“A strike! A strike!” shouted Errol, hopping and flailing his arms in the general direction of the mountains. “Has there been a strike, you old fool?”
“No strike,” came a clear, effeminate voice beyond the commotion. We turned to see the boy standing on the banks, holding his pan of woven straw. “He say, ‘A coach. In the night.’”
We stared like idiots.
“Mail,” the boy said.
Errol took off.
“Thank you,” I said to the boy. “You know ‘thank you’?”
“Yes,” he said.
I dressed and followed Errol along the trail to Angel’s Camp. Out front of the Swede’s a monstrous crowd was gathered around a stagecoach. There were men in numbers I had never seen, hundreds of men not only from our fork of the American but from all of Calaveras County and Eldorado beyond. They were the roughest specimens I have ever seen, and nearly every one of them brandished a revolver or a musket.
The driver of the coach had climbed atop the cab and was arbitrating the rowdy crowd from that position. In his hands he clutched a distressingly small bundle of letters. Errol attempted to pry his way to the heart of the crowd. He pushed between men, struggling to get within shouting distance of the coach. Surely without thinking he shouldered past a ruffian at least half a rod tall with a beard grown down to his chest. The man—a Southerner—informed Errol that he had occupied that spot since before sunup and that he was unlikely to forfeit it to Errol or to anyone. For proof he showed Errol his Bowie knife.
It was then that we noticed that from the mob grew a tail of men. There were too many men to approach the coach at once, and we weaklings had been dispatched to wait in line. We followed this tail through town and out of it, finding its end finally in the woods, behind two Mexicans.
We stood in line for half a day. By the time we came back in view of the coach, emotions had reached the breaking point. Full-grown rough-and-tumbles shouted their names up to the driver and trembled while he searched his bunch. Men who had no letter waiting—and these were the majority—cursed their wives or friends or family for forgetting them. Some desperate fellows offered the coachman flakes in exchange for a missive, as if one might be conjured for the right price. But this was the one place in California where color held no sway.
Very occasionally I watched the coachman pluck a dirty, tattered envelope from his stack and hand it down. The coarse men nearest the coach took the letter as delicately as they might a baby and passed it among them until it reached its rightful owner. As the lucky man opened the letter the others moved away, as if to make room for his reading.
As we neared the coach we spotted the Southern ruffian sitting on a log, holding a letter gingerly between his massive hands. His beard was wet with tears. “Happy devil,” Errol said.
By the time Errol and I approached, the deliveryman’s bundle had become terribly thin.
“Boyle,” Errol shouted, although it was not quite our turn. “Letter for Boyle?”
The coachman, who had by now taken a seat on the edge of the cab roof, searched his skinny bundle. It did not take long. “No letter,” he said.
“You’re sure?” said Errol. But the man had already solicited the next eager miner.
“Please, sir,” I called out. “Check again. The name’s Boyle. Errol. Or Joshua.”
The coachman did check again, God bless him. “Apologies, my boy. Maybe next time.”
I set out in the direction of the river. Errol did not follow me. When I turned, he was standing in the middle of Main Street, which at the time was nothing more than a dirt thoroughfare. His face was blank and he stared at the ground between us. His hands were upturned queerly, as though he carried a burden I could not see.
“Suppose I’ll stay in town a bit,” he said.
“And do what?” I said. But he was already shuffling toward the tavern.
“Forget her,” I called. “She puts on airs.”
He came at me swinging to heaven, and struck me once upside the head with a tight, demonic fist. I collapsed, hiding my head beneath my arms. I thought he would strike me again where I lay, but instead he said only, “Don’t.”
IX. BEASTS OF THE TERRITORY
I panned our claim halfheartedly and alone for what remained of that day, palming secretly the tender knob on my skull. By dusk Errol had not returned. I watched the sunset, gnawing on a rind of salt pork and listening to the heartsick yowls of drunken forty-niners. Errol was somewhere among them, I knew, blubbering about Marjorie. I cursed him. How my body complained, how my stomach wanted, how close we had both come to death how many times so he might win the good favor of a girl whose father owned a stinking soap factory!
I found his pitiful notching stick and snapped it, then snapped it again. I threw the pieces into the fire. One thing I learned from the diggings is that a love of destruction is in every man’s heart, somewhere.
As darkness thickened, my thoughts went to my father. It had been nearly a year since his death and I had nothing of his to touch. I was in a wilderness where he had never set foot, where his spirit would not even know to look for me. I tried to remember everything I could about him. Anything. My freakish mind could conjure up sketches of the future but none of my father’s features, not the smell or feel of him. I cried, a little.
I tried to go to bed early but the groans and rustlings of night turned sinister, if not in actuality then in my imagination. I became afraid. I rose and dressed and walked without thinking down the moist bank, to the Chinamen’s camp.
The man and boy sat across their fire from each other as I approached, not speaking. Their hats were off and their heads—bald and yellow save for the thick tuft of bound hair at their napes—glowed in the firelight. There was something peaceful in their silence, and their fire was large and warm. The boy saw me first and startled. The man turned slowly, and I saw him reach for a switch at his side.
“I’m unarmed,” I said, and raised my empty hands. They spoke in their language for a bit. It seemed they were trying to decipher why I’d come, or perhaps I ascribed those aims to them because I was wondering myself. Eventually the man gestured for me to sit between them.
“Cold out,” I said, though it wasn’t particularly. They said nothing. “Have you all been hearing those hollers?” I asked. Still, they said nothing. We watched the fire. After some time a pocket of sap popped loudly and I jumped like a Mexican bean. The elder man seemed to find this exceedingly funny. When he was through laughing, he said something to me in his language.
“He say you get a letter,” said the boy.
“No,” I said. “Not today.”
He told his father.
“Sad,” said the boy. He was only a child, I saw then, younger than I had originally estimated, but with a sharpness about the eyes that conveyed sure ripsniptiousness.
“Yes,” I said.
A man yelped somewhere.
I felt the need to tell him that I didn’t care for drink and the boy found this remarkable enough to relay to his father, who nodded what seemed like approval. We were quiet a little longer.
“Say,” I said to the boy. “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Why have you both been following us the way you have? Why not find a claim of your own? Seems a fool’s strategy to mine what’s already been mined, if you will excuse my saying so.”
The child conveyed my question to his father. They exchanged words for what seemed a good long time. I grew nervous and said, “Tell him never mind.”
But the boy waved his thin hand in dismissal. Finally, he turned to me. “He say too many tongs killed that way.”