Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “I know.”

  “It’s my job to tell you what they are.” He reeled them off with the habit of long practice. No soliciting in saloons or dance halls. There were special hours for going to the movies and visiting the shops, when she wouldn’t be mingling with respectable society. Regular health inspections and a small monthly payment of something he called a “fine” but which sounded to her like a license to operate.

  If she abided by these rules, she would have the backing of the community and no threat of legal reprisal. “Do you have any capital?” he said. “Any money to invest?” She gave a small nod, wary of admitting to the carrying of any cash.

  “Then you can buy your own house on the Line or, if you like, buy a lot and build.” Seeing her expression, he added, “It’s not like that. The rents are reasonable. So are prices for the lots.” He shrugged, losing interest. “You’ll see for yourself. Next!”

  She stepped to the gangway and paused. “Sir?”

  He looked over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Thank you for your kindness. We are strangers here, and we appreciate it.”

  He grunted. “Are you a lady or are you a whore?” he said to the woman behind her, and she left the deck of the stern-wheeler Georgia Lee behind and descended to the shore of the city of Fairbanks, on the banks of the Chena River, in the heart of interior Alaska.

  She hadn ‘t taken the boat for Fairbanks that day in Nome seven years before. Alex Papadopolous, who had staggered away after she had shot him, hadn’t looked dead enough to her, and she didn’t think for a minute that if he survived that he would think she had gone to Seattle. She was a whore, it was her trade, and the most profitable place to practice it at present was Alaska. Alex would know that, and he would look for her, and he would find her. Outside, she had all the room in the world in which to disappear.

  Gunshots attracted no attention in Nome in 1900, where they averaged one murder a day. She had put Matt, unconscious from the time she had shot Alex, into her own bed and bound the wound in his shoulder as best she could. She’d thrown some clothes in a valise, exchanged one of Matt’s precious nuggets for a case of canned milk, and had smuggled herself and the boy down to the beach, where she found a ship’s captain with an eye for a pretty woman willing to hide her away in his cabin for the duration of the voyage, and willing to be seduced out of the irritants supplied by the presence of a toddler. He had been kind, after his fashion, and mercifully normal in his attentions, and she had parted from him in Seattle with no bad feelings and no regrets.

  Percy was so thin and so pale and so listless those first days at sea that she had been afraid she might lose him. When the captain was absent, she spent all her time with Percy cradled in her arms, holding him, covering his face with kisses, rocking him, talking to him, talking to herself. For a month, as the steamer wended its way slowly south and east, she had nothing to do but submit to the captain’s demands and tend to Percy’s needs. These duties left an uncomfortable amount of free time in which to think, and as the days passed and the relative peace of the voyage remained unbroken, she had time to reflect, to interpret, to determine, and, finally, to plan.

  Her entire life to that point passed in review before eyes newly opened and bitterly critical of her actions to date. She had been so secure in her beauty that she had allowed herself to be sold at auction to the highest bidder, confident that she remained in control of her life and her destiny. She had promptly fallen in love with a man who gave no thought to their future, and had, folly of follies, actually married him and borne his child, and for what? To be widowed and sold into slavery, and this time into slavery not of her own making.

  “Pride goeth before a fall.” She remembered that verse from the Bible teachings her minister father had bellowed at them daily over the table at breakfast and dinner, if she remembered none other. She had been proud, and overconfident, and she had fallen, hard, right to the bottom.

  There, at the bottom, she had allowed Alex Papadopolous literally to beat her into submission, to force her to sell herself over and over again. She hadn’t fought him for her share of the money she earned, and she had allowed him to take her son away. She had let herself believe Alex when he said the boy was all right. It was easier, she thought now with a shudder of self-loathing, easier and less painful to believe Alex, not to challenge him to a conversation that would only end in his fists striking her body, carefully placed hits that would not show to the casual customer who usually cared little how much of her was covered so long as her skirts were up to her waist. He knew how to hit, Alex did. Even now there was lingering soreness on her back and shoulders.

