Every citizen knows that miners are all sorts of souls. They come into a country, I seen it a thousand times, and strip away all the beauty, and then there is black filth in the rivers and the trees just seem to wither back like affronted maids. They like rough food, rough whisky, rough nights, and truth to tell, if you is a Indian girl, they will like you in all the wrong ways. Miners go into tent towns and do their worst. There were never such raping men as miners, some of them. Other miners are teachers, professors in more civilised lands, fallen priests and bankrupt storeowners, men whose women have abandoned them as useless fixtures. Every brand and gradation of soul, as the crop measurer might say, and will say. But they all came into Noone’s saloon and there was a change, a mighty change. Because we were pretty girls and we were the darlings of their souls. And anyhow, Mr Noone was standing at the bar with a shotgun handy in front of him, in plain sight. You wouldn’t believe the latitude the law allows in America for a saloon owner to be killing miners, it’s wide.
Maybe we were like memories of elsewhere. Maybe we were the girls of their youth, the girls they had first loved. Man, we was so clean and nice, I wished I could of met myself. Maybe for some, we were the first girls they loved. Every night for two years we danced with them, there was never a moment of unwelcome movements. That’s a fact. It might be more exciting to say we had crotches pushed against us, and tongues pushed into our mouths, or calloused hands grabbing at our imaginary breasts, but no. They was the gentlemen of the frontier, in that saloon. They fell down pulverised by whisky in the small hours, they roared with songs, they shot at each other betimes over cards, they battered each other with fists of iron, but when it came to dancing they were that pleasing d’Artagnan in the old romances. Big pigs’ bellies seemed to flatten out and speak of more elegant animals. Men shaved for us, washed for us, and put on their finery for us, such as it was. John was Joanna, myself was Thomasina. We danced and we danced. We whirled and we whirled. Matter of fact, end of all we were good dancers. We could waltz, slow and fast, foxtrot and even against the Yankee politics of that district, the Charleston. We swirled about in our dresses and Mr Carmody the storeman’s wife, Mrs Carmody of course by name, being a seamstress, let out our outfits as the months went by. Maybe it is a mistake to feed vagrants, but mostly we grew upward instead of out. Maybe we were changing, but we were still the girls we had been in our customers’ eyes. They spoke well of us and men came in from miles around to view us and get their name on our little cardboard lists. ‘Why, miss, will you do me the honour of a dance?’ ‘Why, yes, sir, I have ten minutes left at quarter of twelve, if you care to fill that vacancy.’ ‘I will be most obliged.’ Two useless, dirt-risen boys never had such entertainment. We was asked our hands in marriage, we was offered carts and horses if we would consent to go into camp with such and such a fella, we was given gifts such as would not have embarrassed a desert Arab in Arabia, seeking his bride. But of course, we knew the story in our story. They knew it too, maybe, now I am considering it. They were free to offer themselves into the penitentiary of matrimony because they knew it was imaginary. It was all aspects of freedom, happiness, and joy.
For that filthy vile life of a miner is a bleak life and only one in ten thousand finds his gold, truth to tell. Course in Daggsville they was digging for lead so all the more true. Mostly that life is all muck and water. But in Mr Noone’s saloon was two diamonds, Mr Noone said.
But nature will have his way and bit by bit the bloom wore off us, and we was more like boys than girls, and more like men than women. John Cole anyhow in particular saw big changes in them two years. He was beginning to give giraffes a run for their money, height-wise. Mr Noone couldn’t find dresses to fit him, and Mrs Carmody couldn’t stitch fast enough. It was the end of an era, God knowed. One of the happiest works I ever had. Then the day came when Mr Noone had to speak. And we was shaking hands then in the dawnlight, and tears even were shed, and we were going to be just memories of diamonds in Daggsville. Mr Noone says he will send us a letter every feast day of St Thomas and St John and give us all the news. And we was to do likewise. And we lit out with our bit of dollars saved for our hoped-for cavalry days. And the queer thing was, Daggsville was deserted that morning, and no one to cheer us away. We knew we was just fragments of legend and had never really existed in that town. There is no better feeling.
