Work Text:
May 24th, 1851.
We have reached Mayfield without incident. Of course, the Commodore’s bloodhounds are likely on our tails - that is my own folly for waving the scented handkerchief in front of their noses - but I shall narrate as if, as ever, I am at my leisure and not pursued by ill intent nor bounty hunters.
Thus: we have reached Mayfield without incident, Warm and I.
-
May 27th, 1851.
We certainly had a lively discussion earlier this evening. I hesitate to call it an argument: a philosophical debate, perhaps. I have left a bitter taste in my own mouth with it.
The nature of man, which seemed to me so transparent until these past weeks - he requires, I had told myself, air, sleep, sustenance, &c &c, but also the ability to roam without a leash upon body nor upon mind - was once more thrown into some existential doubt. Neither Warm nor I seem entirely sturdy with the concept any longer, but we shall, I’m sure, find out way back to solid ground; though whether the outlook will have changed in some imperceptible way remains to be seen.
I did, and will always, delight in listening to him unravel the logistics of his small utopia. His eyes, though dark, alight in a way that reminds me of pokered embers, surging vividly when he soliloquises. I am enamoured with the shape of his mouth when he smiles that particular way. He becomes excitable, skipping over his words, but I can always decipher his meaning. He is very easy for me to fathom. I find myself, in fact, at a holistic kind of ease in Warm’s company.
All-encompassing.
To wit: he was detailing to me a list of each role any man or woman could uphold within the commune, to ensure its self-sufficiency. The four tenets, he told me excitedly - husbandry, education, carpentry and haberdashery - could further break down to suit each cohabitant’s individual strength or background. As such, one could live within the pillar of husbandry but focus solely on, say, milling grain or dairy farming. As was one’s calling.
We were not wont to needle or poke fun at one another. We found ourselves earnest - not humourless, for I laughed a great deal in Warm’s presence, but merely on an even footing that made it so easy to speak with open honesty. So I did not jest that men of the cloth, of course, would reside under the tenet of education, for I knew as well as he that religion had no worth in his humanist utopia. Still, I could not help but ask him, a genuine enquiry, why he put such stock in assigning roles when he thought of himself a man with no place in the world.
I felt indelicate as soon as I had said it, though it was his own description.
“A community is not a singular man,” he explained.
“Nonetheless, if you assign a singular man a particular value - a label - is he not bound by it?”
Warm considered this, frowning. He took all of my advice and whimsy in the spirit it was given.
Again, I was flat-footed. “Does a man choose his own role, or is it given to him?”
“Based on skill, of course—”
“Naturally, yes, but let us assume he is a blank slate, with no particular experience one way or the other. Is he free to forge his own path, even if it results in an imbalance of economy? Can he choose to be a tutor if there is a dearth of weavers or bakers? Or must he accept the fate decided for him by a higher power with an omniscient view of the balance of things? And if so, how can the commune claim a superior moral standing than the rest of society, with its demands we do this, say that, act in such-and-such a way?”
I had chased away his pleasant smile with my rambling and was not at all proud of it. Warm sank into himself somewhat.
“I suppose—” he started. “I suppose—that I should not want anyone to feel obliged. I bore the weight of a great deal of obligation as younger man, and so—well, yet—I’d hope that the greater good would serve as impetus enough…” Here he trailed off, perhaps burned by the remembrance of men less upstanding than he.
We were silent for a time, and not our usual quiet content.
“I have upset you,” I admitted. There is plenty of bullheadedness left in me and for it I freely blame my father.
“No,” he tried, “no, John, it’s important to think through these quandaries. I don’t always have a good answer right away.”
“Nor should you.”
Our next silence was a little less obvious. And then I said the queerest thing. Perhaps it was simple reassurance, or perhaps an attempt to reinstate the connection I had arrogantly shaken. But instead of trusting our natural equilibrium, I blurted out: “I too consider myself undefined. If that is what you would call having no place in the world.”
“You have striven hard to make a place for yourself, John.”
I would have, until that moment, considered him right, but at once it seemed I had spent a lifetime blinding myself with smoke from my own fire.
“I do not feel quite so formless in your company,” was my reply.
I shall dream of less cack-handed retorts. I do not quite know what he made of it. His smile, a small and tight one, was an expression I have seen on his face rarely, and not yet often enough to decipher its true meaning.
We have since retired. It lingers on my mind.
