VIrga

By Ned Purdom

A.P. Chapman is a failure as a gold miner, but he is a master at getting lost. On an ill-fated prospecting trip, A.P. stumbles into a spectacular alpine valley, which he bets will be a hub of agriculture and commerce, feeding legions of Sierra Nevada miners, timbermen and emigrants. While A.P. chases riches in California, his wife, Carrie, and their young boys wait in Connecticut to see how and where they might again fit into his dreams.  

 

The only certainties in the West are the monumental challenges of scratching out a life on the frontier and ruthless financial forces that A.P. will never understand. While familiar, the East is a constant reminder of his family's slow, but inexorable, foundering.

 

With the California Gold Rush as a backdrop, Virga traverses the precariousness of a nineteenth-century transcontinental love story, with the illusory notion of success and how it measures us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chapman Saddle Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737017219

Book preview

1

NAWAAS

Colonial Connecticut

At the precise moment the first blood orange ray of autumn sun shoots across the sound, up the river and onto the flats of the dead-still estuary, an otherwise imperceptible northerly breeze riffles shoreward across the sand bar, only to have its echoes muted by the unimpressed bulrushes and eel grass.

Ducks glide without wake and shorebirds stand stock-still, patiently awaiting the dawn’s warmth and their prey, whichever comes first. Songbirds start the verse, while gulls gliding north from Poverty Point provide the chorus to an early morning hymn.

A young man—a boy really, maybe twelve or thirteen—lies prone in the marsh. His hidden face, likely contorted with equal shares of surprise and fear, is in several inches of the brackish algal muck, which at low tide smells of salty gunpowder. His naked body is covered in the shallows of the Connecticut River, which gently rocks him in the morning breeze. All that remains dry is his coal black scalp lock.

His basket, still full of clams, is thrown ahead; his thin hands clutching clumps of pickleweed torn from the mud as he tried to free himself. It was a short struggle, with no one there to see it. He did not scream or whimper. No one was there to help, even if they could hear him.

He had fallen in the marsh many times while fishing or digging clams, but never with a lead ball buried deep in his chest.

He had known to stay away from the fort. He also knew that the flats in which he now lies dead were full of clams and oysters and bluefish. From his vantage, though he would never again see it, you could just make out the top of the recently hewn palisades, standing sentinel over the best fishing on the river.

The soldier—a boy really, maybe eighteen or nineteen—a frightened member of the tiny garrison, patrolling the shoreline at dusk, aims anonymously toward the splashing footfall. Before the muzzle smoke clears and the report dissipates, he runs through the acrid cloud of spent black powder to the fort’s safety.

He arrived just months ago with the other settlers, west from Boston to serve God and England. The governor commanded them to keep the river from the Dutch. Mostly, they kept the river from the Pequot.

It is better that the boy can no longer see.

Following his murder, which the settlers said resulted only because of the brazen attack on the sanctity of their settlement, the genocide begins. Steady. Inexorable. The pauses between skirmishes heighten the anxious dread. The soldiers come in their ships from Hartford and from Mystic.

It is better that he can no longer see his people running, cut down by sabers and rifles and pistols. They are falling, face down. They are pulling the pickleweed, but their hands have no purchase. They are pulling. Face down. Pulling.

It is better that he can no longer hear ripening corn burning in the fields.

It is better that he can no longer hear the cries of the children and their mothers running, always running.

The soldiers keep coming in their ships from New London and from Boston.

It is better that he can no longer smell the black powder. He can no longer see that they burn in their homes. The burning flesh still reeks. When they run, their burning flesh is ripped by swords and by lead shot, just like the round in his chest. Face down. Burning.

It is better that he can no longer hear. The quiet splash of a child falling face first in the brackish waters. The constant splash of men emerging from their ships and their longboats. Chasing. Running. Catching.

The soldiers keep coming.

It is better that he can run no more. There is nowhere to run. No one to run with.

They keep coming.

It is all gone. Burned.

The soldiers keep coming.

You have taken it all. Those you have not killed, you load onto your ships in shackles and take away. Your men say to the West Indies. Sugar. Those same shackles bind the black men your ships bring back to Nawaas.

The soldiers keep coming.

When you have it all, you take what is left.

You take our name.

2

EAST HADDAM, CONNECTICUT

1848

Winter does not yet have its grip on the Connecticut River, but soon will.

