“Condensation,” Lobb replied without looking up. “The water can’t escape through evaporation, so it remains in the case. A plant can live months in a Ward’s case, as long as it doesn’t get smashed. It’s people who are more likely to damage the plants than anything else. I once had specimens survive in Ward’s cases all the way from Brazil, only to die from being left too long in the cold on a London dock. Seeds are always a better bet, as long as they don’t germinate.”
The next day Robert and William Lobb took their cargo down to Pacific Wharf, where the Columbus was docked. It would steam to Panama City, then the cargo would be carried by wagon across the Panama Isthmus to Aspinwall, where another steamship would head up through the Caribbean to New York. There the cases would be transferred to a ship bound for Southampton, on the south coast of England. In all the trip would take two to three months.
Once they had stowed the Ward’s case and the tin cases down in the hold and were back on deck, William Lobb took out his pipe, filled it with tobacco, tamped it down and lit it. “Go and get anything still in the wagon, would you, lad? I’ve got my hands full.”
Robert thought they had brought everything but he went back as directed. On the wagon bed he found a leather trunk with a brass plate fixed to one side, the initials WL engraved on it. He ran his finger over the letters and frowned. Shouldering the trunk, he hauled it on board.
William Lobb was standing in the doorway of a cabin, and gestured for Robert to put the trunk at the foot of the bed. When he straightened, Robert looked at his employer puffing away on his pipe.
“Aren’t you coming back to Mrs. Bienenstock’s?” he said at last, since it looked as if William Lobb wasn’t going to speak.
“No, Robert.” It was one of the few times since they had met that Lobb used his name. “I’m going back to England. I’m not expected for another year, and Veitch’ll be surprised to see me. But this is the most exciting find since the monkey puzzle. He’ll never believe me about the size of those sequoias unless I describe them to him face to face, and show him my drawings. In a letter he’ll just think I’m exaggerating. This way I’ll get a chance to look after the Ward’s case, make sure it gets out into sunlight now and then, and doesn’t get smashed or abandoned.”
“But—”
“Mrs. B. will set you straight. Now, I’ve got a thing or two to settle with the captain. They always try to shortchange me on fresh water. See you in a year or two, if the sea doesn’t get me, or a grizzly bear you!” With those words William Lobb strode away, leaving Robert standing lost on deck.
He did not wait for the steamship to set out, but walked in a daze back to the boardinghouse. He had assumed that once the Columbus sailed, he and William Lobb would saddle their horses and ride south towards the mountains around Monterey, where Lobb would teach him about pines. Now he had to discard that dream. All he wanted to do was saddle up the gray and ride away—away from the boardinghouse and San Francisco, away from redwoods and sequoias, away from the Monterey and ponderosa and bristlecone pines he’d hoped William Lobb would show him. The problem was, you couldn’t go west of California, and Robert had never run anywhere but west.
In his room he packed his few things. But when he went to settle up with Mrs. Bienenstock, who was in the kitchen grinding coffee beans in a hand mill, she shook her head and he knew William Lobb had paid it. More than that: she had money for him, and instructions. “You take his room, long as you don’t mind how small and dark it is,” she said. “Not so bad now those cases are gone. I’m supposed to pay you. You can have it all now, or regular like a salary. Which do you want?”
Robert stared at her, unable to speak. Mrs. B. shook her head again and turned the handle faster. “We better make it regular.” When he didn’t move, she added, “Come on, man. Time to paddle your own canoe. Go on, put your things in there. I’ll get you some fresh sheets.” As Robert went to obey her, he thought he heard her chuckle.
William Lobb had left his room neat and empty apart from a stack of brown leather notebooks and a letter. The notebooks were similar to the one Lobb had used at Calaveras Grove. That notebook full of sequoia drawings was gone now, of course: Lobb would have taken it with him back to England to show to his employer. But the other notebooks were full of everything he needed to know about California conifers.
He opened the letter—the first he had ever received. It consisted mostly of a list.
September 13, 1853
Goodenough—
Please collect the following:
5 sacks each of Pinus radiata, muricata, ponderosa and attenuata + 3 seedlings each
3 of Abies bracteata + 3 seedlings
10 of giant sequoias + 5 seedlings
4 of Sequoia sempervirens + 5 seedlings
3 of Pinus lambertiana + 3 seedlings
5 each of Abies grandis, procera, magnifica and concolor + 3 seedlings
I have marked on the enclosed map where best to find them. Many you can collect near San Francisco or Monterey, but for the last listed you will need to go far north to the Oregon mountains and bring the cones back by ship to San Francisco.
Send all consignments to
William Lobb Esq
Veitch and Sons’ Exotic Nursery
Mount Radford
Exeter
England
Use Adams Express, on my account. When you ship specimens, always send me two notes—one on the ship carrying the cargo, the other separately on a different ship—to alert me of their arrival.
Yours faithfully,
William Lobb
He sat for a long time, rereading the letter and studying the list of trees. Lobb had not asked him if he would collect for him, but simply assumed he would. That assumption did not bother Robert. Given the choice between the aimless sort of existence he’d had the last few years, picking up farming and ranching here and there, and collecting trees for an employer, there was no doubt which he would choose. And he was flattered that William Lobb felt he was up to the job—indeed, had spent the last several days training Robert.
