The Furies (24 page)

Silence. Louis dug his nails into his palms and shut his eyes, wishing they’d stop.

“I’m not going to argue my motives, Bart,” Amanda said, very quietly. “I’ve never made any demands on you before—”

“No
demands?
What about all that damn investigation?”

“You could have refused. I was very clear on that.”

“You’re saying I can’t refuse this time?”

“Not if what we’ve been to each other means anything—”

Louis wanted to cover his ears when McGill shouted, “So the account’s finally due, is that it? The whorehouse madam finally presents her bill for services rendered?”

Silence again. Dreadful silence. What did McGill mean, calling his ma a whorehouse madam? Louis knew what a whorehouse was—Yerba Buena had one—but the connection with Amanda was a mystery as impenetrable as the riddle of his unknown father.

Finally, he heard his mother speak in a whisper. “That’s absolutely vile. You promised you’d never bring up what I told—”

“Christ, I know,” he interrupted, sounding miserable all at once. “I’m sorry. I truly am. But I can’t stand what’s happening to you, Amanda! All of a sudden you’re acting like the rest of the moon-heads in this town—thinking you can have El Dorado in your pocket before snow flies in the mountains!”

“You’re wrong,” she said in a hushed voice. “I’m not like the rest of them. I’m not going to the mines. I’ve talked to Sam Brannan. I know the odds. Men are staking out claims no bigger than twenty feet on a side. Only one in a thousand will strike anything big. There’ll be many more losers than winners. I can make a killing off both.”

“
A killing
—you see? It’s even affected the way you talk!”

“Bart, I am almost forty-five years old! Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, thinking of what that means. I’m going to die. I’m really going to die. But I swear, before it happens—”

“Now who’s yelling?”

“I don’t care! I won’t throw this chance away! Will you buy the merchandise for me or won’t you?”

Louis was perspiring. He drew a slow, careful breath, fearful of making the slightest sound.

“I shouldn’t,” McGill said. “I should cart you away from here bodily—”

She laughed then. “Impossible, and you know it.”

Through the curtain, Louis heard him sigh.

“Yes, I do. So I guess I’ll help you. But Jesus! You sure do take advantage of a relationship.”

“Bart, I’m handing you an opportunity to earn fifteen percent on your money! If you’re smart, you’ll risk two thousand, not just one.”

“I already reached the same conclusion.”

He didn’t sound overjoyed about it. Amanda was, though. “Oh, Bart, thank you, thank—
now
what are you angry about?”

“Losing my temper, goddamn it!” But at last his voice had a smile in it.

So did hers. “Not typical of you, Captain.”

“Only two things ever get me wrought up. Trouble with the ship, and women.”

“Any women?”

“No, sweet, just those I care about.”

“How many does that include?”

“One. But she’s damn near more than I can handle—”

Louis heard muffled sounds, the sort of sounds that usually accompanied that funny custom of men kissing women—the prelude, he surmised, to what animals indulged in without benefit of hugs or kisses.

In some ways, Louis Kent wasn’t overfond of Captain Bart McGill. The captain treated Israel shabbily. But lying in the dark and listening to the murmurous voices beyond the curtain, this was one time he believed Captain Bart was right.

Because of the gold, Yerba Buena was changing. It was no longer a pleasant place. Maybe not a safe place, either. He’d seen some of the rough characters drifting into town. He’d felt the young deserter’s knife against his own throat. He feared there’d be more of the same in the months to come—

Right then, he altered his thinking about the east. It might be better if they left California—

But they weren’t going to leave. His ma had won the argument—as usual.

The gold was changing her too, though. Changing her into a new person. Someone even more forbidding than the stranger who spoke of Boston. That he feared most of all.

“C
ONFOUND IT, AMANDA! FORTY-EIGHT
thousand, then.”

“Not for sale, Sam,” Amanda said, handing cups of Thirty Rod to the miners elbowing Brannan at the plank bar. “Lord knows why you need another piece of property—”

“Not need, my dear. Want.”

“Your wants should be well enough satisfied by the dozen plots you’ve already bought. Not to mention that shipload of carpet tacks which I hear you’re selling to carpenters at four times cost.”