A.P. Chapman stands alone on the dock below the Belden Hotel, watching the golden lights flicker on as if through mica in the homes along the western shore while they blink off in the warehouses and chandleries on the eastern banks. Wood smoke rises in vertical wisps, punctuated by brilliant, short-lived embers dancing aloft as the fires below are tended. The wisps congregate in small clouds in the trees above Shailerville and Rock Landing before gliding silently north.

This peace will not last.

Icy winds will soon blow in from Montauk, pushing white-caps across the sandbar at Saybrook. The unobstructed fetch from Saybrook to Haddam will boil the whitecaps to grey-black breakers, straining the freezing lines mooring the ships at anchor and those dockside.

All he knows is on this river.

Robert Chapman, the settler, dead nearly 200 years and A.P.’s ancestor, still casts his immense shadow from Fenwick to Hartford. A.P. has never seen Robert nor heard him, nor had anyone he knew. The myth persists: soldier, surveyor, statesman, farmer.

A.P. hears Robert’s wavering voice in his deathbed letter, the best evidence of his complicated legacy. We saw one taken away on day two at another four out of our little number and the Enemy rage and insult that he will have us all.

Deacon? Elder? Fair broker of Indian lands?

A.P. can hear the wind whistling through the rigging on the Yankee, the upper registers of a fine church organ singing from the braces and staying aloft while the main and foremasts chant the bass tones. The Yankee was built by men he remembered, men employed by his grandfathers, the Timothies on either bank of the river. No one ever said why father and son were separated by the river. No one dared ask.

For a time, A.P.’s father Horace had been a brave captain, too, something A.P. can never be. Lord knows Horace tried to help his son appreciate the seas and when that proved fruitless, the less-demanding river. The lessons were many but always followed the same haunting script. It was just a short run down from Haddam Neck with a cargo of granite block and brown-stone. Horace was in command, a steady hand on the tiller, reefing the sheets as they headed windward at gloaming. When the lights at East Haddam came into view, his father reassured him, We’re nearly there.

The black water poured across the deck. The church organ chords were now shrieks, maybe his own. He was certain the stone cargo would crash through the hull. He thought for just a moment that if it were to end now, at least the brownstone would make excellent, if uncut, grave markers. That dark thought vanished as the hull groaned against yet another wave, bigger than the last. Don’t you worry, these cedar timbers and the white oak planking were cut on your family’s land, nothing straighter or stronger.

As his father promised, he brought them safely ashore, like always.

A.P. knew that while his life there was controlled by the river and the sound and the Atlantic beyond, he was best suited to pursuits ashore. He would interrupt a long family tradition by taking to the water only when necessary.

A.P. signed on with a shipbuilder, a skinflint old cur named Cyrus Mead, who said he knew his grandfather. He didn’t believe him, because if Cyrus did know his grandfather, some of his kindness would have worn off. That said, Cyrus gave him a job and said that if he stuck with it, he’d have a trade that would serve him for a lifetime. Armed only with the experience of watching his father cut and join, and without the simplest of tools, he started shipbuilding as an apprentice caulker. He spent his days unraveling old ropes into fiber because old Cyrus Mead was too cheap to buy hemp. The frayed cordage fought all attempt at repurpose and tore the skin from his fingers; his hands burned so badly that he could barely sleep, even as the remainder of his body ached from exhaustion.

He retired from shipbuilding, never advancing beyond apprentice caulker, after two long weeks.

Fortunately, his dear mother Esther insisted that he learn to read and write well and hold his own with arithmetic. This was despite her complete lack of schooling in Ireland and in America. She knew from listening to conversations in all the wealthy houses she scrubbed that her five children would read and write.

He is now a warehouse clerk, carefully checking manifests, bills of lading, contracts, logs, schedules and all the other minutiae of the shipping trade. It is dull, altogether tedious and unglamorous work at which he is particularly adept. He tells himself that his attention to detail is the lifeblood of East Haddam shipping. The captains and shipwrights and stevedores think otherwise. The work is certain and mostly steady, and he is rarely away from his family. In his time at the warehouse, commerce has improved, with shipping volume up to that before the panic. With business improving, so has A.P.’s stature at the firm and along the riverfront. A.P. is thankful his work is ashore. Somehow, he manages to maintain his good humor while clerking, though he worries this outlook will not last.

He knows that nothing lasts on this river, especially in his family. The family ships are gone—and the stores and the red dock and the farm and the timber and the mill. Grandfather Timothy overextended himself, they say. At least he reached for something. The lands, acquired inexplicably from the region’s sachem, are gone, too. Other families or A.P.’s uncles or cousins own the great tracts on either bank now. They have their own families for which they must care. He is reminded nightly of all the riches that were as he makes his way to his in-laws’ modest home on his ride up from the river along the Leesville Road.

