Reckoning of Boston Jim

by Claire Mulligan

  Boston stares at the floor planks. Chief Constable Chandler sighs in disappointment, says he can wait all day. He is a clean-shaven, jowled man whose flesh hangs heavily on his bones. He is standing to one side of Boston. Constable Bearn, hare-lipped and stocky, stands on the other. A clerk is seated at a small table with an inkwell and paper before him. Boston has seen him in town, following the Judge about. The clerk is nervously stroking his beard, which is very dark, and so long that it flows under the edge of the table.

  The silence stretches. Bearn looks at Chandler with raised brows, a balled fist. Chandler shakes his head, then, true to his nickname, Whistling Pete, begins to whistle a tune that is slow and melancholy. Boston has never heard it before and suspects it is of the man’s own devising. He seems the sort. “Beware the inventive man,” Illdare told Boston and held up an ingenious tong made by the new blacksmith. It was January of 1842, a Tuesday, and ice marbled the pathway to the trade room; a mottled rat scuttled over the counter.

  Chandler pauses in his whistling. “Come now, you must have a name.”

  The Dora woman asked if he was truly from Boston, or if he was just an ordinary American. “In the Chinook lingo all the Americans are called Boston men, aren’t they now?” He shrugged and said that some still used the term. He could have said more. Could have said he had no true name, just as he had no true birthday. He could have told her of Milroy, the blade in the firelight, the muttered incantation. She might have had some answer to it all.

  Chandler comes to the end of the tune. Gestures to Bearn who gives Boston an expert wallop that resounds in the small room. Arthur starts. The ink trembles in its jar.

  She will remember the name of Boston Jim because she had

  found it odd. And an oddness is the only thing that enables others to recall a person they have met only once. And so she’ll remember him, remember his name, and she’ll not understand that he was protecting the Hume—her husband, lover, what he was called mattered not. She’ll not understand that, although he failed to bring the Hume back alive, he’d tried to return at least some portion of him to her. She was the one who told him of this custom after all. She was the one who told him of the poet Shelley and how he drowned and how, on his funeral pyre, his heart had not burned and so his friend had snatched it from the flames.

  Boston spits out blood, a tooth. The men take form again. He says the name slowly, under his breath. Surprising that the name has no substance. He has always assumed it would, that it might choke him by its mere utterance.

  “Speak up,” Chandler says.

  “James Milroy.”

  “Lovely. Well, where are you from Mr. Milroy?”

  “Boston.”

  “You have some proof of this? Someone to vouch for you?”

  “Got proof.”

  “Well?” says Chandler.

  Boston tells them to unbutton his shirt. Bearn snickers.

  “It’s there,” Boston says. “Your fucking proof.”

  Bearn takes out his knife. He slices through Boston’s shirt and

  undershirt, the blade scraping from his belly to his neck. Boston’s chest is very pale compared to the rest of him, so rarely has it been bared.

  “I’ll be fried,” Bearn says.

  “Well, Mr. Milroy,” Chandler says. “Worried you would forget who you were?”

  Boston says nothing.

  “Such a quiet man for an American. But we have British law here. We have a determination to discover truth. Perhaps, then, you shall be so kind as to tell it to us.”

  “Told you.”

  “We don’t believe you.”

  “That’s your damn problem.”

  “I rather think it’s more yours, seeing as you are the one who will be tried for murder.”

  “Didn’t kill him, the Hume.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Tell us the story again. I am slightly confused.”

  “Me too,” Bearn says.

  “Shut up, Constable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Drowned.”

  “He drowned, did he?” Chandler asks and smiles.

  A cart rumbles past outside. The clerk scratches furiously at the

  papers, recording it all, and the sound of the scratching is that of a blue jay scratching at the window of Boston’s cabin. It was trying desperately to get out, though how it had gotten in he couldn’t say. He killed and ate it and then swept the blue feathers from the hearth.

  “Hauled him back to shore, but he was already dead. He’s a fool. Never seen such a fool.”

  “Ah, so it was a rescue you were attempting. Intriguing.”

