Since then, he had received two letters from the Rowlands, brief ones scrawled in Ezekiel’s shaky hand. The letters had told him of a cow lost in a storm, a neighbor’s marriage, and the birth of Polly’s boy, but the letters had seemed empty to him. They had not wanted him back, he knew, because he would only remind them of Gideon, the son they had lost at Gettysburg. In their grief, perhaps they had even wished that Lemuel had died in their son’s place.
At last sleep came. Lemuel woke when he heard voices from the other end of the car. Soon the porter was coming through to put away the mattresses and adjust their seats.
He waited until the others in the car had used the washroom, then went there himself. Rubalev was outside the door when he left, looking as though he had slept soundly. “We must eat,” the Russian said without preamble. “I will see you in the dining car—there is one on this train. Tell the waiter I want eggs—ham, too.” He disappeared into the washroom before Lemuel could reply.
He managed to get to the dining car without getting dirt spattered in his face when between cars or being thrown against a wall by the train’s shaking. It would have been easier, he thought, simply to buy some food when the train stopped at the next station. He ordered some breakfast and wondered if Rubalev meant to pay for it. He was already in the man’s debt, and felt uneasy about being in the debt of someone he did not know.
Rubalev soon arrived, sat down, finished his ham and eggs, ordered another plate, drank more coffee, and gave the waiter a silver coin, enough for both their meals.
“Thank you for the breakfast,” Lemuel said.
“It is nothing,” Rubalev replied. “When I had little food, when I was close to starving, I told myself that when I had the means, I would eat as much as I liked. But I do not like to eat alone.”
“You’ve paid for my ticket. You’re under no obligation to feed me as well.”
“You make so much of money. It is of no use if it is not spent.” The Russian leaned back, resting his hands on the arms of his chair. He had been so long about his eating that the dining car was now half-empty. “I think we have something in common, Mr. Rowland,” Rubalev said in a softer voice. “We are both exiles of a sort, both men who must live in a world that is not ours. Perhaps you sometimes wonder, as I do, if there are ways in which we might make it ours.”
The man was probing at his mind; that made Lemuel wary. He said, “I would be content to live out my life without being seen as—as what you call an exile.”
“I wonder if that is possible,” Rubalev said.
“As it is,” Lemuel said, “you don’t have to live as an exile. Surely your money would go as far in Russia as it does here.”
“Russia!” Rubalev’s dark eyes narrowed. “What of Russia? I was born in New Archangel—Sitka, it is called now. People here think of me as Russian, but it is not so. I was a subject of the tsar, one of his subjects in his colony, but I was of Alaska, not Russia.” He paused. “One of my grandmothers was a native, an Aleut.” He raised his brows. “You see that we have more in common than you thought, Mr. Rowland.”
Lemuel felt no such kinship. Any natives that lived that far north were as strange to him as the Russians who had once shared their Alaskan land. Then he recalled how Donehogawa had said that this was a problem of all Indians, that they did not and could not think of themselves as one people, because of their tribal differences, and that the whites still used that against them.
“My home was Alaska,” Rubalev continued. “I thought Alaska would always be my home when I was young. And then, at the beginning of your war between the states, we learned that our Russian-American Company, which had the duty to preserve our colony, had tried to sell it to Washington.” He tapped his fingers against the tabletop. “There is that difference between us, Mr. Rowland. My land was sold. That of your people was stolen.”
“We have land still,” Lemuel said. “Not all of it was stolen. We were allowed to buy some of it back.” He looked away, poured some water from the pitcher on the table, and took a sip. The man’s frankness and open expression of feeling disturbed him. Lemuel had always taken much effort to control himself, to see that he betrayed none of his inner feelings to most of those around him. Practicing such restraint could make him forget, for a while, that there was anything for him to resent. Now this man seemed to be trying to provoke feelings that he had usually been able to put aside.
