Touch

by Alexi Zentner

  I DON’T KNOW when my father stopped expecting my grandfather to return to Sawgamet—or if he ever did stop expecting it—but I know that the stories about Jeannot were something he held on to. He lived with my great-aunt and great-uncle and their daughter, and though Franklin and Rebecca treated him like a son, my great-aunt told me more than once that every knock at the door, every footstep in the distance, every person who came out of the dark who was not Jeannot, was like a splinter in my father’s heart.

  When school wasn’t in session, and when he wasn’t helping Franklin in the store or at home, my father spent much of his time with Pearl. My father loved Franklin and Rebecca, but he was made for the cuts, and after that first year away at school in Vancouver, he said he would not leave Sawgamet again.

  The summer after he returned from school, the summer that my father and Pearl built the steps and the chute beside the mill, my father was stunned at how soft he had become in only a single year away. He had turned sixteen while in Vancouver, but back in Sawgamet he found himself spent before midday.

  First he and Pearl cut and planked the stairs down from the mill, an arduous process that left my father’s hands raw. Sixteen was young enough, however, that the extra flesh on his body melted quickly, and he turned hard and lean working with Pearl. By the time they finished digging and driving the pilings, my father had come to enjoy the work, and he was disappointed that the chute was nearly finished.

  There was more to it than that, of course. Pearl and Mrs. Gasseur had not had any children of their own, and there had been a time when my father had studied Pearl’s appearance with great care, hoping to find some truth to the idea that he might be Pearl’s son. By the time he was seven or eight, however, my father knew with certainty that Pearl was not his father—from looking in the mirror and from what little my great-uncle Franklin had been willing to speak of Jeannot—but one summer afternoon he asked Pearl anyway.

  They had canoed across the Sawgamet and taken the fork up the Bear River, paddling an hour or so before beaching the canoe on a shaded gravel bank that Pearl promised was rife with fish. This was something, my father told me, that he and Pearl had done most Sunday afternoons that he could remember, gone off into the woods together, snow or sun, to fish or hunt or just for him to have a chance to get away from his aunt and uncle for a while. Occasionally Franklin’s daughter, my father’s cousin, Julia, came along with them, but mostly it was just Pearl and my father together. Usually Mrs. Gasseur packed something for them to eat, always thinking to include something that my father—or, for that matter, any boy of seven or eight—liked: shortbread, a few slices of fruit bread, jam-filled scones.

  Pearl had been right about the fish, and in short order they caught enough to fill the creel. Pearl set his rod aside and leaned back on the shore, tipping his hat over his eyes to block the sun. My father kept casting idly, carefully pulling the hook out of the mouth of fish he caught and then gently lowering their twitching bodies back into the cool water. When I was a boy and fished with him, he told me that he loved the way the fish stayed in his hands, hovering in the water for a moment after he released them, how when they darted away they were like streaks of gold flashing in the water.

  He let one go and then he finally turned and asked if Pearl was his father. Pearl touched his hand to his hat but he did not uncover his face. “You know I’m not your father, Pierre.”

  That was all he said then, and though my father might have hoped for more—for Pearl to say that he wished he had been his father—he did not ask again. Later that day, as they let the canoe drift lazily down the Bear River, in no hurry to get to the confluence of the Bear and the Sawgamet and the edge of the village, Pearl told my father a new story about my grandfather. It was not much of a story, and my father knew it was an exaggeration—Pearl told of how Jeannot had once spent the better part of an hour trying to cut a board and cursing a saw’s dullness before realizing that he was holding the saw upside down—but it was a start.

  After that fishing trip, Pearl began to tell more stories about Jeannot, stories that my father had not yet heard. In some ways, my father realized, people in the village had been afraid to tell him stories about Jeannot, convinced that by talking about my grandfather they made his absence more notable for my father. This trickle of stories—it could hardly be called a flood, coming from Pearl—was a relief of pressure that my father had not even realized existed. Pearl was the sort of man who was quiet except for when he was not, and there were times when he liked to tell stories about the woods, about the first few years of Sawgamet, how my grandfather let a tired dog choose the location of the village. Sometimes Pearl even told my father about what he himself had done as a younger man, the way he had worked his way from New York to San Francisco and then north. He was the one who taught my father how to track game, how to shoot and how to clean his kills, things that Franklin could not do for my father.

