The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (3 page)

When the party rode off, I was behind a tree, pretty much in the dark, though there was light enough to follow the action. Anyhow, what I couldn’t see I could hear well enough. It often works out that way, I’ve noticed: when one set of senses lies down on the job, another reports in and takes over.

By a lucky chance, Mr. Parsons’ stallion seemed to be the one most briskly affected. After backing up several feet, it paused to scrape his right leg against a shaggy-bark hickory, which is the very worst kind of tree for that sort of accident, then it ran fifteen or twenty yards down the side of the road and stopped with its forelegs spraddled out, shooting Mr. Parsons over its head into a gully of moss. Up till then, I had no idea he could be so chatty, and to tell you the truth his remarks gave me a fresh outlook on bankers, and made me appreciate them more than before. Even so, his statements were pale and sickly compared with those of Mr. Whitmore, who was mounted on a roan mare, because he and this mare separated almost immediately, in such a way that Mr. Whitmore was left in an awkward position upside down on our gate. Of the entire delegation,
the only one that showed any skill as a rider was Mr. Crawshaw, on a big gelded buckskin, and to his credit he stuck on for several miles down the river road, or as far as the farmhouse of a family named Thornton, which picked him out of a ditch, but when he got home, around dawn, they said his clothes and hair were so caked over with mud and brambles his wife had to use a trowel before she could make a positive identification.

Horses will nearly always behave like that if you place burrs under the saddle. There’s no use trying to reason with them; it’s a prejudice that likely goes back a long way, and could be explained if anybody had the time to sit down and puzzle it out. As for me, I felt that I had helped out all I could for the moment, so I climbed on up the back stairs and went to bed.

Early the next morning my father and mother were at it hammer and tongs, trying to work out what to do. It was my mother’s claim, not complimentary, that he was too addleheaded to look after himself on any kind of journey longer than ten or fifteen miles. “Jaimie would have a better chance of getting to the gold fields than you,” she observed.

“Then let me take him,” cried my father, darting to a curtained east window of the house and peering out with great caution. On the theory that Parsons would probably try to wriggle through the shrubbery, perhaps carrying his papers in his teeth, he had all the shades drawn upstairs and down. Except for the kitchen, where Clara and Aunt Kitty were stationed, for intruders, with an encouragement to use skillets if necessary, the place was as dark as a tomb.

“Why not?” he demanded, having satisfied himself that the azaleas along that side were free of enemy activity. “One year, two with bad luck, and we will return to this astonished city, laden with the treasures of Golconda, respected, envied by all, denied credit by none, including Goldswaithe the tailor—confound his parsimonious hide—he refuses to release my trousers, with or without the new patch—and, in a word, solvent forever.”

Not wishing to overhear what was none of my business, because there are few things lower down than an eavesdropper, I had stretched out on the floor behind the sofa with a book, only a few minutes before. I was reading in it here and there so as to shut out the sound of the voices, but it was an uphill job being a sort of championship long-winded poem by a man named Milton, though
if any of the lines ended in rhymes I failed to locate them, about a group of angels that talked all the time and couldn’t make up their minds whether to settle down in heaven or in the other place.

Try as I might, I couldn’t quite drown out the conversation, so when I realized what my father was saying I sprang up in a hurry and told my mother I had to go.

“You’ve got to let me,” I cried. “You’ve said yourself my eyes are as snoopy as a hawk’s at seeing what I shouldn’t, and if it came to finding gold—”

“Jaimie is enrolled for next autumn at the Male High School,” she said crisply, directing her statement at my father.

Well, there you were. I was already educated to the point of absurdity, but no, she had to have more. Here we saw the perfect example in my father, who had been hauled up as a boy in Scotland and put to doctoring over the plainest kind of objections—he had run off twice and burned down part of a schoolhouse another time—and he’d been miserable ever since, because he wanted to be a smuggler, you understand, like everybody else along that coast, and engage in a respectable trade that brought in a steady living. He used to swear, and I believe it, that if a person had normal curiosity all they needed to teach him was how to read and make change. As he said, though, he didn’t much mind knowing Latin and Greek, because he often got tired of cursing out medicine in English.

