Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  The idea of the taste of fresh seal was on everyone’s mind, and in a few moments the Eskimo men popped from the earth again, harpoons pricked against the sky. All the hunters wore white boots, invisible against the land, so that as they walked toward the ice they appeared to be legless and floating, cruising above the earth. At the edge of the sea they broke into groups, fanning away from the shore and out onto the ice. They searched for holes the size of apples, the breathing holes of seals. They walked far out and when they stopped they bent and peered into the ice and remained still.

  Phil found a hole and bent and scooped the snow and loose ice out of the way until he could see clearly the short dark tunnel that led to the water below. Carefully and quietly he placed an owl feather where the snow had been then slowly held his harpoon high, ready to plunge it downward. Today there would be only one seal. No one knew which air hole the seal would choose, yet all about the bay harpoons were cocked high above the heads of hunters. A seal, lungs cramped and heavy, would come to breathe and a feather would move and the chosen hunter would cast his harpoon so precisely that the feather would fold around its tip and disappear into the body of the animal. When the seal was dead the others, perched like eagles above their own air holes, would come running, would begin pulling the line hand over hand until the lean body of the seal slid from the broken ice like a baby from a shattered womb. Later, on the shore, when the hot meat of the seal warmed and colored the lips of the Eskimos, someone would dig the broken feather from the flesh and hand it, red now, to the hunter. And it would serve as a decoration for a drum or for the wall of his summer home, his lean-to.

  The reverend watched from his window. The children had stopped playing and stood around his soft loft as quiet and still as those on the ice. From this distance the bodies of the men and women, curved like boomerangs over the air holes, looked to be dark shadows laid upon the ice. They waited. One seal would be enough for everyone. Even the reverend, after four years here, understood the anticipation, had acquired a taste for the hot red meat. He liked to let it please his fingers and he was beginning to understand touch as the first stage of taste. The reverend waited with the children, looking out at the white earth and the dark shadows.

  When the hunters, frozen apart for so long on the canvas of his window, finally came together, only the reverend made a sound. He betrayed his newness to the village by a slight intake of breath. It was impossible for him to withhold it. It was a miracle, like watching the figures in a painting only to have them begin to move about. When the hunters came together black spots remained in the reverend’s eyes. The hunters ran, even now were pulling the dead seal from the sea, yet they remained where they had been, dark shadows painted on his very eyeballs. The reverend blinked and waited, knowing that the spots would fade from their fixed positions, melt into the whiteness again or trail across his window and back into the bodies of the real men. He thought of the dead body of Andrew the Suicidal. He looked with the children and saw the long slim seal, born of the earth’s cracked shell. He waited as the Eskimos did, he watched with a calculating eye, wondering how large it was, anxious to warm the tips of his fingers in its neat flesh.

  Finn, off to see the old man, carried money in his pockets and pulled supplies behind him on a sled. He’d found a map among Fujino’s possessions and would follow it, if necessary, throughout the rest of winter. It was not snowing on the day he left, yet the cloud cover was a shade grayer than the earth. Finn followed the map or saw the round mouth and the pinched eyes of Fujino in front of him. Pensum. Penance. Repentance. He’d be a different man after this. He’d be stronger because of it. After this, though he was forty-five, he’d try to begin again. Finn had read Fujino’s shopping list and filled it, and when he found Kaneda he would explain. He would say he was sorry and would prove it by working for the old man and by taking none of the gold for himself. He’d brought Fujino’s whiskey for he knew the old man would want it, but he’d have none of that himself either. He had potatoes and fish and salt. The old man might not be happy to see him at first, but Finn would make him glad. He would explain what had happened to Fujino, making the old man’s memory of Fujino good and letting the old man take stories of Fujino’s bravery home with him to Japan.

