Men of No Property (25 page)

He pursed his mouth in the shape of a kiss, the gesture making his gaunt cheeks more gaunt. He was fair and very tall, and his eyes, large and round like a hungry child’s, were the color of the juniper berry.

“May I come up now, Margaret? Are you ready for me, beloved?”

“Beloved,” she repeated, contemplating the word, not the person. She nodded that she was ready.

The church bells were still pealing when she withdrew into the room and let the netting fall. His knock was at the door.

Queen Mag is dead. Long live the queen!

They were married at vesper-time and went immediately aboard the steamer. A long voyage, the captain promised, shaking hands with his twelve passengers, but by my soul a pleasant one, with seven ports of call before Magellan Strait, a rough nine thousand miles, and another nine thereafter to the port of San Francisco. Two months travel, luck with them. “Without it maybe three. “But what odds that, eh, Mr. Stuart?” This with a wink and a nod to which Matt brayed a laugh that turned all eyes on himself and his bride. He had never before been to sea or to marriage and he could not anticipate a surfeit of either.

Peg directed which of her luggage she wanted up and which they might put down, and learned that the cabin boy’s name was Chancey. From him she learned, too, that aboard were a doctor and wife guarding their supplies, a schoolmaster and marm with a cargo of spellers and primers, and a half-dozen women fearful of the Indians overland or by Isthmus, but set on joining their husbands, wanted or no. A small opinion of women on water, the boy had. By his tune he would sooner transport a parcel of monkeys. The ship was ladened with cotton shirts and breeches, pick-axes and shovels, playing cards and gaming tables, and spirits by the case. They would load sugar at Havana, coffee off Brazil, and Chancey would round Cape Horn for the fourth time and the last as cabin boy, “but don’t tell the captain on me. I’m after gold mysel’ this time, for a man gets weary o’ the sea.” Weary at sixteen and reconciled at sixty, Peg thought, whether of the sea or the plow or the stage.

Weary of that she was herself, and resolved to go no more a-trouping. A good wife she’d be, all loved if not all loving, docile and obedient and please God, bearing children by the name of Stuart. Matt should name the first were it a boy, and the second boy she would call Stephen, Stephen Vincent. Family names, Matt, family names. And when they returned from California they would take their place, their tract of land and brace of slaves among the voting Stuarts of the state of Alabama. Time and again she bade Matt tell her of plantation life and what would be expected of her: congeniality and grace, kind firmness with the slaves: “As if God gave ’em to you like children to watch over and take care they don’t go lazy.” Why was it necessary, she wondered, to buy at auction what God gave into your care. She thought about it, but said nothing, remembering nonetheless Mr. Finn’s Nancy, a cogent, religious woman less the child by far than many an Irish immigrant, or for that matter, a certain Southern gentleman of her intimate acquaintance.

What a different passage this from her first sea voyage: a cabin to themselves with a dressing table and a writing table (which the engine palsied) and shelves in which to stand her unboxed books; dinner at the captain’s table, musicals by members of the ship’s crew in the ladies’ saloon, a pot of coffee in the morning with the captain’s compliments, a bottle of wine from his own store at night to mellow the spirits and calm them as the sea.

“Do you love me, Peg?”

Over and over, Matt asked the question, more frequently it seemed with each day out. They might be sitting in the saloon, listening to the second mate sing
“Then You’ll Remember Me,”
and he would whisper it. Across the whist table he would shape the words with his lips, during a spirit rapping (for one of the ladies proclaimed herself a medium). Alone in their cabin, his head in her lap while she read aloud the poems of Keats and Byron, he would sometimes move the book from her face and search her eyes for something perhaps he feared to find, and ask again: “Do you love me, Peg?”

“Of course, I love you, Matt.”

“Forever and ever?”

“As I love you now,” she answered, mocking only herself a little in the words.

He was a timid lover, for all his protests of devotion, and she knew no more of him a month at sea than she had known in the beginning because, she thought, there was no more to know. Whatever he got from her reading, if anything, she got no more than a sigh to reward her for it. She must take his patience for his thanks. What, she wondered then, did he get from her? The joy of possessing? Was that it? And was that why he must ask the question endlessly—to assure himself that he possessed her? His mother had died in giving birth to him, and he had told her once the only love he had as a child came from his black mammy. And he owned her, body and soul, a chattel. Perhaps, Peg decided, she knew more of him than she thought.

