California Bloodstock

by Terry McDonell

  Her voice was sharp, too sharp for him that early in the morning.

  Look, he said, I don’t see why you have to be nasty about it. I’m still here, aren’t I? And I’m not complaining, am I?

  She didn’t answer, just dropped her eyes away from him and waited. He walked his horse up beside her and climbed slowly into the saddle. He had hurt her feelings, he thought, and he didn’t like to do that. But he was damned if he was going to be badgered into a pace that would exhaust them both and probably kill the horses.

  I know how you feel, he told her and was about to explain about the horses when she cut him off.

  No you don’t.

  She spurred her horse into a reckless lope and he didn’t catch up with her that day, or that week. In fact, he almost didn’t follow her to Sutter’s Fort at all. He thought about turning west, straight for the coast and the hell with her. But he didn’t, and not because of any promise he had made. No, it was far more complicated than that. In fact, he was never sure himself why he followed her to Sutter’s Fort.

  44

  Rio Fresno

  At dusk, Taya pulled up on a bluff and looked northwest. Ash trees quivered in the late breeze along a small river. Two miles farther north, it joined a much larger river, and there, in the crook of that junction, a tribe of Worm Eaters had made a fishing camp.

  Purple light thrown off in a glow from the dropping sun lingered in the air, washing the water birds in a florescent pastel. When Taya looked due west, she noticed the rolling dust of a band of mounted men. They were headed toward the fishing camp. Taya had two choices: warn the Worm Eaters about the night riders headed for them, or forget it and ride on about her own business. She spurred her pony toward the river.

  By this time there were about a hundred thousand Worm Eaters left in California, about half as many as that Majorcan-born soldier of God Junipero Serra had found in the bushes when he had shown up to save them seventy or so years earlier. And the fact that there were, even in this year of our Lord 1846, only a few hundred Californios, Mexicans, Europeans, and gringos loose in the land made the Worm Eater weeding-out process seem all the more successful. Hell, it hadn’t been easy, especially in light of the Worm Eater’s timid manner. The young ones were sometimes tough to find.

  Riding into the fishing camp Taya wasted no time. As the braver of the Worm Eaters snuck out from behind their tule huts to stare at her, Taya jumped from her pony and drew the sign for bad trouble in the dirt.

  As she rode on, her shortening shadow only confirmed what she knew the moment she had seen the dust to the west. A bad moon was rising.

  45

  Gente de Razón

  Only mitten-heads voiced occasional sympathy for the plight of the Worm Eaters. Aside from slavery, simple and direct homicide was the most popular method of dealing with them. And, indeed, as old T. D. Slant was often heard to say, it was difficult to spend a weekend drunk or sober without encountering at least one of their pathetic corpses.

  But consider poor T. D. Jr., who encountered three hundred of them on the banks of the Fresno River where it flows into the San Joaquin. Strange, he thought, as he walked through the carnage in the moonlight, so few of them are women. This was the wrong meat for his mind to chew on and he knew it, but nothing could be done. He wasn’t about to admit to himself that he half expected to find Taya’s lithe young body dead and cold among the corpses.

  She had probably ridden right through. He hoped so.

  ELEVEN

  46

  Galon

  Crabbed and wasted came Galon Burgett to Fort Ross. Twittering sarcastically back at alarmed birds and hawking heavy plugs of yellow phlegm into the foxtails, he scuffed his way around the perimeter of the abandoned fort. Multicolored fungi drove silently between cracks in the log wall like wedges.

  Galon was feeling better. He searched through the various sheds and lean-tos for a new home. There was one large cabin that might do. Two rooms, actually, with smooth plank floors and a scatter of furniture that Galon eyed with satisfaction. But he couldn’t have everything. The place reeked of fish oil.

  Pinecones, Galon thought, perhaps pinecones placed in the corners would get rid of the scaly odor hanging in the tight air. And he could make his bed of boughs and redwood shavings and the fire would help and then—hold everything! There in the far corner of the smaller room he saw a bed, a nest really, of fresh pine cuttings.

