California Gold (65 page)

“ ’Deed he did. One flight up, as I get it, I can sit down an’ eat dinner. Two flights up, I can lie down and have dessert.”

Margaret laughed, though she darted a look at the family to see if anyone had overheard.

“Well put,” she said. A bell above the door tinkled, and again she touched Mack’s shoulder. “Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen. Please excuse me.”

She hurried over to greet two men Mack recognized as City supervisors. Now her lips were pressed together almost primly. The pixie hid while the proprietress showed the gentlemen to a table.

“She’s come a long way for a young woman,” Mack said. “Her parents were pig farmers up in the Sacramento delta. Dirt poor. Our finer citizens call people like that Pikes, because a lot of them came here from Pike County, Missouri. Margaret’s parents did. She ran away from home when she was twelve.”

“Sounds like you know her pretty good.”

“Not the way you mean. She’s a smart girl, ambitious. I see a lot of myself in her. Maybe that’s why I like her.”

The bald waiter came back, and Mack ordered veal chops, Johnson a venison steak. “Seems like you always take a shine to hard-driving females,” Johnson observed after he handed his menu away.

“I wouldn’t say Carla fit that description.”

“No, an’ maybe that’s why it didn’t work out.” Over Mack’s shoulder he observed Margaret at the cashier’s counter, pretending to check a customer’s bill while darting looks at Mack. She caught Johnson watching, and as color rushed to her cheeks averted her head. The momentary loss of poise confirmed what he’d already decided: Margaret Emerson was interested in something a lot heavier than friendship.

Mack mused over his cigar, tapping it on the edge of the ashtray. “I suppose Margaret and Nellie are alike in some ways. I never thought of it before.”

“Say, is Nellie back yet?”

“Week before last.”

“She here? In town?”

“No, she moved right into the place she leased in Carmel. Wants to finish her new novel there.”

“You seen her yet?”

Mack’s hazel eyes shone in the light of the silk-shaded lamp. “Next week. We’re going back to the mountains.”

Johnson took one look at that lovelorn face, and then glanced at Margaret, who was busy now with a pen and a ledger.

Poor gal
, he thought.
She can try till she’s ninety and she won’t get nowhere with him. Wonder if she knows it?

T
HE PACK MULES PICKED
their way along the bank of the Merced, with Mack riding a saddle horse at the rear of the string, Nellie in front. Yosemite Falls thundered in the forest to their left. If she reacted to memories of the falls, she gave no sign.

They stopped at Camp Curry, a well-kept enclave of twenty-five white tents at the foot of Glacier Point. A pair of young schoolteachers from Redwood City, David and Jennie Curry, had opened the camp in the summer of ’99. Transplanted Hoosiers, the Currys were graduates of Indiana, where David Starr Jordan had inspired them with his love of the outdoors. Jordan had urged Mack to pay a call.

Over a hearty lunch prepared by Mrs. Bab, the camp cook, David and Jennie shared their pride in their new venture, the first commercial campground in a national park.

“They’re grand people,” Nellie said after they had said good-bye and started on toward their campsite. “I just don’t like encouraging tourists. Too many of them will despoil this place.”

“What do you propose to do, set up a board to evaluate virtue and intelligence, decide which tourists are fit to come in? You’re dealing with one of the most beautiful spots in America. Everyone wants to see it.”

“I don’t know what I propose,” Nellie said, irked. “I just know we have a problem here.”

The valley rioted with springtime color. Woodpeckers hammered the trees, and floating clouds changed El Capitan from white to purple to white again. They made camp about three o’clock, Mack putting up the tents and Nellie gathering wood and laying the fire. The long trip from the coast had been friendly, even intimate, but without any physical contact except the most casual. They might have been a pair of brothers, he thought with extreme frustration.

He pounded in the last peg and lashed the corner of the tent. Nellie’s tanned face turned up to the sky like a lodestone seeking the magnetic pole, and suddenly she ran from the glade into the meadow and danced with her back to him, her braided hair tossing around her shoulders. She was like an ingenuous child.

She ran back, flushed and excited. “Oh, Mack, I love this place so much.”

“Had enough of German castles and Roman coliseums?”

“Enough for a lifetime. I’m back in California to stay.”

