The Master Of Monterey: A Novel

Chapter the Third

Chapter the Third Merry Jack Chase, maintopman and seaman extraordinaire, looked down from the peak of the main mast at the antlike activity on the deck as the National Intention made ready to sail west and achieve the apogee ofour country's glory. Stevedores brought salt pork in such quantities that a whole nation of hogs must have been sacrificed in order to ensure that the voyage would enjoy the favor of the gods, and they brought shot and powder enough to convince any heretics who might believe that the gods had other intentions. A picked crew reported aboard: young men thirsty for glory, and blooded marines with a taste for combat, and others equally desperate. Jack Chase looked down on Commodore Jones, pacing the quarterdeck unquietly, as though already seeking the horizon, and round Hannibal eating the Commodore's duff pudding, and Captain Rafael Rafael overseeing the loading while ignoring the women crying on the dock. When a new midshipman came aboard and looked up at the ship's intricate rigging in a dazed stupor, Jack Chase came halfway down the ratlines and bid him welcome aboard. The midshipman asked with a tremble in his voice whether he would really have to learn the name and uses of every line. +~ 29 -<~- Jack Chase said he would, and the boy firmed his lip, though his eyes watered - Possunt, quia posse videntur, he said. This was William Waxdeck, a fifteen-year-old who could trace his ancestry to the Pyncheons of Salem, Massachusetts. His second cousins, thrice removed, owned vast tracts of land in the north and west that had not yet been discovered or explored but that formed the basis of their fabulous wealth. William's own branch of the family had been less fortunate, and when his father went bankrupt investing in the lead mines of the Upper Mississippi, William was plucked from the Albany Classical School and forcibly embarked on a career as an officer and a gentleman. He arrived on board the National Intention with more books than foul weather gear, a fact that made Jack Chase laugh. - Possunt, quia posse yidentur, Jack repeated. 'They could do it because they imagined they could do it!' Why, you're a scholar, not a sailor. But welcome aboard, for this will be a most literary voyage. Indeed, when the Commodore heard that a Latin scholar had reported aboard as a midshipman, he called Waxdeck aft and ordered him to suspend his duties amid the masts and riggings and common sailors and marines and serve instead as the Commodore's private secretary. Waxdeck's first and last duties would be to compose an epic poem in heroic couplets on the theme of a ship carrying out the intentions of a great nation to spread freedom to the very logical ends of the continent. The hero of the epic should be shown sacrificing his own personal good in order to serve the destiny of the nation, and the whole +~ 30 -<+ work should be dedicated to the always virtuous and ever beautiful Louisa Darling. At this statement, the Commodore drew himself up to his full, curved-backed, question-mark height. Midshipman Waxdeck looked at him through watery eyes. - I will treat your orders as though they came from the gods themselves, he said. The allusion pleased the Commodore, and he ordered that Waxdeck be given all the paper and ink he should ask for as soon as the ship got under way. This order was given with such high priority that Keyes, the yeoman, unloaded barrels of salt pork and ship's biscuit, and filled the space with paper of the highest quality, and quill pens and bottles of India ink, and pencils manufactured by a Concord firm. Keyes had a face bloated and round as a beet, and was the best-fed man aboard ship. He hated to see the pork taken ashore, and he hated an order to give anyone as much as they wanted of anything. He had spent most of his career giving out as little food as possible to the common sailors while making sure the officers had plenty. By skimping on the sailors' food and embezzling only half the money saved, he had gained his reputation as an able administrator. Keyes thought that offioading pork and taking on words was a dubious idea - salt pork, no doubt, was a more dependable commodity in systems of exchange. Jack Chase saw the stevedores taking off food and stowing writing materials in its place, and he laughed and asked Keyes what they were going to eat when they were becalmed in the doldrums. The yeoman answered through clenched teeth. +~ 31 -<+ - We'll eat verse. Major McCormick, head of the marine contingent, was drilling his troops on the dock, and Jack Chase called out to him what he thought of offioading food in favor of words. McCormick winked at the handsome sailor and said it didn't matter. For with powder and shot, he could win food well enough, and words couldn't stop grapeshot to the best of his knowledge. - But I've got no great use for poetry, he added, pulling on his crotch. For I can neither read nor write. When the sails were unfurled and the anchor weighed, a contrary wind came up out of the prophetic east and held the National Intention in port. Captain Rafael Rafael