Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  Whenever Finn thought of Fujino he thought of Kaneda and knew he was responsible. Hadn’t it been he, after all, who’d asked the young man to stay? He could remember telling him how happy Kaneda would be with the extra gold. And wasn’t it time to wonder about the nature of the accident? Accident—it was suicide, however unlikely. Still, if Finn knew anything about the Japanese it was that there was a connection between them and suicide. He had read it or heard it somewhere. He even knew the word, harakiri, or something nearly like it. Finn remembered that there had been a boy in school who’d taken his own life and left a note saying he was not a coward. He had leapt off a cliff and onto the rocks below because of the taunting of other boys, Finn among them. Still, that boy was a boy who demanded taunting. They had all done pensum. Finn and some of the others took flowers to the boy’s mother and had them scattered back in their faces for their trouble. They had gone to the funeral as a group and stood in school rows behind the teacher priests. Finn remembered praying for the boy’s soul. He prayed hard, his every muscle tight and straining, though he didn’t think it would do much good. He knew that a boy was not supposed to take his own life and so it would be very hard going no matter why he had done it. He had prayed, therefore, not so much for the boy as for his own part in the boy’s fall. He hadn’t a lot of guilt, but he had had some. He had been what might be called a medium taunter, the only hard evidence against him being a time he’d knelt down behind the lad and let another boy push him over. Finn could still remember the feeling of the boy’s buttocks and legs rolling over his back. The boy had fallen and cracked his head on the hard dirt and Finn had stood up and offered the boy his hand, which he immediately pulled away when the lad reached for it. On the day of the funeral and for weeks after, Finn had dreamed that he knelt at the edge of the jagged cliff and let the boy be pushed over him onto the sharp rocks below. He had dreamed of extending his long arm toward the boy. Off the cliff his arm would go, fluttering like a scarf in the boy’s crushed face. They had been terrible dreams and he ran to confession with them and with his part in the taunting as well.

  “He was an odd boy and you may know that God does not hold you to blame,” the priest had said.

  “Father, forgive me for I have sinned.”

  “Do three Hail Marys and feel yourself cleansed.”

  “In my dreams he fell across my back and onto the rocks below.”

  “He was a strange boy…”

  Three times he’d gone and on the third he left the confessional feeling the weight of the boy’s death falling from him. Later the priest invited him to tea and that night he slept soundly and saw the dead boy smiling and running on the playground, kicking a football with speed and precision past Finn and past the others.

  Finn had not thought of the dead boy in years, but now with Fujino the memory of him came back. He knew Fujino would not die. It had been a fortnight, or nearly that, and if he were going to die he’d have done so by now. Pensum. That strange schoolboy word. The memory of it made him realize how his language and his life had changed since leaving Ireland. Hadn’t he cleansed himself of it yet? Couldn’t he be sure of himself even now, after all these years? He was like a fighter between rounds, he was, taking a moment of reflection in the eyes of a dead mule.

  Finn looked up and noticed that it was snowing lightly again. He could hear the mumbling above, and when he looked at Ellen he found her looking back at him. He was hungry, bloody hungry, but the fire had nearly died away. He would build it up again and Ellen would prepare a meal. Phil must be nearly home by now. He could make the trip in winter as fast as most of them could in summer, him being an Eskimo and all.

  The mule’s head was clear to them for only a few hours each day. It was like a sundial, letting them gauge the hours of daylight, letting them know that the shadow they saw quickly passing down over its eyes was the shadow of night. The sun came through the windows briefly, like the dull back of a rolling whale, and then was gone. Finn slept more hours each day than he ever had, and Henriette sat rocking on the stiff hind legs of the straight-backed chair, drawing the shades if the sun shone in, remembering the way sickrooms were supposed to be and keeping everything quiet and dark. Her eyes reddened and from that she got the feeling of satisfaction that she believed belonged to nurses. When she came downstairs for meals, she ate quickly and talked to the others about the condition of the patient, about the amount he was eating and drinking, about the general state of his skin. She told them everything except what he said. That was in writing, and the act of transcribing it made further discussion seem an impossibility.

