A Sweetness to the Soul

  But once in Panama, Joseph found himself drawn to the stock corralled close to the docks and felt he would rather be there with the mules and the Indios than riding the rails with the rich.

  Once they began the trek across the narrow strip of land he had second thoughts.

  First of all, it was late in the traveling season. (When Joseph told me he arrived “late” in the season, I should have been forewarned. It is an issue we have argued about often as he becomes distracted by whatever passes before his mind, totally forgetting that I might like to arrive someplace on time.) Traveling late meant partaking of a much smaller mule train across the land bridge. The smallness allowed for better conversation with the natives but opened the group up for bandito attacks.

  Joseph said it was also early in Panama’s rainy season which meant downpours for several hours each day. In early evening, the rain abruptly stopped revealing steamy forests marked with illusive views of pumas and ocelots and white skies sliced with streaked sunsets and colorful toucans. The mountain trails after the rains were as slick as dog-licked plates and the mud promised to stick tighter than horsehide glue to any traveler straying from the trail. Joseph rode the largest mule, his being such a big man, over six foot plus two.

  The Donario family handled the mule string. Stocky Benito Donario moved like an efficient chicken, his head bobbing as he checked here and there for loose packs, frayed ropes, replacing and repairing. Broken teeth flashed a ready smile against a brown face as smooth as a baby’s. I don’t think I ever saw a wrinkle on his forehead. Even years later only tiny ones finally formed around his eyes. His front teeth were separated by a space wide enough to spit through, a skill that always charmed the children.

  The sparkle in Benito’s brown eyes defied their droopy appearance. When Joseph met him, Benito wore the bright striped wool serape of his people and a flat-brimmed leather hat that was not. “Gift,” he told Joseph when he asked. “Of Californio man.” Benito wasn’t much younger than Joseph, around twenty or so when they met, but he was three years older than his wife.

  After what happened on that trip, I was surprised that Benito made the choice he did, immigrating with Joseph. Benito and his young wife, Maria, had made the trip through the Cotillierra Mountains several times leaving the ocean beaches, rising slowly up through the mangrove thickets into the leafy trees of the mountains.

  Joseph thought the Donarios good handlers and after the second day he was surprised when Benito moved Maria into the middle position with her horse leading a string of two mules, allowing the “gringo” to ride drag. Usually, gringo clients rode the safer, center slot in a mule string, where the experienced drag could watch to see that nothing went awry.

  Joseph said Maria was exceptionally skilled. Quiet, wearing her long traditional dress and wide-brimmed hat, she carried herself regally, had gentle beauty. Once he started to signal her that a rope had drawn up between one of her mule’s legs but she had already noticed. She stopped her string, got off, and wove them into a tight circle that permitted her to untie the rope, pull it through the animal’s legs and reattach it, then unwind the string without a single mix-up all done as easily as his mother wound yarn around her peg.

  But it seems Maria was with child, a fact Joseph noticed while she sang her quick-paced “Punta” as she and her husband playfully prepared the evening meal. The three were dry inside a stone hut just off the trail the second night out. Mules were staked in the lush foliage close to the trail; the trio prepared for the night.

  Flour from the flat pancakes Maria patted out for supper dribbled onto her stomach and as Benito playfully brushed it off, Joseph saw the telltale mound.

  It bothered him. “It was no place for a woman and not a pregnant woman surely,” he told me. He was always of a mind to protect females and didn’t understand that in doing so he sometimes did not act in ways that showed respect for the strengths of the weaker sex. He once told me he could never see any woman he was bound to performing such tasks, a thought which always made me laugh as I remember what we’ve endured together through the years, and what we would have failed to accomplish if he had “protected” me from what I chose to do instead of learning to respect my wishes.

  He dared not discuss his reservations about Maria being on the trail. In those days—and perhaps still—it would be unseemly for a gentleman to broach such a subject with another man, especially one he did not know well. But Benito saw Joseph’s look of surprise and told him: “Is better she with me now than to be alone.” Benito didn’t seem the least bit alarmed that his wife might deliver there in the mountains.

