The Furies (25 page)

“So I see.” As Israel stepped out to the plank walk, Louis gave him a wan smile.
Isn’t exactly the kind of Christmas Eve a boy should have,
Israel thought.

He stopped at the edge of the walk Amanda had installed at her own expense. “Something we can do for you, mister?”

The stranger kept himself from falling by hanging onto the mule’s neck. He squinted at Israel. “You a white man?”

Israel gnawed his lower lip. Christmas, he thought sourly.

“That make a difference to you?”

“Well, if you ain’t white, you sure as hell ain’t the owner of this place.”

“The owner sent me out to ask what you want.”

“Simple. I want a good swallow of Sixty Rod—”

Puzzled, Israel shook his head. “Then bring in the bags. You’ve got dust in them, haven’t you?”

“Damn right I have. I been up at Sullivan’s Creek, pulling out a hundred, two hundred dollars in every pan.”

Israel rolled his tongue in his cheek. If the young miner was telling the truth, he was one of the lucky ones, the few lucky ones. There were supposedly fifty thousand men in the diggings—men who had come by ship around Cape Horn, or over the Panama isthmus with a change of vessels, or the whole way across the continent in wagon trains from Westport and Saint Jo back in Missouri. Israel had heard that more than seven thousand wagons had rolled toward California during the good weather this year.

“You want a drink, come on in,” Israel said, still not understanding the delay.

The miner leaned forward. He would have tumbled into the mud—it was San Francisco’s rainy season now—if Billy Beadle hadn’t dashed from the doorway and propped him up.

“For”—the miner belched—“for a coon, you’re a mighty dumb one. I don’t want to walk in and drink. I want to
ride
in and drink.”

Billy said with a grin, “I don’t think your mule would fit through the door with those bags hanging on him.”

“I don’t want to ride through the door,” the young man replied. “I want to ride through
that.
”

He jabbed a finger at one of the two glass windows.

Billy looked dumbfounded. Israel started back inside; the windows were recent additions, and costly.

“You better find someplace to sleep, mister. You’re already dreaming.”

“No goddamn coon’s gonna tell me—” the miner began, reaching for his pistol.

“None of that, chum,” Billy exclaimed, seizing the miner’s wrist just as another voice interrupted.

“What on earth’s taking you so long out here?”

Amanda stood in the doorway. The miner saw Billy’s other hand lift the slung-shot from his belt, and all at once lost his urge to fight.

Grinning again, Billy took the heat out of the situation. “Why, nothing much, Mrs. Kent. This laddy just asked to ride through the window and have a drink.”

“Ride through?”

Amanda stopped, studying the miner. Thunderstruck, Israel watched her smile.

“That’s a pretty peculiar request. Why do you want to ride through a window, young man?”

“Ain’t ever done it before. Ain’t ever seen a window that big, either.”

“Don’t you have glass windows where you come from?”

“I come from a farm in Illinois and, no, we don’t, ’cause my papa’s poor.”

“But that doesn’t really explain—”

“Listen, are you the owner?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, we’re making progress, anyway. I wasn’t gettin’ anywhere with the coon.” He swept off his filthy hat. “They call me Flaxtop up in the diggings, ma’am—”

“I don’t give a damn what they call you—you
get
!” Israel said, reaching for the mule’s bit.

“Calm down, Israel!” Amanda snapped. “If you can’t keep your temper, go inside.”

Astonishment sapped Israel’s anger almost instantly. He rubbed his eyes. Lord, he was tired of this upside-down existence, where you never knew what to expect next. He was tired of working seven days a week. He was tired of the noise in town—even on Christmas Eve, shouting and laughter and piano music poured from the plank and canvas and brick hotels and gambling dens and brothels that spread out from Portsmouth Square, lighting the peninsula with hundreds of glowing lanterns. The night was so bright, he could even see the masts of the abandoned ships in the bay—seventy or eighty of them, left to rot at the end of one-way trips from Panama or New York. Their crews had rushed to the diggings right along with their passengers—

It was mass insanity! And Amanda had fallen victim to it. Why, she’d even considered hiring four Chilean whores for the second floor until he talked her out of it, convincing her it wouldn’t be suitable with young Louis on the premises.

As further proof of the way her wits had deserted her, Amanda was actually treating the miner’s request seriously. “You really want to ride through one of my windows?”