My mother spoke up to announce that she had talked everything over with Professor Yandell, a know-it-all up at the University who had all the ladies blathering over him at teas. “Jaimie’s studies will include Rhetoric, Belles Lettres, the Classics, and Modern Languages,” she said. “We can decide on the University course later.”

Now I knew I had to go. Not only the Male High School, but another round on top of that. There wasn’t any sense in it. By the time I got out, I’d be too old to do anything except retire, and you didn’t need an education for that.

“Jaimie’s not the type,” said my father. “Maybe you’ve forgotten the unholy ruckus he had with Mental Arithmetic at the Secondary
School. You’re trying to turn him into a milksop—you’ll break his spirit.”

Tossing her head with a considerable show of firmness, my mother replied that, if she could help it, I would be fitted to take my place in “the cultural life of Louisville, and share in the city’s advancement.” Well, I thought, if you ask me, they’ve gone too far with this Louisville already. It was overdeveloped and blown up with commerce and business so you could hardly get across the streets any more without being run down by teamsters. Why, they had eight brickyards in Louisville in 1849—I saw it in a bragging pamphlet that was got up by some merchant or other that seemed to have a good deal of time on his hands. There were three pianoforte manufacturies, too, and three breweries, two tallow-rendering houses, an ivory-black maker—for use in refining sugar, you know-eight soap and candle factories; three shipyards; two glue factories; and four pork houses that slaughtered upwards of seventy thousand hogs a year.

And if you were looking for steam machinery, they had twelve foundries that made the best on the river, or so the pamphlet claimed. There were rope factories, flouring mills, oilcloth factories, three potteries; six tobacco stemmeries, a paper mill, and a new gas works that lit 461 street lamps over sixteen miles of main. Not only that, it had a gas holder measuring sixty feet in diameter and twenty-two feet high. People used to ride out Sundays to look at it, but the superintendent said it was a nuisance because he couldn’t keep the children off. In the end, they were obliged to hire a watchman, but he was bullyragged so steady that he sort of went out of his head, so to speak, and they had to place him in a hospital that made a specialty of such cases.

Another thing they had, not mentioned in the pamphlet, was an epidemic of cholera, and it was this that finally convinced my mother and sent me on the journey to California. My father brought it up toward noon; he had just remembered it. It was lucky for us he did, because two cousins of my mother’s New Orleans plantation clan had died of cholera when she was small, and
you only had to mention that disease for her to get the nervous jumps.

“Two more deaths reported yesterday,” he went on cheerfully, “and not down on the river this time but right smack in the middle of the Fourth Ward, not a stone’s throw from this house.”

She was shaken, and he recognized the signs, for he observed that, “Hannah’s well out of it—we’ll have to write her to stay on in Cincinnati for a few weeks.”

Hannah was my sister. She was off visiting, as she most always was.

My mother went over to a window and stood looking out awhile, holding the drawn curtain a little way back. “All right,” she said at last. “Jaimie can go, but only until the plague [she never could mention cholera by name] has run its course. Let it be understood that he will return next autumn in time to begin at the Male High School.”

I remember those words very well. She didn’t know any more what she was asking than my father did, and that was about as little as possible. A good many classes have assembled and graduated since that morning, and they did it all without me. Neither can I say I’m sorry; we learned some things you couldn’t find out at the Male High School if you were to go there for two hundred years, which I estimated was about the time it would take me to finish up, if I buckled down and worked at it.

First off, my father dashed upstairs and came back with some little shiny books he’d gathered up on the sly and said they must be his “Journals.” I have them here now—they are of duodecimo size, as they call it, in brown hand-sewn leather, and filled with a lacy kind of handwriting, very tiny, that often traverses a page in two directions, the one set of slants on top of the other at right angles, so as to save space. This crisscrossing of lines was popular with the period, but such pages are vexatious to read, and require the use of a glass.

