“You really are ignorant about babies, aren’t you?” she said. “Didn’t you have any brothers or sisters?”
Jack’s face hardened. “No.”
He didn’t have family except for his aunt. None he wanted to think about, anyway. His mother was mean-spirited, a first-class nag. His father, a coal miner, up and walked away one night from the supper table in Ashley, Pennsylvania. Never said he was going, never said he wasn’t coming back. Left Jack’s mother with six kids to raise. Jack had already been working two years at the Huber Coal Breaker, where they busted up anthracite into smaller transportable chunks. But with his father gone, the family needed a bigger paycheck than Huber provided. So at thirteen, Jack descended into the belly of the earth, down into the Baltimore Number 14. From the beginning, he hated the stale quality of air underground, the narrowness of the shaft s. Then one day when he was fifteen, an explosion rocked their house. He knew immediately it was the mine and took off running, along with everyone else in Ashley. He got to the entrance in time to watch his friend Frank stagger out, his head blood-encrusted, face scratched and sooty.
“Jack, it’s something terrible inside. A great rush of air blew out my light. Right after that I heard someone calling out further on the gangway that the lower split was caving. I hitched the mules and tried to get them along, but they wouldn’t move. Not for nothing. Not in the dark, so I went on myself up the gangway. Behind me I heard the roof chipping and cracking. Other men were running, too, but all the lights were out and I couldn’t see a thing. There’s men in there, Jack. My dad, my dad’s in there.”
Jack stood ready with the other volunteers to go after survivors, though that dark tomb was the last place on earth he wanted to enter. But he would. The men in there would have done it for him. He watched while they drilled into the caved-in areas. He felt lucky when they chose five others to go in. They carried three out, their faces charred, unrecognizable. For weeks the memory of their groans roused him from sleep.
The mine explosions had caused the boards on one side of the Joyners’ house to tumble loose. Jack and the next two oldest boys spent the following week doing their best to fortify, to rebuild.
The morning after they finished the repairs, his mother stirred up a pot of oatmeal, complaining about there never being enough money. Jack, who’d gotten maybe two hours sleep undisturbed by the ghosts of those entombed men, dropped his head against his folded arms on the kitchen table.
“You boys is just like your father. Lazy. You should be out looking for another job. Heard they was hiring over at Sugar Notch.”
Jack’s heart hardened like a lump of anthracite. The next day, like his father before him, he hopped a train and never looked back. He didn’t want to know if his brothers went down into the Sugar Notch mines. Didn’t want to know if they were charred or crushed or were buried alive. They were fools if they descended into that hell.
The strangest piece of luck befell him when Collis P. Huntington himself, the railroad magnate, was on Jack’s getaway train. Huntington saw he was hungry and bought him a meal. Took a shine to him, one of the few men who ever did. Introduced him to Mr. Whiting, who taught him everything there was to know about trains and tracks. Never having to climb down into the black bowels of the earth again was motivation enough for Jack to learn fast and work hard.
The only relative he allowed himself to care about was Aunt Elizabeth. He had spent several summers with her in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Every time he smelled cinnamon he remembered the oatmeal cookies she baked. Oatmeal was for cookies. Not the sticky old mush his mother served. Breakfast at Aunt Elizabeth’s was eggs, bacon, toast, and milk. A happy soul, her laugh pealed out like the church bells at noon, deep and sonorous. He had Elizabeth to thank for showing him a life outside the mines was possible. It had led to this new version of himself: husband and father.
During those first weeks after the baby was born a glow surrounded Rosella. For the first time, Jack understood why the Madonna always was painted with a golden aura. Motherhood was—or should be—a sacred thing. Jack couldn’t remember his own mother showing any joy when his brothers and sisters arrived. Instead, a general weariness hung over her: another mouth to feed, another bottom to clean, another nose to wipe. Occasionally, she raged against them all, as if they were to blame for their own births, as if they were holding her back from the life she would have claimed if not for them.
Watching Rosella exposed Jack to something new. He loved to see his wife cuddling and fussing over the baby as she sat on the loveseat by the window, her hair glinting with golden highlights in the sun. He would become the good husband she deserved. This home, this family, his family, was the happiness and respectability he’d been searching for ever since he left Pennsylvania.
