“Which?”
“Like you say. Find own claim.”
“I don’t follow.”
“He say you find lode, men happy.” He pointed to me and then to the river. “Tong find lode men say ‘steal.’ They say ‘hang.’”
The old man spoke again, and the boy’s gaze went to the ground.
“What did he say?” I asked.
The boy looked at me. “He say to tell you my father hang that way.”
“He’s not your papa?” I said, gesturing to the Chinaman. “Your father, I mean.”
“He shu fu,” said the boy. “Uncle.”
So we sat, two fatherless boys, two brotherless men. We watched the fire a little longer. I thought it was perhaps time for me to go, and that I should not have come at all.
Just then the elder Chinaman spoke to the boy. In turn the boy fetched a long wooden box from the tent and delivered it to his uncle. The box had been polished up nicely and gleamed in the firelight. The Chinaman removed the carved lid and lifted a long tubular object from the box. Initially I thought the apparatus was a flute or some similar musical instrument of the Orient. The stem of it seemed to be made of a lightwood and the lower portion had been adorned with a saddle of stamped brass. On this saddle was mounted a delicately grooved bulb made of earthenware, the top hemisphere of which the Chinaman presently removed.
From the wooden box he lifted what looked like a lady’s perfume bottle and deposited some of its coalish black dust into the bulb’s tiny compartment. At that point it occurred to me that the device was a type of smoking pipe.
The Chinaman reattached the bulb’s lid, then bent and pulled a branch from the fire by its unburned end. The lit end of the stick flickered wickishly. He held the branch in one hand and the pipe in the other and tilted the pipe so the flame rippled around the bulb. He puffed there for some time before offering it to me.
My father had been a tobacco smoker. He especially liked his pipe late at night, on the back steps. In this way the Chinaman evoked some of the memories I had been longing for. I took the apparatus. The Chinaman held the stick to the bulb and said something.
“He say breathe,” said the boy. He tapped his own breastbone. “Breathe here.”
The apparatus was heavier than I had imagined, and had a fine, sturdy feel. I wiped the fluted end, put my lips to it and felt that the cylinder was made not of lightwood but of ivory. I puffed as the Chinaman had and he made sounds that I interpreted as encouragement. I took what felt like a chestful and immediately my lungs revolted, setting off a great avalanche of coughs. The Chinaman laughed at this, too.
I returned the pipe and I watched the old man at it. At this proximity I could see the many wrinkles like folds at his small eyes and around his mouth. He finished his puffing and smiled. His teeth were brown and soft with rot. I tried the pipe again, with more success. He took his pigtail in his hand and brushed its end on his own palm. The boy did the same. I had a good feeling from them.
“But how do you make a living, working tailings the way you do?” I said.
The nephew smiled a devious little smile. “I find smallest gold,” he said. “Smallest and smallest. I see things white men do not.”
I sat with them for some time, accepting and passing the ivory instrument and listening to the two talk. Sometimes, the boy would pause to translate some of their conversation for me:
“He say winter no trouble in Gum Shan.”
“He say take much care with ball of mud.”
“He say tong war coming.”
I did not understand what the old man meant by these, but that didn’t matter. I was very warm and now pleasantly drowsy, as though I had been submerged slowly into a hot bath. I removed my glasses and held them in my hand, content to watch the blur of the fire and listen. Their language seemed a beautiful thing, something I ought to have understood.
And then the elder Chinaman began to sing.
At first he sang so softly that I wasn’t sure his song wasn’t something I was imagining, a trick of the fire and the river. But then the boy joined in and they raised their voices together. They sounded like instruments, their voices. I thought nothing of Errol, except to note that I felt more at ease now than I had since setting foot aboard that steamer in Cincinnati. And though the two sang in their Orient language I knew by way of feeling that their song was about fleas and lice and vultures and blue jays and marmots and coons and cougars and grizzly bears, and through their soothing melody all these once frightful and malevolent creatures streamed into my heart as though it were Noah’s, and nested there harmoniously.
X. AN OPHIR, AN EDEN
I was awoken by my own sickness. It was morning and though I had no recollection of returning to my camp nor of putting myself to bed, I lay with my torso in the tent, shirtless. I managed to rise and express my queasiness in a nearby manzanita bush. Only after I rose did I see Errol.
He lay faceup between the tent and the river, where he’d made a pillow of a stone. He was barefooted, bareheaded and bare-legged. His shirt was the only clothes upon his person. A pile of maple leaves had been assembled and arranged to conceal his parts. As I washed myself in the chilly river he woke, groaning.
Errol walked into the woods and emerged sometime later, dressed. “I’ve misplaced my long johns,” he said.
“That is a shame,” I said. “Because we’ve no means to replace them.” I felt in no top shape myself but was not about to betray the fact to my brother. He came and looked at the salt pork I was fixing and groaned again. He smelled strongly of tanglelegs.
That morning we two worked at the cradle just as inefficiently as ever. The only difference was that Errol silently took up the harder work at the shovel. We did not speak. Near noon he paused in his ditching, nodded to my head and said, “See here, Joshua. I apologize for that. I do. Will you just speak to me again?”
“Will you consider taking them on?” My question surprised me.
“They’re filthy,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“We’re filthy,” I said. “We’ve got a city of slows on each our heads. You’ve got no long johns.”
He spit.
“We need them, Errol. All the Negroes are free. All the Indians are owned. This is a new place, Errol. They work hard and they’re honest. We are Argonauts. Christians. We needn’t bring the prejudices of the East with us.”
“Argonauts,” Errol said. “You’ve got a good heart, brother.”
“We won’t have to pay them as we would a white.”
Errol said nothing.
“They work like dogs. They’ve been pulling dust from our old holes.”
This caught my brother’s attention. “Have they?”
“The boy has a keen eye.”
“And how did you come by all this? Been over there, have you?”
“No.” It was easier to lie to him now, after the first. I was thrilled by how easy it was. “I’ve seen it.”
Errol’s face brightened. “You’re sure about this?”
I ought to have hesitated from guilt. But it felt good to be heeded, and to be making decisions for once. “They’re there, with us.” I closed my eyes. “The boy pulls a nugget.”
He deliberated a moment, then said, “They get fifteen percent of our findings between them. They don’t sleep in our camp. They don’t socialize with us.”
“Agreed.” I was relieved, though by logic I shouldn’t have been. All I’d done was recruit men enough to better sift through rock that could very well yield nothing. But perhaps I’d come to believe my lies, too. If nothing else, I believed that if only we could stay in one place long enough, California would offer herself to us. And I liked the Chinaman. I liked his boy.