by Brian Hart
He’d built the Salmon River mill himself, alone for over a year, and thought that someday it would bring him a fortune. Easy to love the poor, but hard to respect them. He and the future Mrs. Kozmin would raise their children in a grand house with windows in every room, windows above windows. Doors tall enough to ride horses through. Some mornings were so quiet it felt like the world had yet to form, like maybe something had broken during the night. The idea of oceans and whales, anything endless and endlessly moving, the liquid and the living; it seemed completely irrational when the river was frozen and sucked down to the rocks and there was not a sound, not even the wind. Not when the mill had been stopped.
Kozmin had purchased the Case steam tractor from the Salter Mine upriver where it had been wrecked and abandoned. He floated it down in pieces by himself, his first time on the sweep. River current can be the most wonderful thing in the world to the solitary man; it can ease all but the heaviest of burdens. Nothing would’ve been done without the river. Say this is true for all of history. Piece by piece Kozmin began assembling the engine, but some of the fittings had been pilfered, and the governor and the gauges had been destroyed in whatever catastrophe had led to the tractor’s abandonment. He put in an order at the mine for the missing brass and a governor and governor belt along with a complete cylinder and a crankpin, and while he waited, he set to falling and skidding and setting a boom. Three mules and chain. A capstan would be like a god, but even without, there was more than enough to do. He built a smokehouse and a springhouse but didn’t do much to improve the cabin. The mine foreman and a few of the crew brought in his shipment and helped him get it put together and bolted to a frame. They were there when he built his first fire and turned the wheel. Glory be thy name. The fury of the thing pleased him to no end, and he and the miners got blind drunk in celebration. A week later, when he set the blade to his first test piece and through it went, faster than any ten men could do it, he nearly wept.
A stranger that had been camped over the hill and heard the sound came to see about the racket. Soon after that, Kozmin and Mr. Harold Burns were working together to get a flume built. Partnerships, like all things, sometimes simply accrete. Harold was building a cabin on his gold claim and worked in exchange for lumber. They got along mostly. Kozmin did the majority of the talking. Harold was quiet and nervous; when he spoke, his hands came up. He’d come from Maine six years prior, and since he’d left home he’d been on the move. He went by foot always, had no love for horses or even mules, feared fast-moving water the way a cat might. Harold could walk forty miles in a day with a hundred pounds on his back. This impressed Kozmin almost as much as Harold’s fear of water amused him. They built a diversion at Short Creek and finished the flume in August. When the aspens dropped their leaves, Harold walked out to have a last go among the civilized before the snow came and locked them in. Kozmin worked furiously through every minute of daylight. The snow came late, and by the time it did, he’d managed to mill and sell enough lumber to the new miners downriver to leave his place safely until spring. He would winter in Lewiston and return when the pass opened and finish the house.
The deer was nearby now. He opened an eye, and it was nearly on top of him, sniffing at his pack, licking the salt dried on the leather. Or blood. You trap a deer by leaving a pool of blood in the snare. He shot out a hand to catch its leg but missed, and when the small buck kicked and went to run, it stepped on his forearm and its sharp hoof left a scrape that bled. Nobody will believe this, he thought. And so don’t tell them.
Late spring and Kozmin and his new wife, Molly, along with Harold, were headed overland by way of Indian trail to Kozmin’s mill. They had seven rented mules and three they owned. The weather was fine, and they were enjoying their days. Molly had formerly been a schoolteacher, and one of the mules carried books and books alone.
“Won’t even keep you warm long if you build a fire with em,” said Harold.
“I don’t need a fire to keep me warm,” Molly said and made both men blush. She was a large and lustful woman, and on occasion Kozmin had caught her eyeing him like he was a mule she planned to work into the ground. They’d been married by the captain of a steamship on New Year’s Eve, both of them so drunk at the time that they required explanations in the morning. Over the following weeks they gratefully discovered that they got along all right, and Kozmin bought her a ring that cost more than his mill, so he was sticking with his investment. Figured out of all the stupid things he’d done while drunk, he’d finally gotten lucky and done something good.