One morning when the baby was a month old, Rosella laid the baby on the dresser to change his diaper. “Oh, nasty—look at this.”
Jack clasped both hands on her shoulders and leaned his head to one side to see. Benjamin’s beautiful egg-white skin was peppered with a rash. They trooped downstairs to consult the expert. Nellie knew quite a bit about childhood ills. Sadly, she had lost her own two children to influenza.
“Baking soda mixed with a little water.”
Rosella made soda pastes and applied them every few hours. Ben wailed. Unable to comfort him, Rosella cried. Jack didn’t know what else to do, so he paced.
By the next morning when they diapered Ben, the red spots had grown into ugly sores and spread beyond the diapered area. Nellie frowned. “Doesn’t really look like diaper rash.”
Jack blanched when he saw the blistered skin. It reminded him of the sores that had peppered his own thighs, the sores Lourdes had dismissed as bed bug bites. Was Leroy Whiting wrong about virgins? Was this another sign his luck had run out?
Nellie suggested trying honey.
Rosella brightened. “Yes, I remember my mother using it for many things. Coughs as well as cuts.” She smoothed the amber stickiness over the sores and placed two layers of clean white cloth over the mess to spare the baby’s embroidered infant gowns.
Still the sores persisted. Jack was disgusted by all the herbs and concoctions. “Let’s call in a doctor.”
Nellie sniffed. “Quickest way I know of to lose six dollars and maybe your life, too. I don’t know what your doctors were like back East, Mr. Joyner, but I’d sooner throw myself under a cable car’s wheels than trust the likes of the quacks we have out here. If Val hadn’t gone off to Johns Hopkins for training, I’d ask him. He’s almost a doctor now and the only one I’d trust. Let’s try tea leaves.”
Miraculously the spots began to fade. Rosella and Nellie were ecstatic, congratulating themselves for thinking of tea leaves.
Jack? He was just relieved his luck hadn’t run out.
~~~
He took the stack of clean baby clothes from his wife and set them on top of the dressing table. “Let’s ride out to the Bay this morning. Walk along the beach. Just the two of us, Rosella. You can
take your sketchbook.”
“Sounds lovely, but the baby will wake up soon and need feeding.”
Rosella retrieved the clothes and tucked them one by one into the chest of drawers. Diapers in the second drawer, gowns in the third, crocheted caps and sweaters and odds and ends in the bottom. His wife reserved the top drawer for special keepsakes. A baptismal gown. A silver-plated rattle. A stuffed bunny from Rosella’s brother Timmy. It was a toy her mother had made for him when he was a baby. Rosella had cried when she opened the package. Jack had been at a loss to understand her tears, at a loss to comfort what he couldn’t understand.
Nellie had tsk-tsked and clasped Rosella in her arms and rocked her, patting her back as if the mother of his child was a baby herself. “When a woman has a baby, ’tis only natural-like she wants her own mother nearby. Course Ro misses her mum, course she does. You can see that, can’t you Mr. Joyner?”
No, he couldn’t. He didn’t want his mother nearby. Nor his
father. And Rosella had been so ready to leave home, to run away with him, he couldn’t understand her desire to go back now. She had taken to nagging him about getting train tickets to West Virginia, the three of them going for a visit. He couldn’t go taking time off work on a whim like that, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her and the baby go across the country by themselves.
He couldn’t understand the changes in Rosella either. Before the baby, she would have jumped at the chance to walk the beach with him, jumped at the chance to sketch. Now she turned him down for a shopping expedition for new gowns. She had no interest in going to the Grand Opera House or Delmonico’s for oysters and champagne, or to soak in the salt waters of the Sutro Baths, even though they could now indulge in a few of the luxuries afforded to the best people of the city. Every waking moment was about the baby. Feeding the baby. Burping the baby. Wiping the baby’s bottom. Keeping the baby in clean clothes. She wouldn’t hear of having a wet nurse. In what little spare time she squeezed out of the day, she sketched the baby from every angle, awake or asleep. Jack loved the baby, too, but he couldn’t help feeling Rosella was shutting him out of her life, the way she cocooned herself and the baby into a shawl to feed him, the way she pushed Jack’s hands away.
