Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  We enacted a simple life and daydreamed about it, but the moment we took these daydreams seriously we were confronted by enormous obstacles, mostly of my making. He would have had us leave California and start a life fresh somewhere else—in Oregon, perhaps, or Australia. He would give Agnes the house, and she could stay in it or sell it, as she pleased. She had told him many times that he was free to go, she could get on without him; he would take her at her word. Naturally, wherever we went, we would start out poor; we couldn’t live on the money I had amassed by helping young girls destroy themselves. My fortune must be given to charity.

  I did not like to argue with him, but it was all impossible. He was wrong about himself if he thought that, with his overactive conscience, he could leave Agnes, now so fragile, to make her own way. As for me, surely he knew better, and it was thoughtless of him to make me say it: I could never do what he proposed. It suited me to be a madam. I did not envision stopping. If I did stop, I would keep my fortune. I would never willingly become helpless again, unable to assist my friends and hurt my enemies. I wanted, one day, to be an influence in Frank’s life. I would need money for that.

  Besides, I had Jeptha, the man I had loved since I was a child—loved not in friendship and kindness, as with Charley, but through and through, down to the soles of my feet, with my heart and my womb and everything. He was here with me. It was not perfect, to be sure, but the life he had in mind would not have been perfect, either. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too, and it seemed to me that I could.

  I would tell him, “We shouldn’t waste our time arguing.”

  And he would say, “What do you want? Do you really want me just to take pleasure with you, and pretend with you, and not care what you really think and do?”

  “Yes, that sounds lovely; let’s do that,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. I wanted him to try to save me; and a part of me, though perhaps not enough of me, had always hoped that he would break down every barrier in my heart and make a good woman of me, make me, if not a Christian, at least a better person, less vengeful, more scrupulous, more like him. But, as he had told me aboard the Juniper, I was a hard case. I needed special attention.

  We quarreled about other things. Ned McGowan had come out of hiding soon after Lewis and I had. The little newspaper he published out of Sacramento was devoted entirely to printing tittle-tattle about the private lives of former vigilantes: this one didn’t pay his gambling debts; that one was so hated by white women that in his native Maine he had taken up with a Passamaquoddy Indian (and Passamaquoddies were lower even than Digger Indians); another had Negro blood; another was half Jewish. Jeptha despised the Phoenix. I can see now it wasn’t anything to be proud of, but then all that mattered was that Ned was making these men suffer. Besides, though I didn’t mention this, I had given McGowan money to help him start his paper. Jeptha and I had an argument about it in which I accused him of feeling sorry for murderers, and he said that there had to be limits in any fight, and I reminded him that to help Charley he had blackmailed a juror. Immediately I knew I had gone too far. “I know you did that for me. You wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. He kissed me to show he wasn’t mad. He put on his clothes, and I made the bed. He lit the fire in the stove. I made coffee. When we sat down to drink it, he said, “That boy on the Juniper would be sixteen now if he’d lived. I think about that a lot. But I haven’t spent my life atoning. I take my share of pleasure just like other people. I threw my wife in the bay; killed my own child, too, maybe. With your help, I break my marriage vows every chance I get. I’ve blackmailed a juror. Evidently, I’m no paragon of virtue. That doesn’t mean I yield the government of the world up to villainy. We are of thrifty Yankee stock, you and I; we don’t throw a thing away just because one piece is rotten. We salvage what can be saved.”

  When he was done, I said: “I could listen to you talk all day. If you would learn to move your arms a little more, E. D. Baker would have nothing on you.”

  LIKE SNOWFALL IN A PLACE SO COLD that snow never thaws, numberless incidents of every size bury the dead deeper from the moment they expire. They are not here to see this, and that, and that. We said we would never forget them. We do forget them, for minutes at a time, from the first day. Each day we think of them a little less, until at last we join them.

