by Brian Hart
“Will you read to me when we get there?”
“Yes. After we eat. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
We followed the wagon tracks of the freighters through a gap in the trees into a meadow, and there it was. Relief is what I felt, and I said my thanks that it was a new place and apparently well built. Long live the queen. There were seven windows (shuttered) and two doors (bolted from the outside), single story, shake roof and shingle siding. If Jacob had built it, I would have been overjoyed. But he did, didn’t he. It was ours. I must never forget that. No one had taken any time with anything but the house and the barn and the privy, and outside of the hand pump in the yard the land was still as raw as the day it was born. No garden, no fence, no clothesline.
The freighters carried our things inside while we sat on the porch. I thought we might be able to sell some of the timber.
“Nobody else lives here?” Duncan said.
“We live here.”
“But nobody else. It’s lonely.”
“Not if we’re here.” He was right, though. Looking out at the swampy bottomland and the dark forest—it was lonely. If there was ever a place that could make you feel exiled, this was it. We needed to leave this coast, but I didn’t know how. Standing at the front door, I thought I could just hear the river whispering through the trees.
Duncan got an ear infection from running around in the wet and mud. When I took him to see Dr. Haslett, the doctor took pity on us and offered me a job, and I accepted. I was to buy his groceries and cook his dinners three nights a week, but the other woman, Miss Falvey, would still do the cleaning and keep the house. I also agreed to help him in his work if needed. Jacob had taught me some things regarding nursing.
Dr. Haslett was nearly the same age as my father. The idea of this sometimes lodged in my mind and put an awful chill on me. We were both adults with children, and we should’ve, a long time ago, resolved ourselves to our roles. It would be a huge mistake, wouldn’t it? But Jacob was gone, possibly dead, most likely dead. Dr. Haslett’s wife had left him too. She didn’t even want money, is what he’d said about her. A judgment on all women. I didn’t immediately understand the loathing in his voice, that it’d be better if she did want something from him. To have no use for him at all was the strongest insult she could muster.
Most mornings I felt alone and completely forsaken. The fallen women crowding the balconies of the Line couldn’t feel as wretched as I did. At times I felt so small that I would look at Duncan and want to ask him what path I should take. Your father left us, and we don’t have any recourse. The strange thing was that the longer he was away, the more I believed that I might not have ever loved him. What was he doing, and where? I began to see what a withering kind of life Jacob and I had shared, small and without purpose. Then I started to dislike him, not for abandoning me but for being who he was—a weak and transitory man who had been spoiled as a child—and my dislike grew into disgust and eventually into hatred. I thought it would all be much easier if he were dead, and more than once I wished he were.
Duncan was old enough to know that Dr. Haslett and I were acting strange, but not nearly old enough to assign guilt. On the nights I cooked dinner, we stayed over. It was too far to walk alone in the dark. Duncan and I shared a room off the kitchen. The room was small and cramped, with a partition and a Dutch stove. Duncan never stirred when I’d get up during the night, and when I returned his breathing was always there for me, steady and deep and in him as if the sound of the ocean could be in him.
Mornings, I woke him in the dark and we began our walk home before the sun came up. Miss Falvey would’ve started rumors. The ferry didn’t run until it was light, so we usually walked. Passing through the empty streets of town, we measured our steps between the gaslights and counted the boards by threes, three-six-nine-twelve, and Duncan would hold out three fingers and bless them like a priest. Sometimes the mills were between shifts when we passed by; the lights were on, but the engines and the blades were quiet. Through the sawdust and steam-glazed windows I could make out the shadows of the workmen inside and hear the saw sharpeners filing away and mechanics tinkering like an orchestra tuning up. And on the days when the rain had yet to start we would take a moment to watch the ships in the harbor, where they rested perfectly at equilibrium, acting by weight alone with no motion. A deep calm filled me when I watched the ships.
