The Furies (27 page)

In the first hour after Amanda’s mulatto had been dragged from the flames, Jared barely said half a dozen coherent words to his cousin. They’d wept and hugged each other for a couple of minutes, but things were too frantic for much more than that.

Amanda saw to Israel’s removal to his shanty behind the restaurant she owned. Then she summoned a doctor. The sleepy physician dressed and bandaged the Negro’s burned legs. He dosed the groaning man with brandy, assuring Amanda that although Israel would suffer pain for a few weeks, as well as the unpleasantness of skin sloughing away, in his professional opinion Israel would eventually be good as new.

With that problem attended to, Jared and his cousin spent three quarters of an hour surveying the damage done by the fire. It had leveled several blocks surrounding the Exchange before being brought under control. Booming gambling houses such as the Verandah and McCabe’s El Dorado had disappeared into smoldering ashes. Had the wind been blowing in a different direction, Kent’s would very likely have burned too.

Amanda introduced Jared to a man named Sam Brannan who apparently owned a good deal of real estate in the town. Brannan predicted San Francisco could expect many more fires in view of the building boom and the flimsy nature of most of the construction. He suggested that volunteer fire companies be organized, and better pumping equipment secured. Amanda pledged financial support of such a program. But Jared somehow had the feeling her heart wasn’t in the promise.

Finally, toward midnight, they returned to her place, to begin building a bridge of words across the years since 1814. They talked all through the night.

Now it was Christmas morning. Jared was relaxing in a chair by a back room window, with Amanda’s handsome, swarthy young son curled up at his feet.

Jared wiggled his nose. “Smells mighty good, Amanda. My, you’ve come a far piece in the world. I’ve never met anybody else who had a French cook.”

Because of all the excitement, Amanda hadn’t bothered to change her mud-spotted yellow gown. She was seated on the piano bench, hands in her lap, and he had to admit she’d amply fulfilled the promise of beauty she’d shown as a child. She was slender but full-bosomed. Her dark eyes were as lively as ever. And the gray in her hair seemed to enhance her beauty, not detract from it.

Jared’s mind could hardly hold all that she’d told him in the breathless bursts of conversation before dawn. Her life with the Teton Sioux. Her marriage to a Spanish trapper. Her difficult experience in Texas. The Mexican officer, Cordoba—and Louis’ birth. Then her migration to California, and now sudden prosperity brought on by the discovery of gold—

Still, all night long, he’d sensed she was holding something back. At those times, her eyes had a hard glint difficult to reconcile with the sight of the happy, self-assured woman seated opposite him, or the memory of the young girl he’d last seen at Stone’s River in Tennessee—

“Felix is a jewel,” she said. “He came from Paris. He keeps talking about going to the gold fields, but I make it worth his while to stay here. He’s cooking something special for dinner. Eggs and oysters. It’s quite delicious, the way he spices it. Oh, Jared”—laughing, she hugged her knees—“this still seems like a dream.”

“If it is, I hope we don’t wake up before we eat. I’m damn near starved to death.”

“We’ll sit down the minute Billy finishes nailing boards across the broken window.”

From Jared’s feet, Louis asked, “Could we sing a Christmas carol first, Ma?”

“Why, yes. Though with Bart gone, we’ve no one to play.”

“Who’s this Bart fellow?” Jared asked.

Louis glanced questioningly at his mother. From the front of the building, the steady beat of Billy Beadle’s hammer thudded. At six in the morning, Amanda had taken what Louis said was a most unusual step. She’d ordered the burly Australian to hang out a sign announcing that Kent’s would be closed the entire day.

Still smiling, Amanda told her cousin, “His full name’s Barton McGill. He works for a New York ship line. Captains one of their cuppers. I guess you could call him my gentleman friend—”

“He’s from Charleston,” Louis put in. “We don’t get to see him often.”

“Well”—Jared stretched luxuriously, then leaned back in the chair; the mellow December sun highlighted the few strands of yellow still visible in his white hair—“I’d be happy to have him here to share this wonderful day. I wish my son were here too.”

“A Methodist minister.” Amanda shook her head. “I can hardly believe it.”

