Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

“A man has died, Dr. Kingman.”

  “Ever since the freeze people have been knocking on my door for some favor or other, but this is the first time anyone has done so because it was expedient.”

  Finn drank the wine and put the glass lightly on the small table next to his chair. This man was playing with him. Perhaps he didn’t believe there’d been a death; perhaps he thought Finn was there out of a desire to get close to him in some way. Finn thought of the look locked on the poor face of Fujino. That round circle of a mouth, those peaked eyebrows. Fujino hadn’t seen death closing in on him until the last moments and he’d been taken aback, that was clear. He’d been taken completely by surprise and now Finn was being surprised by this pompous man. He stood and said, “I’ve business to attend to. Thank you for the glass of red.”

  “But you’ve barely told me why you came. Isn’t there anything else?”

  Such comfort, thought Finn. He felt like picking the little bugger up and pushing him into the fire. He was embarrassed to have been so intimidated by the man earlier. He walked slowly toward the door, trying to give his own face the surprised look that Fujino’s had.

  “Good evening,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Put your friend on ice,” said Dr. Kingman. “There is nothing else to be done before the thaw.”

  Finn opened and closed one door then opened and closed the other and was outside again. The storm was heavier than it had been when he’d entered the house, but from here he knew his way back to the bath well enough. It seemed colder to him now than when he’d ventured out and the snow that hit his face and clung to his eyebrows began, strangely, to feel hot. Finn walked, rubbing the backs of his furry gloves across his forehead as he went. Put him on ice, Kingman had said, and in truth it seemed like the best idea. Poor Fujino. Finn would have to go and tell Kaneda. It was his fault, as much or more than the fault of the others, and he’d have to be the one to tell the old man. He remembered going to the home of his dead school friend to have his flowers thrown back in his face. He worried about Kaneda, hoping that the old man had enough to eat and that he’d been able to keep warm. Fujino had come to town to trade in their gold and to get supplies. Of course the old man had sent him for supplies before the cold weather set in. So he was up there with nothing and likely frozen with that same look upon him! Finn ran now and was among the tents very quickly. The old man! He would do pensum for the death of Fujino by saving the old man. If only he wasn’t too late. If only he could find the campsite, get there without freezing himself. Finn rounded the corner nearest the bath building. There was an oil lamp burning in the window of the room where Henriette had for so long taken care of the dying Japanese. He pulled on the door handle twice before remembering that it wouldn’t open, before stepping around the corner of the building.

  Ellen and Henriette had their faces pressed to the cold glass of the window and were crying. Quickly he took a step toward them and stopped. Freezing the body was the only thing they could do…. Ellen and Henriette had thought of it too. Fujino was wearing a heavy gray coat, a fur hood pulled up warm around his surprised face. Perhaps he thought he was going back to Kaneda, even in death, going back to fulfill his promise to the old man. Before bringing him outside Henriette had closed his eyes. His mouth was open, but for sight he relied completely on the eyes of the frozen mule he rode.

  No one knew what to say. Henriette took it the hardest, and retired, when Finn got back, to the upper room, where she had for so long nursed Fujino. She sat in her stiff-backed chair facing the bed, or she wrote for a while in the journal she’d been keeping. She wrote “the end” but continued to cry with abandonment. Tears dropped from her eyes, and her shoulders and back shook as if from violent laughter. He was dead and could be seen below, riding the awful mule she had so recently described to him. A dead mule and rider, seen through the swirls of snow from the sickroom window, the nurse standing, defeated. It was too horrible. She had been sure he would pull through and from his sitting-up position look past the others and toward her, and stretch out his hand and say, “It was you, wasn’t it? who took care of me? who saved me?” Such a vision of victory. She would glide to him and let him take her hand. She had decided long ago that she would allow herself only a moment of such intimacy. After that she would withdraw, return to being the Henriette that he had known before his illness. She would not let him thank her again, and she would not, even for a moment, let him fall in love with her.

