The Mother Lode (17 page)

Joe stood up feeling a wave of disgust wash over him. “What am I doin'?” he asked. “Almost killin' a man that is already more dead than alive?”

Feeling weary, defeated, and a little sick to his stomach, Joe left the dim space between the buildings and dunked his head again in the water trough. Then he squared his shoulders, slapped the dirt and dust from himself, and tried to think of what to do next.

“Joe!”

It was Ellen and she was rushing up the boardwalk. When she stopped before him, she blurted out, “What on earth has happened to you?”

Joe didn't want to talk about it but he had to. In a few mumbled words he told her about bumping into Fiona's father and then being attacked by the old man. He ended up saying, “Fiona is gone. I got a . . . a daughter . . . somewhere.”

“A daughter?” She smiled. “Joe, that's
wonderful
news!”

But it didn't feel to Joe even a little bit like wonderful news. “Fiona's father is lyin' there between the buildings. I hit him pretty hard. I'm kinda ashamed of myself for doin' it.”

“Joe, you've really got me confused. Let's see to him and find out what is going on.”

“All right,” Joe said, “but I got a sudden real bad feeling in my gut. I'm not sure that I want to know what that old man can tell me about Fiona.”

Ellen Johnson gave him a strange look that turned to sadness. “Joe,” she said, taking him by the arm and leading him into the narrow space between the buildings where a dark and terrible truth was to be revealed, “let's just get Fiona's father and find out what happened to her and your daughter.”

“Okay,” he whispered, suddenly, and for the first time in his long, difficult life, almost afraid.

M
Y GOD, JOE, I think you almost killed Mr. Mc- Carthy! He's having a lot of trouble just breathing!”

They were crouched over the old Irishman in the dim corridor between two rough-sided board buildings. “Joe, we've got to find him a doctor!”

“I swear that he was fighting mad just a little while ago,” Joe said, grabbing Brendan McCarthy's arms and dragging him out onto the boardwalk, where Joe could see that the Irishman was desperately struggling for air. Even worse was that the man's battered face was ashen and pasty-looking.

“Don't you dare die on me!” Joe shouted, kneeling over McCarthy. “You've got to tell me where Fiona is,
then
you can die!”

“Joe,” Ellen commanded. “Go find a doctor. Hurry!”

“But there might not even be one up here on the Comstock.”

“Try, Joe! You have to try and find help for Mr. McCarthy or his death will be on your hands.”

Joe jumped to his feet and began to run down the boardwalk shouting. “Doctor! We need a doctor!”

Miners with drinks and bottles in their hands just shrugged with indifference, but were wise enough to step aside as Joe barreled past. Finally, a woman in her mid-fifties came forward to block Joe's path. “Dr. Taylor is just up the street a few doors.”

“Which building?”

“That one,” the woman said, pointing. “But there are nuns down at St. Mary of the Mountain Catholic Church that are better and will tend to the sick and dying for free.”

“How far is that church where the nuns are to be found?”

“Way down the hill,” the lady told him. “It's quite a long ways on foot, I'm afraid.”

“No time for it,” Joe told her, eyes searching for Dr. Taylor's office sign.

“Ma'am, I can read words good, but not names. Take me to Taylor 'cause a man is dyin' back there on the sidewalk.”

The woman was decisive. She pulled up her skirts and took off in something like a rolling shamble, leading Joe to the doctor's little office. “Thank you, ma'am!”

Joe went inside to see three miners sitting in wooden chairs and a smallish man with a monocle in one eye examining a fourth miner's obviously broken arm. “Doc!” Joe cried. “I got a man just down the street who can't hardly breathe!”

Dr. Taylor turned from his patient and said, “Bring him on here and I'll have a look at him.”

“But you don't understand, this fella is
dyin'.
”

“Then go to the mortuary two doors down. They'll make all the funeral arrangements.”

Joe rushed across the crowded little office, grabbed Taylor by the seat of his baggy pants with one hand and his coat collar with the other. He propelled the doctor across his waiting room and toward the door.

