Guardian

by Joe Haldeman

  Charlie’s Barber Shop advertised three metal tubs in back. We tied up the mule and followed the red arrows to a door that had a picture of a man in a tub scrubbing himself with a brush and whistling. Inside, two woodstoves glowed dull red with the effort of keeping large pails of water hot. It was a pleasant smell, resin from the fuel sticks of pine scrap mixed with the steam and hot metal and soap perfume.

  Two Chinese children were in charge of the enterprise. The girl took me by the hand and, carrying a candle, led me to a curtain, which she parted to reveal a sit-down bath of galvanized metal. She lit four candles around the tub and showed me the dressing corner—clothes hanger on a rod, a chair, and a mat for dirty boots. The wooden floor was otherwise clean. She poured two buckets of water in the tub and said, “I get hot, you undress.”

  I’d had a bath less than a week before, in the Sitka rooming house, but was due for another. I took off my clothes and didn’t need a mirror to see that I was a comical sight, hopelessly begrimed everywhere I’d been exposed to Skagway; white as milk otherwise.

  The girl brought in the steaming water and giggled at me, whether out of embarrassment or at my ridiculous aspect I didn’t know. She poured the water in the tub and told me to get in; she’d bring another in five minutes.

  It was tepid but wonderful. The soap was a sharp-edged homemade block that smelled of both bacon fat and lavender, so I guess I did, too.

  She brought the second bucket and rinsed my soapy hair with it, and then I lay back and luxuriated in the lightness and warmth of it.

  We take bathing for granted nowadays, and no doubt society is healthier as well as prettier for the casual frequency of it. But with every gain there’s a loss, in this case the special time-out-of-time transportation, warm water in the flickering darkness.

  When the water cooled to around body temperature I got out and dried off with a rough towel, and for the first time had the sensation that I was being watched. It would not have been hard to put a peephole in the curtain, or more than one, invisible in the darkness. Were lonely prospectors staring at my unremarkable body? I had an odd feeling about that, a thimbleful of outrage mixed with a cup of amusement. Dressing, I put on a little show for my invisible and probably nonexistent audience, which caused me to glow with embarrassment. I was still glowing when I emerged—Doc, who had just come from his own bath, commented on my healthy color.

  He and I sat on a bench outside while the boys bathed. The smoke from his pipe seemed to keep the mosquitoes away.

  Out of nowhere—out of “left field,” as they say now—he asked me about God. I said something conventional about God helping me through my sadness, which was true.

  “You say sadness, but never ‘grief,’” he said. “And you never speak about your late husband.”

  I was almost cornered into telling the truth. Since Doc did speak often, and lovingly, about his lost Lilian, my reticence about Edward must have seemed strange.

  “It was not a happy union,” I said. “In fact, it was as much a deliverance as a loss. As if God had given us freedom.”

  “He was bad to Daniel, too?” he asked.

  “Very bad.” I couldn’t elaborate, of course.

  “Daniel never speaks of him, either.” He paused to fiddle with his pipe, waiting for me to say something more. I had a sudden insight that almost made me laugh out loud: Doc suspected that there had never been an Edward; that Daniel was a love child, conceived in sin. “He only talks about his early childhood.”

  “His father was very sick for a long time before he died,” I said. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to talk about it. I know I don’t.”

  “Forgive me. I’m being nosy.”

  “You have the right,” I said. “Why did you ask about God?”

  He scraped a match alight along the bench—were they still called “lucifers” then?—and twirled it to burn off the sulfur before he puffed his pipe alight.

  “Maybe for reassurance. He seems distant.” He turned to spit politely. “It wasn’t this way on the farm. Maybe we shouldn’t of left.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He was quiet for a long spell. I remember the tinkling piano and distant drunken laughter.

  “God was always there on the farm. Is that simpleminded? In the season’s changing, the lambs and calves. Even the bad times. The drought, the locust summer—that was like the Bible; we were being tested. Sooner or later the rain came back, the insects died.

