Reckoning of Boston Jim (9 page)

A Reverend appears in the churchyard, points at some unused ground a distance from the regular gravestones, then hurries back into the church, the wind gripping his black coat and seeming to pull him along.

The rocky ground is dense with brambles and rubbish. A tree stump splays out long, gnarled roots. The corpse of a dog lies bloated, its legs stiffly skyward. The convicts clear patches of ground and strain at the shovels. Each man is chained so close to the other that their grunts and odours intermingle and they are like some immense multi-legged insect burrowing vainly into the earth.

By the afternoon the graves are half dug and the men allowed some rest. They huddle under the trees as a wind-driven rain turns the earth to mud. Petrovich is now cursing constantly under his breath. Froth speckles his lips. The boy Farrow is sobbing. Toolie shows his hands to Boston. They are blistered and bloodied. He licks his palms and whimpers.

“Back to it, boys!” Coom shouts. He jerks the end of the chain. Turns his back to attend his horse. A clod of dirt clips him in the ear. He doesn't roar, nor shout. Not Coom. He turns calmly. Studies them with an amused air. He draws his revolver, pulls the hammer back.

“I am a patient man. It is one of God's gifts to me. And thus I will walk out of earshot. Five minutes you will have, and then the miscreant must be given up. If not, all suffer twenty lashes. Understood?”

He mounts Kingdom Come and turns his back again.

“Damn you, Petrovich,” Claude Dupasquier hisses. “You only got a week more.”

His brother kicks at Petrovich. Handel chuckles.

Petrovich stares miserably at them, whispers: “You wouldn't give me up? One fucking drink is all I need. His voice, Coom's, it burns here in my head. He is the devil's whore, yes? The devil himself for all he talks of God. I was not trying to hit him. I am surprised as all of you, yes? Please, I beg you.” Petrovich is trembling as he drops to his knees. Claude grips his collar. Is ready to haul him up and shove him forward when Boston says: “Take the blame for you, Petrovich.”

The others stare at him.

“Take it for me? Yes? You are not jesting?”

“Cost fifty dollars.”

“Fifty? I have, have only eight. Eight. I can give you eight, yes?”

“Three minutes, boys!” Coom shouts.

“Make it sixty,” Boston says. Sixty would be enough money to buy a fine gift for the Dora woman; he need spend no more of his own.

“I have eight only, no wait I remember, I have fifteen, yes? I give you fifteen today and the rest I give you when you are free. You come to me at the shacks on the inner harbour. Ask for me. I give you the rest. On my honour. My word, yes?” He extends a shaking hand.

Boston takes it briefly. “Give it now, then. Forty-five later.”

Petrovich fumbles in a coat pocket, gives over the soiled bills.

“Time's finished,” Coom roars, striding toward them.

“Did it,” Boston says. “Threw the dirt at you.”

“You? By God's grace, I wouldn't have thought you such a fool. Hah, but I am not particular, neither is the whip.”

≈  ≈  ≈

Although a physician has dosed him with laudanum and dressed his back with salve and clean linen, the pain is still fierce, albeit preferable to the company of the chain gang.

He lies on his side on the stone floor. This cell is not much larger than a coffin. Light comes through a crack in the ceiling in the early mornings. Utter darkness otherwise. Not that he fears the darkness, feels absorbed by it rather, feels he might walk straight through it and so to freedom. The Dora woman is the one who fears the darkness, said she had never seen anything like the Cowichan night, rolling in with no street lamps to stop it. She described then the lanterns from the boats on the Thames, how at night they bobbed and wove, like fallen stars struggling to shore. And if you walked along Park Lane when the season was in progress you'd see the quality pouring into houses so ablaze with torches and great chandeliers that the walls seemed afire.

“Don't be worrying about the darkness,” he should have told her. “Day's just as fearsome.” It was as simple then to wander from the human realm into another, quite similar, realm where the bear people walked and the salmon people swam and where the skookums had their lairs. The borders were hazy, unmarked. You could step into it the way you stepped into moss that seemed to cover a rock or fallen tree only to find your foot sinking slowly into a green mouth. You could, as he did, see something small and winged and human-faced, though hideous in aspect, flitting through dusk shadows. And you could hear, at times, a vast moaning that was not the wind, no indeed.

