Читать книгу Tears of the Mountain - John Addiego - Страница 15

sparkling in morning light among the canoe-shaped willow leaf shadows, sending its cool breath upward as Jeremiah led her against the gentle current and across at a shallow ford. The other side was dark with Spanish pines and sweet with the rot of their needles. Man and horse picked their way through forest until he could smell the sulfur of the underworld. Momentarily the redwood shakes of the Springs Hotel caught the morning light through the evergreen branches, and Jeremiah emerged onto the wagon road leading to it. He circled its vegetable garden and came around to the main building. The moment he encountered a view of its grand pillared porch, his eyes seemed drawn like metal filings to a magnet by the intense gaze of the man sitting in a wicker chair.

There were two remarkable features about this man’s visage: foremost were those eyes, which blazed preternaturally from beneath dark and pronounced brows like primeval torches within a cave; second was the silver beard, which grew like no other man’s in Jeremiah’s acquaintance, sprouting from chin-tip and jowls in thin strands and combed into an odd triplicate flag to the shoulders and sternum. Either the man shaved his cheeks bare near to jawline and along the chin sides or the good Lord had burned that flesh clean of fur; regardless, the effect was at once boyish and aged in an odd, preening fashion, the cheeks smooth as youth, the mouth and chin entirely obscured in age, and the whole flag of gleaming whiskers (which had seen much combing over the black ministerial frock) flaring out to a triplicate, stylized silver mane from shoulder tips to breast. Beneath it a series of gold necklaces, of some arcane or occult import, flashed.

Jeremiah tipped his hat to the man and murmured a salutation, but the other merely continued staring in a mouthless expression of fury, or madness, aimed like dual cannon barrels at the school-teacher’s face. It positively made the skin crawl. He hitched the mare and made another attempt at conversation: “Are you speaking today, Reverend? I didn’t see your name listed among the luminaries.” He added, after another awkward pause, “It would be such a pleasure to hear you speak again.”

The gaze intensified, but the hidden mouth remained silent. “Did you bring some of your fellows here from the Fountain Grove Community?” Jeremiah tried. These fellows would be primarily women, married and otherwise, lost in the thrall of the minister’s mesmeric presence. There was another moment of raging, silent eye contact as Jeremiah mounted the porch steps. Thomas Lake Harris indicated the end of their visual congress by a sudden snort through those whiskers and the page-turning of a great Bible on his lap. The eyes turned downward to the tome, and the interview, such as it was, was over.

Jeremiah sighed loudly and entered the hotel, passing, as he had in the dream, from bright sun to darkness and remembering again the conversation with his first wife. As his eyes adjusted he recalled the touch of her hand, the press of her hip against his as they knelt, and the way her bare shoulders and neck shone like the exposed, wind-polished branch of a mountain madrone. What had she told him in that sleep-muffled murmuring, in that mixture of two languages and two worlds? He thought again of the famous mystic seated on the porch chair, a man to whom many flocked in order to embrace life anew as well as to make contact with the dearly departed. A year ago he and Lucinda had visited Fountain Grove with open hearts and minds, she quite pregnant, little Jacob perpetually squirming. Searching for new ways to live on this land, the family had spent a friendly but skeptical week among the utopian brethren, and a month later he had written a reflection published in the Sonoma Democrat, a piece in which he’d hoped to strike a thoughtful balance between praise and criticism of the new community above Santa Rosa. Harris had sent a brief letter in rebuttal to the same news organ, damning Jeremiah’s soul to eternal hellfire and kindling a series of witty and alliterative proclamations from Abner Stiles. Now, as Jeremiah asked after the Burns family, he puzzled over the utopian minister’s practice of placing mankind into two categories: his blessed followers (and those with the potential to become such) versus the damned who doubted him. He realized that, among leaders and idealists, Harris was not alone in this segregated view of humanity.

Many had come to the hotel to take the waters, and Jeremiah heard the faraway accents of New York and even Great Britain among more familiar tones in the lobby, and beyond the counter the indecipherable cries of Chinese from those who cooked and cleaned. These were the men brought across the vast Pacific Ocean to build the railroad and dig the mines, a community who lived by and large in their own hamlets nearly devoid of the fairer sex. He had scant personal exposure to the Chinese bachelors, as they were sometimes called; he’d seen squadrons of them panning and digging during the rush of ’49 and had passed through their Chinatowns along the railroad show, and the few that squatted in Sonoma Town, but he’d never made real conversation. He wondered, as he walked along the covered side porch of the big hotel, if there were any here who might believe in, or interpret for him, the phenomenon of his father’s memories inhabiting the little redheaded boy, and nodded to the sudden smile of an elderly Asian man folding laundry in a doorway.

