Errol sent another letter to Marjorie, which contained many standard fabrications as to our good luck and our promising claim and the clement passage overland, which despite accounts to the contrary was entirely manageable for a lady. I scribbled a postcard to our mother, telling her only the truth: that we had arrived, and that we were alive. Outfitted, we hiked three miles to the American River and established our humble camp at a sandbar where the fat-pocketed Swede had told Errol there was gold for the picking.
I had envisioned the diggings a place of desolation and solitude—such was the portrayal in the literature on the subject—and so I was rather dismayed to find that the American had other forty-niners populating her banks. By their accents I made out Southerners and Yanks, Pikes, Limeys, Canadians and Keskydees. By sight I identified Mexicans, Negroes and Indians. A Pike who claimed he had been a riverboat captain in St. Louis informed me that the Negroes were former slaves—fugitives, though he didn’t say the word. The Indians, he said, were current slaves.
Whether white or colored, every man wore the same red work shirts which Errol and I had so recently purchased, though most were by now a sort of purple with filth. Their pantaloons had gone a snuffy black. Some had added sashes about the collar for a touch of the dude, and most of these were all but shredded with wear.
The only deviants from this diggings uniform were two Chinamen who worked the claim adjacent to ours. I had never seen a Chinaman before and I fear I gazed quite rudely at them. The two—a father and his son, whose age I estimated to be around thirteen—wore billowing yellowish frocks gathered in a queer fashion. They panned not with iron but with the same type of pointed bowls of woven straw they wore as hats. Beneath those brims were their curious slit eyes and skin so hairless and smooth as to appear made of wax. But strangest of all were the snakelike black pigtails gathered from a snatch of hair at their napes and falling down their backs. The boy’s descended past his shoulders impressively. But it was a sapling compared to his father’s, which was so long that when he stooped at the river its tip dipped into the green water and swayed there as he panned.
We staked our ten-by-ten claim and worked it twelve hours a day for two days, Errol at the shovel and me at the pan, then, after Errol called me a duffer, another ten days with me at the shovel and Errol at the pan. Rumor had the territory brimming with gold so handy that men had gouged their wealth from the rock with a pocket blade or a spoon. In truth the work of extracting color was of the spirit-defeating sort, a labor which combined the various arts of canal digging, ditching, stone laying, plowing, haying and hoeing potatoes. The law required us to work our claim every single day, including the Sabbath, lest we lose our rights to it. Thus we toiled in the freezing river and under the burning rays of the sun from dawn to dark, day after miserable day. When finally we went to bed I could not sleep for the pain coursing along my back and between my shoulders. Even Errol complained, his obstinate nature overridden by the numbness in his hands from rotating the pan all day. When I did sleep, I woke shivering and soaked in heavy dew. Soon I was rousing myself by scratching my body and scalp bloody where I’d been munched by fleas and lice, which the forty-niners called quicks and slows. Added to this misery was the constant terror of those dark mountains looming behind us, sheltering cougars and grizzly bears and other unknown beasts that I sometimes heard moving through the forest in the night.
During this period we dredged only meager flakes, not even an eighth of an ounce per day. These I stored in an empty mustard jar. On the thirteenth day my shovel hit foreign material, making an audible metallic tink. Errol and I both started. I reached into the hole with my hands to dig but Errol pushed me aside. He scratched at the hole zealously and finally pulled up an empty whiskey bottle, proof that our spot had already been excavated.
Errol swore and whipped the bottle into the river. He kicked our iron pan in after it. I plunged into the water to retrieve the costly tool. I returned ashore intending to scold my brother, but I was met by a look of such anger and shame that I could not speak.
“We’ve been had, Joshua,” he said. “We’ve been taken on a damned ride.”
He set out in the direction of Angel’s Camp, cursing and swinging at every shrub and low-hanging branch along the way. I gathered our shovel and pan and followed him, wet to my waist, goldless California dust making mud on me.
At the Swede’s, Errol directed me to follow him inside and not to speak. A hearty fear came over me, and I was glad we had no weapon between us. But my brother removed his hat and greeted the Swede cordially. “Say,” Errol said, after trading some pleasantries, “we came up empty at that bar down the way.”
“Eh?” said the slippery Swede from beneath his mightily waxed mustache.
Errol asked whether we might have better luck upriver or down, creekside or in the dry hills, in soil yellowish or redder, and the Swede dispensed advice freely.
“One more thing,” Errol said to the Swede. “Has the coach been by? With the mail?”
The Swede laughed. “You’ll know when it has, boy.”
Outside, Errol was visibly glum. “It will come soon,” I said.
“Have you seen it?” he asked excitedly.
“No,” I admitted. “Only it’s bound to.”
Errol scowled. “Fetch our things and find me upriver.”
“But he said downriver.”
Errol took me by the shoulder. “Consider that man our compass, Joshua. He says downriver, we go up. He says hillside and we stay on the banks. Understand?”
V. LUMP FEVER
And so we moved upriver, and upriver farther three days after that. From there we were ever on the move. In years hence I have come to believe that the rotten Swede’s deception combined with the maddening stories I have described infected Errol with a specific lunacy. Lump fever, it was called at the diggings. It left my brother perpetually convinced that gold was just a claim or two above our own, that the big strike was ever around the bend. He was mad with it.
What agitated him further were the Chinamen, who followed us whenever we moved. We would establish a new camp, and sure as the California sun they would relocate to our old claim. The Chinamen moved in the night, it seemed, for when we woke it was as though they had simply materialized at our abandoned claim. I thought them humorous, with their pointed hats and billowy frocks and pigtails. But they made Errol nasty with agitation. He would emerge from the tent each morning and immediately look downriver to where the tongs were already up and working the patch we’d left. “It’s an ignorant strategy,” he said often. Indeed, we never saw them pull anything of value from those worked holes.
Errol and I had panned flakes enough only to partially replenish our stock of meat and flour. The rest of what we needed we bought on credit. Each morning and night I fried a hunk of pork in the same skillet we used to pan the river. After, I mixed flour in the grease to make a gray, pork-flecked porridge. I was a lacking cook, I admit, but that pork would have bested the fairest housewife. Pickled, cured, or fried, the swine of California was the stinkingest salt junk ever brought around the Horn.
Errol sloughed off weight. One morning I watched him from behind as he rinsed his dish in the river. He had not yet donned his shirt and the way he was bent caused the bones of his hips to rise from his trousers in startling iliac arcs. He reminded me of a bloodhound we had once, with the same scooped-out space where meat ought to have been. This socket movement was hypnotic, so much so that I felt compelled to run my thumb along one of those bone ridges. When I touched my brother, he jumped.