Gypsy

by Lesley Pearse

  She had been making some coffee about seven that morning when John came into the kitchen. She could smell whisky on his breath and judging by his heavy eyes and crumpled, grubby shirt, he’d drunk himself insensible and slept in his clothes.

  She offered him some coffee, but his only reply was a baleful stare which implied she shouldn’t even be in his kitchen.

  ‘There’s no need to be so hostile,’ she said gently. ‘I’m leaving for good in a short while.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  She knew this wasn’t concern for her, only fear she was going to another saloon and might talk about him.

  ‘I don’t think you have the right to ask me that when you’ve been so unpleasant,’ she said airily.

  He gave her another baleful look. ‘Whores like you should be run out of town,’ he retorted.

  Until that moment she’d had every intention of leaving quietly without any recriminations, but calling her a whore changed everything.

  ‘Why, you hypocritical arsewipe!’ she exclaimed. ‘You were lusting after me from the first day I moved in here. I held you at arm’s length for three months, and when I did succumb, you couldn’t get enough of me.’

  ‘You tempted me,’ he whined. ‘You are a Jezebel preying on men’s weakness.’

  Beth put her hands on her hips defiantly. ‘You pathetic snake in the grass,’ she hissed. ‘How dare you try and ease your own conscience by putting all the blame on to me? You are the guilty one because you have a wife and children. I think your poor wife would see it as you taking advantage of me!’

  ‘My wife is a gentlewoman,’ he snapped back. ‘She would understand that I was no match for a whore like you.’

  Beth was outraged. ‘Gentlewoman! What the hell does that mean? That she only lets you fuck her in the dark with her nightdress buttoned up to her neck? No wonder you wanted me — I bet you fulfilled every last little dirty fantasy you’ve ever had. But then there’s every chance someone else has been fucking your wife while you’ve been up here. She might even have found out what it’s like to be loved by a real man, not some sanctimonious weakling.’

  He lifted his hand to strike her, but Beth slapped it away. ‘Lay one finger on me and you’ll regret it,’ she snarled. ‘I could go out on to Front Street right now and raise a posse who would skin you alive. I have friends in this town. Now, get out of my way!’

  He slunk away then like the snake he was, leaving her shaking with anger and a little ashamed that she hadn’t seen what he was right from the start.

  Tearing along at what seemed a great speed, the cold wind prickling her face like tiny pins, Beth did her best to wipe the memory of John from her mind. She did feel a little pride that she’d stood up for herself and had put him in his place — a year or two ago she’d never have been able to do that. But it shouldn’t have come to that, and now she felt bruised and ashamed.

  The snow lay in a thick and pristine white blanket on the river banks, the stumps of all the felled trees making a curious lumpy pattern. But further back, where the hills were too steep for logging, the snow-covered firs looked beautiful. There was no sound but the dogs panting, their paws thudding rhythmically and the swish of metal skids on the snow. She knew Cal was standing on the back of the sledge, but he was so silent, it was as if she was entirely alone with the racing dogs.

  Weak rays of sun were slanting through the clouds, and it was good to leave the noise, ugliness and gossip of Dawson behind.

  It occurred to Beth that she’d never experienced such utter peace before. As far back as she could remember there had always been people and noise all around her. Even up in the mountains on the trail, there had always been people close by. Back in Dawson, she often asked old Sourdoughs who lived miles from their nearest neighbour how they stood such isolation. Almost all of them said they loved it. She had an inkling now why that was. Silence was a great healer.

  ‘Almost there now.’ Cal bent down by her ear to speak to her. ‘In a couple of minutes we’ll be in Bonanza. It was called Rabbit Creek until they found the gold and I bet it was a pretty place then.’

  The dogs veered off from the Yukon into the creek. Within minutes they passed the first of many small snow-covered cabins, smoke rising from the chimneys. Dogs barked as they went by, and from then on others joined in, almost as if each dog was passing the message along that a stranger was coming their way.

