Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  With the quick descent of darkness the window in front of the reverend became a mirror, and it was his habit to look at himself in it for an hour each night and in a loud voice to practice sermons as he remembered them being given in seminary. He was not a preacher really, but he liked what he saw in the window. He was a happy man but did not suppose he was responsible for that happiness or for the happiness of the village. On some nights he sat in his chair, forgetting to eat, just staring at his poor face in the reflected darkness. He liked the sound of his voice and it would occasionally stir him to stand and descend the ladder. By this time his stomach was usually growling and he could not imagine how he had ignored it for so long.

  The village and Nome and the camp on Topcock Creek form a triangle across the permafrost. At the third point, up on the edge of Topcock Creek, Kaneda still waits, leaning asleep over the fire that he does not let die. He has stopped mining but has hunted, piling each new pelt, no matter what the size, close around him on the floor of the tent. He has built fires around his camp, on four sides, and he feeds them with moss, for he believes this will keep the wolves away. Though he is older, he looks so much like Phil that even he will be surprised when they meet. He is sure that Fujino is very late. If nothing has happened to the boy it is unforgivable. The gold that he has been able to take out by himself is not a quarter of the amount that Fujino has, and if he is forced to work alone he will not be able to make that much again. He is not strong and cannot work more than nine or ten hours a day.

  Kaneda has continued telling his stories though there is no one around to listen. In order to pass the time he decided to start at the beginning, to remind himself of all he has read and learned about the history of the country he loves. He talks in a loud voice and shakes his finger in the air when making an interesting or important point.

  “It is always best to begin at the beginning,” he says. “Though Japan has existed forever, we began taking notice of ourselves only three thousand years before Jesus. That was during the Jomon period and we know of it only because some of its pottery has survived.”

  His goal is to tell himself everything he has ever known about Japan, from the beginning of time to the arrival of Commodore Perry, whom he himself saw. Fujino will be sorry when he finds out what he has missed. Kaneda knows not only the events of history but many of the stories behind the events. He has read journals and diaries and looked through the libraries of Tokyo for the notes that generals used to send each other. He would be able to teach Fujino as much as he could learn in the best universities if only the young man were there to listen. But in fact not hearing it will be a part of Fujino’s punishment for being so late. When he comes back he will have lost all that Kaneda has already told. That will be lost to him forever. Kaneda takes a deep breath and sighs. “We don’t know very much about the Jomon,” he says, “but we do know this….”

  Finn secured the window, the cold tin handle of it sticking briefly to his skin. He saw the dead mule and thought how strange it was that he could get used to such a sight so quickly, that he no longer noticed the frozen corpse much. Ellen placed a large copper pot upon the stove. The smell of freshly cut boards was renewed to them and the room seemed much too hot.

  Henriette appeared from the bath and stood staring. “You’ve let the heat out,” she said. “The room’s got cold again.”

  “We thought you’d be upstairs,” said Ellen.

  “He’s worse. As soon as you left he got worse. I had to bring him down all by myself. He stopped talking and began to shiver. I thought you’d never get back.”

  Finn and Ellen moved quickly across the room to Henriette. They pushed her back and peered into the steaming bathroom. It was difficult to see through the mist and hot air, but as they walked into it Fujino appeared to them, sitting naked up to his neck in the hot water of the bath.

  “I had to drag him,” said Henriette. “He’s bleeding from the other end.”

  Fujino’s mouth had hardened into the surprising shape of a zero. His lips had turned the color of his gums. His hands floated in the water next to his knees, and from deep down blood the color of ink floated to the top of the tub.

  “He’s hemorrhaging,” Finn whispered.

  “He’s stopped talking,” said Henriette. “The last thing he said was that he was an interpreter. I brought him down here as soon as I saw the blood.”

  This was the first time either Ellen or Finn had seen Fujino outside of bed since his accident. He had lost far more weight than they’d expected and there were long scratches along his arms and thighs where he’d drawn his sharp fingernails.

  “Is there no one in this town who can help?” said Ellen. “I thought he was getting better.” She turned to Henriette. “You gave us the impression that the man was improving.”

  “I’m the only one who ever took any interest in him,” Henriette said quietly.

  “You took an interest in pretending to be a nurse,” Finn told her. “Why didn’t you tell us the condition he was in?”

  Like Fujino’s Henriette’s mouth formed a little circle. Tears climbed to her eyes, bringing Finn’s arm quickly around her and making him say he was sorry. “We are only surprised to find him so,” he said. “We really thought he was getting better.”

  Ellen carried three stiff chairs from the main room and placed them around the wooden bathtub. “We should keep the water hot,” she said, “the perspiration out of his eyes.”

  Henriette calmed down and brought already prepared water and poured it gently over Fujino’s face. The excess flowed over the sides of the tub and through the loose floorboards. The room quieted as the lapping of the water in the tub subsided. Fujino still held that surprised look. Finn asked him several times if he could hear them, but he got no response. Henriette had her paper handy in case he said anything, but she didn’t think he would. Through the open door of the room, through the window of the bath, Ellen could see the shadowy form of Finn’s mule, its dead eyes shining.

