In the Distance

2.

The Brennans insisted that Håkan join their prospecting expedition. He was going inland anyway, and they needed help carrying their equipment. They also hoped he would stay on and mine with them for a while—he would need money to get to New York, and they could use another man to stake their claim once they found gold. Their chances were good, they said, since James was a coal miner and understood rocks. Håkan agreed. Even if eager to set out as soon as possible, he understood he could not cross the continent without horses and provisions. There was no doubt in his mind that his brother had made it to New York—Linus was much too smart to get lost. And although they had never planned for a situation like this, New York was the only place where they could meet, simply because it was the only place in America they both were able to name. All Håkan had to do was get there. Then, Linus would find him.

As soon as they landed, the Brennans realized that their life savings were worthless. A harness in California was the price of a horse in Ireland; a loaf of bread that of a bushel of wheat. After selling all their possessions back home, they barely had enough for two old burros, a wheelbarrow, some basic supplies, and a flintlock musket. Ill-equipped and bitter, James led his family inland shortly after they had disembarked.

The little party would not have made it very far without Håkan, since one of the donkeys soon bloated up and died, after which he did most of the lugging. He even devised a yoke of sorts—made of leather, rope, and wood—so he could more easily pull the wheelbarrow uphill. The children took turns riding in it. Several times a day, James would stop, read the dirt, and set off on his own, following a sign visible only to him. He would then pick at a rock or pan some mud, study the results while mumbling to himself, and then signal everyone to move on.

America did not make a deep impression on Håkan. Having heard so many of Linus’s tales, he had come to expect a dreamlike, outlandish world. Even if he was unable to name the trees, did not recognize the songs of the birds, and found the dirt on barren stretches surprisingly red and blue, everything (plants, animals, rocks) came together in a reality that, although unfamiliar, belonged, at least, to the realm of the possible.

They moved in silence through the interminable sagebrush, whose monotony was interrupted, now and then, by small packs of dogs and busy, terrified rodents. James failed to shoot jackrabbits but seldom missed a sage hen. The children buzzed around the wheelbarrow and the burro, hunting for glittery pebbles they submitted for their father’s consideration. They collected wood along the way for their cooking fire, by which Eileen nursed Håkan’s hands and shoulders, severely blistered by the wheelbarrow’s handles and the harness, and read from the Bible to the family before sleep. It was a tedious journey that tested their patience more than their courage.

After crossing a forest of giant trees (the only landscape bearing some relation to Linus’s outrageous American vignettes), they found a hirsute, laconic trapper wrapped in a greased hunting frock, and, a few days later, their first mining camps. They walked by modest settlements, clusters of precarious tarp shelters and malformed log cabins with burlap roofing, guarded by hostile prospectors who never invited them to sit by the fire or share a cup of water. The small things they asked for (food for the children, a nail for the wheelbarrow) were offered to them at extravagant prices and could be paid for only in gold.

Håkan barely understood scattered fragments of these exchanges—occasional words and, at best, the general intention suggested by the surrounding circumstances. To him, English was still a mudslide of runny, slushy sounds that did not exist in his mother tongue—r, th, sh, and some particularly gelatinous vowels. Frawder thur prueless rare shur per thurst. Mirtler freckling thow. Gold freys yawder far cration. Crewl fry rackler friend thur. No shemling keal rearand for fear under shall an frick. Folger rich shermane furl hearst when pearsh thurlow larshes your morse claws. Clushes ream glown roven thurm shalter shirt. Earen railing hole shawn churl neaven warver this merle at molten rate. Clewd other joshter thuck croshing licks lurd and press rilough lard. Hinder plural shud regrout crool ashter grein. Rashen thist loger an fash remur thow rackling potion weer shust roomer gold loth an shermour fleesh. Raw war sheldens fractur shell crawls an row per sher. At first, the Brennans (especially Eileen) made an effort to keep Håkan informed of their plans, but eventually they gave up on him. Håkan followed them without attempting any questions. They were, for the most part, heading east, and that was enough for him.

