Ghost Canoe

by Will Hobbs

“It’s not that much of a trick to make chicken soup.”

  Dolla Bill’s hollow eyes went wide. “You like to see a new trick?”

  Nathan shrugged. He wasn’t sure he did.

  Dolla Bill removed one of the chickens from the cage and shut the door on the other. Then he placed the chicken on the counter. It clucked nervously, walking to and fro, keeping one eye or the other on Dolla Bill, who had turned his head sideways, the way a chicken would do, and was staring with one eye and then the other at the chicken.

  After a minute of this, the chicken dropped dead on the counter.

  Nathan was stunned. “How did you do that?”

  Dolla Bill was wide-eyed. “Not a trick!” he exclaimed.

  “You said it was new. Where did you learn it?”

  Dolla Bill laughed. “From Kane!”

  Nathan was thinking as fast as he could. “Was Kane in the circus, too? Did you know him from before?”

  “Met him here!” Dolla Bill cackled.

  “One of those knives you were juggling yesterday…,” Nathan said evenly. “It had some kind of ship engraved on the handle.”

  Nathan was watching Dolla Bill’s hollow eyes for the slightest reaction.

  “Clipper ship,” Dolla Bill said, with no hesitation at all.

  Nathan was surprised by Bill’s complete lack of wariness, but he didn’t pause to think what it meant. He was prepared to ask certain questions, and he felt confident he could ask them without arousing suspicion. As long as everything he was about to say was the truth, Dolla Bill wouldn’t get suspicious. “I was hoping it was a clipper ship, and not a steamer,” Nathan explained. “My father used to be the captain of a Yankee clipper, and I was thinking what a wonderful birthday present it would make for him. How much does it cost?”

  The clerk wagged his tatooed head. “Not for sale.”

  Nathan looked disappointed. “No? But why not?”

  “Kane’s own knife.”

  Nathan was surprised, deeply surprised. No wonder Dolla Bill hadn’t been wary about the knife. Dolla Bill didn’t even know one had been stolen from the store!

  He tried his best not to let his surprise show. He knew instantly what this revelation meant, but he told himself not to think about Kane, not until later. “Well, could I at least take a look at it? I’d sure like to see it. Maybe I could talk Kane into selling it to me.”

  “It’s not here,” Dolla Bill said with a shrug. “Keeps it at his house. I’ll ask him for you.”

  Suddenly Nathan realized he’d gone too far. He’d thought he was being so careful, but he hadn’t seen this coming. He’d made a serious mistake, an enormous mistake. “Oh, don’t bother,” he told Dolla Bill as lightly as he could. “On second thought, it’s not such a good idea for a birthday present, since my father would never use it anyway. A clipper ship inside a bottle, or something like that, would be a better idea.”

  Nathan made his purchases without acting hasty. He kept hoping that Kane wouldn’t walk in, but then he did. Kane was right there in the doorway, looking from him to Dolla Bill and back. It was hard for Nathan to look Kane straight in the face and act normal. The man was so powerful. The features of his face were hard as flint. Nathan could see that now.

  Kane took another look at Nathan. “Close the store,” he ordered Dolla Bill. “Let’s go fishing.”

  Nathan held his breath, hoping Dolla Bill wouldn’t mention the knife to Kane. In the several minutes it took for Dolla Bill to make change and for Nathan to leave the store, he didn’t.

  From a distance, Nathan watched as the two of them launched one of the fishing canoes and paddled into the bay toward Koitlah Point. How long could he hold his breath, hoping Dolla Bill wouldn’t tell?

  16

  He Is with the Whale

  Lighthouse George was walking again. Nathan sat with him down by the bay.

  Nathan’s mother had told him to keep talking to Lighthouse George, even if George wasn’t talking back. “He might be hearing voices from a great distance,” she’d said. “It’s as if he’s sitting on the bottom of the ocean—that’s how I picture it. If you keep talking, he might recognize the sound of your voice, and find his way back up to the surface.”

  On one of Nathan’s visits to the longhouse, he’d heard Young Carver give Rebecca a different explanation: “He is with the whale.”

  “Is that where you are?” Nathan asked Lighthouse George, whose gaze was fixed on the sea. “Are you with the whale?”