She stood not two feet away, breathing out her palpable aura of warmth and strength. Sunlight through budding leaves laid a pattern on her scrubbed cheeks.
It’s the right moment. Take hold of her—

He hesitated too long. A rhythmic noise shattered the peace, and Nellie spun on her boot heel, shielded her eyes.

“There,” Mack exclaimed. From the direction of Camp Curry, lurching along in a blue cloud, came an open auto carrying four passengers.

Goggles flashed and someone flourished a green bottle. The passenger in front threw something in the weeds. The auto resembled a horseless phaeton, and Mack recognized its design. “That’s an imported Daimler, what they call the Siamese model because of the second seat behind the driver’s.”

The Daimler came down a curving road near them. From the backseat, the two ladies in picture hats tied with scarves hallooed and waved kerchiefs. The man at the tiller steered the chugging, rattling vehicle in and out of ruts. Nellie coughed hard—and somewhat artificially, Mack thought; the auto’s blue smoke cloud was confined to the road.

“That isn’t the first automobile in Yosemite,” she said. “A few months ago I saw a photograph of a steam car up on Glacier Point. Now that the valley’s a national park, John Muir wants the Interior Department to ban those metal monsters.”

The Daimler passed on, laying down its trail of murk and noxious fumes. Now Mack got a whiff.

“I can see why,” he said. He too started to cough.

Next day they hiked to the summit of Sentinel Dome. The last two hundred yards on the east shoulder required some hard climbing, and near the top Mack clasped Nellie’s hand to help her over a rough place and she held tight for half a minute.

She looked trim and fit in miner’s shirt and jeans. They clambered the rest of the way and then, in a cluster of scrawny pines on the escarpment, they stood silently in the wind, feasting on the spectacle of the valley.

Mack put his arm around her. The clasp of his hand while climbing up had pushed her close to the limit; this was too much.
Go on—don’t stop there
, she thought. Then she cursed her own weakness, and controlled the faint trembling started by the feel of his strong arm holding her.

He felt her tension and frowned, but didn’t say anything. Then, careful not to look at him, she pulled away.

They climbed the old Tioga Road with their mules. An abandoned mine road, it ran some fifteen miles to Tuolumne Meadows, high country Mack had never seen.

As they rode along, he felt the air growing cooler. Large patches of spring snow rilled the washes and clung to sunless hillsides. Nellie pointed out cedars and ponderosa pines giving way to white fir, mountain pine, and tamaracks that showed the blazes of earlier trail makers. In dark shade away from the road, an occasional empty cabin with shattered windows spoke of some hope unrealized, some California dream abandoned.

In the meadows, the wind waved great fields of gentians and lavender daisies. Two black bears ambled in the distance. They crossed a hairpin bight of the purling Tuolumne River; Nellie said it ran twenty miles down to a valley called Hetch Hetchy. “I went there once with Muir. It’s as lovely as Yosemite. And still pristine.”

They chose a campsite in a grove of dead trees, mountain hemlocks blasted and burned by lightning. “Let’s put up that piece of canvas for a windbreak,” she said.

“Why? It’s hot as the devil.”

“You’ll fight the black ants and the mosquitoes all day, but as soon as the sun’s down you’ll be freezing. We’re at eighty-six hundred feet. I won’t be responsible for death from pneumonia.”

He laughed. “Where’s the canvas?”

They set up their tents facing each other across a shallow pit dug for a fire. Mack’s eye was repeatedly drawn to Nellie; if she was conscious of it, she gave no sign. She was a strong woman. She worked hard, sweating freely, and he discovered grace and loveliness in her swift, supple movements. The line of her throat, the light dew on her forehead—everything about her was special, and desirable.

Part of his desire was physical—he hadn’t slept with a woman for a good while. But only part. What he felt—the love, the need—tugged on his heart and his mind as powerfully and insistently as it did upon his body.

He watched her raise and tie up the flaps of her tent while a doe and her fawn slowly, cautiously crossed the meadow near the dead trees. He longed for some way to catch and hold that fleeting image—Nellie, the deer, the meadows. Hold it forever.

Shadows stretched out, purple-blue and perceptibly colder. The thin air went whistling down into his lungs to produce a high mountain giddiness. Storm clouds blew up from the north, and the sunset disappeared in a sudden spring snowfall. To start the fire he had to dust a layer of white from the wood.

