Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  “Santa Maria!” she cried, and flew at the pot with the knife she had been holding and, as if to kill it, began banging on the sides.

  By the time Seth came home, the cabin smelled of scorched rice and burnt bacon, and Angelique was at the back door, fanning the smoke out with her new apron.

  “This devil!” she shouted at him, and she kicked the side of the stove.

  He peered at the mess in the frying pan. “You used the entire side of bacon? You’re supposed to slice off a rasher or two.” His eyes stopped on the calico on the wall. “What’s that?”

  “Curtains,” she said petulantly, rubbing her nose and leaving a smudge.

  “But there’s no window there.”

  “Sí, but now does it not look like there is one?”

  He eyed the calico tablecloth with a glass jar of fresh flowers on it. “Where’d you get these apples? Vendor doesn’t come through here till Saturday.”

  “I buy them from Señor Ostler.”

  “What! He buys them from the fruit and vegetable vendor and then triples the price! No more buying produce from Ostler. Wait for the farmer’s wagon on Saturday.”

  He went to the pantry and brought out hardtack and jerky. “It’s all right,” he said when he saw her crestfallen look. “I’ve had worse.”

  She looked around the cabin. “What could be worse than this?”

  He stared at her. Anyone else would have made the question sound like an insult. But she didn’t seem to mean offense. “Prison,” he said as they sat at the table.

  Her eyes grew round. “You were in prison?”

  He peeled an apple, handing her half. “I saw a man beating on a woman. I told him to stop, but he had a rage in his eyes. I knew he was going to kill her. So I stopped him.”

  “You… killed him?”

  Seth shook his head. “Broke his back. Now he sits on two useless legs. Won’t be beating up on anyone again.”

  He chewed. Swallowed. “They charged me with attempted manslaughter. I served a year in Eastern State Penitentiary. No labor. Solitary confinement. My meals were slid under the door. For a year, I never saw or spoke to a soul.”

  They finished supper in silence, and when he was done, Seth stood and lifted the corner of the tablecloth. “This has to go back to Bill Ostler.”

  “But it is cut up. He will not take it back.”

  “Then I’ll have to add the cost of it to what you owe me.”

  When he saw her chin begin to tremble, he said, “You’ve done the place real nice.” Seeing the little Aztec figure on the upended powder keg he picked it up and examined it. “This is pink jade. Very rare, very costly.”

  “It is more than that, Señor Hopkins. This talisman once belonged to Montezuma’s queen. It is the figure of the goddess of good fortune. It is a good luck charm given to me by my Aztec nanny and it contains great power.”

  “You think she’ll bring you luck?”

  “She will lead me to my father,” Angelique said with confidence.

  “Better yet, ask her if she can teach you to cook.”

  Although he said it with a smile, and although Angelique could see he meant no insult, nonetheless she felt her blood rise. What he was expecting of her was simply too much. This demeaning situation was not worth the hundred dollars she owed him.

  But as he started to leave for Charlie Bigelow’s, something occurred to her. “A moment, please. I wish to know something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Señor Boggs.”

  “Yes.” She saw that his jaw tensed.

  “You said he was a bad man.”

  “Yes,” he said, and she waited. After a moment, he sighed and said, “You wouldn’t have lasted long with him. Women like you don’t.”

  “He would have made me work?”

  He looked into her innocent, wide eyes and didn’t know how better to put it. “The ladies who live above the saloon,” he said. “That is what Cyrus Boggs would have you do.”

  A heartbeat passed. Angelique suddenly flushed deep red, then she went dead pale. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I will not burn the rice.”

