by Brian Hart
“I did.”
“Pass it over.”
“I don’t know what English these gentlemen understand, but I know that I don’t want you talking about what we have in our pockets right now. You’re lucky you weren’t robbed.”
“Apparently I fucking was.”
The Indian in the bow smiled over his shoulder, and Jonas smiled back.
His father was silent. The Indians kept a steady rhythm with their paddles. Matius stared at the water defiantly.
The Indian in the bow said something.
“What’d you say?” Matius demanded.
“Nothing.”
“I heard you say something.”
“I said, he got out-white-manned.”
The water was black and green. They were out in the middle of it now. They’d drown for sure if they went over. Bald eagles sat on trees on the shoreline and gulls turned effortlessly overhead. When the sound of the paddle behind him went quiet, Jonas looked back and the Indian nodded his head toward the shore. The mill was visible first by its rising steam and smoke and then by its black and shining shingle roof.
The canoe banked in the mud of low tide, and they stumbled out with their packs and slogged up the hill to ask for a job. Matius went first.
No drinking was allowed on the mill property, so Jonas was soon sober and alert, running an edger like he’d done in Portland.
The long hours allowed Jonas brief seconds of relief from a flood of memories. Green chain rolled off, and the dogs brought more and more. He didn’t blame Mary, but he did.
At dusk he stood on the edge of the channel in the pouring rain, looking at the smattering of lights in Juneau. There was a canoe there, and he could take it. Nobody was awake to stop him. He went as far as to untie it from the stump, where it bobbed on the flood tide, but he didn’t get in, and after a few minutes he clove-hitched it back to the stump, with two half hitches roughly put on to finish it. He wasn’t a bad man, and he didn’t see why he’d been cursed. Water cascaded down the cliff face across the channel. His father was suddenly beside him. He had a scab in the corner of his mouth, and it was oozing yellow pus.
“You can’t keep dwelling on what’s done,” his father said.
“Let me be.”
“She was weak-hipped.”
“If you speak to me about her again, I’ll beat your brains in.”
“She wasn’t built for it. It’s the way—”
And Jonas struck him in the jaw as hard as he could, and it was lucky Matius was knocked unconscious and couldn’t fight back, because Jonas hated him to his bones and would’ve killed him.
An Indian from Yakitat the mill workers called Sannup saw what had happened, and after Jonas went back to the bunkhouse, the Indian stayed with Matius until he woke up and then helped him to his bunk.
Jonas and his father didn’t speak for days.
A month later the millwork suddenly ended when the owners decided to hire Chinese, and it got rough with the Indians and the strikers both. Jonas and his father left Douglas for Juneau and rented the same cabin over again and found work in the woods until the rain got too bad. It was just too much; it wouldn’t stop. Treadwell still wanted men in the glory hole, but Jonas hadn’t come this far to die, no matter what he told himself. They watched as the Chinese were run out of town. The whole of the population, no less than fifty of the large Indian war boats, carried them away. The channel was calm, and they went without looking back. It was said that a schooner met them later and took them to Puget Sound. Some thought it was a benefit, but most missed them once they were gone.
They hired the same Indians to take them north. The tide was against them, so they made camp in a narrow cove and slept on the rocks, but it was summer so the sun only played at quitting. Jonas slept with his face buried in the crook of his arm and woke up cramped. As they set out the next day, the wind and tide were in their favor. Still, it took two more days to arrive at the Haines Mission, and they had to wait there for the tide to make their way up Dixon Straits. While they were in camp, a group of officers from a gunship paid them a visit and asked about their progress. Jonas said it was fine, but he needed a rifle. Go ask the captain, they said. The ship was moored two miles away, and Jonas went by himself and left his father playing cards with the crew. The captain was amicable and invited him aboard.
“You have a tough time ahead of you,” he said.
“I know. My father’s with me. We’ll give it a go. Can you sell me a rifle?”
“I’ll loan you one. Send it to Brady’s Store in Juneau when you’re finished, or head south yourself.” He gave Jonas fifty rounds of ammunition. The rifle was a 45.90. The ship was called the Pinto. The captain’s kindness made him uneasy, and several times on his walk back to camp he looked over his shoulder, thinking he’d been followed, but no one was there.
Recall, one golden evening. Mary set Jonas’s plate in front of him on the table. “Should we wait for your father?” She rested an arm on her distended stomach.
“No. He can find his own dinner if he doesn’t want to be on time.”
“I’ll keep his plate on the stove.”
“Sit with me.”
Mary sat down, and since she’d already eaten, she watched, smiling, while Jonas shoveled in his food. “The doctor was by.”
“What’d he say?”
“All’s fine. I told him about the pain I’ve been having, and he said it was normal and would pass.”
“It’s not so bad, then?”
“Not so bad.”
He set down his fork and smiled at his wife. She remained optimistic, even with all the troubles they had. She trusted him, and he prayed he had the strength to keep her.
“Do you still think you could come with us?”
“Why do you ask? You said I’d wait here.”
“I don’t think I can stand to be apart from you that long.”
She smiled. “We should go now and let the child be born in the Yukon. That’s the way.”
