The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  And here, put as wishful an eye to this set of bluffs as he could, Karlsson could not believe them into likelihood as river guardians. They rose inland from the shore a half mile or so, and did not shear away as if a river was working at them. Greater chance that they wore just two more of all such continental ribs lie and Wennberg already had peered at on this coast.

  ... Not there then, where to hell is it? God's bones, how much farther?...

  Eyeing around, Karlsson found himself unexpectedly longing for the narrow northern beaches, the wild scatter of seastacks, the tucked coves where they had made grateful camp. Even the clatter of gravel being shoved by the surf, he missed here. These milder beaches promised ease but nicked their prices out of a man. Mussels had vanished with the shore rocks, so desperation's larder here was clams, dug laboriously with Karlsson's ax. Pawing like twin badgers down into the tide line holes, Karlsson and Wennberg were all agreement on one thing, a desire for a spade. No, two things: the other, that boiled horse clams were furnishing survival but they were tough dismal fare after a day of paddling.

  ... Maybe tomorrow. Day of Astoria, maybe it'll be. Some day or other will be, ...

  Karlsson faced back toward the Pacific. There was this, too, in his lack of preference for this new run of coast. On the sand expanse where the canoe stretched at rest and Wennberg was propping the sailcloth shelter, there was nothing whatsoever they could do to put themselves from sight. This beach held the canoe and its two men prominently as three sprats on a platter.

  The rough tongue of the wind started on their shelter early in the night.

  Noise of the sailcloth bucking woke Wennberg a minute after Karlsson.

  "Blowing solid, sounds like," the blacksmith imparted. And the next minute, was slumbering again.

  Karlsson, though, still lay awake when rain began to edge into the wind sound.

  By morning, the storm was major. The tide was up so alarmingly that Karlsson at once went and drove a stake of driftwood into the sand with the flat of his ax, as a mark to watch the inflow against. Sails of spray flew in off the wave crests, and the wind struck so strong now that even its noise seemed to push into Wennberg and Karlsson. And all that day as the two hunched under the shelter when they weren't having to foray out for firewood or to try to dig clams; all that day, downpour. At New Archangel they had known every manner of rain, but none of it anything to this. This was as if the sky was trying to step on them.

  The Indian arrived at the Astoria customs house with an item and a tale. South from the village bis people called Hosett he had gone to hunt seals but soon sighted instead a great tangle of kelp brought inshore by the tide, and the kelp had seined in with it the body of a white person. Now be had adventured downcoast aboard a lumber ship to report of this find. "Tole," the native said, the coastal jargon word for "boy." Not until he pantomimed and pidgined the description of a downy fluff of beard did the customs collector grasp that a grown man was being depicted.

  With thought of the days of sloshing canoe travel it would take to reach the coastal spot and return, the customs collector prodded hopefully: And ...?

  And the Indian had done the disposition, rapidly buried the corpse in hope that the spirit had not yet got out of it. But had thought first to clip proof for his report. He handed the customs collector a forelock of straw-colored hair.

  That the weather since Christmas had been violent against vessels trying to cross the bar into the Columbia River was all too well known to the customs collector. Merrithew, Mindoro, Vandalia, Bordeaux—two barks and two brigs, they all had gone to grief along this rageful coast in these weeks.

  Taking up his pen, the collector wrote the native his paper of reward: The bearer of this, Wha-laltl Asabuy, hat assisted the duties of the Astoria District of Customs Collection by his report of...

  He then turned to his daybook and began the official epitaph of Braaf: body, supposed from one or another of the vessels wrecked north of Cape Disappointment during this fearful winter, has come ashore near the Makah village of Hosett.—It is that of an unknown young seaman, light hair, roited-faced ...

  By the end of the day, rain still blinded the coast.

  Karlsson took out the Aleut calendar from the map case where he was keeping it now. Moved the peg rightward one hole. A moment, contemplated the little hoard.

  ... Might as well know as not. Pass time by counting time, that's one way, ...

  It came out a few weeks worse even than Karlsson had thought. Since they had left New Archangel sixty-four days.

  Russian Christmas more than two months into the past. In the woods edging Sitka Sound, now buds of blueberry would be beginning to swell.

