The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (4 page)

My father couldn’t carry the rifle because he had his hands full. Besides his knapsack, which was stuffed to the top with Willie’s things and some articles from the house, like blankets, clean linen, razor, and such, he was taking his surgical bag.

This appeared to put my mother out more than anything up to date.

“Whatever for?” she said. “You can practice medicine right here in Louisville.”

“I’m a doctor,” he replied with dignity. “I owe it to the Oath of Hippocrates to be prepared for any emergency.”

The way it turned out, he was right, as he often was at the most unlikely times. Toward dusk our gear was assembled, and with the fading of the warm spring sun the spirits in our household sank a notch, too. I went out in the back yard to say goodbye to Sam, because they were going to take him to a farmer to keep, as soon as we were safely gone. It was cooler this evening, and Aunt Kitty had brought Mary in from the pen the minute the sunshine left. So I untied Sam and put him in the pen instead, and gave him two lumps of sugar, along with a chew of tobacco, which he enjoyed as much as some people do, though he was obliged to swallow the juice, being without any means to spit. I had tried to teach him
many’s the time, but somehow he never got the hang of it, and my father remarked that I might as well throw it up as a bad job, because a goat’s instincts, together with his machinery, were all for moving edibles in exactly the opposite direction.

Going back to the house, I heard Aunt Kitty call, “You, boy,” and I stopped to see what she wanted, under the big crooked oak where I had my treehouse.

“You fixin to go journeying, ain’t that so?”

I replied that we were off to California to seek gold but that she mustn’t say so to anybody before we had left, not even to Man, who was her son that my mother had freed and worked across town in a foundry.

“I talkin’ to
you
, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am. I hear you.”

“I gazed in the boiling pot—see some real bad things.”

She had this black iron pot, with bleached catfish and chicken bones in the bottom, and she could tell the future from the way the bones jumped around and arranged themselves.

“We’ll get rich in California,” I said. “I’ll buy you a nice present to bring back.”

In the corners of her wrinkled-up eyes two large tears formed and rolled down slowly, then dried up for want of support.

“You lookin’ at Aunt Kitty for the very last time on this yearth.”

If I had felt unsettled before, I was miserable now, and I swallowed hard to keep from crying and throwing my arms around her skinny waist, as I had done dozens of times in crises.

“Day you study to come back, I be in the ground, long gone to my good home.”

I snuffled, half angrily, and said it wasn’t so, and then she held out her hand with something shiny in the palm. It was a buckeye, polished like old mahogany, with several marks burned in blackly by a poker or other iron tool. In the top there was fastened an eyelet and screw, and through this, for wearing round the neck, passed a fine-mesh chain.

“Conjure man give me this charm, say you to keep it close by, and shine it to your cheek if need be.”

I knew what a buckeye was, of course, but I didn’t realize they were useful for charms. Aunt Kitty had cures for nearly anything you could name, and when I was bad cut by a sickle, she stopped the bleeding with cobwebs and soot. When my father came home, he said it would have stopped anyhow, but I reckoned that was just professional jealousy.

“It’s pretty,” I said. “What’s it do, Aunty?”

“Time to find out when sperets come.”

“But how do I know they’re coming?
When
do they come?”

“Sperets work they mischief in the dreadful night.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m usually asleep in the night. I don’t hardly wake up at all in the nighttime.”

“Conjure man say this charm good for bears and such; you rub it, come a bear—hear?”

“All right, Aunty, and if it doesn’t take hold, I’ll just go ahead and use the rifle.”

“I’ll use a broom on
you
, give me any more sass.”

She was the thinnest-skinned darky there ever was about charms; you couldn’t say boo about one of her remedies, even, but I happened to know they didn’t always work; the strength went out of them now and then. Only the year before, the conjure man had brought in the Jackson County madstone, from way over in Illinois, for a white peddler that had been dog-bit, and the man went ahead and died just the same, howling and snapping at water, with the stone strapped directly over the bite, exactly as prescribed.

When I got back to the house, everything was ready except that my father was trying to jam two big medical volumes—Andrew Fyfe’s
Anatomy
and Lizars’
Surgery
—into his knapsack, with my mother standing alongside, wearing an expression of scorn.