tried to work the ship through Hampton Roads and across the bar, but for a week they were buffeted and blown back. Commodore Jones was beside himself. He told Hannibal that it was unnatural that anything as insubstantial as a wind should oppose the will of the country, which was founded on principles of freedom. Hannibal agreed with him, while taking note of possible weaknesses in the history forty-four guns could make. Waxdeck was sent for, and he eased the Commodore's mind by reminding him of the classical precedents for contrary winds at the beginning of a glorious conquest. Agamemnon, for example, had to sacrifice his own daughter in order to start the Trojan War, but his fame endured for thousands of years. - If I had a daughter, the Commodore declared, I'd sacrifice her in a minute. Hannibal said he didn't have a daughter either, and the Commodore tried to conjure up some other expedient. +~ 32 -<+ Hannibal was thinking of starting a daughter somewhere in California who might remind him of his beloved and mend the thread of his story of generations broken by the Louisa Darling, but he didn't mention these reflections to the Commodore. In the meantime, the ship clawed out to sea and was blown back into port a couple of dozen times. The last time the National Intention returned to the dock, a young boy stood there, frail and wan, with the skin of a lamb wrapped about his shoulders. The boy was Jimmy F. Bush, the forgotten child of the Ishmael Bush clan, and he and his family had been part of that band of pioneers who were opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent. Every year, Jimmy's father would throw his rifle over one shoulder and his axe over the other and strike out west, striving to stay a little ahead of the frontier. But every year, he would discover that the frontier had caught up with him, and that other families had settled into river bottoms near him, and county clerks had already begun to blaze trees and set boundaries , and the earth was no longer empty and free for him to claim like one of the sons of Adam. They would move again in the spring, abandoning the land that they had broken to a more placid wave of immigrants behind them. And when they had driven their ox-drawn wagons to a place beyond the sight and hearing of other white men, they set up their ragged tents, felled the trees they would use for fuel and forage, broke ground for a crop, and began to kill the buffalo and antelope in the surrounding areas. - The 'arth was made for our comfort, Ishmael Bush often said, while he ate roasted hump from a pointy stick and his +~ 33 -<+ brood gathered around the fire using the shoulder blades of deer to dip beans out of a blackened pot. Young Jimmy Bush was an afterthought in the family, the runt of the litter, a small, frail child of his parents' age. While his older brothers Asa, Abner, Enoch, and Jesse hunted with their father and learned to swing an axe, Jimmy spent most of his days among the few cows and sheep that the Bush clan brought with them. He fetched milk in the mornings for his mother and sisters to use for biscuits and butter, and gathered wool for them to card from time to time, and otherwise he was ignored unless an animal turned up missing, in which case he was whipped until his back was bloody. Jimmy grew up talking to animals more than to humans, at times telling them to please not get lost, so that he wouldn't be beaten, and at other times telling them to please get lost so that he wouldn't be ignored. When it was time to pull up stakes in the springtime and once more endeavor to leave the frontier behind, it became Jimmy's custom to take one spring lamb and hide with it in a dry stream bed or a nearby hollow. He had learned that his father and mother would seek him out before they left, and greet the discovery of his hiding place with cries of relief that the lamb was safe, while he would be beaten and kept without food until sundown. For the rest of that day, his stomach growled and caved in on itself, and he could hold clearly in his mind the tender, joyful sound of his parents' voices. In the spring of 1841, while Ishmael Bush was complaining about the Prairie getting crowdy, dissatisfied that he could no longer safely fell every tree he could view from the flap of his tent, an astonishing sight arrested the entire Bush clan. They +~ 34 -<+ were loading their gear for their annual migration, and a small line of wagons appeared from the eastern horizon, slowly pushing west on a route that had been described in books by authors who had never left New York, a route marked out only in the most passionate of humanity's dreams. Ishmael Bush watched dully as the wagon train passed by. Men walked beside the slow-moving oxen carrying rifles, or built road over a shallow creek so that the wagons could cross. Women walked beside the men, some carrying children in their arms up steep hills. What grieved Ishmael most was that he sensed that this wagon train was forever pushing the frontier ahead of it. That dividing line between Savagery and Civilization was suddenly advancing at a frightening pace. Ishmael