The Chapmans all found their way to this side of the river, save for Grandfather Timothy who decamped west. The aunts and uncles and scores of cousins all live on this road, or the main line through Moodus, or up by the grist mill. In their private moments, A.P.’s father used to tell him that you couldn’t swing a dead cat over your head out here without hitting a Chapman. As a boy, A.P. thought countless times about trying that. Though they were courteous enough to wait until A.P. was a young man, these relations take some pleasure in noting that their specific branches of the family retained their landed wealth and status.

A.P. bites his tongue and doesn’t ask his cousin John, the worst of them all, if he feels at all badly that his profits come at the expense of enslaved men toiling in the south. He knows he stands on solid moral ground, and that his specific family line leans with the abolitionists since Timothy Sr. employed Venture Smith to cut timber on their property. A.P. knows that John would smugly respond about it being a matter of states’ rights in which he or Connecticut has no business, and besides, he and Catherine take care of their growing family. John finds ways to make similar insinuations at church, yet another reason for A.P. and Carrie to avoid services.

A.P.’s father Horace brooks no quarter with John or family members like him. John is an ass who couldn’t find the business end of a shovel if you hit him with it. While A.P. enjoys his father’s bluster, it doesn’t make John’s remarks sting any less. Horace dealt with withering criticism by taking to the sea.

This father A.P. knew so well is gone too, though he is still alive. Horace’s days at sea were cut short by a block swinging silently out of the dark at his temple, sending him careening into the rail, breaking ribs and his left wrist. The bones are mended now, but no owner will hire a captain who can’t walk a straight line across the deck. He explains that it is about getting his sea legs back. The owners are certain he is a drunk.

Nearly seventy years old, his father walks behind a plow on someone else’s land in Saybrook, where it all started, and from where the Chapmans escaped for proverbial greener pastures. He hasn’t seen his father in a year. He should get down there—or write.

He stands on the dock next to the warehouse where he has worked for half his life. He looks up at the third-floor room at the Belden. He lived there alone before marrying Carrie. The light is out in his old room.

This river is home. It is his family. It is all gone. He can no longer see himself on the river.

A.P.? a familiar voice calls from the dark.

A.P. Chapman, is that you?

3

Albert Picket Chapman, A.P. to his small cadre of friends and Bert to his wife, turns from the river to James Kent sitting atop his one-horse buggy. A.P.’s hands are thrust into the pockets of his canvas coat and his collar is turned up against the December chill. A prodigious beard, deep brown for the moment but increasingly flecked with gray, hides his drawn, ruddy face, tucked below a brimmed, wool felt hat. His dark woolen trousers cover finely tanned boots, not those of a working man, but of someone who spends his days at a desk, venturing out only occasionally across the planked piers and warehouses.

It certainly is, Jim. How are you tonight?

I’ll be a damn bit better when I get out of this cold. Get up here now.

It’s not so bad, Jim, we’ve hardly had a worthwhile storm yet this season.

Spoken like a man who spends his days inside, A.P.

A.P. climbs up and sits next to his friend. Unlike A.P., Kent is a man who has always made his living with his hands. About the time A.P. was retiring as an apprentice caulker, Kent found work in the shipyards, first hewing the massive timbers skidded down from the local forests. As the journeymen recognized Kent’s many skills—no one could work faster with such attention to detail—he advanced to joiner and carpenter and to master shipwright.

About the time Kent set out on his own, mostly repair work on local cargo schooners and an occasional new vessel, the work began to dry up. Owners want larger vessels, too large to navigate the damned sand bar at Saybrook that once protected the mouth of the river but now impedes large ships. Mostly, the owners want steamships, and the work is moving to Groton and New London and Boston. Kent would sooner die or farm than move east or work on steamers.

Jim Kent’s hands are outsized for a man of his stature, hardened by years of drawknives, drills, and gouges. His club-like forearms, a mass of sinew and exposed vein, barely fit into the sleeves of his coat. Kent tries to visit the barber with some frequency to keep his face clean save for his sandy mustache. The stubble is winning due in great measure to the challenge of keeping his business afloat.

Kent gives the reins a flick, encourages his mare with a gentle c’mon now, and the pair sets off north along the east bank of the river toward the Moodus, a tiny tributary of the Connecticut, which also gives name to the area in which the men spent all of their thirty or so years.