  But he had taken the precaution of changing Maria’s riding position, moving her and her mules in between the men on the string, a fact he pointed out to Joseph who counted it as wise, but insufficient. “You do well, so we put you last,” Benito told him. “I watch Maria. Have delivered many babies. Brothers and sisters,” Benito said, his wide-sleeved poncho swinging on his short, stocky arms as he motioned, palms down, “not to worry.”

  Joseph hadn’t expected Maria’s time to be close enough to warrant the delivery discussion or consider long the thought that the young adventurer from New York might become a mid-wife! But before he could protest, Benito suggested they head outside where he changed the subject to California.

  “Will you look for the gold there?”

  “My brother brought home a dish pan of nuggets and it did not bring him peace,” Joseph answered indirectly.

  “Las mulas son corrajudas,” Benito said then translated his Spanish. “ ‘The mules are bad tempered,’ but you are happy with them. They like you.” And while Joseph agreed with that observation, it seemed not to follow in the discussion until Benito added: “Maria and me, we take mules to California, bring supplies to gold fields. Make good money. Send some home, but have Maria and bambino here,” he tapped his heart, “and by side. Like you, seek different treasure.”

  Joseph said he watched Benito swat at bugs, stunned at the enterprising suggestion just when he’d confined Benito to predictable—and truthfully, maybe a little dull. Benito’s simple appearance deceived my Joseph. But to his credit, he let new information in and changed his mind. Joseph heard a mule pawing impatiently near the cabin, just out of reach of the lamp light. Joseph said that was the first time he’d considered combining his interest in the mules with his brother’s facts and figures about the gold fields. For Benito was correct: the men in the fields needed everything and would pay top prices for muslin for their tents and baking powder for their biscuits. Better, they would pay to have their gold taken out, but only with a skilled handler willing to take risks. And only with a man of impeccable integrity who would risk himself for their fortunes.

  He had decided to explore this idea further when Benito abruptly suggested they retire. He said good night and took his leave around the corner of the stone hut.

  Joseph lifted his leather-bound sketch book from his vest pocket and made some notes. I have that little book still scribbled full with his thoughts of California, Benito, bambinos, and gold. He brushed the gnats from before his eyes, grateful for the lull in the daily downpour. He smelled damp wool and knew the steamy heat had saturated his red wool vest. He smelled his own scent. Returning his leather book to his pocket, he stood, planning to enter the hut to offer Maria the bed she and Benito had so graciously prepared for him as the “gringo client.” Perhaps he was distracted with the innovative thought Benito raised, or perhaps he was just tired—whatever the reason, Joseph didn’t notice the restlessness of the animals until later, thinking back. So before he could make his chivalrous offer to Maria, he heard the scream of a woman, a scream that sent him plunging through the hut door to her side.

  It was no woman.

  Maria stood inside, shaking, but the scream rose again from the far side of the hut, where Benito had gone to relieve himself. “Benito?” she said, her brown eyes full of worry. Joseph said he grabbed his Sharps rifle and ripped a lantern from a post. He headed
toward the sound trying to place it. Woman? No. Benito? Not likely. Familiar? Yes.

  Then he remembered: Cat! Cougar! Like he’d heard in the mountains of New York in the late winter when food was scarce and the felines slinked their way like fallen women down the ravines to the pastures and corralled cattle.

  Joseph raised his rifle to his shoulder when yellow eyes flashed in the lamp light. Too quick for him! As he rounded the hut, cursing Maria’s independence and unwillingness to stay inside, he stopped in time to see the dark streak stretch its length toward the back of the smallest mule standing not five feet from Maria. He shot once and the cat skittered into the dark and denseness of the foliage.

  Maria did not cry or scream but went immediately to soothe the frightened animals, her eyes searching for Benito who appeared, flushed from his own encounter with the cat. “I smell it, but could not see it,” he said, making his way to Maria.