“That first effort to sell our colony failed,” Rubalev continued. “Many in New Archangel were reassured. Many of us, we were told, lived as well as minor court officials in Saint Petersburg—we would, it seemed, keep our gardens and our tea houses, our theater and our library. We had a gracious and beautiful life, Mr. Rowland, and it was a life led by people who in Russia would have been no more than the dirt under the tsar’s boots. So many of us wanted to believe that we would keep that life.”
He sighed. “I think that I knew even then that we would lose it all, that our colony would be taken from us in the end.” He was silent for a few moments, as if recalling that old life, and then his eyes were suddenly wary. Rubalev glanced quickly around the car, but no one was listening to them; the only diners left were five men a few tables away.
“I left New Archangel in 1860,” Rubalev went on, “and I went to California, to Fort Ross and San Francisco, and to other places, and eventually I found my way to Washington. During your war, you see, I knew that there would be opportunities, and I was looking for something to do.” He lowered his voice. “I will confess that even though my tsar and his Russia supported your Union, I do not know if I would have mourned its passing. If the South had won its independence, Alaska might not have been sold. I could have abandoned my enterprises here and returned to my home and left whatever I began in the hands of others.”
Lemuel was very still. Rubalev watched him with an unexpectedly mournful, almost gentle look in his dark eyes.
“You are wondering now if I worked against the Union somehow,” Rubalev said.
“No,” Lemuel said truthfully. “Ely Parker would never have trusted you or become your friend if you had.”
Rubalev sighed. “It does not matter now. In the beginning, I had enough to live on without exerting myself, so I waited and watched and met many people and learned what I could—perhaps it was then that people began to whisper that I was the tsar’s spy.” He smiled for a moment. “I believed that if the South was to win, such a victory would have to come early in the war. When the war did not end early, it became obvious to me that the Union would likely not lose unless it made tremendous mistakes. I had nothing to gain by aiding a Confederacy of rebels that would be vanquished. I also knew that if the Union was preserved, I would not see New Archangel again. I made my peace with what was and turned my thoughts to—”
Rubalev stopped talking and then smiled again. His smile made Lemuel uneasy. The man, he realized, might be dangerous; perhaps he should not have agreed to travel with him. He steadied himself. Donehogawa had put him at this man’s side; if he could not trust Rubalev, he would have to doubt his old comrade as well.
Rubalev poured himself a glass of water, pulled a flask from his jacket pocket, poured some amber liquid into the glass, and downed the drink in one gulp. “A friend wrote to me, toward the end of your war.” His voice was so low now that Lemuel had to strain over the creaking of the wooden car to hear him. “He told me that Dmitri Petrovich Maksutov was to be our colony’s governor. His letter told of Dmitri Petrovich’s reassurances to the people of New Archangel, his promise that the Russian-American Company would grant us a new twenty-year charter, that our colony would be preserved, that Dmitri Petrovich had spoken of this to the Grand Duke Constantine himself.”
He took a breath. Already, with only one drink, the man sounded a bit drunk. Lemuel waited for him to go on.
“Dmitri Petrovich was to be our governor,” Rubalev said, “a man with a noble wife, a man with the ear of the tsar. And I hoped, when I read this in the letter of my friend, that he w
as right. I hoped that those in Washington who thought of my home as a worthless wilderness would prevail, and put an end to talk of buying it, and leave our land to us.”
Lemuel sympathized with this strange man, while still embarrassed to be listening, to hear a stranger picking at his wounds so openly.
“And then, two years ago, my home—our colony, my people’s land, Russian America, was sold.” Rubalev reached for his flask again, then thrust it into his pocket. “Seward and others in Washington were happy, for they had rewarded Russia for supporting the Union by relieving the tsar of a large piece of worthless land and the expense of supporting a colony there. The tsar was free of a costly burden. And my friend wrote to me to say that New Archangel rejoiced, because the Americans had promised to treat us fairly, that they would leave us our colony.”
