The barker was riling the crowd, playing on their terror. I scanned the bronzed and bearded faces under hats of many hues, the gay Mexican blankets and the blue and red bonnets of the French. Among all those like mirages were Mexican women in frilly white frocks, puffing on their cigaritas. Until then I had ever conceived that my wife would be a Buckeye, or perhaps a New Englander. But from where I was perched in that crab apple tree it seemed impossible to choose a bony, board-shaped descendant of the Puritans over one of these rosy, full-formed, sprightly Spaniard women.
Errol said, uncannily, “I’ll marry Marjorie in a meadow like this. Beneath a tree.”
“I expect so,” I managed.
“I’ll marry her here; then I will build us a great big house on the same spot. Soon, Angel’s Camp will be bigger than San Francisco. I’ll have more land than Sutter. I’ll buy the Swede’s store out from under him. Mr. Salter will have to buy a parcel from me. No.” Glee flickered across his face. “I’ll give him one.”
Errol’s gaze cast out from the tree, across the corral and the meadow and beyond. “Marj and I will have sons enough to line the American River. You’ll be there, too. An uncle.”
It touched me to be included like this, in both the fight and the fantasy. “And Mother,” I said.
“Yes, Mother, too. And Mary and Harriet and Faith and Louisa, too. Everyone.”
Then we were quiet, because we knew it would not be everyone.
By now the action below was nearly afoot. The bear General Scott had achieved a burrow several hands deep and presently he lumbered into it and lay there on his back, much in the manner of a happy baby. The crowd hated him for his merriment and screamed for the release of the bull. They stomped an infectious rhythm. Errol and I thumped the branches of our tree, too.
From the far end of the arena came a large, muscular bull, with horns like none I had ever seen. The crowd went mute.
“Here we go,” whispered Errol.
“Are they going to unchain the bear?” I asked. Errol hushed me.
Initially, the bull seemed not even to notice the bear, so one of the vaqueros jabbed the bull in the rump with a prod, sending the beast galloping from the periphery. This was when he locked eyes on the bear. He stomped and snorted a bit, and then charged General Scott where he lay in his den. I gripped my limb as the bull struck the General in his flank, sending a frightful thunk through the meadowland. A cheer escaped from the crowd.
The bull retreated and immediately charged again. But this time the bear affixed his powerful jaws to the bull’s nose. The bull let out an unsettling cry. But the General would not relent. He latched his forepaws around the bull’s thick neck and held on. I whooped, and in so doing discovered my allegiance lay with the bear General Scott.
The bull attempted to free himself by pounding the General’s chest with his mighty hooves. In response, the General dug his foreclaws into the meat of the bull’s brawny shoulder. Blood spurted, and Errol and I both cheered. The animals separated. Where the bull’s nose had been was now only a dark cavity from which dangled stringy bloodpulp. “My,” I breathed.
Errol said, “Aren’t you a delicate betty?”
The bull paused, then charged again, only to be locked by the General’s devastating, traplike hug. The match went on like this, with the bull trying to hook the General and toss him out of his hole, the General gripping his antagonist and attempting to pull him down to where the bull might be ribboned. The crowd soon grew restless and booed the flagging bull. The impresario emerged, waving his hat, and announced that for two hundred dollars in gold he would release another bull. The hat was passed and the flakes raised. I heard some miners accuse the barker of saving his strongest bull to squeeze more color from them, and when the second bull was released I saw that it was likely true, for this bull stood half a rod taller than the first. His horns were twice as girthy and appeared to have been sharpened.
“Oh,” said Errol, some trepidation in his voice.
With both bulls in the arena, General Scott was sorely tried. The first and smaller bull continued with his strategy of charging the grizzly and grappling with him, while the second bull attacked from the side. Soon the larger, nameless bull speared the General in his ribs and dragged him from his hole. The grizzly roared then, his long, blood-covered teeth gleaming in the November sun. It was a forlorn, haunting sound, not at all the monstrous bellow I had yearned for at the battle’s onset.
Errol had gone quiet. His hand was drawn to his mouth, as was mine.
Exposed in the grassy open, the bear was a pincushion. Horns penetrated his abdomen, his ribs, his haunches and his back. One goring went into his throat and out the other side. Another stabbed his stomach and sliced up and out near the sternum, letting the bear’s guts spill onto the grass. A hot fecal smell filled the air, causing the ladies to bring their kerchiefs to their mouths. There seemed no end to the blood that would spurt from this beast. Soon all the meadowland was wet with it.
The crowd had gone quiet and still, transfixed by the carnage. Finally the impresario directed his vaqueros to lasso the bulls and bring them in. He marched to the center of the arena, where General Scott lay grunting and gurgling in the mud made by his own innards, and declared the bulls the victors of the day. Without warning, he shot the General dead.
The mob slowly shuffled from the arena, no uproar or gaiety left in them. The fiddlers held their fiddle cases to their chests. Errol and I stayed unmoving at our branch perch for just a bit, the vinegar smell from the rotten apples rising all around us. When we finally climbed down, the descent reminded me of how high my spirits had been upon climbing into the tree, and how low they were now.
As we walked it began to rain and we went on, letting the rain get us. Somewhere, I thought, those señoritas are running with their lovely white dresses gathered in their hands.
After some time Errol said, “I believe that was a spectacle I would have rather prevented than witnessed.”
“Me, too,” I told him, and we went on in silence.
It had been easy to succumb to my own deceptions while eating plum duff and roast beef in the sunlight. But now they were suddenly undeniable. We were returning to a ten-by-ten plot of land which I had deceived my brother into believing held his fortune. All my brother had accumulated in California was a gambler’s thirst and some salty talk. I was a liar, a manipulator and a freak.
I said, “You should marry her in a church.”
“Don’t you know?” Errol said. The rain had stopped now, leaving all the leaves and the soil wet and fragrant and colored vividly. “This is the greatest church there is.”
XIII. ORACLE BONES
I had promised that more gold would come but more gold would not come, and after that mournful battle Errol was sick with expectation. He went to town whenever he had the chance, where he spent his share of element on card games and brandy and tarantula juice.
With him gone I spent more time with the Chinamen. The little one was an ace with a rock and it was one of my favorite pastimes to skip stones across the river with him. Sometimes we three whittled miniature boats to race on the water. The elder carved using a small blade with a milky jade handle the exact color of the river at dawn. His ships were the most graceful and well designed. Some of the happiest hours of my life were spent after a whiff or two off the Chinaman’s ivory pipe, watching those moonlit vessels spear along the nighttime water and vanish into the darkness.
Some evenings the tongs took turns shaving each other’s heads with the jade knife while I read aloud from the two volumes I had to my name. (The tongs preferred Odysseus to Christ.) One night the boy interrupted my reading to ask whether I might teach him. I was a frightful tutor, I fear, but his sharpness hid my inadequacies and soon he had memorized Homer’s first song. Muse! sing the Man by long experience tried, /Who, fertile in resources, wander’d wide. He orated to his uncle, with the old one smiling dutifully, as though he understood every fine word.