Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  “They gave it to me.” I pointed where the heavy woman had pointed, the white brackets, the dark space. “There,” I said.

  He opened his mouth a little. “You kept this?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was true, though not in the way I let him believe.

  He held it delicately, smoothing a curled corner with his thumb. He said nothing for a long time; then he ran his finger along the bottom edge. “What do these numbers mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t ask.” He held it a while longer, closer to him. When he tried to give it back I gestured for him to keep it. It seemed he would, at first. But then, suddenly, he thrust it back at me and said, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “I thought you’d want it.”

  He looked at it again, disgusted, as though he could see everything wrong with me in the image. “It’s a piece of paper,” he said finally. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “I thought—”

  “Is that what this is about?” He laughed that hard-edged laugh again. “It is. You’re gonna have this baby as some kind of memento. The centerpiece to your little shrine up there? Jesus, Nat. You are fucked up.”

  “I love him.”

  He slipped the ultrasound into his coat pocket. “You don’t love people,” he said. “You love what they do to you.”

  • • •

  When I went inside, Carly was at the window. She’d been watching us. “Jesus,” I said. “What were you thinking?”

  She put her finger to her lips and said, “Shh.” She gestured to the bedroom.

  “Fine,” I said. I walked into the kitchen, retrieved a pack of cigarettes from on top of the fridge, and went out to the fire escape. My hands were shaking.

  Carly followed me outside. “What are you doing? You promised.”

  I lit a cigarette and took a drag. “Why the fuck would you bring him here?”

  “I was worried about you.”

  I exhaled. “The fuck you were. You’re coming over here, dressing the Miracle like—”

  “You promised,” she said again.

  “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Leave. Take her with you. Don’t come back.”

  She began to cry. “Listen to yourself—”

  “You listen. Do you know what you’re saying? Have a baby? Look at me.” I was shouting. “Look at my life. Why would you want anyone to have a life like ours?”

  She wiped her eyes, sending out little sooty shooting stars of mascara. “You don’t even sound like you.”

  “I don’t sound like you,” I said. I was crying now, too. A car alarm sounded somewhere. Beyond its wailing was downtown, the lights of the casinos crisp in the cold, the Truckee running through. Sam was on a bus, homebound. And beyond that, somewhere, was Ezra, his impossible laugh, his half breaths, his index finger looped around my big toe. Here was my sister, pulling me to her.

  “I’ve got too much of her in me,” I said. “I can feel it.”

  Carly took a deep breath of cold air. “Me, too,” she said into my hair. She sounded surprised. “Me, too.”

  She held me that way for some time. When she let me go she touched the soft places under my eyes with the cuff of her sweater. She nodded to my cigarettes. “Give me one of those, would you?”

  We leaned against the building and smoked in silence. Once, Carly turned and cupped her hands against my bedroom window. “Look at this,” she said.

  Inside, the Miracle was splayed out on my bed, asleep. Her wings and headband had been cast off, and the nunchucks Sam bought her were on the floor. She was sleepmoist, and the wild wispy hairs around her face curled in the dampness. We watched her stretch triumphantly, her brawny hands curled in fists.

  THE DIGGINGS

  for Captain John Sutter

  There were stories in the territory, stories that could turn a sane man sour and a sour man worse. Three Frenchmen in Coloma dug up a stump to make way for a road and panned two thousand dollars in flakes from the hole. Above the Feather River a Michigander lawyer staked his mule for the night and when he pulled it in the morning a vein winked up at him. Down on the Tuolumne a Hoosier survived a gunfight and found his fortune in the hole the bullet drilled in the rock above his shoulder. In Rough and Ready a man called Bennager Raspberry, aiming to free a ramrod jammed in his musket, fired at random into the exposed roots of a manzanita bush. There he found five thousand dollars in gold, free and pure. Near Carson Creek a Massachusetts man died of isthmus sickness, and mourners shoveled up a seven-pound nugget while digging his grave.

