The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (67 page)

I’m telling this speech of the Reverend Ebersohl in detail, as I remember it and from his notes which he showed me, because it gives a better picture of him than what I could do, also a view of San Francisco in those days, particularly from his closing comments on Temperance, which went as follows:

“I give it as my candid opinion that your throat and lungs will suffer less in the pure open air than they do in the carbonized, sickly atmosphere of crowded churches. I am accustomed to listen to the same clear voices in the streets three hundred and sixty-five days in each year: ‘Fish! fish! fresh salmon!’ ‘Eggs! eggs! fresh California eggs!’ ‘Candy! Here’s your celebrated cough candy! Everybody buys it; now’s your chance!’ ‘Here’s your fresh California pears, apples, oranges, and peaches! Only two bits a pound! Buy ’em up!’ ‘Latest news from the East! Arrival of the
John L. Stephens!
here’s your New-York
Herald
, New-York
Tribune
, and New-Orleans
True Delta!’
Who ever heard of a fish, egg, candy, or fruit ‘crier’ or newsboy taking the bronchitis? An auctioneer will stand in the street and cry at the top of his voice for two hours every day, yet we never heard of an auctioneer taking the bronchitis.

“If you will not bind your neck with a tight cravat, if you will stand erect, head up, speak naturally, and not strain your voices, you will experience an improvement in the quality and power of voice; you will also find greater faculty in natural utterance by regular street preaching. Ten years ago, preaching two sermons in church and one in the streets caused me hoarseness of voice, along with weariness of body; but now, with three sermons in church and two in the streets each Sabbath, I have no hoarseness, and but little weariness. Before I commenced street preaching, I was subject to violent colds and soreness of throat and lungs; but I have known nothing of ‘sore throat’ or ‘sore lungs’ for years. I would not intimate that I am invulnerable, but I do believe that the danger is lessened, at least fifty per cent, by outdoor preaching.”

Having said this, Reverend Ebersohl looked around, with a little frown of annoyance between his brows, as if he was trying to remember something. Then the line cleared away and he said briskly, “That concludes my remarks for this evening on the subject of Temperance.”

There was a perfect thunder of applause, as both men and women looked at each other and said how good it was. And a half dozen or more sang out, “Drinks for the House!” Everybody agreed it was the best lecture they ever heard on Temperance, even including Reverend Ebersohl’s sermon aboard the
Union
, when he converted everybody in sight, along with the Chinese cook. But Mr. Wilcox, the proprietor, jumped up on the bar and cried, “Hold on—nobody’s going to buy a drink for the House here except the House. Step up, gentlemen, name your poison.”

And as Reverend Ebersohl climbed down to roll up his signs, one after another at the bar turned and toasted him, sober and courteous, thanking him for the Temperance lecture, and said things like, “Your health, sir,” and “Strength to your voice, Reverend,” and “A splendid effort—both moving and convincing.”

“Hear me
, cried Reverend Ebersohl, jarred but not quite done yet. “This being a lecture on Temperance, I’ll ask which among you would care to sign the pledge? In the interest of shaming the Devil and saving your souls.” He held up a piece of paper and a quill.

I honestly thought there was going to be a riot. They practically fought to sign up, and you could hear things like, “Quit shoving, will you?”, “See, here, I was in line first,” and “That isn’t fair—you’ve signed twice already. Give somebody else a show.”

Everybody put their name down at least once and some as many as four or five times. Then they had a whole new round of toasts, and thanked him again for the opportunity to sign the pledge, being glad, as they said, that he hadn’t forgot it before the lecture was closed.

Mr. Wilcox said the next day that the meeting had stirred people up so, he’d sold twenty-two per cent more whiskey than on any
other evening of the previous twelve months. There was talk of trying to put Reverend Ebersohl on the regular payroll, along with the fiddlers and chorus girls, but nothing came of it.

I walked out with Reverend Ebersohl when he left. He was just a trifle discouraged, the first time I’d seen him so. But it didn’t last over a minute. “There must be
some
way to make them stop drinking,” he said. “Bound to be, it stands to reason. But I’m obliged to say that up to now, I’ve been sniffing away at the wrong scent. If nothing else works, it may be necessary, along with the late, lamented Samson, to employ the jawbone of an ass.”