Jared’s expression was tinged with sadness for a moment. “I couldn’t either when he first broached the idea after his conversations with Reverend Lee. Then I got to thinking. There’s a peculiar streak on my side of the family. Rebellious. The Fletcher blood, your mother used to call it. I expect Jephtha inherited it from me. So it was probably natural for him to strike off in some unexpected direction.”

“Where is your son, sir?” Louis had missed all of the night’s conversation.

“In Lexington, a little place in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He and his wife, Fan, have had four children so far. Three have survived. All boys.” He ticked them on his fingers. “Gideon was born in forty-three, Matthew a year later. Annabelle lived only two weeks in forty-five. Jeremiah came along fourteen months after that.”

“Is Jephtha happy in Virginia?” Amanda asked.

Jared frowned. “If I read his letters correctly, no. His last one came on a packet just before I left Oregon. Gloomier than ever. It’s the chattel slavery question that upsets him. He’s loyal to his wife and her people—they’re southerners. And when the Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery five years ago, he stayed with the southern faction. But what he sees of the system torments his conscience. Of late, unbearably.”

“Well, we’re a long way from those problems out here,” Amanda said. “Though one of these days, I expect I’ll be right in the middle of them.” She gazed at her cousin. “Eventually I’m going back east.”

Jared noticed the way young Louis began to fool with the loose sole of one of his boots. The boy was frowning. Amanda went on.

“I want to see our old home. That’s one of the reasons I’m working so hard to make money.”

Jared flexed his fingers, examined his swollen knuckle joints. The hard glint had returned to her eyes. It bothered him.

“You didn’t mention that last night—” he began.

She shrugged, gazing past him to the sunlit window.

“It’s something I decided a couple of years ago—” Her stem look softened. “We can discuss it after dinner.”

Louis tried to redirect the conversation to a more agreeable topic. “Was your wife really an Indian, cousin Jared?”

“A Shoshoni.” He nodded. “A fine woman. She was called Grass Singing.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“I wish I’d been able to make a pretty life for her”—he cut off the thought, much as he’d cut off an earlier frustration by leaving the failing farm in the Willamette Valley in the late summer of ’48—“but all in all”—he spoke for his cousin’s benefit now—“I have very few regrets. I sired a son to keep the Kent name alive—without ever imagining you’d be doing the same, Amanda. For a long time, I made enough money to five just the way I wanted. I loved the fur trade until my partner, Elijah Weatherby, died. His passing took some of the joy out of it—maybe because it made me realize I was getting old. Then business dropped off. I thought raising wheat in Oregon might be a good thing to try. I was wrong there. Like my father, I wasn’t cut out to be a farmer—”

A sadness touched him. His imagination showed him dim pictures of the house on Beacon Street from which he’d fled after setting fire to the printing house and shooting the man who had helped Hamilton Stovall steal Kent’s. He could look back on all of that without anger. Once, he’d harbored hopes of revenge. But they had been burned out of him by distance, and time, and his gradual acceptance of the life he’d made for himself in a land he found beautiful—

Aware of Louis and Amanda watching him, he resumed. “I sold the farm when Oregon got the news of the gold. I always did like seeing new sights, and Captain Sutter handed me a perfect opportunity. I tramped down the coast on foot and went straight to his fort. There, I heard about a strike in a new camp called Hopeful, so that’s where I headed. I’ve done pretty well, too. That is, the Ophir Mineralogical Combine’s done well—”

Louis said, “Ophir what?”

“Mineralogical Combine.” Jared grinned. “Fancy name for a pretty grimy operation. There are three of us in it. We each had adjoining claims along the stream. The first men on the site agreed no claim would be larger than a hundred square feet. By putting three together and building ourselves a cradle to speed up the processing of the dirt, we see more color than we would if we worked alone. Color means the yellow color of the dust or flakes,” he added in an aside to Louis.

Amanda inquired about Jared’s partners.

“One’s an Englishman. He was a draper over in Liverpool. The other man’s a little Baptist storekeeper from Georgia. He came across the mountains with a wagon train. He’s the one who slapped on the splendiferous name. He said that in the Bible, in King Solomon’s time, Ophir was a land famous for apes, ivory, peacocks—and gold. We’re getting a fair amount of it, but we could get a lot more if we could hire decent help.”

Louis raised his eyebrows. “You mean some of the men in the diggings don’t have claims?”