CHAPTER TWO
ALL THIS TO SAY, we joined up together. Well, our old business has gone bust just from what nature does naturally to the body. Soon after training we were being hiked out across the Oregon trail towards California. It was supposed to be weeks and weeks of riding and then turn left at some place I forget, otherwise you would find yourself in Oregon. It was supposed to be and it was. Lots of dilapidated Indians in Missouri as we rode through, they were even riding the rivers, moving about a great deal anyhows, some of them travelling to get their government annuities maybe, even as far as up Canada way. Sad, dirty-looking people. And plenty of New Englanders heading west, maybe a few Scandinavians, but mostly Americans, upping sticks and off they’d go. You kept away from the Mormons heading into Utah, you couldn’t trust those mad boys. They had the devil’s rep. If you fight them you got to kill them, our sergeant said, but I don’t know if he ever did. Then you had the desert that wasn’t really a desert. Lots of bones of pilgrims’ cattle though, and now and then along the way, a piano thrown out from a wagon, or a cupboard, as the oxen weakened at their task. Drought was the worst thing there. It was a mighty queer thing to see a black piano in the half-true desert.
Hey, John Cole, what in the name of tarnation that piano doing there in the dust?
Must be looking for a saloon, he says.
Man, we were laughing. The sergeant gave us his black look, but the major ignored us, he was probably thinking about that desert. Where’s the water going to come from in a few days, when the water-bottles are empty? We were hoping he had a map, something marked there, we hoped he had. People had been coming through there for a few years now, they said the trail was widening all the time, a mile-wide dirty mark on the prairie, every time army came through they noticed. Half of our company were crusty older men, we wondered they could still ride, some of them. It’s hard on the bollocks, and the lower back, God damn it. But how else were they to live? You rode or you died. It was always a dangerous route. One of the young men like us, that was the aforementioned Watchorn, the last year had seen wagons spread out in their hundreds, and he saw a great herd of buffalo stampede right across them, hundreds of wagoners trampled and killed. That time we were passing, he reckoned the buffalo were keeping away, he didn’t know why. They didn’t like this class of humans maybe. Never seemed to mind the Indians much. White boys were noisy smelly sonsabitches maybe, Watchorn opined. And all their whiny, caterwauling, snot-nosed kids going out to California, or up to Oregon. But all the same, said Trooper Watchorn, yep, I do wants a parcel of kids myself someday. He reckoned he would like fourteen, like his ma. He was a Catholic man, rare in America outside the Irish, but then, he was Irish, or his pa had been, in the long ago. So he said. Watchorn had a fine face, a beautiful face, he looked like a president on a coin, but he was awful damn small, maybe five foot and one measly inch, on a horse it made no odds, he just rode on a short stirrup, that worked well. He was an exceptionally agreeable man, yes, indeed.
We were out there, on the longer grass then, nearer the mountains, just passing along. We were going into someplace to get our close orders. The major knew already though, John Cole said, because he had heard him talking in the night. As for night, we slept on the ground just as we were, our uniforms stinking, the pickets guarding the horses, the horses muttering all through the small hours, talking to God as John Cole said. He couldn’t make that lingo out. It was going to be a week of riding yet, us three hundred souls, and now our scouts came in, two Shawnee lads with their sign language as good as words, and told us they’d seen buffalo seven miles to the north-east, so we were going to choose a party tomorrow to go north and try and kill a few. If I was not the best shot of three hundred I was a liar. I don’t know why, I never shot a gun till training. You got a beady eye, said the drill sergeant. I could soon shoot a hare dead, centre of the head, a hundred feet, no trouble. Better not starve before we go to do our work. We knew in our hearts our work was to be Indians. People in California wanted rid of them. Wanted them routed out. Troopers couldn’t take the bounty legal-wise of course but someone high up had agreed to help. There was two dollars per scalp for a civilian, for God’s sake. It was a funny way to earn your card-money. Volunteers were going out and shoot maybe sixty bucks and bring the bodies in.