At home, the cold bones of the house were hardly welcoming, and sometimes it took all day for it to feel like someplace you’d like to be. After we finished the chores I often read to Duncan, whatever he liked. He had several favorites. The rain beat down on the roof, and we were dry and safe. More than anything I wanted him to grow up and be a man of his own, a better man. I wanted it soon, even though I knew that it wasn’t fair. He was only a boy, a child.
Jacob
1890
I caught a steamship out of Westport, and when I arrived fresh and for everyone the New Face, I told all that would listen that I’d been crimped, drugged and dragged; shanghaied, comrade. Friendski. Remember me? Rampage of a story. With my cash out, new pals, like hens to scratch, assembled. I relayed how a man named Gibbons got me drunk in Montesano and I woke up passing the mouth of the Columbia. Which was true. Gibbons was no friend. I’d been around but not far—Oregon, California, a month at Cooney’s penitentiary not three miles from my front door—but I told them tall tales of how I’d been to Australia and seen brush fires burning from a hundred miles offshore. I had to tell them something, so I told them what I’d heard other people say. Heard about Australia in a redwood camp on the Smith River. Japanese whaling ships I’d heard about in Portland at a mudflat bonfire. Cliffs of Dover in a San Francisco whorehouse. Pygmy cannibals, same whorehouse, different room. Foolishness to think that after years away a person can return to an establishment that he was lastly thrown forcibly out of and be treated with any degree of kindness. Worse for me, though, was that they didn’t even remember me or care that I’d returned.
Eli Bernhardt, a former patient, saw me and came over to ask what I’d been thinking, leaving without telling anybody. Called me Doc, like he hadn’t heard the news. “I’m not a doctor.” He apologized as if it was his fault and said he’d found a new doctor named Haslett, and by the way your wife is working for him. Wink. So there were no hard feelings. He remarked that I was bent lower than when I left and asked what had happened.
“I did something to my back falling off a woodcart.”
He looked me up and down like I was lying, but that was the truth.
“Riding a woodcart on a ship?”
“No, before I got on the ship.”
“Riding a woodcart when you were shanghaied?”
“Before that. In fact it was on my way to getting shanghaied.” I was wearing my broad-brimmed hat, tin pants, and Bergmans with the frilly false tongue, gleaming with bear grease. Everything I owned. A wad of money in my pocket the size of a child’s fist. They knew I’d been in the camps because I wasn’t dark and scurvious like a sailor returned from Australia, but pale and rope tough like them. Roll over the log and find a logger white as a grub. If a photograph were taken, I would be a creature of the main herd.
At the Pioneer I found myself seated beside a wayward powder monkey who was often ringing the bell, and when we struck up a conversation I admitted to formerly being employed as a physician and he confided, yelled into my face like I was the mouth of a cave, that he had recently been a patient of Dr. Haslett’s, and “Whoowee, shoulda seen the nurse.”
“That’s my wife.”
“Yer wife? How is that yer wife if yer you?”
The bartender and everyone down the line were listening, and honestly, I couldn’t answer that.
“We took the vows, all of it.”
“Hell of a world. She doin workin for that behemoth?”
“I’ve been away.”
“But yer back.”
“Yes.” I yelled it. “Yes.”
T
he powder monkey climbed up onto the upper rung of his stool and yanked the rope on the bell. Cheers erupted, and the bartender stepped to. My neighbor peeled off bills and let them float to the bar top.
“She assisted in the surgery that removed my appendix. She had to shave my belly. Saw my mighty whitefish.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I wouldn’t either. Ain’t my wife.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Maybe she could be, the way you let her run.”
When the bartender poured our drinks, I slid mine away and walked out. The smell of cordite was stuck in my nose.