  Someone or something was recently holed up in the old czarist outpost. Galon drew his pistol and turned cautiously back toward the larger room. Suddenly the front door slammed. Galon fired at the noise, splintering a half-inch hole through the door at eye level. He charged forward, reloading, to take cunning advantage of the smoking new peephole, but it was a wasted squint. There was nothing new out there, or so it seemed.

  He stepped out into the windless dusk. Something was fishy. An old sensation stalked along his nerves, a tingle he had felt many times before. He tasted his own spittle turning to cotton on his tongue. He was not alone, he could feel it. He was being watched.

  47

  Shaboom

  Shaboom Watanabe, lost son of Yedo and a stranger all these years in this strange land, squinted through the thorny bushes overgrowing the front gate. At last a man alone had come to him. Shaboom studied the man, remembering. He ground his teeth. He cursed the wretchedness of his curious mind, the mad hunger that so long ago had made him turn his back on the fine points of feudal honor and sail out of Yedo Bay craving travel and knowledge.

  He had hung around Deshima, listening to Dutch sailors paint wide visions of a world beyond, and when he got the chance he had shipped out. And then shipwrecked, and the Russians and the insults and insidious oblivion of this stupid coast on the edge of the world. He had tried to escape once and had learned his lesson, an expensive lesson that had resigned him to stay put.

  How long ago, he wondered, had he snuck down to the beach at night and stolen that kayak? It was a treacherous memory, but not without its moral, the lesson he knew only too well. He had paddled south, gobbling raw fish for strength, nosing ashore each night to sleep in sandy caves. He had hoped to find refuge and passage home in the bay of San Francisco, but floated past its narrow gate in a rainy morning fog. He kept going. Thirteen days out of Fort Ross found him bobbing, exhausted, off Monterey. The next thing he knew a ferocious squall was blowing him further south and within an hour the wind was surfing his delicate craft straight for the rocks of Point Pinos.

  Fished out dripping and disoriented from the churning shallows by some fun-loving Californios, Shaboom had been asked but one question.

  You got any money?

  When he shook his head, trying to collect his wits, they tied him facedown over a horse and galloped into Monterey. And then, before he could explain himself, they had thrown him into a large wooden cage where he spent the next three months. Yes, he shuddered to think about it. The Californios had started a zoo around him.

  On display between a three-legged horse and a gila monster that slept all the time, Shaboom had gone predictably mad in a matter of days and become a great crowd pleaser. He shrieked and threw his own excrement.

  The exact circumstances surrounding his escape remain a mystery, but under the headline CRAZED JAP AT LARGE, the California American had suggested that perhaps the Russians were involved. Was there not a Russian ship in the harbor, the paper argued, and had not some of its officers been observed conversing in front of the fugitive? And had it not looked like he understood whatever the hell they were saying? The paper’s editor, T. D. Slant, knew good copy when he saw it and his news judgment told him to ignore the fact that he had seen someone he knew very well tinkering with the cage on the very night of the Jap’s escape.

  The paper’s innuendos naturally resulted in a call for action, but an intense search of the Russian vessel had turned up nothing but sea otter pelts. Shaboom, meanwhile, had been cutting a zigzag trail north, determined on an elegant suicide to show the Russians.
Just to show them.

  But he had found Fort Ross deserted. The Russians were all gone, having sold out to Sutter, who had come with his Worm Eaters and carted everything movable back to his fort while the Russians sailed away with a small chest of gold nuggets that Sutter had told them came from Mexico. Shaboom had stood alone in front of the fort and decided to wait. It was his fort now and he would command it one day at a time, waiting for a visitor and a chance to get even.

  Since then Shaboom had dug out the necessities of his increasingly moribund existence like a common Worm Eater. He caught fish with his hands. He dug roots on the ridge and gathered kelp-heavy mussels from the rocky tide pools. Only his spiritual training saved him from fading into the thick wilderness like an extinct animal.

