As soon as she had a fixed address, Eliza wrote Tao Chi’en at the Chinese restaurant in Sacramento, telling him her new name and asking his advice about combating dysentery because the only remedy she knew to prevent contagion was a piece of raw meat bound to the navel with a strip of red wool, the way Mama Fresia did in Chile, but that was not producing the hoped-for results. She missed Tao painfully; sometimes she awoke with Tom No-Tribe in her arms, imagining in the wooziness of half sleep that it was Tao Chi’en, but the boy’s smoky odor quickly brought her back to reality. No one had the fresh salt-air scent of her friend. The distance that separated them was short in miles but storms made the route arduous and dangerous. She thought of riding with the mailman to continue her search for Joaquín Andieta, as she had in better weather, but weeks went by as she waited for an opportunity. It wasn’t just the winter that got in the way of her plans. During that period the tension between American miners and the Chileans in the south of the mother lode had exploded. The Yanquis, fed up with the foreigners, joined together to run them out, but the Chileans fought back, first with weapons and then before a judge, who recognized their rights. Far from intimidating the aggressors, the judge’s order merely fired them up; several Chileans ended up on the gallows or thrown off cliffs, and the survivors had to flee. In answer, they formed gangs of marauders, as many Mexicans had done. Eliza realized that given her disguise as a Latin youth she could not risk being accused of some invented crime.
The last days of January 1850 witnessed one of the worst ice storms ever seen in those parts. No one dared leave shelter; the town seemed dead, and for more than ten days not a single customer came to the barn. It was so cold that at dawn water in the washbasins was frozen solid even though the stoves were kept burning, and some nights they had to bring Eliza’s horse indoors to save it from the fate of other animals that woke up in blocks of ice. The girls slept two to a bed, and Eliza paired up with the Indian boy, for whom she felt a ferocious and jealous affection, which he returned with stubborn constancy. The only person among them who could compete with Eliza for the boy’s affection was Joe Bonecrusher. “Some day I’m going to have a strong, courageous son like Tom No-Tribe, but much happier,” Eliza wrote Tao Chi’en. “This little one never laughs.” Babalú the Bad did not know how to sleep at night, and spent the long hours of darkness pacing from one end of the barn to the other in his Russian boots and seedy furs, with a blanket over his shoulders. He had stopped shaving his head and was sprouting a fuzz that matched his wolf-skin jacket. Esther had knitted him a gosling-yellow wool cap that covered his head to the ears and gave him the look of a monstrous baby. He was the one who heard a few faint knocks that morning and had the good sense to distinguish it from the noise of the storm. He opened the door a crack, with pistol in hand, and found a bundle heaped in the snow. Alarmed, he called Joe, and between them, fighting to keep the wind from tearing the door off its hinges, they dragged it inside. It was a half-frozen man.
It was not easy to resuscitate their visitor. While Babalú rubbed him and tried to get some brandy down his throat, Joe waked the women, put more wood in the stove, and set water to heat for the bathtub, where they soaked him until gradually he began to revive, lose his blue color, and mumble a few words. His nose, feet, and hands were frostbitten. He was a campesino from the Mexican state of Sonora, he said, who had come to the California placers like thousands of his compatriots. His name was Jack, a name that doubtlessly wasn’t his, but after all, no one else in that household used the one he was born with. For a few hours, Jack was several times on the threshold of death, but just when it seemed that nothing more could be done for him, he fought back from the other world and gagged down a few swallows of liquor. At about eight o’clock, when the storm had let up, Joe sent Babalú for the doctor. Overhearing her, the Mexican, who had been lying motionless, gulping for air like a fish, opened his eyes, and shouted an ear-splitting “No!” that startled everyone. No one was to know he was there, he commanded, with such ferocity that none of them dared cross him. Explanations were not necessary: it was obvious the man was in trouble with the law, and that town, with a gallows in the middle of the square, was the last place in the world a fugitive would want to look for asylum. Only the cruelty of the storm had forced him there. Eliza said nothing, but the man’s reaction was no surprise to her: he smelled of evil.
