Belle Cora: A Novel Page 53

  When Brannan’s men were forty feet from the flagpole, they put the noose around Jenkins’s neck. Broderick and his associates, including my brother, got off the wagon and rushed the vigilantes. They were joined by a handful of men from other directions, including several policemen. I felt sorry for the stupid thief being hurried to his death and began to hope that Broderick would prevail.

  Big Pete said, “Five to one he hangs.”

  Charley had his arm around my waist, and a barely perceptible tightening of his grip told me that, for the first time tonight, he was interested. “How much?”

  “A hundred.”

  “Make it a thousand.”

  Big Pete handed me his lucky hat, but Charley and McGowan kept theirs on as they rushed in to join the fight—Big Pete to help the vigilantes, Charley and McGowan to stop them. The two sides fought, hundreds of men, a churning mass of arms, shoulders, and heads moving in and out of the flickering light. My attempts to follow the individual efforts of Lewis and Charley and McGowan did not help me to understand what was happening. Eventually, I became aware that Broderick’s men had captured Jenkins. They had their arms around him. Some were trying to get the rope off his neck; some were trying to pull him free of the vigilantes. But Brannan’s men held the rope, and that turned out to be the most important thing. I inflicted further damage on Big Pete’s old hat, twisting it in my hands, as I watched the contest devolve into a tug of war. The noose was still around Jenkins’s neck, and he was slowly strangled in the mêlée; still the struggle continued. The corpse, jerked this way and that with a puppet’s borrowed life, had lost its own meanings. It was no longer a man hoping to be saved or, if necessary, to die bravely, but a ball two teams were fighting over. The vigilantes made steady progress. At the last minute, whether out of respect for Oregon or because the flagpole presented unforeseen difficulties, they put the rope over a beam on the old adobe building. Brannan yelled, “Pull together—let every honest citizen be a hangman.” The body rose. It wasn’t on a pole, but it was a flag now, just the same.

  I looked around for Lewis, but I couldn’t find him. Charley and Big Pete returned, both sweaty and gasping for breath, in good humor, having enjoyed the sport. David Broderick, slapping his clothes and twisting his shoulders as if to loosen his muscles, walked to his wagon, ten yards away from us. Strangely calm, he stood in the street before a wagon wheel, listening to Ned McGowan. As I watched, Ned stretched his arm out in my direction, and David Broderick turned his head and looked at me.

  LII

  AT AN INQUEST THE NEXT DAY, after Jenkins was taken down, a police officer refused to testify, saying that if he did he would be killed by the secret organization that now ruled the city. The day after that, there was another battle in Portsmouth Square, with fists, boots, and sticks, when Broderick’s people broke up a meeting of Brannan’s people.

  I was very worried about Lewis, so I sent a note asking him to visit the house, by the back entrance, during the afternoon. He came at the appointed time and place, but he disobliged me by bringing three friends: men of a sort that my servants would have never let through the front door. “This is Billy Mulligan,” he said proudly. “This is Jim Casey. Billy, Jim, this is my old friend Belle, who I used to know in New York,” and he winked, making me angrier.

  I brought them into the parlor. On their best behavior, they waited for my invitation before settling comfortably into the furniture and looking all about them in hope of seeing beautiful women. Each was dressed in his own garish combination of plug hat, swallowtail coat, plaid trousers, and brightly patterned waistcoat. Their manner was sweet and easygoing. I knew them by reputation. Billy Mulligan, a short-legged fellow with an acne-scarred baby face—like a badly deteriorated fresco of an adorable cherub—was the onetime boxing promoter who had befriended Lewis last year; probably it was he who had introduced Lewis to David Broderick. He was going to die in 1862, during a shoot-out and in a condition of delirium tremens, soon after he began firing his gun randomly out of the window of his room in the St. Francis Hotel. James Casey, a slim young fellow with a sad, puzzled face and prematurely receding hair, had done a term in Sing Sing Prison. He was going to be lynched in 1856 for the shooting of a newspaper editor who had mentioned Casey’s prison record in print.

