Henriette stood to go for more firewood, startling Ellen. What a place it is where everyone sits through the winter staring, lost in some memory or sorry to God that she ever came. It is the end of winter. If spring is here can winter be far behind? Ellen was numbed by her decision, and as she watched the girl coming back in she stood. She would sell the bath and move away, let the others do what they might. As surely as the direction of the town was locked, so was hers away from it.
Ellen looked at her heavy red hands and told them there would be a few more buckets, only a few. She saw the thin-skinned end of her wounded finger and thought, If I leave them something let it be this, a bit of dead skin grafted to the top of a mule’s foot. If she had left her family, she could leave this group whom she loved only with that part of her that was not consumed with daydreaming, with scenes from her unknown future and past. If Finn had won the election she would have stayed. She looked at Henriette, her nose all poked into her small drab diary again. Ellen would tell her grandchildren that she had been responsible for the very first building in Nome, Alaska. That she had been a frontier woman. Thank God for small defeats.
On clear days Nome smoked gray on the horizon, otherwise the Eskimo children had no real proof that it was there. Today they would find out. There would be no school because their teacher was going to Nome, and because many of them were going as well. Everyone dressed in finery for the occasion. Four years earlier when the reverend first walked into the village he wore a thick gray suit with wide lapels, and was the cause of one of the village’s earliest crazes. The heads of families made formal requests, and by the beginning of his first winter the reverend had successfully ordered boxes of the gray flannel material complete with pattern paper. And now they all had suits. Everyone. In some cases the suits of growing children were passed down to others, but by the morning of their departure no one went without. It was formal dress for a formal occasion. The reverend hadn’t had his own suit on in nearly three years, and as they marched out of the village even Finn had shed his winter clothes. It was still cold and the group walked quickly. They wore hide shirts and in place of neckties each wore a golden snowflake.
Only Phil took his entire family. His children walked in front, and behind him his sisters and his wife and Nanoon too. Nanoon still had not spoken, would not, they thought, until winter was really gone. But she’d fixed her gaze on Finn and stared at him constantly, aware of where he walked, sensing the strength of his own sentiment toward her. The excitement of the villagers was mixed with the knowledge that they were going to a funeral. They made Mr. Kaneda walk in the very center of the group. They were going to see the city, yes, but first they were escorting this man to the funeral of someone he loved. And as a gift to the old man the village had reserved the best gray suit for the corpse, the one that had been Phil’s father’s and had not been worn since his death. From Phil himself Fujino would receive the first of the golden snowflakes, the one that he had taken from the converted frypan the moment after Fujino had shown them how it was done.
Each member of the entourage had his own reasons for wanting to go to Nome. Only the old man was a little nervous. He did not know how he would react when he saw the poor body of Fujino. Certainly he would not look the same after so long, after slicing his abdomen open and letting the wind whistle through it. When the funeral ended Kaneda would talk to Phil about plans to leave for Japan. His idea was that they would work the strike until just before the freeze and then ride out on one of the last ships. He had an image of the sea icing in just behind them, and another of Phil arriving in Tokyo and needing to rely on him just as a son should rely on a father, just as he relied on Phil now. But though the old man thought of leaving he had not forgotten Fujino, nor had he forgotten that he was a carpenter. If he could find lumber his parting gift to the dead boy would be a fine handmade coffin. He could carve “Fujino” in deep Chinese characters on the coffin cover and he would not be satisfied until each joint fit together perfectly and was waterproof. He would see if it was not possible to take a photograph of the coffin, something that he could give to his daughter by way of explanation.
When the Eskimo group entered the tent city they walked less quietly, heads turning like Phil’s owls. They could see the wooden frames of new buildings, and Phil pointed out the bath to them, telling them that it was Ellen’s and that it was he who had helped to build it.
“Very little progress,” said the old man.
“They’ve messed up the building of their lean-tos,” said Phil’s wife. “No easy way to get in and out.”
When they got closer in, they walked on the gravel path at Hummel’s tent and he pinned back the flap and came out to watch them. He’d painted his name in high letters on the canvas now, just under his message of murder. He held his hand over the front of his mouth, sucking noisily on his teeth. “Henriette and Ellen are waiting for you, Finn,” he said. “Which one is the reverend?”
The reverend, wearing his original gray suit, raised his hand but Hummel did not address him, so he lowered it again, feeling the weight of the snowflake rise and fall. When they moved on into the city he looked back and saw Hummel again, resetting path stones where their feet had dislodged them.
The bath was empty so the gray-suited visitors hung about the hot stove in the center of the room. On the floor, as if Kaneda’s need had been expected, there were lumber and tools, so the old man, without a word, began fitting the pieces together, making the coffin. The others rubbed their hands together over the heat.
The reverend sat to the side, flipping through the pages of his Bible, looking for something appropriate. This man had been dead for months, was not a Christian, had taken his own life. He looked at a passage or two and then let his eyes lift to the bath door, wondering if the next person to enter would be Henriette. He did not want to officiate at this funeral. He hoped that he would be able to read a prayer and then let the old man or Finn relate something personal about the dead man. There was nothing he could say. Maybe the twenty-third psalm or something like that. Tried and true. The door opened and Henriette walked in followed by Ellen carrying buckets.
