Three stools down, Gertie overheard Doc Newnham gossiping out the side of his thin mouth as Tobin busied himself with a rag.
“Turned her back on a fortune back east — seems she got it in her head to save the world by writing newspaper articles.”
“I wonder if she could do a man a decent favor?” Tobin said.
“I daresay that favor might have teeth,” commented Doc.
“Spirited, eh?”
Doc tossed his whiskey off and grimaced at the heat of it. “Not like she used to be. Used to put a bug in my ear about every social cause you can think of — used to carry on about corporate tyranny and feminine self-sufficiency every time she opened her trap. Seems her opinions have all dried up along with any mothering instincts she may have had. What’s more, she’s driven her man to the hills — and I can’t say that I blame him.”
“Sounds like she might make a good whore.”
“Little proud for that. But if you say so, John.” Doc pushed his empty glass in Tobin’s direction.
The sky was low and the cold air smelled of smoke when Gertie stole out of the Belvedere later that afternoon. Choppy at the shoreline, the strait was slate gray and flat beyond the breakwater, where a pair of steamers crossed paths, one bound for Seattle and the other huffing west against the receding tide toward ports unknown. Yesterday’s snow had been ground to muddy slush by the time Gertie hoisted her skirt and coattails up past her knees and crossed the hogback to the commonwealth. The colony seemed all but deserted in the late afternoon. The largest building in the settlement, nearly twice the size of the boat shed, was still a work in progress, though it looked to Gertie as though the elements were already taking a toll on the exposed structure. For all its fastidious charms, the village as a whole was not weathering the winter well. Paint was chipping all about, roofs were sagging. The little houses, nearly identical in shape and dimension, sat beside one another in three neat rows, a proximity and arrangement that Gertie found oppressive. In spite of her frequent disparagement of Port Bonita, the careless disorder of its design — if one could call it that — the town appealed to her reckless impulses. In spite of its inevitable growth, Port Bonita expanded in ragged disarray as though it were surprised by its own growth. While the colony spoke strongly of containment, Port Bonita pushed restlessly at its borders wherever it could find room.
Gertie located the house with the wreath near the end of the line, its chimney puffing blue smoke, its windows glowing with pale lamplight in the dark afternoon. After the third knock, Eva came to the door in a plain gray dress with a squarish neckline, her hair piled carelessly atop her head in a lopsided bun. She smiled at Gertie as a weary soldier might smile at the arrival of fortifications.
“Miss McGrew, what a pleasant surprise.”
Gertie could hear the wailing of an infant from another room. “Miss Lambert.”
While Gertie removed her coat and stamped her feet free of slush in the foyer, Eva put the kettle to boil, straightened her dress, and finessed her bun into shape. Gertie noted the dark crescents beneath Eva’s eyes. The child’s protestations continued from the backroom, unheeded. Finally, Gertie crossed through the den to the nursery, where she hoisted the baby girl from the crib and cradled her in one arm. The child’s whimpering began to subside immediately. She was a delicate child. Hardly a bit of adipose in the arms or belly. Her breathing was raspy and a little shallow, but Gertie found the girl exquisite nonetheless. What impressed her the most was the alertness in the child’s blue-gray eyes. Unlike most infants, this one seemed to have a keen awareness of her surroundings.
“I wouldn’t have taken you for the mothering type,” said Eva, from the doorway.
Gertie reached with her free hand into the crib for the child’s quilt, wrapping it about the infant, who began immediately to root. “Actually, I’m just the sistering type,” Gertie said. “Five little sisters and a baby brother, in another life.”
Eva watched as the infant began to tug at the bosom of Gertie’s dress, and Gertie ran a delicate finger over the child’s face from cheek to cheek as though she were drawing a smiley face there. That Gertie could soothe the child so easily left Eva feeling both grateful and bitter.
“What became of them?” Eva said.
