Reckoning of Boston Jim

by Claire Mulligan

  A second night comes on. Still he has not eaten, nor slept. Her stories of London parade before him until he finally steps firmly onto the cobbled street. He doesn’t move, cannot move. He is not one for astonishment, and yet. . . .The crowd presses into him. He stumbles forward. “Get outta the way, ye bloody idjit!” someone yells. There are the Hindu tract sellers she spoke of, the piemen, the muffin men, the match girls, the bird sellers. There are the blind beggars, the crippled beggars, the drink-sodden beggars. There are the women who dance on stilts, there the street orchestras. He walks on haltingly past the gin shops and shoe sellers, the rag and bone shops, past shadow men who lounge against the dank walls and watch him intently, without curiosity. The smells are of shit and smoke, of rotting things, of sweat, of ash. He knows such smells, but here all are intensified, as if it were here that such odours were born. Of other smells he has no reference. And the noise! All around costermongers are crying out their wares amid the clopping and rumbling of innumerable carriages and carts, amid the pipes and organs of the musicians. A boy passes him at a half run. He is holding up a tract, throwing out promises of seduction, murder, betrayal.

  He turns ’round in bewilderment and it is a night in early winter. Newcut market now battles with the light the Dora woman so adores: tallow candles, grease lamps, tin lamps cut with stars and angels, the stoves of the chestnut men glowing red. Glowing globes of blue and green dangle from the roofs of coffee vendors where men in top hats and long coats converse with women whose skirts are hiked to their ankles.

  He knows, somehow, where he must go. Finds the narrow street where the roofs of the opposing buildings lean together, nearly touching. Finds the drapery store. The door is thrown open. The interior is smaller than the Dora woman suggested. Her mother is folding a length of white cloth behind the high counter, a paraffin lamp beside her. She is wrapped in several shawls. She is comely, according to the white men’s standards. Her skin is white, against the dark shine of her hair. Her throat is long. Her eyes wide. Does she look, as Dora insisted, as might a queen? Boston cannot compare, having never seen a queen in the flesh before. There. Coming along the street. Dora’s father. So it is before her father’s misfortune. A large man turning to fat, he holds his own in the street. Others part around him, return his hearty greetings. Boston draws back into the shadows. Dora walks beside her father. She is half-grown; her hair hangs down her back in a pale mat. She is chatting and showing her white teeth. She holds her father’s hand. He is grinning also, nodding. He is also proud. Of her, of himself, of the world he inhabits. Dora’s mother is now at the doorway. Dora’s father throws an arm about her, kisses her cheek. “My dove, my wife.” And then to Dora, “Ah, my favourite girl. Promise me you’ll have a marriage as blessed as ours then, eh?”

  “I will, I promise,” Dora says fervently. And then these three lock arms about each other so that they block the doorway, are as one dark form.

  The Dora woman never spoke of such a scene. Boston grips the wooden post beside him. A splinter drives into his thumb. The pain is sharp and true. He is truly here, then. He is about to step forward and ask this Dora what she wants of him when the ground shifts and he is back again at the shore where he lost Girl.

  Never has he fallen into memories. His own or others’. Never has he heard of it happening before. Equata said that in her dreams she travelled to the lands of King George’s Men. There she saw spires piercing the clouds, saw men of bronze, and houses large enough for ten thousand families, saw children pleading before wheeled boxes made of gold and led by four-legged beasts that were larger than bears. But it was the present Equata saw; never had she claimed to fall into the past, nor into another’s memories.

  He studies his thumb by the light of the fire. Yanks the splinter from it.

  All through that night he tries to fall into her memories again. But he cannot. Dawn is now a red smudge over the trees. He is in this time, in this world. And yet a message must lie in the scene he witnessed between the Dora woman and her parents. What of the endearments? The embrace? Her promise to have a blessed marriage?

  “He’s all alone on that road, Mr. Jim, with no one to watch out for him. Riches are nothing if you’re dead. Mr. Hume home with me, that’s all I’m wanting. I’d be so perfectly happy then.” Five times she mentioned her husband, always with sighs and sad smiles. She returned what was precious to him. He must return what is precious to her. An action for an action. Boston was a fool not to have realized this before, to have wasted his time on gimcracks, on Girl even. It will put all back in balance. He stands. It is good to know such absolute resolve.

