The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (70 page)

Shall I come home? You must write and say the words quite openly.

Po-Povi

The twentieth of October was one of those sharp days with an indigo sky and air so clear you could make out each separate clapboard on houses a mile away. In the Bay, the riffled-up waves looked
like something seen through a spyglass, and the islands were closer in to the mainland. Still, it was just another day, a poor one for me because rain fell yesterday and no work was to be had on the streets. Same kind of a day as usual for my father, who arose slowly, trying to muster good cheer, shaved, moving the piece of mirror to a corner so dark he was unable to see his face clearly, fixed up his clothes, then stepped behind a partition where he thought he wasn’t seen and had a nip out of a bottle. He refused a breakfast of cold biscuits and tea without sugar; then he took up his kit to leave, when there came a knocking at our back door.

“Good
morning, sirs,” cried Mr. Peters as we opened it. “It is, as you perceive from this newspaper, the twentieth of October. October twenty, exactly a year from the day you arrived in San Francisco.”

So it was, to be sure. Another year of our adventures was gone, a year of failure and disappointment, a year wasted.

My father sat down weakly. He looked pitiful; his hands shook so at Mr. Peters’ unexpected interruption that he put them out of sight under his coat.

“Then we are to hear at last?”

“I have Client’s instructions,” said Mr. Peters. “Everything executed and in order.”

“Excuse me a moment,” my father said, and stepped behind the partition again. I saw Mr. Peters’ eye gleam with something more than business, but he coughed, to bring himself back to normal, and opened his portfolio. Taking out some legal-looking papers, he said: “First of all, to ease your anxiety, although the procedure is not, strictly speaking, professional, I will depose that you have come into a handsome estate,
most
handsome. And in that connection, I am to give you, at this beginning stage of the transaction, a letter. Will you, doctor, be so good as to read it aloud?”

My father took it and put on his spectacles, but he had to take them off and wipe them. Then he handed it back to Mr. Peters. The simple truth is that his hands shook so much he couldn’t do
the job. “If you don’t mind—I’m not feeling well this morning. I dined injudic—”

“ ‘Cherished friends of the Trail,’ ” Mr. Peters read, trying not to enjoy himself but failing. “ ‘I am taking the liberty of leaving behind a reminder of a companion who would use this selfish means of staying on with you in spirit. Perhaps by now you have made that rich strike which we sought for so many, to me, pleasurable months. If true, I shall be deprived of my gesture. If not, I shall spend many happy hours thinking of you, content in your glorious California. It seems unlikely that we shall meet again. The responsibilities of my new role do not admit of much travel. It is not a bad role, by the way. For better or worse, this is the England that bred me, and I find the matter of discharging my debt in many ways rewarding. Would you, doctor, compress your buoyant spirit into a few pages of correspondence once each year, at Christmas time, to help me to renew my memory of a period that I shall ever regard as among the most priceless treasures of my life?

God bless you all; may good fortune attend your ventures.

B
LANDFORD

(
Henry T. Coe
)

Postscript:
I must add that it would be quite useless for you to refuse; the property is yours, whether or not you wish actively to manage it.

H.T.C.’ ”

Mr. Peters’ face appeared to have strayed from business for a moment. He blew his nose. “To proceed to the point, His Grace, the Duke of Blandford, has seen fit, through the Bank, for which I act as agent, to place on deposit, soon to be in Trust, the sum of ten thousand pounds—approximately fifty thousand dollars—for the purpose of buying, stocking, equipping and Perpetuating—you will kindly note the clause ‘Perpetuating,’ for it has a bearing on the Trust provisions—an estate, or ranch, of not less than six thousand acres, the ownership to be divided among the parties hereinafter
named, subject, again, to Trust (for a period of years), the management to be effectuated by any method you decide upon, once again, within the limitations of Trust.

“That, in brief, is the commission which I am herewith, ah, able, or, as it were, pleased, or even happy, though the viewpoint is unprofessional, to discharge.

“Doctor McPheeters,” said Mr. Peters, arising, “my congratulations, speaking entirely personally, you understand. You are a wealthy man. I wish you and your son and your colleagues the very best of luck!”

