Belle Cora: A Novel (64 page)

Where did the land end and the shore begin? Who could say? The harbor was clogged with brigs, barques, schooners, men-of-war, and Chinese junks. Some vessels had been wrecked to make new land. Others bore painted signs announcing their conversion into warehouses, restaurants, offices, rooming houses, visibly in the process of becoming part of the city’s advancing edge. Beyond that, the flat land and hillsides teemed
with houses, tents, shacks, and tens of thousands of diminutive toiling men.

It was past noon by the time we disembarked. Boatmen charged a staggering sum to row passengers to shore. Most of them turned out to be immigrants from the British penal colony of Australia, either Cockney or Irish in their speech—emancipated convicts, Herbert Owen observed, who had graduated from robbery to extortion. Then we found a cheerful fellow with a New England accent, a plug hat, and a coat with a shoulder seam so torn we could see the white cloth of his soiled shirt through it, who claimed to have been a college professor in Boston. We went with him, though his price was just as high as the others’. He told me it was rare to see a woman here and warned me that my clothes were impractical—it was the rainy season. Until a month ago, it had been all dust here; it got into eyes and mouths whenever people faced the wind. Now they missed the dust. Now it was all mud.

Ewell, who had bought flour in Chile, asked what it was selling for. The boatman replied, “It is being used for landfill.” Ewell turned away, insulted. We found out later that it was literally true. A passenger said he had ten fresh oranges. “Are they juicy?” asked the boatman, and, hearing that they were, he gave him five dollars he had just collected from the rest of us.

Jeptha, who was haunted and speechless when he was alone with me, and in public cheerful and voluble, a cheap imitation of his former self, said, “Tell us about conditions here.” No doubt a common request. The boatman answered readily: “You do a month of living in a day. You meet every kind of man. You hear every language. Mining is killing labor.” That was his general wisdom. Next came news items. “A fourteen-year-old boy found an eleven-pound gold nugget and sold it for twenty-eight hundred dollars last Thursday. A Philadelphian was shot by a New Yorker yesterday at the Bella Union. The gamblers didn’t take their eyes off the roulette wheel.” At last, he settled to his chief enthusiasm, prices, and we learned that we had all made the wrong decisions about what to bring along and what to buy once we got here.

As soon as we reached shore, the boatman began to shout: “Oranges! Sweet, juicy oranges!” He had sold them for a dollar each before the last of us set foot on land.

By then I understood. Everyday rules were suspended. Things that had hardened into their final shape at home were fluid here. If
Alice in Wonderland
had been written yet, it would have come to mind now. With a bite of magical cake or mushroom, a ship could become a lodging house, a Yankee teacher a boatman or a fruit vendor, and flour worthless. I could become a good woman.

The black cast-iron bodies and pipe joints of about a dozen heat stoves waited on the slimy boards at Clarkes Point. Grimacing, with yellow teeth and red faces, suffering men were loading them onto a sinking wagon; the driver was yelling at them to stop. There were buildings of all kinds, many half finished, some mere canvas sheds open in front, covered with signs in several languages, hand-painted with words that in another city would be carved in stone:
GOLD EXCHANGE. DRY GOODS. HARTLEY, DAGUERREOTYPES. JONATHAN STODDARD, ATTORNEY
. There were gray barrels and crates and lumpy coarse-woven tan sacks, heaps of merchandise. There were men, hurrying, waiting, determined, exhausted, as diverse in character as the houses. They say gold has no magnetic properties, yet look what it had dragged to this spot, all these foreign-looking people, thousands of miles from their customary haunts, their many shades of skin, shapes of noses, angles of eyes, in pea jackets and oilcloth hats, in ponchos and sombreros, in knee-length blue tunics and pigtails. They all seemed strangely unsurprised to find themselves here, walking in the sticky mud, their images in caramel puddles mingling with bits of cloud and sky and circling birds.

Red, brown, bluish, green-gray muck, dense as potter’s clay, noisily sucked our steps and gurgled over the tops of our boots. Some fellows were laying planks. Others tried to dig out a frantic mule sunk up to its belly (two hours later, I thought it was sleeping until I noticed the dark stream of congealed blood and the bullet hole). Jeptha, solicitous but distant, pulled me out when I was gripped above the knees. Our predicament was more absurd than dangerous, and he laughed. “Don’t leave me stuck like that mule,” I said, to fan this little flame of laughter. Instead, he grew pensive. His mind had moved from my remark to the general idea of rescue, and thence to the boy’s death.