  * * *

  Seth continued to sleep in Charlie Bigelow’s tent but went to his own cabin every morning for breakfast, a clean shirt, and his lunch bucket, which Miss D’Arcy filled. As it turned out that she didn’t know how to wash clothes, Seth’s first clean shirt after Miss D’Arcy’s arrival had had to be purchased at Ostler’s for an astronomical sum. After that, he showed her how to boil water over the fire, fill the wooden tub outside, cut flakes off the bar of soap, and stir the clothes in the tub. He had managed to teach her how to cook breakfast, but it soon became a monotonous fare of bread either burned or half-baked and coffee too weak or too strong. And his bucket lunch invariably consisted of smoked sausage, salvaged parts of a bread loaf, and apples bought from the weekend vendor. At the end of each day Seth returned for supper, which was ruined more often than not, sending him to Eliza’s for two dinners to take out. After supper, while Angelique washed the dishes, he sat down with the jar that contained the day’s take— gold flakes, dust, and nuggets floating in water— which he cleaned and dried and weighed on a small set of scales, and then poured into a little leather pouch that he secured in a locked box. At bedtime he would take his leave and go to Charlie’s. Otherwise, his life at Devil’s Bar continued as it had been before his unexpected house-guest. He still rode into American Fork every weekend to have the gold assayed and deposited in a bank. And Saturday nights he took down the big wooden washtub, filled it with hot water from the fireplace and scrubbed the week’s grime from his body. Then he dressed in clean clothes and went to the saloon, where he drank whiskey and played cards with Llewellyn, Ostler, and Bigelow, after which he went to the hotel where, once the dining room was closed, he “sat a spell” with Eliza Gibbons, as he put it. What Miss D’Arcy did in her spare time he had no idea. He suspected it wasn’t learning how to cook.

  As he knelt on the riverbank with the hot sun on his back, placing a mixture of dirt and gravel into his pan and then submerging it into the stream, he prayed he would find a nugget that would cover the expenses Miss D’Arcy was running up. He knew she couldn’t help it. She was trying hard, and with little complaint, but she kept ruining the food and burning his shirts with the iron, and using up too much lamp oil. He sincerely hoped that when she found her father, Jack D’Arcy had made enough money trapping to take care of his expensive daughter.

  He dipped the pan into the stream again, and as he brought it out of the water and shook it back and forth, tapping it against the heel of his hand to let some of the gravel slip over the far edge, he thought about the Frenchman. Every time someone new came into camp Seth would inquire if they knew a trapper named D’Arcy. He was starting to worry. He had been hearing news of Indians ambushing trappers because the trappers were depleting the Indians’ food supply. There had been bloody skirmishes up north resulting in a lot of dead white men.

  Dipping the edge of the pan again and again, at a greater angle each time until he had worked it down and he had almost no gravel, only black sand and gold, which he then swirled gently, Seth’s eyes strayed to dark brown pebbles that lay on the streambed, flashing in the sunlight, and they reminded him of Angelique’s eyes, especially the way they would flash in her quick strikes of anger and she would whisper, “Santa Maria!” and strike a blow at bread that hadn’t risen or pudding that had burned. Then he noticed that the tinkling of the water over the rocks sounded like her laughter that always immediately followed such bursts of anger as she chided herself and pushed a lock of black hair from her face. When a kingfisher came to perch on a branch over the stream, looking for fish that were no longer there, Seth thought its blue-gray feathers were the same color as one of Angelique’s gowns, the one she had spilled gravy on and had spent hours trying to clean.

  He shook his head. The way Angelique kept cropping up in his thoughts, it was as if she had followed him to this place.

  He tri
ed to steer his mind to other matters: what changes statehood might bring to California, where he should be thinking of buying a farm, was winter going to come early this year. But his mind was its own master and seemed to want to think only of Angelique D’Arcy. Last Sunday, for instance, when the circuit preacher came to Devil’s Bar and the saloon had been converted into a church, Miss D’Arcy had arrived late. When she appeared in the doorway, all heads turned and everyone fell silent. She was wearing one of her beautiful gowns with a magnificent Spanish lace veil over her head and shoulders, and she had a prayer book and rosary in her gloved hands. When the silence stretched— Catholics were looked upon with some suspicion in this predominantly Protestant settlement— instead of coming forward, Miss D’Arcy had taken a seat at the back, with the prostitutes.

  Gold being heavier than sand, it stayed in the center of the pan while the sand moved to the outside, allowing Seth to pick out the nuggets and flakes with tweezers. Then he carefully drained the last of the water and touched a clean, dry fingertip to the remaining specks of gold, lifting them out and dropping them into his glass jar. It was hard, time-consuming and backbreaking work. Sometimes a day of panning produced no gold. Other times he found nuggets that seemed as big and bright as the sun.