My father sat there like a stone. “It’s too late,” he said finally. “Look at me, a drunken ruin, my family split, hearts broken, hopes dashed, my son’s education knocked into a cocked hat, and by whom? By me, and me alone.”

“Permit me to say—Nonsense!” cried Mr. Peters. “I ask you to look upon me as a friend. The main business is over and finished. I think I may flatter myself that it has been carried out in a way that would have done credit to my father, who was, as stated, a banker of import. I don’t wish to seem unfilial, but I believe a case might be made that he was all business.

“What remains is trivial, principally a matter of counsel, advice, assistance. I shall be working with you on behalf of the Bank. Speaking for myself, and
not
for the Bank, I feel that you will, with no difficulty, rise to this great occasion.”

My father looked up, and said, “What do you think, son? Do you suppose you could ever believe another promise of mine?”

They’d said I was grown now, and I
felt
grown after this past year of starving and looking after my father and wheeling dirt on the streets of San Francisco.

I stooped down, trying not to notice the gray hair and veiny skin and the flesh hanging slack and purplish on his cheeks.

“You kept us together on this trip, however bad things got,” I said. “Strong or not, it wasn’t Mr. Kissel, nor was it Buck Coulter, tough as he is. It has to do with what Mr. Coe wrote in his letter,
the part about spirit. And I don’t think a thing like that ever dies out. The way I see it,” I went on, “this is just about the perfect example of Opportun—”

“Mr. Peters,” my father said suddenly, getting up and brushing off his hat, and having to hold onto a table, a little, for support, “what’s next in the order of business?”

At the bank we learned that the actual transfer of the funds would be done only after it was certain that none of us—the Kissels, Coulter and them—had made a big strike up to October twentieth. But they hadn’t; we knew that, because they weren’t prospecting any more, and besides, we’d heard from them only a few days since.

Came a morning soon when my father and Mr. Peters and I boarded a sailing vessel bound upriver for Sacramento. We had a farewell dinner with the Reverend Ebersohl, using real food at a hotel for a change, which Mr. Peters insisted on paying for, though making it clear the money would come out of Administration. When my father and I begged Reverend Ebersohl to join us in our new life, he declined, with a wistful but determined shake of the head, saying that his real work lay in San Francisco, because the devil had clamped a grip on this region that might take forty years to unhook. Still, he promised that, if he and his associates
did
get the upper hand, through day and night campaigning, he would come to see us, wherever we were.

He stood on the wharf when we sailed, waving his hat, bareheaded, smiling, half starved, filled with courage and duty, a great man, as my father said, by every measure known.

We’d posted letters of thanks to Mr. Coe and a long one home, a letter that had a real ring of truth for once. Then I’d written a note to Po-Povi, but I won’t tell what I said; I’m not much good at that mushy stuff. Before we reached Vernon—actually by Sacramento—my father had begun to take on a fresher look. During
the days riding up the river, he never mentioned whiskey, although some gentlemen in the saloon were drinking freely every night. For several nights he lay wide awake, though. I knew it well enough because he had an upper bunk, with me in the lower, and I heard him tossing around. By now, I could guess how he suffered. In the moonlight that shone through our door, I saw his hand gripping the outside of the bunk, the skin white, tight-drawn over the knuckles. There wasn’t a thing could be done; Mr. Peters knew it, too. So we kept quiet and waited.

The miserable part was that his pomp and bluster were gone. He’d lost most of that bubbling-up confidence, the real honest feeling that Fortune lay just round the corner. I hated to see him so. But standing day after day on deck in the sun and wind and spray toughened him up and helped his appearance some. The gray hair was there, and would stay, but the blotchiness was disappearing fast. Hard going or not, he was on the mend, and before Vernon his appetite had come back almost to normal.

Disembarking at last, we started down the street, me with a nervous fluttering in my stomach. It had been a long time. But there it was, standing right in the same old place. The identical exact butchery stand, though added to considerable, and a little house, with a number of rambling rooms built out behind. The sun was in my eyes, so I shaded them with my hand, trying to make out who I saw. Then I heard Jennie’s happy cry, and the next minute she was flying up the road, holding her petticoats as usual. Her soft, starchy, sweet-smelling hug somehow made up for the whole year of pauperdom. Then it was Mrs. Kissel, and her brood, and, finally, the usual bear’s grip from her husband, confound him; he was dangerous when carried away by good feeling, and my father said the same.