  “A vigil,” she said, looking at herself and at the other two. “Is there nothing else a human being can do?”

  Ellen let her hand fall over the edge of the tub occasionally, and if the water grew too cool she nodded and Henriette got up and poured more in. “Waiting for death,” she thought and she could picture, through the steam, through the depthless zero of Fujino’s mouth, the pursed white lips of her own dying grandmother. Ellen’s grandmother had fallen coming downstairs and had been carried back up again. “I’m going down,” she’d shouted, but the place for the injured was in bed so she was carried back up by her loving son and placed in the bed she’d come from. After that the house was quiet. None of the children were allowed to laugh, nor were they allowed to speak.

  “Don’t say whatever comes into your head,” her father had warned. “Speak only if it’s well worth saying.”

  Ellen remembered that the air of that house had seemed as hot and heavy to her as her old grandmother’s breath, as the bath did now. She sat in the kitchen for hours trying to think of something she knew that was worth saying, that could be said out loud without bringing on a scolding. She eliminated first those things personal: a lesson she had learned, the torments of a school chum. And by these eliminations she discovered she could talk of nothing else for these were her only subjects. She sat for hours waiting to be admitted to the upstairs room. She felt so foolish, a girl of her age with no other subjects but those. Still, as quickly as she thought of something to say she was forced to discard it. She could speak of nothing. Her father had ordered her to be quiet or if she couldn’t be quiet to be sure of the value of what she had to say, and so she discovered that nothing she could think of was of any value at all. Everything was better left unsaid. Everything except the one sentence, the one question she had been permitted to utter over and over again. “How is grandmother?” She said it ten times every day and always it passed as the real concern of a child.

  “As well as can be expected, Ellen dear,” said her fa
ther. “She is very old.”

  Each time she asked he answered slowly and looked at her or touched her on the chin or shoulder, and each time he believed, with all his heart, that she cared.

  How is grandmother? How is grandmother? Of all the subjects of the world was this the only allowable utterance? She cleaned the corners of her small mind but found only this. Again, How is grandmother?

  Ellen stood in the hallway when the other members of her family were upstairs and watched the old clock’s pendulum sweep across her mirrored face. She remembered wanting so much to smash it. Before her grandmother came to live with them this space had contained a coat rack and she was able to stand behind the coats buried in the smell of her father. He would see her feet and would throw his arms around the coats as if he didn’t know she was there, and she would be his bundle, to be carried, squealing, over his shoulder and through the house. And now only the clock, its pendulum moving like a heartbeat inside the dustless case, defined the corner.

  Ellen’s father stood behind her imagining worry in the child’s glass face. “You’d better see her now,” he said, so she climbed the stairs with him, moving as he did, letting all her weight fall on her left foot and then her right. Slowly.

  Inside the room were heavy quilts and heavy curtains. Her father left, feeling that this was a time for the child and her grandmother, a time of communion.

  The child walked on cat’s feet across the floor and peered at the bird’s head that was her grandmother. The skin hung from her neck and face so loosely. The bed covers were nearly flat over the wasting body. Her grandmother was a tall woman and the rod-thin line of her body extended, even now, all the way from the top to the foot of the bed, and as she stood there a hand came at her from the side of the covers, snapping. She stood back slowly out of its reach and watched the hand pecking at the air, blind until the eyes of the grandmother opened to it.

  “Come here.”

  Ellen moved forward and bent low. The fingers clasped the front of her dress like clothespins. The sharp point of her grandmother’s nose was smooth and waxy, the eyes were small and dry. Ellen said quietly, “How is grandmother?” but there was no answer and in a moment her father came and took her out again. She felt her father’s heavy hands guide her toward her room as if she were a stranger there. She felt him squeeze her shoulder and felt him leaning over her in the dark, waiting for her to fall asleep.

  “Sleep now, Ellen, don’t be afraid,” he said. He stroked her head and pushed the hair back out of her eyes. He waited and she felt herself lowering, getting further from him. “How is grandmother?” she heard herself say.

  In the morning her grandmother was dead and the curtains and windows of her room were opened. Ellen could see the fields behind the house and the sun, and she was hungry. She bounded down the stairs and into the kitchen. She saw the heavy arms of her father across his knees and she saw the tears in his eyes.

  “Father?” she said.

  He took her on his lap surrounding her and said, “She is gone. My mother is gone,” and Ellen felt his tears and tried to get away. It was the first time she’d seen her father cry. He who was able to go into pubs and who smoked a pipe. He had said “my mother,” and Ellen thought, How silly, her mother was standing in the kitchen, nobody really cared about the grandmother. They were all pretending. It was important pretending while she was alive, but why continue? It was supposed to be over now. All those days of asking how is she were supposed to be over now and it wasn’t fair.