After three days, Jack had regained some of his strength, but he lost the tip of his nose and two fingers on his left hand were showing signs of gangrene. Not even that convinced him of the need to see the doctor; he would rather rot by inches than hang, he said. Joe Bonecrusher gathered her people at the other end of the barn and held a whispered conference: his fingers had to be amputated. All eyes turned to Babalú the Bad.
“Me? Not fuckin’ likely.”
“Babalú, you sonofabitch. Don’t be such a pantywaist!” shouted Joe, furious.
“You do it, Joe. I’m not good for things like that.”
“If you can cut up a deer you can do this. What’s a couple of lousy fingers?”
“An animal is one thing, a human being is something else.”
“No! I can’t believe it! This no-good sonofabitch, begging your pardon, girls, can’t do me this one little favor. After everything I’ve done for you, you bastard!”
“Sorry, Joe. I’ve never harmed a hair on anyone’s head.”
“What are you telling me! You never killed anyone? You never did time in prison?”
“That was for stealing cattle,” the giant confessed, near tears with humiliation.
“I will do it,” Eliza interrupted, pale but decided.
Everyone stared at her, incredulous. Even Tom No-Tribe seemed a more likely candidate than the delicate Chile Boy.
“I’ll need a really sharp knife, a hammer, a needle, thread, and clean rags.”
Babalú sank to the floor with his huge head in his hands, horrified, while the girls got everything ready in respectful silence. Eliza reviewed what she had learned at Tao Chi’en’s side when he extracted bullets and stitched up wounds in Sacramento. If she had watched that without blinking, she should be able to do this now, she thought. The most important thing, according to her friend, was to prevent hemorrhaging and infection. She had not watched him do amputations, but when he was treating unlucky patients whose ears had been cut off, he had commented that in other lands they cut off hands and feet for the same crime. “The executioner’s ax is quick but it doesn’t leave any tissue to cover the stump of the bone,” Tao Chi’en had told her. He described what he had been taught by Ebanizer Hobbs, who had experience with war wounds and had shown him what to do. At least in this case it was only fingers, Eliza concluded.
Joe Bonecrusher poured enough liquor down the patient to render him unconscious, while Eliza disinfected the knife by heating it red hot. She had them sit Jack in a chair; she wet the hand in a basin of whiskey and then placed it on the edge of the table with the bad fingers separated from the others. She murmured one of Mama Fresia’s magical prayers and when she was ready gave a wordless signal to the girls to hold down the patient. She positioned the knife on the fingers and hit it smartly with the hammer, driving the blade cleanly through the bones and into the wood of the table. Jack let out a yell from the depths of his guts but he was so drunk he didn’t feel a thing as Eliza stitched the fingers and Esther bandaged them. The torture was over in a few minutes. Eliza stood staring at the amputated fingers, trying to keep from vomiting, while the women laid Jack on one of the mats. Babalú the Bad, who had kept his distance from the spectacle, walked up timidly, baby’s cap in hand, and admiringly murmured:
“You’re a real man, Chile Boy.”
In March, Eliza quietly turned eighteen, still waiting for Joaquín to show up at their house one day, just as Babalú had said any man within a hundred miles would do. “Jack,” the Mexican, had recovered after a few days and before his fingers healed had sneaked off at night without telling anyone good-bye. He was a sinister brute,
and everyone was happy he was gone. He didn’t talk much and was forever edgy, defiant, ready to spring at the hint of an imagined provocation. He showed no sign of gratitude for the help he had received, just the opposite; when the whiskey wore off and he learned that his trigger finger had been amputated, he let loose a string of curses and threats, swearing that the dog who had mutilated his hand would pay with his life. That was when Babalú’s patience wore thin. He picked Jack up like a doll, lifted him up to his eye level, and said in the soft voice he used when he was about to explode:
“That was me. Babalú the Bad. Any problem with that?”
