“I can pick out a few tunes, but I’m no Scott Joplin. A bit rusty, too, but I’ll do if the piece is sprightly.”
Clearing his throat, the old man sat up and spoke carefully. “Perhaps we can prevail upon you for a few melodies later. There is a lovely thing by Mozart caught in my aural memory, a song stuck in the head.”
“We’d have a hard time fittin’ a piano in the bathroom.”
Dandling the child on his knee, the old man said, “You’d be surprised what the commodious mind can accommodate. You were about to relate the troubles and grief brought about by a man.”
? ? ?
Raising the stake for any journey was the horns of the problem, ’cause they were young and just starting out, and he didn’t have any money to speak of, and while her pap had a deal of capital, it was all tied up in the farm. He had raised up the whole lot of them from dirt poor and little better than the darkies, her pap did, through the honest sweat of his brow, and as a consequence, held his dollars till the eagles squawked. “Don’t worry,” Jamie says, “I will find us the way, just be ready to go when I says.” “And Flo,” he whispered to her since the conversation was in the bed, “don’t tell no one we’re going till the time comes to say good-bye.”
She never knew who he stole the money from or who he promised a share of the riches to come, it may have been Pap in either case, and she never did ask, not wanting to know, but Jams come home one afternoon and says, “Pack your bags, we’re off tomorrow.” Scant time to say good-bye, she made a tearful farewell with kin and friends, loaded a trunk with her possessions, and found herself scrabbling over to Missouri. Like a thousand others, as pouring into a funnel.
Crazed like so many they were bit by the gold bug to cross the whole country in search of it. They were argonauts, forty-niners, and made their way overland from the basin of the Ohio River. Drawn to the swarm, they leapt acrost the plain and over the mountaintops. A voyage of utter boredom and unrelenting hardship, lost two oxen bought in St. Joe to the wretched nothingness of the Great Salt Desert, made sick by the water tasting of chalk and bonedust and the chaw of dried beef or buffalo and never a lick of corn or apple or any good thing left behind at home. Some never made it at all, perishing on the migration, boiled and bleached by the sun or frozen crossing the high ground. Wasted by the cholera or some damned accident, a misstep, a lack of judgment. Ain’t that always the way, fate just over the horizon waiting to catch ye out or bring ye reward. And all who came over the Sierras were worn and thin and blistered and oh so tired. Jamie and Florence were but twenty and nineteen when they started, and five months later seemed to have aged ten hard years. She rode most of the way in the wagon-back, but he walked or went astride on a good Kentucky gelding till the poor horse caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and was put down by the side of the trail. And then Jams rode on a mule. Or walked when the beast was stubborn. All that time in the wind and sun colored him brown from the brim of his hat to his collar till he was damn near indistinguishable from the red niggers, begging your pardon, Indians sometimes met on the road. Miles of walking hardened the body, too, till Jams looked stringy and wild as a half-starved coyote. While Flo was no more ready for the mining life than when departed from Harlan County, she marveled at how prepared in mind and limb her man was as they fetched up in Sacramento to outfit theyselves. None of them was full ready for the hard work ahead, for they had heard the gold was plenty there for the taking of, but they were all wrong. It weren’t just lying on the ground but hid like every good thing, and they wasn’t the only ones looking for it neither. Jams and Flo was panners at first, like all the other greenhorns, and a more primitive art ye won’t find, but harder than it seems.
A small, unfortunate chuckle escaped the tunnel of my throat.