Heartbroke Bay (37 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
Hannah looks away, then stands upright and moves to the stove, bends down to feed another split of wood into its insatiable maw. Michael is right. Hans has shown only cruelty since the killing, brooding and scowling when he has not been describing in detail what he hopes to see done to Severts if they are rescued. Her husband now seems so far from the man who once charmed her on a train, rescued her from Lady Hamilton’s employ, and, after having been mugged in Skagway, gave his last coin to a grimy beggar.
The fire licks at the new wood and crackles. Hannah places the skillet on top of the stove. After the cast iron absorbs enough heat from the fire, she will wrap it in a cloth and place it beside Michael as a bed warmer.
His voice is soft again when he speaks. “Remember the smell of the grass, Hannah?” He stares at the ceiling for a moment, then closes his eyes and smiles. “You were so beautiful with the sun on your skin.”
Hannah knows precisely the day to which he refers. Centuries ago, when they were heaven-lost and foolish, the crushed heather under their bodies had mingled its soft perfume with the smells of love. There had been bees, drowsy with sun, and a churring escadrille of redpolls playing in the trees at the edge of the meadow. Afterward, Michael had fallen asleep, curled to her back, with one arm around her stomach. She had pillowed her head on the biceps of his other arm and memorized each intricate detail of moss and grass before her eyes while he dozed.
God help me,
Hannah says to herself as she holds her hands to the stove.
I am so lonely.
Hannah says to herself as she holds her hands to the stove.
I am so lonely.
“Will you promise not to take advantage if I ease the ropes?”
Michael opens his eyes and rolls his head to the side. “Do you really think I would ever hurt you?”
Hannah feels her throat tighten and a squeezing sensation inside her chest. Closing her eyes, she nods, then shakes her head. “Just enough to ease your arms, then, Michael. That’s all.”
Michael lies perfectly still as Hannah slacks each knot in turn, then sighs and crosses his arms on his chest as she backs away. Rolling onto his side, he groans, “God bless you,” and falls silent.
When Hans returns, he is empty-handed. “Tide’s low,” he says. The approach of a full moon has pulled the sea far down the strand, uncovering a string of rocks and reefs. “Go see what you can find of those limpets or cockles. I’ve got to warm up.”
Hannah pulls on an extra sweater—it had been Dutch’s and almost fits, but smells of mildew and dirt—sorts out a sack and a knife for prying the mollusks from the rocks, and goes out the door with a backward glance at Michael, who watches her go. As she pulls the door closed behind her, she hears him asking for the chamber pot.
The way to the shore is barred with snow packed into hard drifts by the wind. The upper reaches of the beach have been swept clear by breaking waves, leaving the stones slick with a dull patina of frozen spray. Hannah picks her way carefully over the smooth obstacles, sometimes going down onto her hands and knees to cross a large boulder or log. At the edge of the water, a lone gull watches with intent yellow eyes as she pokes among the rocks for the coolie-hat shell of a limpet or the rough, leatherlike armor of a chiton. Just beyond the break of the surging swells, a sea lion, huffing and snorting, keeps pace with Hannah’s wanders, and she craves the heavy taste of its meat.
Hannah picks and knifes at various bits of fare, gathering the meager sea booty into her sack. She tries a limpet raw, scooping the animal out of its cone with the point of her knife and sliding the morsel tentatively into her mouth. The taste is good—salty and flavored by the sea—but the meat is chewy, like buckskin. She eats another, quicker this time, then another. A small worm of guilt at not sharing with Hans and Michael curls out of the next, and she stays the point of her knife, then continues, eating several for every one she slips into the bag.
An hour of exposure is all she can stand. Her mittens, damp from clutching at tide rocks, are beginning to freeze, and the wind cuts through her clothes and bites at her skin. The sack is crusted with salt ice from the drippings of a small handful of mollusks, and she stumbles on cold-numbed feet as she picks her way back to the cabin.
At the door of the hut she halts, knocking her feet together to clear them of snow. Passing in, she pushes back her hood and sees Hans, arms akimbo, standing over Michael, who hangs half in, half out of the bunk, unconscious and bleeding from his scalp.
“Hans! What have you done?”
Nelson takes two quick steps in her direction and thrusts the pistol at her face before shouting, “Stupid woman! Look what you’ve done! Your pretty boy tried to murder me again! Look!” Snapping open the chamber, he reveals the five metal eyes of the cartridges inside. The shells are old and gleam with the dull color of weathered brass; the primers are encrusted with the verdigris of neglect, and the round immediately under the hammer is indented with the mark of a firing pin.
“He grabbed the pistol when I let him up to piss, but the cartridge misfired. If Harky had taken care of this gun, I would be dead now! And you loosened the ropes, didn’t you?” Outraged spittle flies from his mouth, peppering Hannah’s face.
