I ain’t got long to stay here
Aunt Emeline’s hand dropped back down onto the yellow quilt, and all Isabelle heard was the steady drum of the rain beating on the roof. She sang the last stanza of the spiritual softly, the trumpet sounding in her own soul.
The Lord wasn’t calling her away yet, but it was time for Aunt Emeline to go home.
Chapter 20
Panama
April 1854
The parrots on the isthmus were driving Victor mad. Their screeching grew louder as the hollowed-out logs—bungoes—floated up the Chagres River. Tormenting him.
Parrots screeched, and the monkeys chattered like a rabble of women, following their bungo through the jungle as twelve of the ship’s passengers skirted around rapids and branches and the hulls of boats abandoned in the water. Another bungo followed them with their luggage.
Patience, he tried to tell himself. Soon they would be on another ship, cruising toward California. In just a few weeks, he would be in Sacramento City.
Three days ago, the ship from Boston had anchored far off the shore of this godforsaken wilderness. He and the other passengers had climbed down a rope ladder into a skiff that brought them to a muddy village, where they’d secured transportation across the sixty miles of isthmus.
Though a bungo was hardly a decent source of transportation. If he could carry his belongings, he’d walk through the jungle instead of creeping up the river in a log.
The first day of their river journey, the passengers around him had talked endlessly about the spectacular greens in the foliage, of the colors on the birds that flew down the river before them, but the fascination was long over for all of them. They’d been promised a two-day journey by river, but the crew didn’t seem in any hurry to rush their trip.
Two half-naked natives—one in front of the boat and one behind him—dragged, towed, and sometimes appeared to row their passengers around the curves in the narrow canal. Mosquitos swarmed around Victor’s head, biting his neck. The sun burned his hands.
He’d purchased a ridiculous-looking hat called a Panama to keep the sun off his head, but the rays found every other spot of bare skin and scorched it. The makeshift canopy over them, made of dried leaves, did nothing to keep the sun off him either.
He’d packed swiftly back home for a trip in the snow, not for a journey across this stifling country. If he were back at his plantation, he’d strip down to his trousers like the natives. Then roll his pants up to his knees.
Yesterday he’d tried to cool off by dipping his hand into the river, but one of the crew slapped him with a long pole. Victor had started to rebuke the man until he pointed at an ugly creature sunning itself on a rock, its beady eyes watching their boat.
A crocodile.
The sole woman passenger shrieked, but Victor just stared back at the animal. Until then, he’d only seen pictures of crocodiles, and none that he remembered did justice to this creature. Thorns peaked across its armored back, and its checkered gray scales blended into the rock. Sharp teeth were curved like a dozen sickles outside its mouth and bent into a strange sort of smile.
Victor had smiled back and then dipped his fingers into the water again.
An hour later, the boat floated out from the muddy banks and noisy canopy of the jungle. The land beside the river flattened as they drifted beside a field of sugarcane, the shoots emerging from the morass. He could almost taste the sweetness of sugar in his mouth.
Tonight they were supposed to arrive in Panama City, where there were restaurants and American hotels. After three nights sleeping on a hammock, covered in scratchy mosquito netting, he would rent a decent bed. Then he would eat pork loin, perhaps, or some sort of mutton. A nice cream or pie for dessert.
He turned to talk to the man sitting on the bench behind him. Levi Brooks, the agent of a bank in San Francisco, had made this trip three times already to escort shipments of gold to New York. “Are we almost to Panama City?” Victor asked.
Levi chuckled. “Hardly.”
Victor stiffened. He hated people laughing at him. “When will we arrive?”
“In another day or two, we’ll get to the trail,” Levi said.
Victor disliked the man, but he needed more information. “What sort of trail?”
“Didn’t they give you a travel pamphlet when you booked passage?”
“Of course.” He’d packed it into the leather portfolio now clutched in his lap. “But I thought this river went all the way across the isthmus.”
“We have to take an old mule trail over the Continental Divide before we go down into Panama City. You can rent a mule, but I don’t recommend it. Too many of them fall off the cliffs and ...” He stopped.
“I’m not afraid of a mule trail,” Victor said.
