California Gold (59 page)

“No, I feel it. I’m sure of it.”

He wanted to be enthusiastic. Why was it so hard?

On April 19, Congress passed a resolution declaring that Cuba should be free of foreign domination. It empowered the President to so inform the Spanish government and intervene with appropriate force to bring it about. McKinley put his signature to the resolution next day.

At the end of the following week, Mack and Johnson took a Friday-night walk through the packing house down on the flats. Both of Mack’s packing houses were showplaces because of the general cleanliness and electric lights.

The place was busy, and the spring crop looked exceptional. For this seasonal work, Mack employed mostly older men, married women, and young girls, at least a third of them Mexican. They worked in large interconnected rooms; the finishing lines ran straight through archways. Windows without glass admitted plenty of fresh air.

Mack and Johnson started their walk at the sorting conveyer. Oranges put onto the conveyer by hand had already been brushed, then washed. Farther down, men and women on either side of the conveyer plucked up the rolling oranges and sent them into three spillways, one for each grade. They worked quickly, their white cotton gloves darting and swooping like so many hungry birds.

Mack leaned over the shoulder of a stout woman and plucked an orange out of a channel. “That’s a standard, not a fancy, Margarita.” He gave her shoulder a forgiving squeeze, she returned an apologetic smile, and he and Johnson walked on.

Mack broke the skin of the orange with his thumbnails, then sucked the juice and some of the pulp. Johnson stared at the light fixtures. He had a distracted air this evening, and kept tugging at his sky-blue bandanna.

Something occurred to Mack. “I’m going to put stools in here. Convince the Exchange to do it everywhere.”

“Why should the growers spend the money?”

“Why should these people stand up for nine hours and break their backs?”

As they passed into the next large room, Johnson’s green eyes drifted back to the ceiling, or somewhere beyond. Mack said, “Where’s your head tonight? It isn’t here.”

“Down in Texas, I reckon. That’s where I’m goin’.”

“Back home? Fort Worth?”

“Camp Wood, San Antonio. Leonard Wood and Roosevelt, that blue-blooded pup from the Navy Department, they’re puttin’ together the First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. I read all about it. They want men who can handle a horse. Cowboys, polo players—I fit on both counts.”

“Is the regiment supposed to fight?”

“Damn right. Chase those damn Spics out of Cuba.”

“Hugh, forty-six is too old for that.”

“I’m only forty-five. I’ll shoe-black the gray in my hair and lie like hell. I seen a lot of sights and wonders, but never a war. I bought my train ticket this afternoon.”

Depressed suddenly, Mack walked on. In this room the wide conveyer with its spillways branched into three separate packing lines. On each, women wrapped the fruit in pieces of bright-orange tissue. Farther down the line, other women—Mack’s best, carefully chosen—speedily packed the fruit into two-compartment crates. A Calgold label with the old prospector covered one end of boxes containing the fancy-grade oranges. Less attractive labels, with different trade names, identified the lesser grades.

The packers chatted and laughed as they worked. Many had the tanned, coarse look of farm wives. This room was even noisier than the sorting room. As soon as a box was full, a packer yelled, “Box!” and a rustler ran up. Rustlers were always strong young boys, because it was the hardest work. A filled box weighed seventy pounds.

Mack noticed a boy’s thumb bleeding as he raced by with his load. The box’s coarse shook often ripped palms and fingers. Mack took a pencil and scrap of paper from his shirt pocket. “Got to tell Biggerstaff they need gloves in here.” He put the paper against a pillar and scribbled.

“Listen, you got any objection to me traipsin’ off?”

“No, I told you before—you can always leave whenever you want.”

“If I go, I won’t be around when your kid’s born. I mean—in case you need help.”

They walked out a side door into the warm breezy dark. “Isn’t a hell of a lot you could do for me if you stayed.”

“I’d cheer you up, if I could. You ain’t exactly been clickin’ your heels over the prospect of a youngster.”

Electric light from the shed fell across Mack’s bleak face. “I feel guilty about it. I don’t know why this mood’s on me. Maybe…” He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and gazed at the rustling trees. “Maybe it’s because the whole marriage doesn’t amount to much.”

Johnson spilled pouch tobacco into a cigarette paper and rolled it. “Well, you was pretty impulsive about gettin’ hitched. But then, bein’ impulsive’s one of your good traits too. Not like that stiff-collar lawyer Fairbanks, or some others I’ve met.”

