The Drop Edge of Yonder (34 page)

Everyone ran in different directions except for a dozen Chinamen holding rocker pans in front of their faces. Two were shot out of hand, then three more running into the trees. The rest stood in the water, hands raised in surrender.

The Warden rode furiously back and forth as his men spread out through the camp, bursting into shacks and tents and shooting anyone that resisted, and even a few that didn't. When a large stash of gold was discovered beneath one of Cox's floorboards, he was clubbed, his gold confiscated, and his shack burned to the ground.

The violence stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving in its wake the roar of the river, which was almost loud enough to drown out the cries and moans of the wounded.

As if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, wagons were unpacked and a table and chairs were set up for lunch by the river for the Warden, who was joined by the Sheriff, the photographer, and Stebbins.

While they drank wine and smoked cigars, waiting to be served a warm meal, the photographer set up his tripod.

"Hold it right there, gentlemen," the photographer shouted. "Perfect.... Warden, if you would be so kind as to move to your left three inches. That's right, your left.... Perfect.... Now, if you could all look straight ahead, towards the river.... No one move.... Beautiful."

"We ought to shoot 'em all and get it over with," Hatchet Jack said as the camera flash went off.

"I can drop a few with the Sharps," Zebulon said.

"No point in stirring a hornet's nest," Large Marge advised. "Otherwise, I guarantee, vengeance will hound us forever, or at least until we get to Oregon."

They stayed where they were, looking over the edge of the rocky outcrop until the Warden and his men rode off with the rest of his troops. They were followed in a wagon by Stebbins, the photographer, and the Sheriff, all of them too drunk to mount their horses.

Y THE TIME THEY REACHED THE CAMP, MOST OF THE ANGLO (miners had fled and the remaining Chinese, Mexicans, and Indians were either dead or wounded.

Delilah tore up shirts for bandages and fashioned crude splints while Large Marge cooked a thick gruel of potatoes and mashed-up corn.

Hatchet Jack and Zebulon found Cox lying with his head against a grain sack, a line of blood oozing from his thigh like a fat worm.

"Gold is what I had," he muttered. "Gold is what I lost. A whore's dream slopped on a saloon floor by all the demons of hell."

Zebulon wandered off towards the river. He remembered other gunfights and massacres: a rancher and his wife and five children scalped and decapitated, an old trapper starved to death a mile from his cabin, an Arapahoe village wiped out from plague, settlers and prospectors drowned, hung, or shot. All of it seen and taken for granted.

As he looked at the row of bodies lying near the river, the roar of the rapids exploded into his heart.

he next day the dead were buried in a long ditch on a small rise facing the river. Archibald Cox offered the eulogy, an act he was well suited for, having studied for the ministry in the north of England.

"Life has gotten out of hand. It has become bigger and uglier and, at the same time, more beautiful and more precious than we first knew it to be. Gone are our dreams. Gone is the irreverent and irreplaceable spirit of youth that gave us the blind courage to journey here in the first place. As we stand in solemn contemplation before these graves, we can no longer take our lives for granted. But the Lord protects us by lowering a veil over our suffering. In His mercy, He provides us with enough grace to survive, and soon we will turn away from the dead and we will go on because we have no choice. To be born is to die and soon enough all that will be left of us will be memories of who we were, and then, not even those. Our tears cannot produce the green of May or make love bloom again. But it will, just the same. That is what we live for."

He sat facing the river, unable to speak until he was handed a bottle of whiskey Then he proceeded, along with the rest of the survivors, to drink himself into oblivion.

he next morning, Cox and the rest of the Argonauts agreed that there was still gold to be found in the valley and that others would be coming soon enough to make their own grabs. They decided to hold on and defend what they had, rebuild what was left of their shacks, work their claims, and then get out before it was too late.

For their part, the Mexicans chose to head back across the border, except for a youthful fruit farmer from Chiapas who was determined to find Plaxico, convinced that the old brujo could see into the future and point the way to a mother lode, or at least a big enough score to stake him to another fruit farm south of the border.

The remaining Chinese set out for San Francisco, where they planned to earn enough wages for passage back to China, or, failing that, to remove themselves forever from the gold rush and all that it stood for.

ATCHET JACK LED ZEBULON AND THE OTHERS TOWARDS the coast, avoiding Redding and Plumas City, as well as the Applegate Trail with its new settlements and mining camps. Three days later they crossed the Feather River and proceeded due west, passing Mount Shasta at dusk, its snow-covered cone barely visible through luminous layers of melancholy cloud.

The next morning they came upon the deep ruts of wagon tracks, followed by a trail of household goods - a smashed Chippendale dresser, a leather couch, broken chairs and china dishes, torn pages from a leather-bound Bible, an upright piano, and an array of mining and farming tools - all scattered across a grassy meadow. The slashed portrait of a Puritan minister and his equally severe wife leaned against a wagon wheel near the mutilated bodies of five men and women. Further on, halfhidden in high bunchgrass, a young girl holding a rag doll in her arms lay sprawled across the chest of a black woman wearing a ripped and shredded high-necked gingham dress. Both of them were dead.

A voice rose up behind them: "Mad. All mad. The Warden and his merry band of lunatics."

Stebbins crawled out from underneath a wagon and collapsed at Delilah's feet, coughing up clots of blood.

"They thought the woman was you and they rode in shooting. I told them... I told them... they had it wrong, but they shot her anyway. Then someone shot me."

Delilah held Stebbins in her arms until his breath left him. Then she laid him on the ground, walked over to the dead girl, took the doll from her hands, and wandered off into the bunchgrass.

Zebulon and Hatchet Jack found her sitting on the ground, rocking the doll in her arms. As she started to sing, dark clouds moved slowly above them like a lonely funeral procession: