“And they don’t eat with us,” Errol added. “I’ll gut them if they try to eat with us.”
“Agreed,” I said. I did not ask who in the world would want to join us for our twice-daily pork sludge.
I brokered our new arrangement through the boy. They seemed at first not to understand the proposal, but then I took them over to where Errol stood at the cradle, shoveling a load of river rock into the hopper and then doing his best to pour water over the apron and rock the mud down the riffles at the same time. At such a pathetic sight, apparently, they immediately grasped the proposed cooperation. I was less confident in my ability to explain the proposed financial terms, but they seemed to accept the fifteen percent without comment. I wonder now if they believed they had no choice.
My brother remained silent until the conversation was over. Then he handed the Chinaman the shovel.
The arrangement worked well—the Chinaman on the shovel, me on the bucket, Errol on the rocker, and the boy at the sluice, to spot color. Errol grumbled that the boy was lollygagging there and ought to be hauling pay dirt. I reminded him of the boy’s sharp eyes, to which he made a vulgar remark that I will not transcribe. I am sad to say that my brother routinely unleashed the heat of his character on our Chinamen during those days. He forbade them from speaking to each other in their language. He prohibited them from donning their straw hats and insisted their robes be cinched up tightly. It was not uncommon for foreigners or Negroes to be treated so cruelly, even in Ohio. But it seemed a particular injustice in the territory, because it was a place brand-new, like nothing we had ever seen, far from the achievements of civilization but also from its ugliness. California was an Ophir, not an Eden.
For two days a pair of old Pikes passing through camped near our claim. With them as audience, Errol strode over to the boy one afternoon and began tugging at his robes. “Where is it?” he shouted. He turned to me. “He’s pocketed a nugget. I saw him. Hand it over, you devil.”
The Chinaman stopped his shoveling. The boy, fairly shaken, denied taking anything.
“Turn out your pockets,” demanded Errol.
“He has none,” I said. It was the truth and Errol knew it was. Still, he pilfered the folds of the boy’s robe saying, Dirty thief, stinking tong. The Chinaman moved cautiously closer to Errol and the boy.
Suddenly Errol whirled around, red faced, and pounced on the Chinaman. He drew his knife and took hold of the man’s black pigtail.
I was quite frightened, and the boy was by now hysteric. But the Chinaman was still. Errol put the knife to the pigtail and spoke into the man’s sun-scarred face. “Are you a citizen of California or not?” he asked.
“He can’t understand you,” I called, trying to remain calm. “Let him be.”
Errol released the Chinaman as quickly as he’d grabbed him. He returned to the sluice as if it had all been a great tease, the Pikes up the bank snarling with laughter. But it was no tease. I had heard rumors out of Hangtown of three tongs hung by their pigtails from a tree, their throats slit.
XI. THE FORTUNE FORETOLD
Despite Errol’s occasional volatility, the boy was soon pulling color from the sluice. It was chispa so small and aggregated that no white man would have ever dug it, and Errol said as much—but it was gold all the same. I directed the boy to deposit his findings in our mustard jar. In this way, little by little, day by day, we did accumulate some dust. Errol went to town whenever he had the chance, where he spent his share on card games and spirit. I spent my share on provisions. One Sabbath I had pork and beans. Another, while Errol was away, the Chinamen and I had secret roast beef and potatoes. That rump could have been the toughest, most befouled muscle ever served a man, but to my starved tongue it was gravy-slopped ambrosia.
Then, the day of the first frost, the boy approached Errol and without celebration presented him a grape-size yellow nugget, cool with river water.
My brother did not immediately take the nugget, as I’d always imagined he would. Instead, he leaped to embrace me, taking a long, affectionate look into my anomalous, all-seeing eyes.
After some celebration, Errol spirited the nugget into the tent, pounded it carefully to test for softness, distributed a petal of the malleable color to the Chinamen and a larger leaf to me. Pinching it, I was besieged by fantasies of sardines, tongue, turtle soup, lobster, cakes and pies by the cartful, a box of juicy golden peaches. Unsettling, how swiftly a tiny bead of element could enchant.
Errol instructed us all to continue. “More will come,” he called out merrily, barely containing his urge to wink at me. And it seemed more would come, the day we found our nugget, the day my brother’s infinite faith intersected with coincidence, the day of the first frost.
XII. WAR!
Two days later, Errol appeared by my side late one morning and said, “There’s something I want you to see.”
My brother fidgeted with his hands in his pockets excitedly as I followed him to Angel’s Camp. “What is it?” I asked several times. His only reply was, “Something you’ll have to see to believe.” We passed the Swede’s and continued down a small hill to where a glade flattened out. Many men were gathered there and my heart picked up some, with fantasies of a second mail coach or a bundle of letters lost and now found. But near the crowd Errol halted and tapped a poster nailed to the trunk of a pine:
I had heard of Spaniards hosting contests of men versus bulls and the prospect of witnessing this even higher spectacle excited me. Errol and I hustled nearer the arena, which was composed of tiered seats enclosed by a wood slat fence. We could not see inside. Near the entrance two fiddlers played a lively tune, and a barker lured men by extolling the ferocity of the grizzly General Scott and the virility of the Mexican bull, whom he called Señor Cortés, much to the delight of the forty-niners.
But heavy as my pocket was, the entrance fee was prohibitive. As Errol continued to the arena I called after him, “That’s a costly admission.”
“I knew you would say that,” he said. “Follow me, cheapskate.”
I pursued him to the rear of the corral where a crab apple stood, its fruit already fallen and rotting in the grass. He climbed near to the top of the tree, then helped me up. From there we were afforded a splendid view of the arena.
“Look there,” said Errol, pointing to the clearing at its center. “Your foe.” There, tethered by a chain staked into the ground, was a massive grizzly bear. He scratched and scooped at the earth, his great scapulas moving like the machinery of a steam engine. He was carving a burrow for himself, it seemed. Even from our great distance we could see the thick neck shimmering, the monstrous hump at his back swaying, his knifelike claws making shreds of the meadow and the hard-packed soil. I both wished him to roar and feared that he would.
“Now that you’ve seen one you’ll be less afraid,” said Errol. I swelled with affection for him then, for I had not thought he’d noticed my fears. This was how I wanted us to be, always.