I returned the pipe and I watched the old man at it. At this proximity I could see the many wrinkles like folds at his small eyes and around his mouth. He finished his puffing and smiled, and when he did I saw that his teeth were brown and soft with rot. I tried the pipe again, with more success. He took his pigtail in his hand and brushed its end on his own palm. The boy did the same. I had a good feeling from them.
“But how do you make a living, working tailings the way you do?” I said.
The nephew smiled a devious little smile. “I find smallest gold,” he said. “Smallest and smallest. I see things white men do not.”
I sat with them for some time, accepting and passing the ivory instrument and listening to the two talk. Sometimes, the boy would pause to translate some of their conversation for me:
“He say winter no trouble in Gum Shan.”
“He say take much care with ball of mud.”
“He say tong war coming.”
I did not understand what the old man meant by these, but that didn’t matter. I was very warm and now pleasantly drowsy, as though I had been submerged slowly into a hot bath. I removed my glasses and held them in my hand, content to watch the blur of the fire and listen. Their language seemed a beautiful thing, something I ought to have understood.
And then the elder Chinaman began to sing.
At first he sang so softly that I wasn’t sure his song wasn’t something I was imagining, a trick of the fire and the river. But then the boy joined in and they raised their voices together. They sounded like instruments, their voices. I thought nothing of Errol, except to note that I felt more at ease now than I had since setting foot aboard that steamer in Cincinnati. And though the two sang in their Orient language I knew by way of feeling that their song was about fleas and lice and vultures and bluejays and marmots and coons and cougars and grizzly bears, and through their soothing melody all these once frightful and malevolent creatures streamed into my heart as though it were Noah’s, and nested there harmoniously.
X. AN OPHIR, AN EDEN
I was awoken by my own sickness. It was morning and though I had no recollection of returning to my camp nor of putting myself to bed, I lay with my torso in the tent, shirtless. I managed to rise and express my queasiness in a nearby manzanita bush. Only after I rose did I see Errol.
He lay face up between the tent and the river, where he’d made a pillow of a stone. He was bare-footed, bare-headed, and bare-legged. His shirt was the only clothes upon his person. A pile of maple leaves had been assembled and arranged to conceal his parts. As I washed myself in the chilly river he woke, groaning.
Errol walked into the woods and emerged sometime later, dressed. “I’ve misplaced my long johns,” he said.
“That is a shame,” I said. “Because we’ve no means to replace them.” I felt in no top shape myself but was not about to betray the fact to my brother. He came and looked at the salt pork I was fixing and groaned again. He smelled strongly of tanglelegs.
That morning we two worked at the cradle just as inefficiently as ever. The only difference was that Errol silently took up the harder work at the shovel. We did not speak. Near noon he paused in his ditching, nodded to my head and said, “See here, Joshua. I apologize for that. I do. Will you just speak to me again?”
“Will you consider taking them on?” My question surprised me.
“They’re filthy,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“We’re filthy,” I said. “We’ve got a city of slows on each our heads. You’ve got no long johns.”
He spit.
“We need them, Errol. All the Negroes are free. All the Indians are owned. This is a new place, Errol. They work hard and they’re honest. We are Argonauts. Christians. We needn’t bring the prejudices of the East with us.”
“Argonauts,” Errol said. “You’ve got a good heart, brother.”
“We won’t have to pay them as we would a white.”
Errol said nothing.
“They work like dogs. They’ve been pulling dust from our old holes.”
This caught my brother’s attention. “Have they?”
“The boy has a keen eye.”
“And how did you come by all this? Been over there, have you?”
“No.” It was easier to lie to him now, after the first. I was thrilled by how easy it was. “I’ve seen it.”
“You’re sure about this?” said Errol.
I ought to have hesitated from guilt. But it felt good to be heeded, and to be making decisions for once. “They’re there, with us.” I closed my eyes. “The boy pulls a nugget.”
He deliberated a moment then said, “They get fifteen percent of our findings between them. They don’t sleep in our camp. They don’t socialize with us.”
“Agreed.” I was relieved, though by logic I shouldn’t have been. All I’d done was recruit men enough to better sift through rock that could very well yield nothing. But perhaps I’d come to believe my lies, too. If nothing else, I believed that if only we could stay in one place long enough, California would offer herself to us. And I liked the Chinaman. I liked his boy.
“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 in 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 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.