Battleborn: Stories

There were stories in the territory, stories that could turn a sane man sour and a sour man worse. Three Frenchmen in Coloma dug up a stump to make way for a road and panned two thousand dollars in flakes from the hole. Above the Feather River a Michigander lawyer staked his mule for the night and when he pulled it in the morning a vein winked up at him. Down on the Tuolumne a Hoosier survived a gunfight and found his fortune in the hole the bullet drilled in the rock above his shoulder. In Rough and Ready a man called Bennager Raspberry, aiming to free a ramrod jammed in his musket, fired at random into the exposed roots of a manzanita bush. There he found five thousand dollars in gold, free and pure. Near Carson Creek a Massachusetts man died of isthmus sickness, and mourners shoveled up a seven-pound nugget while digging his grave.

In California gold was what God was in the rest of the country: everything, everywhere. My brother Errol told of a man on a stool beside him who bought a round with a pinch of dust. He told of a child dawdling in a gully who found a queerly colored rock and took it to his mother, who boiled it with lye in her teakettle for a day to be sure of its composition. He told of a drunkard Pike who’d found a lake whose shores sparkled with the stuff but could not, once sober, retrieve the memory of where it was. There were men drowning in color, men who could not walk into the woods to empty their bladders without shouting, Eureka!

And there were those who had nothing. There were those who worked like slaves every single day, those who had attended expensive lectures on geology and chemistry back home, those who had absorbed every metallurgy manual on the passage westward, put to memory every map of those sinister foothills, scrutinized every speck of filth the territory offered and in the end were rewarded without so much as a glinting in their pans.

And there was a third category of miner too, more wretched and volatile than the others: the luckless believer. Here was a forty-niner ever poised on the cusp of the having class, his strike a breath away in his mind. Belief was a dangerous sickness at the diggings—it made a man greedy, violent and insane. This fever burned hotter within my brother than in any other prospector among the placers. I know, because I lit him.

I. HO FOR CALIFORNIA!

My brother and I came to gold country from Ohio when Errol was twenty and I seventeen. Our father had gone to God in December of 1848, leaving us three hundred dollars each. I had not been especially interested in the activity out west—my eyes looked eastward, in fact, to Harvard Divinity. But my brother was married to the notion. He diverted the considerable energies he usually spent clouting me or bossing me around and put them toward convincing me to join him. I admit I rather enjoyed this process of conversion—it was maybe the first in all our life together that Errol had regarded me with greater interest than that due an old boot. His efforts having roused in me the spirit of adventure, I began to fancy us brother Argonauts, bold and divine.

We left our mother and sisters in Cincinnati in the early spring of 1849, and set out by way of the Ohio and Missouri rivers. In Independence we bought a small freight wagon and spent a week and what was left of our money readying it. We fit iron rims to the wheels, tightened the spokes, greased the axles, secured the bolts and reinforced the harnesses. We purchased new canvas from an outfitter, coated it with linseed oil and beeswax and stretched it across the new pine bows. My brother, despite his want of artistic aptitude, painted the canvas with a crude outline of Ohio and a script reading Ho for California!

In Independence we took up with a group of men who called themselves the Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association for California. Errol wrote what was by then surely his hundredth letter to Marjorie Elise Salter, whose family owned and operated Salter Soap & Lye. It was Marjorie for whom Errol was getting rich. That fall and through the winter Errol had developed the habit of slinking off to see her, leaving me to do his chores. I didn’t think much of Miss Salter, I’ll tell you now. I thought she waltzed rather better than I would want my wife to. But the once I alerted Errol to the infrequency with which Salter girls married into farming families such as ours, he rapped my collarbone with the iron side of a trowel, putting a permanent zag in it.

The day we left Cincinnati, Errol leaned from the steamer, tossed Marjorie a gold coin that had been our father’s and shouted, “Where I am going there are plenty more!”

With the yobs and gamblers of the Missouri Company we followed the Platte, then the Sweetwater to South Pass, around the Great Salt Lake, then along the course of a river called the Humboldt, whose waters were putrid and whose poisonous grasses killed two of our party’s oxen. At the place where that miserable river disappeared into the sand we found a boulder on which an earlier traveler had scraped some words with a nib of charcoal. It read: Expect to find the worst desert you ever saw and then to find it worse than you expected. Take water. Take water. You cannot carry enough.

And so we filled canteens, kegs, coffeepots, waterproof sacks and rubberized blankets. Errol removed his gum boots and filled them, then ordered me to do the same. Those we kept secret. We crossed the Hundred Mile Desert only at night, following in the moonlight a trail marked by discarded stoves and trunks and mining equipment and the stinking carcasses of mules and oxen.

II. ABANDONED AT CARSON SINK

At the westernmost edge of the Hundred Mile Desert our leaders unhitched the animals and led them ahead in search of a spring, to recuperate and reconnoiter. Errol and I were assigned, with some others, to stay behind and guard the wagons. The goldfields were close, we knew, and as one day passed and another and we were not retrieved, some of us began to suspect we had been deserted, left to die in that sink, thirsty and scalpless.

After three days without word a young man named Doble, of Shelby County, Indiana, proposed that we remainers set out for the diggings on our own. Errol and I were set to go when I experienced a troubling augury.