Wanting to stay clear of the other diggers, James refused to follow the faint trail over the mountains. They tried to find their way through valleys and over low hills, but the wheelbarrow was too cumbersome for the terrain. They got into a country where there was no grass and water was scarce. The skin on Håkan’s hands and shoulders (where he fitted the leather harness to pull the cart) was, for the most part, gone, and the exposed flesh glistened, pale pink, under the viscous honey-colored varnish of incipient infection. During a steep descent, the compresses in which Eileen had wrapped Håkan’s hands slipped off, and the rough handles burned his blistered palms, tore off his scabs, and pierced his raw flesh with dozens of splinters, forcing him to let go. The wheelbarrow raced downhill with increasing speed, first rolling, then tumbling and flipping on itself, and finally turning somersaults and pirouetting with surprising grace until it smashed against a boulder, shattering beyond repair. Håkan lay on the rocks, almost unconscious from the pain, unassisted by the Brennans, who, mesmerized by the catastrophe, stared at the path made by their belongings strewn down the hill. Eventually, James came out of his stupor, rushed over to Håkan, and started kicking him in the gut, yelling—a wordless scream, a deep howl. Somehow, Eileen managed to contain her husband, and he collapsed on the dirt, weeping and drooling.

“It is not your fault,” she kept telling Håkan over and over again as she picked him up and inspected his hands. “It is not your fault.”

They collected their things, camped by a nearby stream, tried to sleep by a feeble fire, and put off the discussion about their prospects until the following morning.

Apparently, there was a town a few days away, but they did not want to leave their effects behind. Håkan could not be sent for help, and James seemed to refuse to leave him with his wife, children, and property. The kind Irishman who had boarded in Portsmouth was vanishing—since they had docked in San Francisco, he had darkened with disappointment and was quickly being reduced to an angry and distrustful shadow of his old self.

Deep in thought, James wandered down to the stream with his pan, more out of habit than with a clear design, and submerged it absentmindedly in the water while murmuring to himself. When the pan came out, he stared into it, transfixed, as if he were looking into a mirror without recognizing the face that was supposed to be his. Then, for the second time in two days, he wept.

That was the first gold Håkan ever saw, and he found the minute nuggets disappointingly pale. He thought quartz and even the mica scales on any ordinary rock were more impressive than those opaque, spongy crumbs. James, however, had no doubt. To make sure, he placed the pale yellow pea on a boulder and hammered it with a stone. It was soft and did not break. It was, beyond question, gold.

Tracing a line from the spot of his finding to the mountain, James started working with his pick on a flaky hillside off the riverbank. His family looked on. After a while, he stopped, spat on the rock, and rubbed it with his fingertips. Suddenly pale, panting and stumbling stiffly like a flightless bird, he went to his children, dragged them to the hillside, and seemed to explain to them what he had just found. With eyes shut, he pointed first to the sky, then to the ground, and finally to his heart, on which he tapped while repeating the same phrase over and over again. The only word Håkan understood was “father.” The children were frightened by James’s rapture, and Eileen finally had to step in when he grabbed the youngest one by the shoulders and delivered a possessed soliloquy whose ardor brought the boy to tears. James did not notice the effect his state had on his family. He never interrupted his vehement address to the rocks, the plains, and the heavens.

The following weeks resembled, in many ways, Håkan’s life back in Sweden. He was mostly in charge of gathering and catching their food, for which he went on long excursions with the children, just as he used to do with his brother. It was plain James did not want him around the mine. He trusted Håkan only with menial, brawny tasks that kept him far from the actual extraction—moving boulders, shoveling dirt, and, eventually, digging a canal from the creek to the mine. Meanwhile, James worked alone with pick, chisel, and hammer, crawling into his holes and hunching over pebbles, which he spat on and rubbed against his shirt. He dug from dawn until well into the night, when his eyes got dry and bloodshot from laboring by the weak light of two flat-wick lamps. When the work of the day was done, he disappeared into the darkness, presumably to hide his gold, and then returned to camp to eat and then collapse by the fire.