  His fishing partner did not reply. He seemed so content looking out at that carpet of blue-green water sparkling with white.

  Nathan was anything but content. Like twin chemicals concocting poison, dread and terror were welling up inside him, and he was feeling sicker by the moment.

  “I remember how you said there’s a little bit of good inside Dolla Bill,” Nathan said to George. “I don’t think that’s true about Kane. It was him. I’d bet anything. He’s been here all along. It was Kane in the cave! He must be laughing at me! He paddled away, but not when we thought, not when he took the canoe from Dolla Bill. He didn’t leave until after his second robbery, when he stole Bim’s money. Bim was right that someone was spying on him.”

  George sat, impassive. Nathan imagined that his words made as little sense to George now as the language of the Makahs made to Nathan. Still, he wanted to finish. Talking was helping him to think.

  “Kane must have escaped with Bim’s money in that second canoe, the one that disappeared from the village. He probably canoed along the coast all the way to Port Townsend. Then he came back all cleaned up on the Anna Rose, pretending to be a gentleman, and bought the trading post with Bim’s own money!”

  “Klo-she,” Lighthouse George said placidly, his eyes still fixed on the sea.

  “I know,” Nathan responded. “It’s good. The sea is good. I wish you could tell me what it means that Kane and Dolla Bill have gone somewhere now in one of the canoes. They left a couple of hours ago. They were looking for sla hal pieces before; what are they after now? Kane’s after something—that’s why he never left after he murdered the captain of the Burnaby! That’s why he bought the trading post. He’s a murderer, George. What’s going to happen to me if Kane finds out I know about that knife?”

  Nathan’s thoughts were leading in more and more fearful directions. He knew he had to make himself think about something else. “Let’s go see how Young Carver is coming along,” he said, and stood up. Lighthouse George stood up as well and followed him to the village creek, where the whaling canoe was nearing completion.

  George enjoyed watching Young Carver work. “Klo-she,” he said to Nathan.

  “Do you remember Young Carver visiting you in the longhouse, and dancing and singing over you?”

  George tilted his face up to the sun, and said, “Klo-she.”

  Young Carver was working in a sitting position inside the canoe. With a hand adze, chip by chip, he was thinning the sides of the hull. Think about how the canoe is made, Nathan told himself. Think about only that.

  He remembered how, in the weeks before George had been hurt, he had figured out the canoe maker’s method of achieving a perfectly uniform thickness. Young Carver had drilled dozens of small holes all the way through the hull. Then, from the outside, he’d tapped cedar pegs, all the same length, into the holes. Returning to the inside of the canoe, the holes were his guide as he chipped away wood. When he met the end of a peg, he knew to chip no farther, and he split out the wood between one peg and the next. That’s what Young Carver was doing now, stripping lengths of wood between his markers.

  Young Carver never spoke to anyone when he was working on the canoe, so Nathan wasn’t surprised that the elder with the wispy gray beard didn’t acknowledge George and him sitting only a few yards away. The canoe maker was one of the few Makahs who spoke some English, but he rarely used the white man’s language. Young Carver had spoken for the first time in English to Nathan in the longhouse, when Nathan had been sitting day af
ter day with George.

  Nathan made himself think about the world of his family, uncontaminated by Kane and fears of Kane. Would the doctor come soon and help his mother get better? Could his mother get well enough for them to return to Tatoosh? Wouldn’t the storms on Tatoosh only make her worse and worse? How long could his father live apart from his family?

  Just then Nathan realized that Young Carver had paused at his work and was looking at him. Not at Lighthouse George, who was seated next to him, but at him. “Welcome early tomorrow,” he said in English.

  “Good,” Nathan said, though he was confused. “Thank you.”

  “Bring canoe paddles, and bring him, too,” Young Carver said, with a nod of his head toward Lighthouse George. “Sometime something make him remember.”

  Late in the afternoon Nathan walked Lighthouse George home to his longhouse. As they parted, Lighthouse George studied Nathan’s face, trying hard to remember. “It’s Yaw-ka-duke,” Nathan reminded him. “Tenas Mac.”