Since the time when I was very young I had experienced auguries, strange phenomena of the mind in which the visual composition of a scene before me summoned a vivid dream I had had of the same scenario. I was then able to recall the dream, including those depictions that had not yet happened in the waking world. They were a form of prophecy, though I experienced no tingling, weightlessness, chills, nor any other of the physical sensations associated with soothsaying. I felt only a sharpness between my eyes, which could usually be alleviated by removing my eyeglasses and pinching firmly the bridge of my nose.

My auguries came at random frequency, and were of random relevance. Sometimes they allowed me to see only the coming moment; other times I might distinguish the happenings of many months hence. Most events depicted therein were of little significance: our chickens would squabble over a scattering of corn; my youngest sister, Mary, would ruin a pair of our father’s stockings while learning to stitch; winter would be cold. Until Carson Sink the most significant augury I had experienced occurred at the age of eleven, while I watched two men unload a freight wagon outside Edward Boynton’s store. I saw that a keg of brandied peaches Boynton had received was tainted, and would make several people ill. I alerted Boynton of this and he—already suspecting this particular vendor of dishonesty—opened the keg, found the peaches were indeed spoiled, and lobbied a refund. I attempted to convey my condition, as I had come to consider it, to my parents, but Errol was the only who believed me. He was the only who ever believed me.

The visual arrangement which triggered the augury at Carson Sink was my brother’s sack, partially filled, slumped to the right, and beyond it a bare craggy peak and the white sun, all in a line. Clear as a sketch I saw Errol and me following Doble and his company into the mountains. I saw the wagons down in the sink where we would leave them, circled like the spokes of a wheel. I saw three toes of my brother’s bare right foot black with frostbite. I saw man consuming man in the snow.

“What’s that?” Errol said, noticing my affliction. He took me by the arm away from the others. “What have you seen?”

“We cannot go with them.” I recounted the augury. “We’ll die,” I finished.

Errol tore off a sliver of fingernail with his teeth and spit it to the ground. “We’ll die if we stay,” he said finally.

“Likely,” I admitted.

“But you say we should stay.”

“Yes.” I had seen his dead body in those mountains as clearly as I saw his live one before me now.

“Damn you, Joshua. How do you expect we’ll get rich without ever setting foot at those diggings?”

I looked at the range, which rose out of the ground as though she knew her peaks were the only thing standing between us and those goldfields. That was the main impression I had during our travels, that the ranges of the West had a way of making you feel watched. “I only know what I’ve seen,” I said, fearing he would strike me.

Errol regarded Doble and the others, who were near ready to depart. He sighed. “Then we stay,” he said. “For now.” He ordered me to return our things to the wagon. Then he approached Doble and informed him of our intent to remain in the sink. “Storm coming,” he said.

Doble looked to the sky, cloudless. “Boy, leave the weather to me.”

“This is not the time to cross,” said Errol.

Doble scoffed. “It’s barely October.”

Errol returned to our wagon.

I whispered that we ought not let them go.

“You’re welcome to elaborate,” he said, “and risk them shooting you to alleviate you of your madness. Kindly leave me out of it if you do.”

We stayed. They went. I did not warn them. I was young and a coward, if you want to know the word. At the time I thought no fate worse than being considered a lunatic.

Errol and I watched from the valley as a tremendous storm took the range. It lasted three days, and the snow remained for ten more. Each night we built a fire and sat shuddering before it, the wagons round ours empty as fresh-built pine boxes. We did not speak of the storm nor the men up in it excepting the first day, when Errol said he would not care for a stroll in those hills right now, and I said I would not, either. That was, I think, his way of thanking me.

The report reached the diggings before we did. It went round and round and still goes round today: an expedition perished under a bad storm. The Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association. Trapped in the mountains with nothing to eat but their own dead.

III. THE RESCUING SHE-ASS

We survived in the sink on quail which Errol shot and what scant rations the others could not carry. But both supplies and game swiftly dwindled. One night when I lay awake considering starvation and Indian ambush and cougar attack and worse, I saw shadows moving along our canvas. I remained in my ruck, petrified, not even reaching for the knife near my feet nor the musket near my sleeping brother’s. The shadows grew monstrous in size until finally a dark shape loomed at the rear of the wagon. When the form emerged through the slit in the canvas, I nearly laughed aloud at my own cowardice.

It was the head of a burro. She stared at me, ears twitching, an almost intelligent expression on her long face. I donned my spectacles and climbed quietly from the wagon. I ran my hand along her coarse mane and dust rose from it. I did not recognize the animal. She likely belonged to another caravan and had been abandoned, like us.

In the dimness I saw that her back bore the black cross of Bethlehem. I traced my fingers along this coloring and felt beneath it each individual knob of her spine. I wished I had an apple to give her, or a pear. I was overcome then by the melancholy that had been accumulating in me since I left Ohio. I wrapped my arms around the beast’s soft brown neck and wept. The jenny blinked her long-lashed glassy eye and began to walk. I, trail-weary and homesick and perhaps resigned to death, let her pull me along, stumbling and wetting her mange with my tears.

We walked together through sand and scrub and rock for I knew not how long. We crested a hill and then another. And then the old girl stopped. Before us, quaking in the moonlight, was the giant spherical head of a cottonwood. It was the first tree I had seen in seven hundred miles.

