Rising each morning well after the children had been sent off to school or their new jobs, and much later than his lazy brother, James would dress in his silk gown and come down to the table to eat his breakfast when most of California was beginning to grumble for its noonday dinner. He’d learned to read by then and would take the newspaper, usually the morning’s Examiner, or when the steamer came, two weeks’ worth of Dickens’s serials in the New York papers, despite that rascal’s “American Notes,” and Jamie’s reading would occupy mind and spirit for several hours. Then he would dress just as the eldest were coming through the door—John C. from his job as a printer’s devil and Jessie late from her post in a ribbon shop on Union Street. Sometimes he and the boy would have a talk on the front porch, and Jessie was given a little dog by one of her beaus that her father would watch over and play with for hours at a time. A few times a week, Eben would go out and leave him alone in the house, and like as not, Jams would fall asleep by the fireplace or watching the stars through the crack. He was but six and thirty yet had the habits of a man twice his age.
And so things continued to worsen. With little income from the children and nothing from her husband, Flo struggled to meet the bare expenses. Bit by bit, they sold off their possessions. No carriage, no horse, no need. The silver service for Eben and Rebecca’s marriage fetched enough to keep the household running for eight months. Gold and silver trinkets from their mining days went to the pawnshop or friends, who gleefully overpaid as a means of stealthy charity. New purchases were forsaken. His shirts began to fray at the sleeves and he saved the collars for the rare occasions he ventured in the city. Her dresses slipped out of and back into fashion, depending on her skills in mending. The children wore their boots and shoes to the nubbins, and the twins relied on the castaways and hand-me-downs from their elder siblings and had aught new from ’65 on. Thank the Lord they lived in perfect climes where the temperatures were mild year-round, for Jeb and Zach never had more than two gloves for their four hands. How they ever got those children raised was a mystery to their mother. The three girls married young to the first gentlemen interested enough to ask, and the boys left home early to seek their fortune. Young John C. ended up with Mr. Hearst’s enterprises, and one twin joined the gold rush to the Black Hills of the Dakotas in ’76, though the boy met his end that summer at the hands of the Sioux. The other left this mortal coil in an opium parlor attended by a Japanese woman who claimed to be his lawful wife, though her claim earned her nothing at the Worths’ home, for there was nothing to be had.
It were not for any lack of effort on Flo’s part. Sure, she had coddled Jams early on, allowed him time to recover from the blows of first the stocks and then the earth shakes and the damage to the house, but in a few months, she thought to ask when he might be going to find work or some other means to money. “In due course,” he would tell her. “Right now I am aiming to rest for a while.” Her mam had been a nag to her pap, sending the man to moonshine, so she waited and bit her tongue till she damn near bit through it.
At some point someone, probably Eben or one of the twins, had climbed a ladder and nailed a slat across the crack in the wall beneath the roof, obscuring the night sky, but Jams faithfully watched the stars in pieces each night. After many years had passed and all the children grown and flown the nest, the pull of gravity on both sides of the fracture proved too much. The nails popped one by one from the ends, and the board clattered to the floor. Unkempt and soft and bloated and dressed in his ancient silk robe, the man in the winged-back chair broke into a satisfied smile. “At long last,” he said, and the very next day, Jams woke early, shaved, and left the octagon house, announcing to his wife that he was off to seek their fortune and that she should not expect his return that evening or any time soon. She grunted a good-bye and watched the old sloth saunter down the avenue and disappear.
Days later, the little dog starts barking at the door, so she like to think it might be her husband returning. ’Stead a package arrived in the post. She opened it to find a red lacquer box filled with notes from the First National Gold Bank of San Francisco in fives and tens and hundreds, enough money to change their lives. Atop the stack of currency was a letter in her husband’s hand: “This should keep you in the pink of the mode until my return. I must rest from my labors. Your Jams.”
She turned to Eben, who had been speechless ever since she had opened the package, and asked, “What do you make of all this? Where did all this money come from? Where is Jamie, and when will he be coming home?”
“Nuffin in the world no longer surprises me,” Eben said. “I got no answers, though that looks like a Chinese box to me. Suppose when he’s done restin’, we’ll find out.”