Their living conditions deteriorated rapidly. Absorbed by work, James had never taken the time to build a proper shelter for his family—Håkan had tried to erect a precarious hut, but it was only good for the children to play in. Exposed to the elements, their clothes started to degrade, and under the tatters, their red skin bubbled with blisters. Eileen and the children, who were very fair, even developed white reptilian scabs on their lips, nostrils, and earlobes. Since James did not want to attract attention to his quarry by firing his musket, they could only supplement their dwindling provisions with small game—mostly sage hens, which, they soon discovered, were so unfamiliar with humans that the children could simply walk up to them and smash their heads with a club. Eileen cooked the birds in a thick bittersweet sauce made of a kind of huckleberry Håkan never found again in his travels. The children ran around with Håkan all day, dodging their mother’s halfhearted attempts at schooling them. James, working uninterruptedly and hardly feeding himself, was becoming a gaunt specter, his eyes—at once distracted and focused, as if seeing the world through a dirty window and inspecting the grimy glass rather than looking through it—bulging in his haggard, angular visage. He lost at least three teeth in a matter of days.

Each night, he scurried away to his secret spot. Once, Håkan happened to be nearby and saw him remove a slab of stone that covered a hole and put the yields of the day inside. James stayed there for a while, crouching, peering into the pit. Then, he replaced the slab, covered it with sand and pebbles, pulled his trousers down, and defecated on it.

The trip to the nearby town could no longer be postponed. They needed basic supplies and, above all, tools to expand the operation—James was mostly concerned with getting lamps that would allow him to keep working through the night. After complex, secretive preparations, he decided it was time to leave. He gave Eileen and the children meticulous instructions that always came back to the same basic command—no fire. He packed the burro lightly and ordered Håkan to follow him.

Their journey was uneventful. They did not cross paths with anyone on the trail. Silence was seldom broken. The weak burro dragged his feet behind them. James rarely took his hand off his chest, against which, under his ragged blouse and fastened to a string tied around his neck, hung a little canvas sack. On the third morning, they arrived.

The town was only one block long—an inn, a general store, and about half a dozen houses with their blinds shut. The rough, skewed constructions seemed to have been erected that morning (the smell of sawdust, tar, and paint still lingered in the air) with the sole purpose of being taken down at dusk. New but precarious, as if decrepitude had been built into them, the houses seemed eager to become ruins. The street had only one side—the plains began where the thresholds ended.

Tethered to posts along the street, a few emaciated horses twitched under swarms of flies. Meanwhile, the men leaning against walls and door-sills seemed immune to the insects, which were probably repelled by the strong tobacco all of them were smoking. Like James and Håkan, the bystanders were also in rags, and under the wide-brimmed hats, their weather-beaten faces were bark and leather abstractions. Still, the onlookers retained faint traces of civilization that life in the wilderness had completely erased from the newcomers’ countenance.

James and Håkan walked under the silent scrutiny of the smokers, and that same silence followed them into the general store. The shopkeeper interrupted his conversation with an old man in a faded dragoon uniform. James nodded at them. They nodded back. He walked around picking up kerosene lamps, tools, sacks of flour and sugar, blankets, charqui, powder, and other supplies he requested from behind the counter with laconic grunts. When James was done, the shopkeeper went through the items, pointing at each one softly with his index and middle fingers, as if blessing them, and then presented his customer with a bill jotted down in lead. James barely looked at it. He walked to the back of the store, hid poorly behind some casks, turned his back to everyone, hunched over as if doing something obscene, looked behind his shoulder a couple of times, and then returned to the counter, on which he put down a few gold nuggets.

The shopkeeper must have had a well-trained eye, because he neither haggled nor examined the gold but swiftly put it away, thanking his customer. A boy around Håkan’s age but half his size started dragging their things outside. The dragoon slipped out without saying good-bye.

