Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  My brother did not immediately take the nugget, as I’d always imagined he would. Instead, he leaped to embrace me, taking a long, affectionate look into my anomalous, all-seeing eyes.

  After some celebration, Errol spirited the nugget into the tent, pounded it carefully to test for softness, distributed a petal of the malleable color to the Chinamen and a larger leaf to me. Pinching it, I was besieged by fantasies of sardines, tongue, turtle soup, lobster, cakes and pies by the cartful, a box of juicy golden peaches. Unsettling, how swiftly a tiny bead of element could enchant.

  Errol instructed us all to continue. “More will come,” he called out merrily, barely containing his urge to wink at me. And it seemed more would come, the day we found our nugget, the day my brother’s infinite faith intersected with coincidence, the day of the first frost.

  XII. WAR!

  Two days later, Errol appeared by my side late one morning and said, “There’s something I want you to see.”

  My brother fidgeted with his hands in his pockets excitedly as I followed him to Angel’s Camp. “What is it?” I asked several times. His only reply was, “Something you’ll have to see to believe.” We passed the Swede’s and continued down a small hill to where a glade flattened out. Many men were gathered there and my heart picked up some, with fantasies of a second mail coach or a bundle of letters lost and now found. But near the crowd Errol halted and tapped a poster nailed to the trunk of a pine:

  WAR! WAR! WAR!

  The celebrated Bull-killing Bear

  GENERAL SCOTT

  Will fight a Bull on Sunday the 15th at 12 p.m.

  at Tuolumne Meadow.

  The Bull will be perfectly wild, young, of the Spanish breed

  the best that can be found in the country.

  The Bull’s horns will be of their natural length

  NOT Sawed or Filed

  —

  Admission is $6 or one-half ounce

  I had heard of Spaniards hosting contests of men versus bulls and the prospect of witnessing this even higher spectacle excited me. Errol and I hustled nearer the arena, which was composed of tiered seats enclosed by a wood slat fence. We could not see inside. Near the entrance two fiddlers played a lively tune, and a barker lured men by extolling the ferocity of the grizzly General Scott and the virility of the Mexican bull, whom he called Señor Cortés, much to the delight of the forty-niners.

  But heavy as my pocket was, the entrance fee was prohibitive. As Errol continued to the arena I called after him, “That’s a costly admission.”

  “I knew you would say that,” he said. “Follow me, cheapskate.”

  I pursued him to the rear of the corral where a crab apple stood, its fruit already fallen and rotting in the grass. He climbed near to the top of the tree, then helped me up. From there we were afforded a splendid view of the arena.

  “Look there,” said Errol, pointing to the clearing at its center. “Your foe.” There, tethered by a chain staked into the ground, was a massive grizzly bear. He scratched and scooped at the earth, his great scapulas moving like the machinery of a steam engine. He was carving a burrow for himself, it seemed. Even from our great distance we could see the thick neck shimmering, the monstrous hump at his back swaying, his knifelike claws making shreds of the meadow and the hard-packed soil. I both wished him to roar and feared that he would.

  “Now that you’ve seen one you’ll be less afraid,” said Errol. I swelled with affection for him then, for I had not thought he’d noticed my fears. This was how I wanted us to be, always.

  The barker was riling the crowd, playing on their terror. I scanned the bronzed and bearded faces under hats of many hues, the gay Mexican blankets and the blue and red bonnets of the French. Among all those like mirages were Mexican women in frilly white frocks, puffing on their cigaritas. Until then I had ever conceived that my wife would be a Buckeye, or perhaps a New Englander. But from where I was perched in that crab apple tree it seemed impossible to choose a bony, board-shaped descendant of the Puritans over one of these rosy, full-formed, sprightly Spaniard women.

  Errol said, uncannily, “I’ll marry Marjorie in a meadow like this. Beneath a tree.”

  “I expect so,” I managed.