I have had a good many conversations in my life, some with notable men, persons of great wealth and status; and yet I find only the words I exchange with Warm worth writing down; worth etching both on paper and in my memory, so I might later on turn them this way and that like a handsome pebble plucked from the shoreline. I like to look sometimes at the damp underbelly of our words.
I embarrassed myself tonight in a way I cannot quite figure out.
Warm is unutterably forgiving.
—The sun is set and I should have to fetch another candle if I continue so indulgently. To bed.
-
May 29th, 1851.
We have loped from inn to inn looking for shelter, a modern day Mary and Joseph - though we carry no king between us, merely the holy knowledge I like to joke that Warm possesses - and only a grim-faced blacksmith and his wife have offered us a room. It is little better than a stable, their son having recently vacated it to follow his calling in the military, as I understand it from the blacksmith’s mumbling.
The night passed uneventfully: I upon the floor with our combined coats as a blanket, and Warm atop the creaky bed, which woke us both several times. At each, when he sensed I was also awake, he whispered to ask if I would not like to take the bed instead.
Warm - no, I have long been calling him Hermann aloud, and it seems too prim not to do the same in writing - Hermann is the most earnest soul I have ever met. Perhaps his generosity has caused trouble for him in the past, but he shall earn only gratitude from me.
Having worked some years now for the Commodore, I feel I have lost the dignity of calling myself a gentleman. I am a self-made man: my money is my own, the clothes on my back, my horse, the paper on which I write all bought or bartered fairly. But it is undeniably blood money. I am not blinkered to the realities of my employment, even if I have never struck a killing blow or pulled a decisive trigger. I suppose I was always able to convince myself that the world at large is cruel, and I no more so than any other man.
Hermann makes me want to do better. To strive to live kindly, not because it is decreed by psalms or lawmen, but simply because it is a nobler existence.
I have admitted as much to him.
“I think you are a good man,” he told me. I’m sure I snorted or scoffed. “Truly, John. A man able to learn, to change, to regret the actions of his former self - that is surely a good man.”
“Your standards are low.”
“No,” he laughed. “I simply like you very much.”
Nobody has ever said such a thing to me. Most I encounter find me polite, or shrewd in some way, or perhaps somewhat aloof. I am glad to be liked, and most of all I am glad to be liked by Hermann.
—I had thought it not, at first, an event to transcribe at all, but now suddenly I wish to. A matter of transparency, for my future self.
The blacksmith’s wife preferred us not to use their minuscule commode, providing us soap and jugs with which to splash ourselves with trough-water in the stables out back. I was offended, of course, but I like to keep myself clean.
So we divested our shirts, and made do with the dawn-cold water.
I had, up until then, thought of Hermann only as lean, dark, and not tall; I wished for a better description. I did not have to look at his body surreptitiously. He seemed not to mind at all, and pointed out his assorted scars and bruises, told me the stories behind them. His father, he said, had once flung a horseshoe at at him in a fit of anger, which had cracked his bottom-most left rib. Indeed, I could put my finger on it and still feel the hairline fracture under his stretched skin. He was not at all bothered in telling this tale, and it was a notion I understood. Coming to terms with the brutality of one’s father was a rite of passage for young men, it seemed.
“I do have a gunshot wound,” I told him, wanting to match his blithe tone, “but I’m afraid it is a rather embarrassing story.” I pulled down the waistband of my trousers to show him the blackish pockmark above my hip. “The gunman was a notoriously poor shot and only managed a hit because he was entirely soused. I think he had been aiming at my feet, as a warning.”
“Was it earned?” he asked curiously.
“Oh, I cannot recall the particulars of the argument,” I said breezily.
We washed, brisk, for the water was indeed very cold and flecked with dust and horse spittle.
And then, as I reached for my shirt, Hermann said, “Oh, here, wait a moment—”
He bid me perch on the rim of the trough, and fetched one of the small lead jugs, skittering around behind me to the opposite side. The water he sloughed over my shoulders and back was brisk and unexpected enough to make me flinch, and he murmured an apology; and then put his palm across my shoulder blade, guiding the rest of the water in rivets over a cluster of soap suds I had missed.
His hand brushed across my back several times, slowly. Down the muscles just left of my spine. After that first twitch, I was very calm and still under his touch. His palms were not at all soft, roughened from chemistry and rope-burn. The Commodore was the only man I knew with delicate hands.
