Dungeness

by Polinsky, Karen;

  When Nusee-chus was sure the S’Klallam had departed, she cautiously rose, first upon her knee, then in a standing position, and looked around. A shudder crept over her as she looked upon the dead bodies of her tribesmen, which were strewn about the beach . . .

  Contrary to general belief, the S’Klallams did not bury the dead enemy on the beach. Instead, the bodies were placed in the largest of the canoes, and in the bottom holes were bored. A strong southeast wind carried the funeral barge to the deep water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where it sank, bringing an end to this tragic episode.

  James G. Swan, U.S. Commisioner, went to Victoria and arranged the matter as was supposed and understood, and upon the terms of settlement paid over a sum money and quantity of goods to agents of the Tsimshian Indians—

  39

  End of an Epoch

  c. 1890-1900

  So far, no one had noticed me. Except the duffy-grey mule munching on dried kelp. It lifted its head like a heavy boot, put out its lips, and nibbled my hair. Henning’s ride. Like him, it had bad breath. I gave the old biddy a friendly shove.

  Down the beach, Jake, in canvas trousers, was bent double over our weather-beaten skiff, scraping off the barnacles. Next to him, Julia, no longer a babe in arms but rather a curly-haired cherub wearing a pinafore, squatted to poke at a whirligig crab, better than a wind-up toy.

  Jake lifted her up to dip her bare feet. She squealed. In her excitement, she tossed her skirt up over her head. Jake pinched her belly and held her up to reveal to her the mottled sunset. With tenderness, he pulled the skirt back down over her knees.

  Annie peeled potatoes on the front step. She looked thinner. Her thick hair, in the past braided down her back, was now knotted on the back of her head. Her aspect had hardened: her forehead broader, cheeks and chin sharper.

  On her pert knee, a pretty baby.

  The alert infant was the first to notice me.

  It shrieked.

  “Millie,” Annie called out. “You made it.”

  She didn’t shout or leap up. She greeted me the same way she would a passing neighbor. Out of shyness, or something else?

  What was I to her, anyway? A tangled net—a trap?

  She stretched out both arms to show off the baby.

  “James!” I exclaimed, greeting my youngest sibling. He smelled like fish oil and rosemary. I kissed his chubby belly.

  Right off Annie noticed the dirty bandage unraveling from my wrist. She was too polite to mention it. Instead, she said, “Your dress. How pretty.”

  Inside, our cabin, though much the same, seemed homier. The kitchen now featured actual curtains, tied up to let the light in. There was a coiled rag rug under the table. The children still slept up in the loft. The bedraggled fox pelt still tacked to the hearth.

  Carl had added a bedroom in the back. The threshold of the new marital quarters was topped by an arch. On either side, columns trailing vines. Above and below, a smirking Norse dragon. At the pinnacle of the doorway, a pair of stacked-up hearts, the one above a reflection of its partner below. Carl’s carved vestibule, entryway to an intimate place: his Norwegian heart.

  “How—lovely,” I exclaimed.

  Annie whispered, “Shh.” She waved me into supper.

  On top of the slab table, a steamy feast: bean soup, boiled potatoes, with assorted shellfish. Afterward we had blackberry oatcakes with nettle tea.

  My brother returned from his new job at the mill, just in time. Julia crowed with delight. Charley, slightly fazed by his unaccustomed trial, tried to eat with the baby in his lap. However, her efforts to feed him tidbits with an oversized spoon made him put her down. A little while later, her sticky fists grabbed hold of my skirt. Using her belly for leverage, she catapulted into my lap. Edith’s gown was ruined, but I didn’t care. She made me feel like part of the family. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that she looked even more like Jake Cook than Charley or James.

  Jake filled in the details of our passage from Port Townsend, including the fever from my injury which forced us to camp at Dead Man’s Point, delaying our arrival for three days. He didn’t mentioned Charley’s accident, or the healing ceremony that cured him. I, too, said not a word. Did she know what I knew?

