Reckoning of Boston Jim (2 page)

No, he will not stay a day or two as he planned. He will not bother with a bath, nor a night at a Humbolt Street bawdy house. He'll stay only this night. Come dawn he'll make his way back to his cabin, back past the bay where the Dora woman and the other new settlers are. He'll make his traps ready again. He'll not stop and visit as she asked. He offered recompense and she refused. Surely that settled the matter between them.

And now two women give him pause. Their skirts take up the entire boardwalk and sway like great bells. They are talking closely, their bonnets obscuring their faces. Boston certainly cannot go through the two of them; it would be like breaking through a barricade, the sort of action that merits trouble. And he cannot go around them; even he knows this would not do, for then they would have to flatten themselves against a store window to avoid brushing against him in an unseemly fashion.

The women are very close before they notice him. They stop. Boston stops. The older woman wrinkles her nose. The younger woman gazes down. Boston backs up and takes the stairs to the deep mud below, all the while silently cursing these perplexing encounters, these pitfalls, all the while thinking of the Dora woman.

He had been walking for two days along a ragged green trail. Usually it took only a day for this part of the journey, but the rain came on hard and the path churned with mud and he stumbled several times. It was dusk when he reached Cowichan Bay, as the new settlers call it, and torrenting still, and so he sought shelter in a small cave. The next morning was clear-skied and warm. It was then he noticed the tear in his shirt pocket; it was then he noticed that the smoke pouch was gone. Inside it was one hundred and twenty-six pounds, ten shillings. Never more. Never less. It must never be less. It was the same money he had taken from Illdare's personal cache when he left Fort Connelly years ago. This was not stolen money, not truly, for that amount had been owed to him, that much and more besides. His everyday money was safe in another pocket of his coat, in a plain leather bag. But that money hardly mattered.

The tide was rising over the rocks where he had walked. He stood with fists clenched, recalling each footfall. He turned back and searched the path, the bases of the great trees, their roots splaying out thick as barrels. Searched through the ferns and moss, the places where he had stumbled or slipped. Felt light-headed, as if he might retch. Still he searched.

The tide was out when he returned to the shore. That was when he first saw the Dora woman. She wore a calico apron over a blue dress that was hiked to her mucky knees. The dress was ruffled at the collar and sleeves and it shimmered in the watery sun.

Near the Dora woman was a mid-aged Quamichan woman in a tartan shawl and a Quamichan man, lean and grey-haired, dressed in trousers and a pale shirt and a battered top hat. At the feet of all three were baskets heaped with gooey-ducks. The Dora woman looked up at his approach and as she did her blue bonnet slipped back off a froth of yellow hair. The Quamichans eyed him suspiciously, but the Dora woman waved, as if she had been expecting him all along.

“Have you lost something, sir?”

“No.”

“Come now. You've lost something. Could be your very soul with such a look you're having there.” She smiled then.

He walked past her, thinking she was mocking.

“Was it a pouch?”

He halted. His chest tightened as if held in a clamp. “Was a pouch, yes.”

“Tell me what it looked like. I have to be certain, see, before I show you what I found.”

“Was a smoke pouch. With tassels. Blue and red.”

“What sort?”

“Silk. Silk tassels. Worn out nearly. The pouch has a Raven on it. In beads.” He described the colour of the beads, then hastily drew the image of the Raven in the wet sand.

“Ah, enough now. I believe you.” She reached into her apron. “Here it is then.”

He grabbed the pouch from her and turned his back and counted the money. It was wet and soiled, but there, all one hundred and twenty-six pounds, ten shillings. He put the smoke bag into a side pocket. Kept his hand upon it. The weight of the coins seemed to firm up the wet sand beneath his boots.

“Old money that is. I haven't seen its like since I was a girl.”

“You saw it, then.”

“Oh, for certain. I didn't count it, mind. I said, no Dora, it's not yours to be counting.” She smiled at him. “Won't you come to the cabin and have some coffee? You look as if you're needing it. Ah, it has been horrid, hasn't it? This morning I said to myself, Dora, go to the shore and help out Mary and Jeremiah, and so I did because after that rain I had to get out of doors like, and my roof leaked and I had to put a bucket, but ah, the noise kept me awake so and . . . oh, don't scowl so Jeremiah,
yaka tillicum
, he's a friend, a friend.”

