Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  They built themselves a house, a mansion really, in San Francisco after the fires of ’51, and went there to retire from the fields when work was too much with them. Perched atop a hill, they could look out into the Pacific, and from their rocking chairs count the masts of the tall ships abandoned in the harbor, captains, crews, and passengers all lit out for the fields with not a care for their boats. Evening times, they’d feel the fog creep in, so’s that sometimes only the tips of the spars and crow’s nests could be seen, like a fairyland forest.

  Ever since she was a girl Flo had dreamt of such a palace, two stories high, and eight rooms in all, furnished in the finest shipped from New York and Boston and London. Because of the fire, Jams insisted on building in brick, and for a time, the red house stood out amid the general rubble, but one thing about Californians, they is quick to build what’s been razed and try again, for they is the luck-seekingest people on the earth. In no time, a new San Francisco stood, better’n the last. When the babies started coming, Flo contented herself with life in the city while Jams managed the land and holdings and brought home more gold dust from the Chinee every few weeks. They named the first child Jessie, after Mrs. Frémont, and their boy John C. arrived in the same year that Mr. Frémont became the first nominee of the Republicans for the President of the United States at the convention way off in Philadelphia. It was a time to be proud of who ye were, and they were Californians by now and had washed Kentucky clean out their pans.

  Now, up to the point, Jams was a perfect husband and father, industrious as an ant, and never gave her ought to complain, but a kind of idleness began creeping in once he no longer had to actually go out among the miners. And then his brother Ebenezer hired hisself a man to do the job they’d brought him west to do, and now the both of them together had little to occupy their time, and an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, so says the Bible. It were innocent enough at first to be there in that Gomorrah, to have a glass of the hard stuff with your dinner or a scupper of beer at supper, and it were understandable to go pass the time in converse with men your own age and like ye, forty-niners made good or dreaming of the luck to turn. Truth be told, Flo was glad to see them join their friends the first few times, for Jams always came back in a better mood than when he left, and when Jams was out carousing, at least he wasn’t pawing at her. Bad enough the babies kept coming one right on top of the other. And he never came back stinking drunk like her pap had done, and he never hit her neither, and he always said please and darling, so what harm in it? “Me and Eben are going out,” he told her one Christmas night, and she should’ve, could’ve asked him to stay, but instead just inquired where they would be going on the Lord’s own day. “To the hells,” Jams said, with a snort. “The hells?” The youngest baby started bawling. “What is the hells?”

  Eben was at his side, hat in hand. “The hells is places where a man can be a man. Down in the plaza, there are places for a drink and a smoke and a game of chance. We like the Aguila de Oro, don’t we Jams, for there’s a band of Ethiops there every night can sing like your mammy putting ye to sleep. A game or two of monte, nothing at risk.”

  They waited for her nod, which she gave reluctantly, and off the brothers went into the cool night to mingle with the Americans and Mexicans and Chiles and Chinee and Lord knows aught else, when a man should be at home with his family. Off they went for a game of cards.

  The bathtub drain gurgled and sucked away the last of the water, as if waiting for her cue. With a grand flourish, she pulled back the shower curtain to reveal a tubful of gold dust and nuggets and bars and jewels and coins, a trove at least six inches deep. Despite the dim light, it twinkled ostentatiously. A sea of bling. We gathered around the bathtub as if gathering around a manger.

  “Beautiful, ain’t it?” Flo prodded Alice and Dolly with her elbows. “Go ahead, girls, take something for yourself. I’ve no use for any of it anymore. Money is the root of all evil.”

  From behind us, Beckett cleared his throat to draw our attention. The baby in his arms kept pawing, reaching for the wire-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of the old man’s long nose. Beckett had to cock his head just out of reach and thus spoke from the side of his face. “Not money, my dear. The correct adage is: ‘For the love of money is the root of evil.’ Timothy 6:10. Sometimes love is translated as ‘desire,’ which is my own preferred reading of the Greek original. For what are we but the sum of our desires?” The baby boy stuck his fingers between the old man’s lips and Beckett pretended to chew them like some rough beast. “Num, num, num,” he said, and the child squealed with laughter.

