by Brian Hart
“Good to see you, Taylor.”
“Doc. Who’s this?”
“My son. Duncan.”
“He’s a wanted man.”
Duncan leaned back in his chair and looked toward the door.
“I won’t turn you in,” Taylor said. “None of my business what you did, but someone told the police chief that you’re here. Rumor has it you came in on a fishing boat, and now you’re headed upriver to the Snake. There’s fifty coppers and who knows how many else looking for you now.”
I told him about Doris and how I suspected he’d betrayed me. The seedpod came over and whispered something in Taylor’s ear. He rose to his feet and told us to follow him out the back.
“I’m not going with him,” Duncan said.
“They’re coming for you,” Taylor said. “They’ll be coming through the door any minute.”
I grabbed Duncan by the arm and dragged him after Taylor. The seedpod doffed his hat as we left the shop. The door shut behind us, and we followed Taylor through a series of dimly lit passageways until we came to a large steel door that opened into the alley.
We waited in the alley until a trash hauler came with his mulecart. Taylor talked to the man, and Duncan and I hid among the putrid garbage and were jostled away. Taylor said he’d meet us at the waterfront. The cobblestones made for a miserable ride.
“This is why I wanted to go back,” Duncan said. “I can’t hide. I might as well face what I’ve done.”
“We’ll make it out of the city at least. Taylor will get us to the coast. Every day at liberty is a day you weren’t hung.”
“I thought you were going east.”
“Not anymore. They’ll be looking for us.”
“Nobody’s looking for you,” he said to me.
“I’m not leaving you to go it alone.”
“I’d do it to you.”
“And I’d deserve it.”
Rotten apple slime was leaking out of a crate and onto my pants. I crabbed my way over to Duncan and leaned onto the low rail, peeked my head up while I kept my hand on my son’s shoulder to keep him down.
“How far?” he asked.
“I can see the water.”
“Good.”
“First time I was in this city, your mother and I went dancing, stayed up until dawn, and had crab legs for breakfast.” One memory triggered another. “I almost bought a hardware store.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I’d committed to being a doctor already. The thing about lying is that you begin to need it more with every day.”
At the waterfront the trash hauler had us help him throw his cargo into the Willamette.
“They frown on this generally,” the man said. “There’s a pit, but you have to pay. Don’t see the point in paying for something you get better done for free.”
Steamers went laboriously by, and their wakes sloshed against the trash and crates and scrap lumber and spread it onto the banks.
“Rain’ll clear it out,” the trash hauler said, taking a seat on the forerail of the cart. “Taylor said you should wait. I don’t know what for or for who, but that’s what he said.”
I thanked him, and Duncan turned and held up a hand. We watched the cart wind its way up the low hill and back into the tangle of streets and alleys. Along the bank, sheltered from the wind in the tall grass, we found a dryish place to sit and listened to the mill and ships and the birds.
Taylor found us in the dark and led us to a muddy trail on the bank hidden in the tall grass, and we followed it by feel. We had to creep by several houses and warehouses with bright electric lights, and then we were into a bottomland of shanties, campfires, and derelict boats. Taylor walked faster here and more upright. We rested against the wrecked hull of a riverboat, and Taylor told us that his brother had agreed to take us to the coast with his mule train.
“What then?” Duncan asked.
“I don’t know, son. Your father’ll find a way to get you south, I guess. He’s gotten you this far, hasn’t he?”
“I’m not goin south,” Duncan said.
“You go north, you’ll have a short trip. There’s no hiding. Everyone’s looking for you.”
I stood up so we’d keep going. I didn’t want to let Duncan run himself down, worrying about what was next, because what was next was the rest of his life. He’d be living one move at a time for decades, or until he died.
Taylor took his hand and pulled him to his feet. We were back on the trail. The wind was blowing upriver, and I was glad we weren’t rowing against it. I’d thought about stealing a boat earlier. This was better. Taylor wouldn’t betray us. I hoped he wouldn’t.
Eventually the trail ran into a plank road, and after a mile or so of walking we came to a stage stop that, judging by the shape of it, had fallen out of use. No one was around. Broken barrels were piled up in a jumble, ready to burn. The hoops were stacked neatly on the listing porch. Seeing the hoops for some reason made me think we could jump a train, maybe not in Portland, because they’d be watching, but somewhere else, maybe Salem or in between here and there.
We heard the lonely sound of the mules echoing down the road long before we could see them. Taylor’s brother looked just like him except his hair hadn’t gone gray yet. Before we were introduced, the two of them stepped away, and when they came back the man said his name was David, didn’t care what we were called, and told us to mount up, Duncan on the penultimate mule, me on the last.
Taylor wasn’t coming with us. He patted me on the leg and said safe travels and walked off the way we came. The trail disappeared into a wall of fern. The mules knew where they were going, and it wasn’t long before I was nodding off. I’d never ridden a mule, but I found the ride preferable to horseback.
Jonas
He chucked the fence posts out of the way. The snow had melted, and the ground beneath was freshly turned. He paced out where he thought the body was and took up a shovel with a cracked handle and began to dig.
