The Reckoning of Boston Jim
a novel by Claire Mulligan
To refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept,
is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of
alliance and commonality.
—Marcel Mauss, The Gift
One
When he offered recompense the Dora woman said: “Not to worry. Think on it as a gift, for your birthday, like.”
From the bench outside her cabin he could see the sun near touching the waters of the bay, near touching and yet the air remained warm, and the sky remained the blue of full day. “Have none,” he replied.
“None? Ah, well and so, it’s just an ordinary gift, then. But if you like, you can bring me something when you’re back this way again. Not that it matters.”
But it did, of course it did.
≈ ≈ ≈
Victoria, 1863, and this afternoon in May is nearly done. On Bay Street Bridge a water cart holds up and allows a buggy to pass. The buggy rocks precariously, the driver cursing. There is the smell of offal and rotting fish, of wood smoke and sea brine. There is the caw of gulls and a strip of cloud and a moist, lingering wind.
A man, that man, makes his way through the alleys of the shack town where the Chinamen live, past wafts of joss stick and opium, of brimstone, also, if one is fool enough to believe what others say. His rucksack is laden with furs, and the head of a marten, still attached to its pelt, lolls out and seems at a glance like the head of some grotesque, sleeping child. He wears patched trousers tucked into battered boots and a buckskin coat over a shirt of flannel red. At his belt are a bowie knife and a revolver. His face is best fit for scowling, the nose broad and crooked, the lips a splice in a mat of reddish beard. His hair is a slightly darker shade and is long to his collar. He is not particularly tall and not at all clean and no doubt years younger than he appears. He looks, all in all, like many of the disreputable men about, Americans mostly, who came seeking gold in the Fraser in ’58 but who stayed on because there is always more gold in some more distant place. And so what distinguish this man, though few have seen them, are the scars that start just below his collarbone. Though thin-lined and old they form a readable pattern still: james milroy of boston. He was perhaps five or six when the People brought him to Fort Connelly. The scars were new then. The Chief Trader, one Hiram Illdare, called him Jim to distinguish him from the two Jameses who were there already. The engagés, however, called him Boston Jim and soon enough he thought of himself that way as well. Having never had a name, it seemed as good as any.
And so this man, this Boston Jim, stops at the plank that crosses the Johnston Street ravine where the shacks list on stilts over the muck and refuse of the creek. Now makes his way down Government Street, past the Colonial Hotel and the Star and Garter and the Hôtel de France. Pianos clank out discordant tunes and a man in a sky-blue waistcoat jigs drunkenly on a stair. He walks past men playing cards on upturned barrels, past sailors and miners and company men. Most can be described by what they lack—an eye, a leg, a finger or two, any number of teeth.
He turns at Fort Street, by the last bastion of the old fort itself. In the square he passes the barracks, the scaffolds, the proprietors of beer wagons calling out their prices, a greybeard preaching to an audience of none. This is where the Indian women sit, selling shellfish and potatoes and camas. He slows as he passes them, studying their faces as he always does and though he recognizes most of them, the one he always seeks is not among them.
On the docks at Wharf Street a steamer is being unloaded amid much shouting and swinging of ropes. On the far side of the harbour a half-rigged ship tacks past the village the whites call the Songhees. Early in ’62 hundreds of people of all the tribes had plied their way back and forth, working for the whites and trading with them. Now, because of the pox, the canoes sit idle at the shore and smoke furls from only three of their square houses. He doesn’t fear the pox. In August of 1840 a physician came to Fort Connelly on the supply ship and inoculated them all at Illdare’s insistence. The physician pierced Boston’s arm with a lancet. “Ground scab,” Illdare said. “Better than any, prayer, eh, young Jim?”
The slate roof of the Hudson’s Bay Company store gleams dully in a wash of sun. Nearby a brick warehouse is half completed. A workman ceases hammering and saunters across a high beam. Another workman calls out in a language that Boston has never heard. Both workmen laugh and it seems to Boston they turn toward him as they do so. He speaks English and French, dialects of Kwagu’t, Nu-chah-nulth, and Lekwungaynung. Speaks some Kanaka, some Gaelic. Knows smatterings of Russian and Spanish. Speaks, of course, half a dozen variations of Chinook, the trade jargon of the tribes that even the whites have taken on. Still, many in this place are beyond his comprehension. At Fort Connelly the engagé Lavolier had spoken of the tower of Babel, the curse of languages. He held up a canvas marked with the image of a ladder. After the Fall. Before the Deluge. Babel must have been much like this town then, the people from so many countries and tribes, suspicious of each other, and unintelligible to each other, as when God’s vengeance was still fresh.
