Daughter of Fortune (38 page)

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 scarred 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.

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: