When Charlie Met Polly

Charlie Bemis tugged at the celluloid collar around his neck as he waited for the judge to grant him a private audience. He peered out the tiny window at the people on the dusty street of the mining town outside. A man was arriving on horseback; two others were preparing to leave. Women in bonnets and long aprons carried woven baskets as they stepped carefully around horse-droppings.

“Next!” said the clerk and soon Charlie was ushered into the judge’s chambers, sparsely decorated with a 44-star flag, a map of the Idaho Territory, and a picture of President Grover Cleveland, perpetually frowning at the proceedings within.

Judge Lavoie did a double take. “Mr. Bemis? Didn’t I see you on the witness stand just last month?”

“Yes,” Charlie said, adding “your honor,” before he could stop himself. As one of three saloonkeepers in Warrens, he saw fights break out often—and occasionally end up in the courtroom.

Lavoie pursed his lips. “As I recall, you gave useful testimony. Clear, uncomplicated.”

Charlie modestly ducked his head. “I do my best.”

They shook hands. “Take a load off,” the judge said affably, and the men took seats on opposite sides of the broad desk. Charlie had a high pale forehead and thick dark beard. A scar on his left cheek marred the symmetry. Judge Lavoie sported a gray imperial beard and pince-nez suspended on a cord.

“What brings you here today?” Lavoie held out his hand for the paper Charlie was gripping so tightly. “Incorporating a new enterprise?”

“Marriage license,” Charlie said, trying not to smile.

 “Ah, no need to see me, then! Take it to the Registrar. No need to get a judge involved.” Lavoie chuckled ruefully. “Although you might need me later…”

“Actually… there is a small complication…”

Lavoie leaned back in his chair. “Let me guess: there’s a legal wife back in Connecticut, is there?”

“Ha ha,” Charlie said. “Nope, it’s this blasted Chinese Exclusion Act. My intended is from China, you see, but she belongs here. Polly is a fine, genteel woman. Runs the cleanest boarding-house in town. Decent cook and laundress, too.” The scar on his cheek glowed purple.

“Hmm… but the law’s the law.” With pince-nez in place, Lavoie examined the document.

“This woman saved my life, Judge. I took a bullet to the face a couple of years back. Could not eat with this gol-danged mouth injury.” The judge switched his attention to Charlie’s cheek. “Infection set in; they thought I was a goner… but this little woman, this angel, nursed me back to health. As I lay there, drifting and out of delirium, I swore I would make an honest woman of her.”

Lavoie said gruffly, “The Chinese do not pray to our god.”

“No, but I do. I was the one who made the promise before God.” Charlie’s face grew solemn. “I beg you, help me keep my word.”

Lavoie chewed his lip, contemplating. He rummaged in his desk drawer and withdrew a pipe.

Charlie unbuttoned his suit jacket and took out a pipe, too—and a pouch. “Finest-cut Virginia… Be my guest,” he said, offering the pouch to Lavoie. He reckoned the judge was not averse to accepting tobacco, and with any luck, Charlie reckoned he could build on that pattern. Both men were soon puffing away. They talked about weather. Mining claims. Roughing it. Women. Women roughing it. Then back to the weather, which was more predictable than women.

The clerk knocked: time for the next appointment.

As Charlie got up to go, he pulled a fat envelope from his inside pocket. His heart hammered. The sin of what he was about to do weighed on him. There was a risk it could backfire. But Polly loomed so large in his thoughts he felt compelled to go a step beyond a friendly request. Lavoie seemed like a well-seasoned frontier judge. He had a reputation for common sense. For balance. Not too righteous, not too venal.

Charlie slid the envelope toward Lavoie as he said, “I hope that… please do not misconstrue… if there’s any leeway….” Good Lord, now he was babbling.  He took a deep breath and concluded his petition. “In consideration of Polly’s contribution to this town, to my life, to the future of our country… I hope you will accept this here token of appreciation.” He gave the judge a brief, hard look.

“I’ll think about it.” The judge tapped the envelope and looked away.

*       *       *

A few days later, Charlie invited Polly for a walk along the creek. It was a late August afternoon and the frenzied noises of daylight creatures—the throbbing hum of insects and the flutter of the birds that feasted on them—filled the air. Charlie kept reminding himself to slow down. He was nearly two heads taller than she was, and her long skirts kept catching on the sumac and sedge, the cottonwoods and canary grass that clotted the path. He offered his hand so she could climb over fallen logs, but she took it only when strictly necessary.