  So even at sixteen, as my father grunted and pressed his shoulder against the final board of the chute, digging his feet into the shifting bottom of the river, he was already nostalgic for what they were about to finish, wishing that the forced company of this project was not about to end. The water was up to his waist and the current carried strong enough to make it difficult for him to keep his place, but none of that seemed to bother Pearl. The older man sat comfortably on the chute and eyed the nail, wiggling it against the wood before finally giving it a few solid whacks with the hammer. He scooted over, placing three more nails home, and then looked up at my father with a grin.

  “That ought to about do it,” Pearl said. “You can ease off. I’ll throw in a few more nails and then it’s time to give this contraption of ours a whirl.”

  My father ducked his head into the water. His legs had already gotten used to the cold, but the water running down the back of his neck and dripping from his hair came as a small shock.

  “We’re sending logs down?”

  “Of course not, Pierre. They’d just float away down the river, and I don’t think the men would fancy us letting their work go to naught like that. I’ve something a little different in mind.” He gave the sort of grin that thrilled my father.

  Despite Pearl’s appearance of maturity, my father always said when he was a boy and spending time with Pearl, that Pearl could be counted on for a certain amount of mischief, usually of the sort that neither Uncle Franklin nor Pearl’s wife approved of. Not to say that Mrs. Gasseur was an unpleasant woman, but I think that at times she felt as if she needed to be more careful than other women to keep up appearances. Even I have heard the whispers that Mrs. Gasseur was once less proper in her manners, that she had come to Sawgamet during the boom to work, not to marry, but Pearl brought the sort of respect and fear that made men unwilling to openly tell stories about his wife’s past.

  Pearl walked a fast clip up the stairs beside the chute, not looking back, and my father found himself lagging behind. Though he had just turned forty, Pearl’s hair had already turned white while my father was in Vancouver for school, and at least on the surface, Pearl looked like a hard man.

  At the top of the stairs, Pearl moved off to the sluice and turned the wheel enough to start sending some of the diverted creek water down the chute. “Not so much to start,” he said, grinning at my father. “Just enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  Pearl looked surprised. “For us, of course.”

  My father watched the water rush down the chute and swiftly hit the river. “You first.”

  They rode down the chute on greased wooden trays for more than an hour, until neither one of them could face the trip up the stairs again. Each of them was bruised and their throats were tired from whooping. My father had gained a few splinters and Pearl had torn his pants at the knee and bloodied his cheek a bit, but he said it was worth the pain. “Now, not a word of it to the wife,” he said with a wink as they walked between the homes and the shops, past the saloon. “And best not to say anything to your uncle or
aunt, either.”

  MY STEPFATHER HAS TOLD ME that even now, daring boys still ride down the chute during the summer, soaping the rails of sleds or trays jury-rigged for the express purpose of taking the swooping plunge into the river. Though the chute wobbles, and I’m sure that sooner or later it will simply collapse, the boys emerge from the river none too much the worse for wear, with only splinters and bloody knuckles from bashing against the side of the chute. Michael Keeny broke his wrist riding it a few summers ago.

  As we stood in that clearing, however, my grandfather staring at me, I was not thinking of riding the chute, but rather of my father building the chute with Pearl, of my father’s desperation to know Jeannot as more than a story, and I was thinking of what my grandfather had just said, that there was a time when he didn’t care if he ever saw my father again, and the anger must have shown on my face.

  I understand now what Jeannot was waiting for when he stared at me. As a priest, I am all too familiar with this look, have seen so many members of my church stare at me with the same hope: that I would somehow absolve them of their sins. But even if I had the power to do so with Jeannot, if I, as a ten-year-old boy, could have forgiven him, I did not want to. I did not want to forgive him for leaving Sawgamet, for returning too late to save my father, too late to keep Marie from falling through the ice. If anything, I wanted to drop the ax I was still holding and smash my fist against his face.

