Reckoning of Boston Jim (27 page)

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It is a night full of shadows and quicksilver light, a night that can trick the mind and the eyes. Still, something, someone, shifts in the thickets.

“Who's there?” He parts the brambles. A small, furred creature rushes past his legs. Night hare? Fox? Goblin? Eugene yelps and falls onto his back. The earth shifts like a raft on a gentle sea. A warm wind is scattering the mosquitoes. The swath of the Milky Way arches over him. So this Olsen sees no poetry in the firmament, only latitudes and longitudes, only angles and degrees. A pity for him. Likely he also does not notice the crickets that sound like the mutter snores of night itself, nor that haunting fluty call of some nocturnal bird. Likely he never bore affection for woman or beast. Ah, faithful Ariadne, waiting hobbled in the fields. Everyday he slathers her with mud as protection against the insect hordes. When it dries she seems to be in the process of hatching. At least the grass is good, as least she is growing plumper by the day. Dear girl!

A mosquito has burrowed under his collar. He lets it suck its fill. Where is Lilith? He has forgotten Lilith. Ah, but not Dora. Not Dora.

“Doc. There you are. Gosh, you all right?”

“What? Dora?”

“It's George.”

“Wife? Hah. He think wife.”

“Who are you? What?”

“It's your friends, is all. I'm George. Here's Langstrom.”

They haul Eugene to his feet.

“Ah, the Good Swede, the Saintly Young George. I have failed. I must be on my way come the morrow. You will join me? Will you?”

George clears his throat. “We would, 'course. I would, anyway. But our contracts. We won't get our pay, is all. None of it. And Mr. Langstrom and me, well, we've been working near a month.”

“Of course, of course. Do not fear, I will find us a claim. We will be rich. I can sense it as surely as I sensed that Lilith would win. Did I not say Lilith would win?”

“You did,” George says.

“Ya, win,” Langstrom says.

“Say a prayer for me, will you, Young George? There's a fine chap. I need a prayer.”

“Easy now, Doc. Easy. Let's get you on to bed for some shut-eye.”

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The black powder explodes and Old John hurtles upward and stays balanced in the crux of a gigantic tree. On a nearby branch brocaded ladies dangle their jewelled shoes over the abyss and clap as if witnessing a feat of acrobatics. Old John has wispy grey moustaches and wrinkles about his panicked eyes. He waves his bloodless stumps and voicelessly screams. Eugene can see clear down his throat, clear to the green sea churning in his gut and a square-sailed ship careening there, can see clear to the man's childhood in a misty village adorned with pagodas and white flags. The Lieutenant is there, dressed in silken robes. He is berating Eugene. “Your fault. You fool. Shoddy work and fools. Merrily they go. Merrily down the lane.” Dora stands beside Olsen. She is coyly smiling and holds her breasts in her hands the way a baker might hold out two round loaves of bread. “Do you want them, or not, Eggy? There are others waiting. Make up your mind.” Eugene cannot breath. Cannot move. Why is so much asked of him? He is only a man, only a man.

Boston prods Girl awake at first light. They eat the last of his food. Girl eats her share ravenously, gulps water from his flask, then picks up the crumbs that have fallen in the grass.

“Getting a dress for you. The Lady wants you looking nice. Stay here. Lie low. Like a mouse in the grass. Don't be talking to anyone. Send you back to Petrovich if you do.” He repeats this in Chinook. She grabs his hand with her own. It is cold and surprisingly rough. It does not feel like a child's hand, more like some small sea creature, a starfish perhaps, or something with a similarly slow and stubborn life.

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At the Hudson's Bay Store Mr. Gifford looks nervously at Boston. “Excellent to see you again, sir. You are here to collect your goods I take it. Not to worry. I have kept them safe for you. Ah, your receipt, thank you.” He heaves Boston's goods onto the table, checks off the receipt, then hands it back to Boston. “I heard of your misfortune, Mr. Jim. That I did. I was speaking of it to Farlane and Bennet, who are just here, just in the store room, sure to be back in a trice. I doubt Mr. Kines . . .”

Boston is holding up his clasp knife.

“Farlane! Bennet!”

Boston places the knife on the counter. “What'll you give for it.”

“Give for it? Ah. I see. I see.” Gifford dabs his forehead with his sleeve. Boston waits without moving while Gifford settles himself.