  Karlsson looked across to Wennberg; decided the arithmetic of their situation would not be welcome news in that quarter; and put the calendar back into the map case.

  "Småland," said Wennberg, startling him.

  Karlsson waited to see what venture this was.

  "Småland. What sort of place's that? What I mean, what'd you do there?"

  Karlsson eyed the burly man. There had been a palisade of silence between them, the only loopholes Wennberg's curses against the weather and Karlsson's setting of chores. All other conversation the storm's—low grumble of surf, ‹'bickers of wind, drone of rain on the shelter cloth. Into the night now, Wennberg evidently was at desperation's edge for something other to hear than weather.

  ... Come off your tall horse, have you?...

  "Farmed. My family did." Melander's description of farming arrived to mind. "Tickled rocks with a plow, more like."

  "'If stone were hardbread Sweden'd be heaven's bakery,'" Wennberg quoted.

  "Yes. And the family of us, living at each other's elbows. Left the farmstead when I was thirteen, me."

  Karlsson reached a stick, tidied coals in from the edge of the fire. These days and weeks of his mind always leaning ahead, aimed where the canoe was aimed, it had been a time since lie thought back. But memory, always there in its bone bouse. What can it be for, remembering? To keep us from falling into the same ditch every day, certainly. But more, too. Memory we hold up and gaze into as proof of ourselves. Like thumbprint on a window, remembering is mindprint: this I made, no one else has quite the pattern, whorl here and sliver of scar there, they are me. Karlssoil was in Småland now, hills of pine forest, cottages roofed with sod and bark—and yes, stone in the fields and rye short as your ankles and a Karlsson tipped from the land to find what livelihood he could....

  "On a forge by thirteen, I was," Wennberg was saying. "Apprenticed, so I had to hammer out plowshares. Thought my arms'd break off. Bad as this bedamned paddling."

  Wennberg when young—he was the fifth son, the last and stubborn and brawlsome and least schoolable one, of an inspector of mines in the Nordmark iron district—Wennberg when young already was a figure that might have been knocked together in one of the red-glowing forges of Värmland. Who can say how it is in such instances, whether the person simply has chanced into the body that best fits him or whether the body has grasped command of that mind: but Wennberg as boy looked just what he was, a blacksmith waiting to happen. A beam for shoulders, arms plump with strength; A neck wide as his head. Very nearly as thick, too, in all senses.

  "At least there's an end to this paddling."

  "Maybe. Could be wrong kind, though. Melander's had his end, and Braaf his."

  "And chewing over their deaths doesn't undo them. Wennberg, each day We pull ourselves nearer to Astoria."

  "Or to drowning or to Koloshes or to Christ knows just whatever, I ought've taken my death and been done with it, the day somebody spoke 'Merica to me."

  Of that continent which had begun to pull Swedes as the moon draws the tides, the young blacksmith knew only the glittering pun its word made against the Swedish tongue. America, 'Merica: mer rika, more rich. That there somehow was a Russian 'Merica besides the one that the Swedish farm families were flocking to mystified Wennberg only briefly. He imagined the Mericas must be si
de by side there the other end of the ocean, that the ship made a turn like going down one road fork instead of the other. Then word arrived to the Nordmark region, in the person of a merchant over from Karlstad, that the Russians were recruiting blacksmiths to work iron in their America. Wennberg's father, heartily weary of a son with temper enough in him to burn down Hell, managed to see to it that Wennberg was one of the three smiths chosen, and that Wennberg went off south across the Gulf of Bothnia with the others to meet the Russian ship at Sveaborg. They were joining the voyage of Arvid Adolf Etholen, a naval man of Finnish-Swedish lineage serving as an officer of the tsar and now to become the new governor of Russian America. Wennberg never worked clear how it was that Etholen could be simultaneously Swede and Russian and captain and governor, but then Wennberg had ahead of him years of finding out that double-daddle of such sort was not rare where the Russians were concerned. A Russian system, at least as he found it practiced in Alaska, did not need make any too much sense, it simply needed be followed relentlessly and the effort pounded into it would eventually force result of some sort out the far end.