  One day in July 1858, in our cottage between Happy Valley and Mission Dolores, Jeptha read a speech from the newspaper, which everyone would be talking about soon: it was Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech, given upon his acceptance of the Republican nomination for senator from Illinois. Jeptha was very excited by it, and in church that week he called it “the sermon given last June by Mr. Lincoln,” and he recommended Lincoln to his congregation as “a close personal friend of Edward D. Baker,” because Baker, at that time, was widely admired by the people of San Francisco, and most of us had never heard of Lincoln. That Lincoln and E. D. Baker were warm friends, I had learned from Baker, and Jeptha had learned it from me.

  Lincoln gave many other speeches that summer as part of a series of debates he held with his opponent for the Senate, Stephen Douglas. The San Francisco papers reprinted them, and Jeptha followed them closely.

  That fall, to celebrate the opening of the transatlantic electric telegraph cable, our city held a parade so grand that it took an hour and twenty minutes for it to pass one spot. The militia marched, along with the fire companies, the Odd Fellows, the Hebrew Societies, the Masons, and the brewery wagons. A man wrapped in the American flag and a man wrapped in a Union Jack, each standing on a different omnibus, rolled down the street linked by a long rope representing the cable. Colonel E. D. Baker gave a speech. It had been two years since I had seen him in the flesh.

  When I got home, I picked up a hand mirror. I was thirty. Was I beginning to look hard? Less so than you would expect from the way I had lived.

  The following year, when I was thirty-one, Baker delivered the most famous oration of his career. It was at the funeral of U.S. Senator David Broderick, who had loomed so large over our lives throughout the Gold Rush years. We had watched him rise and fall and rise again. Toward the end, a reversal of his political fortunes had made him temperamental and erratic, and one day he challenged another politician to a duel, and he was shot dead. The funeral was held on Portsmouth Square. You may find Baker’s speech in the San Francisco newspapers for September 19, 1859, and in Masterpieces of E. D. Baker. I was there, seated on a horse for most of the time, and Jeptha was there, too, with Agnes; we saw each other but made no sign.

  Lewis was not present. He had other business. He went by hack and then on foot toward a ramshackle one-story house with four rooms and a front porch. It stood beside an abandoned horse shed and a shack that stood over a cockfighting pit, but was otherwise in a waste of mud and weeds and stale water in the neighborhood of Mission Dolores.

  A few days earlier, he had learned that Eugene Howard, one of the vigilantes who had forced their way into my house in ’56, was infatuated with a girl who used to work for Irene Grogan. Lewis offered this girl five hundred dollars if she would help him lure Howard, who was married, to that shack. She agreed to make it their regular place of assignation and notify Lewis in advance when they were to meet, and on the second occasion—today—Lewis would be there with her. The placement of an asymmetrical board at the edge of the porch, its narrow end pointing east, was the signal that the girl was in the house alone and it was safe for Lewis to enter it. They would then wait there together for Howard.

  When Lewis arrived, the narrow end of the board was pointing east. It lied. All six of the surviving members of his special list were in the building, waiting tensely, with pistols and rifles. They had laid this trap months in advance.

  Despite their advantages of numbers and surprise, they were very frightened of Lewis. When they asked around town about him, they found that he enjoyed a reputation for excellence in his profession, and they were sure tha
t it was he who had killed nearly half of their number already. No doubt they had their weapons trained out every window. Something or other—perhaps the condition of the mud around the house, for it had rained the night before—must have made Lewis suspicious. He did not enter by the front door but approached from a side entrance, with his hand inside his coat, in the belt of his trousers, where he kept a Colt six-shot revolver. The men inside could see that something had alerted him, and though their plan had undoubtedly been to let him enter and dispatch him silently, one of the men decided it was better not to wait. “No!” shouted one of the others, and Lewis dropped to the mud. The shot went where his head had just been. Almost anybody else in his situation would have run, becoming an easy target, but Lewis was clever about these things; he rolled quickly toward the house, near the window the shot had come from, as numerous bullets raked up the patch of mud where he had just been.