  “How did I put up with it for so long?” she asked herself now. “How could I? Matt was shot because I couldn’t act for myself.” Matt, who she saw with the wisdom of hindsight had cared for her all along, ever since Dawson. Matt, who had saved her and Percy both, had risked his life, and handed over his poke in a sacrifice all the more painful because it had been so willing.

  The day before they reached Seattle, she had looked at the boy child in her arms, had seen the pinkness creeping back into his cheeks and the roundness creeping back into his limbs, and had felt a surge of terror at the prospect of ever losing him again.

  She looked that terror full in the face for a long moment, acknowledging its presence, and then she spit generally in his eye and made three vows.

  Never again would she put her child in peril.

  Never again would she put herself in peril.

  Never again would she have to be rescued.

  She sent a telegram to her parents in Missouri, telling them about their grandson for the first time and asking for money. They sent it to her with a terse request that she not return home. She sent a telegram to Sam’s parents in Minneapolis. They, too, wired money, and when she went to collect it saw two policemen waiting outside the telegraph office, and remembered all that Sam had told her about the wealth and power of his father. She waited, watching, and two days later when the policemen had become bored and began to wander off, bribed a street urchin to fetch the bank draft for her. She cashed the check immediately, collected Percy, and took the first train to Denver.

  She rented a small apartment, hired a nursemaid, and lived quietly and frugally while she looked for employment in the only profession she knew. She found it eventually in an establishment owned by a big, bluff woman with a nearly impenetrable Irish accent, shrewd eyes, haired dyed a defiant brassy blonde, and a raucous laugh that could be heard in Boulder. Mary Kelley looked the Dawson Darling over with a critical eye and said, “With that hair I could have won the West all by myself. You’ve got a trim figure, and you look clean. I like the name, too. So will the customers.” She waved an all-inclusive hand and an enormous breast popped out of the low-cut bodice of the red velvet dress she wore. She reached up to stuff it back in, pausing to scratch unselfconsciously at the equally large brown nipple. “In my experience, nothing’11 get a man up and off quicker than a hint of the exotic. When can you start?”

  “How will I be paid?”

  One outrageously blonde eyebrow went up. “Oh, so she’s not all looks and no brain, now, is she?”

  Both had a healthy respect for each other’s financial acumen when negotiations were concluded. Mary showed her her room, large and well-appointed with fashionably heavy furniture and a rectangular mirror on the ceiling over the bed. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” she said.

  Mary cast a disparaging glance upward. “Yeah, well, it’s all the rage now, lovey. The boyos seem to like it well enough.”

  Mary ran a quiet house and employed two large men to escort anyone who wasn ‘t quiet enough outside to see how high he could bounce. Mary couldn’t abide violence, and abusive customers were shown the door just as soon as they showed their stripes. She sold liquor on the premises, but she wouldn’t put up with drunkenness in employees or in customers. She wouldn’t tolerate thievery in any form, and one girl who was caught going through a custom
er’s wallet was promptly thrown out and her belongings after her. She was a fanatic on the subject of cleanliness, and had had a large porcelain tub installed in the downstairs bathroom which she insisted employees use regularly. It was available to customers as well, and whether they used it alone or in company was a matter that affected only the price. A doctor was a regular customer, who bartered services for the privilege of Mary’s company.

  One room downstairs was reserved for the playing of games of chance, and winners were expected to tip the house ten percent of the night’s winnings on their way out. There was a piano and a selection of ragtime sheet music. A burly member of the local constabulary named Kevin O’Leary dropped by every Wednesday evening for a drink and a tussle with Mary, who always emerged from these encounters with her eyes sparkling, her cheeks glowing, and her exuberant breasts threatening once more to leap the bounds of her dress. The house never had a problem with the Denver police.

