Reckoning of Boston Jim (41 page)

She is not to be found. None have heard of her. “If this is the best of all possible worlds. What are the rest like?” These words of Candide come unsought, leave him with the sensation that he is tilting in a gale.

On the day of the hiring Boston waits in a queue for the better part of an hour. Now stands before The Hume who sits at a makeshift desk near his cabin. It is the first time Boston has seen the man up close. His eyes are amber flecked with green, and are fairly bloodshot. His moustaches and beard are short-cropped, as smooth and shiny as mink pelts. Below his hat brim are wisps of brown hair. “Handsome, he is,” the Dora woman said. “Handsome as the saints, the devil even.” Boston studies the straight nose, the fine teeth, and supposes this is true.

The Hume asks questions in quick succession, barely waiting for the answers: “Do you have experience? Do you speak English? Do you have any ailments?”

“Some,” Boston replies. “Yes.” “No.”

The Hume scribbles at his papers.

“Work cheaper than the others. Work harder.”

“I do not doubt it. I'll keep that in mind. Yes. Thank you for coming.” He looks past Boston to the man behind him. Boston stands before the Hume a moment longer. The Hume's hands are patterned with freckles; his forehead has three distinct lines. In all, an older face than the one from the tintype the Dora woman showed him.

“Good day then,” the Hume says and motions Boston aside.

Boston follows the path back to the towns. He curses himself for not having dropped his gaze, for it unsettled the Hume, that was obvious. He might have hired Boston otherwise. And then Boston could have kept a proper eye on him, could have made certain he came home safe, just as the Dora woman so wanted him to do.

He looks about, then veers off into the trees and crosses the stream. On a slope he finds a vantage point behind some boulders and bramble. Takes out a telescope. He bought it with the last of his money, not with the one hundred and twenty-six pounds ten shillings still in the smoke pouch, still in the sewn over pocket of his overshirt. That is not truly money anymore, is more a portion of Kloo-yah's spirit that presses against his chest like a small fist. He finds the mine and then the Hume's partners busy at this task or that, and then the Hume himself, talking now to a Chinaman. Boston holds the Hume steady in the round of glass.

Dusk, and the long queue of men has gone. They have hired two Chinamen and a Canadian. The Hume sets off to town with the blond young man and the Swede. Boston follows at a good distance, keeping the figures the size of his hand. He cannot let the Hume out of his sight, that much he knows.

≈  ≈  ≈

In the next two weeks the Hume goes to the towns six times—twice with the black men, Napoleon and Lorn, four times with the Swede and the one called George Bowson. On three of these occasions the Hume visits the Denby saloon. But he does not indulge in Madame Blanc and her women, as do Langstrom and George Bowson. Out in the street the Hume roars that he would rather be boiled in oil, rather be drawn and quartered and his entrails left for buzzards than betray his love. This comforts Boston some. “He's faithful to me, he is,” the Dora woman said. And if the Hume is not faithful? Does Boston's task extend to keeping him safe from other women? He hopes he will not have to decide. He is being kept busy enough following the Hume and his partners about, keeping a discreet distance, shifting himself behind the crowd that gathers 'round the Hume wherever he goes. For the Hume is known to give a hundred dollars' worth of gold to down-and-out miners. He has used champagne bottles for bowling pins, has wrapped a ten pound note 'round a cigar and smoked it. Boston overheard Lorn Hallwood, the scarred black man, reprimand the Hume, and Napoleon Beauville, the tall one, nod in agreement, saw George Bowson stare in astonishment at the Hume's spending. The Hume's antics, however, do not surprise Boston. It is the sort of generosity expected of those with wealth, particularly those who find it in the earth, or win it, or gain it suddenly, for no apparent reason. The Hume's giving is providing him with status, a name, with admirers who vow, for the time being, to follow him. It is ever so in the world. The headman Wa'xwid smashed the copper Quail Before to show his power and to defeat a rival. The copper was worth twenty lynx blankets and twenty slaves and thirty wide planks and forty boxes of grease. He burned three canoes that day, and he gave away four machines that stitched clothing, eighteen rifles, and a hundred three-point blankets, each person receiving according to his station. Boston has heard the missionaries call the potlatching wasteful and knows they are keen to stop it. But it is no different from what the Whitemen practice when they receive bounty, unexpected or otherwise, any idiot can see that.