In the trade room are barrels of molasses, sacks of sugar and flour, boxes of iron tools, titled towers of buckets, stacks of rifles, and stacks upon stacks of blankets—four point and six point even, white, indigo, and red. Wares, Provisions, Dry Goods & Armaments reads one sign. Pro pelle cutem reads the company crest. Boston takes a certain pride in his ability to read. But no, he has no birthday. “Likely at night,” was all Illdare had said when Boston, years ago, had asked when he arrived in the world. He only asked because of Lavolier’s calendar. In January angels hovered over the bed of a dying child, the snow piled high at the window beyond. In April lambs cavorted while a shepherd slept and a devil leered. In August the Christ gazed mournfully upward, chest splayed open, heart afire. Boston found some comfort in seeing the months separated so, in seeing the days boxed and counted and named. The days should give an account of their existence. It seemed only fair.
≈ ≈ ≈
“Good day to ye, sir. A fine day. I am Mr. Gifford. Furs to trade? I am at your service.”
He is a youngish man with an ear half-gone. Though Boston has not seen him before he recognizes the cadence of the man’s speech as that of yet another Orkneyman. He drops his furs on the counter, says nothing. They encourage pointless conversation, these company men, thinking it creates some kind of bond, thinking they can use this bond to their advantage.
“Needing flour and coal oil, plug tobacco, shot. Needing needles. Thread, strongest you got.”
Mr. Gifford clears his throat. “Ah, but it was a devil of a winter, wasn’t it?”
“Won’t take less then eight pound for the marten. Two for the beavers. Three for the mink.”
“That is a goodly price.”
“Thick. You’ve never seen a marten so thick.”
Gifford smiles. “Haven’t I?”
“No,” Boston says, and in such a way that Gifford drops his gaze. Boston prides himself on his trader’s eye. He can remember the exact appearance, size, weight, even odour of an object. He can remember the exact profit he made on trades ten or twenty years ago. He can remember, as well, exact words of conversations, the lineaments of faces, the precise turn of events long gone. He doesn’t struggle to recall as others do. If he cares to, all he need do is think of how he stood on this day or that. The rest comes in layers: first the words and the manner in which they were spoken, next the odours, then how the clouds were shaped, the leaves patterned, how the birds called each to the other. The memories of the far past are as clear to him as what is happening now, all except the ones from his earliest years, before he woke
at Fort Connelly. Those are in jumbled fragments. A wharf on a night of dense heat. The outlines of furled masts and rigging lines. And then he is nestled among sacks and barrels that rock gently beneath him, recalling a thing earlier even, a thing ever out of his reach. Much later and there is a great cracking as a ship breaks apart. A campfire. A canvas overhead. A man who howls and weeps. The gleam of a long, thin knife.
“Let me cipher. I can give ye, give ye . . .” Gifford stares upward, his face rapt, his fingers moving. In all like a damned priest at his rosary.
Now comes the to-ing and fro-ing, the smiling protestations of Gifford, the blunt remarks of Boston. In the end Gifford agrees to a price only slightly lower than Boston wanted. It is enough to buy all the goods Boston requires with three pounds and twelve shillings left to spare.
Gifford hands Boston the notes and coins and a bill of sale in a legible script that notes when Mr. Boston Jim will come and take his goods.
Boston counts the money, his lips moving silently.
“The pox has been a terror, or so I’ve been hearing. I’m newly arrived, ye see.”
Boston scrutinizes a chipped shilling.
“Well, for ye it would be a blessing, mind. For it left ye with few competitors among the Indians.”
At this moment no one else is in the trade shop and it is perfectly quiet but for the buzzing of a fly, the ticking of a clock. Boston looks directly at Gifford. It is something he rarely does; for how many faces need clutter his recollections? He takes in the shadows under Gifford’s watery eyes, the protruding teeth, the peculiar width of his skull.
