Heartbroke Bay

by Lynn D'urso

  Hans, done with waiting, speaks up. “Well, lay them aside and let’s set-to on this dinner.” He points at Michael’s place and drives a spoon into his bowl. “What was it you wanted, Hannah?”

  When Hannah replies, “Nothing, Hans, never mind,” a small smile flits across Michael’s mouth. He smiles again as he sits at the table and raises a spoon to his lips.

  Through the days that follow, he comes for her again and again as she picks berries or washes clothes. Dark circles of guilt grow under her eyes from lying all night with her back to her husband, barred from sleep by the untenable impulse to confess. When she tries to speak of her dilemma to Michael, he takes her by the waist, saying, “It’s too late to worry about that, girl. It’s simply too late.” Drawing her to him, he whispers feverishly, “I have to have you. And I will.” Neither knows if confession or continuation is her meaning as her reply—“No good can come of it”—is smothered by his lips.

  Soon the last of her reserve melts, leaving her awash in a great spasm of pleasure where muscles contract, cry out, and cry out again. A saying of her father’s—that a man may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb—becomes a taunting dirge that recycles itself over and over again to the rhythmic breathing of the man who sleeps, exhausted from his earthworks, by her side.

  Michael is at times tender and gentle, educating her to the many uses of tongues and fingers; at others he growls words she cannot make out over her own cries.

  And afterward there are tears, of both heart swell and guilt; it is all so large and so impossible, so rich and so fraught, that while the men see to their mining and hunting, she can only sit quietly, or move mindlessly about the cabin, a swimmer in a maelstrom of things she fears to name.

  More gold rolls in every day. Hans measures a weighty fistful of nuggets into a canvas sack every night, and the box of sacks becomes heavier and heavier. Everyone laughs when Hannah tries to lift the cumbersome crate and fails.

  As she laughs with the men, she is appalled at how easily she has entered into deception, how the blaze between Michael and herself can be damped in the presence of others until it fails to burn through the charade of marital devotion—and how eager she is to feed the fire every day.

  Each morning Michael gathers the gun and a pack, bids the company good day, and walks into the forest. The deceit is completed after the miners gather their own equipment and leave for the gold; following with a bucket or a pan, Hannah stops along the way at a likely patch of berries, then doubles back into a mossy fen.

  It is as if she had never known color and suddenly walked into a luminous spectrum; his hands seem to know what her body is thinking, and as they crush the flowers with their bodies, feathery seeds spill into the air from their writhings. Squirrels chatter, and fat, salacious marmots urge them on with ribald shrieks. They sneak away so often, her naked body grows brown as a nut, and she fears Hans will notice and wonder at the coloring of her breasts and back, or the numerous tiny scratches and rubbings left by tree bark and stones. But in the oblivion of his riches, he remains blind to all but the luster of gold.

  They grow daring, watching each other’s eyes around the glowing fire at night, her awakened body offering a silent invitation in its postures and pauses. She knows from the persistence of Michael’s gaze that she is desirable, and she preens for him, standing chin up and erect, brushing her hair back with slender fingers.

  In her secret happiness, she believes Dutch when he spins another wild tale of Hawaii, where the women are beautiful and wear hibiscus blossoms and frangipani in their hair. “Left side means a lady’s married. Right side’s for girls that haven’t landed a husband yet.” On a whim, she places a small sprig of lavender flowers behind her right ear. Michael’s eyes dance, and he can barely control a laugh as Dutch corrects her. Enrapt, they miss the evaporation of Hans’s smile.

  The next morning over breakfast, Hans tells an involved, seemingly pointless story of harvesting corn as a boy for neighbors in Blue Lake, Minnesota. Peter and “Black Mary” Hansen, as Hans tells it, had everything his own family lacked: Acres of black soil, fat dairy herds, a warm house, and good water. “And money,” snorts Hans. “Enough to be called mister at the bank!”

  “But why’d they call her ‘Black Mary’?” asked Dutch. “Was she Negro?”

  Hans scoffed. “Nah. Everybody called her that after old man Hansen tarred her.”

