Testament (18 page)

The old man left the dog at the front door in case anybody came, and bringing an unopened bottle from the shelves behind the bar, he returned to the table in the middle of the saloon.

“It’s good stuff,” the old man said. “You’ve got to pour off the oil on top, but after that it’s fine.”

“But all those bottles. They must have left in an awful hurry not to take them.”

“Smallpox.”

Sipping, he gagged, shoving the glass away from him. “Smallpox?”

“Oh, it’s all right now. If there were any germs still around, I would have been dead from drinking this stuff long ago. Go on. Take another sip. It’s not going to hurt you.”

The old man drained his own glass in two quick mouthfuls and poured himself another. “Go on,” he said again.

He raised his glass and swallowed. The taste was sharp and made him gag, burning all the way down. He shook his head.

The old man cackled. “See, I told you. It’s not too bad at all. Just takes a little getting used to.”

While he reached for his canteen to chase the taste, the old man drained his glass again and poured another.

“Yeah the first case hit them just about the middle of the summer. A lot of people saw what was coming and left right away, but a lot of others couldn’t bear the thought of leaving all that gold and stayed. They built a cabin far back up in the woods away from the river and quarantined the family whose son had it and the son died of course and then the mother and father got it and died and so did their two other sons. But there wasn’t any other sign of it in town, and when the stench from the bodies started drifting down from the cabin, the town council got drunk one night, went up and set torches to it.

“They picked a good night for it, a storm on its way, thunder booming, lightning flashing down at the far end of the valley, but the flames from the cabin spread to the trees anyhow, and before the storm finally came and put it out, the fire burned nearly thirty acres of good timber. People were packing up, afraid the flames would reach town. But then they saw that the storm was doing its job, and they figured a fire that big had maybe been a good thing after all. If there had still been any germs in the trees around the cabin, they were gone now for sure, and people started breathing easier.

“At least a little easier. Because there was always the chance that the smallpox would show up again anyhow, and it wasn’t until the first of September that they finally decided the danger was over. They mined a big haul that month, mostly from the river, although some of them had started digging up in the hills, running sluices down from streams to help separate the gold, almost a thousand pounds of it that month alone, and they were just waiting for the packers to bring in supplies for the winter when the second case showed up.

“That was just about this time that year and the snow hadn’t come then either, 1881, and I shouldn’t say ‘case,’ it was cases, four of them, and they built more quarantine cabins, but the next week there were four more cases and eight the week after that, and what with people leaving or dying and then the snow finally coming, they lost fifteen hundred before Christmas. Of course once the snow started piling up, they couldn’t build cabins anymore, so they had to section off the town, one half for people with the sickness, the other half for people without.

“But by February the part of town for sickness was two-thirds. Then there were suicides and people trying to walk out of here, freezing to death, and well, when the thaw finally started, of the original four thousand there were just three hundred and fifty left, and they got out of here as quick as their legs could take them. Word must have got around how bad it had been because people didn’t pay attention to the talk of gold here, they just remembered the smallpox, and nobody ever came up here after that. The valley is humid, so the town didn’t bake to powder and crumble or catch fire or anything, and it was far enough from the slopes to keep from being caught in snowslides, so it just stayed pretty much the same as it was, and that rich meadow out there holds more graves than a person would care to think of. The whole story’s in the town records. If you get a chance, read them.” The old man drained his glass and poured another. “You’re not drinking.”

“Which part of town was set aside for the smallpox?”

“This part of course. That’s why I live at the other end of the street, why I don’t like to come over here much. Not that there’s anything wrong. It’s just association. This hotel here would have been a hospital. You can imagine them lying all over the floor, blistered and fevered and moaning, the cold outside, them dying.” The old man shook his head and took another drink. “It must have been quite a sight, coming in here.” Then his eyes went blank and he didn’t say anything, and finally rousing himself, pushing back his chair, its legs screeching, he wiped his mouth again, said “Well,” and stood. “I guess we’d better have a look how your little girl’s medicine is doing.”

