Empty Mile (17 page)

CHAPTER 19

A
week later, as Stan and I were finishing breakfast, a guy with a beard and sunglasses rang our doorbell. He held out an envelope and a paper on a clipboard for me to sign. He wore a windbreaker that was frayed around the cuffs and the car I could see behind him out on the road was an old sedan with a bad paint job. I figured he must be a local guy UPS outsourced to.

When I signed for the envelope he nodded and said, “Served.”

It dawned on me as he drove away that UPS probably didn’t outsource.

I knew what the envelope held, I’d been expecting it. Plantasaurus hadn’t magically unleashed an avalanche of money in the last few weeks and the mortgage on the house remained unpaid. I held the result of that failure in my hand now—a notice of eviction and a statement about the right of the bank to undertake a mortgagee sale. We had two weeks to vacate.

When things had started to look like they might reach this point I’d talked it over with Stan. He’d been more than horrified. In a way he was like a blind man, someone who could only survive the chaos of the world by sectioning off a small piece of it and progressively limiting its variables until it was ordered and repeatable enough to exist within. Losing the house would rob him of an environment that had not only been a safe and familiar refuge since childhood, but which was also a touchstone to that time before he changed, before the lack of oxygen took away part of him.

I stayed on the doorstep after the courier had gone. Around me the sounds of morning—birdsong, a car starting, a child shouting somewhere further up the street—made the small front garden seem suddenly precious, a place whose true importance had only just been revealed. I stood and listened for a while, then I went inside and told Stan.

He was very quiet for a long time afterwards and just looked around at the walls of the kitchen. Then he wrapped his arms around himself and folded forward a little.

“I won’t be able to remember it all, Johnny. How can I store everything up inside me so it won’t get lost? There’s too much.”

“You won’t forget anything.”

“But some of the things I don’t even know I know. I can’t think of them right now but sometimes I look at something and then suddenly I remember what happened or what someone said or who was there. Like a flash. How can I do that for everything before we go?”

It was technically possible for me to spare Stan this heartache, of course, all I had to do was pick up the phone and list Empty Mile with a realtor. If the land had had no mystery about it, if I could have been certain that it was a plot of grass and trees and nothing more, Stan’s distress was such that I would have done so despite the promise I had made to my father. But I couldn’t believe Empty Mile was only what it appeared to be. My father simply wouldn’t have bought it if it was.

It was in an attempt, then, to find some justification for subjecting Stan to the loss of the house, for my decision not to sell the land, that I went upstairs.

My father’s room was a dark, strange place to me. As children Stan and I had not been allowed into it without permission. Ours had not been a family where we could wander in and bounce on the bed and kick off a Saturday morning horsing around with just-woken parents. This had always been their room, and after my mother died, his room. It was a dim place of adult secrets, of glimpsed-into cupboards that held things you never saw anywhere else—boxes for cuff links, a small stack of books that were never held in the bookcase downstairs, a rack of ties, shadowy ranks of clothes through wardrobe doors just ajar … Stan and I had spent a silent ten minutes there after my father disappeared and then avoided it ever since.

There was a bed, an oak dresser with small belongings ordered neatly across its top, a looming wooden wardrobe with a mirror on its center panel, worn carpet, a bedside table. Everything old and dark. And against the foot of the bed the large wooden trunk he’d made as a schoolboy assignment in England and which he’d possessed longer than I’d been alive.

This had been his private storage space. In here he kept his photographs, his papers, his letters, private copies of his real estate deals, bits and pieces of his early life in England. As I lifted the lid and smelled the cool waft of old paper and the dry tang of wood long closed up, I felt as though I was trespassing.

And as I began searching through the trunk I found that I was reluctant to examine some of the things it contained, to have them cast their small illuminations across the shadowed terrain of his personality. A lifetime of being held at arm’s length had made it difficult for me to take more than the crippled intimacy I was used to from him. I left many of his possessions alone for this reason—a pair of gold cuff links, a watch that did not work, a rugby trophy from his youth, a bag of old coins. But I spent an hour flicking through papers and documents and at the end of that time I’d found three things connected to Empty Mile.