  All Beth’s imaginings about the fabled goldfields were set in summer, an idyllic scene with flower-strewn meadows, men in shirtsleeves panning in the water and shady trees overhead. Perhaps it had been that way before the stampede, but the trees were cut down now, and each tiny cabin or shack they passed was surrounded by snow-covered machinery; sluice boxes, picks, shovels and wheelbarrows were strewn around on the dirty, trampled snow. Men who looked more like apes in their heavy coats and hats were bent over fires or shovelling out dirt from holes in the ground.

  ‘This is Ostrich’s claim up ahead,’ Cal shouted to her. ‘See his flag flying? He hoists it up every morning. He sewed it himself.’

  Beth could see a blue flag fluttering, with something brown on it, but it wasn’t until the dogs began to slow down that she smiled as she saw that the brown shape was an ostrich cut out of leather.

  Two big malamutes, one black and white, the other grey and white, came charging down from the cabin, tails wagging and making that woo-woo sound Beth had come to know was typical of their breed.

  ‘They know I always bring them something,’ Cal said, pulling up his dogs and jumping off the back of the sledge. ‘But you give it to them.’

  Beth got off the sledge and took the bag Cal was holding out. It contained two large bones and she gave them to the dogs a little nervously. She must have met thousands of sledge dogs, this breed and huskies too, since she’d started out in Skagway. She admired their strength and courage enormously, but she had never been at such close quarters with them before.

  ‘Don’t be scared of them,’ Cal said. ‘Malamutes like people, and they’ll like you.’

  ‘Howdy, Cal,’ a voice called from the cabin, and an older man with a bushy beard, in a thick coat and matted fur hat, came shuffling down the path towards them. ‘You stoppin’, or are you taking that purty young lady on a jaunt?’

  Beth smiled.

  ‘Her jaunt ends here, Oz,’ Cal said. ‘This is Miss Bolton, the famed Klondike Gypsy Queen. She’s come to see Jack.’

  Before Beth could even shake Oz’s hand, he turned and yelled to Jack to come, his voice so loud it made the sledge dogs howl.

  ‘Well, missy,’ Oz said, turning back to her. ‘I sure do hope you’ve brought your fiddle with you, for I’ve heard a great deal about how sweet you play it.’

  Suddenly Jack was up on a hill above them, running down as though the hounds of hell were after him, whooping as he came.

  ‘I’d say the lad is pleased to see you, missy,’ Oz said with a toothless grin.

  Jack had grown a thick beard, his hair was touching his shoulders, and in mud-daubed clothes and boots he looked just the way all the miners did. But his face glowed with health and he’d lost that strained look he’d had in the last weeks at the Golden Nugget.

  He hugged Beth and spun her round, laughing with delight.

  But her heart sank when Oz asked them into his cabin for a cup of coffee, for she couldn’t see how Jack could fit in there, let alone her too. It was tiny, with a hard-packed dirt floor, a bed made out of old packing cases, a table, stool and another chair, all made out of rough wood. But it was very warm, for there was a tin stove, and Oz laced the coffee liberally with whisky.

  Both Jack and Oz were anxious to hear every detail about the fire. They’d got news of it a couple of days after the event, and Jack said he’d been set to come to Dawson to see if Beth was all right. But then he was told that the Monte Carlo was still standing and she’d been looking after the homeless.

  It was only when Cal got up to go, saying that he’d get her bag from th
e sledge, and then he must be on his way to pick up a load of timber, that Beth realized both Jack and Oz thought she’d just come for the day and would be returning with Cal.

  ‘I had hoped I could stay with you for a while,’ she explained. ‘But I can see there’s no room. So perhaps I’d better go back with Cal.’

  ‘You certainly won’t,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘I don’t live here with Oz. I’ve got my own cabin up on the hill. If you can stand the roughness of it, I’d be more than glad for you to stay.’

  They waved Cal off and, picking up Beth’s valise, Jack led the way round Oz’s cabin and on up the steep hill, past a great deal of snow-covered equipment.

  ‘It’s real good to see you,’ Jack said, his dark eyes shining the warmest of welcomes. ‘I guess something went wrong with you and Fallon? But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  Beth was too out of breath to speak, and she was a little horrified that Jack had heard that there had been something between her and John. She ought to have expected it, though, for no one could do anything in Dawson without everyone hearing about it.