“You did this! You almost got me killed!”
Hannah staggers back against the door and sags, closing her eyes against the cartridge, evidence of what she has done; she did this, she almost killed Hans. And if Michael had broken free, would he have killed her, too? She can no longer doubt he is a willing killer; his defense of an assault planned by the murdered partners cannot be true.
Hannah whets the knife to a keen edge on a flat piece of granite before slicing another narrow strip from the hide at her feet. White hair spills from the ribbon of skin onto the floor as she shaves it bald with the blade. This morning, while digging for firewood, she found the goat hide, cast away from an earlier, successful hunt, frozen into a wad under the snow. Now a cauldron boils slowly on the stove, its contents afloat with fingernail-sized shavings sliced from the cuttings of hide. Bits of fat and a few rare scraps of flesh form a thin skim atop the simmering soup. It is the only food in the cabin.
Hannah’s head nods as she works, and she struggles to keep her eyes open. The strain of taking turns sitting guard over the prisoner has depleted her like a medieval bleeding. Severts never seems to sleep, but rolls, moaning, from side to side through the night, or lies still, eyes open and shining in the firelight.
“Yes,” says Michael from the shadows. “Yes, I would have killed him.” His wrists are crossed and lashed above his head, his legs tied at ankles and knees. He writhes continuously, seeking relief from the pain of bone ends rubbed raw against the planks. “I love you that much, Hannah, that I would kill to be with you.”
“There are two barrels to the shotgun, Michael. You were trying to load them both.”
“No, I wasn’t going to shoot you—or Hans—then. I was just dumbed by the cold, didn’t know what I was doing. Out all day in that blizzard, worrying it out in my head to shoot Dutch and Harky, afraid they would have killed you by the time I could work up my courage. I was half out of my mind.
“Now I been hog-tied in this bunk for a month. God, it hurts, Hannah, it hurts.” His voice approaches a whine. “It’s cruel. Him beating on me every time you’re away, and me helpless here. He’s no good, that man you married.
“Yes, I was going to kill him,” he sighs. “I’m that desperate, seeing him hurt the woman I love.”
Hannah is silent, bending close to her work and slicing. She shakes her head in disbelief and replies in a low voice. “All this killing. We cannot.” Her words falter. Yearning twists into a tight knot inside her, and she knows it is possible to die from simple homesickness, from wanting the order and reason of streets laid out with shops, the sureness of civilization with its flow of food and clean water, its disappearing garbage. In that world someone else would have an answer for all of this; there would be policemen, barristers, and judges, and the truth would be clearly defined. Hans would have no opportunity to torment Michael, Michael would have no hope of escape, and she would never have experienced the impulse to turn a shotgun on the man to whom she is married.
“Let me go, Hannah. Please, let me go. I’ll run away, head for the Indian village or up into the mountains.” Warming to his fantasy, Michael’s voice grows excited. “Come with me. We’ll leave the gold here for Hans. It’s all he ever cared about. And if you won’t go with me, I promise, you’ll never see me again. I’ll just disappear.”
Hannah minces a piece of the raw skin smaller and smaller, pressing the blade down again and again, shaking her head, vaguely aware that all feeling has fled. “No.”
A tear starts at her eye. “No.”
The blade cuts and cuts again. “No.”
Her eyes fix on nothing and her voice is hollow.
The creak and rattle of the door announces Hans’s return, and he enters, muffled to the eyes with a ragged shirt wound round his face as a scarf. He stamps his boots and slaps at the legs of his pants to knock away a rime of ice before advancing into the puny warmth of the stove. Breathing heavily through his nose, he shows his palms to the fire, coughs, and looks around the cabin before rubbing his hands briskly together. In midrub he stops, grows motionless, and straightens. His eyes roam, glittering above the mask of his scarf, and he turns in a slow circle, eyeing the interior of the hovel.
On the table each piece of silverware lies perfectly ordered, shining and polished. Each spoon is perfectly aligned with its neighbor in orderly display. Each plate, cup, and bowl is placed perfectly abreast of its companion. The chairs are as correctly spaced as sentries.
On the bunk, each item of clothing remaining to the prospectors is folded and ordered by category, pants with pants, shirts with shirts. Blankets and towels folded into flawless squares mark the perimeter of the arrangement.
By the stove, the stack of firewood has been ordered into perfect symmetry of size and length, in rows that flow from splinters and shavings to finger-sized kindling and wrist-thick splints; not one piece is out of order. On her knees in the corner, Hannah picks at the space between two slabs of the shale floor, probing at the crack, flicking spruce needles and bits of trash into a rag.
When she looks up at Hans, her eyes are flat and distant. They do not change when he asks, “What are you doing?”
She does not reply.
Unnerved by the silence, Hans reaches for the woodpile behind him, groping at a piece of spruce without taking his eyes from his wife.
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