Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  But nothing came there. He wondered if his own rank odor had driven game away, or whether this region lacked game entirely. When it grew too dark to make meat he retreated to his horse and rode quietly down to the trail, where Victoria would be waiting for him. He felt faint with hunger and miserable with defeat.

  He found her and the dog at a tiny marsh-lined pond well ahead. She had an animal hanging from a limb and was butchering it slowly, with the ancient spearhead, a hard and miserable task, while the dog lay waiting.

  Amazed, he unsaddled and picketed the horse beside hers.

  “How?” he asked.

  She nodded toward the dog. “He brought it. Dragged it. Yearling red deer. I have never seen a red deer.”

  The deer’s windpipe had been mangled.

  The dog, again.

  He gathered firewood, which lay abundantly about this tiny marsh area, and slowly peeled shreds of dry bark until he had a small pile. Then he gathered small sticks, broke them into fragments that would catch easily. And then he pulled the big pistol from his waist and studied it. He had no worm or other means to disarm it, but he worked powder out of the pan and hoped that would do. Then he nestled a cottony bit of tinder below the frizzen, cocked the flintlock, and squeezed, aiming the weapon away from camp. It didn’t fire, but neither did the rain of sparks, as flint struck steel, ignite his tinder. Five attempts later, using various bits of tinder, he was able to transfer a few glowing embers into the little mouse-nest of tinder on the ground, and blew gently upon it. In a few minutes he had a flame. In an hour they had cooked meat.

  The yellow dog ate first and best, and settled into a supine languor.

  That evening they continued to butcher and cook the meat until they had roasted it all. They ate the whole while against the starvation to come, feeding bits to the dog, which soon surfeited itself and settled into a nap. Skye watched the skies restlessly. This was November, the monsoon season in this Mexican province, and his small family had no shelter at all.

  He talked Victoria out of her petticoat, and wrapped the cooked meat in it and hung it high in a limb, fearing bear or wolves.

  He did not sleep. Their vulnerability worried him. He had the rifle for protection against predators or mortals, and for food. One shot. And yet he was glad. His mood had slowly risen, like yeasty dough, since fleeing Monterey.

  They made good progress the next day, seeing no one. But the following day, when the trail wound close to the great inland bay and away from the coastal mountains, they beheld traffic on the road. They passed coppery peasants with creaking ox-carts laden with hay or melons, and women bearing baskets on their heads, old people in black who were standing and staring at the world. They passed corrals and strings of burros and flower-bedecked graveyards.

  They had somehow left a dangerous wild behind and were approaching a more civilized country along the endless shore of a vast and shimmering freshwater sea. Skye traded the pistol for melons and beans and goat meat, and still had enough for an ancient flea-infested blanket.

  They exchanged cheerful greetings with all these warm-fleshed people, but beyond that they understood nothing and could not convey their slightest thoughts. They knew they were closely observed, and with great curiosity, especially by women and children. They realized that Skye’s stubbled face, torn and stained frock coat, and Victoria’s ripped and soiled skirts occasioned much clucking among the Mexicans. The Californios wore clean clothing, much of it snowy white, or black, or dove-colored leather, and numerous gaudy rings, bracelets, and necklaces made to glitter.

  The trail occasionally lifted them over majestic hills only to dump them into cloistered valleys verdant with waxy-leaved shrubs. But eventually it led past an ancient mission called Mission San Francisco de Asis, though the people didn’t call it that. Skye thought it had been named after some woman.

  But it was the first truly formidable building Victoria had ever seen, so he paused there and let her gape at this holy place of the Mexicans, and exclaim at the candles and gold and lovely images. She could not fathom the bleeding Christ, crowned with thorns, or why mortals knelt before him.

  “Sonofabitch,” she muttered, along with other imprecations. What sort of god was this? She began eyeing Skye suspiciously for signs of adherence to this strange belief.