  Ellen felt disgusted looking at her father, and for the very first time. And what she did next everyone supposed was due to grief. She got away from her father and without hesitation smashed the face of that grandfather’s clock. She did it with her grandmother’s cane and heard her father and mother rush into the hall and expected to be beaten for it. She waited, stiffening, even pushing the cane in her father’s direction, but all he did was pick her up and hold her. She tried to wiggle but he held her tight until she was quiet. And all she could hear was her father’s heartbeat, sounding from deep within his chest.

  When Fujino died Henriette pushed the other two out of the bath and would not let them return until she’d dried him off and had him into clean clothes. Finn went again into the night to find out what was to be done with the remains in this city. There had been deaths before yet there was no doctor. People like John Hummel were allowed to leak blood over everyone and grin about the fact that there was no professional man nearby to heal them. Finn felt now, for the first time, that he was in a wilderness. The dim oil lamps of the bath died before he was a dozen feet away and there were no stars or lights from the dirty tent sides, which, like the flat white sides of ghosts, he kept bumping into. He headed toward the Gold Belt, but even after all this time he couldn’t find it alone, totally unguided by any light.

  The man is dead, thought Finn. He’s been dying the whole time and I did nothing but stand by watching. This time there was nobody to blame but himself. He could have asked someone other than Fujino for help at the beach strike; there had been others around. Finn supposed he viewed suicide less tragically than he did accidents. The man took his own life, after all, and who is to say that he should have been saved from it? Still, though the evidence was clear, it seemed impossible that Fujino had wanted to die. Even that last evening he had talked about Kaneda and how he’d be glad to get back and how he hoped that the old man had not worried. It had been wrong of Finn to talk Fujino into staying in Nome for so long. He should have let the man go. He should have drunk with him and then sent him packing, back to Kaneda, back to Topcock Creek.

  Finn stopped and looked around him. The paths turned in six directions and he had no idea which might lead him to help. A man had died and the first thing he’d done was run into the night, getting himself lost. This was the second time in his life that he’d felt touched with blame. Someone had died and he had not been unconnected. When Finn noticed that it had again started to snow, he continued walking, no longer choosing the path he would take, but merely turning on impulse. The snow was tiny and hard-hitting, yet when he closed his eyes he could somehow take comfort from it. He felt it encasing his eyebrows, he felt the increasing weight of it settle and freeze on the hood of his heavy jacket.

  But Finn soon regained a sense of where he was. He had worked his way out of the canvas labyrinth and now found himself on the path that led up the hill behind the city and directly to the door of Dr. Kingman. He remembered the short man and even at this distance could see the yellow glow of the crystal chandelier. He knew immediately that he would knock and ask his question of whoever answered. The light from the chandelier did not seem brighter as he got nearer to the house, and in every window it was now possible for him to see the tinier glow of other, smaller lamps. When he stepped onto the porch the boards took his weight without comment. He swung two pieces of brass together three times, then waited and knocked again. In a moment a thin strip of wood slid from the middle of the door and someone peered out at him.

  “It’s late.”

  “There has been a death. I must ask someone…”

  There were two doors, an outer one and an inner one, spaced three feet apart. Finn stood for a few seconds more, until the voice told him to come in, then he pulled back the first big door and walked into an entryway. He was told to close the door behind him. Now the eyes were looking at him through the next door.

  “Who are you?”

  “Finn Wallace,” said Finn, pushing the hood off his head. “There has been a death.” He decided to say no more. Though he had pushed his hood off so that they could get a better look at him, he did not want to give the impression that he’d come with his hat in his hands.

  Presently the second door opened and the small man, Dr. Kingman himself, stood in front of him. He held a wine glass in his hand and had a small pistol stuck in his back pocket.

  “You aren’t with our group,” Dr. Kingman said flatly, holding the door open and watching Finn closely.
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  “I am independent,” said Finn.

  “You’re an Irishman, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before. You’re connected with the public bath.”

  “A man has died, Dr. Kingman. A Japanese named Fujino. He is in Ellen’s bath even now.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, the truth is I’ve been looking for someone who can tell me what is to be done with the remains. There is no doctor. There are no facilities.”

  “Who told you there was no doctor? We have a doctor. He stays out at the mine site, but he might have come.”

  Finn felt that the man was going to say, “Why didn’t you come to me earlier? If I’d only known,” but instead he turned on his heels and walked away from Finn and into the room that held the chandelier.

  Dr. Kingman poured more red wine into his own glass then filled another to the top for Finn. There was a large fire burning at the hearth and there were two heavy chairs in front of it. The light from the chandelier and the fire cast the room in unlikely brightness. Dr. Kingman motioned to Finn. “Sit down. I’m curious why you came to me with your problem.”

  “I was looking for someone to help me with the remains.”

  “But why me?”

  “Yours was the first light I saw. I got a bit lost down below and when I saw your light it seemed the most expedient place to stop.”

  “Expedient? You came to me because it was expedient?”