≈  ≈  ≈

He shuts his eyes. Shifts to ease his back. It is a Friday evening when the miseries begin. Dora's father is at large in his old haunt of Newcut Market, is boasting that his wife is the most splendid female about, better than any other wife. “Better than yours, sir,” he calls to a passing rubbish carter. Soon enough the crowd forms a ring around her father and the rubbish carter. Dora squeezes between the shifting legs, hauling her younger brother with her. The rubbish carter is immense, a fortress unto himself.

Hard to say how it happens. They are boxing and circling each other, her father not cheerful now, the rubbish carter snarling and lashing out with a great fist. Her father falls onto the cobbles, does not break his fall, does not move after falling. He's not dead, but never the same. Now he lives only in the instant, cannot recall if he has just eaten or shat, cannot recall his children's names, nor his wife's. He sits on a stool in the shop and says nothing to the patrons, says nothing at all for hours, his mouth jarring open at a fly trekking over his knuckles. Occasionally tears course down his cheeks. Occasionally he speaks clearly for a few moments, calls for his children by name and then, as if a door has been shut, the glassy stare returns. It breaks Dora's heart to know her father is imprisoned in his own skin. She would like to save him, but how? She cannot imagine how.

Her mother is afflicted with melancholy, can barely manage an exchange of pleasantries with the patrons. Not that these patrons are seen much of late, the sight of the once bold Mr. Timmons being more than they can bear. And there is competition. A new drapery has been set up two doors away. The proprietor has self-generating lamps and wears a fantastic yellow coat embroidered with tulips and peacocks. He has such quantity of stock it seems his doors might burst open and spill rivers of fabric into the street.

Their luck dribbles away. Her mother croons to her few coins and ignores her children who are given little to eat except potatoes and black-spotted bread. Ah, but she is not cruel. She longs for her husband, combs his hair and sings mournful songs to him. “Come now, Tom,” she says. “Come on now.” It is as if she believes he is perpetuating a complicated joke. Often she sobs in misery, swears she can hear the creaking of the workhouse door.

Dora's older sister marries into the oyster sellers and pries open shells with her husband on Dark House Lane where the fish are piled in great, slippery walls. Dora crouches near her sister's table like a dog. When her husband is not looking her sister slips her an oyster. She abhors the oyster's soft fleshiness, gulps it whole and feels like someone forced to cannibalism.

Her youngest brother dies. Dora carried him on her back when he was an infant. Fed him his first gruel. She cannot bear that he has died. She grows furious at her mother, at the cold room, the meagre food. Her two other brothers run off one day and take her mother's coins with them.

Worse and worse. The landlord pounds at the door of their flat. Now Dora and her parents are forced to live in the shop. Dora wraps herself in lengths of woollens. She can tell one drapery from the other even in the dark, by their texture, their scent. This one smells like dried grass. That one feels like sand, finely woven. They give comfort to Dora, but not to her mother. “Don't be crying so, mama,” Dora says as cheerfully as she can. “I'll be taking care of us. We'll have that shop on Regent Street yet. How grand it shall be.”

Fire was what the Dora woman spoke of next. She shook her head as she did so, as if to deny what she was saying. Her father must have upset a candle. Difficult to say. Dora remembers only being on her knees and coughing up black phlegm amid the spellbound crowd, that and the billows of black smoke and then the firemen with their greatcoats and useless pumps, their apologetic assurances that it was too late to save the two still within.

≈  ≈  ≈

After his week in solitary, Boston is returned to his usual cell. Boston says nothing when the others greet him. He eats his bread and cornmeal gruel and then follows the other prisoners into the high-gated yard. It is Sunday and they have a half day of rest in which to contemplate their sins. The others mill about. Not Boston. He does not mill. Has never done so. He stands near the gate and keeps an eye on the other prisoners, on the street. A group of Indian and mixed blood children gape at him through the bars. The girls are in clean white pinafores, the boys in short pants. A nun hurries them on, her face afloat in the black expanse of her habit.