  As for Lewis Godwin, soon after arriving in California, he had gotten a reputation by winning prizefights, and then won a small fortune by losing them, until no one, including his brother Edward, would bet a penny on him ever again. Then he and Billy Mulligan were hired by a couple of men to win a dispute over a contested mine. Then they had been involved in a shoot-out in which a woman selling tamales across the street had been hit by a stray bullet, whose bullet was never determined, and then they had come here. And the date and circumstances of my brother’s death will be related in their proper sequence among the other events of this narrative.

  I sent word that the girls were not to come down, but I had Niobe bring out some wine, along with bread and oranges and dates and cheese, which counted here as delicacies, and talked with Lewis and his friends for almost an hour, just so they would not feel slighted. Then I begged them to go, on the grounds that members of the Vigilance Committee often came here during business hours, and if they stayed there was bound to be a brawl—for I knew what caliber of men they were!—and that the breakage would ruin me. They laughed and they departed, except for Lewis, whom I asked to stay a little longer.

  As soon as they were gone, I said, “These men you call your friends—they’re no good, and they’re not going to do you any good.”

  He stood up. “I came because you’re my sister and I need to see you sometimes. I didn’t come for this.” He thrust his arm into a coat sleeve. I clutched his gaudy silk vest. “Let go.”

  “If you could hear the things I’ve heard about that man,” I said. He knew I meant Broderick. “You’re such a fool. If you heard what is said …” I was vague as to details, because I was too upset to remember. “No one respectable likes him—a politician who surrounds himself with hooligans. Hooligans like you, who he’ll toss aside the minute they’re not useful to him.”

  “What do you know about it? He’s not like a politician. I’ve seen him go into fire—a real fire, that could have killed him—to get a friend out safe.”

  I released him, as if his argument about Broderick’s heroism had moved me, and he was in less of a hurry to leave. “Well,” I said, “that takes courage, to be a fireman.”

  “It does,” said Lewis.

  “Jack Cutter was a fireman. I suppose he wasn’t all bad.”

  He went for the door again, and I didn’t grab him this time, but I did say, “I thought you’d want to stay and visit Jocelyn.”

  He hesitated a moment. “You know she won’t see me here,” and he went stomping down the hall in those big boots that make all the men of the West feel a couple of inches taller than they really are.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, when I told Jocelyn what Lewis had said, she shrugged and told me he was right. I changed my clothes and left her in charge, and went with Charley to the house of Tom Gallagher, where Judge McGowan had arranged for me to meet David Broderick.

  Gallagher, who had built the city’s first theater, the Jenny Lind, lived with his wife, their maid, their cook, and an occasional lodger, just for company, in a three-story house on the plaza. Ned McGowan was already there when we arrived. Gallagher’s wife, who had come from nothing, just as Gallagher had, was friendly and natural with me, and we all had a fine dinner served on real silver and good china. Broderick recognized Charley as one of the men who had tried to save Jenkins’s life, and commended him for it. Charley said he was glad of Mr. Broderick’s good opinion, but he had to be honest: he had been trying to win a bet, and his friend Big Pete of the El Dorado had been helping the other side only because of the bet, and Mr. Broderick shouldn’t hold it against him. Broderick did not reply. McGowan said that anyway Charley had tried to do the right thing, though the results had been unf
ortunate.

  At last the table was cleared. Gallagher and his wife invited the rest of the company to enjoy cigars and brandy in another room, Broderick and I stayed behind.

  We examined each other, and I found him quite frightening on close inspection. His associates lived to satisfy their immediate appetites. If there were such elements in his own character, he had mastered them. At dinner he had drunk only water and had eaten the capon as if it were a bowl of mush; when he glanced at me, the sorrowful expression on his ugly face seemed to say various things: that we were both mourning someone, or that he still loved me even though I had disappointed him in some profound way. When I had first seen those saintly, grieving eyes of his up close, I had wanted to tell him: don’t do it, you can’t win against Sam Brannan, he’s heartless, and nature has given you a mother’s heart. But by this time I had sensed the steely purpose behind the sad eyes, and I had concluded that David Broderick was a fanatic. To feel himself another inch nearer his destiny was the only pleasure that meant anything to him.

