“Now, no talk like that. Jack is a solitary man, and has probably taken himself off for a time. We’ll find him here in the morning, cooking our breakfast.” Fleming himself does not believe a word of it. Dull anger at his fellow Scotsman beats in his breast. “How’s your hand, Albert?”
“Fine, sir.”
He’s lying.
They all go off, subdued, to their tents and try to sleep.
* * *
That night, he cannot move. Again, his mother’s voice: Sandford, stay away from the water!
The cries of children are more distinct now, and he sees them: his three boyhood friends, Albert, Andrew, and Edward.
No, those weren’t their names; those are the boys here, now, on the survey. Andrew, yes, but the other two were Robert and David.
They’d all three of them drowned in the river.
He’d been a wee lad, only four years old at the time. Nothing had ever been found of the other boys, only some guts washed up on the shore.
His hand had been burnt. That was true. How that had happened his parents never said – if they knew – and nobody would speak of it after. There was much that was not spoken of back in Kirkcaldy.
Only, that you are to stay away from the water. Malignant spirits live there. Kelpies, they’re called. Three boys, together, carried into the depths. Beautiful black horse, its back extending, longer and longer to accommodate all its little passengers. Its legs would be backwards. One boy would remain on the shore. He would usually pet the horse, but his hand would then stick to its neck. He would have to tear his palm from the horse to free himself. He would survive, but the other children would be carried off and drowned. Only some of their entrails would be found, afterwards.
Fleming awakes in such pain that he cries aloud. His hand is burning. Something heavy and wild circles his tent – not a bear, no, he hears the hollow ringing of hooves on the ground. Don’t the others hear? Fleming pours himself from the tent, hand cradled to his chest. Something dances away from him. There, in the fractured moonlight under the trees: a horse. It prances around the crouching Theodolite, inanimate under its cover. A beautiful, powerful black horse.
Its hooves are backwards.
Fleming knows this creature. For he brought it with him, so many years ago. And something about this land, this vast island full of ghosts, has brought it out of him. He is the lightning rod. The angry spirit manifests in a form that he recognizes inside his blood, his bones.
Summoning something from deep within, something one of his savage, unconquered ancestors might have recognized as courage, he roars and runs straight at the creature, arms raised overhead. He will strike it between the eyes.
The horse, with its demonic turned feet, wheels in a circle and gallops into the night.
Unhesitating, Fleming strips the cover from the Theodolite. He scoops coals from the smouldering campfire into the firebox, and blows upon them until he hears the riveted iron boiler begin to stir; the fire tubes are doing their work, transporting the hot gases throughout the water.
He can hear the Kelpie, through the trees, down by the lake. It neighs, a battle cry.
The others do not wake. It no longer surprises Fleming. This is a battle for him alone.
When he is satisfied that the firebox is burning well, he slams shut its door and begins to mount the Theodolite. Then he pauses. He takes the time to find an iron spike, one of the many they have brought to mark surveying points, and throws it into the embers of the campfire. He lets it heat until it glows red. Then, using a stick, he levers it into a steel pan.
Placing the pan with the glowing spike on the saddle, he then mounts the Theodolite.
It is hard to make his way through the trees, in the dark. But the demon calls him on. Shadows loom, branches strike his face. His hand, still wracked with pain, refuses to close properly on the controls. But he limps forward on his steed, until finally he comes out onto a clear place, a beach of smooth rocks next to the vast lake.
The blind tree watches.
The monster is waiting for him.
It rears up on its hind legs, lands, and charges.
Fleming is only just able to turn the Theodolite aside in time, steel feet screeching on the rocks with the speed of his scramble.
Another scream of rage from the monster, the horse. Equus. The ancient god.
The Kelpie charges Fleming again.
Again, all Fleming can do is dodge.
He runs the Theodolite down the beach, putting as much space between himself and the Kelpie as he can. The rocks shift beneath the Theodolite’s feet and the creature lurches. The hot spike is flung from its pan. Fleming stands in the saddle to catch it, and succeeds; the searing pain in his palm is no worse than the phantom pain he already endures.
The Kelpie is charging. Its eyes glow cold blue in the night.
Fleming stands his ground. He swears he can feel the Theodolite quiver beneath him, wanting to charge, or to flee, he knows not which. But they hold, oh, they hold, and the ebony monster comes with flashing eyes, huge, larger than any horse ever was.
Just as it is about to mow them down, Fleming and the Theodolite spring to the side.
Fleming plunges the hot spike into the Kelpie’s flank.
* * *
The next day, Fleming blames the terrible long burn across his palm on an overheating incident with the Theodolite in the night.
“But that’s impossible, I raked out her firebox myself!” Manny exclaims. He is worried, shaken, doubts his own capabilities.
How well Fleming knows that feeling. He hates to put Emmanuel Smith there, but he must.
Albert, fetching water down on the beach, finds a pile of white, quivering, melting starch, or something like it. So he says.
By the time the others come down to look, it is gone, all but a trace of white film across the rocks. Conne River Joe looks hard at Fleming, but says nothing.
Jack is never found.
The hands of Albert, the boy, and Fleming, the chief engineer, heal but scars remain. They finish the survey, cutting along the south coast of the island.