“Don’t act so damn virtuous. Wouldn’t you do the same thing?”

“Of course. That’s why pouring you a Christmas drink is the limit of my generosity for the evening.”

“One side, one side!” Israel yelled, pushing past the crowd at the bar. He held two platters of grizzly meat with side helpings of oysters. Two more were precariously balanced on his forearms. He was jostled and shoved, but he managed to deposit the food on one of the tables. Out in the kitchen, Felix, the recently hired Frenchman, was screeching about the inhuman pace of his work.

Israel’s expression made it evident he didn’t enjoy the duties of a waiter. But the Mexican girl, Conception, had quit to work in a bordello for much higher wages. He scribbled a chit and flung it down. “Pay the boy when you leave.” He pointed an elbow at the podium by one of the front windows.

Behind the podium, Louis Kent sat on a stool. On the podium stood a quill and inkstand, a balance and a set of weights. Immediately to Louis’ left, six-foot Billy Beadle lounged at the front door, a big slung-shot conspicuously displayed at his belt.

Billy kept watch on the men packing away food and drink in Kent’s public room. He was one of the lately arrived Sydney Ducks—Australians transported to San Francisco by a government desperate to rid itself of the criminals in its overcrowded jails. Bruises on Billy’s face testified to his fondness for brawling. His size and obvious strength helped keep the customers from sneaking out without paying—or from wrecking the place. Virtually all the customers were miners down from the diggings on a holiday, or would-be miners heading for the camps. Hardly a one of them was sober.

The air in Kent’s was heavy with tobacco smoke and the aromas of its eclectic menu. The miners demanded everything from the hottest Mexican chili to duck, plover, trout and antelope. The stink of sweat mingled with the more exotic odors; most of the miners were none too concerned about their grooming.

As he struggled back toward the bar, Israel reflected that white folks had always looked pretty similar to him. That certainly was true of the men who came down from the American and the Yuba and the Feather and all the other obscure forks and branches and intersecting creeks on which strikes were being made. The men the newspapers called the modern Argonauts tended to dress alike after a few weeks in the diggings: flop-brimmed hats that they never bothered to remove indoors; flannel shirts; dark pants; heavy boots. Their individuality was further blurred by an almost universal adoption of chest-length beards. In the whole noisy, smoky, smelly place, Amanda Kent was the only person who looked distinctive and halfway appealing this Christmas Eve in the year 1849. Of course she was also the only woman.

At the bar, Brannan was saying, “You should realize forty-eight thousand dollars is a damn generous offer!”

Israel stopped, leaned over the exasperated man’s shoulder and said, “Don’t you settle for less than a hundred thousand, Miz Kent.”

“A hundred thousand!” Brannan exploded. “Your nigger’s a bigger swindler than I am!”

Unexpectedly, that hurt more than Brannan’s use of the word nigger. Israel had made his remark without thought. Now he realized he was unconsciously being caught up in the mood of avarice that pervaded Kent’s these days.

He showed no anger at Brannan’s term for a colored man. With the exception of Amanda and her son, every white person used it. He didn’t like it, but shrugging off a word was a lot easier than avoiding outright trouble in San Francisco anymore. He thought he’d escaped that sort of trouble when he fled Mississippi—

He walked warily wherever he went. Fear was his companion again, just as it had been on the plantation. There a man toted his cotton basket to the gin house fearing he’d be whipped if he brought in even a few ounces less than his quota. At the same time he feared that if he brought in too much, he’d be expected to deliver the same quantity the next night—and would be whipped if he failed. Israel had been free of that kind of constant fear for quite a few years—and now it was back.

“Sam,” Amanda said, “do you want some Christmas whiskey or don’t you? You’re not going to buy Kent’s this evening or anytime. I told you last month and again last week—the property isn’t for sale.”

She said it with a charming smile. Yet the smile somehow seemed less genuine than the ones Israel recalled from their first days together down south.

