“Do you remember Eliza, the girl who lived with my brother and sister in Valparaíso?”
“Perfectly.”
“She ran away from home nearly a year ago and I have good reason to believe that she is in California. I have tried to find her but no one knows anything about her or anyone of her description.”
“The only women who have come here alone are prostitutes.”
“I don’t know how she came—if she did. The one fact we have is that she left in search of her lover, a young Chilean by the name of Joaquín Andieta.”
“Joaquín Andieta! I know him, he was my friend in Chile.”
“He is a fugitive from justice. Accused of theft.”
“I can’t believe it. Andieta was an upstanding young man. In truth, he had such a strong sense of pride and honor that it made it difficult to get close to him. And you are telling me that he and Eliza are in love?”
“I know only that he embarked for California in December of 1848. Two months later, the girl disappeared. My sister believes she came here, following Andieta, although I can’t imagine how she did that without leaving a trail. Since you move around through the camps and towns in the north, I thought you might find out something . . .”
“I will do what I can, Captain.”
“My brother and sister would be eternally grateful, Jacob.”
Eliza Sommers stayed with the caravan of Joe Bonecrusher, where she played the piano and shared her tips fifty-fifty with the madam. She bought books of songs in both English and Spanish to liven up the long nights of entertainment, and for idle hours, which were many. She taught the Indian lad to read, and helped with the daily chores and the cooking. Everyone in the carnival said that they had never eaten better. With the same eternal dried beef, beans, and bacon, she prepared savory dishes created in the inspiration of the moment; she bought Mexican condiments and added them to Mama Fresia’s Chilean recipes, with delicious results: she had only lard, flour, and preserved fruits, but she made pies, and when she could get eggs and milk her creations rose to celestial gastronomic heights. Babalú the Bad was not a believer in men cooks, but he was the first to wolf down the young pianist’s banquets and so had to stifle his sarcastic comments. In the habit of being on guard during the night, the giant slept like a log most of the day, but as soon as a whiff from the cook pots wafted to his dragon nostrils his eyes flew open and he sat down near the kitchen to wait. He had an insatiable appetite and there was no way to fill his gigantic belly. Before the arrival of Chile Boy, as they called the supposed Elías Andieta, his basic diet had been whatever game he caught, split down the middle, seasoned with a handful of salt, and laid on the coals till it was black. Following that method, he would eat a whole deer in a couple of days. Exposed to the cuisine of the pianist, he refined his palate, hunted every day, selected the most delicate prize, and delivered it skinned and dressed.
On the road, Eliza led the caravan on her sturdy nag, which despite its sorry appearance was as princely as the finest purebred, with her useless rifle strapped onto her saddle and the young Indian drummer riding on the horse’s croup. She felt so comfortable in men’s clothes that she wondered whether she would ever be able to dress like a woman again. Of one thing she was sure: she would never wear a corset, not even on the day of her marriage to Joaquín Andieta. If they came to a river the women seized the opportunity to collect water in barrels, wash clothes, and bathe. Those were Eliza’s most difficult moments; she had to invent more and more contrived excuses for cleaning up out of sight of observers.
Joe Bonecrusher was a corpulent Pennsylvania Dutch woman who had found her destiny in the wide-open spaces of the West. She had a prestidigitator’s skill with cards and dice, and she was passionate about cheating. She had earned a living betting, until she got the idea to organize a crew of girls and travel the mother lode “prospecting for gold,” which was what she called her method of mining. She was sure that the young pianist was homosexual and that was why she made room for him in her heart beside the young Indian. She did not allow her girls to tease him or Babalú to call him names: it wasn’t the kid’s fault that he was born without a beard and with that baby face, just as it wasn’t hers that she had been born a man in a woman’s body. These were just jokes God invented to screw things up. She had bought the Indian boy for thirty dollars from some vigilantes who had killed the rest of his tribe. He was four or five at the time, nothing but a skeleton with a worm-filled belly, but within a few months of forcibly feeding him and taming his rage so he didn’t destroy everything within reach or beat his head against the wagon wheels, he had grown a hand’s width and his true warrior’s nature had emerged: he was stoic, hermetic, and patient. She named him Tom No-Tribe so he would never forget the debt of revenge. “The name is the person,” Indians said, and Joe believed it; that was why she had invented her own name.
