Billie Lapham removed his top hat and nodded at Molly. “Ma’am.”
Molly turned her attention to Martha, eyes fastened on her stomach. “Well, now, who’ve we got here?”
Robert was too stunned to speak. Martha, in the midst of a contraction, clutched the side of the wagon again and could say nothing. Their silence brought on the expression Robert had seen in Molly when he was leaving her at French Creek: that desperation, the desire to be in control when it was clear she was not in control. It was almost unbearable, and he did not want the others to see it. “That’s my sister, Martha,” he managed to mutter. “She’s only just come out here from Ohio.”
Immediately Molly’s face cleared and she was able to laugh. “Of course, I should’ve guessed! Ain’t you two the spits of each other. You never told me you had a sister. And look at that, a baby, jest like me. When you due, honey?”
“Soon—now,” Martha gasped.
“I’ve still got a couple of months to go, I think, but I’m as big as you now. Wonder if it’s twins?” Molly pulled the skirts of her yellow dress—already let out in most places—tight over her belly.
“We’re headed down to Murphys,” Robert explained. “Billie and Nancy are moving there, and Martha and I …” He didn’t finish, though several pairs of curious eyes watched him to see how he would finish that sentence.
“What, you’re not leavin’ the big trees when I ain’t even seen ’em yet, are you? I come all this way!”
Robert shrugged, not knowing how to answer her question.
“You gonna stay at the new hotel at Murphys?”
“We are indeed, ma’am,” Billie Lapham replied, clearly sensing that Robert needed help.
“I loved it there. It’s got two floors, with balconies running around three sides. There are basins in every room, and mahogany everywhere! I didn’t like the first room they gave me, so I had them show me all the others and I chose the one in the front, above the street. You can sit out on the balcony and watch all the comings and goings—of which there are plenty ’cause there’s a saloon and a restaurant. And they let me store my mattress in the barn.”
Robert pictured the big feather mattress he had spent so much time in, and began to understand. “Have you left French Creek?”
Molly wrinkled her nose. “Of course! You don’t think I’m gonna bring up a child there, do you? Not with all those rascally miners around, I’m not. No, this baby’s gonna have a better life than that.” She smiled at him expectantly.
“Why don’t you go on up to Cally Grove and stay at the hotel there?” Robert suggested. “I’ll come back up in a day or two.”
“Why would I want to stay there on my own?” Molly spun her parasol again as if trying to mesmerize Robert with it. “Ain’t you gonna come back with me and show me the trees?”
Martha stared at Robert with big eyes, one hand still clutching the side of the wagon as if it had jolted her. The look on her face decided him. “No,” he said to Molly. “Martha’s having her baby now, and I’m taking her to Murphys to see her through it. I’m her brother. That’s what a brother does.”
Molly stopped spinning the parasol. “You hurtin’, honey?” she said to Martha, who nodded.
“Poor thing. You should be in bed, not out here in a wagon! Of course, you all go on. I’ll settle myself up at Calaveras, see what there is to see. Isn’t there a bowling alley up there?”
Billie Lapham sat straighter in his saddle. “There sure is, ma’am!” He was proud of the bowling alley.
“Maybe I’ll try it, if this don’t get in the way.” Molly patted her belly. “Give me another kiss, Robert, then I’ll head on up, and see you soon as you’re ready to come find me.” She seemed somehow to pull out of the awkward situation with her dignity intact.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Billie Lapham said, raising his top hat again, and Nancy murmured in agreement.
“You too. And good luck, honey!” Molly nodded at Martha, then tapped her driver with the top of her parasol and they moved on.
They were all silent for a moment. Once Molly was out of earshot, Billie Lapham started to laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned, Goodenough! You sure keep us guessin’, don’t you?”
Once Billie Lapham had ridden ahead to Murphys, the wagon continued slowly down the mountain. Robert remained riding behind it until Nancy called out, “Don’t stay back there, Robert Goodenough. You come up alongside us so you can answer some questions!”
