“Napa County.” Dora Williams’s finger glided over a California map. “In the valley, just below Mount Saint Helena, there’s a little town called Calistoga. They’ve got hot springs up there that will cure anything you throw in them. Go to the Springs Hotel.”
“Honeymoon” was too fine a word to put on the trip to Napa. They planned to stay for a couple of months in the mountain air on the advice of the Oakland doctor. After getting a look at himself in the mirror the morning they departed, Louis understood the gravity of the advice, for he resembled more a candidate for the grave than a groom heading off on his wedding trip. Yet his heart felt light, and his mind raced with the possibilities ahead.
They took a train north as a party of three, including Sammy, plus the dog, Chuchu. Outside, rolling hills—May-green and naked of trees—undulated past.
“Let’s look at land up in Sonoma and Napa, maybe buy a ranch,” Louis said when they passed a farm. “We could live out in the hills, hunt and fish for our food. You could sketch.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He turned away from the panoramic view, leaned back in his seat, and rested his eyes on her. “Just now, in the sunlight—my God, you look splendid in blue.” He squeezed her hand. “You are a beauty who has married a skinny wolf. Don’t you find my toothy new smile rather fine, though?”
“I do.”
“Listen, Fanny,” he said, suddenly serious. “I am done with travel books. Lately, all I care to write is action, with drama and incidents. Big characters with moral dilemmas.”
“I think you already do that in your stories.”
“I’m talking about something with more carpentry.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Louis looked back outside and caught sight of a stone quarry where men stood like ants on giant boulders. There was true labor, the kind that broke backs. How dare he complain about travel writing?
It was idle talk, anyway. Fanny knew as well as he that they would starve if he devoted himself to novel writing. He had only to look at Sammy, twisting a lock of his blond hair in the seat ahead of them, to remember that there were three to feed, and one of them had to be educated.
Louis reached into his pocket, opened to a clean page in his journal, and listed the pieces of writing he had in the basket, finished or nearly so. The Amateur Emigrant and the travel book on crossing the plains on the train; essays on Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, and a Japanese hero named Yoshido-Torajiro who’d captured his interest; and The Pavilion on the Links, a tale set in Scotland about a gypsying young man who hunts up a wealthy old schoolmate and soon finds himself hunted.
His work wasn’t as backbreaking as prying gargantuan rocks out of the earth, but in fairness to himself, he’d pushed his body hard, writing that heap of words. And he’d been hungry through much of the duration. Fanny and Sam couldn’t be expected to live that way. Nor could he any longer.
At the Springs Hotel in Calistoga, Louis took the waters early every morning before the thermometer rose too far above ninety degrees. When he returned to their white gingerbread cottage, Fanny was often just waking. She had taken to wearing a chain around her neck with a gold coin suspended from it, and it was, quite simply, the most suggestive bit of eroticism he had ever seen. Some mornings as he soaked in the springs, the mere thought of that coin against her tawny skin brought him hurrying back to the cottage, where he latched the door between their room and Sammy’s. He made love to her then, despite his fragile lungs and her whispers of “Gently, now.”
“Why gently? You are my medicine.”
Free of scandal and sorrow, Fanny let her own caution drop away. With the sun pushing through drawn muslin curtains, she held herself just above him while the gold coin swung mesmerically.
“Dear girl,” he murmured with wonder after these sessions. She would rise and put his notebook in his hands as she did every morning, then bathe, dress, and head to the lodge kitchen, where, early in their stay, she had talked her way into the good graces of the cook. When Louis joined her and Sammy for breakfast, he could see Fanny’s hand in the morning’s offering. There would be butter aplenty for the thick chunks of bread, and an omelet the size of a bowler hat, stuffed full of bacon, cheese, potatoes, and whatever else she had spied in the larder. On the table would be Fanny’s own strawberry jam that she had brought as part of her plan to fatten him. The other diners looked jealously at the spread.
Their habit, after breakfast, was to return to the cabin, where Louis could write in bed. For a while, Fanny had her own composing to do. She struggled over a period of days, writing a letter to his parents to accompany the wedding portraits. Do not expect a great beauty when you meet me, she wrote. It’s just that I can’t seem to take a bad picture.
With their funds running low and the summer days getting hotter, Louis asked around about other, less costly accommodations at a higher altitude.