Have you told Carrie yet? Kent asks.

You get to the point quickly, don’t you?

"You don’t want her to learn from a nosy woodcutter or a loud Congregationalist, do you?

We haven’t made it to church in months.

A.P., I don’t want your faint heart to scuttle our plans.

Jim, that’s not fair. You’ve nothing to hold you here.

That may be so, but this is our chance. We need this, and you need to square it with Carrie.

Well, I keep meaning to, but the time is never right, between the boys and her family.

Do you just plan to sneak off in the night and leave a note?

No, no. I will tell her, but I need to plan it out. She is certain to tell me I’ve not thought it out particularly well.

Well, we haven’t, Jim responds with a laugh.

That’s not true. We know how we’ll get there. We are just a little thin on the plan once we arrive.

Are you paid up with Shawmut?

Yes, yes. Sent the last of the fare off last week. I’m in.

I don’t mean to be in your business, A.P., and Lord knows I’ve never had any practice with a wife, but you’ve got to let her know. How are her folks?

About as expected; no better, no worse. But they aren’t much help around the place and Frank and Charlie can give anyone a run.

We’re leaving in less than two months, with or without you, A.P.

Jim, the next time I see you, Carrie will be on board with the plan. I swear.

The pair continue on along the Leesville Road in the growing darkness, their deliberate silence interrupted by the mare’s snorts and the crunching leaves under the buggy wheels. The silhouettes, with the driver some four inches shorter than his passenger, rhythmically join and separate at the shoulder as they bounce along, the steam from their breath meshing in a single cloud before evaporating in the leafless trees.

4

Washday starts like any Monday, but it is not ending well. Before leaving for the warehouse, A.P. brings in the three wooden tubs and the stand from the shed and sets them up off the kitchen just as Carrie has asked. Carrie excuses her husband from further domestic duties, tells him to be quiet so as to not wake their boys or her parents, and sends him off with what he sees as a perfunctory kiss, but she sees otherwise. She knows it is time to get on with the business at hand.

Carrie, born Caroline Chapman, is a distant cousin of her husband, tracing her American family to the Mayflower Fullers on her mother’s side and Robert Chapman, settler of Saybrook, on both her father’s and her husband’s family ledgers. That lineage is of little use trying to manage five souls other than her own: two starting life, two failing quickly, and her husband of five years, whose current trajectory she cannot plot.

While her family sleeps, Carrie gathers up the laundry, piling the whites and the woolens into piles on the wooden floor. While the wash water heats but before the steam obscures the view from the kitchen window, she looks out on the small piece of property her parents lease from a generous neighbor who might in some complicated way be another distant cousin.

As a child, her parents owned the red house hard along the road and the forty or so somewhat arable acres that stretch across the undulating lea to the hemlock and hardwood forest that covers the top of the ridge running east to Moodus Lake.

Carrie marvels at the beautifully curved line that defines the dense forest from the gently sloping grasslands, which tumble down the hill toward the Moodus River and the long-shuttered mill. Now, the fields are a soft brown stubble awaiting the first real snow; the hay crews had been through several weeks ago. In her mind, the grass is always an unimaginably lush green, like a field full of the newest oak leaf shoots.

The steam obscures the windows now, keeping Carrie from seeing the present hillside and the long-gone past. The mill is quiet, the pond and raceway silted in and the water wheel crumbling. The neighbors up the hill bought the property nearly ten years ago and promised her father George they would keep him on. He hasn’t cut a log since.

George does what he can to take care of his family. He tends the small garden and the animals with more attention than when he was at the mill. He gets some occasional work by the river doing carpentry. He framed in the new vestry at the Congregational church, though that didn’t pay much more than meals and some measure of forgiveness for the years he and his family avoided services. The carpentry work is hard though; his once-powerful body can no longer put in the hours. His family worries about his mind and his spirit. Mostly now, George relies on Carrie. Betsy and Myra are long gone, living with their families farther up the river in Hartford, he thinks. He can’t remember when he last saw Betsy and Myra and how many children they have.

Carrie spends her days looking after George and her mother Beulah and the boys, Franklin and Charles. At five, nearly six, Frank does what he can to help out with Charlie—at least keeping him from anything truly dangerous. Her parents are taking more and more of Carrie’s attention and some days she is lucky just to get them out of bed and dressed.

