“Don’t worry, Errol. I’ll get you out.” I tied one end of a rope to a tree. I refilled the bucket and poured it in. Then I flung the other end of the rope into the hole and called, “Grab hold, Errol! I’ll pull you up!”
The digging persisted, but now there was a watery sound beneath the scrape of the shovel.
That night I sat jiggling the rope, touching the notch my brother had left in my collarbone, saying I was sorry and could he please please please please grab hold.
When morning came I gathered the heaviest rocks I could carry and assembled them in a pile near the lip. I was desperate. I intended to brain my brother, climb down the rope, tie it around him, climb up the rope and then pull him up. Giddy images of his wilted body dangling from the rope passed through my mind at the moment I noticed a strange sound. It was silence. The absence of shovel on bedrock.
I approached the hole, bracing myself for the sight of my brother’s dead body at the bottom. Instead, he sat quite alive with his back against the earth wall, as if resting after a morning’s work and not three feverish days spent burying himself alive. It was noon and the sun was beaming directly into the hole. I could see his scalp burned pink where his hair had gathered in clumps, and his blistered, bloody hands. He had removed his boots and one was half-submerged in the water I’d poured upon him. The rope was well above where he sat, curled like an animal in a waterlogged den.
Then he began to sing. It was the first I’d heard his voice since he declined the now-crusted beans still awaiting him on the stump. The song was a popular one, and he sang it with an unsettling bounce:
Hangtown gals are plump and rosy,
Hair in ringlets, fists of posy,
Painted cheeks and jossy bonnets—
Touch ’em and they’ll sting like hornets!
“That’s a fine tune,” I said when he was done. I don’t know why I said it, except that it was.
Errol looked up at me, finally, squinting against the light. His face had gone gaunt and grimed and socket-hollow. He did not look like himself. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abigail.”
That was our mother’s name.
“I’m Joshua,” I said. “Joshua. Your brother. Say Joshua.”
“Sing me ‘The Old Oaken Bucket.’ You know that one, Abby?”
“Joshua!” I cried.
Errol reached his hand across the shaft and scraped some soil from the wall opposite him. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abby girl.”
I threw myself at the pile of rock and attempted to lift one. I intended to throw my boulders down upon him, smiting him as would the God of that hole. I did not care, at that moment, whether I stoned him to death or buried him alive. But the Lord had taken my strength. I only lay in the dirt and wept.
“Do you know ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’?” whispered Errol.
“No,” I said through my tears. “How does it go?” And then I passed into darkness.
XVI. A TROUT
A promise unkept will take a man’s mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold. I know that now. But this was years ago, when I was young and felt the whole world of Errol’s collapse was mine to bear. It is strange telling you this, because the boy I was feels so far away from the man I am now. I know I ought to consider that distance a blessing, given the darkness and the difficulty of the time I have described here. But it brings me no comfort to think how far I have traveled nor how much wiser I’ve become. Because though I was afraid and angry and lonesome much of the time, I was also closer to my own raw heart there in the territory than I have ever been since.
I woke at the Chinaman’s camp. It was dusk. The boy sat near me with a tin cup. Behind him was his uncle, sitting on a stump near the fire, and behind him was the dusky blue Sacramento valley with fires and lanterns burning here and there.
“Where’s Errol?” I said. “Where is my brother?”
The boy handed me the tin cup. “Where you think?” He frowned, as if disappointed in himself. “He is in the earth, still.”
“Is he digging?”
The boy shook his head.
“Singing?”
“No.”
I got up and walked upriver to the hole and looked inside. Errol sat in the muddy water with his legs folded to his chest, alive and shivering. He had removed his shirt and tied it about his head. I jiggled the rope and called to him, but he did not answer. He was apparently through digging, and his hole had not gained any more depth. Yet he felt farther from me than when last I saw him.
I returned to the Chinaman’s camp and sat looking from the boy to his uncle. The old man was cleaning the blade of his jade-handled knife on his robe and chewing a stalk of grass. I wanted him to say something. I felt if he spoke he would have a way to end this thing. But he said nothing. And the yellow stalk of sweetgrass bounced in his mouth.
