The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (62 page)

“It ain’t in me to cheat, never was,” he said, blowing his horrible breath at us, “and I may turn too drunk to get there. I’ve did it before,” he went on, chuckling. “Lodged on a island and stuck there two days. Have some gut-wash? You, sir? Boy?”

“At this hour?” said my father, still exasperated over the troublesome voyage down from Vernon.

“I overslept,” said the captain, in a kind of apology. Apparently, he’d misunderstood.

It was a full two hours before we got aboard the brig. A filthier
ship would be hard to imagine. Broken casks lay about, garbage was strewn over the decks, several deck hands leaned over the rail, bleary and unshaven, and from below there floated up snatches of drunken song. Eight passengers had arranged transportation, besides us; we all stood looking around with distaste.

This ship was a square-rigged two-master, though a small one, and about half of the rigging appeared unfit for use. But when the captain came on board, reeling slightly, just like the man on the boat from Vernon, he began to bray orders through a ridiculous kind of brass-rimmed horn, as if this was the grandest ship on the ocean. For about five minutes, nobody paid the least attention, then three of the hands sullenly took to hauling on this line, and loosing that, and the lower sails on both masts finally got up; we were under way.

I won’t go through the details of that trip, but it was considerably worse than the other, except that the captain stayed on deck. It was about seventy miles to San Pablo Bay, plus forty miles across the Bay to the city. Throughout, he never once managed to get the drunken singers down below on the job, though he went to the companionway several times to shout through his horn: “All hands on deck. Lay to, there.” And once, in an aggrieved tone, “All right, Bilters. You and Jones ain’t going to get a cent of whiskey money out of me. You’ll see. Not this trip.” The singing broke off, but nobody appeared, and presently it started up again.

In places the river was very broad and we sailed before a mild breeze for several hours; then, rounding a bend thirty miles below Sacramento, a fresh wind sprung up and blew us on shore. Well, we were in a fix, worse than the last one. The captain roused himself up and said we’d put a line to the other shore and haul off. But none of the hands would row over without grumbling. After a good many threats, they finally tumbled in a skiff, cursing, and made the trip. Then they put a tackle block on a tree, took a turn with the rope, and heaved, but the line was too weak, so it broke, and there we stayed, right where we were, stuck fast.

“What’s to be done here?” my father demanded of the captain, having worked up a peeve by talking to the other passengers.

“Well, sir, I wish I knew. Tell you the truth, I been trying to sell my interest in her, but she needs touching up here and there. The brightwork’s gone green.”

“Touching
up
!” cried my father. “It’s a floating pigsty, and I don’t mind saying so.”

“Floating
now
,” said the captain, with a shrewd look. “We’ll see what she’s doing by morning.” At this, my father stamped off, so red in the face I thought he’d explode.

“That scoundrel’s no more a seaman than I am,” he told the other passengers.

But when evening came, the wind died down and we hauled off to recommence our float-and-sail downstream. And at dark, we tied up at the foot of an island for the night.

Off early the next morning, the captain walking the deck with a cup of coffee, probably full of rum. It was an interesting trip, and stirred you up. We began to pass all manner of ships-schooners, steamers, brigs, barkentines and the like—and along shore we occasionally saw Indian villages. Saw one at a place called “the Slew,” then we got to the junction of the Sacramento and Joaquin rivers, where there was a town called New York, with six or seven houses, and after that, when we’d gone through some rough water at Hills Cook, I’m blessed if
this
ship didn’t swing around and take to floating stern first. It was so much of a coincidence that my father threw his hat down on deck and stamped on it

“That ends it,” he said. “We’ll never get to San Francisco.”

But to give him credit, this captain did his best possible; at least he was on duty, which I thought was quite an improvement. Just as before, we cracked out a boat and towed the bow till the wind blew up again.

This far down, the river was strongly affected by tide, so we went aground around about dark, but the tide floated us off by
midnight, and we kept right on booming, it being moonlight, bright and clear.

We slept on deck and had our meals, $1.50 apiece, in a bad-smelling saloon below. The food was so painful—biscuits like leather, pork rancid, coffee like mud—that my father and some others called in the cook to congratulate him. Afterward, we came to find out he’d never cooked before, but had just signed on, being busted as a miner, to get down the river.