Morris Friedberg, a local merchant, was short and distinctive for wearing a wool coat in the wilting heat, unlike other men, who were down to their waistcoats. He and his wife walked with Louis out to the middle of the main road, lined on either side by one-story shops with two-story facades. Louis made note of the false building fronts. He had seen them all across America during his train trip; they spoke of the hurry-up American attitude of trying to make something look bigger than it was, without taking the time to build it bigger. The facades, like so much about this country, seemed to be an expression of intent. All the talk was about the future.
“These hills are full of empty shacks that were abandoned when the mines didn’t pan out.” Morris Friedberg gestured at the mountains in the distance. “You see the big one?”
“Mount Saint Helena?”
“Yup. About halfway up, there’s a place that was an actual town just five or six years ago—Silverado. Somebody found silver and gold about eight years ago, and before you knew it, we had, oh, a thousand miners and boardinghouses and hotels. I had a branch of my store up there. But”—he sighed—“the vein run out.” He shrugged philosophically. “If you’re looking for a place above the fog line, that’s where I would go. Rufe Hanson has the tollhouse on the road just below the place. The stage goes there every day.”
“You can get fresh milk from Mrs. Hanson,” Mrs. Friedberg added.
The man sized up Louis. “Rufe was a consumptive, you know,” he said. “The fresh air cured him. He does everything now. Shot a hundred and fifty deer up there last year.”
Louis felt slightly humiliated to be searching for free lodging. There was Fanny’s dignity to be considered. What could he do now, though, except put a good face on the whole enterprise?
“ ‘Squatting’ is such a deliciously unsavory word,” he said when he returned to the cottage. As they sat on the porch swing, he rested his arm on Fanny’s shoulders.
“I suppose somebody still owns those shacks. Probably the mining company,” she said.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to do something mildly unlawful?” Louis teased. “It’s enticing to consider going rent-free into a ready-made house. And it will make up bright as a travel story. It’s so American—roughing it and all that. We’ll call it ‘The Silverado Squatters.’ What do you think?”
“I’ve lived in a ghost town or two. Their charm is overrated,” Fanny said. “But if you are asking, yes, my love, I will camp with you wherever you want to go.”
LOUIS CARRIED TWO light blanket rolls on his back plus a broom that the toll keeper’s wife had pressed on them, while Fanny bore the heavier sack of food and utensils. Following an overgrown footpath, they haltingly climbed up from the road, switching back and forth for a mile or so through brush and pine trees, until they reached the cabins. Three wooden shacks, built just above one another, leaned into the hillside. The floor of the bottom shack was covered with ankle-deep rubbish and mounds of dirt blown there by the wind. Poison oak pushed through the creaking boards. This section had been the assayer’s office. The shack above it held eighteen bunks and was equally filthy.
“It ain’t worth the borrowin’.” Louis sighed.
“I’ve had worse to work with,” she said.
Many of the buildings that once made up a settlement had been carted away to different locations, according to Mrs. Hanson. But there were a couple left, and everywhere, evidence of the mining operation—piles of ore and boards and iron. Not far off, a stream ran through a clearing where they could bathe and wash their clothing.
The first night, they all slept outside. “The Milky Way seems the wrong name for it,” Louis said of the banner above them. “It’s thick as clotted cream.”
In the morning, a white fog roiled below them, covering any evidence of Napa Valley, its patches of farmland, or the forested foothills below Mount Saint Helena.
WHEN THEY RETURNED the following week, they brought a wagon full of tools and supplies. Louis swept out the bottom building while Fanny and the boy spread hay over the two bunks they would occupy. She covered the hay with sheets she’d brought from Oakland, then began more serious homemaking. The bottom shack, which was to be a dining room and kitchen, had no windows or door remaining. She began by cutting into strips a battered boot she found; the strips became hinges for a wood door she hammered together. She fashioned window frames out of scrap boards and covered them with white cotton. Sammy worked as her assistant while she sawed and hammered useless chunks of wood into tables and seats. Inside the mouth of the mine tunnel, she placed an icebox where she stored the milk. Near it, she hung sides of venison and wild duck that Rufe Hanson sold her. Rufe brought up a stove for her to use, and she designated one section of the assayer’s office as a kitchen. Once when he came up, he found her making a cabinet out of logs. “She goes at it like a house afire, don’t she?” Rufe remarked to Louis.