looked back east, along the route the wagons had traveled, and he saw that Civilization had already arrived; all the trees had been felled in the wagon's wake, and all the wild animals had been killed. He saw, as in a vision, endless lines of wagons following him, and fences built across the oceanic Prairie, and the hated county clerks along with the fences. In a dull panic, he drove his sons and daughters to finish piling their rude furniture, iron pots and plows, powder and shot, and barrels of flour into their two wagons. While his sons hurried to slop grease onto the axles and kingbolt, old Ishmael shouted at the oxen and cracked a whip over the shoulders of the lead yoke, and they creaked off to catch up with the frontier , barely able to see the crude sign on the rear wagon ahead of them which read CALIFORNIA OR BUST, forgetting young Jimmy, who was hiding out in a dry oxbow with a soft lamb smelling of shit and urine hugged to his chest. +~ 35 -<+ At twilight, surprised and hurt that he hadn't been beaten, Jimmy emerged onto the Prairie and found that his family was gone. While the young sheep bleated for its dam, Jimmy walked around in circles, finding only gnawed bones and tree stumps to tell him that this had once been his home. He hugged the lamb tightly, as it would be the offering he would present to his father and mother to be welcomed back, and he tried to orient himself to go straight where they would be. But the vastness of the plains confounded him. He felt suddenly lost in it, his way home blocked by the very openness of space all around him. He wandered in the gloaming until he came upon what seemed to be a linear track marked by tree stumps and buffalo carcasses, and he began to follow it, unaware, as his sense of direction was never very good, that he was following the wagon train's trail back east. Jimmy staggered easterly for days with the lamb clutched to his chest. He petted the lamb, called it his friend and brother, told it they soon would arrive, while its cries for its mother grew fainter. When it died, Jimmy wanted to bless and bury it. But driven by hunger and cold, he skinned and ate the animal and wore its fleece over his shoulders, certain that in doing so he had committed some horrible crime for which he would have to be punished. And to sufficiently punish him, only his mother and father loved him sufficiently. For a year he doggedly kept his path through a welter of moving humanity, coming across stagecoaches, and keel boats, and great white sternwheelers taller than all the trees he had ever known, and railroads that moved faster than the fires of the Prairie. He found land broken by his family ages ago, now +~ 36 -+ tenanted by strangers who would sell it to strangers and move on. He was briefly taken into the company of men who used him and cast him aside in their hurry, cared for by women who called him an orphan and coaxed him to tear off the lambskin he clung to, until they abandoned him as one of the abandoned. Down the Missouri, the Mississippi, up the ohio River, along the National Road, he moved against the tide as though he might intersect with his parents at some unremembered point of origin, until he came to the edge of the sea, face-to-face with the National Intention. Jimmy stood confounded by the sight of so much water, confounded by the terminus it seemed to place on his search, until Jack Chase called down from the maintop and asked him what he was looking for. - My mother and father, Jimmy Bush said. - Where are they to be found? Jack Chase asked. Jimmy struggled to think. - They were heading west. - Come aboard, then. For we're going as far west as can be, and you can meet your mother and father when they arrive. You'll seek no more on your present course, unless you can walk across the sea. As soon as Jimmy set foot aboard ship, the Commodore had him seized. He was asked when he had left the crew. He said he had never been part of the crew, and this was put down as an offense because everyone was part of the crew. He was asked why he had come back aboard. He said because he thought he was lost. This was a graver offense, because nobody was permitted to be lost aboard the National Intention, especially not lost and heading east. He was asked how he would plead. He +~ 37 ,,+ pleaded with them to give him a little bread. The Commodore ordered him made a spread eagle, and he was bound hand and foot to the rigging, while all hands were mustered to witness punishment. Jimmy was flogged three times for being a deserter, once for being hungry, twice for letting on he was hungry, and five times for saying he was lost. Then he was cut down and sent belowdecks, not altogether unhappy. Being beaten and hungry reminded him of his mother and father, and he felt he was on his way home. The next day, while women waved lace handkerchiefs from the dock in delicate hands, the National Intention cleared Cape Henry and sailed for California with a crew of glory-hungry warriors, would-be merchants, homesick children, lovelorn men, all under the command of the restless and questioning Commodore Jones. +~ 38 -<+ ...