She did not cease speaking as she led the way. Boston and the Quamichans followed silently. It had never happened. Not to him, not to anyone he had heard of. Money belonged to the one who held it. If it is found it is not returned, not voluntarily. It made no sense. Perhaps she was wealthy and was showing her largesse. Service and homage, then, was what she would want in return. But she was not someone of great property. He knew that soon enough. The cabin was like the few others in the area, was no more than twenty feet wide and made of unpeeled logs and had a shingled roof and a few flat stones before the door. A sheet and a petticoat heaved out from a makeshift line. Some of the charred stumps about were still smoking, much of the ground unbroken.

The Dora woman told him to sit on the bench by the outside wall of the cabin. He did so, one hand on his rucksack. Jeremiah milked the lone cow in the lean-to. Mary attended to the few chickens scratching inside a wire pen. From the cabin came clattering and bits of song and in a short time the Dora woman came out and gave him barely raised bread and hard cheese and coffee thick with grains. She apologized, said it was all she had. She asked for his name. He told her and she repeated it several times, as if it were something to bring luck or keep evil at bay. She spoke queerly, leaving out the h's and speaking as if she were half swallowing her words. He'd heard English spoken that way, but never by a woman. She introduced herself as Mrs. Dora Hume. The names of her helpers were not really Mary and Jeremiah, those were just the names a priest gave them. They wouldn't tell her their true Indian names. Wasn't that odd? She left no gap for a reply. She said she'd been astonished at first at how many Indians were about. Terrified as well. She was sure they'd kill her in her sleep. But, no, these Indians were kindly folk and oft-times brought offerings of venison and berries. And wasn't it a great source of comfort being able to hire them? To always have someone about? “And where is it you're living, Mr. Jim?”

He gestured vaguely to the hills beyond the bay.

“Ah, I see,” she said, and then began talking, an endless stream of words and stories. Boston had never heard such talking before. She said, first off, that it astounded her how people appeared in this place, no announcement, no rumours of arrival. Might be a whole thriving city just on the other side of that thick, high wall of trees, one only had to enter through the right shaft of rare sunlight, say some magic word, in Chinook she supposed, because that way everyone could understand it. Even she could understand it, for she spoke Chinook quite well, thank you. Her neighbour Mrs. Smitherton said she'd never seen such a quick study. Now the Dora woman was speaking of muddy Methodist boots appearing one day as she was poking at the seedlings in her garden, of how they began preaching of God's love, black-suited knees of salvation. She looked up into a face that was promising a heaven paved with gold and full of angels singing the praises of our Lord. She told the man that all she wanted was a little more sun and that she was High Church and then kindly suggested he not stand so on her new pea shoots. He looked down amazed, hands still in the air, and she laughed because by his expression you'd think he'd just realized he was a hundred miles up, hanging onto strips of clouds.

She spoke next of her life in London, spoke of her family without any introduction, as if he knew them as well as she. Well, he did soon enough, certainly.

Boston finished his coffee, made a brief movement of leaving. He would have to leave soon if he were to hire a canoe to take him down the inlet. And so what held him there? He cannot say, but it was impossible for him to move from the block of sunlight, impossible to move away from her voice that was wrapping about him like twine. He should have been more careful. Odd things lie in wait for weary travellers. He knew that as well as anyone.

“And so I signed up on the
Tynemouth
. Can you believe that, Mr. Jim? Ah, but I didn't want to share the fate of my older sister who hoped for greater things but ended up in Dark House lane, selling fish and oysters. I'd never heard of Victoria, and for certain not the colony of Vancouver Island. Anything outside the boundaries of London were like a foreign land to me. I still can't believe I'm here. I'm often pinching myself I am.”