Robert sighed. He would prefer not to talk, and to be alone, so that he could take in the reality of Molly and another baby. His life was rapidly filling with other people, without the time to figure out how that was going to change things. No one else seemed bothered by this, though. It wasn’t their life that was being tumbled around.
He brought the gray forward so that he was level with the women. Even looking at them made him blush: though Martha was clearly in pain, she was also smiling, and Nancy was openly grinning. “All right, now,” she said, “tell us all about her!”
Robert reluctantly explained about meeting Molly in Texas and again in Sacramento, and his subsequent visits to French Creek. He mentioned her cooking but not the other side of her job, and hoped they would not speculate too much. He found it embarrassing to have to reveal this side of his life, but at least it distracted Martha from her contractions. She let Nancy ask the questions, but she listened as closely as she could.
When Nancy had finally finished interrogating him, Martha nodded at her belly and said, “This baby will have a cousin.” Put that way, with her simple words making the lines between her and Robert and Molly clear, Robert felt a whole lot better.
Billie Lapham had two back bedrooms ready for them at Murphys Hotel when they arrived mid-afternoon, and had found a doctor and even a rare woman to help with the birth. The room was as nice as Molly had said—nicer than any room Robert had stayed in, with carpet on the floor and striped wallpaper and solid mahogany bedboards and washstands and good glass in the windows. He could not imagine sleeping well in it.
He hovered in the doorway as the woman got Martha into bed, but she waved him away. “Out—you’re no use,” she muttered. “Don’t need a doctor either—this ain’t no illness.”
“I’ll be nearby,” Robert called to his sister, but by then she had moved into the kind of pain that blocked out everything around her, and he doubted she heard. For a while he waited out in the hallway, but when she began to scream he went out and walked up and down Main Street.
Murphys was like other mining towns, full of supplies and alcohol, but it had a heft to it—like a building with a proper foundation laid—that made it likely to survive gold fever and become something more. Robert saw none of this, however, too shaken by his sister’s screams to notice the sturdy planks laid out for walking along the streets, the brick buildings, the gutters that had been dug. For a while he sat in one of the saloons with a glass of whiskey before him, but he was not a drinking man, and eventually he left, the glass untouched.
He preferred the outskirts of Murphys, where a few miners were camped. A creek—a tributary of the Stanislaus River—ran back behind the hotel, and he sat for a long time on its bank, watching a family dig up the mud from the bed and sluice it through a rocking box—one of the few who were still mining using the early methods Robert was familiar with. It was unusual to see a woman and children mining. He wanted to stop the woman and ask her what was happening to Martha, how a woman could survive so much pain. But he didn’t: she’d had the two children he could see with her and clearly survived that, and she would probably say as much about his sister. So Robert sat in the sun and watched them find their meager flakes of gold and tried not to think.
That was where Billie Lapham found him. Lapham was a man who wore his emotions physically, and Robert knew from the moment he saw his friend hurrying down the path that Martha was all right. He let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.
“Goodenough, you got yourself a ne
phew!” Billie Lapham pumped Robert’s hand and wiped his forehead. He clearly liked being the bearer of good news.
“How’s Martha?”
“Oh, she’s fine. Tired, of course. It’s incredible what women have to go through, ain’t it?” He shook his head in wonder. “She’s asking for you, and I said I’d find you. Looked everywhere except back here. C’mon, I’ll take you to her.”
She was lying in bed with the baby in her arms, oblivious to the activity around her: Nancy Lapham bringing her a cup of tea, the doctor putting away bottles and metal instruments Robert didn’t want to look at too closely, and the woman bundling sheets into buckets of water. Before he joined his sister he paid the doctor and gave something to the woman too. Then he sat on the chair next to the bed. “Martha,” he said.
“Oh, Robert,” she rasped, her throat raw from yelling. “You’re here.” Martha’s hair was clumped together with sweat, and she had new lines around her eyes and mouth. The pain she had just been through had pressed its heavy mark on her. But when she held out her hand to take his, her grip was firm.