“Wait!” the doctor cried. “If you insist, at least let me take my medical bag!”

“All right, but you better hurry!”

They rushed outside and back to Ellen and Brendan McCarthy, who was still fighting for air and shaking badly.

Dr. Taylor looked to Ellen. “What happened to his face?”

“I punched him 'cause he was trying to strangle me,” Joe confessed. “But I didn't hit him in the throat.”

“He's got a high fever and his heart may be giving out,” the doctor pronounced after making a quick examination.

“What can you do about that?”

“Nothing for the heart,” the doctor replied. “By the looks of him, he's used himself badly in life. It may be his time.”

Joe was so frustrated he could have screamed. Instead, he said in an almost pleading voice, “Doc, you gotta try and keep him alive long enough to tell me where to find his daughter and my daughter.”

“What?” Dr. Taylor was confused.

“I need to talk to him! Ask him a few questions before he croaks.”

Dr. Taylor looked to Ellen with pity. “Ma'am, you seem like the only one with any sense here besides myself. We need to get this man to my office as quickly as possible.”

“Joe, pick him up!” Ellen ordered.

Joe was so desperate to learn where to find his Fiona that he scooped Brendan McCarthy up in his arms and started running back toward the doctor's office. Ellen and Taylor overtook him at the door, and they rushed the gasping Irishman into a back office where there was a stout wooden examination and operating table, dark-colored with the stain of blood.

“Lay him down and then leave,” Dr. Taylor told them.

“But, Doc, I need to get some answers from him!”

“Get the hell out of this room!” Dr. Taylor bellowed.

“Come on,” Ellen said, pulling Joe outside into the reception room, where the miner with the broken arm was gritting his teeth in agony.

One of the miners looked Joe up and down and then spat tobacco on the floor, showing his dislike. “It wasn't your turn to see the doc. Was our friend George's turn.”

Joe's hand dropped to his tomahawk and he hissed, “Mister, it'll be
all
your turns with me and God if you don't shut your yaps!”

The four miners shut their yaps.

The next hour was one of the longest Joe had ever spent in his life. He'd demanded that the miners give up two chairs for Ellen and himself, and they'd only grudgingly done so. Joe didn't know if Brendan McCarthy was still alive or not, and once, when he'd pushed open the door to take a look, he'd witnessed Dr. Taylor administering some kind of medicine to McCarthy, and then the physician had yelled at him to close the door.

“I don't think he's gonna make it,” Joe lamented, resuming his seat beside Ellen Johnson.

“Even if he doesn't, we'll still find your Fiona,” Ellen consoled. “But Joe, why did you have to hurt that old man so badly?”

“He went for my throat like a wolf,” Joe explained, knowing it was a sorry excuse. “McCarthy wanted to kill me. Can you imagine? And I'm the one that should be killin' him. I don't understand it. I knew he never liked me, but I never deserved his hatred.”

Ellen pursed her lips and whispered, “Mr. McCarthy probably hates you for what you did to his daughter. Did you take her . . . her maidenhood?”

Joe flushed with humiliation. He couldn't speak for his shame and embarrassment. The best he could do was to nod his head that he had indeed deflowered little Fiona.

“Well, there you have it,” Ellen said, laying a gentle hand on Joe's knee. “I know that you two were in love, but . . . well, you must understand what a father would feel like in Mr. McCarthy's circumstances.”

“I guess I do,” Joe admitted. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Ellen, there was a man told me that Fiona has a daughter. And besides that, Fiona McCarthy now calls herself Fiona Moss.”

Tears put a sudden shine into Ellen's eyes. “That means that Fiona still loves you, Joe. That's the only thing that it could mean . . . her taking your last name for herself.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding his big, stupid head. “I guess it does at that. But what about that little girl? She'd be . . . four years old . . . this month.” Joe suddenly felt very low and his voice thickened with emotion. “Four years old and she's never even seen her real father.”

“That may be about to change, Joe. Fiona and your little girl might still be in town. Don't give up so easy.”