The old man walked over to the bar where they’d set a pot from the oven, bending close, sniffing. “Yeah, I guess it’s cooled enough now. Let’s give it a try.”

“You still haven’t said what’s in it.”

“A little of this and that. I’d rather not say. You might not let her drink it.”

“Then
you
drink it.”

The old man turned and looked at him. “Still being careful, huh? Think I might want to poison her, huh? All this trouble I’m going to. I’ve half a mind to walk off and leave you.”

But the old man didn’t. He just picked up the wooden spoon by the pot on the bar, dipped it in, and sipped from it, pale green liquid dribbling thickly from it like pea soup.

“There now, you satisfied?” the old man asked, making a face.

“She won’t just be taking one spoonful. Try another.”

“This stuff doesn’t taste very good you know.”

“Try another.”

The old man dipped the spoon in and sipped from it again, sucking the liquid loudly past his lips and teeth.

“That’s it.”

“Not quite. Once more.”

The old man didn’t even bother saying anything. This time he jammed the spoon down into the pot, jerked it up to his mouth, and shoved all of it in, sucking it clean. “Now that’s the last,” he said, gesturing with the spoon. “If that doesn’t satisfy you, take care of her yourself.”

“I’m satisfied.” He stood from the table, went over and got the pot, and took it to where Sarah was huddled, eyes closed, in a sleeping bag in the corner.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, kneeling, shaking her gently. “Wake up. I’ve got something that’ll make you better.”

She sighed, but her eyes didn’t open, and otherwise she didn’t move.

“Come on,” he said, shaking her a little harder. “Wake up.”

She peered up at him, her face in shadow this far from the yellow lamplight. “Is it morning?”

“No, a long way from it. I want you to take some of this. It’ll make you better.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’ll keep you from throwing up anymore. That’s right, isn’t it?” he asked, turning toward the old man by the bar. “It’ll keep her from throwing up?”

“Sure, if anything will,” the old man answered. “And get some nourishment in her. And some salt. Just let her have a few spoonfuls to start, then a few more in an hour. By morning she can try something solid. But she’s not going to like the taste. You’re going to need to force her.”

He didn’t like the way the old man said the last part.

He asked Sarah, “Did you hear?”

She nodded.

“Well, come on then. Sit up and try some.”

He raised her gently, propping her against the wall, using the other sleeping bag for a pillow. But when he brought the spoon toward her mouth, she turned her face. “I don’t want to.”

She held her stomach.

“You have to,” he said. Catching her off guard, he slipped some of it between her lips.

“Ugh,” she said, screwing up her face, and he needed to put his hand over her mouth to keep her from spitting it out.

She tried to push the spoon away as he raised it once more toward her mouth. “It tastes awful.”

“Of course,” he said, and it shouldn’t have sounded funny but it was. “Of course it tastes awful. It’s medicine, isn’t it?”

And she relaxed enough to open her mouth and grin. Before she realized, he slipped in another mouthful.

16

“They did it like this,” the old man said, propped up against the wall beside Sarah, taking another drink and setting the glass by the bottle on the floor beside him. “They took a big pan like this and squatted down by the river and scooped it full of water and sand and gravel. Then they swirled the water around in the pan so that some of it spilled over the edge, taking some of the sand and gravel with it. They kept swirling it around until in a while all they had left in the pan was a bit of water and fine sand and if they were lucky maybe even a big chunk or two.

“But that didn’t happen very often, and mostly they were happy to get just the sand because of course it wasn’t sand at all but gold. Placer gold. Little bits of it washed down out of the hills to here, and because the gold was heavy, it sank to the bottom where the water wasn’t strong enough to wash it along anymore or where there was a kind of natural dam in the water to catch the gold and let it sink. That’s why the old prospectors used a pan like this. Because the gold was heavy enough that it would stay in the bottom after the water had taken most of the gravel over the side. Of course they had to be quick about this. It didn’t pay them to spend a half hour on just one pan of gravel, and most of the old timers could rinse out a panful in less than a couple of minutes.

