The Art of Love: Origins of Sinner's Grove

by A. B. Michaels

  “Any idea where he might be?”

  “Probably over at McCraig’s. He likes the tables over there. He’s a gamblin’ man, more so than the rest of us. But as far as I know he’s honest.” Shorty aimed for a nearby spittoon. “Course that’s probably why his gamblin’ don’t pay off.”

  “You’re a cynical old coot,” Gus said.

  “You been around as long as I have, you git that a way.”

  Gus paid for their drinks and stood up. “We’d best get back at it. I’m gonna talk to Porter, see if I can do some business. Then I’ll head over to McCraig’s.”

  Gus’s instinct about the creek above Bonanza was looking good; early tailings promised even bigger payouts than Carmack’s discovery. The new name for the creek, “Eldorado,” said it all: “the golden one.” Gus, Shorty, and Porter had all staked claims on Eldorado; no telling yet if any of them would strike it rich. Still, there was an awful lot of hope in the air.

  Gus and Shorty had put together a couple of crews and promised to pay them a percentage of the take on the claims they worked. Gus had turned around and negotiated a percentage of Porter’s new claim in exchange for providing the miners to work it. Using his claim on Bonanza as collateral, Gus had also borrowed money to negotiate a slew of side deals that entailed down payments and hefty interest rates. In a matter of weeks he owed more money than he could ever hope to repay in his lifetime…unless one of his claims paid off big.

  But it still wasn’t enough. Experience had taught Gus the fickle nature of a gold rush; he had a lot more in mind than digging down through permafrost and working a sluice box.

  “I’m telling you, by this time next year, Forty Mile will be a ghost town,” he told Porter over a cup of coffee in the restaurant’s kitchen. “There’s an Indian fish camp upriver where the Klondike flows into the Yukon and it’s already being taken over by miners wantin’ easy access to Bonanza and Eldorado. Hell, my own crews have set up camp there. Now all those prospectors are gonna need food, aren’t they?”

  “What have you got in mind?” Porter asked.

  “Fifty-fifty split on a restaurant in the new location. We make it a fancy place where miners with pockets full of gold won’t mind spending it. What do you say?”

  “I like the way you think,” Porter said, refilling Gus’s cup. “How about we call it the ‘Wilson-Wolff Restaurant’?”

  “Nah, keep my name out of it,” Gus said. “You’re the front man. You know the business. People know Porter Wilson means good food. I’ll just bankroll you and we’ll see how it goes.”

  The two men came to terms and shook hands on the deal. Gus then headed over to McCraig’s, where he found a man talking with a miner who was handing over a packet along with a small leather pouch.

  “Ed Barlow?” Gus asked the man who was taking the packet.

  “One and the same,” Barlow said. He was fresh-faced, young, and rotund, with pale skin and coppery-red hair that had already begun to recede.

  “I hear you’ve booked passage on the Alice headin’ down to St. Michael’s tomorrow morning, and on to Seattle.”

  “Yessir. And you probably heard I’m takin’ letters to people on the Outside for a small service fee.”

  Gus smiled. “I like a man of business. So how much to take a letter for me?”

  “Ten dollars,” Barlow said.

  Gus took off his hat and rubbed his head. “Whew, that’s a stiff price, young man.”

  “It’s a long way down to Seattle.”

  “Tell you what,” Gus offered. “I’ll double your fee if you promise you’ll deliver my letter first.”

  “Right in Seattle?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, then. Done deal.” Barlow stuck out his hand and Gus shook it.

  “I’ll bring the letter back in less than an hour. You gonna be here?”

  Barlow held up a wad of money he’d already collected from various prospectors eager to connect with their loved ones on the Outside. “Yessir. I’m feelin’ lucky.”

  Gus walked back to his cabin on Nob Hill. He’d spent little time there over the past few months, and he knew he’d be locking it up for good in the next few days. The energy was shifting upriver, and he needed to be where that energy was.

