Page 13 of A Good Prospect

Chapter Six

“Sal, Sal, Sal.”

Doña Carmen wrung her hands dramatically, entwined on her black silk lap. Sal’s mother had always been fond of theater. “Why will you not go see Don José for me? All this talk of losing our land has been weighing so heavily on me. Don José will know how to set things right. The last time I spoke to him, he was losing his land near the Bay, too.”

Salvador closed his eyes patiently. “Madre. Don’t you remember? José Berryessa was killed at the Mission San Rafael in forty-six. His brother Nicolas is the one who remains, and he has lost most of his land paying legal fees to defend his title.”

His mother frowned, mystified. Streaks of grey had appeared in her hair of late. Sal wished there were more women at the adobe, for he’d heard of some herb that women washed their hair with to keep it black and glossy, but he had no idea what it was. Women would know. “No, it is Don José de los Reyes Berryessa I am talking about. Stop contradicting me!” That certain twinkle came into her eyes, and Salvador didn’t like that one bit. It meant she was reminiscing. Thinking about times he could barely remember. “He always wears those white stockings, and thin morocco slippers. He has such tiny feet…”

Knut Frostad set his mug of aguardiente onto a low table. “Now, now, Mrs. Doña.” Knut imagined that the appellation “Doña” was not a title but part of her name. “I shall personally send a messenger to New Almaden to request that Don José de los Reyes Berryessa come up here, pay us a visit. How does that sound? Would you like that? You can show him your cows.”

Sal rolled his eyes. Why would Knut propagate a fantasy such as that? For Doña Carmen now became even more excited, standing in her lacey bustle, one hand modestly going to her hair to tidy it, as though the ghost of Don José was already walking through the door. “Oh, yes, Knut, you must send a messenger right away! A fast rider can get to New Almaden by tomorrow evening. Why don’t you send this fellow?” She pivoted in her wing chair to face Ophir. “Are you a good rider? You must be, since you’ve been working in the stables.”

Raising his eyebrows, Ophir turned his hands palms up to the ceiling, as if to say “What do I do now, Sal?” Sal exhibited a calming hand to Ophir and said to his mother, “Madre. This is Ophir, my partner, not a stable hand. He’s helping me out with Father’s mining equipment, and we just completed a survey—”

Knut struggled to his feet, swiping at his aguardiente cup on his way. “Mrs. Doña doesn’t need to be bothered with such boring details, Salvador! Come, let us talk manly talk in the library, and leave the womenfolk to their embroidery.”

Salvador rose, utterly confused by now. Sure, it was everyday knowledge that Doña Carmen had been a bit loca since her husband had been shot at the Mission San Rafael. Berryessa, upon hearing that General Frémont had jailed his son for alleged revolt against him in the Bear Flag incident, decided to sail across the Bay to visit his son in Sonoma. Salvador’s father, Captain Dearborn, went with them in order to report back to the commandant at San José, where they lived at the time. Upon disembarking near the mission, both men, as well as Berryessa’s nephews, were promptly ambushed and shot. The murderer was famed scout Kit Carson, acting upon Frémont’s orders, as he had no room for prisoners at the mission.

Doña Carmen had been a bit loca, understandably. Sometimes she imagined that John Dearborn was still alive, and sometimes her suitor was José Reyes de Berryessa.

Now they left her alone with the housekeeper Ascención, the only female company his mother had at the rancho. The three men crowded into Captain Dearborn’s study, where Knut reached onto a shelf between volumes of Two Years Before the Mast and The Deerslayer. Predictably, Knut withdrew another bottle, this time of brandy, motioning to Ophir to shut the door.

“Knut!” Salvador scolded, with folded arms. “Why do you lead her to believe Berryessa is still alive? That is the worst sort of pretense!”

Knut squared his shoulders for a really good harangue. “Let me tell you, son. With a delicate woman of Mrs. Doña’s fragility, and taking into accounts the debilitating effects of her disease—yes, it is a disease! I am sorry to have to break that news to you—it is for the best just to humor her, to play along. If you try to reveal the facts of any affair, to force reality to intrude upon her insubstantial and unsound mentality, why, you could crack the very shell that is protecting her gauzy mind from the shattering effects of the disease itself!” He took several swallows of brandy, and gazed out the window thoughtfully. “Let her continue to think Ophir here is a stable hand. What harm can it possibly do?”

