Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

He lay faceup between the tent and the river, where he’d made a pillow of a stone. He was barefooted, bareheaded and bare-legged. His shirt was the only clothes upon his person. A pile of maple leaves had been assembled and arranged to conceal his parts. As I washed myself in the chilly river he woke, groaning.

Errol walked into the woods and emerged sometime later, dressed. “I’ve misplaced my long johns,” he said.

“That is a shame,” I said. “Because we’ve no means to replace them.” I felt in no top shape myself but was not about to betray the fact to my brother. He came and looked at the salt pork I was fixing and groaned again. He smelled strongly of tanglelegs.

That morning we two worked at the cradle just as inefficiently as ever. The only difference was that Errol silently took up the harder work at the shovel. We did not speak. Near noon he paused in his ditching, nodded to my head and said, “See here, Joshua. I apologize for that. I do. Will you just speak to me again?”

“Will you consider taking them on?” My question surprised me.

“They’re filthy,” he said with a wave of his hand.

“We’re filthy,” I said. “We’ve got a city of slows on each our heads. You’ve got no long johns.”

He spit.

“We need them, Errol. All the Negroes are free. All the Indians are owned. This is a new place, Errol. They work hard and they’re honest. We are Argonauts. Christians. We needn’t bring the prejudices of the East with us.”

“Argonauts,” Errol said. “You’ve got a good heart, brother.”

“We won’t have to pay them as we would a white.”

Errol said nothing.

“They work like dogs. They’ve been pulling dust from our old holes.”

This caught my brother’s attention. “Have they?”

“The boy has a keen eye.”

“And how did you come by all this? Been over there, have you?”

“No.” It was easier to lie to him now, after the first. I was thrilled by how easy it was. “I’ve seen it.”

Errol’s face brightened. “You’re sure about this?”

I ought to have hesitated from guilt. But it felt good to be heeded, and to be making decisions for once. “They’re there, with us.” I closed my eyes. “The boy pulls a nugget.”

He deliberated a moment, then said, “They get fifteen percent of our findings between them. They don’t sleep in our camp. They don’t socialize with us.”

“Agreed.” I was relieved, though by logic I shouldn’t have been. All I’d done was recruit men enough to better sift through rock that could very well yield nothing. But perhaps I’d come to believe my lies, too. If nothing else, I believed that if only we could stay in one place long enough, California would offer herself to us. And I liked the Chinaman. I liked his boy.

“And they don’t eat with us,” Errol added. “I’ll gut them if they try to eat with us.”

“Agreed,” I said. I did not ask who in the world would want to join us for our twice-daily pork sludge.

I brokered our new arrangement through the boy. They seemed at first not to understand the proposal, but then I took them over to where Errol stood at the cradle, shoveling a load of river rock into the hopper and then doing his best to pour water over the apron and rock the mud down the riffles at the same time. At such a pathetic sight, apparently, they immediately grasped the proposed cooperation. I was less confident in my ability to explain the proposed financial terms, but they seemed to accept the fifteen percent without comment. I wonder now if they believed they had no choice.

My brother remained silent until the conversation was over. Then he handed the Chinaman the shovel.

The arrangement worked well — the Chinaman on the shovel, me on the bucket, Errol on the rocker, and the boy at the sluice, to spot color. Errol grumbled that the boy was lollygagging there and ought to be hauling pay dirt. I reminded him of the boy’s sharp eyes, to which he made a vulgar remark that I will not transcribe. I am sad to say that my brother routinely unleashed the heat of his character on our Chinamen during those days. He forbade them from speaking to each other in their language. He prohibited them from donning their straw hats and insisted their robes be cinched up tightly. It was not uncommon for foreigners or Negroes to be treated so cruelly, even in Ohio. But it seemed a particular injustice in the territory, because it was a place brand-new, like nothing we had ever seen, far from the achievements of civilization but also from its ugliness. California was an Ophir, not an Eden.

For two days a pair of old Pikes passing through camped near our claim. With them as audience, Errol strode over to the boy one afternoon and began tugging at his robes. “Where is it?” he shouted. He turned to me. “He’s pocketed a nugget. I saw him. Hand it over, you devil.”

The Chinaman stopped his shoveling. The boy, fairly shaken, denied taking anything.

“Turn out your pockets,” demanded Errol.

“He has none,” I said. It was the truth and Errol knew it was. Still, he pilfered the folds of the boy’s robe saying, Dirty thief, stinking tong . The Chinaman moved cautiously closer to Errol and the boy.

Suddenly Errol whirled around, red faced, and pounced on the Chinaman. He drew his knife and took hold of the man’s black pigtail.

I was quite frightened, and the boy was by now hysteric. But the Chinaman was still. Errol put the knife to the pigtail and spoke into the man’s sun-scarred face. “Are you a citizen of California or not?” he asked.

“He can’t understand you,” I called, trying to remain calm. “Let him be.”

Errol released the Chinaman as quickly as he’d grabbed him. He returned to the sluice as if it had all been a great tease, the Pikes up the bank snarling with laughter. But it was no tease. I had heard rumors out of Hangtown of three tongs hung by their pigtails from a tree, their throats slit.

XI. THE FORTUNE FORETOLD

Despite Errol’s occasional volatility, the boy was soon pulling color from the sluice. It was chispa so small and aggregated that no white man would have ever dug it, and Errol said as much — but it was gold all the same. I directed the boy to deposit his findings in our mustard jar. In this way, little by little, day by day, we did accumulate some dust. Errol went to town whenever he had the chance, where he spent his share on card games and spirit. I spent my share on provisions. One Sabbath I had pork and beans. Another, while Errol was away, the Chinamen and I had secret roast beef and potatoes. That rump could have been the toughest, most befouled muscle ever served a man, but to my starved tongue it was gravy-slopped ambrosia.

Then, the day of the first frost, the boy approached Errol and without celebration presented him a grape-size yellow nugget, cool with river water.

My brother did not immediately take the nugget, as I’d always imagined he would. Instead, he leaped to embrace me, taking a long, affectionate look into my anomalous, all-seeing eyes.

After some celebration, Errol spirited the nugget into the tent, pounded it carefully to test for softness, distributed a petal of the malleable color to the Chinamen and a larger leaf to me. Pinching it, I was besieged by fantasies of sardines, tongue, turtle soup, lobster, cakes and pies by the cartful, a box of juicy golden peaches. Unsettling, how swiftly a tiny bead of element could enchant.

Errol instructed us all to continue. “More will come,” he called out merrily, barely containing his urge to wink at me. And it seemed more would come, the day we found our nugget, the day my brother’s infinite faith intersected with coincidence, the day of the first frost.

XII. WAR!