Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  “You did a right good job,” Beckett said. “If there ever was a hole, you can’t tell by looking at it.”

  Nothing to be said. His compliment had a disingenuous air.

  “But there is another hole, a real hole. You have left us on the precipice high above the canyon with the girls in their cancan frocks gathered about the pianoforte.” Perhaps he could hear the wheels spin in my cranium, for he added: “Begin again if you must. Come home on a June afternoon to find an orgy of chrome and rubber on the front lawn. Seven ladies’ bicycles, and just who are these lascivious two-wheelers? And what’s that melody but the house itself singing Pagliacci—”

  “Strauss,” I corrected. “A woman singing the laughing song from Die Fledermaus in a makeshift music chamber set up in my brother’s room. Odd, though, but it was my brother, not me, who cared for the classics.”

  “Right, so,” he said and winked. There was that third eye tattooed on the lid, and the others had the same design except for Marie, whose second sight was in her hands. Each palm bore a cartoon eye, though the words on her skin had vanished.

  “They were dressed in fishnet stockings and petticoats, like they just stepped out of the Old West.”

  “Dusty and busty,” the old man said. From the bathtub, two short whoops of endorsement. I thought I heard a horse nicker on the staircase.

  “Only more refined,” I said. “A cross between elegance and decadence.”

  Marie cleared her throat. “The virgin and the whore.”

  I ignored her editorial. “When the mezzo finished her song and the last note of the piano sounded, the rest of the women clapped politely, and one or two began to wave silk hand fans, for though only June, summertime had come to town, and the room was close and moist. I should have thought to turn on the air conditioner, but my principle is to wait till the official first day of summer.”

  “Ah, the solstice,” Beckett said. “The longest day of the year. Though this night rivals it, or perhaps only seems eternal. When we are waiting, every moment is pregnant. Are you sure you have no cigarettes?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Never start. They’re the devil to give up. And a thousand pardons for my interruption. We left the showgirls perspiring in the parlor.”

  “That’s when they first took notice of me. The piano player stood and tapped the vocalist on her shoulder, and she motioned for the rest to stand. The music lingered in the chamber. A collective jolt of recognition ran through the group. As I may have said, they were perfect strangers to me, though young and beautiful, of all shapes and sizes pleasing to the eye. A more attractive group of women would be hard to imagine. Yet for all their novelty, they behaved in ways traditional and comforting. I had heard that pianist before and recalled her elegant phrasing. The singer, too, brought back the buried memory of the same song in another place and time, but more than the aural echoes, for the music caused deep emotions to come gasping to the surface. A lot like a love that had once been deliberately forgotten. While I did not know them, they knew me and had been waiting for my arrival, and now that I had come, they rushed forward with open arms, each racing the others to be first to embrace and kiss me.”

  “Kiss you, is it?” Beckett asked. “I find that difficult to accept under the circumstances.”

  My pride was hurt, but I showed nothing.

  Beckett stepped forward and whispered confidentially, “You know I have always been on your side, right? A word of advice: do not turn around, but reach back with the bottom of your foot and shut the door behind you.”

  I did as instructed, and as the door slammed into the jamb, something slammed into the door. The wood splintered with a wrenching crack as a sharp metal point poked through. The weapon that had just avoided my head looked like a grappling instrument of the kind issued to mountain climbers, only larger. “A gold miner’s pick,” Beckett said, as though reading my mind.

  A stream of blue curses flooded the hallway, and the swearing woman on the other side of the door clasped the handle and tugged mightily to free the pick and wield it again. Two clomps preceded a renewed effort, and the old man suggested with a hand signal that I should open the door to see what was on the other side. Fastened like a pit bull, a rather short but wiry young woman tugged at the pick, her bare feet propped against the door so that when it swung into the bathroom, she swung with it. Her blue crinoline rode up along her thighs, and her face flushed red beneath her dark brown hair each time she re-exerted herself. Like Merlin’s sword in the stone, the point of the axe lodged firmly in the wood, and try as she might, she could not budge the lethal tool. The more she struggled, the worse her temper grew, till she was little more than clenched teeth and unspent fury, a torrent of obscenities gushing from her delicate mouth in a most shocking display.