A.P. doesn’t need as much looking after and he works steadily. His wages mostly keep this enterprise called life afloat. Carrie and A.P. put up what they hope is enough firewood for the winter. She can hold her own in the wood pile, having learned to cut and split from her father. She also tends to the small garden out back, which is now mostly gleaned of summer vegetables. She put in a few onion starts but knows she is rapidly losing the chance for anything green that will come up before the snows.

She prays that there is some way out of all this, though she never makes time to formalize her wishes in church. After making such an effort to join the Moodus congregation, she isn’t sure if she and A.P have been back since their wedding. Frank will soon need to start his lessons. She just doesn’t know where she’ll make the time for his reading and writing. If it comes to it, she knows she could write to her sisters for money, but what Carrie really needs are more able arms and legs.

Carrie worries that in his own silent way A.P. is drifting. He is steady and helpful and home, unlike all the men in his family who were married to the sea and the wind and whatever customers wanted of their time to move their riches from one point on the river to another. While he shares only the most essential information, Carrie senses an even greater distance now between what A.P. needs and what he is willing to ask for.

Carrie fills the washtub with scalding water, cuts some soap from the bar, and puts the first load into the wash just as her sleeping family begins to stir. She reaches into the water and starts to scrub, hoping that by starting the laundry she can somehow forestall the inevitable bathing, dressing, cooking, and cleaning that will fill this day and all the days ahead.

Despite her responsibility for five souls and for the upkeep of the disheveled red house, Carrie maintains her upbeat mien, her optimism and her beauty. A thick braid of nearly black hair without any touch of gray surrounds her fair face, which remains lineless just shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her deep brown eyes focus unfailingly on whomever she is engaging and maintain that gaze until the words, spoken and not, are complete. Hard work and good fortune eliminate any hint from her figure that Carrie had given birth to Charlie only a year ago. In their rare moments alone, A.P. often asks if she had a momentary lapse in judgment when choosing him. She smiles and tells him that he is first on the list of many. Carrie has the grace to conceal that many of these choices are not far from their cramped home.

While Carrie accepts her current domestic situation with both good humor and extreme care, she aspires to more. She devours the newspapers and pamphlets that A.P. brings up from the docks, intensely interested in the 1848 presidential election in which she could not participate. Like most of his Connecticut voting peers, A.P. cast his ballot for Taft. Carrie had pressed him hard on the Whig candidate and eventual victor, telling him it should be impossible to trust a slaveowner from Louisiana. Her sympathies lay with the Free-Soilers and their somewhat more abolitionist policies.

Your family hosted the most famous freeman in this state. The wood he cut built your family’s ships. He’s buried with your family. I can’t understand your vote for Taft.

A.P. is unable to respond to his wife’s measured arguments, preferring a silent you don’t fully understand look.

All Carrie and A.P can agree on is they could never support a Democrat.

Carrie toys with the idea of deeper political involvement, but a lack of time and the sanctimony of the temperance ladies keeps her at home. Besides, she enjoys a drink from time to time. A.P. is cautious in his relationship with the bottle, and her Irish mother-in-law, whom she adores, would mock her without mercy. Carrie dreams of places and ideas and people that are beyond her reach but not her comprehension.

At some point late in the day, Carrie knows she has to choose between finishing the laundry and getting an evening meal prepared. For the betterment of the group, Carrie chooses sustenance and stokes the coals in the fireplace and under the stewpot on the stove. She puts the laundry—washed, bleached and rinsed but still wet—out back in the tubs, praying it won’t freeze solid overnight. If it does, she will be the only one to know.

As she dries her slippery bleached hands on her apron and tucks a few strands of errant hair behind her ears, Carrie hears A.P.’s familiar steps on the wooden porch.

5

You are doing what?!

Carrie’s response is largely as A.P. expected though it is somewhat louder than he had hoped. His plan was to tell his wife first and put off explaining the circumstances to his in-laws and his boys. He now worries that her exclamation, not to mention the crash of the cast iron pot on the floor, is certain to wake the family, necessitating that he re-tell what he had just haltingly started to explain to Carrie.

Jim Kent and I are heading to California to make our fortune in the gold fields. As soon as we do, we will be back to buy our own place here and make a life better than this. We’ve signed on to leave early in the new year.

A.P.’s response confirms what Carrie thinks she heard, though the repetition only multiplies the questions racing through her head. Carrie senses that if she can bend down and pick up the Dutch oven, she can avoid looking at her husband while she tries to regain her composure. Though she knows that A.P. does not mean it, she is hurt deeply that some sort of half-baked quest for El Dorado could improve the life that she is doing her level best to provide her family. At the same time, she knows that bending over will force more blood to her head and make the pounding and the ringing insufferable.