  The clerk pauses in his writing and mops at his brow with a handkerchief. The Dora woman spoke of handkerchiefs. “We had the loveliest ones in our family shop. Ones with pictures from the Duke of Wellington’s funeral and from the Crystal Palace. They weren’t for using; they were so people wouldn’t be forgetting things. So as they could tell their children about what they’d seen and done, like.”

  Perhaps a simple handkerchief would have sufficed. Perhaps that was what the Dora woman meant.

  “Mr. Milroy,” Chandler says.

  “Rescue. That was it.”

  “Ah, well, you see, though you say it was a rescue attempt it certainly didn’t look like that to Mr. Hume’s partners. Indeed, to them it looked like something far more foul.”

  “Was it for some rite or other?” Bearn asks. “I’ve heard of the Indians in Canada carrying on like that.”

  Chandler turns to Bearn. “Damn you, I’ll ask the questions. . . . Well, was it some rite or other?”

  “Not an Indian. Wasn’t no rite. Was to even things out.”

  “Ah, revenge. That’s not particularly original. I put it to you, Mr. Milroy, that you were waiting to rob Mr. Hume. Indeed, that perhaps you justified doing so because he did you some injury in the past. He was an annoying man, after all, the sort who is always putting his foot in it, or so I have heard from Mr. Bushby here, and others.”

  Boston stares at Chandler’s boots which have been so polished that Boston can see a rough blotch that must be his own image.

  Chandler continues: “I put it to you that you thrust Mr. Hume, a sick and weakened man, under the water to force him to confess where his gold was hidden. And then you committed the second foul deed while he still breathed, hoping, perhaps, that some innocent Redman would hang in your stead.”

  “Seems a damned fool way to rob a man.”

  “Not for a damned fool.”

  Boston spits. It is a poor spit as his mouth is so dry. Still, it lands close enough to Chandler’s polished boots to warrant another wallop from Bearn.

  “Easy. We don’t want him so thick tongued he cannot talk.”

  “Fuck the lot of you.”

  At Chandler’s nod Bearn punches Boston in the stomach. Boston slumps groaning in the chair. Arthur Bushby hunches miserably over his papers. Chandler whistles the tune of “Greensleeves.” This tune Boston has heard before. In the Victoria jail the idiot Toolie sang it seven times over in his high, cracking voice before the jailer stuffed his mouth with straw.

  Chandler taps the clerk’s papers. “Mr. Bushby?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it all transcribed there?”

  “Yes, I think. Yes. Should we not help him?”

  Chandler gestures to Bearn who unties Boston and then manacles his hands and pulls him to his feet.

  Bushby watches white-faced, anxious-eyed. “I’m a musician, you know, I’m not really cut out for this law business.”

  “One does get used to it.” Chandler says.

  “He didn’t deserve this,” Bushby says.

  “Mr. Hume? I quite agree.”

  “I meant Mr. Milroy. It hasn’t been proven. He hasn’t been tried.”

  Chandler claps Bushby on the shoulder and steers him toward the door. “Let’s get together for some music making sometime, shall we? I have a modest talent for the notes m
yself.”

  Bushby twists in Chandler’s grip and looks back at Boston. With what? Curiosity? Revulsion? Years past, Illdare gave him such a look when he passed his gloved hand over Boston’s forehead, and then again when he learned that Boston could not forget. Kloo-yah, too, gave him such a look when she traced the scars on his chest, as did the Dora woman when first she saw him, there at the shore.

  Thirty-Eight

  The Judge has left the makeshift jail. Boston settles back against the iron forge to which he is manacled.

  “It’s odd, Mr. Jim, but it feels like I’ve known you for ever such a long time.”

  The Dora woman was quiet then, as if she was holding her breath. It seemed there’d never been such a quiet in the world. Boston stood and stomped his foot, for it had fallen asleep.

  “You’re leaving? Well and so. I’ve kept you here so long, haven’t I? All my stories. Oh, I talk, yes I do. But you’ll be coming again, won’t you? When Mr. Hume returns? We’ll have scones with butter. I’m sure to know how to make butter proper by then.”

  He muttered that yes, he might. And when he did his throat constricted, as if he had eaten juniper berries, as he did once at Fort Connelly, when he was still a child.