“Too soon. I can’t risk having a second child so soon.”
Too soon. Always too soon. Yet the baby was four months old. Jack suspected that old busybody Nellie was responsible for Rosella’s reluctance. Before the baby, his wife had been eager enough for his hands. The old crone probably was, no doubt, filling Rosella full of tales about the wife’s duty to control her husband’s appetites. Jack had thought Rosella smarter than that, thought her different from other married women.
When the baby was five months old, Jack’s boss told him it was time to get back out on the road, designing spurs for the many business concerns sprouting up across the West. Whiting said Jack’s talents were wasted behind a desk. Jack thought he might as well go back on the road. He wasn’t needed at home. The morning Jack was to leave, he leaned over to kiss Benjamin. The baby grabbed Jack’s mustache and gave it a good yank. He must have thought it was quite funny because his round little face lit up with a huge smile, a smile that seemed to have extra shine because his chin dripped with drool. All the while Benjamin warbled animal noises. He was trying to tell Jack something, but what? Jack wished he knew. He kissed Rosella goodbye, picked up his suitcase, and would have headed out the door that instant, but he passed by Rosella’s sketchbook. She was occupied, her back to him, while she changed Benjamin’s diaper. Jack set down the suitcase and fanned through the sketches until he came to one that captured the earnestness of that drooly smile. He slipped it out of the sketchbook and tucked it into his suitcase. He left without looking back.
On the road, it was all too easy to resume his former habits. The gambling. The women. He was no damn good at celibacy. Hell, he was just no damn good, and he’d be the first to admit it. But these women—they didn’t mean anything, they didn’t mean he didn’t love his family. At the oddest moments—as he was unlacing a woman’s corset, as he was eating eggs the next morning—he would think of Rosella, remember her sitting by the window, the light shining in her hair, her mouth pursed in concentration as she tried to capture the expression on Benjamin’s face with her pencils. He hardened himself against such softness. The worst moments came when he would remember the baby’s intense efforts to talk to him. What was it Benjamin wanted to convey with the gurgles and wild waving of his fat little fists? Only when Jack was alone and stinking drunk would he take out the sketch of the baby he’d spirited away. That little piece of paper always blew a hole in him as wide as a ton of dynamite packed into the side of a mountain.
Yet the next night, drunk and lonely again, he’d find himself sending a half-smile toward the prettiest woman in the saloon. One night he was back in El Paso and it was Lourdes.
“Where’s your pimp?” he asked.
After that, she behaved like a bitch, but he bought her a drink anyway, and then another.
She pushed her chair away from the table. “I’m sick of this place.”
He looked around the room, took in the dim lanterns, the line of smelly cowhands bellied up to the bar, the sticky floor. Thought of the barren land outside the city, far as the eye could see, thought of the midday heat, the way the sun could give you lizard-skin in only a few days time.
“Never been my favorite place either. Now, San Francisco is something to behold. Never too hot, never too cold. It’s a city with class. There’s an opera and the restaurants treat you like a king.”
She tilted her head back and slung the shot glass at her lips. She arched one shoulder like a cat. “I don’t believe you.”
Jack felt his blood warming, the effect of whiskey and Lourdes’s sensuality. “Believe me or not. There’s this one hotel that has a courtyard surrounded by dozens of arched windows and lined with palms. The hotel restaurant serves you champagne and oysters on white linen table cloths. If that’s not treating you like a king, I don’t know what is.”
“What’s the name of this restaurant, King Jack?”
“Th e Palace.”
“You will take me there.”
He realized too late she’d manipulated him into a corner. “Sure, someday we’ll go.”
“Not someday. Now.”
Drat. Why had he shot off his big mouth? He should have known better. Lourdes harbored illusions that it was possible for her to scale social barriers. As if a pretty dress or a hat with a stuff ed bird would make her something more than a saloon girl. “That’s not such a good idea, Lourdes. You are so beautiful I fear someone will steal you away from me.”