Men who had been looking away while we approached were suddenly surprised by the sight of a female, and they removed their dripping hats
with wonder writ on their faces. Other men, many yards away, recognizing this sign of a woman’s presence, began trudging toward us. Jeptha introduced himself as a preacher and me as his wife; the men nodded absentmindedly while staring at me as if I were Niagara Falls or a two-headed calf.

All who had been here over a week spoke like old-timers, eager to disabuse newcomers of foolish Eastern notions about mining, California, and Life. Some, fresh from the hinterlands, looked unhealthy—undernourished, missing teeth, or walking on a leg that had been broken and set improperly by amateurs. We asked if they had seen Lewis or Edward, and I searched each new face, expecting it to belong to one of my brothers. Sometimes I was fairly sure I recognized a face from New York City.

Around Portsmouth Square were substantial edifices of wood and adobe, and hotels and gambling houses in two-story buildings with wood frames and canvas walls. We were dumbfounded to see men crouching with pans and buckets before the United States Hotel, washing the mud: a Connecticut Yankee told us that, indeed, gold had just been discovered in this mud—whether it was here naturally or some drunken miner had dropped a bag of gold dust, who knew. He offered to sell us the equipment. “You have made up this story to sell pans and buckets,” said Jeptha, and the fellow shrugged. We heard later that he had been playing this trick on greenhorns for months.

We bought coffee and pie being sold from the back of a wagon. By then it was evening. The gambling houses were open. Having paper- and canvas walls, they glowed all over like giant lanterns, and we used their light to find our way as the music from the different houses clashed in the festive discord heard today in carnival midways.

A drunk staggered out of the El Dorado, throwing the door wide, and with this gesture, like a dimpled Cupid uncurtaining a bathing Venus, he laid bare a lavish world of gilt, mirrors, and crystal, voluptuous furniture, obscene oil paintings, young sirens in lace and muslin, every type of hat, cravat, and mustache, and lifetimes of toil rising in sinuous golden towers on the tables. It occurred to me that a Harriet Knowles could become rich very quickly in this unnatural city, where there was so much sudden wealth and the mere sight of a woman made men gasp in wonder.
Though I looked on my former life as a disaster that had befallen me long ago, I could not control these thoughts about what could be done with the materials at hand. I thought this way automatically, as a man who had once been a cooper might look at a barrel and think,
I could have made it better
.

We walked on. Jeptha put his hand over my eyes to spare me the sight of a man urinating in the street.

WE SPENT OUR FIRST NIGHT BELOWDECKS
on the
Juniper
, our second in a wood-frame lodging house in which a canvas curtain separated us from several men in the next room. On the third day, we moved into a permanently moored schooner formerly called the
Flavius
. Nailed to a short pole where the mainmast had once been was a large hand-painted sign,
FLAVIUS FOOD AND LODGING
. Its owner was Captain Austin, a Mexican War veteran who had bought the vessel, along with several water lots and nearby town lots, with twenty thousand dollars in gold dust, after which his wife had come out by steamship, almost dying of yellow fever in Panama. I helped Mrs. Austin cook and bake, and I cleaned and served meals, for which Jeptha and I were given free board and lodging and I received another twenty dollars a week; Jeptha brought in about forty dollars by helping to put up houses four days a week. On the other three days, he preached in the streets for nothing. At night, he collapsed on the bed and never attempted to be intimate with me.

Captain Austin was short and had a head too large for his small body, like a funny man in a children’s book; he was clean-shaven, with sleepy, protuberant eyes. His sloping nose had a bulb at its end, and one of his small hands was missing half a pinky finger. Mrs. Austin described this gravely as a war wound. She was short and stout, with a face like her husband’s, and the same storybook proportions. He wasn’t around much except at meals, at which times his bulging eyes followed me in his unmoving head as though he were a lion studying a grass-eating creature from a hilltop.