He had to hook a horse to the body, hug it to get the rope underneath, to get it out of the mud, and when it came, it made an awful sucking sound. He prayed that they would kill Duncan, but he took it back instantly and prayed for his salvation, for his freedom.
Hank Bellhouse and the McCandlisses arrived in the afternoon while Jonas was digging the new grave under the last tree on the high ground. Bellhouse passed over his father’s shotgun.
“Where’d you get this?”
“The boy left it at my place, after he did that.” Bellhouse nodded at the corpse. The blankets were stained black and muddy, and even through them it was obvious that Matius’s head was crushed or gone altogether.
Jonas laid the gun across his father’s body. “What’d you want?”
“You need help digging?” Bellhouse asked.
“No.”
“Joseph, go find us some shovels in the barn.”
“I said I don’t want help.”
“You’ll get it anyway.” Bellhouse took off his coat and carefully set a fine Jules Jurgensen pocketwatch on top of it, coiled the chain around it like a sleeping snake. Joseph caught his brother’s attention when he saw the watch, and they both smiled.
With four of them digging, they made the hole deep and wide. Bellhouse kicked the McCandlisses out, and it was him and Jonas left.
“No idea where he is?” Bellhouse asked.
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Don’t you want to hunt him for this? For what he did here.”
Jonas climbed from the grave and perched there on his knees, catching his breath. “You can leave me to bury him now.”
“I’ll put you in that hole with him, you don’t tell me where that little son of a bitch has gotten to.”
“Chacartegui’ll catch him first,” Jonas said.
“Chacartegui’s dead, and it was Duncan that did it. Shot my man Tartan full of holes too.”
“Well, he’s left the Harbor then—if he has any sense, he has.”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Y’all can get the fuck outta here, won’t bother me at all.”
“Sorry for yer loss,” Ben said.
Jonas didn’t say anything as they mounted up and left, and when they were gone he held his palms flat to the mud. Had the thought: At least the ground hadn’t froze. If Duncan did kill Chacartegui, he was gone. He was dead. Jonas had been dead once, and he’d come back. From one side to the other; he’d been in the open before. His father had taken him on a journey, now look at him.
Jonas and Matius: Alaska
Jonas stood on the dock and surveyed the western shore. The piledrivers and wharf carpenters were small and busy above the muddy and white-capped water of the Willamette. Buildings had sprouted in their wake like morels in a burn. Puttin a skirt on her, he’d heard said. This was February, when warmth and blue skies were mythical, like the Cyclops or Medusa, and Jonas had ceased to believe in a rain-free future. He’d resigned himself to the gray drizzle, and when it finally and suddenly subsided, it left him feeling a little abandoned. The gods had stopped warring and returned to the mountain. There was peace, but still; he’d been abandoned.
When he got home Mary was on the porch, surrounded by steaming raw lumber and mud. She lifted her hand to wave, and her face broke into a free and uneven smile. And with that the final tightness from the day’s shift drained from Jonas’s body, and he walked loosely. It was as if he’d been swimming a broad river and was tired and needed the shore and almost couldn’t make it, couldn’t go on, and then he let himself sink and tested the depth and unbelievably his feet touched. He was done. She set down her book and stood to hug him.
“Your father was here,” she said.
“When?”
“A few hours ago. He’s very skinny.”
“He’s always skinny.”
“He’s skinnier than I’ve ever seen him. And he’s grown a beard. He left you something.”
He followed her inside. Spread on the table was a map. Holding down each corner were small, smooth black stones.
“When did he say he’d be back?”
“He didn’t. I told him you’d be home this evening, and he said he couldn’t wait. Did you know he was coming?”
“Not so soon, I didn’t.”
The noise from the couplers slamming to in the train yard behind their house was enough to rattle the glass in the frames. Burnside was only quiet on Sunday mornings for an hour or so. Noise has different colors, and a person can grow accustomed to anything. What before had kept them up nights now lulled them into a deeper sleep. Mary had used a powdered soap to scrub the floor, and there was a picture of flowers on the box, but it smelled of ammonia. Years later he’d think of his young wife sitting like this almost daily, a small, beautiful girl waiting for him alone, and the ammonia would be thick in his mind and he’d go dizzy. He was nineteen and she was a year younger, added, mathematically prime. Pregnant but not showing, didn’t show much even two months from when the child was born; she didn’t look pregnant, only plump.
“Swallowed a crookneck,” Matius had said, after he arrived unannounced and was told of the pregnancy. “Bodes poorly for both child and mother if she don’t show.”
“Doesn’t mean that,” Jonas said.
“Does.”
“Not every time.”
“I know a thing or two.”
“So you have to say it.”
Matius would be back, and there’d be more talking and lying and cajoling. Mary believed him. There was talk in the streets too, and stories in the paper. Who wasn’t rich already? Who wasn’t going? Jonas blamed his father. They couldn’t leave yet. They’d spent their savings getting settled, and now that he’d found work in the mill and they had a house, he wasn’t ready to leave it behind. And the quiet word at the mill was that Alaska wasn’t so nice or golden as they said. True, the managers could’ve spread these rumors, but the mill was stable and could be counted on. Jonas didn’t look out on great hillsides of gold, or even gold mines. It was trees, and if there was an end to them, he couldn’t see it.