  Now, having no small talk for the likes of me—or for any woman, I supposed—he said, “You said you had something for me. What is it?”

  “Four members of the executive committee of the Committee of Vigilance are regulars at my house; they come, they drink, they have a good time. They brag, to impress the girls. They get drunk enough, they brag about the committee and what they know, the secret signs and signals and plans. I thought that might interest you.”

  “Do you know the watchword?”

  “Fiat justicia ruat coelum, which is Latin. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ ”

  This was a secret at the time, supposedly known only to committee members. “I knew that,” said Broderick, and I believed him. “Now tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I must find it out first. I will, don’t worry.”

  “And what do you want in return?”

  “Three things. If and when you come out on top, I’ll want your protection.”

  “All right,” he said. That was easy to promise.

  “Good. But there’s something else, and this is important to me. I have a family connection to Lewis Godwin. I’d like you to keep an eye on him.”

  “I always look out for my boys,” he said calmly.

  “I am attached to him. I don’t want to see him sacrificed to your noble causes. If he’s hurt, I’ll be your enemy, for what that’s worth.” Broderick’s lips tightened. He had a bad temper—that was what got him killed, in 1859, in a duel with a former chief justice of the California Supreme Court. But he wanted to use me, so he kept listening. “If he’s killed, I’ll use everything I’ve got, call in every favor. I’m sorry if it offends you, but I need you to know it.”

  There was silence while the sober mind behind the saintly eyes performed various measurements and calculations. “You said three things.”

  “Tell me things I can tell the committee. Things you can afford to let them know, but which they’ll see as useful. It doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be true. I’ll tell it to them, and they’ll be beholden to me; if they win, I’ll have their protection.”

  After considering this for a while, he called out, “Ned, come here,” and McGowan joined the discussion.

  When we were done, Charley came back and we said our thank-yous and goodbyes to Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher. Near the door, the maid handed Broderick his hat. With an expression I had not yet seen on his face—a warm smile—he thanked her and patted her on the shoulder. Turning to me, he said, “Sam Brannan has money and influence. But he hasn’t got any persistence. He gets an idea in his head, and he runs with it as long as it’s fun. Who dares to say no to him? Nobody, except Coleman, but Coleman’s a fool.” He put his hat on. “These vigilantes may have their way awhile. But they’re impatient. They’ll get bored, they’ll get tired. I don’t get tired. It’s their hobbyhorse. It’s my life.”

  I HAD NOT BEEN ENTIRELY CANDID with Broderick. I did have an excellent source of information about the committee, but it wasn’t pillow talk. Though these men didn’t have the mighty minds they thought they had, neither were they stupid, and I didn’t dare ask my girls to wheedle secrets out of them.

  Instead, Herbert Owen was my spy; it was he who gave me my privileged view of the committee’s inner workings. Sam Brannan and William Tell Coleman, wanting to have a lawyer on the executive committee (the committee’s head, the select group that made the big decisions), had invited Owen to join. Owen was flattered to have his judgment and expertise solicited by such important men, and tempted by the promise of their future support. But he had been against the quick hanging of Jenkins, and hurt when his advice was ignored. He had thought of the committee as a kind of trade association full of men it was useful to know. He had not really expected them to do anything, certainly not so quickly. He felt that he had been swept into criminal actions that his family back east would never understand. Two days after the hanging, he contacted me, and he began supplying me with the committee’s secrets, aware that I would pass them on to its enemies.

  Herbert Owen wasn’t the only man with doubts, but whenever public opinion seemed about to turn against the Vigilance Committee, something would happen to direct people’s fury elsewhere. On the very day when David Broderick was to hold a big anti-vigilante rally in Portsmouth Square, there was another big fire, and nearly everyone was convinced it had been set on purpose, and that all the fires had been set on purpose. Frightened people, wanting to be saved from this chaos, were grateful to the Committee of Vigilance when its private army conducted street patrols and searched houses and ships in the harbor.

