Reckoning of Boston Jim (17 page)

Eugene catalogues her sins—deaf, doddering, imbecilic, pug-ugly—voice raised above the tumult and the rain, rounds a sharp corner and nearly bellies up against a gang of Chinamen. They wear long tunics over trousers and conical hats veiled with rain. The blows of their pickaxes reverberate through the canyon. Just past them is a pile of rubble, evidence of yesterday's blasting. Several more Chinamen heave rocks into the river. One slips and shouts. His companion hauls him to safety. The one Chinaman in English garb directs Eugene and Ariadne over the rubble, past the other workers who are perhaps thirty strong. Mostly Chinamen, but also a few Indians, a few Whitemen. One of these Whitemen stands under the shelter of a rock. He is shaking his head in exasperation and holds what looks to be a yardstick. His scarlet tunic is soaked with rain. His pillbox hat has slipped to the back of his head and his high boots are slick with mud. A Royal Engineer! The Pride of England. Eugene might well have spotted a bird of paradise. He is that delighted, that amazed.

“Hallo, sir. Hallo! A fine job you are doing here. Fine, indeed.”

“Keep to the inward side. The rain, man!”

“I thank you for your concern. By the by, could you tell me how far is it to Boston Bar?”

“What's that?”

“Boston Bar, the furlongs, the miles? Surely you would know?”

“Not there! Damnit, there!” He points past Eugene. Eugene turns. A Chinaman stops working and gazes sadly at his pickaxe as if it alone had offended the engineer.

“Good sir,” Eugene calls “If the whole cliff must be cut asunder why should not the man start there?”

“Why not? Why not? Get on with ye.”

“Hah, is it a Yorkshire accent I detect? I have friends from those environs.”

The engineer does not seem to hear him.

Eugene is taking a breath to give his next shout force when a silver light illuminates the scene—the Chinamen assaulting the grey cliffs like gnats assaulting an elephant, the engineer wildly gesturing. Then comes a great crack and then a rumbling as if the earth were about to split in two.

Eugene crouches against the canyon wall. Hauls Ariadne close. Dynamite? Cannons? Damn the Yorky. There is that lightness in Eugene's skull, that hateful moth-like fluttering.

The rumble recedes.

“You might have informed me that you were about to blast! Indeed, sir, you might have.”

“It's a storm, man, a storm! Not bloody blasting! Ye can't blast in a storm. Now get on with ye. Stay in the open, away from high points, trees and cliffs like. The lightning feeds on them.”

“Ah, quite so, quite so.” Eugene catches his breath. His palms ache from gripping Ariadne's bridle; his jaw aches from clenching. He would like to apologize for his brief loss of rationality, but the engineer has disappeared, the workers are hurrying off and he and his mule are alone in the storm like characters in a gothic tale.

Strange lightning. Eugene has never seen the like. It cuts the sky in parallel strokes. An agitating wind. A thrashing rain. He finds a low rocky overhang and manoeuvres Ariadne across the opening so she forms a sort of barrier, crouches behind her and is now grateful that she is deaf. The thunder does not trouble her in the least. Eugene, however, is startled by the massive booms each and every time.

The storm passes surprisingly quickly, leaves a trail of clouds, bushes laden with gem drops of water, and a column of ominous smoke in the distant hills. Eugene leaves the safety of the overhang and stretches his fingers into the burgeoning sun. He is bone cold and wet through. It is not the greatest discomfort he has experienced. The Crimea was worse, certainly, though all that seems to have occurred to a different man entirely. One of hardier mettle.

Boston Bar is a collection of perhaps ten buildings strung dangerously close to the river. A horse stares at him as he passes, a sow feeds on a trough of fish.

“What a blessing to come upon your establishment,” he tells Mr. Moore, the owner of the International Hotel. “I was bloody well stormed upon.”

“Weather has it in for ya, does it?”

“It does seem so, yes.”

Mr. Moore bawls out for one Orvid to stable the fine gentleman's mule, then shows Eugene to a back room that is crammed with bunks. An open fire burns mightily at one end. Men are resting in their beds, others play cards on barrels. Socks and shirts and trousers festoon the bunk beams and ledges. The room smells of wet dirty boots, wet dirty men, wet dirty wool. It is hot as a baker's oven. Eugene looks about, sees no familiar faces. He might even welcome the sight of Oswald at this moment. Perhaps he need only engage the man in his own parlance.
Ain't,
Eugene silently practices.
You bet, Hey there, Damn blamed fucknit.
They might even become something like friends. Everyone likes Eugene Augustus Hume and it rankles that this Oswald seems to view him as a well-dressed cockroach.