The Chinaman sheathed his knife and stowed it in the folds of his robe. Then he reached into a bucket beside him and brought up an enormous rainbow trout. It was dead, but freshly dead, shimmering still and with that gruesome pout that dead fish have. Fish were rare on our part of the river, so many were devoured by men upstream. It was a lovely creature, and I knew the tongs must have traveled a long way to catch it.
“For Mister Errol,” said the boy.
Then, at the sound of the boy’s voice and the gutted shimmer of the trout in the blue dusk, the providence of the thing burst upon my mind. I saw Errol climbing up out of his hole and sitting beside the Chinaman’s fire, saw us four scooping soft, steaming handfuls of fish to our mouths. It was no augury, only the visions of my own hopeful heart.
The skin of the fish sizzled wonderfully, emitting a stirring aroma as we cooked it. Surely the meal would return Errol’s mind and deliver him the strength and will to reach up and take hold of the rope. I watched it fry, feeling that the rest of my life was lodged in that trout.
With the cooked fish I approached the hole. It was dark now and the moon had risen. The night was clear and the gibbous moon so bright I expected to see its reflection dancing in the water pooled at the bottom of the pit. But there was only darkness. I called to Errol.
“I fixed you dinner,” I said, holding the tasty rainbow over the hole. I could not see him but I heard the earth crumble a little as he shifted, heard some stones hitting the water. “Errol, will you come up and have some trout?”
He said nothing. No matter, I thought. I was convinced that all he needed was to see the thing, to lay his hand on its soft fish belly. He would eat it, head and all, and return to me. “Look out below,” I said, and dropped the trout into the darkness.
I listened at the hole for some time and heard nothing. I returned to the Chinaman’s camp to wait. The boy tossed pebbles into the river and we three sat listening to the sound of them dropping into the water. “He’ll die down there,” I said, for I had just realized it.
I spent that night in the China camp, stretched out on a flat sandy spot near the embers of the fire. Before sleep I resolved that at dawn I would descend into the hole, fight Errol into submission and bring him up. He would return to me.
No sooner had I fallen off than I was awoken by the mournful roars of a grizzly.
I sat up and saw the bear, standing on its hind legs, staggering toward me. It bellowed and I scrambled along the ground away from the beast. He came at me. I saw in my mind the purple innards of General Scott strung along Tuolumne Meadow and my bowels spasmed.
Through sheer dumb habit I brought my spectacles to my face, and with them saw that the grizzly was no grizzly. It was my brother, naked and covered head to foot with black mud. His arms were raised over his head. He carried something there, as though to an Old Testament altar. He came closer. Moonglow shone upon his lips, blistered and cracked and bloody and trembling. The nail of one of his big toes was missing.
He thrust the trout into my hands. He had not eaten a bite of it. He bellowed again, and this time I understood the word.
“Gold!” he said again, pointing to the fish.
Another man would have identified this as the raving of a lunatic. But I was dazed and accustomed to heeding my brother and did so now. I examined the mangled, mudded fish. I ran my hand along its sides and lifted its fins. Once I saw one I saw them all. Thousands of tiny gold flakes lodged amongst its scales.
The Chinaman and his boy emerged from their tent. The Chinaman was bare-chested, the first I had ever seen him so. Errol pointed a filthy, trembling finger to where he stood.
“You!” he bellowed. Errol charged at the Chinaman, toppling him to the ground. The boy shouted. Up came the sounds of fist on flesh. When the men rose, Errol had the Chinaman by his throat. The Chinaman’s eye was cut. He scratched frantically at Errol’s hands where they held him.
“You had it all,” Errol said.
The Chinaman stomped and kicked at Errol but Errol did not flinch. I stood in horror with the trout in my hands as Errol dragged the Chinaman to the river. The two descended into the slow, dark water. The Chinaman flailed wildly now, sputtering. Errol lifted the Chinaman slightly and then plunged him under the water.