  In California gold was what God was in the rest of the country: everything, everywhere. My brother Errol told of a man on a stool beside him who bought a round with a pinch of dust. He told of a child dawdling in a gully who found a queerly colored rock and took it to his mother, who boiled it with lye in her teakettle for a day to be sure of its composition. He told of a drunkard Pike who’d found a lake whose shores sparkled with the stuff but could not, once sober, retrieve the memory of where it was. There were men drowning in color, men who could not walk into the woods to empty their bladders without shouting, Eureka!

  And there were those who had nothing. There were those who worked like slaves every single day, those who had attended expensive lectures on geology and chemistry back home, those who had absorbed every metallurgy manual on the passage westward, put to memory every map of those sinister foothills, scrutinized every speck of filth the territory offered and in the end were rewarded without so much as a glinting in their pans.

  And there was a third category of miner too, more wretched and volatile than the others: the luckless believer. Here was a forty-niner ever poised on the cusp of the having class, his strike a breath away in his mind. Belief was a dangerous sickness at the diggings—it made a man greedy, violent and insane. This fever burned hotter within my brother than in any other prospector among the placers. I know, because I lit him.

  I. HO FOR CALIFORNIA!

  My brother and I came to gold country from Ohio when Errol was twenty and I seventeen. Our father had gone to God in December of 1848, leaving us three hundred dollars each. I had not been especially interested in the activity out west—my eyes looked eastward, in fact, to Harvard Divinity. But my brother was married to the notion. He diverted the considerable energies he usually spent clouting me or bossing me around and put them toward convincing me to join him. I admit I rather enjoyed this process of conversion—it was maybe the first in all our life together that Errol had regarded me with greater interest than that due an old boot. His efforts having roused in me the spirit of adventure, I began to fancy us brother Argonauts, bold and divine.

  We left our mother and sisters in Cincinnati in the early spring of 1849, and set out by way of the Ohio and Missouri rivers. In Independence we bought a small freight wagon and spent a week and what was left of our money readying it. We fit iron rims to the wheels, tightened the spokes, greased the axles, secured the bolts and reinforced the harnesses. We purchased new canvas from an outfitter, coated it with linseed oil and beeswax and stretched it across the new pine bows. My brother, despite his want of artistic aptitude, painted the canvas with a crude outline of Ohio and a script reading Ho for California!

  In Independence we took up with a group of men who called themselves the Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association for California. Errol wrote what was by then surely his hundredth letter to Marjorie Elise Salter, whose family owned and operated Salter Soap & Lye. It was Marjorie for whom Errol was getting rich. That fall and through the winter Errol had developed the habit of slinking off to see her, leaving me to do his chores. I didn’t think much of Miss Salter, I’ll tell you now. I thought she waltzed rather better than I would want my wife to. But the once I alerted Errol to the infrequency with which Salter girls married into farm
ing families such as ours, he rapped my collarbone with the iron side of a trowel, putting a permanent zag in it.

  The day we left Cincinnati, Errol leaned from the steamer, tossed Marjorie a gold coin that had been our father’s and shouted, “Where I am going there are plenty more!”

  With the yobs and gamblers of the Missouri Company we followed the Platte, then the Sweetwater to South Pass, around the Great Salt Lake, then along the course of a river called the Humboldt, whose waters were putrid and whose poisonous grasses killed two of our party’s oxen. At the place where that miserable river disappeared into the sand we found a boulder on which an earlier traveler had scraped some words with a nib of charcoal. It read: Expect to find the worst desert you ever saw and then to find it worse than you expected. Take water. Take water. You cannot carry enough.

  And so we filled canteens, kegs, coffeepots, waterproof sacks and rubberized blankets. Errol removed his gum boots and filled them, then ordered me to do the same. Those we kept secret. We crossed the Hundred Mile Desert only at night, following in the moonlight a trail marked by discarded stoves and trunks and mining equipment and the stinking carcasses of mules and oxen.

