she had felt to whatever might happen to herself and her traveling companions. Remembering this moment as an adult, she again felt confidence. With her eyes closed, she remembered that fugitive family in the outback of her past, and she watched her father kneel down beside her pile of blankets, and saw that she had been in the care of a saint. He may have been a bruised and broken man, with very little common sense left in him, but he was good, and if there were miracles to be had, he would have his share, enough to see them through.
2. A New Home
The spa fad of the early twentieth century died off by the twenties, but by then Joel Hope had made friends with the picture people in Hollywood, and his hotel in the mountain woods became the scene of glamorous, scandalous parties, where champagne bubbled and flowed alongside the healing water. These newer guests, who arrived in long roadsters, with their expensive cigars and beautiful bodies, had no need for doctors and cures, and certainly no need for private bath houses. Joel Hope dismissed the doctors and tore down the bath houses. He hired an architect to design an elegant Craftsman style bathhouse to shelter the cooling tanks and invited his guests of all sexes and persuasions to bathe together. He let his guests make their own rules, and there were no rules. Nor were there bathing suits. Swashbucklers chased naked nymphs through the forest, and executives made afternoon deals while the sun baked their bare bottoms. In the bathhouse boys became men, girls became starlets, women became stars, men became boys. One can only imagine what went on in the hotel, upstairs.
By this time Joel Hope was well into his fifties. He had never married. He had been so busy buying orchards and selling fruit, building his bathhouse and hosting people even wealthier than he, that he had never found the time to fall in love. But one perfect summer night, he saw the star that he knew his heart must own. Clara Bianca, “America’s Sweetiepie,” the world’s most famous blonde, shed her satin robe and covered her perky breasts with crossed arms as she pointed one foot and dipped five perfect, painted toes into one of the long, tiled tanks to test the temperature of the water, then pouted, then sighed, then smiled, then laughed merrily. She dropped her arms to her side to let her nipples shimmer in the light of the Japanese lanterns. She gently scratched the platinum curls of her pubis as she stepped down into the tank. When her body was submerged and only her face was above water, she squealed with happiness and everyone waited to hear what this flapper darling would say next. She said, “Mr. Hope, thank you for giving my body the most delicious moment of its life. What can I do to repay you?”
Joel heard himself reply: “You can marry me.”
He heard the motion picture community applaud with wet hands.
Clara Bianca Hope quit the movies and devoted herself to making her husband proud and happy and her former colleagues welcome and comfortable in the mountain retreat. The parties became grander and grander, with the most elegant meals, the best French wines, the hottest jazz.
———
So it was that when Professor Pomeroy arrived at Hope Spring late one fall afternoon, with his daughter Libby, the child Nqong, and a second taxicab filled with scientific supplies and samples, he found a far different place from the one he had visited some years earlier. He asked the drivers of the first and second taxis to wait while he announced himself to whoever was managing the front desk. The taxi drivers barely listened to him; they were gawking at the naked starlets on the other side of the road, who were lounging on the lawn, sipping martinis in the warm Indian summer sunshine, and feeding the olives to the peacocks.
Nqong shut his eyes and opened his nostrils as wide as they would go. The air smelled like home!
When the professor ushered his children nervously into the lobby of the old hotel, he saw that the Victorian furniture had been replaced by Deco furnishings. A lovely young thing traipsed across the lobby and gave the odd company a quizzical smile. She wore a long string of pearls and a short skirt with swishing fringe. “May I help you people?” she asked, wrinkling her nose—either to stop herself from laughing or to reveal an outright disgust, Libby guessed. Libby had very little hope for most white people.
“Please inform Mister Joel Hope that Professor Pomeroy has arrived from Australia,” the old man requested.
“Okey dokey,” the young thing said with a shrug. “He’s terribly, terribly busy, of course.” She turned and walked away with a little twitch in her rear, the fringe swaying with her gait.
Only moments later, Joel Hope, the proprietor, burst into the lobby and raced across the carpet to shake the old man’s hand. “By golly!” he said. “By golly! Welcome back, sir. Welcome back to my home. Where is your lovely wife?”
“I regret to say my dear Mathilda died,” Professor Pomeroy answered.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Hope said. “But she was expecting a child—?”