“No, it’s not. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He picked up his fork.
“You’re right. We’ll stick to your plan. You and your father go first, and we’ll follow. It’s safer.”
“I’ll go mad without seeing you every day.”
“You’ll be fine.”
They divided their provisions into four packs of one hundred pounds apiece and camped at the glacier crossing and waited for night so it would freeze. There was a rope across the river to hang on to, but it was rumored that men had died even with it; the water wasn’t two feet deep, but it was swift. Jonas strung his boots around his neck. His father chose to wear his, and suffered for it later. At the summit they made a rough camp and hardly slept with the wind and the cold. The old man clutched at black toes. Jonas massaged them with bacon grease, and that seemed to help. There were other men around, but their isolation felt complete. In the morning they stumbled downhill, and Matius had to stop and rest and complain about his knees and his back and of course his poor fucking toes every quarter mile. Jonas took some of the weight from his pack, but he still complained. Indians were camped on Lake Bennett, and they said they were Stick Indians and that there was lots of big water four miles down the lake. They still had another trip back to the summit for the other two packs. Matius wandered off and found a flat rock in the sun and lay down, said he’d stay and see if he could get some of the Indians to help him cobble together a raft to make it across the lake. They’d brought the whipsaw and the crosscut saw with them on the first trip, but the ax was at the summit.
“I’ll use my teeth,” Matius said. The first smile to cross his face in two months.
Jonas set out feeling better without his father behind him, slowing him down.
Two weeks later they were camped with fifteen or twenty others at the mouth of the Forty Mile River. Two men had drowned in the canyon above. Jonas had a lean-to in the trees and had traded his extra gumboots for a bottle of whiskey.
Missionaries a
rrived by steamer and with them S. D. Staunton, the storekeeper, and they brought some mail. By chance Jonas and Matius each received a letter. The other men were envious. His father handed him the letter, and he opened it; it was from his wife. She was marrying a cranberry farmer from Seattle.
If you are still alive you need to send word and grant me a divorce so as not to be afoul of any law regarding polygamy.
Jonas thought that was fine; she could do as she liked; he didn’t care, but he couldn’t look away from the words.
“Good news?” His father said.
“Mary’s taking a husband.”
“She has one of those already.”
“She thinks I’m dead.”
“So she posted a letter to your corpse?”
“It has your name on it too.” He held up the envelope.
“It does? I didn’t notice Well, maybe you’ll stop your moping now.”
“Maybe I will.” He motioned to the envelope in his father’s hand.
“Your uncle Jacob, failure recounted.”
“Is he coming here?”
“Hell, no, he’s not coming here. He says he’s become a logger, the little tart.”
“Are we ready to go?”
“Nearly.”
With Mr. Staunton returned, the store was opened, and soon everyone would be drunk. He had the miners unload his cargo into the tent, and within minutes he was open for business. The Indians on the bar weren’t allowed to buy liquor and would have to wait for someone to bootleg it to them. The bonfire was stoked and loaded up, and smoke swirled around the bar and filled Staunton’s tent until he shut the flap in disgust.
The missionaries that brought the mail said they’d recently been at the Pelly River and that there were men working the creeks there. Matius thought it to be as good a place as any to make a try with their new rocker. They made the rounds and said their good-byes and told the others where they were headed so they’d know where to look if they didn’t return, or if they wanted to visit.
The birch bark canoe they’d traded for rode low but level with all the gear they’d piled into it. There was ice in the river, and a man came floating down in a listing craft, a boat that had been cut in half and boards nailed across the squared-off stern to seal it. He was using a coffee can to bail water.
“Me and my partner split everything down the middle,” the man said when he came alongside.
“Seems like the balance leaked out your ears,” Matius said. “Half a boat. Half a goddamn brain.”
“This is no place for a compromise. You’ll see.”
“If I had a speck of dust for every time someone told me ‘You’ll see’ in this country, I’d be set to go home and retire with my fucking tonnages.”
The man paddled away, looked over his shoulder. “You’ll see.”
Jonas couldn’t help but laugh.
“At least you had two paddles to divide, or you’d have to use half a blade,” Matius yelled after him. “Half a board for half a boat. Half-wit.”
The man bent down and searched among his effects and then held something in the air, and as the current turned the canoe, they could make out the shape of a perfectly bisected paddle. “I stole the spare when he wasn’t looking,” the man yelled. The ice slurried all around them, and they could feel it as it bumped gently against them.
They didn’t make three miles before they camped. By noon the next day they’d hiked up a small, fast-falling creek and cleared eight ounces of dust and had a four-ounce nugget to marvel at over dinner. They spent the whole next day pacing out their future claim and cutting blazes.
