Heartbroke Bay

by Lynn D'urso

  A crack of candlelight appears along the door to the hut. The foot of the rough-hewn door makes a grating sound as it sweeps a perfect quadrant into the wind drift gathered in the lee of the cabin and the line of light enlarges into a trapezoid of gold.

  As the door is muscled outward, a long shadow springs across the doorway of light drawn upon the snow. The shadow diverges into two parts and a pair of huddled figures step out. The figures, one much smaller than the other, lean together into the wind, rolling a barrel before them. A third shadow follows, a short coil of rope dangling from its hand.

  The rope is frayed and broken, with coarse strands of sisal bristling along its length. The diameter of the line is no greater than the joint of a thumb, and its bearer worries that its strength has been compromised by months of exposure to salt and sun. Michael shrugs. It is all that is left of the cutter’s rigging. It must suffice for the job.

  The trio wends its way through a field of stumps. Blowing snow moves in layers, swirling about their feet, sniffing rudely under flapping rag tails of coats stiff with grime. At the edge of the field they stop beneath a spruce tree that bows and nods in the tempest.

  Michael bends an S-shaped bight into the standing part of the line, holding it as he takes round turn after round turn with the running part, then with cold, fumbling fingers tucks back the end to form a loop. His is a sailor’s skill with knots; when he tests his work, the hangman’s noose slips and tightens easily.

  When he speaks, his voice is weak. “I reckon to do this proper, we’d need something higher than that barrel. It would be better if there was more drop. Quicker, you know.” His voice trembles. “This way …” He swallows the rest.

  Hannah struggles to tip the barrel upright beneath the branches. Hans steps back and watches. Rocking the barrel on the bulge of its shape, she grunts with a surge of effort that upends the cask, then pushes back her hood. Her face is fine-boned and drawn. Her eyes—large in her skull, the skin pulled tight by starvation—are the color of the sky, becoming pearl gray as dawn advances.

  A raven appears out of the forest, its wing beats like a sword cutting the air. Lifting and dodging, it swoops overhead on a rising gust of wind. The Irishman follows the arc of its passing with his eyes, staring as if he might see through the wall of the storm into a world less frightful than the one he is about to leave.

  “Michael?” Hannah’s voice is soft. He turns from his contemplation of the raven and hesitates before stepping, rope in hand, over to the barrel beneath the trees. His movements are slow and weak.

  Rolling the coils of line with the fingertips of one hand, the noose swinging lightly in the other, he readies a loop for a toss. The first throw rises too sharply, tangling in the branches of the tree for a moment before unwinding to the ground. Michael sighs, coils the line again, and eyes a lower, thinner branch. The second toss is good.

  The wind rises, shaking the tree, but the noose seems to hang without moving. Blowing snow stings their upturned faces. Hannah’s nose and cheeks are fiercely red. The first waxy white patches of frostbite are beginning to appear on Michael’s hands, which grow lumpish with cold as he struggles to knot the end of the line around the tree. The rope is stiff and reluctant in the bitter air. As he shows her how to take up the slack, tears rolling from Hannah’s eyes freeze into lusterless pearls.

  Severts tests the barrel for balance, pushing against the rim. Turning his back to Hannah, he places his hands behind him; she lashes and ties. Grunting as he tries to climb aboard the barrel, he falls back, too weak and stiff to rise without aid. Hannah steps forward, takes his arm, and looks to Hans. “Please.”

  Nelson looks away, trying to cover a looming failure of heart with bluster. “I wanted this done from the start. Now you can just do it yourself.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Nelson,” says Michael. He tries again. With Hannah’s help, he makes it onto the barrel, teetering and kneeling for balance.

  “There’s something else, Hans,” says Michael. And for a moment Hannah is afraid he means to confess their affair. Lowering his head for Hannah to remove his hat, he eyes the noose before saying, “That bear of Dutch’s? I killed it. The carcass is in one of the ice caves along the edge of the glacier. It stank something awful, but it might still be edible, being frozen and all. We’re past being choosy now, aren’t we?”

  Hannah fumbles the noose over his head, then pulls the knot tight beside his ear. Standing on tiptoe, she reaches up with his hat, places it on his head, and pulls it down to his ears. “It’s so cold,” she says, choking. “You must take care.”