  Late that afternoon, they reached the cold and misty village of Yerba Buena, chilled to the bone, and discovered a settlement of three or four hundred, and a grimy Yank brigantine bobbing lazily in the harbor, riding the ebb tide.

  thirty–eight

  Yerba Buena sprawled so widely that it gave the illusion of being larger than it was. But Skye swiftly discerned a thriving commercial port perched on the chill peninsula. Burros, dogs, chickens, hogs, and sheep rambled across the village. No Name eyed them carefully but did not contest the neighborhood. Seagulls perched on every roof. The tang of the sea lay in the fresh breeze, a clean scent as old and familiar to Skye as his own name. Old women in black shawls hung on benches, and old men in dark woolen homespuns lounged in the feeble sun.

  But it was the brigantine that captured Skye’s attention. Where was it headed? The Stars and Stripes stirred lazily from its mainmast. Stain had long since reduced its white hull to a patched tan and brown. The grimy sails had been furled slovenly, bulging loose on every spar. Skye looked in vain for a name. A fine spread eagle, gilded and fierce, decorated its stern. Once it had been a proud ship. Now it probably hauled stinking seal pelts to New England.

  He saw no one aboard, but a grubby longboat was moored to a small wharf on the waterfront that extended just far enough to keep a small boat afloat at low tide.

  “I want to book passage if it’s going north,” Skye said to Victoria.

  “I don’t like that big canoe.”

  “It’s Yank. We’ll be safe enough.”

  “It’s a bandit ship. I am tired of bandits.”

  “No, just a coaster picking up sea otter and selling stuff from the East Coast.”

  “We have horses. Let’s walk on the earth.”

  “This is where we either catch that brig or get ferried across the water to the north side of the harbor.”

  “Let’s do that. We got horses.”

  “And nothing to live on.”

  She didn’t respond. He knew she was unhappy, tired of this long ordeal, and above all, homesick. He knew all about that malady. He had been homesick for years in the Royal Navy. The offer from Hudson’s Bay had wrought a whole new wave of homesickness. But the navy had cured that in Monterey.

  She was plenty homesick now, having seen a large chunk of the world beyond the foothill kingdom of the Absaroka people. The odd thing was, he was beginning to share her yearning, not for England but for her village, and maybe even the company of the Yank fur brigades. And for the great Rocky Mountains, where he had found himself, his manhood, his wife, and his liberty.

  “Victoria,” he said quietly, “we’ll go to the mountains and your people just as fast as we can. I miss them as much as you do.”

  She eyed him, this time with a certain wonder, and with an infinite trust. He saw that trust form in her face and smiled.

  “We’ll get there, and maybe in three moons be sitting in your father’s lodge.”

  He stirred his horse and they rode quietly along the waterfront, past obscure adobe buildings that looked abandoned but probably weren’t. A taberna near the dock beckoned. That would be the place of food and drink and most dockside transactions in Yerba Buena.

  They rode to the taberna and dismounted, hitching their reins to a rail. The dog settled smack under his horse, as if to prevent it from departing without him.

  Skye lacked so much as a shilling. He surveyed his dress ruefully. The sleeves of his frock coat were half-ripped from it, and the rear seam had come undone half up the back. The fabric had been hopelessly stained. His toes bulged through cracks in his boots. The battered beaver top hat now had a bullet hole through it. His shirt was vile. Weeks of stubble decorated h
is cheeks and his hair hung in strings. His nose had blistered in the California sun and looked like a red mountain between his small blue eyes.

  Victoria had managed to do better. Her dress hung limply without its petticoats, but she had somehow kept it relatively clean. The shawl had survived and hung loosely over her shoulders. But the rents in her skirts showed hard use, and her Vancouver-made slippers had virtually fallen apart. She wore her black hair braided, and it shone from the frequent washings she had given it, milking the stalks of yucca for a sort of soap. She was quite the lady, even if he looked the ruffian. Why was it that Indians could endure the wilds and look their best in it, while white men deteriorated the moment they were beyond the reach of civilization?

  No matter. He would try to find out about the brig, and about ferries that would take them and their animals across the amazing water gate that almost sliced California in two.

  He took her arm and escorted her into the taberna, carrying his rifle with him because he didn’t entrust it to the horse outside. The door hung on leather hinges, and the windows lacked glass, though they could be tightly shuttered in squalls.

