Guardian

by Joe Haldeman

  Pretty soon, “horse trading” was the order of the day. Everyone knew how expensive things were reported to be in Skagway, so they compared their own kit to the ones around them. “You don’t got near enough bacon,” one would say; “how ‘bout I trade you two tins and two dollars for that extra axe?”

  We were approached by several entrepreneurs who noted that our kit was too small for four people—evidence of how little communication there had been on deck. After it became common knowledge that I was going back after Skagway, some of them diffidently asked if I might post a letter or two. Skagway had a bad reputation for mail delivery. You could wait in line all day, only to have the service window close in your face.

  Two men had procured a guitar and fiddle in Juneau. The fiddler could carry a tune, but the guitarist had never played before, and was attempting to learn from a booklet that came with the instrument. Before long, there was a spirited bidding for the guitar, to be used as fuel—though the coalition that won the auction, at twelve dollars, simply smashed it to pieces and threw it over the rail, to tumultuous applause. Even the owner of the guitar laughed—and suddenly I realized that it must have been set up in advance! The soi-disant musician was as loud and annoying as he could be, and his accomplice started the bidding, to drop out when it got sufficiently high.

  The water was very calm, and passage swift, and when the sun went down a party atmosphere prevailed, the fiddler joined by a boy with a harmonica and some improvised drumming. Men danced with energy, alone and together. Several asked me, but I had to demur out of ignorance. I would have gotten the rod for dancing as a child, and the ballroom dancing I learned at Wellesley was a little too stately for these reels and jigs.

  But then Doc shyly offered to waltz with me, and I had to say yes. The music was not three-four time, and he danced like a stork, but it was good to be in his arms. We ignored the initial hooting and it dwindled away.

  I had a strange premonitory feeling: suppose I said yes, Doc, I will marry you, but only if you give this up and come back to the States, to start up a normal life. Would Daniel and Chuck give up the Yukon?—surely not. And I wanted Doc, with his steadiness and knowledge, to be there with my boy.

  When I woke at dawn (chastely apart from Doc) we were maneuvering into the one space available at Skagway’s crowded wharf. We’d heard about the wharf and what a difference it made for new arrivals: had we come a year earlier, the steamer would have anchored out in deep water, while our goods were laboriously transferred by small boats to the mud at the high-tide mark. Horses and mules would have to swim ashore. Women and children were carried over the last hundred yards of mud—if they had someone willing to carry them.

  In contrast, this wharf was a paragon of comfort and modernity—there were even electric lights, snapping off as the dawn brightened.

  I had envisioned a place that was mostly tents and mud, with a few hastily constructed saloons, but there actually was a substantial town past the wharf, bigger than Fort Wrangell, even though most of the buildings couldn’t have been more than a year old. I caught the smell of fresh pine just as the characteristic whine of a sawmill started up.

  There were scores of people waiting on the dock, some with wagons for hire to transport your kit out to the tent town. Doc told the boys to stay put while he went down to see whether that was a luxury we could afford. I went along with him, both hesitant and curious.

  Right at the bottom of the gangway was a little gray-haired lady with a stack of newspapers, the Skagway News. I found a dime and bought one, and told her I was surprised and relieved to see a woman at work here alone.

  “Plenty of trouble for women here,” she said with a twinkle in her eye, “especially for them as wants it.” She introduced herself as Barbara, from Butte, Montana. I later found out that she was a local “character,” saving her pennies while she lived inside a piano box that she’d bought for two dollars.

  Most of the other women who came down to the ship were obviously women of easy, or no, virtue, but they weren’t offensive in their behavior. They just stood around trying to look attractive, which frankly was a task beyond most of their powers.

  Doc asked all of the men with wagons, and the cheapest one he could find was fifteen dollars. We had a powwow about that, and decided it would be worth it if the driver would promise not to unload our goods until we agreed on a proper site. He said that wouldn’t be a problem; there were dozens of places pretty close to town.