I dropped the trout and ran into the river. Water filled my long johns and pulled at them. A shape flashed at my side and then past. It was the boy, plunging toward the place where his uncle was being drowned.
I did not see it immediately, only saw the boy launch himself at Errol and cling to his backside. Errol screamed and released the Chinaman and the Chinaman surfaced, gasping for air. Errol flung the boy off him. It was then that I saw the jade-handled knife still in the boy’s hand where he’d been tossed, and that Errol had a long gash across his bare haunch. Errol twisted to examine the wound and as he did so it opened and out rolled a rivulet of black blood.
The Chinaman and his nephew stood on the bank, checking each other for wounds. The boy was trembling. I approached them. They watched me a moment, then fled.
Errol looked from the gash to me. He motioned for me to come to him, but I could not. “You see,” he said, serenely. “It’s so clear. They had it all along.”
I fled. I could not endure the fact of his believing, believing, believing beyond the rotten end. That’s all I can say about it.
XVII. EPILOGUE
When I finally came upon San Francisco Bay, it was so dense with abandoned vessels that their masts made a leafless forest atop the water. I found work as a torch boy for the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, and with them I fought the Christmas Eve fire of 1849 and the Saint Valentine’s blaze. When finally I had earned enough money I bought passage aboard a thousand-ton sidewheeler called
Apollo
, where I was the only human cargo among sacks and sacks of gold bullion. Eventually, I disembarked in Boston Harbor. I intended to return to Ohio from there, but it was many years before I was able to meet my mother, the woman whose son I had abandoned in the wilderness. I went to church, and to school. By the time I had the courage to see her I was a grown man.
While in San Francisco, I read in the
California Star
that in Angel’s Camp two tongs, father and son, had been captured by a mob of citizens and tried for the crime of robbery and attempted murder. They were hanged, said the report, though I knew that would be their fate the night I sat hiding in the woods above Sacramento, listening to nocturnal beasts moving through the scrub, when the snow ring around the gibbous moon triggered my final augury. As to last words, the
Star
reported that the tong boy recited a passage of Homer.
In the years following the rush, it became fashionable for Easterners to decorate their parlors with gilt-framed daguerreotypes of forty-niners. In these years I’ve seen many such portraits of Argonauts posed proudly with pan or pick or troy scale, their whiskers cut back in a semblance of civility. Each time I encounter one I hope to see my brother in it, although I know it is unlikely he ever had himself pictured off. And it is a false art, I realize. Most of the men used props on loan from the portraitist. Some were models sitting before drop cloths in New York City. But a great deal of what I like about those faddish daguerreotypes is that they show no trace of the darkness I remember of the diggings, none of the loneliness or the madness or the hunger. Even the pistols in the men’s belts seem tucked there in jest. I’d very much like to see my brother there someday, in his red miner’s shirt with his hat tipped back, a fresh sash at his collar, brandishing a fine new pickax and a lump. I’d like to see him poised at the center of a gleaming gilded frame, as if color was every bit as bountiful as we’d been told. I’d like to see him posed with his endless belief and at last surrounded by bright soft gold. And maybe if I saw him there I might see the Argonaut believer within myself, too, for we looked so similar in the territory.
What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, N.T., and said only that the lode had a hold of him.
VIRGINIA CITY
W
e were at a house party last night, Danny, Jules, and me, leaning over a low, sticky coffee table playing Texas Hold ’Em like always, when Danny mentioned that his parents got married in secret up in Virginia City, in the back room of some casino, to escape the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’d never told me this in all the years we’ve been friends. Jules got stuck on it, saying over and over again, “What? That’s so fucking crazy!”
Danny leaned back and got all quiet and smug the way he does when he knows he has something you want. “You can still see the room.”
And Jules said, “You guys, we have to see this place. This
means
something. Iris?”
And I was drunk or high or both by then, so I said, “Yeah, sure. We’ll drive up there.”