She pushed away from the table. “Either you take me or I’m leaving you.” When he hesitated, she added, “For good.”
“Sure, okay. When I finish this job, we’ll take off for San Francisco, you and me.”
Her wanting to visit the coast wasn’t a great idea, but it wasn’t that bad, either. On the first floor of popular establishments like the Palace, husbands dined with their wives. On the second floor, hoteliers accommodated more intimate arrangements. There, in private dining rooms, Jack could offer a woman like Lourdes a taste of the life of the rich. She could eat the same oysters, drink the same champagne, sit at the same elegantly arrayed tables as the elite set. She just couldn’t do it in their company.
Jack made a bet on a half-breed he’d met when he was overseeing the laying of track on a new southern spur. Best man Jack had ever seen on a horse. Jack didn’t know anything about the two horses being raced, but he knew the half-breed. If he was riding the brown stallion, it was a sure thing. He put all the money he could muster on the half-breed and won a considerable sum and a godforsaken piece of desert. He hated the land around El Paso, and he promptly deeded the plot to Hernando. Jack didn’t quite think of it as payment for taking Lourdes. More like an insurance policy that Hernando wouldn’t feel obligated to bust Jack’s head next time he rode into town. He nodded at Jack with eyes black and hard as obsidian, and then strode off and it was done.
Clouds formed as Jack and Lourdes boarded the train to leave El Paso. The brakes hissed and the familiar clack of the wheels began. It was Lourdes’s first train ride and she couldn’t stop smiling. The sky appeared to be boiling with dark clouds as they passed Thunderbird Mountain. Jack could barely make out the red clay formation that gave the mountain its name.
A streak of lightning split the sky, so close it seemed as if it stretched from the mountain right to the passenger car they were sitting in. Unfazed, Lourdes babbled about how she couldn’t believe she was actually going to San Francisco, she was actually going to drink champagne.
Jack hardly heard her. It almost never rained in El Paso, but he was remembering an Indian legend about the mountain. That half-breed had shared the story over a poker game. Said a big bird lived in the mountain. When it flapped its wings it thundered, and lightning flashed from its beak. Only happened when the
Great Spirit was really displeased. When you’d really pissed him off .
Total nonsense. Still, Jack felt uneasy until he rode past the storm. Had he really just bought a woman?
~~~
Jack leaned back in his chair and lit the cigar Mr. Whiting offered him. Smoke hung thick inside the club, covering everything with a slight haze.
Thick white eyebrows that angled toward his nose dominated Mr. Whiting’s face, especially when he waggled them, which he did now. “That li’l Mexican girl I saw you with last night’s a looker, Jack.”
Jack frowned. Whiting lost all discretion when drunk. In a city this large, you’d think you could keep a secret. What were the odds he’d run into his boss only a month after Lourdes’s arrival? Jack took his last card. “Raise you two dollars.”
Pullen and Scholtz made their final bets.
Whiting downed a shot of whiskey. “She looks like she has expensive tastes.”
“You gonna play?”
Whiting’s forehead wrinkled, and his eyebrows connected over his nose. “Yeah, sure, what’sa hurry?”
The old man lost the hand, and Jack swept up his winnings. Pullen and Scholtz called it a night. It was after 2 a.m. Jack should head home, too.
As he pushed back his chair, Whiting laid a hand bristling with white hairs on Jack’s forearm. His speech was slurred. “Jus’ ’tween you an’ me, someone could make a lotta money. A lotta money. Southern Pacific’s gonna gain control of Pacific Electric. You wait’n see, if it don’t.”
Jack’s brain whipped into focus. His boss oft en met with the movers and the shakers, sometimes with Henry Huntington himself. Henry was the nephew of Collis, the man who’d turned Jack over to Whiting to begin with. Collis had died a few years back and Henry inherited a fortune. Whiting must have overheard some big plans.
The old man staggered as he tried to stand up. By morning, Jack figured Whiting wouldn’t even remember he’d let that tidbit slip.
Buried Seeds Page 15
