Memories of Gold (3 page)

Since that time, she refused to buy another set of nice china for some reason. Mary suspected that Angelina believed the box would somehow turn up on her porch one day.

Angelina sat down across from Mary and poured the tea. “How’s Jane doing?” she asked.

Mary’s face grew serious as her heart ached for the main character of her current novel,
Jane Eyre.
“It’s so unfair. It’s not her fault Mr. Rochester had a wife who was off her nut, so why must she be the one to suffer? I was reading yesterday and nearly threw the book across the room because of the trials that poor girl’s had. It better turn for the best before the end or I ain’t taking recommendations from you anymore.”

Mary had long since given up on speaking perfectly proper around her teacher. The small vestiges of her upbringing on the gold claims became more pronounced when she was excited or frustrated, which happened fairly often during her studies with Angelina. It was far too hard to speak using perfect grammar the whole time, and Angelina had dismissed it as unnecessary after the first few attempts to fix it. As long as she could write correctly and use appropriate grammar when necessary, the older woman said, there was no need to force it in private at the cost of candor.

Angelina laughed at Mary’s exaggerated vitriol. “Don’t I know it. But is there anything in the reading that has stumped you with which I can help? That is what you pay me for, you know.”

“Angelina, I think you’ve done a pretty bang-up job as far as my reading’s concerned. Currer Bell uses some impressive vocabulary, but I understand about everything I’ve come across, and what I don’t know I can figure out or look up in the dictionary. I’m moving through this one quick, and I am excited to see what you have for me next.”

Angelina smiled a mischievous grin, placed a thick book on the table, and said, “I think we shall take it up a notch and try this one.”

Mary looked at the tome, confident that she could master any novel, even a book as thick as that. Then she glanced at the title and frowned. “
Les Miserables
. Angelina, this book is in French! I’m not good enough yet!”

Angelina’s smile widened. “I think you are, and since I am the teacher, it is my opinion that matters. Or are you too scared you might fail to even try?”

Mary chuckled, knowing that Angelina was playing on her inability to back down from a challenge. She was unable to do anything but take the bait. “Wait just a second, Mrs. Swenson,” Mary started, using Angelina’s title—which she only did in public or when she was trying to make a point as forcefully as possible—“I may be a little green when it comes to French, but you know that I’ll never give up just because something is tough. Hand it over.”

Mary took the book and opened it to the first page, nervous that the text would be incomprehensible. To her surprise, however, she saw that most of the words were at least somewhat familiar to her. There were several she’d never seen, though, and was glad she had a French dictionary as well as her English one tucked away in the room she shared with Josie.

“How about you read the first page aloud, so we can work on your pronunciation? You can use your dictionary to look up anything you don’t know later,” prompted Angelina.

Mary spent a half hour arduously repeating word after word to practice her French accent—something she struggled with, but had gotten noticeably better at in the few months since they’d started incorporating it into her studies. She was finally garnering many fewer corrections and more exclamations of “
Charmant
!” from Angelina. After that, it was another half hour of writing in both French and English, in which Angelina would dictate and Mary would write, trying to spell correctly and write in the beautiful nearly blotch-free script expected of a lady.

Angelina praised Mary on her gains. “My dear, you’re about as perfect a writer as I expect to see in these parts, and that includes the teachers. I can picture you blending in with the educated ladies in New England without trouble, if you could just keep yourself from saying ‘ain’t’ so much.”

Angelina tittered as Mary grimaced. She could speak properly if she paid close attention, but often reverted when she let her guard down; just one more holdover from her wild and free childhood around the panners.

Mary thanked Angelina, paid her for her time, and went back to the saloon with her new book. In the room she and Josie shared, she carefully placed
Les Miserables
beside the French and English dictionaries,
Jane Eyre,
and the primary readers and various other texts she had purchased as her reading skills improved.

Novels had to be special-ordered, were expensive, and often didn’t last long in the rough-and-tumble of California. Mary treasured each book she purchased, and handled every book Angelina lent her with care. Reading was akin to breathing, and every text held a special place in her heart.

At first, she had wanted to learn to read because she hated seeing the squiggles above the doors and not understanding what they meant, and she thought it might be a handy skill. Once the world of novels had been opened to her, though, she found a love of literature that she never expected. She read anything and everything she could get her hands on, from the dime magazines full of serials to the giant volumes Mr. Carter secured for her at his store.

Once her books were organized and tucked away, Mary pulled up the floorboard near her bed and took a small sack from the hidden space beneath. She poured out several small chunks of gold into her money purse and put the sack back, pushing down the board so it looked untouched. While she trusted the other girls in many ways, she was very careful to keep her hoard of gold secret.

Then she went out once again, this time in the opposite direction.

She stopped at another house, not much different from Mrs. Swenson’s, but bigger. She knocked and a plump kindly-faced woman in her thirties answered. The moment the door opened, the sounds of shouts, laughter, and running footsteps could be heard, and the woman smiled at Mary and shrugged her shoulders. “The children are feeling a bit wild today, if you cannot tell.”

The woman laughed at her own joke and held the door wider so Mary could enter. The house looked as it usually did—as if a small tornado had landed, tossing jackets and toys wildly around. It was a homey, comfortable mess clearly made by happy, energetic children. It lifted Mary’s heart to see it. “How are you today, Mrs. Harper?”

Mrs. Harper smiled again. “Oh, just as crazed as usual, but the boys will be calming down for dinner here in a few minutes.”

The woman’s smile dropped from her face as she continued. “Emma has had a rough morning, though. She was playing with the others, happy as can be, yesterday. Today she won’t do more than sit on the couch and lets nobody near her, not even me.”

