Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  It was then that we noticed that from the mob grew a tail of men. There were too many men to approach the coach at once, and we weaklings had been dispatched to wait in line. We followed this tail through town and out of it, finding its end finally in the woods, behind two Mexicans.

  We stood in line for half a day. By the time we came back in view of the coach, emotions had reached the breaking point. Full-grown rough-and-tumbles shouted their names up to the driver and trembled while he searched his bunch. Men who had no letter waiting—and these were the majority—cursed their wives or friends or family for forgetting them. Some desperate fellows offered the coachman flakes in exchange for a missive, as if one might be conjured for the right price. But this was the one place in California where color held no sway.

  Very occasionally I watched the coachman pluck a dirty, tattered envelope from his stack and hand it down. The coarse men nearest the coach took the letter as delicately as they might a baby and passed it among them until it reached its rightful owner. As the lucky man opened the letter the others moved away, as if to make room for his reading.

  As we neared the coach we spotted the Southern ruffian sitting on a log, holding a letter gingerly between his massive hands. His beard was wet with tears. “Happy devil,” Errol said.

  By the time Errol and I approached, the deliveryman’s bundle had become terribly thin.

  “Boyle,” Errol shouted, although it was not quite our turn. “Letter for Boyle?”

  The coachman, who had by now taken a seat on the edge of the cab roof, searched his skinny bundle. It did not take long. “No letter,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” said Errol. But the man had already solicited the next eager miner.

  “Please, sir,” I called out. “Check again. The name’s Boyle. Errol. Or Joshua.”

  The coachman did check again, God bless him. “Apologies, my boy. Maybe next time.”

  I set out in the direction of the river. Errol did not follow me. When I turned, he was standing in the middle of Main Street, which at the time was nothing more than a dirt thoroughfare. His face was blank and he stared at the ground between us. His hands were upturned queerly, as though he carried a burden I could not see.

  “Suppose I’ll stay in town a bit,” he said.

  “And do what?” I said. But he was already shuffling toward the tavern.

  “Forget her,” I called. “She puts on airs.”

  He came at me swinging to heaven, and struck me once upside the head with a tight, demonic fist. I collapsed, hiding my head beneath my arms. I thought he would strike me again where I lay, but instead he said only, “Don’t.”

  IX. BEASTS OF THE TERRITORY

  I panned our claim halfheartedly and alone for what remained of that day, palming secretly the tender knob on my skull. By dusk Errol had not returned. I watched the sunset, gnawing on a rind of salt pork and listening to the heartsick yowls of drunken forty-niners. Errol was somewhere among them, I knew, blubbering about Marjorie. I cursed him. How my body complained, how my stomach wanted, how close we had both come to death how many times so he might win the good favor of a girl whose father owned a stinking soap factory!

  I found his pitiful notching stick and snapped it, then snapped it again. I threw the pieces into the fire. One thing I learned from the diggings is that a love of destruction is in every man’s heart, somewhere.

  As darkness thickened, my thoughts went to my father. It had been nearly a year since his death and I had nothing of his to touch. I was in a wilderness where he had never set foot, where his spirit would not even know to look for me. I tried to remember everything I could about him. Anything. My freakish mind could conjure up sketches of the future but none of my father’s features, not the smell or feel of him. I cried, a little.

  I tried to go to bed early but the groans and rustlings of night turned sinister, if not in actuality then in my imagination. I became afraid. I rose and dressed and walked without thinking down the moist bank, to the Chinamen’s camp.

  The man and boy sat across their fire from each other as I approached, not speaking. Their hats were off and their heads—bald and yellow save for the thick tuft of bound hair at their napes—glowed in the firelight. There was something peaceful in their silence, and their fire was large and warm. The boy saw me first and startled. The man turned slowly, and I saw him reach for a switch at his side.