“I hate that we spend our days apart,” Mary said.
“I have to work.” He felt stupid for having to say it out loud.
“I’m so alone here. There’s no one to talk to or visit, no women my age. I want an adventure, Jonas, not this dull place.”
“It won’t be any different up north. It’ll be worse, I assure you.”
“But we’ll be together. We’ll work together and build a place and make a fortune together. It’ll just be us.”
“That’s all I want, Mary.”
“So why don’t we leave?”
“I told you.”
“Your father agrees with me. We should make our way before the fall, or we’ll be wintering here.”
“I want it to be safe when we travel. I worry about the child.”
“There’s no more safety here than on the road.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know, Jonas. I know I don’t. But I feel in my heart that we need to get on our way. If we stay here, it feels like we might not get another chance to leave.”
He listened to her breathing while she slept and felt that he was destined to fail her. Portland wasn’t so bad a place, if she could get used to it. He thought they could someday build a house on the other side of the river.
“Jonas, no.”
“Purdy is selling lots. He told me. He said he’d let me make payments.”
“I don’t want to live here.”
“Fine.”
“Can we go?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Talk to your father. He has it all planned out.”
“Don’t listen to him. He has nothing planned out. He’ll lean until he’s standing on us.”
“Jonas.”
“I’m serious.”
“He’s your father.”
“That’s why I said what I did. I know him. I know how he is.”
“I hate it when you’re not here.”
“I know.”
He thought: Maybe the old man and me, after the baby’s born, we’ll make a trip up there and get a place built, sink some holes and see what we can find. He imagined digging a hole, a deep, black hole, so deep he could stand up and see dirt ten maybe twenty feet above his head and a ragged piece of sky, a rent in the dirt fabric. Would there be gold there? One foot deeper? Two? Two hundred? How much gold? A fleck? A train load. Bags of it, enough to bar a flood. To be done, that’s how much. He would be done working forever. Imagine that. Now, he thought, you’re falling for his bullshit.
“We could go right now,” Mary said. “I don’t have to wait.”
“It’s not safe. We can’t.” It was easier to make the change in his mind and not tell her. In the end, it felt more up to him instead of what it was, a surrender.
He quit the mill, and their house went to another family. But by then he’d already rented Mary a room in a boarding house. She was on the third floor, with two windows that looked out over the river. The widow that ran the house had three young children and promised to keep an eye on Mary and help once the baby came. The corrals were nearby, but you couldn’t smell them. Before he left they’d stood together at the window and watched the cattle mill in their pens. He promised to be back soon.
They’d only made it as far as Seattle when he got word about the child. At first he wanted to go back, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He let his father’s will drive him farther and farther north until he didn’t want to go back, couldn’t imagine facing her if he did.
They crossed the channel in a hired canoe. There was a small amount of water in the bottom and it sloshed around and rinsed the mud from their boots. Matius and the Indian that spoke some English were in the bow while Jonas and the other Indian, so far silent, rode in the stern. A quiet trip, but nervous. Three Tlingits had been killed, two hung, one shot, for the murder of a saloonkeeper at Go
ld Creek, and the Ellstroms were hesitant to get in the boat with the quiet men, perhaps father and son just like them. Not much of a choice, though, if they didn’t want to wait for the scow to go over and have twenty men beside them asking for the same jobs.
When they first arrived, there’d been a gallows on the beach. They’d hung an Indian and left him there. It was an ugly sight, and the others on the steamer thought it barbaric. The Northwest Trading Company had a committee, and they passed the laws and judgment and hung Indians while keeping the majority, minus those necessary to maintain the ferry service, out of the town proper. The steamer only came once a month, so no one at the trading company cared what a bunch of tourists thought. The Indians were from Hoonah mostly, and they’d been getting fleeced and murdered by different brands of whites for a hundred years. If they wanted someone to hear their grievances, they wouldn’t find him in Juneau. Formerly they’d been a warlike tribe, and the warriors among them were still amazed at the ferocity of the whites. A sense of humor was not something apparent in them, not without cruelty, without viciousness. They’d laugh at you bleeding, but not at you laughing.
Their light packs soaked up the water from the floor. The rest of their gear was stowed in a cabin rented from a blacksmith on the waterfront in Juneau proper. If the mill on the island hired them, they’d be going back for another trip to bring their outfits over. If not, men were dying in the Treadwell mine every day. Matius’s back was humped against the rain, and he had a tick, shiny and crimson, buried in his neck, like it was the first pebble that would mark him turning into stone.
Like he knew Jonas was staring at him, his father turned, spoke: “You better at least act sober when we get there.”
“I already told you I was sorry.”
“I didn’t say act sorry. I said act sober.” His father spit a cottony dot onto the black water and turned to look into his son’s face. “It’s shameful.”
“Then ignore it. Turn a blind fuckin eye.”
“You don’t even remember, do you?”
“I remember some.”
“You’d be embarrassed if you could.”
“I’m embarrassed, and I can’t. I hardly see the difference.” Jonas felt inside his jacket for his leather satchel, and it wasn’t there. “You take something from my coat last night?”