 He chewed a toothpick so vigorously it bobbed along under the thatch of his mustache like a rabbit running through sagebrush. How could he put this to her?

“You told me there was sparkle in water,” Polly said. “Show me, please. I have to get back to work—and you do, too.”

“We’ll come to it.” Charlie moved ahead, tramping on and through brush to make her passage easier.

“Maybe you dreamed the sparkle,” she teased. Her laugh—sweet, genuine—was a balm to his ears.

The way became more precarious, with her tiny no-grip lady shoes sliding on muddy rocks. Suddenly they were at the edge of the creek. “I see sparkle,” she hooted. “Fish!

“The rocks have sparkles, too,” he said, scooping some wet gravel into his hand. “I’m seeing enough sparkle that I think we should file a mining claim.”

“Fish is more delicious,” Polly said.

“A mining claim could make you a rich woman.”

“You want to be rich man with mining claim.”

“I do,” Charlie said. “I want us both to make claims, strike it rich, and live happily ever after.”

“A gold mine is a dream,” she said and pointed to the stream, “but this is supper!”

They fell silent, watching small fish at the water’s edge.

At last Charlie said, “Have you thought about my proposal?” Every day he watched her coming and going on the wooden sidewalk. Watched her hanging laundry to dry. And once, with a broom, chasing away some hooligan pissing on the side wall of her boarding house.

Her smile was replaced by a look of pained perplexity. “Charlie, you had a big scare,” she said, motioning to his scar.

“Exactly. And as I lay there for weeks while you tenderly cared for me, I reflected on the path my life had taken.” He snapped a twig.

He recalled the first time he’d laid eyes on her: the foggy day that Hong King, the owner of the King Saloon, had taken her for a buggy ride. How her face, glowing, had unexpectedly appeared from the shadowy depths of the buggy. Weeks later, Charlie was pouring drinks at the bar when Polly, clad only in a muslin slip, had darted into his saloon, and crouched under the counter. Within minutes, a drunken lout barged in, asking Charlie if he’d seen “the girl.”

Charlie had thundered, “Get lost!”

After that, he’d kept an eye out for Polly. She had stirred in him something that he hadn’t felt since his days with Annie, the plucky little sister he’d lost to diphtheria.

Polly showed her gratitude in many small ways: mending a shirt, handing him roast potatoes on hectic evenings, gamely sitting through the smoky haze of poker nights.

“So… how about it, Polly?”

She stood there, trailing a long blade of grass in the stream, apparently focused only on the fish. Finally she spoke, as much to the fish as to him. “I have learned to make my way in the world without marriage.”

“Yes, me too,” he said. “But you know, a journey is better with a friend.”

The muted buzz of life teeming around them was torn by a shriek. A hawk swooped down from the sky and reduced one of the sparrows to feathers and fluff. Polly and Charlie exchanged a look. “And how soon that journey can end,” he said.

Polly showed no surprise. She bore the vagaries of fate with an aura of pleasant efficiency. And no wonder. Over the years, Charlie had come to know the outlines of Polly’s life. How in China, a long drought had made her family so destitute they’d bartered their delicate teen-age daughter for food. How she had come all the way up to Warrens in Idaho Territory, where Hong King, a saloon owner, expected her to be his concubine.

She had somehow charmed that old moneygrubber Hong King, and convinced him to set her up to run a boarding house. In return, she would give him a percentage until she paid off her bride-price to him. The town was booming, she’d doubled the size of her operations and started a laundry, offering employment to widows and other cast-off women.

Charlie wondered how she interpreted the hawk-eat-sparrow drama. Was it an omen of warning? A reminder that she was always at risk? He shifted awkwardly. The fate of his proposal could very well depend on it.

“Do not misunderstand me, Polly. I do not want to marry you and put you in a cage. I just want to help you stay in America. I spoke to a lawyer and he said, with this new law, Chinese persons can get thrown out of America. You must establish legal residency in the U.S.”

“Legal residency?” she said, puzzled.

“Yes,” he said. “You can do so by marrying a U.S. citizen—me.” For comic effect, he stuck his thumbs in his suspenders as he said the last word and waited for her to smile.