“I’m not sure Carla wants the baby.”

“I don’t ’spect she does, very much. She’s a handsome woman, but she ain’t cut out for home and hearth. Puts a double burden on you, ’f you want my opinion.”

“I don’t think so.”

Johnson struck a match on his pants. “Too bad—you get it anyway.”

He lit the cigarette dangling from his lip. “You clean forget about your wife sometimes. You’re busy eighteen, twenty hours a day—you was in New York a mighty long time just for some business calls. That newspaper girl’s in New York, ain’t she? The one who wrote the book?”

“Forget about her. She has nothing to do with this.”

Johnson didn’t believe it, but he didn’t argue. “All right. I’m just sayin’ once again—don’t nail Carla too hard if she gets the fidgets. You ain’t exactly payin’ court to her every minute of the day. Still, none of that matters a tad when it comes to this here youngster. You’re the papa, so you got to do your part and maybe some of Carla’s too, you want to raise the kid right.”

“Do you think I’d want to do anything else? That baby will be cared for regardless of how Carla feels.”

“Why, sure,” Johnson said softly. “I was just remindin’ you.”

America fought her splendid little war on two fronts, and it lasted 105 days. In the Caribbean, General Shafter’s expeditionary force whipped the imperialists on the island of Cuba, and General Miles whipped them on Puerto Rico. In the Philippines, Commodore Dewey, General Wesley Merritt, and Philippine rebels besieged the Manila garrison. On July 30, McKinley demanded Spain’s surrender and dictated the terms. Spain capitulated during the second week of August, agreeing to cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and allow her to occupy Cuba and the Philippines. The victors counted about five thousand lives lost, 90 percent of them to yellow fever and dysentery.

In late August, Sergeant Hellburner Johnson came home from the war. About two dozen people gathered at the Riverside depot to meet his train an hour before dawn. Mack drove the black trap through a heavy wet mist that enfolded the town. The headlight of the local stabbed the fog and the train chugged in. As the conductor helped Johnson down the steps, the well-wishers clapped. Johnson shook his head, amazed. He picked up his portmanteau in his left hand, supporting his right side with a forearm crutch. His right foot, the one they’d replaced with cork, dragged over the wooden platform.

A Spanish sniper had hit him on July 1, during the advance on the hilltop village of El Caney. “Ain’t nothin’ like them Mauser bullets. You heard ’em comin’ through the palmettos:
zzzzz.
If you heard ’em go
chug
, you knew they got somebody. I heard one go
chug
and looked down and it was me.”

He’d recuperated in a Tampa hospital for a month. Considering his permanent injury, he was in good spirits. “Teach me to go sashayin’ off to a war like it was a party. Well, I never was much for dancin’ with the ladies. Rather get ’em into bed right off.”

He was full of stories about his regiment: “Newspaper boys couldn’t decide what to call it. Teddy’s Terrors was one handle. Teddy’s Gilded Gang—that was another. Finally a name stuck: Rough Riders.”

Stories about the second-in-command: “Teddy really ran the outfit. He’s an all-right sort for a dude who wears little spectacles the size of dimes.”

Stories about Nellie: “Colonel Roosevelt, he read her book. Dean, the Harvard football quarterback, he was carryin’ it. So was Stephen Crane, a reporter fella. He said Nellie was famous.”

“She’s getting there,” Mack agreed. “The book is selling fast. It’ll be published in Europe this fall.”

Johnson had questions, too.

“How’s Carla gettin’ on?”

“Physically she’s fine. She’s big now and she hates that. She stays in bed a lot. I sleep in another bedroom. She wants it that way.”

On the night of September 27, ten days after Mack turned thirty without a celebration, Carla went into labor. Nearly twenty-four hours later, Dr. Gustav Mellinger stepped out of the master bedroom. Mack jumped up from a chair where he’d been dozing. Before Doc Mellinger shut the door, Mack heard a squall.

“Doc, is everything—”

“Fine, my boy. Your son is fine, your wife is doing well.”

Mack slumped against the wall. He’d slept only lightly, sitting up, since the vigil had begun the previous night. His rumpled clothes had a stale odor, his skin a clammy feel. In spite of it all, his spirits lifted.

“Tell me about him.”

