by Earls,Nick
She moves her hand forward, and for a moment three hands are touching the cover. My father pulls back, keeping his elbows on the table.
‘He married Laura Heyward, from a successful San Francisco family. They had two daughters, but in late 1895 Doctor Harper left in a hurry. The book puts it down to an affair.’ She shrugs. ‘There is no evidence or definite report. Whether the affair is believed by the novelist of Northwest of Everything or invented by him, I do not know. Her family supported her. She moved back to her parents’ home. But they exchanged letters, Laura and Stanton, full of details, and this is what assists the novelist. It is clear from the letters that an error has been made by Stanton, but it is not named. The title of the book comes from one letter, his first from Juneau.’
‘And Thomas is mentioned in the book?’ My father’s voice is breathier than usual, as if it might crack. His eyes open wider, a hint of the jaundice of his illness still in the whites.
‘No. And this is curious to me. Many people are mentioned, but not Thomas. There are pages missing from Thomas’ medical records—that is not unusual—but by the middle of 1896, he is working for the hospital. He is fixing the roof, fixing the shutters. Thomas Chandler is doing this, being paid for it. And then there is this.’
She takes a ledger from the box and opens it carefully, at a marked page.
‘See the payment?’ she says. ‘The novelist did not find this. It is contractor records, not anything to do with Stanton Harper. Not directly. But this is a deduction for board and lodging. In 1896, Thomas is living in a house on the hospital grounds that is also lived in by Doctor Stanton Harper.’
‘So he gets better? There’s some kind of remission?’ My father watches Hope for a sign, a tell.
‘Yes. It would seem so.’ She closes the ledger and returns my father’s gaze. ‘And he is living in a house with Doctor Harper.’
‘A group house, for hospital staff?’
‘I don’t think so. It was not a big place.’ She pauses. I’m sure she has a scene in her mind—the house, the household, the doctor and the misfit, his head clearer for a time. ‘This was before the ladies arrived in town in big numbers, before the Red Dog and other establishments. Men were always in each other’s company and some took comfort from that. This means different things, perhaps, to different men.’ She nods, and draws my father into nodding with her. ‘You know Saint Nicholas’ church? It was a community undertaking to build it. The whole community, not just the Russian Orthodox. A doctor organised a ball to fund the start of it, in 1894. In June of 1896, Doctor Stanton Harper organised another ball, a midsummer costume ball, to fund the belltower and cupola. This was a grand occasion. There was an orchestra, ice cream, a photographer. And, so, there is this…’
She reaches to the bottom of her record box and produces another photo. It’s about six inches by four, in portrait orientation, two men standing in front of a fabric backdrop, perhaps a theatre curtain. One is draped in a white smock with a row of four large soft buttons, also white, down the front. He is wearing a black skull cap, and his powdered face looks as pale as his smock. His lips are dark, his mouth is slightly open and his hands are raised in an expression of mock alarm. He is the character Pierrot, but with a short dark beard and moustache. Beside him is Harlequin, his black mask held away from his face on a stick, the bright colours of his costume showing as shades of grey. His jacket is snug, with a white ruffle collar. The two men are positioned to face out, away from each other, each in his own character’s pose, but their shoulders appear to be touching.
Harlequin is thin, but healthily so. He is staring straight down the barrel of the camera, affecting a look of mischief. He is, unmistakably, Thomas Chandler.
‘You can keep this copy,’ Hope is saying. ‘I will email it, too. You know which is which? In the picture?’
‘Yes.’ My father taps the picture on its lower border, under Thomas. ‘I think…I think we can say he’s happy here.’ His voice lifts at the end, as if by accident the observation has become a question. He glances at Hope.
‘Yes.’
I try to speak but nothing comes out. I start to clear my throat, but have to cough to do it properly. ‘Are the other photos from the night like this?’
‘Like this? In some ways yes, in some ways no. There are costumes, but the others are bigger groups or a man and a woman.’ She looks at my father, but he’s still focussed on the image. ‘I can find no other quite like this, two men only.’