  He recalls this part of the conversation, recalls her restless movements, the Quamichans working in the garden, the clucking of the chickens, the spider making its web in the join of her cabin door. Now recalls all she said from when he first saw her on the shore, and how she looked when she spoke of the Hume, of her family, of London. There is still time. He might fall into her memories again. He might find himself again in the alleyway watching the young Dora with her mother and father. This time he will come from out of the shadows. “Join us,” they will say, and the jail will cease to be, as will the dull pain in his ribs and eyes, the fierce pain along his jaw, as will the knock-knocking of the scaffold being built outside the doors.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The next morning Bearn ties Boston’s hands behind his back and hobbles his legs

  “You are a sight,” Chandler says as he takes Boston’s hat.

  “Give it,” Boston mumbles, his lips being swollen and split.

  Chandler says he cannot wear his hat in the presence of the Judge, which is like being in the presence of the Queen, which is like being in the presence of God.

  “Bugger them all.”

  Bearn dutifully punches him in the ribs. Boston drops to his knees.

  “Mr. Milroy has drawn a sizable crowd,” Chandler says. “You are lucky to witness it, Mr. Bushby.”

  “Lucky?” asks Arthur Bushby, standing in the doorway.

  The shorn hills are the first thing Boston sees, then the morning sun fractured by clouds, then the crowd murmuring and shifting. One eye is suppurating and nearly shut, but the other recognizes most in the crowd as clearly as if he has known them all his life. Others might find this comforting when approaching a scaffold, seeing such familiar faces. Boston does not. He would much prefer to die in his cabin alone.

  Madame Blanc, carrying a green parasol, is talking with several men, her face averted. Boston thought she would be at the trial, that she would tell of what he wrote, of what she read aloud. But Madame Blanc did not appear. Keeping secrets was her own personal commandment, that was what she had said to him at the Denby saloon. Good that she was true to her word. Otherwise the jury would have construed he murdered the Hume because he coveted his wife, not his gold. Not that it mattered. The outcome would have been the same. Still, he was relieved when the Dora woman was not mentioned. For he did not covet her. To do so would be a betrayal of Kloo-yah, and he had betrayed her enough. No other word suffices. He can admit that now.

  The Swede lunges at him. Bearn shoves him back into the arms of Miss Anna. She is wearing a plaid dress this day and a bonnet. The one called Mariette stands in a plain brown dress, her hands folded before her. She will be busy when the hanging is done. All the whores will be.

  Boston’s lawyer, one Jedidiah Smithe, falls in beside him and mutters his regrets. He is a clerk at the assizes office, though lawyering, he said, was always his ambition. He has a high voice, a nervous habit of knuckling his cheek. Boston didn’t give a horse’s ass about a lawyer and told the Judge so. “You must do your part as well,” the Judge said.

  A short man in a high top hat shakes his fist and hurls a litany of curses. His companion wraps his scarf more tightly around his neck, as if it were he who needed protection from the noose. The two black men from the Hume’s claim are at the edges of the crowd. The tall one is walking away. The scarred one hesitates and then follows. The jury men jostle for position and place their bets, likely on how long his dying will take.

  Now Boston passes this George Bowson. He is sniffling and mouthing, fish-like, to the sky, his hands pressed in an attitude of prayer. He was the first one called to the stand, swore fervently on the Bible, then said: “I fell asleep. It was my turn to watch him, your honour, and I fell asleep. I can’t never forgive myself for it. I’ve been praying night and day every since but I don’t think I can ever be forgiven for it. . . .”

  He wiped his face with his sleeve. Chandler, acting as prosecutor, asked George Bowson what transpired on the night of September 14th. “Be specific. We must not shirk the specifics.”

  “Mr. Hallwood there and Mr. Langstrom, they woke me up when their shift was finished. They said: where’s Eugene? And I said I didn’t know. We went looking outside and then one of us, I don’t remember which, but one of us said that we should check the creek. When . . . when . . . we got there it was bright from the moon and it was cold. Terrible cold. And there was the sight the like of which I’ll never forget. Not if I should live to be a hundred by God’s grace. . . .”

  “Take your time,” Chandler said.

  “Thank you, sir. Mr. Hume, he was . . . was stretched out on the bank and that man there he . . . he was crouched over him. He had a great huge knife. There was an awful lot of blood. It was horrible, horrible.”