  A week or two after the fire, I opened the Alta California and read that a suspicious character caught hiding out in the high brush of California Street Hill had been turned over to the Committee of Vigilance, and this man had confessed that he was the real English Jim, the notorious thief and killer (and according to the newspaper he bore an uncanny resemblance to the unfortunate fellow who had already been hanged). The committee kept the new English Jim in a secret location, where he was confessing to many other crimes, and naming his associates and the dirty politicians who had helped him, and from these confessions the committee was already compiling a secret list of men to be hunted down and hanged or driven out of the state.

  It seemed clear that the committee was going to add everybody they disliked to this list. Herbert Owen memorized it and gave me a copy to slip to Ned McGowan, who passed the names on to David Broderick. In July, English Jim was hanged. In August, on the authority of his secret confessions, two more men were hanged. Several more were put on ships to Honolulu and Shanghai. With forewarning, Broderick arranged to have some of his men leave town in advance of their capture, though he didn’t bother to warn a couple of fellows who had become a liability to him.

  “I thought your man would fight harder,” I told Ned McGowan.

  McGowan had a way of stroking his triangular mustache as if it were an abacus or an oracle to be consulted on important decisions. “We decided it was better to duck this time. We will melt into the hills, Indian-style. Brannan will get his candidates elected, and they’ll have the government for a year. Then we’ll be back. Don’t worry. You didn’t back the wrong horse. Well, I guess you backed both horses, right?”

  OFTEN DURING THIS TIME I WENT to the Clay Street Unitarian Church, where, week after week, Jeptha preached against the vigilantes. In this respect, he was unique among the city’s clergymen. The rest of them stood in their pulpits asking God to further the Vigilance Committee’s noble work, or else they preached against the “criminal element” in a way that complemented the committee’s efforts. An Episcopalian priest lent dignity to the hangings by wrangling privately with the condemned in their last hours, afterward passing on the news that this one had died repentant and that one blaspheming to the last. Meanwhile, before a congregation that included three members of the executive committee and probably hundreds of regular committee members, Jep
tha hunted in his well-thumbed Bible for verses that spoke of God’s monopoly on vengeance, the bad judgment of mobs (“Give us Barabbas”), etc., and moved quickly from the text, which really gave him little support, to tell his audience that they were surrendering rights for which English-speaking people had been giving their blood since the days of bad King John and the Magna Carta, that a city of thirty thousand young male transients was bound to have crime, and if they wanted less of it they ought to employ more policemen and pay them better. Next he dwelt on the horror of the hangings and the bestial emotions they aroused. (Fool, high-minded fool—my eyes told him that. But I could not help taking a secret pride in him. He had preached his first sermons to me from the boughs of trees.)

  There was much angry murmuring the first time Jeptha spoke against the vigilantes. The second time, one man stood up. It was a signal: fifty others promptly rose in a body and walked out, and most of them joined other churches. The men who remained were the least passionate ones, but even among these there was talk of dismissing Jeptha—impossible, since Jeptha himself had contributed a third of the money to build the church, and unpalatable, because he was a talented preacher, not easily replaced.

  I had many complicated feelings about all that, but I did not examine them very closely; I was thinking of other things. By the time English Jim was hanged, Agnes was visibly pregnant, completing her victory over me—her victory over him, too, as I thought. I lost sleep trying not to think of the child Jeptha and I hadn’t had; of their happy life, their serious, churchy life elaborating itself. It was like watching a ship with my heart on it sail away from me. Only a few weeks later, in September, I learned from a couple of male members of the congregation who snubbed me in church but were talkative in my house, that Agnes had lost her baby. I went to church the following Sunday. Her pew was in the front row, and mine five rows back. Twice she looked at me and looked away, unable to keep up her charade of pity for me. She was still stout from her pregnancy. Jeptha saw me from the pulpit, and as always his eyes rested on me just long enough to acknowledge our prior acquaintance, but not long enough to announce it to the congregation. The ship had returned, and I was relieved, but I did not triumph. What had I won? I had won nothing, and it was all too sad.