“I never do anything easy,” he told Ellen. “But finding Fiona is about the hardest thing I ever tried.”

“It's going to work out,” Ellen promised, although she also had a bad feeling about the McCarthys.

“What's takin' so long in there?” the miner with the broken arm sobbed as he rocked back and forth in pain. “This arm is killin' me and it needs to be set and splinted. I need some powerful opium!”

“Maybe you should go look up a Chinaman,” one of the miners suggested. “They'll sell it to you cheap enough.”

“Aw, shut up!” the injured miner barked. “I got no money for opium. Not even for a bottle of whiskey. And how am I gonna feed myself if I can't work until this arm mends?”

“We'll all chip in for a while,” one said after a long silence. “Won't we, boys?”

“That's right,” another said as if trying to convince himself. “Wasn't George's fault that rotten timbers buckled and the roof dropped on him. Could have happened to any of us down there today. We'll talk to the head of the union first chance and raise some hell over that mine.”

“Shit,” another said with obvious disgust. “Our damned miners union isn't going to put up any fuss with the Consolidated Virginia Mine Company! Not on your life they won't. Why, the Consolidated has men begging to take our places standing fifty deep in line every shift.”

“Well, they need to put in more timbering. Shore up those walls and ceilings!” another miner cried in helpless frustration. “Boys, we're just dancin' with death every time we go down that miserable mine shaft.”

Joe and Ellen listened to some more complaining. It was clear that even though these Comstock miners were making good daily wages, it wasn't worth the great risks they were taking far underground.

Finally, Joe said, “I don't know any more about mining than I know about New York City, but it seems to me that you fellas are in a tough fix. Why don't you leave and go find work somewhere else?”

One of the miners snorted with derision. “Mister, you're right about not knowing mining. The simple answer to your question is that there are too many men and not enough work to go around on this strike. We're miners and this is where the mines are producing gold and silver, so this is where we have to be no matter how hard or dangerous the work.”

“Well,” Joe said, not wanting to inflame them any more than they already were, but determined to make a point, “once upon a time I was a free mountain man, a by gawd scalp-takin' fur trapper. But then, almost overnight, nobody wanted to buy beaver furs for hats anymore.”

Joe threw up his hands as if he could snatch the answer to his problem from the air. “So, boys, I turned to what else I could do and that was leading wagon trains westward. And when that didn't quite work out, I became a freighter in Old Santa Fe. My point is that a man has to change his work sometimes or he's shit up a creek without a paddle.”

“Well thank you, mister, for the damned lecture!” the one with the broken arm gritted between his bad teeth. “But we're here and we're miners and that's the long and the damned short of it! And by the way, this ain't any church and you ain't a preacher standing on a pulpit!”

Joe could feel his anger start to rise, but Ellen patted his arm and said, “I think I heard Dr. Taylor calling us to join him in that back room. Let's hope that I did and that Mr. McCarthy is alive.”

“I'll second that sentiment,” the miner with the broken arm snapped in exasperation. “So they can get that old bastard out of there and the doc can get back to fixin' me!”

Joe was about to slap the one-armed patient across the side of his head and then give his friends a go-around, when Dr. Taylor opened the door and motioned Joe and Ellen into the other room. Brendan McCarthy was asleep and his color had returned, although it was still poor.

“I've given him a strong dose of laudanum,” the doctor explained, “although I can imagine that all he wants is more bad whiskey.”

“What happened to him?”

“He told me that you hit him harder than the kick of a Missouri mule,” the doctor said, shaking his head and giving Joe a look of utter contempt. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for behaving like that toward a man so much older and weaker than yourself.”

“He's old,” Joe agreed, “but he ain't a bit weak. And McCarthy wanted to choke me to death. He wasn't givin' me a friendly greeting, Doc.”

“Well,” Taylor said dismissively, “he's in extremely poor physical health. Undernourished. Probably got a bad liver from too many years of hard drinking, and he has a cough and lung infection with accompanying fever. Mr. McCarthy needs to be taken care of properly. If not, I doubt he'll last more than a few more weeks . . . possibly only days.”