I had seen one of them before, or at least a version of it—an eight-by-ten aerial photograph, a smaller print of the image my father had so excitedly hung on the wall of the living room. It looked like this smaller photo was the original. It was sharper and the paper had a heavy professional feel to it. I turned the print over. There was writing in a corner, done in my father’s hand with a fountain pen—a short note:
The trees are different.

I flipped the picture several times, looking first at the image and then reading again what my father had written. There were trees on either side of the Empty Mile curve of river, but there was nothing special in that. There were trees everywhere in this part of the country. What had my father seen in these particularly? I looked at the picture a little longer but I couldn’t find an answer, so I put it aside and picked up the second of my finds—the papers for the original sale of the Empty Mile land to my father.

The date of the sale was recorded—just two weeks after my return to Oakridge. There was information that the owner possessed, along with freehold to the land, both mineral and water rights. There were references to the cabin and to boundaries and numbers of acres. And there were, of course, the details of the parties involved—my father as the new owner, and a company called Simba Inc. as the seller. The address for Simba Inc. was given as care of a law firm in Sacramento.

I called information on my cell phone, got the firm’s number, and called them. After bouncing from a receptionist, to an assistant, to a lawyer, I was finally told that the reason the law firm’s contact details were used for Simba Inc. was because Simba Inc. was a small investment concern whose principal valued privacy. The firm regretted, therefore, that it could provide no details whatsoever as to the identity of the previous owner of the Empty Mile land without a court order.

I hung up disappointed, but I figured that if there was some secret to Empty Mile the last owners wouldn’t have known about it anyhow, otherwise they wouldn’t have sold it to my father.

The final thing I’d found relating to Empty Mile was over a hundred and fifty years old and its presence in the trunk was as puzzling as the information it contained. Three sheets of discolored paper. Six pages of precise handwriting in ink. The missing pages from the gold-hunter’s journal I’d read at Millicent Jeffries’s place.

I could think of no explanation for them being there other than that my father had stolen them. But in all my life I had never known him to do anything remotely like that.

The room was gloomy. I turned on the lamp that stood beside my father’s bed and started to read, hoping that in these final pages of the journal I would discover some reason for his purchase of Empty Mile.

March 17, 1849

I rose at dawn and broke camp, determined to reach the stretch of river spoken of by the trapper before the sun was risen above the trees. The going was not difficult. The banks of the river, before I had gone very much more than half a mile, thinned of vegetation and I was able to proceed with relative ease. I was alert for indications of my longed for El Dorado and feared lest I passed by without recognizing it. The description the man had made possessed me—a broad curve of sandy bank, the water slow moving and shallow. From the panning at my last camp I knew that this part of the river was rich and I was conscious of the deposits that almost certainly lay within feet of me. But I want the best of the river and did not stop. At midmorning I found the place I was looking for. I need not have feared missing it. Cooper’s Bend. It is well named. A sweep of river curving roundly about a swell of land on its right bank. It is a pretty place but I did not stand long admiring it. Whether or not the trapper has told the men at the diggings downstream about this place they will, by their natural progression through the country, arrive here soon. I might have a week or two. I might have but days. I have to make my advantage count.

A river that makes a pronounced curve will generally deposit its gold toward the outside bank at the apex of the curve. My desire was to rush for this point and begin panning but I have learned that with gold nothing is properly predictable and it seemed prudent that I sample the length of this curve, this Cooper’s Bend, in order that I might be assured of the richest claim before the arrival of my competitors. And so I began where I was, at the downriver start of the bend on the left-hand bank. Today, though, I have had little luck. I have panned along one hundred yards of the bank, and I have panned in the body of the river for it runs shallow and affords no great difficulty. But I have found nothing. The faintest traces of color only, far less than in any other part of this river I have so far prospected. It is a disappointment and I worry, for even though I am only at the beginning of the bend I had high hopes. Still, there is much riverbed ahead of me.