Last fall, when Kozmin first arrived in town, he’d heard rumors of Harold going on the rampage, and that he’d been locked in jail for weeks at a time. He’d been engaged to a woman—Kozmin never got her name, but she left with a photographer from New York and never returned. They didn’t speak of it, and by the time they were ready to leave, Harold wasn’t drinking anymore, so it didn’t matter.
The bolts he’d drilled into the rocks on the shore had held. A weight of worry dropped from his shoulders. From the bank it appeared that the winter hadn’t done any damage, and the mill was mostly unchanged save for some new rust and the beginning of a robin’s nest atop the main beam. He had to reset the irons, since they’d been removed and had spent the winter, along with his two saw blades and all the bolts and assorted parts, wrapped in oily burlap in a dirt-walled hole in the floor of his smokehouse. The flume had not been so lucky. A mudslide had washed away the last hundred yards to the river, but the surge of the flush with all of the runoff was such that if they hurried they could still use it. Maybe they’d dig out the bank while the water was pulling at it, but it was one or the other: log or dig. They worried that the ground on the ridge would be too soft for the mules. The snow had yet to completely clear off the peaks. Harold had laughed when he’d bought the rope from the company store at the Salter Mine to tether the mill platform to the bolts. “If the river comes up that high, no damn piece of rope will save it,” he said. And when Harold left in the fall it was a slack and easy piece of river, but Kozmin had seen it in the spring and knew what to expect. The rope and the bolts had held, and what else could he have done? Built on higher ground, or closer to Short Creek, was the answer. But the slope was too steep there, and the creek had petered out by the end of July last year. Where would he be if he’d built there? Might’ve lost the whole operation to one of those damn mudslides. He didn’t like being second-guessed, but he wasn’t one to gloat either. The rope had held; it might not have been the best way, but it’d worked. What else mattered?
“You can build your mill wherever you choose,” Kozmin joked, as he stripped naked and swam out to his mill with a cable and clevis. He yelled to the shore: “You can build your mill at the top”—he pointed to the ridge—“so you can haul all your trees straight up.”
Harold waved him off and told him to hurry up; nobody wanted to see him naked anyhow.
“Speak for yourself,” Molly said.
Kozmin laughed and swam the tag back to shore, and he and Harold used a block and tackle to haul it in. The sun-warmed grass on the banks was thick and cool under Kozmin’s bare feet. Molly had her skirt hitched up to her knees, and the sun shone on her fat, creased legs. She looked like an overgrown baby and smelled strangely of milk.
“We’re in business now,” Harold had said, and Kozmin had agreed. But later those words would somehow tell the future and interrupt the rest of Kozmin’s good moods, like a pebble in his shoe that only rolled out under his heel when he felt ready to walk for miles and on for the rest of his life. Because what was business, if not violence? No man can profit without another getting poorer, and trees don’t grow fast enough either.
The bottle had more in it than he remembered. Maybe he’d pack up and make his way across the harbor. He didn’t even know what he was doing here. He’d gotten drunk at Lott’s and might’ve been thrown out. The whole goddamn Harbor is unfit, he thought. He’d come across the bottle on the mole, a sailor drunker than h
im, plucked it from his hand, laughing. Now you’re a thief too. You’ve always been a thief; moral shortcomings are blameless. Blame God; he likes it.
