Janet Quin-Harkin (32 page)

“But Hugh, your leg,” she protested. “It’s such a narrow bed.”

“Hold me, Libby,” he whispered. He slipped his arms around her and pulled her toward him, nestling his head between her breasts like a child. “So good,” he murmured. “This feels so good.”

That night Libby lay awake with Hugh’s arm tightly around her, his leg across hers, trying to make herself feel something for him. She knew it was only a matter of time before he would make love to her and she was terrified that he would notice her lack of response to him. “You are my husband,” she murmured to herself. “I promised at the altar that I would love and cherish you. I was only eighteen. I was just a child. I didn’t know what I was promising. Am I to be punished for the rest of my life for demanding my own way when I was a spoiled child?”

After that Hugh tried hard to be of assistance to Libby. He insisted on helping with the baking and the washing, often making the job twice as complicated for her, but it was hard to dissuade him. “I want to feel I’m good for something,” he’d say. “Just give me another chance at kneading that dough. I know I can get better.”

In spite of working seven days a week, Libby was still short of cash when the end of the month loomed ahead. Sheldon Rival’s proposal and Big George’s proposal before it crossed her mind more than once. Would it be so terrible to sell her body to a few men, just until she made enough to pay the debt? After all, did anything matter anymore, now that Gabe had gone? She felt as if her body had died with him. Did it matter if men paid to make love to a corpse? She wrestled with the idea as she rolled and pounded dough, scrubbed and wrung out washing. She had worked as hard as any human being could work, doing everything she could think of, and it was not enough. After this, a few nights in bed with strange men would seem easy money.

She made up her mind to go speak to Big George about it the next day. He was a decent enough man, by California standards. He’d select her respectable clients and she’d heard that a good saloon girl could make a hundred dollars a night in the gold towns. Then we’ll get out of here and go to England, she told herself. Nobody need ever know except me.

In the morning she dressed with care and put up her hair, instead of tying it back as she had done for months.

“You’re going out?” Hugh asked.

“I have some business to attend to in town,” she said.

“What sort of business?”

“I’m trying to renegotiate our debt,” she said shortly. She was just deciding whether to add her bonnet to the outfit when Ah Fong yelled from outside, “Missee. Come quick. Come quick!”

She dropped the bonnet and ran outside. “What is it?” she shouted, expecting to see men with guns, grizzly bears, or something equally dangerous. Ah Fong was dancing around like a crazy person.

“Come see potato,” he shouted. He pointed down at the soil. “I think maybe this plant bigger than rest so I dig up carefully to see. Take look. You think this very fine potato?”

Libby looked down at the ground. The roots of the plant lying there were full of big brown perfect globes, bigger than goose eggs.

“Potatoes,” Libby screamed. “They’re wonderful, Ah Fong! Is this the only plant that’s ready so far?”

“Maybe these two, three more,” he said. “See they get best sun and water here. We go dig up and see, yes?”

“Yes,” Libby said. “Dig them up and see.”

So instead of setting off for town, Libby set off with a basket full of potatoes. By the time she had gone through two mining camps she had sold them all and she was thirty-five dollars richer. Plants continued to ripen all week and on the last day of April Libby was able to take Mark Hopkins his entire amount of money.

All through May the plants continued to yield well. Ah Fong would not let her dig them all up at once.

“Make people wait for them,” he said. “Too many at once not valuable. Then price go down.”

Rumor of the potatoes spread through the camps and Libby no longer had to go out peddling them. She sold them as fast as they came out of the ground and she set Ah Fong as guard at night, just in case any miner decided to help himself rather than pay her dollar apiece. As it was, nobody seemed to object to the high price. They were so much fresher and more appealing than the tired, moldy objects down at the store that the miners were delighted with them.

“You got any more vegetables, missus?” they asked. “We’ve been without decent vegetables all winter.”

“I’ll have some soon,” she said. “I’m going to be planting summer crops.”

She hurried over to Ah Fong. “What would grow fast and easily in this soil and this climate?” she asked.

