Night fell, and with it came fury. I cursed him. I stood on the edge of the hole and shouted at him. Men came down to have a look at the commotion, and I ran them off. I shrieked into the pit. I said things I had never said to anyone. Things I have not said since.
I must have slept that night, because I woke before light, shivering with frost, atop the mound he’d made. The scraping went on. The sides of the chasm sparkled with frost, too, and this brought me a strategy. I filled the bucket at the river, returned to the hole, and began trickling water down into it. “Errol,” I called. “I think the river’s coming in. Hear that? That’s the river, old boy.” He said nothing but his scraping paused, I thought.
“Don’t worry, Errol. I’ll get you out.” I tied one end of a rope to a tree. I refilled the bucket and poured it in. Then I flung the other end of the rope into the hole and called, “Grab hold, Errol! I’ll pull you up!”
The digging persisted, but now there was a watery sound beneath the sound of the shovel.
That night I sat jiggling the rope, touching the notch my brother had left in my collarbone, saying I was sorry and could he please please please please grab hold.
When morning came I gathered the heaviest rocks I could carry and assembled them in a pile near the lip. I was desperate. I intended to brain my brother, climb down the rope, tie it around him, climb up the rope, and then pull him up. Giddy images of his wilted body dangling from the rope passed through my mind at the moment I noticed a strange sound. It was silence. The absence of shovel on bedrock.
I approached the hole, bracing myself for the sight of my brother’s dead body at the bottom. Instead, he sat quite alive with his back against the earth wall, as if resting after a morning’s work and not three feverish days spent burying himself alive. It was noon and the sun was beaming directly into the hole. I could see his scalp burned pink where his hair had gathered in clumps, and his blistered, bloody hands. He had removed his boots and one was half submerged in the water I’d poured upon him. The rope was well above where he sat now, curled like an animal in a water-logged den.
Then, he began to sing. It was the first I’d heard his voice since he declined the now-crusted beans still awaiting him on the stump. The song was a popular one, and he sang it with an unsettling bounce:
Hangtown gals are plump and rosy,
Hair in ringlets, fists of posy,
Painted cheeks and jossy bonnets—
Touch ’em and they’ll sting like hornets!
“That’s a fine tune,” I said when he was done. I don’t know why I said it, except that it was.
Errol looked up at me, finally, squinting against the light. His face had gone gaunt and grimed and socket hollow. He did not look like himself. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abigail.”
That was our mother’s name.
“I’m Joshua,” I said. “Joshua. Your brother. Say Joshua.”
“Sing me ‘The Old Oaken Bucket.’ You know that one, Abby?”
“Joshua!” I cried.
Errol reached his hand across the shaft and scraped some soil from the wall opposite him. He said, “There’s a good pile coming, Abby girl.”
I threw myself at the pile of rock and attempted to lift one. I intended to throw my boulders down upon him, smiting him as would the God of that hole. I did not care, at that moment, whether I stoned him to death or buried him alive. But the Lord had taken my strength. I only lay in the dirt and wept.
“Do you know ‘The Old Oaken Bucket’?” whispered Errol.
“No,” I said through my tears. “How does it go?” And then I passed into darkness.
XVI. A TROUT
A promise unkept will take a man’s mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold. I know that now. But this was years ago, when I was young and felt the whole world of Errol’s collapse was mine to bear. It is strange telling you this, because the boy I was feels so far away from the man I am now. I know I ought to consider that distance a blessing, given the darkness and the difficulty of the time I have described here. But it brings me no comfort to think how far I have traveled nor how much wiser I’ve become. Because though I was afraid and angry and lonesome much of the time, I was also closer to my own raw heart there in the territory than I have ever been since.
I woke at the China camp. It was dusk. The boy sat near me with a tin cup. Behind him was his uncle, sitting on a stump near the fire, and behind him was the dusky blue Sacramento valley with fires and lanterns burning here and there.
“Where’s Errol?” I said. “Where is my brother?”
The boy handed me the tin cup. “Where you think?” He frowned, as if disappointed in himself. “He is in the earth, still.”
“Is he digging?”
The boy shook his head.
“Singing?”
“No.”
I got up and walked upriver to the hole and looked inside. Errol sat in the muddy water with his legs folded to his chest, alive and shivering. He had removed his shirt and tied it about his head. I jiggled the rope and called to him, but he did not answer. He was apparently through digging, and his hole had not gained any more depth. Yet he felt further from me than when last I saw him.
I returned to the Chinamen’s camp and sat looking from the boy to his uncle. The old man was cleaning the blade of his jade-handled knife on his robe and chewing a stalk of grass. I wanted him to say something. I felt if he spoke he would have a way to end this thing. But he said nothing. The yellow stalk of sweetgrass bounced in his mouth.
The Chinaman sheathed his knife and stowed it in the folds of his robe. Then he reached into a bucket beside him and brought up an enormous rainbow trout. It was dead, but freshly dead, shimmering still and with that gruesome pout that dead fish have. Fish were rare on our part of the river, so many were devoured by men upstream. It was a lovely creature, and I knew the tongs must have traveled a long way to catch it.
“For Mister Errol,” said the boy.
Then, at the sound of the boy’s voice and the gutted shimmer of the trout in the blue dusk, the providence of the thing burst upon my mind. I saw Errol climbing up out of his hole and sitting beside the Chinamen’s fire, saw us four scooping soft, steaming handfuls of fish to our mouths. It was no augury, only the visions of my own hopeful heart.
The skin of the fish sizzled wonderfully, emitting a stirring aroma as we cooked it. Surely the meal would return Errol’s mind and deliver him the strength and will to reach up and take hold of the rope. I watched it fry, feeling that the rest of my life was lodged in that trout.
With the cooked fish I approached the hole. It was dark now and the moon had risen. The night was clear and the gibbous moon so bright I expected to see its reflection dancing in the water pooled at the bottom of the pit. But there was only darkness. I called to Errol.
“I fixed you dinner,” I said, holding the tasty rainbow over the hole. I could not see him but I heard the earth crumble a little as he shifted, heard some stones hitting the water. “Errol, will you come up and have some trout?”
He said nothing. No matter, I thought. I was convinced that all he needed was to see the thing, to lay his hand on its soft fish belly. He would eat it, head and all, and return to me. “Look out below,” I said, and dropped the trout into the darkness.
I listened at the hole for some time and heard nothing. I returned to the Chinamen’s camp to wait. The boy tossed pebbles into the river and we three sat listening to the sound of them dropping into the water. “He’ll die down there,” I said, for I had just realized it.