He smiled to himself. He was becoming a tree agent.
For over a year Robert collected for William Lobb without hearing a word from him. He worked hard to gather the quantities demanded in the letter, traveling in a wide radius around San Francisco, making another trip to Calaveras Grove—hiring mules to bring the sacks back to the city—and going north for the first time to the Oregon mountains. The gray finally resigned himself to climbing and carrying sacks of cones, though he still kicked and bit when his owner tried to hang pails of seedlings on him, and Robert had to devise leather pouches to put them in instead.
It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica. He was surprised at how much he missed people. Sometimes he deliberately sought out miners’ camps, just to sit with others around a fire. When he needed familiarity, he went back to San Francisco so that he had Mrs. Bienenstock to talk to—or at least to be around, as she was more a grunter than a talker. Robert did not say much either, but they sat in the kitchen together, reading the newspaper, or out on the steps of the house, where she smoked her cigar and he watched passersby. Once she offered him a cigar and he made the mistake of inhaling. She chuckled about it for a week.
By the following spring he had collected and packed and sent three shipments of specimens and seeds, ticking off everything in Lobb’s letter. He didn’t know what to do then, and asked Mrs. Bienenstock. She didn’t even look up from mopping the
kitchen floor, cigar clamped between her teeth. “Do it all over again.” So he did.
His next round of collecting was what brought him riding down a Sacramento street on a late spring day just as the sun came out from behind a cloud and lit up a woman in a yellow dress. She was standing by a wagon and watching as men loaded it with sacks of flour. Robert pulled up the gray with a start at the sight of Molly Jones.
Robert had met Molly five years before on a Texas ranch where she worked as a cook, with a side line in prostitution. She seemed equally at home in both roles, though she never called herself a whore. Sleeping with men was just another task, like scrubbing pots or gutting chickens. Robert had even seen her pause in the middle of preparing a pot of stew to step into the pantry with a cowboy and lift her skirts.
Molly had curly black hair, wide blue eyes, a substantial bosom and a cheerfulness that did not always match her circumstances. Robert had seen her continue smiling as she passed a corpse by the side of the road or after a customer gave her a black eye. “Robert Goodenough,” she repeated the first time she heard his name. “Now I am sure that ain’t right. I’m gonna have to check jest how good you are!” And she did, that night, finding him and leading him back to her room, which had the most comfortable bed on the ranch, and relieving him of his ignorance of women. Her bosom smelled like bread. “First one’s free,” she said afterwards, lying along her arm and smiling. “You can go now, honey,” she added as Robert sat on the side of the bed, hands hanging between his knees, unsure of the etiquette. Molly was helpful like that.
For a week Robert was in love with her, with her yeasty smell, her frizzy hair that would not stay in a bun, her lips a dark red like she had just been eating blackberries. Really he was in love with being so close to a person that you were actually inside their body. He could not get enough of that feeling, and visited her bed three more times that week. Between bouts they would lie in bed recovering, and Molly would ask him about his past. Robert dodged the difficult questions, said nothing about why he had left Ohio, about having to grow up fast, about being cold and hungry and tired most of the time. If he did not talk about it, he did not have to think about it, and could keep a dark curtain pulled shut between then and now. Instead he entertained her with funny stories about Jonah Parks, the charlatan medicine man he’d worked for in Indiana, like the time they went to jail after Jonah Parks stole a wooden leg and accidentally tried to sell it back to the owner. Molly loved that story.
She was more forthcoming about her own past: a childhood in Georgia, a mother dead in childbirth, a drunk father, a brother and sister killed by Indians while Molly hid in a haystack and watched. “You got to smile,” she said. “Otherwise you’d cry all day.”
After the fourth bedding, Molly took his money and said, “No more for a while, or you’ll run through your pay, with nothin’ to show for it at the end.” It was her way of warning him off feeling more for her than he should, and Robert knew she was right. He still went to bed with her occasionally, but he did not try to get to know her better.
Sometimes, though, when he was wrapped in his blanket during a starless night, or chasing the horizon across an endless plain under the brutal Texan sun, he remembered the dazed feeling he’d had during that feverish week of love, riding among the cattle with the sensation that everything in the world—every scrubby plant, every outcrop of rock, every cow and horse and man and cloud—all connected up along a path that led back to one woman, standing in a kitchen making biscuits. While he was feeling it he had not thought he could ever feel any other way. Once it was gone, though, he wondered how something so strong could fade to a ghostly trace, like a river that had flooded but now dried to a trickle, leaving behind only a flood mark of debris. For the feeling did fade, Molly became just another worker at the ranch, and when Robert left for California, he said goodbye to her as if they had barely met and certainly not shared a sweaty bed. For her part, Molly remained buoyant. “Maybe I’ll go to Californie too,” she said. “Find me some gold and put my feet up. That’d be the life, wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll do that.”
