Reckoning of Boston Jim

by Claire Mulligan

  Nineteen

  Boston prods Girl awake at first light. They eat the last of his food. Girl eats her share ravenously, gulps water from his flask, then picks up the crumbs that have fallen in the grass.

  “Getting a dress for you. The Lady wants you looking nice. Stay here. Lie low. Like a mouse in the grass. Don’t be talking to anyone. Send you back to Petrovich if you do.” He repeats this in Chinook. She grabs his hand with her own. It is cold and surprisingly rough. It does not feel like a child’s hand, more like some small sea creature, a starfish perhaps, or something with a similarly slow and stubborn life.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  At the Hudson’s Bay Store Mr. Gifford looks nervously at Boston. “Excellent to see you again, sir. You are here to collect your goods I take it. Not to worry. I have kept them safe for you. Ah, your receipt, thank you.” He heaves Boston’s goods onto the table, checks off the receipt, then hands it back to Boston. “I heard of your misfortune, Mr. Jim. That I did. I was speaking of it to Farlane and Bennet, who are just here, just in the store room, sure to be back in a trice. I doubt Mr. Kines . . .”

  Boston is holding up his clasp knife.

  “Farlane! Bennet!”

  Boston places the knife on the counter. “What’ll you give for it.”

  “Give for it? Ah. I see. I see.” Gifford dabs his forehead with his sleeve. Boston waits without moving while Gifford settles himself.

  “May I?” he asks finally and reaches for the knife. Gingerly he tests the blade with his thumb. The handle is of ebony and is inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “I can give ye one pound.”

  “One pound is it.”

  “Or one pound, ten shillings.”

  “You can take the coal oil back, then. And won’t take less than two pounds for the knife. Cost more than that. It’s got good silver.”

  “I kin see that. It is just that we have an abundance of knives at the moment.”

  Boston frowns. His hand drifts over his bowie knife. It is a fine piece, easily finer than his clasp knife. The double-sided blade is ten inches long, the quillon is of silver, and the engraving on the handle is of a creature half-horse, half-alligator, and is wrought so well the creature looks as if it might spring to life. He got this knife off an American two years and seven days ago and has used it near every day since, for the bowie is designed for the ordinary tasks of skinning and gutting as well as for the killing of men.

  Gifford is swallowing nervously. “But as you are an excellent customer, or so I have heard, then the clasp knife. . . . Let me look again.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  A time later and Boston is walking through Bastion Square, a package under his arm. Soon he will be telling the Dora woman that Girl belongs to her now, and the Dora woman will exclaim. “Ah, well and so! It is just what I was wanting! Why she even looks a bit like Isabel.”

  Two children brush by him calling: “My turn, my turn now.” A man with a brace of bottles calls out the price for a gross of jalap, a pound of opium, a bottle of Turlington’s balm.

  Boston buys potatoes and camas roots from two Indian women. The younger one pulls them steaming from a coal-laden pot. Wraps them in leaves.

  “Mahsie,” he says.

  “Mahsie, Kahpho,” she replies.

  Older brother? Why not? Once an exchange is made it creates a bond, however tenuous. All about, exchanges are being made and contemplated and weighed. All about him, the world is being held in balance.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Girl leaps out of the grass. “Dress? Dress?”

  “Not for you. For the Lady. It’s for her you’re being made pretty.”

  She prods the package. “Want see.”

  “No. Have to clean you up. Then put it on you.”

  She pats his arm, as if in some kind of thanks. Why is she crying? Will she cry when she is with the Dora woman? Will she be of any use to her? But then Isabel Lund was weepy and she apparently inspired in the Dora woman a type of courage. Girl might well do the same. Boston puts his hand on Girl’s head. His smile is a brief upward movement of his beard.

  They stick again to the alleys, walk around shattered bottle glass, a pool of black sludge. A woman pounds a ragged carpet with a stick. A man squatting at his morning stool grimaces as they pass. Soon enough they are through Chinatown and then onto the path through the marshlands. The day is fine and hot. The salal quivers with small birds. Frogs croak from the reeds.

