by Patrick Lane
McAllister sat there, his mouth open, his breathing loud.
“They are stories, Art,” Wang Po said softly. “I remember them because I remember. It is a life and I have it.”
Art didn’t move.
“So, there is another story. We were taken to the riverbank. They lined us up on the wharf in Hsiakwan. There were many hundreds of us. Cipango made us stand all day. Then they brought the machine guns, ten, twenty, and shot everyone. I was in the back of the wharf. When the guns started I fell into the water. Other men fell on me. Dead men, alive men. A corpse was in the water beside me. I pulled him to me and held him in my arms. My head beside his head, my cheek by his cheek. We swam together. The officers stood on the wharf laughing as they shot the water. They tried to kill the dead men with their pistols. The man I held was shot three times. Down the river we floated away, my dead friend in my arms.”
Wang Po smiled.
“You’re crazy,” McAllister said, and in a whisper, as if Art couldn’t hear him, pleaded, “Can you help me?”
“I think if you talk more he will shoot you,” said Wang Po. “It is best for you to be quiet again.”
McAllister crossed his arms on his chest and leaned forward, holding himself. After long minutes looking into Art’s eyes, he said, “Please tell him to stop looking at me.”
Wang Po settled deeper into himself as the sound of men coming up the gravel road broke into his thoughts. Hearing them, Emerson slipped from the doorway, not a sound from his boots as he vanished.
“They’re coming,” said McAllister in a whisper. He was speaking to himself. “I can hear them. They’re going to help me.”
“Stop,” said Wang Po. He held up his hand.
McAllister winced as if he’d been struck. “Don’t hurt me,” he begged. “Please.”
“Art,” Wang Po said. “What is it in your lap?”
The pad of Art’s finger moved slightly on the curved trigger of the Winchester. A single high note rose from McAllister, a wail slipping from his lips. It was like the cry of a child when he is faced with a punishment he can’t avoid. “Help me,” he pleaded.
“Art?”
The first-aid man reached into his pocket with his free hand and lifted up a necklace, passing it across the rifle to Wang Po. A string of black glass stones clicked against the barrel. Wang Po held it up to the yellow light from the lamp. The silver chain lying across his fingers looked stained with rust. He brought the necklace close to his eye and thin flakes of blood fell from the links into his palm.
McAllister turned his face away, his hands burrowing into each other.
Emerson was in the doorway again, his back to the room. He was looking out into the dark. Joel appeared as if from nowhere and stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder, but Joel facing into the room, his eyes meeting Wang Po’s.
“Art?” Joel asked, his name a question.
“It’s all right, Joel,” said Wang Po. “Be quiet. Everyone be quiet.” He turned back to Art and held up the necklace. “What are these?”
“Alaska black diamonds. They were Irene’s.”
Jim hung his head and stared down at his hands. They wrenched at each other as if they could take each other apart and undo their clasp.
That was when Wang Po reached out and placed his fingertips lightly upon the barrel of the Winchester and shifted it an inch to the side.
Art smiled as the barrel moved.
“Jesus, Jesus, I’m sorry!” McAllister shouted when he looked up and saw only Art’s smile, his hands at last undone. He held them out to the first-aid man. There was a deep quiet for only a moment as he cried, “Can’t you hear me?”
Art turned his head and looked at Wang Po as he pressed the trigger.
McAllister fell forward from the couch onto his knees, his body violent in its shaking. His pursed mouth opened and closed like the vent of a dying fish. Helpless, his hands patted at his chest for the blood that wasn’t there.
The first words Wang Po heard were Claude Harper shouting at Emerson, men crowding behind him in the joy-shack. He could see Joseph’s face and beside him, Bill Samuels. Two or three others were in back trying to see. He recognized Oroville Cranmer, but the others in the shadows he couldn’t make out.
“Put the knife down, you little sonufabitch,” Claude said through his teeth.
Joel turned around and saw Claude raise his hand as if he were going to strike Emerson.
“Don’t you try and touch him,” said Joel. He pushed past Emerson and struck Claude’s chest with his fist. “He’s my friend.”