  "You can't close your cars always," Karlssoil said.

  "Maybe not," concurred Wennberg. "The trouble is to know when the devil's doing the talking."

  Finns predominated in the number that voyaged for Russian America during the term of Etholen; weavers, masons, tanners and tailors, sailmakers, carpenters. But for ironwork a Wennberg was wanted. The forge must have been the cradle of these Värmland Swedes. So Wennberg was shipboard with new governor Etholen's entourage those nine months from the Baltic to New Archangel in 1839—4)0. Etholen with his prim little divided mustache and those hooded eyes which seemed to see all over the ship at once; he was said to know more of Alaska than any of the tsar's men since Baranov. And Etholen's big-nosed young wife, pious as Deuteronomy recited backwards; and Pastor Cygnaeus, and the governor's servants, and the naval officers; oh, it was high carriage and red wheels too, for a blacksmith to be journeying in company with such as these.

  "Tell me truth, Karlsson," Wennberg blurted now. "How many more days d'you think it can be? To Astoria?"

  Karlsson, carefully; "There's no count to what you can't sec, Wennberg. I'd give much to put a finger a place on Braaf's counting board and say, 'Here. Astoria day, this one.' But we can't know that. We can just know tomorrow will carry us closer to it,"

  Wennberg shook his head. "I've played cards against men like you, Karlsson, They count too much on the next flip from the deck."

  "While your style won you the world?"

  Wennberg's embarkation to Russian America carried him to a fresh corner of the planet, a familiar livelihood and religion, and a doom. At first, curiosity was all there was to it, a way to ease hours—watching the cardplayers. Then he edged into the gaming, merely an evening now and again, which in a feet-first fellow such as Wennberg truly shows how guardful he was being. Some money vanished from him in the first years but not all so much, no amount to keep a man awake nights. Besides, Pastor Cygnaeus was one to inveigh against waywardness, the devil's trinity of drink and cards and the flesh; and as it is with those who have some of the bully in them, Wennberg by close-herding could be bullied in the general direction of moderation. But came the spring of 1845, Pastor Cygnaeus departed New Archangel, sailed back for Europe with Etholen at his end of term as governor. Wennberg yet had two years of indenture and during them his gaming, and all else, changed.

  "Back there at the tide trough."

  Karlsson waited, impassive.

  "If I'd been to the right of you and Braaf to the left, I'd've gone into that millrace instead of him."

  ... If that'd been, my ears would get rest this night.... Aloud: "If the moon were window we could sec up angels' nighties, too. Lay it away, Wennberg." Less than anything did Karlsson want to discuss the perishing of Braaf. "Tomorrow paddles will still fit our hands, and the canoe will still fit into the ocean. Live by that,"

  Wennberg moved his head from side to side. "You can wash your mind of such matters, Karlsson. I can't. Death this side of me and then that, I need think on it. Sec through to why I was let live."

  "Maybe God's aim is bad."

  "No, got to be more to it than that." Wennberg would not be swerved. "Maybe like sheep and goats. 'And He shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left—' No, Braaf was to the right—"

  "Wennberg. Stow that."

  Wennberg peered earnestly through the firelight to Karlsson. "You know what the pastors'd say, about all this."

  ... No, and I damn well don't give a...

  "They'd say I'm being put to test. All this, bedamned coast, you other three, Koloshes—" Just now a thought could he seen to surprise Wennberg: "Maybe even you, too, Karlsson ! Being put to test 1"

  Proclamation of his eligibility did not noticeably allure Karlsson. "Wennberg, I know at least this. We're not playing whist with God along this coast. Either we paddle to the place Astoria or die in the try. One or other. Just that."

  Wennberg shook his head. Not, as it turned out, against Karlsson; the pastors. "But they don't know a thumb's worth about it either. Found that out, I did, when it happened with—with her."

  Karlsson looked the question to Wennberg.

  "Katya," the blacksmith said.

  "Katya?" Karlsson echoed.