March 19, 1849

For two days I have worked methodically up the river, crossing from one bank to the other and working the bed carefully in between so that I should not miss any but the smallest accumulation of gold dust in the river’s gravel no matter where it might lie. But does it lie anywhere? I have found nothing. Nothing! Some traces of dust, a sad thimbleful by the end of the day. I have not seen a stretch of river so poor. It is beyond my understanding. I could stop at random along the miles of Swallow River that wind behind me and, if there were space for a claim, pan a day’s wages at least. But here it seems a man would starve before he could dig enough to buy a week’s provisions. What unhappy luck it was that my path crossed that of the trapper’s! The river is broad, the water is slow, dust should fall from it and settle, and there is sand and gravel aplenty to catch it, but it seems some giant hand has already scooped it up. Men have not mined here before, this stretch of the river bears none of their scars. It must be nature then, alone, who plays this cruel joke. I have another day ahead of me before I reach the middle of the bend. I dare not speculate what awaits me.

March 21, 1849

Cursed river! Yesterday I reached the repository of my greatest hopes—the middle of the bend—and that day and this I have worked until it was too dark to see. I am burned by the sun, the flesh of my hands is raw from shovel and pick and constant immersion in water, but I have not found my storehouse of wealth. The middle of the bend is as barren of gold as the stretch I have so far prospected. There are some hundreds of yards yet before Cooper’s Bend becomes again the Swallow River, but I do not think now that they will make my fortune. How can they be any different from the yards I have already scrabbled over? There is a chance, it is true, and I must hold that hope close to me, but even if the river changes its nature ahead things will not be as I wished them. Men from the diggings downriver have begun to arrive this evening and are staking claims as the light fades. The dream of having a new strike to myself is gone. I am once again one among many and if any wealth is ever revealed here it cannot but be diminished by such division.

March 29, 1849

I must let it go. If Cooper’s Bend had carried the amount of gold any sane man had a right to expect I would have succeeded in my goal, I would have returned to civilization a man to be remarked upon. But it is not to be. Cooper’s Bend holds nothing. More than two hundred of us, for the influx from the diggings downriver has been swift, have worked the river here for a week and know this as a truth. Though the riverbed has been thoroughly turned, not a single man has panned more than an ounce and there is movement away from here, onwards up the river or back to the diggings downstream. Those who have not already left, though all will do so soon, have re-christened this wretched stretch of water. The name they call it by now is “Empty Mile.” It seems fitting. I will move upriver with the others. I may yet find paying dirt, and though I am unlikely now to become a gold dust tycoon I may still pan myself a house, or perhaps, if I am lucky, a small ranch. If I am lucky …

April 2, 1849

The river is rich again! We are beyond “Empty Mile.” Men, from where the bend finishes to as far upriver as it is possible to see, and more arriving by the hour. Each of us throwing himself at the small square of bank or bed we have claimed as our own. We are like some mad race of boring insects, our humanity temporarily suspended as we dash to secure a future for ourselves. How many of us will succeed? Will I be among them? Already I have four ounces safely stored and the river’s golden heart beats steadily with each pan I lift. Let it beat this way tomorrow and all the days after. Let the gold never end.

There was nothing more. Nathaniel Bletcher had run out of paper and the end of his story was not recorded. I wondered what the Gold Rush had left him with. Millicent had said she thought he had become well off, so I guessed that at least he had not been one of the hordes of broken men who went home poorer than they had been when they started.

Whatever had eventually become of him, though, what he’d written was not what I needed. It did not clear up the mystery of Empty Mile. If anything, after reading the final pages of the journal, my father’s purchase of the land seemed stranger than ever. If there had once been gold in that part of the river I might have suspected that he’d had some sort of plan to find an overlooked pocket of dust. But the journal pages showed plainly that this could not have been the case, that there had never been any gold there to overlook in the first place.