Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  Finn pushed at his bedroll and lay down, staring wide-eyed at the darkness. The fire was nearly gone; only a few orange stars remained in the gray ash. Each man should stay with his own then, that’s the answer to it. The Irish with the Irish or with those close to them. Here he was, starved for the sound of English, and Phil spoke Eskimo to a man who didn’t understand it.

  Finn reached over and took another bottle of whiskey in his dark hands. Sleep is liquid. He pulled on the bottle, letting his tongue act the cork. Even drunkenness takes time. While Finn waited he played a game with himself. He began listing all the things he and Phil might have said to each other had they had a conversation.

  The pale path in front of the bath was peopled with bathers waiting. A hot bath when the winter had been so long, what better way to make time pass? For a week it was more popular than the saloon. Ellen was forced to set a temporary soaking limit of fifteen minutes and to charge double should a customer require extra water. Clean men walked the streets, back to their dirty tents, the hair they had washed forming frost caps, making them all look old. Ellen worked the front room, Henriette the back, and they both carried snow and ice in buckets and watched it settle over their slow fires. They collected money in a cigar box and kept supplies in the empty chicken coops behind the counter. Towels. Soap. They gave the bathers what was needed to get clean, Henriette washing the towels after closing, hanging them above the tubs to dry.

  Henriette went to the Gold Belt and gave the owner a card allowing free baths to the winners of the bar’s continuing contest. Nearly every man in Nome had tried to balance himself on the Gold Belt’s scale swing, to equal his body weight with those sacks of sand. There had been a few winners, perhaps one in twenty, but the contest had been good for business. The owner, in return for the gift, bought each of his employees a bath and arranged for them all to come at one time, early in the morning after the bar had closed. He turned toward Henriette and asked about Finn.

  “Finn?” she said. “Fine. We tried like you did at the beach but we didn’t make much. Since then, for one reason or another, the bath’s been closed.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s not a man in town who hasn’t seen the sculpture that closed you. Some thought you’d gone into the mortuary business as a sideline.”

  The owner grinned at Henriette from behind his mahogany bar. As always he held large cloths under his hands, continually turning them, shining the spot where he stood.

  “That was the result of an accident,” said Henriette.

  A mock chandelier pushed light over the edges of tin cans so that one customer could see another in the bar. Henriette had never liked this man, though Finn thought he was all right. She compared every man now to the reverend. Had she never met the reverend she would never have known what it was like to hold a man as a man holds a woman, of that she was sure. Henriette liked to remember how the day after their first night together he’d been deeply embarrassed, busying himself with Ellen, talking to her and doing little favors. He spent hours making breakfast and then said he wasn’t hungry and left the two women to eat alone. Henriette had seen him from the loft window, standing waist deep in one of the Eskimo tunnels, looking down into the earth. It was such a strange sight, seeing a man whose body from the middle down seemed stuck in the frozen ground. He’d looked like the trunk of a tree. And when he finally came back home he spoke to neither of them. He went to his desk and composed a little note and then sat at the piano playing until Phil’s friend came to take them home. He was such a funny man. Afraid to say a word to her, forced to write everything down. “Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” That is what the note had said. No greeting, no signature, no date. Just the one sentence, printed and dark, as if he’d pressed very hard on each letter with his pen. Still, he’d used the best paper, and Henriette carried the note, tied through a loop, on a string around her neck. She hadn’t told Ellen; she hadn’t told anybody.

  “Accident or no accident,” said the bar’s owner, “it was a shocking sight even for such a rough town as this and I’m glad to see something was done about it.”

  Henriette stood still in front of him. The bastard. He’d never talk this way to Finn or Ellen. She was trying to think of what to say in reply when the flap was pushed back and John Hummel came in, neat as a pin, in his heavy coat but still carrying that sack of money around his neck.

  “A drink for myself and one for the lady,” he said, looking straight at the bartender. He pulled at the tips of the fingers of his gloves, then set them on the bar, his light hands on top of them. He smiled and Henriette peeked quickly at his gums for any sign of what had been. Though they were as clean and pink as those of a baby, he still had that sucking habit, as if he too could not quite believe that the scurvy was gone. He alternately smiled and sucked, giving the appearance that he was trying, abstractedly, to dislodge a particle of food from between his teeth.

  “I was on my way to the bath,” he said. “If you’re going back we can walk that way together.”

  The owner placed two glasses of sherry in front of them and received proper payment from Hummel. He worked his way down the bar turning his rags under his hand as he went. It was his policy never to listen to the conversations of customers.

  Under her heavy coat Henriette wore her thin sealskin jacket so Hummel ran the back of his hand along its fur and let the sherry run slightly along the seam of his lips.

  “I’m going to build a house,” he said, “right where my tent is now. I’m going to build a tall house and buy the best furniture for every room.”

  “Your tent is in such good order that it seems like a house now,” said Henriette. “You’re a man who doesn’t need a woman to keep things straight.”