‘What a special thing to have,’ he says when he finally looks up. He turns to me. ‘Is there a place for it in your bag? Make sure it doesn’t get bent. Put it in a book or something. My iPad Mini. It’ll fit there, in the case.’
‘And soon after that,’ Hope says, a serious tone back in her voice, ‘I am sorry to say, the story ends. There was an outbreak of typhoid fever early in 1897.’ She opens a folder, leafs through the documents and draws out a single sheet of paper. ‘There were many cases in the hospital. A significant number of deaths, processed quickly, buried quickly.’
She keeps the document—it’s a list—from us as she studies it, holding it up so only she can read it. She finds the section she’s looking for.
‘Here.’ She places it in front of us, pointing to the place. ‘There is an error. This is why it was not on the internet when you looked for it, Ken, in the Alaska Vitals.’
It is a page from a register of deaths, covering a week in February 1897.
‘This is a church record,’ Hope says, ‘not a government record. The Territory of Alaska started recording deaths in 1913. So the Alaska Vitals for earlier were compiled later, from other sources.’
Below the name ‘Harper, Stanton L’ is ‘Handler, Thomas C’, both dead from typhoid fever on the same day. Their ages appear as thirty-three and twenty-two, their occupations as doctor and hospital watchman/labourer. Stanton Harper has Boston as his birthplace, Thomas has a blank. Most of the other names on the page are typhoid deaths, too.
‘Thomas C Handler,’ my father says. ‘Twenty-two.’
‘There is no Thomas Handler in Juneau at that time,’ Hope says.
The story is over, the search is over. February 1897, twenty-two.
My father picks up the photo from the ball again and rearranges his glasses on his nose. He looks at it closely, going from one face to the other. ‘He was a good man? Stanton Harper?’
‘He was. I’m sure he was.’ Hope waits, but my father doesn’t speak. ‘Edward’s second letter arrived shortly after. There was a new doctor then. People were leaving Juneau for Dawson City, for the new gold rush. The Klondike. The letter was filed. We don’t know if Thomas died in the hospital or at the house. Perhaps at the house. For both of them.’
My father looks up, over his glasses. ‘And where is he buried? Do you have any idea of that?’
‘An idea, yes. Only an idea. Nothing certain. You see this? These entries?’ She points to a narrow column near the right of the page. ‘Place of burial? You see the ditto marks, the ‘do’?’ She says it like the word, ‘do’, not as ‘d, o’. ‘It cost five dollars to dig a grave in those days, and a casket cost twenty. And that was at the best of times. In the typhoid outbreak, there were many bodies needing quick burial and not many people to bury them. And miners dying with nothing but a couple of pans to their names. That is probably the ‘do, do, do’ you see further down the page.’
The word ‘Evergreen’ appears for one name, and ‘do’ for the five below it.
‘Sometimes it just means the same cemetery but, in epidemics, it can mean the same grave. But there is no money for a stone, so…’ She shrugs. ‘These men are somewhere in Evergreen Cemetery, in one of the older parts.’
‘Somewhere,’ my father says. ‘Near Juneau and Harris, under the trees.’ He straightens up and winces as his back catches. He rotates a few degrees, twisting to one side and then the other. He breathes out, and settles his hands in his lap. ‘I had a feeling he was there.’
‘Yes, but
not just there,’ she says. ‘Maybe not just there. Look at the ‘do’ marks. He is not with that group. See? Stanton Harper, Evergreen. Thomas, ‘do’. Then another Evergreen and ‘do’ many times. Stanton Harper is not in an unmarked grave. The hospital, the community, they paid his expenses. There is a stone. And beneath his ‘Evergreen’ on the list, there is just one ‘do’. And that is Thomas. I spoke to others in the Gastineau Genealogical Society, members who have done more of these ancestor look-ups than me, and they agree with me. It is likely that Stanton Harper and Thomas are buried in the same grave. And I can take you to it.’
It takes a moment for my father’s expression to change. He had settled for that section of the cemetery, the greening bronzes, the patches marked only with numbers or with nothing, Thomas somewhere in there among the unnamed miners.