  “And I saw it, but could not kill it,” Joseph told him. He felt bad about missing the animal or worse, that he might have wounded it and thus would make it more dangerous than it was.

  “Hungry. Old and toothless or would not have attacked so close to man-scent,” Benito said. “Is too dark to track.”

  In the morning, the rain had washed any signs of blood away and the trio left early after an uneasy night. Joseph said he did not sleep even when his watch was over, and he was pleased that at sunrise, they were all ready to head on down the rain-slicked trail.

  What happened next stays with Joseph years later though he is older and has cared for many, is wiser and accepts that he has been forgiven. But he still holds himself at fault.

  The first time he told me of it, tears welled into his soft eyes, and I held his broad shoulders in my arms and let the wetness from his eyes dampen the tucks of my calico while I stroked his hair over and over the way a mother does a child she knows has wounds so deep no one can heal them. Of all the gifts he ever gave me, his willingness to share his tears I count most precious. It was a gift I held with tenderness despite how frightened his crying made me. No man had ever laid his feelings on my shoulder. It was only later that I understood how a man of strength must be yielding too or he will surely break. I was pleased to be a person he chose to bend with.

  He told me that in the morning, following his missed shot, the trail was slick but the rain had stopped. A blue heron lifted its legs, heavy against the thick morning sky. Joseph said he thought of a hundred things that could go wrong: banditos, slipping on the trail, Maria giving birth, and of course, the return of “el gato,” so he kept himself and his Sharps ready and alert.

  Maria rode before him wrapped in her bright serape, her wide-brimmed hat pulled down over her dark braid. He thought her a capable and pretty girl, he told me, and Benito a lucky man. Almost before he finished that thought, he saw the form from the corner of his eye and believed at first it might be a bird lifting in flight or a snake dripping from the branch beside him. But the general restlessness of his horse and the mules ahead told him it was not.

  In slow motion, into the middle of the string, the cat arched through the green onto Maria and her mule all at once and pulled them over, girl and packs and animal, pulled them as they fell. The soft thud as the fractured three met the rain-soaked earth is louder still in Joseph’s mind he tells me, louder than the too-late crack of his rifle; the memory of the cat’s attack even more vivid than the despair falling onto Benito’s cheeks as he screamed for the life of his lost young wife.

  But it was the plaintive look of Maria’s eyes as life left them that propels Joseph decades later to give so much of himself, attempting, I think, to seek God’s forgiveness for what he could not have caused; wanting to believe, perhaps, there is always good in God’s plan for life despite the pain that comes with it; pain enough to make us wonder.

  SHYSTERS AND SHENANIGANS

  By the time Joseph and Benito set foot on the foggy docks of San Francisco some months after Maria’s death, they had weathered serious storms and were a pair, friends. He and Benito had chosen to support each other rather than lay blame, a sure recipe for surviving tragic accidents and forming friendships of enduring strength.

  That was perhaps what I had missed the year I faced my own losses.

  The men had washed away Maria’s wounds and bound the body and returned with it to Panama City, wrapped in a pale-striped serape on a travois of mango branches pulled behind her mule.

  Maria’s people did not blame Joseph, a fact he found astonishing since he blamed himself. In fact, as was their custom—one shared by the Warm Springs Indians, too—the family gave away their daughter’s special things. Joseph found himself a recipient. “Maria’s uncle give her this,” Benito said. Joseph looked down at him as Benito gently pushed a leather bola toward Joseph, sea green turquoise stones hanging from its leather thongs. “Is yours now. To remember Maria.”

  Touched both by their generosity and that they held no fists toward God, Joseph filed away their coping for future reference.

  The friendship of Joseph and Benito blossomed those weeks and then bore fruit as a result of Maria’s death, something good coming from that darkness.