  Henriette wore heavy clothes around the house; she wore her sealskin jacket with her heaviest dress underneath. She seemed always to be cold, but when Ellen or even Finn tried to talk her down the stairs to be for a moment next to the bigger fire she resisted.

  “I’ve got my place and my job to do,” she said once. She climbed the stairs with a smoking tray of food and closed the bleeding door behind her, leaving Finn and Ellen alone again.

  Finn said, “Daylight’s gone. I had thought to go out.”

  “It’s not too far to the Gold Belt that you couldn’t get there and back without freezing.”

  “It mightn’t be a bad idea,” he said vaguely, already searching for his greatcoat. “I’ve been staring through this window so long that I feel like a painting and it my frame.”

  Ellen, casting her eyes toward the ceiling, said, “Bring back some beer. It might revive the young man’s spirits.” Finn was fitted into his outside clothes but hadn’t yet started toward the window.

  “Wouldn’t you consider coming along?” he asked. “I’ve seen proper women in the place before. Think of it as a change of scenery.”

  It was a matter of form, his asking. Ellen had been inside Irish pubs as a girl and could remember the smell of stale talk and ale. She remembered rubber faces turned on their stools to look, to see who’d come in, and she could recall the voice of the owner as he called to her father, “Lem, it’s your girl come to fetch you home.”

  Had she come full circle then? Finn stood with his hand out, waiting. He too realized that she might go with him. His standing there reminded Ellen of herself waiting for her father to make up his mind. Even if he took an hour, once she’d let him know she was there she could not speak again, and looking at Finn, she knew that he too would wait for her without speaking.

  “You don’t think I’d be hindering the fun of it?”

  Finn smiled broadly and moved toward her. “Not in the least,” he said. “It’s something we both need. We could make a night of it, really we could.”

  He took Ellen’s heavy coat off its hook and held it open for her now like the cape of a matador. Ellen walked to the window and looked out at the dark. “Time seems to mean nothing,” she said. She stepped into her coat and selected one of the skin-and-fur caps that they’d collected over the past few weeks. They could hear Henriette talking quietly in the room above them. One of the things Ellen had noticed about her bath was how clearly sound traveled. She didn’t like that. She wanted silence from the occupants of the rooms. She wanted the effect of privacy.

  Finn opened the window and they backed out, stepping quickly onto the crusted snow. Stars were dim and dusty and the nearby tents were dirty next to the white snow. They stopped for a moment and looked through the front window of the bath. This was the mule’s view. They saw the empty room and the clean table and the red glow from the stove. It didn’t seem nearly as cold as they’d expected it would. Though the path between the tents and bath had filled with snow, they found it well packed and easy to walk across. Only occasionally did one of them step through the top crust. Mostly the snow held them, let them step on its crisp top without breaking.

  The Gold Belt was not the only saloon in Nome, but it was the largest and it was the only one that had the frame of a building built up around it. The tent flap opened precisely where the door would be. The room was smoky and full, but they found a cor
ner table and sat down. It was dark. There were dozens of girls wearing long trousers and wool shirts whereas before they’d all dressed as ballerinas. There was music and loud talking and they were forced to wait for a long while before being served. Neither of them spoke. They looked around the room, so different from the one in which they’d spent the last days. Even Ellen felt a certain release, a certain sense of celebration. More people were arriving; no one was going home. The owner spotted Finn and waved. Business was booming, though it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon.

  At selected spots around the Gold Belt iron-bellied stoves burnt heat into the room, and at each stove a wire mesh fence kept people away, kept them from locking their cold hands to the metal. Snow from the boots of customers melted into the sawdust and dirtied it so that every few days the owner laid the floor again, fresh sawdust covering the old. At the end of winter it would be higher than the floor of the city and customers would have to step up to get inside.