  Twice each day he stared west in meditation and managed somehow to find the ordered vacancy of the gardens of Kyoto in the fog that rolled in below him like a curtain closing over the ocean.

  Now he contemplated his visitor, his guest. The man was obviously not a Russian or even a Californio. No matter, he would have to do.

  TWELVE

  48

  Sutter

  Gathered around the gate at Sutter’s Fort, Millard Burgett found an assortment of Californio layabouts bemoaning the arrival of the Mormons. Willing to work harder for less money, the Mormons, it seems, were grabbing all the good jobs.

  But Millard was not discouraged. He was determined to make his fortune for Galon. He rode inside looking for Sutter, the man himself.

  John Augustus Sutter would probably have wound up very rich were it not for two egregious dings in his generous and otherwise progressive character: (1) he gave advice in crowds and (2) he had a tendency to play both ends against the middle. Thus, he was eternally overrun by the weak and indecisive while the people he should have been able to count on didn’t trust him. Old T. D. Slant was given to referring to Sutter, in print, as a toadying sycophant. Millard Burgett, on the other hand, came to admire and esteem him. Such were the whim-whams of Sutter’s public image as he sat in his office adding a long column of figures.

  Outside he heard the evening bell clang and put down his pen. It was his favorite time of day, feeding time for the Worm Eaters. He smiled to himself and walked outside.

  Running along the fort’s eastern wall was a shallow wooden trough, one hundred feet long. Sutter noted with satisfaction that very little of the warm gruel poured into it by the heavy-ankled women who worked in the cookhouse was spilling to the dust. Waste not want not, he always said. He walked the length of the trough, stopping only once to dab a thick finger into the soft mixture of beans and corn to measure the consistency. He didn’t want it too thick.

  Presently, the first wave of Worm Eaters came pouring through the side gate. Close to two hundred of them crowded into long lines behind a rope that had been stretched waist-high, parallel to the trough. All eyes were on Sutter. He backed out of the way, and with a sweep of his arm signaled that the rope be dropped to the ground.

  Feed yourselves, he said, smiling benevolently, and reached in his vest pocket for his pipe.

  Millard had never seen anything like it. The Worm Eaters surged to the trough and began scooping its contents into their mouths with cupped hands. And already a second wave was forming at the gate.

  Close to an hour passed before the last Worm Eaters had jogged in from the most distant fields to gobble down payment for a day’s labor. Forty-nine huge caldrons of the bean-and-corn mixture had been poured like slurry into the trough, and through it all Sutter had quietly smoked his pipe.

  Millard was overcome with respect. When Sutter set out on the rest of his evening rounds, Millard followed at what he hoped was a respectful distance, gathering nerve to approach the great pioneer. Sutter toured his storerooms, checking the number of hides and candles and sacks of wheat. Millard dogged him with growing admiration. Finally, when Sutter was on his way to his own supper in his private dining quarters, Millard tugged at his sleeve.

  What do you want? Sutter demanded gruffly.

  A job, Millard told him. I want to work for you.

  So does everybody. What can you do?

  Millard was stumped. He hadn’t worked it out that far and could only stand there toeing silently at the ground as Sutter walked away from him.

  49

  Honest Work

  The times were ripe for frenzy and, knowing what he knew, Sutter found himself in a very busy and rather delicate position. Acting as go-between for the various factions of Californios, Americans, Mexicans, and assorted other interests in this joke of a revolution, he cursed the fact that it had come before he was ready and he stalled for time. Like most people who find themselves cast in the role of middle-man, Sutter had much bigger things in mind for himself.

  In only eight years he had built his New Helvetia into a medieval barony, outsmarting an endless string of Indian raiders, Russian interlopers, French plotters, English trappers, and American adventurers, not to mention his Mexican hosts and Californio neighbors. Now he faced the biggest test, and it all depended on keeping one secret until he was ready for what he knew would follow its disclosure like a storm.

