Janet Quin-Harkin (23 page)

After the tent, the cabin seemed like a palace. The bed was only strips of rawhide nailed to a frame and way too small for the three of them, but it had a mattress stuffed with pine needles and it was off the wet ground. They managed with the two girls snuggled at one end and Libby at the other. The table kept the food away from ants and rats and there was even one high shelf behind the stove where the miner had stored his most prized possessions like tobacco, ammunition, coffee, tea, and sugar. His rifle hung on a hook on the wall. Best of all, there was some dry wood and the stove gave out steady heat. Libby joined the canvas from their former tent to rainproof the last two walls and stood looking around her in delight.

“Our own home at last,” she said.

“Are we going to live here forever?” Eden asked suspiciously. “What about Papa?”

“We’ll find him,” Libby said, “but we can’t travel during the bad weather. We’ll be snug here.”

“I want to go home to Grandma and Grandpa,” Bliss said suddenly, sitting up in the bed. Her face was still red and blotchy but the deep cough on her chest had improved with hot broth. “I miss my toys. We don’t have any toys here. And I want ice cream again. I want to go home.” Her little lip quivered.

Libby felt like crying too. She wanted to say that she agreed completely with Bliss—she missed her own things and the good food and, above all, the company of people she felt at home with. She knew how to make small talk at dinner parties. She knew that wherever she went in Boston she would be treated with respect. Here, she was never sure from day to day. The miners were polite enough to her at the moment because they still thought she was Hugh’s wife, but just how long would they go on being polite if no Hugh showed up? As she sat warming her hands in front of the stove she considered seriously for the first time that she might never see him again and was embarrassed that she did not feel an overwhelming sense of loss and desolation. She would miss him, of course, but her main emotion was the empty fear of having nothing and nobody.

She stood up and went over to Bliss, giving her a beaming smile. “We’ll find Papa and be home and safe before you know it,” she said. “Remember that big house in England I told you about—the one waiting for Papa? We’ll be going there and choosing ponies for you girls and a nursery full of toys.”

“Can there be a dollhouse?” Bliss asked, her eyes lighting up.

“Definitely a dollhouse,” Libby said.

When she had cleared away the evening meal that night, Libby sat down to sew. She was in the middle of making the girls dresses, but she put that aside and got out the scraps of calico and gingham to make into two crude dolls. She realized that at the moment some things were more important than looking neat and clean.

The dolls were a big success, although nobody could say that they looked beautiful. Bliss named hers Annabel, after her favorite doll at home, and took it everywhere with her, dangling by one hand. Consequently, hers soon got very dirty, while Eden’s, tucked into the bed during the day, remained pristine. Bliss didn’t seem to mind. She was happy and she was well again and it warmed Libby’s heart to watch her scampering through the woodland. She worried more about Eden. Eden never said much and never gave away what she was feeling, but Libby could tell the child worried about their future by the occasional questions she asked and the way she bit her lip at the answers Libby gave.

“What will you do if there’s no more washing?” she asked Libby. “How will we eat?”

“We’ll manage,” Libby said. “There’s a barrel of flour in the cabin and plenty of beans.”

Eden made a face. “I hate beans,” she said.

“I’m not very fond of them myself,” Libby agreed, “but they are better than starving. We’ll have to try and get some meat. Maybe I could shoot a rabbit.”

“Shoot a little rabbit?” Eden asked in horror. “You couldn’t shoot a nice furry little rabbit, could you?”

“If we have to, we have to,” Libby said. “We need meat, Eden.”

“I’ll eat beans then,” Eden said stubbornly.

Libby considered the possibility of hunting for their food as they walked down to the creek for water together. They often saw wildlife in the woods—ground squirrels and doves and quail and rabbits, also the occasional deer, although the deer had become very wary of humans and their guns. Would she have the nerve to shoot them? she wondered. Then she knew she would if her children were starving. It would be just another thing she would have to do to be added to the list of things she never dreamed she was capable of doing.