Matius shotgunned a cow moose from ten yards, and they built a frame and cut it into strips and kept a fire underneath it to keep off the flies. When some Indians came by, they traded moose for fish and were told the story of a child killed by a bear, didn’t know if it was true or myth. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
Jonas found a stranger up the creek, panning on their claim, and asked if he was in the habit of trespassing and stealing. The man threw a rock at him and they had a fight and Jonas was being beaten bloody with a stick when Matius got there and shot the stranger in the back with his shotgun. They buried the man under a downed tree they managed to roll uphill and then roll back once he was in the ground. They kept watchful, even stood guard, thinking that the man’s friends must show up sometime, but he must’ve been a loner, because nobody ever came looking for him. A week after the man was buried, Jonas found his half-boat and his kit pulled up on the bank downstream and carefully covered with brush. Farther into the forest, they found the man’s camp. They didn’t know how they’d missed it when they hiked out the claim. They left the camp as it was and never found his gold, if he had any. Jonas found the dead man’s blazes on the trees, and on one he’d peeled away the bark and written out the boundaries and size and angles of his claim in a carved longhand. His name was Davis, and a man named Christianson had witnessed the carving in the tree. Not wanting to get hung for murder or shot by this Christianson while they were sleeping, they cleaned up. In the three weeks they’d been there, they’d cleared five hundred dollars in dust and had several nuggets too, maybe another one fifty or so.
A mob was gathered at Staunton’s store. An Indian had killed a prospector, and a posse was being formed to hunt him down. Jonas asked if they’d seen the body and who he was and where it had happened, thinking it might be Davis and that somehow someone knew that he was dead. But it was some other man they’d never heard of. They decided to leave their kits with Staunton, like everyone else. The fat man sat on his chair in front of his tent and smoked. He told them he had no sympathy for a man that got himself killed up here; it was the way things went.
“God has business like I have business. I’ll not get in the way a his,” Staunton said.
“You’ll watch our things?” Asked a man named Demetri, who owed Staunton a hundred dollars.
“Yes, for the agreed price.”
“You’ll charge us to watch em? Can you believe this bloodsucker? You got no backbone outside a that tent, Staunton.”
Staunton smiled. “Get your hands bloody and get to work, Demetri. Pay me what you owe, or you’ll see what kind of backbone I have.”
“C’mon,” Demetri said, but nobody listened, and he stood there like a fool until eventually the posse got under way.
“Safe travels,” Staunton called after them.
They went to the Indian camp and found the man who had supposedly killed the miner.
“I killed him,” the accused replied.
“You don’t deny it?” said Demetri.
They had him stood up against a tree.
“If I could, I’d kill every last one of you.”
“You heard him,” Demetri said. “Get the rope.”
They tested the knot, but it bound and wouldn’t slip. They greased it with tallow, and it worked fine. They left the man swinging in the tree. Jonas was drinking whiskey, and Matius didn’t try and stop him.
“That was a long bit of wretchedness,” Matius said.
“We were part of it. Stood there. Partly our wretchedness.”
“You know why we came, though, don’t you?”
“So we don’t get pinned for Davis.”
“That’s right. So we don’t get pinned for Davis. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t dig him up and blame that man hanging from the tree.”
“We told everybody we were down there. They’ll know something’s wrong.”
“Maybe not,” Matius said.
“Leave him be.”
“Nobody’ll know when he was killed.”
“I said leave him.”
“Fine.”
They fled south to Juneau for the winter but in the spring they returned to Forty Mile, and only one drainage over from where they’d buried Davis they filed two adjoining claims and built a cabin. They braved several winters, but never did as well as that first trip. Once or twice they went south vowing never to go back but they always d
id. Then, six months before Franklin struck it rich and flung open the door for the rush, they finally made up their minds and sold their claims and the cabin together for six hundred dollars. Jonas could think back on the time as he thought back on fevers he’d sweated, injuries endured. Maybe stronger for it, maybe not, just a breath away from greatness, or great wealth. If in fact they were different.
Jacob
At the fork the mules went south to Hebo, and we went north. The next day we circled widely around a coastal village and stayed in the shadows until we saw the sea. The beach and the waves had the grand feel of industry. Work was being done, and we had wandered into it, at our peril. We tried to keep in the trees, but with the marsh and the brush, we couldn’t. Gauging distance on the beach was no easy task. Duncan seemed nearly healed from his fever. I quit trying to change his mind. He was going back.
We had food from the younger Taylor, and for the time we ate well. There wasn’t any hurry. We’d walk through the long day and then make camp. Ships were off the coast, but they wouldn’t be able to see us with the breakers. I saw us doing it for a lifetime.
Problems started with the cliffs. Twice we were trapped by the tide. On the first occasion we were forced to wade into the frothing ocean and at times swim, which was a truly miserable experience with the icy water and waves slamming us against the rocks, but it was the second occasion that nearly killed us. The earth trembled, and pebbles rained down on our heads, punctuating the raindrops, and then a mudslide two hundred yards across slammed into the water directly behind us. We were covered in a yellow mud and soaked through. Nearly killed. So nearly killed we didn’t speak afterward, just walked on, and for myself I can say I tasted the brined earth of mortality, and I didn’t like it. We turned inland.
There were spatterings of townships, and we had to wait till night to move past them. Duncan stole a chicken from a house with no dog. His eyes were glassy and cold when he returned. He held up the chicken by the legs, and I put it in my pack. I told him I wanted to leave a silver dollar on the step of the coop, but Duncan wouldn’t allow it. He was right. If I’d done it, I’d have sunk us; the law would be on us in no time.