Amanda Kent was very alert, brisk and energetic for a woman of her age. In fact she drove her employees—and herself—twice as hard as a man might have. And she always looked handsome in the bargain—

That was true tonight. Her hair was neatly done—though turning grayer, Israel had observed of late. Her dress of yellow taffeta was the sole spot of bright color in the restaurant. She had chosen the dress from the pages of a
Godey’s Lady’s Book
McGill had brought her. The dress itself had come with the captain’s most recent cargo. He was on the lucrative New York—California freight run now; three round trips since that regrettable night over a year ago when Brannan had returned with his quinine bottle full of gold.

At the moment McGill was eastbound around the Horn. Israel was glad. He and the captain would never be friends. And while McGill made an excellent business partner for Israel’s employer—and was also her lover, he knew—he wasn’t sure the arrangement was doing Amanda any good.

Oh, she’d prospered—mightily. She’d realized four hundred percent from her first investment in a quantity of pickaxes and pans. Then she’d switched to lumber, which couldn’t be milled fast enough up in the hills to feed San Francisco’s construction boom. Kent’s itself had used part of the lumber, adding a second floor—a thirty-man dormitory. For bed and breakfast, Amanda charged twelve-fifty.

Like everything in town, the price was inflated. But the hopeful, pathetically overequipped arrivals from the packets and clippers paid it without protest, staying a night or two before they bought passage on a river skiff, or set out on foot for the diggings. Right this minute, through the ceiling, Israel could hear one of the gold-hunters bellowing an exuberant celebration of his future:

Then blow, ye breezes, blow! We’re off to Californi-o—

Brannan refused the drink Amanda had offered. “All right, Sam,” she said. “I don’t want to be rude, but you’re taking up space for a paying customer.” Shaking his head, Israel started on for the kitchen.

There’s plenty of gold,

So I’ve been told,

On the banks of the Sacramento!

The singer slurred the last notes into a whoop and a couple of stomps that vibrated the flimsy planks overhead. The mulatto’s frown deepened. A lunatic with no future except an imaginary one that fumed out of a liquor bottle was of no consequence to him. But Amanda was. And her behavior worried him. She no longer had time for anything but business. No time for the boy, for instance—Israel had taken over Louis’ lessons.

“Israel? Hey, chum!”

The yellow-skinned Negro turned in response to the shout from Billy Beadle.

“There’s a chap outside who’d like to talk to someone from the establishment.”

Israel pointed to Amanda. But she was busy filling cups with Sixty Rod, the god-awful whiskey that was twice as strong as its counterpart, Thirty Rod. A whiff of either was supposed to flatten the unwary at the indicated distance, even around corners.

“See what the man wants, Israel,” Amanda called as Brannan jammed his silk hat on his head and left.

With a sigh, Israel started for the front. He overheard snatches of conversation. One miner bragged he’d soon see color on his claim now that he’d teamed up with some partners and installed a long torn. Another complained that it was a crime the way greasers could walk the streets as freely as whites. Greaser was a catchall term for the Mexicans, Peruvians and Chileans pouring into the town along with Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Australians and even a few Germans.

The remark put another scowl on Israel’s face. Then he reminded himself that he was a free man. If he didn’t like the situation in San Francisco, he could always leave—

Yet he stayed, and would stay, because he was loyal to his employer, as well as fond of her. Amanda Kent was one of the few human beings who had ever treated him as a person. To most of the others he’d known during his thirty-two years, he’d been either subhuman, or property, or both.

His wife Cissie, whom he’d married at age sixteen in Mississippi, had been property. He’d been forced to stand by and see her whipped when she was pregnant with their baby. She’d brought in too little cotton to the gin house, so the big boss ordered a pit dug in the ground—a pit in which her bulging belly fitted as she lay facedown. He was whipped unconscious when he tried to interfere. When he woke much later, he learned that Cissie had lost the child. She was sold off within two months. No white person on the plantation had expressed one word of regret to Israel, and he’d never seen his wife again—

Amanda Kent wasn’t that sort of white woman. She was kind, thoughtful of others. At least she had been until the damn craziness struck the whole town—

One more example of it was waiting outside. In the spillage of lamplight through the smoke-grayed plate glass windows, Israel spied a young, yellow-haired miner on muleback. Reeling drunk. Armed with a pistol and a knife, too. A bad combination.

At the door, Billy Beadle said, “Don’t know what the bucko wants, but he’s got fat saddlebags.”