Fleming’s hand never wholly recovers. The palm remains shiny, livid, devoid of any human lines: heart, head, and life, all seared away. The pain continues to haunt him.
But he accepts it, accepts the price. One must have a railroad to enter the modern era. It leashes the land, renders the unknown known, the irrational rational. There are no uncertain dreams, no vengeful gods, in a land circumscribed by a railroad.
GOLD MOUNTAIN
KARIN LOWACHEE
Here in the snow, your handprint. Rabbit small and delicate white, limned by blue shadow and the scrape of spruce branches. Here in the snow, your handprint leading me to hearth, as if you’d been crawling on your knees to start the fire.
I thought at first you were a trapper, surrounded by cabin walls you’d hewn by hand. I was going to discover animal skins tacked to the wood and fur lining your face, feral and savage. Chimney smoke trailed up toward the sky like it was singing a song, every twist of grey a note brought high by the air. It sounded like refuge. My eyelashes jewelled by frost, the ends of my hair brittle with cold. Surely, only a huntsman like my husband buried himself so deep in the woods, clinging to the mountainside that hid you from distant paths, long forgotten by iron tracks below.
When I touched the wooden panels of the door, the grain gave a warmth that sank through my woollen mitten, as if the tree you’d decimated was somehow yet alive, transfused by blood.
* * *
“Please open the door.” My voice in the emptiness of a winter forest fell first into the drifts. Everything dampened. Here, you could bury yourself as if you were beneath a blanket and hope the darkness didn’t see you.
The latch lifted on the other side. A sliver of light and a gust of that warmth from within. A dark eye not framed by fox fur, but fox-like just the same. Angular and golden, as if it had fetched the fire burning behind you and trapped it. Peering at me, wary in your den.
<
br /> “Please.” I grasped the collar of my coat, squeezing the lapels together against the biting air. “You’re the first person I’ve seen up here and I know it’s going to storm.” Even the animals were digging holes.
I should’ve stayed out. I had climbed this far to live and die as the animals. But the tracks in the snow pulled me forward. The scent of smoke. And a part of me thought I would see my husband Sam on the other side of this door. He would apologize for not being able to come down the mountain. He would say he was waiting for the spring thaw.
But it wasn’t my husband.
The door eased wider. The dark eye, lit with fire, blinked twice. More warmth spilled out and took hold of me, drew me in.
* * *
You even walked like a fox, gentle steps across floorboards that stretched a little warped, curling at the edges. Rough but sturdy, like your hands when you loaded the pot-bellied stove and poked at the flames. Hair black as ink and tied in a knot at the top of your head, pulling your face back to make every stare a scrutiny into the wind. Long cheekbones, burnished skin. Like you’d stood too close to the fire or been hammered out from the elements. I couldn’t see your muscles from beneath the grey and brown layers, but you carried the cast-iron cauldron full of water as if it were a picnic basket woven from straw.
I sat with knees to the fire like a child begging for attention. The shadows flung around the walls and corners of the cabin and I tracked them. Barely ten feet in any direction, but that just meant every whorl and eddy of wood lay exposed to this heat. No skins or furs anywhere. No guns. How did you survive in the wild without guns? I watched your hands.
A raised box in the corner must have been a bed; it was strewn with piles of blankets both colourful and dun.
You dropped leaves into the water pot, and things that looked like tiny twigs, and some sort of powder. Soon the aromatic half-notes of spice and salt wafted to my seeking breaths. This was tea. Or broth. I didn’t care which. I’d run out of hard tack a day ago.
I took the offered mug with both hands. You passed it to me with the same, nodding twice. We hadn’t spoken once in the diligence of your hospitality.
The only seat in the cabin and I sat upon it. You squatted in front of the light and held your own cup, encircled by strong fingers. We sipped and said nothing until enough of the soothing tea had thawed out my thoughts.
“Thank you.”
Only a dip of the chin in return.
“My name is Jules.” I didn’t hold out my hand. I knew this wasn’t the ritual of Chinamen, and that was who you were. A Chinaman alone in the middle of the mountains. They came in droves to the mountain and the gold fields, for the rush and then the railway. Set up tents and communities, speaking their strident song language, wary of strangers.
I understood that inclination.
“Lin,” you said, nodding again. That was all.
Coolies, we called the Chinese. Some were only boys but they took the voyage from the Far East – actually west of this western side of the country – desperate for a new land or better wages or some opportunity they couldn’t find in their home. Escape. Didn’t we all come here for that? Except for those who’d been here first. I knew some Indians, no less wary than the Chinamen with just as much reason to despise, if not more.
You passed your palm over the drifts of steam rising from your mug, and the white curls seemed to dance between your fingers. Following them.
“How do you survive up here, Lin?” On frozen berries and herbs and mushrooms? How was it that you survived up here and my husband did not – a man who had made work of thirty-five years in rough country, crossing environments like an explorer until he settled into mine?
You just wafted more of the steam into your eyes, like a tribal chieftain in a smudging ritual.