“May I?” he asks finally and reaches for the knife. Gingerly he tests the blade with his thumb. The handle is of ebony and is inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “I can give ye one pound.”

“One pound is it.”

“Or one pound, ten shillings.”

“You can take the coal oil back, then. And won't take less than two pounds for the knife. Cost more than that. It's got good silver.”

“I kin see that. It is just that we have an abundance of knives at the moment.”

Boston frowns. His hand drifts over his bowie knife. It is a fine piece, easily finer than his clasp knife. The double-sided blade is ten inches long, the quillon is of silver, and the engraving on the handle is of a creature half-horse, half-alligator, and is wrought so well the creature looks as if it might spring to life. He got this knife off an American two years and seven days ago and has used it near every day since, for the bowie is designed for the ordinary tasks of skinning and gutting as well as for the killing of men.

Gifford is swallowing nervously. “But as you are an excellent customer, or so I have heard, then the clasp knife. . . . Let me look again.”

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A time later and Boston is walking through Bastion Square, a package under his arm. Soon he will be telling the Dora woman that Girl belongs to her now, and the Dora woman will exclaim. “Ah, well and so! It is just what I was wanting! Why she even looks a bit like Isabel.”

Two children brush by him calling: “My turn, my turn now.” A man with a brace of bottles calls out the price for a gross of jalap, a pound of opium, a bottle of Turlington's balm.

Boston buys potatoes and camas roots from two Indian women. The younger one pulls them steaming from a coal-laden pot. Wraps them in leaves.

“
Mahsie
,” he says.

“
Mahsie, Kahpho,
” she replies.

Older brother? Why not? Once an exchange is made it creates a bond, however tenuous. All about, exchanges are being made and contemplated and weighed. All about him, the world is being held in balance.

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Girl leaps out of the grass. “Dress? Dress?”

“Not for you. For the Lady. It's for her you're being made pretty.”

She prods the package. “Want see.”

“No. Have to clean you up. Then put it on you.”

She pats his arm, as if in some kind of thanks. Why is she crying? Will she cry when she is with the Dora woman? Will she be of any use to her? But then Isabel Lund was weepy and she apparently inspired in the Dora woman a type of courage. Girl might well do the same. Boston puts his hand on Girl's head. His smile is a brief upward movement of his beard.

They stick again to the alleys, walk around shattered bottle glass, a pool of black sludge. A woman pounds a ragged carpet with a stick. A man squatting at his morning stool grimaces as they pass. Soon enough they are through Chinatown and then onto the path through the marshlands. The day is fine and hot. The salal quivers with small birds. Frogs croak from the reeds.

Girl trots to keep up with his strides. Soon she is breathing hard and limping. He crouches and peers at the thin lines of blood. It will take more than the usual two days to reach the Cowichan, that much is obvious. He pulls the thistle from the hard sole of her foot, then tears a strip from her sack dress and tightly binds her foot. She does not whimper. “Good,” he says.

By late afternoon they reach the base of an inlet. A stream fans out from the immensity of the trees. Sunlight through the poplars and cedars casts fragmented shadows on the rocky shore. Boston finds a long, thick branch and sharpens it with his bowie knife. He wishes briefly for the clasp knife that is now in Gifford's keeping, for the bowie knife, no matter what its many uses, does not have that knife's finesse.

He waits at the stream, spears three salmon in succession. He turns to show Girl but she is gone. He calls her and she appears after a few moments, holding something in the hem of her dress. Shows him the fiddleheads, mushrooms, fern roots.

They stuff the gutted salmon with her findings, then roast them over a fire, rocks acting as a brace. The meal tastes finer than any Boston has had in a long while. It is the clean smell of the breeze and the clean sound of birds that makes it seem so. The prison was rank. The shit bucket overflowed. A roach crawled sideways along the floor. Coom shouted out that they were damned.

Boston sucks a salmon head. There it is again, that sense of elongated time, that sense of fullness. He felt it at the Dora woman's place, once he had resigned himself to staying. He felt it years ago, with Kloo-yah. A word appears to him, an English word: contentment. He supposes it might suit best.

“Wash now,” he says.

Girl grins and a gap shows where a tooth has gone missing. She pulls the sacking over her head and runs into the water up to her waist. She shivers and hugs herself.