The soiled doves of the caravan consisted of two sisters from Missouri who had made the long trip overland and lost the rest of their family on the way; Esther, a girl of eighteen who had run away from her father, a religious fanatic who beat her; and a beautiful Mexican, the daughter of a white father and an Indian mother, who passed for white and had learned four phrases in French to bamboozle men who had only one thing in mind, because according to popular myth French girls were the best. In that society of adventurers and ruffians, there was also a racial hierarchy: whites accepted cinnamon-skinned girls but scorned any mixture with black. All four women were grateful for having run across Joe Bonecrusher. Esther was the only one without previous experience; the others had practiced their trade in San Francisco and knew the bad life. They hadn’t worked in the “best” houses; they knew about beatings, sickness, drugs, and the evil of pimps; they had had countless infections, suffered brutal remedies, and had had so many abortions that they were sterile, which they considered a blessing, not a tragedy. Joe had rescued them from that vile world and taken them out of the city. Then she had supported them during their long martyrdom of withdrawal to rid them of addiction to opium and alcohol. The women repaid her with the loyalty of daughters, and besides, she treated them fair and square. The intimidating presence of Babalú discouraged violent customers and hateful drunks; they ate well and the rambling wagons seemed a favorable atmosphere for good health and spirits. In those far-reaching spaces of hills and forests they felt free. There was nothing easy or romantic about their lives; they had saved a little money and could leave, if they wanted, yet they didn’t because that small band of humans was the closest thing to a family they had.
Joe Bonecrusher’s girls, too, were convinced that young Elías Andieta, with his effeminate manners and high voice, was homosexual. That gave them leave to undress, wash, and talk about any subject when he was around, as if he were one of them. They accepted him so naturally that Eliza tended to forget she was supposed to be male, although Babalú made it his job to remind her. He had taken on the task of making a man out of this lily-livered weakling, and he watched Elías closely, quick to correct him when he sat with his legs crossed or shook back his short mane with a very unmanly gesture. He taught him to clean and oil his weapons, but gave up trying to teach him to shoot because every time his student pressed the trigger, he closed his eyes. He was not impressed by Elías Andieta’s Bible; on the contrary, he suspected he used it to justify his childish ways and complained that if the boy did not want to become a damned preacher, why the hell did he read all that foolishness, anyway?; he’d be better off reading dirty books to see if that gave him any ideas about acting like a man. Babalú was barely able to sign his name and read with great difficulty, but he would die before admitting it. He said that his sight was failing and he couldn’t see the letters well, although he could shoot a terrified hare between the eyes at three hundred yards. He used to ask Chile Boy to read out-of-date newspapers and the Bonecrusher’s erotic books aloud, not so much for the sexy parts as the romantic, which always brought him near to tears. The plot invariably had to do with burning
love between a member of the European nobility and a common peasant girl, or sometimes the reverse, an aristocratic lady who lost her mind over a rustic but honest and proud man. In these tales the women were always beautiful and the gallants tireless in their ardor. The backdrop was a series of bacchanals, but unlike pornographic dime novels these had a plot. Eliza would read aloud, masking her shock, as if she had always been exposed to the worst vices, while Babalú and three of the doves listened, mesmerized. Esther did not participate in those sessions because to her it seemed a worse sin to describe the acts than to perform them. Eliza’s ears burned but she could not help but recognize the unexpected elegance with which these lusty tales were written; some of the sentences even reminded her of the impeccable style of Miss Rose. Joe Bonecrusher, who was not the least interested in carnal passion of any sort and so was bored by the reading, personally saw that not a word wounded the innocent ears of Tom No-Tribe. “I am raising him to be an Indian chief, not a pimp for whores,” she said, and in her wish to make him strong she also refused to let the boy call her Grandmother.
