Centuries of June (26 page)

Reckoning arrived swiftly, as bad news often does. They say people no longer had any confidence, though she could not understand how ordinary people could be confident one day and not the next. The lack of confidence brought a panic, and the panic caused the fall, and the value of the stock in the mining company plunged down the shaft, and there was no hope for recovery. Overnight, the Worths became worthless. The bubble had burst and not so much as a slick of soap remained. By the time they sold their shares for pennies and accounted for their considerable debts, little was left but the octagon house and its contents and some cash Flo had in her name to pay the domestic staff their monthly wages. The servants, a-course, were let go at once, and telegrams sent to hurry Jessie back from Italy. They was ruined, and so was Ebenezer, returning home from his wedding trip to less than nothing, who had to move instead with his new bride into the third floor of the octagon house. She—the girl’s name was Rebecca—was there all alone that Sunday in October when the Big One hit, the heaviest earth shocks ever felt in San Francisco to that time.

The Worths, sans Jams, was at service on Sunday morning, and when the first shock hit, the minister said stay calm, stay put, which they did for perhaps five seconds as the pews rocked violently and the stained-glass windows rattled like a carriage going over cobblestone. The second shock threw them from their seats, the whole church emptying into the streets, with the minister leading the flock to safety, the shepherd jogging past each and every sheep. A loud grinding noise followed, the brick buildings rubbing together, glass and plaster falling, and the earth itself rumbling and growling. The walls swayed and
buckled like treetops in a tempest, and the windows popped out like firecrackers. Above, the bell kept ringing of its own accord even as the shock subsided, until the third tumbler tossed all around for another six seconds, and then it was all over.

Flo and her children watched in dull amazement as the cross on the steeple tottered to the left and stopped short of toppling over. A few blocks away, Jams and Eben crawled out of one of the hells with the gamblers and rummys and the hookers and that morning’s entertainment all blinking in the bright sunshine and swirling dust like bats from a cave. At the corner of Seventh and Howard, the earth had opened and laid bare a sewer flowing with water. Over where an empty lot had stood was now a pond, and they watched in a stupor of cards and liquor as a duck circled and landed there, calling in grave distress. Geysers were forced up into the air on certain street corners, and here and there among the ruined and cracked buildings small fires blazed. Back at the octagon house, poor Rebecca had been having a bath and had to run out into the street in nothing but a robe as the walls began swaying and making to bear down upon her. She was not the only one thrust out into the public. Others emerged in little more than a bedsheet, and it went to show what occupied the common man on a Sunday morn.

That was the beginning of the end for Rebecca and Eben, for she wanted no more part of the quakes and shakes of San Francisco, and he would not be parted from his brother. Last anyone saw her, she had taken the train back to her folks in Baltimore. As for the octagon house itself, the inner walls were badly damaged, the windows shattered, and every room littered with plaster from the ceiling. On all eight sides, paintings had fallen to the floor or swung round to face the walls, and every good piece of glass or china on the mantels and in the cupboards was chipped or broken. A small fissure, the size of a man’s arm, opened in the northwestern corner beneath the roof, letting in the air and dust,
but the house survived, unlike so many others. The structure stood firm and strong, though some small damage had been done.

Not one of them was seriously hurt, but John C. had taken a bump in the church, though it made him no sillier than usual. It would have been a double blow to lose a child or lose their home on top of losing their fortune, and she was not sure she could have stood either, though in hindsight, perhaps better they had been forced to start all over and go somewheres else. As it was, the earth shakes was what did in Jams. He wandered back home that Sunday night in a daze, as if the world itself had fallen in on him.