No matter how much trouble, these Journals are interesting, and filled with excitement. Practically any place you read, something good is about to happen tomorrow. The same is true of his letters,
only more so. Nobody ever lived that could touch my father for producing perky and misleading letters, and he himself acknowledged, one day when we were nooning at the foot of Independence Rock, that their tone was somewhat “crouse an’ canty,” which he said was the phrase of a Scottish poet named Burns, who had written a good deal of material about small animals. Here at the foot of one letter—to my sister Hannah—is a grainy smear of gold dust affixed to the page with mucilage. All is now black with age and weather; at only a spot or two do pinprick glints of yellow shine through to bolster up his tale. But I was there, and I chance to recall that this particular dust was washed by an Ohio man, and came to us in exchange for a pair of surgical shears, with which he intended to set up as barber at a Feather River camp. In those weeks, you could have thrashed out our clothes with a flail and not found a grain of dust, for my father had taken to “crevicing,” a system he’d picked up from a friendly oracle with the Wolverines. The rotary motion of pan-washing made his head swim, he said. This crevicing was just the thing: you walked up a dry creek bed with a knife and a spoon and dug nuggets out of gold pockets in the shelves. “It’s as simple as opening a bank,” he went on. “Any fool can do it.”

Well, if this was true, we’d soon be rich, I figured, because no ordinary fool could have got us out there in the first place. But to give my father his due, specially since everybody was always running him down, he was as methodical as clockwork once it was decided we were going. You never saw such a bustle; the whole house was turned upside down. He made a little speech, full of pomp and reassurance, telling my mother how comfortable and well off she would be, and said, “Now you have the income from the old gentleman’s estate—God rest his peculiar New Orleans soul; he let a fortune slip through his fingers when he declined to finance my Convalescent Home for Drunkards—and this house with inclusory chattels will be intact during the period of my separation. To sum up, you and the family are secure.”

Then he sent her on a trip downtown, with his “holograph
power of attorney,” which was a piece of note paper with his name signed to it in a looping flourish, with a number of curlicues, to “liquidate” his account at the other bank, only when she got there, there wasn’t anything in the till except an overdraft of eighteen dollars, so she drew out her own money and cashed in two bonds they had put by together, which he had overlooked somehow, and altogether raised nearly four hundred dollars. When she got back, she handed it over with the same kind of look I once saw on the faces of some relatives at a funeral, just before they screwed down the coffin: mournful but resigned to the loss.

The next thing was to “fit out the expedition,” as he called it, because he said we would leave early the following morning, before the usual rising hour of process servers. So he hauled out some lists which he had mostly made up from Ware’s book, and appointed Willie the yard boy to do his buying, with the precaution not to get any two articles from the same store. “We must avoid indications of an evasion,” he said. All afternoon, Willie tramped back and forth, piling up stores in the woodshed, and before he was done, he had bought two soft gum rubber ponchos, a waterproof can of matches, an India rubber spread for putting on the ground under blankets, two knapsacks, some lye soap and candles, a skinning knife, two pistols with ammunition, some outdoor cooking utensils, a belt ax, a sewing kit, and a number of other things, some of which we couldn’t have used in a million years.

By this time, my father was hopping around as full of directions and information as if he had been prospecting for years. He had begun to use the word “we” to mean the old-timers around the California gold fields, including himself.

“What’s the skinning knife for—Indians?” asked my mother, whose tongue had been getting a little more sarcastic as my father swelled with importance.

“Game. We often find that fresh meat puts new heart in the emigrants, especially if provisions are running low.”

“Who’s to shoot it?”

“I’m reckoned a fair shot with both rifle and pistol,” he said a trifle huffily.

He had an old Hawken rifle a trapper had turned over instead of paying for an operation on his groin, which had been caught in a trap while sleeping, and he said we would take this along, but I didn’t much care for the idea when I found out I’d have to carry it. Herbert Swann and I had sneaked this rifle out in the woods one day and shot it off. It was so long we had to rest it in the crotch of a sapling, and it weighed about a ton and a half, give or take a couple of pounds. When we pulled the trigger, it kicked us both back into a slough, and the ball zipped through some sycamore leaves and out into a little clearing we had failed to notice and knocked two slats out of a tobacco shed that was several hundred yards away and should have been out of range, but wasn’t.