  Looking around the tiny front room, he felt the emptiness closing in on him. So little remained: a few woolen blankets and a blue china teapot with a cracked spout, some mismatched dishes and a large tin washbasin. No one seeing the place now would ever think a woman had lived there.

  He’d given the golden-haired doll back to Janey Fortuna, and the little girl had cried as she clung to it. Mattie had been right about that; he just hoped the doll didn’t end up back at the dry goods store, because he didn’t want to come to blows with Janey’s dad over such a trifle.

  The only things he had left to remind him of his own family were a little tintype of Mattie they’d taken at a carnival in Seattle, and a lock of Annabelle’s hair. Those and the sack of blocks that Shorty had made. He took out a sheet of paper and a fountain pen and began to write, pausing only a second before expressing the lie that he hoped would turn out to be true:

  Dear Mattie,

  How does it feel to be a rich woman? I struck it big on the Klondike (like I said I would) and we are never going to have to worry about money again. I have to stay here to supervise the mining operation I have set up, but I promise I will come down for good next spring. Just hold tight and use the money included with this letter to keep you and our baby girl safe and happy. Give my darling Annabelly a big sloppy kiss for me. I will come back as soon as I can after the spring thaw. See you soon.

  Love, Gus

  P.S. Please remember the time and day that you received this letter.

  Gus put a few bank notes in the letter and sealed it, addressing it to “Mattie Wolff at the Empire Rooming House, Seattle.” He took it back down to McCraig’s and stood in the background while Barlow finished a hand of poker. The pile of bills and claims and nuggets in the center of the table was large, and the man across from Barlow smiled broadly while he chomped on a cigar.

  “Read ’em and weep,” the man said, laying out his winning hand. Barlow tossed his cards in the center pile and muttered, “Goddamnation.”

  “Barlow,” Gus called out.

  The young man got up from the table and walked over to Gus.

  “Feelin’ lucky, huh?” Gus asked.

  Barlow shrugged. “I’ll win it back. Only a matter of time.”

  “Right. You keep telling yourself that.” Gus tried to keep the disgust out of his voice. “So, here’s my letter and twenty dollars. Like I said, I want this to be the first thing you deliver when you get off that ship. You’ll be on the Oregon out of St. Michael’s, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’m going to find out when the Oregon docks in Seattle, and I’ve asked my wife to tell me what time she gets the letter. If too much time has passed between those two events, I’ll want my money back…and I’ll find you to get it. Do you understand?” Gus tapped the letter onto Barlow’s chest. “I’m a man of business too.”

  Barlow swallowed. “First thing. Yessir.”

  Gus walked out of McCraig’s wondering if there was any other solution to his problem, because relying on Ed Barlow didn’t seem to be the best option after all.

  The Alice landed at Circle City, downriver from Forty Mile, in the evening. Ed Barlow, whose luck hadn’t improved the day before, figured he’d do better in the new surroundings. They called Circle City the “Paris of Alaska” and sure enough it was full of piss and vinegar. No Mounties on the U.S. side of the border stickin’ their noses into people’s business. And it had a lot more pleasure palaces than Forty Mile ever thought of having. And who would have thought that out here in the middle of nowhere there’d be nearly thirty saloons—surely one of them would help him recoup his losses from the day before.

  Ed slipped the rucksack full of letters to be delivered in Seattle und
er his bunk, pulled on his heavy wool jacket, and headed off the boat to see what kind of game he could scare up. The sky was leaden; there would be no stars tonight. It looked like a storm might be coming in.

  Two streets off the river landing and up three blocks he found the Pickled Hen, which sounded just about right to him. He found a table of hapless-looking five-card-stud players and mentally licked his chops. “Whiskey,” he ordered as he sat down.

  Four hours later, Ed stumbled through the snow, his pockets empty and his brain pickled worse than the hen’s. Snow was coming down thick and he wasn’t sure which direction led back to the boat. He was growing colder by the minute, which part of his addled brain told him was a good thing because it kept him awake long enough to keep going. He saw just one person out on the streets and shuffled faster to ask the fellow which street led down to the landing.