“That she does,” Louis answered admiringly.
Great bubbling stews followed, and corn bread and pancakes; Fanny knew how to cook over a campfire without turning food black and hard, a fact that astounded Louis. At eleven o’clock in the morning and again at three, Fanny served him rum punch topped with whipped cream and cinnamon. “Elevenses!” she would call out in a bad English accent, and he would leave off his writing to down the rum. The food was only part of the health regimen Fanny enforced: She rubbed him down twice a day with oil and ordered him into the sun to rest when he’d been at his writing too long.
Near the remains of a blacksmith’s forge, Louis stacked old boards against a boulder to make a flat wall to lean against as he turned his notes about Silverado into a narrative. The travel story was full of the characters he had met along the way, such as Petrified Charlie, the old Swede who had stumbled upon a forest of ancient trees turned to stone not far from Calistoga. Charlie knew an opportunity when he saw one and soon enough began collecting admission fees to his “museum” in the woods. Then there was Jacob Shram, the vintner who was bent on making his piece of Napa into vineyards worthy of discerning French palates.
“The Scottish enjoy clucking over strange American types,” he told Fanny over breakfast one morning. “They will like Petrified Charlie.”
“Is that so?” she said. “Look at yourself and see who’s strange now.”
Louis glanced down. He had thrown on the nearest warm clothing when he awoke so as to leap into his writing straight from sleep. He wore his long nightshirt, a shawl of Fanny’s, and one of her hats, shaped like a mushroom.
“The hat, darling?” Fanny said. “You’ve got it on backward. The feather is not meant to touch your nose.”
One day the stagecoach brought a pile of letters for Louis forwarded from Oakland to the tollhouse. The most recent letter, dated June 29, was from his mother. It was long and newsy, as if no sorrow had ever passed between them. I hope you both understand that I don’t care for ancient history at all. I’d love to hear about your lives right now, Margaret Stevenson wrote. A separate letter from Thomas strongly urged the newlyweds and Fanny’s boy to come back to Scotland for a visit. The old man would pay for it all.
The remaining envelopes were from Colvin and Henley. Colvin disliked his Amateur Emigrant book; in fact, he questioned whether anything Louis had written since leaving was salable, and urged him to come back to England to live among “his equals.” Henley claimed his language was becoming too American, implied that nothing he’d written in Monterey was worth a damn, and that he was losing his power to make a living as a writer, the longer he stayed in America.
“How dare they hound you that way! Don’t they understand a sea voyage right now would kill you?” Fanny asked in disbelief. “Henley especially. He has been ill himself.” She was spooning lard into a frying pan. “And they are wrong entirely about Pavilion.”
Both men had roundly rejected The Pavilion on the Links. The story he’d written while he was bedbound in Monterey was not a novel but the longest fiction he’d produced so far. Louis was proud of its chilling atmosphere and suspenseful twists.
“They don’t understand,” he said sadly, reaching for the last unopened letter in the pile. “I am just beginning to truly find my method as a writer.”
Joy flooded his body, along with a mighty burst of smugness, when he read the final letter. It was from Leslie Stephen, who wanted to buy The Pavilion on the Links and publish it in Cornwall.
FANNY KEPT SAMMY active fetching groceries from the tollhouse, where he had struck a friendship with the Hansons. Louis gave him lessons in math and Latin in the afternoons, and they worked together on making a pamphlet with the toy printing press Louis and Fanny had bought for the boy some months earlier. Left to his own devices, though, Sammy seemed adrift as he shuffled around the hill with a stick in his hand, looking for something to do. He sometimes climbed up a pile of boulders near the camp and sat for hours on the highest rock. He had turned pudgy of late, as twelve-year-old boys were wont to do before they shot up tall and grew fuzz on their upper lips. Up there on his rock, Sammy looked as bored as a human being could be.
Surely it must be strange, Louis reflected, to go from having Sam Osbourne in his life after a long absence to having Louis Stevenson as his stepfather. How strange to sleep in a makeshift bunk above his mother and this man every night. Truth was, it had been strange for Louis. The boy’s presence in the same sleeping room had put an end to his passionate interludes with Fanny.