As soon as his fever was gone, Jack wanted to cash in on the opportunity to use the doves for his pleasure but, as one, they rejected him: they were not about to give anything away, and he had empty pockets, which they had observed when they undressed him to put him in the bathtub the night he had come to their door half frozen. Joe Bonecrusher took the trouble to explain to Jack that if they hadn’t amputated his fingers he would have lost an arm, probably his life, and that he should be thanking his lucky stars that he had stumbled on to them. Eliza would not allow Tom No-Tribe to go anywhere near the man, and she approached him only to hand him food or change his bandages, because his odor of evil was as disturbing to her as a tangible presence. Babalú couldn’t stand him either, and refused to speak to him all the time he was under their roof. He thought of the girls as his sisters and was wild whenever Jack obscenely tried to wheedle sex. Not even when he was most desperate would it have occurred to Babalú to use his companion’s professional services; in his mind that would have been the same as incest. If his urges got too strong, he went to the local competition, and he instructed Chile Boy to do the same in the improbable case that he got over his missy-sissy habits.
Once when she was handing Jack a bowl of soup, Eliza worked up the courage to ask him about Joaquín Andieta.
“Murieta?” he asked, suspicious.
“Andieta.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Maybe it’s the same person,” Eliza suggested.
“What do you want with him?”
“He’s my brother. I came from Chile to find him.”
“What’s your brother look like?”
“He’s not very tall, and he has black hair and eyes and white skin, like me, but we don’t look alike. He’s thin, muscular, brave, and passionate. When he talks, everyone listens.”
“That’s Joaquín Murieta all right, but he’s not Chilean, he’s Mexican.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure? I’m not sure of anything, but if I see Murieta I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
It was the next night that he left, and they heard nothing more from him, but two weeks afterward they found a two-pound sack of coffee at the door. A little later when Eliza opened it to fix breakfast she found that it wasn’t coffee but gold dust. According to Joe Bonecrusher, it could have come from any of the sick miners they had looked after, but Eliza had a strong intuition that Jack had left it as his payment. He was a man who didn’t want to owe anyone a favor. On Sunday they learned that the sheriff was organizing a party of vigilantes to look for the murderer of a miner who had been found in the cabin where he had spent the winter alone, with nine knife wounds in his chest and slashed eyes. There was no trace of his gold, but because of the brutality of the crime they had placed the blame on Indians. Joe Bonecrusher, who did not want to get mixed up in any trouble, buried the two pounds of gold beneath an oak and ordered all her people to keep their mouths shut and not under any condition mention the Mexican with the amputated fingers or the sack of “coffee.” In the course of the next two months, the vigilantes murdered a half dozen Indians and then forgot the matter because they had more pressing problems, and when the chief of the tribe came with great dignity to ask for an explanation, they killed him, too. Indians, blacks, and mulattos could not testify against a white man. James Morton and the other three Quakers in the town were the only ones who dared confront the mob at the lynching. Unarmed, they formed a circle around the chief, reciting from memory passages of the Bible that prohibited killing one’s fellow man, but the crowd pushed them aside.
No one knew it was Eliza’s birthday and there was no celebration, but even so, that night of March fifteenth was memorable for her, and for everyone else. Business was again booming at the barn. The doves were steadily occupied, Chile Boy was banging away at the piano with real gusto, and Joe was spinning optimistic tales. Winter hadn’t been so bad, after all; the worst of the epidemic was past and they had no patients stretched out on the floor. That night a half dozen miners were drinking with true dedication while outside the wind was ripping branches from the pines. At about eleven, all hell broke loose. No one could explain how the fire began, but Joe always suspected the other madam. The wood caught fire like Roman candles and the curtains, silk shawls, and bed canopies flared up within seconds. Everyone got out safely, even managing to throw on a few blankets, and Eliza snatched up the tin box that contained her precious letters. Flames and smoke rapidly engulfed the building, and in less than ten minutes it was blazing like a torch as half-naked women and tipsy clients watched the spectacle in total helplessness. Eliza thought to count heads and realized with horror that Tom No-Tribe was missing. The boy had been fast asleep in the bed they shared. Without thinking, she grabbed a quilt from Esther’s shoulders, covered her head, and ran inside, with one push flattening the thin partition of blazing wood, followed by Babalú, who yelled at her to stop, not realizing why she was dashing into the fire. Eliza found the boy standing stock-still in the swirling smoke, his eyes wide with fright, but perfectly serene. She threw the quilt over him and tried to pick him up, but he was very heavy and she was bent double by a fit of coughing. She dropped to her knees, pushing Tom to make him run outside, but he did not move and both of them would have been reduced to ashes had Babalú not appeared at that instant, picked up one under each arm, as if they were parcels, and bolted back outside to be greeted with loud cheers.
