Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  “We must be getting home,” she said, standing and speaking to Henriette. “Mr. Hummel, you have a well-kept place and we thank you for the coffee.”

  “And for getting rid of Fujino and that mule,” said Henriette. “I was dreading going home because of it.”

  Hummel smiled for a moment then sucked his teeth and said he’d be around for a bath as soon as they reopened. He also said he would spread the word among the employees of Dr. Kingman and that there wasn’t a man among them who didn’t need a bath right now. The two women stood on the salt-worn path and looked back at John Hummel. He’d gone from outcast to company man merely by corking his bleeding mouth. Ellen remembered him marching the beach, down at the tide’s edge, pointing his stick, like a rifle, at them all. He’d tried to claim the entire beach as his own. He had been angry and laughed at by everyone. How could a man who could not keep the blood in his veins be so neat? Keep such a clean house? Look at him smiling, white teeth and pink gums like the rest of us, a company man standing in front of his candy. Ellen remembered how her father had hated company men, those who bought up the small farms and linked them together on the map like sausages. They had come to her bath and taken the dead man and buried him in the snow with his mule still under him. If it was such a Christian thing to do why did she feel like calling them a bunch of bloody body snatchers? Was it because they laid no caring hands on him? No more feeling for Fujino than for the dumb mule?

  Ellen and Henriette walked the swirl of tents toward the bath, leaving Hummel standing on his clean path like a woman in the doorway of a cottage. They were thinking different thoughts. Henriette smiled at the image of the clean, mule-free path. Fujino was gone and none too soon for her. It was always better to look toward the future. It was nice, what Dr. Kingman and Mr. Hummel had done for them. There’s little enough of helping others around here.

  The bags they carried were heavy in their hands as they circled. They passed the Gold Belt, its tent inside, a wooden frame without. From here they knew the way, could even see the top of the bath suspended oddly, as if hanging from the gray sky. It was the only building finished during the rush on the beach. Indeed, the town would have been better off without its Mr. Hummel, thought Ellen. It would have been a complete town. If not for his beach gold, people would be living in buildings and able to carry on normal lives. Yet it was not Hummel’s fault. He believed the beach strike had been his alone. No, it was the fault of them all, and of the bloody golden snowflakes as well. Men chased after those things like children after real ones. It was the way they appeared so magically in the frypans, all finely webbed and beautiful. Ellen wanted them as much as anyone else . . for the things they could buy.

  The door to the bath had been locked by winter, the window sealed as well. Henriette pushed on the window, chipped away at the ice that held it, and pushed again. Ellen stood back looking at the spot where the mule had been. They had done a neat job, Hummel and his friends. The mule had been locked in place for so long that they’d not even tried to dig him up. Rather they’d sawed, as close to the ground and as evenly as they could, through the skin and through the meat and bone, just above the mule’s ankles.

  Ellen removed her glove and bent and felt the smooth surface of the top of one of the remaining mule’s hooves. So smooth you might think it had been sanded to free it of its rough spots, she thought. She imagined that a table top would fit on the mule’s legs without the slightest wobble. She could hear the tapping of Henriette as she tried to reopen the window, and at that instant she felt the tip of her finger freeze to the top of the mule’s hoof. She pulled back gently but could not free herself.

  “Henriette,” she said, “come help.”

  Henriette tapped and peered at her work, but did not answer, so Ellen sighed and then very quickly snatched her finger away and pushed her hand back into her glove. There was no pain. Her finger, frozen from the knuckle, had not yet begun to thaw. But on the top of the mule’s hoof a round piece of thick skin curled halfway over itself and then froze into the shape of a little wood chip. Ellen tried to push it off with the tip of her boot. She imagined those men sawing through the mule’s legs, then carrying it off toward the north of the city. They’d made no distinction between the mule and the man, she was sure of it. She wondered, would they have sawed through Fujino’s legs if he’d stood on solid ground? She could remember the look on Fujino’s face so well, but with the spring thaw she was sure that look would soften, his jaw would slacken and fall and his head would loll on the muddy ground. And here in front of the bath, would the four mule hooves soften and begin to bleed? Would the smooth finish turn liquid and warm around Ellen’s poor piece of skin?