My empire, gone. Wife, gone. Son, gone. A fine joke was unspooling against me. It was then that I went entirely sentimental for my days as a physician and the respect that came with it. I’d been great. I’d been right there in the cupboard where I was to be found, and then I’d left. Now my place had been taken. I’d come home and presented myself as a fool and a liar and had been treated accordingly. Another among the fallen, and when I got up I didn’t rise half as far, and that’s why they laughed. Shaking with rage, I headed out; what was expected, what I’d deliver. Another bar, another drink. I could be a man about this and go find her and cut her throat. Truthful now, the last thing I wanted was to hurt her. I’d rather let the smug bastards kill me. Nothing so kind as that, they laughed me out the swinging doors. Still, it took me three days to break free of the Line, my big stories all told, my money half spent.
Up the road, dreary and forlorn. Since I’d left they’d planked most of it, but the work had gotten shoddy as they moved away from the town proper. Half the planks were going to the mud by the footfall, some were missing altogether, slapped onto someone’s chicken coop or icehouse wall most likely.
Without a knock or call, I entered Matius’s house, my home. Nell was speechless, eyes locked on the upended corpse. I was what had been missing, so I thought, but I was useless to her, plain as that. A broken hinge served more purpose than me. She said she’d heard that I’d returned and she’d packed all of her possessions to take to Dr. Haslett’s. She was leaving me. She’d left.
Her speech concluded, she walked by me, dumb stump that I am, and went to the bedroom and gathered the boy in her arms. His dirty socks kicked stains on her dress. He’d grown long and wiry and wore my furtive brow.
I reached in my coat pocket and produced a small, fuzzy-looking bear I’d carved from redwood. “For the young explorer, grown so big while I was away.”
“What is it?”
“A bear. What does it look like?”
He took the toy with him to the table and sat down and studied it. “It looks like a pig. Are you sure it’s a bear?”
“It’s a bear.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I made it.”
“You did not. You can’t make bears.”
“I can.”
“No, you make pigs.” He looked at me and pushed up his nose and snorted.
“Why did you come back?” Nell asked.
“You’re my wife still.” From the other pocket I brought out my wad of money, what was left from town, and set it on the table. I gently kicked my toe against Nell’s steamer trunk, opened the lid, and looked inside at the folded clothes. “You’ll stay the night at least. No time to be struttin off into the darkness lookin for a place to sleep. You ask me, you belong under this roof with me, not someone else’s.”
“I’ll not share a bed with you ever again.” She gathered the boy and went into the bedroom and shut the door. I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. She was in there thinking that I’d be coming in after her but I let her stew, let her get worked up with excitement for the fight or whatever she thought I’d bring in there. Imagine her surprise when she came out the next morning and discovered that I was gone.
I came back in the afternoon. She was still packed and still waiting. Duncan was sitting at the table, dressed in a stiff, brown suit.
“Haslett isn’t coming for you. I talked to him.” This was a lie, I hadn’t talked to the man at all. I’d played trumps at the Eagle and won seventeen dollars.
“I’ll walk then.”
“He doesn’t want you.”
“Well, I don’t want you, so aren’t we a pair.”
“Stay here with me. It’s for the best. We’ll forget this whole business.”
“You stink of liquor.”
“I know.”
“Why couldn’t you stay away?” She had started to cry. She hated me, but I knew her and knew that she could love me again.
“I missed you.”
“Get out.”
“Are you stayin?”
“Get out.”
The next day when I returned I was churchly sober and glad to see that Nell had unpacked her things. I’d found a job working at Camp 21, but I didn’t tell her. It wouldn’t mean as much if I told her now. I’d wait until she showed her claws so I could turn her from anger. That was an easier move than turning her from disgust. Duncan was taking a nap in what I saw in the future as being our bed.
“You’ll stay then?” I asked my teacup, but talking to her.
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“It was a low thing that Haslett did. He took advantage of you.”
“He did not.”
“Well, it seems that way to me. He should be ashamed.”
“Is this your new adventure? To pretend you’re an ignorant logger from God knows where?”
“It’s a new start.”
“Jacob, I want to be clear.” Then she told me she didn’t love me, didn’t remember if she ever had. “I married a doctor.”
“You married an impostor.”
