Awake Unto Me (2 page)

“I won’t. Maggie’s not too smart that way. She only knows how to draw a dumb sailor in to get his head cracked.”

Jack laughed again. “True. Old Tom makes the poor shanghaied sailors suffer knocks on their heads as well as the hangovers from whiskey and laudanum. At least I don’t give them that.”

Kerry shot from the saloon, intent on showing Jack she could do her part. Holding her cap to her head, she ran full tilt to the dock and waited, bouncing on her toes in anticipation.

The sailor boys of the
Defiant
tumbled off the Whitehall, shouting and laughing. They’d been round the Horn and mostly at sea for six months as they sailed from the East Coast to the West Coast. They had half their pay and were ready to taste the famous pleasures of the Barbary Coast. It had been forty years since the Gold Rush, but the legends of San Francisco’s seafront had only grown. Sure enough, Kerry saw Maggie Harlin pull up alongside the youngest looking of the
Defiant
sailors and smile. She stayed back and watched.

“Howdy, sailor!” Maggie crowed with her toothless lisp. “I can show you a good time.”

“Is that a fact?” the sailor said, suspiciously. “How do I know you won’t rob me when I’m asleep?”

“Well, I never!” Maggie said primly. “I’ll give you an honest fuck, I will, and send you on your way whistling.”

“No, thanks, sister. I prefer women with teeth in their heads, not gap-toothed hags.”

Maggie grinned wider. “You don’t know what it feels like to get a suck from my mouth.”

Kerry saw the sailor hesitate and she was at his side. “Mister, that whore’s lying. They rob you blind, drug you, and next thing you know you’re are on a whaler going back to the North Sea for a year.”

The sailor looked hard at her, then back into the horrible toothless grin of the whore.

“Oh?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What would you offer instead?”

Kerry smiled then. “I can show you to a good saloon with honest drinks and pretty waiter girls, if you want that. A good cheap bed for the night and breakfast to send you off in style the next morning.” Kerry was surprised that lying came so easy to her.

“Sorry, girl. I believe the lad here, not you.”

Maggie frowned and peered at Kerry, who had taken care to black her face here and there and put a cut above her nose. She tugged at the sailor’s sleeve so he’d follow her.

“Hey, boys,” the sailor called to his mates. “I have a guide here to take us to paradise. Or some version of it.”

Kerry walked into the Grey Dog with all six of them—one over her quota. Her father and Leo looked on from the bar. Then Jack tossed her a silver dollar. “Be gone with you, lad. This is no place for a youngster.”

Kerry stared at the silver coin in her palm.

“Gentlemen,” Lucky Jack said, “welcome to San Francisco. Can I interest you in some card-playing along with your refreshment?”

*

A week after she started working for Jack, Kerry grabbed Minny’s hand and said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” The fog had burned off and the mid-morning sun lit Meiggs Wharf, giving it a deceptively innocent and peaceful air. They looked much like a boy and his sister. Minny, a year younger and small for her size, looked up at Kerry worshipfully.

“Where we going?” she asked plaintively.

“You’ll see.” They scampered a couple of blocks down the wharf until they stood in front of a ramshackle building. The sign above the door said, Warner’s Cobweb Palace and Saloon, and below, in smaller type, Oddities of Interest.

Kerry ranged freely about the wharf area of the waterfront district, looking for marks off the myriad ships docked in the San Francisco Bay’s biggest port, and had come upon Warner’s Cobweb Palace early on. Minny and Kerry went inside and waited for their eyes to adjust, the sounds of animals assaulting their ears.

Minny clutched Kerry’s arm fearfully. “What’s that?”

“Shush,” Kerry said. “You’ll like this.”

“No, I won’t!” Minnie looked up and saw the thousands of spiderwebs adorning the rafters and screamed. Old man Warner would never kill a spider and over the years they had spun thousands of webs. Some of the spiderwebs had been there so long, Warner’s saloon customers joked they would be there long after he bit the dust. He let the local kids in to see the spiderwebs and his animals during the day before the saloon got busy.