  “But lately I doubt. I lie awake in the middle of the night and doubt that He’s there, and ask for a sign. Nothing comes.”

  “God doesn’t work that way.”

  “So they say. So they say. But you follow that around; how does anybody know how God works? He could send a sign by lifting His little finger. And maybe save my soul. Is it worth that little?”

  “Maybe the raven was a sign.”

  He laughed. “A real sign. Something clear.”

  “I can give you the Sunday school answer. God gave us the capacity to doubt as the ultimate test of our faith. If God sent you a sign, then believing would be easy. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  “I know the Sunday school answer. What’s Rosa’s answer?”

  I should not have calculated my response. I should have told him about my own sleepless nights, full of nothingness. Instead, I asked him whether he had heard of Pascal’s Wager. He hadn’t.

  “Pascal asks you to imagine two worlds: one where God exists, and one where He doesn’t.

  “Suppose you live out your life according to God’s precepts, and when you die, it turns out there is nothing afterwards; you just cease to exist.”

  “You’ll have wasted a lot of time in church.”

  “Yes, but only that. And if there is a God, you will have gained an eternity of bliss.

  “But suppose the opposite—suppose you assume there is no God, and act only according to whim and appetite. When you die, if you’re right, nothing will happen. If you’re wrong, though, you will have bartered a few years of pleasure for an eternity of damnation.”

  He nodded into the darkness. “Forever is a long time, compared to the rest of your life. That’s what his argument boils down to.”

  “And it’s not as if faith could not be a source of pleasure, either,” I began.

  “But wait,” he said. “I’m a plain and practical man. I don’t like loose ends, but that’s all your Mr. Pascal offers. You have to die to collect on his bet.”

  “But living a life of faith is an end in itself.”

  He wagged his head and smiled. “So is a life of dissipation, is it not? Little as you and I know about it.”

  I laughed with him. “You wicked, wicked man!” The boys came out of their baths then, ending that line of conversation before it could become dangerous. But a seed had been sown.

  They set me on Dr. Jekyll’s cart, and I rolled through the streets of Skagway like royalty, or an invalid. The boys were redolent of whiskey as well as soap, and treated us to their versions of “Clementine” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”

  I resolved to give Daniel a good talking-to the next morning, but by morning I had no pinnacle to climb. While the boys snored sonorously, Doc and I shared intercourse, twice. It was a desperate, wonderful thing. If God and Pascal were looking down on the two of us, wrapped in mildewed blankets, caught in the cage of each other’s limbs, they must have understood, if not forgiven.

  After nine decades of thought and prayer, I am all but certain that God forgives transgressions of that nature. I even dare to think that sometimes He precipitates them, for His mysterious reasons.

  The parting.

  The morning was difficult. Maybe it was guilt on my part, but I was certain that Daniel and Chuck knew exactly what their parents had been up to during the night—and morning. I could certainly see the difference in Doc, and didn’t dare look in a mirror myself.

  The marriage obligation had never been pleasurable with Edward, and of course it wasn’t unusual for a wom
an of my time to believe that that was normal. But my less complete surrender to Doc on the boat, before Sitka, had been almost frightening in its intense pleasure, and this was even greater, amplified by’ the desperation of parting. (A practical side of me must acknowledge that he knew more about a woman’s anatomy and nervous system than I did, despite all my formal education. Three cheers for veterinary science and none for Wellesley.)

  While breakfast was cooking, I passed around the early Christmas presents. Daniel and Chuck were thrilled with their knives, and Doc impressed with the gutta-percha tobacco pouch, the like of which he’d never seen.

  I said good-bye to Doc and Chuck at the tent, giving Doc a chaste kiss and a whispered promise, and walked to the boat with Daniel. I tried not to say anything too mother-hennish, and neither of us cried until the whistle blew and the boat drifted away from the dock.