  Girl trots to keep up with his strides. Soon she is breathing hard and limping. He crouches and peers at the thin lines of blood. It will take more than the usual two days to reach the Cowichan, that much is obvious. He pulls the thistle from the hard sole of her foot, then tears a strip from her sack dress and tightly binds her foot. She does not whimper. “Good,” he says.

  By late afternoon they reach the base of an inlet. A stream fans out from the immensity of the trees. Sunlight through the poplars and cedars casts fragmented shadows on the rocky shore. Boston finds a long, thick branch and sharpens it with his bowie knife. He wishes briefly for the clasp knife that is now in Gifford’s keeping, for the bowie knife, no matter what its many uses, does not have that knife’s finesse.

  He waits at the stream, spears three salmon in succession. He turns to show Girl but she is gone. He calls her and she appears after a few moments, holding something in the hem of her dress. Shows him the fiddleheads, mushrooms, fern roots.

  They stuff the gutted salmon with her findings, then roast them over a fire, rocks acting as a brace. The meal tastes finer than any Boston has had in a long while. It is the clean smell of the breeze and the clean sound of birds that makes it seem so. The prison was rank. The shit bucket overflowed. A roach crawled sideways along the floor. Coom shouted out that they were damned.

  Boston sucks a salmon head. There it is again, that sense of elongated time, that sense of fullness. He felt it at the Dora woman’s place, once he had resigned himself to staying. He felt it years ago, with Kloo-yah. A word appears to him, an English word: contentment. He supposes it might suit best.

  “Wash now,” he says.

  Girl grins and a gap shows where a tooth has gone missing. She pulls the sacking over her head and runs into the water up to her waist. She shivers and hugs herself.

  “Under. Get your hair,” Boston calls. She dips under and rises spluttering. Boston throws her the store-bought soap and makes the motion of washing. She does so, eyes shut tight. Her hip bones and ribs prod through her skin. Her nipples are as small, puckered scars on the flatness of her chest. Boston turns his back to keep a sudden anger at bay. She need not be so oblivious to her own vulnerability. She looks as if she would crumple in a minor wind. She looks as fodder for a puma, or for those colossal birds of prey seen on rare occasions catching the high winds. She looks, certainly, with that hairless, unguarded sex, as prey for men. Boston sees her again in the shack, Petrovich’s hand on her neck, her wary gaze.

  He squints into the lowering sun and aims his revolver. Girl yelps at the shot and a green-winged duck flaps its last.

  “You need more food.”

  She crouches naked by the fire while Boston cuts the duck and spears its parts for the embers. “I clean. Dress. Dress now,” she says.

  “No. Tomorrow, when we’re close. Don’t want it getting dirty. Put that on again.” He points to the calico shift. She shakes her head furiously. Not until they have finished the duck and she has washed her face and hands again does Boston relent.

  She unwraps the package with great care. The simple dress is the blue of an autumn sky at dusk, darker than the shore-water blue Dora wears, but of the same company: sky and water, one reflecting the other. Girl touches it with reverence, strokes the black stockings, the shoes, the comb. “We know what looks pretty on a girl,” the old woman at the haberdashery said. “We knew you’d come back and let us help you, that we did.”

  Girl awkwardly pulls on the stockings, then the dress. It is slightly large for her, but this does not signify. “They gr
ow,” the old woman assured him.

  “You,” Girl says, pointing at the many buttons of the black shoes. Boston does them up for her, but slowly as the buttons are needlessly numerous and small. Girl walks unsteadily along the rocky shore, her limp made worse. She laughs, returns to the fire. Now sweeps a rock clean and sits and forces the comb through her hair. The snarls are too great and she holds it out to Boston with a sigh of exasperation. She winces when he pulls too hard, once swats gently at his hands. He crushes the lice in his nails. In all, it is a task that takes until the sun is gone.

