The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  Jemimah had to admit his actions at present were less admirable. Dressed only in baggy jeans cinched with rope, Hosea was bent at the waist, balancing on the rocks of the riverbed in a wide stance, with his arms raised as though preparing for flight. The water rushed around his knees, soaking rolled cuffs. He appeared blissfully fascinated by the shimmering current for minutes at a time until he suddenly swatted at the water with one hand. Accomplishing nothing beyond creating a splash, Hosea cocked back to his ‘ready’ position.

  ‘He thinks he is a bear,’ snapped Berenice. ‘If he thought he was a moose, I swear I’d hang the wash on him to dry.’

  Hosea could hardly have been expected to hear his mother’s complaint above the flush and gurgle of the river; nevertheless, he raised his head towards the bank and shouted genially, ‘In accordance with nature!’

  Jemimah hoped to dispel her nervousness of the odd situation by appealing to practical matters. ‘Aren’t your feet cold?’ she called.

  Hosea shook his head vigorously. Only after he stopped did he answer, ‘No!’

  Of course my damn feet are cold, Hosea thought, still smiling broadly. Aren’t we in Alaska? Though Hosea knew nothing of the world outside the valley save what little he’d read in a few books, he understood his home state was renowned for its cold. Maybe rivers in the lower forty-eight run warm in summer, but not here! Hosea turned his head away from the women and puffed staccato breaths. As unaffected as he pretended to be, in truth he was not sure how much longer he could endure the chill. But he was determined to endure the pains of his pretence so that he wouldn’t have to endure life in the valley for the rest of his days.

  Hosea looked again to the water. Miraculously, a foot-long silver-green fish bobbed to the surface in seeming slow-motion, pausing as though curious. Hosea knifed his hand into the water and hit the creature broadside. The fish flew toward the bank in a wobbly arc before smacking Berenice flat on the chest. She threw her arms up and quacked in revulsion. The fish flopped at her feet. She glared at her son.

  Jemimah would laugh about it soon (to herself and in private), but just then she was too amazed by Hosea’s success. ‘My goodness,’ she whistled.

  Hosea dug his nails into his palms to keep from laughing. He stood tall and proud, frigid toes forgotten. ‘Did you get it, mama?’

  Berenice deliberately burned the fish and imagined it a punishment to make Hosea eat the whole thing. He thought it was the best meal he’d ever tasted.

  After dinner Hosea went walking with Hannah. The inviting fragrance of summer drew out several young couples that evening. The chaperones made a show of following the youths out of town, only to stop and sit in weather-beaten chairs hidden behind a small clump of scraggly trees at the fork of the various narrow paths, where they would smoke their pipes and joke of bygone, similar, unfortunately chaste promenades.

  Hosea was surprised that Hannah not only did not defer but proposed the direction of their venture—over the footbridge and up the path towards the seldom-used road, beyond which began the slow rise of a low mountain ridge’s frozen swell. As they walked, Hosea surmised the choice may have derived from the necessity of frequently offering his hand to assist her along the slightly steeper and craggier trail. He smiled at the ruse and at the blush kindled by his smile. Hosea’s young heart thrilled at her company, at the clamping of clammy hands and the shy glances between them. He didn’t know exactly what he thought of Hannah. He liked her, but she was part of the town that frustrated him. He sometimes thought, in weaker moments of his conviction, or in stronger moments of his desire, that he could stay and be happy with her, but those moments never lasted. Would she leave with him if he asked? Would he ever truly consider asking?

  They strolled through the field, talking softly of the colours surrounding them. Up from the verdant mossy carpet had sprung the prickling knee-deep shrubbery and willowy hip-high flowers. Small red and yellow-green leaves flickered in the slight, valley breeze, while courses of orange and vermillion flowed in all directions, competing tufts of ubiquitous fireweed reaching hundred-fingered shoots up from the evergreen scrub, topped with cones of magenta flowers, tiny bells. Hosea remarked, not for the first time, how the short summer demanded every plant grow with controlled intent, compelling every leaf and flower to form quickly and remain small that they might spill in multitudes across the land in their short day. Hannah teased Hosea, not for the first time, that, given his ever-expanding frame, he seemed to violate his rule of Alaskan growth, and perhaps he didn’t belong there at all. Hosea’s smile masked contemplative agreement. They walked on with their escort of mosquitoes in a halo around them, held at bay by liberal dabs of Nootka cedar oil.

