Guardian

by Joe Haldeman

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re the first. The notice only went out yesterday noon.” He looked up. “You are a teacher.”

  “In fact, I am. But I’m not here about a notice.”

  “Ah. Hum.” He set down the watering can and looked over my shoulder, lost in thought for a moment. “Have a seat, please, Miss, Mrs. …”

  I smelled a job but made a quick decision. “Flammarion—Rosa Flammarion.”

  “Ah. Very good.” He eased himself down into a chair and pulled it up to his desk, wheels squeaking. “And what can I do for a Southern lady this far north?” For some men I use a little more Georgia, than for others.

  “I’ve just come from Fort Wrangell.” I took the envelope out of my purse. “Grace Loden asked me to bring this to you.”

  He sighed. “Let me show you a demonstration of mentalism, Mrs. Flammarion.” He touched the corner of the envelope to his temple and squeezed his eyes shut. “She needs money.”

  “Not so much money as books and supplies,” I said. “She’s in a really bad way. Old books, anything.”

  He nodded and slowly slit the letter with a jade opener. He kept nodding as he read it. “Old textbooks might be possible. There’s little money. You don’t have religious contract schools down south, do you?”

  “I taught in Kansas. We once had them—I taught in a secular school, but gave religious instructions to the Indians in an old Presbyterian one-room school-house.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that. “We used to be a Presbyterian contract school. We could count on about forty, even sixty percent of our expenses to be covered by the church—until a couple of years ago.”

  I’d heard something of that. “The government?”

  “That’s right. They closed down the system, on constitutional grounds, supposedly—and supposedly the federal government would make up the loss. But we’re not a state. So we’re the small pig at the trough, if you’ll excuse a barnyard metaphor.” He rolled his chair to a low bookshelf under the window and selected the last in a series of worn ledgers. He rolled back, his nimbleness almost comical, set the ledger next to Grace’s letter, and flipped through it.

  “I think—here.” He put his finger on an entry. “I can help her on the McGuffey readers. We got fifty new ones back in April; the old ones would be in the library back room. I’ll have them boxed up. You’re on the steamer that had the … unfortunate accident?”

  “Yes, the White Nights.”

  He nodded and put his glasses back in their case with a snap. “It will call at Fort Wrangell on the way back. Miss Loden will have her books. And I can find her some composition books and pencils. Could you make sure that they get to her?”

  “I won’t be aboard. We’re getting off at Skagway.”

  “Skagway?” He tilted his head at me. “You’re not going prospecting.”

  “No; my son is, and a couple of friends. I want to see them off safely.”

  “See to your own safety, too. It’s a coarse and dangerous place.”

  “I know. Miss Loden told me to watch out for Soapy Smith and his gang.”

  He laughed. “Unless I’ve misread your character, I don’t think you’ll ever see Soapy Smith. He’s in a much hotter place than Alaska now.”

  I was a little slow. “Hotter?”

  “Mr. Smith died in a gunfight last week. There was some sort of a town meeting about him, on the wharf, to which he wasn’t invited. When he tried to force his way in, a guard shot him. He killed the guard as well, as his dying act.”

  “God rest their souls.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “Skagway should be noticeably calmer when you and your boy get there. What then? Back to Kansas?”

  “No. I’ve had enough of that. I thought I’d try my luck in Seattle or San Francisco.”

  “Teaching what grades?”

  “I did nine through twelve in Kansas.”

  “There’s a job here, tailor made for you, teaching and missionary work. Not much competition.”

  “I don’t know that I could—”

  “You’d be close to your son, Mrs. Flammarion. And to us you’d be a godsend.” He shrugged and smiled. “God’s will, perhaps.”

  I tried to read his character as he had mine. “Mr. Bower, may I entrust you with a secret?”

  He smiled. “If it doesn’t involve a hanging offense.”

  “I left a bad marriage. I can’t go back to Kansas because he found me there.”

  “You don’t believe in divorce?”

