Page 23 of A Good Prospect

“Right, right. To buy your family out of slavery? How many people? Mother, father?”

Ophir was perplexed. His parents were long gone. “No. My two children.”

Sal froze in his tracks, and Ophir could swear that his pupils, under the shade of his sombrero brim, shrank into tiny pinpoints. His muscles, too, froze as he gazed vacantly at Ophir’s apartments, as though he were sleepwalking. Ophir wondered if Sal was having some sort of immobile seizure. He’d seen that happen before in a few people, and it was frightening. He grabbed Sal’s bicep and gave him a brisk shake, once.

“Sal!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”

Abruptly waking, an almost serene smile spread over Sal’s handsome face as he turned to face Ophir. “Sí. Of course I’m all right. Just a bit shocked.” He commenced walking again, casually asking, “Only two children? No wife?”

“No wife,” Ophir said brusquely. “My master is ransoming—I suppose you could call it that—my two children until I pay him enough to manumit them. He first gave me my freedom so I could win enough bare-knuckle bouts to free my wife and children. But when my wife died”—Ophir swallowed hard in a dry throat, as he had so many thousands of times the past few years when forced to discuss this—“he doubled the price of the children’s freedom. Since then, no matter what I send him, he raises the price. The ransom, I call it.”

Sal waited politely for Ophir to unlatch the door to his apartments. Now, around noontime, the sun did not directly blare into the living space, or “parlor” as Salvador called this sort of little white-washed room with a cow hide thrown on the floor—the same old California bank note, since Ophir had not won a fresh rug as a result of the boxing match. As Doña Carmen currently approved of Ophir, at least his horseshoeing talents, she had sent over two rocking chairs with woven cane seats and an array of other puzzling decorations he had since discovered were retablos. She must assume everyone else in California was of the Catholic faith, but Ophir could not in good conscience display these altarpieces, some of them absolutely horrifying renditions of Christ on the cross in various stages of decay and gore. Catholics certainly seemed to enjoy their gore.

They now sat down at the table in the rocking chairs, where Ophir kept a bottle of aguardiente that Tamasin seemed to be asking for lately. After slinging their sombreros over the chair backs, Ophir poured a cup for Sal, but oddly, Sal didn’t touch it, instead asking softly,

“That’s despicable, Ophir. Californios do not hold with keeping slaves. You know I would have forged your freedom papers even if you had turned out to be a fugitive. What can I do to assist you in getting your children back?”

Ophir tried to chuckle. “But you have bárbaros working all over your estate, doing menial things and living in the basest manner.”

Sal explained patiently, “They are emancipados, neophytes, converted bárbaros with nowhere to go when the missions were secularized. Some of them worked for us in San José. They come of their own free will, and can leave any time.”

“And you won’t hunt them down?”

Sal’s laugh was genuine. With relaxed arms on each rocker arm, leaning back like that he was almost beatific—like some of the more up to snuff saints in the happier retablos. “Like a runaway beef? Why would I? I have more vital things to do with my day. Branding cows, doctoring the ill ones, signing new agreements with other landowners and merchants who wish to buy beeves—”

“—seeing to the grain crops, the pumpkins, and the grapes—”

Salvador pointed an adamant finger in agreement. “Sí, sí! Why, the hundreds of things I do around here! Brawling, bullfighting—”

“—horse racing, wooing women, singing—”

Sal could no longer restrain his outright laugh. “Sí, just the singing alone could take entire days! The drinking, the eating, the masturbation—”

Ophir joined in the laughter. “—falling down drunk, standing up again after falling down drunk…” His hearty chuckles quickly died away, though, when he realized Sal had said the word “masturbation.” Absolutely no one wanted to address that word or even admit he had heard it, so both men’s gaze wandered to different points in the room, clearing their throats, pretending they were still thinking about cows.

Sal finally put his forearms on the table and touched the rim of the aguardiente mug with his fingertips. “So, what sort of assistance did you—”

“Masturbation?”

That tiny, lilting word startled both men so harshly that they literally jumped into half-standing positions.

Apparently there was someone else, a black silhouette in the doorway, who wanted to address that word.

* * * *

“Masturbation?”

Tamasin had never uttered that word aloud before, but she knew what it was. Nuns had referred to it as one of the endless “unnatural vices,” vaguely in the same category as sodomy—whatever that was. Of course, this had led to curiosity on the part of every girl in the asylum, and not a night passed without the shivering of many of the wooden pallets where they slept while girls explored the resulting horrors of this vice. Tamasin, who had never quite been able to shake off her independent Irish ancestry, privately deemed it an acceptable practice, especially since so many of the things the nuns had hinted at had also been found to be patently wrong—such as the concept that sexual congress within the confines of marriage was some manner of ecstatic bliss. That “proper ejaculation of seed” had been a painful, laborious, abominable hell. So maybe the nuns had everything exactly backward.

And her recent conversion to the pleasures of aguardiente somehow seemed to have loosened her tongue as well as her morals. She would never have dreamed of uttering that word aloud prior to a month ago, and would not have uttered it even now, had the men who had saved her life not said it aloud first. The men had even been laughing, so they must feel the same way about it as her. It was such a forceful word, it seemed to eradicate all their talk about horse racing and pumpkins.

But now her saviors looked perplexed, even stunned. The three of them stared at one other for several long moments, the men’s eyes riveted on her. They were fully clothed, so she had not caught them masturbating, and Ophir did not have any of the dreadful retablos on his walls that populated the main hacienda and seemed to be the source of Doña Carmen’s ever-changing nonsensical moods. In fact, the silence was so long and bewildering Tamasin had a good chance to drink in their beautiful, strapping forms, how their linen shirts bulged at the biceps, how silken their chests looked under the knotted scarves about their necks. She could not decide which man was more handsome, although Ophir was friendlier and she had had many more conversations with him. Don Salvador was too upright, too much of her superior, although she knew the men considered themselves equals. Ophir had been the one to shelter her with his body when Don Salvador shot Niall Norris dead.

At last it was Ophir who laughed nervously and came to a full standing position, proffering one open hand to her. “Tamasin, my little duckling.” Tamasin didn’t know why he called her that, but she liked it. “We were just discussing how Knut is bringing you some paper and paints when he returns from San José tomorrow.”

Don Salvador rose fully also and made a funny little bow. These Californios stood on such ceremony. She was only a laundress, after all! “Yes, and how Ophir here also is in need of some paper to write a letter. I presume you have good reading and spelling skills, being raised in a convent?”

“I read and write fairly well, I suppose.” So she had made a mistake, after all, uttering such a venereal word! They were pretending they had never heard it, standing here formally discussing her literacy. Perhaps only men were allowed to utter such a word. Men were allowed to do many things that women were not even supposed to think about. “Did you need my assistance in writing something in English?”