  Twenty

  A country stroll from Quesnel to Barkerville? What cretin told him this? Damn his eyes. Damn him and his bloody damned relations to the tenth generation.

  “Arie, please, I beg you. Do not fail me now. I’ll fête you with the finest oats, with a warm stable, mash. Golden bloody horseshoes, muleshoes.” Eugene is speaking urgently, softly, swallowing his panic. He must for her sake.

  His boots are braced in a labyrinthine fall of logs that is slick with moss and smashed slugs. He yanks on her bridle with one hand; his other has hold of a stunted, twisted tree. All about him are plants with oily leaves and sickly yellow flowers. Carrion eaters? He has heard of such diabolical plants. Likely they entice the unwary with some intoxicating vapour. Only this could explain how they stumbled off the main path and came to this. Eugene had faithfully followed the wavering needle of his compass. He had not led them astray.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  It is no use. The bog has her. She is up to her belly now. She is exhausted from her thrashing and rimmed with sweat and her eyes roll in panic.

  They are not alone in their predicament. Dotted about them are dead horses, mules, cattle, even a moose. Many are mired upright so that it seems they might totter on forward at any moment, decayed and fly infested and reeking like some hellish visitation.

  “Goddamnit! Bloody hell. Fuck!” Eugene grapples with the supplies on Ariadne’s back, nearly tumbles into the bog himself, so far does he have to lean. He unlashes the trunks and sacks. Struggles under their cumbersome weight, finally thrusts them clanking and thudding into the bush. The bandana falls from his face and he inhales innumerable flies. Gags from this and from the stench of rot. Would vomit if he had anything left in his belly.

  He looks upward and apologizes profusely for his lack of observance to Sundays, his poor attendance at church, his belief in luck over prayer. Grey clouds stretch apart in a high wind. He shuts his eyes. Hears Ariadne’s laboured breathing and his own, hears the quarrelling of the birds, the hellish symphony of the mosquitoes and black flies, feels the bite of those miniscule demons that tear hunks out of a man’s flesh, that could no doubt flay him slowly alive.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  He left the road crew three mornings ago. Bid farewell to George Bowson and Langstrom and arranged to meet up with them in two weeks’ time in Camerontown. Promised to stake out a fine claim. Good that he was going early, they all agreed. It was already the second week of July. The season had already begun.

  He disembarked from the steamer at Quesnel, a town so full of celestials he might have disembarked at Canton. He walked with a party of Cornishmen for the first day. The trail was a thin slash through murky forests, over logs and stumps. At times the mud was knee-deep. Other trails led off from this so-called main trail. Did prospectors make these? he wondered. Or did the beasts in these parts? Didn’t Mr. Barrymore mention a bear? Yes. Ursus something or other. They are big as bulls, vicious as lions. Are man-eaters. Likely they prefer English flesh to all others.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “Keep going east,” the Cornishmen advised just after they told him he was slowing them down, just before they tromped off without him. The youngest, a boy no more than fourteen, gave him bannock and a fill of water from his own flask and then that frank look of pity that children sometimes bestow upon the cursed.

  He spent that night under the p
rotection of some fallen trees. He huddled in his bedroll, wondered where his splendid luck had gone, where the way houses had gone for that matter. They existed on the route. He had heard that. What he would have given for a bed, even one infested with vermin. Ah, but he was too slow, always too slow. And now it was not all Arie’s fault. His feet were as heavy as if his boots were filled with lead shot. His head ached as if held in a steel clamp.

  She is up to her chest now. Her breathing is harsh. She has not brayed for some time.

  Addendum

  If the Gentleman should find himself trapped in the Quagmire of Despair he is advised not to thrash as thrashing will only encase his limbs in the putrid mud & if he does thrash, he should then be advised to say his prayers & if it is only his pack animal that has succumbed to the embrace of the bog, then he should be advised to carry on regardless. For what is a pack animal? Or let us be specific, what is a mule? It is, good sirs, a creature without a soul, a beast of burden created by God for our use & thus I recommend that you leave it where it lies with no thought of rescue, for any rescue may needlessly endanger yourself.

