Page 46 of Working the Lode

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Bowmaker

Striking their spurs into their horses, rifles flung across the horns of their saddles, they headed across a few passes toward Tragedy Springs. As that was a new moniker for that deadly place, they had to rely on the dubious directions of Three-Fingered Jack and Garcia. They had taken Garcia along, as he was least likely to make a break down a valley and warn anyone about their nefarious plan. They had left the two vaquero guards bound in a ravine, and forced Jack to tell Feliz they were going on a pleasant outing. Most of Valenzuela’s band were too pickled to question Jack’s story, especially when they heard their jefe Valenzuela repeating the story.

About noontime they picked up the arduous pioneer road where men had labored rolling huge boulders, only building several feet a day according to Jack. Detritus such as pickle bottles, empty powder horns, and even pots and pans were dashed here and there on the road. Zelnora found a pair of shepherd’s plaid trousers she declared had belonged to Henderson Cox, one of the three murdered men.

Bowmaker proceeded with unease, crying “yep!” to his animal, thinking only of Mercy, and the Sing Sing conversation Valenzuela had postponed until later. He wasn’t sure which part of the story would cause Zel to loathe him more, but saving her closest friend from Brannagh’s clutches would dispose her more kindly toward him, so they had best accomplish that first.

The three Americans rode abreast up the good road. Erskine sniffed casually, as though he smelled a skunk. “Rains’ll start soon, this time of year.”

“Yes,” agreed Zelnora. “It’s the loveliest time of year in San Francisco, but the rains start around the end of October.”

Bowmaker shifted nervously. He felt Zelnora looking at him sideways, wondering “why Sing Sing?” He believed he already knew her most mortifying secret, that her husband had abandoned her for having the gall to be barren. This had not dissuaded him in his unwavering love that had consistently grown, and he knew he wanted to start the new wine venture with her. With Valenzuela, Quartus, Erskine and, god willing, Mercy, they hardly needed a new child to make a family complete.

But this Sing Sing business…how would he explain it? Dr Damian Smith had graduated from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr Damian Smith had entered Sing Sing, but it was Cormack Bowmaker of mountain fame who had broke from that place with his compañero, the Wall Street trader in bogus stocks—though now reformed, to be sure—who had once been known as Levi…Levi Block, was it? Levi Fogel? Bowmaker frowned, as he could no longer recall Erskine’s former name.

He was merely Aaron Erskine now, and he was saying something, a topic almost as asinine as the weather. “Zelnora…About Sing Sing.”

Ho, boy! Heaps of beaver to Erskine for just diving into it like that!

“Erskine, I don’t think Zelnora wants to—“

“No, that’s fine, Cormack,” Zelnora said evenly. “It sounds very intriguing, and now I’ve deduced that Sing Sing is not a Far Eastern city.”

Erskine cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I’ll go ahead with the others. I just thought you could use my help, explaining to Zelnora the truth.”

“Yes,” Bowmaker said from the corner of his mouth. “Because selling stocks in companies that don’t exist makes you such a reliable source of information.” He was instantly sorry he’d uttered that, because Erskine was right. If she was to be his wife, Zelnora had every right to know, and since Brannagh had already spread the Sing Sing story around California, it was best she hear it from them. “Wait, Erskine. Don’t go ahead. It’s no tremendous doings, after all.” Around this bend he could see they were nearing the end of the pioneer trail. He would have to talk fast. “I was tossed into Sing Sing in ‘35 for assisting a morbidly ill patient to die.”

Erskine was quick to add, “With dignity, and to alleviate the massive amounts of pain he was in.”

Bowmaker continued, “He was suffering, Zel, and begged me to assist him. He couldn’t walk, or see or…do any of the most basic things for himself. He would have only lasted another month at the outside, so I merely hastened it.”

At last Zelnora said, “Well. It’s still murder, right? What were you charged with?”

Bowmaker shrugged. “Murder.”

Erskine rapidly inserted, “The patient wrote a letter explaining to his relatives that Cormack just supplied the drugs, and was sparing him weeks of agony. But they were so irate, so…”

“Grief-stricken,” said Bowmaker.

“Yes, grief-stricken, they charged him anyway. You know, Zelnora, when you see an injured bird whose wing is broken? And you know it will never fly again, and will just die, and become carrion, and the agony will be drawn out? Cormack just put a merciful end to that suffering. What I did was far worse, bilking innocent investors. Cormack was just being a good compassionate doctor. So we spent three years buried from the world, marching in lockstep…”

“At Sing Sing, the silent system was the rule,” said Bowmaker, glad of a chance to stop talking about the deceased patient. “Miniscule cells, three foot by seven. Slave labor. Erskine here cobbled shoes all day.”

“Cormack made wooden barrels and furniture.”

“Then how did you get to know one another, if you couldn’t speak?” Zelnora did not sound appalled by his crime, but Bowmaker couldn’t be sure. With her pious background, it could very well be she would see this differently, as did the jury at his trial.

Bowmaker even smiled a little, remembering. “They allowed us Bibles, and the warden decided it was no crime if I was allowed some Buddhist scriptures to read, since we were encouraged to meditate. So we’d write upon the margins—“

“With shoe polish,” said Erskine.

“—and tar, or glue, and planned our escape.”

“It was quite simple, really,” Erskine said as small droplets of rain began to fall on their hands that held the reins. Valenzuela and the two bandits waited at the top of the bluff where the pioneers had ceased building the trail. “We communicated mostly by facial expressions. I had no idea this old hoss had such an odd Scottish way of pronouncing things, since I’d rarely, if ever, heard him speak.”

Allowing Erskine to ride on ahead a bit, Bowmaker swiveled his torso to analyze Zelnora’s attitude. Her head was held high on a proud neck, and she seemed strangely serene for such anxious circumstances.