Fools' Gold

by Wiley, Richard

  “It was a coach that I was taking into the town of Londonderry, and as I looked for the last time among the members of my family, there he was, third from the shortest, and as the coachman got the horses moving it was Hugo Reily who began to sing. Oh he was the consummate politician! He had a grand voice and he did not stop when the coach was out of sight or even when the rest of the family had gone on home. Indeed, I know because miles away when we had occasion to stop for a man who stood at the side of the road, I thought I heard his voice coming thin and sharp along the road behind us.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked the quiet room. “Regardless of which of us you elect you’ll have your programs for the development of our city, so it is not very important who you choose. But beyond that my able opponent is in business for himself and I’ll be in business only for you. This town will become my family and I’ll treat your children like Hugo Reily treated me. If I am elected mayor I will rough their hair. And if any of you decide to leave I’ll be at the dock and I’ll sing to you so that you can stand at the ship’s rail and listen and I won’t stop singing even when you are gone, even when your ship’s smoke no longer darkens the horizon.”

  Finn looked down and was disappointed to see the moon eyes of Henriette upon him. Only a moment before he was sure that she’d not been listening but now he knew she was. The whole room was quiet. He had everyone’s attention so he sat down quickly to the rising applause.

  9

  As near as anyone could figure, spring broke during Finn’s speech. In the morning, at first light, the townspeople crowded the beach, looking out along the waterway that filled a huge crack in the sea of ice. It was like looking down a long blue road. And by the end of the day there were other roads cracking off into the solid ice halves. There was a general giddiness among the people, a tendency to run about in shirt sleeves, to run about underdressed.

  Henriette spent the morning bent at the waist, her head lodged between her knees. She had eaten nothing and therefore had little to give other than a retching sound, a hollow imitation of the soft ice tearing through the middle of the bay. She tried to be sick gently so as not to give the baby discomfort. During the meeting the night before Henriette had thought of the baby as a boy, as a small copy of the reverend, floating, like a marble egg, inside her, and she did not want him to be sick too. Luckily she was alone in the bath. Finn and Ellen had gone with the rest of the town, down to watch the sea parting. It was like a miracle and she knew that the reverend would rejoice as the expanding crack passed the village. She saw him clasping his hands together and standing on his toes; she pictured the entire village engaged in a dance along the still-hard sand. It was a painful moment for her. Her jaw was tight and saliva ran slowly from the corners of her mouth.

  Finn lost the election. He was defeated three to one. Ellen stood with him on the upper part of the beach and talked quietly about his speech.

  “I maintain you had a chance,” she said. “It was that ‘ditto’ that lost it for you. It isn’t done. One political speaker does not follow another and say ‘ditto.’”

  Finn smiled and tried to hold her hand. “I got fifty-three votes. Not counting the three of us, fifty people in this town weren’t stopped by my speech. Fifty people would have me over that other fellow.”

  In truth Ellen had enjoyed the speech and was not upset now. There’d been an old politician in her village as well and at his death it was her own father who’d vied for the position. But why hadn’t the fool told the story and then presented a genuine platform to the people? Maybe he would not have won but he would have collected more votes, more than just the fifty-three.

  “Look at the way the ice breaks,” said Finn, turning her attention back to him. “In a week the ground will soften and the prospectors will go back to their gold fields. Won’t it be easy running the bath when there’s no thawing to do first?”

  Ellen looked at him then saw herself working the difficult bath for innumerable seasons ahead. She had not been there a year yet she was very tired. When spring comes can winter be far behind?

  “I’ll tell you something, Finn,” she said, letting the election skip behind her. “In a week, in two, when the ground softens enough, we are going to have a proper funeral for Mr. Fujino. We’ll ask the reverend to preside and we’ll commit that poor man to his maker.”