  If anything, the place was colder than the village without.

  A Mexican man motioned him to an empty trestle table, but Skye resisted. He couldn’t afford a meal or a drink, as much as he pined for both. Instead, he studied the half dozen patrons, settling at last on a bearded Yank in the corner, sitting lazily over a mug of cerveza with a Californio. The master, probably, but there was no way of knowing. This one sported a beard such as Skye had never seen; it bulged outward like a sunburst, reaching his lap and haloing his face with a salt-and-pepper aura. The man’s mouth was not visible, and that orifice lay buried beneath a matt of stained hair.

  Skye doffed his top hat and approached.

  “You the master of that brig?”

  The man surveyed him. “Abner Dickens.”

  “Barnaby Skye, sir, and Victoria. Mr. Dickens, you headed north? I’m looking for passage for my wife and my dog and maybe one horse.”

  “That was my intent. But if my dickering with this gent here is successful, I’ll be heading around the horn.”

  The Mexican knew English and was following the exchange.

  “What would be your price?” Skye asked.

  “I don’t reckon I’d take your horse. Nuisance and a danger at sea. The rest of ye?” He studied Skye’s clothing. “How’ll ye pay me? In coin?”

  “We have to sell one or two horses here.”

  “Fat lot of money you’ll get. The last thing a Californio needs is another horse. Sit,” he said, nodding toward the bench.

  Skye and Victoria sat. The scent of cooked meat dizzied him, and the sight of good brandy on the wood table shot hungers through him.

  “I’d also sell the rifle if I have to.”

  “Fat chance of that. No one can afford one. Where do you want to go, exactly?”

  “Astoria, mouth of the Columbia.”

  “You willing to work?”

  “We both will work for passage.”

  “I’m short of men. Ship’s company down seven. Two scurvied and died off Chile. One ran into a whore’s stiletto. Four deserted, Callao, Diego … Can she cook?”

  Skye didn’t answer. He was having second thoughts. “Where are you bound?”

  “Sandwich Islands to get some Kanakas. Good seamen and cheap. But you need to keep a whip handy.”

  Skye knew that once he boarded that brig he’d not get off it until it reached its home port. He didn’t want to go to the Sandwich Islands. “Sorry, mate,” he said.

  “Mate? I thought so, Skye. You’ve shipped before. I could use a bosun.”

  Skye didn’t answer. He could not conceal his past even if he tried.

  “You’re an Englander,” the master said.

  “London,” Skye replied.

  “Long way from home,” Dickens said. “You hire on and I’ll take you and your lady to Boston and see to your passage across the Atlantic.”

  It stirred him. Passage to England. His dream fulfilled after all, but not on an HBC schooner. Passage to his father and sisters, and kin. That royal pardon, a good name. He sighed, and then felt Victoria stirring unhappily beside him.

  “No, thank you,” he said. He had already crossed that bridge and would never turn back.

  The master’s cordiality cooled, and Skye could almost hear the man thinking of ways to shanghai Skye and ditch the woman. He would be on his guard.

  “A thousand pardons, senor,” said the Mexican. “That fusil—that rifle. I know it. How did you get it?”

  Skye weighed an answer and decided to conceal nothing. Half truths and untruths never sat well with him. Silence was sometimes a refuge, but not deception. “It belonged to a bandit in a gang south of here,” he said. “Horses did, too.”

  “Sacramento del Diablo,” the man whispered. “How did you get this piece?”

  “That was the second bunch robbed us, and I got mad.”

  “Mad? Loco?”

  “Plenty loco.”

  The Mexican involuntarily made the sign of the cross. “And you live to tell of it. You were coming from Monterey, si, and that is the worst trail in California. Why you are alive I cannot imagine.”

  “How’d you know this rifle?”

  “It was stolen from my son, senor.”

  “They stole the rifle from him?”

  “After they killed him. That trail, it is infested with bandits. No one in his right mind goes by land; always by sea. I begged Andres not to go that way.”

