Jubilee Trail (54 page)

Garnet nodded.

“Now of course,” Florinda went on smiling, “you’re wondering where I got the capital and you’re too polite to ask. So I’ll tell you. Remember when I gave you my fare from New Orleans to St. Louis, I took the money out of a purse I had sewed to my corset?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, that was my bank. I thought I was fairly safe in New Orleans, but there was always the chance that I might have to make a quick getaway, just as I did. So I stitched a purse to every corset I owned, and every morning when I got dressed I put my jewelry into it, and enough money to keep me going a while.”

“You’re very wise,” Garnet said with admiration.

“Not always. But I learn as I go along. And one lesson I do know. Don’t ever be without money. Money is the most important thing on earth.”

Garnet smiled and frowned at the same time, considered, and shook her head. “No it’s not, Florinda.”

“What is, then?” asked Florinda.

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I’m going to find out about living. But it’s not money.”

Florinda smiled sagely. Reaching along the wall-bench, she picked up Garnet’s purse. It had lain there since this afternoon when Garnet had taken it out to pay Isabel for altering the black dresses. Florinda shifted the purse from one hand to the other, feeling how comfortably heavy it was. As she set it down she gave a significant look from Garnet to the purse and back again.

“Try doing without it sometime, dearie,” she suggested.

Standing up, she stretched and yawned, as though to imply there was no more to be said on the subject.

T
HE MONTH OF JUNE
was cool and misty and full of flowers. Then on the first of July the sun came out. After this the sun shone every day. It scorched the mountain brush to a hundred shades of purple and bronze, and made the grass crackle like paper underfoot.

Soon after the sun appeared, a trading party brought news of more disorder in the north. The men said Frémont had gone to Oregon as ordered, but he had come back to northern California almost at once. As soon as he got back trouble had started again.

Their story went like this. Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the richest men in California, lived on his rancho north of San Francisco Bay. One morning in June a group of thirty-three Yankees raided his home. They said they were a party of revolution, ready to take over the government, and they were here with the approval of Frémont.

They piled into Señor Vallejo’s parlor, got drunk on his liquor, and called for pens and paper. Some of them could not write, and of those who could, several were not sober enough to do so. But the others drew up a document saying California was now a republic. This done, they made prisoners of Señor Vallejo and his family, as well as several other well-known men of that neighborhood. They marched their captives first to Frémont’s camp and then to Sutter’s Fort, where they locked them up. That afternoon, to clinch their conquest, they ran up a flag over Señor Vallejo’s rancho.

A man named Todd made the flag. Some people said he made it out of a sheet and a woman’s red flannel petticoat. Mr. Todd painted a red star in a corner of the sheet and drew a picture of a bear looking up at the star. Across the bottom he tacked a strip of red flannel, and above the strip he printed “California Republic.” That is, he meant to print it that way, but he got confused and left the letter I out of the word Republic. He put it on later, above the C. The flag had about as much dignity as the rest of the day’s performance.

Of the thirty-three men who raided Señor Vallejo’s home, a few were village or rancho workers, but most of them had no permanent address and no known occupation. Twenty of the thirty-three had been in California less than eight months. Mr. Larkin, the American consul in Monterey, and Mr. Montgomery, captain of the American warship now in San Francisco Bay, condemned their behavior at once. The Yankee traders and rancheros heard the tale with dismay.

These Yankees were doing a good business and they wanted to go on doing it. True, they had long been hinting that any time California wished to be free of Mexico, they would be glad to help. But they wanted a friendly union. They did not want the Californios to get the idea that Yankees were hoodlums. In Silky’s bar, the Yankee residents of Los Angeles talked angrily about the rumpus. They assured the Angelenos that they had nothing to do with those loafers up north, and that Frémont was going to get himself into rich trouble if he didn’t go on back to Oregon.

Half amused and half annoyed, Silky and Florinda told Garnet about the conversations in the bar. Garnet felt exasperated. She was tired, she was within a few weeks of childbirth, and she thought she had put up with enough. “Do you mean,” she demanded, “that we’re going to get blamed for this, just because we’re Americans too?”