Livingston Pomeroy grinned and nodded. He turned to his daughter and said, “Libby, I’d like you to meet my friend, Mister Hope.”
Libby looked up into the portly man’s red face. He was staring down at her with a look she had never seen before.
———
Pomeroy and the children were given the carriage house to live in. “Nobody uses carriages anymore anyway,” Clara Hope said. “It’s going to waste. Please. I want you to be happy so you’ll stay forever. Do whatever you want with it. Fix it up. You know: have fun. Put in some bright colors. Sofas and things.”
“You’re too kind,” Bugs told her.
“Not at all,” Joel Hope said. “We want you to stay. I plan to do all I can for this young lady,” he said, his hand on Libby’s head.
“And I,” said Mrs. Hope, bending down and speaking straight to Nqong, “want you to be my special friend.” She took hold of his yellow dress and said, “I’m going to dress you like a boy, and give you a boy’s haircut, so you can be my boyfriend. You can call me Auntie Clara, and I’m going to teach you to garden. Can you understand me?”
Nqong smiled and said, “Ontie Clara.”
———
Livingston Pomeroy converted the carriage house into a laboratory, of course. He made sleeping quarters for the children in the loft, and he himself slept on a sofa in an area downstairs that served as a parlor. But most of the carriage house was given over to sinks and counters and shelves and drawers. There he taught the children about insects in general and beetles in particular. He also gave them lessons in reading and writing and playing games with numbers.
He took them for long walks in the woods, and sometimes, when the bathhouse was free of movie stars, the three of them would sit in the hot bath and tell each other stories in the Wanqong tongue.
———
“You must never tell them that we brought these larvae here,” Livingston Pomeroy told young Nqong, in the Wanqong tongue. “That will be our secret. Let the world believe the sulfur beetle has lived here, unnoticed, forever. You see? Hmm?”
The boy was happy with the idea. He was in favor of whatever made the old man happy, and especially whatever made the old man take Nqong along on his walks up the creek and into the forest. He delighted in knowing that Bugs needed him now, needed him to scamper up the trees and put the cocoons in place. Nqong was proud, too. H
ere he was barely six years old (or so he’d been told), and he was entrusted with handling the cocoons. Back home, only the men were allowed to touch the cocoons.
They had been putting the cocoons to bed in the trees for three days. It was chilly and wet in the forest, but Bugs said they’d be happy here. “It’s the sulfur in the air, you see? It’ll give them sweet dreams.”
Nqong climbed down from the oak tree and showed Bugs the empty burlap sack. “All gone,” he said, in English. “Finish.”
The old man beamed. “Jolly good,” he whispered.
Nqong whispered back, “Jolly good.”
They scrambled their way out of the forest until they came to the trail leading downhill to the hotel. As they walked, with Nqong leading the way, the old man chattered away in English. Nqong realized that Bugs Pomeroy did not know that he, Nqong, knew English. For all Bugs knew, he was talking to himself.
Hope Springs had changed in the years since he had last visited, the old man said. He remembered the place as elegant but sleepy, a quiet, relaxing spot where one could spend all day enclosed in a private bath house, soaking in sulfur water and breathing its fumes and talking to nobody. Or one could spend a rainy afternoon in the library and write in one’s journal or read a book and talk to nobody. One could sit on the veranda in the late afternoon and watch the sunset and drink gin and quinine and talk, again, with nobody. Or one could walk in the woods or along the stream or through the fields, poking about with a net, talking to oneself. The host, Mr. Hope, sometimes came along with him, but he was very good about eschewing conversation. Livingston Pomeroy wasn’t all that fond of conversation. That’s one of the many things he’d appreciated so much about the Wanqong: they didn’t talk much, and they didn’t care if old Bugs had nothing to say to them.
But the new Hope Springs, the place to which he had returned with the children and the precious cocoons, was neither quiet nor relaxing. Chatter, chatter, chatter. They’d put a pianoforte in the lounge, and someone was always banging on it. There was a Victrola in the library now, which made reading altogether impossible. And one didn’t just have a quiet gin and quinine by oneself on the veranda anymore. Oh, no, that would never do. Now, since alcohol was forbidden by law, one didn’t drink a quiet anything. Now one drank loudly, proudly, in large laughing groups. “Whatcha drinkin’ there, sport?”
Hot Springs Eternal Page 2
