Very occasionally I watched the coachman pluck a dirty, tattered envelope from his stack and hand it down. The coarse men nearest the coach took the letter as delicately as they might a baby and passed it among them until it reached its rightful owner. As the lucky man opened the letter the others moved away, as if to make room for his reading.
As we neared the coach we spotted the Southern ruffian sitting on a log, holding a letter gingerly between his massive hands. His beard was wet with tears. “Happy devil,” Errol said.
By the time Errol and I approached, the deliveryman’s bundle had become terribly thin.
“Boyle,” Errol shouted, although it was not quite our turn. “Letter for Boyle?”
The coachman, who had by now taken a seat on the edge of the cab roof, searched his skinny bundle. It did not take long. “No letter,” he said.
“You’re sure?” said Errol. But the man had already solicited the next eager miner.
“Please, sir,” I called out. “Check again. The name’s Boyle. Errol. Or Joshua.”
The coachman did check again, God bless him. “Apologies, my boy. Maybe next time.”
I set out in the direction of the river. Errol did not follow me. When I turned, he was standing in the middle of Main Street, which at the time was nothing more than a dirt thoroughfare. His face was blank and he stared at the ground between us. His hands were upturned queerly, as though he carried a burden I could not see.
“Suppose I’ll stay in town a bit,” he said.
“And do what?” I said. But he was already shuffling toward the tavern.
“Forget her,” I called. “She puts on airs.”
He came at me swinging to heaven, and struck me once upside the head with a tight, demonic fist. I collapsed, hiding my head beneath my arms. I thought he would strike me again where I lay, but instead he said only, “Don’t.”
IX. BEASTS OF THE TERRITORY
I panned our claim halfheartedly and alone for what remained of that day, palming secretly the tender knob on my skull. By dusk Errol had not returned. I watched the sunset, gnawing on a rind of salt pork and listening to the heartsick yowls of drunken Forty-Niners. Errol was somewhere among them, I knew, blubbering about Marjorie. I cursed him. How my body complained, how my stomach wanted, how close we had both come to death how many times so he might win the good favor of a girl whose father owned a stinking soap factory!
I found his pitiful notching stick and snapped it, then snapped it again. I threw the pieces into the fire. I learned from the diggings that a love of destruction is in every man’s heart, somewhere.
As darkness thickened, my thoughts went to my father. It had been nearly a year since his death and I had nothing of his to touch. I was in a wilderness where he had never set foot, where his spirit would not even know to look for me. I tried to remember everything I could about him. Anything. My freakish mind could conjure up sketches of the future but none of my father’s features, not the smell or feel of him. I cried, a little.
I tried to go to bed early but the groans and rustlings of night turned sinister, if not in actuality then in my imagination. I became afraid. I rose and dressed and walked without thinking down the moist bank, to the Chinamen’s camp.
The man and boy sat across their fire from each other as I approached, not speaking. Their hats were off and their heads — bald and yellow save for the thick tuft of bound hair at their napes — glowed in the firelight. There was something peaceful in their silence, and their fire was large and warm. The boy saw me first and startled. The man turned slowly, and I saw him reach for a switch at his side.
“I’m unarmed,” I said, and raised my empty hands. They spoke in their language for a bit. It seemed they were trying to decipher why I’d come, or perhaps I ascribed those aims to them because I was wondering myself. Eventually the man gestured for me to sit between them.
“Cold out,” I said, though it wasn’t particularly. They said nothing. “Have you all been hearing those hollers?” I asked. Still, they said nothing. We watched the fire. After some time a pocket of sap popped loudly and I jumped like a Mexican bean. The elder man seemed to find this exceedingly funny. When he was through laughing, he said something to me in his language.
“He say you get a letter,” said the boy.
“No,” I said. “Not today.”
He told his father.
“Sad,” said the boy. He was only a child, I saw then, younger than I had originally estimated, but with a sharpness about the eyes that conveyed sure ripsniptiousness.
“Yes,” I said.
A man yelped somewhere.
I felt the need to tell him that I didn’t care for drink and the boy found this remarkable enough to relay to his father, who nodded what seemed like approval. We were quiet a little longer.
“Say,” I said to the boy. “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“Why have you both been following us the way you have? Why not find a claim of your own? Seems a fool’s strategy to mine what’s already been mined, if you will excuse my saying so.”
The child conveyed my question to his father. They exchanged words for what seemed a good long time. I grew nervous. “Tell him never mind,” I said.
But the boy waved his thin hand in dismissal. Finally, he turned to me. “He say too many tongs killed that way.”
“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.