Mrs. Austin did not seem to notice. She dressed like a farm wife, in a baggy calico wrapper—she owned three—and a long, stained blue apron I never saw her without. She did not bathe as often as I would have liked, and this mattered to me, since we were constantly together. For several
days, she did not speak except to tell me what to do. Then, one time when we were in the
Flavius
’s tiny galley, she paid me a compliment. She was mixing a tablespoon of saleratus into a bowl of corn flour. I was using an empty tin can to stamp out disks of dough for soup dumplings. Taking note of my speed, she said she had been afraid that, being pretty and refined, I would not be a hard worker, and she had been pleasantly surprised. But I mustn’t slack off now that she’d said this. I promised I wouldn’t (reminding myself that life is a wheel, as I believe Herodotus mentions somewhere). She said, “Everything happens fast here. Back east, Captain Austin would have taken twenty years to make his fortune. Other men might take ten years to admit they’ve failed; here that takes just months. Men who would do murder one day in Philadelphia do it here the first time they walk into a gambling hall; and the ones who would turn into broken-down drunks after twenty years, here you see sleeping in their puke a week after they arrive.”

I was impressed by this observation, and I thought I might enjoy her company once I got used to her physical liabilities, but it turned out to be the sum total of her special wisdom; she was a one-idea person, like a minor character in a novel by Charles Dickens, and once the topic was introduced, no day passed without a discussion of Time in the West. For example, when I spoke to her about Jeptha’s prospects, and whether he would become known and have a church, she said, “Whatever happens, it will happen fast, you’ll see,” and she repeated the speech that had impressed me so much the first time I had heard it.

Once, I carelessly described Captain Austin as “lucky.” Mrs. Austin, shoving equal proportions of red meat and white fat into a grinder, denied it so hotly I was afraid she would lose a finger. The
country
had been lucky to acquire this territory—with Captain Austin’s help, remember—just when gold was found on it. Captain Austin had seized the opportunity. His character was such as to make it inevitable for him to become rich: the gold discovery had merely hastened the process.

There was something rather anxious about this insistence that her husband’s success was grounded on his talents: perhaps she was afraid it would turn out to be a mirage. And so it might. When she was not expounding her single insight, Mrs. Austin fretted out loud about her husband’s business, and I learned that Captain Austin had taken a great
risk by sinking his money into the water lots around the
Flavius
. He had bought too late, when the market was high. Besides, he had purchased them during the time of transition between Mexican and American rule, when it was not clear who had a right to sell land. There was sure to be a legal battle, and if things went badly in the courts—perhaps even if they
seemed likely
to go badly in the courts—he might lose them.

Even if Captain Austin held on to his wealth, that might not help Mrs. Austin. They often quarreled. One night I heard him say he wished he hadn’t sent for her.

Really, there was nothing sillier than to deny the role of luck in everything that occurred in San Francisco in those unnatural years. The whole city was a vast casino; a fortune hung on every decision. Walk into this lodging tent; you and a fellow you happen to meet there start a mighty business enterprise still in operation in 1910. Walk into that other tent; die of cholera next week. Earn good pay loading riverboats; but lose the fortune you would have found in the gold fields.

Philosophers know that all choices are fateful. Each decision destroys worlds of possibility and permits others to survive at least a little longer. In a gold rush, the process is visible to ordinary men, and since they’re not philosophers, it unsettles them, and they begin to do strange things.

SOON AFTER WE ARRIVED
, I woke to the noise of crackling and the smell of smoke. I shook Jeptha awake. “Wake up, wake up, the ship is on fire!” He jumped into his trousers, I wrapped myself in the blanket, and we hastened out to the deck along with others who had been roused by the commotion. It was determined pretty soon that the fire was not on the schooner. It was in the city. To wake us here, it must be big, but we could not see it until the fog lifted. By then, Jeptha and some of the other men were fighting it: his tasks for much of the day were to shovel mud onto burning walls to tie ropes to the tops of buildings in the fire’s path and to help to pull the buildings down.

That day, Jeptha met David Broderick, the Tammany politician who had come from New York round the Horn in steerage, with the express purpose of becoming a U.S. senator from California when California became a state. Volunteer fire companies were the heart of Democratic Party politics, and Broderick showed considerable experience and conspicuous
bravery in battling the flames, as did several other men who would come to have dubious reputations in San Francisco. Jeptha mentioned the name to me repeatedly, and later, when Broderick’s name was on everyone’s lips, its syllables would conjure a memory of Jeptha as he was during the fire—in a good mood, full of interesting news, pleased with his small but creditable role that day—and how grateful I was to the fire, hoping its salutary effects on my husband would last.