  Ellen had hoped to find Finn tending the store when she got back, but she knew he wasn’t there when she saw no smoke curling upward. She wanted nothing to do with Finn, but she wanted him safe just the same. She wanted nothing to do with him because the women in her family had always married men like him. After all, they had a country full of them so there was little choice. But he was all right enough in his own way and it would ease her mind to know that he was warm.

  Ellen held one hand tightly in the other. Her hand had warmed now and it surprised her that such a little wound could hurt so much. And she was cold. They’d been five minutes standing here, Henriette tapping at the icy window.

  “How much longer will it be, Henriette?” she asked suddenly. “Do you think we’ll have to break it?”

  Strips of silver ice struck the ground around Henriette but again she did not answer. Surely she’d heard. She worked slowly, never losing patience. Whatever else she might be, the girl was meticulous. Slow, careful, considerate. Surely the reverend was now more interested in Henriette than he had been in her. He was a timid man, and though she liked the daydream of the two of them she knew it wouldn’t be a good match. And she’d not take a man because she was worried about time, about growing old. Others had done that; indeed, she believed her own mother had. Think of your age, Ellen, had been her mother’s advice. When you meet a man, think of your age before deciding to what degree you can abide him. Not her. What she liked about Finn and what she liked about the reverend, if she could find those qualities tied up in the same bag of skin she might consider it. Not to say that she was any great catch herself, all bigboned and proud. She knew she was not a favorite with the men but what did it matter?

  “There,” said Henriette, “no thanks to the help you’ve given me.

  She pushed the window wide and then stood back for Ellen to climb in first. “I’m sorry,” said Ellen, “I was taken with my own thoughts.”

  Henriette was in the room behind her and had closed the window. “Never mind,” she said. “Out there the one who works is the one who stays warm.”

  The room seemed dustless in the twilight and was as cold as ice. Ellen hurried about lighting lamps, and Henriette pushed several large sticks of wood and some moss into the frozen stove. In the bathroom the two tubs glistened, their insides coated a half inch and all shiny and slippery. Ellen set a lamp in the bottom of each and stood watching for a second as the texture changed, as the sides lost their frost and began to slide toward the bottom. Henriette was already upstairs; Ellen could hear her footsteps, pacing the floor. Whatever Hummel had said, he was right about one thing. They would reopen the bath. Tomorrow, no later. They’d burn the winter out of this new building and out of the town as well. They’d clean everybody, money or no.

  Ellen pulled the lanterns from the tubs. The wooden floorboards were soft with the dripping water. Her finger throbbed in her glove. In the main room the chickens looked about like stored puppets. They were, of course, dead. It couldn’t be helped. The one nearest Ellen sat stupidly upon the marble egg and upon two or three of her own.

  By the time Phil had been at the strike site for a week they had enough firewood to last them for more than a month. The dog stood or slept by Phil now, still silent. The old man and Finn, staying outside when Phil did, learned to skate,
but at dusk they all went back inside, rubbing their sore muscles and warming themselves by the fire. When the old man spoke, Phil answered him in Eskimo. It had quickly become a pattern, and just as quickly Kaneda fell into his old habits, spending hours each night retelling the history of Japan, starting again at the beginning so that Phil wouldn’t be confused, so that there would be no gaps for him, just as if he understood.

  “He’s praying again,” said Finn.

  “Not praying,” said Phil. “He’s telling us a story. If he were an Eskimo he’d be telling us a story.”

  During the time that the old man spoke each night, neither Finn nor Phil interrupted him, Finn because he believed it was a prayer, Phil because he did not want to be impolite. The old man leaned toward Phil, speaking only to him, and when he finished he set a bottle of whiskey on the ground between them and then pointed to it as though it had been there all along and he was surprised they had not touched it.

  “When we get to Japan, Taro, I will show you how to drink sake. You won’t believe the sweetness of it.”

  Finn took the bottle and poured three tin cups half full. He set one in front of each man and then looked back down at the fire.

  “You too, Finn,” said Kaneda. “If you come to Japan you won’t believe the sweetness of sake either.”