  This lot done, he rested back on his heels and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He looked across the stream at the ruins of the Indian village. Seth had been one of the first to stake a claim on this offshoot of the river. The day he arrived, the village was thriving. Indians had stood on the opposite bank, silently watching the crazy white man sift through dirt. And then other white men had come with picks and shovels, and built sluices and great wooden cradles for dredging the gravel from the streambed. In a short time, fish disappeared from the stream and so the Indians had left, to go in search of other food sources.

  Some had even gone looking for gold because, even though they had no use for the metal themselves, they had learned they could buy blankets and food with it. Some had gone to work on white men’s farms and places like Sutter’s Sawmill. When he and Miss D’Arcy had stopped at Sutter’s Mill to water the horses on their way from Sacramento they had seen several hundred Indians squatting in the noon sun. As soon as troughs of food were brought out and set on the ground, the Indians had swarmed over them, on their knees, madly scooping food into their mouths as if they knew there wasn’t going to be enough.

  Most Indians, however, were hiding in the mountains. There were some white men who felt the Indians no longer had a place here and so went after them with guns. The federal government, meanwhile, was trying to round up all the natives and confine them to reserved land. The only villages still going were inhabited by women, but even they were starting to vanish due to rampant kidnapping. When news of gold had got out, every man and woman in California had dropped what they were doing and headed for the gold fields. Farms and ranches were suddenly left without workers, rich people had no servants. So now there was a lucrative trade in kidnapped Indian women and children. They were taken south and sold for labor.

  As he took a break beneath the warm sun, Seth contemplated the colors of wildflowers, the blue of the sky, things he hadn’t noticed in years. Memories of Eastern State Penitentiary haunted him, with its experimental program of keeping men isolated for their rehabilitation. What the prison officials didn’t know was that, for Seth Hopkins, the solitary confinement hadn’t been much different from the silence of his father’s cottage or the darkness of the coal mines. The day he had been released, the warden had said, “I hope you’ve learned something here.” But the only thing that Seth had learned was that every man was on his own in this world. Each man is born alone and must survive alone. And no man can depend on anyone to help him get by.

  As he reached for his pan and braced himself for another hour of backbreaking labor, a surprising image sprang into his mind: Miss Angelique D’Arcy sleeping in his bed, her rich black hair tumbling over his pillow.

  * * *

  A spell was being cast over the folks at Devil’s Bar. Eliza Gibbons was certain of it. A spell woven by the cunning Miss D’Arcy, the beautiful French widow Seth had found on the docks at San Francisco and brought home like a stray cat. Eliza was no fool, nor was she blind, which was perhaps why she was the only person immune to the creature’s power. It was as if a sort of mass hysteria had gripped the people of Devil’s Bar.

  Eliza had first suspected that something was wrong the Saturday morning the creature had surprised everyone by showing up at Eliza’s hotel while Seth was away at American Fork, paying his weekly visit to the bank. The small lobby and dining room had been busy with Devil’s Bar citizens enjoying Eliza’s good coffee, or picking up their mail and newspapers, which had just been brought on the morning stage. Eliza’s was a place to congregate and meet, to share gossip and news, and to shed the weariness of a week in the gold fields. Seth’s French widow had suddenly materialized in the front entrance and the place had fallen dead silent.

  Eliza would never forget how all heads had suddenly turned and everyone had stared. And then, in the next minute, the men had done something that had made Eliza’s mouth fall open: they rose from their seats and removed their hats! No other woman in the camp had ever received such treatment. Least of all Eliza herself, who was of the firm opinion that if any woman should receive royal treatment, it was Eliza Gibbons. Wasn’t I the only one to think of contracting with the stagecoach line so that mail and newspapers are delivered to my hotel? Am I not the only one who connived a way to build a cold storage so that folks can keep their hams and butter fresh, game birds to be saved for a special occasion, even Bill Ostler’s secret bottle of champagne? Are my meat pies not famous all the way to Nevada? What thanks do I get? Only grumbles that my prices are too high.

