Down to a Soundless Sea (5 page)

The Posts had a broad reputation as a hospitable and compassionate clan, given to forbearance where youth and folly were concerned. John’s antics were barely a passing diversion to people who had seen just about every kind of addlepated eccentric who ever mounted a horse.

On the last day of work the Posts laid out a lavish farewell feed as a token of gratitude for the hired and volunteer labor. It was a traditional Post roundup fiesta. Mrs. Post engineered an enormous feast of roasted wild boar and vegetables, baked pigeons in currants and cream, abalone steaks grilled with green onion and chiles. Other local delights included wild mountain honey cakes and quarts of pickled quails’ eggs, acquired in a trade with the enigmatic Sing Fat. Everything looked truly marvelous; everything except John’s immediate future.

After a dessert of hot apple pie with thick ginger cream, Mrs. Post approached John and handed him a small, brown envelope accompanied by a pat on the cheek. She said the Ranch hoped to see him again next season. The little manila packet
contained four dollars, exactly the price of the stage fare back to Monterey. From there he was on his own. Mrs. Post knew John would jump a local freight to Salinas like the rest of the boys. He would find his way home in good order, and that was all that really mattered. Next year, she hoped out loud, John would keep his mind on his job.

Unhappily, John returned home without ever collecting the least evidence of his bear. But that was just as well as far as he was concerned. The less said about the incident the better. He was already tied up in knots trying to think of a way to explain to his folks what happened to his mare. To reveal more than was absolutely necessary would only cause him further embarrassment. The stage ride to Monterey gave him plenty of time to think about the numerous distressing alternatives to the truth.

But John never forgot his Great Sur Bear, the mountain wizard, the God of generations. For John, if for no other living human, the immortal beast was as alive and real as he was, and that was all that really mattered.

When he got home, John was faced with the immediate problem of scraping together four dollars to repay Mrs. Post’s generosity. It was imperative that he unburden himself of that obligation as soon as possible to regain his sense of honor, if not pride. Two of the dollars he pulled from his tin strongbox, which was hidden behind a loose board in his closet, but the last two greenbacks he had to borrow from his father. Happily his father asked no questions, but he required the two dollars be paid back by the end of the month.

John went to the Bank of Salinas early the next day to have
a check drawn up. He knew hard cash would never arrive at its destination. He wrote a short letter to accompany the funds and tried to make it sound as mature and businesslike as possible to cover his youthful chagrin.

John’s letter was addressed to Mrs. J. W. Post, Big Sur, California, and dated August 12, 1920. It began, “Esteemed Madame, Enclosed find check for stage fare from Post Ranch to Monterey. Distance thirty-eight miles. Rate ten cents a mile. Total four dollars. Hoping that I have not inconvenienced you by my delay.” It closed, “I beg, my friend, to be allowed to remain, yours very respectfully, J. E. Steinbeck Jr. P.S. Kindly forward a receipt.” The return address indicated was 130 Central Avenue, Salinas, California. John kept that receipt for years to remind him of his bear and the expense incurred by magic visions.

An outsider would have said that young Chapel Lodge was truly a creature fashioned by the hand of the Almighty for the purpose of testing the human bounds of endurable loneliness. His father was a traveling man who was always on the shy side of making a decent living for his family. His mother doubled in brass when it came to sharing her husband’s borderline schemes for success. As a result, she rarely had time for her only child, whom she considered an impediment to her future prosperity.

The poor child’s family had lived under so many roofs, in so many towns, that the boy was ignorant of the meaning of the word “home.” Since a real home was the one thing he could not have, it became the one thing he longed for most, even if a tangible intuitive definition eluded him.

As a young boy Chapel spent most of his time desperately
alone. Every so many weeks or months he would be hauled up by his pants loop, loaded with the shabby baggage into the back of a dusty buckboard, and invariably plunged into curious and even more peculiar domestic arrangements. The experience always left him feeling remote from the world and very helpless. His formal education was spotty at best, thanks to his parents, and in later years he would laugh and count himself lucky to be able to read and write with any skill whatsoever. Chapel’s enforced solitude in a long register of “cheap and cheaper” boardinghouses presented scant diversions. The most readily available distractions were the page-worn periodicals and lurid dime novels left behind by departing boarders.

In a world in which the fates and their mercurial favors move with the subtle regularity of the tides, it would follow that even Chapel should have secured his share of good fortune at some time, but such was not the case. In fact, Chapel’s whole life was an atlas of “from bad to worse.” Good fortune was not to be had at any price or from any quarter, so he stopped expecting it.

When he was only fourteen, Chapel’s indifferent parents deposited their youthful “dilemma” with a brutish old skinflint of an uncle who lived near Fresno. His father had puffed up, thumbed his glaring suspenders like a ward heeler, and exclaimed that he had made important business connections back East that needed addressing, or so he said, and that a train trip to Kansas City was an imperative move toward success in these matters. Chapel’s parents casually assured their son that they would return by spring, wreathed in greenbacks and robed with dazzling prospects. Meanwhile, “Hey you! Boy!”—which Chapel once mistook for his own first name—
was to obey his uncle in all things and make himself useful for once.

After secretly reappropriating the $125 they had settled on the old man to care for the boy, Mr. and Mrs. Lodge boarded an eastbound train and disappeared over the horizon. They never returned. They never even sent so much as a note of explanation. They just vanished, leaving not the least trace of their existence save a gaggle of angry creditors and a veritable turnpike of unpaid bills. No one ever saw or heard from the Lodges again. The rabid old uncle didn’t seem unduly surprised by the deceitful nature of his brother’s desertion, though he happily took every opportunity to denounce the theft of the money due him. As far as the old panther was concerned, the most damnable, unrepentant scoundrels were usually found close to home, or in it. Chapel’s parents and their chicanery remained a thorn under the old man’s blanket, and he refused to abide the outrage gracefully. But he would get his money’s worth, even if he had to take it out of the boy’s hide for the going price of a strong cottonwood switch.

