I spent that night in the Chinamen’s camp, stretched out on a flat sandy spot near the embers of the fire. Before sleep I resolved that at dawn I would descend into the hole, fight Errol into submission, and bring him up. He would return to me.
No sooner had I fallen off than I was awoken by the mournful roars of a grizzly.
I sat up and saw the bear, standing on its hind legs, staggering toward me. It bellowed and I scrambled along the ground away from the beast. He came at me. I saw in my mind the purple innards of General Scott strung along Tuolumne Meadow. My bowels spasmed.
Through sheer dumb habit I brought my spectacles to my face, and with them saw that the grizzly was no grizzly. It was my brother, naked and covered head to foot with black mud. His arms were raised over his head. He carried something there, as though to an Old Testament altar. He came closer. Moonglow shone upon his lips, blistered and cracked and bloody and trembling. The nail of one of his big toes was missing.
He thrust the trout into my hands. He had not eaten a bite of it. He bellowed again, and this time I understood the word.
“Gold!” he said again, pointing to the fish. Another man would have identified this as the raving of a lunatic. But I was dazed and accustomed to heeding my brother and did so now. I examined the mangled, mudded fish. I ran my hand along its sides and lifted its fins. Once I saw one I saw them all. Thousands of tiny gold flakes lodged amongst its scales.
The Chinaman and his boy emerged from their tent. The Chinaman was bare-chested, the first I had ever seen him so. Errol pointed a filthy, trembling finger to where he stood.
“You!” he bellowed. Errol charged at the Chinaman, toppling him to the ground. The boy shouted. Up came the sounds of fist on flesh. When the men rose, Errol had the Chinaman by his throat. The Chinaman’s eye was cut. He scratched frantically at Errol’s hands where they held him.
“You had it all,” Errol said.
The Chinaman stomped and kicked at Errol but Errol did not flinch. I stood in horror with the trout in my arms as Errol dragged the Chinaman to the river. The two descended into the slow, dark water. The Chinaman flailed wildly now, sputtering. Errol lifted the Chinaman slightly and then plunged him under the water.
I dropped the trout and ran into the river. Water filled my long johns and pulled at them. A shape moved at my side and then past me. It was the boy, plunging toward the place where his uncle was being drowned.
I did not see it immediately, only saw the boy launch himself at Errol and cling to his backside. Errol screamed and released the Chinaman and the Chinaman surfaced, gasping for air. Errol flung the boy off him. It was then that I saw the jade-handled knife still in the boy’s hand where he’d been tossed, and that Errol had a long gash across his bare haunch. Errol twisted to examine the wound and as he did so it opened and out rolled a rivulet of black blood.
The Chinaman and his nephew stood on the bank, checking each other for wounds. The boy was trembling. I approached them. They watched me a moment, then fled.
Errol looked from the gash to me. He motioned for me to come to him, but I could not. “You see,” he said, serenely. “They had it all along. It’s so clear.”
Then I fled. I could not endure the fact of his believing, believing, believing beyond the rotten end. That’s all I can say about it.
XVII. EPILOGUE
When I finally came upon San Francisco Bay, it was so dense with abandoned vessels that their masts made a leafless forest atop the water. I found work as a torchboy for the Knickerbocker Five Engine Company, and with them I fought the Christmas Eve fire of 1849 and the Saint Valentine’s blaze. When finally I had earned enough money I bought passage aboard a thousand-ton sidewheeler called Apollo, where I was the only human cargo among sacks and sacks of gold bullion. Eventually, I disembarked in Boston Harbor. I intended to return to Ohio from there, but it was many years before I was able to meet my mother, the woman whose son I had abandoned in the wilderness. I went to church, and to school. By the time I had the courage to see her I was a grown man.
While I was still in San Francisco, I read in the California Star that in Angel’s Camp two tongs, father and son, had been captured by a mob of citizens and tried for the crime of robbery and attempted murder. They were hanged, said the report, though I knew that would be their fate the night I sat hiding in the woods above Sacramento, listening to nocturnal beasts moving through the scrub, when the snow ring around the gibbous moon triggered my final augury. The Star reported that the tong boy recited a passage of Homer before he was killed.
In the years following the Rush, it became fashionable for Easterners to decorate their parlors with gilt-framed daguerreotypes of Forty-Niners. In these years I’ve seen many such portraits of Argonauts posed proudly with pan or pick or troy scale, their whiskers cut back in a semblance of civility. Each time I encounter one I hope to see my brother in it, although I know it is unlikely he ever had himself pictured off. It is a false art, I realize. Most of the men used props on loan from the portraitist. Some were models sitting before drop cloths in New York City. But a great deal of what I like about those faddish daguerreotypes is that they show no trace of the darkness I remember of the diggings, none of the loneliness or the madness or the hunger. Even the pistols in the men’s belts seem tucked there in jest. I’d very much like to see my brother there someday, in his red miner’s shirt with his hat tipped back, a fresh sash at his collar, brandishing a fine new pickaxe and a lump. I’d like to see him poised at the center of a gleaming gilded frame, as if color was every bit as bountiful as we’d been told. I’d like to see him posed with his endless belief and at last surrounded by bright soft gold. And maybe if I saw him there I might see the Argonaut believer within myself, too, for we looked so similar in the territory.
What I now know of Errol I know from a postcard he sent our mother twenty-five years ago, which was postmarked Virginia City, NT, and said only that the Lode had a hold of him.
EDITOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many good people championed the writers in these pages and sent terrific stories my way. I am especially grateful to Matt Bell, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Justin Taylor, Rob Spillman, Kate Zambreno, Blake Butler, Thalia Field, Gary Fisketjon, Joshua Cohen, Heidi Julavits, Sam Lipsyte, Deborah Eisenberg, Rebecca Curtis, Martin Riker, Ethan Nosowsky, Brian Evenson, Halimah Marcus, Ann DeWitt, David McLendon, Calvert Morgan, and Max Porter.
Andrew Eisenman was a sharp and relentless scout from the beginning. He built exhaustive lists, chased down stories, and offered intelligent persuasion when I most needed it.
Thanks to Ryan Smernoff, who helped prepare the manuscript.
To Peter Mendelsund, thank you once again for your stunning work.
Denise Shannon, in a twenty-year streak of generous, smart, and deeply supportive acts, helped me navigate the dark, arid land of permissions, which sometimes seemed conceived solely to prevent anthologies like this one from ever coming into being.
Huge thanks to Tim O’Connell, for inspired editorial guidance and the endless, intelligent determination to get this book right.
Thank you to Kathleen Cook, Aja Pollock, Stephanie Moss, and all the other folks at Vintage who helped me get this book from manuscript to beautifully printed page.
And Jordan Pavlin’s fierce belief in the short story as an art form made this book possible in the first place: thank you for everything.