  He waved until the boat turned into the channel. I climbed up a deck and could see him again, but he was walking down the street by then, head down and hands in pockets.

  I couldn’t ignore the possibility that this was the last time I would see my son, but that seemed remote. He was in good hands.

  There was no place to sit on the small boat’s bow, but I passed a lot of time there anyhow, standing with my weight against the worn mahogany rail. The wind Of our passage was bracing—salt and pine, fish and kelp—and I floated in my freedom, a feeling that was both pleasant and disturbing: for the first time in my adult life, I was truly alone. Parents gone, husband a bad memory, son on his own path. In a way, I was a new person, reborn.

  My layover in noisy Juneau was a mercifully short four hours. I could have gone aboard the steamboat to wait, but instead bought my ticket and checked my trunk, and then worked my way up the muddy boardwalk toward the tea shop that had Edison and Scott Joplin. On the way, I stopped in a newsstand-bookshop and bought a volume called Northwest Indian Ways, about the Tlingit and Haida races.

  The men who had seemed so rough and frightening a few days before had suddenly become well-dressed gentlemen, after Skagway. They wore or carried guns but also tipped their hats to me.

  The toothless proprietor greeted me warmly and asked after “my husband,” and I said he was my fiancé, off to find his fortune in the goldfields. His face grew grave at that, and he wished us both luck.

  I read for a couple of hours, fascinated especially by the tales that form the basis of the Tlingit religion, which read like Aesop’s fables, except that the morals at the end are often alien; sometimes brutal.

  Half of them have the Raven as a character, a kind of trickster like Loki, and the only creature who can talk to both humans and animals. That gave me a chill to read.

  He figured in a myth reminiscent of both the Tower of Babel and the biblical flood: long ago all the animals and people could talk together, but then the world was flooded in a great rain, and each kind of human and animal wound up on its own island. With the passage of time, each one developed its own language, which none of the others could understand except for the Raven, who flew from island to island, and could take the shape of any creature. So ravens have those talents to this day, shape-changing and speech.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden motion. On the other side of the window, a raven had landed on the boardwalk. That gave me a terrible start. But of course they were not uncommon in Juneau.

  He did look at me, though, or so it seemed. Then he hobbled down the boardwalk a couple of yards and took off when a cowboy-looking fellow aimed a boot at him.

  Oddly enough, the bird circled around and landed back outside the window again. I set the book aside and did a quick drawing of him in my diary.

  Then I realized I’d better be getting down to the boat if I wanted to secure an outside seat; I’d want to sleep during the trip, and that wouldn’t be comfortable, sandwiched between two strangers. So I paid my bill and plugged up my ears and stepped outside.

  A raven was waiting for me. The same one? It hopped out of my way, into the mud, but didn’t fly away. At least it didn’t say anything. Absurdly, I could feel its eyes on my back as I made my way down the steep hill.

  The beginning of the end

  I did secure an end, seat, but slept little, even though I made bold to buy a whiskey with hot water at the lunch counter. So much was going through my mind, about both Sitka and Skagway, future and past. Reading would not quiet my hopes and worries, nor would the dramatic scenery distract me. When darkness crept upon us, listened to my fellow travelers’ snores and crepitations for two or three hours.

  It seemed as if the ice was somewhat thicker now at the Icy Strait, looking curiously warm in the rising sun’s crimson light. Twice we thumped against small ice floes.

  Rain began soon after that, and it poured all the way to Sitka. I was glad not to be shivering on deck, but had improvidentially left my umbrella in the trunk, to which I was not allowed access en route.

  So I was thoroughly drenched by the time I arrived at the Baranoff Hotel. The sour old lady softened enough to seat me in a wicker rocking chair by the fire, and bring me a pot of tea. The tea and pine smoke restored my spirit. I arranged for laundry so I would be presentable for Reverend Bower the next day.

  It was a four-hour cleaning service, so I went to my room and read and napped, sleeping deeply for the first time since Juneau’s din had been replaced by the steamer’s chuffing and churning.