  “I’ll marry her here; then I will build us a great big house on the same spot. Soon, Angel’s Camp will be bigger than San Francisco. I’ll have more land than Sutter. I’ll buy the Swede’s store out from under him. Mr. Salter will have to buy a parcel from me. No.” Glee flickered across his face. “I’ll give him one.”

  Errol’s gaze cast out from the tree, across the corral and the meadow and beyond. “Marj and I will have sons enough to line the American River. You’ll be there, too. An uncle.”

  It touched me to be included like this, in both the fight and the fantasy. “And Mother,” I said.

  “Yes, Mother, too. And Mary and Harriet and Faith and Louisa, too. Everyone.”

  Then we were quiet, because we knew it would not be everyone.

  By now the action below was nearly afoot. The bear General Scott had achieved a burrow several hands deep and presently he lumbered into it and lay there on his back, much in the manner of a happy baby. The crowd hated him for his merriment and screamed for the release of the bull. They stomped an infectious rhythm. Errol and I thumped the branches of our tree, too.

  From the far end of the arena came a large, muscular bull, with horns like none I had ever seen. The crowd went mute.

  “Here we go,” whispered Errol.

  “Are they going to unchain the bear?” I asked. Errol hushed me.

  Initially, the bull seemed not even to notice the bear, so one of the vaqueros jabbed the bull in the rump with a prod, sending the beast galloping from the periphery. This was when he locked eyes on the bear. He stomped and snorted a bit, and then charged General Scott where he lay in his den. I gripped my limb as the bull struck the General in his flank, sending a frightful thunk through the meadowland. A cheer escaped from the crowd.

  The bull retreated and immediately charged again. But this time the bear affixed his powerful jaws to the bull’s nose. The bull let out an unsettling cry. But the General would not relent. He latched his forepaws around the bull’s thick neck and held on. I whooped, and in so doing discovered my allegiance lay with the bear General Scott.

  The bull attempted to free himself by pounding the General’s chest with his mighty hooves. In response, the General dug his foreclaws into the meat of the bull’s brawny shoulder. Blood spurted, and Errol and I both cheered. The animals separated. Where the bull’s nose had been was now only a dark cavity from which dangled stringy bloodpulp. “My,” I breathed.

  Errol said, “Aren’t you a delicate betty?”

  The bull paused, then charged again, only to be locked by the General’s devastating, traplike hug. The match went on like this, with the bull trying to hook the General and toss him out of his hole, the General gripping his antagonist and attempting to pull him down to where the bull might be ribboned. The crowd soon grew restless and booed the flagging bull. The impresario emerged, waving his hat, and announced that for two hundred dollars in gold he would release another bull. The hat was passed and the flakes raised. I heard some miners accuse the barker of saving his strongest bull to squeeze more color from them, and when the second bull was released I saw that it was likely true, for this bull stood half a rod taller than the first. His horns were twice as girthy and appeared to have been sharpened.

  “Oh,” said Errol, some trepidation in his voice.

  With both bulls in the arena, General Scott was sorely tried. The first and smaller bull continued with his strategy of charging the grizzly and grappling with him, while the second bull attacked from the side. Soon the larger, nameless bull speared the General in his ribs and dragged him from his hole. The grizzly roared then, his long, blood-cover
ed teeth gleaming in the November sun. It was a forlorn, haunting sound, not at all the monstrous bellow I had yearned for at the battle’s onset.

  Errol had gone quiet. His hand was drawn to his mouth, as was mine.

  Exposed in the grassy open, the bear was a pincushion. Horns penetrated his abdomen, his ribs, his haunches and his back. One goring went into his throat and out the other side. Another stabbed his stomach and sliced up and out near the sternum, letting the bear’s guts spill onto the grass. A hot fecal smell filled the air, causing the ladies to bring their kerchiefs to their mouths. There seemed no end to the blood that would spurt from this beast. Soon all the meadowland was wet with it.

  The crowd had gone quiet and still, transfixed by the carnage. Finally the impresario directed his vaqueros to lasso the bulls and bring them in. He marched to the center of the arena, where General Scott lay grunting and gurgling in the mud made by his own innards, and declared the bulls the victors of the day. Without warning, he shot the General dead.