While the burro was being loaded, James and Håkan went to the inn. Heads turned, several pairs of eyes looked up from froth-crowned mugs of ale, a dealing hand froze in midair, a light lingered too long in front of a cigar. The Irishman and the Swede also paused. Everyone stared at them. With their first step toward the counter, the patrons came back to life.

The bartender nodded as they approached, and by the time they had reached the bar, two ales and a plate of dried meat were waiting for them. Håkan had never had liquor before and found the warm, bitter brew repulsive. He was too shy to ask for water and made the mistake of eating some of the charqui. James took a pull at his ale. Nobody looked at them, yet they were unmistakably the center of everyone’s attention. James patted his chest, trying to conceal the pouch that kept showing through the tears in his tattered shirt. The bartender kept his mug full.

A door opened on the second floor, across the room from the counter. Only James’s and Håkan’s heads turned around and up. Fleetingly, Håkan saw a tall woman in a purple dress with silver scales. Above the corset, her bosom also sparkled with glitter. Her hair poured in waves of thick amber over her shoulders, and her lips were a red that was almost black. She tilted her head, looked at Håkan with an intensity that somehow came from her lips rather than her eyes, and vanished behind the doorjamb. As soon as she was gone, the shabby dragoon came out of the room, followed by a tidy fat man. The rotund fop hobbled down the staircase, following the dragoon, and headed straight for the two strangers. Despite being soaked in sweat, he was the only clean man in the place, the only one who was not caked with grime. An orange-blossom aura surrounded him. He wiped his brow with an immaculate handkerchief and folded it fastidiously before returning it to his chest pocket, after which he flattened his hair to one side with his hands and cleared his throat. All this was done with the utmost gravity. Then, as if a spring activating a hidden mechanism had been set off, he smiled, took a small bow, and, quite loudly, addressed the strangers. It seemed to be a formal speech. While talking, the fat man described an arc with his upturned hand, encompassing the whole bar or maybe even the entire desert beyond it, and then stretched out his other arm, as if accepting or offering an enormous gift, shut his eyes beatifically, and said, in conclusion, after a solemn pause, “Welcome to Clangston.”

James nodded without ever looking up.

With the loud and affected friendliness that Håkan would later find in preachers and peddlers, the perfumed man asked a very long question and then widened his frame by fitting his thumbs into his waistcoat’s armholes.

James grunted a brief response with a dryness that was either defiant or fearful.

The fat man behind the imperturbable smile nodded compassionately, as if dealing with a sick infant or a harmless idiot.

The dragoon, who had slithered to the darkest corner of the room, pressed down on one of his nostrils and cleanly shot out a plug of snot from the other. The fat man sighed, signaled in his direction with a soft hand, and apologized in a tired, somewhat maternal tone. Then he turned back to James and asked him another question, always smiling, always polite. James stared into his mug of ale. The fat man repeated the question. Only a few of the gamblers and drinkers could keep pretending to go on with their conversations. James swept the filthy counter with the edge of his hand a few times. With affected patience, the man pointed at the general store where they had bought their supplies and explained something in a condescending tone. Once done, he shrugged and looked at James, who, after a long pause, said, “No.” The fat man shrugged again, folding his lower lip over the upper one, and then clapped his hands against each of his thighs, emitting a potent surge of orange blossom, and shook his head, as if resigned to accept some outlandish fancy as an irrefutable truth. He stood in silence for a while, assuming a contemplative air, and then arched his eyebrows and nodded, pretending that James’s answer had finally sunk in and that he was genuinely at peace with it. The dragoon blew the other side of his nose. Nothing came out.

The bartender was about to top James off once more when the boy from the store peered into the bar and announced that the burro was ready. James produced a few coins from his trouser pocket, but the fat man, feigning grave offense, cried, “No, no, no, no, no, no,” and interposed his starched sleeve between James and the bartender. He made a brief ceremonial statement, took a deep breath, and finally repeated, as his fingers crawled between the buttons of his waistcoat, “Welcome to Clangston.”