After the rubble had been cleared and the windows replaced and the cracks mostly plastered, Jams sighed at the state of things and went to bed and stayed there for four days. He made no complaint other than feeling powerful tired, and he could rouse himself to have a meal at eleven in the morning and seven at night and to visit the jakes, of course, but otherwise he slept like a newborn. His brother could not lure him with a hand of monte or faro or the prospect of a night in the hells, and Flo herself slept on the couches in the parlor downstairs for better egress should the shocks revisit. She left her husband alone. On the fourth day, the twins, unaccustomed to having their father lay about, jumped upon the mattress and then his prone body till he fought back, wrasslin’ little Zach and Jeb as though a child hisself again. “C’mon, Pa.” Jeb smacked him with a wooden sword. “You can be Johnny Reb and I will be Tecumseh Sherman and march you to Atlanta.” Their father roared at the boys and chased them in his nightshirt, pausing only at the top of the stairs to catch his breath.

After supper that evening with the whole family, at which he seemed to brighten and return to his old energetic self, Jams climbed back up the stairs to the room with the crack just under the roof. He sat quite still in a chair and watched the stars pass by, not greatly participant in the conversations that surrounded him, but not ignoring the others either. Jessie
read from Hawthorne to the others, and Ebenezer and Flo discussed the reports of damage around town from the shakes. But Jams just sat and did nothing, and this pattern he repeated several nights in a row—to All Hallows’ E’en—doing little till supper and retiring to watch the constellations turn, or if there was no stars, to stare at the clouds or the rain, and once or twice, let the fog seep through the fissure and engulf him and the chair and the whole room altogether, like they was in a dream. Through this routine he passed the time as if a man a leisure and not the head of house bound for ruin. When his brother asked him to go out for a game of poker or to hear the Mexican crooners or see the magicians from Siam now down at the hells, Jamie begged off. “Not tonight, but you go on and say whaddyaknow to the boys. I think I’ll just rest a bit.” And so he did, night after night, day by day.

Rising each morning well after the children had been sent off to school or their new jobs, and much later than his lazy brother, James would dress in his silk gown and come down to the table to eat his breakfast when most of California was beginning to grumble for its noonday dinner. He’d learned to read by then and would take the newspaper, usually the morning’s
Examiner
, or when the steamer came, two weeks’ worth of Dickens’s serials in the New York papers, despite that rascal’s “American Notes,” and Jamie’s reading would occupy mind and spirit for several hours. Then he would dress just as the eldest were coming through the door—John C. from his job as a printer’s devil and Jessie late from her post in a ribbon shop on Union Street. Sometimes he and the boy would have a talk on the front porch, and Jessie was given a little dog by one of her beaus that her father would watch over and play with for hours at a time. A few times a week, Eben would go out and leave him alone in the house, and like as not, Jams would fall asleep by the fireplace or watching the stars through the crack. He was but six and thirty yet had the habits of a man twice his age.

And so things continued to worsen. With little income from the
children and nothing from her husband, Flo struggled to meet the bare expenses. Bit by bit, they sold off their possessions. No carriage, no horse, no need. The silver service for Eben and Rebecca’s marriage fetched enough to keep the household running for eight months. Gold and silver trinkets from their mining days went to the pawnshop or friends, who gleefully overpaid as a means of stealthy charity. New purchases were forsaken. His shirts began to fray at the sleeves and he saved the collars for the rare occasions he ventured in the city. Her dresses slipped out of and back into fashion, depending on her skills in mending. The children wore their boots and shoes to the nubbins, and the twins relied on the castaways and hand-me-downs from their elder siblings and had aught new from ’65 on. Thank the Lord they lived in perfect climes where the temperatures were mild year-round, for Jeb and Zach never had more than two gloves for their four hands. How they ever got those children raised was a mystery to their mother. The three girls married young to the first gentlemen interested enough to ask, and the boys left home early to seek their fortune. Young John C. ended up with Mr. Hearst’s enterprises, and one twin joined the gold rush to the Black Hills of the Dakotas in ’76, though the boy met his end that summer at the hands of the Sioux. The other left this mortal coil in an opium parlor attended by a Japanese woman who claimed to be his lawful wife, though her claim earned her nothing at the Worths’ home, for there was nothing to be had.