  “Young lady,” Beckett entreated, “you will never succeed by ignoring elementary physics.”

  She bundled her muscles and hunched her shoulders and strained again, to no avail. At the moment of surrender, her whole body slackened. One cold hard look at the old man gave way to resignation and abject hopelessness. For a brief second, I felt sorry for her and wished she had reached her goal, despite its dire consequences for me. In a final gesture of defeat, she let go the handle and dropped to the floor on her bum. Bending gently to her, the old man helped her to stand and held her by the elbow as she fussed with the waist of her dress and brushed the lint and wrinkles. A gentleman always, he escorted her farther into the room to a place among the other females, and with a slight bow, let go of her with a signal of one finger that she was to behave. And then, stepping up to the pickaxe, he pushed the handle, rather than pulling as she had, and once the point was thus free, he eased it from the wood as deftly as lifting a splinter from a little boy’s palm. He hid the pick behind his back, and the girl in blue crossed her arms and pouted.

  “Now that’s no way to begin a story,” Beckett said. “First, engage your audience, and besides, a scowl does not become you. Give us a smile and a tall tale, and we will give you our ears and our hearts.”

  The number of people in the small bathroom made me feel a bit claustrophobic, and we squeezed in even tighter to allow the newest woman a stage. She drew the shower curtain behind her like a scrim and stood on the narrow proscenium of the bathtub edge. The old man sat on the toilet and bounced the baby on his knee. Flush with anticipation, Dolly fanned herself next to the open window. With a hop, Marie settled on the countertop surrounding the sink, and the rest of us took positions as groundlings, forced to stand for the performance.

  “Will someone outen the lights?” our newest guest asked, and Alice complied. In the dark, I stretched to get my bearings, which did not please my neighbors when my foot or fist struck another body. I made my excuses and tried to becalm my restlessness until the spotlight silenced everything, originating from some point above the old man’s head and haloing the woman who had tried to plant her pick in my cranium.

  “A man is to blame,” she said, “but ain’t that always the case. He wasn’t a bad man, not at all, especially in the beginning. But as soon as he got what he wanted, then that was it.”

  The women murmured their amens.

  “After, he was no use to nobody, man, woman, nor child. Like a mule in the middle of an ocean or an axe in a sandstorm, just no use at all. But no sooner than I get started, but I am already ahead of myself.”

  I tapped Beckett on the shoulder, and he quieted the child, steadying the boy with a brace of one hand against the small back. “She’s the piano player,” I whispered. “A dead ringer for the woman at the recital.”

  “Dead ringer?” the old man asked, and then turned his attention to the spotlight and the tiny woman, carefully assaying her from head to toe. “Are you sure about that, Sonny? She looks a bit wild and unkempt for that sort of thing.”

  Her cornflower dress rustled when she flinched, but she betrayed no further emotion other than silent umbrage.

  “I am quite sure she is th
e singer’s accompanist.”

  “Miss,” he addressed her. “What is it we are to call you?”

  “My name is Florence. But call me that, and you’ll get no further response from me. Flo, if you please, short for Florence, for only my mam ever referred to me thus.”

  “Since you are short, a short name it shall be. Flo, my friend here says that you are a piano player of some renown.”

  “I can pick out a few tunes, but I’m no Scott Joplin. A bit rusty, too, but I’ll do if the piece is sprightly.”

  Clearing his throat, the old man sat up and spoke carefully. “Perhaps we can prevail upon you for a few melodies later. There is a lovely thing by Mozart caught in my aural memory, a song stuck in the head.”

  “We’d have a hard time fittin’ a piano in the bathroom.”

  Dandling the child on his knee, the old man said, “You’d be surprised what the commodious mind can accommodate. You were about to relate the troubles and grief brought about by a man.”