  For Ellen and Finn the room was in half light, the ceiling as black as a starless sky. It gave them the feeling of limitlessness. At the center of each table a kerosene lamp glowed as far as the faces of the customers, round circles of light extending only to the table’s edge, making it difficult to see those who walked near. A waitress appeared out of the darkness and took their order. A whiskey for Finn, tea for Ellen. Music drifted across the room, soft military marches. There were soldiers in the bar, the luminous stripes that ran down their pant legs visible in the dark, vertical shafts of light swinging across the room like clock pendulums.

  “A whiskey and a tea,” said the waitress, suddenly beside them again. Finn placed heavy coins in her hand.

  “It’s more like a country carnival than a pub,” said Ellen. “It reminds me of a circus or a traveling show.”

  “The man does have a flair for the grand spectacle,” Finn told her. “Look what he’s done.”

  He pointed to one of the waitresses passing their table. The waitress and most of the others had round red circles of rouge painted onto their cheeks, large red lipstick kisses on their mouths. And each girl had a gray wool shirt tucked neatly into canvas trousers. When the waitresses were not tending to customers they often picked partners and danced between the tables. Familiar faces from the bath and the beach strike appeared around Finn and Ellen as they sat sipping their drinks.

  It was a surprise to Finn to discover that many of the creek mines had shut down late, caught by quick winter, and now some of the men had nowhere to go and refused to leave places like the Gold Belt and the New York Kitchen even at closing time. At the edges of the room in which they drank, a few men were rolled into blankets, asleep on the dirty sawdust floor.

  Ellen pushed her teacup about the small table. “Men turn out this way or that depending on what’s inside them,” she said. “That same group would be lying flat on the lower streets of Belfast. Those that turn out well here would turn out well elsewhere.”

  “Such talk,” said Finn. “No credit given to a bit of luck? None to a twist of fate?”

  Before Ellen could answer, John Hummel, whom she’d not seen since the day before Fujino’s accident, came into their circle of light, still wearing his canvas necktie with its twelve-hundred-dollar sign. A new lively tune began and Hummel stretched his necktie into a dancing partner and whirled with it two or three times around them. It was a waltz and the dips and stops that it afforded him pleased some in the crowd and encouraged him to continue. He held his left arm out stiffly and pressed the canvas sack to his chest, making it the back and shoulders of his dancing partner. He glided and turned, dipping nearly to the floor. The heavy coins in the necktie clanged together in clumsy time to the music. He smiled broadly at Ellen and Finn, letting small liquid whips of spittle escape from the corners of his mouth and arc to the floor. Hummel danced until the music ceased, then he let the sack bounce dully on his chest and come to rest once again as a dead weight, one that he might dance with, but one that might carry him to the bottom of the river as well.

  He scooted onto a chair, letting his elbows rest on the back of it, wiping his mouth on his sleeve before speaking.

  “Hello, Ellen, how’s your bath?” he said.

  Though until now Ellen had had sympathy for the man and his condition, she detected the note of menace in his voice and answered guardedly: “Hello, Mr. Hummel…”

  “Have you forgiven the community for jumping your claim then?” Finn asked, half smiling at the man. “The last I saw of you, you’d have liked to shoot us all.”

  Hummel knew what the result of his work had been. Every day since the incident he’d scurried through the blinding snow to hide behind the rump of Finn’s dead mule and peer through the windows of the bath. He had seen them standing, heard them talk. He’d moved back from view when Phil left and tonight had followed the two of them as they tried not to crack the frozen top of the paths that the winter had made.

  “Forgiven,” he said, “but not forgotten. Everyone is rich on my discovery.” He wanted to ask after the condition of the Japanese, but knew he could not. He turned his attention to Ellen.

  “I would have been by before now, miss, but I’ve noticed that your place is closed.”

  “We’ve a sick man there, and the winter has been more than we’d counted on. Even our door is frozen shut.”

  “Well, I want to be the first customer again, after you reopen.”