  The mob slowly shuffled from the arena, no uproar or gaiety left in them. The fiddlers held their fiddle cases to their chests. Errol and I stayed unmoving at our branch perch for just a bit, the vinegar smell from the rotten apples rising all around us. When we finally climbed down, the descent reminded me of how high my spirits had been upon climbing into the tree, and how low they were now.

  As we walked it began to rain and we went on, letting the rain get us. Somewhere, I thought, those señoritas are running with their lovely white dresses gathered in their hands.

  After some time Errol said, “I believe that was a spectacle I would have rather prevented than witnessed.”

  “Me, too,” I told him, and we went on in silence.

  It had been easy to succumb to my own deceptions while eating plum duff and roast beef in the sunlight. But now they were suddenly undeniable. We were returning to a ten-by-ten plot of land which I had deceived my brother into believing held his fortune. All my brother had accumulated in California was a gambler’s thirst and some salty talk. I was a liar, a manipulator and a freak.

  I said, “You should marry her in a church.”

  “Don’t you know?” Errol said. The rain had stopped now, leaving all the leaves and the soil wet and fragrant and colored vividly. “This is the greatest church there is.”

  XIII. ORACLE BONES

  I had promised that more gold would come but more gold would not come, and after that mournful battle Errol was sick with expectation. He went to town whenever he had the chance, where he spent his share of element on card games and brandy and tarantula juice.

  With him gone I spent more time with the Chinamen. The little one was an ace with a rock and it was one of my favorite pastimes to skip stones across the river with him. Sometimes we three whittled miniature boats to race on the water. The elder carved using a small blade with a milky jade handle the exact color of the river at dawn. His ships were the most graceful and well designed. Some of the happiest hours of my life were spent after a whiff or two off the Chinaman’s ivory pipe, watching those moonlit vessels spear along the nighttime water and vanish into the darkness.

  Some evenings the tongs took turns shaving each other’s heads with the jade knife while I read aloud from the two volumes I had to my name. (The tongs preferred Odysseus to Christ.) One night the boy interrupted my reading to ask whether I might teach him. I was a frightful tutor, I fear, but his sharpness hid my inadequacies and soon he had memorized Homer’s first song. Muse! sing the Man by long experience tried, /Who, fertile in resources, wander’d wide. He orated to his uncle, with the old one smiling dutifully, as though he understood every fine word.

  One day the boy snared a deer, and that evening we sat smoking and pulling greasy venison from the spit. Full of roast meat and smoke, I found myself going on and on. I talked mostly of Errol, of the darkness I saw in him and the light I saw in him, too. Of my fear of what would become of him in the territory without me. Then, without thinking, I said to the boy, “I have peculiar vision, too. Like you at the sluice. I can see what’s not yet happened. It’s a condition I have. A deformity.”

  He translated this to his uncle, who paused at his venison shank, sifted another thatch of black powder into the bowl, and handed it to me. As I took it, he spoke through the boy.

  He said, “There are many people see in all directions. At home, seers set bones in fire, read future in the cracks. These men are . . .” The boy searched for the appropriate word, settling finally for two. “A gift.”

  Something went through me then: a phantasm that warmed me, physically. The sensation of truly belonging in a place and a moment is a rare one. I have not felt it since.

  The Chinaman had contentedly taken up his venison again. I must have gaped at it for some time, because the boy leaned toward me. “Wrong bone.”

  Errol never asked what I did when he was away, and I never told him. I grew more content, and he became more wretched. Often he would stay in some parlor or another until dawn, then walk the three miles back to the river and take up his post at the rocker, emitting a stench that could have felled a man at sixty rod. By now our silt had given way to orangey clay, then black rock. Each day Errol looked more deranged. This was the state of things when the second stagecoach came.