I ran down the hill to the tree, stumbling, and fell finally at its raised roots. Beside the cottonwood was a stream, icy and clear. I drank from it, drank and drank and drank. The water soon returned some of my faculties and I turned to account for the burro. She stood, miraculously, on the hill where I left her.

I retrieved her and we both drank. As the sun rose I rode the old girl back to the wagon, calling, Hullo, hullo, to Errol. The look on his face suggested he thought us a mirage, and indeed when I drew near he reached up and touched my jaw, lightly. The jenny and I led him to the cottonwood, a warm wind at our three faces. Errol took a bit of the stream in his hand. “It’s meltwater,” he said.

Errol wanted to set out that day but it was the Sabbath, and he surprised me by agreeing to observe it, which we had not done but once the entire journey. So Errol sat drinking beside the crick and I spoke a service, the first of my life. I knew then that the Word was my calling, but knew as well that it was too late to follow.

At dawn we loaded the jenny with our supplies and those which the others had not been able to carry. That same curiously warm chinook was with us as we followed the stream into the hills, where it branched from a mountain river throbbing with snowmelt. The river led us through the Sierra Nevada, and we spent some threatening cold days in those mountains, our burro growing so weak that we were forced to discard nearly all her load, save for the meagerest provisions and two books—the Bible and The Odyssey—which I insisted on keeping with me always.

Finally, she bore us to the diggings. I recall the moment we crested the last ridge on our journey. It was dusk, and lightning bugs blinked among the shrubs. I cleaned my spectacles and saw then that they were no insects but the fires of the goldfields, strung along the foothills below us. We howled in joy and exhaustion. I knelt, and asked Errol to do the same. I spoke a prayer of thanks to God and to the rescuing she-ass He’d sent us. Errol, blasphemer that he was, spoke a prayer of thanks to me.

IV. DECEPTION AT ANGEL’S CAMP

So it was that we arrived at the diggings penniless and without any equipment. Our first stop was the general store in Angel’s Camp, which was at that time a log house rudely thrown together with mud. There, we had no choice but to sell our burro to the store’s proprietor, a Swede who denied us a fair price, saying she was an Arkansas mule and not of the sturdier Mexican stock.

God had tested my brother with a wicked temper and a walloping hook. It was a test he often failed back home, bloodying Ohio noses and blacking Ohio eyes for no good reason I could see. I was worried he might put his pique to use here, where we had no one. I discreetly reminded by brother that we were not in the East anymore and that this man was likely the only merchant in the entire county. Inwardly, though, I envied the way my brother could make a man cower.

So, in the first of many injustices in the territory, we sold the jenny to outfit ourselves with a fraction of the very supplies we had dumped in the Sierra: an iron pan for the outrageous sum of sixteen dollars and a shovel at the ungodly price of twenty-nine. We also purchased two red shirts, two pairs of smart-looking tan pantaloons, a tent, a sack of flour, and a shank of dried pork.

Errol sent another letter to Marjorie, which contained many standard fabrications as to our good luck and our promising claim and the clement passage overland, which despite accounts to the contrary was entirely manageable for a lady. I scribbled a postcard to our mother, telling her only the truth: that we had arrived, and that we were alive. Outfitted, we hiked three miles to the American River and established our humble camp at a sandbar where the fat-pocketed Swede had told Errol there was gold for the picking.

I had envisioned the diggings a place of desolation and solitude—such was the portrayal in the literature on the subject—and so I was rather dismayed to find that the American had other forty-niners populating her banks. By their accents I made out Southerners and Yanks, Pikes, Limeys, Canadians and Keskydees. By sight I identified Mexicans, Negroes and Indians. A Pike who claimed he had been a riverboat captain in St. Louis informed me that the Negroes were former slaves—fugitives, though he didn’t say the word. The Indians, he said, were current slaves.

Whether white or colored, every man wore the same red work shirts which Errol and I had so recently purchased, though most were by now a sort of purple with filth. Their pantaloons had gone a snuffy black. Some had added sashes about the collar for a touch of the dude, and most of these were all but shredded with wear.

The only deviants from this diggings uniform were two Chinamen who worked the claim adjacent to ours. I had never seen a Chinaman before and I fear I gazed quite rudely at them. The two—a father and his son, whose age I estimated to be around thirteen—wore billowing yellowish frocks gathered in a queer fashion. They panned not with iron but with the same type of pointed bowls of woven straw they wore as hats. Beneath those brims were their curious slit eyes and skin so hairless and smooth as to appear made of wax. But strangest of all were the snakelike black pigtails gathered from a snatch of hair at their napes and falling down their backs. The boy’s descended past his shoulders impressively. But it was a sapling compared to his father’s, which was so long that when he stooped at the river its tip dipped into the green water and swayed there as he panned.

We staked our ten-by-ten claim and worked it twelve hours a day for two days, Errol at the shovel and me at the pan, then, after Errol called me a duffer, another ten days with me at the shovel and Errol at the pan. Rumor had the territory brimming with gold so handy that men had gouged their wealth from the rock with a pocket blade or a spoon. In truth the work of extracting color was of the spirit-defeating sort, a labor which combined the various arts of canal digging, ditching, stone laying, plowing, haying and hoeing potatoes. The law required us to work our claim every single day, including the Sabbath, lest we lose our rights to it. Thus we toiled in the freezing river and under the burning rays of the sun from dawn to dark, day after miserable day. When finally we went to bed I could not sleep for the pain coursing along my back and between my shoulders. Even Errol complained, his obstinate nature overridden by the numbness in his hands from rotating the pan all day. When I did sleep, I woke shivering and soaked in heavy dew. Soon I was rousing myself by scratching my body and scalp bloody where I’d been munched by fleas and lice, which the forty-niners called quicks and slows. Added to this misery was the constant terror of those dark mountains looming behind us, sheltering cougars and grizzly bears and other unknown beasts that I sometimes heard moving through the forest in the night.