  Hummel stood and saluted, then marched once more around their table, his stick shouldered again like a gun. Finn and Ellen looked toward the bar as he marched that way. They watched him duck through the heavy flaps of the tent and into the darkness. The Gold Belt was still crowded and many of the girls and customers were dancing. A few moments after Hummel left a fight broke out and one of the men cracked his head on the corner of the bar and was carried away. He bled into the sawdust from a wound in the back of his head. There was not much blood, but Finn saw Hummel in it, smiling at him from his wounded mouth. With the beginning of another tune the girl who’d been waiting on them extended her hand to Finn. He looked at her briefly then recognized the invitation and stood quickly. He waited to see if he could detect disapproval on the face of Ellen before he began roughly whirling her across the floor.

  Mounds of earth were covered with snow and dotted the flat area of the Eskimo village like insect bites. The lean-tos had been dismantled pelt by pelt, the materials placed inside the storage sheds, away from the water’s edge. The reverend’s house still loomed, its large front window reflecting the sun, but otherwise only Nanoon’s cold coming-of-age hut could be seen.

  During the daylight hours the men and women of the village walked again on the paths between their underground houses and out onto the ice of Norton Sound, where they cut holes and pulled fish out of the freezing water. During the daylight hours Phil’s women wore their golden snowflakes on the outsides of their jackets, dangling down their fronts heavily. The reverend wore his too, not hanging from his neck, but pinned to the outside of his greatcoat just over his heart so that sometimes when he walked from his house toward the village the sun caught it and the villagers knew who was coming.

  This was a village of crazes, and soon Phil’s golden snow-flakes had been seen and handled by everyone. Phil had brought back not only the product but the method of the snowflakes, and the reverend decided that he would send all the children scurrying, when winter broke, into the streams and rivulets for nuggets. A snowflake for everyone, he promised them, for though it was a village of crazes, none would be content unless all possessed. There were too many examples to number, but going back just a year, each member of the village had collected a pink parasol, a soft-lead pencil, and a sketch pad.

  And now the golden snowflakes. The children lived in anticipation, asking questions. They wanted to know if the shapes of their snowflakes would be something they could choose and if all the snowflakes would be of equal size. Phil told them what they got would represent purely the shape of chance, but they w
ere not satisfied with his answer and within a week there had been a revival of the popularity of the pencils and pads. Each would draw the snowflake of his choice according to the web of his imagination. Then in spring, as the golden snowflakes were made, they would be compared to the drawings and given to the person who most truly had imagined what the first and then the second and then the third snowflake would be like. The members of the Eskimo village believed that no two imaginations were alike. Thus, rather than saying, “I am first; the first snowflake is mine,” they decided upon the shapes of their snow-flakes and then waited for them to come true.

  Darkness falls, whatever the activities of the day have been. The villagers crawled into their huts, into their underearth homes, through the tunnels they had made. The walls of the houses were truly made of ice, and of dirt and wood and pieces of cloth. Inside there was tar blackness and lamps that lightened it slightly and chimneys that projected upward and air vents that came in from the sides. The floors of the underground rooms were covered first with skins and then with small dried pieces of fur from rabbit or beaver or fox. Game was not plentiful in this area but the robes lasted years and during the summer were stored carefully away. The Eskimos tried to sleep only as much in winter as they did during the summer, or only a little more. During the long hours before sleep, when it was dark and early on the outside earth, the families sat and talked, told each other stories, or made love. There was an unsureness as to the parentage of the children, so as a precaution everyone was mother or father to each. Stories were told of the old days and the old were revered for their storytelling.

  Each night the reverend reentered his house and started his fires and sat with tea in one of the warm chairs in front of his window. At sunrise and at sunset he saw the Eskimos fading in and out. At night he saw the area in front of his window take on the appearance, once again, of a wasteland. This was the time he used for writing long letters and for preparing his next day’s lessons. Several times he had written to Ellen, but of course he had no easy way of sending his letters, and as much as they were letters to Ellen they were letters to himself. He did not believe in loneliness, with his memories and his God and his busy schedule as teacher.