No, what worries Boston is that the Hume is drinking without restraint and does not seem to notice the ones who glare at him with envy instead of hope. On the last occasion the Hume went on a spree to the towns he stumbled back to the cabin alone, singing drunkenly. Langstrom the Swede and George Bowson were still at the Denby. The night was full of wind and odd rustlings. The Hume, drunk as he was, did not notice the two men following behind him, closer than Boston ever dared. They carried no lanterns and walked with the stealth of thieves.

The two men stopped when Eugene stopped. Boston stopped also. For a moment all four were stock-still, as if waiting for some cue, and then Eugene swung his lantern this way and that, searching for the path, as if he'd never been that way before.

The two men were whispering together when Boston came upon them. He hit the large man on the back of the head with the butt of his revolver. The large man thudded to the ground and as he did Boston clamped his hand over the other man's mouth, pressed his revolver to his head.

“Who's there?” the Hume called.

“Don't make a fucking sound,” Boston whispered. “Kill you if you do. And stop squirming.”

The Hume called out again and then blundered off. Boston waited until his singing faded, then released his hand from the man's mouth and searched him for weapons. Threw an old pistol and a knife into the ditch.

“Damn. I think you killed Jevowski.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“You a constable? Christ, how's a man supposed to get by around here?”

“Leave the Hume alone, hear?”

“Whaddya care about our business?

“Nod or I'll blow your head off.”

“I'm nodding. Ouch! Fuck Christ. Easy now. Hume owes me, the fucking idiot. Interfered with me when I was trying to make a living. Harmless game it was. And here he comes along and calls me a sharper, a cheat. I never cheat at Find the Lady. He set the Judge on me and poor Jevowski here. Damnation, now you.”

“Get going. Kill you if you bother him again.”

“Oh, fucking hell, fine, fine. I'm going. I've had it for tonight. What about Jevowski?”

“He'll live. Get going, that way.”

“Christ, I don't get it. Like they say, Hume must shit out horseshoes.”

≈  ≈  ≈

Another week passes and now the days are rimmed with frost, spiced with cold. On the tenth of September Boston wakes to snow, to an unasked-for remembrance of Kloo-yah lifting her face to a thick snowfall. The snow dissolved on the wet ground, showed white against the dark gloss of her hair. A raven on the roof of their cabin dislodged a piece of bark the size of a plate. The bark plunked on the woodpile and the raven flew into the sixth branch of a spruce. Boston had seen snow eighteen times before in his life. And yet it did not seem familiar, not with Kloo-yah standing in its fall.

≈  ≈  ≈

Boston crawls from his bower. From his chosen vantage he peers through the telescope. The Hume and his partners come into view. The Hume is safely above ground. He is gesturing at the snow and scuffing at it with his boot. He looks surprised, as if just aware that winter is coming on. The Hume, to Boston's relief, has not been to the towns since the night he was nearly set upon.

It is now just past nine. The Hume and Napoleon Beauville have been working a sluice together for four hours. Two whiskey jacks flit from branch to branch. One alights on Boston's boot and pecks at the straw and mud caked upon it. Boston pays it no attention. The second bird careens down to the mine workings. Its partner soon joins it. The Hume smiles at the birds, as if they were a rarity, as if they were anything but a nuisance.

Addendum to the Second Edition

While working assiduously at pulling riches from the earth the Gentleman will no doubt often be assailed by the cheeky whiskey jack who is always to be seen with its mate twirling about in skyward dance & who is bold enough to snatch food from one's very hand & who is ever together with its mate, ever plotting thievery, ever playing the coquette. One assumes the bolder of the birds is the male though in truth which is male & which female is impossible to tell for any but the most enthusiastic naturalist. Consider, Gentleman, how would the world figure if women and men were indistinguishable? Would one be wracked with indecision if one female were exactly like another in form or in temperament or in speech? Would life be simpler or merely dull?

“How are you feeling, Mr. Hume?” Napoleon asks.

“Salubrious. Fit as a fiddle. Merely pondering some philosophical ideas. Is it not warm today?”

Napoleon looks at him curiously and says he finds it quite brisk. Eugene nods and comments on the paucity of gold this day. Napoleon says “patience.” Simple enough for him to say. He is the most patient man ever born, never raises his voice, never looks to his pocket watch. He unnerves Eugene at times, but then so does Langstrom heaving on the windlass. By the warmth of their new stove he is often polishing his new revolver with the same look of expectation he gives to his cooking. At the moment he is singing tunelessly in Swedish, a habit Eugene does not find as soothing as he once did. As for Lorn, he has made Eugene uneasy since the day they met. It is that perpetual false sneer, his slurred speech, as if his mouth were filled with bile. It is his comments that could be taken this way or that. At the moment he is below, overseeing the hired men, a task to which he has taken with considerable relish. Who can blame him? The world is inverted here. Eugene must emphasize this in his guidebook, or at least direct his secretary to do so. As for Young George, he is bringing over endless buckets from the shaft. Bringing them their fortune. Dear George. He heaves a bucket into Eugene's sluice, bellows: “Number
103
!”

