in that mixture of two languages and two worlds? He thought again of the famous mystic seated on the porch chair, a man to whom many flocked in order to embrace life anew as well as to make contact with the dearly departed. A year ago he and Lucinda had visited Fountain Grove with open hearts and minds, she quite pregnant, little Jacob perpetually squirming. Searching for new ways to live on this land, the family had spent a friendly but skeptical week among the utopian brethren, and a month later he had written a reflection published in the Sonoma Democrat, a piece in which he’d hoped to strike a thoughtful balance between praise and criticism of the new community above Santa Rosa. Harris had sent a brief letter in rebuttal to the same news organ, damning Jeremiah’s soul to eternal hellfire and kindling a series of witty and alliterative proclamations from Abner Stiles. Now, as Jeremiah asked after the Burns family, he puzzled over the utopian minister’s practice of placing mankind into two categories: his blessed followers (and those with the potential to become such) versus the damned who doubted him. He realized that, among leaders and idealists, Harris was not alone in this segregated view of humanity.
Many had come to the hotel to take the waters, and Jeremiah heard the faraway accents of New York and even Great Britain among more familiar tones in the lobby, and beyond the counter the indecipherable cries of Chinese from those who cooked and cleaned. These were the men brought across the vast Pacific Ocean to build the railroad and dig the mines, a community who lived by and large in their own hamlets nearly devoid of the fairer sex. He had scant personal exposure to the Chinese bachelors, as they were sometimes called; he’d seen squadrons of them panning and digging during the rush of ’49 and had passed through their Chinatowns along the railroad show, and the few that squatted in Sonoma Town, but he’d never made real conversation. He wondered, as he walked along the covered side porch of the big hotel, if there were any here who might believe in, or interpret for him, the phenomenon of his father’s memories inhabiting the little redheaded boy, and nodded to the sudden smile of an elderly Asian man folding laundry in a doorway.
The waters of Sonoma flowed underfoot through the twisted geography, hot and cold, sweet and bitter. There was even the icy poison with its attendant warnings, an arsenic spring piped to a black pool in which arthritics favored a footbath. Mineral water brought from nearby Calistoga fizzed into vessels in the lobby, and there was a carbonated and somewhat salty tonic to be quaffed, tasting strongly of hard-cooked eggs and thought to be especially therapeutic for common illnesses. Most popular was the hot sulfur pool, and here he found the attorney Burns lying back in a voluminous black bathing suit, limbs jutting out like white bones, face red as cooked crab.
The man was drunk, asleep, or passed out. Luck had kept his head on the toweled rock ledge to avoid drowning; the devil had slipped a tin brandy flask into the folded cloth beneath the red cranium and the gaping, snoring nose and mouth. Other bathers, soft, pale city folk, stepped around him to immerse themselves in the healing concrete rectangle, floated with arms outstretched. One stout fellow sat sunk to his chin with a cigar puffing absurdly above the waterline like the stack on a steamboat. “Mr. Burns?” Jeremiah prodded the bony shoulder. “Sir?”
“I don’t think you’ll get the barrister to the bench today,” the cigar smoker said between clenched teeth. His laughter was sandpaper on a plank.
“Mac!” A velvet voice carried across the row of lounge chairs set beside the pool, and Jeremiah saw the long-white-bearded face of the proprietor in the porch shadow. Madison had known him since their youth. “You come for the waters, Mac?”
“Hello, Madison.” The hotel owner had a gentle voice and a general aspect of holiday relaxation, and Jeremiah wondered if this affect came from business savvy or daily immersion in the hot pool. Madison had been a timid, nervous student in the one-room school. “Just swung by to talk to this fellow,” he indicated the drunken attorney, “but I guess it can wait.”
Madison’s mouth turned down in the slightest expression of disapproval as he nodded toward Burns. “Take a pair of bathing togs and have a little soak, Mac. I reckon you have a busy day and could use a little of the waters for your bones.”
“Much obliged, Mad.”
THE POOL was a somewhat rectangular, steaming impression of river rock and concrete set into the hillside behind the main building. It was large enough for a dozen people to wade or float in and so hot that nobody tarried long within its embrace. Jeremiah stepped down the cobbles and floated on his back near the attorney. The various aches and knots in his joints and muscles, especially those emanating beneath the purple scar on his leg, let go of their claims; the sky through its gauze of steam was bright blue with a single cloud. It seemed that he and the cloud floated in like manner slowly eastward, as if the imperceptible wind or the pull of the earth’s rotation moved them as one.
He emerged and lay back on a hotel chair to dry, feeling at once bone-heavy and weightless, as if he were still floating in the sulfur pool. Presently his eyes closed and Teresa spoke to him again, her voice a whisper of Spanish so soft that it seemed like the murmuring of wind in distant trees, a high sibilance that made him think of glass rubbing against cloth. He understood that she was late for something, that they were both late, and that others were probably checking their timepieces and grumbling beside the carriage, but that she still needed to sort through a few things before she was ready to depart. She sat beside him and emptied the contents of a large wicker basket sparkling with jewelry among swaths of clothing, and her voice made that glass-rubbing sound, and he was suddenly aware of being asleep and dreaming near the pool. There was this precarious mind-locale in which he could balance momentarily between sleep and waking, and he wanted to remain there long enough to understand why she was speaking to him, and what she had to say.
Her dark eyes darted back and forth, then suddenly locked into his. “No comprendes, mi esposo?” She touched his shoulder. There was so much sorrow in her visage as she fidgeted beside him on the bed, her hands rapidly and mechanically sorting through garments and jewelry. He saw that she’d powdered only half of her face. He thought of how quickly her mind had worked, her speech and gestures sometimes twice the velocity of those around her, and as the words tumbled from her mouth like the insubstantial foam of a mountain cascade, part English, part Spanish, and perhaps in part the secret language of the dead, murmured so softly it felt as though the sounds originated in some recess within his ear, the hand on his shoulder pulled him entirely from sleep, and he looked up to see the gleaming needles of a Monterey pine and another woman’s face.
“Mr. McKinley?” It was the young Mrs. Burns, leaning above his face exactly as his first wife had in the dream. The red hair was damp and uncovered, combed over one shoulder.
He sat up. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said. “I dozed off.”
Mrs. Burns had dressed in a light pinafore that buttoned at her chin. “Did you come to see my Walter? He’s frolicking in the pool.”
Jeremiah studied the boy, who pushed a hand-sized wooden boat near the stout fellow with the cigar.
“Walter!” she cried. “Come to Mother, Walter!” The boy ignored her. “You see how we’ve spoiled him,” she said. “When he’s off in his own little world like this, he won’t listen to anything but his own fancy.”
She and Jeremiah went over to the pool’s edge, and the woman touched the boy’s shoulder. “Walter, do you remember Mr. McKinley? The man on the farm?”
It took more entreaty from the mother before the lad turned his head just enough to make eye contact with Jeremiah. There his gaze rested a moment, the mouth slack, open, until he turned again toward his wooden bark and nodded.
“Did you want to talk with Mr. McKinley?” she asked. The boy shook his head.
“Well,” Jeremiah said,