  Boston adds more wood to the fire. He sits with his back against a log. Girl sits beside him.

  “Lady. Pretty?”

  “She’s good. She’ll be good to you. Lives in a nice cabin. Her and her husband. You be like a daughter to them.”

  “Yes. I good help. Get food. There. There.” She points to the forest, the water.

  “Not with your dress on.”

  “No. Dress clean. Good.”

  “Yes.”

  She points to Boston. “Visit? Visit me?”

  “Suppose. Yes,” Boston says, though he had meant to say no.

  Girl smiles. “Story now.”

  Boston pokes at the fire. “Just one.”

  “Yes.”

  And so Boston tells her a story that Kloo-yah told him. How in the beginning of the world the moon was always fat and full and satisfied and was bright as his brother the sun. And Raven became jealous because even he, with all his power, never knew if each day was going to be better or worse than the last. And so how could he be happy? How could he be satisfied? Why should the sun and the moon never know melancholy? The sun was too bright and strong for the Raven to steal and so he stole the moon and locked him up, and the moon mourned for the sky. Soon the moon was only half himself and then a silver splinter, but before moon could disappear Raven let him out. And then he was like the rest of the world—satisfied and glad and full for a time, and then lean and aching and nearly lost.

  “Story. More.”

  She is insatiable for stories. She should sleep. He should sleep. They must leave early in the morning. Yet now he does not want the next morning to arrive, nor the moment when he stands before the Dora woman again. Strange that he should dread it and yet desire it.

  He tells her of Gulliver and his strange travels. These tales were some of Illdare’s favourites. They spent long evenings with Boston reading aloud, and then Illdare. Boston now abridges the stories as best he can, for it would be days before he recited all of Gulliver’s adventures. He tells of Lilliput and its tiny inhabitants, of Brobdingnag and its giants. He tells of the flying island of Laputa, and then of the island of the wise and virtuous talking horses, and how among them lived creatures called the Yahoos, who were a form of degraded people. Boston dwells on the last part, for this was Illdare’s favourite. How Gulliver came home to England and could not bear to be about people, not even his wife and children, for they reminded him of the Yahoos and filled him with loathing and disgust.

  “So this Gulliver spent at least four hours a day with his horses because even though these ones couldn’t talk, he liked them better than people. And after a while he’d sit with his wife, but the smell of Yahoos was too much for him and he had to stop up his nose with rue and lavender and tobacco leaves. That’s it. The story.”

  Girl yawned, stretched out closer to the fire. Held up one finger.

  Boston settled down beside her. “One more. That’s it, Girl.”

  She nodded.

  “The lady told me this one. You should be hearing it, since she likes it so much. It’s about a poet fellow. He drowned. Had seen it coming . . .”

  He looks down. Girl is sleeping. He covers her with his coat, stokes the fire. Now gets into his bedroll. The waves lap noisily at the shore.

  “Oh, but he were famous, Mr. Jim. Eggy told me of him. Percy Shelley his name was. He drowned after he saw the ghost of his little girl. Poor mite. He saw his own double, too. There’s a German word for that; I think it’s German. Eggy would know it. You can ask him someday. Well and so, this double person warned Mr. Shelley about his coming death. It were a premonition, like. That’s the word. He was on a boat. His own boat, I’m guessing, and it sank in a terrible storm. I know about terrible storms now and I can’t but think how wretched it would be to die like that. His friends found him washed up on the shore. In Spain, it was, or maybe Italy. They sounded like strange folk to me, this Shelley and his friends and their wives, but my Eggy admired them because they weren’t afraid of flouting society and all its rules and that. Eggy said takes more courage than fighting battles and the like. They didn’t bury the poor man, see. They burned him on the beach, right there where he washed up. Just like they do in India and such. And when it was nearly done his friend, I don’t remember the name, but he saw that Shelley’s heart didn’t burn up—it must have been such a strong heart, don’t you think?—and so he snatched it out of the fire and put it in a nice box and gave it to Shelley’s widow. They found it with her things when she died, oh, years and years later. That story always sets me going, it does. It’s so sad and beautiful, and at the same time, like. I envied Mrs. Shelley when Eggy told me that story. I said I’d never heard anything so romantic. It’s like she had some part of his love forever, right there on her mantel.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Boston stokes the fire for the last time. He turns onto his side, his revolver near to hand. Girl stirs and curls into his back. She is a pocket of warmth and not unwelcome, no.