“What harm?” Ophir asked mildly. “Well, it sure makes a difference to Roberto, the real stable hand. Doña Carmen had me shoeing a horse the other day, and he near about tore my head off.”

Salvador chuckled, but Knut took the subject with the utmost sobriety. “This is what I mean! You are a competent enough blacksmith, are you not, Ophir? Well, then, why not play along with her?” He sipped some more, then said, “Back in the olden days, when the war first ended, I used to argue with her, to attempt to remind her that her venerated and cherished ‘Don Juan’ had met an untimely demise. It was pointless, Salvador. Pointless. It would only upset her, and what is the point in upsetting someone when you can have them gaily laughing?”

Salvador strode to his father’s old desk. “Yes, speaking of gaily laughing.” He pointed to a tray that contained a clay pipe and some crumbly balls of a green herb. “Since when have you taken to smoking hemp? Like you need to become any more ridiculous and absurd?”

Knut grabbed a sombrero that hung from the chair’s back and even made as if to cover the tray with it. “Oh, ah, this belongs to one of the assayers, yes indeed! This is the ‘journey in my head’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets! Quite healthy and good for the blood that circulates through one’s brain, but certainly not agreeable to a gadabout such as myself. Speaking of those fine gentlemen, we should bring them in here for a meeting, pronto. Ophir, you have inspected Captain Dearborn’s mining equipment, have you not?”

“Yes,” replied Ophir. “It all looks to be in good working condition after a little oiling. What’s odd is, apparently they are parts for a sixteen-stamp ore-crushing mill, four banks of four stamps apiece. How could the Captain have foreseen that quartz vein mining would be the future, when he didn’t know of the existence of any gold on his land? But yes, the engineers will need to design a check dam with a penstock—after we decide where, with the help of the Sonorans.”

Their next journey was to head back to the Bear Valley area with the surveyors and Sonoran miners. Salvador agreed, “Yes, I’ll leave the building of the mill to them. I’m not much for technical items. But we should form a company, should we not, Knut?”

“Jah, jah, indeed, señor! I can get investors, if you allow me to travel to San José and see some of my old compañeros.”

Salvador ushered them out the door so they could go to the carriage house where the engineers were lodging. As they walked down the flagstone path, Salvador addressed Knut in a low voice. “You do know, Knut, that Nicolas Berryessa is also said to be smoking that hemp, and slowly going insane.”

“Yes. I have heard that too. It is the end of the dream in the new land of California.”

“Nuñez over at Rancho Orestimba told me many tragic stories a few months ago when I wintered there with the cattle. Apparently the Berryessas had a dubious lawyer who told them to emulate settlers, and squat on their own land. The lawyer allotted each of them one acre apiece. Then this lawyer went and claimed the ‘vacated’ property, including Don Nicolas’s hacienda. Other squatters are deliberately grazing cattle on his newly-seeded fields, driving him from his sickbed to save the crops. Don Nicolas in a rage burned many of his papers.”

“Well, yes,” Knut conceded. “The Berryessas were once great friends of your father’s. All amenities and courtesies of life were preserved in their home, and our personal life and liberty were as sacred at their hearth as they were at our own fireside.”

“Yes, they woke the waltzing string of the fiddle on our behalf,” said Salvador, becoming as flowery as Knut in his speech. “But this insanity…seems to run in their family.”

“Indeed!” Knut agreed. “That it tends to do! I have seen it on many occasions!”

Salvador was really thinking about his mother, and her worsening insanity. If insanity ran in families, what good did that speak for him? Of course there had been many occasions when he’d been apparently wandering around, his limbs going through the motions of riding, or lassoing, or horse racing, and the next day he recalled only bits and pieces of those events. But that was probably just the aguardiente. Such losses of memory had only occurred a couple of times in the past month, when he had nearly ceased poisoning the “blood that circulated through his brain” with aguardiente.

But what had this insanity to recommend him as a future husband for a good upstanding Californio girl? If he was just going to go loco and wind up racing naked through a field, what future security had he to offer a woman?

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