  Late that night, Sutter sat at his writing desk. A tiny fire smoldered in the corner of the stone fireplace. It was too hot for a fire, but it kept him alert, lest he forget the humiliation of a shotgun wedding and bankruptcy in Switzerland, the land of fireplaces. Never again, he mused, looking into the flames. Rich and powerful, he called himself captain now, and wore the uniform of an officer in the French Guard which he had picked up somewhere. He would win out in the end if he could just keep his balance. He took his pen in hand and began to list his problems. It was a list of names.

  There was Fremont, of course….That mercenary glory hound was mucking up everything with his swagger and entirely too much ambition. Fremont had even locked up Vallejo right here in New Helvetia, telling Sutter to keep the dignified Californio as a guest for a while, or else.

  Valejo, yes…he was another problem. The man had controlled too much to simply give up. He read too much and he had powerful friends, Larkin for example.

  Larkin, hmmm….Hard to understand but definitely sneaky, that Larkin, with his secret land deals and contracts. He was no friend of Fremont, yet they seemed somehow to be working toward the same end. But then Larkin had warned him about Brannan.

  Brannan, well….It was too soon to tell about Brannan, but if it was true, as he had heard, that Brannan had hired that son-of-a-bitch Slant and given him a newspaper to run, then something had to be done.

  Slant, shit….That crazy propagandist had been a pain in the ass from the beginning with all his talk about the dangers of concentrated power and his dirty connections.

  Dirty connections, of course…all those self-serving revolutionaries browsing at the edges of everything, crisscrossing the countryside from one nefarious rendezvous to the next clandestine deal. And some of them were probably working for him, even as they worked against him.

  So…Sutter read over his list and decided to make deals with everybody he could, just in case. He’d show them. He wadded the piece of paper and tossed it into the fire.

  There was a knock at the door. Sutter waited until his list darkened into charcoal before answering. It was Joaquin Peach, one of his new labor bosses.

  I hired another man, a funny little American, Peach told him.

  Sutter frowned.

  Don’t worry, Peach insisted, he’s too old and stupid to cause any trouble.

  He’s an American. What’s his name? Sutter asked.

  Burgett, and he’s got a good gun. I can use him to guard the Worm Eaters cutting wood on the river.

  Very well, but keep him away from me. I don’t like Americans.

  50

  Go Away Closer

  Taya missed running into Millard at Sutter’s Fort by less than a day. As it was she ran into Joaquin Peach. She rode through the front gate and was surprised to see the roto walking around giving orders. W
hen he saw her, he bowed with a flourish.

  I have moved on to bigger things, he said.

  She could see that, but was in no mood to listen to how. Early that morning, she had come across a band of Worm Eaters. They had been shouting at the sun, talking to it as if it were listening, encouraging it to continue its rise as if it might not. Then suddenly a bunch of Sutter’s men came and herded them off. That the Worm Eaters could be so straightforward all the time, and so vulnerable, had struck Taya somehow. They had such simple ideas, worshipping everything they saw in the hope that more would appear. And then lying down in front of any stranger to be stepped on like the dirt itself. It made her uneasy. She didn’t want to think about it anymore, and Peach’s success obviously had something to do with it. He was carrying a whip.

  How’s it going? he wanted to know.

  Where’s Zorro? she shot back.

  The question threw him. Why, he didn’t have to feel guilty for leaving the old hero, but that’s how she had made him feel. On purpose, he imagined. He’d show her:

  Where’s your husband?

  Husband? The roto was getting out of hand. She brushed past him into the main office and took a room for the night. Husband? T. D. Jr.?

  —

  The next morning, Taya ran into Peach at the corral. He was probably waiting for her.

  I’ll bet you don’t even have a husband, he said with a smile. I’ll bet you’re pretty loose too.

  He was trying to be funny, trying to flirt a little, but it was definitely the wrong approach. Taya slugged him in the arm and turned abruptly, just in time to see T. D. Jr. come riding through the gate. No big surprise really, she had expected him to catch up sooner or later. She glanced back at Peach, who was not smiling, and ran to meet T. D. Jr.