  Eugene is sobbing only because he is exhausted. Lost. Only because his splendid luck has deserted him entirely.

  The light itself seems muddy, difficult to move in. He fumbles at his revolver. Clenches his hands to stop them from shaking. Ariadne stares at him. Her eyes are filled with flies.

  At the shot the birds wheel upward like ash from a fire. There is a roaring in his ears, a pounding in his skull. There is a sense that he must escape at all costs.

  Twenty-One

  The steamer plies the water to the mainland. On the wharf a crowd waves goodbye, white handkerchiefs flitting in their raised hands. Now it is only grey sky above, grey water below. Off the starboard rail the monstrous blackfish leap from the waves and show the white of their great bellies before crashing back. The People near Fort Connelly hunted the blackfish in the month of the ripe salmonberry. The women slice at the corpse that is drawn onto the shore. The headman takes first share and then the shaman takes his and then the nobles and then commoners and then the slaves. There are rivers of blood. Strips of flesh as long and thick as trees.

  The blackfish plume and vanish into the deep. A man vomits over the rail. Boston hunches in his coat and pushes down his own nausea. He does not go below. He does not like to be sealed up within a boat. Does not like boats at all, not even canoes, though he uses them when he needs to. Feels uneasy in the territories of the salmon people, the whale people, the seal people, and all those creatures of the between worlds in which he half-believes. Not only that. Boston presses his knuckles to his forehead. The remembering comes unbidden once again. He is crouching behind barrels, backing away from an arm that gropes for him. The hold rocks; a barrel tips. The arm grasps his long and matted hair and hauls him out. The arm is thick-muscled. Sinewy. Blue tattoos of a turtle, a bird, of whorls, a cross. What else? It is beyond. In the time before. He struggles and bites. Laughter. Is held up. A lantern blazes into his eyes.

  “And when did you sneak on board, you damned little wharf rat, eh? When’d you start thinking you could be eating up old Milroy’s stores, making him look the fool, eh? Well, now. You owe me, boy. You owe.”

  Twenty-Two

  Hold his head. We must not let him gag.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Where?”

  “Be easy now. Lie back.”

  “You’re Negroes? What?”

  “Shit, and here’s I thought we was lily white. Sure is a revelation.”

  “Yes, it certainly is, Lorn. Sleep now, Mr. Hume. Sleep is the finest of remedies.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The red eye of a stove glows red then clanks shut. Warmth of furs against him. Dora? Is he home then? Has he dreamt? But why two beds and not one? Ah, yes. The goldfields. The road. The Negroes. Placidly he watches them. They are eating at a rough table. A candle is between them. On a shelf above them is a line of bottles, a mortar and pestle, two chipped mugs and four neatly stacked books. Drying plants hang from the rafters. Though the cabin is scrupulously clean and well-appointed it does not look a place that one would call home for long. No woman’s touch, that is the trouble.

  One of the men stands and becomes so thinly tall his head nearly scrapes the roof.

  “Good, you are awakened. How are you feeling? Any palpitations?”

  Eugene croaks out a no. The tall man hands him a mug of water from which Eugene gratefully drinks.

  “Visions of any kind?”

  Eugene manages a smile. “Visions, no. You, indeed, seem real enough. Though it would help if I knew what I may call you.”

  “I am Napoleon Beauville.” He gestures to the man still sitting at the table. “And this is Lorn Hallwood.”

  The second man sneers mightily. “I had a fever once and I thought the angels themselves were sitting around, gossiping and playing tiddlywinks and whatnot.”

  “Do you know your name, sir?” Napoleon asks.

  “Yes, of course. It is . . . is . . . Eugene Augustus Hume.”

  “Excellent. I believe you are recovering.” He hands Eugene a cup of syrup. Eugene nearly gags. It smells of mould and vinegar and of something putrefying.

  “I cannot. I apologize.”

  “It will help.”

  “He knows his remedies,” Lorn says. “He fixed up a family dying of the fever and whatnot. I saw it myself. And he fixed me up right, didn’t you, Nap?” Eugene now notices that Lorn is not sneering. He only seems to be sneering because of a scar that has pulled up the corner of his top lip and exposed his teeth and gums.