  Hannah’s heel got stuck in marshy soil. Hosea jovially grabbed her waist and lifted her towards him. She gasped and flung her arms around his neck. He felt her breath on his mouth, felt the burgeoning bloom of her flesh against his chest. She looked at him with anxious acceptance of the unspoken mutual dare passed between them. Hosea watched her eyelids droop as she leaned forward. In the moment of their kiss, Hosea felt he could stay in the town forever and be happy—he could not, in fact, imagine being unhappy ever again; if one moment could last forever, how many forevers could be strung together in a lifetime?

  And suddenly she was gone, out from the red-rainbow brush, springing lithely up the slope and up onto the plateau. She laughed at his slack face before she turned and skipped out of sight. Hosea clambered after her. By the time he stepped on the tufted road, she was stretching to touch the top of a sharp basalt boulder in the tumbledown at the base of the mountain slope on the other side. Hosea was all the more enamoured by the giggling girl; she was like him, exploring the border—and perhaps, he hoped, daring to venture beyond.

  ‘Do you think this is as big as one of the tower stones?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘No. They are even bigger,’ Hosea said, though he didn’t know for sure. He’d only seen the dark shapes of the counterweights pass between the slats of the tower and was never able to measure them in their entirety.

  ‘Did they come from right here?’

  Hosea pointed. ‘My mother told me they came from the cluster closer to town. They rolled them right down the slope.’

  ‘How do you think they did that?’ Hannah asked, though it was clear to Hosea she had no real interest in the subject, and was asking only to talk. She didn’t wait for his reply before crossing behind the boulder and scrambling up several smaller rocks that resembled steps strewn in the dirt. Hannah twirled on a slab. Hosea was entranced by her humming. Suddenly she stopped and gazed coyly at Hosea. ‘Do you know what I think?’

  ‘No. What do you think?’

  She nodded in the direction of the ‘forest’, actually only a loose congress of several stands of pine and fir trees clustered towards the mouth of the valley. ‘Do you have a knife? I think we should carve our initials in a tree-trunk!’

  Hosea looked at the screen of green needles and grey shadows beneath. Was she serious? How far did she mean to roam, or how far did she . . . mean to go? He hesitated, and quickly grew angry with himself for his equivocation. Wasn’t this the spirit that similarly inspired him? Almost brusquely he grabbed her hand, barked, ‘Let’s go!’ and began to trudge to the trees.

  They soon passed between the scraggly black spruce sentinels at the rim of the wood. They bounced their fingers on the springy spines of the larches that dominated their more willowy neighbours. But the barks of these trees would not serve their purpose. They strolled on towards the half-dozen paper birch that grew in an unusual clearing among the larch. Hannah raced ahead and laid her hand on one thick, crooked trunk.

  ‘This one,’ she said, the decision as instant and eternal as the emotion the young lovers shared.

  Hosea joined her and touched the trunk just above Hannah’s hand. Her choice was inevitably perfect. He pulled away a peeling white strip of bark to expose the greyer new flesh beneath. He pulled his knife from his pocket and opened the bl
ade.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Hannah said.

  Her curious expression halted Hosea just as the tip of his knife bit the wood. He followed her gaze. Close to the edge of the birch-clearing, there was what appeared to be a misshapen tree. Hosea felt oddly about the short tree; the repulsion and attraction of danger and abnormality seemed to emanate from it. He chuckled lightly when Hannah drew near him as though she felt the same way.

  ‘It just seems strange, that’s all,’ he said.

  ‘No, I think there’s something wrong about it,’ she replied.

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘No! Let’s go back now. I don’t like it.’