No change in our living through December and January. My father would drink for a few days, then sober up and work like the furies for a while. Either way, he never mentioned his condition, the lapses or the good parts. It was a secret between us, something shameful that wouldn’t be in good taste to bring out in the open.

I ran the stand, helped by Reverend Ebersohl. By now I figured out the things to buy—food, mainly—and let my father handle his medical calls and other problems. I served coffee and tea and chocolate, twelve and a half cents a cup, and sometimes sandwiches and cakes, bread and molasses. I’d established a good business selling whale oil, too, that I got from the Chinaman.

You might have called it living, but there was precious little fun in it. We had plenty to eat, what with the money from the stand and from doctoring, but nothing was left over. Because whatever my father got his hands on, from any source, he gambled away in a hurry. Sometimes he won a little; not often. To be fair, none of the people in the El Dorado or United States wanted him to drink or gamble. They knew our condition, but of course they couldn’t keep him out.

What I missed most was companionship. On days like Christmas, that meant something back home, I was so low I had to fight tears when I went to bed. I had Christmas dinner by myself, off pickled pork and cold biscuit, my father being drunk somewhere, and in the afternoon, about dead from loneliness, I went to Reverend Ebersohl’s church service. Afterwards he gave me some cake a
woman had brought him and seemed so anxious and concerned and fatherly that it only made me bluer, somehow. He was a good man. I missed Po-Povi, and I missed Todd, too. Herbert Swann and the boys in Louisville seemed a long, long, time ago; I couldn’t get them straightened out in my mind any more. I wanted to see my mother of course, but what I missed most right now was our family of the wagon train. Even Jennie.

You could say there was excitement here a-plenty, but not for a boy, unless he wanted to grow up fast and forget he’d been a boy. Still, that fight the Reverend Ebersohl mentioned in his speech, between the bull and the grizzly bear, was interesting for about two minutes, for the way the animals took to each other. Reading the handbills and hearing the talk, my father closed the stand, during one of his sober spells, and we got a ride to the American Valley, where they had this high, spiked corral built, to keep the bull in. A whopping big crowd was there, in a drunken, noisy humor, and the promoter made a pile of money selling tickets at a dollar a head, half price for children under twelve, and infants free.

Then the time came, they rolled the grizzly out in his cage, with a chain fastened to a ring in his nose, and turned him loose in the pen. The bull came charging up with a spine-jangling bellow, but when he saw who it was, only a grizzly bear, he acted like his peeve had been a case of mistaken identity. The bear stood on his hind legs and smelled the bull over, bow and stern, then seemed pleased to have made this attractive new friend. They ambled over the turf together, the bull grazing, the bear searching for grubs and ants, for all I know steering each other to the choice tidbits.

A number of men cried, “Sold!” and threatened to put the promoter in the corral with the animals, but they finally let him off. Even a drunk man could see it wasn’t his fault.

Dogfights were a favored amusement on the Plaza, and the scabbier men occasionally got up what they called a “boy fight,” sicking two boys of about equal size onto each other, making them
fight so as not to be called cowards. Usually these were fixed up between boys of different races—American and Mexican for the most part—with the representation that they were fighting for the glory of their country. Often, these poor, ignorant, ragged, dirty boys were made to fight until they had knocked one or the other’s teeth out, along with torn-up ears, and twice I saw boys of around twelve blinded in one eye. My father said “nothing could be more contemptible” and claimed that the men who started these things likely wouldn’t fight if you kicked them in the stomach, unless it was a midget or a tubercular woman.

In February he had a long session of soberness, and some doctors at the City Hospital put him up for a steady job there, with the title of Assistant Physician. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year. Hearing about it, he was almost cheerful over something to do with medicine, for a change. It was an honor, and the salary being, as he said, princely, it would enable us to move into a house, buy a carriage and horses, send for Jennie and them, if they’d come, and then send for the folks at Louisville later on. He was all worked up about it, though it seemed to me only swapping an unhappy situation in Louisville for the same kettle of fish in San Francisco.

In any case, it didn’t matter, for on the first ballot taken by the Board, five votes were cast for my father and three for a Dr. Hunter, and then, when they ran it off in other ballots, Dr. Hunter won out.