  “I’m unarmed,” I said, and raised my empty hands. They spoke in their language for a bit. It seemed they were trying to decipher why I’d come, or perhaps I ascribed those aims to them because I was wondering myself. Eventually the man gestured for me to sit between them.

  “Cold out,” I said, though it wasn’t particularly. They said nothing. “Have you all been hearing those hollers?” I asked. Still, they said nothing. We watched the fire. After some time a pocket of sap popped loudly and I jumped like a Mexican bean. The elder man seemed to find this exceedingly funny. When he was through laughing, he said something to me in his language.

  “He say you get a letter,” said the boy.

  “No,” I said. “Not today.”

  He told his father.

  “Sad,” said the boy. He was only a child, I saw then, younger than I had originally estimated, but with a sharpness about the eyes that conveyed sure ripsniptiousness.

  “Yes,” I said.

  A man yelped somewhere.

  I felt the need to tell him that I didn’t care for drink and the boy found this remarkable enough to relay to his father, who nodded what seemed like approval. We were quiet a little longer.

  “Say,” I said to the boy. “Can I ask you something?”

  He nodded.

  “Why have you both been following us the way you have? Why not find a claim of your own? Seems a fool’s strategy to mine what’s already been mined, if you will excuse my saying so.”

  The child conveyed my question to his father. They exchanged words for what seemed a good long time. I grew nervous and said, “Tell him never mind.”

  But the boy waved his thin hand in dismissal. Finally, he turned to me. “He say too many tongs killed that way.”

  “Which?”

  “Like you say. Find own claim.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He say you find lode, men happy.” He pointed to me and then to the river. “Tong find lode men say ‘steal.’ They say ‘hang.’”

  The old man spoke again, and the boy’s gaze went to the ground.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  The boy looked at me. “He say to tell you my father hang that way.”

  “He’s not your papa?” I said, gesturing to the Chinaman. “Your father, I mean.”

  “He shu fu,” said the boy. “Uncle.”

  So we sat, two fatherless boys, two brotherless men. We watched the fire a little longer. I thought it was perhaps time for me to go, and that I should not have come at all.

  Just then the elder Chinaman spoke to the boy. In turn the boy fetched a long wooden box from the tent and delivered it to his uncle. The box had been polished up nicely and gleamed in the firelight. The Chinaman removed the carved lid and lifted a long tubular object from the box. Initially I thought the apparatus was a flute or some similar musical instrument of the Orient. The stem of it seemed to be made of a lightwood and the lower portion had been adorned with a saddle of stamped brass. On this saddle was mounted a delicately grooved bulb made of earthenware, the top hemisphere of which the Chinaman presently removed.

  From the wooden box he lifted what looked like a lady’s perfume bottle and deposited some of its coalish black dust into the bulb’s tiny compartment. At that point it occurred to me that the device was a type of smoking pipe.

  The Chinaman reattached the bulb’s lid, then bent and pulled a branch from the fire by its unburne
d end. The lit end of the stick flickered wickishly. He held the branch in one hand and the pipe in the other and tilted the pipe so the flame rippled around the bulb. He puffed there for some time before offering it to me.

  My father had been a tobacco smoker. He especially liked his pipe late at night, on the back steps. In this way the Chinaman evoked some of the memories I had been longing for. I took the apparatus. The Chinaman held the stick to the bulb and said something.

  “He say breathe,” said the boy. He tapped his own breastbone. “Breathe here.”

  The apparatus was heavier than I had imagined, and had a fine, sturdy feel. I wiped the fluted end, put my lips to it and felt that the cylinder was made not of lightwood but of ivory. I puffed as the Chinaman had and he made sounds that I interpreted as encouragement. I took what felt like a chestful and immediately my lungs revolted, setting off a great avalanche of coughs. The Chinaman laughed at this, too.

  I returned the pipe and I watched the old man at it. At this proximity I could see the many wrinkles like folds at his small eyes and around his mouth. He finished his puffing and smiled. His teeth were brown and soft with rot. I tried the pipe again, with more success. He took his pigtail in his hand and brushed its end on his own palm. The boy did the same. I had a good feeling from them.