“Hell’s fire, I’m not anyone’s grandmother. I’m the Bonecrusher, do you hear what I’m saying, you damn brat?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
Babalú the Bad, an ex-convict from Chicago, had crossed the continent on foot long before the gold rush. He spoke Indian tongues and had done a little of everything to earn a living, from strongman in a traveling circus, where he might lift a horse over his head or pull a wagonload of sand by his teeth, to stevedore on the docks of San Francisco. That was where he had been discovered by Joe Bonecrusher and had taken a job in the caravan. He could do the work of several men, and with him they needed no further protection. Together he and his employer could scare off any number of attackers, as they had demonstrated on more than one occasion.
“You have to be strong or they grind you down, Chile Boy,” Babalú counseled Eliza. “Don’t think I’ve always been the way you see me. Once I was like you, weak and soft, but I began lifting weights and now look at my muscles. No one tries anything with me.”
“Babalú, you’re more than six feet tall and weigh as much as a cow. I’ll never be like you!”
“Size has nothing to do with it, man. It’s balls that count. I may have been big but they laughed at me just the same.”
“Who laughed at you?”
“Everyone, even my mother, may she rest in peace. I’m going to tell you something nobody knows.”
“Yes?”
“You remember Babalú the Good? That was me before. But ever since I was twenty I’ve been Babalú the Bad, and things have gone much better for me.”
Soiled Doves
In December, overnight, winter descended upon the foothills and thousands of miners had to abandon their claims and move to town to wait for spring. A merciful blanket of snow covered that vast terrain tunneled by greedy ants, and what gold was left again lay quietly in nature’s silence. Joe Bonecrusher directed her caravan to one of the new little towns in the mother lode, where she rented a dilapidated barn in which to hibernate. She sold the mules, bought a great wood trough for a bathtub, one cookstove and two for heat, and a few lengths of cheap cloth and boots for everyone because in the rain and the cold you couldn’t do without them. She set them all to scrubbing out the barn and making curtains to mark off rooms; she installed the canopy beds, the golden mirrors, and the piano. Then she went off to pay a courtesy call to the taverns, the general store, and the blacksmith shop, the centers of social activity. In the way of a newspaper, the town had a one-sheet bulletin printed on an aged hand press that had been hauled across the continent, in which Joe placed a discreet announcement of her business. Besides the girls, she offered bottles of what she called “The Finest Cuban and Jamaican Rum”—although, in truth, it was a savage brew that would curl a man’s soul—“torrid” books, and a couple of gambling tables. Customers showed up promptly. There was another brothel, but novelty was welcomed. The madam of the other establishment launched a campaign of slander against her rivals but refrained from openly confronting the formidable duo of Joe Bonecrusher and Babalú the Bad. In their new quarters there was frolicking behind the improvised curtains, dancing to the tune of the piano, and betting of considerable sums under the watchful eye of the boss lady, who did not permit any fighting or cheating under her roof—unless her own. Eliza watched men lose in a couple of nights what they’d won with months of titanic effort, then weep on the bosom of the girls who had helped clean them out.