It were not for any lack of effort on Flo’s part. Sure, she had coddled Jams early on, allowed him time to recover from the blows of first the stocks and then the earth shakes and the damage to the house, but in a few months, she thought to ask when he might be going to find work or some other means to money. “In due course,” he would tell her. “Right now I am aiming to rest for a while.” Her mam had been a nag to her pap, sending the man to moonshine, so she waited and bit her tongue till she damn near bit through it.

At some point someone, probably Eben or one of the twins, had climbed a ladder and nailed a slat across the crack in the wall beneath the roof, obscuring the night sky, but Jams faithfully watched the stars in pieces each night. After many years had passed and all the children grown and flown the nest, the pull of gravity on both sides of the fracture proved too much. The nails popped one by one from the ends, and the board clattered to the floor. Unkempt and soft and bloated and dressed in his ancient silk robe, the man in the winged-back chair broke into a satisfied smile. “At long last,” he said, and the very next day, Jams woke early, shaved, and left the octagon house, announcing to his wife that he was off to seek their fortune and that she should not expect his return that evening or any time soon. She grunted a good-bye and watched the old sloth saunter down the avenue and disappear.

Days later, the little dog starts barking at the door, so she like to think it might be her husband returning. ’Stead a package arrived in the post. She opened it to find a red lacquer box filled with notes from the First National Gold Bank of San Francisco in fives and tens and hundreds, enough money to change their lives. Atop the stack of currency was a letter in her husband’s hand: “This should keep you in the pink of the mode until my return. I must rest from my labors. Your Jams.”

She turned to Eben, who had been speechless ever since she had opened the package, and asked, “What do you make of all this? Where did all this money come from? Where is Jamie, and when will he be coming home?”

“Nuffin in the world no longer surprises me,” Eben said. “I got no answers, though that looks like a Chinese box to me. Suppose when he’s done restin’, we’ll find out.”

They waited for him to return to the old run-down house, waited night and day, week after week, watching the stars pass through the hole in the wall, pestering the postman twice a day to double-check for
letters, taking turns walking the hilly streets to his old haunts, diving into the hells, and inquiring at the banks. None of their old friends could recall the last time they had seen him inside or out of the octagon house, and none of their old business partners or fellow speculators could even recall old James Worth. As the months became years, they had forfeited hope for the return of the prodigal brother and husband. He had vanished from the earth, leaving behind just enough, if they were careful, for the welfare of the pair. And for the most part, they husbanded their little egg well, though Eben pissed away a fair share gambling and dissipating. And then he lost all one day in 1881 when he crossed too close to a cable car racing down Clay Street, and he died at hospital from the injuries, leaving Flo all alone in the ramshackle house.

Like Penelope faithful to Ulysses, she waited for Jams to come home. Over the years, the frequent earthquakes had widened the fissure in the wall to the point where she no longer felt safe entering the room, but his presence lingered there in the indentations on the seat of the easy chair, the shape of his body on the sofa cushions, and the picture of the universe he loved to watch. Rain and moisture left a trail of mildew that trailed down the wall and into the room below, and the carpets and furniture were constantly damp and coming to pieces. The stove was near impossible to light. Nails in the flooring had popped and would catch her slipper when she crossed. Her bed was lonesome, and whenever the house creaked she feared it was either another quake or his return. Mice had gotten behind the plaster, and she could hear their comings and goings in the dead of night, and seagulls had frequented the southwestern sides and streaked the outer walls with their guano. Forty years had passed since they had left Kentucky and a dozen since he had suddenly left her to go rest. Had he walked through the door at any moment, she would have given him an earful, beat him for abandoning her, and then held him in her arms.

Just when all hope was lost, a Chinaman come to her door one Sunday afternoon. Ye scarce saw any Chinee since the Exclusion in ’83, for they kept to themselves more or less from fear of the whites. The young man on the stoop unnerved her. She had not a word of Chinese, and he little English, though he had a message to deliver.

“Mister,” he said. “Mister in the bed.”

“There is no mister here. I live by myself.”

“No. Mister-in-the-bed no more. All gone.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Your mister. All gone.” He handed over a packet addressed to her.
“Nee dohng mah?”
He lifted his eyebrows as if trying to convey some understanding.