  The girls ranged in age from fifteen to thirty-five, in race from Swedish to Japanese. The roster remained remarkably steady but for the depredations of a series of piano players, who always seemed to fall fatally in love with one or the other of them. Mary Kelley finally threw up her hands and hired a piano teacher to instruct the girls, who took a night off upstairs in exchange for a night downstairs on the piano stool. The Darling came to love that piano, the feel of the ivory keys beneath her fingers, the way she could make music sound from beneath the polished wood of the upright.

  Soon after she went to work for Mary, she bought a tiny house in a quiet, working-class neighborhood on the opposite side of Denver, and moved Percy and his nursemaid there. She had Thursday afternoon and all day Monday off, and she spent every free minute she had with her son, reading to him, playing with him, singing him to sleep. He was tall for a child, blue of eye and fair of hair like his father and with the promise of his father’s long, lanky frame. He was intelligent and inquisitive and friendly to a fault to any passing stranger. He played with the neighbor children, but they didn’t invite him home. Their parents watched when she left, and they watched when she came home, and they weren’t fools.

  So the Dawson Darling smiled, and one night a week played the piano, and the rest of those nights opened her legs for a succession of increasingly faceless men, some of whom would have been willing to love her if she’d given them half a chance. She saved her money, and dreamed of the day when she would have enough to support herself and her son for the rest of their lives.

  The years slipped by and that day didn’t seem to be any closer than it had been when she arrived. In 1906, Mary called the girls together and announced she was selling out. They stared at her, and she snorted her laughter. “You look as if you ‘d seen the Pope himself walk in the front door, the lot of you,” she informed them. She patted her hair, this year a bright brown, and said, “The fact of the matter is this, that Kevin O ‘Leary, fine man that he is, has taken up a sheriffing job in Oregon, and he’s had the great good sense of asking me to accompany him there as his wife, and I have accepted him.” She sat, placid and satisfied, waiting for the cheering and the applause to die down.

  But it did die down, when they came to realize that their safe haven was no more. The house would be closing at the end of the month, with one big party that last night for all the steady customers, at which Mary expected everyone’s presence and the morning after which bonuses would be paid. They wouldn’t be big bonuses, they knew that already, as Mary Kelley was tight with a dollar, but it was enough to keep them working for her until the end of the month and she knew it, and she knew the girls knew it. They dispersed in ones and twos, whispering, making plans, going upstairs to their rooms to look at their belongings and decide what to take and what to leave behind. Mary had given them names, people to contact, other houses to go, but Mary Kelley’s had been a special place and veterans all, they knew it and were sorry to see it go.

  The Dawson Darling sat at the piano after everyone else had gone, fingering the keys, drifting from one tune to another, and looked up suddenly to see Mary watching her from the doorway. “I’m sorry,” she said, closing the lid of the piano and rising to her feet. “I’m late, I know. I’ll go get into my working clothes and—”

  Mary held up a hand. “Wait.” She looked her over with the same critical eye she’d used the day the Darling had walked in her door for the first time. “That town you’ve taken your name from, Dawson. It’s in Alaska, isn’t it?”

  “Almost,” the Darling said, smiling. “Next door, anyway.” Everybody Outside had very vague ideas about the north.

  “Mmm,” Mary said. She swished across the floor and sat down in an armchair, waving the Darling to one opposite her. “I’ve been hearing things, I have, about a different place in Alaska, good things for the working girl.” She paused. “Have you heard how things used to go on in St. Louis for girls like us?”

  The Darling’s interest sharpened. Of course she had, they all had. St. Louis in the early seventies was a dream come true for the working girl, where pimps were outlawed, where there was a special district within the city where they could own their own homes, where medical checkups were held on a regular basis, where there was hospitalization for the diseased. The saloonkeepers and the cops on the take hadn’t been happy with the result and it hadn ‘t lasted long, a mere four years, but St. Louis continued to be a place where the working girl had a fighting chance of keeping what she earned, without being beaten, robbed, or murdered along the way.