“He weighs six and one half pounds. Very strong lungs. You can see him. Your wet nurse has already cleaned him up.”

The old German stood aside with a gesture of permission. Mack tugged his vest down and tucked in his shirt. As he put his hand on the knob, Mellinger squeezed his shoulder and gave him a keen look he couldn’t interpret. Congratulations? Or some kind of commiseration?

He heard his son’s soft sucking cry before he saw him. The wet nurse held him in clean soft cotton blankets. Her name was Angelina Olivar. About thirty-five, she had only last month lost her first child, an infant son. Her shiftless husband had run off some months before. She had long braids, compassionate eyes, and a huge bosom contained in a tentlike blouse.

“Senõr Chance, mire que magnífico se ve.”

With a new father’s trepidation, Mack lifted a corner of the outer blanket. He gasped at the strange sight of a little red head with a cap of blond fuzz, slitted eyes, puckish open mouth. He touched a tiny fist, still moist. Slowly, like a dawn, the miracle of birth lit Mack’s face.

The boy-child started to cry again. Angelina Olivar jogged him in her fat arms and nodded Mack onward, toward the bed.

Doc Mellinger had chosen to deliver the baby under gaslight, keeping it trimmed low, and the dimness softened some of the harsh ancillaries of the birth: basins in a corner, still full of pink water, bloodied cloths.

In the rumpled bed, Carla sat with her unkempt hair spilling over the shoulders of her gown. Her dark-blue eyes looked huge as moons, and momentarily vacant. She was pale, sweaty, as unattractive as Mack had ever seen her. He took her hand. The line of her mouth remained downcast.

“The baby’s fine.”

“I know.”

“Are you all right?”

“It hurt. My God, it hurt. I never felt anything so awful.”

“What shall we name him? We talked about it but we never decided. I’d like to give him my father’s name.”

“Give him any name you want.”

The bluntness stunned him, but he tried not to show it. Carla rolled her cheek onto the pillow, away from him. He felt suddenly helpless.

“Do you want to hold him again?”

“No. I did my part. Now you take care of him. Just like the rest of your property.”

And so he did. He named his son James Ohio Chance II, and ordered special blankets from Los Angeles. On the corner of each, in handsome embroidery, the seamstress reproduced the familiar cartouche, but with the initials
JOC.

I
N THE LATE FALL
, engineers from Wardlow Brothers established a field office at San Solaro. Mack hired a firm of land planners, and interviewed real estate men in Los Angeles. Before Christmas he signed an agreement with a successful broker named William Hazard. Hazard’s Sundown Sea Realty Corporation would be the primary selling agent for the new town.

In January 1899, Cole and Clemons Wardlow stepped off the Southern Pacific in Los Angeles, and soon plunged into their studies and preparations for designing a water system. The brothers neither drank nor smoked. For relaxation they read the Scriptures. They worked six days a week, and as many nights. On Sundays they worshiped at a Baptist church.

Toward the end of the month, a wrinkled envelope without an address brought Mack a tear sheet from the Monarch of the Dailies. On January 15 the
Examiner
had published a poem called “The Man with the Hoe.” The paper presented it in decorative type, with an ornamental border. Across the bottom Mack found a scrawled message:
A wonderful work of socialist conscience. The whirlwind is coming. Marquez.

The poet, Edwin Markham, drew his inspiration from Millet’s famous painting, now owned by the Crockers. The first lines captured the image in words.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground…

In the body of the poem Markham unleashed his wrath on the proprietors—the owners—who condemned the man with the hoe to a life of crushing labor.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?

The poem spread from paper to paper like a prairie fire. America embraced it as a literary sensation. Swampy Hellman didn’t embrace it, however. On one of his weekend visits, he found the tear sheet and complained to Mack.

“This is garbage. This Markham, who is he? Some pink anarchist from New York?”

“A schoolteacher. Oakland, I think.”

“They got lynch ropes in Oakland too. You know what Mr. Huntington said about this? He said any man should be grateful to have a hoe.”

“Come on, Markham’s right. Too many rich men exploit the poor. I like the poem.”

“You like anything that’s radical. You’re a crazy person, a disgrace to your class. How you got such a fine son I don’t know. Here, I got things for him. A toy pistol. Genuine Colt reproduction, bang, bang. Outside there’s a little surrey you can hitch to a pony. He can ride around the estate.”