  He smiled at her, his usual smile, but imbued with earnest comfort to her worry. He walked closer to the tree. It was a paper birch only slightly taller than he, and young enough that he could still fit his hands around at its thickest. But the oddness of its disposition became clear to Hosea when he was still several paces away. The stubby tendrils that curled into the air weren’t the trees branches, but its roots. The tree had been torn from the earth and reinserted upside-down.

  Far away, an iron bell clanged repeatedly.

  ‘The All-In bell!’ Hannah cried, ‘We have to hurry back!’

  ‘We have an hour before they put up the night,’ Hosea said, ‘We have plenty of time.’

  ‘Please, Hosea, let’s go!’

  Hosea was disappointed in Hannah. His hopes for her seemed suddenly ridiculous. He knew she would never leave and he would never be contented to stay in the town with her. He felt foolish and misled by his heart. He wasn’t angry at Hannah, but he pitied her, and he knew he could never build a love on that foundation.

  ‘All right,’ he capitulated, and tried to smile empathetically.

  They moved quickly out from the wood and hurried back over the road to the rugged path through the fireweed. The hem of Hannah’s dress became clotted with black earth kicked up in their haste. One of the elders, Tom Cooper, waited alone for them, the others having apparently gone into town with the last of the other young couples. Cooper watched them approach with a flat smile under knowing eyes; he knew they’d receive any due scorn from their parents and was simply relieved to have them back in time.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he ushered.

  Berenice and Jemimah waited just inside the Town Ring. In truth, both had reason to be happy their children tarried long together: Jemimah could think of no better match for her daughter and Berenice should have been happy that someone might devote themselves to keeping her fool child alive despite himself. But with the responsibility of parenthood comes the implication of disapproval, and Hosea and Hannah hung their heads in quiet supplication as they split and stood with their mothers between them.

  ‘One of these days you’ll get caught out there for sure,’ Berenice muttered sharply at her son. ‘You’ll get sun-sick and that’ll be that.’

  ‘Is father on the pull-line?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘You know he is,’ Jemimah replied. She didn’t like to speak of her husband around Berenice, who had always to do without.

  ‘Can we go watch him?’

  Berenice anticipated Hosea’s request to accompany them (little did she know he had no such intention) and barked, ‘Not you. Reuben’s in bed with fever; you’ll need to help Samson with the lamp-lighting.’

  Hosea sighed. He knew Samson needed no help; lighting the street lamps would take even a single man no more than fifteen minutes. He was glad for the excuse not to go along with Hannah and her mother, but preferred to go straight home so that he could be alone with his thoughts. Hannah, for her part, mistook Hosea’s sigh for forlornness, and, much as she would have at any other time received the expression gratefully, she thought he should be more troubled by the chasm that she was sure had suddenly opened between them. She wondered how their feelings could be so unattuned. They parted without a word.

  Samson had anticipated no help and so had begun his work already by the time Hosea caught up with him. As he had only the single wick with him, he told the youth not to trouble himself and dismissed Hosea home. Hosea arrived at the door of the cabin he shared with his mother when he heard the iron bell ring again, this time striking slowly and deliberately twelve times to announce the oncoming of night.

  Naturally, daylight permeated the town nearly without cease during high summer. Only for a few hours a day did the twilight sun brush behind the far south mountain, an event no one in town ever saw occur.

  The town was built on a plateau above the river bed, opposite from the road. A cluster of some thirty small houses was encircled by an enormous ring, outside of which sat the barns and other utility buildings. In the town square stood a nearly featureless wooden tower, a huge scaffold covered in lath with a ladder fastened to one side. Two thick trunks stood up like horns from the top of the tower in parallel; the tops of the trunks were shaped to concave curves and sanded smooth. A thick coil of rope ran down from the tower to a point on the Town Ring where it was tied to the cover between two other lines. One ran immediately through an eye screwed fast into the ground to a large spool nearby where the bulk of it was wound; the other ran up to the tower where it rested in the groove at the top of one trunk before going down through another guide eye at the opposite side of town to an empty spool.