“Stay close to me!” Kerry figured Minny needed to get out more and away from Rose and Sally. It was funny how protective they were of her, considering the future she was likely to have.
Kerry noticed the food stains on Minny’s dress and the remnants of porridge on her face. Unlike Minny, however, Kerry was beyond their control. Rose had thrown up her hands after she found out Lucky Jack had set Kerry to luring marks for his crimping operation.

In the dim light, Minny and Kerry gazed at the huge cages with monkeys and kangaroos. When a huge blue parrot saw them, it screeched, “Puta! You loco!” and some gibberish old man Warner told Kerry was probably Chinese. The bird was half crazed from the whiskey the saloon customers fed it.

To Kerry the Cobweb Palace was by far the best and most interesting place on the wharf.

“Tell your pop the
Mary Lou
is in from Philadelphia,” old man Warner said to Kerry. When the parrot heard his voice, it squawked, “Grandfather!” in a hoarse voice, making Minny jump and Kerry laugh.

Everyone knew Warner had a soft spot for kids, though he could curse a blue streak at anyone else and had a rough way with women. Thousands of pictures of women covered the walls of the Cobweb Palace from floor to ceiling, most barely visible in the dark and under all the cobwebs. When she wasn’t looking at the animals, Kerry stared at the pictures everywhere. She had her favorites and would gaze for ages at Gertrude or Priscilla or Fay, trying to divine who they were and what they would be like in person. Some of them looked like real ladies. The only women Kerry knew were the waiter girls at the Grey Dog or other saloons in the Barbary Coast, and they sure didn’t look like the women in the pictures. Giving in to Minny’s insistent whining, she led them back outside.

“What do you want to do now?” Kerry asked.

“I don’t know,” Minny said, sucking her thumb. Just then, Kerry spotted her friend Teddy from Black’s Warehouse.

“Hullo,” he said.

“Hey. You was able to get away from your dad today?”

“Yeah. I was coming to find you. I’ve got to get away before the old man notices I’m gone. Want to go to downtown?”

“Only if we can go to Chinatown first.”

Tommy made a face. “I don’t like that place. All that strange stuff in the stores smells bad and them people are weird.”

They had gone to Chinatown the month before and, while Kerry was fascinated by the Buddhist temples and the food markets with endless bins labeled in Chinese, Teddy was not. She was grateful that he kept it secret about her clothes instead of ratting her out. Boys could go places girls couldn’t, and she wasn’t about to let a skirt stand in the way of her adventures. He had told her she was more fun to be with than the boys on the Barbary Coast, who only wanted to pick fights.

“Pop said the Chinese will kidnap us and sell us into slavery.”

Kerry rolled her eyes but decided to humor him. “So where do you want to go?”

“What about the Palace Hotel? I know a guy who works in the kitchen, Sam Reed. He can get us something to eat. Something good.”

“Yeah. First I have to take Minny home.”

“Well, be quick about it then. I’ll wait here.”

Kerry dragged Minny home, dropped her off, and waited until she’d curled up and fallen asleep almost instantly on the couch before running back to Teddy, who was throwing rocks at an abandoned building’s windows. They made their way through the maze of streets until they stood in front of the Palace Hotel. They were on New Montgomery Street staring at a building larger than any ship they’d ever seen. It occupied an entire square block and was eight stories high.

“Come on. Let’s go inside,” Teddy said, and pulled her arm.

They entered the lobby. It was, if possible, even grander inside than out, with a giant central court with a ceiling of thousands of panes of glass and great marble columns. Kerry stood with her mouth open, feeling every bit of dirt under her nails and grime on her shoes. It was a universe removed from the grubby barrooms and music halls and dirty wharfs of the Barbary Coast.

“I could do that. I could work here,” Teddy said softly as a bellboy pushed a cart full of cases past them.

“How much money could you make? Not much, I bet.”

“Silly. It’s not the money they pay you. It’s the tips from all the rich people who stay here. Really, really high-class people come here, like them nobs that live up on the hill yonder.”

Before Kerry could respond, they heard a sharp voice from nearby. “Hey! What are you two ragamuffins doing? Get out before I throw you out.”