  She looked at Finn as if daring him to disagree. It surprised him that she should mention Fujino now. Except for Hummel’s constant hounding Finn hadn’t thought of Fujino since leaving Topcock Creek. If the reverend came, perhaps there would be word of Phil and the old man, but Finn did not look forward to seeing the frozen zero of Fujino’s mouth again. It seemed impossible that the dead man could still be alive to all of them. No matter whose fault it had been, the man was now dead and should have been buried long ago. “A Christian burial though he was not a Christian?” asked Finn.

  “A Christian burial to get the man out of sight,” said Ellen. “Do you suppose he will stay hidden once the snow has gone? Do you suppose it’s not our duty?” Ellen fairly shouted, then reached over and twisted Finn’s arm. “Respect,” she said. “That’s what is lacking.” The word echoed in her head as she said it and she pictured herself carrying endless buckets of water.

  As soon as the village children had their skates cut and tied the ice became too soft to support them. The sleds lay like amputees along the path from the storehouse, and deep practice grooves zoned the ice in front of the village. It was too abrupt an end for the popularity of skating, and the children had a difficult time bringing their enthusiasm back to the golden snowflakes. They wore them on all occasions, but with the discovery of skating the snowflakes had become commonplace, followed the course of sketch pads and parasols in their lives.

  The reverend and Phil and Kaneda had been giving lessons. Each was popular with the children and each enjoyed the chance to do some free skating. When all were finally forced to hang up their skates they went back to their snowflakes without speaking. Many trips were made back and forth past the broken sleds until finally the abandoned runners were stuck in the softening ground beside them, like steel totem poles.

  The reverend was making preparations for school. It was his habit to begin longer lessons the morning after the children moved back above ground, and he intended, this year, to be more organized in his planning. He would ask the old man to visit the class and perhaps teach them something about Japan. As for himself, he would teach his weak subjects well and would read aloud to them from the books he loved, from McTeague and from others.

  The reverend and the old man sat in the soft loft chairs and watched as the lean-to poles were driven through the thin snow. In a few days the summer village would stretch before them and a few days after that parties of other Eskimos would come, like bears, out of the low hills, lean and hungry after hibernation. In other years this was a time when the reverend felt the beginning touches of homesickness, a time when he sometimes considered going home. This year, though, the old man sat next to him and talked continuously. He rarely looked at the reverend but his voice sawed through the quiet room like a prayer. He made the reverend remember his schooling, the times he had studied Latin, the peacefulness of not understanding. It was a pleasant sensation. He sat there easily, making believe that his large chair was a rocker, that he was being sung to sleep.

  When Finn arrived in the village he found construction well under way. He had been sent to announce the burial of Fujino and to ask the reverend to come to Nome to say a few words. The snow had already melted down around the mule and rider and the two women were forced to take snow from other parts of the city, and to heap it wet about the remains.

  Finn made the short trip in less than half a day. It felt fine to be out of Nome again. In the few days since the election Ellen and Henriette had treated him gently, telling him that he had done well to get as many votes as he had. And indeed there was a moment after his speech when he’d thought he would win. Since the
election he’d been called in twice for visits with Dr. Kingman. He was asked his opinion on certain subjects, and each time Hummel had been there scribbling silently, his scratch pad balanced on his bony knees.

  Finn did not expect to find Phil and Kaneda in the village, and when he did he embraced them, turning them in the snow until only dirt remained under their feet. They broke into their three languages like strangers. Finn turned to Kaneda. “We are going to bury Fujino,” he said. “You must all come to Nome.”

  “Yes, I have never forgotten,” said the old man. “I have been wondering again about the nature of his death.”

  “Fujino,” said Finn again, looking at both men.

  The reverend approached the trio from the direction of his house, walking on the spotted earth, avoiding stepping on the patches of snow, thinking of his mother.

  “Finn!” he said.

  The three unlocked arms, allowing the reverend to come into their circle, and together they turned the thawed earth to mud. “Winter is over and everyone is safe,” said the reverend. “Thank the Lord.”

  “Can you come to help with the burial of Fujino?” Finn asked. “You’ve heard talk of his tragic death. Now it is time to bury him.”