  Jack’s cabin was a log one, much like Oz’s, but larger and newer and the furniture was less crude.

  ‘You can have the bed,’ he said as he stirred up his stove and put some more wood on it. ‘I’ve got a camp bed, that’ll do me.’

  ‘What did you hear about Fallon and me?’ she asked, sitting down on a miner’s string chair.

  Jack shrugged. ‘Just that you’d taken up with him, but I was a bit sad you didn’t feel able to tell me in any of your letters.’

  ‘Do you tell me every time you have a new woman in your life?’ she retorted.

  ‘I would if she meant anything special.’

  ‘Well, Fallon wasn’t special. It was just a bit of—’ She paused, not knowing how to explain without admitting it was just sex.

  ‘A fling?’ he prompted.

  ‘Yes, that’s all it was.’

  Jack nodded in understanding. ‘So who ended it?’

  There was nothing for it but to tell him how it was. But as she began to tell him what John had said after the fire, she saw the funny side of it and began to laugh.

  ‘Oh, Jack, it was so weird. I’d never have put him down as a Holy Joe, and when he came out with all that turning away from wickedness, and saying Dawson was like Sodom and Gomorrah, I couldn’t keep a straight face.’

  Jack laughed too. ‘I sometimes think that all the strangest people in the world end up in Dawson. I always found Fallon a bit of an oddball. He used to come into the Nugget and have just one drink while you were playing. He didn’t seem to have any pals, he never gambled, I couldn’t see what attracted him to the Klondike, or why he bought the Monte Carlo.’

  ‘He never told me why.’ Beth shrugged. ‘But then we didn’t talk much about anything now I come to think of it. He said I was a whore this morning. Isn’t that awful, Jack? But I guess I brought it on myself.’

  Jack came over to her chair and knelt in front of her, his eyes full of understanding. ‘I’d like to go into Dawson tomorrow and beat him to a pulp, but that would only create more gossip. He’s to be pitied if he doesn’t see the difference between a woman who gives herself willingly and one who demands payment.

  ‘Don’t torture yourself, Beth, just put it down to experience. You are still the prettiest girl I know, my best pal and the greatest fiddle player. So the way I see it, you haven’t lost anything but a bit of pride.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have taken up with a married man,’ she said sadly. ‘It was wrong.’

  ‘Now, don’t you come all holy on me.’ Jack laughed and got to his feet, pulling her out of her chair. ‘Let me show you what I’ve been doing before it gets dark, and tonight we’ll get blinding drunk to celebrate you finally making it to Bonanza.’

  Jack led her up some fifty yards behind his cabin. He warned her to take care to walk carefully around any indentations in the snow as they were holes he’d dug. He explained what he was doing.

  ‘The ground is frozen two feet or so down, even in summer,’ he said. ‘So I dig down as far as I can, then light a fire in the hole. That melts the ice, and the next day I shovel out all the slushy dirt, which is what those piles are.’ He indicated huge snow-covered mounds and a fresh one that he’d been digging out when she arrived. ‘They are called dumps.’

  He swept the snow off a long trough with crossbars running all along the bottom. ‘This is a sluice, and when the thaw comes, I’ll shovel the dump into the sluice, then wash it with water. All the gravel and dirt gets washed away, and if I’m lucky I’ll find some gold stuck at the bottom of the sluice.’

  ‘And you give it to Oz?’ she asked.

  ‘Not if I find it here. I’ve taken a “lay“on this bit of his claim. I didn’t pay him any money for it. Our arrangement is that I work for him down there for part of the day, and anything we find there belongs to him. In return I get this.’

  Beth nodded. ‘So have you found any gold?’

  ‘Not yet, that will only be revealed when I start sluicing. Maybe I won’t ever find any. But Oz has found a lot in the last two years. He could, if he wanted, sell this claim for a fortune.’

  Beth smiled. Ever since she arrived in Dawson she’d heard so many fantastic stories about claims along Bonanza and Eldorado changing hands for staggering amounts. Many of the men who originally staked the claim now owned the hotels and saloons in Dawson, or had gone back to the Outside very rich men.

