Reckoning of Boston Jim (35 page)

Ah, Dora, Dora. One word from her would be enough to torch these idle thoughts. He would not even bridle at the ridiculous sobriquet “Eggy.” Perhaps his latest letter, penned three weeks ago, is only just arriving. She is at the pier, bathed in the glow of the setting sun. She is waving at the sloop. She is inquiring breathlessly. Now Mrs. Smitherton is reading:

The mine is going well & yielding a steady outflow & I have no doubt that if we dig deeper we will find a rich strain though I must constantly assure our young Bowson that we will not fall into the pits of hell & see the damned there cooling their heels. He is also fearful that we will stumble upon the remains of the creatures and sinners swept away by Noah's flood, at which I could not resist suggesting that, according to that fellow Darwin, we are more likely to find the bones of our monkey ancestors, who were replaced slowly & surely by the wily specimens of men who rule the earth in these modern times. Poor boy! I believe he would rather encounter a demon than such evidence of our paltry, animal origins.

Or some such. In any case, she is smiling and saying how witty is her Eggy, how hopeful, how brave. One distant day he might well agree.

Eleven years, three months and nine days have passed since Boston first awoke to Equata's singing. Though he has only a youth's sparse beard, he is never called Young Jim anymore, not even by Illdare. “It's like you were born old,” more than one of the engagés have said, and they offer no complaint when he is placed in charge of the trade room after McNeal's death from apoplexy. Boston is, after all, the best at bartering, and he speaks the language of the People as fluently as if he had been born among them. He speaks the jargon as well and all its variations and all the languages of the engagés, though some with a roughness he has never cared to improve upon, wanting as he does, less and less over the years, to hear pointless talk. Of the men who were there when he arrived only Illdare and Kanaquasse Fleury are of the originals. Some engagés Illdare sent off for thievery or insolence. Others, such as the Sandwich Islanders, died of gangrenous fever or by accident or suicide. As for Lavolier, he left Fort Connelly on April
17
th four years previous. He walked into the forest dressed in a black robe that he had sewn himself. It was of no great surprise, for Lavolier had taken to claiming he was Saint Ignatius of Loyla himself, to lying prone with arms outstretched in the mud, to saying repeatedly that he must save ten thousand heathen Indian souls before his life was done. Without the ten thousand he would never be received into heaven. Such was the Lord's price in return for eternal bliss.

The new engagés complain even more bitterly of Illdare and his ways. True, he has grown harsher in his punishments over the years, is more likely to flog a man, or make him run the gauntlet, or clap him in irons, though he has told the engagés that he is more just than most company officers, and for this they should be grateful. He does not, after all, inflict these punishments in a drunken fit, nor to satisfy some prejudice or private grudge, nor for simple blood lust. He inflicts them for distinct causes, and only if the evidence against the miscreant is clear, and even then without any sign of enjoyment, rather a revulsion that it must be done at all. Often he reassures the miscreant that he should not blame himself, for all men are debased, some are merely better at suppressing their bestial nature. Boston he never touches with a whip or a fist, but then Boston does his tasks well and does not join in the combinations that happen from time to time, when the engagés refuse to do work other than that of their craft, or demand better wages or better food. And he does not steal, nor raise his voice against Illdare, nor drink more than he is allotted. No longer, however, does Illdare invite Boston to his sitting room to read from the books of Voltaire and Swift. No longer does he invite him to sit by the fire in silence. The last occasion he did so was when Boston's voice was beginning to change. Illdare did not drink brandy on this occasion, nor did he ramble. But then not once had he done so since he learned that Boston could not forget. “I have taught you what I can. There is no need for us to meet here again. You are too much the man now.” Then Illdare added that an officer should not befriend an engagé.

“Not an engagé,” Boston said. He had never signed a document binding him to the company. Illdare and he had agreed that it was enough that he had his life, his food, the roof over his head and the clothes on his back. And he is allowed a small share of the profits, taken from Illdare's own, and a small share of the trade goods to trade again or to do with as he pleased.

“No, you are not formally an engagé, I will grant you that. But you are an underling and a grown man now and I am an officer and should not show favouritism.”