  “I can’t stand a mess,” said Hummel, sucking grimly at the side of his upper lip. “Never could.”

  Hummel took his hands off Henriette and began to tell her about Idaho, his home state. He’d lived without a father and said he tried to keep his tent as clean as his mother had kept their house. Alaska had taken him by surprise, the harshness of it, the terrible difficulty of everyday life. Now he was all right, but when he first arrived he began to bleed from the mouth almost immediately. He was forced to stay in Nome where he could get occasional fruit from the ships, and because of it he hadn’t been able to stake a claim and had no chance for the big money that everyone always spoke of. Big money. Now he knew better. He’d make big money as Dr. Kingman’s accountant and be able to stay clean and warm and dry while he did it.

  “You seemed like you wanted to kill us,” said Henriette. “We were all afraid you’d try something.”

  “The beach belongs to me,” he said. “I still believe that, but I no longer think looking for gold is important. I was angry for a long time, but I’m not anymore.”

  Hummel smiled and, to prove his goodwill, bought more sherry and made Henriette touch glasses with him.

  “Here’s to the business end of it,” he said. “You and Ellen and Dr. Kingman and the saloon owners. Now that I’m an accountant I know how much the average miner makes.”

  Hummel and Henriette touched glasses twice more, then ducked through the flap and into the twilight. Hummel took Henriette’s arm and pointed off into the gray sky toward the second floor of the bath, toward the room she had used so well for nursing. No one ever talked much while walking here, for the winter moved into open mouths and clung to wet tongues. Hummel tried to walk beside Henriette on the narrow path, but soon gave up and took a step in front of her. His head, as she watched it, bobbed in and out of the collar of his coat.

  Inside the bath Ellen had finished pouring and was ushering another bather into the back room. The fires in both rooms were down a little and as they came in Henriette hurried to restoke them, nodding while she did so at each waiting customer and telling Hummel to have a seat.

  “It takes two to run a bath,” Ellen said.

  “I’ve brought Mr. Hummel. He says he’s going to bathe himself every
day.”

  Ellen ignored Hummel, took the money of two clean miners, and walked with them toward the door. Ellen had fixed the door the day of their arrival back in Nome. It was either that or ask their customers to come and go through the window.

  The reverend was in a blue mood, sitting at his loft window, rereading something from his small collection of fiction. McTeague again, the horror and greed of another gold rush. It was Sunday and the reverend had finished another hollow sermon. Had they always been as bored by what he said as they were today? He hadn’t been involved. He’d given only cheap truisms, an hour of the kind of rote Christian rhetoric he’d hated as a child and promised never to stoop to himself. He’d read from the Bible and heard in his tone the same boredom that he saw on their faces. Boredom and anger. Once he had told them never to come out of a sense of duty.

  The pages of the reverend’s book were loose in their binding and slipped out of it into his hands. He needn’t put them back in order if he chose not to. That was what he liked so much about storytelling. And he knew McTeague so well that he felt free to reorder the story in his imagination. He could change parts of it here and there and still be true to its essence. Many variations were possible in the world of McTeague, just as many were possible in his own world or in God’s. Christianity frees the imagination. If he could teach just one lesson that would be the one he would choose. Christianity frees the imagination. He had proven it so many times in his sermons. He was a magician, not a liar, even if today he had failed. Someday he would discover in the fabric of his Christianity an eleventh commandment, another golden rule. Thou shalt exercise thy imagination. Thou shalt carry thyself to the limits of what it is possible to think, bending thy language and thought fearlessly. Blessed are those who imagine for they shall view the world through the eyes of God. Oh what a sermon that would be. So why hadn’t he given it today?

  The reverend made notes on the edges of the loose pages of his book. There is no difference between the truth and what one imagines the truth to be. When you search for God, search for Him in your imagination. It was stunning. If missionaries were of any use at all this was the lesson they needed to teach. The reverend imagined all the questions that might arise from such a sermon, all the bad uses men might put it to. What a joke, here he was in his misery, rediscovering the essence of his religion. He had always known it but had never before considered it so clearly. Yet it must have been common knowledge at the time of Christ. So much a part of thought that no man feared that it might be lost. So much a part of thought that God himself had failed to command it. It would have been foolish, like saying, Thou shalt breathe. The imagination is boundless. Imagine and let imagine. Let this commandment be your guide.

  The reverend considered his body and knew he had let it limit the imagination of Henriette. Being with her had not been an act of love but an act of violence. It was the first time in his life he had so severely broken God’s law. And he had broken it again with the note he had written: “Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” How could he have been a party to such lies? It made him sad. For days he’d told himself that when she returned he would tell her the truth. Thank God he was past such sober-faced frankness now. The truth was as volatile as quicksilver. He’d relived his moments with her countless times and each time the experience was altered. He remembered the violence but he did not relive that part of it. And, as a matter of fact, each time, in his memory, the act became less violent, became, even, more lovely.