  “If he had only come to me with his problems I would have understood,” said Kaneda.

  Late on the afternoon of Finn’s arrival the villagers stretched the canvas hides across their lean-to poles while the children collected snow, rolled it into balls, and threw it far out onto the liquid surface of the bay. In an hour the view from the reverend’s window changed. The reverend and Finn sat toasting springtime, toasting the village and the women they knew.

  The reverend said, “I can see that winter has weathered the lines of your face. Was it hard on the women as well?”

  Finn looked at him through his wine glass, laughing. “On Ellen it was,” he said. “And both of them have put their shoulders into the carrying of bath water a few more times than they should have. Ellen’s the strongest but somehow it shows on her and does not on our Henriette.”

  “Henriette’s all right?”

  “All right and untouchable,” said Finn. “She turns her thoughts inward a bit more than she used to but it’s a habit that’ll protect her complexion.”

  Finn ran his fingers over the loosening skin below his own eyes. The top of his beard came very high up his face, giving him the feeling that his eyes were deeper than before, his sockets more sunken.

  “You are an interesting man for one so religious,” he told the reverend. “I might have come to you if you’d been handy. Over the death of Fujino, I mean. I had a very stormy session over that.”

  The reverend had been thinking of what he might say at Fujino’s funeral. He’d never been very good at that particular service. He couldn’t muster the resonance of voice, the massive seriousness.

  “Oh well,” he said.

  “I’ve always been quick to grab at guilt,” said Finn, “but this time there was no stopping me. I was eaten away with it. I had gone a little ‘round the bend.”

  He told the reverend about the old man’s prayers and the reverend said that there had been evidence of that ever since the old man had been in the village.

  “Yet he does not seem unhappy,” said the reverend.

  “Not unhappy, not guilty,” said Finn. “And the sheer power of his prayer knocked all my guilt away. I find it hard even to think about Fujino anymore.”

  They sat quietly a moment and saw the old man walking among the lean-tos below them. He examined the way the leantos were built, climbing to the top of one and sitting with his heels bouncing against the door.

  “With him at Fujino’s funeral you’ll have your work cut out for you,” said Finn.

  The reverend nodded and stood. “I’m sure he’ll want to say something,” he said. “I never knew the man, don’t know what he was like, what kind of service might make him happy.”

  They started down the ladder to join the village for a feast. They would leave for Nome in the morning, and since it was no longer freezing Phil was taking his entire family. It had been a long winter for the Eskimos, so there were others going as well. Word spread among the villagers that there would be a special outing. Tomorrow those who felt like it would be going to Nome.

  Finn and the reverend walked under the pale sky, following the scent of seal. The reemergence of the neat rows of lean-tos had taken only the morning and now, in silence, the entire population of the village surrounded the still-standing coming-of-age hut of Nanoon. For weeks the hut had sat silent, its feathers graying, some of them plucked for fishing but most still stuck to its mud sides. Finn remembered shouting through it and hearing nothing for his trouble. Surely she’d not survived. He remembered seeing her fragile face as they’d dressed her that day. She was so young. He imagined a few sprouts of pubic hair, like spring vegetables, like the lovely tops of dark carrots, breaking the smooth surface of her skin. To each his own, he thought, but customs such as this one are barbaric.

  When everyone was ready and the long seals were propped like sentinels at each side of the sewn-up door, Phil stepped forward. The sight of the dreary feathers made him want to turn and tell the owl story once more, but instead he drew his sharp knife up the side of the hut as smoothly as through any seal fat. Like a painful cesarean, thought Finn, but no sound came from the dark hole, no arms or legs kicking angrily out at the new world.

  “Nanoon,” said Phil. “Wake up. Winter’s gone and you’re a woman.”