“I don’t want to be married to an impostor. I don’t want to be married to you at all.”
“I understand.”
“You understand? You’re a fool, a weak idiot fool.”
“Duncan’s sleeping.”
“I know that. I know what he’s doing.” She turned her back to me. “You stay out of my garden and the henhouse too. That’s our food, not yours.”
And that’s how it went. Nell and Duncan stayed in the bedroom, and I slept on the floor in front of the fireplace like a dog. I didn’t have anything to lose, but I wasn’t like my father, a man looking up from a hole. I’d climb into this new life like I was climbing onto a springboard, ax in my hand, kerosene bottle hanging from my belt. My partner across from me, waiting with the whip. Day in.
Nell
If there were a headline in the paper, it would read “Wife Surprisingly Un-Forsaken Retraces Bad Road.” I thought he was dead, that I’d never see him again. Strange the way that can play on your mind. It was like we’d never met or maybe I’d dreamed him, but then there he was like a stray dog, and one that had rolled in something besides.
I went to see Milo but couldn’t bring myself to knock on the door. It was no secret what I’d done, and since Jacob had returned I could see that people were gossiping; their faces changed when they saw me, as if they’d been talking about me or thinking of me. It’s no good searching for guilt in other people’s faces. I was treated coldly, but I felt that walking around shamefaced asked for it, so it was my burden.
Jacob hired on with a logging outfit and disappeared again. I didn’t know him anymore. He said he still worked as a physician if someone needed it, but no longer advertised. He’d never done that anyway, and I could see now that it was part of his plan, not to be noticed or bold, to fit in. The quiet chicken that eats and scratches and roosts but never lays. Before he left, I had him order supplies delivered from Heath’s store so I wouldn’t have to go to town. Duncan and I worked in the garden, and with the money Jacob brought us, we bought three pigs and four lambs. We had a bit of clear weather, and the sun felt lovely. He writes me letters; they come with the supplies or with whoever’s passing by the house.
A family, the Parkers, moved into the abandoned homestead south of us. Edna was around the same
age as me, and they had a boy, Zeb, the same age as Duncan. Lewis, the husband, worked at the mill and was gone most of the week, sleeping at the bunkhouse. They raised goats, and you could smell them from a mile off. Edna and I became friends, and Duncan and Zeb did too. We visited often, and soon it was them that brought the mail and any other news deemed valuable.
To my surprise, I began to expect and perhaps need the letters from Jacob, and it felt like maybe I understood him, or at least understood why I’d married him in the first place. I felt that in some ways I knew him for what he’d always been, but in others he presented himself fresh, whole cloth. He told me that he’d once stabbed his brother in the leg when he was a boy because Matius wouldn’t stop teasing him. He stabbed him and locked him in the tack room in the barn and wouldn’t let him out. He told me that with his back to the wall he felt the boards shake as his brother kicked and screamed to be let out.
“You can only take a thing so far,” he’d written.
I didn’t know if he was bleeding to death (it sounded like he was dying) and I didn’t hate him any longer but I was terrified of what he would do when I let him out, and also what my father would do to me for stabbing my own brother. It was a pocketknife and short-bladed but I stabbed him deep enough to hit bone. He still hasn’t forgiven me. Even after the savage beating I received when he finally escaped. There’s been occasion when I’ve caught him looking at me with the same murderous look as when I let him out of the tack room, and like then, it makes me want to run. I guess it takes little to turn a man to fear and worry. Each of us has his own recipe. I wake up most mornings worried that I’ve failed you, and I know that it is true. I needed honesty after what I’d done, who I’d pretended to be, and the woods welcomed me. There are days when I can’t bear the thought of coming home, and I don’t know why that hasn’t changed. I can’t blame you for your infidelities. I can’t blame Haslett either. I write that, and in the same moment that the ink stains the paper I pray that you burn this letter so no one can shame me with what’s transpired. But doesn’t everyone know? It seems the case. On and on.