Lemuel knew little of this. During his time in Washington, he had heard that almost all of the Russians in Sitka—in New Archangel—had chosen to return to Russia. It had been one of those small facts of no great consequence to him or to those around him.
“And then my friend sent me his last letter.” Rubalev’s face sagged. “The Americans sent their soldiers. They sent men who wanted to get rich, to steal what they could for themselves. Shanties to house them went up, and more soldiers came, and before long they were looting our churches and taking our houses and using our women. They sold liquor to the Tlingit people, something we had always forbidden. And when the winter of 1867 came, those Russians who were left in New Archangel left with Dmitri Petrovich Matsukov.” He paused. “Only a few were left behind.”
Lemuel said, “I know of broken promises.”
The waiter was watching them. He would be waiting for them to leave so that he could clear the table and prepare for the next meal. Lemuel, unlike many of those he had met in Washington, had never been able to pretend that servants and porters and other help were invisible.
“My friend left for Russia with the rest,” Rubalev said. “They are now lost to me. When I was younger, while I still lived in New Archangel, I used to hear that those who left Alaska for our motherland, for Russian cities, did not live long.”
“I am sorry,” Lemuel said, feeling the inadequacy of those words.
“Being sorry is useless, Mr. Rowland. I am happy that I left when I did. I am relieved that I did not have to see it and that my time in this land has been profitable. “He rested his hands on the table. “And you, Mr. Rowland—what is it that you seek in the West?”
“I told you—there will be work for me there.”
“Or perhaps you are another like me who does not want to see what has become of his old home.” Lemuel heard the sadness in his voice. There was, he thought, a deep sorrow in the man, the kind of sorrow he had seen in others during the war, a sorrow that flowed from him like a dark current.
“And what is it you seek in the West, Mr. Rubalev?” Lemuel heard himself say.
Rubalev was silent for so long that Lemuel thought he might not answer him at all. “The fate of this land will be decided there, in the West, not in the triumphant North or the conquered lands of the South. I would prefer to be in a place where fate can make use of me. Perhaps you feel that, too, Mr. Rowland.” Rubalev stood up. “The train will stop soon. There should be time for a walk at the depot.”
In Cincinnati, a bearded middle-aged man boarded their train and came to the Pullman car. Lemuel saw the look of recognition that passed between the stranger and Rubalev, and then they left him to go to the smoking car. The stranger had muttered a greeting before going off with Rubalev, and Lemuel had heard the accent of a Southerner. He wondered about that after Rubalev returned to the car alone, and about why he had not been introduced to the man.
“An old friend?” Lemuel asked.
Rubalev nodded, but did not elaborate. The man, so voluble in the beginning, now fell into a somber silence. He reached toward a valise, extracted a small leather volume bearing gold letters in an unfamiliar alphabet, and began to read.
They passed the rest of that day that way, Rubalev intent on his book and Lemuel gazing out the window at the green, gently curving Kentucky hills, until the train came to a sudden stop at a small town station. After an hour, passengers left the train to stroll under the depot’s overhang. Lemuel got out to stretch his legs and heard someone mutter about a problem with the locomotive. Rubalev paced restlessly, clearly impatient to be on his way.
After they reboarded the train, the blond man fell into a brooding silence. During the few times Rubalev bothered to speak, it was to tell tales of his early life in New Archangel. He had, he said, been educated in one of the colony’s schools, where he had learned both French and Russian. He had also studied at the colony’s zoological institute, and might have continued his studies in Russia had he not chosen to leave Alaska for California. He claimed descent from a Russian noble as well as from an Aleut woman. He had made some of his money through various ventures in San Francisco, but did not offer any details about those pursuits.
Lemuel did not know how much of what Rubalev told him was true. The man seemed hesitant about answering any questions about exactly what he had studied at the zoological institute or what he had done between leaving California for the East and the end of the war. But in his voice, Lemuel heard him mourning for what was lost. The place he had known was gone; only the dream of memory was left.