Mary looked over towards the couch and sighed. A small girl, twelve years old with mousy brown hair covering her face, sat wedged into the farthest corner of the piece of furniture, looking away from the door. Mary went and sat beside her, putting on a smile and a lighthearted tone. “Emma! You look right pretty today, except for your hair all over your face. Let me just move that so we can see your pretty blue eyes.”

Mary reached over to touch Emma’s hair, only to get her hand pushed away by the little girl, who then huddled into a small protective ball. Mary moved away a little, knowing that it would be pointless to do more while the girl was in this mood. Usually describing her eyes would be enough to make her interact, since she loved the fact that her eyes matched Mary’s. They both had their father’s eyes.

Emma had been four when Mary found out that her father had another child. Emma’s mother had walked up to their tent, talked to her father quietly for a few minutes, and walked away without the child despite his protestations. He didn’t want another child to take care of, especially not one that was…different.

Emma had not been able to talk or fend for herself at all when she was four. Even at twelve, she only spoke single words and used gestures to explain herself. Their father had ignored the strange girl, effectively putting Mary in the role of parent, and she was often the only person that could get Emma to cooperate.

When their father had died, Mary had to find a place for Emma to stay where she’d be taken care of while Mary tried to earn enough money to provide for both of them. Mrs. Harper asked a fair price for taking in Emma, but it would have been an impossible amount if Mary hadn’t gone to work in the saloon.

Mary missed the freedom of just taking care of herself, missed the fun she had when playing around the camp with her best friend, the one she still looked for night after night, but those times were long gone, and her responsibility to Emma was tantamount, even if it was a burden at times. She loved the girl, though, and was unwilling to shut her away.

Mary sat there for several more minutes, talking occasionally to lift the girl’s mood, but to no avail. Emma continued to sit, not moving or looking at her half-sister, until finally Mary got up to leave. She found Mrs. Harper setting food out on the table. “You were right. She is in a terrible state today, Mrs. Harper. I’ll come back tomorrow and try my luck again. Here is what I owe you for the next few weeks.”

She poured the golden nuggets she had so carefully saved into the woman’s hand. They smiled and nodded at each other, and Mary left much sooner than she had expected. Outside, she leaned against the side of the house and took a deep breath. Having Emma in her life certainly didn’t make things easy, and days like this made it even harder. She reminded herself of the days when Emma would smile and hug her, chattering happily in a language only she understood. It helped ease the pain a little.

She let out one long, low breath and headed back towards her room.

She whiled away the afternoon finishing
Jane Eyre,
then napping to prepare herself for the long evening ahead, and finally looking up the words she could not understand on the first few pages of
Les Miserables.

At six o’clock, an hour or more before the saloon would be busy enough for the ladies to enter, Josie came in from her afternoon spent purchasing cloth and ordering new dresses from the town seamstress with a few of the other girls. She took off her sunhat, set down her parasol, and began ripping open packages of ribbons and rouge. Mary glanced up, smiled and shook her head slightly before continuing with her studies.

Though Josie was her best friend in the house and they always got along well, Mary didn’t understand why she allowed every nickel and scrap of gold she got from the men to fall right into the hands of the shopkeepers along Main Street, never saving anything for longer than a week.

To make things worse, Josie had a child, a young girl named Alice. Josie had come to the saloon when Alice was just a fatherless baby. A woman in town took care of the girl, and Josie had to scrimp at the end of each week to get the money to pay her. There had even been a few times when she had needed to borrow money from Mary for an emergency, paying her back after the next big weekend.

Although dresses for work, tutoring, books, and Emma’s care were necessary expenses for Mary, much of the rest of her earnings stayed hidden under the floorboard, and every few weeks she would take what she had accumulated to Shasta’s only bank and deposit it into her account, where she had over six hundred dollars saved up. If she could get the amount up to a thousand, she could consider what to do next and possibly even open up her own little shop in town—the thought of running her own business intrigued her, even though she had no idea what she could sell. Maybe then she would be able to care for her sister herself. For the time being, though, she had to wait.

Once Josie finished opening the last package and putting away the final items, a brooch and a comb with turquoise embellishments, she interrupted Mary’s reverie. “Mary, we should go eat supper before our night begins. Daisy’s making ham and corn bread, and another slice of her dry ham is liable to kill me. How about we go down to Lee’s and get some Hangtown Fry?”

Mary wrinkled her nose. Hangtown Fry was a dish made of bacon, eggs, and oysters scrambled together. “I can’t for the life of me understand why you and the other girls like that mess, but I’ll go with you.”

Mary normally wouldn’t spend her money to dine out when she got free fare at the saloon, but her time with Emma still hung over her head like a cloud, and a supper away would be a pleasant change. Besides, Josie was right: Daisy’s ham was often horrid, bless her heart.

Josie giggled and clapped her hands, and she rushed out to tell Daisy where they were going as Mary removed a little more of her hard-earned gold. She was glad Josie was in a good mood; her daughter had been sick the week before, and the extra expense and worry had taken some of the life out of her for a while. Not to mention her own illness, whatever it was.

Mary had no idea what exactly was wrong with Josie, but she was hesitant to ask. Her friend had tried to hide it, but she’d been pale and tired for several days, and occasional bouts of coughing made it hard for her to sleep at night. Josie brushed it off as the same cold her daughter had gotten, but her health hadn’t seemed to improve any. She was happy to see Josie’s spirits lifted.

They walked out into the evening, the setting sun painting the clouds pink against the darkening sky, and made their way to the edge of Chinatown. Lee’s restaurant straddled the edges of Shasta and the village the Chinese immigrants had created, allowing him to gain white customers without the two races intermingling too much, which often caused trouble.