The Touch Read online

  “How old is the earth?” asked Alexander, it never having occurred to him before to wonder about the globe he lived on.

  “No one honestly knows, Alex. Some say two hundred million years, others reckon about sixty million years. But it’s sure been spinning around for a lot longer than the Bible says.”

  “That makes sense,” said Alexander. “There were no geologists around when the Bible was written.” Something else popped into his mind. “And the crust? Is it entirely rock? Where do the minerals come from?”

  “Minerals in a mass are rocks.”

  Chuck took over. “The crust is layered in what the paleontologists call strata, according to what fossils are found in the rock. That’s how we know Darwin is right about evolution. The older the rock, the more primitive the life forms preserved in it are. Some rock—they call it fundamental gneiss—is so old that it contains no fossils at all, but nobody’s ever found any of this fundamental gneiss, though there’s a red sandstone in Britain that’s so old it’s lifeless.”

  “But,” objected Alexander, “almost every cliff in every canyon we see isn’t in nice flat layers at all. In fact, it’s hard to see layers.”

  “The crust’s moving all the time from earthquakes,” said Bill, “so after they’ve been formed the rock layers get shifted, crumpled, contorted, dislocated—you name it, it’s done to them. They’re also worn by wind and water, or else they’re under a sea at one moment, above it at another. When it comes to rocks, the earth is a real busy old ball.”

  California, Alexander learned, was quite young, especially along its coastline. And—though he personally hadn’t felt any since his arrival—it was convulsed by frequent earthquakes.

  “The coastal mountains are extremely young—sandstones and shales, but northward they’re broken up by intrusions of granite that turned them on their edge during the Pliocene era—very recent. There are limestone outcrops in the Sierra foothills, but the range itself seems almost pure granite. It’s in granitic country that you find the quartz veins containing pure gold, and they’re what we’re looking for,” said Bill.

  IT IS SAID that some men have a nose for the presence of gold, and swear that they can actually smell it, even under the ground; Alexander turned out to be such a one.

  They rode south from the American River in that early spring of 1862, shepherding a huge mule train carrying their purchases from San Francisco as well as everything they had scavenged from abandoned workings, including a broken-down battery stamper mill, a rock crusher, and, on a rough frame that dragged its back legs over the ground, a medium boiler for the steam engine Alexander would build. Bill and Chuck were in favor of plunging into the high Sierras, but the prudent Alexander said no, not when it would be winter before they were really mining. He was, besides, edgily conscious that he could smell the same odor as emanated from a gold filling in one molar. It oozed out of a valley that looked no different from a hundred others—granite boulders dewed the slopes, which were clear of forest in places.

  “We try here first,” he said, adamant. “If we find nothing, we go higher, but I think there’s gold here, and close to the surface. See that outcrop, Chuck? Go look at it. This is where we stake our first claim.”

  Beneath the leaf mold and soft earth at the base of the outcrop was an unmistakable thick vein of quartz that sparkled when Chuck scrubbed it clean and chipped it.

  “Jesus!” he breathed, sinking back on his heels. “Alex, you’re a witch doctor!” He sprang to his feet, did a dance. “Right, we’re gonna be here for a whiles, so we build a good hut and a corral for the horses—the mules won’t stray too far, this is wolf country. Alex, get started on the engine.”

  “Later on,” said Alexander, curiously unexcited, “you’ll have to teach me to blast.”

  SUMMER WENT by in a frenzy of construction; many trees had to be felled to season for burning in the engine firebox, that shack had to go up, and the machinery readied to deal with the increasing piles of fragmented rock Chuck and Bill first dug out with picks, then, following the vein inward, by small blasts of black powder. There were the inevitable accidents; Chuck barely escaped serious injury when a charge exploded early, Bill badly cut his leg plying an axe, and Alexander was scalded by a gush of steam. Bill sewed up the rent in his leg with an ordinary darning needle, and Chuck, hobbling around on a home-made crutch, produced some foul-smelling bear grease to anoint the burn. But the work went on remorselessly, for who could tell when some men would ride into their valley and discover what they were up to?