“Then they got tired of bending over scooping up gravel all the time and decided to let nature do some of the work for them. So they found a spot in the side of a hill where it looked like there might be a lot of gold, and then they dug the gravel up and put it in a wheelbarrow and dumped it in a big wooden box at the bottom of a water trough. When the box was full, they channeled a stream down the trough into the box, controlling the speed of the water so it was just strong enough to take away gravel but leave the gold, and at the end of a day all they needed to do was look at the bottom of the box, and there the gold was.

“Most people, though, when they went looking for it never found the gold at all, and when the few of them did, they almost always spent the money from it right away or invested in more equipment to find an even better spot to dig, and towns like this didn’t help much either. As soon as the gold started coming in, prices went up, and before long what had been a beefsteak for five dollars was beans and salt pork for twenty dollars.

“There just wasn’t any way to win, except maybe for the shopkeepers and saloon owners and anybody else who fed off those who worked the gold. Not to mention frostbite and mudslides and God knows what else might catch up to you. No, there were easier ways to make a living, that was for sure, but it was like the gold wasn’t really what they were after anyhow, it was the feeling of being out on their own, moving on when they felt like it, staying when they found a spot they liked, coming into town to have a few drinks with the rest of the guys once the day’s digging was done. There was a lot of claim-jumping and back-shooting and all, but there was a lot of friendship too.”

The old man had been looking up at the shadows on the ceiling as he talked, off somewhere, slowing toward the last, and now as he finished, he looked toward Sarah to see how she was taking it, and she was asleep. He smiled to himself, looked toward the left front window and the pale moonlight out there on the buildings across the street, and after pouring another drink, draining it, he braced himself and stood. Or almost stood. The effort caught him off-balance, and he fell back against the wall and had to brace himself again before he managed to get up, the bottle in one hand, groaning. The bottle was three-quarters empty.

He had been watching the old man for the past half hour, standing at the bar, staring over into that corner. Three-quarters of a bottle and maybe the old man was having trouble standing, but his speech wasn’t slurred. He glanced from the old man toward Claire at the bar beside him, and her face was stark and except for the moment when the old man had thanked her for the supper, she still did not feel confident enough to relax around him.

“It’s cold,” the old man said, reaching them, rubbing his elbows. “You can feel it coming. Can’t be more than two or three days away.”

“What’s that?”

“The snow.” The old man rubbed himself again. “Never seen an autumn like this, warm so late the way it’s been. It’s going to be a hard winter.”

Off somewhere, even with the doors closed, he heard the long howl of a wolf. Two yips. Then another howl. Under a middle table the dog perked its ears and stood.

“Hush,” the old man said.

One more howl and then another on top of it coming from a little to the left of the first. Ears still perked, the dog went over to the door.

“Hush,” the old man said again,. “They don’t want you up there no matter if your dad was one of them or not. Even as big as you are, they’d finish you in a minute.”

“I would have thought he’d do well up there.”

“My smell on him, they’d never accept him, and on his own, he’s been around me so long, the edge for hunting is off. He’d never last the winter.” The old man leaned against the bar, staring at his reflection in the mirror back there. “Time to sleep. We’ve got to be up there by first light tomorrow. God, is that what I look like? Yeah, I think it’s time to sleep.”

The old man took the bottle and a patched-up blanket he’d brought with him. He shuffled around behind the bar, wrapped the blanket around him, took a final sip from the bottle, and lay on the floor.

“Better do what
I’m
doing,” he advised.

“I think I’ll stand watch for a while.”

“No need. The dog’ll wake us if anything goes wrong.”

“I think I’ll stand watch anyhow.”

“Whatever.”

He and Claire stood silently, looking at each other. In a while, the old man was snoring.

“I’d better wake Sarah to feed her more medicine,” Claire said.