  When the whiskey was gone from all three cups, Kaneda refilled them, this time all the way to the top.

  “This old man has started a kind of drinking contest,” Phil told Finn. “He looks so much like my father that I cannot act normally in front of him.”

  Now, very quickly, Kaneda drank all the whiskey and sat back smiling. And once he’d moved to fill the cups again, Finn had managed to get himself out of the contest by taking the job of pourer. He didn’t feel like drinking. He had introduced these two and now he felt like getting out of the way. He knew they could not understand each other, but they talked on anyway and he had had enough. It was beginning to appear to Finn as though a common language was a luxury in the world. Look at them. One speaking Japanese, the other Eskimo, both happily passing the time. There were people in the world who were meant to run across each other, he was sure of it.

  “I have something I have been meaning to show you,” Kaneda told Phil. “It is an old and formal photograph but you will be able to see her features from it nevertheless.”

  He reached back into his bedroll and pulled out a paper wallet containing a few thin bills, a few cardboard photographs.

  “This is my daughter. Her name is Kimie and I want you to meet her. I wouldn’t show Fujino this photograph, so I must volunteer it to you. Maybe he’ll be able to see it through your eyes.”

  Phil took the photograph in both hands and leaned closer to the fire. It showed a grim-faced young woman in a dark and formal gown, standing in front of a shrine. Her hair was pulled back from her face and fixed in solid-looking waves.

  Finn, peering around Phil’s shoulder, saw a lean-bodied woman on the dark paper. Kaneda had never shown him these photographs. He wondered if the woman was his wife.

  Kaneda waited until the two men stopped looking at the photograph, then he took it back and handed Phil another, showing a house of plain wood on a very narrow and curving street.

  “This will be your home. I will live in it with you until I die and then it will be yours. It is in the very center of a certain part of Tokyo and cannot be said to be substandard in any way. I am a carpenter and have done everything myself.”

  Finn and Phil looked at the house. Finn glanced back at Kaneda and smiled, but Phil looked at every corner of the photograph, studying the walls and the support posts and the curving street in front of it. The gate was open, and through it he could see a stone path through a garden and then another door that he assumed led to the living quarters.

  “Thank you,” he finally said to Kaneda. “You are a very lucky man.”

  “Oh, you have so much to learn,” said the old man. “First the language. It will be much easier to teach you things after you have mastered that. Japanese history and carpentry and then how to play Go or perhaps the Shakuhachi. From my daughter you will learn tea and be in the presence of flowers. She is even proficient in dance, which is not such a common thing as it used to be.”

  Phil nodded and held his cup high. “Here’s to your woman and your house,” he said. “Though you look like an Eskimo, your life is quite different.”

  The two men turned their attention once again to the whiskey, swaying in the lapping shadows of the flames. Finn poured and watched as they gulped, each speaking his own language, but full of goodwill, reunited, like father and son. The old man, loose-jawed now, was the first to slip away from the steady flow of the booze. He lifted an edge of the hide floor and poured the remaining contents of his cup out onto the frozen earth below. Then he leered back at Phil as if he had finished first and waited impatiently for Finn to pour again. Phil, for his part, drank everything but remained himself, sitting round-shouldered, hunched forward as if he were considering what to say next. He looked into the fire and remembered that it was not his father that sat across from him. Finn poured a small amount of whiskey into each cup again then held the bottle up so that the two men could see that it was empty.

  “It’s gone,” he said, “and very quickly too.”

  The old man finished the last sip of his whiskey, held the cup high in the air and hit it with the bent knuckle of his other hand.

  “In Japan our sake is as clear as creek water,” he said. “If I were to fill my cup with sake it would appear empty, as it does now.”

  The old man shouted but his voice was dulled by the soft walls of the shelter. “In the fall, when Fujino was here, we would get drunk and walk over the creek and up into the hills. Fujino in his young body would often run ahead leaping into the air like an animal. He was in excellent physical condition, not like any of us.”

  Finn reached behind him and brought out another stiff piece of moss to lay on the fire, darkening the room while the flame burnt through.