“I sure do. I struck pay dirt and I want to celebrate. I got the dust to pay for the privilege”—he reached back to slap a saddlebag—“plenty of it.”

Israel headed inside. No doubt she was just being courteous to the young fool—

He pulled up short at the sight of her face. Lord God in heaven. She was
considering
it!

With a cool smile, she said, “Your fun won’t come cheap, Flaxtop.”

“I guessed not, ma’am. How much?”

She pondered. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars for the window—there’s no plate glass manufactured in the United States, you know. It’s imported from Europe. Add another two hundred and fifty for general damage. The Sixty Rod will be on the house.”

Even Billy Beadle gaped. Israel performed some quick calculations. Allowing for freight charges, Amanda could order a new window from the east coast for maybe five hundred, repair some broken furniture for a hundred or a hundred and fifty. Her terms were outrageous; but she’d presented them with an absolutely straight face. His stomach started to hurt.

“You’re sayin’ a thousand?”

“One thousand,” she repeated. “If that’s too steep for you—why, Merry Christmas.”

She pivoted away from the miner. Israel marveled at the way she bluffed. It worked.

“Hang on! I—I guess I can afford it. You got yourself an arrangement, ma’am.”

Amanda acted unruffled, as if what was happening was an everyday occurrence. “Fine. We’ll give our guests a little holiday entertainment with their suppers. Billy, you carry those bags inside. Weigh out the equivalent of a thousand dollars. Flaxtop, you wait right here until I move a few tables.”

The miner slapped his mule’s neck and uttered a long, piercing yell. Louis appeared, drawn by the noise. Amanda spoke to Israel. “We’re out of Thirty Rod. Walk over to Dennison’s Exchange and see whether they’ll let me have twenty gallons.”

“Sure they will,” Israel said. “Your credit’s good all over town.”

Amanda swept back inside. Billy Beadle chuckled, started to unstrap the saddlebags. The mulatto glanced at Louis.

“You walk along with me to the Exchange.”

The boy’s face fell. “I want to see him bust the window.”

“I said you come along! It isn’t fit for a youngster to watch grown men act like fools—” Muttering gleefully to himself, the miner paid no attention. “You watch enough of ’em, you’ll start behaving the same way. Come on, now—I’ll need help rolling the cask through the mud.”

He said it harshly, still upset by the way Amanda had taken advantage of the tipsy miner. He yearned for the old days: Yerba Buena quiet and mellow in the sun; a relaxed pace at the tavern; a few slow-moving residents hoeing potatoes in the square—

What the devil had come over her?
What was driving her?
He was afraid he knew the answer.

“Clear away, boys, clear away!” he heard her shouting inside. “Move your legs, mister. We’ve got a customer coming in by a different route. Billy? Hurry up with those bags!”

“Come
on
,” Israel said, with such a savage gesture that Louis shied back. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy stepped down from the plank sidewalk. Instantly, the mud hid the soles of his boots.

“You’re gonna miss a real fine show, Mr. Coon,” the miner said. Israel grabbed Louis’ hand and didn’t look back.

I mustn’t let it twist me up,
he thought.
I’ve listened to every dirty slur ever invented for a black man. I’ve watched the Hounds beat up Frenchmen and rip down the tents of the Chileanos on Aha Loma, and I haven’t let any of it bother me too much because I’m a free man. I can walk away any time I want.

Maybe I will. She’s not the same woman anymore.

Israel tugged the boy’s hand, pulling him to the left. “Watch your step!”

Louis had nearly stumbled into the top of a cast iron stove. The rest of the stove had sunk into the mud produced by the December rains.

Neither man nor boy was much surprised by the sight of the stove top. Discovering that charges for shipping heavy freight to the diggings were astronomical, the gold-hunters who came by ship discarded all sorts of personal goods in the public thoroughfares. Speculators who attended the beach auctions and bid on the cargos of the incoming vessels sometimes had to take every item in a shipment when they wanted only part of the shipment. The unwanted merchandise was abandoned in the same places the would-be miners left their heavier belongings. Rotting sacks of flour, expensive commodes, unopened cartons of dress shirts—you could find damn near the whole residue of civilization buried in the winter slime of San Francisco’s streets.