Gifford steps back. Puts a hand to his cheek.
Boston pushes the shilling across the counter.
“I’ll, I’ll change that for ye, sir. Bad money about these days. My apologies.”
Boston pockets the shilling and hoists on his near-empty rucksack. He thrusts the needles and thread in his pocket. “Come back for the other goods. Keep them safe, hear,” he says and then leaves without looking at Gifford again. He walks back up Government Street, and then to Cormorant, intent on the London Coffee house where the food is good and plentiful, the liquor well priced and unwatered. He notes a lone pig snorting in an alleyway, notes the general decrease of soap lees, ash, and night soil. Last autumn all manner of goats and pigs and cows wandered freely, feeding on just such refuse that was tossed into the streets. This new cleanliness is not the only difference. Now many of the buildings have been painted in blood reds and ocherous yellows. In the blue of watered ink, the green of precious jade. Now several of the saloons have changed their names and one offers a dining room for ladies. Now a spirits store with a false front and canvas walls stands where a heron had walked through clover and salal. Now there is a gunsmith, a carpet merchant, a photographers’ studio, an auctioneer or two.
Boston spits out a stream of tobacco and silently curses. He does not like the way the town grows in size and changes in character each time he comes to trade. It makes him uneasy, as if more time has passed than he has realized—ten or twenty years perhaps, and not just six or seven months.
No, he will not stay a day or two as he planned. He will not bother with a bath, nor a night at a Humbolt Street bawdy house. He’ll stay only this night. Come dawn he’ll make his way back to his cabin, back past the bay where the Dora woman and the other new settlers are. He’ll make his traps ready again. He’ll not stop and visit as she asked. He offered recompense and she refused. Surely that settled the matter between them.
And now two women give him pause. Their skirts take up the entire boardwalk and sway like great bells. They are talking closely, their bonnets obscuring their faces. Boston certainly cannot go through the two of them; it would be like breaking through a barricade, the sort of action that merits trouble. And he cannot go around them; even he knows this would not do, for then they would have to flatten themselves against a store window to avoid brushing against him in an unseemly fashion.
The women are very close before they notice him. They stop. Boston stops. The older woman wrinkles her nose. The younger woman gazes down. Boston backs up and takes the stairs to the deep mud below, all the while silently cursing these perplexing encounters, these pitfalls, all the while thinking of the Dora woman.
He had been walking for two days along a ragged green trail. Usually it took only a day for this part of the journey, but the rain came on hard and the path churned with mud and he stumbled several times. It was dusk when he reached Cowichan Bay, as the new settlers call it, and torrenting still, and so he sought shelter in a small cave. The next morning was clear-skied and warm. It was then he noticed the tear in his shirt pocket; it was then he noticed that the smoke pouch was gone. Inside it was one hundred and twenty-six pounds, ten shillings. Never more. Never less. It must never be less. It was the same money he had taken from Illdare’s personal cache when he left Fort Connelly years ago. This was not stolen money, not truly, for that amount had been owed to him, that much and more besides. His everyday money was safe in another pocket of his coat, in a plain leather bag. But that money hardly mattered.
The tide was rising over the rocks where he had walked. He stood with fists clenched, recalling each footfall. He turned back and searched the path, the bases of the great trees, their roots splaying out thick as barrels. Searched through the ferns and moss, the places where he had stumbled or slipped. Felt light-headed, as if he might retch. Still he searched.
The tide was out when he returned to the shore. That was when he first saw the Dora woman. She wore a calico apron over a blue dress that was hiked to her mucky knees. The dress was ruffled at the collar and sleeves and it shimmered in the watery sun.
Near the Dora woman was a mid-aged Quamichan woman in a tartan shawl and a Quamichan man, lean and grey-haired, dressed in trousers and a pale shirt and a battered top hat. At the feet of all three were baskets heaped with gooey-ducks. The Dora woman looked up at his approach and as she did her blue bonnet slipped back off a froth of yellow hair. The Quamichans eyed him suspiciously, but the Dora woman waved, as if she had been expecting him all along.
“Have you lost something, sir?”
“No.”
“Come now. You’ve lost something. Could be your very soul with such a look you’re having there.” She smiled then.
He walked past her, thinking she was mocking.
“Was it a pouch?”