  “You probably want to hit me, huh?” Jeannot said, as if reading my mind.

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “Go on,” my grandfather said, stepping closer to me and leaning over. “Hit me if it will make you feel better.”

  So I did.

  I was surprised at how easy it was to hit my grandfather, and how Jeannot’s head snapped back and then his body seemed to follow. I looked at my grandfather on the ground, and then I could not help myself: I started to laugh.

  “Dammit,” Jeannot said. He had his hands covering his face, and I could see blood already dripping down his chin. “My nose.”

  And for some reason that made me laugh harder. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

  Jeannot shook his head, and then gave an odd half-smile that made me again think of him as a shape-shifter, as a man who could also be a wolf. “No, Stephen, I can’t say I really thought you’d do it. Guess I deserved it, huh?”

  I thought about it for a second, but then I shook my head. “No. I understand. You didn’t want to be burdened,” I said, and I was stunned by the pained look in Jeannot’s face, the way my grandfather’s hands fell away and the blood, already slowed to a trickle, left a mark on Jeannot’s shirt.

  “Burdened? No. God, no, Stephen, I didn’t think of it like that. I knew Franklin would take care of Pierre. I wanted him to be safe. I couldn’t be sure that the woods were done with me, or if there was still more to pay.” He wiped at his nose and then shook his head. “And I thought if I came back that maybe it would be too hard, that maybe I didn’t want to see any part of your grandmother if I couldn’t have all of her again.”

  “So you’ve come back to find her?” I could not help the eagerness in my voice, and my grandfather heard it. “But she’s dead.”

  Jeannot regained his feet and stood next to me. Slowly and deliberately he put his hand on my shoulder. “I can’t do anything about your father, about Marie.” He dropped his hand from my shoulder and with an exaggerated cheerfulness he started pacing around the clearing, stopping at a large hillock. “Here,” he said. “This is a fine site for a cabin. We’ll dig it out and build it into the hill. It will keep the winds at bay some during the winters, make it warmer. We’ll cut the wood and strip it before we touch a shovel to the ground.”

  He walked to the edge of the clearing and we spent nearly an hour marking out the trees that he planned to take down, aiming for trunks that were straight with as little taper as possible. Once or twice Jeannot turned down trees that I pointed to, saying they were too big for the two of us to handle without a horse team, but mostly my grandfather nodded his assent at whatever I chose. Finally, when we were ready to cut, Jeannot reached out his hand to take the ax from me, but I did not give it over.

  “You left yours at the house.”

  Jeannot raised his eyebrows and laughed once. “The ax you’re holding was mine well before you were born.”

  “And you left it when you left Sawgamet,” I said back evenly. “Had you really wanted it you would have taken it with you.”

  Jeannot looked at me, and at the tightness in the way I gripped the handle of the ax.

  “Just because I left it behind doesn’t mean I didn’t want it,” he said. He held up his hand so that I could see the shiny, scarred flesh on his palm. “That ax left a mark on me the night your grandmother died. But if you help me take down these trees, then I’ll say you’ve earned it.”

  I grinned and held the ax in front of my chest. “And I’d say you don’t have much choice in the matter anyway, unless you want me to hit you again.”

  “I’m not enough of a fool to try to fight a boy who is holding an ax when I’ve not mine. Besides, you seem like you take after me in your unwillingness to yield. We might be here all day beating on each other. Let’s save our blows for the trees, shall we?”

  “Jeannot,” I said, and both of us cringed at the sound of the name. “Sorry.”

  Jeannot sighed. “I guess I can’t expect to have you call me grandfather after all this time. Jeannot will do.”

  “What’s the second way?”

  “The second way for what?”

  “You said you came back so you could see my grandmother, and that there were two ways to see her. One was to look at me. What’s the second way of seeing her? What did you mean when you said you’re going to raise the dead?”