  “But how do you make a living, working tailings the way you do?” I said.

  The nephew smiled a devious little smile. “I find smallest gold,” he said. “Smallest and smallest. I see things white men do not.”

  I sat with them for some time, accepting and passing the ivory instrument and listening to the two talk. Sometimes, the boy would pause to translate some of their conversation for me:

  “He say winter no trouble in Gum Shan.”

  “He say take much care with ball of mud.”

  “He say tong war coming.”

  I did not understand what the old man meant by these, but that didn’t matter. I was very warm and now pleasantly drowsy, as though I had been submerged slowly into a hot bath. I removed my glasses and held them in my hand, content to watch the blur of the fire and listen. Their language seemed a beautiful thing, something I ought to have understood.

  And then the elder Chinaman began to sing.

  At first he sang so softly that I wasn’t sure his song wasn’t something I was imagining, a trick of the fire and the river. But then the boy joined in and they raised their voices together. They sounded like instruments, their voices. I thought nothing of Errol, except to note that I felt more at ease now than I had since setting foot aboard that steamer in Cincinnati. And though the two sang in their Orient language I knew by way of feeling that their song was about fleas and lice and vultures and blue jays and marmots and coons and cougars and grizzly bears, and through their soothing melody all these once frightful and malevolent creatures streamed into my heart as though it were Noah’s, and nested there harmoniously.

  X. AN OPHIR, AN EDEN

  I was awoken by my own sickness. It was morning and though I had no recollection of returning to my camp nor of putting myself to bed, I lay with my torso in the tent, shirtless. I managed to rise and express my queasiness in a nearby manzanita bush. Only after I rose did I see Errol.

  He lay faceup between the tent and the river, where he’d made a pillow of a stone. He was barefooted, bareheaded and bare-legged. His shirt was the only clothes upon his person. A pile of maple leaves had been assembled and arranged to conceal his parts. As I washed myself in the chilly river he woke, groaning.

  Errol walked into the woods and emerged sometime later, dressed. “I’ve misplaced my long johns,” he said.

  “That is a shame,” I said. “Because we’ve no means to replace them.” I felt in no top shape myself but was not about to betray the fact to my brother. He came and looked at the salt pork I was fixing and groaned again. He smelled strongly of tanglelegs.

  That morning we two worked at the cradle just as inefficiently as ever. The only difference was that Errol silently took up the harder work at the shovel. We did not speak. Near noon he paused in his ditching, nodded to my head and said, “See here, Joshua. I apologize for that. I do. Will you just speak to me again?”

  “Will you consider taking them on?” My question surprised me.

  “They’re filthy,” he said with a wave of his hand.

  “We’re filthy,” I said. “We’ve got a city of slows on each our heads. You’ve got no long johns.”

  He spit.

  “We need them, Errol. All the Negroes are free. All the Indians are owned. This is a new place, Errol. They work hard and they’re honest. We are Argonauts. Christians. We needn’t bring the prejudices of the East with us.”

  “Argonauts,” Errol said. “You’ve got a good heart, brother.”

  “We won’t have to pay them as we would a white.”

  Errol said nothing.

  “They work like dogs. They’ve been pulling dust from our old holes.”

  This caught my brother’s attention. “Have they?”

  “The boy has a keen eye.”

  “And how did you come by all this? Been over there, have you?”

  “No.” It was easier to lie to him now, after the first. I was thrilled by how easy it was. “I’ve seen it.”

  Errol’s face brightened. “You’re sure about this?”

  I ought to have hesitated from guilt. But it felt good to be heeded, and to be making decisions for once. “They’re there, with us.” I closed my eyes. “The boy pulls a nugget.”

  He deliberated a moment, then said, “They get fifteen percent of our findings between them. They don’t sleep in our camp. They don’t socialize with us.”