  And so on.

  Jedidiah Smithe asked Bowson if it weren’t possible that the Hume had drowned first, like the defendant had claimed. Smithe’s voice cracked as he spoke. He ruffled through his papers and sheaves of them fell to the floor. Chandler stood with his thumbs hooked in his vest, at ease with the world. Above them both sat Judge Begbie, black-robed and be-wigged, his hammer near to hand.

  “But I saw Mr. Hume move, sir. I heard some terrible moaning, too,” said Bowson.

  “Ah, but you’d just woken up,” said Smithe.

  “That’s true I suppose.”

  “And had you indulged in spirits, or opium, or well, anything of the like?”

  Bowson admitted to the opium. “But it wasn’t much. And I’ll never touch it again. I swear it on my father’s grave.”

  “Your honour,” Chandler interjected, “If a man’s testimony was to be discounted because of some indulgence then justice would never be done, not in this town, certainly, where hard-working honest men need some respite.”

  The jury nodded at this. Smithe stammered some objection. Why did he bother? Boston thought. It was all show, all sham.

  Through an interpreter whose English was not much better than his own, Langstrom told much the same story as Bowson had, added how he had seized Boston and likely would have killed him but for Mr. Beauville, who came running when he heard the ruckus and demanded he be held for the constable.

  “And why did you not want him killed on the spot, Mr. Beauville?” The Judge asked Napoleon when he took the stand.

  Napoleon looked at the Judge curiously. “I have seen justice taken into the hands of the mob, your honour. I have seen innocents murdered. Restraint is the only cure for such madness.”

  Lorn nodded at this. Chandler frowned.

  “You would make a fine lawyer, Mr. Beauville,” the Judge said.

  The details were wrong. The Hume had not moved, had not groaned. Boston had tried to revive him first, had turned him over and thudded his back to
get the water out. But the Hume was already stone dead. And Boston had not been howling in some foreign tongue as George Bowson said, as the others agreed, even this Napoleon Beauville. He had not been covered in blood. He had not fought with the strength of ten men. His limbs had been numbed from the cold stream. His fingers seemed frozen to the handle of the bowie knife. In any case, the desire to struggle fell from him as soon as Bowson and then the others were upon him. No, it did not occur the way they said. But then that is always the way with others. It is as if they inhabit a thousand possibilities. It is as if the past shifts for them to suit the present. They cannot be trusted, not ever, only the Dora woman. Only Kloo-yah who is gone from him.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Chandler passed Boston’s bowie knife to the jury. Told them to note the blood still on the blade. Then he passed them a small wooden box. “Final evidence. Look well.” One of the jury men retched as he opened it. Not long after, the Judge reached for his black cap.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The crowd falls nearly silent. Chandler and Bearn lead Boston to the four steps at the base of the scaffold. A priest of the Anglicans waits with his head uncovered. To the left of the scaffold is the Judge. Smoke curls from the pipe in his fist. Arthur Bushby is beside him, scuffing at the dirt.

  Boston spits. He had told them he wanted no priests, had told them he was making no deals with their conniving God.

  The priest says a prayer, then asks Boston for his last words. Boston’s mouth is too dry to spit again and so he ignores the priest and steps up on the scaffold. Bearn follows, holding Boston’s arm.

  Chandler pulls the hood over Boston’s head. Boston hears his own breathing and then the creaking of the boards as Chandler reaches for the noose. A weight is around his body, a slide of cloth that is rustling and smooth. His body is of a sudden larger, softer. It smells chalky and sweet. His heart quickens, his blood. Something scratches at his neck, a tendril of hair, such a bother at times, so unruly. Need more pins. Such a warm day. Ah, well and so, must talk to keep this worry within its banks. Poor man. I’ve never seen anyone so dirty and tired, it’s as if he’s been walking for centuries, like. And such misery in his face. Like that of a tragic actor. How could I have been frightened of him at first? He is as lonely as I am, worse I’ll guess, for he lives off in those mountains with only dead animals about him. And he’s listened so well. I chatter. How I chatter. Good that I gave him back that old pouch and the money. How astonished he looked! Good that I said it was for his birthday, poor sod. But who wouldn’t give him back his own? Who wouldn’t pity him enough for that?