  Harky paused in the middle of spooning pulped and strained berries onto his bannock bread. “Tarred her?”

  Hans waggles a cup at Hannah to signal for more coffee. “Yep. Tied her to a tree and shaved her head. Then tarred her.”

  “Jesus Christ!” yelped Dutch. Hannah imagines the smell of hot tar on flesh and feels nauseous.

  “What’d he do that for?” rumbled Harky.

  Hans placed the cup on the table and spread both hands flat. “Well, I guess he didn’t like the way she was going off with the field hand.”

  Something inside Hannah quivers at the smirk in her husband’s voice. “How was he punished?”

  “Punished?” Hans wrinkles his forehead to simulate puzzlement. Michael stiffens in his chair.

  “Yes!” demands Hannah. “For what he did to his wife?”

  Hans motioned for Dutch to pass the bannock. “Hell, he wasn’t punished,” he replied casually. “She was the one. She’d been with another man.”

  That afternoon Hannah and Michael recline on the beach, embracing to the sound of the tympanic surf. When they walk back to their clothes, panting and brushing the sand from each other’s skin, they find pressed into the damp grit alongside their garments the fresh tracks of a bear. And atop Hannah’s skirt are three feathers: two black and shining primaries from a raven’s wing and a single gray quill from a gull.

  October 1 (or thereabout)

  Dear Diary,

  What remarkable changes come in the course of our lives. I hardly feel myself to be the same woman who married so impulsively just a year ago. Never could I have imagined myself to be in this position: in this wilderness, becoming rapidly rich beyond my wildest expectations, an adventuress of a sort I cannot believe.

  It is apparent that we must leave soon. The snow is halfway down the mountains, but the gold comes so well now that the men only discuss departing in the abstract, as if winter will stay its arrival until we have recovered every last gram. They work like Trojans and eat like bears. It is nothing to consume two entire salmon, perhaps twelve pounds or more of food in a single meal. Fortunately, there have been many fish in the streams, and it has been a simple matter for Michael to catch enough to feed us by using a gaff attached to a long pole to snag them from the pools. However, their numbers seem to be declining recently, and the meat of those remaining is becoming quite poor in quality. I fear for when even these are gone. Yet when I attempt to discuss our departure with Hans, he only replies that we must remain until we have “enough.”

  The castaways wake to the glitter of frost. Each leaf and blade of grass is coated in gleaming crystals. In the rivers, the strength of the salmon is at an end and the fish lie gasping in the shallows, spent and dying from the effort of consummation.

  Severts shoulders a canvas sack, the shotgun, and his fish gaff before bidding the men good-bye, then whispers to Hannah as she gathers wood from the pile behind the cabin that he longs to be with her.

  “My work,” she replies in a low voice, shaking her head. “It is too neglected.” But she makes a promise for tomorrow as he turns to go.

  A mile from the cabin Michael pauses beside a shallow stream and inspects the salmon gathered there. The bodies of those remaining are marked with bars of red and green. The tattered edges of their fins and tails fall away in loose patches. The surviving males have become hook-jawed and fiercely toothed from an inner alchemy of raging hormones that contort their bodies into single-minded fighting and mating machines. The females, too, are ragged and beaten from the battle of procreation. White fungus eats at their skins, and the lifeless re
mains of their brothers and sisters float in stinking shoals along the banks.

  Michael watches carefully, hoping to spot a new arrival still fit for eating. Upstream, a splashing louder and more insistent than the thrashing of dying salmon draws his attention to the narrow throat of a falls. At first he sees nothing except the water tumbling over a collection of large, light-colored stones. When one of the stones appears to move, he wonders, then stares. Standing with its back to him, the round, full body of some animal feigns the shape of a boulder, then raises its head, becoming a bear. Stepping into a shaft of sunlight, the fur along its back glows gold, the color of pure bullion.

  The bear grabs at a salmon, plunging its snout into the water and batting with its paws. When the flurry of action is over, a fish as long as Michael’s forearm struggles in its jaws. Holding its prize aloft, the animal walks splashing and sloshing from the river.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Michael whispers. “Dutch wasn’t lying.”