During this period we dredged only meager flakes, not even an eighth of an ounce per day. These I stored in an empty mustard jar. On the thirteenth day my shovel hit foreign material, making an audible metallic tink. Errol and I both started. I reached into the hole with my hands to dig but Errol pushed me aside. He scratched at the hole zealously and finally pulled up an empty whiskey bottle, proof that our spot had already been excavated.

Errol swore and whipped the bottle into the river. He kicked our iron pan in after it. I plunged into the water to retrieve the costly tool. I returned ashore intending to scold my brother, but I was met by a look of such anger and shame that I could not speak.

“We’ve been had, Joshua,” he said. “We’ve been taken on a damned ride.”

He set out in the direction of Angel’s Camp, cursing and swinging at every shrub and low-hanging branch along the way. I gathered our shovel and pan and followed him, wet to my waist, goldless California dust making mud on me.

At the Swede’s, Errol directed me to follow him inside and not to speak. A hearty fear came over me, and I was glad we had no weapon between us. But my brother removed his hat and greeted the Swede cordially. “Say,” Errol said, after trading some pleasantries, “we came up empty at that bar down the way.”

“Eh?” said the slippery Swede from beneath his mightily waxed mustache.

Errol asked whether we might have better luck upriver or down, creekside or in the dry hills, in soil yellowish or redder, and the Swede dispensed advice freely.

“One more thing,” Errol said to the Swede. “Has the coach been by? With the mail?”

The Swede laughed. “You’ll know when it has, boy.”

Outside, Errol was visibly glum. “It will come soon,” I said.

“Have you seen it?” he asked excitedly.

“No,” I admitted. “Only it’s bound to.”

Errol scowled. “Fetch our things and find me upriver.”

“But he said downriver.”

Errol took me by the shoulder. “Consider that man our compass, Joshua. He says downriver, we go up. He says hillside and we stay on the banks. Understand?”

V. LUMP FEVER

And so we moved upriver, and upriver farther three days after that. From there we were ever on the move. In years hence I have come to believe that the rotten Swede’s deception combined with the maddening stories I have described infected Errol with a specific lunacy. Lump fever, it was called at the diggings. It left my brother perpetually convinced that gold was just a claim or two above our own, that the big strike was ever around the bend. He was mad with it.

What agitated him further were the Chinamen, who followed us whenever we moved. We would establish a new camp, and sure as the California sun they would relocate to our old claim. The Chinamen moved in the night, it seemed, for when we woke it was as though they had simply materialized at our abandoned claim. I thought them humorous, with their pointed hats and billowy frocks and pigtails. But they made Errol nasty with agitation. He would emerge from the tent each morning and immediately look downriver to where the tongs were already up and working the patch we’d left. “It’s an ignorant strategy,” he said often. Indeed, we never saw them pull anything of value from those worked holes.

Errol and I had panned flakes enough only to partially replenish our stock of meat and flour. The rest of what we needed we bought on credit. Each morning and night I fried a hunk of pork in the same skillet we used to pan the river. After, I mixed flour in the grease to make a gray, pork-flecked porridge. I was a lacking cook, I admit, but that pork would have bested the fairest housewife. Pickled, cured, or fried, the swine of California was the stinkingest salt junk ever brought around the Horn.

Errol sloughed off weight. One morning I watched him from behind as he rinsed his dish in the river. He had not yet donned his shirt and the way he was bent caused the bones of his hips to rise from his trousers in startling iliac arcs. He reminded me of a bloodhound we had once, with the same scooped-out space where meat ought to have been. This socket movement was hypnotic, so much so that I felt compelled to run my thumb along one of those bone ridges. When I touched my brother, he jumped.

“You’ve gone a beanpole,” I stuttered.

He held the spoon he’d been washing at my eye level. The reflection was a skeletal version of myself, bug eyes and bony nose. I reached up and touched my whiskers, scraggly thin and clumped with filth. I was unsettled by my reflection and pushed the spoon away. I resolved to shave as soon as we could afford a whetting stone.

Throughout that day and others I considered that reflection. Its most unsettling aspect was not my thinness or my griminess, but my new resemblance to Errol. I’d somehow acquired his nose, his jawline, his seriousness about the eyes. He and I had never looked particularly similar before, but we did there, in the agony of starvation and ceaseless labor. The territory had twinned us.

VI. AUGURY AT AN AGREEABLE SLOUGH

Lump fever took us into November. We would shovel and pan, shovel and pan, shovel and pan. And without fail Errol would get to looking upriver, and we would have to pick up our stakes and start anew. At the rate we were moving, we would retrace our route eastward to Ohio by spring, a notion I would have found more than acceptable, were we not certain to die on the way.