  • • •

  Raising the stake for any journey was the horns of the problem, ’cause they were young and just starting out, and he didn’t have any money to speak of, and while her pap had a deal of capital, it was all tied up in the farm. He had raised up the whole lot of them from dirt poor and little better than the darkies, her pap did, through the honest sweat of his brow, and as a consequence, held his dollars till the eagles squawked. “Don’t worry,” Jamie says, “I will find us the way, just be ready to go when I says.” “And Flo,” he whispered to her since the conversation was in the bed, “don’t tell no one we’re going till the time comes to say good-bye.”

  She never knew who he stole the money from or who he promised a share of the riches to come, it may have been Pap in either case, and she never did ask, not wanting to know, but Jams come home one afternoon and says, “Pack your bags, we’re off tomorrow.” Scant time to say good-bye, she made a tearful farewell with kin and friends, loaded a trunk with her possessions, and found herself scrabbling over to Missouri. Like a thousand others, as pouring into a funnel.

  Crazed like so many they were bit by the gold bug to cross the whole country in search of it. They were argonauts, forty-niners, and made their way overland from the basin of the Ohio River. Drawn to the swarm, they leapt acrost the plain and over the mountaintops. A voyage of utter boredom and unrelenting hardship, lost two oxen bought in St. Joe to the wretched nothingness of the Great Salt Desert, made sick by the water tasting of chalk and bonedust and the chaw of dried beef or buffalo and never a lick of corn or apple or any good thing left behind at home. Some never made it at all, perishing on the migration, boiled and bleached by the sun or frozen crossing the high ground. Wasted by the cholera or some damned accident, a misstep, a lack of judgment. Ain’t that always the way, fate just over the horizon waiting to catch ye out or bring ye reward. And all who came over the Sierras were worn and thin and blistered and oh so tired. Jamie and Florence were but twenty and nineteen when they started, and five months later seemed to have aged ten hard years. She rode most of the way in the wagon-back, but he walked or went astride on a good Kentucky gelding till the poor horse caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and was put down by the side of the trail. And then Jams rode on a mule. Or walked when the beast was stubborn. All that time in the wind and sun colored him brown from the brim of his hat to his collar till he was damn near indistinguishable from the red niggers, begging your pardon, Indians sometimes met on the road. Miles of walking hardened the body, too, till Jams looked stringy and wild as a half-starved coyote. While Flo was no more ready for the mining life than when departed from Harlan County, she marveled at how prepared in mind and limb her man was as they fetched up in Sacramento to outfit theyselves. None of them was full ready for the hard work ahead, for they had heard the gold was plenty there for the taking of, but they were all wrong. It weren’t just lying on the ground but hid like every good thing, and they wasn’t the only ones looking for it neither. Jams and Flo was panners at first, like all the other greenhorns, and a more primitive art ye won’t find, but harder than it seems.

  A small, unfortunate chuckle escaped the tunnel of my throat.

  “Think it easy, jackanapes?” She wrenched back the shower curtain, revealing a few inches of brackish water flowing along the bottom of the tub as if in a creekbed. “If ye gentlemen won’t mind?” She handed two miner’s pans to Beckett and me and spun a third like a pie plate on the tip of her middle finger. “Ye’ll want to scoop up some of that ere river bottom and a slick of water on top and swirl it about, keeping an eye on it the whole time. Ye sift and watch for the telltale glister.”

  The old man caught on at once, and squatted on the tiles, intent on the muck he had dredged. Less certain as to how it would work, and worried in part over the mess we were making and the future task of scouring the surface, I bent to it with reluctance. I shaved two inches of gravelly mud and a half inch of water and stared at the bottom of the pan, past the reflection of my own face, seeing nothing more than a dismal reminder of my own dull life. How had I ended up with these strangers? There was no one there to truly trust, and the questions swirled in my brainpan. A speck flashed in the dirt, and with the end of my little finger, I picked it from the silt like a surgeon. “Eureka!” I said, holding up the flake for all to see. The old man grinned at my discovery and tried to conceal his pan in the folds of his robe, but not before I could see the collection of nuggets as big and plentiful as a mouthful of teeth.

