When she reached the building, she realized that the bustle was not a crowd, but rather a mob of thirty or forty men. They milled on the rutted street, Indians and white and black men and some so unkempt and dirty that it was impossible to tell which group they belonged with. A small group of Chinese stood off to the side, and there were even a few women—whores, by the look of them—mixed in with the mob.
So unassuming was the solitary figure on the porch of the building that it took Rebecca a moment to realize that the voices that were raised in anger were directed at him. Franklin stood with a hunch, like he was still behind a counter, and he had not taken off his shopkeeper’s apron. His hands shook as he raised them, attempting to quiet the yelling.
While the shopkeeper’s actions had no effect, the booming voice of Dryden Boon did.
“If you want to be alive to spend your gold at the end of the winter, Franklin,” Boon yelled, the voices of the mob dropping away almost immediately, “you’ll keep your prices where they were when this snow first started falling.”
Boon was a large man, his head above most of the crowd. Rebecca felt a sudden tightness at the sight of him. He had tried to pay her before, mistaking her for one of the women who had come to Sawgamet to work in a brothel.
He was well dressed and loud. His black suit and fine hat, his kid-leather boots and his close-shaven cheeks and chin, showed that he was not one of the miners, but someone who fancied himself as more important. He took a few steps forward until he was standing on the bottom of the steps, yet even so, his head was almost even with Franklin’s.
“You know me, Franklin, and I wouldn’t begrudge you your profit, but there’s only so far you can push us. Even the girls,” he said, motioning to a pair of immodestly dressed women who stood near the front, “won’t stand for it. They’ll stab you in your black little heart during the night. And who knows what the Chinamen will do to you?” He turned toward the small huddle of Chinese men standing off to the side, bugged his eyes out, and wiggled his fingers. “Strange magic,” he whispered loudly, and at that, a number of men started laughing.
Boon, who had walked up the two steps to stand next to Franklin, turned to face the crowd, though he pretended to address Franklin. “Now, fair is fair, Franklin. Four dollars a pound is already too much money for potatoes, but that’s what you charged me last week. Today you want eight?”
“It’s the snow,” Franklin said. “I’m not sure when I’ll next be able to get supplies brought in.” He straightened up a little. “And if you don’t like my prices, Boon, you don’t have to shop at my store. You can bring your own goddamned supplies from Vancouver.”
Boon slid his arm around the shopkeeper’s neck like they were friends, and then he glanced to the side and saw Rebecca. He showed his teeth and then turned back to the shopkeeper. “Let me ask you, Franklin, if this fine lady over here,” he said, now pointing to Rebecca, “needed to buy a length of rope, would you sell it to her?”
Franklin looked over at Rebecca, and as he locked eyes with her, she could see that something seemed to break. He slumped over a little more and his voice was quieter when he responded. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t sell to you, Boon, but I’m not making you buy.”
Rebecca watched as Boon tightened his arm, making Franklin cringe.
“So you’d sell me a length of rope, then? Because I’m going to be needing it to string you up.”
“You’ll not threaten anybody, Dryden,” a loose-limbed man said as he pushed through the crowd, walked up the steps, and then stepped in front of Boon and the shopkeeper. That man—Pearl—had the same thickened French accent as Franklin’s. Rebecca had seen him working at Jeannot’s mill, though Pearl had said little to her.
I’d asked Pearl about this incident once, when I was twelve or thirteen, after Great-Aunt Rebecca had told me her version of the story, but Pearl had looked at me as if I’d claimed the ability to fly. Still, despite his insistence that he was not there, both Rebecca and Franklin named him as the man who stepped in.
“You’ll get the hell out of here, and when you come back”—Pearl turned to my great-uncle—“Franklin will have decided that the prices he had last week are fair. Franklin?” Franklin nodded.
Boon smiled, and Rebecca thought he gave her a little glance. “Ah, Pearl, and just when I was thinking it might be best to kill him and have it done with anyway.” He pulled his arm off of Franklin’s neck, ruffled the man’s hair, and said, “A misunderstanding, huh, Franklin?” Then he turned to face the crowd. “How about it? I’ll stand you all to a drink.”
They cheered, and most of them followed Boon down the street, a few others—Pearl included, despite denying that he had been there—drifting off to their cabins or their mines. Rebecca stayed where she was. Slowly, hesitantly, Franklin looked up at her. He seemed sad, like some conversation had passed between them, but Rebecca did not understand what it had been. She took a step toward him, but he turned away and went into the store.
The snow was packed down on the street in front of the building. That was something good about the cold, Rebecca thought. Instead of rutted mud and precarious boardwalks, she could walk where she wanted without worrying about being sucked into the muck or dirtying her dress. The snow that fell from the sky balled tighter and seemed as if it turned to ice for a moment, pelting her face and stinging her, and she shook herself out of her daze, following Franklin into the store.
He did not look up when she entered, and she stood by the door, unsure what she should do.
“That wasn’t something I wanted you to see,” he said. His voice was quiet and trembled, but it startled Rebecca a little. She was, she realized, not expecting him to acknowledge his embarrassment.
“You didn’t come to dinner on Sunday,” she said by way of a reply.