  “No I do not.”

  “Let me hazard a guess: you are not actually related to a French astronomer and novelist.”

  “That’s correct. I can’t use my real name; that’s how he found me, after four years. My son tried to join the army.”

  He rubbed his beard and stared at the desktop for a long moment. “You don’t want to talk about why you left him.”

  “No. Except to assure you that it was the only course. For my only child’s safety.”

  “I do believe you.” He closed the ledger quietly. “You know … Alaska has a fairly difficult examination for teachers. One’s performance on that means more than, say, academic records. You’ve been to college.”

  “Wellesley.”

  “Boston. You might find our winters no worse here.” He anticipated my question. “I don’t suppose we’d have to bother them about a transcript if you did well on the test.”

  “Well, then. I should like to arrange to take it.”

  He reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a large white envelope. “Do you have a pencil?”

  I was given three hours and an empty classroom. At ten o’clock, children filled the hall, laughing and screaming. It was only a little distracting, and soon enough they were properly caged up. Reverend Bower had warned me about that—regular school wasn’t in session, but there was instruction in crafts, music, and dance.

  The science and mathematics parts of the test were easy, stopping short of calculus. English was also simple, sentence diagramming and rules of grammar. Some of the history was difficult—for some reason, there were no questions about the history of Kansas, and I had never taught the history of Alaska! If they could make allowances for that, I was pretty confident.

  I took the test back to Reverend Bower. He sealed it and signed across the flap, with time and date. “You had another forty-five minutes. The test was not too hard?”

  “Except for Alaskan history, no. I could study that and retake it.”

  “Yes, of course.” He scribbled something under his signature. “The territorial board meets tomorrow, down at city hall. I should have word in the afternoon, if your steamer is still here. Could you come by about three or four?”

  Of course I would; I asked him to send word on to Skagway if I had to go on. He said he’d try but wasn’t sanguine. School wouldn’t start until Monday, September 5th, though; I could be back in plenty of time to find out about the job and, if I were accepted, prepare for classes.

  It was still a beautiful morning, and rather than go back to the rooming house, I explored the town a bit. It had a much more permanent feel than Fort Wrangell; it had been the Russian base of operations before Seward’s Folly. Some of their substantial log buildings were still in use, almost a century old.

  I stopped in the office of the weekly paper, the Alaskan, and bought a copy. Reverend Bower’s advertisement for a high school teacher was prominent, on the last page. The other jobs listed for women were menial and low-paying. (There was an article about communicable diseases sweeping San Francisco, with troops coming from all over to muster for the Philippines—it’s just as well we had gone quickly in and out.)

  The man at the newspaper office directed me to the Presbyterian mission, over on the Tlingit side of town. There used to be a stockade fence separating the two areas; the only thing left of it was a dilapidated watchtower. I guessed the lumber had long since been scavenged for building or fuel.

  There’s a muse
um full of Tlingit crafts and lore on the mission grounds. I gave it a cursory look, planning to return, and followed a sign to the Indian River Walk. That was a couple of miles of pathway along a charming brook; just what I needed, except for the mosquitoes, large and aggressive. Absent the snow-topped mountains, I could have been back in the rural Massachusetts I loved as a college student.

  Coming back into town, I saw Daniel and the Colemans fishing with hand lines off the dock. I thought that was typically male—what would they do if they caught one, eat it raw?—but in fact the lady at the rooming house had loaned them the equipment and said she would cook up their catch. So far they hadn’t had any luck, but it was pleasant to sit with them and have an iced root beer out of their bucket.

  They’d checked the situation at the White Nights, and although no one there could speak English, they could see that the boiler was disassembled, so we wouldn’t be leaving right away. That was good news for me, of course; I told them about the morning’s interview and test. Daniel’s reaction was subdued; he thought I shouldn’t commit to anything here until I’d checked Skagway. I had to laugh at that, and I’m afraid I embarrassed him, saying if they didn’t need teachers, I could always get a job as a dance-hall girl or barmaid. You’d make ten times as much money, Doc said, which was probably true.