The waters of Sonoma flowed underfoot through the twisted geography, hot and cold, sweet and bitter. There was even the icy poison with its attendant warnings, an arsenic spring piped to a black pool in which arthritics favored a footbath. Mineral water brought from nearby Calistoga fizzed into vessels in the lobby, and there was a carbonated and somewhat salty tonic to be quaffed, tasting strongly of hard-cooked eggs and thought to be especially therapeutic for common illnesses. Most popular was the hot sulfur pool, and here he found the attorney Burns lying back in a voluminous black bathing suit, limbs jutting out like white bones, face red as cooked crab.

The man was drunk, asleep, or passed out. Luck had kept his head on the toweled rock ledge to avoid drowning; the devil had slipped a tin brandy flask into the folded cloth beneath the red cranium and the gaping, snoring nose and mouth. Other bathers, soft, pale city folk, stepped around him to immerse themselves in the healing concrete rectangle, floated with arms outstretched. One stout fellow sat sunk to his chin with a cigar puffing absurdly above the waterline like the stack on a steamboat. “Mr. Burns?” Jeremiah prodded the bony shoulder. “Sir?”

“I don’t think you’ll get the barrister to the bench today,” the cigar smoker said between clenched teeth. His laughter was sandpaper on a plank.

“Mac!” A velvet voice carried across the row of lounge chairs set beside the pool, and Jeremiah saw the long-white-bearded face of the proprietor in the porch shadow. Madison had known him since their youth. “You come for the waters, Mac?”

“Hello, Madison.” The hotel owner had a gentle voice and a general aspect of holiday relaxation, and Jeremiah wondered if this affect came from business savvy or daily immersion in the hot pool. Madison had been a timid, nervous student in the one-room school. “Just swung by to talk to this fellow,” he indicated the drunken attorney, “but I guess it can wait.”

Madison’s mouth turned down in the slightest expression of disapproval as he nodded toward Burns. “Take a pair of bathing togs and have a little soak, Mac. I reckon you have a busy day and could use a little of the waters for your bones.”

“Much obliged, Mad.”

THE POOL was a somewhat rectangular, steaming impression of river rock and concrete set into the hillside behind the main building. It was large enough for a dozen people to wade or float in and so hot that nobody tarried long within its embrace. Jeremiah stepped down the cobbles and floated on his back near the attorney. The various aches and knots in his joints and muscles, especially those emanating beneath the purple scar on his leg, let go of their claims; the sky through its gauze of steam was bright blue with a single cloud. It seemed that he and the cloud floated in like manner slowly eastward, as if the imperceptible wind or the pull of the earth’s rotation moved them as one.

He emerged and lay back on a hotel chair to dry, feeling at once bone-heavy and weightless, as if he were still floating in the sulfur pool. Presently his eyes closed and Teresa spoke to him again, her voice a whisper of Spanish so soft that it seemed like the murmuring of wind in distant trees, a high sibilance that made him think of glass rubbing against cloth. He understood that she was late for something, that they were both late, and that others were probably checking their timepieces and grumbling beside the carriage, but that she still needed to sort through a few things before she was ready to depart. She sat beside him and emptied the contents of a large wicker basket sparkling with jewelry among swaths of clothing, and her voice made that glass-rubbing sound, and he was suddenly aware of being asleep and dreaming near the pool. There was this precarious mind-locale in which he could balance momentarily between sleep and waking, and he wanted to remain there long enough to understand why she was speaking to him, and what she had to say.

Her dark eyes darted back and forth, then suddenly locked into his. “No comprendes, mi esposo?” She touched his shoulder. There was so much sorrow in her visage as she fidgeted beside him on the bed, her hands rapidly and mechanically sorting through garments and jewelry. He saw that she’d powdered only half of her face. He thought of how quickly her mind had worked, her speech and gestures sometimes twice the velocity of those around her, and as the words tumbled from her mouth like the insubstantial foam of a mountain cascade, part English, part Spanish, and perhaps in part the secret language of the dead, murmured so softly it felt as though the sounds originated in some recess within his ear, the hand on his shoulder pulled him entirely from sleep, and he looked up to see the gleaming needles of a Monterey pine and another woman’s face.

“Mr. McKinley?” It was the young Mrs. Burns, leaning above his face exactly as his first wife had in the dream. The red hair was damp and uncovered, combed over one shoulder.

He sat up. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said. “I dozed off.”

Mrs. Burns had dressed in a light pinafore that buttoned at her chin. “Did you come to see my Walter? He’s frolicking in the pool.”