One afternoon when they were standing alone at the rail, he said: “Peg, I decided there’s something I ought to tell you. There was a girl once home and I made love to her…”

From where, Peg wondered, came this sudden confession. “I’ve been made love to many times, Matt,” she said quietly when he hesitated, shy of what he himself had commenced.

He threw back the thatch of hair from his forehead. “I did more than that,” he said. “I got her with child.”

It was not a confession, she realized, if it was the truth at all. He needed now to boast his manhood to her. She felt so much older than him that moment that she smiled a little sadly.

“You mustn’t take it hard,” he said, interpreting her expression to his needs. “Men do things like that. It’s their nature—hot-blooded-like.”

“Oh,” said Peg. “I’m glad to be enlightened on the nature of men.”

“There,” he said, putting his hand on hers where it lay on the rail, “you mustn’t be jealous. It wasn’t anything really.” He moistened his lips and blinked his eyes like a delighted boy. He had hoped to see her jealous, and hoping it, believed it to be so. “My father settled it…with her father.”

“And who settled it with her?”

“A cousin,” he said. “Not a kin cousin, you understand.”

“What other kinds of cousins are there?”

“Marryin’ cousins.”

“Oh.”

“Peg…do you love me in spite of it?” He put his arm about her, his fingers playing at her breast beneath the shawl.

She drew away until she could look into his face. “Or because of it—that’s what you truly mean, isn’t it, Matt?”

He blushed and then went white. “You got no cause to be readin’ me like one of them goddam books. I’m your husband, and I’ll do the readin’ after this.”

She turned from him and climbed the steps to the cabin where she threw the latch on the door and sat down on the edge of the bunk. Everything was not going to be all right after all. Her penance was not done. Confessed and married by a priest, she was not shriven because there was no penitence in her heart. Therefore was she married? Once more she had decided what was right for Peg and launched herself upon it, and in such a manner that to escape must mean upheaval. Escape what to what? The mistake was the long journey by water. Overland they would have laid bare their flesh to hardship, their souls to survival and not to one another’s barbs. Poor lad to need to make such boasts. Poor lad, she told herself…and yet, kin cousins and marrying cousins. Conveniences, no less. But was her marriage more to her?

A bottle of wine lay nested in the basket and suddenly it seemed the company she most needed. But Matt was at the door before she had the cork drawn.

“Margaret, let me in. I’m heart-sorry. Please, Peg.”

The men would be looking down at him from the bridge, or the watch from the look-out, and in their galley that night the seamen would confirm amongst themselves what their glances already foretold of the wedding couple: gold they’ll never find together though California’s shining with it. She put the bottle away and unlatched the door.

He did not wait for it to close upon him, throwing himself on his knees, his arms about her waist. She leaned across him and slammed the door while his hands clung to her. “I know I ain’t the man you wanted, Peg. I just ain’t good enough, but I swear as God is in His heaven and my mother in the grave, I’ll be a better man than you ever thought of. Just don’t let your eyes go cold on me. I know there’s someone else you’re thinkin’ of and measurin’ me. I’ll show you my measure, Peg, I swear it. There wasn’t any girl and no child either. I’m startin’ life with you…”

“I know, I know,” Peg crooned, finally muffling his voice against her breast as she cradled his head in her arms. As near as she came to loving him was in these moments when he was more a child than lover.

“I won’t ever say things like that again, Peg.”

She smiled, and lifted his chin, looking deep into the frightened eyes. He got to his feet. So tall he was she had to tilt back her head to look at him. “Let’s make no promises we cannot keep, Matt.”

“Then promise me somethin’ we can keep,” he said. “Don’t go away and leave me like that again. Just hit me hard across the mouth when I start the dirty sass, but don’t turn your back and leave me all alone. Promise me that much?”

“That much. Shall we go out on the deck,” said Peg, “and show ourselves again as lovers?”

“It isn’t like a part you’re playin’ on the stage, is it?”

She looked at him in the shuttered light, surprised by the remark and for the first time a little ashamed before him. “Not if you can make it real, Matt,” she said.

He caught her in his arms and lifted her from the floor. “I’ll try, honey, I’ll try.”