Eugene strips to his sodden underclothes and turns himself this way and that before the fire like a choice roast of pork. Remembers Dora sitting by the fire, her skirt hemmed with wet. The hem began to steam as if a fire were beneath her skirts. He told her this and she said there was indeed and he was welcome to try to put it out.

Eugene faces the fire and shuffles closer. He clasps his hands before him, feels as he did when he was thirteen or fourteen and his organ had a will of its own. Thinks of his sister's governess and how she once leaned very close and rapped his knuckles with a ruler, not hard, almost lovingly. She had dark wells for eyes, a rosebud mouth. What hidden reservoirs of power they have, these women, these ‘weaker' vessels. It was at that moment he realized this. His sister died of a fever not long after this. The governess he never saw again.

Halfway dry he sits heavily on his bunk. The straw mattress rustles under him, has that pungent odour of squashed bedbugs. He unfurls the map from its leather casing. Curses under his breath. The parchment is soft with wet. The rivers have become bleeding, spidery lines, the lakes pale seas, the place names blurred and unreadable. He hurls the map to the floor and a man striding by leaves his boot print on the island of Vancouver. Eugene holds his head in his hands. Picks up the map, stares at the gibbered lettering. Is this how Dora sees lettering? As if it makes sense and yet does not? Eugene can understand that. It is how now he feels about most things.

≈  ≈  ≈

He makes better time the next day. The sun shifts through a pewter sky. The rain holds off. The road is grittier, sandier. Stands of poplar. Pines hunkered down like old men resting. Red-throated birds sweep low to the river that is broader now and tamer. A few miners work the bars, Indians and Chinamen mostly, silent at their rockers. The mountains are wedge-shaped, clay-coloured, sparsely wooded. The place now barely warrants the name of canyon. If not for the grouse he would say it were peaceful. Twice now they have exploded out of the brush and sent his heart pounding. Even Ariadne betrayed a nervous flick of her ears. Fortunate that she is nearly deaf after all and thus not given to tearing over hill and dale over a bit of bird, a bit of thunder.

By noon Eugene has stripped off his jacket. He tries singing a London drinking song but the full verses elude him. He is being made anew, that is it. The old songs no longer signify. He needs a song of the wagon road.
My feet are weary. My eyes are bleary. My darling dear is far from here. And it is four hundred miles to the goldfields, and. . . .
What rhymes with fields? It will come to him, surely. For now his mind is rubbed clean.

≈  ≈  ≈

Past noon and he comes to a rough fence and a field of burnt stumps and then a stable and a barn and a peak roofed house. Boothroyds Welcome Sogerners, the sign says. A freight wagon waits there, the oxen lowing and dropping great turds. The wagon is nearly as high as a two-story building and is precariously narrow for its height. Astonishing that such wagons do not topple over in a breeze. He watches the swamper hammer at a man-high wheel. It is not a job Eugene would relish. Better to make a fortune at one fell swoop than spend years carting goods to and fro.

He drinks ale with a chaser of goat's milk and orders flapjacks and steak from a daughter of the place who makes no apology when he questions the prices. Indeed, she sullenly assures him that the prices will shoot upward with each yard he walks.

“Then I best have another ale, my lovely girl, and a brandy, yes, and a coffee.” She stares at him and he pities her of a sudden, though he is not certain why. For the unfortunate brows perhaps, for the constant presence of loutish men, for some grim secret hinted at by the twisting of her hands.

He eats quickly, drinks quickly, compliments the cook, and then the girl herself, pressing a quarter dollar into her hand.

“What's this?”

“A tip.”

“A tip? You ain't never coming back, so what does it matter?”

“I may come back, miss, I may.”

“I won't remember you if you do,” she warns, though she watches until he and Ariadne are gone from sight.