‘Yes,’ he says. He starts to push himself up, as though we’re leaving already. ‘Yes. Please.’
‘I have my car.’
My father is halfway to standing, his hands still on the arms of the chair, launch incomplete, as if there’s a chance he hasn’t got it right, there is no grave, we aren’t going. He surveys the table—the pan, the knives, the blanket, the papers.
‘That book…’ He points to Northwest of Everything. ‘Is it available anywhere? I want to know about him. Stanton Harper.’ Before Hope can answer, he turns to me, and the pointing comes my way, too. Point, point, point. ‘The iPad Mini. There’s free wi-fi here, isn’t there?’
Hope nods. He takes the pack as soon as it’s off my back and pulls his iPad Mini out. He flips the cover open, flicks a switch and starts tapping at the screen.
‘Come on, come on…’
It comes to life and starts looking for a connection. He hands it to Hope so that she can enter the wi-fi password and then he goes straight to Amazon.
‘A few used hardbacks and paperbacks,’ he says, eyes not leaving the screen. ‘But I can get it for Kindle now.’
As he makes the purchase, Hope packs the museum’s objects into the record box.
‘The writer of the book,’ she says. ‘I didn’t meet him. We were in Honolulu then. Carl was stationed at Pearl Harbour. My friends here, they remember the writer as a giant, but I don’t know. Maybe he was just tall. Things get exaggerated. It was before the time when people took photos of everything. I don’t know for sure what he found. I don’t know how much he wanted the book to be a true story.’
‘I want to make a donation,’ my father tells her. He’s already put his iPad down and unzipped his bumbag. ‘To the museum or the genealogical society or both.’
He starts pulling notes from the bumbag, as if a wound has opened up and he’s gushing greenbacks.
‘Oh.’ Hope steps back. ‘I don’t know how. The museum people who take donations aren’t here today. I don’t know how to do a receipt.’
‘I don’t need a receipt.’ He folds up a wad of bills, takes Hope’s hand and presses the money into it. ‘I’ll leave it with you. It can all go to your society, if that’s easier. Buy more software, whatever you need to make it easy to do what you do. Or just buy everyone a drink or two.’
Hope drives a bottle green Subaru, with only the speckling of bugs across the front bumper and numberplate suggesting she lives anywhere near a frontier. It’s a manual and she drives with the seat well forward and a cushion—a firm, angled wedge of foam—to lift her. In her small hands, the wheel looks big enough to turn a ship.
My father takes the front passenger seat, leaving me to move one of the two booster seats in the back. The boot is full, so I slide the seat next to me and keep a hand on it in case we brake suddenly. There is just enough room for me to do up my seatbelt. The backpack ends up on my lap.
My father asks Hope when she lost Carl, and I wonder if Carl once drove the car, and was a better fit for it.
He tells her about my mother. I’ve never heard him explain my mother’s illness to anyone. Not this way, with no corners cut. I’ve only ever heard him keep it to a sentence. He has worked out how to tell it, and I’m still not sure how to put it myself.
The course of Carl’s illness was much the same as my mother’s, difficult, downhill, with scattered false optimism most of the way. They are two people, Hope and my father, who are out the other side of that, changed by it and yet not, a new path found. She talks about her genealogy research, her look-ups for people around the world, all with threads connecting them to Alaska. He talks about staying on at work, and then not, the hours that opened up and needed filling. I was off at the mines and heard none of that then. I asked him. At the time, of course, I asked him. But he was fine, always fine.
Their two old heads nod. The backpack brushes noisily against the back of Hope’s seat. I ease it away and change my grip to silence it. I have one thigh against a booster seat, the other against the door. The booster seat smells of old spilt milk. I get motion sick in the back seats of cars. My father knew that once. But this trip is only a few minutes.
Hope parks near the Glacier Avenue entrance to the cemetery. I stay behind them on the walk in, the two of them still talking, stooped forward, sometimes rocking towards each other with the way their feet land on the uneven ground.