Silky, who was checking the credit ledgers, pulled at his mustache a moment, and shook his head. Silky could be serious enough when he chose. “I don’t think we need to be worried, Mrs. Hale. The Angelenos like us. Look how they come in here every evening to drink wine and play monte. They know men like me and Abbott and the rest of us, we don’t have any truck with floaters like that crew.”

Garnet felt better, and went back to her sewing. Silky resumed his checking of the profits. Business was good and Silky was in a cheerful mood. His satisfied expression as he added the figures reminded Garnet that she had not yet made any arrangement for paying her own expenses. She had told Florinda she wanted to, and Florinda had said, “You don’t have to do that. Beef is so cheap here that all you can eat wouldn’t come to a dollar a month.” But Garnet still wanted to pay her share. Both Silky and Florinda were more interested in getting rich than in anything else, and Garnet was pretty sure that neither of them would persist in refusing good money. Besides, she was about to have a baby, and with Silky at least she suspected that regular cash payments might make the difference between a squalling brat and a sweet little cherub.

She decided she had better see Mr. Abbott now, and get this matter straightened out before her baby was born. When she went upstairs that evening, she looked at her figure in the glass. In New York, she would never have dreamed of going out where people could see her. But she had observed that in California women about to have children went about as usual and nobody took any notice of them. So she would go to see Mr. Abbott tomorrow, if Florinda would go with her to show her the way.

The thought of being responsible for her own property gave her a shaky feeling, for she knew so little about such things. At home her father had given her an allowance, and Oliver had always been generous. In New Orleans, whenever she said she was going shopping he would offer her a bill or two from his pocket. In Santa Fe he had given her a handful of Mexican coins before she had thought of asking for them. Since reaching California she had not spent any money at all except what she had given Isabel for altering the black dresses. She had offered to pay for the cloth Florinda bought for the baby’s clothes, but Florinda had said, “Oh, that’s paid for. I told Mr. Abbott to check it off in Oliver’s credit book.”

Florinda understood money. She had told Garnet how much to pay Isabel for the sewing, and she could explain the odd mixture of coins and hides and credit books used in California. When Florinda came up to their room that night, Garnet told her she wanted to see Mr. Abbott. Florinda nodded.

“Why sure, dear, I understand. It’s confusing not to know how much you’ve got. I’ll go with you tomorrow—José can take care of the bar, and I need some shoes anyway.”

Garnet was sitting on the wall-bench before the window, looking out at the stars. She saw the Big Dipper, and remembered how her father had first shown it to her when she was a little girl. It gave her a wrench of homesickness. Looking at the stars, she said suddenly,

“I wish my child was not going to be a foreigner!”

Florinda was piling her laundry into a basket to be given to Isabel the next day. “It’s a shame, Garnet,” she said. “Having to stay here when you didn’t mean to.”

“I don’t think I ever really thought about my own country before,” said Garnet. “In New York, the Fourth of July was just a lot of fireworks and a fat man on a platform reading the Declaration of Independence. But out here, when the day went by and it was just another day—” She stopped. “I’m sorry! This won’t do either of us any good.”

“People do get back, you know,” said Florinda.

“Yes, of course. Maybe I could get the captain of a clipper ship to take me as a passenger. Do those ships ever carry women?”

“Sometimes. Once in a while a captain brings his wife with him. If there’s one woman along he might not mind having another. You’d be company for her.”

“I’d pay him everything I had,” said Garnet. After a pause she asked, “Would you go with me?”

“No, dearie,” said Florinda.

So Garnet did not pursue the subject. But as she looked out at the stars and thought of home, she felt her eyes smarting with tears.

The next day they went to Mr. Abbott’s. Garnet wore one of her black Mexican dresses, and Florinda showed her how to cover her head with the strip of black silk that the Californios called a rebozo. It was a glittering midsummer day. They went by paths trodden through the wild oats, winding this way and that among the houses. Dogs and children scampered around them, and here and there they stepped aside to let a horseman go by. The walk took them only ten minutes, but they turned so often that Garnet looked back more than once to make sure of the direction they were taking.

At the trading post a stack of hides lay on the porch in front. As she smelt them Garnet made a face.

“What would you have said in New York,” she asked Florinda, “if somebody had told you where your slippers came from?”