  There was a faint regular knocking sound, coming from the White Nights: a muffled drum. The cabin boy marched down the gangway with the drum, followed by six men struggling with the coffin on their shoulders, and then the crew, dressed in a motley way, some in the work clothes they wore on deck and some in coat and tie. From fifty yards away, we could smell mothballs and the tang of celluloid collars.

  The first mate, in what I suppose was a Russian naval uniform, saw us, and with an inclination of his head invited us to join the procession. I was torn between curiosity and an instinct not to intrude, but the men shrugged, tied their lines to pilings, and trotted down the dock, so I went along, too.

  There was a Russian priest waiting at the graveyard behind the church. He wore red, and my memory of the scene is like an overexposed Kodachrome, his scarlet against the verdant green and the cloudless hard blue sky. At his feet, the dark scattered earth and deep hole.

  He surprised us by speaking in unaccented English, about this man’s long journey through life, and the short one he was now to undertake; about the mystery of God’s will and our need to accept it without question. Then he spoke in faltering Russian, the captain whispering words when he paused.

  His Russian was more sure when he slipped into memorized liturgy. He sang a hymn in a deep rich voice, the ship’s crew mumbling along, the way their American counterparts would. Then they removed the boards supporting the coffin and lowered it with ropes. The priest threw a handful of dirt after it and said a few words. The captain and his men repeated the gesture; the first mate said softly to me, “You, please, too.” Well, we had shared part of his journey. The soil was surprisingly warm and dry.

  Reading that fifty-year-old diary, I wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t died there. The worlds I gained for his losing this one.

  Signs and portents.

  There was a great amount of clatter and the ring of hammers on metal that afternoon, and then they fired up the boiler; most of the men up on the deck or, like us, standing on the dock alongside. Then the whistle blasted two short notes and two long, our signal, and repeated it twice. The first mate shouted down that we wouldn’t depart until first light, and so could have another night on shore if we wished. Momentarily torn between parsimony and comfort, all four of us opted for feather beds.

  The next morning I sat in the stern and watched Sitka recede as we made our way up the Chatham Strait toward Juneau. It was a strange feeling. I would be back in a week or two, a completely different woman. Childless for the first time since my twenties.

  I was not too concerned about whether I would be accepted for the job. I could survive for more than a year on the money I had, and if Sitka didn’t have anything for me, there were certainly jobs in Seattle and San Francisco, and (I thought until the next day) even Juneau, which was larger than Sitka, two years away from being named the new capital.

  We saw icebergs for the first time as we steamed past the Icy Strait. An otherworldly blue, pieces of them as small as carriages bobbed past us—though they were actually eight times as large, most of their bulk underwater. (We found out the crew hoped there would be plenty of southbound cargo in Juneau and Skagway; otherwise they’d be filling the hold with ice bound for San Francisco, arduous, freezing work.)

  That night we endured the first heavy rain since Fort Wrangell. The ship slowed almost to a stop in the poor visibility. We huddled around candles, wrapped in damp blankets, while I read Edgar Allan Poe stories to them, for a different kind of chill.

  A strange thing happened while I was reading Poe—doubly strange for me—an actual raven appeared, landing on the deck with a clatter and caw. Odd to see a bird out in that storm, and weird that it should be a raven.

  Daniel had read the poem, and he looked pale. “If that thing says ‘nevermore,’ I’m going to jump over the side.” He started to explain that to Doc and Chuck.

  I knew what it was going to say, though.

  It hopped to within a yard of me, cocking its head. It was close enough that I could see the glint of candle in its eye. “No gold,” it said.

  “‘No go’?” Doc said.

  It took a hop toward him. “No gold!” Doc aimed a kick at it, and it barely got out of the way. Another kick and it flew off into the wind.

  “Jesus.” Doc shook his head. “Signs and portents.”

  “Mom used to say that,” Chuck explained.