  By the time the rainy, sleety winter came down, they were in full production, breaking up the rock, pounding it to powder under the iron shoe of the stamper, their engine huffing and roaring away. This was a land prodigiously endowed with water, more than enough to wash through the stamper cylinder and force the free gold to amalgamate with the droplets of mercury inside the chamber. What gold didn’t amalgamate there ran through as slurry on to a sloping apron, at the bottom of which a copper plate covered with more mercury captured it.

  High spring saw the end of the mercury, piled now in flaky, yellowish masses under a covering of brush.

  Alexander had just had his twentieth birthday, and had developed the wiry, sinewy body of one reared on hard labor; at just over six feet, he knew he had stopped growing.

  But, he thought, I am tired of this life. For almost all of the past six years I have had no roof over my head that kept out the cold, or didn’t leak when it rained—even Quinnipiac dribbled water on my hammock because her deck wasn’t properly caulked. If a deck ever can be properly caulked. I eat until my belly is full, but in Glasgow the food was ninety-five percent flour, and here it’s eternal beans and venison. The last time I had roast beef and roast potatoes was at a Kinross wedding. Bill and Chuck are good men, intelligent and well read on geology, but they know far more about George Washington than they do about Alexander the Great. Yes, I am tired of this life.

  So when Chuck spoke on that clear May morning, Alexander listened as if to the sound of a distant, melodious horn.

  “That,” said Chuck, gazing at their haul, “is one helluva lot of gold. Even if we get closer to thirty than forty percent of bullion from the amalgam, we’ll be rich men. It’s time to let the cat out of the bag. One of us will have to ride into Coloma to get separation retorts. Two will have to stay here to deal with claim-jumpers.”

  “I’ll go because I want to go,” said Alexander. “I mean I want to leave permanently. You can buy me out with one-third of our amalgam, which I’ll take with me. You can deed my share of the mine to whoever is willing to bring up the retorts, and a man who can keep the engine running. Give me a pound of good ore for assay and you’ll be overwhelmed with potential partners.”

  “But the vein’s not worked out yet by a long shot!” cried Bill, horrified. “Alex, the deeper we go, the better the yield! We’ll never get other partners as hardworking and easygoing as you! Why do you want out, for God’s sake?”

  “Och, I guess I’m just footloose. I’ve learned all I can, so it’s time I moved on.” He laughed. “There’s more gold under more mountains someplace else. I’ll send you guys the separated mercury back if it hasn’t sickened.”

  ALEXANDER HAD his third of the amalgam separated in Coloma, and kept fifty-five of the sixty pounds of gold it yielded as bullion. It traveled with him hidden in the false bottom of his tool chest loaded on a mule as he rode out of town. Of course the word was out that he had gold, but within a mile of the last shack he had eluded those who pursued him, to vanish without a trace.

  By the time he attached himself to a large and well-armed party of men journeying east to get in on the dying throes of the Civil War, Alexander was faultless in the role he had assumed, that of disgruntled and luckless prospector. Even so, he slept each night cuddling his precious tool box to him, and grew used to the discomfort of the gold coins sewn into his clothing. Nor did he ever look as if overburdened.

  Once the high Rockies were t
raversed he was fascinated to see Red Indians in their natural state, magnificently haughty men riding their ponies bareback, clad in buckskin that was sometimes intricately beaded, their lances flaunting feathers, bows and arrows at the ready. But they were too wise to attack this big, warlike party of the hated white men, just sat their ponies to look at the intruders for a while, then disappeared. Buffalo in hundreds roamed the grasslands together with deer and other, smaller creatures; one little burrowing fellow would sit up on his haunches like a gnome, which enchanted Alexander.