I meant it then but didn’t this morning, when I woke up to the underwater thuds of a fist pounding on the window of the only bedroom I’ve ever had. I cracked my blinds to see Jules straddling a furrow of my mom’s failed vegetable garden, her fingers folded into metal horns, yelling, “Virginia City! Fuck, yeah!” Danny stood behind her bleary-eyed, holding a Mountain Dew. When Jules gets stuck on something she doesn’t let it go. I used to love that about her.
I drive—I always drive. Jules and Danny sip road beers, him in the front seat of my car, her in the back. Danny turns the music down and asks Jules what’s become of Drew.
I have to strain to pull a memory of Drew—the scene trash Jules went home with last night—to this side of my hangover. Jules mashed into the couch with a skinny boy in tight pants, hibiscus flowers and sparrows and bug-eyed koi creeping up his forearms. Or later, her arm looped through mine, nodding indiscreetly to where the guy stood by the door with his coat on, drinking a tallboy, waiting. Jules yelling over the music to Danny, saying she didn’t need a ride home. Drew is a ghost. A placeholder in a parade. Like all of Jules’s boys, Drew is real only to Danny.
“Working,” Jules says. “He’s in that band, the Satellites. You know them.” She gestures with her Coors Light, part of a twelve-pack she stole from the party. “We saw them at XOXO. They opened for that emcee from Sacramento. They’re like indie slash electro slash power pop.”
“Keep that can down,” I say.
“Which one?” asks Danny. “What does he play?”
“I don’t know. Synth? I think there was a keyboard in his room.”
“If I get a ticket you guys are paying it.”
“Synth,” says Danny. “You sure? Where does he work?”
He’s trying to make her admit something. He should know better. Jules has never been ashamed of sleeping around. That would defeat the purpose. She shrugs and sips her beer, looking out her window at the gnarled piñon pines clinging to the mountainside, or Reno down beyond the guardrail, shrinking away from us.
Danny takes a drink. “You don’t even know where he works?”
She smirks at me in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t have a chance to ask.”
“How was it?” Danny’s only ever been with one girl. He’s twenty-four years old and still fascinated by the fact that people sometimes fuck people with whom they aren’t in love. This is what he likes to hear—the anonymity, the baseness, how a person can do what Jules does. A good friend, she is always willing to oblige.
“Not bad,” she says. “Oral, oral, missionary, doggie-style, money shot. Nothing flashy.”
Poor Danny. He lives with his parents and Jules is the kind of girl who makes sure every man she meets falls in love with her, in case he comes in handy later. She tilts her beer on end, finishing it. Danny does the same.
“Keep that shit down,” I say. Then, because I sound, just for a moment, like the me I was before Jules, I say, “The Satellites are basically a sloppy Joy Division cover band.”
She shrugs and looks out the window. “They are what they are.”
I met Jules in our capstone seminar the fall before we graduated. She was a BFA student, a painter. Even though the seminar is basic humanities, you’re supposed to take it within your college. The nursing seminar was full and I didn’t want to wait for the next semester, so I’d begged my adviser to let me into another section. It wasn’t until I got into the art auditorium that I realized how much I hated the other girls in nursing, their white shoes, the face-framing layers in their hair, their gel pens and highlighted, color-coded note cards.
On the first day of class, Jules called to me from the aisle of the auditorium like she knew me. I remember her ugly brown boots unlaced and splattered with paint, her short, bleached-out hair. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know her; I didn’t know anyone like her. She made her way over and sat beside me and gave me a flyer for a show downtown where her friend was deejaying.
“I thought you might be into this,” she said. “Last time he was in town he absolutely killed.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d been sitting in lecture halls for three years, staring straight ahead, rounding out the bell curve, waiting for someone like her.
She sat beside me whenever she came to class. I missed her when she didn’t, and she often didn’t. She invited me to more shows and gallery openings, showed me the flyers she’d redesigned herself because the bourgies at the gallery had used some bullshit motel art on theirs. I always went. One day she came into class and convinced me to leave with her before our professor arrived. We took the Spirit bus downtown to the Eldorado and spent the afternoon drinking gimlets and playing the penny slots. She taught me how to smoke. It was the best day I’d ever had.
Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians. Soon she was taking me along with her to after-parties and all-night diners with whichever guy had orbited into her life. Nick who worked at Sundance Books, Brady from the co-op, her Life Drawing TA, Corbett, a visiting “electronic installation artist” from Ireland, with his insufferable chronic irony. They asked me stupid questions, like did I come here when I was a kid, and did I know the Heimlich, and what would I do if they started choking. One time I said, “Nothing,” and Jules laughed like a dream I had of her once where she laughed so long and hard that her laugh lifted us both above the city and over the mountains, hand in hand, flying.
That was three years ago. Later, Jules got drunk and told me that she’d only called out to me that first day because she’d thought I was some girl from her sculpture class.
• • •
I
n the car we pass billboards advertising casinos and tourist attractions. One says
The World-Famous Suicide Table
and another says
Virginia City: A Town of Relics and Memories and Ghosts of the Past
and another says
Bonanza or Bust
. Danny says, “That’s it. The Bonanza.” He looks so pleased with himself that I wonder if he’s making this whole thing up.
We crest the hill and see Virginia City below us, the little strip of Main Street restored to look like the Old West boomtown this once was, the sharp white spire of Saint Mary’s of the Mountains on one edge of town, the iron-gated cemetery creeping up the bald man-made hills of rock on the other. We’ve been here before, the three of us. But every time I see this view I’m struck by how the buildings huddle together on the hillside, how a small town’s like a big family.
We park on the street and stand around the back of the car with the trunk open while we each down a beer. Jules finishes hers first and belches. We toss the empties into the trunk. Jules takes three unopened silver cans from the twelve-pack and puts them in her purse. She puts the last three in mine. “I’m hungry,” she says.
We cross the street and walk for a while. Danny says he likes the hollow sound of our steps on the wood-plank walkway. He’s said this before.
Jules squeals and points and takes pictures of everything like a tourist: a man leading a fat brown horse down a gravel side street, two local women dressed as Old West whores in dyed ostrich-feather hats and corsets, the rotating stainless-steel arms of a machine pulling purple taffy in the window of a candy store. She stands for an absurd amount of time at the plaque about Mark Twain, running her fingers over his little bronze mustache. She pretends not to notice when Danny takes a picture of her there. It’s exhausting.
Danny points to the old-looking hanging sign for the Bucket of Blood Saloon, a sign we’ve seen half a dozen times though we’ve never gone inside. “How about that?” he says.
“That’s fucking awesome,” says Jules. Everything is fucking awesome. Inside, the place is painted all red and has red velvet drapes too big for their windows. Chandeliers dangle from the ceiling, and large oil paintings with ornate gold frames hang on the walls. As far as I can tell, we’re the only patrons not wearing cowboy hats. Jules nods to some old men at a nearby table. “Howdy,” she says. Fucking howdy.
Jules flirts with the bartender, an old guy with the silly striped apron of a nineteenth-century barkeep hanging from his neck. His name tag is handwritten and says Bernie. Jules asks him to fix her his favorite drink and he brings over a Bloody Mary, pungent with extra horseradish. He shrugs shyly and says, “That’s how I like ’em.”
“That’s how I like ’em, too,” she says.
Danny and I taste her Bloody Mary and order two for ourselves. We all order bacon cheeseburgers, which Jules says is lame of us but Danny says is actually super interesting because by having the same meal in the same place we’ll be closing the gaps between us and come closer to fully understanding each other’s experience. These bacon cheeseburgers, he says, have the opportunity to be transcendent.
Jules rocks forward on her stool. “It’s hard to picture your parents eloping.” It is. Danny’s mom, Lucy, is the head pediatric nurse at Saint Mary’s, and his dad, Dick, is a high school principal. They play Boggle and tennis together. Every Saturday morning Lucy organizes the recycling while Dick washes the car.
Our food comes, the meat slippery in the buns. “Tell us what happened,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Jules, her mouth full of burger.