  “Tenas Mac,” Lighthouse George said, trying hard. But he couldn’t remember.

  Nathan went straight to his mother’s cottage, without a glimpse of Kane or Dolla Bill. Inside, he felt safe. He wished he could tell her everything, but he thought he shouldn’t. Her health was much too fragile. He should save it for his father.

  No sleep. It wasn’t possible.

  In the morning, without a glimpse of Kane or Dolla Bill around the trading post, he went to George’s longhouse and brought him to the place up from the beach and beside the creek where Young Carver was making the whaling canoe. Fifteen men were helping today. This was highly unusual. Nathan set aside the two canoe paddles he had brought from the longhouse. He didn’t know what they might be for. He was happy to be among so many Makahs. He felt safe, for the time being.

  Some of the men were carrying water from the creek, a canoe bailer full of water in each hand, and pouring it into the canoe. Young Carver and some others were selecting stones from the creek bed and placing them in four small fires that had been built not far from the canoe.

  Nathan helped to carry water to the canoe while Lighthouse George watched the men bring rocks to the fires. When the bottom of the canoe had a foot of water in it, Young Carver signaled that it was enough. Men started bringing the superheated rocks to the canoe, on poles forked at one end, and dropping them into the canoe. Nathan helped with the stones. Every time one was dropped into the canoe, the water hissed and gave off a burst of steam. The rocks glowed red for a second or two, and then the cold water quenched their fire.

  For several hours, red-hot stones were brought from the fires, and cold ones were retrieved from the canoe and returned to the fire. Finally the water in the canoe reached the boiling point, and clouds of steam rose all along the length of the canoe. A young boy was sent to get more help. Suddenly everyone who’d brought a canoe paddle picked it up and took it to the canoe. Nathan grabbed the two they had brought and gave one to Lighthouse George, who was just as confused as Nathan. In imitation of the other men, they stood at the side of the canoe and splashed the boiling water up against the insides of the canoe’s hull.

  Billowing clouds of steam engulfed them, and so did the pungent scent of wet cedar. The new men who had come to help kept bringing the fiery stones and retrieving the cold ones. The boiling and the splashing and the steaming continued for several hours. George had a contented expression on his face. He was speaking to Young Carver in Makah.

  “Does he know you?” Nathan asked hopefully.

  “No,” the canoe maker replied. “He said he has to go to Tatoosh, but he can’t remember why.”

  “To deliver the mail,” Nathan suggested. “That must be what he’s trying to remember.”

  “Tomorrow,” Young Carver said, “we take the mail to Tatoosh, you and him and me.”

  Tomorrow, Nathan thought, tomorrow I’ll see my father.

  The sides of the canoe were softening and spreading outward in front of Nathan’s eyes. Now he understood how the canoe achieved its graceful shape from a simple cedar log. He kept slopping the boiling water. Young Carver kept calling for hot rocks until he was satisfied that the flaring sides of the canoe had spread far enough. Then he and some assistants drove posts paired across from each other all along the length of the canoe to keep the upper edges from spreading any farther.

  Finally Young Carver put in the thwarts and fastened them to the hull. The thwarts fixed the exact finished width of the canoe, and they would also serve as the paddlers’ seats.

  It was late in the day. Nathan stood back and admired the lines of the canoe. Exactly like the lines of a clipper ship’s hull, he thought.

  Nathan passed close by the trading post on the way home. Kane and Dolla Bill were walking up from the beach. They saw all the Makahs who were waiting for them to open the store. Kane just kept walking, toward his cottage. Dolla Bill, who’d lived inside the store since Kane’s first day, shooed them all off the porch angrily in Chinook. “Chako mahkook house tomolla!”—“Come to the trading post tomorrow!”

  “Tomolla!” he yelled after them.

  Dolla Bill signaled for Nathan to come close. Nathan pretended at first he hadn’t seen, but Dolla Bill persisted. Whatever it was, Nathan didn’t want to hear it.

  “Kane said to tell you that he’s sorry he can’t sell you his knife. He lost it today, over the water. Deep, deep water. He was killing a fish.”