“Damned kid! What were you doing in there!” Joe scolded as she hugged the small Indian, covering his face with kisses and slapping his cheeks to make him breathe.
It was only because the shack was isolated that half the town didn’t go up in flames, the sheriff commented later; he had plenty of experience with fires, they happened too frequently around there. A dozen volunteers had responded to the glow in the sky to fight the flames, headed by the blacksmith, but it was too late and all they could do was rescue Eliza’s horse, which everyone had forgot in the confusion of the first minutes and was still tied in its lean-to, crazed with terror. Joe Bonecrusher lost everything she owned in the world that night, and for the first time was seen to lose heart. With the boy in her arms, she watched the destruction, unable to hold back the tears, and when all that remained was smoking embers she buried her face in the enormous chest of Babalú, whose eyelashes and eyebrows were singed. Seeing the surrogate mother whom they had thought invincible so vulnerable, the four girls burst out bawling, forming a cluster of petticoats, windblown hair, and trembling flesh. The support network, however, had begun to function even before the flames died out, and in less than an hour lodging had been found for everyone in various homes in town and one of the miners whom Joe had nursed through dysentery took up a collection. Chile Boy, Babalú, and the young Indian—the three males of the group—spent the night in the blacksmith’s shop. James Morton laid two straw ticks with warm bedcovers beside the still warm forge and served his guests a splendid breakfast carefully prepared by the wife of the preacher who on Sundays shouted his loud denunciation of “such brazen exhibition of sin,” as he referred to the activities of the two brothels.
“This is no time for prudery, these poor Christians are shivering,” the reverend’s wife had said when she showed up at the smithy with rabbit stew, a pitcher of hot chocolate, and cinnamon cookies.
That same lady went door-to-door collecting clothing for the dov
es, who were still in their petticoats, and the women of the town responded with generosity. They did not like to pass in front of the other madam’s establishment, but they had of necessity dealt with Joe Bonecrusher during the epidemic and they respected her. So that was how the four ladies of the night went around for a while dressed as modest housewives, covered from neck to toe, until they could replace their splendiferous professional outfits. The night of the fire, the preacher’s wife wanted to take Tom No-Tribe home, but the boy clung to Babalú’s neck and no human power could pry him loose. The giant spent sleepless hours with Chile Boy curled up in one arm and the Indian in the other, piqued no little by the blacksmith’s lifted eyebrows.
“You can get that idea out of your head, man. I’m no pansy,” he sputtered indignantly, but he did not disturb either of the two sleepers.
The miners’ collection and the pouch of gold dust buried beneath the oak were enough to install the victims in a house so comfortable that Joe Bonecrusher had about decided to give up her traveling company and settle down there. While other towns disappeared as the miners moved to new sites, this one grew, maintained its growth, and even thought of changing its name to one more dignified. At the end of winter, new waves of adventurers were climbing into the foothills, and the other madam was getting ready for them. Joe Bonecrusher now had only three girls, because it was obvious that the blacksmith was planning to steal Esther from them, but she wanted to see if she could work things out. Joe had won considerable respect with her compassionate works and she did not want to give that up: for the first time in her chaotic life she felt accepted in a community. That was far more than she had had in her Pennsylvania Dutch homeland, and at her age putting down roots did not seem like a bad idea. When Eliza heard those plans she decided that if Joaquín Andieta—or Murieta—had not appeared by spring she would have to tell her friends good-bye and keep looking for him.