The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (2 page)

“How does one convey oneself to these Elysian fields?” asked my mother in her dry, practical way.

“Why, that’s the joyful part, that’s the very thing I was hoping you’d ask,” cried my father, his expression dissolving into a perfect sunburst of triumph. “This fellow Ware—Joseph E. Ware—has written it all down in a book—I’ve got it right here. Old Captain Billy Givens of the
City of Memphis
brought it down from St. Louis, where they printed them up, you know, and sold it to me at the most unbelievable bargain—”

“How much?”

“Believe me, Melissa, these books are going like wildfire in St. Louis. The people up there are fighting for them in the streets—I stole this one for twenty-five dollars, and only fifteen of it in cash at that: for the remainder, I lanced a carbuncle on his engineer’s neck and gave them a partly used bottle of Blue Moss.”

She sniffed again, unconvinced.

“Joseph E. Ware’s
Immigrant Guide to California”
he went on
briskly. “It’s all here—every blade of grass, every water hole from the borders of the Nebraskas to the Humboldt Sink and beyond. Or, if you prefer, there’s the Santa Fe Trail, a southerly desert route said to be salubrious for those with nasal stoppages—covered in full in the book—or yet, if you’ve a freakish distaste for oxcarts and donkeys, there’s the water passage via the Isthmus of Panama, a scenic holiday on such luxury vessels of the far Pacific as the
New Orleans
and the
California.

“Now listen to this, on this page 54—by George, this is a wonderful book; it ought to be required reading up at the University—Upon your arrival at Chagres, take your baggage at once to the custom house, where you will experience but little delay. Then hurry out of the village, which is, ah, pestilential [no doubt a figure of speech]. Hire your canoe, which for expedition ought to be of small size. This is called a “piragua,” is about 25 feet long, and navigated by a steersman and two rowers. The cost of boat-hire and men to Cruces ought not to exceed $12, unless, indeed, an increased traffic may have had the effect of raising the prices—’

“Fancy that, now,” he said aside, shaking his head in wonder—“a mere twelve dollars for a canoe ride of fifty miles, and with your own rowers. This fellow Ware is an absolute trump.”

“May I see the book?”

For a moment he looked undecided, then he handed it over, and if he’d had any suspicions that she was going to run it down, he was dead-right. Holding Ware’s precious volume as if it had been plucked out of a garbage bin, she read a few passages aloud, but they were so tedious and uncomplimentary that nobody but a fool would have gone out of his yard, once he’d heard them. “It rains every day,” she noted. Then she added that, “ ‘Bilious, remittent, and congestive fevers, in their most malignant forms, seem to hover over Chagres, ever ready to pounce on the stranger.’ ”

I don’t mind acknowledging that when I opened the register, I was pretty excited, what with this prospect of gold-hunting, but my mother’s remarks put a damper over everything, and made me wonder
if my father wasn’t possibly a little peculiar in the head. That was her style.

She was a good deal younger than him, beautiful, too—everyone in Louisville said so—but as far as I was concerned, he seemed like a child beside her, because of his bouncy spirits. Now that I think it over, he was one of the scatterbrainedest fellows that ever lived, and one of the nicest. He was a doctor, in very good standing, medically speaking, but he had a number of habits that appeared to give offense, though I failed to see that it was anybody’s business but his own. For instance, whenever he got some money ahead, he usually went down to the shantyboats and had an enjoyable evening playing cards.

I’ve heard it said my father was a bang-up poker player. But there wasn’t much chance of his winning, not with those cheats. Mostly, they were serious, hard-working professional men—thieves, forgers, cutthroats, small-time river pirates and a backslid preacher or two—as interesting-spoken a group as you would care to meet, but they could no more have gambled honest than they would have been comfortable in church.

Along with Herbert Swann, I’d climbed up many’s the time and looked in the windows, which were punched out and had old raggedy pieces of burlap nailed over the holes. They’d be playing partners against my father, and such a lot of signs, winks, under-the-table kicks, bottom-deck dealing and aces flying out of sleeves you never saw anywhere. But if any hard-faced strangers were present, they would use the “sand tell,” which was a deck marked with sandpaper so as to know the cards from their feel. And if by chance one of these out-of-towners got away with money, being a bigger cheat than what they were, it was considered an obligation to relieve him of it before he got five miles past the city limits. It was done out of civic pride; there wasn’t any meanness in it.