  XIV. THE SECOND COACH

  We heard the news from a man who hollered it across the diggings. Errol stopped his rocking, rinsed his soiled hands and face in the river, replaced his hat, and said, “I have a letter to retrieve.” Then he set off without a word.

  The tongs continued their digging and sifting. The old man was wary of large gatherings, and rightfully so. Forty-niners were a volatile bunch of drunkards and criminals, especially with their sentiments roused. And nothing so roused them as a mail coach.

  I had to follow Errol. I had the sense that my brother stood at a crevasse, that the vellum keeping him on this side was as thin as a sheet of Marjorie Salter’s stationery.

  The stagecoach had stopped beneath the arms of a giant, leafless valley oak, and men were already gathered around it. Suddenly, I felt a pressing at my brow. The arrangement of the bare branches’ veiny shadows along the side and top of the coach and the dusty pool of men’s hats beneath it sent forth an augury. I saw from the beginning how the end would be. I saw Errol approach the coach, and saw him fail to receive the letter he so anxiously wanted. I pressed my hand to my forehead but took it away before my brother should notice.

  The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.

  At that moment I traveled down a long-forgotten tunnel of memory. At the end of the tunnel I found a cat. When I was nine or so, Errol twelve or thirteen, our mother let us feed a litter of barn cats. There was one for each of us children. Mine was white, with gray boots and gray, eyebrowlike markings. I called her Isabel, because I thought Isabel was the soundest name for a cat that ever there was. Errol called her Eyeballs, probably because she was a touch bulge-eyed. Each time I said Isabel—when I fed her or just when I went out to be with her—Errol would be right there, saying Eyeballs, Eyeballs. I can still hear him. And lo, the family started calling her Eyeballs, too. People took to Errol like that, even our own parents. He had a way of making you love him even while he was being cruel. I don’t know why, but I think we could have been all right, Errol and I; I could have put up with his temper and his beating on me and the way he’d get quiet and mean at the smallest thing bothering him. I think I could have forgiven him all this, could have been on good terms with him come December of 1849, when we rounded the glade and saw the coach spidered with the shadows of oak limbs. I could have warned Errol of the heartbreak I saw at the coach, and maybe he would have been better able to accept it. Maybe not, but maybe so. Maybe we would not have been plunged down the dark path we were on. If only I had spoken up. If only he had let Isabel be Isabel.

 
And so I stood in line watching Errol worry the brim of his hat and squatting on occasion to sift some dirt through his fingers or toss pebbles. When at last we reached the coachman Errol nudged me to indicate that I should call our name, maybe out of secret superstition or because his voice had gone with nerves. I showed surprise at the gesture, though of course I had none.

  “Boyle,” I called. The coachman checked his bundle.

  “Here,” he said, passing down a lovely vanilla-colored envelope. I reached to receive it but Errol snatched it from the driver. His hands trembled as his large fingers carefully negotiated the letter from its paper case. He was smiling. It had been a long time since I had seen him smile. Then, nearly the instant he unfolded the paper, he dropped it to the ground, where our two pairs of boots faced each other. I retrieved the letter as Errol walked away from me. My dear sons, it began, as I knew it would.

  From there I was back in the realm of the unafflicted, where we cannot know what will come next. I expected Errol to embark on another binge, and I braced myself for it. But he set out in the direction of the river instead and I followed, losing myself in reading our mother’s letter as I went. I had never been so delighted to hear of my sisters’ schoolwork or the comings and goings of livestock. I read and reread it all the way back to camp. December had crisped the air pleasantly, and the day was beautiful.

  XV. THE DIGGING

  That afternoon, Errol resumed his post at the rocker. His working did not soothe me. The Chinamen gave him a wide berth. Come sundown, the hour when we usually retired, Errol stayed at the rocker. I dismissed the tongs and stayed with him, clumsily shoveling and rinsing. I thought hard work might cleanse him of heartbreak and was happy to keep him in ore, if that would do it. But soon it grew so dark that there was no chance that Errol could determine the character of the sediment coming down the sluice. And anyway he was looking not at the sluice but at the stars.