And he hasn't, not since that day, but greets Boston in the same clipped tones as he greets the other engagés. He asks him mostly of the details of the trade and often reminds him, as if Boston might forget, that he be informed if the Indians have brought any items out of the ordinary to trade. Now and then he commends Boston on always making his quota, and now and then he mentions that he trusts Boston more than any other man at the fort. Boston takes pride in this trust of Illdare's, and in the trust, also, that the People show him. For lately he has been invited, though none of the other fort men have, to the potlatching where the guests witness the taking of names and songs and privileges, and receive goods in return, each according to his rank. He attends, as well, the potlatching for the dead and the newly born. At these ceremonies long speeches are given and tales retold. These tales have been passed down through the generations, are as old as the mythic times. They give evidence of hereditary rights and are not the free-form stories told for entertainment. It may take half a day to recite the history of the headman, or a family, or the collective history of the People, and a type of sacredness is in each immutable word. Boston knows the People's remembering, though greater than that of any Whiteman, is not the same as his. It is practised and learned. They do not recall the mundane details of each and every day. Still, this vague sense of commonality is enough to draw him back to the potlatching, as does the latticework of reciprocity that is so formally acknowledged, that maintains a balance that is almost palpable and satisfies him in a way that the religion of the Christ never has.

“Tell us what they are planning,” Illdare said when Boston first began attending the village ceremonials. “If you do not, you cannot go.”

Boston agreed to gather what information he could. But the People tell him nothing of much use, and instead ask him questions about the Ghost People. Why do they rely on books? How many guns at the fort? How strong are the gates? Boston brushes off the questions and goes to the ceremonies less and less. For it is not an alliance between Fort Connelly and the village, but an uneasy truce with advantages for both sides, and Illdare knows, as Boston does, that many in the village would like to see the fort burned and plundered and the heads of the men arranged in neat piles.

The single shaft is some twenty feet deep. The drift runs west under Lickety Creek, following the downward flow. Today Langstrom is responsible for cranking on the windlass and emptying the bucket into rockers manned by Lorn and Napoleon. Eugene and George are to go down into the mine itself. It is their turn. Nothing can be done about it.

“Today the day, sir?” George calls. He is full of his usual appalling good cheer though it is barely light.

“Assuredly, yes. Pay dirt as they say,” Eugene says, with no conviction whatsoever. Except for dustings and a few slivers here and there the mine still refuses to show up. The first week they took out only three ounces. Barely enough to maintain the mine and themselves, though enough to keep their hopes up. Now they are working at a loss.

They sling their shovels on their backs. Eugene hooks the lantern into his belt and looks wistfully at the clear field of the sky. It has been raining steadily since he saw the Judge last week, the sort of persistent drumming rain that seems to mock a man.

Now the descent. It is what Eugene hates most. The air becomes cool and thick as he passes the fraying rope and rusted bucket of the windlass, and then the canvas that flaps against his face like torn sails. The support timbers creak and weep, as might those of a sinking ship. And all smells of wet wood and ancient earth. Of things best left where they are.

Their gumboots are treacherous on the ladder that is slick with slime. “Careful now!” he calls when George nearly slips, nearly drops on Eugene's head.

“Gosh darn it all. Sorry about that.”

What would it take for George to soundly curse? Surely he has it in him. Eugene tried to bet Langstrom that George would curse before the season was out. The Swede refused the bet, saying, as far as Eugene could surmise from his gesticulating and paltry stash of English words, that if George did swear it would bode ill indeed.

Eugene drops the last few feet to the bottom of the shaft. The water splashes up to his booted calves. George drops behind him. The darkness is lit only by Eugene's lantern. Eugene, a good head taller than George, is bent nearly double in the shaft. Already his neck and back dully throb. What he would give for a bath, a true bath, not this sponging of his visible parts with water heated on the stove. Not this washing in the creek as Langstrom is wont to do, and which Eugene and the others can only watch with amazement. For Langstrom settles into the cold waters of the creek as happily as if he were in a Turkish bath, leisurely rubs himself with sand and then returns to stand naked before the stove, his broad body white and scarred and steaming, his pipe soon enough clamped again between his teeth.