October became November. In between rainstorms the weather was mild and beautiful. It seemed that the moment a storm passed by, the sun came out like the middle of summer and even in November it was warm and pleasant. It even became too hot inside the cabin with the stove going, so Libby rolled back the canvas front of the cabin to let in the fresh air and prepared her food in the open.

One afternoon Eden had been out alone and came running back to Libby excitedly. “Mama, I found berries. Are they good to eat? They look good.”

“You didn’t taste any, did you?” Libby asked, hurrying over to see what Eden held in her hand.

“Not until you told me they were all right,” Eden said.

She held up her hand and Libby relaxed. “Why, they’re blackberries,” she said. “You must have found a late bush. Are there more?”

“Lots more,” Eden said.

Libby went to get a pail. “Come on, show me where you found them,” she said. “We can make a lovely pie. Much better than beans.” She slipped her hand around her daughter’s shoulder and Eden grinned up at her.

An hour or so later the pie stood cooling on the table, sending out a wonderful aroma. The smell must have wafted down the trail on the light breeze because it wasn’t long before a miner came stomping up the path, pausing and scratching his head in wonder when he saw the pie.

“You just bake that, missus?” he asked.

Libby nodded.

“What’s in it?”

“Blackberries,” Libby said.

“I’ll give ya this nugget for it,” he said, holding out a sizeable lump of gold in his hand. “It’s about an ounce.”

“You want to give me that for a pie?” Libby asked in amazement.

“It’s worth it to me,” the miner said. “My wife used to bake the best pies and I’m mighty homesick for a good one.”

“Then it’s yours,” Libby said. Still rather dazed, Libby handed him the pie with instructions to bring back the plate. She put the nugget in her pocket.

“Mama, you sold our pie,” Bliss complained.

“She made a lot of money, Bliss,” Eden said. “The man gave her a lump of gold. Now we’re rich, right Mama?”

“Not rich,” Libby said, “but we’ve a little money now, and you know what? We’re going hunting for all the blackberries we can find and were going to bake as many pies as we can.”

They only managed to find enough blackberries for four more pies, but Libby sold them all with ease and went into town to get the gold weighed. It came to almost five ounces and Libby came out of Wells Fargo with seventy-five dollars in her pocket. She looked for the familiar tent at the end of town and was told that Mr. Hopkins had sold all his supplies and gone down to San Francisco to get more.

So he’s already on stage two of his plan, Libby thought, happy for him, but missing the one friendly face she could count on. A big new wooden building was going up along what had become a main street, not draped with calico and canvas but with thick log walls and a sturdy porch. Libby paused to look at it as she passed.

“I see someone struck it rich,” she commented to a man who was working on it.

“Going to be the biggest hotel in the whole gold country,” the man said. “This guy’s supposed to be rolling in money.”

“Lucky for him,” Libby said. She went into the German’s grocery store, trying to decide what supplies would give her best value for her money.

“Still no vegetables?” she asked.

Herr Otto shook his head. “Only potatoes right now. The mules can’t get up from Sacramento anymore. The roads are too bad.”

“And the potatoes are still the same old ones at a dollar each, I suppose?” Libby asked.

“The same.”

Gradually, an idea was forming in Libby’s mind: a picture of sprouting potatoes.

“Give me fifty,” she said.

“You want fifty potatoes?” the man asked. “You got the money?”

Libby put down fifty dollars on the counter and carried her potatoes home in triumph.

“Yippee! Potatoes,” Bliss said when she saw them. “Can we have them baked with butter on them?”

“Not these potatoes,” Libby said. “I’ve got something else in mind for them.” She started cutting them into pieces, around each sprout. The children watched, mystified. Then she took the spade and worked solidly all afternoon, turning over the soft sandy soil in front of the cabin.

When the children saw what she was going to do, they were horrified.

“Don’t plant our potatoes, Mama. We want to eat them.”

“What will we have to eat if you put them in the ground?”

“Maybe we can spare just one to eat now,” Libby said, softening. “If this works out well, we’ll never have to worry about food again.”

