A Sweetness to the Soul (5 page)

In slow motion, into the middle of the string, the cat arched through the green onto Maria and her mule all at once and pulled them over, girl and packs and animal, pulled them as they fell. The soft thud as the fractured three met the rain-soaked earth is louder still in Joseph’s mind he tells me, louder than the too-late crack of his rifle; the memory of the cat’s attack even more vivid than the despair falling onto Benito’s cheeks as he screamed for the life of his lost young wife.

But it was the plaintive look of Maria’s eyes as life left them that propels Joseph decades later to give so much of himself, attempting, I think, to seek God’s forgiveness for what he could not have caused; wanting to believe, perhaps, there is always good in God’s plan for life despite the pain that comes with it; pain enough to make us wonder.

S
HYSTERS AND
S
HENANIGANS

B
y the time Joseph and Benito set foot on the foggy docks of San Francisco some months after Maria’s death, they had weathered serious storms and were a pair, friends. He and Benito had chosen to support each other rather than lay blame, a sure recipe for surviving tragic accidents and forming friendships of enduring strength.

That was perhaps what I had missed the year I faced my own losses.

The men had washed away Maria’s wounds and bound the body and returned with it to Panama City, wrapped in a pale-striped serape on a travois of mango branches pulled behind her mule.

Maria’s people did not blame Joseph, a fact he found astonishing since he blamed himself. In fact, as was their custom—one shared by the Warm Springs Indians, too—the family gave away their daughter’s special things. Joseph found himself a recipient. “Maria’s uncle give her this,” Benito said. Joseph looked down at him as Benito gently pushed a leather bola toward Joseph, sea green turquoise stones hanging from its leather thongs. “Is yours now. To remember Maria.”

Touched both by their generosity and that they held no fists toward God, Joseph filed away their coping for future reference.

The friendship of Joseph and Benito blossomed those weeks and then bore fruit as a result of Maria’s death, something good coming from that darkness.

After the mourning, they crossed the Isthmus—Benito for the last time and Joseph for the first. The two docked finally in October in the fastest growing city of the west.

Joseph told people years later that you could see the city building overnight. “In one year,” he said, “San Francisco went from eight hundred souls to more than ten thousand. A hotel owner’s dream!”

In fact, the hotels and boarding houses bulged with gold mine recruits and every fresh upstart with an idea in his head to make quick money. Even the runaways: men and women running from family, from responsibility, from their past, all found solace in San Francisco.

Hotels advertised “Beds and Baths, Five Large Cents,” but assigned three men to every mattress. One never knew whose stinky feet would greet one’s nose each morning—or who would inhale yours! Bedbugs slept without charge. Joseph said he wondered if anyone used the baths. What else could explain the general scent of grime and sweat that swept the rooming houses. So the two new friends decided to sleep in the safety of Adam’s Livery not far from Market Street, accompanied by the creaks and stomps of predictable stock rather than share beds with total strangers.

Joseph and Benito took little time before determining that shysters and shenanigans reigned supreme in any booming city, and rather than become unwitting victims, they set their own course with a plan. They would buy mules and head inland, toward the bare hills and then into the mountains on one trip before the snow fell. Weather permitting, they’d make a second trip north into Oregon Country where towns were said to be booming along the Rogue River. Pack supplies north; pack gold back south with the mules they planned to buy from failed miners who only waited the sale of their animals before heading broken, home, back east. They’d winter in California on the spoils of their efforts. It was a good plan, the men agreed; one they could implement quickly.

They were almost not fast enough.

I’m inclined to believe Benito’s side of it. Not because my Joseph makes himself a hero in his stories—what man doesn’t?—but because of Joseph’s tendency, still, to put adventure over prudence, curiosity over common sense.