Thomas Chandler, Stanton Harper. Harlequin and Pierrot, touching at the shoulder. Proximity and closeness are not the same. I will get my own copy of that photo. Who took it? Did he know them well, to pose them just that way? Or was he an itinerant photographer, arrived by steamer with his glass plates and flash powder for a few weeks in midsummer?
Who was it taken for? It was never going back to San Francisco, and probably not to England. It was for them, Thomas and Stanton. I can’t believe it was for anyone else.
Hope turns at the row of posts marking the end of the laneway and the start of the cemetery. The sun has broken through the cloud for now and gleams on the damp grass. She follows a gravel path towards the cemetery’s edge, but veers off it when we reach a stone cross.
The graves in this section are in deep shade, under the boughs of tall conifers, with smaller trees and shrubs screening them from the car park of the deli and gym beyond the fence.
‘There,’ she says when she finds the one we’re looking for. She stops and stands with her hands clasped in front of her, eyes down.
The stone is large, almost square, a mottled grey. Its edges and the letters on it have been recently cleared. ‘Stanton Harper, 1863–1897, A fine doctor, A man among men.’
My father smiles to himself, like someone who’s just recalled a joke but is remembering with more intensity the happy circumstances in which he heard it.
‘He mentioned that in the novel,’ Hope says. ‘The great-grandson, the author. He mentioned the wording. In his story, a daughter comes here years later. It’s some consolation to her that her father was well thought of.’
I can see no border to the plot, just the stone set in the ground among grass tussocks, pine needles and leaf debris. A nearby stone is tilted at an angle, moss crusting its exposed corner, but Stanton Harper’s is well set. I can picture the bones down there, loose in a good pine box—four thigh bones, dozens of ribs, one complicated set of remains.
‘I told him,’ my father says. His gaze is fixed on the stone. ‘I told him I would try. My grandfather. I was ten. It was the last time I saw him. I didn’t realise it would be. I can still remember it. He smoked Woodbines even though they were common, and the smell was always in his clothes. He said…’ My father stops to think about the words. ‘He said his father had told him to always keep an eye out for Thomas, any time he could. And that didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Thomas never came back. So I told him I’d find out. I told my father I wanted to write to whoever was in charge in Alaska, and he told me that whoever was in charge in Alaska was far too busy for such nonsense.’
He shifts his weight from one foot to another and rubs his back.
‘They’d had quite a falling-out at the time,’ he says. ‘My father and grandfather. I found that out yea
rs later. It was over us migrating to Australia. My grandfather was afraid he’d never see us again. He was right about that.’
He rocks forward, then back again, catching himself before he overbalances. It’s been two hours since the pretzels, too long.
‘I’m going to sit,’ I tell him. ‘I’m going to sit on that bench over there and have a muesli bar.’
He blinks at me, still correcting his sway.
‘I suppose that means I’m doing the same,’ he says.
By the time he sits, I have his muesli bar ready. He takes it in one hand and keeps the other anchored to the lip of the bench. He takes a bite and chews it.
He swallows it as quickly as he can and says to Hope, ‘I have diabetes.’
He holds up the muesli bar and shrugs. She joins us on the bench.
‘It’s a beautiful place,’ she says. ‘I think it is anyway.’
He nods, says, ‘Mmmm,’ through another bite of muesli bar, crumbs cascading down the front of his open jacket.
I take his camera and photograph the headstone, making sure I get good close-ups with and without flash and some shots showing the surroundings. When I look over his way, he gives me a thumbs up. The legs of his pants have ridden up over his ankles and I can see his thick cream-coloured socks bunched above the tops of his boots. On the long high-backed bench, in front of the biggest pine tree around, he and Hope look small, him with his scrappy snacking and scrawny limbs, her with her hands in her lap, the two of them like a schoolboy and schoolgirl waiting for a bus.
I take a photo of that, too.
With his jaws still working on the last mouthful, my father stands and shakes off muesli bar fragments. He walks over, steadier already, and centres himself in front of the grave.
‘I wonder…’ he says. ‘Would it be possible to add a headstone for Thomas? Would we have to prove that he was there?’ He turns to Hope. ‘Would they let us do that?’