  Before leaving Nome, Finn bought a dog. He’d been told by a man that the dog was of a breed that could walk through high snow drifts and that it would easily pull a sled as small as the one Finn showed him. The dog was gray like the sky and had almond eyes. And he was silent. Even under the most pressing circumstances, the man told Finn, the dog would make no sound. Finn called the dog Mute. They had been traveling long days slowly, but though the dog was good at walking through high snow he was not a puller. Each time Finn harnessed him to the sled he sat back, not understanding what to do. The dog leapt, gray like a wolf, through the surrounding snow, but Finn pulled.

  They were able to move during daylight hours, but when the earth blackened they sat by a low fire, hollowed into a snow-bank, or buried under furs. Finn cooked over the fires he built, and though the orange flames gave little heat, he had regained the sense that it was not as cold as it ought to be. Finn saw the darkness around him as the expanding depths of the mouth of Fujino, and he was often sure that he saw, beyond the fire, the golden eyes of his dead mule as it kept its blind rider close to the man who would explain, who would tell Kaneda how it had been. Death was all around him. Finn had been responsible for Fujino, for that child in Ireland, and if he found Kaneda too late … He pursed his lips and bore his responsibility quietly. He leaned against the dog. “Father forgive me for I have sinned,” he mumbled, and there was no echo in the night.

  “It’s scandalous,” Ellen said. “People are getting used to the winter. They’ll be coming past here soon to stare at him.”

  Henriette stood at the window looking back at Ellen and out toward the sea. She too was ashamed. It had been her idea to place Fujino on the mule but at the time Ellen had quickly agreed for it hadn’t seemed right to lay him on the snowing ground. And now he was frozen. When they came to their senses they dug a shallow grave in a bank of snow but it was too late. He couldn’t be moved. He was locked as if one with the hairy body of the mule. Even his clothes, the way the trouser legs wrapped themselves around the poor man’s thin ankles, were now fixed. And both the mule and the man had turned the color of lead. Henriette had seen statues like him in the parks of San Francisco, of military men riding with swords high.

  “We’ll need a man’s help. Or we’ll tip the mule and bury them both,” she said.

  Ellen, sitting by the fire far from the window, knitted. She’d not stand staring as if there was nothing to be done. They’d received an invitation from the reverend and from Phil. Would they be interested in experiencing Christmas in the Eskimo village? If so, there were sixteen children in the village and could they bring a little something for each? The very smallest of gifts would suffice, the reverend wrote, but something would be necessary.

  Ellen read and reread the reverend’s letter. On the day of its arrival she remembered the wool she’d brought all the way from home. There’d been no chance to use it until now, but at Christmastime children got stockings. As a girl she’d found them tacked to the mantel above the fireplace quite early on Christmas mornings. Always two pairs, one from her mother and one from her grandmother. It had never been a surprise. And if there was time she might have a sweater as well, and from her father a coin tucked deeply into the toe of each stocking. She wore the stockings, one pair and then the other, and she threw the coins into the air and had them come down into her hands.

  There was a Christmas game that she played with her father, who would always be dressed and friendly on that day. He’d swing Ellen high into the top of the main room then let her go just as she threw the coins, and he’d catch her just as she was supposed to catch them. She’d shriek and the coins would roll and she’d chase them, sometimes out of the living room, under chairs and under the big clock in the hallway,
the one that ticked the seconds of her grandmother’s life away. And after her father had three times thrown her and after she was exhausted and nearly in tears from laughing and running, her grandmother and her mother would come disapproving from the kitchen and one would announce the goose and the other the pudding, as though the goose and the pudding were guests in their house for the day. Her grandmother, looking stern and evil, would always speak more clearly than her mother. She’d look with her rooster eyes at the father and the child, then she’d sweep her arm and head forward and in her most cultured voice, acting like a butler, she’d say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the goose,” and Ellen and the others would walk quietly and with dignity into the next room to dinner. It was her grandmother’s only joke, the only time Ellen had ever been able to see in the eyes of the old lady any spark of good humor.