Carrie takes a deep breath, stands up, places the heavy pot and lid back on the sink board, and slowly turns to face her husband. Trying her best to be as cold, dispassionate, and quiet as the wet laundry now freezing outside, Carrie asks, Just how do you get to California?

A.P. is somewhat prepared to answer this line of inquiry, as he and Jim have spent countless hours on their rides home planning and spending their yet-to-be-found riches ever since news reached the East of the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill early that year.

Every captain and crew member that comes ashore from Boston has word of another mining company forming up to take men out to California and then up to the gold. They say it’s lying on the ground waiting to be scooped up.

Carrie thinks about asking why, if the precious metal was just sitting out for anyone to see, it had not been found before, but decides, since her husband was unusually passionate and effusive about something, she should just be quiet and let him run. She has never seen A.P. like this, and while the outline of the plan is disturbing, she is fascinated by his investment in it.

Jim and I are full shareholders in the Shawmut and California Trading and Mining Company and they are providing passage to San Francisco and then up to the gold fields. We should be in the gold before the end of ‘49 and home late in 1850, ready to start over here.

A.P. is not sure how this is going. Carrie’s eyes are fixed on him, but she always locks eyes with whomever she is speaking. She keeps drying her hands on her apron but doesn’t appear to be crying or reaching for anything dangerous. When she does speak, her tone is measured and quiet to not disturb the sleeping family. The silence following his explanation is frightening; A.P. fills the void with the sketchy notions that he and Jim have decided.

Some companies take you across the country, but that’s too much time bumping along in wagons in Indian country and in the desert. There’s talk about shipping to Panama and then crossing over, but few companies know how that works, especially the crossing over part. So we’re sailing south from Boston, along South America, around Cape Horn and up the Pacific to San Francisco.

Carrie steps back and rests against the sink board, casting her dark eyes fully into shadow. When she gestures, her strong but delicate hands cut through the lamplight. She hints that she will say something but remains silent. A.P. speaks to fill the void.

My family has been at sea for more than two hundred years. I figure if I am going to do this, I am going to go how they would.

Carrie moves forward a step toward A.P., the amber light revealing her dark but altogether dry eyes. That may be the case, but Bert, you are the one Chapman who hates sailing and most anything to do with the sea.

Looking down, A.P. quietly replies, But I’ve never had a chance like this—we’ve never had a chance like this.

It is hard for Carrie not to buy some of A.P.’s plan or dream or whatever he is trying to sell. The five of them crammed into three rooms and no time to think or breathe is not how she saw her life. It is not the life her sisters and cousins are leading about which they are so good at reminding her, though they never admit to such torment. At the same time, his scheme is all so crazy and far away and coming too quickly.

Carrie steps even closer, brushing a few errant strands of her black hair behind each ear. Do you know the first thing about mining gold? I think the only time you’ve actually touched it is when you bought this ring.

Carrie, right now, there are men with much less sense and skill than me and Jim making fortunes. The gold is out in the open, in the rivers, we just need to get to it. We are quick studies, and I’m good with numbers and Jim with his hands. We can learn what we need.

Bert, this is the most excited I’ve seen you and I’ve known you my whole life. I think you’re more excited than when our boys were born. Carrie’s dark eyes continue trying to find his, her hands crossed on her chest.

A.P. looks away from Carrie and scans the room, half hoping a child or in-law will emerge and save him from Carrie’s interrogation. I wouldn’t go that far.

Fair enough. But, as much as I like to see you reaching for something, you’ve not thought through what happens here. I’m sure you’ve noticed, but I’m taking care of this family as best I can. It’s barely working, with my folks needing more and more. I can’t have our boys growing up like feral cats. What am I supposed to do when you are gone?

Carrie realizes that the volume of her deposition is likely reaching every rafter and room.

Just above a whisper, A.P. responds, Of course I’ve thought this through, and the only reason to do this is for you and the boys.

Carrie folds her arms tightly and for the first time during their interchange breaks her gaze with A.P. and looks down at the floor, wondering where this part of his plan will go.

We plan to be back inside two years.

A.P. senses immediately that this is not the best direction to take. He has no idea how long it will take to get to California, where he and Jim will go, and how they’ll return, with or without fortunes.