  As I turned, I spied the three round bottoms of the women as they bent and dipped into the treasure. Only Marie resisted the temptation to further embangle her arms with bracelets or cram more rings upon her fingers or toes. Alice claimed a necklace of nuggets, and Jane wove a chain of gold into her hair. Worst of the three, Dolly emerged from her splurge with a rime of dust flecked upon her lips and staining her cheeks, as though she had tried to feast upon it. Like a magician, Flo pulled to the curtain and hid the glitter from our curious eyes.

  See, they were rich, Jams and Flo, richer than she had thought possible, and the money kept flowing into their lives like the ocean beating upon the shore. When the fifth baby came in ’61, the Worths bought a bigger home on a hilltop overlooking the Golden Gate, stealing the design of the octagon house down on Gough. They dined at Delmonico’s or at the Sutter House when the mood struck and paid no heed to the prices, though would ye believe, near $15 a dinner at the peak. She would regularly take all of the children on an August day to the Fountain Head or the Branch for a cooling glass of ice cream, devil-a-care the expense in dragging out a man and coach just to get them there. On Steamer Days, the thirteenth and twenty-eighth of each month, the ships would come in from the East and bring them treats from New York and Philadelphia. Buttons and bows. Whirligigs and thingamajigs and Dresden dolls and hobby horses. Them babies wanted for nothing, she saw to it, and were it not for the War of Northern Aggression, she would have taken them all to Kentucky for a visit, arrive in style to show her kin and all the girls she’d a-grown up with how fine life had become for those that worked hard. She tried in her daily doings to show the Worth boys the simple truth of this lesson, but Jams and Eben preferred to let the money work for them ’stead of the right way round.

  When every last dot of gold had been dug off their lands, they sold off what was played out and let their workers go, with a $20 bonus to the Chinee who so long and honestly served the Worth operations. Piece by piece, the land vanished, and their assets converted to a number in a bank account. She would have preferred to hold on to what was real, stomp on their soil, finger their cold cash, but Jams insisted the figures scratched upon the ledgers was as good as gold. “There’s more to be made in making deals and trading paper,” he told her, “than the capital and labor of the man of trades.” In a single week in ’62, Jamie made a small fortune by buying and then quickly selling the stocks of a company that provided blankets to the Union army when the weather back east suddenly took a chill. His brother, too, became a rich man and lavished upon himself the accoutrements of wealth. Ebenezer wore bespoke suits and studded shirts, shoes imported from far-off Italy and Spain. A suite of rooms at the Parker House and three meals a day at the best restaurants in the city. Nights at the opera and days at the races. A dollar bet on everything from whether the Rebs would hold Shiloh to whether he could teach the yellaman shining his boots to speak a sentence of passable American before he finished both feet. He smoked cigars two bits apiece and had the finest liquor and whores of every color and nationality. It’s a wonder that he could not figure out how to evaporate his fortune despite his best efforts.

  With no more gold mines but an excess of enthusiasms, the Worth brothers began to cast about for some other scheme to make money without dampening their brows. They searched no further than over the Sierras, crossed so long ago, and there found the next wave of speculato
rs in the silver mines of Nevada. Giddy as two schoolgirls, they read the papers and heard the rumors in the streets, and the next year set off on expedition to Virginia City to see right close the famous Comstock lode and what prospects Nevada held for men so bold as they. The silver fever was upon them, and no remedy can be had but silver itself.

