Chapter 1
It was a bright sunny day, without fog. He was walking on the cliff at Metini. It was as if he had been a long time gone. Behind him like gray bones in the grass lay the broken wooden posts of the old Russian fort. Ahead of him the curving arm of the land jutted into the sea, combing the sea’s white edge.
His sister, Anna, stood on the cliff, her back to him. He rushed toward her, eager, almost running, glad to see her again. He said her name. But before he could reach her she disappeared.
He stood on the edge of the cliff enduring a grief like a hole in his chest. The grass rippled in the wind off the sea.
Anna’s voice spoke. “The people join the generations together. The people grow like the grass with roots in the mothers and the fathers, with our children in our arms like seed in the grass, and when our children stand here we shall be their roots, and they shall hold their children in their arms like seed.”
His sister’s voice spoke, and the grass rippled in the wind off the sea. The wind grew stronger and stronger until it tore the grass up out of the soil. He saw the roots broken; he saw the blades blown away on the wind. He ran after them but they blew in all directions, and finally he ran aimlessly, his hands up, chasing whatever floating shred was closest. Catching nothing.
As he ran, the sea cliff was gone and the sky was gone, until he was running alone and in no place, around him a vast blackness like under the sea, roaring and empty and cold. And he knew if he stopped he would fall into the cold darkness, and so he went on running, but his legs were heavy, and he was getting tired.
✽✽✽
Mitya opened his eyes. The dream still clung to him. His face was damp from the mist, from the salt spray off the bay. He lay on the deck of the lumberboat, in the prow, and now and then the boat dipped its nose into the bay and cast a sheet of water against the rail. The sun was going down.
He sat up, hunched to keep from bumping his head on the rail. His lips were dry and salty. Behind him he could hear men moving around on the boat, calling out to one another, swearing, laughing. White men. They had let him take passage across the bay because he had helped them split and load the lumber now stacked on the deck, but that did not make them his friends. He settled down with his back to the lumber, looking out over the prow of the boat, across the rough water into the fog.
The edge of his mind still held on to the dream of Metini, and he caught at it, but that drove it off entirely. Only the black void remained. He fought against the sorrow of the void.
On his left now, beyond the stacked lumber and the barge’s rail, loomed the steep, lumpy peak of an island. The water here was much smoother. The lumberboat settled, and behind him a sharp voice called and the white men took in the sail and began to use oars. The boat moved forward in glides and jerks. Mitya sat still in the prow, unnoticed.
He straightened, his skin tingling, as gaunt, towering shapes appeared in the fog before him. He almost shrank down to hide from them. Then he saw they were ships at anchor.
The lumberboat nosed in past a low, flat hull with two masts, bits of rope and canvas hanging off the yards like treebeard. No men walked the deck; the railing was broken and rotting. Ahead the fog glowed in patches and points that flashed and blinked. A schooner rose against this light and slipped silently by, back into the darkness. Its bowsprit was broken off and there were holes bashed in the cabin wall. Masts and yards like stripped trees thrust up into the sky on either side and before him. In ranks the seagulls roosted on the decks and the yards.
The birds squealed and cried, and the waves slapped on the hulls of the ships; old wood groaned. Somewhere a bell clanged with the rocking of the waves. There were no sounds of men from these ships, but now a low hum reached Mitya’s ears, coming from up ahead, vague as the fog made audible.
The lumberboat poked along, its oars grinding and splashing, making a crooked way through the deserted ships. A white man climbed onto the stack of lumber and called out directions to the rowers. They slowed even more, groping through fog that began at the level of the rail and climbed away into the sky, stinking of old smoke. Beneath the dense mist the air was clear and cold and still. In the glassy water a rat as long as Mitya’s arm swam boldly past the lumberboat, reached the slanting hawser of an anchored hulk, and climbed up toward the deck above. As the lumberboat passed, the rat turned, and in the boat’s lantern light its eyes glowed an instant, red as drops of blood.
The lumberboat slid past a sinking ship, its deck even with the surface of the bay, awash with every little wave. The hum in the air was now a roar.
Ahead, through the swaying masts, he saw more lights. The roar grew steadily louder in his ears, a heavy pelt of sound woven of thousands of smaller sounds, voices, footsteps, the clang of pots, the thump of axes, coughing and crying, snoring and laughing, things thrown and things caught, things built and things falling down. He knew this noise, he had heard it before, on the Sacramento, where also thousands of men were gathered, and all their individual doings wound together in one vast place called a city. Ahead of him, on the bayshore, was another city.
Through the fog its lights were appearing, every moment more and sharper, some dull and pale and some hot and bright, spreading out up and down from him, and ahead of him piling up into ribbons and blotches and great glowing heaps. Now he could hear the waves tumbling against the shore. The closest of the lights ranged just beyond, a line of open fires on the beach; against their fluttering orange he saw the shapes of people walking back and forth in a constant hurrying stream.
He knew its name, this place. The other men had called it San Francisco.
Now the lumberboat was butting in toward a cove like a notch in the beach. Directly ahead a crowd stood packed around a great fire, their voices like a bee swarm. The shallows and the dry sand just above the waves were littered with pieces of wrecked boats, with boxes and barrels, with scraps and rags and broken tools.
Beyond the high-tide line was a solid wall of huts, put up of branches and rocks, pieces of boxes and long flaps of cloth. Mitya sniffed, and the stink reached him of burnt meat and bad whiskey. He grunted, his fears shrinking. This was not so different; this was another place like Sutterville, on the Sacramento.
The lumberboat rocked under heavy footsteps; a man paced up past the stacked lumber into the bow and leapt down into the water. He had one of the boat’s ropes over his shoulder, and turning, seeing Mitya, he shouted, “Hey! Injun! Give me a hand here.”
He was pointing across the prow, to the far side, where another rope hung coiled. Mitya took it and stepped off the boat into the water, going in up to his thighs. The bottom was soft and mucky under his feet. He drove through the shallows toward the dry land, lugging the rope over his shoulder. The other men jumped into the water and pushed and heaved the lumberboat after him onto the shore.
“Let’s go! Tote that wood on up here — hey! Clear a path. This here is Mr. Brannan’s wood.”
The lumber was stacked high on the barge’s deck and lashed down tight. The workmen stood around waiting for the ropes to be untied; the boss climbed up onto the stack, feeling for the knot.
Mitya lingered only a moment. He had already gotten what he wanted from these men, the ride across the bay. The roar of the city was in his ears, and the lights dazzled him. He went away quickly into the crowd, away from the shore.