After dark they put on heavy coats. The fire generated a comforting warmth and light. Mack was famished: Slab pork, tinned beans, and hardtack tasted like a banquet at his mansion. He squatted with his fork and tin plate, his physical need strong again. Fortunately his coat hid that.

The snow diminished and the clouds passed, a quarter-moon visible now in the clear dark sky. When he couldn’t stand the need any longer, he tossed his plate aside and reached for Nellie’s hand.

“There’s no way to say this but straight out—”

“Mack.” It was half pleading, half warning.

“Come live with me. Marry me.”

Her eyes grew larger and misted at the corners, as if she wanted what he wanted. He chafed her small hand between his harder ones. But she pulled away, and like the moment on Sentinel Dome, this one also passed.

“It’s a lovely, flattering thought, Mack. I don’t mean to dismiss or demean it when I tell you I can’t do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I have an agenda—just like you. Where is Mr. T. Fowler Haines, by the way? Still in Riverside?”

“Yes, that seems to be a good permanent home for him.”

“I finally did some reading about that intrepid gentleman—”

“Don’t change the subject. If you married me, you’d never have to work again.”

The wind billowed sparks from the fire. Little ribbons of snow fluttered around the tents. Nellie’s laugh rang in the frosty air.

“Am I really hearing this? Yes, I fear so. I have got to say this so you never misunderstand again. I care for you. I care for you very much. But I am not a Victorian woman. I am not dutiful, submissive, or a lot of other things I probably should be in the opinion of most men and far too many women. Well, too bad. I’m Nellie Ross, Natalia Rotchev, no one else. I have many more books to write, more than I can finish in a lifetime. I’ll always work.”

“But you’re still a woman. There’s absolutely no need for you to support yourself—”

She slapped her knees and stood. “You’re impossible. Sometimes I think the word is
unredeemable.
Did you hear anything I said? One word?”

It was going wrong again. He didn’t know what to do about it, and got angry. “Yes, but damn it, I don’t understand. I never understood Carla. I don’t understand you.”

“Precisely, my dear.” Her light tone didn’t conceal a sudden bitterness. “Maybe that’s the whole trouble. You don’t try.”

He gripped her shoulders. “I’m trying tonight.”

Again she disengaged herself and he swore, his breath pluming out, a cloud tinted by the firelight. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he walked around the windbreak to the edge of the dead trees. With his back turned he said, “I’ll sort out what we need for breakfast and hang it up so the bears can’t reach it. That way we can get an early start down to the valley.”

“Yes. That’s best. It’s turned cold up here.”

He walked around the windbreak to the fire. She’d already gone in and laced the flaps of her tent.

Mack came into the billiard room buttoning his overcoat. Johnson sat on one end of the table, and at the side, standing on a stool, Little Jim leaned into the glow of electric light from fixtures with shades of green glass. Johnson rolled a red ball across the baize from his right hand to his left.

“One,” the boy exclaimed.

Mack watched from the shadows. His son saw him and his face illuminated. Johnson whizzed a white ball to his left hand. Jim jumped up and down and clapped.

“Two.”

Johnson ruffled Jim’s blond hair. “This little sprout’s mighty quick. He can count to ten easy, and up to twenty with a bit of cogitatin’.” He ambled over to Mack. “You should stick around a little more and see.”

The boy rolled balls across the table, all the while darting shy, affectionate looks at his father. Mack kept his voice down. “I give him all the time I can.”

“An hour at the end of the day when he’s tired ain’t hardly enough. Not when he’s nigh onto three and growin’ and changin’ so fast.”

“What makes you such an expert on fatherhood?”

“I was a sprout once myself,” Johnson said, just as testily. “A Comanche on a toot put a bullet in my pa, and I didn’t have him no more after age two. It hurts a youngster to grow up like that.”

“I do my best,” Mack said. He crouched down and held out his arms. Little Jim ran to him. “Good night, son. Go to bed and get your rest.” Mack hugged him and then left. The boy stared after him for a long moment.

He turned into the passage leading from Jessie Street. The fog rolled thick and white, muffling the hoot of a ferry in the Bay. Under a dim electric bulb on the rear stoop, Mack shot a look over his shoulder, then knocked. On the second knock someone unfastened the inner bolt.