“It’s the silliest thing I ever heard of—walking all the way to California carrying two heavy books.”

“You never can tell, Melissa,” he said, using his knees with great vigor. “Some poor sufferer of the not too distant future, prostrate
on the alkali plains, may owe his deliverance to these very selfsame volumes.”

“The more I think it over,” she went on, “the more I’m convinced that I’ve agreed to a fool’s errand. I have a feeling I’ll live to regret this night.”

There was such an earnest ring to her voice that I sent a curious glance her way, and I’m glad I did. She fitted into the room, you might say; the one seemed to go with the other, they were that upright and graceful. Maybe because of this last look, I find the room easy to remember: the black iron fireplace with its fancy marble mantel, the faded Persian rug—a family heirloom from New Orleans—the horsehair sofa and chairs, each with its starchy-white antimacassar, which last were supposed to keep off the Macassar oil that people had taken to putting on their hair, and the cheerful old wallpaper of steamboat and cotton-bale design.

Just when I was getting into a nice sentimentally frame of mind, almost wishing we weren’t leaving, she said, “Sardius, before you go to bed, Jaimie is to have the caning he was promised yesterday morning, before all this came up. He was smoking catalpa beans again, out by the woodhouse.”

Wouldn’t that show you? Her husband and son were preparing to enter the wilderness, probably to be devoured by wolves or red Indians, and she must insist on the regular rules of the house. Well, in itself the caning amounted to very little, as usual. My father viewed the smoking of catalpa beans as both harmless and dull. I had dried out a considerable parcel from last summer and stored them in a handy place in the cellar, comfortably removed from the rats, which seemed to favor them. According to custom, we climbed the stairs in silence, to all appearances mournful and low, and I went on into my room. From beneath a mattress in his, my father extracted his latest copy of
The Turf Register
, then brought it in, tightly rolled, and fetched the bed several noisy whacks, whilst I voiced a few piteous howls, meanwhile proceeding with the removal of my clothes.

The sheets were cold, the wind howled round the eaves. I went
to sleep and dreamed a mixed-up sort of dream about bears and buckeyes, and cockleburrs and Mr. Parsons, and at one point, far out on the prairie, my father had Fyfe’s
Anatomy
open beside a sick Indian that was stretched on the ground, looking indignant, and he was saying, “There’s no need to argue—you’ll have to give up catalpa beans.” I tossed and turned, sleeping very shallow and restless, and it seemed like no time at all before my father was coming down the hallway with a lantern and shaking me by the shoulder. It wasn’t just a dream, then. Dawn was an hour away, of a clear, cool, sweet-smelling morning, and we were off to California.

Cape Girardeau, Missouri
May 27, 1849

Dear Melissa:

I take up my pen for this first letter home with a very heavy heart. The temptation is strong to consider the events in chronology, but the suspense of waiting for bad news would be too cruel. I must face up like a man, though a foolish and misdirected one, it appears, and tell you that Jaimie is gone, presumably lost off the boat and drowned during the night before we arrived at this sleepy little river-bottom town.

No amount of upbraiding and reproach, of reminding me how right you were (and always have been) can make me feel worse than I feel. For the rest of my life I must bear the stigma of knowing that I have, in effect, caused the death of our boy. Had I listened to you, and borne my responsibilities, this terrible thing would never have happened. I beg you to tell Hannah as gently as possible, and be no more bitter than you must. At this moment, all I can think of to say to you is that I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.

Now, your first shock over, I shall try to describe what happened in such detail as will make it all clear. As you know, Willie delivered us in the rig to Portland; dawn was breaking as we arrived. The boat I’d booked stateroom passage on, the
Courier
—a packet for St. Louis—was lying in the canal, though far from ready to go, despite the advertised sailing time of 8
A.M
. It was nearer 11 when our cargo was aboard and the plank taken in. You may imagine what a fever of anxiety I generated during this delay; we alternated between disposing our luggage in the astonishingly small cabin assigned us (a mere closet, with wooden bunks one above the other,
next to the ladies’ quarters in the stern) and pacing the upper deck, myself watching the communicating roads, as the morning wore on.