My father beat them once in a while, through outrageous good luck, and then they were very polite and courteous, knowing perfectly well they’d get it back soon, with interest up to date. He recognized that they were cheating, of course, so he gouged them
medically. For knife fights, blacked eyes and broken limbs, these shantyboaters, as civil as they might be in other ways, were in a class by themselves. And my father had all their custom. He was the only doctor they ever called. Mostly they’d send their cook, a big black man named Paddlefoot, up to the Marine Hospital with a note that gave the effect of having been labored over. One of these, rent down the middle, lies before me as I prepare this history. “Your esteemed old friend Jim Harbeson [it goes] has had the misfortune to lose the upper portion of his right ear through the medium of a bite at the hands of Ernie Caldwell, and would appreciate your professional opinion as to whether it can be sewed back or glued. He is bleeding freely but is not otherwise in distress since full of whiskey. Respectfully—” and signed by Ben Martin, the principal shantyboater of the district.

On these occasions, it was my father’s way to turn over his appointments to an associate and rattle cheerfully down in his carriage, after which he treated the sufferer with great flourish, and charged triple his usual fee. What’s more, he always collected it; then that night he came back and lost not only the fee but whatever other sum he had on him, along with his watch chain, or a ring, or a stickpin, or shirt, or some gewgaw of the sort. These articles he usually redeemed later. He got drunk, too, but not very often, and only because he didn’t like being a doctor.

When my mother finished reading all the bad things she could find about Chagres, she laid Joseph Ware’s book down with a contemptuous rustle of taffeta and observed that, “It certainly seems explicit.”

“Oh, pshaw,” replied my father. “I hadn’t the least notion of going by that route anyhow, though it would scarcely discommode a man with a degree in Systemic Surgery from the University of Edinburgh to ward off a few mild vapors. These fellows get carried away, all writers do it. Let somebody sneeze and they try to turn the place into a pesthouse. I’d like to bet—”

Taking a grip on the register, I held my breath, for I knew what was coming.

“Yes, to be sure,
bet,”
said my mother in the iciest kind of tone; then she went on to give out what betting and drinking, only she called it gaming and tippling, had done for our household, and if I had been my father, I would have gone down in the preserve cellar to live for a few days, I would have felt that low.

To upholster her argument, she left the room and came back with “the ledgers,” a pair of big blue books she officiated over with as much pomp and mystery as if they had been the Bank of England. According to her figures, we owed money to nearly everybody in town, and it was all my father’s fault. The minute she paid up in one place, she said, he skipped in and ran us into the hole somewhere else. And what was most bothersome was his new system, very sneaky, of picking up cash and putting it on charge accounts, all unbeknownst to her.

Watching him, I felt so sorry and sympathetic I would have run out and raised the money myself, if I’d known where to look, but I didn’t own anything of value outside of my stuffed water moccasin, and the string of bear’s claws I had bought off a Choctaw trader, and my deersfoot knife, unless you’d care to count Sam, but there weren’t many people would have acquired him, he smelled so.

In one way, the whole situation seemed unfair. Here my mother laid out money by the cartload to the Presbyterian Church, with special donations to something called “Foreign Missions,” which was in a yellow envelope—for the Chinamen, you know—and not one cent of it would do a particle of good to anybody we’d ever be apt to meet, and would likely work a lot of harm, getting the Chinamen stirred up and dissatisfied with their religion and not knowing which way to turn. And only last fall when I dropped in my nickel along with a message saying it was to help pay the transportation of a Chinese preacher over here, to even things up and give us a chance to compare notes, the Reverend Carmody brought it back to my mother and I got a licking, for something they represented to be “impertinence.” But it was nothing more than ordinary common sense except they didn’t have the good judgment to see it.

“Melissa,” said my father when she was done, “it’s even worse
than you think. I can’t to save me remember why, but I made a note of hand for five hundred dollars at old Parsons’ bank, and now they want to call it in.”