“The boy died of the fever before his teeth ever broke. Made my father, who always wanted sons, none the more pleasant, though it was one less mouth to feed. Not that there was enough to go around after the fact. Two of my sisters took to whoring in St. Louis, and two of them joined the convent. Jury’s still out on the youngest.”
“Why did you come west?”
“The wind blew me as far as Idaho, where I met Mr. John C. Tobin, a man with big plans and the money to back them. And the rest is history, as they say. It’s been written before, so I won’t bore you with it. And what brought you out here, if I might ask, Miss Lambert?”
The kettle began to moan softly from the kitchen. “All the while I thought it was my Utopian ideals, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I wasn’t chasing a man, or at least the ideal of a man.”
“You?”
“The irony is not lost on me, Miss McGrew. It’s just beginning to sink in.”
“And when it sinks in?”
“I shan’t allow it to,” said Eva, turning to tend the kettle.
It occurred to Gertie that Eva might be the most complicated woman she’d ever met, and that was saying something. Whatever was bending Eva on the inside, it was not of the garden variety. It seemed as if her will were bending her one way and stubbornness were bending her another. But whatever tempered such a stubbornness, and where it resided, was beyond Gertie’s comprehension. The child had fallen asleep in Gertie’s arms. Looking down at the girl, her little fists balled in front of her, Gertie felt a rush of warmth. Only then did she begin to feel the weight of dead possibilities. How many possibilities, such as the one sleeping in her arms, had she rid herself of — how many at the hands of Doc Newnham alone? An entire population. No precautionary measure seemed to suffice. That she was still not barren after all these years made matters all the more troubling. The moment Eva returned and set the tea down atop the dresser, Gertie handed the child to her.
“What if I told you I liked it, Miss Lambert?”
“Mothering?”
“Whoring.”
“I’d say you were lying.”
“What’s that word you modern women are always moaning about? Objectification? What if I told you I liked the objectification of it? Not the relations part, not the black eyes and the chafed thighs and the rank taste of a man’s payload, but the getting outside of myself part. What if I told you I took comfort in being an object?”
“I’d say that was sad.”
“What if I told you,” Gertie said, “that I thought you could use a good debasing yourself?”
Blanching, Eva turned toward the fire. “Then I’d say you were vulgar.”
“And you wouldn’t be the first.”
Composing herself, Eva turned back to Gertie with her chin held high. “And what if I told you that you might put those convictions of yours — which you obviously have no reservations about voicing — toward some better use than whoring yourself?”
“Many find me useful, Miss Lambert. I’m practically all used up, according to some. But what did you have in mind?”
“You say you like to be outside of yourself — you like to be an object. Then why not be an instrument to some higher purpose than demeaning the tenets of womanhood for the rest of us?”
“Listen, dearie, I’ve had Jesus, God, and the Ghost fed to me more ways than you can count, from Bibles to sticks, and it hasn’t stuck yet. And I promise you this much: your Virgin Mary has done more damage than all the whores from Babylon to Port Bonita.”
“I’m not talking about God. I’m talking about society.”
“Society?” said Gertie. “I see how it is: I try to make a whore out of you, and you try to make a social crusader out of me. It’s like
a vaudeville comedy. Very clever. Hard to imagine making any kind of a difference, Miss Lambert. But why don’t I send a telegraph to Little Ben, care of the capital, and see where we go from there?”
“Anybody can make a difference, Gertie.”
“That could be, Miss Lambert. But it takes a certain type to be a whore.”
paradise awaits
JANUARY 1890
The snow started up again shortly after the party bedded down the previous night, and by morning it had turned to steady rain. Down the hill it came, running in muddy rivulets through the camp. The snowpack grew dense and heavy with moisture, and much of what was stuck to the canopy plopped to the forest floor all about them in lumps. The weak winter light of midmorning filtering through the trees might have been dusk. They were down to one mule. The dogs were beginning to whimper with hunger. Overland travel conditions could hardly have been worse than the heavy waist-deep slush. But Mather held out hope that a good frost that night would make for hard snow and good traveling in the days to come.