“Melon,” he said. “They grow like weed, and squash, and onion. Onion grow real good and easy.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Libby said. “I’ll get Mark Hopkins to look around for me and find out where I can get seeds.”

“Maybe Chinese get you seeds,” Ah Fong said. “Chinese grow own gardens, have seeds too.”

Ah Fong’s enquiries came up with some watermelon seeds and some mung beans, which he said she could sprout on a piece of flannel and eat after a few days. Encouraged by this, she tried sprouting some of her own dried beans and soon had a row of beans growing in her vegetable patch. Mark Hopkins came back to report that most of the vegetables down in San Francisco still came from Chile but that a broker in Sacramento might be of some use to her.

“I’m going to find new things to plant, Ah Fong,” she announced as she returned to the cabin. “Mr. Hopkins thinks I might be able to buy seeds or little plants in Sacramento.”

“You get more plants you need more land,” Ah Fong said. “No sense buying just a few plants. Get many, get rich quick.”

“Where do I get more land?” she asked. “We’ve almost reached the edge of the clearing.”

“Dig up around cabin,” he said as if it were a stupid question. “What you need grass out in front for? I get ready for you while you gone.”

Then she took all her profits from the potatoes and went down to Sacramento.

Sacramento was like a gold town, only larger. It had grown into a large city, set out in ambitious square city blocks but still half tent, half wood, busy and bustling, incredibly smelly and dirty. Evidence of the winter floods was still marked by the black line halfway up the canvas walls and by the evil-smelling mud in the streets. The wharf was full of ships, from big river steamers to Little sailing craft, all unloading and adding to the enormous piles of every kind of provision already stacked in the open air. Obviously, some of the perishable foods had not been sold soon enough and flies were settling on slabs of green bacon and mounds of rotting peaches and spoiled fish. Mosquitoes were everywhere. Libby felt her stomach turn as she picked her way over thick debris to find the food broker.

She found that he was one of the few who had managed to build a warehouse for his goods, in the hope of keeping them from spoiling. He did not seem to be succeeding in this because the temperature inside the big wooden hall was just as hot as it was outside. The air was fetid with the smell of rotting fruit.

“Seeds you want?” he asked Libby. “I don’t have any seeds to sell, but I can let you have some corn. That would grow well here and I’ve some squash that are too big and old to sell now. You can take the seeds from them if you like . . . and these strawberries are just rotting on me. See if you can get new plants from them.”

Libby bought those and a variety of dried beans and peas, to see which of them could be coaxed back to life, plus all the onions he had. Then, because she still had money to spare, she bought two sacks of flour and a box each of apples and peaches, remembering how easily she had sold the pies last fall. She was just paying him when the heat and the smell seemed to overpower her. Perspiration started to run down her forehead and she felt clammy all over. Saliva welled up in her mouth. The walls started to sway around and the next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor with several worried faces bending over her.

“You all right, missus?” a young man asked.

“I think so,” Libby said. “It’s just so hot in here.”

“You’d best go lie down in a cool room,” the older man said. “There’s a lot of fever going around. They say there’s cholera and typhoid and smallpox too, after the floods.”

Libby sat up cautiously. “I think I’d rather get the stuff packed up and get out of here, back to the hills,” she said. “I feel fine now.”

She bought a mule and had the sacks loaded onto it, then she set off, leading the mule behind her rented horse, not stopping until she was on rising ground again and could spend the night at a hotel above the plains.

All the time she journeyed, she worried about getting sick. Even though she was clear of the city, she still could not shake off the clammy, nauseated feeling she had had before she fainted.

I can’t have come so far to go down with a fever now, she told herself severely. Not now that we’ve almost made it. If these vegetables work out, I’ll grow more and more. Like Mark Hopkins, I can make a fortune. But I can’t afford to be sick.

Her stern pep talk seemed to be working, because she felt better as the air got cooler and by the time she rode up to the cabin the next day, she was feeling almost well again. Ah Fong greeted the vegetables with delight, showing her where they were going to plant the corn, where the squash was going to go, and how they had finished a new bed for the onions. They worked together, all five of them, all day to get everything planted. When they finished, by sunset, the little girls danced around with Ah Fong singing a nonsense song, “Planting all the melons, planting all the beans, planting all the good things, yum yum yum.”