I mean, since we learned about gold in California and how we could get there, I’ve been squirrelling away some money. I’ve done some bookkeeping for a few shippers and builders, and I borrowed some of the passage money from Uncle Revilo.

I’m surprised he even talked with you, Carrie responds, her tone warming slightly.

So was I. I guess he felt guilty when I told him about father and all.

Have you told your mother and father?

No, I need to get down to Saybrook. Hold on though, let me finish. I think I can leave with you just about what I’d make in a year. By that time, I will be sending lots of money home from what we find. I’m sure of it.

Bert, I’ve never doubted that you know your responsibility and always pay your way. But you’re asking me to do alone what we can barely do with two.

If anyone can make this work, it’s you. This is our chance, maybe our only one. I need to take it. We can’t stay like this.

Who am I going to talk to for two years? I don’t have a Jim with me. Carrie’s glance falls and her shoulders slump.

A.P. realizes he hasn’t planned for such sentiments. He can only look at Carrie and hope his lack of response will elicit some sort of pity. She has already made a life completing his sentences, especially at those awkward moments with family and their small circle of neighbors.

Carrie, I’m not sure we’re going to solve this tonight. I just hope you know how important this is to me.

That’s very clear, Carrie responds, wondering silently about where she fits.

A.P. heads off to the bedroom they share with their small but quickly growing boys. While he finally screwed up the nerve to broach the subject, he is disappointed in his performance. Carrie is as well. He talked about the money, the details of the trip, everything having to do with how he and Jim will become rich. He neglected everything about what he would leave behind: most of all, Carrie.

Maybe if he had been more forthcoming, told her the real reasons, she would have understood. He should have told Carrie what has been eating at him forever. He hasn’t lived up to the family’s reputation. The adults, often falling short themselves, never fail to remind him. Every greeting. Every landmark along the river. Every milestone in his life. It is always A.P., you are from a long, long line of adventurers, pioneers. Chapman men cut forests, build forts, plow fields for first crops. Your family made it safe to prosper along this river.

You tell these relations that you think the legacy is more complicated, especially the lands. Chapmans lied, cheated, treated many unfairly. They made colossal mistakes. The relations will have none of that. We are pioneers, founders. So you sit at a desk with your ledgers and your figures. You make money for the men who so greedily cleaned up the mess your Grandfather Timothy left. You sit safely in a warehouse and fill the holds of what were Timothy’s ships and his stores. You are tired of being safe, caring for the family branch that failed. You stay ashore. Never build. The break in the proud line of pioneers.

Carrie stares at the glowing oil lamp, watching the flame cast concentric circles of slowly undulating light on the table.

He is going.

All she can do is steel herself for the loneliness and let him know that despite her many, many reservations, he can indeed do this, whatever this hastily constructed plan is all about. He will make this fortune, or he won’t. She knows he must try. He is going. He is already in California.

A.P. should have told her the real reasons. It would have been so much easier.

She has watched him wince and look at his feet embarrassed when his uncles ask about his work. Never mind that his uncles live off inherited property and when that doesn’t provide, they sell off parcels settled centuries ago.

Carrie knows that every dock, every mast, every line straining against a cleat is a reminder that he is not in the family business. He is not a settler, not a pioneer. Never mind that his family has never wanted, never hungered.

If it were not gold in California, he would chase some other dream somewhere far away from home. Far away from her.

6

What A.P. Chapman and Jim Kent know about gold—and more importantly, about finding it—would fit in a very small volume. Not in a book really, nor in a pamphlet, but maybe on a business card, something neither would ever carry. Were they to have calling cards printed by the enterprising engravers and lithographers who were already hauling their presses and plates up into the mountain gold towns while A.P. and Jim were trying to convince their family and friends that they had some sort of a plan, the cards would certainly read: Gold Seeker—Naïve, Ignorant, but Game.

Among the many things the pair did not know was why gold—and silver for that matter—was being found in a place that until just months ago had, in fact, been part of Mexico. That geologic forces millions of years prior had forced upward a massive intrusion of molten granite and in so doing exposed ancient gold-filled riverbed gravels that had been eroding for millennia into the snow-melt streams flowing west to the Pacific Ocean. Nor did they understand that for every exposed alluvial bed, there were millions and millions of cubic yards of ancient gravels that lay buried awaiting exploration by enterprising miners.