It seemed she had done what she’d threatened. Robert sat on the gray on the Sacramento street and studied her. Molly was thinner now and more weathered—crossing America did that to a face—but still looked cheerful. She was turned away from him, and he could have ridden past and pretended their paths hadn’t crossed, and never seen her again. He thought about it, and then he called her name.
Molly gave a shout when she saw him, ran over as he dismounted and hugged him, laughing, then pressed his face to her bosom. It sagged a little now but still smelled like bread. “Why do you look so surprised?” she cried when she’d let him come up for air. “I told you I’d get to Californie.”
“You—are you prospecting?” he asked. It was hard to imagine Molly as a miner. And finding gold was harder now; most of what was left required extraction with heavy equipment and cooperation rather than one man with a pick, a shovel and a pan. Many miners had joined together into companies. The rest had turned reluctantly and headed back east, or stayed and become sailors or ranchers or farmers or merchants or pimps or whores or hustlers. California had once been a huge land with a few Indians and Californios living there; now it held hundreds of thousands of Americans, come for gold and looking for something else to replace that dream.
“Me a miner?” Molly laughed. “You think I’m gonna get these hands dirty? Naw, I’m cookin’ at one of the camps up French Creek, off the Cosumnes River south of Hang Town. You know it? I jest come to Sacramento for supplies. Miners don’t want to spend a minute away from their work, so they pay me good money to feed ’em. I’m keepin’ an eye out for which one’s found the most gold and managin’ to hold on to his money. That’s the one I’ll stick with. Ain’t found him yet.”
She’s a cat, Robert thought, landing on her feet. He was glad to hear she had work and a plan, and had avoided the gold fever that took over so many and ravaged them. But he was a little uneasy too: he thought he’d seen a flash of desperation behind Molly’s cheerfulness when she first caught sight of him, more pronounced than the simple pleasure of running into someone she knew. It was not easy for a woman in California, there being so few of them, and so many volatile men, but Robert preferred to think that Molly could take care of herself. He did not want her to want something from him.
“So how about you, honey? You prospectin’?”
“I did for a while, but I’m not now.”
“Didn’t think so. You sure don’t look like you struck rich. No watch, no new boots. And your horse …” Molly made a face at the speckled gray. “What happened to Bolt?”
“Indians took him.”
She chuckled. “Shame. They got a good eye for horses. What, they left you this flea-biter, did they?”
The gray seemed to understand her, for he jerked his head and whinnied.
Robert explained that he’d left prospecting and begun collecting trees for William Lobb to send back to England. Molly stared at him. “What do they want with our trees? Don’t they have their own?”
Robert shrugged. “They don’t have so many pines there.”
“You put ’em on a ship goin’ thousands of miles and they pay good money for ’em?”
Robert nodded.
“That’s the silliest damned thing I ever heard.”
Robert smiled. It was a common response when he told people what he did. “You ever hear of Calaveras Grove, sixty miles south of here?”
“Heard of it. Never been. There’s a hotel up that way, ain’t there?”
“Yes, and trees bigger than anything you could ever imagine. Think of the biggest tree you’ve ever seen—”
“An old pecan tree, back of my Pa’s cabin in Georgia,” Molly said immediately. “I used to sit at the bottom of it and jest look up and up. I loved that tree.” For just a moment she dropped her cheery mask and became pensive.
“Take that pecan and triple it in size, both how tall and how wide. T
hat’s a sequoia.”
“Well, now, I’d like to see that. Maybe I’ll go to Calaveras Grove and see those trees.” She sounded like she had back in Texas when talking about California. They exchanged a few more words about people they’d both known in Texas and what had become of them. The men had finished loading the flour and were waiting for Molly, picking their teeth and spitting tobacco on the ground around the wagon.
“Well, good luck with your seed collecting, Robert Goodenough,” Molly said at last. “I can see trees suit you better’n cattle ever did.”
“I guess.”
“Come and see me if you’re ever up near French Creek.”
“Are you still making those biscuits?” Molly’s biscuits in Texas had been famous for their fluffiness.
“Of course.” Molly winked. “Remember, the first one is free.”
Robert had thought he would never get to French Creek and take up her invitation. There were no redwoods or sequoias there, only some sugar and ponderosa pines he could collect but which he could also find just as easily closer to San Francisco. There was no reason to go. Nonetheless, three weeks later he made the trip. Molly was so glad to see him that he knew then the flash of desperation he’d noticed in Sacramento had not been imagined. Indeed, it was in her eyes when he arrived and when he left. In between she kept him near her, brought him into her bed and had him take her over and over until he had slaked his pent-up energy. When they were not in bed he helped her cook, for he had no desire to mine or watch others do so.
Being at French Creek reminded Robert of the prospecting fields he had left three years before: the relentless focus on gold that made men both crazed and dull, and the many nights around fires spent talking about the minutiae of equipment—whether a rocker box caught more gold than an individual pan, or where to buy a balanced pickaxe—or endlessly analyzing the latest rumors of gold elsewhere that could empty out a camp by morning. He hadn’t liked it then, even when he took part in it, and he detested it now, when the gold was harder to find. The miners still working were more ruthless, even when they were meant to be cooperating.