  Henriette remembered the times when Fujino had been completely asleep and she had lifted his covers to tuck them back in around his legs, under the thin mattress. She’d let her eyes fall upon every part of his wrinkled body then and she had touched him. It was too awful, but once and with a dull pencil she had written her name long across the length of his thigh. She had been surprised at how little hair his body had when she’d laid her arm, soft, against his sallow stomach. He had been asleep, dying, and she had used his body as a curiosity. Sometimes she imagined that she was looking at the body of a very old man, of Kaneda, or even her own father. “He is Japanese,” she said to herself. “He came from Japan.” She remembered the Chinese she’d seen in Seattle, but he was nothing like them. They were to be suspicious of and scurried in groups. He and Kaneda were quiet and wore regular clothes, and though they spoke to each other oddly, they were always careful to explain what they were saying to the others.

  Henriette’s crying subsided now, though she tried desperately to maintain it. What a fool she had been. She’d treated him like one of the stuffed rag dolls of her childhood. She looked down at herself and at the dress that she for so long had imagined to be the uniform of a nurse. She knew that if she looked out the window she would see the hollow-mouthed patient, riding, leaning forward on the mule, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets like some trick rider. The mule’s eyes were opened and she knew, if she looked, she would see them staring, trying to lead that blind one back to her.

  Henriette silently and slowly began unbuttoning the front of her dress. She let it slip from around her shoulders but caught it before it fell to the ground. She took off the rest of her clothing then walked to the window, looking straight ahead. She hung the dress from tacks, draping it over the window like a curtain. She hung her stockings and underwear, and she placed her shoes on the window sill, using them as weights to hold the curtain down, to keep it from moving with the breeze that came slightly sifting between the boards. Though her own body was pale, as she looked down at it she knew that she was in good health, would outlive everyone.

  When Henriette got in the bed and pulled the heavy covers up to her chin, she could feel her body settling into the contours that had been formed by the dying Fujino, and she let herself lie as he had. Did the bed still contain some of the warmth of his body? She wanted to continue crying, but she knew that was impossible. She wanted to stay awake and in mourning all night long, to know that the others were asleep and that only she was conscious and remembered, but that was impossible as well. She felt sleep moving in. Like the tide she felt it washing over her, and she let it pull her gently. Though she’d failed as a nurse, she wanted to be successful at grief. Could sleep come so easily to one who mourned? How could she let herself find peace when her failure stood hard as granite and staring at the building where she slept? These questions died like candles and she was dreamless and did not toss or turn. Later she would look at herself in the mirror and call herself heartless.

  4

  Just as the land stretched back from the sea-less shore the snow piled up, the wind blew it into drifts, and the drifts into mountains. The freeze reclaimed that top four or five feet that the summer had softened. In the Eskimo village the reverend felt the cold. Though it was his fourth winter, and though he had thought for weeks about all he would need to stock up on to be comfortable, there were certain things he had forgotten. He had enough firewood, and enough food, but he had neglected reading material. Stories. Those he had he had reread many times. He loved the sound of th
e words as they came off the page and he especially loved reading aloud, but he wanted to be unaware of what the story would bring him, of what would happen. Sometimes he had the urge to tear final pages from the books and replace them with endings of his own. He was a willful man and could be a willful storyteller, one whom the listener would know could handle himself, come what may.

  The reverend often thought of writing down stories. He told them frequently enough, when he preached to the village people. And, though he would never have admitted it to his superiors, there were many times when he got carried away. More than once, indeed nearly always, he took what he remembered to be the point of his sermon and added to it. He made up characters that the Bible never knew and his characters always worked well for him. Of course his teachings were always Christian, but the characters, and the way they saw the light, with those he had taken liberties.

  Anyway, for today the reverend didn’t need to worry about stories. Today he was having a party. He tried to have at least two parties each winter, so soon his house would fill up warmly with all the members of the village. If he climbed to his balcony he could probably see them now, emerging from their underground homes as if by magic. It always amazed him to be looking out at the vast expanse of whiteness and to suddenly see people appear. They came out of the ground like spring vegetables and moved about. It was a hard life, being an Eskimo, and he had nothing but admiration. Summer homes, winter homes. Fishing, hunting. My, how he admired them sometimes.