“What do you want to know?” says Danny, chewing on the celery stalk from his drink, loving the attention. “When my mom was eighteen she was engaged to this guy Wally, who worked in a tire factory off Wells. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, like my mom’s whole family. Wally’s dad was an elder in their church and everyone wanted them to get married. And they were going to, too, but my mom met my dad at school and called it off.”
Jules says, “Fucking awesome,” and Danny’s happy to make her happy. I’ve seen her with so many men but none of them have ever looked at her the way Danny does.
He goes on. “But this guy Wally took it pretty bad. They found him butt naked in the Truckee. In March. And I guess he was saying some crazy shit. I don’t know. They should have checked him into a mental institution. I mean, he was
eighteen
. But his dad, the elder, decided that Wally’s breakdown was actually God talking through his son. At one point the whole congregation was at Wally’s bed, praying, talking about ‘the one hundred and forty-four thousand’ and ‘the Lord’s Evening Meal.’ All that shit.”
The bartender comes over and Danny orders another round of Bloody Marys and two fingers of bourbon for himself. Jules says, “Thanks a million, Bernie. You’re a doll.”
“Anyway, the elder went and talked to my grandma and grandpa about how God had revealed His Great Will and how my mom marrying my dad—a Catholic, of all things—was not, you know, in the divine plan. And the fucked-up part is that they believed him. They told my mom she couldn’t see my dad anymore. Then the three of them—my mom’s parents and Wally’s dad—sat my dad down and said he’d better stay away from my mom, or else. Fucking
or else
. They thought this kid Wally was some kind of prophet.”
“Which makes your dad what?” says Jules. “The Antichrist?” This is funny, Dick the Antichrist, soaping down the minivan in his too-tight running shorts and tennis shoes from Kmart.
“Dude, but check it,” says Danny, slapping the bar, eating it up. “My dad didn’t care, right? He wanted to get married anyway. But my mom believed that shit, I think. Even though she agreed to marry my dad, she wouldn’t do it in Reno. She said they had to come up here so no one would know. So it could stay secret.”
“Is that what she said?” I want to know. We’re done eating, just picking at Jules’s fries. Why hasn’t Danny told me this before?
He shakes his head. “My dad told me. My mom doesn’t talk about it.”
Our check comes. Bernie the barkeep says our drinks are on the house. Thanks a million, Bernie.
Outside, the boardwalk and the street are crowded. We’ve just missed a mock gunfight, and the smell of fired blanks still hangs in the air. People are milling around, dazed from the excitement of vigilante justice. Jules and Danny walk ahead of me, weaving through the crowd. We stop to watch two horses pull a covered wagon down Main Street, an old man holding the reins loosely, two sheepish-looking bandits in the back. The horses’ hooves make a satisfying
clop-clop
on the asphalt. I pull my thin jacket closed. It’s cold up here and it’s only September.
Outside the Silver Queen, a sign promises the actual Silver Queen. We’ve all seen her before, but Jules wants to go. Danny shrugs and says, “Since we’re here.” I’m just glad to get away from the crowd. We walk through the narrow, dim casino to a mural of a woman, at least fifteen feet tall. She’s sort of Frida Kahlo–looking, only white. Her gown is made out of hundreds of the shiniest pure silver dollars you’ll ever see. Rows of them ring her neck and wrists, and stack to make a crown nestled in her brown updo. Jules hands us beers from her purse and takes one for herself. The beer is warm, and something about that warmth feels good.
Jules reads the plaque and tells us the silver is from the first strike of the Comstock Lode, which we already know. The silver dollars glint like the scales of a fish. I want to touch them, but the whole thing’s been covered with Plexiglas to keep people from prying the coins from the wall with their fingers. Who would do something like that? We would.
Jules gives me her camera and poses in front of the mural with her hands on her hips, just like the queen herself. Danny joins her. I set my beer on a stool in front of a slot machine and watch them through the camera’s viewer. They grin, posing with their Silver Bullets in front of the Silver Queen, their arms around each other.