In a short time the miners became very fond of Joe. Despite her piratical mien the woman had a motherly heart, and that winter fate put it to the test. The area was visited by an epidemic of dysentery that felled half the town, killing several of its victims. As soon as Joe heard about someone near death in some distant cabin, she borrowed a couple of horses from the blacksmith and rode with Babalú to help the poor devil. They were often accompanied by the smith, a formidable Quaker who disapproved of the mammoth woman’s livelihood but was always ready to help a neighbor. Joe would cook for the stricken miner, clean him up, wash his clothes, and console him by reading letters from his far-off family for the hundredth time, while Babalú and the blacksmith shoveled snow, hauled water, cut wood and stacked it by the stove. If the man was really bad off, Joe would wrap him in blankets, throw him over her horse like a sack of flour, and take him back home, where the girls would look after him with the dedication of nurses, happy to have the chance to feel virtuous. There wasn’t much they could do besides make the patients drink liters of sugary tea so they wouldn’t get dehydrated, keep them clean, warm, and in bed, with the hope that the trots would not drain their souls or fever cook their bones. Some died, and the rest took weeks to come back to the world. Joe was the only person who had the pluck to defy the winter and ride out to the most isolated cabins; sometimes she found bodies turned to ice statues. They weren’t all victims of disease; more than once the fellow had shot himself in the mouth because he couldn’t take any more growling guts, loneliness, and delirium. Once or twice Joe had to close her business, because the floor of the barn was crowded with mats and her doves had all they could do to take care of the patients. The town sheriff trembled when Joe appeared with her Dutch pipe and booming prophet’s voice to demand help. No one could refuse her. The same men who gave a bad name to the town tamely submitted to helping her. There was nothing resembling a hospital; the only doctor was worn out, and Joe just naturally assumed the task of mobilizing forces when there was an emergency. The lucky ones whose lives she saved became her devout debtors, and during that winter she wove the web of connections that would sustain her after the fire.
The blacksmith’s name was James Morton, and he was one of the few good men in the town. He felt an unassailable love for all humanity, including his ideological enemies, whom he considered errant out of ignorance, not intrinsic sinfulness. Incapable of a mean act, he could not imagine one in his neighbor; he preferred to believe that perverseness was a twist of character that could be remedied once exposed to the light of piety and affection. He came from a long line of Ohio Quakers, where he had worked with his brothers and sisters in an underground railroad for runaway slaves, first hiding them then leading them to free states and to Canada. His activities had drawn the ire of slaveholders, and one night a mob attacked their farm and set fire to the buildings; his family had watched without lifting a hand, because, faithful to their beliefs, they could not take up arms against a fellow man. The Mortons had to disperse and leave their land behind but they kept in close contact through the humanitarian network of abolitionists. James did not consider prospecting for gold to be an honorable way to earn a living because it did not create anything or perform a service. Riches debase the soul, complicate life, and engender unhappiness, he maintained. Besides, gold was a soft metal, useless for making tools; he could not understand the fascination it held for others. Tall, robust, with a luxuriant chestnut-colored beard, bright blue eyes, and muscular arms scarr
ed from countless burns, lighted by the glow of his forge he was the reincarnation of the god Vulcan. In the town there were only three Quakers, men who cherished hard work and family, content with their lot, the only men who did not swear, drink, or frequent the whorehouses. They met regularly to practice their faith, modestly, preaching by example while patiently awaiting the arrival of a group of friends from the East who were coming to swell their community. Morton was often at Joe Bonecrusher’s shack to help with victims of the epidemic, and there he met Esther. He would visit her, and pay her the regular fee, but all he did was sit with her and talk. He could not understand how she had chosen the life she had.
“Between my father’s beatings and this, I prefer the life I have a thousand times over.”
“Why did he beat you?”
“He accused me of provoking lust and inciting sin. He believed that Adam would still be in Paradise if Eve hadn’t tempted him. Maybe he was right. . . . You see how I’m earning my living.”
“There is other work, Esther.”
“This isn’t so bad, James. I close my eyes and think of nothing. It’s just a few minutes and then it’s over.”
Despite the vicissitudes of her profession, the girl had kept the freshness of her twenty years, and there was a certain charm in her discreet and silent bearing, so different from that of her companions. There was nothing of the flirt about her; she was plump, with a placid, bovine face and a strong country girl’s hands. Compared to the other doves, she was the least pretty, but her skin was glowing and her gaze gentle. The blacksmith didn’t know when he had begun to dream about her, to see her in the sparks of his forge, in the flare of the hot metal and in the cloudless sky, until he was no longer able to ignore that cotton wool feeling wrapped around his heart, threatening to choke him. Nothing worse could happen than to fall in love with a loose woman; it would be impossible to justify in the eyes of God and his community. He decided to conquer temptation with sweat; he closed himself in his shop and worked like a madman. Some nights you could hear the loud ringing of his hammer until near dawn.