  Lewis knew by the rapidity of the fire that there were several men in the house and that they would be splitting up so that they could come at him from different directions. But they could not know which exit he was covering. He ran, in a crouch, close to the building, to the front porch, and shot twice at John Lyon, the man leaving the door. The first shot missed; the second shot went through Lyon’s throat, and he dropped his gun and fell, mortally wounded, clutching his neck with both hands. Lewis noticed where the pistol had landed on the porch. He would have liked to have gotten this extra gun, but of course he did not dare stop to pick it up. Supposing that men would be coming from the other exit, and hoping that at least for a few seconds his enemies would be too scared to come out the front door, Lewis turned back the way he had come and ran into William Bagley, who put a rifle bullet clean through Lewis’s side, just under the ribs. Before Bagley could pull the trigger again, Lewis shot him, fatally, in the chest. He then shot twice at Jason Babcock, who was right behind Bagley. The first bullet caught Babcock’s left shoulder; the second went through his right eye into his brain, and he fell dead.

  Lewis had one bullet left and needed more, because he expected with good reason that more than one foe remained. Weakened but not stopped by his wound—excitement carries us forward in such situations—he circled the building and came at the porch from the other end. He looked under it and on top of it. There was no noise but a horse whinnying and snorting somewhere and the hiss of the wind in the trees. Lyon’s body lay on the front porch, and beside it a Colt revolver. Lewis picked up the long board that had deceived him about who was in the house, and used it to sweep the revolver off the porch. He ran for the pistol: as he picked it up, a bullet from the house caught him in the right shoulder, and he dropped his own gun. He ran away from the house and rolled into a gully, and waited as the three remaining men, Corothers, Robert Gray, and Howard, advanced on him, firing rifles. On his back, with Lyon’s pistol in his left hand, Lewis put a shot into Corothers’s stomach and another into Gray’s face. Their weapons fell to the mud. Howard turned and ran. Corothers bent over, clutching his stomach. Gray staggered blindly back in the direction of the house.

  This had all taken about three minutes. Growing weaker and weaker, until he could not lift his arm, Lewis waited for Howard to return. Ten minutes passed, during which Howard, in terror of his life, chased a horse that been hidden in the shack over the cockfighting pit. The horse had been unnerved by the shooting and would not allow itself to be mounted. Eventually, Lewis heard shouting in English and Spanish, horses whinnying and clomping in the grass and mud, and men talking: “Stop. It’s over.”

  The shouts had come from several bystanders, most of them customers and workers at a cantina about fifty yards away who had heard the shooting, armed themselves, and waited at a discreet distance. In the meantime, Howard had finally managed to get on his horse, and they let him get away.

  “You there, are you alive?” they called to Lewis cautiously. By then he was unconscious. They brought him into the house, along with Corothers and Gray, who were also still alive.

  Later, in his delirium, Lewis mentioned my name. I was sent for, and when I came I brought along a doctor, Matheny, and a surgeon, Blair, both of whom I knew to be good at their work, though with vigilante sympathies. I arranged for a fast carriage to take us to the scene together. On the way, I offered them bonuses if Lewis lived. Blair protested that the Hippocratic Oath required him to do his best in any event, which made Matheny, who needed money, very angry. I said that nevertheless there would be a bonus in it; whereupon Matheny, a clever man, suggested that I arrange as soon as possible for a shipment of ice to be brought to the scene.

  Lewis woke long enough to recognize me, and he asked for his lucky stone to grip while the surgeon took the bullet out of his shoulder. When I looked in his pantaloons, the pockets were empty. “Don’t operate yet,” I said, in what I can only describe as an overpowering fit of superstition. Matheny and Blair said that any delay would endanger Lewis’s life, but I got them to stop while I went outside. Then I saw that it was laughable to look for his stone amid so many in the grass, in the mud, in the gully, and I turned and spoke to the men who had come upon the scene. “A rock was found in Lewis Godwin’s pocket, or else”—I had just thought of this—“maybe it was in his hand; maybe when he knew the shooting was over he reached into his pocket for it and clutched it in his hand as though it was important. There’s no gold in it, or anything else that most people think is precious. It is a good-luck charm just for him—it is without value to anyone else.” A small grizzle-faced man in a serape, with gaps among his teeth, reached into his pocket and produced the stone. “Thank you,” I said, giving him a gold coin; I rushed back into the house, wrapped my brother’s hand around the stone, and covered his hand with mine.