Eventually we came to a sunny slough where the water was shallow and slightly warmer than we were accustomed to. We had barely begun our endeavor when, without a word to me, Errol began to pack our things.

I was crazy with fatigue, perhaps. Instead of packing I retrieved the mustard jar where I kept our flakes. On it I had pasted a strip of paper which I had marked from the bottom up with the names of foods available in camp: flour, salt pork, pork stew, pork and beans, roast beef and potatoes, plum duff, canned turkey with fixings and, at the very top, oysters with ale or porter. We had never eaten above pork and beans and I reminded him of it.

“Let’s work this bar a while,” I begged him. “A week, say.”

Errol stood and looked to me. He made a sad clicking with his tongue. “This is not the place.”

“We’ve been at it less than a day.”

He resumed gathering our few things, including that evil keg of salt pork.

“Errol,” I said.

“We haven’t the time,” he shouted. “Men are getting rich around us!”

“A cradle, then.” I had read of men using rocking boxes during the rush down in Georgia.

Errol scoffed. “The Swede’s asking a hundred dollars for one.”

“We’ll build our own. Work twenty times as much rock through it.” I held the mustard jar, shaking it like a babe’s empty rattle. “This is the place.”

Errol hovered over his ruck where he was rolling it. “You’re certain?” I knew what he was asking by the way he asked it. He harbored such reverence for my visions that it changed the way he spoke. “You’re certain?” he repeated.

What I was was homesick and hungry and bone tired. But my brother made no allowances for these. “I’m certain,” I said.

Errol dropped his sack and clapped me on the back. “Ho, ho!”

A more decent man would have been troubled to see his own brother go giddy at such a lie. But my conscience was waylaid by his gratitude, which caused a sudden sting in my heart. I had long known my brother had brought me to California not for my strength or my intellect or even for my company. He had brought me so that my auguries could make him rich.

I’d never found the fact troubling; it was in keeping with the way he’d been to me as long as I’d been alive. But what comfort it would have been, I thought now, if but once on this long, torturous journey he had intimated that he wanted me along to help him, because we were brothers. Brotherhood had never been on his mind, and for the first time I hated that it wasn’t. I hated that he considered me of use only when the visions overtook me. And in this thinking I saw his cure and mine: I would find our gold. I would tunnel my way to his affections. I would make him love me in the way of brothers.

I removed my spectacles, pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “I have seen it,” I said. “Oh, I have seen it.”

VII. A CRADLE AND ITS TROUBLES

Back home we could have built a cradle in two hours for two dollars. But lumber was scarce and expensive, so we had no choice but to cut our own. From the Swede I procured a saw, a hammer and some nails, all on credit. Errol and I worked steadily at the cradle for three days, a lifetime in the gold hills. Once he took a step back to assess our work, the crude box set on rockers. “I must admit,” he said, “I never imagined I would be caught a bachelor fashioning a cradle in the womanless wilds.” I knew about the branch of juniper he’d notched, a notch for each of the thirty-six days since he’d dispatched his last pitiful letter to Marjorie. But he seemed in good spirits as we worked, and I softened toward him. He had a winning way about him when he chose.

With the cradle finally assembled, we saw that it would indeed move more rock, that neither of us had accounted for just how much rock it was capable of moving. The problem was that the cradle required constant rocking in order for the gold to be captured in the riffles while worthless sediment passed them by. For a day we tested different arrangements. First we had Errol rocking away while I attempted simultaneously to dig the pay dirt, scoop it into the hopper and pour river water over the sediment so that its finer particles might be strained through the canvas apron. Inevitably I would run out of either sediment or water and have to fetch some more, at which point the slurry would stop streaming and our momentum would be lost. The cradle, ingenious a device as it was, depended on a steadier rocking and pouring than we two alone could maintain.

Errol, seeing the imperfection of our new method, became frequently agitated, and would often curse me, take the shovel from my hand and push me to the handle. Attempting to man both the shovel and the bucket on his own, Errol would see quickly what I saw: our operation was a man short.

“This won’t do,” he said finally. “We’re just rinsing the soil.”

I nodded.

“We need more hands,” he said.

I might have made that observation twelve long and fruitless hours earlier, were I not sure he would smash up all our hard work in a fit. “What about the Chinamen?” I said.

Errol shook his head. “I won’t split with them.”

“And what’s our choice? Split nothing fifty-fifty. Fifty-fifty salt pork and gruel? Fifty-fifty sleeping on the ground?” I cast my shovel to the ground. Now I was agitated, and from the corner of my eye I saw the elder Chinaman pause. “Do you know what we owe that Swede?”

Errol returned me the shovel. “You don’t become a man of society by keeping quarters with Orientals.”

VIII. THE FIRST COACH

When we rose in the morning the diggings were deserted. I trudged sleepily up and down the bank in my long johns. The place had gone a ghost town. Upriver each claim was abandoned, pans half sifted, the wooden handles of shovels jutting like masts from where their heads had been thrust into the soil. Downriver was the same, except for the Chinamen, who worked on, same as ever. I approached the father, aware that Errol was following.

“Where’s everyone gone?” I said. I pointed to the manless claims. “Where are they?” The Chinaman began to speak in the tong language, which I had never heard. The sound was bizarre and impenetrable.

Errol interrupted him. “Has there been a strike?” he said loudly.