It struck me, not at the time but a minute or two after, as I was dressing again, that had he a dagger in his belt or boot, it would have been the perfect moment to slip it up under my ribcage, into the back of my heart. I was quite unawares and entirely off guard. A piercing, quick death, had he wanted to escape my company and the threat I still posed. But even when Hermann had held my own pistol pointed at my face - was it only a week prior? - I had not feared for my life. From the moment we met, I trusted him. A great many men in this world will kill you for a great number of poor reasons. I did not believe Hermann ever would. I could not tell you why. It was the kind of trust reserved for fools and fairytales.
I must have slouched a little against his hands, because he touched the back of my neck very briefly.
“All done,” he announced.
—I am unsure and unsettled as to why this seems to me so urgently worth detailing.
Perhaps I—
Perhaps I should sleep.
-
A letter to the offices of J. Farthington, Esq., dated May 30th, 1851.
My dearest friend,
A belated postscript to my prior letter. When next I am in Washington we must discuss the finer details of my Will, such as it is, but I must with haste add an immediate amendment now that I have accepted the recent swelling of my coffers.
At your earliest convenience, please amend the beneficiary of my estate to one Mr Hermann Kermit Warm of no fixed address, San Francisco. I’ll make my intent plain: my father’s wealth and land will pass immediately to him upon the event of my death. Please take my signature below as binding. We will hash out the minutiae when I see you within the year.
I remain your friend and client,
John Morris
-
June 4th, 1851.
I write this entry a day after the fact. More on which later, but nonetheless; my god—!
I have seen men under the spell of gold. No matter how far east one travels, and I try to stay east of Oregon as often as humanly possible, the gold sickness follows. Once a man has plucked a speck of the stuff from his pan, held it between his thumb and forefinger, smaller even than his own iris but iridescent in the California sun, he is infected. He cannot sleep, cannot eat, can barely live until he has a heavy palmful of it, at the very least; and then a bucketful; and then a barrelful. It is never enough.
As a boy, my father took a single gold bar out of his safe, and made me hold the thing in my small hands, barked at me to feel the heft, to lift it to the lamplight and see the sheen, though my arms were too weak and this I had to do with both hands. “Now you have known gold,” my father declared. It was his way of inoculating me, and I am chagrined to admit that it worked. I was never once inclined to sniff out the stuff. My reputation as a tracker extends only to people, not to precious metals.
But, my god.
When Hermann and I held between our conjoined hands four great bricks of ore, that gritty and speckled rock veined through with gold so molten-seeming it could almost have been liquid—
When we held it between us, I felt a little of the madness upon me.
“We have done it, John,” he said reverentially.
“You, my friend. It was all you.”
“We are in partnership now,” Hermann said. His soft laughter made his hands bump against mine, and I clasped them properly to better clutch the ore. “Everything you or I do, we do.”
Not a moment after this the caustic sting on my palms became unbearable.
In fact, I could not even hold a pen last night. My hands were forced open by the burn, as though I had a stigmata on each palm.
Hermann seemed quietly agonised about the whole affair.
I wished I could stem his concern; there was certainly no blame to lay. We took such care with the pails, carrying them between us in an awkward side-on strut like two proud crabs, always clearing the debris before we set them down so they would have a level surface to keep them upright.
He had assumed our little reservoir would dilute the poison enough, and I was quite content with his analysis - knowing nothing myself of chemistry save from a vague awareness that yeast makes bread rise. Still, he cautioned: use the shovels, not your hands, and stand tall to keep the water from splashing about your face.
Well, there was a clump of ore by my feet, glowing like a cluster of fireflies on a mild Texan eve. I reached in entirely without thought, two handed, and fished it out. It was quite something to see that illuminated stone, green-glowing and mythic, pass from the lakewater to the warm air and transform, quite suddenly, into the mottled amber-grey of ore. A fantastical dream made solid in my hands.
Thus I am chastened by the pain.
Both of us spent the night scratching at our lumpy shins and ankles, but it was only I who had damaged my hands.
Hermann then offered me something extraordinary.
“If you dictate to me, I shall strive to write your journal for the day?”
I was taken aback. I found, with some measure of surprise, that I was not afraid of his reading the journal. The opposite, in fact - his penmanship upon these pages would have been desperately intimate. My cheeks likely flushed, and I fear they are again now as I write this, at the thought of Hermann transcribing my innermost thoughts. My little book of adventures, he had called it, though at the time he had cause to say it with spite.