  “Maybe that’s enough reading for tonight,” I said.

  “Aye.” Doc blew out the candle and patted my hand in the darkness.

  I couldn’t sleep for a long time, haunted by a sense of prophecy. The raven’s “no gold” had saved us twice, and the meaning now was just as clear. I wished I had told them about the other times. It would sound false now.

  The boys also tossed and turned until the storm abated and a thin gray light showed the fast-scudding clouds.

  We could hear Juneau a long time before we saw it, though the incessant banging noise was not from the city proper, but rather from the rock-crushing factory across the bay. Dockside, the noise was as loud as a carpenter would be, hammering in the next room without letup.

  How could they stand it? We rolled up wads of paper to block our ears, to little effect. The crew loaded and unloaded in a fast, nervous way; they wanted to get out before dark.

  A calm man in a business suit came aboard, a local merchant checking the storage of his furs. When I asked him whether the noise ever let up, he said, “No, not even on Christmas. After a while, you don’t hear it anymore.” I said it would drive me insane before I could get used to it.

  “Maybe that’s our secret,” he said with a wink. “You have to be mad to stay here. But it’s the sound of money. You don’t hear that much in the States nowadays.”

  They said we would be here for three or four hours, at least, so I asked Doc whether he would accompany me in search of a cup of coffee, while the boys went off to a saloon. He readily agreed. I could have gone alone, but I didn’t see any other unescorted women on the “street,” which was actually a steep river of mud. A lot of the men wore pistols, swaggering along, which I hadn’t seen in Sitka. Doc said it was probably because people carried “pokes” of gold here. That made my poke of double eagles feel more heavy than usual.

  About halfway up the hill we found a café with a card in the window advertising an Edison Spring Motor Phonograph on the premises. When we walked in, the proprietor started a cylinder of Scott Joplin, melancholy and merry at the same time, not quite loud enough to drown out the hammering across the bay.

  The man was friendly but strange-looking, immensely fat and both hairless and toothless. He brought us a plate of pastries he said his
wife had baked. Rich and delectable, they partly explained his size, and perhaps his lack of teeth.

  This was the first time either of us had heard one of the “brown wax” cylinders, much more clear than their predecessors. We were fascinated, even though the cylinders were only good for two minutes of music, and he only had a dozen of them.

  Between Doc’s beer and my coffee, we were for some reason compelled to talk about our pasts—I stuck to the part that was true, childhood to courting. He was feeling sentimental, I think aided by the music, and recalled his wife, Lilian, with a candor that would have been embarrassing if it had been any other man talking. With Doc it was natural and endearing. Their love had been intense and physical, and he had no command of polite words for describing it—so he used barnyard terms in a reverent private whisper.

  Strange how things turn out. We would be here again, and all the world would change. But this time we were a day or two away from parting, perhaps forever. I realize now that Doc’s outpouring was driven by a premonition of death. He had never told anybody about his love and his loss in such detail. Describing it to me was a way of keeping his love alive.

  Reading over these words, I can see that it sounds as if Doc were obliquely trying to seduce me. I don’t think so at all; we had an unspoken understanding about that. The fact that we had known one another intimately did give him leave to talk plainly, and he was aching to talk, to memorialize Lilian.

  Fifty years later, I think I have every record Scott Joplin ever made. When I put them on it’s as close to a time machine as most people will ever experience.

  Cleanliness and godliness.

  We were ten miles upriver by the time the noise faded. One day out of Skagway, and the excitement on deck was palpable.

  The crowd of prospectors became more sociable, walking around discussing plans and comparing kits. One fellow noticed that we had an overabundance of rifle ammunition, twelve bandoliers of sixty rounds each, and he offered to buy a couple of them. Doc took a sample bandolier around the deck and wound up selling half of them for ten what he had paid, hiding his glee behind a serious expression. (They hadn’t been a totally honest purchase in the first place, coming from an army sergeant who had certainly misappropriated them.)