  Yet there were still many old Sourdoughs like Oz who would never sell up. They continued to live in their primitive cabins, going into town once in a while to blow a great chunk of their gold, then back they’d go to the cabin and start again.

  ‘Oz can’t dig much now,’ Jack explained. ‘He’s getting old, tired and achy. He don’t really need any more gold, but he don’t want to give up either. So with me here he’s got what he wants — help, company and the excitement that comes with finding more gold.’

  They walked on then right up the hill to where it turned to woodland.

  ‘I come up here and shoot,’ Jack said. ‘I got a moose a couple of weeks ago and we’ve got enough meat to last till the thaw. It was so pretty last autumn, so many different berries growing and the leaves changing colour, not like down there,’ he said, thumbing in the direction of the view down towards the creek.

  Beth turned to look at the snow-covered scene. ‘It’s pretty now,’ she replied. ‘But I suppose that’s because all the scars of holes, dumps and mining equipment are disguised by the snow. I bet it will look like a junkyard set in a slick of mud come the thaw.’

  ‘Worse. There’s huge ditches cut from the streams to wash out the sluices. It looks hideous.’

  Jack had to light more fires in his holes, so Beth went back into the cabin as it was so cold.

  She didn’t need to ask if he’d built it. His stamp was all over it, from the way he’d fitted the bed into an alcove to the carefully crafted shutters at the windows. She guessed he’d made most of the furniture during the worst weather when he couldn’t go outside. She ran her hand over the table legs, marvelling that he’d whittled the curves and rubbed them down till they were smooth.

  Everything was so tidy too. Plates and dishes were stacked away on the shelves, a shirt hung drying on a rack by the stove, and he’d even made his bed.

  It was while looking at the bed that she saw the pictures. They were pinned to the wall in the alcove and wouldn’t be seen by anyone just coming into the cabin for tea and a chat.

  One was of Jack and herself when they first got to New York, which they’d had taken in a booth down by South Seaport. Beth’s copy was lost when they had to move so hastily out of the flat on Houston Street, and it was good to see it again. Another picture was of her playing her fiddle at the Bear in Philadelphia. She had no idea who had taken it or when, as she’d never seen it before.

  There was one of Jack and her taken at Skagway. That one, she remembered, was taken b
y a man who was compiling a photographic journal of the Chilkoot Trail. She didn’t know how Jack had got a copy of it, for they never saw the man again. Finally, there was one of her playing on the opening night at the Golden Nugget. It was taken by the editor of Dawson’s newspaper, The Nugget, and it appeared in the paper along with an article about her, Jack and Theo, and how they’d lost Sam on the trail. Jack must have begged him for a copy of the picture.

  She felt warm inside at him displaying pictures of her. She thought most miners would have pictures of pretty, scantily dressed ladies, not just an old friend.

  ∗

  ‘Those pictures of yours brought back a few memories,’ she said later when he got back.

  He looked a little sheepish. ‘It’s good to look at them when I go to bed,’ he said. ‘I had the one with the four of us taken in Skagway up there for a while too, but I took it down because Sam’s face made me sad, and Theo’s made me angry.’

  Beth pointed to the one of them together in New York. ‘You look so young and skinny,’ she said. ‘And I look very prim. How we’ve changed!’

  ‘You wouldn’t even invite me up to your room in those days.’ He grinned. ‘And here we are all this time later, alone together miles from anywhere. That’s progress!’

  In the days following her arrival at Jack’s, Beth felt like a tightly coiled spring gradually unwinding. The fire in Dawson, helping the homeless and the unpleasantness with John afterwards must have taken a lot out of her.

  It was good to wake in the morning to absolute silence and to know the day ahead would make no demands on her. Sometimes Jack took her out for an exhilarating ride on the sledge, with Oz’s dogs, Flash and Silver, pulling them. But mostly she read a little, mended Jack’s torn clothes and took walks along the frozen creek or up through the woods, with the dogs happily accompanying her.