When at last the whistle blew and the huge stern wheel began to turn (disconcertingly near us), we thrashed out into the broad Ohio, greatly swollen by the Spring rains, to the shrill squealing of pigs, the alarmed lowing of cattle, and not a few drunken hurrahs, these varied articulations rising from the lower deck, where not only the poorer passengers but an assortment of livestock were quartered.

Under the circumstances in which I write, I realize your impatient lack of interest in the trip, as such, so I hasten to the unhappy time which has saddened and impoverished us both. But first I must relate an incident that may or may not have affected Jaimie to some reckless adventure in the night, some ill-advised nocturnal ramble to soothe his mind, for he witnessed a sight frightful to the most seasoned adult and doubly so to a lad barely in his teens.

The entertainments of this vessel fell into two divisions, separated by the daylight hours and those of darkness. In the first instance, time was passed by the upper-deck gentry in firing off pistols at objects afloat in the river, with wagers of prodigious size riding upon each round. At night, poker games even more ferocious commanded their attention. Faithful to my new vows, I abstained from both pleasures. Amongst this convivial group was a Mr. Streeter, portly, ruddy-faced, amiable, grievously fond of spirits. The fact is, I might say without doing him injustice, that this worthy quite evidently began his refreshment immediately upon arising, for he appeared at breakfast in the most exuberant humor, and with his face bearing the warm glow of a particularly fiery sunset. He had, we were soon informed, by none other than himself (for he was a powerful talker), sold a substantial business in the textile line, in Pittsburgh, consequent upon the death of his wife, and was now en route (as we were) to the frontier, there to find opportunities for prospecting.

Pitiful to relate, this unfortunate was not destined to go very far. On the evening of the third night, he was attracted to the boisterous merriment of the saloon, and was there cursed by as whimsical a fall of cards as it has ever been my lot to see, and I believe I might (ahem!) pose as an experienced observer. Well,
with each worsening of his luck, he absented himself for a hand or two, in order to consult John Barleycorn, thus, I assume, deadening his pain. Upon coming back, he would produce a leathern pouch of capacious size, from which dribbled a steady stream of gold coins onto the green baize and into the willing hands of his co-travelers. At length, after a monstrous failure, at a point when the table held no less than a thousand dollars, our Mr. Streeter, now far gone in drink, muttered thickly and excused himself, as it developed, for the very last time.

It may have been ten minutes later that we heard a terrible cry, a shriek from the innermost recesses of Hell, it seemed, and felt a soft, padded thumping that appeared, suddenly, to stop all way on the boat. There followed a rushing of humanity, crewmen and passengers, and then the chilling shout, “He’s tumbled into the blades!” Poor, wretched man! In his dulled and heedless state, he had made his way toward his cabin and stumbled over the taffrail and into the churning wheel. With the engines cut and the
Courier
sliding down in ghostly silence, broadside to the stream, two roustabouts ran out onto the fanways and removed Streeter’s broken body from the dripping paddles. You would scarcely believe it, but he was yet alive, his legs in multiple fractures, the skin and hair removed from one side of his head, an elbow protrudingly nakedly, and his insides in Heaven knows what condition of rupture.

For all this, I had some slight notion he could be revived. Perhaps the protective effects of the spirits lengthened his life. You may imagine that I was promptly impressed into service. Indeed, the Captain—Captain Macready by name, a sturdy Scot himself, with friends in common with my cousins near Linlithgow—entreated me so piteously to succor the victim that I saw tears glisten in his eyes.

We contrived a makeshift hospital in the wheelhouse, for reasons that you shall see. In my mind, the immediate necessity, aside from staunching the appalling flow of blood from his head, was to set the elbow and legs before the sedative benumbment of whiskey and shock wore off. We were twenty-two men passengers, apart from the crew, and strong, yet we could devise no effective means of pulling out those legs in such a way as to persuade the bones back into alignment. Accordingly, working as fast as possible, I rigged
cables to the wheel, in a similiar fashion to the ancient instrument of torture, and, with members of our company holding the victim firmly by the shoulders, extended the right leg to something like an advantageous position; alas, midway through this operation our patient awoke with a bloodcurdling scream, struggled himself momentarily to a sitting position, then fell back—stone-dead.