“You all right?” Robert asked. Despite the woman taking the sheets away, the room was metallic with the smell of blood.
“Sure I am. I’m just glad he’s out. Look at him.” She pointed a tiny, wrinkled red face at him with the radiance only a mother can have for her baby. Robert couldn’t take in his nephew for the moment; it was his sister he was concerned with.
“What shall we call him?” Martha said.
Robert shook his head. “You decide.”
“I want to call him after our father. James.”
Robert flinched. “Your father, you mean,” he said after a moment, though immediately he regretted bringing up the subject at such a time.
But Martha looked at him steadily. “I meant what I said. Our father. I never paid attention to what Ma said about Uncle Charlie. She was just—well. She was being Ma. Fighting to the last.”
Robert wasn’t so sure. He had put his mother’s last words to him up on a high shelf that he never visited. But maybe he would let Martha do the visiting for him.
“Let’s call him Jimmy to start with,” she said. “James is awful serious for a boy.”
Robert had another, dim memory of the name Jimmy carved on one of the wooden crosses that marked the graves of his dead brothers and sisters in the Black Swamp. When his mother was drunk she had shouted at God and the swamp fever for taking her oldest boy. Maybe a new Jimmy was some kind of an answer to that loss.
The red face let out a sudden cry. Robert reared back like the gray would when it saw a snake, but Martha pulled open her dress and put him on her breast. Robert looked away. “You want anything?”
“Some bread soaked in a little milk would be nice—I’m starving! And a towel to wrap around Jimmy for a diaper.”
Robert went down to the restaurant and ordered food for Martha and himself, and asked about towels. These were unfamiliar domestic arrangements to him, and he found himself thinking about his bedroll, about the gray in the stables, about the camps surrounding Murphys and the fires the miners would soon be sitting around, eating tack and hard biscuits and smoking cigars. Would he ever join such campfires again? He could not imagine Martha sitting by one with a baby in her arms or, later, a child playing at her feet. But then, he had never imagined her coping with the rough life on board a ship going around South America.
While they ate together in the hotel room, the baby asleep on the bed beside Martha, he asked her more about that trip, about New York City and, tentatively, about the Black Swamp. Martha was in the middle of telling him something funny about Hattie Day when she stopped. “You know I can’t ever go back there,” she said, interrupting her own story. “’Cause of what I did to Caleb.”
Robert swallowed. “Is he …”
“I don’t know. I run off. But there was a lot of blood.” Martha fixed her eyes on the candle by her bed. “I thought they might be looking for me in New York so I kept real quiet there, and slipped onto the ship at the last minute. But there’s a whole country between me and the Black Swamp. They won’t come looking for me all the way out here, will they?”
“Of course not. I’ll keep you safe.” Robert tried to sound reassuring, hiding his shock over her mention of blood. “We can live somewhere out of the way. There’s plenty of land out here. California is where you get to start over.”
Martha turned her eyes back to him from the candle. “What about Molly?”
“What about her?” Robert’s reply was cockier than he actually felt.
“She’s family now. Her baby will be a Goodenough too, and so will she once you marry her.”
“Marry Molly?”
“She seems real nice. Spirited. And it’d be good to live with someone else having a baby at the same time—makes it easier.” Martha chuckled at the look on his face. “You haven’t thought about it much, have you?”
Robert shook his head. “There hasn’t been any time.”
“Well, now you can start to plan. Tomorrow you go up to Calaveras Grove and talk to her about the future, make sure she doesn’t mind if I live with you all.”
“Of course she won’t mind!” Robert didn’t add, “No one has talked about living together.” Martha was making assumptions, and he suspected Molly was too. That was how women had to be, he supposed: pragmatic, looking out for their children.
To his relief, they didn’t have to talk about the future anymore, for exhaustion had caught up with her and Martha’s eyes were closing. Robert quietly unrolled his bedding and spread it on the floor. He pretended to be asleep each time his nephew woke for a feeding.