What looked like Joseph’s hand reached out and pulled Claude back by his collar just as he was about to throw Joel aside. “He’s just a kid, dammit!” Joseph said. He shook Claude, the boss’s head jerking up and down as he pulled him close. He spoke quietly into Claude’s ear but Wang Po heard the words: “Shut up, you fool.”
Claude stopped struggling and looked over Emerson’s head at McAllister, who was kneeling on the floor by the couch, his face in his hands.
“What in hell’s going on?” Claude asked, but no one paid any attention except Emerson who still blocked the door, his knife weaving in the air above Claude’s belt buckle.
“Just don’t you try anything,” said Emerson. “You’re not too big to bleed.”
Bill Samuels looked down at Emerson with a half smile on his face. “Jesus,” he said. “Where the hell did you come from?”
Wang Po placed his hands on his lap, one on top of the other. “Where is she?” he asked.
“In the box freezer at the dump,” Art said.
Everyone in the joy-shack heard him.
Claude hung from Joseph’s fist, blinking his eyes.
Emerson slipped his knife into his scabbard and turned to look into the trailer beside Joel.
A few of the men Joel had brought from the dance crowded into the joy-shack, trying to peer past the others. The ones behind Claude and Joseph told the rest what Art had said, the men starting to talk and argue, Bill Samuels telling them to settle down and be quiet. “We’ll know soon enough what’s happened here,” Bill said. “Some of you go find Ernie. He’ll be at the dance. Take him down to the mill and keep him there. According to what the kid tells me he’s got a part in this.”
The boys moved into the room.
Wang Po placed his hand on Art’s shoulder and whispered a fragment from a poem he learned as a boy in school.
We wandered far into the mountains in search of bones.
Like the moon we cried out when we were broken.
This path and that path. We did not stop to listen.
Art lifted the rifle to his chest, cradling it in his arms. He leaned his face against the barrel. “I killed Tommy,” he said. His voice was the voice of a child.
“I know,” said Wang Po, gentle as he took the rifle from Art’s hands and laid it on the floor at his feet.
THE OLD MAN HAD CRUMPLED NEWSPAPERS and stuffed them inside Joel’s coat and pants and helped him into the lee corner of the gondola car. He’d sat Joel in front of him, pushed their legs into a gunny sack, and wrapped them both in thin grey blankets, a stream of snow seething over the metal rim above them, the tiny grains finding their way into the cracks and crevices of what covered them, filling them in, leaving no room for anything but the snow. Joel had sat between the old man’s legs, his arms in a cross, his hands pressed into his armpits. The man’s arms surrounded him, holding him close to what warmth there was in his body. The wind screamed through the night, the storm covering them with the breathing of mountains. Joel had felt he was a small child as he curled himself into the old man’s chest and belly, his head under the curve of the old man’s jaw, their two faces looking into the whirlwind as the train careened down the canyons. In the other lee corner of the car two men lay prostrate under greatcoats, a voice finding its way through the wind’s howl as a man sang “The White Cliffs of Dover” repeating and repeating the refrain until it became a crippling whisper in Joel’s hea
d. After a long while he no longer knew if the man was singing or if the man had died and the song was all that was left of him in a world made entirely of winter. Beneath Joel was the ceaseless chatter of the wheels on the rails, its endless clatter becoming a part of the man’s song, “just you wait and see.” A fragment formed inside him, a sonorous cascade made from words hanging in his mind, the “wait and see, wait and see, wait and see” going on forever.
And what he saw last of the man who had saved him, a wretched face hanging over the rim of the gondola alongside the visages of the other two men as the old man pleaded to be let down from the car. Bill Samuels told the three of them to stay where they were, Joel shaking as he walked away from the tracks, Art leading him toward the lights shimmering in the cookhouse window. Joel knew he would remember it forever, his not thanking the old man for saving his life in the storm that lasted the hundred miles between Jasper and the village where he lived now.