  The deck was a madhouse of activity, mostly heavy lifting and cussing, so I let the men take care of both aspects. I went down to the end of the dock and got them a pail of coffee, but otherwise just stayed out of the way, reading the paper.

  The storm we had weathered on the way into Juneau had been severe enough to make the news. We were lucky to have been inland; a river steamer like ours, the Mable Lane, had sunk in the Bering Sea.

  There was a story about the funeral for Frank Reid, the man who had killed Soapy Smith on the 8th of July. The two men had evidently fired simultaneously, Reid suffering a shattered spine. He lingered in agony for twelve days, the church choir singing in an attempt to alleviate his misery and “bring him back to God.” What a hard way to go.

  By the time I finished the short paper, the men had the wagon nearly loaded. They swung aboard with the kit while I hoisted myself up to sit uncomfortably close to the wagoneer. He smelled worse than any of the men on the boat, none of them paragons of hygiene. His face and exposed forearms were crusty with open sores, and all his teeth were rotten. I would rather have walked alongside in the mud, but we were off as soon as I was settled.

  I could have walked in a third of the time, too, as the tent town was waking up and the mud road was crowded with people and animals. The wagoneer kept up a constant stream of muttered oaths that exploded into shouted imprecations when necessary.

  He did find us a place, though; a recently vacated square of almost dry dirt. Doc paid him and he amiably helped the men unload. The things that were not too heavy for me to lift, I unloaded and stacked along one edge of our temporary homestead.

  We had gotten a sheet of printed instructions along with the tent, but they were nowhere to be seen. The boys tried to improvise its erection while Doc and I searched for the directions. We found the sheet eventually, safely hidden inside a box of dry goods, by which time the boys had strung together a misshapen skein of rope and canvas. Several neighbors watched with interest.

  The neighbors did help, though, once we had the canvas and poles laid out according to the diagram. It was good to have several men pulling on the ropes. By the time we were finished, the canvas was tight as a drumhead.

  One neighbor sold me a bale and a half of straw for a dollar, and I floored the tent with that, to control mud or dust, depending on the weather. It gave the place a pleasant smell and felt good underfoot.

  I set about preparing a lunch of fried potatoes and bacon while the men moved the gear inside, and I was overtaken with a sudden hollow feeling.

  This was the end of the line for me. I had shepherded my boy to the beginning of the next stage of his life, and from here on I was supernumerary, just a consumer of the goods they would be needing later on.

  After lunch, Doc and Chuck went off to find a mule. Daniel and I washed the dishes in uncomfortable silence. He felt it, too.

  I skipped all of the things I wanted to say. “Would you come down to the dock with me? I have to book passage.” He came along with a silence that a passerby might have mistaken for sullenness. Neither of us really knew what to say. I know that he was glad I was leaving, and felt uncomfortable about that.

  It was not a place where you wanted to abandon your only child. The filth and smell bothered me less than the ubiquitous opportunities for sin and excess. I knew him too well to give voice to my concern, but he knew me well enough to read my thoughts.

  “Mom,” he said as we mounted the steps up to the dock area, “I want you to try not to worry too much about the …” Hi
s gesture included, as any gesture there would, a number of prostitutes and drunks. “I think I can resist all that.”

  “I’m more worried about bears and desperados,” I said, which at that moment was a lie. “Be careful and watch your temper.”

  He nodded and smiled. “No more Pinkerton men. Oh …” He reached into his deep coat pocket and pulled out the revolver. “We said you would keep this.”

  I hesitated, but took it. Spinning the universe off in a new direction.

  None of the next day’s southbound boats was going straight to Sitka, but they all put in at Juneau. I booked on the latest morning one, leaving at ten.

  We strolled along the boardwalk for a while, talking about inconsequential things. After a while I told him I could make my own way back to the camp, and had some shopping to do. I gave him a half dollar and bid him pick up a few bottles of beer—not whiskey!

  When he was gone, I doubled back to a pawnshop we’d passed. The window was full of trinkets and guns, but there was one thing that had caught my attention as an early Christmas present, a fine hunting knife. From my Philadelphia kitchen I recognized the expensive Toledo steel, the shimmering rainbow of its damascene surface. The handle and hilt were smooth horn and brass. A hefty man’s knife, more than a foot from pommel to point.