  Michael’s eyes are infinitely sad as he attempts a rueful smile. His lips tremble. “Jesus, I’m scared,” he whispers. “God help me, I’m so scared.”

  He struggles to stand. Once aloft, he shivers in tenuous equilibrium, legs bent at the knees, his hands struggling like small animals against their bindings. The barrel tips an inch under his weight and he jerks into a deeper crouch, eyes wide, mouth twisting in panic.

  Placing both hands on the rim of the barrel, Hannah cries out, “Good-bye, Michael!” and shoves with all her strength. The snow beneath the barrel crunches as it drops from beneath his boots. Hannah watches in horror as the inadequate limb sags beneath his weight, leaving him to choke and struggle. His toes scrawl an arabesque of death on the icy ground.

  “Hans, help me!” screams Hannah, grabbing at Michael’s legs. She tries to scream again, but the words knot and clamp in her throat. Her voice fades and dies to a rasping howl. Nelson turns to run, stumbles, and trips on a stump. When he looks back, he sees his wife kneeling before the strangling man, her arms tight about his waist, face buried to his belly, adding her own weight to the rope. Severts’s face is turned upward at an unreal angle, his eyes wide and staring, in a tableau of a saint searching heavenward for ascension, a supplicant at his feet.

  NINETEEN

  Negook sits in the bow of the canoe, a bearskin cloak wrapped around his scrawny frame for what warmth the coarse fur can bring to his bones. He has been shivering for weeks, since watching the bizarre actions of the whites from the shadows of the forest after the tall, yellow-haired one had come and asked him to make his mark on the paper. It has been a long time since anything scared Negook, but watching the cruel acts of these people drove an icicle into his belly that nothing seems to melt.

  After watching the hanging—an ugly, utterly undignified thing—he spoke quietly to his ravens, making soft mewing sounds until the birds flew away to fetch the People home. Now the clans rightly refuse to take the Guski-qwan into their canoes to return them to their own people; purifying a valuable canoe of that sort of crazy evil might be impossible. But they have agreed to take the white woman’s papers to Skagway and tell the other white men to come for the survivors. He is worried that somehow the whites will think of a way to blame the Lituya-kwan for all of the craziness and would prefer to see the whole thing disappear, but that is impossible. No, he has to do this one last thing, but after this, if he ever sees a white person again, he is going to run into the forest as fast as his brittle old bones will carry him.

  The buzzing trill of a migrating thrush calls out from the forest, as Hannah hikes her skirts to her knees and wades out to the waiting canoe, the bundle of papers wrapped in a piece of canvas. The meat of the bear is nearly gone (foul, horrible mess) but there is a certain softening of the air, a dulling of the razor-sharp wind that says spring will eventually come, and she knows that somehow she and Hans will survive. She stops, listening to the call-and-response of the rhyming thrushes, and touches a hand to her throat. Her lips work, mouth opening as if to reply, but only silence emerges.

  A north wind curls the heaving sea back on itself. The canoe rocks in the shallows. Salt spray torn from the waves glitters in diamond-shaped points. As Hannah comes alongside, she stumbles, and Negook sees her hand dart to cover her belly before grabbing at the gunwale for balance. Sighing to himself at the thought of the small life he sees struggling in her
womb, he signals the paddlers. It is time to go.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Heartbroke Bay is a work of fiction, based on an actual event that took place in Alaska during the fierce winter of 1899, on the outer coast of what would one day become Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Nearby Lituya Bay was said to be home to the angry demigod Kah-Lituya, a toadlike spirit whose fierce temper tantrums were credited by the Tlingit Indians with causing the powerful earthquakes that have ripped through the coastal region at regular intervals, creating huge tsunamis that have wiped out entire villages. In 1958, one such earthquake created the largest tsunami ever recorded in history, a mind-bending wave 1,720 feet high.

  The real Hans and Hannah Nelson came to Lituya Bay in September of 1899, shortly after an earthquake of similar size ripped through the coast. They were drawn north into the gold rush by a broadsheet of sweet promises published by a group of “investors” calling themselves the Lituya Bay Placer Gold Mining Company, and claiming offices in New York and San Francisco. In truth, the company had no real assets other than title to twelve hundred acres of mining claims north of the bay, and certainly not the neatly laid-out township or modern gold refinery projected by the pie-in-the-sky prospectus.

  Promised easy access to “the biggest fortune ever dreamed of,” the Nelsons and their partners—Sam Christianson, known as Dutch; Fragnalia Stefano, known as Harky; and Michael S. Severts—expected a benign climate and easy pickings. What they found instead was hardscrabble mining of the most laborious sort, in one of the most remote and hostile environments in the world, where a long day of arduous pick-and-shovel work might yield a meager twelve to fifteen dollars’ worth of gold; nothing like the riches promised by the prospectus. Their only amenity was a small, crude cabin built of logs and moss, a squalid shelter little better than the canvas tents in common use during the gold rush.

  Nonetheless, the Nelsons and their cohorts set to work, digging so intently at the sands throughout the summer and on into autumn that they missed their chance to catch the last boat leaving the coast before the onset of winter. Not long afterward, the five miners found themselves marooned by fierce weather and settled in as best they could to pass the long months of frigid darkness.

  With food low and rationed, some degree of cabin fever was perhaps inevitable, but there is nothing in the record up to this point to indicate that there was any significant discord among the group, nothing to hint that beneath the time-killing banter of storytelling and card games an ember of violence was smoldering. Nothing, that is, until one October evening when Severts suddenly got up from the dinner table, walked outside, came back inside carrying a gun, and started shooting.

  Harky was killed instantly. Dutch fell to the floor with a wound in his neck. Contemporary newspaper accounts vary in detail (and often cross the line from journalism into creative fiction), but most agree that Hannah and Hans reacted quickly, attacking Severts as he tried to reload. Hannah threw a dishcloth around his neck and choked him while Hans pummeled him. Somehow during the struggle Severts was wounded in the leg. At the end of the melee, the battered killer was bound hand and foot and roped in a bunk, and the Nelsons were left with a murderous prisoner to guard. After a long period of deprivation, Severts began to suffer from his wounds and begged to die, but the Nelsons—Hannah in particular—were reluctant to take the law into their own hands. It was not until it became evident that they would all succumb to hunger and the elements if they continued that they decided to extract themselves from the situation by holding a trial and handing down a sentence of capital punishment.

  I first came across a reference to the tragedy in 1986, in the opening pages of Glacier Bay: The Land and the Silence, a seminal work on the park by the writer and photographer Dave Bohn. Glacier Bay had only recently been designated as a national park, after being upgraded from a national monument in 1980, the result of a long and arduous effort to safeguard a wilderness that has since become the crown jewel of the national park system. I was on a sailing trip to the bay, and moving through the stark, peak-lined fjords in a small boat among glittering icebergs brought to life Bohn’s brief description of the ordeal the Nelsons faced over the course of that terrible winter. In that context, their decision to hold a trial seemed a reasonable, though somewhat byzantine, solution.

  Bohn took the details of his brief account from a story written by the gold rush era’s best-known storyteller, Jack London, for McClure’s Magazine in 1906, five years after the incident. Shortly after my sailing trip ended, I obtained a copy of London’s article from the Alaska State Historical Library, read it, and was enthralled. London’s version of the event was clearly highly colored, but the story raised numerous questions. What effect would such extreme duress have had on the psyche of a Victorian woman, isolated in a vast wilderness, when violence and a harsh environment conspired to strip away all notions of law and civility? How could anyone fend off the seemingly inevitable psychological decay inherent under such protracted privation, yet still hold to the values inculcated over a lifetime?

  Somewhere in the event, I felt sure, was the material for a novel or a screenplay, so I threw myself into research, threading my way through yellowed newspaper clippings and rolls of microfilm, and learned that word of the hanging had first reached the outside world as an aside at the bottom of a short article on the front page of the May 12, 1900, issue of the Alaskan. The newspaper headline read “Sloop Lost,” and the article described how a month earlier, a sailboat in tow behind the steamship Excelsior had been lost when the towline parted. After entering Lituya Bay during the search for the lost vessel, the Excelsior reported that a double murder had taken place there the past winter, followed by a “lynching bee,” during which the “Lituyans thought proper to take the law into their own hands,” and “hence the elevation of the criminal.”