  II. ABANDONED AT CARSON SINK

  At the westernmost edge of the Hundred Mile Desert our leaders unhitched the animals and led them ahead in search of a spring, to recuperate and reconnoiter. Errol and I were assigned, with some others, to stay behind and guard the wagons. The goldfields were close, we knew, and as one day passed and another and we were not retrieved, some of us began to suspect we had been deserted, left to die in that sink, thirsty and scalpless.

  After three days without word a young man named Doble, of Shelby County, Indiana, proposed that we remainers set out for the diggings on our own. Errol and I were set to go when I experienced a troubling augury.

  Since the time when I was very young I had experienced auguries, strange phenomena of the mind in which the visual composition of a scene before me summoned a vivid dream I had had of the same scenario. I was then able to recall the dream, including those depictions that had not yet happened in the waking world. They were a form of prophecy, though I experienced no tingling, weightlessness, chills, nor any other of the physical sensations associated with soothsaying. I felt only a sharpness between my eyes, which could usually be alleviated by removing my eyeglasses and pinching firmly the bridge of my nose.

  My auguries came at random frequency, and were of random relevance. Sometimes they allowed me to see only the coming moment; other times I might distinguish the happenings of many months hence. Most events depicted therein were of little significance: our chickens would squabble over a scattering of corn; my youngest sister, Mary, would ruin a pair of our father’s stockings while learning to stitch; winter would be cold. Until Carson Sink the most significant augury I had experienced occurred at the age of eleven, while I watched two men unload a freight wagon outside Edward Boynton’s store. I saw that a keg of brandied peaches Boynton had received was tainted, and would make several people ill. I alerted Boynton of this and he—already suspecting this particular vendor of dishonesty—opened the keg, found the peaches were indeed spoiled, and lobbied a refund. I attempted to convey my condition, as I had come to consider it, to my parents, but Errol was the only who believed me. He was the only who ever believed me.

  The visual arrangement which triggered the augury at Carson Sink was my brother’s sack, partially filled, slumped to the right, and beyond it a bare craggy peak and the white sun, all in a line. Clear as a sketch I saw Errol and me following Doble and his company into the mountains. I saw the wagons down in the sink where we would leave them, circled like the spokes of a wheel. I saw three toes of my brother’s bare right foot black with frostbite. I saw man consuming man in the snow.

  “What’s that?” Errol said, noticing my affliction. He took me by the arm away from the others. “What have you seen?”

  “We cannot go with them.” I recounted the augury. “We’ll die,” I finished.

  Errol tore off a sliver of fingernail with his teeth and spit it to the ground. “We’ll die if we stay,” he said finally.

  “Likely,” I admitted.

  “But you say we should stay.”

  “Yes.” I had seen his dead body in those mountains as clearly as I saw his live one before me now.

  “Damn you, Joshua. How do you expect we’ll get rich without ever setting foot at those diggings?”

  I looked at the range, which rose out of the ground as though she knew her peaks were the only thing standing between us and those goldfields. That was the main impression I had during our travels, that the ranges of the West had a way of making you feel watched. “I only know what I’ve seen,” I said, fearing he would strike me.

  Errol regarded Doble and the others, who were near ready to depart. He sighed. “Then we stay,” he said. “For now.” He ordered me to return our things to the wagon. Then he approached Doble and informed him of our intent to remain in the sink. “Storm coming,” he said.

  Doble looked to the sky, cloudless. “Boy, leave the weather to me.”

  “This is not the time to cross,” said Errol.

  Doble scoffed. “It’s barely October.”

  Errol returned to our wagon.

  I whispered that we ought not let them go.

  “You’re welcome to elaborate,” he said, “and risk them shooting you to alleviate you of your madness. Kindly leave me out of it if you do.”

  We stayed. They went. I did not warn them. I was young and a coward, if you want to know the word. At the time I thought no fate worse than being considered a lunatic.