“We walked through a bawdy circus,” Joseph said of that first sunrise after the morning fog lifted over the city. “People washed themselves in the open air, shouting to each other about this and that.” Horses and mules and ox carts rattled by as vendors wove their way in and out of gobs of people dotting the cold dirt streets like clumps of yellow jackets, listening, hovering, trying to interpret the latest tidbit of direction.

“Sausages sizzled in pots set up beside the street. And somewhere, I will not forget,” Joseph told me, “I smelled the scent of a fresh-baked pumpkin pie!” More than one enterprising widowed woman survived those years by baking pies over open fires, a venture requiring no man to help her, I’m told—nor take the profits.

While Joseph swallowed his saliva and cast his eyes in search of pie, Benito signaled to join him under a small lean-to where two men with bulging muscles slapped dough around chunks of potatoes and onions and wizened carrots before dipping them into the bubbling oil of a huge caldron set over an open fire.

The proprietors, “two mountains of men” (according to Benito), worked under the lean-to. One hummed happily to himself as he bent beneath the center post of their shelter to fold his pasties. Brown flour stuck to his sweaty face where he brushed straight iron-colored hair from his forehead and pushed it behind ears that stuck out like those of the Yorkshire pigs of Joseph’s father’s farm. The man smiled and his small eyes seemed to sink into his puffed, reddish face.

The other, who sported a thick dark beard, stood large-armed and stocky as he chopped the onions and shriveled carrots. A sharpening stone lay beside an extra cleaver on the chopping block, and he picked it up frequently, sharpening his tool.

Joseph rarely noticed height. Being a tall man himself, he seldom described others by their size. Instead, he said the men looked “Irish” with arms the size for fighting.

Behind the men in the shadow of the shelter, sitting with a second chopping block balanced on her calico-covered knees, was a skinny woman who kept her eyes lowered as she peeled potatoes with an antler-handled knife. Her bony fingers moved slowly around the “taters” as the men called them.

“Hungry?” the pink-faced man asked over the head of his shorter, darker partner. He scratched his nose, leaving a trail of brown flour as a mustache.

“What have ye then, and how much?” Joseph asked.

“Pasties for cuatro reales, friend Irish.”

Joseph said, “it’s mine,” as he pawed through his pile of coins of various sizes looking for reales. He found four in his money belt, not thinking until later that he opened it wide before prying eyes.

“You know I’m Irish?” Joseph asked handing the bits to the dark, big-armed man who slipped them quickly into his own fat purse beneath his white apron. He wore jeans of a nutmeg-color held at the seams and the pockets by brass rivets. In fact, both men wore the heavy jeans and Joseph noted idly that the spitting grease from the cooking pots did not penetrate the material though it did not appear to be oiled.

“Sure,” the dark man said, bringing Joseph back to him. “Me name’s O’Connor and I recognize a bro.” He tapped his ear with his finger acknowledging Joseph’s Irish history and his own good ear for dialect. “What be your name, then?” O’Connor continued, turning to dip the pasty into the bubbling pot. A slight breeze lifted the smoke away from them, away from the bay.

“Sherar,” Joseph said. “Joseph Sherar.”

“Ah, one of the Sherar brothers,” the piggish man said, brushing the flour from his hand on his jeans and reaching to shake Joseph’s.

“You know James, then?” Joseph asked, surprised, “of New York?” He turned to Benito who had plopped down on one of the
upturned powder kegs set around for seats. “He knows my brother! Must have met him in forty-eight! Imagine that!”

Benito looked skeptical, remained silent.

“Sure. We be knowing James Sherar of New York,” O’Connor answered, his thin lips formed a smile that disappeared into his thick black beard. “Who made a fortune in the fields?” His last comment was spoken as a slight question as he turned away to check the pasties.

“That he did. That he did,” Joseph said, musing. Benito told Joseph later it was lucky probing.

The stocky man smiled expansively and nodded. “And this be me own bro, Paul, though his friends just call him Pinky.” O’Connor slapped the taller, pinkish man on the shoulder who raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment. The woman lifted her head and looked through dull dark eyes at Joseph then returned to her chopping when she was not introduced.