  The light from the wound in her wall came hard into Nanoon’s head. She pushed her eyes shut but it spread through her anyway, looking into all her corners, pushing her limbs out like flowers opening. Phil slit the wall further and found her far back among her blankets and pelts, frozen bits of all her winter meals still standing like sculptures around her. They took her arms and lifted her to the light like a captured mole, her nose sensing the seal, her knees still dug in under her chin. “Stand up,” said Phil. “It’s all over.” With her arms Nanoon held her sisters and the entire crowd watched as her long legs inched toward the ground. Finn’s heart flew to her as his guilt had flown to Fujino. She’d looked young before but now her face was furrowed, her color gone, her hair, like wisps of winter, making her look old. Finn stepped past the reverend and helped hold her, put his big hands under her arms while Phil pulled at her legs, massaged her muscles downward. She was a woman now, would soon be married, gone to Port Clarence or off toward the north.

  When Nanoon’s eyes opened Finn found himself their focus and freeing his hand pushed the crumbs from his beard and stood straight. The sun setting behind them was still strong, so the others moved in to darken the ground around her, letting their shadows shade her eyes. Lord, thought Finn, how can one so young look so old? Phil, beside him, bathed her face with seal oil, laid some salt slabs on her tongue. “She’s a woman now,” he told Finn. “If you look at her long she’ll mistake your meaning.”

  When Nanoon was standing by herself, Phil pulled Finn back and the others too moved away, allowed her space to step in. She rubbed the wrinkles out of her face and pushed the hair from her eyes. “It’s true, she’s a woman,” said the reverend, shaking his head. “It was only a year ago that she was among my students.” Finn saw the look of old age fall from her like snake’s skin, saw her former face return. She put one leg forward and then another, and by the time she could walk in small circles most of the villagers had turned their attention to the standing seals. Phil dug the dry heart of the smallest seal from its flat chest and breaking it into pieces gave half to Nanoon to eat. He found Finn and handed him the other half, and Finn was gone again, caught off balance, gouged once more by guilt and head over heels in love.

  Though the ground was still hard the snow was nearly gone, and Ellen and Henriette had to carry bath buckets of it from as far as one hundred meters away. They dumped the wet snow on the dirty mule mound and waited for Finn and the reverend. They had not seen the dead man that they cove
red and they would not, they hoped, until the time came for burial. They’d hired a man to dig the deep grave next to the mound they protected, and though they did not know how far under the snow he sat, they were taking no chances. They worked continuously, carrying their buckets on the ends of long poles balanced across their shoulders. When they passed each other they did not speak. The weather was getting warmer. She with the empty buckets moved more easily than she with the full.

  When the evening came the snow held, the temperature moved it to ice and let the women go back to the bath and sit around the stove, their heavy arms hanging. They had closed the bath until after the funeral for it was impossible to carry buckets for both purposes. Ellen wondered if the others would be surprised to know that she was thinking of leaving. She had made a business of the bath and could sell it. Of course she would not return to Ireland but she had seen the greenery of Washington state and would not mind an easier life. What surprised her, as the idea grew, was that she had not entertained it at all until the moment Finn lost the election. If he had won she would have stayed, she knew. If he had won, Nome would have grown in wider directions than it would now, and yet she believed that in almost every way Dr. Kingman would do a better job. Dr. Kingman moved for laws and civil codes. He was asking people to zone land, to section its use. He was organizing construction so that all would be finished before heavy winter came again. He was setting high penalties for claim jumping and low ones for street brawls as well. Ellen agreed with all and knew that Finn would have done none of it. Think of the way he’d laid his proposals before the community. Ditto. Dr. Kingman talks of laws and sectioning the land and Finn says ditto. Yet he was Irish and had made the lovely figure of Hugo Reily dance for the people. His ditto would have taken five years where Dr. Kingman was taking one. And now she was thinking of leaving. If Finn had won they would have moved forward ever so slowly, but with endless possibilities. Now the town’s fate was sealed, and because it was, living in the deadening cold and with back-breaking work was no longer worth it. No, Nome would have had to remain a frontier for her to put up with all of that. Now that it wasn’t she would leave.