  Errol and I watched from the valley as a tremendous storm took the range. It lasted three days, and the snow remained for ten more. Each night we built a fire and sat shuddering before it, the wagons round ours empty as fresh-built pine boxes. We did not speak of the storm nor the men up in it excepting the first day, when Errol said he would not care for a stroll in those hills right now, and I said I would not, either. That was, I think, his way of thanking me.

  The report reached the diggings before we did. It went round and round and still goes round today: an expedition perished under a bad storm. The Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association. Trapped in the mountains with nothing to eat but their own dead.

  III. THE RESCUING SHE-ASS

  We survived in the sink on quail which Errol shot and what scant rations the others could not carry. But both supplies and game swiftly dwindled. One night when I lay awake considering starvation and Indian ambush and cougar attack and worse, I saw shadows moving along our canvas. I remained in my ruck, petrified, not even reaching for the knife near my feet nor the musket near my sleeping brother’s. The shadows grew monstrous in size until finally a dark shape loomed at the rear of the wagon. When the form emerged through the slit in the canvas, I nearly laughed aloud at my own cowardice.

  It was the head of a burro. She stared at me, ears twitching, an almost intelligent expression on her long face. I donned my spectacles and climbed quietly from the wagon. I ran my hand along her coarse mane and dust rose from it. I did not recognize the animal. She likely belonged to another caravan and had been abandoned, like us.

  In the dimness I saw that her back bore the black cross of Bethlehem. I traced my fingers along this coloring and felt beneath it each individual knob of her spine. I wished I had an apple to give her, or a pear. I was overcome then by the melancholy that had been accumulating in me since I left Ohio. I wrapped my arms around the beast’s soft brown neck and wept. The jenny blinked her long-lashed glassy eye and began to walk. I, trail-weary and homesick and perhaps resigned to death, let her pull me along, stumbling and wetting her mange with my tears.

  We walked together through sand and scrub and rock for I knew not how long. We crested a hill and then another. And then the old girl stopped. Before us, quaking in the m
oonlight, was the giant spherical head of a cottonwood. It was the first tree I had seen in seven hundred miles.

  I ran down the hill to the tree, stumbling, and fell finally at its raised roots. Beside the cottonwood was a stream, icy and clear. I drank from it, drank and drank and drank. The water soon returned some of my faculties and I turned to account for the burro. She stood, miraculously, on the hill where I left her.

  I retrieved her and we both drank. As the sun rose I rode the old girl back to the wagon, calling, Hullo, hullo, to Errol. The look on his face suggested he thought us a mirage, and indeed when I drew near he reached up and touched my jaw, lightly. The jenny and I led him to the cottonwood, a warm wind at our three faces. Errol took a bit of the stream in his hand. “It’s meltwater,” he said.

  Errol wanted to set out that day but it was the Sabbath, and he surprised me by agreeing to observe it, which we had not done but once the entire journey. So Errol sat drinking beside the crick and I spoke a service, the first of my life. I knew then that the Word was my calling, but knew as well that it was too late to follow.

  At dawn we loaded the jenny with our supplies and those which the others had not been able to carry. That same curiously warm chinook was with us as we followed the stream into the hills, where it branched from a mountain river throbbing with snowmelt. The river led us through the Sierra Nevada, and we spent some threatening cold days in those mountains, our burro growing so weak that we were forced to discard nearly all her load, save for the meagerest provisions and two books—the Bible and The Odyssey—which I insisted on keeping with me always.

  Finally, she bore us to the diggings. I recall the moment we crested the last ridge on our journey. It was dusk, and lightning bugs blinked among the shrubs. I cleaned my spectacles and saw then that they were no insects but the fires of the goldfields, strung along the foothills below us. We howled in joy and exhaustion. I knelt, and asked Errol to do the same. I spoke a prayer of thanks to God and to the rescuing she-ass He’d sent us. Errol, blasphemer that he was, spoke a prayer of thanks to me.