“On behalf of the passengers,” said my father acidly, “I want to thank you for the most indigestible presentation of swill it has ever been our pleasure to reject.” I never saw him in a worse humor.

This cook was a big, lanky man wearing a ridiculous white hat like a mushroom to keep the hair out of the food, somebody explained, as if it would make any difference; and I thought he might get sore.

But he only grinned. “Fierce, ain’t it? I dum near puked on it myself.”

It was fifteen miles from New York to Benicia, which was a brand-new town where they had a Government Army Post, and five miles after that we entered San Pablo Bay, all sparkling in the strong sunlight, water a pale blue-green, choppy with white-caps peeling off, grassy hills rolling up from the sides, with cattle grazing there, and altogether a very fine sight to behold. I couldn’t get enough of that fresh salt bay air in my lungs. But it was nippy, too.

We reached the city in the afternoon and went ashore, to the racketiest uproar we’d seen since Independence. Everywhere you looked, but mostly going up the hills, were tents of all shapes and sizes, and scattered over ¿he rough, uneven ground were shiny new frame houses, houses of tin, zinc, galvanized iron, brick tiles, and others with parts made of each.

Somebody told us later that the city was in a period of “rapid transition.” My father wrote the remarks down in his diary. Only a few months before, it had been nothing more than a nasty, dirty, raviney, sandhilly, clayey place on one side and a great rocky
hill covered with earth on the other. And not a good house in town, the best of them a kind of plank cow stable, with the greater number made of canvas or calico, using any old wood for frame studs. The streets were so miry all winter it was hard to get up and down, and the first sidewalks were barrel staves nailed end to end, in a couple of the “squares.”

Now everything was being improved. They had sawed plank and board coming down from Oregon, and bricks unloading from other ships, and the streets were taking on a fresh look. The main thing that helped build the city was three monster fires, or conflagrations, as they said, which burned down the trashy stuff around Portsmouth Square, which was the main square, so that they hadn’t any choice but to replace it with better.

Also filling in gullies, leveling sand hills, and planning a wharf to extend out a half a mile into the Bay. They had started grading the streets, too, and later they meant to put down planking for pavement.

The city lay five miles across the Bay from the entrance to the ocean, and a better harbor would be difficult to find, for the tidal ebb and flow brought big ships right in and out, to anchor directly in front of the city, without needing the slightest breeze; they could make it even with the wind smack in their face.

All in all, there were some that predicted the city, so situated, had a tolerable chance to grow; and one man, who they laughed at, because you
can
go too far in these things, said he figured to see it at a population of a hundred thousand, before he “handed in his bucket.”

Once ashore, we hiked to the post office after mail, and I found out that Po-Povi had left me a letter behind. Funny thing was, it didn’t bother me. I wouldn’t say I missed her, because nobody can really miss an Indian, but I found myself seeing things on that trip we would have talked about, and it’s perfectly possible I might have missed her if she’d been white. She had a kind of way about her, almost wise, never answering you right off, but
thinking things over first so as not to talk a lot of nonsense. Most important, she wasn’t like Jennie; there wasn’t anything bossy about her, or sassy like that. And she was nowhere near as ugly as she could have been. Not only in the face, with her plain black hair and dusky-pale skin, but all over, because I’d seen her bathing in the stream, just like Pretty Walker, and then walking out, and she looked like a slim piece of statuary out of a garden, standing there in the grass. But don’t let slim fool you—she was grown. It was interesting to see how she wasn’t a child any longer, being somehow larger undressed than dressed, both forward and rear. To be honest about it, this was the first time I’d noticed how she looked especially.

She said, “Dear Jaimie: How nice that I have learned to make letters in the English tongue. We leave tomorrow on a great ship, with white wings like a bird. I am to be a lady. Mr. Coe has told me that I shall stand the country squires on their heads. I do not know exactly what he means, or who these are, but it will be very funny to see them so.