Of this sea voyage she spoke in great detail. Of how when they finally arrived in Esquimalt the men lined the road and she had five marriage proposals within a day. Oh, but they were rough-looking characters and she would not be so rash. She had signed a contract to work for the Avalon Hotel and she intended to honour this contract. But then she met Mr. Hume. He begged for her hand. Such a fine man. How could she refuse him? She had wanted to stay in Victoria, but he knew of free land to be had in the Cowichan. It astounded her and still did. “One hundred and sixty acres. We're like Lords and Ladies of the manor, that's what.”

She spoke at length of this husband, Mr. Hume, and said several times how he was to come home any time now. She looked to the forest as she did so, as if expecting him to stride forth. Later she changed her story. “I can tell you the truth. You ain't, I mean, you're not a thief or a cutthroat. You have a good face, you do.”

Her husband had, in fact, set off just five days ago to seek gold in the Cariboo. He was sure to find it as he was more clever than most and more handsome, too. Didn't women glance at him in the streets? Didn't it make her both jealous and proud? And he knew something of everything—languages and poetry and history and old tales and he'll write his memoirs as soon as he's old. At that point she dashed inside the cabin and came out with tintype that bore her husband's face in muddy shades.

Her way of remembering was not as his, was not like opening a book and seeing it all there, the same each time. She struggled with names and pondered dates and was often turning back to fill in a word or gesture or detail which had escaped her before. Likely, too, events shifted and reformed for her, as they did for most people and as such could not be taken as truth.

Mary and Jeremiah returned and stood quietly by, only then did she pause and so allow him a chance to leave. “Why, the whole afternoon is gone!” she said and looked about as if it might be retrieved from under a root.

He held up a marten pelt, the second best one he had, a paltry offering for the return of his money, for her hospitality. That was when she said: “Not to worry. Think on it as a gift, for your birthday, like.”

“Have none,” he replied.

“None? Ah, well and so, it's just an ordinary gift, then. But if you like, you can bring me something when you're back this way again. Not that it matters. Just come again and I'll have some better food for us and you can tell me of yourself, because I chatter on so, indeed I do.”

≈  ≈  ≈

The women have walked on, their rain pattens clattering on the boards. Boston thumps back up the stairs, his boots now covered with mud, now heavy as anvils. He cleans them on the boot scrape and enters a haberdashery. He does this small politeness of scraping his boots, but he does not take off his hat, which is battered and sweat-rimmed at the crown.

The haberdashery is long and narrow and is lit with lanterns though outside it is not yet dark. He shifts uncertainly. He has never entered such a place. Why would he? It is a woman's place. Here are needles of all sizes, hatpins the size of daggers, bone corsets and steel embroidery rings, tins of buttons and tins of beads, stiff bonnets perched on wooden heads, and other, unnameable things, their gleaming and sparkling multiplied in the wall of looking glasses. He has no liking for looking glasses. Cannot imagine why anyone does. But this time he pauses at his own image. “You have a good face,” the Dora woman had said. He never thinks of his face, whether it is good or otherwise, but considering it, at this moment, even he can see that for most people it would not be a face to inspire trust, not at all.

≈  ≈  ≈

“Something for the wife, sir?” The woman is as small as a child and her dress is festooned with scalloping and bright coloured bows. Her ringleted hair, however, is grey, her face furrowed, her voice a harsh rasp.

“Need a gift, for a lady.”

“A lady? Had you anything particular in mind? Most gentlemen do.”

Boston's mouth is dry. “Ribbons,” he says after a pause. Women went in for ribbons. For their hair, he supposes, or to pin on their dresses.

They are amongst the gimping and edgings, are of pink or white satin and unfurl from fat rolls. How many? How long? They would be soiled and tangled by the time he gave them. They would resemble shrivelled worms.

“Your expression tells us we have not divined quite the best thing. Come. Look.” The old woman now shows him ivory combs, silver scissors, silver lockets, bracelets dangling with cupids and hearts, crystal bottles of perfume. “We know the best way to a lady's heart, oh, yes, indeed.”

Boston has now fully entered foreign territory. He does not like it. So many of the objects are small and smooth, but with sharp, unexpected points, with uncertain purposes.