One of the stove lids lay in the mud just beyond the sunken obstacle. Angrily, Israel flipped the lid over with his toe. “I bet when Jason and his Argonauts went hunting the golden fleece, they never left a trail of garbage!”

As the boy and the Negro crossed the square, the noise remained constant. Men and women laughed in the bars. A brass band blared “Deck the Halls” from the lobby of the Parker House. Barkers shouted from the entrances of the gambling tents—
“Come on in, gentlemen, come on in and try to find the little joker! Here’s the place to get your money back!”

They circled around a bearded, wild-eyed fellow in parson’s weeds. Clutching a Bible under one arm and exuding a smell of gin, the man bellowed at them, “Divine services tomorrow morning! Eight sharp in the tabernacle just a few steps up Kearny. Divine services unless there’s news of a strike tonight!”

“Thimbleriggers—cheap women—rum sots—
trash!
” Israel declared, his yellow face changing as he and Louis passed from shadow into the blaze of lanterns. Everywhere, men walked or ran or staggered—going to perdition!

He guided Louis around a signboard on a pole at the edge of a particularly sinister-looking mudhole. The sign bore the words:

THIS WAY IMPASSABLE!

Below, in a rougher hand, someone had written:

not even jackassable

“You surely don’t like San Francisco anymore, do you, Israel?” the boy said at last.

“No, sir, I don’t. They say we have twenty-five thousand people, and that’s twenty-four thousand five hundred too many. You no sooner blink an eye than somebody reports one more camp opened up, with fool names that are an insult to the English tongue. Gouge Eye—Whiskeytown—Mad Mule Gulch—Murderers’ Bar—people’ve lost their minds even when it comes to christening towns! Old Polk should have kept his mouth shut.”

“What’s the president got to do with it?”

“Why, Louis, if President Polk hadn’t stood up when Congress opened its session a year ago—”

As he spoke, his eyes were never still. He saw half a dozen rats prowling over a heap of garbage. Heard a passing miner make reference to his color. A Peruvian in rags loitered in the shadows, watching him and stroking the edge of a knife across his thumb. Every time he ventured out these days, it felt like Mississippi again. He needed to arm himself.

“—if he hadn’t blabbed about the gold Colonel Mason sent to the Philadelphia Mint in a tea caddy, it might have been a lot longer—years, maybe—before the country got excited about California. Polk should have just gone out of office quietly and let Taylor take over—but no, he had to pop the cat from the bag. They say he always wanted land. The whole continent under one flag.

I don’t object to that, but I do object to him giving the fever to every rascal, fool and failure on three continents—”

Without a smile, Louis said, “I told you most a year ago that Ma had a bad case. You didn’t believe me.”

“I know. Proves how wrong a man can be.”

“Know something?”

“What?”

“I don’t like it either. I mean, here it is Christmas and we don’t even have a holiday pine with some candles on it. And nobody’s got time to make presents—we’re too busy fixing to serve dinner all day tomorrow—” The boy sighed. “I try not to think about it too much. Most of the time that’s easy. I’m so frizzled out from working, there’s nothing on my mind but sleep.”

“We keep on this way,” Israel said, “we’re liable to wind up the richest folks in the graveyard.”

“Not Ma. She’s tough.”

“Tougher all the time.”

“She wants to go to Boston something awful, I guess.”

Israel didn’t answer. The boy only knew the surface reason Amanda worked so hard. The mulatto, on the other hand, had heard her speak at length about Hamilton Stovall—not only about how he’d gained control of Kent and Son, but how he’d ruined her cousin’s life. He believed Amanda had kept that latter part of the family’s history from her son.

The man and the boy reached the large canvas tent whose signboard read
DENNISON’S EXCHANGE
. Like the other establishments around Portsmouth Square, it poured noise into the Christmas Eve darkness—and, from outside, it shone like one immense lantern. Suddenly men yelled in the distance; glass shattered.

Louis spun. “Oh my Lord, she really let him do it!”

Israel refused to look. His face was as bleak as his thoughts.
It’s that Stovall driving her. Stovall and those books McGill brings in. She doesn’t see what it’s doing to her, either
—
and what it could do to her boy.

To speak to Amanda on that subject would have been overstepping. Israel could argue with her about the advisability of women on the second floor—even though that too concerned Louis, that was business. But he didn’t dare intrude in more personal areas. After all, she was his employer—