Chapel’s very existence, already a portrait of sad neglect, soon became a standing irritation to the old man. He obviously took no joy in the responsibility and reminded the boy of his indignation with every oath he swore. The old bully had eventually taken to smacking the boy around until Chapel had learned to dodge the blows. After that, the brutality became verbal, but no less painful for all that. Chapel began to spend as much time away from his uncle’s house as feasible, and that seemed to accommodate everybody’s interests.

Unsupervised, floundering, and broke, Chapel launched himself into various categories of willful mischief, but as was to be expected, his dismal attempts at novice criminality were
habitually doomed to exposure and punishment. It required a considerable amount of good fortune to be a marginally successful criminal and, of course, Chapel Lodge had no such luck and everyone knew it.

There came a time when Chapel discovered that he had burned a few too many bridges on his old stomping grounds, and he quickly decided to test pastures farther north. San Francisco might offer the silver-lined pockets and the requisite anonymity necessary to a petty thief. Having spent most of his youth in agrarian settings like Santa Maria, Paso Robles, and Stockton, Chapel had an itch to see how the big city eagles lived. Life with the sparrows held no further appeal. He’d been a sparrow all his life, and he hated it. Perhaps San Francisco would also prove less precarious to his liberty. He had already done plenty of time for vagrancy and petty theft, and he didn’t look forward to repeating that experience. He was sixteen and ready to strike out alone, for alone was all he knew. He somehow felt he could handle any eventuality if just left to his own devices. How he supported this cheerful illusion of his future success remained a mystery even to him.

So one day, at approximately three in the morning on the edge of town, Chapel Lodge lay hidden near a railroad siding on which a slow, northbound freight wheezed patiently. It was waiting for the fast night express to pass before pulling back out on the main line. Chapel watched the fireman make his inspection of the cars to roust out bindle stiffs from the support rods under the cars. When the commotion had moved on down the tracks, and just before the freight pulled out, Chapel crept out from the underbrush and dashed for a tarpaulincovered flatcar loaded with heavy machinery. He vaulted aboard and ducked under the stiff, oil-stained canvas. There he made
a nest for himself between the crates. Using his packed bedroll as a pillow, Chapel lay back and went to sleep. Lulled by the slow and steady counterpoint of the rails’ joints, he rested peacefully for hours.

Visions of fast times and easy living spun through Chapel’s dreams like dust devils in dry fields. He awoke to the jolting switches in a shunting yard on the outskirts of San Jose. Barely managing to evade watchful firemen and railroad cops, Chapel at last located and jumped aboard the market train for San Francisco. This time he was forced to sling-ride the truss rods under a freight car filled with iced fish. This mode of travel proved uncomfortable, odorous, and dangerous in the extreme for a newcomer to the sport.

Chapel at last achieved his destination and was wonderfully impressed with the size and power of it all. San Francisco was certainly a treat to behold for a boy with dreams. He had never seen anything like it. Beautiful houses graced the hills; the bay boasted a forest of ships’ masts, and scores of steamers moved in and out of the narrows. But the best thing, to Chapel’s way of thinking, was the complete absence of plowed fields and dusty farmers. However, any illusions he might have harbored about sharping the slickers were soon painfully dispelled.

Young Chapel Lodge was spotted as a raw rube the first moment he surfaced on the waterfront. Two black eyes and a broken hand soon led Chapel to see the errors of blind supposition. So he pondered his predicament and decided that a more forthright means of making a living might just forestall his taking up residence in a pine box in the near future.

The boy needed work and the docks always needed labor,
so Chapel gravitated toward the rugged haunts of stevedores and teamsters. After two days of futile searching and sleeping rough, Chapel fell in with a shifty-eyed bosun’s mate named Baily Pryot.

They discovered each other in a dockside rum-dive so disreputable the owner had dispensed with giving it a name. Pryot took Chapel’s measure and offered to share his bottle of smuggled Russian vodka. Chapel had never tasted vodka before. He found it reminiscent of tar solvent and so was only mildly surprised that he remembered next to nothing when he awoke many hours later.

Even before he opened his eyes, Chapel Lodge knew he was in a bad way, perhaps dying, maybe worse. He’d never felt so sick.

His body floated left and forward, then right and back. Nausea and profound discomfort greeted every movement. Eventually the fetid pungency and constant throbbing vibration of his surroundings made him wish he were dead. His half-realized world smelled like an oil-slicked harbor at low tide, but somehow far worse by virtue of the odor’s clinging proximity.

When Chapel at last opened his crusty eyes he saw very little. He lay on a shabby, thin mattress that smelled of cheap hair grease and aged sweat, and his body continued to move in a most distressing fashion. He tried to sit up, but hit his head on a low metal beam and cried out in pain and anger. A strange voice called out of the gloom. “If your name’s Lodge, you’ll be wanted on watch at the boilers in ten minutes.… I wouldn’t miss another watch-call, if I were you, son. Captain Billy Ortega is a thoroughgoing son of a bitch when it comes to strict ship’s orders. By the way, welcome aboard,
for all it matters to the gulls. There’s java in the mess for the weak of heart.” With a rude clang of a closed hatch the voice was gone.

It took a while for Chapel Lodge to piece together the events leading to his employment shoveling coal into the boilers of a grain ship bound for Alaska. When at last he located Baily Pryot drinking coffee in the galley, Chapel was ready to eat the man’s liver raw. The bosun saw him coming, smiled, and raised his cup in salute.