Touch (10 page)

And they did sell, even at eight dollars a pan. Men continued to pour into Sawgamet, and as the miners pulled the gold from the ground, some of it always stayed in the hands of my grandmother and her brother. They sold all of their pans in a few days and then hired men to bring in dried beans, shovels, bullets, flour, and always, more tin pans. Martine baked bread and Franklin sold it for a dollar a slice, two dollars with butter. The pies she baked were nine dollars. Seventeen if the miner wanted to keep the pan that the pie came in. Franklin kept the prices high, yet there seemed to be enough gold in Sawgamet—at sixteen dollars an ounce—that men paid what Franklin asked.

After he sold his first load of tin pans, Franklin bought a ramshackle cabin and then hired my grandfather to saw and build a solid, handsome store in front of the cabin.

As for my grandfather, by then he had already stopped trying to use his own tin pan. While gold seemed to leap from the ground for other men, my grandfather had not found even a glint of the metal since digging the nugget from the floor of his cabin. Instead, my grandfather worked the trees, providing lumber to miners. By the time he was finished building the store for Franklin, Jeannot had more than a dozen men whip-sawing for him up the hill. Whatever wood he could produce was spoken for before the sawdust settled: the miners needed to build sluice boxes and flumes.

My grandmother and her brother spent their first winter in the rickety cabin behind the store, and though it was not
a particularly cold winter—certainly no colder than any they had experienced on the Red River—for Martine, the cabin felt like penance for a sin that she had not committed. Franklin did not mind that the cabin was small and let the wind leak through it. He spent most of his time in the store, weighing gold dust and sending for more supplies by sea from San Francisco or by land and river from Quesnellemouthe; it was Martine who spent her days trapped inside the hovel, baking goods for her brother to sell, the poorly vented stove sending choking smoke against the low ceiling. At least she was near the fire, she sometimes thought, because she could never seem to keep warm, and the flames gave off more light than the one small greased-paper window let in.

The wind blew constantly that winter, but the snow held itself. Only a few inches stuck to the ground—not enough to stop men from working—and by the spring, ten thousand men had transformed Sawgamet into a dirty, noisy, bustling boomtown. Jews, fishermen, Indians, farmers, Chinamen, Londoners, Irishmen, Russians, bankrupt men needing a fresh start, former slaves and former slave owners, beat-down soldiers, dreamers, adventurers, and even honest-to-God miners boiled over the landscape, and with them came saloons and whorehouses, but never enough dressed lumber or tin pans.

WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER
realized that the winter had passed but that she still could not get warm, she marched fiercely into the store and demanded that her brother build her a proper house.

My great-uncle looked up from the counter and blinked at his sister, as if Franklin were not sure whom the angry young woman was. “I’d no idea,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Franklin,” Martine said, “I did say something. I said something every morning and every night. Even my bones said something while I was sleeping. Did you not hear me shivering from across the room?”

Franklin rubbed at his temples. My grandmother watched him pressing on the side of his head, as if the bright sun that streamed through the large windows in the front of the store pierced his eyes. She wondered if he still thought of her as simply his younger sister. He was certainly capable of looking at her and not realizing that she was eighteen and attractive, one of the few unmarried women in Sawgamet who was not a whore or worse. They ought not to be sharing a single-room cabin anyway.

“Franklin.” She was careful to make sure that her voice did not sound angry, though she was insistent, and Franklin nodded and reached for the ledger book under the counter. She did not know why he bothered to reach for the book: he well knew how much gold they had earned.

“I’ll order you some dresses,” he said, and she thought of silk and beads and swiss waists and buttoned shoes that were more appropriate for an opera than for the muddy streets of Sawgamet. “And books. I know you’d like to have some more books, and they’re something we could sell once you’ve finished them.”

My grandmother smiled and reached out to pat her brother’s hand. He meant well, but sometimes she wondered if he
thought much beyond the gold that passed through his hands. He seemed so odd to her sometimes. She asked for a house and he offered her dresses and books. “We’ll not be heading back to the Red River, will we?” she asked.

Franklin let her touch his hand for a moment and then he took it off the counter. She watched him pretend to look down at the ledger book and felt a sudden stab of love for him. He had done the best he could with her since their parents died. He had taken her west with him when it would have been so much easier for him to simply leave her to her fate on the Red River. She would have married somebody. She could have scratched out her life as a farmer’s wife.

“No,” he said. “We’ll not return there.”

“Then let’s not live as if we will,” Martine said. “It’s thoughtful of you, Franklin, but I don’t need new dresses and I’ve nowhere to wear them anyway. What I want is a house, something with walls and real floors rather than swept dirt, with enough windows—glass windows, not greased-paper—to let in the light, and a properly built stove. I want something that feels more like a home than a coffin. You’ve given the goods that you’re selling a better home than you’ve provided for me.”