  The creature’s hide is yellow in the sun. A crucifix of storm-colored fur marks its shoulders. Black eyes and snout stand out against a blond ruff around its face. It is a beautiful creature, and as it sets itself to tearing at the salmon, its skin ripples with the play of great muscles.

  Replete from weeks of gluttony and belly-rolled in fat, the bear is intent only on the finest, oiliest parts of the salmon. Slitting open the belly with one ivory-colored claw, it releases a flood of pearly orange eggs, slurping up the caviar with rapid darts of its tongue. Next it nibbles at the head, tilting its face delicately to one side to bite at the brains. As it gnaws, Michael imagines the sound of cartilage crunching.

  The bear moves, repositioning itself to pin the salmon to the ground with one broad paw. Beads of water flicker in the golden light along its bulging belly. Its shoulders are the color of polished bronze.

  Droplets of mist from the waterfall tingle against Michael’s face, carrying his scent away from the bear. He steps slowly and carefully closer, raising the gun. The white noise of the river covers the sound of his tread.

  “Whatever you’re worth, you beauty, you’re mine.”

  A squeeze of the trigger splits the light and the mist with gunfire, and Severts feels the weapon kick. A pattern of buckshot slams the bear’s side, erupting a burst of shining water from its fur. Leaping cat-quick and hunchbacked into the air, it falls to the ground, snarling and snapping at the pain in its side.

  The report of the shotgun seems to extinguish the murmur and chatter of the river; roosting eagles and foraging gulls explode into a thunder of wings and cries. Thrashing furiously, the wounded animal bites at itself and screams, piercing the air with a bayonet shriek of pain. The tortured wailing staggers Michael back, stopping his heart, and from the deepest place of regret he moans, “Oh God, what have I done?”

  Desperate to stop the cries, he raises the shotgun and fires the second barrel, missing and blowing clots of moss and dirt from the ground.

  At the second shot, the bear flails to its feet and springs for the underbrush. Trees shake and limbs break as it fights through the thicket, running for its life.

  Frantic, the empty shotgun naked in his hand, Michael throws his pack to the ground and tears at the flap for more ammunition. Thumbing shells one at a time into the breech, he fumbles to reload. Trembling, he sits back on his haunches, gripping the gun in both hands, and listens to the diminishing cries.

  As he sits frozen on the bank of the river, time passes in an unmeasured gap. The air is heavy with the smell of decaying fish, and the birds do not return. The forest closes in around the damage done by the fleeing bear.

  After a while, a raven drops from the sky into the green gulley formed by the trees on either side of the river. The whoosh-whoosh of its heavy wings wakes Michael from his stunned reverie, and he rises to his feet, stroking the wooden stock of the shotgun to gather courage. It’s probably dead, he tells himself. Dead of its wound. Then he sets out on the blood trail to recover the meat. And a hide more precious than gold.

  For the first part of the morning, drops of blood show dark and drying against the green of the forest, and he follows slowly, pausing often to peer into the brush, fearing an ambush by the pain-maddened bear. As the day grows longer, the blood trail grows fresher, until the drops and streaks began to glisten among the leaves.

  In late afternoon, he finds where the bear lay for a moment behind the trunk of a fallen tree. There are crushed ferns, sticky with blood, and a rank smell in the air. Somewhere just ahead a Steller’s jay shrieks; his pulse thunders into his ears. He freezes, unable to force himself ahead. Better wait a bit, let it lose more blood.

  A kettledrum sound rumbles up from the ground, vibrating into a drumroll that begins to shake the log he leans against. The earth dances and jerks beneath his feet, rolling in a succession of small waves until the branches overhead appear to shiver, then whip back and forth as the earthquake builds into a series of sharp, hard jolts that nearly knock Michael down.

  The tremor is over before his already-overheating fear of the bear can build into a screaming panic. Gripping a branch of the fallen tree, he stares wildly about, certain an attack of some variety is coming.

  A minute passes, then five before his heartbeat begins to calm and reason returns. “An earthquake,” he tells himself aloud. “It’s over.” And as if to convince himself further, “No harm done.”

