One day the boy snared a deer, and that evening we sat smoking and pulling greasy venison from the spit. Full of roast meat and smoke, I found myself going on and on. I talked mostly of Errol, of the darkness I saw in him and the light I saw in him, too. Of my fear of what would become of him in the territory without me. Then, without thinking, I said to the boy, “I have peculiar vision, too. Like you at the sluice. I can see what’s not yet happened. It’s a condition I have. A deformity.”
He translated this to his uncle, who paused at his venison shank, sifted another thatch of black powder into the bowl, and handed it to me. As I took it, he spoke through the boy.
He said, “There are many people see in all directions. At home, seers set bones in fire, read future in the cracks. These men are…” The boy searched for the appropriate word, settling finally for two. “A gift.”
Something went through me then: a phantasm that warmed me, physically. The sensation of truly belonging in a place and a moment is a rare one. I have not felt it since.
The Chinaman had contentedly taken up his venison again. I must have gaped at it for some time, because the boy leaned toward me. “Wrong bone.”
Errol never asked what I did when he was away, and I never told him. I grew more content, and he became more wretched. Often he would stay in some parlor or another until dawn, then walk the three miles back to the river and take up his post at the rocker, emitting a stench that could have felled a man at sixty rod. By now our silt had given way to orangey clay, then black rock. Each day Errol looked more deranged. This was the state of things when the second stagecoach came.
XIV. THE SECOND COACH
We heard the news from a man who hollered it across the diggings. Errol stopped his rocking, rinsed his soiled hands and face in the river, replaced his hat, and said, “I have a letter to retrieve.” Then he set off without a word.
The tongs continued their digging and sifting. The old man was wary of large gatherings, and rightfully so. Forty-niners were a volatile bunch of drunkards and criminals, especially with their sentiments roused. And nothing so roused them as a mail coach.
I had to follow Errol. I had the sense that my brother stood at a crevasse, that the vellum keeping him on this side was as thin as a sheet of Marjorie Salter’s stationery.
The stagecoach had stopped beneath the arms of a giant, leafless valley oak, and men were already gathered around it. Suddenly, I felt a pressing at my brow. The arrangement of the bare branches’ veiny shadows along the side and top of the coach and the dusty pool of men’s hats beneath it sent forth an augury. I saw from the beginning how the end would be. I saw Errol approach the coach, and saw him fail to receive the letter he so anxiously wanted. I pressed my hand to my forehead but took it away before my brother should notice.
The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.
At that moment I traveled down a long-forgotten tunnel of memory. At the end of the tunnel I found a cat. When I was nine or so, Errol twelve or thirteen, our mother let us feed a litter of barn cats. There was one for each of us children. Mine was white, with gray boots and gray, eyebrowlike markings. I called her Isabel, because I thought Isabel was the soundest name for a cat that ever there was. Errol called her Eyeballs, probably because she was a touch bulge-eyed. Each time I said Isabel—when I fed her or just when I went out to be with her—Errol would be right there, saying Eyeballs, Eyeballs. I can still hear him. And lo, the family started calling her Eyeballs, too. People took to Errol like that, even our own parents. He had a way of making you love him even while he was being cruel. I don’t know why, but I think we could have been all right, Errol and I; I could have put up with his temper and his beating on me and the way he’d get quiet and mean at the smallest thing bothering him. I think I could have forgiven him all this, could have been on good terms with him come December of 1849, when we rounded the glade and saw the coach spidered with the shadows of oak limbs. I could have warned Errol of the heartbreak I saw at the coach, and maybe he would have been better able to accept it. Maybe not, but maybe so. Maybe we would not have been plunged down the dark path we were on. If only I had spoken up. If only he had let Isabel be Isabel.
And so I stood in line watching Errol worry the brim of his hat and squatting on occasion to sift some dirt through his fingers or toss pebbles. When at last we reached the coachman Errol nudged me to indicate that I should call our name, maybe out of secret superstition or because his voice had gone with nerves. I showed surprise at the gesture, though of course I had none.
“Boyle,” I called. The coachman checked his bundle.
“Here,” he said, passing down a lovely vanilla-colored envelope. I reached to receive it but Errol snatched it from the driver. His hands trembled as his large fingers carefully negotiated the letter from its paper case. He was smiling. It had been a long time since I had seen him smile. Then, nearly the instant he unfolded the paper, he dropped it to the ground, where our two pairs of boots faced each other. I retrieved the letter as Errol walked away from me. My dear sons, it began, as I knew it would.
From there I was back in the realm of the unafflicted, where we cannot know what will come next. I expected Errol to embark on another binge, and I braced myself for it. But he set out in the direction of the river instead and I followed, losing myself in reading our mother’s letter as I went. I had never been so delighted to hear of my sisters’ schoolwork or the comings and goings of livestock. I read and reread it all the way back to camp. December had crisped the air pleasantly, and the day was beautiful.
XV. THE DIGGING
That afternoon, Errol resumed his post at the rocker. His working did not soothe me. The Chinamen gave him a wide berth. Come sundown, the hour when we usually retired, Errol stayed at the rocker. I dismissed the tongs and stayed with him, clumsily shoveling and rinsing. I thought hard work might cleanse him of heartbreak and was happy to keep him in ore, if that would do it. But soon it grew so dark that there was no chance that Errol could determine the character of the sediment coming down the sluice. And anyway he was looking not at the sluice but at the stars.
Eventually I stabbed the shovel into the rock and said, “I think I’ll heat some beans. Care for some?”
“No. I don’t think so,” said Errol, taking up the shovel. I fixed dinner and set some on his stump for him. As I ate I watched his futile efforts at the shovel, then the bucket, then the rocker, then the shovel again. He stayed at the shovel then, with his breath puffing into the cold like the stack of a steamboat. I went to bed with him still at it, figuring he would exhaust his frustrations and retire in his own time. I fell asleep to the skeletal scrape of iron against bedrock.
And in the morning I woke to it.
I emerged from our tent but Errol was nowhere in sight. I could hear his work but not see him. There was the cradle, unmanned. In the place where I had last seen him was a large mound of dirt. Beyond it, a pit. I approached. Down at the bottom of the pit was my brother, shoveling earth as steadily as he had been six hours before. The hole was likely five feet deep and vaguely rectangular. The shape of it alone frightened me, but I composed myself and adopted an air of nonchalance.