  After the mourning, they crossed the Isthmus—Benito for the last time and Joseph for the first. The two docked finally in October in the fastest growing city of the west.

  Joseph told people years later that you could see the city building overnight. “In one year,” he said, “San Francisco went from eight hundred souls to more than ten thousand. A hotel owner’s dream!”

  In fact, the hotels and boarding houses bulged with gold mine recruits and every fresh upstart with an idea in his head to make quick money. Even the runaways: men and women running from family, from responsibility, from their past, all found solace in San Francisco.

  Hotels advertised “Beds and Baths, Five Large Cents,” but assigned three men to every mattress. One never knew whose stinky feet would greet one’s nose each morning—or who would inhale yours! Bedbugs slept without charge. Joseph said he wondered if anyone used the baths. What else could explain the general scent of grime and sweat that swept the rooming houses. So the two new friends decided to sleep in the safety of Adam’s Livery not far from Market Street, accompanied by the creaks and stomps of predictable stock rather than share beds with total strangers.

  Joseph and Benito took little time before determining that shysters and shenanigans reigned supreme in any booming city, and rather than become unwitting victims, they set their own course with a plan. They would buy mules and head inland, toward the bare hills and then into the mountains on one trip before the snow fell. Weather permitting, they’d make a second trip north into Oregon Country where towns were said to be booming along the Rogue River. Pack supplies north; pack gold back south with the mules they planned to buy from failed miners who only waited the sale of their animals before heading broken, home, back east. They’d winter in California on the spoils of their efforts. It was a good plan, the men agreed; one they could implement quickly.

  They were almost not fast enough.

  I’m inclined to believe Benito’s side of it. Not because my Joseph makes himself a hero in his stories—what man doesn’t?—but because of Joseph’s tendency, still, to put adventure over prudence, curiosity over common sense.

  “We walked through a bawdy circus,” Joseph said of that first sunrise after the morning fog lifted over the city. “People washed themselves in the open air, shouting to each other about this and that.” Horses and mules and ox carts rattled by as vendors wove their way in and out of gobs of people dotting the cold dirt streets like clumps of yellow jackets, listening, hovering, trying to interpret the latest tidbit of direction.

  “Sausages sizzled in pots set up beside the street. And somewhere, I will not forget,” Joseph told me, “I smelled the scent of a fresh-baked pumpkin pie!” More than one enterprising widowed woman survived those years by baking pies over open fires, a venture requiring no man to help her, I’m told—nor take th
e profits.

  While Joseph swallowed his saliva and cast his eyes in search of pie, Benito signaled to join him under a small lean-to where two men with bulging muscles slapped dough around chunks of potatoes and onions and wizened carrots before dipping them into the bubbling oil of a huge caldron set over an open fire.

  The proprietors, “two mountains of men” (according to Benito), worked under the lean-to. One hummed happily to himself as he bent beneath the center post of their shelter to fold his pasties. Brown flour stuck to his sweaty face where he brushed straight iron-colored hair from his forehead and pushed it behind ears that stuck out like those of the Yorkshire pigs of Joseph’s father’s farm. The man smiled and his small eyes seemed to sink into his puffed, reddish face.

  The other, who sported a thick dark beard, stood large-armed and stocky as he chopped the onions and shriveled carrots. A sharpening stone lay beside an extra cleaver on the chopping block, and he picked it up frequently, sharpening his tool.

  Joseph rarely noticed height. Being a tall man himself, he seldom described others by their size. Instead, he said the men looked “Irish” with arms the size for fighting.

  Behind the men in the shadow of the shelter, sitting with a second chopping block balanced on her calico-covered knees, was a skinny woman who kept her eyes lowered as she peeled potatoes with an antler-handled knife. Her bony fingers moved slowly around the “taters” as the men called them.

  “Hungry?” the pink-faced man asked over the head of his shorter, darker partner. He scratched his nose, leaving a trail of brown flour as a mustache.

  “What have ye then, and how much?” Joseph asked.