With nothing to eat but prunes, which they exhausted long before they could fill their stomachs at breakfast, the men enjoyed little opportunity for leisure that day. Haywood, Reese, and Runnells, the latter upon a swollen ankle, hunted throughout the day without success, managing only a single shot between them. Though still well within the winter range of elk and deer, having not penetrated beyond the last of the green foothills, the fauna was scarce, in part, Haywood reasoned, owing to the incomprehensibly vast size and ruggedness of the country. A half-dozen elk herds might be rendered invisible by the dense wooded hollows stretching out in every direction, so that only dumb luck might betray their presence.
Cunningham remained in the tent most of the day gathering warmth. Now and again he emerged to relieve himself and huddle by the flames from which he still could draw no heat. Inwardly, he cursed himself for undertaking the expedition. He had been of little use as a doctor; indeed, he was powerless to soothe his own aches, and as an explorer he had proved to be a liability more often than not — a light load bearer with a big appetite, a boob with a rifle, incompetent with a towline. Of all the men, Cunningham pined most acutely for the family hearth. As with the others, he had neither sent nor received any word from his family in over a month. He missed the comfort and routine of civilized life, the poached eggs and newspapers and umbrellas of it. He yearned for the hours and minutes of civilized life, a tempo that could be controlled and manipulated, doled out, sectioned up, and spent, unlike the shapeless drudgery of day, night, day, night.
The spark of adventure still had not touched the torch of Mather’s fervor since he dragged Cunningham bleeding from the Elwha, a fact that Haywood was keen to observe.
18 January 1890
Though I am loath to express my uneasiness with our intrepid leader in recent days, I can’t help but think that the others don’t feel some similar discomfort with his behavior. Yesterday, when the snow was still falling heavily, and the rest of us organized gear beneath cover, Jim sat perfectly still in the clearing on a low stump in his shirtsleeves for the better part of an hour, until the snow drifted halfway to his ankles. He does not inspire confidence. When he left for the river today, he forgot his tackle and lost nearly an hour of daylight trekking back downriver to retrieve it.
Upon his return from the river, the hunting party hopefully awaited Mather’s arrival at camp. When at last he crested the high bank, clutching only a steelhead and a trout, neither an ounce over three pounds, the dejection of the party was palpable, though nobody dared give it voice. Dinner weighed in well short of a feast.
The temperature did not drop, and the hard frost Mather had hoped for did not follow. However, good fortune did visit the expedition the following morning. Haywood, in fact, was quick to credit providence for this good fortune, when in the crepuscular light of dawn he was awakened by the stirring of canvas. Rolling over with the expectation of finding Cunningham answering the call of his tiny bladder, Haywood was dumbstruck to discover that a doe had poked her head into the tent and proceeded inward well past the shoulder. More improbably still, she did not startle as he went for his rifle, or flinch as he leveled it, or blink when he pulled the trigger and the shot rang out with the sting of powder.
Cunningham awoke screaming as the doe toppled upon him, pinning his lower half. The sudden appearance of blood and cranial tissue spattered in a wide arc upon his bedding did little to calm him. Unpinning himself in a desperate flash, Cunningham all but leapt from his bedroll and scurried out of the tent in his stockings, much to the amusement of Haywood. Much ado followed as the beast was dragged from the tent and promptly dressed.
For the next three days the weather did not break, and the hard frost did not come, but the curative powers of fresh meat upon the party’s morale were considerable. By the time Cunningham devoured his second venison steak, his fever had disappeared and his teeth had ceased clattering altogether. His strength and humor returned with each mouthful.
The second afternoon Reese bagged a small black bear whose misfortune it was to amble into camp and set the tethered dogs to barking. Haywood was moved to comment in his journal upon the docility of the beast, who did not so much as raise her hackles as the dogs snarled and yipped and Reese scrambled for his rifle.