  Finally getting his bearings, he lumbered onto the gangplank and found his way back to his cabin, flopping on the bunk and wrapping the bed’s wool blanket around himself. Damn, it was cold. The whiskey helped him fall asleep and he woke up the next morning with a skull that felt like it’d been split with a hatchet. He waited for the shrieks of the boat’s whistle, but heard nothing. In fact, it was quiet. Way too quiet. He waited to feel the rumble and vibration of the steam engine, but there was nothing. Did I stumble onto the wrong boat? he wondered. He made his way to the top deck and saw a lone crew member battening down the hatches. It was snowing much harder now and the deck hand kept wiping his eyes so he could see.

  “What’s going on, why aren’t we moving?” Ed asked.

  The crew member looked at Ed like he was crazy. “Look around you, man. There’s a freeze on. River’s closed up. The Alice won’t be goin’ anywhere anytime soon.”

  “What?! Well how are we supposed to get back to Seattle, then?”

  “Sad to say, we ain’t, at least not on this boat. You’d best go back below, Mister. Cap’n will come around later today and explain the situation.”

  Ed shook his head, thinking about all the money he’d been paid to deliver those letters. Money that he’d lost the last two nights. He thought about the money that must be included in all those letters and thought for a moment that maybe he could borrow some of it and pay it back when he started to win again. Would that be considered stealing, if I put it right back where it belonged? Wouldn’t it just be borrowing? He went down to his cabin and reached under the bunk for the knapsack. First he’d see how much there was to work with, before making a decision.

  But the decision wasn’t his to make, because when he reached under the bed to pull out the knapsack, it was gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  November always signaled a major shift in the landscape of the northern territories. Day by day, the Yukon River transformed itself from a busy water route to a solid road of snow. Every year there were ignorant souls who thought they could read the river, and many of them died from exposure as the ice they thought was solid enough gave way to freezing water and a quick death.

  “They’s in too much of a hurry to live,” Shorty would comment when news hit of the latest fatality. “Well, they sure got to the end of their lives right quick, now didn’t they?”

  Waiting for the freeze, Gus and Shorty’s men had built some basic log cabins to replace the tents they’d been using up in Dawson, the settlement Gus had told Porter about. The new restaurant had also been started with an eye toward feeding the growing ranks of hungry miners. By now, however, the smaller creeks, like the Bonanza and Eldorado, had frozen over, which meant the real work could begin.

  Unlike gold fields on the Outside, the best time to work a claim this far north was in the winter. Finding placer gold meant digging down through permafrost to bedrock where ancient streams had flowed, usually near currently running rivers and creeks. Much heavier than rock, the metal had washed down from higher places eons before, often getting stuck in the stones, boulders, and crevices of the older streambed. Sometimes signs of that journey showed up on a canyon wall high above the current water flow. More often than not, the real payoff lay in figuring out where the gold had finally settled, sometimes thirty or forty feet below the surface. Digging holes that deep was only possible in the winter because the walls were too frozen to collapse, and running water wouldn’t turn the shaft into a dangerous, muddy mess.

  Gus and Shorty supervised the crews as they began the process of sinking holes through the permafrost. Estimating where the old river channel had run along their claims, they first cleared away the snow and vegetation before starting fires that would thaw the ground enough to start digging. The process was slow and required hard work: build several fires in the morning, let the ground thaw, dig it out in the evening, build another fire, let the ground thaw overnight, dig it out, build another fire in the morning, and so on. Having worked a number of claims the same way at only two to three feet of progress per day, Gus was struck again by how inefficient it all seemed.

  “There’s gotta be a faster, easier way to dig,” he complained one day as they watched the time-consuming excavation.

  “Yessir, there should be,” Shorty said. “Mebbe if we poured hot water down there, it’d move a might faster.”

  Gus stared at the hole. “What about steam?” he finally said.

  Shorty scratched his beard. “That mebbe could work. You get enough pressure going, you’d melt that frost lickety-split. But how you gonna get a steam engine down in that there hole?”