“He is a kind and good man; I must prepare myself to serve him in any way he desires. But I know him very little. He has beautiful yellow hair that ripples like the waters of a brook. I recall that your hair is stiff, the color of sand, and that it is not combed very often.

“I am lonely for the people who bought me from the A-rap-a-hoe. Do you please take care of the doctor, that his great and foolish heart shall not lead him into trouble. He is a child’s spirit imprisoned in the body of a man. How I shall miss you all! I have cried in my sleep from this sorrow.

“Now you must write a letter to your sister. Dear Jaimie, think of me sometimes when you wander in the woods.

Po-Povi”

It made my head dizzy for a few minutes, when I read that. It was just what you’d expect from an Indian. She was sorrowful, now she was leaving, and after everybody had practically begged her to stay, too. As for Mr. Coe and his beautiful hair—that exhibit
would look uncommonly well hanging from the tip of a Crow spear.

I read it over, itching to write an answer right away, so as to straighten some things out. But I wasn’t quite so mad when I read it a second time. She had learned to write very well. There were a good many girls in my grade in Louisville, specially Daisy Coontz, who could chin herself, all right, but would never know the difference between the Greeks and the Spartans if she lived to be a hundred, that couldn’t do anywhere near as well. I’m not the best writer in the world, but I’ve read most of the books back home, certainly all those about robbery and murder, and I could see that this Indian girl had shot right ahead. Once she’d got onto using a few long words, and dropped all those short ones, she’d be a credit to her race. It’s off the subject, but she had the same trouble that way as the Bible, which my mother read from in the evenings. I hate to knock something religious, because those old Hebrews likely put in a lot of time on it and hoped it would succeed, but the book lacked style. It hadn’t any words that amounted to a hill of beans, and alongside a work like
The Last Days of Captain Kidd
, by Morton E. Jenkins, it was mighty thin stuff. No, in some ways, the Bible was a very ignorant book.

While my father stood in the post office door, reading a letter from Mr. Coe, I went over her remarks again. I didn’t like that part about her crying in her sleep. It was a coincidence, for many and many a night since they left, I lay in our tent feeling very blue, lonesome for my mother, I reckon. This Indian girl
was
my sister, red or white, and I didn’t think I’d have much trouble thinking about her when I wandered in the woods. I’d done it already. All of a sudden I began to wonder if I hadn’t lost something. I didn’t feel so good; I had a hollow in my stomach, and went over and sat down on a box. I had this funny idea that maybe I was going to throw up.

But there’s something I forgot to tell. When collecting our mail a few minutes before, a strange thing happened. The man in the window looked up sharply and said, “Doctor Sardius McPheeters, formerly of Louisville?”

Astonished, my father replied, “That is correct, sir. May I ask how you know?”

The man looked embarrassed. “There was an inquiry. We had a note here about it. Would you mind very much to say where you are stopping here?”

“Why—” my father began, and I could see he was about to give out a high-sounding address, but he was handicapped, not knowing any, so he said, “We aren’t settled in, sir. Not as yet.”

“When do you expect to come in for mail again?”

“I’ll call at ten tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the clerk, and scribbled a memorandum on the note he had.

“Most mysterious, most mysterious indeed,” my father said, as we walked down the street. “But in no way uncivil. No doubt one of the old wagon train, desirous of renewing our acquaintance.”

We walked around, looking the place over and keeping an eye out for “opportunities,” but none appeared to arise, so that night we paid three dollars to share a small, lumpy, ill-smelling bed in a mean lodginghouse. Neither of us slept much, because my father was in one of his snoring humors, which sounds like a cross cut saw ripping into a nail, and my legs have the habit of twitching, or kicking, as the muscles get rested and smooth out. “I don’t know when I’ve taken such a hiding,” he said when we got up, both pretty grouchy. “I’m black and blue from ankle to thigh. It was an interesting experience, not unlike being shut up in a four-foot stall with an especially vicious donkey.”

I mumbled something just as surly, and we got dressed.

Out early to have breakfast in a coffeehouse, and killed time till ten, when we went back to the post office. There wasn’t any more mail, of course, but the clerk seemed glad to see us, and said, “The gentleman was here only a moment ago. I believe he will make himself—”