Håkan and James went outside and inspected the ropes and straps fastening their goods to the burro. James started out slowly, without turning back, but Håkan lingered by the tethering posts. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching and then drank avidly from the trough by the fly-ridden horses, cupping the brown water in his hands. The men inside the bar laughed. Håkan turned around, startled and ashamed, but the door was just a black hole in the sunstruck façade. Then he remembered the woman and looked up. The window glistened impenetrably. He caught up with James, and together they made their way down the single street of Clangston.

They traveled back as fast as they could, stopping after dark and leaving again before daybreak. For long stretches, James had Håkan follow him backwards, sweeping the ground with a stick to dim and confuse their tracks. From time to time, James would suddenly stop and stare into the void, his index finger crossed over his lips and his hollowed hand to his ear, listening for pursuers. They ate charqui and biscuits (both of which James had to soak in water), and they never built a fire.

Although they had spent only a brief time in Clangston—and even if its short, shabby street could hardly be called a town, and its few filthy inhabitants had almost been eroded by the elements—Håkan was still astounded by the sight of James’s rustic mine by the stream. The camp was just a heap of branches, some planks salvaged from the wrecked wheelbarrow, and garbage that could only have any value in that extreme isolation—all scattered around an ash pit. Eileen and the children, jumping for joy at their arrival, were shredded, swollen, pustulated creatures. Not just their clothes, but their very skin was ragged, and it hung off their flesh like worn gauze. They were gaunt yet bloated by the sun, and their small gray-blue eyes set in this contradictory frame shone with a feverish spark, all of which made their delight a frightening thing to witness. Håkan thought of the condemned forest creatures in his brother’s tales.

Rather than improving their situation, the new supplies only deepened the void that separated the Brennans from the world. After setting up his new lamps, James was able to work around the clock. He became a demented skeleton, hammering away day and night, pausing only to sneak into the dark to hide his daily findings. Eileen and the children remained as lively as ever, but they were careful to stay clear of James, whose mistrustful fits of anger were becoming impossible to contain. When he was not digging the canal or lugging boulders, Håkan spent his time with the children, who also taught him some English—although the words he learned did not go far beyond their immediate environment and the modest demands of their games.

A few days passed. How many, Håkan could not tell—he was not even sure how long it had been since he had landed in San Francisco. In Sweden, back at the farm, they had neither calendars nor clocks, but work had both divided the days into regular segments and grouped them into constant cycles. At the mine, however, time seemed either to be frozen or to slip away—it was hard to tell which. James worked ceaselessly. Eileen invented chores for herself. The children roamed around. Each day resembled the last, and their lives remained unchanged until a speck of dust appeared on the horizon.

By the time Eileen alerted James, the speck had grown into an ochre smudge hovering on the skyline, and while James fetched his musket, it became a cloud shrouding six riders and a carriage. James looked at the approaching convoy while loading shot into the muzzle and fumbling with his powder flask. His wife asked him nervous questions. He ignored her and readied the flintlock. The children stood by their father, gaping at the horizon. Always staring ahead, James pushed them away from him. The horses approached at a slow walk. Gradually, the crunch of pebbles being ground under the steel tires, the chirp of springs and poorly oiled axles, and a jingle of bits, buckles, and spurs became audible. All eyes were on the carriage. It was a purple coach covered with shiny spots that reflected the midday sun. The four plumed horses driving it seemed to feel insulted by the heat. Nervous tassels dangled from the sides of the roof. As the carriage got closer, the shiny spots revealed themselves to be gilded volutes, flowers, laces, and wreaths that framed vividly painted scenes of men suffering the cruelest torments and of women forced in unspeakable ways, of villages in flames and heaps of rotting animals, of whippings and impalements, of beheadings and burning stakes, of pillories and gibbets, of agonizing faces and spilling entrails. At the front of the contingent, Håkan saw the tidy fat man and the dragoon.