  “I don’t know,” Gus said. “But just about anything’s better than this.”

  As the hole grew deeper, the crew set up a winch system to haul the excavated dirt up in buckets. The men would dump the dirt, called “tailings,” by the side of the hole, to be sifted through during the “spring cleanup” when the creek water started flowing again and could be used to “sluice” or filter the gold from the lighter sand, rock, and gravel.

  After work each day, Gus would return to his cabin, much more rustic than even the cabin in Forty Mile, and go over his ledgers. Money, on paper at least, was flowing out at an alarming rate. If nothing panned out…well, he couldn’t think that way. Instead he prayed his claims on Bonanza and Eldorado would produce the kind of pay dirt he’d been searching for.

  Mattie and Annabelle were never far from his thoughts. This is all for them, he often told himself. But several days into the dig, when no appreciable signs of gold had surfaced in any of the holes, he forced himself to take stock. He’d gone back to his cabin early, eaten a plate of warmed-over stew, and drunk a larger than usual measure of liquid courage. Lying in his bunk after the whiskey had taken the edge off, he faced the truth about himself: This isn’t about Mattie and Annabelle at all. It’s about me. He remembered his father’s funeral, and his older brother Jonas sitting him down for a man-to-man talk.

  “Look, the farm’s barely holding on and I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed,” he’d told Gus. “You don’t like farmin’ and you make that known every day you’re asked to do chores. So, I’m suggestin’ you head off on your own, see what’s out there for you.”

  Gus could still recall the cold sense of panic washing over him at his brother’s words. Out on my own? What will I do? Where will I go? Jonas had spoken the truth: Gus had never taken to farming, and he’d always felt there was something better out there. But what? There’d been no money for college, so at the age of sixteen he was challenged to find some other way to make his mark. Now he was twice that old and still had nothing to show for it. The specter of failure burned inside him, the flames licking at his soul. His mama used to say that when you got to feeling sorry for yourself, it was the Devil laughing at you; lately it felt as though Ol’ Beelzebub was the life of the party.

  If all his claims went bust, could he pack up his pride and go back to Mattie, hat in hand? The thought curdled his stomach. She seemed to have lost her fire for him already; he could just imagine how she’d feel to have a ne’er do well of a husband hanging on to her skirts.


  No. He’d go back for a while, make sure she and Annabelle were taken care of, and then head back up north. Somehow, some way, he’d find a way to make a fortune in the Yukon. By God , it was there for the taking—why couldn’t he find it?!

  He laughed at himself. “That’s the fever talking,” Mattie would say. And she’d be right…again. The thing about Mattie was, she was a good woman. She’d been a good wife and a fine mother to little Annie. But—and here was the hardest thing of all to face—he’d started to lose his feeling for her too. Maybe that was the price he had to pay for following the head in his pants instead of the one on his shoulders.

  Three days later, shirtless and sweating, Gus spent the morning working down in the number three hole on his Eldorado claim. Too impatient to wait for others to make progress, he’d climbed down the thirty-foot shaft with a pickax and shovel, bound and determined to work off the anxiety that had begun to sink its talons into him. He hoped to find something—anything—to keep this from being one more busted hole. He dug his shovel into the newly thawed earth and heaved it into the bucket, pausing to run his hand through the tailings before sending them topside.

  That’s when the glint caught his eye. In the dim light of the lantern, clumped along with the dirt and rock and gravel, he saw several nuggets the size of fat ripe blackberries, looking as if they’d been dipped in gold.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered, not quite believing his eyes. He ran the nuggets through his fingers, then knelt down to check the dirt next to the bucket he’d filled. It too was sprinkled with gold. “Like cheese on a sandwich,” he said out loud, echoing Dawson Charlie’s description. “Damned if he wasn’t right on the money.” He tapped on the bucket to signal the crew topside. “Daniel!” he yelled up to the miner who’d been operating the winch for him. “Pay dirt rising! Comin’ up gold!”