  Upon that aphorism, she paused. With the tweezers of her right thumb and index fingers she dug into the bustline of her blue dress and produced a lit cigarillo, took a deep drag, and blew a jet of smoke in the general direction of the open window. Beckett frowned at her and gestured with his chin to the babe asleep in his arms. “Tut, tut, tut,” he said. Flo grabbed one last puff before extinguishing the cigarillo underneath a stream of water gushing from the sink’s faucet. The room suddenly smelled like a boxing gym or the men’s room at a horseracing track. Had I not been somehow constrained to remain in the house, I would have left, robe and all, for a quick walk around the block and some fresh air. “I wasn’t always like this,” she said and nodded at Alice as apology for smoking in front of the child. “All nervous and all.” She clicked her nails on the edge of the sink in a rhythm reminiscent of a pianist’s flourish. My brother had a similar nervous habit. After ten years of clarinet lessons, he would absentmindedly finger a pencil, performing a melody heard only in his mind. Funny what you remember. I had not thought of the clarinet in ages, despite the fact that it had been the daily music of my youth. My brother struggling to learn and then his sudden mastery, and how he would change the time of almost any song to redefine it: a melancholy Christmas tune, a syncopated Irish reel. Amidst this early morning’s chaos, I can almost hear him again.

  They returned, Eben and Jams, in three months’ time, bringing not much from Nevada save the dust that had collected in their hats and clothes, in their carpetbags and boots, a silt of alkali that gathered even in the wrinkles around the eyes and collected in the hidden cracks and creases of a man that only the wife knows. The maid was sweeping silver dust from corners nine months after their return. For the children, Jams brought silver trinkets made by the redmen, spurs and belt buckles for the boys and combs and mirrors for the girls. Elegantly wrapped in a mahogany box, his gift for Flo was a hunk of raw silver ore, blue-black as night and heavy in the hand. “This here will double our money,” Jamie said. “The ground is thick with it. Those poor bogtrotters who discovered the Comstock lode knew nothing for silver. Four Irishmen were digging for gold, and this black stuff kept clogging their rockers, and it were an accident altogether that they even bothered to ask were it of any use. McLaughlin cashed in for $3,500 which he promptly lost, and Comstock hisself traded an old blind horse and a bottle of whiskey for a one-tenth share formerly owned by the mick called Old Virginny. Give me an Irishman to dig the hole any day, but I’d take even a Chinaman to have wits enough to ask what was in it.” He picked up the hunk of silver sulphite and pretended to smoke it like a cigar.

  Something about his mood or manner alarmed her that morning, and try as she may, Flo could not completely shake the sense of foreboding that began to build upon her husband’s return from the silver hills of Nevada. She should have trusted herself to be right. When she and Jamie had first left home for the west, she was but a girl, just married, and knew no better. But now with his latest scheme, James seemed so cocksure it was all going to work out just the same as it had in ’49, but the difference now was she was a grown woman and mother of six, and his confidence grated on her common sense. “We ain’t kids no more,” she said. “Are ye going back into the earth? Or send that brother of yours, at least? To see firsthand what labor is necessary to find this ore?”

  He dropped the silver cigar back in the box and spoke coldly. “We been under the ground and seen it, Flo, in the pit of hell with but a candle. The hole timbered and beamed like a ship’s hull, and every minute a danger of the cave-in and the whole mountain landed atop ye. I been there, and I seen it. Ain’t I been right before? And amn’t I the one who got us all this?” He gestured at the furnishings. “Have ye no faith in me?”

  “It ain’t a matter of faith, but of capital and risk.”

  “We was there near three months, woman. I think I can find my way round a silver mine and know a good investment when I see it.” One of the infants commenced caterwauling from the other room, and he frowned at her. “Ain’t ye going to tend your baby?”

  “Nurse can take care of her, Jams. This is a serious proposition ye made, and I need to hear it out and understand—”

  “Leave off understanding to me, Flo, and to Eben. We saw for ourselves what’s coming up the ground by the tubful, and we spoke direct with the owners. They has drifts and tunnels, five miles in all, and over five hunnert men in the ground. Once ye go down, ye never wish to go again, and I don’t aim to. Leave it for the workingman. I’m too old for that sort of thing, and besides, the real money is in the speculation. Don’t worry about it, for we will be made millionaires when this comes roaring through.” Jamie held her in his arms, and for the last time, Flo felt assured there.