Joel stared up at the lapped-board ceiling of the church that was going to be his home and thought of the old man in the gondola car last winter holding him in his arms. And he thought of Cliff holding Alice in the boxcar as it threaded its way through the mountains and canyons and into the ranchlands and farms of the river valley where it opened up at Little Fort and beyond. It was in the drylands at the junction across the river from Kamloops where they must have got out and run across the lines of tracks to the bush and at last over the bridge to the town where they could find the bus depot restaurant and bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup, and a grilled cheese sandwich maybe, before boarding a bus going to the north that would drop them on the side of the highway at Williams Lake. There they could hitch a ride in a pickup truck to Riske Creek where the Toosey people lived.
Cliff must have held her all that way, them talking, the wind in her black hair, telling each other the stories of their lives, and maybe touching each other too, and then Joel couldn’t think anymore about them and what they might have done or not done to each other, with each other, because he wasn’t looking at the ceiling anymore in a dream, he was looking at the curve of Myrna’s shoulder, a lock of her blond hair lying upon her soft skin, a spray of pale freckles across the top of her shoulder blade looking like the Milky Way in the night sky, the sheet moving ever so slightly as she breathed. For a moment he could see Cliff looking at Alice’s shoulder, her skin, and Joel closed his eyes because he didn’t know how he could have Alice in his head at the same time Myrna was lying beside him in their bed.
He knew Alice would come and go in him before she left forever. He knew that. He had dreamed her for what seemed to him now forever. He’d thought about Alice for just a moment when he’d come back tonight to the light of the oil lamp in the window. She vanished the moment Myrna took his hand and pressed it against the quickening in her belly. He tried to imagine the baby moving in there and wondered at it aloud. Myrna laughed at him thinking so and he laughed too, and after a long quiet they slept in each other’s arms.
As he lay there in the middle of the morning the past night came back to him. He watched again as Joseph and two other men took McAllister away, Claude telling them to tie him up and lock him in the supply shed down at the sawmill. Others were sent to the Hall to find Ernie Reiner and take him to the sawmill too, but when they got there the men at the dance said Ernie had taken off in his pickup. They told them Ernie said he was quitting and headed over to the bunkhouse to get his stuff. A few minutes later they saw Ernie’s truck head up to the high road and he was gone, which way, north or south, they didn’t know.
What Joel remembered most was the moment when Claude told Art to come down to the mill with him. Art had looked up at Claude and whatever it was passed between them was enough to make Claude turn away without a word and leave the trailer. When everyone was gone Wang Po told Art he was going to the cookhouse to bake the bread for Sunday breakfast. Art nodded. Joel asked Wang Po what Art was going to do and Wang Po smiled and told him he should go home. “You leave Art alone now,” he said. “Art is enough.”
Joel had left then with Emerson. There was the end of a bright moon when they went down to the bunkhouse. Joel put what little clothing and stuff he had in a kit bag a worker had left behind when he took the train out one day months ago. Joel’s hat had been sitting on the foot of his bunk and when he turned to pick it up he saw Emerson holding it. Emerson’s thumb ran along the braided leather that scrolled the crown, his thumb touching the faint crusts of grease and salt left there by Joel and the man who’d worn it before leaving it on a fence post down on the Lakes. The three red-tail hawk feathers slid through Emerson’s fingers as he stroked the vanes, the barbs catching and the feathers finding the shape of the wind again. The hat turned slowly in his hands. Joel thought of Emerson squatting by the bunkhouse door when Reiner confronted him, Emerson backing Reiner off with that knife of his.
Joel remembered Wang Po telling him Emerson looked up to him like an older brother. Joel knew he wasn’t kin to Emerson, no matter his being with Myrna and the baby, but Emerson had chosen him as someone beyond blood. Joel hadn’t had that kind of friend before. Emerson was a strange kid with his knife and his secretive ways, but his knowing of the river and the forest was deeper and different than how Joel knew it. What Emerson had were gifts Joel was only beginning to understand.
“Hey, Emerson.” When Emerson looked up, Joel said, “Keep that hat, why don’t you. It doesn’t really fit me right.”