Yes, dear George. He has hummocks of dark flesh under his eyes. A manic cheer that has manifested itself in the last week or so. What has happened to the wide-eyed young man, diligently rereading his mother's letters? Diligently praying by his bunk? He has been transformed by wealth. They all have, certainly, but none more than George Bowson. In truth, it is somewhat disquieting. For George has developed a taste for unwatered whiskey, for chewing tobacco, and smoking cigars, for dancing the hornpipe until all hours, for shouting and singing himself hoarse, and for the ladies of the Denby saloon, Mariette in particular, said to be the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jesuit priest, said to be able to turn any man heathen. If these were his only pastimes, Eugene might console himself that George is merely a young man testing the waters of life. George, however, has recently acquired a taste for the Chinamen's opium. It was not just Eugene who suggested sampling it. Langstrom by his gesturing seemed to have some expertise in the matter. It was a mere lark in any case. He, Langstrom, George, and Miss Anna. The three of them in a small room that smelled foreign and acrid. On a square table were numerous gaming tablets inscribed with the Chinamen's fanciful writings. On the floor were straw mats. They stretched themselves out. Tang Lee's assistant took a pin and poked the sugar-brown chunks into the long pipe, then lit the pipe with a practiced hand. The opium bubbled in the small bowls. Ah, so this was what blue tasted like. The room melted, expanded. A flow of colours, a sense of half-dreaming. Joy, then, was not some philosopher's concept that Eugene secretly doubted. It inhabited his body. His bones. It had form and shape. It was lavender and white as well as blue. An age passed. And then, the following day, a sore throat, a headache which has plagued him since, a weakness in his limbs, and worst of all a melancholy and loss of appetite that had no place in the breast of a wealthy man. George, however, was barely afflicted. In fact, he was agog, and became distressingly poetic as he described how he had communed with angels. Now he smokes a portion each night and each morning drinks whiskey to combat the ensuing lethargy. Eugene's insistence that opium is an invention of the devil, his tales of sordid opium dens, white slaves, rotting skulls, have not deterred young George in the least.

≈  ≈  ≈

Eugene straightens laboriously. His head pounds and there is a swath of pain in his lower spine, a swath of sweat on his brow. The droplets reach his eyes and the gold particles for which he is so keenly searching disappear in the swim of brown water. Absurd, this thought that it is all an illusion, a spell, this idea that the gold does not exist at all. It is only that the day is surprisingly warm, no matter what Napoleon says, only that he is surprisingly tired. Come now, Eugene Augustus, you are no longer young, that is all. True, true. Time was he could sleep for two or three hours and wake refreshed by the noontime chimes and the shouts of friends at his door. Time was he could drink prodigiously and awake with only a gentle throbbing in his temple, as if some disapproving teetotaller was tapping him with her fan. Now when he imbibes it seems a drummer has taken her place. And his throat. So parched come the unwelcome mornings, such a longing for simple water. It is as if he has dragged himself through the Sahara instead of the saloons and gambling dens of the town. Come now, has it not been worth it? Of course. Most certainly. Already one of his exploits has been put to song—the footrace between Miss Anna and a boasting Oregonian. He, Langstrom and Young George bet on Miss Anna, out of loyalty, out of show, and were astonished as any when she won by two strides. Later she accompanied them to the Occidental in a dress patterned with dots, a cigar still firmly between her teeth. Miss Anna tromping about in a dress! What magic had they worked, or rather what magic had Langstrom worked, for it is his side she never leaves as they make their way through the towns, betting on the roulette, the blackjack, the dog fights, the bare-knuckle fights. They come away, roaring with laughter, marked with droplets of blood. Win or lose, it hardly signifies. Lucky Hume he is being called, and not just by Langstrom now. He could sell the buttons on his coat, clippings of his hair, certainly his advice. Even the Judge hinted he would like to question Eugene on one or two matters, a roulette game, for example, in which the wheel kept responding to his number. The Judge approached Eugene as he was scraping up his winnings. Arthur Bushby, nearby as usual, was humming some annoying tune. The Judge complimented Eugene on his good fortune, then posed his questions with impressive tact. He nodded at Eugene's explanation of astounding luck at work, gave his good day and turned to leave.