They came to a patch of cat-tails in a marshy part of the creek. She tried to break off a plump cat-tail but its stem was too green. With his pocket knife, Charlie cut her the baton and solemnly presented it to her.

“So how about it, Polly? Will you marry me?”

*       *       *

Polly’s fingers wound around the cat-tail stem. She closed her eyes. Felt the warm sun on her face. Breathed deeply of the smell of river life.

Why did others seek to claim her? Her mother, yelling at her to “sit still!” while her feet were bound. The bandits, bargaining two bags of seed for her. Two bags? Oh, the indignity! She swore never to return home. The ship steward, moving her to a private bunk and then selling “night in paradise” to all comers. Threatening to beat her if she told. And then the scare of the brothel in San Francisco, the major fuss she’d had to kick up to make connections to leave that stinking place. “My rich husband in Idaho mining town is waiting for me!” she had screamed. And then the crashing disappointment to find that she would not be a high-status, cherished, well-regarded first wife—or even second wife—for Hong King, but instead his fifth, pitiable, concubine.

She brandished the cat-tail at the demons swirling around her.

Why couldn’t silly old Charlie just catch her a fish and take her home? She had stuff to do! Who was setting the table for dinner tonight? Who was ordering the meat for next week’s meals? Who was supervising the starch pot at the laundry? Her eyes flew open.

And there he was, standing, waiting for her answer.

“Impossible,” she said. “No judge will marry Chinese and white.”

“We’re in the land of opportunity,” Charlie said. “I spoke to Judge Lavoie last week. I even, uh, offered him something to sweeten the deal.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What you mean, ‘sweeten’? Like honey in tea?”

He whispered, “I mean ‘bribe.’ There’s one part on that gol-danged marriage license application that he has to… ignore.”

“Bribe! What, you get us thrown in jail!” In dismay, she slapped the cat-tail against him and the thick end exploded, sending fluff all over. “I like my own bed, Charlie. Not jail bed.”

“I like my own bed, too. Do you see how much we have in common?” Again, that silly smile.

“No, nothing in common,” she protested. “You’re big. I’m small. You like rum, I don’t.”

“Oh come on! I only drink because… well, no decent saloon is run by a tee-totaller. Tell you the truth, I’d like to sell my saloon… I’m sick of the fistfights, the posturing, the profanity, and the payday pandemonium. I would love to come live here—near a river for fishing and panning for gold! Wouldn’t you like to stake a claim and pick up gold nuggets from the stream?” He reached out for her hand.

She let him take her hand—after all, the riverbank stones were wet and slippery. Her mouth watered; she hadn’t eaten fish in ages. “Okay, here is the deal. I give up boarding house and laundry. You give up saloon. We make mining claim. We make house, garden. We get fishing poles.”

“Fishing poles?” Charlie’s face split into a grin and he gently squeezed her hand. “I will take that as a ‘yes.’”

*       *       *

After a tasty dinner of venison stew, Judge Lavoie helped Marie collect the crockery. “Leave the washing-up until later,” he said. “It’s our anniversary and I have something for you.”

Marie went to the wood box and came back with a cloth drawstring bag. “I have something for you, too.”

She gave him beaded leather moccasins. “I made them from the elk hide my brother gave.”

“Mm, comfort,” he said, easing his bunioned feet into them as he watched her open the small box he gave her.

She looked at the necklace a long moment.

“You don’t like it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought it would be fun to try something different. It’s what rich Europeans wear. Diamonds.”

“I like them, Emil. Just don’t know what I can wear them with. They look like sparkle in a stream.”

Taking the bribe seemed easy at the time, but now Lavoie had second thoughts. He wished he hadn’t been so weak. Would Bemis complain about “corruption of justice”?  As the husband of a native Tukudeka woman, from the local band of Shoshone, Lavoie was fine with interracial marriages. Poor old Charlie would be fit to be tied when he found out.

The End

HISTORICAL NOTE

This is a fictionalized account is based on the real-life story of Polly Bemis, one of the first Chinese-American pioneers in Idaho Territory. According to Wikipedia, Polly was born in China in 1853, smuggled into the US, and sold as a slave in San Francisco at age 19. She was transported to a mining town to become a rich man’s concubine. Later, she ran a boarding house and laundry there. She ultimately married and settled down near Salmon River, Idaho, with former saloonkeeper Charlie Bemis, whose life she saved twice.