The Chinaman pressed his lips together, then began to speak again, slowly. And again, the language was entirely incomprehensible.

“A strike! A strike!” shouted Errol, hopping and flailing his arms in the general direction of the mountains. “Has there been a strike, you old fool?”

“No strike,” came a clear, effeminate voice beyond the commotion. We turned to see the boy standing on the banks, holding his pan of woven straw. “He say, ‘A coach. In the night.’”

We stared like idiots.

“Mail,” the boy said.

Errol took off.

“Thank you,” I said to the boy. “You know ‘thank you’?”

“Yes,” he said.

I dressed and followed Errol along the trail to Angel’s Camp. Out front of the Swede’s a monstrous crowd was gathered around a stagecoach. There were men in numbers I had never seen, hundreds of men not only from our fork of the American but from all of Calaveras County and Eldorado beyond. They were the roughest specimens I have ever seen, and nearly every one of them brandished a revolver or a musket.

The driver of the coach had climbed atop the cab and was arbitrating the rowdy crowd from that position. In his hands he clutched a distressingly small bundle of letters. Errol attempted to pry his way to the heart of the crowd. He pushed between men, struggling to get within shouting distance of the coach. Surely without thinking he shouldered past a ruffian at least half a rod tall with a beard grown down to his chest. The man—a Southerner—informed Errol that he had occupied that spot since before sunup and that he was unlikely to forfeit it to Errol or to anyone. For proof he showed Errol his Bowie knife.

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 unburned 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.

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:

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-covered 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.

Eventually I stabbed the shovel into the rock and said, “I think I’ll heat some beans. Care for some?”

“No. I don’t think so,” said Errol, taking up the shovel. I fixed dinner and set some on his stump for him. As I ate I watched his futile efforts at the shovel, then the bucket, then the rocker, then the shovel again. He stayed at the shovel then, with his breath puffing into the cold like the stack of a steamboat. I went to bed with him still at it, figuring he would exhaust his frustrations and retire in his own time. I fell asleep to the skeletal scrape of iron against bedrock.

And in the morning I woke to it.

I emerged from our tent but Errol was nowhere in sight. I could hear his work but not see him. There was the cradle, unmanned. In the place where I had last seen him was a large mound of dirt. Beyond it, a pit. I approached. Down at the bottom of the pit was my brother, shoveling earth as steadily as he had been six hours before. The hole was likely five feet deep and vaguely rectangular. The shape of it alone frightened me, but I composed myself and adopted an air of nonchalance.

“Good morning, Errol,” I called. “Would you care for some breakfast?” I peered again into the hole. The sun was not yet very high and so Errol was mostly in shadow. His head alone was illuminated, and it seemed to hover above the darkness of the pit, disembodied. His hat was gone. I later found it buried in the pile.

“I think I’ll make some flapjacks,” I repeated. “Would you care to take a break for some flapjacks, Errol?” His answer was a shovelful of dark sediment, flashing in the sunlight. It seemed there was nothing to do but what I’d always done. I fixed breakfast, and when I was through I tossed Errol a warm flapjack, only to have it ejected in yet another shovel load.

My brother remained in his mine all morning. The Chinamen arrived ready to work, but I dismissed them. I stood near the lip of the pit, saying his name again and again and again, until his name went meaningless as a tong word. He never acknowledged me, only dug.

I offered him water. He dug.

I read him our sweet mother’s letter. He dug.

Noon came. The hole was not so deep that Errol could not climb out—not yet—but it was deep enough now that even when he stood straight, my brother’s frame was completely subterranean. I might have lain on my stomach and reached down to touch the top of his head, but I did not. He dug. The ceaseless sound of his shovel on the rock penetrated my every thought.

I flattered him. He dug.

I taunted him. He dug.

I bribed him. He dug.

I told him we could go to San Francisco and nap in feather beds. He dug.

I told him, finally, that we could return to Marjorie. He dug.

By dusk the hole had gone narrower. It was now over seven feet deep. I sat near the lip, dejected and alone. I had no one but Errol here and I suddenly felt it was very important to touch him. I laid my belly against the cool earth, inched my way to the edge of the hole and extended my arm down into it. I called softly for Errol to pause in his task for just one minute, to reach up above his head and stretch his fingers toward mine. So I could test his temperature, I said. But he would not turn his face to me.

Night fell, and with it came fury. I cursed him. I stood on the edge of the hole and shouted at him. Men came down to have a look at the commotion, and I ran them off. I shrieked into the pit. I said things I had never said to anyone. Things I have not said since.

I must have slept that night, because I woke before light, shivering with frost, atop the mound he’d made. The scraping went on. The sides of the chasm sparkled with frost, too, and this brought me a strategy. I filled the bucket at the river, returned to the hole, and began trickling water down into it. “Errol,” I called. “I think the river’s coming in. Hear that? That’s the river, old boy.” He said nothing, but his scraping paused, I thought.

“Don’t worry, Errol. I’ll get you out.” I tied one end of a rope to a tree. I refilled the bucket and poured it in. Then I flung the other end of the rope into the hole and called, “Grab hold, Errol! I’ll pull you up!”

The digging persisted, but now there was a watery sound beneath the scrape of the shovel.

That night I sat jiggling the rope, touching the notch my brother had left in my collarbone, saying I was sorry and could he please please please please grab hold.

