Page 51 of Working the Lode

EPILOGUE

Sonoma, California

August 1849

Bowmaker

“This day shines any way you fix it.” Bowmaker raised his champagne glass—a proper crystal one, at that—and clinked it against the uplifted glasses of Valenzuela and Erskine. “Here’s luck!” he declared, the usual mountaineer’s pledge.

They were dressing in their best clothes in Bowmaker’s chambers. They needed to reckon with odd habiliments they were unaccustomed to: red silk sashes knotted at the hip, rust-colored leggings, stiff gold-trimmed velvet jackets. Valenzuela claimed the sash should be knotted at the small of the back, but Erskine balked at this, and pulled the ends of his out like a peacock’s tail feathers. General Vallejo had offered his tailor’s services and he himself had even been in the chambers earlier to advise on waistcoats with buttons stamped with Mexican eagles. Bowmaker felt a deal too “foofarraw,” like a sappy picture, but it was for a thoroughly good cause—and well worth it, to laugh at how stiff and formal Erskine looked—and now Valenzuela even became maudlin with the spirit of things, toasting:

Batallas, tempestades, amoríos,

por mar y tierra, lances, descripciones

de campos y ciudades, desafíos

y el desastre y furor de las pasiones,

goces, dichas, aciertos, desvaríos

Which, as far as Bowmaker could make out, went something like:

Battles, tempests, love affairs,

by sea and land, deeds, descriptions

of countryside and cities, challenges

and the disaster and furor of passions,

enjoyments, happiness, successes, deliriums

“’Deliriums’?” Bowmaker questioned. He shrugged. “I guess that could mean a happy sort of delirium.”

“A rebellious and romantic poet from Spain wrote that,” Valenzuela explained.

Erskine beamed widely from ear to ear. “That just about describes all of us. Rebellious and romantic! And tomorrow, for a fortnight at least, I’ll have my own palatial lodge in San Francisco with a wondrous view of the field of topmasts choking that pacific bay!”

Erskine referred to the hundreds of ships abandoned by frenzied gold-seekers. The windows of the front room in Bowmaker’s new house displayed a rowdy theater of comings and goings as longshoremen tossed unsalable items overboard before abandoning the town for the gold mines. As property was already at a premium, a new landfill was being created in the tidal flats, building lots created out of tossed cast iron stoves, chamber pots, nail kegs, and sacks of flour. Fact, a sign near Casa Bowmaker declared of the thigh-deep mud, “This street is impassable, not even jackassable.” The place was a morass of reeking humanity, but Bowmaker’s manor shined in the muddiest kind of crowd.

Valenzuela pointed at Erskine with a cigarito he kept clenched between his teeth, squinting against the smoke that drifted into his eyes. “At least this time, you’ll have a roof over your head. And it’s not the rainy season.”

Holding his champagne aloft, Erskine agreed, “Viva Carlos Quinto!”

The other two men grinned like donkeys at Erskine’s favorite new motto, but choked in mid-gulp when there came a pounding of bare feet down the adobe corridor outside Bowmaker’s bedchamber.

“Señor Bowmaker!” Someone beat on the heavy oak door.

Bowmaker grimaced at the ticklish champagne rising in his nostrils, and the fact that he’d expressly instructed all of the hacienda’s servants to approach his rooms with a quiet demeanor, if at all.

“Cormack! It’s an emergency of the highest order!”

Valenzuela raised one silken, handsome brow. “Shall I let him in?”

Bowmaker shrugged, adjusting his cravat in the gilt-framed looking glass. This hacienda had been loaned to him by General Vallejo until his winemaking business showed a profit, which it looked to do, given the hundreds of orders Erskine and Valenzuela had collected from enthusiasts hard up for decent bug juice—old Californio families as well as the rush of thirsty norteamericanos. Of course, they had to make and age the wine first. And sometimes Bowmaker forgot whether he was supposed to be referring to Joaquin as “Antonio Carillo,” depending on whether their new customer was a pickled pioneer Valenzuela’s band had robbed before.

Speaking of bug juice, Quartus Stringfellow burst into the cool adobe room with outstretched talon hands and eyes behind his thick spectacles bulging like a housefly. Oddly, his fancy embroidered calzoneras were rolled up to his knees, revealing bare feet stained purple-black up his white calves. He even tracked purple footprints onto the adobe tiles.