When they had come to the outskirts of Louisville, Rubalev looked up from his book and said, “Mr. Rowland, what would you say if I told you that another war is coming, a war in the West?”
Lemuel looked up, startled. “Are you speaking of another war of secession? I have heard nothing—”
“That is not what I am asking.”
“If you are talking about Indians and settlers, I can only say that such a war would soon be over. It wouldn’t even be a war—only a few pitched battles,”
“That is what some think, but perhaps they are wrong. There is a chance that such a war may go on for some time, ten years, perhaps twenty.”
“Both the North and the South are drained by war,” Lemuel said, “and my hope is that Donehogawa can help to keep the peace in the West.” He kept his composure, even though the man’s talk was making him uneasy. He did not know why Rubalev had suddenly spoken of the West and of war.
“Let me know what you hear,” Donehogawa had asked him. Had the commissioner put him in the company of Rubalev in order to find out more about him? But the man would not reveal anything important, certainly not anything that he might want to hide, to a stranger.
“I have been through one war,” Lemuel continued. “I don’t have the stomach for another.”
“Even if you can find some—shall we say—purpose in the fight? Some worthy end?”
Lemuel leaned back. “I was full of noble thoughts eight years ago, all fired up to volunteer, going to Ely Parker to say that I would join his Iroquois volunteers if the Union would ever let us fight. Even when we were told that it was a white man’s war, that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. Those were my ends—preserving the Union and proving myself to the whites around me. And if I sought an even nobler purpose than that, I could think of enslaved Negroes yearning for their freedom.” He glanced out the window at the darkening landscape. “That war is over. And if it didn’t quite turn out as some might have hoped, it’s over.”
Rubalev closed his book. “The war never ends, Mr. Rowland. It may stop for a while in one place before beginning again in another, but it does not end. A war is not ended merely by the signing of a surrender or victory in a few battles. It can end only when the enemy no longer has the will or the power to fight.”
THREE
She was a child, ten summers in age, when the dream came to her one night during the Leaf Moon. Men on horseback were riding down on her father’s camp, shouting war cries. The men were Wasichu, like the men in the fort near the agency.
When she woke, she told her dream to her mother. “You have been listening to stories,”
her mother said. “The white men will not come here. We have a treaty with them, we’re at peace with them. Why should they ride against us now?”
“We should join Touch-the-Cloud’s band, Mother. There are too few of us in this camp to be safe if the whites come against us.”
“It is not up to a girl to tell the men when to move camp, and how to fight is for men to decide, not for you. They will join Touch-the-Clouds when it is time to hunt together.”
A few days later, a band of Wasichu came to the camp of her father, before most of the men were awake. She was about to go fetch water from a nearby stream when she spied the Blue Coats in the distance. Her father left their tent as the blue-coated men approached, and before he could call out a greeting, the men fanned out around the camp on their horses and took aim with their firesticks. There was a sharp sound, a sound like the crack of dead wood, only louder, and then her father fell, clutching at his chest.
She threw herself to the ground and crawled under a hide. Her gorge rose and filled her mouth with bitterness. Something fell across her, pinning her down. Even under the hide, she could hear screams. A woman cried out, begging for her child’s life, and then her voice was cut short.
She struggled for breath under the hide, then held the air inside herself, fearing that her lungs would burst. She kept expecting one of the Wasichu to find her, to pull her out from under the hide and the body lying over her, and then there was silence.
She waited for a long time after she heard the sound of the white men’s horses carrying them away from the encampment. She huddled under the hide until there was silence and she was certain that the Wasichu were gone.
Pushing against the weight that lay over her, she crawled out from under the hide and saw that night had already come. The moon was up, silvering the grassland. She shivered in the cold, then looked down at a body near the hide and saw that it was her mother. In her dream, she had seen her mother’s death, but had not told her that part of the vision, fearing that she might call her mother’s death to her if she spoke of it aloud.
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 3