When morning came I gathered the heaviest rocks I could carry and assembled them in a pile near the lip. I was desperate. I intended to brain my brother, climb down the rope, tie it around him, climb up the rope and then pull him up. Giddy images of his wilted body dangling from the rope passed through my mind at the moment I noticed a strange sound. It was silence. The absence of shovel on bedrock.

I approached the hole, bracing myself for the sight of my brother’s dead body at the bottom. Instead, he sat quite alive with his back against the earth wall, as if resting after a morning’s work and not three feverish days spent burying himself alive. It was noon and the sun was beaming directly into the hole. I could see his scalp burned pink where his hair had gathered in clumps, and his blistered, bloody hands. He had removed his boots and one was half-submerged in the water I’d poured upon him. The rope was well above where he sat, curled like an animal in a waterlogged den.

Then he began to sing. It was the first I’d heard his voice since he declined the now-crusted beans still awaiting him on the stump. The song was a popular one, and he sang it with an unsettling bounce:

“That’s a fine tune,” I said when he was done. I don’t know why I said it, except that it was.

Errol looked up at me, finally, squinting against the light. His face had gone gaunt and grimed and socket-hollow. He did not look like himself. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abigail.”

That was our mother’s name.

“I’m Joshua,” I said. “Joshua. Your brother. Say Joshua.”

“Sing me ‘The Old Oaken Bucket.’ You know that one, Abby?”

“Joshua!” I cried.

Errol reached his hand across the shaft and scraped some soil from the wall opposite him. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abby girl.”

I threw myself at the pile of rock and attempted to lift one. I intended to throw my boulders down upon him, smiting him as would the God of that hole. I did not care, at that moment, whether I stoned him to death or buried him alive. But the Lord had taken my strength. I only lay in the dirt and wept.

“Do you know ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’?” whispered Errol.

“No,” I said through my tears. “How does it go?” And then I passed into darkness.

XVI. A TROUT

A promise unkept will take a man’s mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold. I know that now. But this was years ago, when I was young and felt the whole world of Errol’s collapse was mine to bear. It is strange telling you this, because the boy I was feels so far away from the man I am now. I know I ought to consider that distance a blessing, given the darkness and the difficulty of the time I have described here. But it brings me no comfort to think how far I have traveled nor how much wiser I’ve become. Because though I was afraid and angry and lonesome much of the time, I was also closer to my own raw heart there in the territory than I have ever been since.

I woke at the Chinaman’s camp. It was dusk. The boy sat near me with a tin cup. Behind him was his uncle, sitting on a stump near the fire, and behind him was the dusky blue Sacramento valley with fires and lanterns burning here and there.

“Where’s Errol?” I said. “Where is my brother?”

The boy handed me the tin cup. “Where you think?” He frowned, as if disappointed in himself. “He is in the earth, still.”

“Is he digging?”

The boy shook his head.

“Singing?”

“No.”

I got up and walked upriver to the hole and looked inside. Errol sat in the muddy water with his legs folded to his chest, alive and shivering. He had removed his shirt and tied it about his head. I jiggled the rope and called to him, but he did not answer. He was apparently through digging, and his hole had not gained any more depth. Yet he felt farther from me than when last I saw him.

I returned to the Chinaman’s camp and sat looking from the boy to his uncle. The old man was cleaning the blade of his jade-handled knife on his robe and chewing a stalk of grass. I wanted him to say something. I felt if he spoke he would have a way to end this thing. But he said nothing. And the yellow stalk of sweetgrass bounced in his mouth.

The Chinaman sheathed his knife and stowed it in the folds of his robe. Then he reached into a bucket beside him and brought up an enormous rainbow trout. It was dead, but freshly dead, shimmering still and with that gruesome pout that dead fish have. Fish were rare on our part of the river, so many were devoured by men upstream. It was a lovely creature, and I knew the tongs must have traveled a long way to catch it.

“For Mister Errol,” said the boy.

Then, at the sound of the boy’s voice and the gutted shimmer of the trout in the blue dusk, the providence of the thing burst upon my mind. I saw Errol climbing up out of his hole and sitting beside the Chinaman’s fire, saw us four scooping soft, steaming handfuls of fish to our mouths. It was no augury, only the visions of my own hopeful heart.

The skin of the fish sizzled wonderfully, emitting a stirring aroma as we cooked it. Surely the meal would return Errol’s mind and deliver him the strength and will to reach up and take hold of the rope. I watched it fry, feeling that the rest of my life was lodged in that trout.

With the cooked fish I approached the hole. It was dark now and the moon had risen. The night was clear and the gibbous moon so bright I expected to see its reflection dancing in the water pooled at the bottom of the pit. But there was only darkness. I called to Errol.

“I fixed you dinner,” I said, holding the tasty rainbow over the hole. I could not see him but I heard the earth crumble a little as he shifted, heard some stones hitting the water. “Errol, will you come up and have some trout?”

He said nothing. No matter, I thought. I was convinced that all he needed was to see the thing, to lay his hand on its soft fish belly. He would eat it, head and all, and return to me. “Look out below,” I said, and dropped the trout into the darkness.

I listened at the hole for some time and heard nothing. I returned to the Chinaman’s camp to wait. The boy tossed pebbles into the river and we three sat listening to the sound of them dropping into the water. “He’ll die down there,” I said, for I had just realized it.