“The ones that are too lazy. They’ll pick up a few dollars for day wages, then go on a weeklong tear. We’ve tried hiring a few Pikes. Every one of them’s proved to be worthless.”

“What’s a Pike, sir?”

“Originally it meant a fellow from Pike County, Missouri. Now the name sticks to anybody with small education and a big temper. If a man says he’s a Pike, you can be halfway certain he’s running from the law, too. There are a lot of men of that sort in the diggings. They even make up tunes about ’em—”

Leaning back, he began to wave his hand to and fro, smiling at Louis as he croaked in an off-key way:

Oh
,
what was your name in the States? Was it Thompson
,
or Johnson
,
or Bates?

Louis clapped in delight. Amanda looked impatient.

Did you murder your wife, And then run for your life? Say, what was your name in the States?

“I’ll have to teach that one to Captain Bart—”

Amanda interrupted. “How much gold are you mining, Jared?”

“Lately it’s averaged out to near twenty-four, twenty-five hundred dollars a week—”

He was startled by her look of intense concentration. “You could wind up a millionaire.”

“Sure—in about thirty years.”

“Thirty! I calculate nine or ten.”

“You forgot my partners. It’s share and share alike.”

“Yes, I did forget that.”

“The claim may peter out, too. A great many do.”

She looked disappointed. What in the world was going on inside her head?

Louis diverted him with another question. “Do you work every day?”

“Every day except Sunday. It’s not a matter of miners being godly—just worn out. Sunday’s actually the wildest day of the week in Hopeful. Sometimes we have dances—”

“Are there women in the camps?”

“Once in a while a female of—call it low character—shows up and spends a couple of nights. If you don’t believe grown men can go crazy, you should be there when a woman arrives. Women of that sort aren’t interested in dancing, though. For dances, the men take turns tying ribbons on their arms and acting the woman’s part. But no matter what you do to liven up the routine, camp life still gets boring as the devil. My partners and I drew lots to see who took the first holiday. I was lucky. I picked the short straw. So I got to come down to see the elephant. I’ve always wanted to see one elephant or another,” he sighed. “I guess that’s why I never really lived up to this—”

From his pocket he drew a tarnished medal, handing it to Louis for inspection. On the obverse was a design of a tea bottle and an inscription in Latin. The reverse bore the words
KENT AND SON
and a date—
1810
.

“Your grandfather gave me that,” Jared explained. “It was part of a fob, but the green ribbon’s long gone. The Latin means take a stand and make a mark.”

But Louis was more interested in something else the bearded man had said: “There aren’t any elephants in San Francisco, cousin Jared.”

“Oh, that’s only an expression. From an old story of the farmer who had read about elephants but never set eyes on one. The circus came to a town near his home, so he loaded his wagon with eggs he meant to sell and drove in to watch the circus parade. The elephant frightened his horse, the wagon overturned, and all the eggs broke. But the old farmer shrugged it off—‘I don’t give a hang, I’ve seen the elephant.’ It means living through a bad experience. Or, the way some miners use it, just satisfying your curiosity.”

He retrieved the medal and slipped it back in the pocket of his worn trousers.

“That’s practically all I’ve done since Weatherby and I went up the Missouri in 1814, chase elephants. I suppose a man could do worse, though—”

“But now you’re a rich gold miner!” Louis exclaimed.

“Not rich by a long shot, son. Not yet.”

Amanda leaned forward. “What are you going to do with your share?”

“Just enjoy it while I can. I’ve never had much money. I’d like to take a trip back east myself. See Jephtha and my grandsons—”

A stranger looked at him from her eyes.

“And Boston?”

“No, Amanda, that’s past history.”

“Maybe not.” But she didn’t amplify the remark.

The back door opened. Billy Beadle ducked as he entered, slapping his hammer against his thigh. “When’s that bloody frog going to serve dinner? I’ve worked up a proper appetite—”

Amanda rose. “I’ll go ask him.” As she started out, she noticed the Australian frowning.

“Something wrong, Billy?”

“Nothing much,” Billy replied with a too-quick shrug. “Thought you should know that a couple of Felker’s chums wandered by while I was nailing—”

“Hounds?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve seen them before, though I’m not familiar with their names. They passed a few remarks about what happened to the little bast—excuse me, Louis. To Felker. Seems they don’t think too kindly of any of us. I expect they’re all bluff and brag, though.”