  After supper, as I dried the last dish, Annie remarked, “Carl was never anything but old, yet I never expected him to die. Charley put up a cross. Swan refused to read from Seya’s bible. He called his friend ‘eccentric,’ ‘odd’ and ‘unusual.’ It’s true, he seemed to attract predicaments. For example, fishermen are often are lost at sea, but who dies retrieving his net in a safe harbor? Late in life, Carl made a decision to settle down and protect our family until he was no longer able. Swan said he admired him, no, that he loved him, for that.”

  She sighed. “Wait until you see the beautiful carved grave marker. Charley’s got a real talent for woodworking from his father.”

  Carl or Jake? I wondered. What comes from whom? I was discovering that in different types of people there was a disturbing amount of overlap that was hard to disentangle.

  Suddenly, a rasping-grating sound, like the growl of an old dog chained to a creaky wagon emanated from behind the closed door. Annie gestured at the elaborately carved threshold of the new room.

  “Hjalmar,” she explained.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  She smiled wanly. “Napping.”

  Annie opened up the pocket of her apron. Inside, a gob of candy wrapped in waxed paper. “Black licorice. It’s the only thing that stops his hacking.”

  She handed Julia to me and disappeared into “the marital quarters.” Just before the door clicked shut, I glimpsed their faded quilt, piled up on against the bedpost. I had to look away.

  That night Charley slept on a pile of blankets next to the fireplace. I slept with the children up in the loft. Jake disappeared, where to I cannot say. Annie passed the night in the bedroom tending to Henning.

  The next morning, despite a squall, while Charley served oatmeal to the children, I followed Annie through the marsh to the little marker on the hill by the water’s edge. On a hill overlooking the Strait, a charming marker two-and-a-half feet in height. Despite the cold and damp, I knelt.

  I felt nothing.

  Not a twinge or a pang.

  No tears.

  Even if he was not my father, I still wanted to believe that Carl cared for me. Without Carl’s love, to quote Hamlet, I did not “set my life at a pin’s fee.” Still, I felt nothing. What did it mean?

  Annie folded her arms on her chest and looked down at the water.

  The wind groveled.

  I shouted, “I need to know. Was Carl my father, or not?”

  Annie turned to face me and shrugged. “Yes.”

  I studied Charley’s handiwork, simple yet stately. Annie had been right . . . he’d inherited a considerable talent.

  Still, no tears.

  I announced, “I want to marry Hjalmar Henning.”

  Her eyes widened.

  For a full minute, she said nothing. After what seemed like an eternity, she smiled. “I didn’t even know you liked him.”

  “How old is he, anyhow? Fifty? Sixty?”

  She refolded her arms. “More like eighty.”

  A joke?

  “I’ve thought it over. After he dies, I’ll turn the property title over to you and the children—”

  She stopped me. “No, thank you.”

  Annie knew—I knew it too—that my words, though brave, were empty. I could not marry the oxcart man. Not now, not ever. One year older than Annie when she married Carl, I could not emulate her noble gesture.

  For I was still a child.

  Hers.

  She laughed and then turned serious. “The Reverend has set aside money to pay for college. Only a fool would pass up a chance for a real education. And, Millie, you’re no fool.” She paused. “Anyhow, I took care of it. I already married Hjalmar. Swan is in Port Angeles, filing the papers. It’s too late.”


  Too late, a mantra. On the brink of her freedom, once again, Annie bartered her life for mine. There was nothing for me to say.

  From out of my dress pocket, I retrieved the silver fish. I held them out to her. “Here,” and added, “please.”

  Annie, after a moment, opened her hand. “You’re right. The earrings came to me. It’s up to me to make it right.”

  She dropped them into her apron pocket.

  The carved cross, polished with a soft rag by Charley, gleamed in the sun-streaked rain. Still, I felt nothing.

  Annie remarked, “He’s not there.” Before I could ask, she added, “I buried him in a tree.”

  In a tree? Was this her revenge? Carl had eschewed S’Klallam belief and prohibited their practice in our house. Was this way of getting back at him? Or, a sideways attempt to honor him?

  Really, I was confused.

  Swan remarked that in his lifetime Carl had a tendency to attract absurd situations. Death had dished up one last opportunity.