For Joseph, the thought of coming upon two men his first morning in San Francisco who knew his brother astounded him more than the quietness of the woman.

“We’ve a plan, Pinky and me,” O’Connor told them their second morning in San Francisco. “Could use some good minds such as yours.” O’Connor’s flattery tripped easily off his tongue. “James even talked of it before he left, now that I think of it.”

Benito was instantly alarmed, thinking it just too strange that James would have talked of some business adventure with these men all those years before. “What adventure?” Benito asked. He rubbed thawed street sand in his hands to clean the grease from them, then gave his full attention to the O’Connors. A sea gull swooped over the roofs of the open-air stalls, settling well beyond the O’Connor stand, picking treasures from the earth.

“It’s to be a restaurant. On the wharf,” the stocky O’Connor said. Benito noticed the woman who did not speak look up with frightened eyes and glanced at Joseph. O’Connor went on to describe in great detail their plans, his enthusiasm growing. “It’d be a guaranteed success,” O’Connor continued. “Just look at all our
customers. It’s someone like you we’d consider as partners, though. Builders, procurers of supplies. If you go north as planned, think of all you could bring back. We’ll be serving them what leaves the gold fields, spreading gold dust like a sneeze. They all have to eat. And they want to eat heartily.” He straightened up when he said “heartily” and rubbed his belly as a satisfied man. He stared off, toward the bay, and seemed to be lost for a moment in his vision of the future, built there, settled.

“We got our pocket full of rocks,” dark O’Connor said, “but we’d go farther with investors like yourselves. Maybe even open a hotel. What do you say?”

“Your jeans,” Joseph said, not interested in restaurants. “What keeps them from burning or staining?”

Pinky startled. “Jeans?” he asked as he looked at his legs as though they’d just appeared beneath his greasy apron. “You want to know about my jeans? I don’t know,” he said disgusted. “Some German sells them. Eleanor buys them,” he said, pointing, making his first indication that he knew the woman who sat behind. “They wear well so we don’t buy many. Miners get ’em.”

Joseph noted the man’s confusion, thrown by his interest in the jeans. Benito was baffled, too, he told me. “I look from him to the surprised faces of O’Connors and wonder what this man thinks of! Before I can ask, the woman makes her eyes look very scared and I wonder more.”

“So you be not interested in our restaurant?” the dark O’Connor said. “We’re brothers. Irish. Like you. We shake hands. You can trust us.”

“We’ll consider it,” Joseph said, sensing that the man was easily frustrated. “That we will. But now I want to know more about the German and his jeans,” Joseph persisted. “Eleanor, can you tell me his name and where I might find—”

“She don’t talk,” Pinky interrupted, letting his impatient character show openly now as he turned back to Joseph. “And she don’t walk neither. Born with club feet and got her tongue cut out after her husband’s
drunken brawl. Gets carried about, she does.” He calmed then and added, “But she writes if you’ve a need to know the German.”

The ease with which the man spoke of the woman’s misfortune bothered Joseph, but he reached for a small pad and piece of lead and handed them gently to the woman, his first real contact with her. He noticed a wistfulness in her eyes and a hesitation. She looked at Pinky. Joseph nodded encouragement before she bent for her own little book, ripped a blank page, took Joseph’s lead and wrote. Then she pointed, held up two fingers, and wrote “Lexington St.”

Joseph read the name but she motioned him to give back the script. She looked warily at the O’Connors who appeared busy with customers and drew a line as though she’d made a mistake. She wrote something else below the word “Lexington.”

Joseph read it, a bit confused at first, then told the woman, “Thank you,” and tipped his flat-brimmed hat. The woman’s eyes smiled now, her face blushed with the gentlemanly gesture.

“You have assisted in what I hope will add to our own grand adventure, ma’am,” he said. “Our thanks,” he added as he gently tapped her note on his fingers.