My adventures revolve around only Hermann, of late.
He stuttered on. “My cursive is nothing as pretty as yours, of course, and—I’m a fool, I wasn’t thinking—your privacy—”
“Not at all,” I reassured him. “This has been a momentous day, and I shall record it dutifully. Perhaps it is best to let the evening sit a while; to relish it as it stands, not put it to page and warp my own memory of it right away.”
Bullcrap!
“As you like,” Hermann said, still embarrassed, but summoning his smile once again.
I always strive to record events truthfully, coloured as they are by my own thoughts and biases. Thus I shall also detail what transpired next, although it was nothing so earth-shattering as the prospect itself.
We had shot a deer two days ago and cooked much of it across the stretch of the afternoon, while we were occupied with building the dam. Hermann had thought to set a bowl beneath the meat, to catch the rendered fat - we dipped crackers in it later, and the taste was perfectly satisfactory. I watched curiously as Hermann now fetched the remaining lard and struck a flint into last night’s kindling, just enough heat to warm the leftover fat until it was unctuous and malleable. He used himself as the test subject, daubing viscous clumps of the stuff against his raw ankles as though he were an immature artist, and then rubbing it in tentatively with his palms.
I watched his expression carefully. Soon his hesitance gave way to a soft relief. It was like watching dawn break. It suited him beautifully, after the excitement of the day. A great peace descended upon me, seeing Hermann so suddenly at ease, despite my ongoing ache.
At once I felt that I could see our lives unfurl before us. This fundraising stint at Fulsom Lake, flecked with melodrama and fancy; the arduous journey to Dallas; the hard toil of land-breaking, building a community from nothing; and then—a long, unadulterated stretch of serenity. Figures seemed to float around us in my vision, a vague community, but only Hermann was clear in my mind, with that same expression in his eyes of soft and unfettered relief.
“Here—” His voice awoke me from my reverie.
Hermann was knelt in front of me, quite calmly, and was rolling up my trouser legs.
“You needn’t—”
“Your hands are sore,” he said at once. “It’s easier if I do it. It will dull the bite of it.”
He lathered his fingertips with the deer fat, and with a small furrow of concentration on his brow, began to massage each of my ruined shins in turn.
I had noticed, almost as soon as I met him, that Hermann was a careful man. Not in the sense of being overly cautious or distrusting, but in a more literal sense: he undertook every duty with a great deal of care. This task was no different.
He was careful to avoid the worst of the burns, where my skin was reddest. Instead, he rubbed his slick thumbs in gentle circles, testing the waters, and if I did not hiss or recoil, he would press a little deeper. He started his work just below the knee of my left leg, working down to the ankle, and then, after an apparent moment of thought, he gently pulled off both my boots and gave my feet no small amount of attention, even though our leather hessians had borne the brunt of the poison. Then he attended my right leg, the opposite route, from forefoot to kneebone.
Finally, he tapped my elbows, and encouraged me to rest my arms atop my knees, my hands hanging downwards. He took another great scoop of the warm fat, and, one finger at a time, massaged it into my skin: encircling each knuckle, pinching gently down between the webbing, and letting his thumbs ease the pain in my sensitive palms.
He seemed very content in this work, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of me, humming under his breath.
As for myself, I was—
In some way compromised.
How best to explain it?
I have never been one to ignore man’s base urges. What point would there be? Morality does not figure into it: if my body makes demands - hunger, thirst, fatigue - I shall sate it; lust is no different.
And yet I—
I find myself shy to detail it.
I was not aroused by him. I could not call it that. I was quite relaxed under his roving hands. I felt myself in some liminal state of excitement: I could attend to it, or not. It would make no difference to the pleasure I derived from the experience. Of Hermann, pleased to be at my service, and the physical easing of my wounded body.
“Better?” he asked me.
“Very much so,” I murmured.
He left my calves exposed to the evening breeze and, like a family doctor, promised to check upon me the next morning. “I shall have to return the favour,” I said, quite without ulterior motive.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied.
I still have not figured out if he was being coy.
It hardly seems to matter either way. I find myself of that opinion on a great deal of matters these days, in Hermann’s welcome company.
-
June 5th, 1851.