  “Well, I don’t mean that I’m going to raise the dead, exactly.”

  I let out a little breath, not even realizing that I had been holding it. “Oh.”

  “I don’t need to. She’s already out here, your grandmother, in the woods. All I have to do is find her and bring her home.”

  FOUR

  Boom

  AFTER MY GRANDFATHER’S NUGGET of gold started a rush, the fervor brought miners and landgrubbers, dance-hall girls and gamblers, and it brought my grandmother and her brother from the Red River. They came across the prairies, and all the way to Sawgamet, where they set up a general store.

  My grandmother, Martine DeBonnier, stayed in the small cabin behind the store, baking and cooking, while her brother, Franklin, twenty-two and four years older than her, sold tin pans and beans and hatchet blades to the miners. Sometimes, when her brother needed to lie down from the headaches that were visited upon him, she put on his white apron.

  She had not wanted to leave the Red River and had been angry at Franklin the entire journey—the shriek of the dust-clogged wooden axles grinding on wooden wheels still seemed to ring in her ears—but now that they were in Sawgamet my grandmother was willing to admit that she had been wrong. Before they left, Franklin had talked to Red River men who had joined the Cariboo gold rush at the start of the U.S. Civil War nearly a decade earlier, and aside from food, clothing, some tools and supplies to live on, the only merchandise Franklin brought with them was tin pans. Ordinary, fifteen-cent tin pans. Every tin pan he could buy or have made before they left the Red River, more than four hundred in all. Martine had asked him if they ought not to bring shovels or cloth or nails or something other than tin pans, but Franklin had said, “Never you mind, Martine.” He had smiled smugly in the way that he had taken to since their parents died three years previously, and then, in a happy singsong, “Tin pans is tin pans is tin pans is all we need.”

  Franklin had been right about the tin pans. So many of the men who streamed into Sawgamet in search of gold—walking north or taking steamships from San Francisco and then hiking inland—came ill-prepared. Some of them had even less knowledge of how to find gold than my grandfather. They brought foo
d and clothing and shovels, tents and whiskey and the news that gold was there for the taking, but not enough of them carried tin pans.

  For her part, my grandmother was curious as to why a man would pay eight dollars for a simple pan, and she made Franklin go down with her to the river one day. They had to walk for nearly an hour to find a stretch of water that was not already claimed. Franklin rested on the bank, sitting wanly in the sun, reading a book, but my grandmother stepped into cold water and mimicked the gentle swirling motion that she had seen men doing. Her skirts got wet and dragged heavily as the current pulled at the cloth. Franklin occasionally shaded his eyes from the sun and looked up at her, clearly impatient and ready to return to the store, but she ignored him. After an hour or so, she had found only a single glimmer of gold, and that was when she decided that it was simply easier to sell the pans than to use them.

  And they did sell, even at eight dollars a pan. Men continued to pour into Sawgamet, and as the miners pulled the gold from the ground, some of it always stayed in the hands of my grandmother and her brother. They sold all of their pans in a few days and then hired men to bring in dried beans, shovels, bullets, flour, and always, more tin pans. Martine baked bread and Franklin sold it for a dollar a slice, two dollars with butter. The pies she baked were nine dollars. Seventeen if the miner wanted to keep the pan that the pie came in. Franklin kept the prices high, yet there seemed to be enough gold in Sawgamet—at sixteen dollars an ounce—that men paid what Franklin asked.

  After he sold his first load of tin pans, Franklin bought a ramshackle cabin and then hired my grandfather to saw and build a solid, handsome store in front of the cabin.

  As for my grandfather, by then he had already stopped trying to use his own tin pan. While gold seemed to leap from the ground for other men, my grandfather had not found even a glint of the metal since digging the nugget from the floor of his cabin. Instead, my grandfather worked the trees, providing lumber to miners. By the time he was finished building the store for Franklin, Jeannot had more than a dozen men whip-sawing for him up the hill. Whatever wood he could produce was spoken for before the sawdust settled: the miners needed to build sluice boxes and flumes.