  “A fella passed through the house last night,” Mary said reflectively. “Said he was down from the gold fields in the Klondike. Says there’s a new mining town up along some river or other in the middle of the Alaska territory. Name of—what the hell was it now, Fairbanks, that’s it. Says there was only seven working girls in the whole town the last time he passed through. Says they were plumb tuckered out. Says a new girl arrived on the same boat he left on, and the city fathers met her with a parade.”

  The Darling was silent.

  Mary shrugged. “Thought you might be interested, seeing as you hail from those parts. And you might want to start thinking about providing for that boy of yours.” Her breasts shook with silent laughter when she saw the expression on the Darling’s face. “What, you thought none of us knew? Denver ain’t that big a town, honey. You’ve about scandalized your neighborhood with your comings and goings and carryings on.” She clicked her tongue reprovingly.

  “I never—carried on at home!”

  Mary shook her head pityingly. “Do you think that matters?” Serious now, she leaned forward and gripped the other woman’s knee. “Go north. I know you left under a cloud, whatever it was, but it’s been six, almost seven years. Whoever it is you’re on the run from is long gone. They ‘re pulling gold out of the ground by the fistful, and some of it has your name on it. And your boy’s name.” She sat up. “You’ve got a few good years left in you, Darling. Make them work for you.”

  She’d thought it over and concluded that Mary Kelley, hardheaded businesswoman turned sheriff’s wife and Oregon rancher, was right. Alex Papadopolous was very probably long gone. If the ratio of men to women was even half of what she remembered, if the stories Mary had heard were even partially true, then she would be welcomed with open arms.

  And paid better than she would ever be south of the fifty-three.

  So she packed up and moved north again, and now here she was, in Fairbanks, Alaska, a city of eight thousand on the edge of a narrow river an unattractive grayish-brown in color from the glacial silt in it, with thickly wooded hills rolling away in every direction. On a clear day, if you squinted north from the top of a high hill, you could see the icy peaks of the Brooks Range. Many days in summer, the air was blue with the wood smoke of forest fires blazing unchecked through the territory’s interior.

  The Line, as it was referred to, was all she had been led to believe. She had her own crib, a narrow building containing a sitting room with a large window, beneath which r
an a boardwalk. Customers could stroll down the boardwalk as they window-shopped for a companion for an hour’s entertainment. Customers were mostly miners, although businessmen and city fathers, some of whom were Line landlords, picked a partner for the long, juicy waltz often enough, too. She was afraid that at thirty-two she would be too old to attract attention, but there were women working the Line in their forties. The money was ten times what she had earned at Mary’s in Denver, and soon she had a steady roster of regulars, which enabled her to work a six-hour shift in the evening.

  Best of all, she had found wonderful care for Percy with Lily MacGregor, an Athabascan woman married to a Scotsman named James, who had invested heavily in Fairbanks real estate some years prior to the booming of the town and the creation of the Line, and subsequently had a great deal to lose when he developed the habit of beating Lily when he came home of an evening. Lily waited until he passed out after one beating and then went to the judge who was running against James for mayor. The judge was delighted to grant Lily a divorce and the ownership of all her husband’s real estate.

  When it came time for the Dawson Darling to invest in her own crib on the Line, she went to Lily, a tiny woman with rosy brown skin, tilted brown eyes, and sleek black hair who held title to two lots on Cushman Street. Lily’s home was full of strays, old, young, men, women, children of every age and race tumbling over one another in the house, in the yard, in the trees of the yard, in the stream running through the yard. They looked tanned and fit and happy. Percy joined them without a backward glance at his mother and was accepted without question, a tow-head among many darker ones.

  Lily MacGregor not only sold the Darling the best of the two lots, she found her a contractor to put up a crib, two stories with a scalloped awning, a dainty porch, and the biggest sitting-room window on the street. It was a design much envied and quickly copied.