“Would you still have me?”
“For dinner?” She pulled down her shawl and stepped closer to him. Still, he did not look up.
“Not for dinner,” he said. “Would you still have me after seeing that?”
“I would have married you already,” Rebecca said, “if you’d but ask.” She tried to keep her voice light and warm, as if it would be enough to cause his chin to float up, despite a stomach that felt ready to drop below her, but Franklin did not move. He kept his head down, like he expected a scolding. Franklin had been so proper with her, not taking advantage of her for so much as to hold her hand.
WHEN SHE TOLD ME this story, my great-aunt gave a terrific smile and said, “I decided it was time to risk seeming indelicate.”
“Indelicate? Hadn’t you just told him you’d marry him if he’d but ask? You don’t consider that indelicate?”
“And are you the one telling this story?” she said, but I could tell that she enjoyed seeing me attentive, just as I am now tolerant of the questions my daughters ask of me when I repeat these same stories for them.
Franklin would not look up at her, so Rebecca stepped behind the counter where Franklin was seated and gently touched her hand to his cheek. And then leaned down and kissed him.
As my great-aunt was telling me this—with Virginia sitting beside me and knitting a scarf—my great-uncle came into the parlor and sat beside her.
“And then what happened?” he said, taking her hand.
“And then we were married,” Rebecca said. “And then we were buried.”
SEVEN
Qallupilluit
I HAD GROWN UP USED to the idea that the float was a time for waiting: waiting for the men to return to the village from Havershand, for my father to bring Marie and me presents, for a last flush of celebration before the winter. But the year I was eleven, the float did not occasion much change in our daily life. I’m sure the men did not return from Havershand any quicker that year, but without having my sister there to ask me daily when our father would return, it felt like it.
When the men came back from the float, the new priest who had come to replace Father Hugo accompanied them. He was young, and han
dsome, and charming, still carrying a thick accent from the Ireland he’d left only a few years earlier, and I overheard Mrs. Gasseur laughingly tell my mother that some of the women were complaining that the Catholic priest was not allowed to have a wife like the Anglican priest. By this time I had grown used to living in my stepfather’s house, the difference in Sunday services between his church and our old one. Likewise, Jeannot’s presence in Sawgamet had become familiar, comforting, even with his vain pursuits in the woods.
Life did what life does, and progressed, and I found myself thinking less and less often of my father and my sister. And then came the freeze-up.
The river froze quick and flat and calm, and it was not long before afternoons and Sundays meant skating and hockey as long as there was light. That year, parents were careful to tell their children to stay away from the tip of the channel.
MID-NOVEMBER, MY MOTHER and I walked back to the house after Sunday service, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder. We stopped for a moment and looked out at the children and parents already spilling onto the ice.
“Go on, then,” she said to me.
“What?”
“If you want to skate, to go down to the river, you may. I know you’d like to go be with your friends.”
One of the children—from where I stood, I could not tell who it was—a girl, perhaps seven or eight, wobbled away from the snowbanks and out onto the ice. She caught up with another girl, and the pair linked arms. The two girls skated forward until one of them fell to the ice, pulling the other atop of her. Their shrieking laughter carried to me.
My mother’s hand left my shoulder. “I’ll put your skates out for you.”
Her footsteps on the snow sounded like sugar crunching, and the two girls on the ice climbed gingerly to their feet. I turned and looked at my mother. She moved lightly across the packed snow in the direction of our house. For the first time I realized that though I thought of my mother as old—and now looking back, already ten years older than my mother was at the time, I shudder to think of how ancient I must appear to my own children—she was still young enough to be a mother again. I knew that my stepfather had been married once, but until that moment I had not thought of the idea of my mother and Father Earl having children of their own. As I watched my mother’s back moving away from me, it took me a moment to realize that I was on the verge of crying
I suddenly, desperately, did not want to be alone, but neither could I face the thought of returning to the house, of looking at the skates that my mother was sure to put out on my bed.
I headed back toward my stepfather’s church, passing a family headed down to the river with their skates and sticks. When I neared the church I saw my stepfather talking with a few last parishioners, and I ducked behind the old cabin that he lived in when he first came to Sawgamet. The small building’s roof had fallen in years ago, and a sapling was twisting its way through where a window had once stood. I could not imagine my mother and me living with Father Earl in such a small house, even if it had stood whole. The house we were in by the village was not luxurious—nothing like the one that Uncle Franklin had built for himself—but it was large enough for me to have my own room, for a study, and even spare bedrooms should my mother and Father Earl start a new family.
After a few minutes I heard footsteps and the familiar voice of my stepfather pass by and then disappear. I hurried across the tramped-down path, past the large rock, the church, and then a little further into the woods until I came to Virginia’s house.
To those who came across Julia and Lawrence’s house unexpecting, it must have seemed like a mirage. There was a small cabin that had been Uncle Lawrence’s before he married Julia, and then, on the other side of the clearing, the stone-built, three-story house that Uncle Franklin had lavished his attention on as a wedding gift for his daughter. The house was elegant and strong, and would not have been out of place on the grand streets of Vancouver. It was much larger than Julia and Lawrence could use with only one child, and there were several rooms that nobody ever seemed to go into. Virginia and I had often played hide-and-go-seek with Marie in the house, though my sister had refused to hide by herself after the time when we forgot to look for her and she accidently locked herself inside a chest in a forgotten room.