This crushed my father down as bad as anything that had happened. He even began to neglect his occasional practice he’d built up, and took to spending his time serving on juries, making three or four dollars a day. I ran the stand, Reverend Ebersohl helped as usual, also helped with my father, and we floundered along.

On one of the worst days, in late March, I was steering him across the Plaza (as he’d fallen into a ditch after coming out of the Courthouse) when I heard a familiar, “Dear me, dear me, I hope there’s nothing wrong,” and it was the spry little cricket, Mr. Peters,
who’d insisted on knowing our address in San Francisco.

My father straightened up with dignity, slapped some of the mud off of his trousers, brushed his hat, which was now a wreck, with the lid busted loose so that your hand would slide through, and said, “Wrong? wrong? Perhaps you’ll explain yourself, sir.”

Mr. Peters was a hoppity little rabbit of a man, but he was not easily cowed. He stood surveying my father, one forefinger on his upper lip, then shook his head in distress. He was dressed in the same professional way, fussy, prim, neat, even more businesslike than before, if possible.

“Oh, this won’t do, it really won’t—and seven months yet to go” (consulting his notebook) “till October twentieth, to be exact. Client would be
most
disturbed.”

It’s hard to admit, but my father was far from sober. To put it plainly, he didn’t entirely make sense. But he drew himself up like the grandest kind of actor on a stage, jammed on his hat with a beautiful flourish, causing the lid to pop up on one side and stay there, then said, “I am not accostomed to being accusted in the public thoroughfare, like a common footpad. Kindly consult me at my office, sir. Make an appointment. Any afternoon will do; I generally sleep it off in the mornings.”

“Oh, my!” said Mr. Peters. “This
is
serious, is it not? How fickle is fortune! I never dreamed—Surely you remember me, sir. Junius T. Peters, of the inquiry at the post office?”

My father gave him a very keen look, then he said, “It won’t do you a particle of good to masquerade under an alias. I’m onto that dodge. Now suppose you sit yourself down there”—we had reached the stand—“and state your symptoms like a man.”

“My dear sir, I am
not
ill! I really must protest—”

My father had reached underneath the counter, removed his heart cone, and applied it to Mr. Peters’ chest. Listening gravely, still with his hat on, he said, “You should have come in sooner. I cannot stress too strongly the importance of a periodic check, especially at your age.” Then he straightened up with an air of decision. “Your case is simple, Mr. Streeter. You’ve either swallowed
a cheap watch or you haven’t over a month to live. In any event, I’d like to call in another opinion before resorting to surgery.”

I have no idea how much of this nonsense was done on purpose, from being in a gay mood, and how much was dumb, drunken talk. Once alcohol removed his cautions, he was sometimes given to carrying on very elaborate, silly jokes, to make up for all the seriousness he had to go through, and hated, about medicine. I’d seen him do it often before.

Mr. Peters tried to struggle to his feet, but he was pushed back firmly and a wooden spatula inserted in his mouth.

“Ah,” said my father. “Say ‘Ah.’ No, no, not ‘Ugh’—‘Ah.’ Better, that’s better. You’re coming along fine. We’ll lick this thing yet. The trick is to get them at their source.
Great jumping Jehosophat!”
–peering into his mouth—“this is shocking. Mr. Streeter, I hate to say so, but I’m afraid you’ve been drinking.”

Mr. Peters opened his mouth to protest again, having got rid of the spatula, but my father sat down beside him and said, in a sympathetic tone—he
did
have a fine bedside manner; everybody noticed it, “To understand this case more fully, I’ll have to ask a few routine questions, to get your history, that is. Now, first of all, has there been any serious insanity in your family? On either side.”

Right here I want to pay tribute to one of the most admirable men, large or small, it’s ever been my good fortune to know. In these years, while I’ve been writing down our adventures, I never go to San Francisco without calling at his home, and he, in turn, often comes to see us.

Instead of blowing up, as he was wholly entitled to do, from this outrage, Mr. Peters said, “Both my mother and my father, sir, were certifiable idiots.”

I could see my father’s face working, and realized that the answer had gone pretty far toward getting him back to normal. Suddenly he took a bottle out of his pocket, fetched two small tumblers from under the stand, poured them half full, then broke the bottle on the end boards.