Libby watched them with a weary smile.

“You’re tired,” Hugh said. “You’ve had a strenuous time. Now maybe you can take it easy until these crops grow.”

“I’ve got to keep on with the washing and baking in case they don’t,” Libby said with a sigh. She felt so tired that she could lie down and sleep for a week, and she still could not shake off the clamminess.

I’ve got to see the doctor in the morning, she decided. I can’t risk getting sick now. I can’t risk giving something to my family.

So in the morning she rode the new mule down to Hangtown, which was strange in itself, because usually she enjoyed the walk. The doctor greeted her civilly. “It’s good to meet in happier surroundings than before,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

Libby described how she had fainted in Sacramento and how she could not shake off the feeling. “I don’t want to find that I’ve got some terrible fever, Doctor. I have to know, because I don’t want to give it to anyone in my family.”

“Let’s take a look at you,” the doctor said. “If you had cholera, or typhoid, I think you’d know it by now. That’s not to say you haven’t caught a lesser fever. Every germ in the world breeds down in the swampy country by the river.”

He examined her briskly and efficiently. When she had dressed again, he motioned her to sit at his desk.

“You don’t seem to be running a fever right now,” he said. “Let me ask you one thing, when was your last menstrual period?”

“My what?” Libby asked, then blushed. “I’m not very regular, I’m afraid. I never have been.”

“But not within the last month?”

“I don’t think so,” Libby said.

The doctor nodded. “Then I think I have happier news for you than a fever,” he said with a smile, as if he were very pleased with himself.

Libby looked at him in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me that I’m going to have a baby?”

“My dear young woman,” he said. “Does it come as such a surprise? You are reunited with your husband after a long time apart. What could be more natural?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Libby stammered.

The doctor held out his hand. “My congratulations,” he said. “I expect you’ll both be hoping for a boy this time, eh?”

“Yes,” Libby managed to say with a false smile on her face. “That would be very nice.”

She got to her feet. “Thank you very much, Doctor,” she said.

“I expect I’ll be seeing you about eight months from now, eh?” the doctor asked jovially.

No, Libby said to herself, hurriedly counting from March. About seven months from now.

T
HE KNOWLEDGE THAT
she was going to have Gabe’s child should have shocked Libby. Instead it elated her. She often put her hand to her belly, as if touching it was in some way touching part of Gabe. “Now I’ll always have something to remember you by,” she whispered.

When Libby told Hugh, a month later, he was equally delighted, if very amazed. Libby was glad that they had made love, albeit very tentatively, so that he did not question that the child was his.

“It will be a boy this time, I know it will,” he said happily. “Finally it looks as though everything is going to be fine, Libby. We’ve had a rough time but now our troubles are over.”

Libby smiled at the irony of his words. Everything in the world has mended except for my heart, she thought. The garden is flourishing, the children are flourishing, Hugh is recovering, and the baby is growing. I’m the only one who can’t flourish.

As the summer days grew longer and warmer, Libby spent a lot of time in the vegetable garden with Ah Fong. Hugh had forbidden her to take in any more washing as soon as he learned about the baby, and it really did look as if the garden was going to produce magnificently. In a month the corn had already grown into strong green shoots, the squash and melons were sturdy little plants, and the onions had begun to flower. They had already begun to sell Ah Fong’s bean sprouts, at first to very suspicious miners, then to repeat customers. Ah Fong looked after the garden as if it was his own child. He would not allow the tiniest weed to appear. He collected horse dung relentlessly and worked it into the soil. He dug irrigation ditches from a stream higher up the hill so that there was enough water flowing past the plants on hot dry days.

Libby’s pies were also very successful. Both hotels in town would buy as many as she could bake and often she sold her entire stock before she ever reached town.

“If only we had a bigger oven,” she complained to Hugh. “Maybe I’ll get a brick oven built outside when the profits come in from the summer crop.”