  Before the last toll of the iron bell died, Hosea heard the shouts of ‘Hup!’ begin, calls used for timing and encouragement between the men working the spools and those on the tower. Inside the tower, two boulders bound with heavy rope were connected through a pulley system to act as counterweights. The heavier counterweight was unlocked from its position at the top of the tower, pulling the cover up from the Town Ring. Gravity provided much of the needed energy, but the men at the full spool and the empty spool were still tasked with hard labour, braking and winding respectively. Why oxen were not employed towards these purposes was long lost to memory—though likely due to the smell of the oxen being trapped in town overnight—but the men took it as a point of pride that it was their exertions and not those of lowly animals that accomplished the task. The cover began to rise, a vast hemp canvas tarpaulin supported by a framework of half-circle ribs hinged at the middle of the Town Ring. The counterweight plumbed into a deep well dug beneath the tower as it pulled the first rib of the cover to vertical. Here the men atop the tower had to guide the slackened spool ropes hand over hand so that they would stay on course in the grooves on the trunks. Also at this point began the hardest work. Though the smaller counterweight assisted the effort, as did the weight of the cover itself coming over the balance point, still the men winding the ‘night’ spool were tasked with not only pulling the cover home but also raising the heavier counterweight back to its apex. The shouts grew loudest as the cover lowered before erupting in a brief celebration as it fell into place on the track of the ring and both spools and counterweights were locked for the evening.

  The town was dark, though it was not hard to see outlines in all directions. A diffuse glow bled through the weave of the fabric to assist the intermittent lamps that Samson had lit. Hosea looked up at the underside of the cover and traced, as all in town had many nights before, the patterns of the archaic runes painted broadly across the span of every section of canvas, the protective symbols that kept the dreams of pale night from their sleep.

  Hosea heard the satisfied calls between the men as they separated and each went to his home, as well as a smattering of tamer farewells from the few women still out. When he saw his mother approaching, he hurried in before her.

  Raising the dome initially cooled the town with shadow, but as time went on the temperature would climb. The canvas would warm in the sun, eventually transferring heat to the close air trapped beneath, which would not diffuse again during the brief dark. Because of this, once houselights were extinguished (consensually within an hour of ‘raising the night’) on warmer evenings such as this, shuttered windows were left open and curtains tied back. It was this circumstance that enabled Berenice
to notice the small shaft of light stealing through a hole in the dome. She growled with disapproval. She thought one of the men should have noticed the flaw when the cover was closed. She hated small lapses in vigilance and mistakes others might consider trifles. She knew all too well the insidious reach of the light and the consequences of even a small opening in the dome. Berenice got up and saw the illuminated patch fell harmlessly in the street, but she was not pacified. As the sun moved, the white sliver would move as well, and who knew where it might roam? She wanted to raise an alarm, but she knew the other townspeople would be angry with her and berate her for causing an ‘unnecessary’ panic. Fine, she thought, let them get what they get. She memorised the location of the hole—she knew she would be commended for diligence in preventing a larger rent just as she knew she would be chastised for disturbing the town’s slumber—and lay back in bed.

  Dumb boy, she thought of Hosea. Born of sun and destined to it. One of these days he’ll be left out at night or sleep in the day and he’ll get sun-sick for sure. Her eyes passed back and forth across the featureless ceiling. Her criticisms of her son, justified as she felt they were, pricked at her until feelings bloomed both of fondness and of protective worry, each fuelling the other in turn. ‘What am I supposed to do about him?’ she whispered.

  No reply came. Minute dragged after minute. Berenice frowned. If he wasn’t so dumb he wouldn’t keep me up at night. I have to sleep. I can’t sleep. I shouldn’t let myself get worked up and worry so. She began to feel warm. She threw back the thin blanket and top-sheet covering her. She worried that she had missed her window of opportunity to fall asleep, that the warming night would now keep her awake until morning. Then where will I be? Her left wrist felt especially warm, so much so that she looked at it. She gasped in horror and leapt up. Pulling the covers from her bed, she backed towards the darkest wall and clutched the covers up under her chin. The small patch of light from the hole in the dome had found its way into her room and onto her bed. It shone on the drab sheet, no larger than a hand.