In the morning, despite the night’s interruptions, Martha was clear-eyed and smooth-faced, and insistent that he go back to Calaveras Grove to see Molly. “Please,” she added as Robert hesitated. “It’ll set me at ease to know where Jimmy and me fit in to the future. And besides, she’s carrying your child. You got to see she’s all right.”
The Laphams were with them by then, Nancy sitting with Martha and Billie walking up and down with the baby in his arms. “Go on, Goodenough, we’ll take good care of your family,” he said, jiggling his bundle.
“Course we will,” Nancy added. “I’ll get my knitting and sit here all day for company. This little boy needs some warm clothes for the winter!”
“All right,” Robert agreed finally. “I’ll be back tonight.” Part of him was relieved to get away from his nephew. He had only held him once, briefly, and his red skin and his eyes squeezed shut and his grasping mouth were alien to Robert. Secretly he couldn’t understand why the others were praising the baby so much when he resembled an animal rather than a human.
He leaned down and kissed his sister’s forehead. She smiled up at him. “Say hello to Molly for me. Tell her I’m looking forward to the cousins playing together.”
Robert nodded. As he left, Nancy Lapham was making arrangements for a tin bath to be brought up so that Martha could wash away the sweat and blood of the previous day.
At Calaveras Grove he found Molly leaning against the Chip Of the Old Block, chatting to other visitors and looking as if she lived there. As he dismounted and headed towards her she was saying, “Myself, I like a waltz, especially when I’m so big. Imagine trying to polka with this belly!” The group with her laughed.
Molly brightened when she saw him, and went to put her arm through his. “Robert Goodenough, you were right about this place. It’s wonderful!”
“You walked through the trees yet?”
“Naw, just saw those.” She waved at the Two Sentinels. “I’ve been waitin’ for you to come and show me. How’s your sister?”
“Good. She had the baby. She’s calling him James—Jimmy. She—she sends her regards.” Robert could not bring himself to repeat the part about the cousins playing together, and about living together: it was too much too soon. “Let me stable the gray, then I’ll show you the trees. I can only stay for the day.”
Molly
frowned. “Ain’t you even gonna stay the night? The food is good here—I had a long talk with the cook. And I love the bowling! Have you tried it?”
Robert shook his head, remembering how scathing William Lobb had been about the game. “I promised Martha I’d come back tonight. She’s still pretty tired, and I want to make sure she’s all right, and knows I’m there.” Thinking of his sister gave him a pang, and he began to regret having left her to come to Cally Grove.
Molly looked as if she were going to say something, but stopped herself. “All right, then, Robert Goodenough, let’s enjoy the day while we got it.”
She accompanied him to the stables to put up the gray. After only a day she clearly knew her way around, and she hallooed everyone in sight, for it seemed she had introduced herself to those who worked at the Grove and all the visitors too. In fact, Molly seemed much more interested in the human element of Calaveras Grove than she was in the sequoias themselves—which to Robert was missing the point. However, it did mean he didn’t have to take her all the way around the mile-and-a-half circuit to see every tree. She was content to look at the trees that were only a little way into the woods, insisting as they went around on leaning on Robert’s arm, as Martha had two days before. This time he felt the weight of her expectation even more heavily than Martha’s. She held herself like a ship steering a slow, proud passage through calm waters. The visitors who encountered them smiled to see such a large woman among large trees—a response Molly accepted as if it were her due, like a queen or a president.
When they neared one of the named trees, Molly stopped and squinted. “The Old Bachelor,” she read aloud from a plaque that had been hung on it. “Huh!” She glanced sideways at Robert. “Let’s set here awhile.” Without waiting for him to agree, she settled onto a nearby bench placed so that there was a good view of the tree. Robert perched beside her.
“Sit back!” she said, pulling at his shoulder. “You’re tense as a cat in a thunderstorm.”