The sun glows unfettered. Eugene is pleasantly flush with food and drink. His rucksack seems lighter this day, hardly a burden. The landscape is dry, true enough, but has a simple, stark beauty he had not noticed before. And the birdsong, the air fairly trembles with it. He stands aside to let the freight wagon from Boothroyd's pass him. The bull puncher walks alongside the oxen, his goad stick over his shoulder. High above, the skinner sits against a backdrop of canvassing, his whip at a rest. He calls out something unintelligible over the rumbling of the wheels and lowing of the oxen. Eugene watches the wagon disappear from sight, then tethers Ariadne to a tree and walks into the low bush and pisses for a long while. He is walking back when a grouse erupts from the thickets. Eugene yelps and falls flat on his back. Clouds the shape of flat-bottomed scows sail across the sky. “Here lies Eugene Augustus Hume. Done in by a bird,” he says and laughs for a time. That dear girl at Boothroyd's, she did serve the brandy with a generous hand, bless her. He stretches into the warmth of the sun, the sandy earth, closes his eyes for a moment, for two. Opens them to a lowering light. Jerks up to his feet. “Who's there!” He points his revolver here, there. Sees a badger, gamely digging a hole.

≈  ≈  ≈

The darkness has gathered before he arrives at Salter's Roadhouse there at the base of Jackass Mountain. The oxen regard him, their breath billowing. About him are the silhouettes of outbuildings. The freight wagon that passed him earlier is nearby, its canvas lifting in the gusting wind.

He leads Ariadne to the stable. Unburdens and fodders her himself as there is no assistance to be had. At least he is gaining some practice at this stable-hand business. To some he might even look as if he knows what he is doing.

He dines on beefsteak and potatoes. He is ravenous once more. The conversation drifts about him, as do pipe smoke and cigar smoke and smoke from the hissing stove.

“It's a blessed thing, this road,” says a Scot, one Red Olsen. “Once the bridges are done and all the rest, the prices will be coming down, mark my words.”

“But there'll be more and more damned greenhorns. Every inch of the creek will be staked by July,” says the one called Spitting Bob.

“This why, I think, it call gold rush,” says the Dane, and the others nod as if he has spoken words of great wisdom.

Red Olsen. Spitting Bob. The Dane. Lancashire Morton. Thunderman the bull puncher. They are the names of characters in a penny gaffe. Or the names of men who are preparing to pass into legend. They talk of the war in America, the election of Douglas as Governor of both the colonies, his decision to disband the engineers. They debate which roadhouse is the most infested, and who bakes a finer pie: Mrs. Hautier at Lytton's Globe Hotel or old Mr. Ying at Clinton's Colonial. It seems it might have to be settled with pistols, but Salter soothes it over with the skill of an experienced diplomat.

They are now talking of mining, endlessly it seems. Blue streaks. Pay dirt. The special place in hell reserved for claim jumpers and spikers. They talk of the road. Of Jackass Mountain and which is the steepest grade of it. Didn't Cataline himself lose two mules on his last trip?

“I was pondering why it was called so,” Eugene says. He has a mulled claret in hand now, feels his mood lifting, his tongue loosening.

Thunderman thumps his tin cup on the table. “It ain't called Jackass Mountain because it's a mule killer. It's called that because one of them highfalutin engineers tried to name it after himself. Was to be Huchins Hill or some such horse shit. So Salter here, and the rest about, said don't worry, sir, we'll make sure it's named after you. And when he left, Salter said from now on we're gonna call it Jackass Mountain.”

The room erupts in laughter. The men applaud Salter who is hunched there by the fire, smiling modestly.

“Now the Judge,” Thunderman says. “He deserves a mountain named for him, or a lake, but no, not those strutting popinjays.”

“The Judge? He was here?” Eugene asks.

“Shore,” Salter says. “Not but yesterday. We went hunting, him and me. By God that man can shoot the eye out of fool hen at fifty paces.”

“Yes, Matthew is a fabulous woodsman,” Eugene says.

“Matthew?” Salter says.

“Yes, the Judge. Matthew Baillie Begbie. I have dined with him many times. We both attended Cambridge, you see, and have much in common, our backgrounds, our ideals. I will be staying with him when I reach the goldfields.”

This invites suspicious glances from a few, stories from the rest. Eugene listens closely. The Judge is apt to hold court in a tent with a stump for a desk, or even from horseback in wig and robes. The Judge swore in a Chinese miner by cutting off the head of a chicken. He translated Latin into Chinook for the benefit of an Indian. The Judge near alone keeps the law on the road and in the goldfields and has seen to the hanging of a good many miscreants. Don't the bravest men quail before him? Don't even faithful wives follow him with their eyes?