  “Agreed.” I was relieved, though by logic I shouldn’t have been. All I’d done was recruit men enough to better sift through rock that could very well yield nothing. But perhaps I’d come to believe my lies, too. If nothing else, I believed that if only we could stay in one place long enough, California would offer herself to us. And I liked the Chinaman. I liked his boy.

  “And they don’t eat with us,” Errol added. “I’ll gut them if they try to eat with us.”

  “Agreed,” I said. I did not ask who in the world would want to join us for our twice-daily pork sludge.

  I brokered our new arrangement through the boy. They seemed at first not to understand the proposal, but then I took them over to where Errol stood at the cradle, shoveling a load of river rock into the hopper and then doing his best to pour water over the apron and rock the mud down the riffles at the same time. At such a pathetic sight, apparently, they immediately grasped the proposed cooperation. I was less confident in my ability to explain the proposed financial terms, but they seemed to accept the fifteen percent without comment. I wonder now if they believed they had no choice.

  My brother remained silent until the conversation was over. Then he handed the Chinaman the shovel.

  The arrangement worked well—the Chinaman on the shovel, me on the bucket, Errol on the rocker, and the boy at the sluice, to spot color. Errol grumbled that the boy was lollygagging there and ought to be hauling pay dirt. I reminded him of the boy’s sharp eyes, to which he made a vulgar remark that I will not transcribe. I am sad to say that my brother routinely unleashed the heat of his character on our Chinamen during those days. He forbade them from speaking to each other in their language. He prohibited them from donning their straw hats and insisted their robes be cinched up tightly. It was not uncommon for foreigners or Negroes to be treated so cruelly, even in Ohio. But it seemed a particular injustice in the territory, because it was a place brand-new, like nothing we had ever seen, far from the achievements of civilization but also from its ugliness. California was an Ophir, not an Eden.

  For two days a pair of old Pikes passing through camped near our claim. With them as audience, Errol strode over to the
boy one afternoon and began tugging at his robes. “Where is it?” he shouted. He turned to me. “He’s pocketed a nugget. I saw him. Hand it over, you devil.”

  The Chinaman stopped his shoveling. The boy, fairly shaken, denied taking anything.

  “Turn out your pockets,” demanded Errol.

  “He has none,” I said. It was the truth and Errol knew it was. Still, he pilfered the folds of the boy’s robe saying, Dirty thief, stinking tong. The Chinaman moved cautiously closer to Errol and the boy.

  Suddenly Errol whirled around, red faced, and pounced on the Chinaman. He drew his knife and took hold of the man’s black pigtail.

  I was quite frightened, and the boy was by now hysteric. But the Chinaman was still. Errol put the knife to the pigtail and spoke into the man’s sun-scarred face. “Are you a citizen of California or not?” he asked.

  “He can’t understand you,” I called, trying to remain calm. “Let him be.”

  Errol released the Chinaman as quickly as he’d grabbed him. He returned to the sluice as if it had all been a great tease, the Pikes up the bank snarling with laughter. But it was no tease. I had heard rumors out of Hangtown of three tongs hung by their pigtails from a tree, their throats slit.

  XI. THE FORTUNE FORETOLD

  Despite Errol’s occasional volatility, the boy was soon pulling color from the sluice. It was chispa so small and aggregated that no white man would have ever dug it, and Errol said as much—but it was gold all the same. I directed the boy to deposit his findings in our mustard jar. In this way, little by little, day by day, we did accumulate some dust. Errol went to town whenever he had the chance, where he spent his share on card games and spirit. I spent my share on provisions. One Sabbath I had pork and beans. Another, while Errol was away, the Chinamen and I had secret roast beef and potatoes. That rump could have been the toughest, most befouled muscle ever served a man, but to my starved tongue it was gravy-slopped ambrosia.

  Then, the day of the first frost, the boy approached Errol and without celebration presented him a grape-size yellow nugget, cool with river water.