  As European settlement grew more widespread, they passed through tiny villages of a few tired wooden buildings grouped on either side of a muddy track; here the Red Indians were clad in the white man’s garb, shambling along in a drunken haze. Strong drink, reflected Alexander, has been the ruin of the world; even Alexander the Great had died of a ruptured stomach after a gargantuan drinking binge. And wherever the white man goes, he brings cheap strong drink in his train.

  They were following one of the wagon trails, though, thanks to the war, they encountered few settlers going west in the long convoys that gave them some protection against Indian raids. It crossed Kansas to Kansas City, a biggish town at the junction of two great rivers. Here Alexander said goodbye to his companions and followed the Missouri River to St. Louis and the Mississippi. These must be the greatest rivers in the world, he thought, awed, and marveled again at the bounty Nature had given America. Rich soil, any amount of water, a good growing season even if the winters were far colder than those in Scotland. Which made little sense, as Scotland was much farther north.

  He deliberately avoided the war zones, having no wish to become embroiled in a struggle he felt he had no part in, nor any entitlement to. Then, crossing northern Indiana, he stopped at a lone house coming on dusk with his usual request: a meal and a bed in the barn in return for whatever hard labor might be needed around the place. With so many of the menfolk away, this worked very well; women trusted him, and he never betrayed their trust.

  The woman who answered his knock held a shotgun, and he quite saw why: she was young and beautiful, and there were no sounds of children anywhere. Alone?

  “Put the gun down, I’ll not harm you,” he said in that Scots burr so strange and attractive to American ears. “Give me food and shelter in the barn for the night, and I’ll chop wood for you, milk the cow, take all those weeds out of your vegetable patch—whatever you need, madam.”

  “What I need,” she said grimly, propping the gun against the wall, “is my man back, but that’s not going to happen.”

  Her name was Honoria Brown, and her husband of a few weeks had been killed in a battle called Shiloh; she had been alone ever since, scraping a living off what soil she could till herself and resisting the pleas of her family to return to them.

  “I like my independence,” she said to Alexander over a good dinner of chicken, fried potatoes, green beans from her garden and the best gravy he had tasted since leaving Kinross. Her eyes were the color of an aquamarine, thickly fringed with lashes so fair they looked made of glass, and they held humor, hardness, indomitability. A new expression entered them, of speculation; she put down her fork and stared at him intently. “However, I’m wise enough to know that once this war is over and the men start drifting, I can’t exist here alone. I don’t suppose you’re looking for a wife who owns a hundred-acre farm?”

  “No,” said Alexander gently. “Indiana isn’t journey’s end for me, nor will I ever be a farmer.”

  She shrugged, the corners of her lush mouth turned down. “It was worth a try. You’ll make some woman a good husband.”

  The meal done, he sharpened her axe and chopped wood for an hour by lamplight, swinging the instrument easily, tirelessly. Toward the end, she appeared at the back door and watched him.

  “You’ve worked up a sweat,” she said when he put the axe down, sharpened it again. “It’s cold, so I’ve put a little hot water in my tin kitchen bath tub. If you bring in more water from the well, you can have a bath in the warmth while I wash your clothes. They won’t dry before morning, and that means you can’t sleep in the barn. You can sleep in my bed.”

  The kitchen, wherein they had eaten, was spotless again when he entered, the dishes done, the big cast-iron cooking range giving off enough heat to make the air comfortable; her tin tub stood before it, the bottom filled with hot water from her huge iron kettle, which he refilled from the well before adding more water to the tub. Her hand out, she stood while he gave her his clothes—jean trousers, jean shirt, flannel long johns—then smiled appreciatively.

  “You’re very well made, Alexander,” she said, turning to a small wash-tub on the deal table.

  It felt so good to squash himself down into warm water that he lingered, sitting hunched with his chin on his knees; his eyelids drooped, closed.

  The feel of her strong, rough hand on his back woke him.

  “It’s the one bit you can’t do for yourself,” she said, fingers kneading his flesh.

  She spread a big braided rag rug on the floor under his wet feet, draped a huckaback towel around him, rubbed briskly.