  He considers abandoning the hunt, but remembering the exotic shine of the bear’s fur, imagines it his, and considers what its sale might bring. That money’s mine, he says to himself. No partners to split with this time. And he starts down the trail of blood again.

  The trail leads inland, between steep hills and up draws, climbing toward a ridge that looks down on the glacier. As the land rises, the air becomes colder. The ground grows hard and frozen underfoot.

  When Severts breaks free above the tree line, he sees a pale shape ahead. Limping and staggering, the bear drags a foreleg, forcing itself uphill with a faltering three-legged gait at a range too great for the shotgun.

  Michael watches as the bear pauses and looks over its shoulder. Settling its black eyes on him, it lifts its nose into the wind and pushes its nostrils into the creepers of his scent, searching for the identity of its tormentor. Finding nothing, it limps over the ridge, head drooping.

  Michael follows, his legs beginning to shake and jitter from the strain of pursuit. He gasps, fighting for breath. The high, thin air snaps with frost, and the cold metal of the gun barrel burns his skin. Trickles of blinding sweat sting his eyes.

  From the top, the ridge falls away in a steep crumble that spills down onto the glacier, scattering shards of shale into bottomless blue ravines. Michael wipes the sweat from his eyes and blinks at the sting of a sharp wind pouring up from the valley, then spots the bear thirty yards away, picking its cautious and shuffling way along the interstice of ice and stone.

  Lifting the gun, he settles the bead on the slow-moving bear, pulls the stock hard into his shoulder, and takes a deep breath to quiet the trembling in his arms. The metal is cold against his cheek. The weight of the gun feels enormous. When he fires, the recoil nearly knocks him down. Bear and man stagger, propelled apart by the physics of death. The bear drops, slides, and rolls in a clattering avalanche of splintered schist before coming to a halt at the edge of the glacier.

  Severts steps over the lip of the ridge onto the loose shale, faltering as the ground gives way beneath him. Sliding and tumbling, he edges downslope, glissading with the loose, shifting stone.

  The bear lies angled into the sharp V of a crevasse. The ice shimmers with frost and as Michael advances, weapon at the ready, he can see the steam of his own breath. The bear’s eyes are half open, glazed and dull. Its lips curl in rictus, exposing the teeth and tongue. In death, the corpse looks small. With the golden light of its life gone, the remains are inert, dirty, yellow, and gray.

  Michael stares at the body from a distance, reassuring himself that the bear
is dead. Then he removes a skinning knife from his belt and approaches. An overpowering stench of rot and sulfur rises from the carcass, and he gags, covering his mouth and nose with his hand. Stepping back, he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and breathes through it.

  “Shit,” he says, stepping back again. “Shit.” And walks away.

  When Michael emerges from the forest that afternoon, the earthquake has shaken a beam from the ceiling, and Hannah is working at an arrangement of poles and levers to raise it back into position. The canvas roof has been pulled back, and the stones holding it in place have been cast down. The sun is low on the horizon. A gentle surf eases ashore, tumbling a line of softly golden foam before it.

  Michael looks about for any sign of the miners, then pitches in. Saying nothing about the bear, he shrugs when she asks about fish. “They’re played out.”

  Hannah tugs at the canvas to stretch it tight over the beams. “The earthquake spilled the stew I was making. It was the last of the meat. We’ve nothing left but some berries. Berries and a few carrots.”

  “They’ll be unhappy about that, won’t they?” says Michael, meaning the miners.

  But the miners do not return. Day fades into night until stars begin to pinpoint the darkness. Inside the cabin, Michael listens for boot steps and runs his hands over Hannah until she pushes him away. “Not here.”

  The fire burns down, is replenished, and burns down again, but still the men do not return. Hannah begins to fret, pacing the small confines of the cabin, puttering at projects by the light of the lantern, cleaning spotless pans, pushing away the urge to settle on Michael’s lap. The night is utterly still, and cold air flowing gently down from the glacier surrounds the cabin, creeping in through gaps between the logs.

  “Where are they? Something has gone wrong.”

  “No,” replies Michael. “They’ve just hit a good streak and can’t tear themselves away.”