  The reverend prepared what he could for the party, according to the stock of his shelves. He baked cookies and made punch, using an old family recipe. He knew that the children liked to climb up and down the rough ladder to his loft, so as a precaution against splinters he had wrapped each of the rungs with old pelts, no longer of any use as clothing.

  At the first knock on the door the reverend slipped into a light coat with the cherished golden snowflake on its breast. He adjusted his clothing and opened the door. Everyone in the village was there. They had come as a family, all at one time. They did not want the heat to escape from the room as it would if the reverend had to keep opening and closing his door.

  “Hello,” they said, walking in single file. They had arranged themselves short to tall. The children disappeared up the fur-covered ladder and the main room was left to the adults. Immediately, as the door was closed, those who had not yet completed their snowflake drawings pulled off their coats, exposing sketch pads and pencils pressed to their bodies. They sat and wet the ends of their pencils, then stared hard, as if looking into the paper for ideas. The others took off their outer clothing and stood waiting to sense the temperature of the room. It was a treat to dress lightly in a heated house. They moved to the punch bowl, tapping tin cups against it like prisoners.

  A child hung by her knees from the balcony railing.

  Phil’s women, displaying their snowflakes proudly, stood back to back in the center of the room, waiting to be admired.

  Phil himself sought out the reverend, wanting to continue a conversation that they’d had briefly the day before. They were talking about suicide, about its suddenness and its consequences. Phil retold the story of Fujino, how he had seemed so normal, so full of anticipation. “It was the very eve of his return to Topcock Creek and he seemed happy to be going.”

  “The human mind works mysteriously,” the reverend told him.

  “Are Japanese Christians?”

  “I suppose if there are any there are only a few.”

  “I don’t know whether he lived or died.”

  The reverend had never been comfortable in private conference with his parishioners. He preferred the distance of the pulpit for serious talk.

  “Oh, he probably lived,” he said weakly.

  “But if he died the gates of heaven are closed to him. Whether he is a Christian or not.”

  “Well…” said the reverend. He looked at Phil and realized that this man, a village leader, a hunter, was asking him for guidance. These were the toughest times.

  Phil asked, “Thou shalt not commit murder means suicide too, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, I guess so….” The reverend leaned down and dipped some punch out of the metal basin. He handed it to Phil and took another cup for himself. Out of respect for the fact that he was giving them a party, the other men and women sat or stood quietly, listening, waiting for him to more fully answer Phil’s question. By now the story of Fujino was well known, and had been passed with precision around the village. No one knew what Japan was, but they understood that the man looked like one of them and that he’d tried to take his own life. Many of them thought it must have been a matter of illness, or of no food. He died so that others could eat, something along those lines. But he was a young man and certainly must have been able to hunt. It was puzzling.

  The reverend stood stooped over the punch bowl for a few seconds, thinking. When he straightened up again he laid his thin hands on Phil’s shoulders and gazed around the room at the others.

  “Andrew the Suicidal,” he said, pausing, waiting for the words to show themselves on Phil’s face.

  “Andrew the Suicidal lived and marched, for a while, with Jesus Christ himself. He was not a hunter, and he carried from the day he was born an intense dislike for himself.” The reverend was confident now, and in his mind’s eye could picture Andrew moping around the outskirts of the band of Jesus’ followers.

  “He was not an easy man to like, and for that reason Jesus spent more time with him than with many of the others. Some were jealous of their relationship, for to Andrew, you see, Jesus was more than a savior. He was an object of intense desire.”

  Several of the Eskimo women looked to their neighbors to translate the words of the reverend, and several others dipped their cups again into the delicious punch. Phil, the direct recipient of the reverend’s words, remembered for the first time in years his boyhood fling with the leader of another group.