  Skye sighed. “The rifle’s yours. I don’t want stolen property.”

  The man was touched. “A thousand thanks. Ask me any favor, senor. It is Carlos Sepulveda you address.”

  Skye considered. “We need to go to Fort Vancouver in Oregon. How can we outfit and do that?”

  Sepulveda shook his head. “It is too late by land, senor. The mountains to the north are impassible in the winter. Only by sea …”

  thirty–nine

  Skye didn’t like that news. This remote province of California was walled by alpine snow much of the year. Not until May could he escape it by land. He sat there, in the taberna, wondering what blow would strike next.

  “There is one way, senor, but it is arduous, si?” Carlos Sepulveda continued. “Sail south to San Diego. There one can take a wandering trail across arid wastes to the City of the Holy Faith in Nuevo Mejico, Santa Fe, and from there go north through fierce lands …”

  Skye nodded. He lacked the means, the patience, and the time. Fort Vancouver lay only a few hundred miles away; not two thousand.

  “I’ll take ye to Astoria, Skye, for wages,” Dickens said.

  “It’s Mister Skye, sir.”

  “Mister, is it? How do ye collect a gentleman’s title?”

  “Because I’m here in the New World, mate. For much of my life I had only a surname and never even a mister. All the officers called themselves mister or sir, but that didn’t apply to Barnaby Skye, who was pressed off the streets of Wapping, near the London dock, at the age of thirteen and held prisoner until he escaped here in this free land seven years later. Now I am called a deserter.

  “No one will ever take my freedom away again. They may capture me, but not alive, sir. My freedom is worth my life. Put me on a ship against my will, sir, and I’ll fight to death. Take me where I will not go and I’ll fight to the death. My freedom is worth my life. I spent all those years with no liberty, mostly a powder monkey and then an able seaman, living only to obey and avoid a flogging and given nothing for it but my gruel. That’s no life, sir. It’s living death. I was a brute, a beast of burden, to be reined and spurred and whipped, and tossed to the sharks if I did not bend to their will.”

  Dickens’ eyebrows arched.

  “So, a warning, sir. I am Mister Skye, not Skye. If you sail for the Sandwich Islands against my will, you’ll have a mutineer on your hands. If you’re as good as your word, you’ll have an able seaman,
working hard and true, and an able cook, working hard and true. It’s life or death for me, Mr. Dickens, and not all the whips of all your bosuns can subdue that.”

  Dickens stared. “I’ll take you up the coast. I’ve recruited two boys here, but they’re green. We’ll train them. I’ll do some trading for otter pelts along the way, and sell the last of my trade goods, so it makes sense. We’ll deliver you to Astoria and then head for the Sandwich Islands for some Kanakas. You and Mrs. Skye willing?”

  Skye studied the man. “Is that your bounden word, and are you good as your word, Mr. Dickens?”

  “I’ll oath it, Mister Skye. Upon my honor, we’ll go directly up the coast to Astoria.”

  “And release us, Victoria, my dog, and me, there?”

  “Upon my honor, sir.”

  Skye swallowed back the anxiety. “Then we’ll sign on. When do you pull anchor?”

  “First thing in the morning.”

  “Time for me to sell the horses and outfit, then. All right, Mr. Dickens, we’ll be waiting at that jetty at first light. You’ll not be disappointed.”

  “Far from it, Mister Skye.”

  They shook on it.

  The trader, Sepulveda, helped Skye that afternoon. One of the horses, unmarked, traded easily for ten reales. The other bore a brand no one would touch, and the Mexican finally agreed to drive it out of town and abandon it.

  Skye bought worn blankets and two knives with nine of the reales; a supper and shelter on the floor of the taberna with the last. A blanket and knife apiece from Sepulveda. He threw in some cowhide and thong and an awl as well. Victoria smiled. A blanket and a knife was treasure. And she could resole his boots and make herself some moccasins.

  The next dawn they waited in the chill while Dickens’ crew rowed a longboat to shore. Along side them were two solemn Mexican youths, one of them accompanied by his father. The boys looked frightened and ready to bolt.