  The attitudes of the men, on that Saturday morning, had alarmed Eliza. Especially when Mrs. Ostler had next greeted the creature with a “good morning,” and the other ladies had followed!

  Miss D’Arcy had explained that she wished to purchase something for Mr. Hopkins’s supper, and so she had bought fried chicken with mashed potatoes and giblet gravy from Eliza’s kitchen. Eliza had wanted to inform the creature that the food was for hotel customers only, but how could she say that when it wasn’t true and everyone was standing there to witness her lie? She had had no choice but to let the girl go off with a basket full of Eliza’s best cooking, which she had no doubt the creature was going to claim she cooked herself.

  It hadn’t ended with that. There had been the Saturday night when a group of fiddlers had come into the camp to hold an old-fashioned barn dance without the barn and it had ended up in a brawl because all the men wanted to dance with Angelique. And the day a couple of mountain men came into Eliza’s hotel with their Indian women and Eliza had been about to demand that they leave when Angelique had come running in, having heard of their arrival, to ask if they knew her father and, learning they were French, to get them all prattling like monkeys in a foreign tongue with Llewellyn, that daft Welshman, asking her afterward to give him French lessons! Ingvar Swenson sending a dozen fresh eggs to Miss D’Arcy as a welcoming gift; Mrs. Ostler wanting Miss D’Arcy’s opinion on the color of the yarn she had chosen for a new shawl; and Cora Holmsby asking Miss D’Arcy for advice on perfume.

  But the final straw had been the incident with the peaches.

  Eliza had secretly contracted with a farmer in the valley to bring a wagonload of peaches on the guarantee that everyone would buy them, with Eliza receiving a percentage of the take. As she had promised, peaches were such a rare treat that everyone crowded around, pressing banknotes and bags of gold dust upon the vendor. And then all of a sudden, Seth’s creature had come pushing through, babbling something about the fruit being bad and that to eat it would make everyone seriously ill.

  A fracas had erupted, with the farmer shouting angrily and waving his arms, and Miss D’Arcy trying to stop people from reaching for the peaches, and Seth Hopkins arriving and trying to calming ev
eryone down. When asked why she thought the fruit was bad, the creature hadn’t even been able to explain. She had just looked at Seth with those bewitching eyes, and said, “Please, you will all be ill if you eat.”

  To Eliza’s astonishment, Seth had said, “Well then maybe we shouldn’t buy the peaches,” and everyone had replaced the ones they had selected.

  While the others stood around wondering what to do, with the farmer shouting invectives in a language no one recognized, Eliza had walked up to the wagon and purchased a whole bushel of peaches. The others immediately followed suit, nearly emptying the man’s wagon and sending him off with a smile.

  What had burned the incident into Eliza’s brain was the way Seth had acquiesced to the creature’s admonition, as though she had sapped his will. That was when Eliza had realized it was time to take matters into her own hands.

  And so, on this late-summer Saturday evening with crickets singing and a taste of fall in the air, she plied Seth Hopkins with a generous second helping of her peach pie. “She knows things,” he said between mouthfuls, washing the sweet, juicy pie down with cold milk. “I don’t know how or why, but Miss D’Arcy just somehow knows things. She said she saw the camp falling sick after eating the peaches. Like a vision.” He ran his spoon around the plate, catching the last of the syrup and crust. “Some folks do have the sight, you know. Women, mostly.”

  Eliza didn’t know anything about visions or sight, but she knew a sly and cunning woman when she saw one. After the peach vendor left Eliza had made up a batch of pies so that the folks who had missed the farmer could still have a treat. She had even sent a pie over to Seth’s cabin, only to learn the next day that the creature had thrown it out! Everyone in the camp had savored Eliza’s peach pies and declared them the best in the territory. Who did that creature think she was to throw one out? But Eliza knew the gesture had less to do with Miss D’Arcy being worried about the fruit than with her staking a claim on Seth Hopkins. Eliza knew what the creature was up to. Even if Seth did not.