  I asked her, “Did you love him?”

  She replied, “No.” Immediately, she added, “At least I didn’t hate him.”

  Upside-down heart.

  Annie said, “Let’s go. I have things to do. Besides, I’m starving.” A moment later she was swinging her arms to part the grass to clear a path to the cabin.

  “Wait,” I called out.

  She stopped, and turned.

  “What about Jake Cook?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, what?”

  “Does he stay or go?”

  It was her turn to act surprised. “It’s not a bad thing to have a man around the place. Plus, I have three kids who need a father. Why not?”

  “Because. He’s a killer.”

  She turned away, swinging both of her arms as she moved through the wet, withering grass. “Well, everyone’s done something.”

  Real life: at its best, a series of compromises; at worst a trail of tears leading to extinction. Holding my breath, I waited. For what? Redemption? A prayer? Forgiveness? For an instant, the earth stopped ticking—and then went on.

  Together, we went in. To brew a pot of coffee and drink it fast. In my family, that’s how we do it. The paradox that rules our lives: Too late to undo, but never too late to redo.

  The next day Annie traveled to Port Angeles to secure the property that she had paid for with her life, not once, but twice. She planned to carry the marriage certificate to the land office and add her signature to the property deed. Meanwhile, Seya, now fully recovered, would mind the children. It was Jake, the unacknowledged groom, who would maneuver the canoe to the signing of a treaty that would legally bind her to Henning. Jake: a murderer, an invisible hero.

  I was left behind to look after my new step-pappy. By dint of black licorice, I managed to put the crusty ox-herd to bed. I threw on Carl’s big woolen shirt, my knitted cap, and went outside. Down by the water, a female goldeneye, attended by her partner with a white teardrop, bobbed in the shadowed grasses. Startled, they rose up, showering me with the rain from the tips of their spread wings.

  The eye of the lighthouse blinked.

  I let the bandage unravel onto the sand.

  In the center of my palm, a red circle inside a black circle. The center opened up like the mouth at the center of a purple starfish.

  With the water running over my bare feet, I stretched out my right arm, flexed my wrist at eye level, and peered through the hole in my hand, which suddenly burned with a searing intensity.

  For the third and final time, I was visited by a vision of a vessel on the water:

  “Heave,” rasped out Lame Jack, the massacre’s leader.

  His unbuttoned shirt flapped. His big belly bounced. On the salted breeze I caught the scent of his body, which smelled of fresh fish guts and old whiskey.

  Out of the shadows, about a half-dozen Native men, stripped to the waist, raised up a seafaring canoe. They carried it over the drift logs and shimmied it into the water without a sound.

  Lame Jack staggered into the lead canoe. He turned to look back in my direction. His glare flinted and hit me squarely in the eye. “Are you coming, or not?”

  Dream-like. Preposterous. Was it possible I had entered the vision so completely that he could see me?

  “Why not? No weapon? Here.”

  He tossed me a twisted piece of rusty iron. I stepped to one side. The iron lump powdered the sand. I bent down to retrieve it. Was it even real? Just then, a lithe form passed by my right shoulder and scooped the makeshift weapon. The paddlers shoved off; the boy leapt from the shore. Thomas, his father, offered a hand. Together, they hunkered down in the canoe.

  With his bone club, Thomas began to beat out a rhythm on the gunwale. His song: a call to action. His song: a wish to die. In less than one year, the one-sided battle at Dungeness would gratify that desire.

  Jake swiveled to scan the shore. Searching for what? Me?

  No.

  He was staring at the mystic-silver light streaming from the bow of the canoe, a lit pathway with the power to reverse the flow of time.

  “Leap!” I shouted.

  It was not too late. If Jake would only listen to the phosphorescent murmurings underneath the current, he could absolve himself from a lifetime of bitter uncertainty. “Do it.” But, if he did, he would forfeit his last chance to remain at his father’s side, and to exhibit prowess as a warrior—sweet revenge for the raft of humiliation that would be his portion now and in the years to come.

  “Jump,” I urged. “Do it, now.”

  Next to his father’s knee, Jake hunkered down, his gaze fixed on Dungeness.