I stood on the front porch and hesitated. I had left the river thinking that I could not go home but could not stand to be alone, but the idea of spending time with my cousin was more than I wanted. She was always so cheerful, so full of energy, but what I needed at that moment was someone who would allow me to be alone within their companionship.
I was thinking this—or the simulacrum of this that an eleven-year-old boy thinks—when Uncle Lawrence opened the door.
He did not seem surprised to see me standing there, though I cannot say that I ever saw him look particularly surprised.
“Virginia’s out with Aunt Julia.” He took a bite of his apple. “Skating.” He looked directly at me when he said it, without shame or avoidance. “Want to help me feed the dogs?” He motioned to his old cabin and the kennels that lay behind them.
“No, thank you.” I glanced at the kennels and then realized that the dogs were silent. “How come they didn’t bark when I came up?”
“I told them not to.” He stepped fully out onto the porch and shut the door.
“You knew I was coming?”
“A little bird told me,” he said. “I was thinking of taking the dogs out for a run after I feed them. If you want to join me, you’re welcome.” He stared at me until I looked down. “Unless you just need to get off into the woods by yourself for a while.”
Uncle Lawrence had invited me to ride the trapline with him before, but I had always turned him down. There was something about the fierce sharpness of Lawrence’s toothed traps that unsettled me, the careful way that my uncle worked through the bloody piles of pelts. I liked the dogs, though, and on another day I would have agreed to help him feed them. Some men’s teams were furious and unruly, but Lawrence had a true hand with his “boys,” as he called them, even though the lead dog was a bitch.
“Would you like to borrow a fishing pole? You can still find some open water if you pick a stream that gets good sun. Maybe you’ll be able to bring something home to your mother. It’s inside the old cabin,” he said, pointing across the clearing. He swung his hand against the side of my arm and then walked off the porch.
He pushed open the door of the cabin for me and then walked around the side of the building to the kennels, leaving me alone to enter the house that he had lived in before he married my aunt Julia and my great-uncle Franklin had insisted on building him, as Lawrence called it, a castle in the woods.
As I stepped inside I was struck by how neatly he kept it. Lawrence had built the cabin himself, and though it was quite small, the joints were so tight that I could not imagine the wind leaking through. Even the floor was neat; Lawrence had washed gravel and hauled it up from the banks, covering the floor with the fine rocks. He had told me before that he had always planned on putting down planks, but then he had married Aunt Julia and Franklin had insisted that there was nothing to it but to build a house that was fit for his daughter.
The cabin had a slightly musty smell, but still looked ready to live in, as if Lawrence expected guests at any time. The inside was an odd mixture of practicality and unexpected warmth. Brutal, jawed traps hung from pegs, organized by size and looking well oiled, while there was a fussily crafted wardrobe tucked into the corner. The arched doors matched perfectly in the middle, and Lawrence had fashioned a latch out of a stone from the river’s edge and carved a wolf in the wood. Two bunks were set against the wall, one above the other, and the small tabletop was a sawed-off round, sanded and polished so that even in the light wafting through the windows, the unlit lantern on its top seemed to have a twin. The two chairs tucked into the table were indistinguishable from each other. I wondered how Lawrence had bent the wood backs so well. Our house was filled with furniture my
stepfather had purchased, but this furniture was something different, something that seemed to draw all of the light. That might have been why the last thing I noticed was the pelt hanging from the wall by the door, almost against my elbow. I had never noticed it before, and I touched it warily, like it might still be alive. The fur was incredibly soft, colored gray with two fierce streaks of sunset parading down the length. It was as long as my arm and half again as wide.
I heard footsteps outside and then Uncle Lawrence came in through the door. He looked at me touching the fur, and I said, “What’s this from?”
Lawrence pulled the fishing rod from a slot on the wall. “Don’t know. Came up in one of the traps last year. Spit and fought and tried to bite me. Couldn’t get near the thing. Had to shoot it four times to get the thing to die. Never seen anything like it.”
“The woods,” I said.
“The woods,” Lawrence agreed. He handed the pole to me. “Here. Made the pole myself. Spent a few hours shaping and whittling it. You’ve got to get it when it’s green and know which ones have enough give. It’s a fine pole. You won’t find grubs in this weather, but I’ve got some stale bread I can give you, something for the hook. Not sure you’ll catch much anyway, least not unless I take you to my secret spot. But if you do catch something, be sure to let your mother know who lent you the rod.”
I waited outside of the big house for a moment while Lawrence went in for the bread. When he came back out he handed me a tied handkerchief filled tight.
“Seems like a lot of bread,” I said.
“Well, I might have slipped some cookies in there,” he said, and gave me a wink that was so large and obvious and slow that I couldn’t help laughing. “But there ought to be enough bread in there to see you through anyway. And you’ll tell if you catch a fish with a chunk of gold in its belly.”
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