They stopped at a prudent distance but close enough to address James without screaming. Nobody dismounted. They all had guns at their belts, and one of them brought two burros in tow. James stood still. The children hugged Eileen’s waist. The door and windows of the carriage remained shut. The heavy black velvet curtains swelled and collapsed, slowly, regularly, as if the coach were breathing.

The fat man patted his shiny gray lovingly and leaned over her neck, whispering something to her. He cleared his throat; the hidden spring activated his mechanical smile; and—after raising his hat to Eileen, who shyly curtsied back—he started delivering one of his long, smug speeches. He addressed Eileen for the most part, but he also had sanctimonious smiles and admonitory finger-wags for the children. Suddenly, he pretended to have discovered the mine and the canal and to be deeply impressed by them. A spirited oration ensued. Once done with his condescending panegyric, he feigned having a hard time extinguishing his enthusiasm, but when he had finally composed himself, he arranged his paper cuffs, rubbed his hands, and moved on to serious business. After a lengthy preamble, he laboriously detached his pommel bag and held it wide open. It was brimful with paper money. He made a dramatic pause, stressed by an emphatic adjustment of his waistcoat. James kept his eyes on him. The fat man wiped his brow with his handkerchief and uttered a few words with sacerdotal pomp. Then he motioned to the mine once again. This time, he seemed to refer to it with some disdain, and to conclude, he pointed again to the money with great satisfaction.

“No,” said James with determination.

The fat man sighed stoically, like a doctor dealing with a superstitious patient who refuses to accept what is best for him, then turned to Eileen and, resuming his patronizing tone, in a singsong manner, said something about the children.

James, trembling with fury, started screaming. He ordered his family to step back, and yelled at the convoy, brandishing his old musket. The fat man pretended to be scandalized by this outburst. James turned his wrath to the carriage. Håkan did not understand the words, but it was clear enough that James was asking who was in there and demanding he come out. Eventually, he gestured too vehemently toward the coach, which prompted the men to draw their guns. James paled. The dragoon rode in a slow curve, putting Eileen and the children directly in his line of fire. The fat man intervened with conciliatory phlegm, as if he were the only adult present. Again, he spoke with resignation about James’s children. This time, he was brief. A moment of silence ensued, after which the fat man snapped his fingers, and the burros were led to James’s side. The fat man tossed James the bag of money and explained that the burros were for Eileen and the children.

“Go,” he concluded with surprising curtness. “Now.”

James attempted a response.

“Now,” he repeated.

James looked at the mine with quivering lips. He had the expression of an obsequious dog ordered to follow a command it did not understand. He glanced toward the secret hole where he hid his gold. Eileen put the children on one of the burros and went to get her stunned husband. Håkan started to pack whatever supplies were at hand.

“No. Not you,” said the dragoon, nodding in Håkan’s direction. His voice was surprisingly pleasant, “What’s your name?”

“Håkan.”

“What?”

“Håkan.”

“Hawk?”

“Håkan.”

“Hawk can what?”

“Håkan.”

“Can what?”

Håkan remained silent.

“Get in the coach, Hawk.”

Håkan looked around, confused. The Brennans were too busy and dumbstruck to mind him. He walked hesitantly to the coach and opened the door. Blinded by the midday sun, the interior seemed to him as vast as the night sky. It smelled of incense and burned sugar. He sat awkwardly on a mangy velvet seat, and, as shadows became visible in the dark, across from him, gradually, the tenuous yet gleaming outline of the woman with thick lips and amber hair took shape.

“You don’t speak English. You don’t understand. That’s fine.” The words spilled out of her full lips. That was all the woman said during their four-day journey to Clangston.

Håkan ate and slept with the men but rode with the woman in her dark, suffocating carriage. Toward the middle of the trip, she requested, both through gestures and by firmly guiding his body, that he recline his head on her lap. She caressed his hair and stroked the back of his neck for the next two days.