  17

  A Voice from Beyond the Grave

  Young Carver didn’t want to wait in the quarters attached to the base of the lighthouse while Nathan was visiting with his father. “We go up,” he said to Nathan’s father. “See if George can see whales.”

  “Good,” Zachary MacAllister said. “Thank you for bringing the mail, and George, and my son.” The two Makahs disappeared up the tower’s winding stairs.

  “Now tell me all about the whale hunt,” Nathan’s father said. “And how George was hurt.”

  “I will, later. Where are your assistants?”

  “Scattered, to read their mail.”

  “They might walk in. Let’s go to your office, where no one can hear us.”

  His father could see it was important. They went outside and down the path to the tiny building his father kept as his office, and his father closed the door behind them. “What, then? Is it your mother?”

  “No, although she’s not doing any better. It’s about the man who bought the trading post.”

  His father had taken a seat, and offered Nathan the other. Nathan sat down, collected his thoughts, then told everything he suspected about Kane. His father listened carefully, and his face showed both surprise and grave concern. As Nathan finished his story, he told his father, “I still wonder what Kane and Dolla Bill are looking for, and whether they found it when they went off in the canoe.”

  His father stood, and looked out the windows to the sea for a long time. “What is it?” Nathan asked.

  Zachary MacAllister turned back to Nathan. His gray eyes were deeply troubled. “You know far more than I could have ever guessed. Much too much.”

  Nathan was confused. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “I know the answers to both of your questions.”

  “You do?”

  “Your second question first,” his father said reluctantly. “As to whether they’ve found what they were looking for…yesterday the two of them paddled to Fuca’s Pillar. We saw them land on it. They pulled the canoe onto a rock shelf at the base of the pillar. We were watching all of this with spyglasses, my assistants and I.”

  “When Alexander Flagg’s brother came, he searched the pillar.”

  “Yes, but Kane climbed to the very top of it.”

  “The top! Is that possible?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, but I witnessed it with my own eyes. He came back down safely as well—all without a rope, mind you. It was an amazing feat. In regards to what you suspect about the identity of the ‘Hairy Man,’ I could add
that Kane took off his shirt before he climbed. That man’s body is nearly as hairy as that of a beast.”

  “Do you think they found what they were looking for?”

  “His behavior on Tatoosh afterward would indicate they did not.”

  “You mean they were here?”

  “We had a strange meal together. Kane was as civilized as you might imagine, and Dolla Bill…well, his table manners left something to be desired. He made quite an impression on my assistants.”

  “Did Kane have an explanation for climbing Fuca’s Pillar?”

  “One of my assistants asked him that question. Kane said, ‘For the sport of it.’ He claims to have climbed the highest peak in the Andes of South America. Kane mentioned that he found something on top of Fuca’s Pillar, although—”

  “Some bones…a skeleton?” Nathan interrupted, to his father’s amazement, and then he explained that Lighthouse George had told him of a young Makah stranded there. “Now tell me why Kane and Dolla Bill were on Tatoosh.”

  “They wouldn’t say, of course, but they spent the afternoon scouring every inch of it they could reach, looking for something.”

  “So they didn’t find it…. Did you say you could explain what it is they were after? How could you know?”

  The retired sea captain bit his lip. “From a letter,” he answered reluctantly. “A letter I received some weeks ago. You’ll have to forgive me for not showing it to you then. I thought your welfare and your mother’s would best be served by keeping it from you. Especially you, with your curiosity and your determination. I knew its contents would put you in harm’s way. I hadn’t accounted for how much you could surmise on your own. Knowing as much as you do, you’d best know the rest.”

  With that, his father brought out a bundle of letters from the bottom drawer of his desk, and withdrew one from the middle of the stack. “This is a copy that was made for me of a letter written by the murdered captain of the Burnaby to his brother, Jeremiah, shortly before his death. His brother sent it to me after he returned to Portland from his visit in Neah Bay. I didn’t receive it until around the time of the big potlatch. In a note attached to the letter, Jeremiah Flagg said that he had learned of me from the captain of the boat he had chartered in Port Townsend. He regretted having no further time to try to resolve the circumstances of his brother’s death, though he doubted that his brother’s murderer could have escaped the wreck and swum to shore.”