Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  Henriette and Ellen were dressed in long white skirts and sloshed about, doing their work. Three customers lined the waiting bench and one walked briskly from the back room, rubbing his wet hair with a towel. Finn could see the line of empty chicken coops to his right, behind the counter where Ellen stood, and when he looked at the three customers again he recognized one of them as John Hummel. Finn stood staring for a full minute before jumping back and passing his hand through the air where the mule and Fujino should have stood. He remembered the strong zero of Fujino’s mouth, how it was dark to look into, how it was the startled look of death taking him by surprise.

  Finn went to the edge of the building and peeked around it as if perhaps he’d come to the wrong window. He came back and saw the dark snow holes and bent over to look at the black tops of the mule hooves. When he stood again Ellen and Henriette were there, both of them looking out at him as the three of them, weeks before, had looked out at Fujino. He could hear them dimly calling his name: Finn … Finn … Henriette jumped and Ellen had a tear for him too. She was happy with the sight of him as no one had ever been with Fujino.

  Henriette and Ellen saw Finn laugh, his mouth moving wide through his beard. They stepped to the heavy door and opened it. “Finn! Finn!” said Henriette. She kissed his cheek and turned to Ellen as though presenting him to her as a gift.

  “You’re safe and I thought you’d be frozen solid,” said Ellen, smiling.

  They closed the door and wove a pattern around each other, all of them talking at once. Ellen took a sign from behind the counter and placed it on a hook outside the door: CLOSED. “We’ll have a feast right now,” she said, “just the three of us.” She turned to the customers, assuring them that their dirt would come off as well the next day as this and then held the door for them.

  “Of course,” said John Hummel. He took Henriette’s elbow and turned her toward him and told her that he’d be going, that he’d see her later, as if his leaving was his own idea. “Your Finn’s come back of his own accord,” he whispered to her. “Welcome him back, you’d both better welcome him back.”

  Ellen closed the door firmly behind him. Henriette held Finn’s arm tightly, laying her head on his shoulder.

  “Ah, it’s good to be back among my own kind,” said Finn. “To speak English again, that’s the ticket.”

  “Did Phil find you?” asked Henriette. “We were in the village when he went off looking.”

  “He found me and he and Mr. Kaneda hit it off so well that there was no further use for me. They’re up there still, jabbering at each other in their own tongues.”

  “And how did he take the news of young Fujino?”

  “He donated over an hour each night to long prayers for the young man’s soul. I could feel Fujino’s presence though I didn’t understand a word.”

  Finn sat up on the edge of the counter and looked down at the women. “But nothing’s happened up there that’s not bleakness and bitter cold,” he said. “Tell me about yourselves. The bath seems busy. There has been some organization since I’ve been gone. I noticed the sign board in the center of town.”

  “We had a town meeting right here,” said Henriette, “and there’s going to be an election; you must have seen the notice.”

  “I not only saw it, I signed my name atop the list for mayor. We can’t let this Kingman have the town for his signature alone.”

  Ellen, who had been lifting food from shelf to counter, stopped and gave Finn the longest of her looks. She wiped her hands down the front of her apron.

  “It’s a good idea,” she said. “The man not only expects to win, but expects no one to run against him.”

  Ellen forgot the occasion of Finn’s return and left the food where it stood. She went up the stairs to her room and returned with a sketch pad given her by one of Phil’s children as a Christmas gift. Henriette still held Finn’s arm, moving toward and away from him like a dancing partner.

  “If you weren’t joking we’ve no time to lose,” said Ellen. “The election is in three days.”

  Finn said that indeed he hadn’t been joking but that he’d had a long walk and was dirty and hungry and tired, so Henriette released him and went into the bath to pour water from stove to tub, and Ellen went back to work on the meal.

  “You can bathe and we can eat,” she said, “but after that if you’d like to sleep for a while Henriette and I will make your posters. I haven’t seen a one for our friend Kingman.”

  Finn remembered Ellen. He had forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by her but he remembered now. So he was going to run for mayor. He didn’t like Kingman but in truth he’d signed the list only because the idea had occurred to him as he stood there, only because of an impulse. Now he was in a campaign and he hadn’t been back in the town thirty minutes. He went into the bath when it was ready and sat in the burning water and closed his eyes. For weeks he’d listened to men speaking in languages he did not understand. Then he’d left them and been by himself, silent as he walked over the earth or sat inside the ice tombs Phil had shown him how to build. Each night they had been identical, and in the bath now, with his eyes closed, he could picture himself still housed in ice. For a week he’d let his thoughts go random. He’d not thought about Fujino or the state of his life, or where he ought to be at fortyfive years of age. For a week Finn had been in a state of grace and cooling, and now he was running for mayor. It made him want to laugh. He could hear Ellen and Henriette like two winter animals outside his ice shelter, planning his campaign. Three days. All they could do would be to put up signs and talk to people who came to the bath.

  Finn the politician stayed in the water a long while, imagining that he was smoking a long cigar. When he came out the table was set and the women were seated. Around the wall sketch paper had been laid or tacked and on each piece Ellen or Henriette had written his name. They told him that after dinner they’d go out and place the signs in the bars, scatter them about town, tack them to the sides of tents.