Jeremiah studied the boy, who pushed a hand-sized wooden boat near the stout fellow with the cigar.

“Walter!” she cried. “Come to Mother, Walter!” The boy ignored her. “You see how we’ve spoiled him,” she said. “When he’s off in his own little world like this, he won’t listen to anything but his own fancy.”

She and Jeremiah went over to the pool’s edge, and the woman touched the boy’s shoulder. “Walter, do you remember Mr. McKinley? The man on the farm?”

It took more entreaty from the mother before the lad turned his head just enough to make eye contact with Jeremiah. There his gaze rested a moment, the mouth slack, open, until he turned again toward his wooden bark and nodded.

“Did you want to talk with Mr. McKinley?” she asked. The boy shook his head.

“Well,” Jeremiah said, raising his lanky frame from a crouch, “I don’t want to press him. I just thought I’d drop by since I was close to. Perhaps later in the day. Will you folks be taking in the parade and the fireworks in Santa Rosa?”

“I expect we will,” she replied. “Though Nathaniel might stay put for the cure.” Her mouth turned down at the corners and trembled. “At least Walter and I might come to town for the local color.”

“There’s not much color in Sonoma Town, but the county seat is entertaining. If you’ll excuse me.”

Jeremiah left for the changing rooms, and when he returned to poolside for another try at speaking with the little boy his hand brushed the corner of the envelope from the courthouse. He wished he could locate a Bible to find the reference to Deuteronomy and chuckled at the notion of asking the Reverend Harris to let him borrow that enormous volume he held on his lap. Mrs. Burns had pulled a chair near to her snoring husband, whose face had grown even more the color of a cooked sea crustacean.

“Walter!” the young woman called out. “Say good-bye to Mr. McKinley, the man on the farm!”

“My farm,” the boy corrected in a voice with some gravel in it, as if he’d swallowed a bit of the subterranean water he directed his boat through. His mother laughed.

Once again Jeremiah squatted on his haunches poolside. “What do you remember about your farm, about Fin Hollow Glen?” he asked.

“Everything.” Walter spoke to the boat. “I remember you, too.”

Jeremiah and the young mother exchanged smiles verging on stifled laughter.

“What about me?” the man asked.

“You wouldn’t obey when you was young,” the little boy said in that gravel voice. “Always got to do everything your own way.”

At this the mother covered her mouth and shook with laughter. “That’s the Lord’s truth,” Jeremiah said. He and Mrs. Burns exchanged mirthful glances. “Did I turn out all right, though, after a fashion?”

Walter’s boat dipped underwater and popped up. The boy’s brow furrowed. “I reckon you did, but I fear for you now, Jaybird.”

The July sun and the soft bone-warmth of Jeremiah’s bathe suddenly turned to ice down his spine. He felt the blood drain from his face, and he rocked from his squat into an Indian lotus, soaking the seat of his trousers on the concrete. A commotion emanated from the porch, and an entourage of some dozen men in bathing togs and towels, most of them smoking cigars, marched toward the pool, Madison leaning doggedly toward the procession. “Fremont,” Jeremiah heard somebody say. “Fremont.”

The pool emptied to make room for this platoon of dignitaries. Jeremiah found himself pulled by an elbow into the queue of admirers wishing to shake the great man’s hand before immersion. The Burns family had vanished: the sleeping drunk, the frail young mother, and the little boy with old Daniel’s memory all somehow disappeared into the steam rising from the geothermal waters, and Jeremiah rocked unsteadily against Madison’s shoulder. “You a little light-headed from the bath, Mac?”

“I think it’s just my old war wounds.” He doffed his hat and wiped his brow. “Might be best if I sat on this bench.” He settled next to a damp copy of the Sonoma Democrat opened to the Abner Stiles editorial.

“Make way!” Madison said, and at the front of the queue Jeremiah saw Thomas Lake Harris again.

There was no sign of Fremont. No glimpse of the man of whom Abner had written,

Pathfinder, Pioneer, Peerless Penetrater of the perilous wilderness, leader in the Great Bear War, John C Fremont mapped the Great West, from Oregon and the Rocky Mountains to our fair valley! The Pathfinder led the charge against Mexico, represented our free state in Congress, and even ran for President as the first candidate of the Party of Lincoln! We are deeply honored and fortunate to have this brave Bayard, this beacon of bold bravado, coming to our humble town on the Glorious Fourth to shed some wisdom of his years. He has taken some time from the daunting duties of Territorial Governor of Arizona to tour old haunts in California and pay old friends a visit. Look for The Pathfinder to speak at Two O’Clock before the Courthouse! Count yourself lucky! To be in the presence of one of the great stars

in the American Constellation, the bright