He halted. His chest tightened as if held in a clamp. “Was a pouch, yes.”
“Tell me what it looked like. I have to be certain, see, before I show you what I found.”
“Was a smoke pouch. With tassels. Blue and red.”
“What sort?”
“Silk. Silk tassels. Worn out nearly. The pouch has a Raven on it. In beads.” He described the colour of the beads, then hastily drew the image of the Raven in the wet sand.
“Ah, enough now. I believe you.” She reached into her apron. “Here it is then.”
He grabbed the pouch from her and turned his back and counted the money. It was wet and soiled, but there, all one hundred and twenty-six pounds, ten shillings. He put the smoke bag into a side pocket. Kept his hand upon it. The weight of the coins seemed to firm up the wet sand beneath his boots.
“Old money that is. I haven’t seen its like since I was a girl.”
“You saw it, then.”
“Oh, for certain. I didn’t count it, mind. I said, no Dora, it’s not yours to be counting.” She smiled at him. “Won’t you come to the cabin and have some coffee? You look as if you’re needing it. Ah, it has been horrid, hasn’t it? This morning I said to myself, Dora, go to the shore and help out Mary and Jeremiah, and so I did because after that rain I had to get out of doors like, and my roof leaked and I had to put a bucket, but ah, the noise kept me awake so and . . . oh, don’t scowl so Jeremiah, yaka tillicum, he’s a friend, a friend.”
She did not cease speaking as she led the way. Boston and the Quamichans followed silently. It had never happened. Not to him,
not to anyone he had heard of. Money belonged to the one who held it. If it is found it is not returned, not voluntarily. It made no sense. Perhaps she was wealthy and was showing her largesse. Service and homage, then, was what she would want in return. But she was not someone of great property. He knew that soon enough. The cabin was like the few others in the area, was no more than twenty feet wide and made of unpeeled logs and had a shingled roof and a few flat stones before the door. A sheet and a petticoat heaved out from a makeshift line. Some of the charred stumps about were still smoking, much of the ground unbroken.
The Dora woman told him to sit on the bench by the outside wall of the cabin. He did so, one hand on his rucksack. Jeremiah milked the lone cow in the lean-to. Mary attended to the few chickens scratching inside a wire pen. From the cabin came clattering and bits of song and in a short time the Dora woman came out and gave him barely raised bread and hard cheese and coffee thick with grains. She apologized, said it was all she had. She asked for his name. He told her and she repeated it several times, as if it were something to bring luck or keep evil at bay. She spoke queerly, leaving out the h’s and speaking as if she were half swallowing her words. He’d heard English spoken that way, but never by a woman. She introduced herself as Mrs. Dora Hume. The names of her helpers were not really Mary and Jeremiah, those were just the names a priest gave them. They wouldn’t tell her their true Indian names. Wasn’t that odd? She left no gap for a reply. She said she’d been astonished at first at how many Indians were about. Terrified as well. She was sure they’d kill her in her sleep. But, no, these Indians were kindly folk and oft-times brought offerings of venison and berries. And wasn’t it a great source of comfort being able to hire them? To always have someone about? “And where is it you’re living, Mr. Jim?”
He gestured vaguely to the hills beyond the bay.
“Ah, I see,” she said, and then began talking, an endless stream of words and stories. Boston had never heard such talking before. She said, first off, that it astounded her how people appeared in this place, no announcement, no rumours of arrival. Might be a whole thriving city just on the other side of that thick, high wall of trees, one only had to enter through the right shaft of rare sunlight, say some magic word, in Chinook she supposed, because that way everyone could understand it. Even she could understand it, for she spoke Chinook quite well, thank you. Her neighbour Mrs. Smitherton said she’d never seen such a quick study. Now the Dora woman was speaking of muddy Methodist boots appearing one day as she was poking at the seedlings in her garden, of how they began preaching of God’s love, black-suited knees of salvation. She looked up into a face that was promising a heaven paved with gold and full of angels singing the praises of our Lord. She told the man that all she wanted was a little more sun and that she was High Church and then kindly suggested he not stand so on her new pea shoots. He looked down amazed, hands still in the air, and she laughed because by his expression you’d think he’d just realized he was a hundred miles up, hanging onto strips of clouds.
Reckoning of Boston Jim Page 1