“Ah, hello, you’ve made it, thank the Lord,” said Ellen. The gray-dressed people turned to face her like a choir. The old man put down his tools and bowed.
“And you’ve dressed,” she said. “If you’ll give us a moment we’ll be ready as well.”
The two women passed through the room but stopped when they got to the reverend at the rear. Henriette let her hands fall to her stomach and Ellen stretched hers out toward him.
“Once he’s buried I believe I’ll give it up,” she said quietly. “Maybe you could help me decide where to go.”
The reverend smiled absently, looking past her at Henriette.
“How are you?” he asked.
He stretched his hand out to her and she took it and shook it. She was carrying the log of Fujino under her arm and held it out to him.
“These are all the words he uttered, what he said before he died. I wrote it all down.” She opened the book and took out the reverend’s note before letting him have it. She turned and followed Ellen up the stairs.
The visitors sat at distances around the room, waiting and watching the old man work on the coffin. The lumber had been cut to correct lengths so he busied himself notching the ends in order not to have to use nails. He worked steadily with a knife or with the smallest saw he could find. Once or twice he turned and motioned to Phil, and when Phil finally joined him he spoke softly, explaining what he did as he did it.
“The notches must be made just so,” he said. “Thus at the first sign of moisture they will expand, making the box waterproof.”
Across the room the reverend held both black books in front of him, looked from one to the other for clues. In the Bible he wandered over familiar passages absently. He’d been tempted to bring McTeague and to read from it but now he had this other, this thin diary written in Henriette’s faint hand. He opened it to th
e first page. “Medical Record,” it said, and then, “Mr. Fujino’s disease.” After that for three pages Henriette had listed all the things she’d done for the man to make him comfortable, to try to cure him. The reverend read page after page, his eyes adjusting to her strange scribble. At times when the dying boy was quiet Henriette simply wrote down what she had been thinking. Here’s what she said about men. “They are rough creatures, always kneading your flesh. They are all the same, that’s what I’ve learned. Even him, if he could get up, would let his hands wander out toward me.”
The reverend stopped reading and reddened. This was written before he’d been with her yet he had proven her right. She had accepted him calmly, opened her blankets to him and had not been surprised by his actions. He’d only hoped for a moment of silence, a chance to watch a woman sleeping, to hear her breathing regularly. And as he climbed the ladder he’d expected Ellen, it had been Ellen who’d first fired his imagination, toward whom he’d first directed his dreams. The reverend had trouble bringing his mind back to the death of Fujino. He could hear the old man working softly on the coffin a few feet away. Kaneda had begun carving Fujino’s name in the coffin lid and had captured the attention of everyone else in the room with the shape and beauty of the characters. The reverend stayed alone, holding one in each hand, the thick book and the thin.
Workmen finished the grave and stood back among the others. Though they dug not three meters from the mound of snow, they did not dig into it, were not curious as to how the winter had moved a mule and rider.
When the procession arrived each looked up at the mound then down into the grave. After a moment Henriette and Ellen stepped forward and held their knotted blankets high. The old man and Finn and Phil opened the newly made coffin, lifted out the folded gray flannel suit and golden snowflake, and stepped around behind the curtain to dig. The reverend took a step forward and stood holding each black book tightly in front of him. He would have to say something soon. He stared into the crowd as if looking for the right words.
For Phil and Finn it was a difficult matter scraping the melting snow away from the body that lay beneath it. They used their hands and the old man helped by using a small flat piece of wood that he’d slipped into his pocket when he finished making the coffin. The coupled figures lay on their sides, flat along the ground, Fujino’s left shoulder and the mule’s left flank riding the softening earth.
The first parts exposed were the footless back legs of the mule. Phil grabbed them and pulled as he might have the roots of a fallen tree, the handles of a plow, but there was little movement. There was no longer any evidence that feet had once graced the rounded stumps. The legs in his hands were stiff and fixed a certain distance apart. Like the handles of a dog sled they felt secure and he knew that he could put his weight against them and they would not break. The others continued to bare the brown body. Finn recognized the mule as his own by the markings on its flank, and by the tattered brown blanket that he had draped across the mule as protection against the coming cold.
Two men from the crowd stepped forward and took the ends of the blanket from Ellen and Henriette, for their arms were tired and they had lowered it considerably. And when they stepped back into the crowd they saw for the first time how many people there were. There were more people waiting for the beginning of this funeral than had attended the town meeting or had voted for mayor. People fanned out, were peering from distances, trying to view the separation of the mule and man. Ellen and Henriette stood looking down. The reverend still held his two books tightly. There were noises coming from behind the blanket but the crowd was quiet. It was as if a single prospector, far from the nearest settlement, patiently separated bedrock from a vein of pure gold. The sound of snow coming off a dead mule.