The cabin that Kozmin had started the year before was passable, although it was small and windowless, with a sloppily laid wood floor. Daylight came through cracks in the mud chinking. He didn’t have a proper bed, and he and Molly slept on a grass-tick mattress laid out on a hastily fashioned frame. She built herself a bookshelf out of stone, and it made the cabin seem instantly substantial. It got Kozmin working, and he built out the kitchen with log and then milled lumber for cabinets and even built a real table and three chairs. He was sure Molly would get pregnant soon, as much as they went at it. She’d pull up her skirt and lock her arms against the door jamb, a tree, the wall of the mill, anything in reach, and Kozmin would mount her, squirming into it, digging in his heels not unlike a rooster to a hen. Just loved it. Steam blasting, walls and floorboards creaking. She kept her wedding ring in a check in a log above their bed so she wouldn’t lose it.
There was strange summertime frost on the ground when the log came free of the flume and crushed Kozmin’s hand and broke his ankle. Harold came with a peavey and rolled it free.
“Shouldn’t have tried to stop it,” Kozmin said, holding up his bloody and fast-swelling hand. He was in bed for a week, with Molly nursing him and getting obviously bored of it by the minute. Then he was on the bank, one-handed and one-legged with a spud bar, prying the earth away from itself. He would’ve had to abandon the place if it weren’t for Harold. His partner had stopped work on his own residence long ago, but Kozmin didn’t know it yet. Heat of the summer, things started to change between them. Molly stayed away longer and longer during the days, helping Harold at the mill, and didn’t come back to check on him. They ripped through his meager boom in a matter of weeks, and men came from Salter with a raft and loaded up lumber and hauled it back upstream with ropes and polemen. His hand was healing badly, and he could no longer make a fist. For several nights in a row he made his own dinner and ate it by himself, and when Molly finally arrived with Harold in tow, Kozmin told him: “We ain’t got enough fer you, go home.”
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow anyhow.”
“Givin up?”
“Course not, friend. Me and Molly are goin for supplies.”
“I’ll be healed soon,” he said to his wife. “We’ll go then.”
“I want to go, though,” Harold said. “I feel that I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me nothin, but if you want to go by yerself, yer welcome to.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll bring her back here to nurse you up right.”
“She ain’t going with you.”
“How do you know?” Harold asked, but Kozmin could tell he knew the answer already.
“I’d like to see town again,” Molly said. “There’s some things I need.”
“I’ll be up and at em in no time. Let Harold scoot, and we’ll be right behind.”
“We already decided,” Molly said.
“Listen,” Kozmin said to Harold. “I want you to leave. I don’t want you hangin around here anymore.”
Harold stood there scratching his head. Molly looked from one man to the other and then started packing her things. At first he thought she took the ring, but when he was getting ready to burn the cabin down, he found it on the floor under the bed. Years later, he would lose it in a card game, betting on a hand that he knew wouldn’t win.
He’d made a mess of his lashings. He stashed the bottle in his pack and cinched it all down and hefted the load onto his shoulders. The prayer he muttered as he made his way through the damp woods was not a prayer of light and hope, of redemption; it was a prayer of guilt and solicitude. Amen. Nobody hardly ever gets what he wants, and that isn’t a bad thing. Praise be.
Jacob
I was hidden in the trees watching for the sound when Kozmin passed by on the trail. I almost let him go by but I whistled and the old man turned.
“I’m lookin for you.” I closed the pine box and shoved it under a fern. We shook hands on the trail.
“He’s not drowned,” I said.
“I know it. I was there when we found him.”
“Been in a bottle?”
“War is what it is. What day is it?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. Guess not.”
The wind was gusty in the trees and the sky was gray. I brought out the pistol from my coat to show Kozmin.
“Those make holes in people,” he said.
“Traded it for a Disston I found stuck in a tree above Helmick’s.”
“Found, you say?”
“It was rusted to hell, and it took me all day to chop it out and another to clean it up.”
“Hard to imagine walking off and leavin a saw.”
“A limb must have come off and brained one of them. That’s the only sense I can make of it. They had wedges in.”
“I think that saw might’ve been more useful to you than the gun.”
“Tough to fit a misery whip in your pocket.” The old man touched his temple tenderly, as if it were a wound. “You’ll see how light it is if’n you shoot somebody with it.”