  “I did my best,” Napoleon says modestly.

  “You are a physician. I see, quite so. I am most lucky then.”

  “I suppose you could look at it thataways,” Lorn says. The scar has slurred his speech, has made him sound as if he has been drinking. Curiously, spirits are not something that appeals to Eugene at the moment. Not even brandy, that fine cure-all.

  “Drink the syrup slowly. And you must take more water with it.” Napoleon’s hair is grey at the temple. His face grave. He certainly seems the sort who knows of what he speaks.

  Eugene sips as docilely as a patient should. “I feel its benefits even now. My thanks. Pray tell me, how long have I been here?”

  “Three days,” Napoleon says.

  “Three days?”

  “Yes. And for several more you must not exert yourself. I believe you have mountain fever. It has killed many men in these parts.”

  “Good Christ! Will I . . .? That is . . .”

  “Settle yourself, Mr. Hume. The worst has past. You will not die of this occurrence.”

  “What of contagion? Do you not fear . . . ?”

  “I have observed that the mountain fever thrives only where there is filth and vermin. Cleanliness is what keeps it at bay.”

  Eugene now notices the cleanliness of his own hands, that he no longer smells ripe. These good men must have cleaned him while he lay senseless. “My thanks again, my thousand thanks.” He swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Winces as he puts weight on his blistered, swollen feet. He is wearing a clean night shift of coarse linen. It is not his own. A panic grips him. “My boots? Damnation if . . .”

  “Here by the fire,” Napoleon says. “Do not trouble yourself. Your money is safe.”

  “Ah, quite so, of course, I did not doubt . . . and my apparel?”

  “Washed and drying outside,” Lorn says as he jams a log into the stove.

  “Sirs, I have to, I must immediately.”

  Napoleon hands him a bucket. Turns his back.

  Lorn glances over. Difficult to believe that he is not sneering at Eugene’s incompetence, his stupidity, his struggle to piss.

  When he is done Napoleon gazes into the bucket. “The colour is too deep. You need well-boiled water. Two quarts a day at the least.”

  “Should I be bled?”

  “I have never seen it help a man or woman. It only ser
ves to weaken them. Your guts are dry. Simple water well-boiled, more restorative syrup, as well as tea with a suffusion of willow bark and balsam fir. Bitterroot would not be amiss, but none is to be had, unfortunately.”

  “As you have cured me thus far, Mr. Beauville, I will comply. I must, however, I must search for my supplies. I . . .”

  Lorn gestures to a dim corner. Eugene’s two trunks and assorted sacks are there. Filthy, but there.

  “Again, my thanks. How the devil did you find them, or me for that matter?”

  “I heard someone shouting in the bush.” Lorn says. “Found you crawling ’long a deer path. You were so filthy you looked as black as us, and some awful, too, all splattered with blood and whatnot. We figured from what you were raving on about that you’d got yourself caught up in Iverson’s Bog. It’s not so far from here. We thought this Ariadne was your woman, so Nap hauled you here and I headed straight off. Didn’t find no woman, just a fresh dead mule, and your stuff half-ripped up by birds and whatnot.”

  “My mule served me well. I must apologize. I hope my delirium was not too disturbing.”

  “Do not trouble yourself for it. I am certain that you would do the same for us,” Napoleon says.

  Eugene assures them he would. He is not one to judge a man for his colour. What matters is his bearing, his deeds.

  Napoleon folds himself into a chair and studies the roof. Lorn looks at him with that false, mocking sneer. Eugene’s voice winds down. He is miring himself, thrashing about for some appropriate phrase, and they are content to let him do so. He falls quiet. A log sizzles and snaps. A night bird trills out. Lorn chuckles. Napoleon smiles gravely. Eugene laughs, feels as if he has not laughed in a century. An age.

  Later Napoleon gives him broth and mashed beans and then his remedy of bark tea. The strength pours into him, and with it a sincere gratitude. Indeed, he would save them as they saved him. Ah, better. When he has his fortune he will buy them something fine. Clothes. White shirts to set off the walnut dark of their skin. Embroidered waistcoats. He had seen a footman of their hue wearing one. How remarkable he looked.