  As Ellen knitted she thought of her mother knitting stockings for her; she thought of her grandmother sitting with stiff collars pinned at the neck by cameos. The wool was gray and the stockings were all the same size. Those that were finished were washed for shrinkage in one of the bathtubs and hung around the front room of the bath like fish carcasses. Ellen tried to string the line as close to the heater as she could, and on the floor around their chairs now water drops left dark circles. Henriette, sitting again, moved her chair this way and that, each knee damp and the material of her dress sticking slightly to her skin. She too would give gifts, knotted necklaces, ready to wear with the golden snowflakes. She looked toward the ceiling and thought of the dripping stockings as long and slender teats coming from the dark underbelly of a cow somebody had forgotten to milk. She laughed. She had been depressed too long. It was nearly time for them to meet Phil, nearly Christmas.

  Kaneda was almost out of food. He had not taken precautions and by the time he realized that Fujino was indeed late, his food supply had dwindled too rapidly to get him through the winter. He still had tea and bags of ground meal, but his lack of other food had forced him to begin a fast. It was not a complete fast, of course, for he would eat some of the meal and drink tea each morning, but though he knew it to be spiritually weak, it nourished his anger with Fujino and allowed him to continue his history. He was not happy with the telling of stories when there were no listeners. In general he had allowed only a day or two for each century since Jomon, and he caught himself skipping many of the smaller details. He spent almost no time on personalities, and sometimes he let certain geographical areas go unmentioned for as long as five hundred years. Now he was in the middle of the sixteenth century when things were really beginning to happen in Japan. He had just finished all of the gruesome stories of the feudal wars and was anxious to get on to unification. Unification! For the first time the entire nation was at peace with itself and under one leader. Fujino knew little of this time in history so it would be too bad for him, for under no circumstances would Kaneda repeat it.

  “Hideyoshi,” Kaneda said in a low monotone. He paused, remembering statues he had seen of the great hero Hideyoshi in armor or Hideyoshi reading. A portrait of the great man was on one side of the new paper money, and a likeness of him had been etched on several of the country’s coins.

  “Hideyoshi was our first modern hero and the man who first unified Japan.” There was music in the telling of stories. He could hear it in his voice. “Hideyoshi defeated both the small and the great armies and instigated change. Under his rule Japan had her first land registration, her first census, and the sword hunt that left most of the wandering samurai without the instruments of their trade.”

  It was hard to continue in the formal monotone of a storyteller. He knew the time of Hideyoshi so well there was no use telling himself. When he tried to picture the small face of the great general, he had no trouble. It was for someone else that he wanted to do the telling, to make the thing come alive.

  Kaneda heard the approach of Finn at sunset and for a few moments confused those noises with the internal sounds of sixteenth-century Japan. They were like the sounds made by a cart being pushed from behind by a man. He imagined Hideyoshi riding, and himself a tradesman trying with all his strength to get his cart and his wares off the road in time.

  Outside, Finn saw the water wheel first and remembered Fujino trying to explain to him how it worked. He stood before the closed shelter that the two men had built. He’d rehearsed a hundred times what he would say, yet he hesitated now, afraid to push the hide door back, afraid to find Kaneda wearing Fujino’s mouth, his body frozen into those same angles. He unloaded the sled, moving boxes up close to the entrance, hoping that the old man would come out, would greet him. The dog pushed his nose under the flap, smelling the fire, and Finn saw an orange tongue of flame. He was alive then!

  Kaneda moved slightly to one side, picking up a knife and thinking “wolf.” Finn pushed the dog out of the way and when he threw back the curtain Kaneda’s knife was inches from his face. Finn looked forward out of his thick hood and for a moment saw the flames dancing in front of the face of Fujino, highlighting the pink flesh of the inside of his mouth. Kaneda held his thrust. Finn pushed the hood back away from his face.

  “Mr. Kaneda?”

  “You are not a wolf.”

  “Do you remember me? I’m Finn. From Nome.”