  Where before he had been exhausted, now he was alive, alert, all his senses leaping. He turned inside the towel to face her, and kissed her awkwardly. That brought a huge response from her, deepening the kiss to a dark web of the most intensely physical emotion he had ever known. Her shabby dress came off, her shift and drawers, her home-knitted stockings, and for the first time in his life Alexander Kinross felt a naked woman against him. Her full breasts enthralled him, he couldn’t get enough of them, buried his face between them, brushed her nipples with his palms. It all progressed so naturally; he didn’t need prior experience to sense what she wanted, what he wanted, and the climax when it came was shared, a light-filled ecstasy that bore no relation to the shame of stimulating himself to climax.

  At some time during the night they transferred to her bed, but Alexander kept on making love to this wonderful, passionate, beautiful woman who was as starved as he.

  “Stay here with me,” she pleaded at dawn when he started to put on his clothes.

  “I can’t,” he said through his teeth. “This isn’t my fate, it isn’t my destiny. Were I to stay here, it would be Napoleon electing to stay on Elba.”

  She didn’t weep or protest, but rose to make him breakfast while he went out to saddle his horse, load his mule. For the first and only time during his American odyssey, the gold had lain forgotten all night under the straw in the barn.

  “Destiny,” she said thoughtfully, loading his plate with eggs, bacon, grits. “It’s a funny word. I’ve heard it before, but I didn’t know men could think about it the way you do. If you can, tell me what your destiny is.”

  “My destiny is to become great, Honoria. I have to show a narrow, vindictive old Presbyterian minister what he tried to destroy, and prove to him that a man can rise above his birth.” Frowning, he gazed at her rosy face, all aglow from the splendor of the night. “My dear, get yourself four or five big, nasty dogs. You’re a fierce woman, they’ll respect you and do as you tell them. Train them to go for the throat. They’ll be better protection than a shotgun—use it to feed them rabbits, birds, whatever you can find. Then you can live here alone until that husband comes along. He will. He will.”

  When he left she stood on the height of her porch to watch him for as long as she could see him; he wondered if she had any idea how massive was the change she had wrought in him. What had been an inchoate ache at his core was now conscious knowledge. She had opened Pandora’s box, Honoria Brown. Yet thanks to the kind of woman she was, he would never go the way so many men did, willing to beggar their pride for the chance to have a woman whenever they could.

  His greatest grief at the parting was his awareness that he couldn’t do what he burned to do—leave her with a little bag of gold coins to tide her over if times grew harder. Had he offered, she would have rejected them and thought the worse of him, and had he left them fo
r her to find later, her memories of him would be tainted. All he had been able to give her were firewood, a weedless garden, a well pulley that worked much better now, a sharp axe, and the essence of himself.

  I will never see her again. I will never know if I quickened her, I will never find out what her destiny is.

  TO ALEXANDER’S horror, New York proved to be a city much like Glasgow or Liverpool in that its teeming hordes were pent up in stinking slums. Where it differed, however, was in the cheerful mood of its poor, convinced that they wouldn’t be at the bottom of the human rubbish heap forever. Some of that was due to the polyglot nature of these people, who hailed from all over Europe and clustered according to nationality. Though their living conditions were appalling, they lacked that awful hopelessness the British poor had aplenty. A poor Englishman or Scot never even dreamed of getting out, of rising up, whereas everyone in New York seemed sure that times would improve.

  Or at least this was what he concluded in his very brief progress through the city; he had no intention of being parted from his horse and mule until he walked up the gangway of a ship bound for London. The better class of people who frequented the wide avenues of the commercial area smiled at his appearance, judging him some yokel from plains country, with his buckskins, his weather-beaten steed and that patient, plodding mule.

  And so finally he docked in London, another fabulous urban sprawl he had never seen.

  “Threadneedle Street,” he told his hackney driver, keeping the tool chest bearing his gold inside the cab with him.