Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

And the day after that:

March 16, 1849 Half a day’s travel and the same of panning. The dirt is richer and I feel an excitement of the kind the hunter must feel as he closes with his prey. I am near. I know it. Tomorrow, perhaps, just a little further along the river, my fortune will present itself. Though I was lucky enough tonight. As I prepared my supper a trapper happened across me. Praise God that I had stopped my work and that my equipment was stowed out of sight. He travels downriver with beaver pelts and dried meat and took me at my word, I think, when I lied that I was looking for land to homestead. I bought some meat from him and we shared the meal. I asked for a description of the river ahead. There is, he said, a landmark known to those who have traveled this way but a few hours from where I write-an unusual length of river, curved so roundly that it bears the name Cooper’s Bend, as if it followed one side of a giant barrel. The river is quite broad and slow here, he said, with a bed of gravel and sand. Though I am lonely for company I was glad when our meal was over and he left to continue his journey downriver for I could not have much longer contained my euphoria. The place he speaks of can be no less than what I seek. All things point to it. The form of the land about, the slowness of the river, the composition of its bed. What treasure must lie trapped within it! I will leave at first light. He seeks to trade with the men I encountered five days previous and he may mention my presence here. Miners are suspicious men and some of them perhaps will not believe a tale of homesteading.

This entry finished at the bottom of the last page in the book. I had become caught up in the narrative and I felt a pang of disappointment that the outcome of his quest had not been recorded. I held the book open in my hands for a moment, wondering what had become of the man, and as I did so I noticed jagged lines of paper along the inside of its spine. It looked like three pages had been torn out.

I put the book back on its shelf.

“The last few pages are missing.”

“Are they? I never noticed. But then, as I said, I haven’t looked at it for years.”

“What happened to him?”

She laughed. “What happened to your great-great-grandfather?”

“I don’t even know who he was.”

“Exactly. I know he was supposed to have been reasonably well off. Whether it came from gold or not I couldn’t say.” She looked tiredly about the room. “I know his money didn’t stick around too long, though. Our family’s been in this area since Nathaniel came up that river and I don’t think a single one of us ever was what you would call even comfortable.”

“Have you ever heard of a place called Cooper’s Bend? He mentions it in the journal.”

“Yes, though there aren’t many people still alive who know it by that name.”

“Where is it?”

“Right here. That piece of river at the bottom of your father’s land. That’s what used to be called Cooper’s Bend till folks took to calling it Empty Mile-after all the gold was mined out, I guess.”

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment. I’d come here hoping to find out why my father had bought the land. An old journal would have been an exciting place to discover the secret, but I had read nothing there that might explain the land’s importance to him. The only whiff of meaning came from the mention of gold, but what of that? Any gold there might have been in the Swallow River at Empty Mile, along with all the gold in all the other Californian rivers, was long gone.

Millicent smiled patiently at me. “Does any of that help? A couple of months after his first visit your father came back by himself and asked to read the journal again and then, not long after that, he and his friend showed up to dig some fence post holes.”

“I didn’t see a fence. Where did they dig?”

“Down in the trees at the bottom of the meadow. Made such a racket I went down to have a look. They had this thing like a big corkscrew with a gasoline engine that they held between them. Bored right into the ground. Looked like a crazy place to do it, right in the trees. I don’t know how they thought they were going to string wire through all that brush. But then, your father didn’t look too much like the practical type, and I don’t think they drilled more than a handful of holes anyhow.”

“When was this?”

“Three or four months ago.”

“And you don’t know who this friend was? You didn’t hear a name?”

“No. He was a redhead, the sandy type. Tall, thin.”

I took my cell phone out and brought up the photo Gareth had insisted I take of him. Millicent nodded.

“Yes, that’s him.”

“My father didn’t buy the place until a month ago. Why would he be digging fence holes on land he didn’t own?”

“Perhaps he was getting a jump on things.”

“Who owned the land before?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you show me where the holes are?”

Millicent went to the front door, pushed open the screen, and pointed to a spot in the trees at the bottom of the meadow.

“Go straight in from there, you should find them.”

I thanked her and walked down across the meadow.

The first hole I found was about twenty yards in from the start of the trees and I’d seen it before. It was the hole my father had stood pondering over the day he brought Stan and me to Empty Mile for the first time. By walking parallel to the meadow from this point I found two others.

Although I’d never put up a fence I guessed the holes were about the right diameter but everything else about them looked wrong. They were too widely spaced, at least twenty-five feet between each, and they seemed overly deep, they went down about four feet. And what was the logic of erecting a fence on uncleared land?

I left the belt of trees and walked back up the slope to take a look at the log cabin. It was reasonably large for that type of building and had three bedrooms. Through the window of one of these I saw Stan and Rosie. They were standing in the middle of an empty room. She had her arms around him and their faces were pressed together, kissing.

I knocked on the door of the cabin and waited. A few seconds later Stan and Rosie came out and I told him I had errands to run and that he could stay at Empty Mile while I took care of them if he wanted.

From Millicent’s place I drove straight to Tunney Lake. Marla and I had reached an unspoken agreement to act as though the night with Jeremy Tripp had never happened, but that didn’t mean I had the same agreement with Gareth.

He was sweeping the steps to one of the cabins when I pulled into the parking lot. He looked up from his broom as I approached.

“You took your time. I thought you’d be back last night.”

“She told me what you have on her.”

“Mmm… busted for hooking. Nasty.”

“You prick. Why would you do something like that?”

“Um… money?”

“You’ve got the other girls for that.”

“Johnny, I want to be friends with you. This thing with Marla, it’s between me and her. It’s part of our history.”

“You haven’t lived with her for ten years.”

“You’re pretty self-focused, you know that? So what if it’s been ten years? She took my fucking future. I mean, honestly, Johnny, can you blame me if sometimes I feel like treating her like a cunt?”

Gareth took a deep breath, sighed it out, and steadied himself.

“Look, you’ve been away a long time. And while you were away our lives went on without you, and maybe they got a bit twisted, I admit it. I know I shouldn’t still hate her so much, but sometimes… I don’t know, I just get fixated.”

“Blackmailing someone into prostitution is beyond fixated.”