Fujino appeared to the men first as a deformity of the creature he rode. His buttocks moved grotesquely away from the natural contour of the mule’s body. As he appeared to them out of the snow Finn thought of a camel’s hump, or of a hunchback scooting through the streets of a damp city. When the entire body was exposed to them the men stepped back. Fujino was riding loosely on the mule now, not frozen to its back as they had expected but all hunched up like a rider heading into a sandstorm, his hands pulled up to his chin, his great zero of a mouth showing dull surprise at the changing weather, at the sudden turning. The eyes of the three men struck Fujino’s poor face carefully. It had weathered, was cured like leather, looked as old as time. All of the muscles in his body were flexed and tight and it seemed as if he were trying desperately to stay on the mule, to keep from falling off and being left alone on the deadened earth.
Yet, strange as it was, the old man seemed the only one of the three taken off guard by the sight of Fujino. Though the dead boy was bleak-skinned and closed to the world, the old man easily recognized him as Fujino. It seemed strange to him that the young man should look so grotesque while the mule looked so natural, so much the way a mule ought to look. The old man began to cry. His tears moved slowly to his eyes and then fell away quickly like water breaking finally away from the winter ice. He felt that if he let himself he could melt, that he could become his tears and wash into the spring-soft soil at his feet.
The dead wrinkles of Fujino’s face so drew the men that it was not until Finn stepped forward with the gray suit that they saw that Fujino too, like the mule, had no feet. At first they thought that his feet had withered, rolled like the dead heads of flowers up along his legs, but no, they were simply gone, cut off like the mule’s and taken. Phil peered quickly into the clumps of snow they had removed, searching. Finn and the old man looked back toward the people and saw Hummel holding a sign high above him, its slogan blurred by the sun. The crowd swayed together like a thawing field of wheat.
“Give me the suit,” said Phil. He stuck his hands under the cold armpits of the dead man and was surprised by how easily he came loose. The faint hint of human flesh still rode the mule; bits of gray mule hair still clung to the insides of Fujino’s thighs.
Fujino was heavy and cold. Phil set him, face up, on the ground next to the mule, then motioned for Finn to push on the dead man’s knees. He had ridden high on the mule and would have to be straightened out if they expected to be able to close the coffin lid. Finn and Phil lent their weight to his straightening, and the old man stood back of them, ready to drape the golden snowflakes around his partner’s neck, but capable of little else. His eyes were fixed on the stubbed ends of the dead man’s legs. They were like the mule’s, like axe handles waiting for the attachment of blades. When he looked at Fujino’s legs he thought of fresh blond wood, the kind he had seen protruding from barrels at the tent where men bought provisions. He thought of the wide mouth of harakiri, its dried opening hidden somewhere under the boy’s clothing.
At first when the two men tried to straighten Fujino’s body they were unsuccessful. Then quickly and with a snap that perked the ears of the city, the body gave a little, cracked. Finn took the gray trousers and slipped them onto the angled legs. He pulled at the arms of the corpse and held them apart, like huge springs, until Phil was able to get the jacket on. Then Finn leaned over the corpse and looked into the bottomless mouth and believed he felt the lazy warmth of living human breath around his eyes and on the bridge of his nose.
It had been a long time since Finn had thought of Fujino as a man. The name no longer conjured up the smooth speaking boy but rather this piece of petrified wood, this changeless winter mold, this park statue. He reached out and tried to close the dead man’s mouth, but though the legs and arms were thicker, it was this mouth that would stay, that would not vary from its depthlessness, its initial expression of shock and surprise. And for Finn it was only this circle, empty and deep as space, that remained human. Looking now into its blackness, Finn remembered himself coming back down to Nome, camping in the unlimited darkness of his hand-built igloos. It was then that he’d captured his proper view of the world, and he saw it again now in this circle of a dead man’s mouth.
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“Lift him up,” said the old man. “I will place the snowflake around his neck and we will bury him.”
Finn and Phil buttoned the front of the gray jacket over the dead man’s chest, over the shirt that covered his invisible harakiri. His hands were still bunched in front of him and the old man pushed the golden snowflake between them so that it looked as if Fujino held it on either side, was trying with all his strength to break it in half. They lifted him by his shoulders and footless legs and placed him in the coffin and placed the lid over it before anyone from the crowd moved up to look. The two men who held the blanket lowered it when they heard the light tapping of nails.
“Dearly beloved,” said the reverend in a voice that cracked across the crowd. He stood looking gravely down at the box sitting crooked on the dirt before him. He held both black books and could feel himself growing red. He was never fully prepared when he began a sermon but this was too much. And yet no one seemed to have noticed his mistake. They still remained as quiet as the dead man, still moved on their feet like wheat, as if the wind pushed them. And this, if he was any judge of numbers, was his largest crowd. From his position on the slight incline at the edge of the grave he could see the town but could see no one walking the twisted streets. Everyone was here, close by, staring up at him.
“When thinking about this eulogy,” he said, “I had two books to go by and both were about the life of the deceased. This,” he held up the Bible and shook it, “is the story of all our lives, and this other one was written by the deceased’s nurse and contains his dying words.”
Fools' Gold Page 27