My mother sat in stunned silence.

“I was down at the Courthouse this morning,” he went on, “and one of my connections there, a man very close to the County Clerk, if you know what I mean—”

“Mr. Axelrod, the County Clerk?” she asked in a low voice that sounded tired out and humiliated.

“I didn’t say so. This connection of mine informed me that a number of creditors were banding together with the intention of obtaining an attachment. Now that illustrates what I have often said to you, Melissa, and, yes, I’ve tried to bring it home to Jaimie, too—that it pays for a man to keep up his friendships. If it hadn’t been for this highly placed connection I mention, I’d never have known what those fellows were up to. As it is, I have consulted legal counsel, and if I should absent myself to go gold-seeking, there is nothing on this green earth they can—
what’s that?”

I’d heard it too—one or more men on horseback had reined up at our gate and were dismounting; I could hear the horses switching around in a half-circle the way they do after they’ve shucked off their load.

My mother got up and went to the window. “I imagine it’s Mr. Parsons and a delegation of creditors. Very probably come to give you a last chance to straighten out your affairs. All the decent people in this city have tried time and again to help you turn over a new leaf. Reverend Carmody—”

“Never mind,” cried my father, with a leap toward the kitchen. “If they have papers to serve, they’ll find the bird flown. Tell them I’m upriver tending a woman that’s down with chicken pox. Put them off for just twenty-four hours and they can address me care of General Delivery, Upper California.”

I hung on long enough to see who it was, and sure enough it was old string-bean Parsons, looking uncommonly smug and self-satisfied, together with several others, all having as much fun as if they’d
set a pack of hounds onto a cat. They didn’t produce any papers, though; my father had been wrong about that. What they wanted was for my mother to place him in something called “moral chancery,” which was to say, put him on probation like a mischievous child, with no drink, no cards, nothing but hard medical work and a schedule of paying off his debts.

Looked at squarely, this didn’t appear too outrageous, particularly for a skinflint like Parsons, but their injured and gleeful way of telling it made me boil up with resentment for my father, who for kindness and understanding and real humanity was worth a hundred like them, with the Reverend Carmody thrown in for luck. I’d known him to labor all a hot summer day in a dirty run-down shack to ease things for some nice old darky woman who could as quickly have paid him as she could have been elected Governor.

Well, this Parsons mooned on, enjoying the sound of his complaints, and finally he worked himself up into such an aggrieved and sanctimonious state that he made the blunder of thinking my mother was on his side. “I know you won’t take offense, ma’am,” he said, “when I ask you to keep this conference private. My depositors would take it amiss to know that I had extended leniency to a man of Doctor McPheeters’ kind.”

When I saw her face, I didn’t bother to wait for the answer. Mr. Parsons may have been, as people said, a good and crafty banker, but in the present instance he had sadly misjudged his audience. I heard afterward that my mother drew herself up to her full height, and she was by no manner of means short, and blistered this pious delegation with a defense of my father that more or less left them groggy, and ended up by suggesting that on any future visits they use the trade entrance instead of driving up to the gate. Mr. Parsons thereupon showed his true and natural colors by fishing out his papers, which had reposed all along in the pocket of his jacket, the miserable hypocrite, only he hadn’t got anybody to serve them on, my father being absent, being, in fact, crouched just then in a thick patch of cockleburrs that lay behind the house.

I knew he was there, because I saw him when I went back to
collect up a hatful, thinking something ought to be done to make Mr. Parsons feel he wasn’t neglected.

“Is that you, Jaimie?” he whispered.

“Yes, father.”

“Have they left yet?”

“They’re trying to.”

“What’s that you’re doing, son?”

“Picking cockleburrs.”

“Whatever for, my boy?”

“For Mr. Parsons and his friends.”

There was a little silence; then I heard him begin to laugh. After a minute or so he took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I’m proud of you, son. It’s little attentions like these that make people remember you and want to come back. Always bear in mind that nothing’s too good for a guest.” Presently he began to laugh again, and he was still at it when I crawled out, loaded up with some of the nicest burrs in our patch.