“What do you suppose he thinks about this new setup?” Louis asked, gesturing around the humble shack where light peeped through the boards.
“I used to know what he thought on every subject,” Fanny said. She took a candle she’d brought and plugged it into a hole in the table’s top. “But not anymore.”
“Perhaps the boy hardly thinks about us at all. Lord knows, I was that way. When I was a stripling like him, I regarded my parents as ancillaries at best.”
“Were you happy?”
“Supremely. I remember we used to go over east to a fishing village at the end of summer for a long holiday. My cousins would be there. The boys tended to run in a pack, and it seemed that town was created just for our amusement. The stretch of beach was full of hiding places, and there were ruins of an ancient fortress at one spot. We were free, you see, to be hanging about the fishing boats, angling off the dock, or clambering over garden walls to knock on windows.
“There’s one thing we did that I remember vividly. When the evenings began to get dark earlier, in September, and we knew our idyll would end soon, we would go out from our little cottages and meet on the beach. We all wore a tin bull’s-eye lantern on our belt. Our innovation was to go out with a topcoat over the lantern so it was hidden, not a ray of light showing. Why we didn’t immolate ourselves, I’ll never know—you could smell the tin blistering. We’d sally out into the pitch black and, once in a while, flash our lamps. When we bumped into each other, we’d whisper conspiratorially, ‘Have you got your lantern?’ And then we’d go as a group and climb into some boat, bring out our lights, and, as I recall, curse up a storm and tell frightening stories. But the talk was not the thrill of it. To walk in the dark and know you had that secret lantern at your belt …” Louis put his hand on his chest. “Ah, there was the magic of it for a boy.”
“You know, Sammy’s not been in one place long enough to make any good friends,” Fanny mused. “I don’t think he’s gotten his fair share of happy-go-lucky times.”
LOUIS BEGAN BY taking the boy to explore the two mine shafts. With the sun hitting the upper crevice—a great crack between the red boulders—they could look down fairly far into the bowels of Mount Saint Helena. When they put their ears to the crevice, they heard water drops plip-plopping in the dark interior. Not far from the cabins was a blacksmith’s forge to contemplate, plus a great iron chute down the hillside. Next to some railway tracks lay an overturned cart that once carried ore out of the tunnel to a stamping mill below, where tons of rocks were hammered into dust in the search for silver. Louis and the boy spent hours imagining adventurers who had come here to get rich. They pictured men playing poker and drinking whisky around dozens of campfires flickering on the side of the mountain. They imagined miners returning home on the stagecoach, either penniless or with pockets stuffed with sacks of gold.
Late at night by the fire, after Fanny had gone to sleep, Louis told Sammy the tales he had heard in Calistoga, of the Mendocino City dentist who removed teeth with pliers in the morning and robbed stagecoaches in the afternoon; and of Black Bart, a stage bandit who looked like a minister and behaved like a perfect gentleman as he robbed ladies of their jewelry. Louis told every ghost story and every bogeyman legend in his repertoire, sang every sea shanty he knew, and when those were exhausted, he issued Sammy a lantern and went out with him to see what moved about in the darkness.
He recalled aloud a book he’d read in San Francisco about Christmas in the West Indies; in particular, the words “dead man’s chest” stuck in his mind. He couldn’t remember the meaning of the phrase, but he quickly thought of the verse, which he sang out into the black night. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
The boy laughed. “Tell me a pirate story.”
Louis drank down his cup of wine. “Well, let me think on it, Sammy. You would have to begin with the main pirate. Let’s say you name him”—he cast his eyes around for some inspiration—“Silver. John Silver.”
“Does he have a saber?”
“Oh, yes, or maybe a cutlass,” Louis said. He thought of Henley, whom he’d always felt would make a fine pirate in a theatrical, given his wild red beard and barrel chest and general huffing bravado. “Silver is a crafty, shifting sort of fellow. People remember him because he has a peg leg. The other pirates often hear the tapping of the leg on the planks of the ship before they see him.”
“What’s the ship named?”
Louis made a grand gesture with his arm. “The Hispaniola!”
“Are there girls in this story?”
“I have no idea.”
“Very well.”
Across from him, Sammy nodded with enthusiasm. He sat twirling his hair around his forefinger, mouth agape, wide eyes glinting in the light of the campfire. “Tell me more,” he whispered.