“I guess I’d have said, ‘Thank heaven I don’t have to live there.’ Well, you never know what’s going to happen next. There’s a step under these weeds, be careful. There, fine. That’s Mr. Abbott, the fat man sitting behind the counter.”

Mr. Abbott, round and bald and jovial, smiled broadly upon them as they came in.

“Well now, this is a treat. How do you do, Miss Florinda?”

“Healthy as a weed, thank you, sir. Let me make you acquainted with my friend Mrs. Oliver Hale. She wants to see you on a little matter of business.”

Mr. Abbott did not look as if he ever moved any more than he had to. But out of respect for Garnet’s black dress and her obvious state of health, he now pushed himself up out of his chair with a great puffing and heaving, gave her a big soft hand and told her how deeply he felt for her in the grief displayed by her widow’s weeds. Drawing up a chair for her behind the counter, he invited her to sit down.

Garnet thanked him, went around the end of the counter, and took the chair. Solemnly clasping his hands over his paunch, Mr. Abbott told her Oliver had been a fine man, and he would be happy to do any service in his power for Oliver’s widow.

Garnet did not want to discuss Oliver. Sensing this, Florinda interrupted Mr. Abbott to say she’d like to try on some shoes, please, if he had any nice ones. Why of course he had, Mr. Abbott exclaimed, some real stylish shoes from the best factory in Connecticut. He shouted for somebody to come wait on Miss Florinda, and two Yankee clerks appeared from the back room behind the counter. Florinda flashed her charm upon them, and they hurried to bring not only shoes but ribbons and dress-goods as well. Sitting on the wall-bench to slip off the shoes she was wearing, Florinda wanted to know if they thought she owned a rancho, that she could buy a thousand hides’ worth of clothes all at once.

“There now, don’t you go teasing me,” Mr. Abbott boomed at her. “If everybody kept their credit on the books as good as you do I’d not have a care in the world. Collins! Bring some wine for Mrs. Hale, she looks a bit peaky. Well, yes, a cup for me too, don’t mind if I do. Join us, Miss Florinda? Better reconsider, ma’am, nothing like a little wine for the stomach’s sake, so says the Good Book itself.”

Florinda thanked him but shook her head, admiring her foot in a black kid slipper with a silk rosette, and flirting with both clerks at once. While they talked, Garnet looked around at the trading post. The front and both side walls of the room had adobe wall-benches, and the counter faced the door so Mr. Abbott could greet his customers as they came in. At one end of the counter was a pile of old newspapers that had been wadded and stuffed into the chinks of the goods-boxes. Some of the pages were whole, others had been torn, but all had been smoothed out so the American customers could read them. Few of the papers were less than a year old, for they had come on ships around Cape Horn, but they brought the latest news to be had from the United States.

On the back wall of the room, behind the counter, were shelves piled with ledgers. The rancheros brought in their hides, got credit for them on the books, and took their credit papers to be exchanged for goods as they needed them. There was very little cash handled anywhere.

Behind this room was another, where the clerks had been working when Mr. Abbott bawled for their services. Evidently they had been unpacking a shipment of goods, for Garnet could see the open crates, and the pots and pans, mirrors and cloth and shoes that had come out of them. Young Mr. Collins, the clerk, set a bottle of red wine and two cups on the counter. Mr. Abbott poured a cupful of wine for Garnet and handed it to her with as much of a bow as a fat man could manage sitting down.

Mr. Abbott never hurried. Sipping his wine, he asked Garnet what she thought of that ruckus up north. Disgraceful, wasn’t it? Bad for business. And how’d she like this fine summer weather? Hot days and cool nights, never got anything like this back in the States, no sirree they didn’t. Another man dropped in, a stringy, lantern-jawed character in a red shirt and dusty black trousers. Mr. Abbott introduced him to Garnet as Mr. Bugs McLane. Garnet had heard of Mr. Bugs McLane, who was well known at Silky’s: he did a thriving business in bringing whiskey and other contraband goods from the ships. Mr. McLane said he had come by to talk over some little things with Mr. Abbott, but he was in no hurry and could wait till Mrs. Hale was finished. Meanwhile, he had noticed a woman selling hot tamales yonder by the church. If Florinda had picked out the shoes she wanted, he would be mighty pleased if she would drop over there with him, and they could refresh themselves with a few tamales.