I spent that night in the China camp, stretched out on a flat sandy spot near the embers of the fire. Before sleep I resolved that at dawn I would descend into the hole, fight Errol into submission and bring him up. He would return to me.

No sooner had I fallen off than I was awoken by the mournful roars of a grizzly.

I sat up and saw the bear, standing on its hind legs, staggering toward me. It bellowed and I scrambled along the ground away from the beast. He came at me. I saw in my mind the purple innards of General Scott strung along Tuolumne Meadow and my bowels spasmed.

Through sheer dumb habit I brought my spectacles to my face, and with them saw that the grizzly was no grizzly. It was my brother, naked and covered head to foot with black mud. His arms were raised over his head. He carried something there, as though to an Old Testament altar. He came closer. Moonglow shone upon his lips, blistered and cracked and bloody and trembling. The nail of one of his big toes was missing.

He thrust the trout into my hands. He had not eaten a bite of it. He bellowed again, and this time I understood the word.

“Gold!” he said again, pointing to the fish.

Another man would have identified this as the raving of a lunatic. But I was dazed and accustomed to heeding my brother and did so now. I examined the mangled, mudded fish. I ran my hand along its sides and lifted its fins. Once I saw one I saw them all. Thousands of tiny gold flakes lodged amongst its scales.

The Chinaman and his boy emerged from their tent. The Chinaman was bare-chested, the first I had ever seen him so. Errol pointed a filthy, trembling finger to where he stood.

“You!” he bellowed. Errol charged at the Chinaman, toppling him to the ground. The boy shouted. Up came the sounds of fist on flesh. When the men rose, Errol had the Chinaman by his throat. The Chinaman’s eye was cut. He scratched frantically at Errol’s hands where they held him.

“You had it all,” Errol said.

The Chinaman stomped and kicked at Errol but Errol did not flinch. I stood in horror with the trout in my hands as Errol dragged the Chinaman to the river. The two descended into the slow, dark water. The Chinaman flailed wildly now, sputtering. Errol lifted the Chinaman slightly and then plunged him under the water.

I dropped the trout and ran into the river. Water filled my long johns and pulled at them. A shape flashed at my side and then past. It was the boy, plunging toward the place where his uncle was being drowned.

I did not see it immediately, only saw the boy launch himself at Errol and cling to his backside. Errol screamed and released the Chinaman and the Chinaman surfaced, gasping for air. Errol flung the boy off him. It was then that I saw the jade-handled knife still in the boy’s hand where he’d been tossed, and that Errol had a long gash across his bare haunch. Errol twisted to examine the wound and as he did so it opened and out rolled a rivulet of black blood.

The Chinaman and his nephew stood on the bank, checking each other for wounds. The boy was trembling. I approached them. They watched me a moment, then fled.

Errol looked from the gash to me. He motioned for me to come to him, but I could not. “You see,” he said, serenely. “It’s so clear. They had it all along.”

I fled. I could not endure the fact of his believing, believing, believing beyond the rotten end. That’s all I can say about it.

XVII. EPILOGUE

When I finally came upon San Francisco Bay, it was so dense with abandoned vessels that their masts made a leafless forest atop the water. I found work as a torch boy for the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, and with them I fought the Christmas Eve fire of 1849 and the Saint Valentine’s blaze. When finally I had earned enough money I bought passage aboard a thousand-ton sidewheeler called Apollo, where I was the only human cargo among sacks and sacks of gold bullion. Eventually, I disembarked in Boston Harbor. I intended to return to Ohio from there, but it was many years before I was able to meet my mother, the woman whose son I had abandoned in the wilderness. I went to church, and to school. By the time I had the courage to see her I was a grown man.

While in San Francisco, I read in the California Star that in Angel’s Camp two tongs, father and son, had been captured by a mob of citizens and tried for the crime of robbery and attempted murder. They were hanged, said the report, though I knew that would be their fate the night I sat hiding in the woods above Sacramento, listening to nocturnal beasts moving through the scrub, when the snow ring around the gibbous moon triggered my final augury. As to last words, the Star reported that the tong boy recited a passage of Homer.

In the years following the rush, it became fashionable for Easterners to decorate their parlors with gilt-framed daguerreotypes of forty-niners. In these years I’ve seen many such portraits of Argonauts posed proudly with pan or pick or troy scale, their whiskers cut back in a semblance of civility. Each time I encounter one I hope to see my brother in it, although I know it is unlikely he ever had himself pictured off. And it is a false art, I realize. Most of the men used props on loan from the portraitist. Some were models sitting before drop cloths in New York City. But a great deal of what I like about those faddish daguerreotypes is that they show no trace of the darkness I remember of the diggings, none of the loneliness or the madness or the hunger. Even the pistols in the men’s belts seem tucked there in jest. I’d very much like to see my brother there someday, in his red miner’s shirt with his hat tipped back, a fresh sash at his collar, brandishing a fine new pickax and a lump. I’d like to see him poised at the center of a gleaming gilded frame, as if color was every bit as bountiful as we’d been told. I’d like to see him posed with his endless belief and at last surrounded by bright soft gold. And maybe if I saw him there I might see the Argonaut believer within myself, too, for we looked so similar in the territory.

What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, N.T., and said only that the lode had a hold of him.