  The reverend rose and padded down the ladder on the soft rungs. There were papers scattered about the house where earlier people had sat listening to his listless sermon. He would never be a bore again. God help him. He still held his book and walked with it into the kitchen. It was always a little cooler here than in the loft, until he kindled the fire. The reverend was hungry and in no hurry to return to the world of McTeague. He had thought, once or twice, of reading to his parishioners from this book. He might read just a little each week until they’d heard the whole thing. He could use it as the beginning of his sermon on the imagination, a springboard into a whole series of such sermons. The reverend poured oatmeal into a pan and looked out the small kitchen window at the nearby trees. Henriette beamed at him from the branches. He had been right to make her go away, for when she returned it would give their life together some sense of formality. They would not speak of the night in the loft yet each would continue to imagine it. The reverend brushed the vision of her from his eyes and looked into his steaming breakfast. He would carry his food and book and climb the ladder softly, just as he had that night. He could imagine Henriette waiting there, asleep and then sitting up and then pulling him to her. She always held him by the back of the neck, lifted him off the ladder like a flag lifted high off its pole by the wind. Her soft skin. How he fluttered around it.

  The steam from the bowl covered the reverend’s spectacles and swirled around the loft ladder as he climbed. No matter how soft his foot she would awaken. The reverend peered across the loft floor, finding her obscured a little, but nestled on the gentle boards. Henriette, diminutive of her father, who wanted four sons all trailing in his footsteps down the dusty ruts of his farm. Henriette, swallowed whole by this salmon preacher who turned her in his mind to suit himself. The steam from the oatmeal thinned. The reverend began reading again, eating between sentences, at the ends of paragraphs. The pages of the book were ever so loose in his hands. It did not matter what order he read them in, for as yet he was only testing, seeing if he could read, could leave the proper intervals between the words. This was not the Bible, was never meant to be. Only McTeague. Fiction. A proper springboard into his sermon on the imagination.

  6

  Nome awoke from winter long before the season ended. Construction started again, and for a few hours each day hammer shots cracked the thinnest ice, workers pooling their talents, everyone doing one job and then another. When someone posted a plea for a town meeting Ellen offered the use of the bath. She turned the tubs on their tops and brought in benches and baked bread. Everyone contributed something, tea or cookies or bowls full of hard-boiled eggs. Ellen expected one hundred people and got fifty more. Many hadn’t seen each other since the beach strike and were embarrassed into a light kind of laughter. It was a time of low talking and gentle movement. Many spoke of the dead man, and of the mule he’d rode so coldly in front of the very room where they now met. They sat toe to toe on the stairs, or on the floor, backs against the wall.

  Ellen waited an hour before finally knocking for quiet on the top of her counter with the rounder end of the marble egg. Though no one was in charge of the meeting, John Hummel spoke first, offering his services as town secretary. He said he’d be honored to record what was said at the first town meeting. Ten minutes later Dr. Kingman was elected mayor.

  “This town will be a good one,” Dr. Kingman said. “One that avoids the problems other frontier towns have had. If we work together we can raise all the public buildings by the end of winter. And then we can start on private homes. We will do them by lottery so that though the length of time a man has to wait may be unlucky, it won’t be unfair.”

  Hummel had devised a shorthand and bent seriously over his journal, taking down every word. Henriette sat next to him fingering her necklace and the reverend’s note, and Ellen sat across the room holding her marble egg. Someone nominated the assayer as tax collector and it was agreed that he’d be able to levy taxes best, on the prospectors at least, at the time he weighed their gold. The tax revenue would be used for public buildings and for paying the construction crews. Everyone agreed on everything. They talked about what the town needed: a hospital, a newspaper, a bank. Did they need a sheriff? Did they need a jail? Did they have the power to make their own laws and punish those who broke them? The mayor ordered the town recorder to write to the United States government for answers to their questions. At the next meeting they would nominate and elect the other town officials.

  “I’ll put nomin
ation lists on the wall of my pub,” said the owner of the Gold Belt, and when he said it Ellen raised her hand.

  “In that case perhaps we’ve voted for mayor too quickly,” she said. “There should be nominations and a proper election for that office as well.”

  Some of the prospectors protested, but Dr. Kingman insisted that she was right and it was decided that, yes, that too was only fair. They should elect the mayor too, only after nominations.

  When the meeting ended nobody wanted to leave. It was warm and friendly in the bath, and the walls were made of wood rather than canvas. John Hummel immediately began transcribing his notes, shorthand to long, writing in a clear and beautiful script. The minutes would be posted on the walls of the bath for anyone who hadn’t attended the meeting. Henriette found some tacks and sat ready to help post them when he’d finished. She appreciated anyone who could write clearly. All of the others had taken to socializing again. There was a group standing around Dr. Kingman, and another large one in the other room, helping the owner of the Gold Belt turn the bathtubs upright again. Tonight would be the night that all his employees took the baths he had bought for them.