Emerson slit his eyes a bit as if thinking about what it meant for Joel to offer it, then nodded, knowing that a gift was a gift and not to be refused. “I don’t know if it’ll fit because of the bandage,” he said. He took it by the brim in his two hands and pulled it down on his head, the hat sliding over the bulge by his ear. “It’s too big, anyway,” he said, lifting it off.
“Don’t worry about that,” said Joel. He stepped out the back door of the bunkhouse and tore a strip of moss off the side of a boulder. “Give it here.”
Joel tucked moss inside the hatband on one side, testing the fit on Emerson’s head until it sat right. He tucked a bit more moss in and put the hat back on Emerson’s head. “It’s just right now. When you get that bandage off you can put more moss in there, especially ’cause the moss is going to dry out anyway. The hat’ll settle in once you grow into it. Hey,” he said, “it looks a lot better on you than it ever did on me.”
“Thanks,” said Emerson, a grin on his face.
The two of them had stood there and listened to the river. There’d still been a couple of hours until dawn, the moon above the mountains to the west. The Milky Way spread across the sky, a great band of light becoming brighter as the moon paled. Orion was tilted in the east, the stars of his body leaning into whatever new struggle was coming through the heavens. Wisps of horsetails brushed the rim of the mountains to the west.
“There’s weather coming,” Joel had said. “We have a last thing to do before I go to the Someday Church and Myrna. C’mon,” he’d said, going back into the bunkhouse, Emerson beside him. The two of them made their way down the row, a single brown moth circling the light from a coal-oil lamp burning on the shelf above Ernie Reiner’s empty bunk. There was nothing much left of what he’d had. Joel didn’t look at any of it, socks and old boots, empty cartridges. It was the skulls of the bears Reiner had killed Joel was looking at, two on the shelf and the other on the floor under the bunk.
Joel had picked up the fallen one and told Emerson to take the other two. When they got back to Joel’s bunk Joel grabbed the kit bag and threw it over his shoulder. They were outside on the back porch of the bunkhouse. He remembered telling Emerson he’d learned a lot of things in the past days. “Wang Po and Art taught me a lot,” he’d told him, “but so did Myrna and your mother, Isabel.” And then he told Emerson how Emerson had taught him a few things. And it was because of what he’d learned that he was trying to think what he should do with the skulls. He said, “They’re all that remains of the bears Reiner killed. It’s like you
said—he didn’t need to kill them. The bears weren’t dangerous. And they weren’t hunted. He just sat on a rock at the dump and picked them off when they came for food. He didn’t respect them at all.”
“Yeah,” said Emerson.
“I’m just glad he never shot that grizzly up at the dump.”
Emerson nodded.
“I don’t know,” Joel said. “Bears mean a lot to Art Kenning and he’s a friend of mine and a friend of yours too. I thought at first I’d bury them someplace special because of Art, but that doesn’t seem right, so I thought I’d ask you what you think we should do.”
Emerson picked up a handful of dirt, smelled it, and put it back where he found it. He lifted his head and coursed the air like a small animal questing. “Can you smell it?” he said. When Joel nodded, Emerson said with a big smile, “It’s the river. It wants the bears to come home.”
“You show me where’s the right place,” said Joel in wonder at this boy who’d come into his life. “You lead, I’ll follow.”
Emerson turned to run and Joel stopped him. “I got something to get before we go,” Joel said. “You get those skulls while I’m doing what I gotta do.”
Emerson passed Joel like a wraith as he went back into the bunkhouse. When he came back out with the skulls tied up in a shirt that looked like one Reiner must have worn, Joel was sitting on the porch with his tobacco can beside him.
“You went and got that out of the bog,” said Emerson. “I thought that’s what you were gonna do. It’s why I took so long getting the bear skulls.”
“You knew about my tobacco can?”
“Yup.”
“Hell,” said Joel. “There isn’t a secret I’ve got that you don’t know about.”
“Yup,” said Emerson.
“Okay,” said Joel as he pushed the can into the bag with the skulls. “Let’s go.”