  “Of course Jesus was celibate,” continued the reverend, “and though he recognized the soft eyes that Andrew cast upon him, he would promise him only that they would be together in the kingdom of heaven, and would rejoice.

  “‘Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice,’ Andrew said to him once. ‘All you ever talk about is rejoice. What about me? What about now? If you won’t have me I’ll kill myself. I’ll cut out my heart.’

  “Well, each time that Andrew was reduced to such threats, Jesus would take him in his arms and, talking lowly, walk with him around the inside of the circle of followers, until Andrew was calm again. And after he was down and quiet the others would breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Jesus,’ they would say. ‘How do you put up with it? I’d go out of my head.’

  “Three times Andrew built up enough nerve and enough guilt to go to Jesus and say, ‘I’ll cut out my heart,’ and on the third time he did it. He waited until the last of the late-sleeping disciples had slipped between his blankets, then he marched to the place where Jesus slept and, baring his chest, stuck a knife into it to the hilt.

  “‘Ah, ah,’ he said, ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ for the sharp pain was surprising to him. And the savior was on his feet in an instant, and Andrew fell where Jesus had lain and clutching the still warm blanket to his bloody breast he said, ‘At last I have known the warmth of your bed,’ and he died.

  “Well, Jesus cried, and though Andrew had never endeared himself to the other followers, Jesus’ tears led them to mourn Andrew with wails and tears of their own, and the following day Jesus gathered them together, and while some stacked rocks for the tomb of Andrew, he told the others that though suicide was murder and that both were wrong, Andrew was forgiven and waited for them even now beside His father’s throne.

  “Well, as you know, Judas was there, and this was more than Judas could take. Rules were rules, he thought, and so he asked, ‘On what grounds?’ for he had always hated Andrew and more than once had succumbed to the impulse to strike him.

  “Jesus looked at Judas for a long moment before a
nswering, and then he said, ‘On the grounds that it was not suicide at all. It was an accident of fate.’ And with that he gave Judas such a low and mournful stare that it made Judas cringe and it was as if to say, ‘Do not, Judas, deny forgiveness for accidents of fate.’”

  The reverend stopped for a moment and looked at Phil and the others. Should he be going on like this? Clearly they believed him. As he stood in front of them, only the noises of the children could be heard. He had been talking for a long time, and while he had done so the Eskimos had been slipping their cups quietly over the side of the metal bowl and scooping up more punch.

  He took a breath and continued. “Anyway. If Andrew can be forgiven on the very bed of Jesus, surely your friend Fujino will have no trouble. Consider it an accident of fate.”

  After the reverend’s little speech the party fell to normal rhythms. Eskimo women fed their children, men drank until the tin bottom of the reverend’s bucket was scraped loudly by the edges of their cups. When the punch was gone they pushed the furniture out of the way and let an old man begin a drum dance using a new drum that he’d made especially for the occasion. Though the drum was simple, a flat skin with no echo chamber, the old man got three distinct sounds from the instrument, and once he’d established the rhythm he began chanting a story of his own, one about a seal waiting in the freezing depths of the bay, waiting to feed the starving Eskimo people.

  Eventually everyone danced. They depicted the quiet waiting, the patient, breathless waiting of the Eskimo hunters. They became the sea under the ice and the seal gliding toward an air hole. It was a familiar dance, and with punch and time each Eskimo felt the need to hunt seal, right now, on the icy bay in front of their village. This kind of hunting was called feather hunting, and while the women left the reverend’s house in search of feathers, the men went for their harpoons, and the reverend was left with the children alone. His winter parties often ended as abruptly as this. He took some food and his tin punch cup and, climbing the ladder, looked at the scattering people through his beloved window. The side of Nanoon’s cold hut shone in the sun for him. Like the smooth shoulder of a hunched bird it stood, its feathers perfect for hunting so snatched here and there by the searching women. He imagined the girl wrapped in her furs and waiting. Could she feel her feathers lightly lifted? Did she know the hunt was on?