  More research taught me that Hannah’s maiden name was Butler, and that she had come from England to work in service as a Victorian lady’s assistant. After meeting Hans in Chicago, she eloped with the strapping young Norwegian and headed for the gold fields of Alaska, where they connected with Harky, Dutch, and Severts. Over the next few years, I also learned how the story had filtered its way out of Alaska into the world of sensationalist journalism, coming to roost in William Randolph Hearst’s notoriously yellow San Francisco Examiner under a shrill headline that shouted “Woman Hangs a Man and the Law Upholds Her!” The headline was accompanied by a fanciful illustration of a slender young woman decked out in a jaunty little hat and a bustled skirt, dangling a hangman’s noose from one delicately gloved hand.

  Whether the reader was supposed to be more troubled by the fact that murder had been committed or that a woman could be capable of hanging a man is not clear, but in any case, it was a remarkably bad piece of journalism. The writer not only had embellished his report with details he could have had no way of knowing but also got Hannah’s name wrong, referring to her as Edith Whittlesay instead of Hannah Butler. Severts, the killer, somehow became Michael Dinnen. Jack London apparently used the Examiner piece as a primary source for his own story because he, too, referred to Edith Whittlesay and Michael Dinnen.

  Reaction to London’s version of the event was swift, kicking off a grumbling match between various newspapers (primarily the rival Seattle Post Intelligencer and Seattle Times) regarding the “truth” of London’s story, with each calling on its own experts to confirm its stance. But none, apparently, tumbled to the fact that Sam Christianson (Dutch) had not only survived the wound to his neck but had also returned to Juneau and become a beer wagon driver. By the time London’s story was published, he had been entertaining the patrons of Juneau’s saloons with his own version of the event for several years.

  All agreed, however, that Hannah was a “plucky little woman,” as stated by the federal judge who ruled that her execution of Severts was a valid judicial proceeding. This opinion was reinforced by an article run by the Alaskan after London’s story ran in the Examiner. “Those
who know her best,” declared the article, “say she is a kind, patient, never tiring soul, yet brave, heroic and unflinching for all that is right or good.”

  Such high praise provided me with a good measure of Hannah’s character, which helped answer the question of how she had survived the emotional mauling of being witness to a murder amid grinding isolation, and how she withstood the horror of putting a rope around a man’s neck to strangle him. But as I plowed through the research and plotted the novel, one more question kept coming back to me. I wondered how—or even if—the Nelsons’ marriage had survived. Looking back from our modern era, when relationships often seem to fail for the smallest reason, I could not help but wonder what effect such an ordeal would have on a marriage.

  It took nearly a decade to answer the question, and even then it required a stroke of luck. I was visiting the small mining town of Atlin, a community of less than four hundred souls in the northernmost part of British Columbia. As the crow flies, Atlin lies less than seventy miles from Juneau, but it is seventy miles of cloud-raking peaks, glaciers, and broken ice fields, so getting there requires a sixty-mile ferry ride and a long day of driving, much of it on a narrow gravel road, to make an end run around the impassable mountain range. On the last day of my visit, I stumbled across a slender pamphlet of the sort small-town history buffs put together to document their community’s past, and inside the pamphlet was a reproduction of a newspaper clipping titled “New Arrivals in Town,” dated almost ten years after the hanging. The writer seemed delighted to announce that a Mr. and Mrs. Hans Nelson had recently moved to Atlin to manage the new hardware store.

  Lynn D’Urso

  Juneau, Alaska

  May 12, 1900

  The Alaskan

  SLOOP LOST.

  The Lituya Bay Gold Mining Co’s schooner Dora B., in tow of the S.S. Excelsior parted the tow rope in heavy sea off the bay, but being a staunch boat and perfectly sea-worthy, Capt. Whitney deemed it prudent to allow her to take her own course which she shaped for the bay. This happened on the evening of Sunday, Apr. 15, and since then nothing has been heard of the schooner; the supposition is, however, that she was driven ashore and broke up. The body of a man supposed to be one of the four on board was found on the beach at Yakutat but no clue was obtained as to his identity.