The ledger on the sideboard had been balanced in three different inks over four decades, none of them flattering to the Evans name. Isabelle wet the tip of her lead pencil with a tongue that tasted exclusively of alkaline dust and dried hyssop, then drew a short, furious line through forty pounds of tallow-dip candles.
“We aren’t eating them, Toby,” she said without looking up from the desk. “We are simply burning them faster than the bees can provide the grease. If your cousin Arthur comes up the trail again today asking about the survey pegs, tell him I have gone down to the creek to drown the calf.”
The boy, who was nine and possessed knees like peeled walnuts, did not look up from where he was skinning a pocketful of slippery-elms with a dull penknife. “The calf died in February, Aunt Belle.”
“Then tell him I am drowning the memory of it. It amounts to the same delay.”
The house was not a house so much as a lean-to with architectural pretensions, wedged into a cleft of decomposed granite where the Mokelumne foothills began to heave themselves up toward the timberline. Below them, tucked into the elbow of a diverted creek, sat the iron skeleton of Prescott’s contraption: a small-scale, steam-driven placer dredge that Jasper Prescott had hauled up from Stockton four winters back behind six mules that had died, one by one, of the epizootic.
Jasper himself was currently visible some eighty yards down the gully, standing thigh-deep in grey tailings water while he hammered a cold chisel into a cast-iron eccentric strap that had cracked during the Tuesday morning run. He did not look like a man who owned a steam engine. He looked like an exceptionally tall badger that had rolled in lamp-black.
Isabelle dropped the pencil, picked up her wool shawl—the one with the scorched hem from the chimney flare of ’65—and walked out into the noon glare. The air smelled of hot pine resin and wet horse-clippings.
“Jasper,” she called out. The wind was coming off the high snow-fields, carrying that peculiar, razor-thin bite that made old joints ache before the sun had even cleared the manzanita.
The badger paused, the hammer head resting against his thigh. He wiped his forehead with a forearm that left a streak of grease right across his spectacles, which he wore tied on with a greasy strip of salt-pork rind.
“The gasket’s gone again,” he shouted back. His voice was naturally high, almost bird-like, which always surprised people who expected a man of six-foot-two and shoulders like a cider press to rumble like an earthquake. “I told the fellow in Sacramento that pig-iron was too brittle for these rocker-arms. He said it was Swedish. It’s no more Swedish than my grandmother’s cat.”
“Arthur Strickland is in town,” she said, picking her way down the scree with the exaggerated care of someone whose ankles turned on trifles. “He has three more forms for you to sign regarding the tailing runoff. He says if the gravel from your tumbler gets into the lower ditch another time, he’ll have the registrar attach the boiler for county taxes.”
Jasper laid the chisel down on a flat rock with great deliberation. He did not swear; he merely took off his hat and beat it against his thigh until a small cloud of dried grit rose into the stiff mountain air.
“The county taxes were paid in gold coin on the sixteenth of May,” he said. “I handed the sack to Strickland myself behind the blacksmith’s shed so the widow Gentry wouldn’t see us and start another rumor about the schoolhouse roof.”
“He says that was for the water-right, not the machinery assessment.”
“The water-right *is* the machinery. You can’t run three yards of copper tubing on dry air and good intentions.” He waded out of the sump, his heavy hide boots squelching like over-soaked leather. When he reached the bank, he didn’t offer her a hand—he knew better; Isabelle preferred to negotiate granite on her own terms or fall down trying—but he did lean his shoulder against the upright beam of the sluice-gate to steady himself. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him nothing, because I was busy crossing out twenty pounds of tallow we never bought.” She stopped two feet from him, squinting against the glare off the brass dome of the boiler. “We have twenty-two sacks of low-grade dirt sitting in the bins, Jasper. If we run the engine twelve hours a day until Friday, we might clear enough to pay the miller. If we don’t, Strickland takes the belt-drive. And if he takes the belt-drive, you’ll be back to shaping foundation stones for the Methodist chapel, and I’ll be taking in mending for teamsters who don’t know the difference between linen thread and harness cord.”
Jasper looked down at his own hands. They were enormous, square-palmed, and permanently stained the color of wet slate around the nail beds—the hands of a man who had spent twenty years laying stone plumb before he got it into his head that he could cheat the river-wash with steam and a cast-iron bucket-chain.
“The eccentric won’t hold twelve hours,” he said quietly. “Not with a cold-shut patch. I’d have to braze it in the forge, and the charcoal is down to three sacks.”
“Then borrow a sack from the blacksmith.”
“I owe him for the last three.”
“Then offer him two dozen of Toby’s dried peaches.”
“The boy ate half the dried peaches in January when he had the lung-cramp.”
Isabelle sighed, her breath pluming small and white despite the sun. “Then we shall give him the blue crockery teapot with the chipped spout. He’s wanted it for his shelf since his sister got married.”
That was how the Evans-Prescott partnership operated: not through grand declarations or mutual rescue, but through a steady, grinding subtraction of household goods until nothing was left but the tools and the ground they stood on. They had been neighbors since the dry year of ’62, when Isabelle’s father had died leaving four hundred dollars of debt and a flume that leaked like a cabbage leaf. Jasper had shown up with a plumb-line and an axe, not because he was sweet on her—at the time he was barely on speaking terms with anyone who didn’t use three-quarter-inch anchor bolts—but because he could not bear to see good granite masonry choked with blackberry briers.
By sixty-four they were sharing the flour barrel; by sixty-six they were sharing the mortgage; by sixty-seven they had stopped pretending to anyone in Mokelumne Hill that they lived in separate cabins, though they continued to sleep under different roofs twenty feet apart, mostly out of an obstinate Southern pride neither could quite name.
“I’ll go down to the shop,” Jasper said, reaching for his canvas coat where it hung over a fence-post. “If Strickland’s still there, I’ll tell him the boiler’s cracked. He won’t want to attach a machine that might blow the courthouse roof off.”
“He’s a lawyer, Jasper. He’d attach a wet sponge if he thought he could squeeze three cents of juice out of it.”
“Then I won’t mention the boiler. I’ll mention my cousin Eli.”
“Eli died in the Wilderness campaign four years ago.”
“Strickland doesn’t keep up with the casualty lists. He thinks Eli’s still running a dry-goods store in St. Louis and owes him twenty dollars on a horse trade.” Jasper pulled the coat on over his broad shoulders, the stiff canvas scraping against the timber. He looked down at her with those pale, near-colorless eyes that always seemed to be measuring the thickness of a lintel. “You look thin, Belle.”
“I am thin because the flour has too much bran in it. It goes through one like a river-pilot.”
“Take the gray mare up to the upper bench. There’s wild mustard coming in by the old sheep-dip. Boil it with some salt pork.”
“The gray mare has a stone in her near-fore shoe, and Toby is using the salt pork to grease the saw-blade.”