T
HE THOUGHT OF
potatoes growing outside her door lifted Libby’s depression and gave her something to aim for again. She knew nothing about planting things, but she dimly remembered, back in her very early childhood, hanging around the gardener at her grandmother’s big estate.

“You want to see magic?” the gardener asked her.

Staring at him wide-eyed and a little afraid, she had nodded silently. He had taken a big old potato from his pocket. “Here,” he had instructed. “Drop that in the ground and when you come back next time, you’ll see magic.”

When Libby had returned several months later, she had hurried out to find the gardener. Grinning at her from a mouth with most of its teeth missing he had beckoned her to follow him. Then he put a fork into the soil and where the potato had been, lots of perfect new potatoes were growing instead.

“How did it do that?” she had asked, as if she had just witnessed a miracle.

“Each one of the eyes can grow into a new plant,” the gardener explained. “Clever, ain’t it?”

Now she hoped her brief lesson in horticulture was going to pay off. If each of those segments really did produce potatoes in the spring, her financial worries would be over. If she had heard nothing of Hugh by then, he must be dead, or gone home, she reasoned. She’d make enough money from the potatoes to sail back to Boston in style and then . . . she’d see what happened next.

Another worry was relieved with the new cabin. After days of relentless rain, it was comforting to hear it beating on a shake roof with only a few drips coming through and only the occasional blast finding a gap in the canvas walls. Even if a blast came in, it didn’t matter, because the stove was giving out comforting heat. Libby felt like a child in her first playhouse and realized with a jolt that this was her first real home that she had not had to share with her parents. Knowing it was hers gave her the incentive to improve it. She tried her hand at making a bench for the girls to sit on and, impressed with her success, decided she would make a second bed if she could get someone to give her some rawhide.

Winter had now set in. It was cold all the time. There was only a brief hiatus between storms and the creeks did not go down. Some miners gave up and moved down to Sacramento for the winter. Others, who could not afford to go, hung around in their cabins, playing cards, whittling, and doing chores to while away long days. There was no more washing to be done because nobody was getting fresh gold to pay for it. Hunger began to be a problem. It was also a major concern for Libby. She had plenty of flour and beans, but she knew that children needed a nourishing diet. She had to get meat from somewhere. When she saw a pair of miners go past, dragging the carcass of a deer, she suggested that she’d make them a venison pie if they gave her some of the meat.

“We’d like to help, but there’s five of us at the cabin,” one of the men said. “It’s hard to find deer these days. They’ve all been driven right up into the mountains.”

Libby took the girls out hopefully scouting for edible plants, not really knowing what she was looking for, but the high winds had stripped and flattened anything that might have been edible. She found some acorns under a grove of big oaks and tried roasting them. They tasted quite pleasant but they all had stomach pains that night so she didn’t dare try it again. She watched the mourning doves up in the trees and wondered if she could ever manage to shoot one of them with the rifle. Secretly, she began to practice behind the cabin, aiming at a target on a tree trunk until at least she could fire the rifle without it slamming into her shoulder.

One morning she heard a twittering just outside the canvas and peeked out to see a flock of quail, feeding happily in the grass. They were enchanting plump little birds with adorable black crests, like question marks, bobbing on their heads as they communicated with each other. Swiftly, she grabbed a length of cloth she was about to cut out, opened the canvas suddenly, and threw it over the birds. Some managed to escape, running peeping into the forest, but the fabric still twitched with the remaining birds. Cautiously, she reached under it and her hands fastened around a bird. It struggled as she lifted it up, then lay limp in her hands. She could feel its tiny heart hammering against her fingers and noticed how beautifully it was marked with a delicate little crest on its head.

How can I possibly kill it? she asked herself, her heart racing almost as fast as the bird’s. She slipped her thumb and forefinger around the little neck, but before she could apply any pressure the crested head fell back and the bird lay there, dead in her hand. It was frightened to death, she thought, feeling guilty and elated at the same time. She had never believed it could be so easy. She lifted the cloth and found that two more birds had died. The others scurried around in panic but she let them go. It took her ages and much revulsion to pluck the three little birds, but they made a good stew to which she added dumplings.