The newspapers that breathlessly reported on gold nuggets glimmering for anyone to find in the region’s crystal-clear streams neglected to mention that still more of the precious mineral was bound to quartz rock that spiraled in hidden veins deep within the steep Sierra peaks and buttes. A.P. and Jim knew what the headlines said about gold in California. Never mind that these accounts were produced by the same scoundrels who would gladly outfit your gold-seeking adventure with the tools, clothing, provisions and whiskey so central to that big, but altogether certain, payday.

While A.P. and Jim know the value of hard labor—Jim on a practical, first-hand level and A.P. in more of an abstract sense—they have next to no understanding of the real work associated with finding gold. They have wielded picks and shovels professionally. They are altogether unaware that to make their nascent enterprise even marginally successful, they will through their own initiative and sweat literally move mountains and change the course of pristine creeks and rivers. They do not know that for every pebble-sized gold nugget that they might happen upon, the real lode—what could help them live the life they dream of in Connecticut—will have to be coaxed out at great effort, risk, and cost, from tons and tons of gravel and muck and promising quartz.

The most important thing they do not recognize, though they are beginning to experience it unwittingly, is the emotional if not spiritual addiction that gold engenders in otherwise rational men. A.P. and Jim have heard all means of investment opportunities, get-rich schemes, and outright fraud in their thirty years on the Connecticut River. For the most part, neither has acted on these promises. They smile and say, Sorry, not for me. Why now? What is it about a few breathless headlines from unknown places like Sutter’s Mill or Mokelumne Hill that causes A.P. and Jim to lash up with complete strangers into a mining company void of any mining know-how and book passage around Cape Horn to a lawless territory that no one they know or trust has ever seen? On a normal day, the pair think long and hard about sailing upriver to Hartford.

Were the pair to have pursued any sort of formal education, such as a first-year chemistry course at nearby Yale College, they would know that gold is not magnetic. Yet its pull is stronger than that of any element on the periodic table. Its pull is greater than all metaphysical forces, especially those in the hearts and minds of men. Finding gold does not generally exert the same forces over women. The quest for gold pulls A.P. and Jim and more than 300,000 other souls to California by all means of conveyance and from all compass points.

For many reasons, chief among them the gold seeker’s unwillingness to admit to any sort of affliction, the pair has no understanding of the pathology of gold and its manifold symptoms. They do not understand, for instance, that the search for gold can turn otherwise magnanimous and loquacious men into silent, mean-spirited curs who will never admit to an acquaintance that they have actually found gold or even that they are mining for it. While the pans and picks and sluices hauled up into country that will challenge even the most surefooted mules tend to be a dead giveaway, admitting one’s intention or luck to anyone beyond your closest intimate is not in the miner’s code.

The impact of gold on men’s patience and persistence is equally profound and is not at all understood by A.P and Jim from the comfort of coastal Connecticut. If that first pan or test hole does not yield whatever the miner feel it should, it is time to consider abandoning that claim. To be certain, riches are always just around that next corner, and certainly the one after that. By definition, good miners must be peripatetic, even if that means moving from claim to claim, from river to river, from county to county, across state lines and even to other countries. Gold is where you find it and there is absolutely no sense spending any time looking harder in one place when you can always look in another.

What they will not learn until they reach California and are deep into the Sierra Nevada mountains is that as they are setting sail from Boston, discouraged, sickly, and destitute miners are already departing San Francisco with little more than shattered dreams.

7

There is some real warmth to the sun on New Year’s Day, 1849. A bit of snow remains in the shadows below the woods, but for the most part the muddy brown fields are clear, exposing a riot of vibrant green hay shoots. A new storm is likely in soon, so Carrie decides she had best take advantage of this break and get the boys out of the house for some fresh air. They have been inside for too long and the cramped quarters are dampening everyone’s good humor.

A.P. has headed off to work early again. Since he broke the news to Carrie and told old man Hawthorne at the warehouse, he has been working seven days, trying to get the books ready for the new man. A.P. is certain Hawthorne will never hire a new man. Thanks to A.P., the warehouse runs itself and Hawthorne will just let it coast along until A.P. grows weary of coming up short in California. Hawthorne will pay him through the end of the month, so A.P. figures he will try to leave the place as shipshape as he can. Though he won’t tell anyone, A.P. thinks it prudent to hedge his bet somewhat and not burn any bridges with the old man, just in case.

Carrie’s parents awake without complaint. Before checking on the boys, Carrie calls down the hall as she does every morning. To her surprise, both mother and father are up, dressed, and heading to the kitchen.

Can I put on some breakfast for you? Carrie says.

"No, thanks, dear.