“I was going to see Duncan,” I said.
Kozmin’s face bloomed into a smile. “That’s why you brought the pistol.”
“No, that’s not it at all.”
“Yer gonna spy on him.”
“That’s right. He won’t know I was there.”
“I’m comin with you.”
“Fine.”
“Put that thing up before you put a hole in my leg.”
“I’m not shooting anyone.”
“Should a kept the damn saw.”
“Maybe. Hold up.”
Kozmin stopped.
“Wait here. I left something.” I ran back up the road and got the box and ran back. Kozmin was sitting cross-legged in the mud when I returned.
“I need a drink,” he said.
“You need a bath.”
“I need redemption, a priest. I need to confess my sins.”
“You need a lady. A bit of snuggle would do you good.”
“No, not that. Salvation, nothing else will do.”
“And another bath.”
Kozmin was laughing, but he had tears in his eyes. I almost told him, Kozmin, you’re my good friend. But I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. Empires collapse from lesser omissions.
I sent Kozmin to peep in the window, and he waved me over because Duncan was sprawled on the floor, looking dead. Inside, we each took an arm and got him into the bedroom and stripped him down. He was a man now. I’d missed everything. Hope may spring eternal, but so does failure.
I soaked his shirt in cold water and draped it over his bare chest to try and drop the fever. We expected to see Jonas or Matius but they never came. With nothing else to be done, Kozmin and I sat at the table and played cards, and he continued with the story of Timofei Tarakanov.
Tarakanov thought that it could be the Americans that were scraping together an army to usurp the outpost. They’d traded pelts for weapons when it was forbidden. He told Medvednikov, but his leader wouldn’t listen, said he wasn’t scared. Tarakanov let him be not scared and stupid as an animal awaiting slaughter and sent his hunters, his friends, and their families south, round the island in their canoes for an extended hunt, and then took his pack and went inland. Nothing hurried or reckless, for they were being watched.
He constructed crude quarters near the place where his friend Kuskov had been killed by the deadfall. He stood in the spot and craned his neck to see where the limb had snapped. Kuskov was unlucky, or depending, since he felt no pain and was killed instantly, very lucky. On the hillside, in a gaping pit left by a downed tree, he thatched together a lean-to from the root ball downhill and dug a drainage of sorts, but it was watertight enough the way it was, and after he covered the ground with cedar bark, it was quite luxurious. No stinking farting promyshlennik
i, no wet dogs or woodstoves that wouldn’t draw. He had room to stretch out and have a fire, and he relaxed in his pit, thinking of what could be done about the raiders when they came. It would be best to move off and wait for them to steal inside the barracks and the storerooms and then lock them inside and set it all on fire, but no one would see the sense in ruining so much hard work, even if the storerooms were emptied. The promyshlenniki would wake to the dream of having their skulls cleaved open. To his keepers, the tsar and Medvednikov, the peoples of this coast were a flame that needed to be extinguished. But like a song that ended too soon, they would be missed; at least, by him they would.
Waiting out the rain, he mended his boots and made a small kit for future repairs if he found himself isolated and fit it inside his jacket between the wool and the leather. He rubbed beeswax into the seams of his clothing and scraped his knife over the whalebone club he carried called a khootz, which he’d taken off a Kiksàdi warrior who had tried to tip over his baidairka in a running battle up the coast almost three months ago now. He knew what it was to stand and fight with these Koliuzhi, and he was no coward. He was no drunken fool, expecting an Aleut slave to save him.
“He should’ve walked from that outpost and found his own way, put down his servitude.”
“That would’ve been impossible,” Kozmin said.
“Why?”
“He was a man of honor.”
“He was afraid of going it alone.”
“It’s not dishonorable to feel fear in the face of loneliness.”
“Honorable men can be the worst kind.”
“This story is part of the first story and part of the last, but we haven’t gotten there yet, so be patient.”