My skin warmed, some heated delirium after so much cold causing my thoughts to wander to the fantastic. Maybe my husband had transformed. Maybe he was beneath the blankets here. Maybe you could explain how the bones of the Earth dared to latch onto something living. Like we latched onto the dead.
“Why do you live up here?”
Not that I couldn’t see the appeal. I’d implored Sam to bring me to these heights, build a cabin like this one, live out the rest of our days away from the tent cities. It was always something to do next spring, next summer, just a little more time.
You sipped your tea as if you hadn’t heard. Maybe you hadn’t understood.
But then you spoke with a soft accent and a sad bend of your gaze. “I am poisoned.”
* * *
We all saw them, the Chinamen, laying track and exploding rocks, serving the unrelenting bridge between one province and the next. Eventually, all the way to the opposite coast if the rail barons had their way. Maybe the Chinese thought if they built far enough, travelling east into the rising sun, they would meet their own country once again.
But we were without country here. We were blown across the land, broken away from our mother homes like shale in a storm.
I am poisoned.
From what?
You just shook your head.
You built me a fort of blankets on that bed and gestured for me to lie down. I was too weary to argue. From beneath the layers I watched you crouch by the belly fire, your palms open to the flames.
* * *
I woke up to a conversation of weather outside the door.There were no windows so I just listened, woollen blankets up to my eyes, as snow and wind made the trees moan and the mountain creak. The buffeting across the log-bound roof sounded a little like war drums. A storm like this howled, as wild as a wolf, and nature rooted to the earth answered back. The whip of branches, the shudder of scrub. And from above, the Lord’s impatient fingers tapping a staccato of hail.
You still sat in front of the fire, feeding it.
I thought I saw the flames stretch toward you, dance over your sleeve, then retreat back into the iron. I thought I saw you rise and walk the floorboards, a blossom of fire in your palm, and you went to each dark, cold corner and took the warmth there.
You stood over me, holding fire, and spoke in a different tongue. The heavy heat wore down my eyes until they shut.
* * *
I dreamed.
Three-masted sailing ships traversing the wine-dark ocean. Below decks, men and boys lined so tightly behind closed hatches that the cabins felt more like coffins. Your father died on the journey.
Spilled onto the shore of the island, this new world was bewildering. Cold. Like promises.
Your people called the ultimate destination Gold Mountain like it was a place of sunlight and fair wages. Instead it was backbreaking, dollar-a-day toiling and you never complained.
Food, clothing, tents. None of it provided. Nothing left over to send back home. You had your hands, though.
You possessed a quiet.
In the winter, you set your palm to rock and dissolved it.
You could move mountains.
The energy of your body was the energy of nature.
Your hands and feet made patterns into the ground, through the air, passing through fire and stone, some strength born from the world in your chest, and from the quiet. More stable than the explosives they made you use, where countrymen fell and died beneath cascading rock and collapsing tunnels. Unreported and ignored, only carried in the memories of those still alive.
And each life lost was a drop of poison in your veins.
So you went headfirst into the canyons. You touched the stone and the sediment. You commanded trees. Under moonlight, when none of the white workers could see you. Shifting nature, compelling the breeze.
And the iron laid in your wake was a damning shadow that followed you all the way up this mountain.
Despite all you did to hold back the earth, men like your father still perished. The iron was consumed in their blood and in yours.
You could not hold back every avalanche.
I stood beside you in the dream, overlooking the dark
valley. Wishing for green. Where you were silent, I screamed.
* * *
How did it end?
I only heard from a hunter who came down the following spring. He said Sam had been caught in the winter avalanche. Of course he hadn’t left me of his own will, even if men like him tended to follow tracks most women could never find.
I heard the words but nothing else. I became deaf to all but that reality. It was like newsprint that wouldn’t wash off my fingers, no matter how hard I scrubbed. Man dies in avalanche, leaves wife behind. Man will never smile again. Man will never be found. Man was lost somewhere in the wilderness, alone, and the woman refuses to believe. If there was no body, how could they be sure of death? Death at least owed me the conclusion, some confirming dream, a deer with a scrap of wolf fur in its mouth, a bear with blood on its teeth and a tale to tell.
Suffocated by snow is not how it ended. I wouldn’t believe, even if a part of me trekked up the incline and the storm to follow his trail. A part of me sinking into the snow with every step.
Is that why you climbed the mountain too? Are you chasing your dead?
For everything built, something must be destroyed.
* * *
Because you didn’t speak, I did. It wasn’t common to volunteer one’s story, but who would you tell? I’d been carrying these words so far deep inside my chest that they were separated from syllable. Emotion existed before language, and without language we were babies, mewling and screaming for expression. Sometimes, experience piled up enough to knock you back into infancy.
A husband buried in the snow. Ours had been a love of truth, perhaps rare in this climate of so much cold and covering up. He came down from the mountain like a roving bear, though he wasn’t so large beneath the fur. Blond beard sprouted from pale cheeks. He seemed bleached from the weather but his smile was wide. It took weeks to warm up to him, serving him drinks, letting his eyes march over my back when it was turned to him on purpose. He could have been as rough as the others, and in some ways he was, but there was a sense of honour about him that didn’t quite fit this untamed land.
He lived up here. He died up here.
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