  By some subterfuge, the houselights were extinguished and once more Flo stood in spotlit halo before the shower curtain. “Ladies … and gentlemen. I bring new riches from days gone past. Not gold, me dearies, but somewhat else …”

  On Beckett’s lap, the baby began to whimper, and from the folds of her skirt, his mother slipped a pacifier and popped it into his mouth. The handle of the ninny was plated in gold.

  Flo cleared her throat and spoke in a loud voice, “I now draw your attention to the rewards of rash speculation.” She opened the curtain and in lieu of the golden treasure, the bathtub held six inches of paper in a ragged heap. Upon closer examination, the documents were identical stock certificates, emblazoned with the American bald eagle clutching in one taloned fist a miner’s pick, and in the other, Union dollars.

  For two years, the Worths collected these certificates, buying more stock in the mine than they could afford, and living as they were accustomed, on credit and debt. This borrowed way of life did nothing to curtail their habits; if anything, they lived more extravagantly on the promise of the profits from their gamble. With the war’s end in the spring, prices continued to rise, but despite the cost, daughter Jessie was sent to Europe with a governess on a summer’s tour. Eben found a girl and asked her to marry him, and brother Jams gave him a send-off never seen before in the city, a ball with full orchestra, a meal with pheasants shipped overland by train, and flowers of every kind, all out of pocket, and damn the expense. They made a wedding gift of a full silver service, as much a token of filial bonds as to encourage the purchase and use of silver among their acquaintances. Why, they even gave away money they did not have, to various benevolent societies for the care of homeless children, for it was important to the acquisition of a place in society to behave as if the millions existed, whether or no merely on paper.

  Reckoning arrived swiftly, as bad news often does. They say people no longer had any confidence, though she could not understand how ordinary people could be confident one day and not the next. The lack of confidence brought a panic, and the panic caused the fall, and the value of the stock in the mining company plunged down the shaft, and there was no hope for recovery. Overnight, the Worths became worthless. The bubble had burst and not so much as a slick of soap remained. By the time they sold their shares for pennies and accounted for their considerable debts, little was left but the octagon house and its contents and some cash Flo had in her name to pay the domestic staff their monthly wages. The servants, a-course, were let go at once, and telegrams sent to hurry Jessie back from Italy. They was ruined, and so was Ebenezer, returning home from his wedding trip to less than nothing, who had to move instead with his new bride into the third floor of the octagon house. She—the girl’s name was Rebecca—was there all alone that Sunday in October when the Big One hit, the heaviest earth shocks ever felt in San Francisco to that time.

  The Worths, sans Jams, was at service on Sunday morning, and whe
n the first shock hit, the minister said stay calm, stay put, which they did for perhaps five seconds as the pews rocked violently and the stained-glass windows rattled like a carriage going over cobblestone. The second shock threw them from their seats, the whole church emptying into the streets, with the minister leading the flock to safety, the shepherd jogging past each and every sheep. A loud grinding noise followed, the brick buildings rubbing together, glass and plaster falling, and the earth itself rumbling and growling. The walls swayed and buckled like treetops in a tempest, and the windows popped out like firecrackers. Above, the bell kept ringing of its own accord even as the shock subsided, until the third tumbler tossed all around for another six seconds, and then it was all over.

  Flo and her children watched in dull amazement as the cross on the steeple tottered to the left and stopped short of toppling over. A few blocks away, Jams and Eben crawled out of one of the hells with the gamblers and rummys and the hookers and that morning’s entertainment all blinking in the bright sunshine and swirling dust like bats from a cave. At the corner of Seventh and Howard, the earth had opened and laid bare a sewer flowing with water. Over where an empty lot had stood was now a pond, and they watched in a stupor of cards and liquor as a duck circled and landed there, calling in grave distress. Geysers were forced up into the air on certain street corners, and here and there among the ruined and cracked buildings small fires blazed. Back at the octagon house, poor Rebecca had been having a bath and had to run out into the street in nothing but a robe as the walls began swaying and making to bear down upon her. She was not the only one thrust out into the public. Others emerged in little more than a bedsheet, and it went to show what occupied the common man on a Sunday morn.