  Slowly, the vision misted. I cupped the moonlight in my palm. The pain subsided. My hand healed.

  At last, I understood. The encounter with the legendary Aia’nl had imbued me with a special gift—to perceive the past, present, and future simultaneously. To locate what is lost and return it to its proper place. The memory of this mystic power would pour through my pen in the years to come.

  With sudden clarity, I knew: If the Tsimshian girl had escaped, ransoming her life with a pair of silver earrings, then the mysterious eighteenth corpse had to be the leader of the massacre. Lame Jack—who was known as Nu-Mah the Bad to his own—had been shot and killed by a disgruntled kinsman in the melee. He’d been left to rot along with the massacred Tsimshians.

  Thus, my tale concludes where it began. The way of things with my people. Redo but no undo.

  With the pages remaining in this notebook, I offer this epilogue:

  Edith and Astor arrived without mishap in San Francisco—having boarded the brig and not the ill-fated schooner. One year later, my mistress, sister, and friend succumbed to her illness. According to the actor, during the throes of fever, her eyes were alive with a feverish joy. Her final hour was helped along by morphine, injected by a hypodermic needle, a new medical tool, acquired by her desperate lover who no doubt used the same instrument to ease his own pain after she had breathed her last.

  Ultimately, in fulfillment of Carl’s wish, I would complete my formal education. At a liberal college for Natives and Anglos in Lawrence, Kansas the bereft Thomas Astor tracked me down. After two hysterical weeks in a hotel room, we married. With a new, well-respected last name I was admitted to the elite parlors of New York. Their disregard for the real challenges of real people confused me. It took two more years for me to realize that those in high society, with all of its luxurious distractions, were even more confused than me. In this atmosphere, Astor’s better angel gave into addiction. The debased devil inside of him would stop at nothing to satisfy the need.

  One night Astor, in a fit of despair, hit me. Afterwards he cried, collapsed on the divan, and passed out. I threw on my wrap to wander the cobbled streets of Manhattan. The next day I sold my wedding ring to a crooked jeweler. With a son and a daughter by Astor—of all of his gifts to me, the most precious—the next morning I booked passage for three on the cross-continental rail west to the Pacific Nor
thwest.

  In these pages I’ve fulfilled my pledge: to tell my own tale and the story of a region. What about the silver fish? Wait a bit. That will come.

  George never came back to Dungeness. Though I have tried once or twice to find him, each time led to a dead-end. Whenever I felt lonely, on the teeming streets of New York City, and long after I returned to my home, I searched for him. Quite honestly, I still do.

  After my third and final vision, Annie returned to Carl’s cabin with two stamped documents: a marriage license and a property title. Grateful to her benefactor, or resigned to her fate. By spring, Hjalmar was recovered enough to help Seya out—gathering kindling, weeding the kitchen garden, and playing with the kids while Annie and Jake were off God knows where. This domestic routine, even with its apparent contradictions, suited Hjalmar. He brushed his teeth often.

  In the autumn of 1891 Henning developed a sharp pain in one ear. Annie and the children were off at the wildflower camp fishing and hunting with Jake Cook. His minor ailment became intolerable. With a dollar and a half in his overall bib, he mounted his mule and set out for help. Though Jake searched the obvious routes, as well as the local hospitals, Hjalmar Henning never turned up. His final wish, to die in a proper bed with a devoted wife, thwarted.

  Jake stayed, and though never legally wed, he and Annie settled into Carl’s marital quarters.

  The following autumn, Jake created an additional bedroom with one small window for my grandmother Eliza III. In all of the years that Annie lived with Carl, Seya refused to move into our house. At last, she agreed. Not because she liked Jake more than Charles Langlie. Of the two, she preferred Carl. In her own words, she agreed to move in to the plank house “because now it belongs to us.”

  Ten years after the events penned here, Swan, eighty-two, died of heart failure alone in town two days after he penned his last journal entry. My grandmother never acknowledged any particular affection for the man. She remained an active member of the Indian Shaker Church. Folks still talk about the ceremony in Jamestown, part wake and part potlatch, to honor her.