  Finn turned and pulled the closest box of supplies into the small room. Already, in the moments he’d been in camp, the sky had turned toward another night. Finn took the knife from Kaneda and slit the side of the box. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey and several small packages of salt salmon. He sat next to the old man and waited.

  “Where’s Fujino?” the old man asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Finn held out the bottle. “Fujino’s dead,” he said quietly.

  Kaneda unwrapped a little of the salt salmon and looked at it. He had, after all, been fasting only because there was not food. He put a little of the fish to his lips and sucked on it. “Sending you won’t get him off the hook,” he said. “He is late, very late.”

  Finn reached inside his coat and handed Kaneda the package of money. “This is what he got for your gold. And the raw gold is his share for the work he did on the beach.”

  Kaneda counted the money. “Why did he not come himself? Fujino is not so big a coward. Is he so big a coward?”

  “Harakiri,” said Finn.

  Kaneda closed his fist around the whiskey bottle. The word came to him late for he had expected English, expected not to understand.

  “Harakiri?” This time the voice was his own. Four distinct syllables. He let the word slice the air. “Fujino? Harakiri?” The old man stood and stupidly saw himself as the sixteenth-century peasant again. He looked at the knife stuck in the side of the box that Finn brought and pictured the soft hairless abdomen of Fujino and the knife moving through it. He saw a wound open cleanly, robust intestines bursting forth like Christmas gifts.

  “Fujino? Harakiri?”

  Finn put his arm on the old man’s shoulder. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I talked him into staying.”

  There were noises inside the old man’s head. He heard drums and horns. The mute dog entered and sat quietly next to Finn.

  “Seppuku,” the old man said. “Harakiri.” The dog cocked his head, listening.

  “I’m sorry,” said Finn.

  The old man reached down and pulled the knife from the side of the box. He felt the pressure starting way down in his bowels, moving up. He thought he was going to be sick. He swayed, nearly falling. In his hand the knife moved, swinging easily, and the dog, recognizing a game, took it in his mouth and sat with it between his paws. It was a sharp knife, one that Kaneda honed each day, and on the blade now were drops of blood. The dog, surprised, cleaned the blood off the knife and began sniffing around the room for more. He could taste it in his mouth but didn’t recognize it as his own. He thrust his muzzle deep into the open side of the box and began to pull on the sharp tail of another of the frozen salted salmon.

  Though Finn and the old man could sp
eak to each other, they couldn’t understand. Finn knew Kaneda had no English, but he’d assumed that it wouldn’t be a big problem. Sign language, certain words, drawings; these were the tools they would use. And Finn, at the old man’s insistence, abandoned early his decision to give up whiskey. He’d been there only a few hours and already a bottle was gone and another was opened and on the ground between them. The small room was hot. Kaneda was in no danger of freezing, and though he was very low on food he had managed well with his meal and his tea.

  Finn leaned forward, pressing his face close to the old man’s. The fire reflected yellow off his beard and eyes.

  “It was my fault,” he said. “Do you understand the meaning of the word ‘fault’?”

  “Harakiri is an old and honorable method. The samurai, the ronin, used it quite often. But Fujino…”

  “He did it with mercury,” Finn said slowly. He took a piece of the paper he had been drawing on and drew a picture of a bottle and wrote mercury on its label.

  “Whiskey,” Kaneda said, pushing the bottle toward him.

  “No, mercury. Like the planet.” Finn drew the sun and placed circles around it at various distances.

  “This one,” he said. “The circle closest to the sun. The smallest…”

  Kaneda looked at the paper then shook his head. He didn’t understand.

  “It was not at all uncommon during the phase of history that we are now studying for a ronin to commit harakiri,” he said. “Things were pretty bleak then. In fact it used to be the custom of ronin to stand at the gates of the homes of rich merchants and threaten to disembowel themselves if the merchants did not offer money and food. Very disgraceful to see the decline of such an honorable group.”