“Well, they cost a pretty penny more than you do,” he said. “I only had to bring you from the Red River, and you walked some of that way on your own.” He waved his hand out toward the shelves and then touched her nose. “Some of this I had to have shipped in from San Francisco.”

She swatted away his hand, and then, with a mischievous look, yanked the ledger book out from under his hands. She knew he hated her touching it. She slammed the ledger shut
with a flourish. “Lord knows you sell those damned tin pans for enough that you can afford to build me a proper house.”

“Lumber is hard to come by right now,” he said. “I was lucky to get enough to build the store.” He reached out and gently pulled the ledger back from her. “My little temple of commerce.” He slipped the book under the counter. “Jeannot can’t keep up with the demand,” Franklin added, “and now some of the men are starting to work pit mines, so he’s making props, too.”

At the mention of my grandfather’s name, Martine felt a coldness move through the store. The last hum of winter, she thought, and she pulled her shawl over her head and wrapped her arms around herself.

“Are you all right?” Franklin, usually so self-absorbed, so busy with his books and his wares, sounded concerned.

“You see, even in here I can’t get warm.”

MY MOTHER HAS SHIVERED
like that for the last few days. We kept her covered with blankets, the fire burning, the furnace turned up, and still she shivered. Her hands were cold in mine, and I rubbed at them, trying to put the chill at bay.

“The winter they fell through the ice,” I said, “you shivered then, too.”

“I wasn’t dying then,” she said. I flinched at the words, and my mother squeezed my hand. “Stephen. You’re a priest. You’ve sat by the bedsides of enough mothers and fathers.”

“Never my own mother,” I said. “Besides, experience doesn’t make it easier.”

“I was cold that entire winter. I felt like I’d gone through the ice myself. You were a good son, though. You kept the fire stoked, kept chopping wood for kindling.” She nodded at the fireplace. “I still like a good fire, but it’s easier now. Turn the dial and the furnace does the work. Same with the stove. Unimaginable luxuries, and all you have to do is turn a knob.” She shifted onto her side to face me, letting out a small grunt. Her bones had been hurting her. “Can you put a pillow behind my back?”

Her body was hard angles. She was so thin and small that it was hard to believe she had once carried me. I adjusted the pillow and I heard her suck in her breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to be gentle.”

She nodded but closed her eyes, and in a few minutes she was sleeping.

I stared at my mother while she slept. The logs burned in the fireplace, and it was at that moment, watching the fire, that I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her from dying.

A child should never be allowed to watch his mother sleep.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
, Martine and Franklin walked through the forest and up the hill. In the clearing, three large frames held logs off the ground. Each frame featured a sawyer standing underneath with another above, the men taking turns pulling on their ends of the eight-foot-long saws. The blades tore at the wood and sent shivers of sawdust floating down onto the men who were below. A few men hauled a straight, bucked tree into the clearing, while off to the side another man stacked a small pile of rough-cut boards.

Across the meadow, a thin man who seemed no older than Martine stepped out of a squat, crooked cabin. He stooped over to rub the muzzle of a shaggy gray dog that lay near the door, and then he looked up and appeared to see Franklin and Martine.

Martine had seen my grandfather when he and his crew built the store, but she had not talked to him before. In some ways, though, she felt that she knew a lot about him—she had heard men in the store talk of the young Frenchman who had first discovered gold in Sawgamet but who had found himself more lucky cutting trees than along the river—but she was surprised by the accommodations he kept for himself.

“That’s his house?” she asked.

“First one built in Sawgamet,” Franklin said. “Wintered here alone with that dog.”

“It looks a little …” She paused, searching for a word. “Forlorn.”

Franklin laughed. “He’s eighteen and without a wife. What does he need more than that for?”

Jeannot wiped his hands on a cloth as he walked across the clearing, the dog trotting behind him at close attention. Martine was struck by the way that my grandfather carried himself, and how, when Franklin said, “My sister’s wanting a house,” Jeannot only glanced sideways at her, like he was afraid to look at her directly.

The thought almost made my grandmother laugh—and both my grandfather and my great-aunt Rebecca did laugh when they told me their versions of this story—and I can understand why. My great-uncle Franklin was not the sort of man who usually inspired concern, and my grandfather,
though not a large man, had the sort of face that made it clear that he did not mind settling disputes with his fists.

Jeannot turned and looked at the gang of men working for him, seeming to consider something, and then he turned back. “I’m sorry, Franklin,” he said. “I’ve been selling it for one hundred fifty dollars for a rough-cut thousand feet.”

“I can pay,” Franklin said quickly. He glanced at Martine. She had the distinct feeling that he was for some reason afraid she might suddenly turn on him if he did not get her what she had asked for. Franklin had his coat off and his sleeves rolled, and she could see sweat building at the top of his forehead, but my grandmother shivered a little, as if she had never known the touch of the sun. “And I’ll hire you on to construct it if you’re willing.”