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They trundle on. Eugene's throat constricts. If only the possibility of being buried alive did not present itself with every trickle of slum through the timbers. No, it is not his element. He is no Welshman. No Cornishman. It is not in his blood, this toiling in the dark like a mole.

They come to the end of the tunnel where the barrow was left the previous day.

Eugene stops. George bumps up against him.

“Here then?”

“Yes, yes. Where else?” Eugene regrets his tone. But why is it that George looks to him for even the most minor of decisions? Eugene is not the young man's father, nor has Eugene shown any great wisdom in mining. Indeed, by now it should be obvious that he is a charlatan, a fool.

They pound their sticking toms into rock and timber, and then into their sticking toms they shove their merlin oil candles. Six hours it takes for one to burn. A shift half-gone. A life melting to a puddle of ooze.

They shovel dirt, water, and gravel into the barrow. They are down at the bedrock, where the stream ran eons ago. The gold should be on this bedrock. It was where Barker found it, and Cameron, and Oswald, though to be certain, to be thorough, they have gone at the rock walls with both mattocks and tweezers, looking for a vein as well, for a colour, a glory hole.

Eugene pushes the loaded barrow to the opening of the shaft. He fills the bucket, then calls “haul up,” to Langstrom. Would they had a long tom with a flume to feed it, or at least extra hands to load it with water. Oswald and his partners have three long toms that are fed by flumes that are higher than the trees of which they were made. He has four shafts. Says, smugly, that he is doing “not so damned bad.” But then who admits to high yields? Tax agents and thieves is all that would lure.

The hours drip on. Eugene strains at the shovel. There is a burn of pain in his back. A burn of cold in his feet and hands. These discomforts occupy the whole of his thoughts. It is not as he had thought it would be. He had thought that while his body was labouring his mind would be free to devise philosophical theories, or design the house in which he and Dora would one day live, or decide upon the manner of his lecturing (for a lecture circuit would no doubt follow the publication of his guidebook). And for a time he did ponder such things, as well as old mistakes, past injustices, the whereabouts of a spinning top he lost when he was a child (the gardener took it, he decided), any number of plays that he has seen, ditties he has heard, the names of the daughters of Zeus, the way Dora sheds each layer of clothing as if it were a hindrance, then him gazing at the rounded sheen of her limbs. Then, one afternoon, doing his time at the rocker, he realized that his mind was perfectly vacant. This is a great deal different from one's mind being perfectly clear or at peace. Eugene had known the approximate of such feelings on those afternoons when he and Dora lay together after love. No this is a mindlessness; it is a realm where nothing moves and nothing comes to light. It is a dark vat, the black waters of his soul. He can only imagine his expression when he is mired there—dull, fixed, like that of a gravedigger, or of a beggar who sits all day in the shadow of a church.

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Lunch is a respite of a half an hour or so. The clearness of the morning is gone. The air is green and aqueous. The clouds thick on the horizon. It is as if they have stepped into an entirely different day from the one of this morning. It is as if time follows a different stream below.

Langstrom hands them biscuits, then holds up his rifle and motions to the trees. Would that Eugene could go with him. He'd rather face a bear, a charging stag, a poisonous snake than a return to the shaft. But the more they work on the mine the better are their chances of finding the motherlode. He was the one who said this just yesterday, during a fit of hopefulness.

Eugene rubs his neck. Does Napoleon suffer as he does? He is the only one taller than Eugene and when he is in the shaft he walks in a crouch with his hands pressed on his knees. He must suffer, and yet he never complains. A stoic man. A good man. A weary affection for them all suffuses Eugene. For Langstrom trudging toward the hills, humming a tune from the cold regions of his youth. For Lorn who is spitting into a ditch. For Napoleon who is inspecting a plant and no doubt dreaming up concoctions that will cure the ague, the palsy, the black dog of melancholy. And most of all for Young George Bowson. He is snoring softly on some canvas sacking. He can sleep anywhere, at any time. Only the young are so blessed. Only those who owe nothing to anyone.