She crushed her mouth to his ear as though she would bruise her lips. “Get me with child, Matt. For the love of God, get me with child.”

“O
NLY A MADMAN SAILS
his ship into San Francisco Bay,” said the captain, “and madman I am, but a wise one. Lloyd’s will pay her owners if she never sails out again, and me the courts exonerate, for no man sails alone.” The crew were beady-eyed and restless, sniffing the air for land like hound dogs scenting game. They’d mutiny now could they swim ashore and to the last man, their pay collected, they were expected to desert. “The chances are, of course,” the captain further said, “I’ll sign on as many strangers as regulars desert me, for all that come do not find gold no more than all men enter heaven, and some who find it lose it.” The croupier’s rake is mightier than the pick and stripped to the croupe is many a man, however rich were his diggings. Oh Susanna, wait a while for me. When I’m back from California, then you can cry for me.

As Peg took joy in the sight of the town, Matt seemed to resent it because it lay between him and the gold fields. He counted the hundred idled ships in the bay, but only to number the men before him in the diggings, behaving, Peg thought, as though it were he who had discovered the gold and all the rest were invaders. No eyes had he for the hoveled hills of the city, were it not for the everlasting sun, as shoddy and patched with dwellings as Squattertown, New York. Nor did he mind the poppies where they grew as though the earth were stabbed and bleeding. No wonder had he for the bowed “Chinee” upon the streets, nor for the Spaniards, proud as bulls, nor for the lithe, rust-colored Indian women who spat on men, alike their own and frenzied strangers, and carried their children upon their backs as though they could not bear to see the faces begotten of them by man.

Matt would prance beside her passing the gaudy, glittering palaces of Portsmouth Square, raised to gambling, most of them, to all the luxury gold could buy, where pocket merchants sold diamonds and purging pills and carried a scale in a carpetbag with which to weigh the gold dust. “All this I’ll buy you, Peg. I swear it.” All what? “All the champagne you can drink. You’ll wear diamonds in your hair and have gowns of East Indian silk.” If God hung a sign on the sun: PURE GOLD, she thought, he would start building himself a ladder.

“Tomorrow we’ll go,” Matt said from the first day of their arrival.

“Another day, Matt,” she pleaded, “one more day in civilization. I never loved the sky so much as when there’s land beneath it, and people on the land.”

“The less people we see where we’re goin’,” said Matt, “the better I’ll like it.”

“Matt, I’ll be a hindrance to your speed,” she said finally. “Go without me and return the sooner.”

“What would you do while I’m gone?” he said, and she knew then he was tempted.

“Sit amongst the women at the Gibbons House and dream.”

“Of what?”

“Of diamonds in my hair and gowns of East Indian silk.”

“And of your husband?”

“As often, surely.”

“I’ll go,” he said, “as you say to be back the sooner.”

She tried to still the sudden throb of her heart at the thought of freedom. “Matt,” she said, and out of conscience, “don’t stay forever if you don’t find gold.”

He scowled and set his jaw. “I’ll find it. And you better fix to help me find it, Peg, because we ain’t goin’ home without it. I’m takin’ you back to Alabama in silks, not in the rags of Gallus Mag.”

“Dear man,” she said, and touched her fingers to his scowl, “just remember, it isn’t men you’re fighting, or me, or your father. It’s nature. The gold you’re after is in the earth, and the earth is a vast place.”

He ran his tongue over his lips and nodded. “Will you pray for me, Peg?”

“I will,” she said. “I’ll remember my prayers while you’re gone.”

And he was off within three days, partnered with a Charleston lawyer, a Mexican Campaign veteran who was wily in the ways of men and mules, a team of which he shared with Matt at Matt’s expense, although in justice to him it needed to be said he bought the wagon. Peg stood on the veranda of the Gibbons boarding house and waved them out of sight. She was alone at last as she had never thought to be alone again. If he could bring her all he promised, she would love him no more for it, and if he brought her nothing, no less. She had not told him that. What use to tell him when he could measure himself only by what he could give her? She was not with child. Half his allowance was spent thus far. If he did not strike gold would the other half be spent in searching it? What then? It was a strange thing, she thought, to promenade the dusty streets of San Francisco with only a wedding ring to look upon as consort.