  The surgeon’s instruments were not especially dirty, but no one back then had ever conceived of such a thing as sterilization. A fever developed. Matheny had a theory that high temperatures themselves were dangerous, and he put Lewis in a bath of ice to bring the fever down. For days, my brother’s life hung in the balance.

  At the beginning of this long ordeal, Corothers and Gray were in the shack with us. Their physician, Pratt, a small, stocky young fellow with close-together eyes who did not have a professional degree, I think, was clearly less skillful than the doctors I had hired for Lewis. Drs. Matheny and Blair had time on their hands while waiting for my brother’s fever to respond to their ministrations, and a professional distaste for their colleague’s clumsiness. They would have liked to help with Corothers’s and Gray’s cases, for when you are good at a thing you hate to see it done badly. But when they stopped to intervene, I shouted out in alarm that Lewis had taken a turn for the worse, and they had no choice but to return to their patient.

  Corothers expired early the next morning. He talked some of the time; I worried about that. I asked Pratt what the fellow’s last words had been: Pratt said that Corothers had spoken about his poor mother and his poor sister back in Missouri, and his spotted hunting dog, Danger, who had run off one day many years ago and had never been seen again. I did not think Pratt was cunning enough to lie. Corothers had, however, identified himself. When no one was looking, I searched his pockets and found a copy of my list of vigilantes, which Lewis, with his usual reckless bravado, had anonymously mailed to the targets.

  Gray, whose name was indicated by a letter and a bill of sale in his pocket, lasted two excruciating days. He spent both those days on his face, because he had trouble swallowing and whenever he was on his back he would start choking on his blood and spit. Dr. Blair wanted to give Pratt an ingenious little hand pump, equally useful for draining wounds or fluid collecting in the mouth, and I could not stop him from mentioning it. Fortunately, Pratt was reluctant to accept help. I said, “Dr. Pratt is a member of the rising generation. Let him do as he thinks best.”

  Lewis was in a bedroom at the time, where he had been made as comfortable as possible with linens and pillows and a spring mattress. Now and then we wrapped him in canvas and ice. Gray was
on the table in the kitchen. He lay on his stomach, gurgling and moaning. I spoke to him. “Mr. Gray. You can’t see me. I’m Belle Cora. I think perhaps we have met before. This would be a good time to consider your sins, Mr. Gray. Were you ever burned, for example, by touching a hot frying pan? Imagine that happening all over your body for all eternity.” Then, remembering what one of my girls had reported about his behavior back in ’56, I thought a bit and added, “But perhaps, for you, the punishment will be gagging. Gagging forever—that would not be very agreeable, either.”

  The sheriff at the time was a Mexican War veteran named Charles Doane. He had been grand marshal of the Second Committee of Vigilance. As soon as Doane heard about the incident, he ordered that Lewis be arrested on a charge of murder and moved to the county jail, which since ’56 had become a rat-infested hell by reason of Doane’s embezzlements and the thrift of Know-Nothing government. Not that the destination mattered: moving Lewis at this point would have killed him. Matheny and Blair, who had some standing in the community, said they would call it murder. Doane posted a guard at the shack while an investigation was conducted.

  Doane himself handpicked the grand jury, but all the witnesses had the men in the house firing at Lewis first; it was obviously an ambush, and the jury was forced to rule that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

  IT WAS A YEAR BEFORE LEWIS FELT quite himself. He never recovered a full range of movement in his right shoulder, but with practice his right hand reacquired its former speed and accuracy with a pistol. By posting anonymous advertisements in the Bulletin and the Globe, offering a reward to anyone who could find Eugene Howard, he learned that Howard’s wife was receiving letters from a mining camp in Coulterville. “It’s a trap,” I told him. “Don’t go.” But he wouldn’t listen. He returned two weeks later, his eyes glittering, and the first words he said to me were “That’s finished.” He had killed every man on my list.