  The book gave me strange dreams about gageets, the supernatural creatures who were half human, half sea otter—tall and skinny, covered with fur, arms growing out of their chests. They are soul-stealers, kidnapping the spirits of incautious people on or near the water. I dreamed the boat from Juneau was full of them, and the pilot was a raven with long legs and a captain’s hat. At the Icy Strait we turned seaward, toward the glittering glaciers, and when I tried to protest, two of the gageets held me fast. In my diary I wrote that one had the face of Edward and the other was the toothless tea shop man.

  I turned to the Bible that night, reading stories about sons. Joseph and his coat of many colors, the prodigal son, Abraham and Isaac. Nothing about a woman who abandoned her son, leaving him to wander in the wilderness.

  Or did Mary do that? Allowing her Son the freedom to go and seek His death.

  The next day, Thursday, I presented myself to Reverend Bower precisely at nine. He was glad to see me.

  “I sent a letter to Skagway,” he said, enclosing my hand between his fat warm palms, “but of course you wouldn’t have gotten it yet.”

  I nodded. “The line at the post office was so long and unruly, I left it alone. I thought if I didn’t have a job here, I could keep looking.”

  “Look no further. The board was glad to accept you. Here.” He shuffled over to a closet and brought out a potato sack full of books and papers. “I took the liberty of assembling this, against the possibility of your return. It’s copies of the students’ texts, and some material about Alaskan history.” He hoisted the bag up onto his desk, and stacked up the books.

  None of them presented much of a challenge except for Latin. In Kansas there’d been a separate instructor for that. I picked the book up and opened it here and there, feeling vague echoes of panic and shame from high school and college. “Not my best subject,” I said ruefully. It hadn’t been on the test.

  He took it from my hand and riffled through the beginning. “Don’t worry about it. Only three boys are taking it, and I’ve been guiding them through. You’d be better off studying Tlingit.”

  “Can white people actually speak it?” The glossary in the back of my book was full of unpronounceable words.

  “It does take practice, and I suppose they laugh at our accents. You’ll have some help from one of their elders, a shaman we call Gordon. Less help from the Russian Orthodox priest. He speaks it pretty well, but wants their children to learn Russian.”

  “That’s the young man who conducted the funeral?” He nodded. “But he didn’t seem to speak much Russian hims
elf, except for liturgy.”

  He spread his hands. “What can you say? He came from San Francisco, born there, but his parents are Russian and he felt a vocation. Perhaps mixed with a little guilt.”

  “So I’ll be in competition with him?”

  “No, he’s just a gadfly, an anachronism. Only old folks speak Russian anymore. Ah, Gordon.”

  I hadn’t heard him enter the room. But I smelled him, wood smoke and must. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, but also had a kind of bib of bones and shells and feathers woven together.

  His face was burnt-bronze and heavily creased; he could have been forty or seventy. There was a little gray in the hair plaited into a large topknot. He regarded me with cool intelligence.

  “This is Mrs. Flammarion, our new teacher for the older students.”

  He touched my hand with his calloused one. “You will also be at the mission,” he said with very little accent.

  “That’s right.” His face was gentle but his eyes bored into me.

  “I’ll see you there, then.”

  “Gordon’s a shaman, trying to understand our strange ways.”

  “Very strange,” he said, smiling, still looking at me. Then he turned to Reverend Bower. “Those poppies along the north wall are not going to thrive. They were planted too late, and don’t get enough sun anyhow.”

  “Can you transplant them?”

  “Around to the front, some of them. Replace them with some things from the forest.”

  “Fine. Thank you.” Gordon turned and walked away.

  “Your gardener’s a shaman?” I asked.

  “The other way around, I suppose. He’s a shaman who took an interest in our garden. Walked in one day about a year ago and told me what needed to be done. Works a couple of days a week, fifty cents a day, and he’s magical with plants.”