  I bargained the shopkeeper down from fifteen dollars to twelve, which would actually have been a good price back in the States. I also picked up a folding knife for Chuck and a fine tobacco pouch for Doc, soft leather lined with gutta-percha.

  Perhaps the knife was a symbolic exchange, weapon for weapon, though I don’t think that occurred to me at the time. I just remembered that the steel on his belt knife had been so soft it had bent while he was prising open a crate, and I’d resolved to get him something better.

  There was nobody at the tent when I got there, so I put water on to boil and set to scraping the mud off my boots. The straw was luxurious under my bare feet. Nobody could see from the outside, so I left them bare while I padded around preparing dinner. I felt a little exposed and forward when Doc came home, alone, but he glanced at my feet and looked away, and then deliberately removed his own boots and scraped them more or less clean, and set them outside to dry.

  He offered to help with dinner, but there was really nothing to do. I was boiling the dried beef into a chewable state. We each got a cup of broth from it, and he told me all about their adventures in mule commerce.

  After a few minutes’ discourse on mules’ teeth and coats and the mendacity of their owners, a sudden obvious question occurred to me. “Doc—what on earth are you and the boys going to do with a mule? You can’t carry it in pieces over the pass.”

  He blinked a couple of times, sorting that out. “Nobody told you.”

  “Told me what? About a mule?”

  “Rosa … things change fast here. We found out this morning that there was a way to bypass the long haul up the mountain.”

  “On a mule?”

  “Not exactly.” There was a twinkle in his eye. “An elevator, actually.”

  I just looked at him. I hadn’t seen an elevator since Philadelphia.

  “It’s in the way of a steam-powered platform, actually, up in Dyea. It’ll move half a ton at a time up to the trail on the other side of the pass.”

  From where we sat, we could see the line of men slowly beetling their way up the stairway cut in the side of Chilkoot Pass. “You mean to tell me all those men haven’t heard of it?”

  “Likely they can’t afford it. Take most of our money.”

  We both said “But worth it” simultaneously—in my case, a question.

  “Without a doubt! We’ll be weeks ahead of the others, and fresh—and with a mule and cart to speed us along. Get to the Yukon goldfields before the snow falls. Long before.”

  My only argument against it was that it sounded too good to be true. “Will you need more money, then?”

  “No, Rosa. We have it all calculated.”

  I plucked at a tent rope. It sang like a bass viol string. “So the tent comes right back down?”

  “Not for twelve days. We had to reserve two weeks ahead on the lift.” He reached toward me, toward my knee, but stayed his hand halfway. “Stay with us till then?”

  So many forces tempted me. But I had already taken my leave emotionally. I didn’t want to stitch up the fabric only to tear it apart again.

  “I wish … no, I have a ticket for Juneau in the morning. And then on to Sitka. I’d better confirm my position at the school there before someone better qualified shows up.”

  He stared up the road and twice started to speak before words came out. “Before the lads get back, Rosa.” He locked his hands between his knees and didn’t look at me. “My … my regard for you is great, is un-undiminished since …”

  “Since we talked,” I provided. “I feel the same, too, Doc. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  He cleared his throat, got up, and went to the vegetable bag. He took out four large fresh potatoes and a bunch of carrots.

  “I was just going to use the dried potatoes.”

  “Well, it seems to be an occasion.” He took the back page of the newspaper and set it on the straw, and laid out the vegetables in a row. He squatted down next to them easily, Indian style, drew out his knife, and tested its edge with his thumb.

  “And what will you do if someone else has gotten the job?”

  I was sure enough that I hadn’t thought too much about it. “If there’s nothing in Sitka, I’ll probably go back to Juneau, if I can stand the noise.”

  “Not here, though.” He was concentrating on making a long continuous spiral of the potato peel. “Not that I blame you.”