  "My wife." Wennberg wiped the back of bis hand across his mouth, as if clearing away for the next words. "Think you're the only one ever looked at a woman, do you? You've fiddled your time, north there. You know what the Creole women can be, the young ones. Black diamonds, the Russians call them. Katya was one, right enough—But why'd she die?" Wennberg's look was beseeching, as if Karlsson might be withholding the answer. "If she hadn't, I'd not be in all this. God's will, the pastor said. God's swill, right enough, I told him back. What kind of thing is that to do, kill a man's wife with whooping cough? Didn't even seem ill at first, Katya. Just a cough. And then—'() satisfy us early with Thy mercy,' that clodhopper of a Finn preaching when we buried her on the hill. Mercy? Late for mercy on Katya. And me. How's I to go through life with her grave up there on the hill from me all the while? If I could've bought my way out of that Russian shit pile, back to Sweden. If the gambling'd worked—"

  Evenings, that summer of 1845, a particular plump Russian clerk sat into the barracks card games. Three times out of five now, when this clerk departed the table he look with him just a bit more of Wennberg's money than Wennberg ought to have let himself lose. Nor was Pastor Cygnaeus' successor any help as a vigilant; he too suffered from that same soul sweat, New Archangel ague, the fever of cards at night and clammy remorse by day. Before Wennberg quite knew any of it, then, the fetters of debt to the company and of more years in Russian 'Merica were on him, and Wennberg had turned with fury against a God who let such chaining happen and a God's man who stood by mumbling while it did. Against, it might be said, life.

  "—but no, oh no, and God's little Finnlander telling me, 'Steady yourself, Wennberg, keep from the cards,' and himself squatting at the table with the Russians half the night. Man of God. God doesn't have men, he has demons of some kind to strangle women with the whooping cough and blast the back of the head off Melander and drown Braaf like a blind pup—"

  Wind flapped the shelter cloth behind Karlsson's head, rain still was pelting. He and Wennberg in shared life those hundreds of days at New Archangel, now these dozens in the narrow canoe and beside the campfires, they had wrangled and come to blows, might yet come to worse, how was it you could be wearily familiar with every inch of a man and know not much of him at all? Unexpected as winter thunder, something like this, and as hard to answer.

  "Wennberg, I—"

  "What you said, just then." Wennberg was looking harshly across at Karlsson. "That about the cards. More than style is in it. Luck. Luck I haven't had since Varmland, except the goddamn black sort that ended me up w ith you."

  It had quickened past them, the moment. They were plowshare and rock aga
in. Karlsson heard himself saying as stone will answer iron—

  "... you've had some in plenty, recent days."

  "What, dragging along this boil-and-goiter coast? You pall that luck?"

  "The two of us who are dead, neither of them is you. There's your luck, Wennberg. Now shut your gab and get some sleep."

  At morning, sky and shore showed hard use by the storm. Both were smudged, vague. The ram had dwindled and the wind ceased, but less than a quarter mile in each direction from Wennberg and Karlsson and the canoe, fog grayed out the beach.

  ... Fog ought mean the wind is gone, we won't swamp. But this cloud on our necks we won't sec along the coast, either. Stays sand beach, that won't matter. Rocks though. Rocks'd matter. Can't mend it before it happens. Rocks we'll face when they face us....

  "Whyn't we go it afoot, here on?"

  Say for Wennberg that in his tumbril way, he had come this far past Braaf's death, past the rock-spiked coast, past the end of regular food, before balking. Not that Karlsson could see any of the credit of that, just now. What he turned to face was an unsailorly weary man who did not want to set forth in a canoe into fog.

  This new corner of reluctance on Wennberg took all of the ear]y morning to he worked off. Karlsson's constant answer "¡is question hack: what when they hiked themselves to a river, or another sound, or headland cliff? Swim, Wennberg? Take a running jump at it? Fly?

  "But goddamn, out into that cloud—beach here like a street, maybe there won't be water in the way—"

  "Wennberg. Ever since New Archangel, there has been. Wish won't change that. There'll be water."

  When at last the jitter wore out of Wennberg, he looked spent. So much so that Karlsson came wary that the man's next notion would be not to move at all. As wan as a man of his bulk could be, Wennberg this day. Plainly, the clam ration and the dreariness of hunkering in from the storm had exacted much from him.