“Round of cards, yes? Poker?” Petrovich pulls a miniature pack from his sleeve, slyly winks. “The jailor, he'll not see.”

“Cards,” Boston says and spits in the dirt. He dislikes such games entirely, the closeness of the others, the gloating when the winning is done. He keeps track easily enough of the cards and the likelihood of which will appear. Even so he has lost often enough to know that it is not worth his time. Once it was to a Whiteman with a flat-topped hat and a cane, once to an old Salish woman with a silver tooth, once to a fat Chinaman who spoke English as if he were born to it. They cheated, of course, but he had known they would when he sat down. It was part of the contract and could not be complained about. Still, he had thought he could best them.

“You have fifteen. Play me at hand with that,” Petrovich says. “And you have credit. I have not forgotten. Thirty-five dollars. Yes?

Boston spits near Petrovich's boots. “Forty-five more. We agreed on sixty in all.”

“Yes, ah, yes, sixty. I forgot. Forty-five more. I am good for it, yes. I am out tomorrow. You come to find me.”

“I'll find you, now fuck yourself off.”

Petrovich chuckles, as if Boston is joking, then sidles off at the beckoning of Tom McBride.

June 6, 1863

Beloved Dora,

Do not fear, my dearest heart, for I have arrived safely in Yale this day after a most exhilarating journey from Hope in which God was being called upon with all manner of tongues by the motley & malodorous guests & crews of the
SS
Champion, as our trusty captain led an intricate dance through a cauldron of roiling water while the cliffs frowned down upon us. Never have I felt the like of such currents which threatened to dash us against the cliffs or else send us spinning into the whirlpools alike to those which are said to herald the Kraken rising from the ocean's depths! The paddlewheel beat backwards and still we hurtled forward while the spray baptized all aboard whether heathen, Christian or Jew & the bell gave clamorous directions to the crew who ran about in a dither until at last the rough dock of Yale & the spire of its new church could be seen by all & so we praised God once more & then let out a lusty cheer & now we can go no further for beyond Yale the Fraser is truly impassable for here lieth the Devil's Canyon, or Hell's Gate as it is so colourfully called. It is here in Yale that I am provisioning as well as tying knots of friendship with several companions with whom I scraped up on an acquaintance on the Champion & who, I am certain, will be willing investors in my mining venture. Astonishing how quickly adventures bind people together! Astonishing how quickly friends are made here in this country where no one has any history with another! I have encountered a representative of nearly every country & enclave in Europe & a great many Canadians & Americans, though the Americans are said to be hardly as prevalent as in previous years, due to the War of the Rebellion there. The Celestials seem to be spontaneously generating from the soil & are said to pull gold from claims that the most desperate of Whitemen has abandoned for better & as for the red Indians they are plentiful & are responsible morning & evening for a bucket brigade that brings water to these buildings that are as crude & unembellished as a child's toy blocks & still smell of the forest from which they were hacked. Of these Indians often a noble-looking specimen can be espied & as there are so very few White Women their women provide a parody of Christian marriage to lonely men who have chosen to dwell out their days in this wilderness. I believe that it would not be . . .

Parody of marriage? “Bloody hell,” Eugene mutters.

He draws a line through the sentence. The ink blotches over a good quarter of the page. He curses again. Loudly. A page is worth at least the price of a brandy. Yet Dora is worth it. Certainly. He imagines her waiting each week for the post, disappointed when nothing from him arrives at the dock in Maple Bay. Difficult though it is for him, it is doubtless more difficult for her. But then isn't it always for women? Condemned to wait, darling Penelopes, the lot of them.

He sets the paper aside for fire starter, straightens out his writing set. It is no simple matter to think in this pressed-in room, its wallpaper blotched and peeling and embellished with the smashed remains of insects. It is no simple matter to write on this listing table amid the smell of the last tenant's boots. Why had he troubled to rent a room at all? To have some privacy? Hah! Given the volume of noise from the saloon below he might as well be stretched out under a bench with all his adventuring brethren.

On with it, Eugene Augustus. He dips the pen in the inkwell, waits for the ink to hold to the nib. This time he begins with the trip from New Westminster and how the captain—no doubt noting the strength of Eugene's voice—bid him ring the bell for departure.