  “You must think of something to say at the town meeting,” said Ellen. “That will be your job. Henriette and I will do the rest. And you must go to the Gold Belt and talk to those who are interested in the election. Tell them what you’ll do if elected. Tell them your platform, the kind of town you’d like to have.”

  Ellen smiled across the steaming food as she talked to him. He tried to remember how long he’d been gone but could not. He looked at Henriette and saw her, head hung, picking at her food. A strong woman and a weaker one. Between them he wondered which he would choose. Neither probably, nor would they have him if he did. They were all here because they’d been thrown together and he could think of no better reason. He was running for mayor because he’d seen the list, and was there any higher motive? Things happen because they do, that was what he’d discovered during his time alone, and it made him proud to have discovered it at last. He would resist the urge to mourn the years he’d lived not knowing it.

  Finn looked across the table. There sat his friends speaking to him in English, but it didn’t seem so important to him now. He had, after all, been just as at home listening to the others, to the tones of Eskimo and Japanese. It is the sound of the human voice that is important, not what it might be saying. No, out at Topcock Creek he’d not been upset by the languages they’d used. He knew that now. Finn listened and nodded at what Ellen told him was the proper way to conduct himself as a candidate. He would do it too, exactly as she said. And he would work on his speech. He laughed to himself and finished his meal. If he only knew enough of it, he thought, he’d be sure to give all his campaign speeches in Gaelic.

  Ellen lowered the price of the bath and asked the bathers to vote for Finn. She sent Henriette with tacks and sketch paper, out into the streets, and for one whole day Finn stayed in his room upstairs, pacing, thinking up things to say and practicing his speech. Ellen had been involved in a real election once before and remembered now how it had been. She should get others, one or two in each p
art of the town, to visit their neighbors and to tell them just exactly why Finn was the man for the job. But it was too late for that. Only three days and no one to tell and not a single reason that made Finn out to be a better man than anyone else. No, in a case like this everything depended upon the speech that she could hear Finn practicing upstairs. She couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but the sound of it was political and made a good impression on those who bathed below. And the election preparations had given her the opportunity to tell Hummel that he must not come around at all. He came once again the morning after Finn arrived and blinked at the campaign posters around him. He didn’t wait for Henriette, but stepped back out the door and disappeared up the path toward Dr. Kingman’s house right away. And now he followed Henriette around the streets asking her if she wanted him to take what she was doing as a personal insult.

  “You’re working for one man and I’m working for the other,” he said.

  He took her arm and turned her toward him and asked her what he was supposed to tell Dr. Kingman, and Henriette thought and then said that she didn’t know why he had to tell him anything. Hummel hung behind her for a while longer then shuffled off toward his tent. He could write better than any of them and would make up a few signs of his own.

  Henriette posted the signs slowly, tacking all around the edges. When she finished she stood back a few feet, then took out a pencil and wrote her name neatly in the lower left corner. “Henriette.” It was by her authority that this sign was posted. She liked her name and liked the way it looked sitting soft and neat at the bottom of the sign. She was the only Henriette she had ever known.

  Henriette believed she could feel the band of her skirt tightening around her middle so she’d taken Fujino’s diary out and hidden it in her room. She was going to have a baby, she had no doubt. She was going to have a girl, and if she did she would give it a name like one of these: Bertha, Martha, or Agatha. If it was a boy she’d name him Henry and make him clothes and take him with her wherever she might go. Henriette decided not to marry or if she did to marry someone she as yet did not know, or maybe, perhaps, the reverend. She wished he lived in Nome and had a good job. Or no, the job was all right, but she wished he lived in Nome. She wanted the baby to be able to see the town grow and to be a student in its first school. She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected that hers would be the first new baby since the strike. Little Bertha, Martha, Agatha, or Henry.

  The first person Henriette would tell, once the baby began to show, would be Ellen. She was afraid of that, though she was not ashamed. In a way it was better not to know the exact father, for then she could not be forced to have an exact husband. Still, she hoped the father was the reverend so that must mean she liked him best. If the child was Hummel’s it would cause all kinds of problems, though she didn’t expect to be able to see the father in the newborn’s face…. Unless the gums bled.

  Henriette tacked her signs and held her belly. The baby would be born in winter but part of the time she grew with it the weather would be warm. She could see signs of the end of winter in the ground, in the longer hours of daylight. If Finn was elected mayor she’d ask him for a job working for the city. She needed time to be with the little one, and even now, though she made money working for Ellen, the work was too hard and she was afraid the baby would feel the strain.

  Henriette tacked up the last of the thin posters and walked about the town looking at her work, FINN FOR MAYOR. Ellen had written each one as neatly as she could. Behind the lettering she had tried to draw a silhouette of Finn, but it was unrecognizable. Spring was coming. As Henriette worked her way back to the bath she saw a group of men standing in front of one of her posters.

  “The one who hangs around the bath house,” one of them said. “He came here with politics in mind.”