  Girl is gone when he wakes to a grey sky. He did not hear her leave. Odd. Usually he sleeps lightly enough to be aware of any movement. He rubs his beard, spits, then nudges the fire. The embers are faintly alive. She must be at her morning stool, must be in the bushes near. His coat is there. The dress as well. It is laid out neatly on a log, the stockings and shoes on the rocks below. It is as if she has melted from within her garments. He calls her name once, twice. He shouts louder and a flock of ducks rises flapping out of the rushes. She must be seeking breakfast—berries or camas, yes, and did not want to dirty her dress. He had warned her not to, after all.

  The nearby bush shows no evidence of her passage. He searches in an ever wider circle about their camp. Strips and wades into the water. Searches for a wave of hair, a shadow of thin limbs. There is a faint ringing in his ears, a hollowness in his gut. He curses her, curses the sky, pounds at the water. Back on shore he hauls on his clothes. Again he searches the brush, the nearby forest. Again he calls her name. In the afternoon he spears another fish and eats it raw and with an intense concentration, as if the eating were a test in which the reward was his own life.

  The day is windless and hot. He pulls out a few strands of her dark hair from the comb and winds them tight around his thumb. Grips the comb. The teeth bite into his palms. He saw her vulnerability. He should have told her not to stray. He should not have wasted his breath on stories about Raven and Gulliver and that idiotic poet, Shelley. He should have told her of the horrid creatures who lurk at the border of the forest and shore, at the borders between men and beasts and who were worse than any Yahoo. He should have warned her of the Boqs who are hairy and stooped and have penises so long they have to be carried rolled up in their arms, of Matlose—black-bristled, with great claws and a voice so terrible that it alone could kill—of Skookums in all their varieties. Then she would not have strayed off. Would not have dared.

  He searches and waits. Searches and waits. Calls until his voice is hoarse. Clouds filter over the sun. The day is drawing to its end. He is searching further and further into the forest. All is shadows and green. All is oddly quiet. A faint crack. He whirls. “Girl!” he shouts.

  The bear shuffles toward him, then settles on its haunches. It is a small bear, barely old enough to be on its own. Boston holds his revolver ready. It should run. It should not be looking at him unafraid. Looking at him as if it wants to speak. He knows then, and the knowledge is a hard thrumming in
his chest. She did not know her people. Or would not say. She came naked to Petrovich from the forest. She left Boston in the same manner. It is what they did sometimes, the bear people. Traded off their skins and tried on those of a human for a time. It is evident enough that of all the animals the bear is the best at adopting human form. Anyone can see how they favour human company, how they favour human food. Anyone can see how a skinned bear has a human shape.

  “You shoulda told me. Wouldn’t of taken you then. Bear people aren’t what the lady needs.”

  He thrusts his revolver back through his belt. She became caught in the human world. It happens to those who are too young. At least she is fine, after a fashion, at least she did not wander off in search of food, become lost, meet some bitter end. No.

  “Go on back to your people, then. Go on then. GO!”

  She dashes off. For a while he hears her crashing through the bush. And then the forest is still. No breeze and no sound excepting his own harsh breathing.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  He stays that night by the shore and does not sleep. It is as if he is mired there, unable to move forward, unable to move back. He feeds the fire but he does not eat. He has failed, yet again, and so again he relives the day he met the Dora woman. He sees the Dora woman returning the tobacco pouch. Hears the words “for your birthday, like,” as clearly as if she were whispering them in his ear.