“Under. Get your hair,” Boston calls. She dips under and rises spluttering. Boston throws her the store-bought soap and makes the motion of washing. She does so, eyes shut tight. Her hip bones and ribs prod through her skin. Her nipples are as small, puckered scars on the flatness of her chest. Boston turns his back to keep a sudden anger at bay. She need not be so oblivious to her own vulnerability. She looks as if she would crumple in a minor wind. She looks as fodder for a puma, or for those colossal birds of prey seen on rare occasions catching the high winds. She looks, certainly, with that hairless, unguarded sex, as prey for men. Boston sees her again in the shack, Petrovich's hand on her neck, her wary gaze.

He squints into the lowering sun and aims his revolver. Girl yelps at the shot and a green-winged duck flaps its last.

“You need more food.”

She crouches naked by the fire while Boston cuts the duck and spears its parts for the embers. “I clean. Dress. Dress now,” she says.

“No. Tomorrow, when we're close. Don't want it getting dirty. Put that on again.” He points to the calico shift. She shakes her head furiously. Not until they have finished the duck and she has washed her face and hands again does Boston relent.

She unwraps the package with great care. The simple dress is the blue of an autumn sky at dusk, darker than the shore-water blue Dora wears, but of the same company: sky and water, one reflecting the other. Girl touches it with reverence, strokes the black stockings, the shoes, the comb. “We know what looks pretty on a girl,” the old woman at the haberdashery said. “We knew you'd come back and let us help you, that we did.”

Girl awkwardly pulls on the stockings, then the dress. It is slightly large for her, but this does not signify. “They grow,” the old woman assured him.

“You,” Girl says, pointing at the many buttons of the black shoes. Boston does them up for her, but slowly as the buttons are needlessly numerous and small. Girl walks unsteadily along the rocky shore, her limp made worse. She laughs, returns to the fire. Now sweeps a rock clean and sits and forces the comb through her hair. The snarls are too great and she holds it out to Boston with a sigh of exasperation. She winces when he pulls too hard, once swats gently at his hands. He crushes the lice in his nails. In all, it is a task that takes until the sun is gone.

Boston adds more wood to the fire. He sits with his back against a log. Girl sits beside him.

“Lady. Pretty?”

“She's good. She'll be good to you. Lives in a nice cabin. Her and her husband. You be like a daughter to them.”

“Yes. I good help. Get food. There. There.” She points to the forest, the water.

“Not with your dress on.”

“No. Dress clean. Good.”

“Yes.”

She points to Boston. “Visit? Visit me?”

“Suppose. Yes,” Boston says, though he had meant to say no.

Girl smiles. “Story now.”

Boston pokes at the fire. “Just one.”

“Yes.”

And so Boston tells her a story that Kloo-yah told him. How in the beginning of the world the moon was always fat and full and satisfied and was bright as his brother the sun. And Raven became jealous because even he, with all his power, never knew if each day was going to be better or worse than the last. And so how could he be happy? How could he be satisfied? Why should the sun and the moon never know melancholy? The sun was too bright and strong for the Raven to steal and so he stole the moon and locked him up, and the moon mourned for the sky. Soon the moon was only half himself and then a silver splinter, but before moon could disappear Raven let him out. And then he was like the rest of the world—satisfied and glad and full for a time, and then lean and aching and nearly lost.

“Story. More.”

She is insatiable for stories. She should sleep. He should sleep. They must leave early in the morning. Yet now he does not want the next morning to arrive, nor the moment when he stands before the Dora woman again. Strange that he should dread it and yet desire it.

He tells her of Gulliver and his strange travels. These tales were some of Illdare's favourites. They spent long evenings with Boston reading aloud, and then Illdare. Boston now abridges the stories as best he can, for it would be days before he recited all of Gulliver's adventures. He tells of Lilliput and its tiny inhabitants, of Brobdingnag and its giants. He tells of the flying island of Laputa, and then of the island of the wise and virtuous talking horses, and how among them lived creatures called the Yahoos, who were a form of degraded people. Boston dwells on the last part, for this was Illdare's favourite. How Gulliver came home to England and could not bear to be about people, not even his wife and children, for they reminded him of the Yahoos and filled him with loathing and disgust.