  A titter tweeted from woman to woman at the sight of our comparative luck. I knew right away that Flo’s story would involve a certain amount of fate and chance, as do all such stories about the acquisition of wealth. I have never been a lucky man, not in love or fortune, but more of a determined plodder. More pluck than luck. When their giggles edged toward laughter, I took the only viable option: I stuck my finger in my mouth and ate the golden speck.

  “I see ye have the appetite, too,” Flo said, as she pulled shut the shower curtain.

  One bite—or once bitten by the gold bug—ye will not let off till ye’ve made your mark or it has broken both body and spirit. Many who toiled by the rivers, those who sailed half the world or beat the dusty trail, many were broke by the experience and went back home the poorer or made a new life in California, up Sacramento way or lured to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Could be side by side in the same river. One man becomes rich, the other remains a fool.

  Flo and Jams staked a claim to a rick tributarying offen the American River, and worked it fierce in twelve-hour hanks, pausing only the Lord’s day as commanded. Eked by the first four months on little more than hope and nerve, enough to keep them on the spot and not give in, one urging the other when they was low. Downstream in a natural gulley, four greasers up from Sonora way played out a rich deposit, and though they could not understand a word of Mexican, Flo and Jamie sensed enough to tell when the wheel of fortune swings someone’s way.

  “Them boys,” Jams said, “knows somethin’ we don’t. We just drib and drab and they must have pulled an ounce a day out one spot over.”

  She cogitated for a spell, put down her pan, and walked the hillside watching the foursome in the distance. That night over their beans and rabbit, the idear hit her sudden, like the old apple offen Newton’s tree. “Gravity,” she announced, as if discovering it. “Ever know the notion? Says the heavier a thing is, more it seeks out the bottom. We’re on the side of a hill, and they in the dip. Where the river naturally sets, that’s where to look. All that gold sunk down there, like treasure at the bottom of the sea.”

  With the femur of that hare, Jams pointed at her like a schoolmaster driving home the lesson. “Flo, if ye are right, we will never do more at this here claim. We quit it and find a bottom spot, life becomes the easier.”

  In one morning, they fixed their packs to the jenny mule and went in search for a more likely site, and in three days, they found the same. First pan of river, they dredged up two nuggets big as sunflower
seeds. Against the bright sun, Jams held them up between his finger and thumb and proclaimed to her, “Girl, our future is made.” Out of that hole, they dug in three months to the value of $20,000 and only quit it by hiring a Chinee and his brother to continue work and split the leavings. They was two yalla men by name of Lee who had twelve words of English between them, but honester than two monks, bringing each day’s labor back to the little house Jams had built not far off for an accounting. He was content with the takings and ready to quit off, live the life of luxury, maybe head back to Kentucky and run a few horses, but she would not let him. “We have our nut,” she said, “and from the tiny acorn the mighty oak doth grow. We have to plant that seed, invest our money, watch it grow.”

  Though she herself had long left the fields, Flo kept her eye on the miners in the surrounding valley and kept her ears open for the latest chatter in the town. When sluices were introduced, she hired a carpenter and had built at a second claim up north a more elaborate system for separating mud and water from the gold. The money poured in faster than they could count it, and with each new way of mining, the rate of flow only increased. If sluices watered their bank accounts, water cannons blasted away whole hillsides with mother lodes a-hiding. They made canyons out of hillsides, valleys out of plains. Jams hired ten more Chinamen to run three more claims and then secured a man named Murphy, out of New South Wales, Australia, to collect the profits from every Lee and make sure they would not cheat, and each of the claims proved true and more land was staked, more Chinee and Americans, too, redmen and the blacks, to come work for James Worth, and it seemed to never stop. Murphy hisself hired two more men to do the job he once held, and in time, fifty-seven in all mined sixteen claims in the hills of California and wasn’t every damn one of them a moneymaker. Flo hired a girl to write letters for her and to read aloud the replies, and she sent back enough money to Harlan County so that her mam and pap had nary a care and ever last sister and brother and Jamie’s family besides, so much so that his youngest brother Eben, who was but a tadpole when they left, hopped the western highway and took over for Murphy, who had earned enough so’s not to work another day of his life, and he didn’t. ’Stead he sailed back to his wife—the kangaroo—for all Flo cared.