They ran back to the street.

“Come on.” Teddy grabbed Kerry’s hand and dragged her around to the alley behind the hotel. He stuck his head in the door and Kerry peered over his shoulder. He spotted Sam standing at a sink as big as a bathtub, piled high with dishes.

“Pssssst!” Teddy hissed.

“Hey, Teddy. We have to be quick. The cooks will be here soon for dinner service. Chef will have my head if he catches me on French leave.” Kerry knew French leave meant fooling around, not doing your work. She’d heard Jack say it to the waiter girls more than once. She figured the French must not work at all.

They followed him into the kitchen and into a giant walk-in cooler crammed with food.

“Don’t take too much,” Sam said unnecessarily. The amazing quantity of food mesmerized Kerry. On one side she saw barrels of live lobsters and oysters and slabs of meat and whole chickens and ducks. On the other side lay crates of every kind of vegetable imaginable, boxes of potatoes, turnips, and squash. In yet another part of the cooler, Sam showed them the prepared food. Kerry and Teddy helped themselves to chicken legs and steak while Sam kept a lookout, stuffing their pockets with as much food as they could fit. Teddy even put a drumstick in his sock.

On their walk through the kitchen, their arms laden, Kerry stopped to gaze at the huge wooden work tables and the array of pots and utensils hanging from the ceiling. She saw racks of knives and four great stoves, each with six burners and a giant grill in the middle. It was after lunch and before supper so the fires were low. Even so, the kitchen was tremendously hot.

More than the food, the kitchen itself drew Kerry. She knew only the tiny kitchen in the Grey Dog where the women cooked their simple meals, and this was a different universe, a big, clean, magical one.

Teddy grabbed her arm again. “Come quick. We have to go, Kerry! We can’t get Sam in trouble.”

She stole one last look at the gleaming surfaces before she let Teddy pull her out of the kitchen and into the alley, where they sat to consume their stolen meal.

The Mission District

San Francisco, April 1891

“Elizabeth, dear. Please run over to the Italian market and buy some carrots and cabbage for dinner.”

Beth’s father George looked up and frowned but didn’t object. If her mother Frieda was busy, he allowed Beth to run quick errands as long as she came directly back to the store. Their busiest time was afternoons as the neighbors came home from work and stopped in to do their shopping at Hammonds Dry Goods.

The store stood on the corner of 17th and Valencia, about two blocks from the Mission District’s chief landmark—the church and mission of St. Francis of Assisi. The Spanish priests had built it over two hundred years before, and it was still the biggest Catholic church in the neighborhood.

Its parishioners were the Italian and Irish immigrants who had come during the Gold Rush, and although they hadn’t found any gold they found a place to settle. The Hammonds were a “mixed” couple. George was German and Frieda was Norwegian, which made their only daughter, Beth, not that different from the rest of the neighborhood melting pot.

The Mission District was sunny and placid, far different than crowded, noisy downtown San Francisco. It was a mere two miles away from the Barbary Coast, but other than a few businesses such as the Hammonds’ store, it was purely residential and home to respectable working families.

Beth was relieved to get away from the constant tension at home. Her father worried about the business, about what people might think—really about everything. The worry made him irritable.

She strolled down Guerrero Street and turned on 17th Street to Mission Street. It was April and the afternoon sun was warm. She looked up toward the twin hills in the distance and saw the fog approaching, as it almost always did at that time of day, although it wouldn’t reach the Mission until nearly dark.

In the Rocco Produce store, at least one of the many Rocco children was always at work. Beth thought how different it would be if she had a brother or a sister to take some of her parents’ attention and to help them. She walked slowly past the racks of vegetables and fruits, bursting with life and color. She ran her hand over thick-skinned cantaloupes, spiky artichokes, and glossy tomatoes. What would they taste like? Her family ate only a few different vegetables, none of them what her father called “exotic.” The Roccos’ vegetables seemed so alive and earthy compared to the beige barrels of rice, wheat, sugar, and the like in her parents’ store. She chose a cabbage and the orangest carrots she could find and put them in a mesh bag.