  “The men on the street are not ‘polite,” I said. “They make assumptions.”

  “I don’t think they mean harm.”

  “Possibly not. But they do harm. I could never feel easy here, the way I did in Sitka.”

  He nodded. “Not much call for schoolmarms, either, I guess.”

  “Probably not.” I’d seen a handbill, actually, advertising for a grade school teacher. Who would bring young children to this place? was my first thought, but then I realized they wouldn’t be stampeders’ children. There might be a thousand people living here permanently.

  But the salary was laughable, given the expense of living at this far end of civilization, and I had little experience with children so young. Only Sunday school, where even the most mischievous could endure being good for an hour because Jesus is watching and cookies are waiting at the end of it.

  “Glad you’re not going back to Seattle anymore.”

  “It’s not close enough.” though it was my safety net, if nothing in Alaska worked.

  “You’ll write once you have an address?”

  “Of course. You’ll probably still be waiting here. At least I hope it won’t be two weeks before I’m settled in.”

  He looked up at a noise I hadn’t heard. “The lads coming.” Down at the far end of the road, I could see them leading a mule with a cart.

  “How long are you going to give it?” I asked. “If you don’t pan out.”

  “Quit after the first million, that’s my only plan. No call to be greedy.”

  “Suppose the raven was right?”

  “The raven?”

  “The one on the boat, who said ‘no gold.’”

  “He was just croakin’.”

  “It sounded clear to me.”

  He laughed nervously. “Rosa, I’d never take you to be superstitious. Birds don’t talk.”

  Our eyes met. “This one did, Doc. You heard it as clearly as I did.” I almost told him about the other two times, but the boys were approaching.

  They introduced us to the mule, which they had named Dr. Jekyll, reserving Mr. Hyde for when he misbehaved. While they were freeing him of his traces I fed him a double handful of oats, enjoying the feel of his soft whiskery mouth and smooth hard teeth.

  He did host an entourage of flies and l
esser creatures, but he didn’t smell bad for a mule, and he had large sad eyes. They tied him up to a tent post, and then thought better of it—he might decide to take the tent for a walk—and just looped the rope twice around a large rock.

  In the cart they had twenty-two bottles of beer, having consumed two on the way; a roll of mosquito netting, and a small wooden cask of sherry from Spain. Doc was exasperated at the expense—and the fact that they had spent the money without consulting him or me—but we all mellowed with a cup of the stuff, a sweet powerful dark syrup. It was called “oloroso,” a sad-sounding name for a merry libation.

  I spiced up the beef stew with some of the sherry and sharp Colman’s mustard, and we enjoyed it over thick slabs of sourdough bread. We had some of the beer with it, too, and the talk was lively. I wondered aloud about how amazed I would have been twenty years ago, a proper Wellesley girl, to see a vision of myself in the future, covered with grime and swatting mosquitoes, drinking beer with a trio of disreputable prospectors in a mudhole at the end of the world. A master of celestial mechanics stranded at a place where the night was so short you hardly saw the stars.

  Chuck allowed that he couldn’t do anything about the stars, but he had seen a place that advertised hot baths for two bits, open all day and night, a barber shop on Third Street.

  That wasn’t so far away. I produced a silver dollar and said I would treat us all to at least one evening of cleanliness.

  They insisted on bringing Dr. Jekyll and his cart along, so I wouldn’t have to walk through the mud on the way back. I protested on the poor beast’s behalf, but common sense could not penetrate their chivalry.

  The town was lively, a honky-tonk piano banging away in the place that used to be Soapy Smith’s saloon, competing with a couple of banjo players on the boardwalk, rolling their eyes in blackface while a Negro child danced loudly on a piece of tin, holding out a hat as we passed by. Farther down the street, a supposedly dancing bear sat and glared at the human who held his leash and poked him with a cane. Dr. Jekyll froze at the sight or smell of him, which gave Doc an opportunity to demonstrate his way with animals: he stood between the mule and the bear and stroked his ears and talked quietly to him, and got him to turn around and seek a less direct route to Third Street.