  “You may know a lot,” Kaneda said, looking at Phil, “but you don’t know what it is like to grow old. Nor do you know what it is like to be Japanese. Growing old is indescribable; to be Japanese is to live your life as the brass tip of a walking stick. The weight of the rest of the stick and of the walker are constantly upon you. It is something that severely limits freedom.”

  Phil held the last sip of his whiskey in his mouth, letting it wash between the wide spaces of his teeth. His father had not been a drinker. Nor had he been a talker. He could remember long evenings like this spent under the earth but he could not remember his father’s voice. And, if he tried to recapture what his father looked like, he saw only the face of Kaneda instead. After they got to know each other he would ask the old man if he’d like to visit the village. Everyone would comment on how he looked like Phil’s father. His wife would remember, so would his sisters. His children would be told, “This is what grandfather looked like.” Ah, but if he said that, they would ask if this was grandfather and Phil would say no, not grandfather, only what grandfather looked like, grandfather’s face, grandfather’s body.

  Phil watched the flames poke through their moss lid. The faces of the other men were highlighted quickly by the fire, washed as if by a snake’s tongue. The old man had stopped speaking and closed his eyes, probably thinking of his home and daughter. The fire’s shadow danced about the hair on Finn’s thick wrists. Finn and he had become friends, he supposed. People who came in search of gold were generally very friendly. Still, he questioned their intelligence in coming here to look for it. Why not stay home? Surely if there was not gold in their country there must be something of value. Of the five foreigners he knew, Phil liked the reverend best. He was a good storyteller. He had energy for his stories, and though he might tell the same one a dozen times he always changed it. Phil suspected that the old man, that Kaneda, was a good storyteller too, and even though the style of his storytelling was nothing like the reverend�
�s, even though he couldn’t understand, Phil enjoyed the stories. It was like listening to music. It was like it had been years ago, listening to his father’s father and to the other old men telling wild hunting stories. It would be interesting sometime to discover what the old man spoke of. He would not be surprised if they too turned out to be stories of a good hunt.

  Phil reminded himself that it would be necessary for him to begin telling stories himself soon. He should have started long ago but he didn’t seem to have the knack. He remembered his experience with the two owls and thought that that would make a good story. He was pleased that he had had the presence of mind to pick up all the owl feathers he’d found stuck to the ice of the Snake. White feathers, exactly the kind used for sealing. The owls had presented him with dozens of them in return for the block of ice they took. He could use the feathers as proof, bringing them out in the middle of the story to add weight to what he was saying. Still, the reverend would never do that. No really good storyteller would. It was like wearing a costume or drawing a picture. It was a crutch, was really much like saying that the story or the teller was not good enough on its own. No good storyteller needs a feather to lean upon.

  The old man was asleep and the whiskey soaked Phil’s thoughts until he too smoothed out his bedroll and turned toward the wall of the tent. That left Finn. It was an unusual experience for him to be awake and sober while others lay in drunken sleep. What an evening. Three men, three languages. It didn’t seem to matter to either of the other two that there was no communication. Kaneda, praying or not, could go on this way forever, Finn was sure. And Phil, hardly more than a sentence to Finn and he shifts to his own language. Eskimo. Japanese. Maybe it was the drink that let them enjoy their isolation so, and if it was Finn would be sure to join them next time. He’d see what he could remember of Gaelic and add that spice to the pot. My God, and now they’re asleep without so much as a goodnight. Is it the booze or the terrible weather? Each desires more than anything to talk and so he talks to himself and pretends that the other is listening. Finn spoke out loud a moment in the sleeping room. Not much satisfaction. If it’s booze that makes them sleepy I should have matched them cup for cup for I’m wide awake now. Damn, it was irritating. Each talking to his own like that. No sir, an Irishman would never do it. In an Irishman there’s love for the other, not just for the self. What in God’s name would be the purpose of a pub if all were like these two? A room full of people, warm and cozy, all speaking bloody different languages. Finn had to laugh at the thought of it. Maybe it was just as well after all, for look how well they got on. No, not so. Sociability is a man’s responsibility. Customs. Politeness.