We all had a good cry, even Mr. Peters, who had, as he stated several times, no more than a business interest in the reunion; so that he was, as he told us (blowing his nose) uninvolved in any emotional way. For which he was thankful, since he doubted if his late father would have approved of the other.

And later that day, when Coulter and Uncle Ned and Todd came in from a trip to the mines, we did it all over again.

Then we told about Mr. Coe and the ranch, and nobody could take it in, it was so awesome. But I guess the most affected were the Kissels. Mr. Kissel said five or six times, so as to pound it in, “He was a farmer born; I always felt it,” and Mrs. Kissel went aside to hide her face in her apron, but later on she came back to say she would send him some tomatoes out of the very first stand that was raised.

The only flaw in our good feeling was that everybody seemed embarrassed by my father’s new manner. They hated to see him so quiet and abject. I watched Coulter at dinner—we had it indoors, now, instead of around the old campfire—and afterward, when he got my father aside, I followed out of curiosity. I found me a handy place behind a tree.

“Doc,” said Coulter, taking my father’s elbow, “you did me a favor once that I’m not apt to forget. Far as I can see, my turn appears to have come. It might be you’re feeling like a failure right now, blaming yourself for hardships and losses. No, don’t interrupt. Likely you don’t feel so good about drinking, either. Well, you’re in the same boat I was in when you gave me the preaching.” My father started to speak again, but Coulter waved him down.

“I ask you—who’s responsible for Mr. Coe and this thing he’s done? Me? a backwoods ignoramus that can’t more than sign his name? Matt Kissel, who couldn’t hook three sentences together to save himself from drowning? Mrs. Kissel? Jennie? No, it was you all down the line. Doc, you’re the backbone of this party, and always was. There was a kind of poetry in all those stories you spun around the campfire. I don’t think anybody entirely
believed
all your fancy dreams, but we enjoyed hearing them told, and what’s more, they kept us going. Uncle Ned Reeves and I were talking about it the other day. Doc, you made us feel good; it’s something that can’t be bought. We miss it, and hope it comes back soon.”

My father turned away and walked off toward the river. But the
next morning, when we got up, he seemed to have undergone a change; he didn’t look hangdog any more.

“About the location for the ranch,” he said, putting on his spectacles and removing a booklet from his pocket, “I’ve been doing some research and feel that Opportunity, the real opportunity, lies in the Sandwich Islands, coming to be known more commonly as Hawaii, the vowels to be pronounced independently for strictly pure usage.

“During the course of my practice in San Francisco, I had reason to converse with a number of people from there. The climate is salubrious, the land fertile and cheap, the mineral situation largely unexplored. To go a step further, news of a gold strike in that area at any minute would not surprise me.

“However
, the point of particular interest is this: the present native ruler, King Kamehameha III, is a confirmed sot”—he had the good grace to wince slightly when he got the word out—“and in truth appears at Court functions almost invariably carrying a brandy bottle under his arm. This is not hearsay; it is factual material that will soon appear in the book of an English acquaintance of mine.

“Most
important from our standpoint is this: the king is completely under the domination
of a Scottish minister!

“Now, can you not envision the preferential treatment we must enjoy with such a racial tie at Court? I allude, of course, to my own Scottish origins.

“So—there is no question in my mind of geography. Fortune, probably wealth undreamed of on the mainland, lies in Hawaii.”

He paused here and took off his spectacles; then he said briskly, “Boat passage may be booked from San Francisco every fortnight.”

It was pleasant to hear him; his remarks were downright musical, and made about as much sense as before; that is, there was certainly something in them, but not much. Anyhow, he had returned to normal, and everybody looked glad.

Coulter said, with a smile, “Let’s save Hawaii to use as the other side of the fence, doc. It’ll be there to think on. We can keep it permanent, like, for when we get restless.”