19 January 1890
Indeed, the beasts are veritably giving themselves up to meet our appetites. That this bountiful place should provide such sustenance at this elevation (the altimeter reads 1,450 feet, though surely we must be higher), and at this late season (even the bears needn’t slumber their winters away for lack of food), may be further testimony that paradise awaits us over the divide.
There was laughter all evening as the fatty bear meat popped and crackled in the skillet, and the remains of the whiskey was passed around the circle. They savored the very last of the spirit in ceremonious conjunction with the liver, which melted on their tongues. It was decided in the spirit of competition that each man should design and construct for his load his own means of overland portage.
Masticating slowly, his shaggy brow furrowed, Mather conceived of a travois made of alder, which amounted to a wheelbarrow on runners. Cunningham, meanwhile, striking various thoughtful comportments of his own, conceived of a sledge with bowed vine maple runners. Reese and Haywood settled on towropes, reasoning identically that anything more elaborate would simply prove cumbersome and unwieldy over the rough terrain. Not content to wait for morning in executing his design, Runnells, basking in the glow of the fire and the whiskey, began constructing a nondescript contrivance somewhere between a toboggan and a sled that he named the Buggy, upon which it was generally agreed all classification was lost.
The weather finally broke, and morning brought the hard frost they’d been awaiting. The party was collectively healthy, rested, and optimistic, even Mather. But nowhere was this upswing more evident than in Cunningham, five pounds heavier and immeasurably stronger, who had shaken his misgivings about the expedition and constructed his maple sledge with a certain whistling relish.
Mather constructed his travois with the slight alteration that he was forced to build the stanchions and deck of fir, having burned most of the cedar readily available to them. Though Runnells effected a few painstaking refinements in the frame of the Buggy, these alterations were invisible to the others, and he spent a good deal more time admiring his ugly duckling, convinced that he alone would subdue the elements with the marvel of his conception. Haywood watched the others work with the keen interest of a knowing father.
Before they even set out, the clouds returned in earnest dragging sheets of wet snow. Within an hour of breaking camp, the snow defeated all but the mule. The Buggy was a shambles. Mather’s travois wilted. Even the towropes proved ineffective against the drag of slushy snow. Cunningham’s sledge had weathered the trail best, though its maple runners had straightened out somewhat and were forever mired beneath the crust. Finally, all vehicles were abandoned in favor of the time-hon
ored mode of backpacking.
The river had lightened their loads considerably, but they steadily gained elevation as the day unfolded, carving switchbacks through the timber for hours upon end. The oil clothing was useless against the wet snow, prompting Mather to abandon his altogether rather than endure the weight of it. The going was brutal, though Dolly suffered the worst of it, wincing frequently beneath her load as the skin of her ankles was rubbed raw by the snow.
Even well rested and nourished, the men were out of steam long before the daylight ran out. They ate the last of the doe and a good deal of the bear and slept hard that night. Mather dreamed, not a dream, but a slow heavy pulse, like a heartbeat from the center of the earth.
and beyond
JANUARY 1890
When Ethan and Jacob reached the head of the canyon and emerged in the snow-blanketed meadow below the bluff, the grandeur of the scene was lost on neither man. The valley was a bowl of glorious white, and beyond the foothills the rugged snowcapped peaks of the divide loomed in dramatic relief, crisp against a backdrop of deep blue sky. And right in the middle of it all, Ethan was overjoyed to see his little cabin transformed. Not only did it boast a cedar shake roof but sturdy steps and a porch and, wonder of wonders, a river rock chimney belching black smoke into the whitewashed valley. Ethan could not have been prouder of these improvements had he made them himself.
When the men were halfway across the snowy meadow, Indian George emerged on the stoop waving. And waving back, Ethan grinned ear to ear, but even as he grinned, the thought of George’s pillaged cabin was heavy upon his mind.
West of Here Page 12