  8

  The problem of the golden snowflakes had been solved by a miracle. The reverend told the children they would form snow-flakes in the spring but they had all been surprised by the coming of this stranger who wore the snowflakes as a tree wears Christmas ornaments. Whereas a few days before the villagers had remained in their underground homes, now they walked in perfect patterns across the snow. They wore their snowflakes like sheriffs’ badges or like necklaces that hung all the way to their belts, riding softly on their hard middles.

  As the children walked across their roofs the men of the village began bringing lean-to poles out of the storage sheds that stood at the edge of the forest. They placed the poles along the ground and set thin rolls of hide and canvas next to them. From the reverend’s window the material looked like the solid foundations of buildings. The reverend had invited Kaneda to stay with him, but the old man did not want to be away from Phil. That first day as Phil lowered himself into the ground the old man had tried to follow. It was Phil’s wife who’d met him before he could get inside and escorted him, stringing her arm through his, all the way back to the reverend’s house. Now he sat in the soft chair next to the reverend, watching small figures fishing way out on the ice. The fishermen were using the snowy owl feathers that Phil had brought out the evening before, when he’d made his first attempt at storytelling. He had held the pure white feathers in his hands to give the story power. So it was important that the hunt be successful today to give his story credibility. But it was a difficult time of the year. The men spaced themselves far apart on the ice in order to avoid falling through.

  “This is called red feathering,” said the reverend. “If you like we can walk out onto the ice to get a look at it first hand.”

  “Do they never stand straight?” asked Kaneda. “Whenever they walk on the ice they remain bent. It looks uncomfortable and is certainly bad for the posture.”

  The figures had locked themselves into their hunting positions, legs straight, bodies bent at the waists, eyes peering at the white feathers on the ice, arms cocked skyward with harpoons. “If we are lucky we will soon see one of them pulling a seal straight from the water,” said the reverend. “When I watch from here I always imagine that they are rescuing someone from drowning. It is in the way they hold the seal, the way they prop it up between them, like a friend who has had too much to drink.”

  The reverend had been watching Phil and as he spoke the old man leaned forward and pointed. “Look! They are drawing a man from the ice.”

  “Yes,” said the reverend, following Kaneda’s finger. “It looks as though it will be a good day. It is very early to have made a kill.”

  The old man looked at the reverend and then looked quickly back at the ice. The hunters had laid the seal down and had backed off quickly to avoid breaking through.

  “A seal,” said the old man.

  “It must be very difficult for you,” said the reverend. “After having lost Mr. Fujino, I mean.”

  “They are hunting seal, now I understand.”

  Another seal and then another slid from the quick ice in front of them, and the reverend and the old man grew quiet. Each felt a sense of goodwill toward the other. The chairs were soft and they had tea in a huge pot between them. They watched the children watching the hunters. The old man thought of his daughter, of how she should be here to see her future husband in action, and the reverend thought of Henriette and when he might see her again.

  When the reverend looked at Kaneda he too could see Phil’s father’s face. It had been his first winter in the village when Phil’s father fell through the ice. He had been sitting where he was now, in front of his new window, and he had rushed out of the house without a coat. Before he reached the bay he found himself freezing and was forced to turn back, to return for his jackets. He’d dressed and gone out again only to find the village, every member, standing on the ice staring at a small hole filming over.

  Phil and his sisters and his wife, he didn’t really know them then, slid up to the opening on their bellies and let their heads fall into the water and turn at the necks this way and that, searching. When after minutes they emerged, their fac
es were frozen and wide-eyed with grief. Water did not drip off them, for their features were incased within a fine ice shell. None of the other members of the village moved to their aid so the reverend held back as well. Phil’s father’s harpoon line was taut and still attached to its base. Phil and his sisters and his wife picked it up in their cold hands and, leaning away from the hole, began to pull it in, hand over hand. It took time because all of the line had fed itself into the sea and the sea in this spot was deep. Still nobody helped and still the grief frozen to their faces did not break. Cracks ran across the ice but the people were spread wide and no others fell through. Finally after all of the line was retrieved the dark head of a large seal appeared at the hole and they leaned against it with all of their weight and using all of their strength made it slide dead out of the water and across the ice to stop at their feet. Nanoon, just a child then, knelt and dug at the tip of the harpoon until it was freed and then from the wound she took the red feather and handed it to a sister. Phil cut the seal from neck to tail and the carcass opened to all of them easily, like the unbuttoning of a jacket. And then they ate. Not just the family of the man who had died, but everyone ate, the entire village. The reverend stepped forward with his Bible, his heart in his throat. He was going to say something, but when he looked at the family all he could see was ice masks facing him, all red around the mouths. He could see eyes where hot tears had melted the ice and tears where they ran down the outside of the ice masks and froze again around covered noses and mouths. He ate and, flushed with embarrassment, slid his Bible under his shirt, out of sight.

  But on the ice in front of them now the hunt was a success. Each time someone pulled in a seal the old man applauded and sat forward and turned toward the reverend. There were six or seven big seals whereas on a good day the village was lucky to have three. The old man wished that the reverend would make some move to go out, for he wanted a closer view. He rubbed his hands together, and when a seal that appeared to be larger than any of the others was caught he stood up and pressed his face against the glass. When he turned around again the reverend was smiling at him and handing him his coat.