I have wondered - not often, but on the occasion my path crosses with that of a dead or dying man - what my memory will deign to show me in my final moments. I’m sure it is nothing but cold comfort, but they say life unspools in one’s mind like a vaudeville at the apex of death. If such nonsense is true, I should very much like to see in full, unspoiled, this exact day as I have lived it.
We were quite at our leisure.
There was to be no more fishing today. We resolved to move the camp further around the lake, to another spot Hermann had staked out when we arrived, and start the process afresh. It was slow work, for we were aching and overwarm, but it was not at all unpleasant; in fact I enjoyed methodically strolling back and forth with Hermann. His conversation was once more free-flowing, having been stoppered by his nerves over the first prospect; we were quite assured of his genius now.
We left the pails where they were for now, not wanting to brave them with our unsteady limbs, and concentrated on re-erecting the tent, setting up a new firepit, and fetching flat rocks for a second dam.
Deep in the valley where our claim lay, the midday sun burned with vigour. The heat trapped itself like a broiling ouroboros, and rather than divest ourselves of our shirts and plough on, burning from above as well as below, Hermann wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm and said, “Let’s rest. The gold isn’t going anywhere fast.”
So we retired to the tent. Whether it was factually cooler or a mere placebo, we were glad to be out of the sun’s fierce scrutiny.
Who lay down first?
He did, I recall. So it was I who lay, not turned away from him, but face to face. His presence next to mine was not at all startling now, as we had been using the single tent for some nights, but we were so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. He was smiling. Just a hint of his teeth. I loved seeing that smile from a new angle, and almost felt compelled to clamber atop him and see it in another new light; to perch behind him and glimpse it upside down - still a smile, not a frown, even at that angle.
Hadn’t we settled down to doze?
I struggle to remember the exact order of events. It is only a few hours after the fact, but they appear to me as a series of individual daguerreotypes, each framed in a smoky oval, sharp and crisp and somehow too real in my memory.
I know that I murmured his name, though I do not recall if that was the catalyst or conclusion.
I know, too, that I put the newly calloused pad of my fingertip upon his bottom lip.
“John,” he sighed. I remember this because I could feel the faint movement of his dry lip under my finger; could feel where it would become damp and humid inside his mouth.
I drew my finger away then; an invitation to do whatever he liked. I wanted, in that moment, to follow down whichever path Hermann chose for us.
We kissed. He, I think, kissed me.
I was inordinately relieved by it.
I will defend myself only by saying there was nothing at all lurid about it. We barely moved, save for his lips pressing and unpressing sweetly against mine - once, twice, innumerable times. It was not unlike being kissed by a childhood sweetheart, and I had the same giddy burbling in my gut over it.
At one point I said, “My whiskers don’t bother you?”
“Not at all,” he laughed. I wanted to devour that laugh, dissolve it on my tongue like a sugar cube.
—I swore not to be lascivious.
We did doze, after this. It was easy to sleep next to him. I was not burdened by an ounce of shame or regret. Kissing Hermann was no different to me than shaking his hand.
To write it like that seems trivialising, and that is not my intent. I only mean that it came very naturally.
We roused perhaps two hours later, when the sun was past its prime. In sleep, our hands had found one another’s and become quite entangled. I helped him up, we both stretched sorely, and we continued our preparations lazily, well into the evening, never straying far from each other. I lost count of how often his shoulder bumped pleasantly against mine, or the backs of our hands brushed, just lightly.
He is puttering about outside the tent as I write this. Smothering the fire and rinsing our supper plates in the lake. I find myself—
After all I have described, am I still so shy?
I find myself deliriously happy in a way I have not experienced since very young childhood, a very long time ago. A naïve sort of pleasure I thought I had long outgrown: the kind a boy has on finding the shapes of cattle in clouds or smokestacks, or on being allowed by a mother cat to approach her newly born clutch of kittens in the quiet, dark corner of a lowly barn.
I am excited, yes, to kiss him once more, and there is nobody in the world who can mock or shun me for it.
—I can hear his soft approach now.
-
June 6th, 1851.
The bloodhounds have caught up with us at last. I am not much troubled: we have both higher ground and a greater knowledge of the terrain, and the Sisters boys have not yet discovered us. If luck and probability are on our side, Charlie will be drunk, and Eli distracted in nursing his bitter grudge over Charlie’s drinking.
No, I find that I am not much troubled by their arrival at all.