Solomon Gursky Was Here (53 page)

Six

One

1973. Following his hurried descent on Washington and his frustrating trip to North of Sixty, a weary Moses returned to his cabin in the woods. Strawberry, he discovered, was in a sorry state. He had put in ten days painting the Catholic church in Mansonville and had yet to collect for it. He was not only out his pay, but also the cost of the paint and the fifty dollars he had forked out to rent a spray gun. The new priest, a sallow young man, had assured him, “Your money is safe. It's in the vault.”

“Let's get it out, then.”

“There is a problem. The cleaning lady has thrown out the paper with the combination written on it.”

“Doesn't anybody know the combination?”

“Not since Father Laplante, who preceded me here.”

Father Laplante was locked up in the Cowansville jail.

“But don't you worry, Straw. I have written to the good people who installed the vault in 1922. Meanwhile your money is safe.”

Legion Hall rolled into The Caboose, bellied up to the bar, and asked Gord to bring him a quart.

“You buying?” Strawberry asked.

Without bothering to turn around, Legion Hall lifted a fat droopy cheek off the bar stool and farted. “I got good news for you, Straw. I just dumped a load of gravel at the church in Mansonville. Father Maurice is real upset. The company that installed that vault for them went bust in 1957.”

Moses was no longer listening. He was totally absorbed in a page of
Time
he had opened at random.

ALASKA'S SPEEDING GLACIER

A wall of ice seals a fjord, endangering nearby villages

The first person to report that something was amiss was Guide Mike Branham, 40, a strapping six-footer who each spring flies a pontoon plane lull of bear hunters into a cove on Russell Fjord, in Alaska's southeastern panhandle. This year he discovered that things had changed: Hubbard Glacier was on the move—at a most unglacial pace of 40 ft. per day. “We saw the glacier advance like it never had before,” says Branham. That was in April. Within weeks, the leading edge of ice had sealed off the fjord at its opening, turning the 32-mile-long inlet into a fast-rising lake and trapping porpoises, harbour seals and the salt-water fish and crabs they live on.

The immediate danger, explained USGS Glaciologist Larry Mayo, is that the lake, now rising about 1 ft. a day, will spill out of its southern end into the Situk River, a salmon-spawning stream that is the economic lifeblood of Yakutat. “In another 500 to 1,000 years,” says Mayo, “Hubbard Glacier could fill Yakutat Bay, as it did in about 1130.”

“You'd better drive me home, Straw,” Moses said, staggering to his feet.

Moses curled right into bed and slept for something like eighteen hours. Waking before noon the next day, he settled his stomach with a beer bolstered by two fingers of Macallan. He showered, shaved with his straight razor, nicked himself only twice, ground some beans, and drank six cups of black coffee, shivers breaking through him in diminishing waves. Then he defrosted a couple of bagels, shoved them into the oven, and prepared his first meal in three days: an enormous helping of scrambled eggs with lox and potatoes fried in onions. Later he made another pot of coffee and sat down to his desk. A good start, he thought, would be to blow the dust off his pile of mimeographed copies of
The Prospector
and file them in chronological order.
The Prospector
(a weekly, price ten cents) was Yellowknife's first newspaper. In the issue of February 18, 1939 Moses read that
Mountain Music
with Bob Burns and Martha Raye was playing at the Pioneer Theatre. The Daughters of the Midnight Sun were planning a dance at The Squeeze Inn.

Moses found the item he wanted in the issue of February 22, 1938. A big banner headline announcing:

RAVEN CONSOLIDATED POURS FIRST BRICK

Considerable ceremony attended the pouring of the first gold brick from the Raven Consolidated plant in the Yellowknife gold fields. The brick weighed 70 pounds and was valued at approximately $39,000.

Several company officials and a number of out-of-town guests attended a banquet Tuesday night to celebrate the event. Prominent among the out-of-town guests was Raven's major shareholder, British investment banker Hyman Kaplansky.…

No imp leaning on a malacca cane appeared in Cyrus Eaton's biography and there was no mention of him in all the material Moses had collected about Armand Hammer, another tycoon who had made his first millions peddling cough medicine during Prohibition.

Fragments. Tantalizing leads. Tapes, journals, trial transcripts. But so many pieces of the Gursky puzzle missing. Take Aaron Gursky's case, for instance. Moses had been out west many times, seeking out old-timers who might remember Aaron, who had died in 1931.

Such a nice Jew.

A real good guy.

Some hard worker.

So far as Moses could make out, Aaron had been no more than a hyphen, joining the Gursky generation of Ephraim with that of Bernard, Solomon and Morrie. A shadowy presence, inhibited in the first place by his father's mockery and then by the turbulence between his sons.

Then there was the problem of Ephraim. The Newgate Calendar entry aside, Moses could find little hard evidence of his sojourn in London or his voyage out with the doomed Franklin.

Ephraim couldn't have been at ease in London, circa 1830. Henry Mayhew wrote of that time and place, “Ikey Solomons, the Jew fence, buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest.” He noted two distinctive races among the London poor. The Irish street-sellers, a numerous and peculiar people, with “low foreheads and long bulging lips, the lowest class of costermongers, confined to the simplest transactions,” and then of course there were the Jews. Mayhew deplored the prejudice that saw the Jews only as “misers, usurers, extortionists,
receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers,” but he did allow there was some foundation for many of these accusations. Gambling was the Jews' chief vice, he observed, just as the extreme love of money was their principal characteristic. But the Jews, he wrote, were also known for their communal spirit, contributing generously to Jewish charities, so that no Jew ever had to die in a parish workhouse. Remarkable, he concluded, “when we recollect their indisputable greed for money.”

Once, while he was still living with Lucy, Moses took her to Westminster Abbey to show her the memorial to the foolish but intrepid Franklin, the epitaph composed by the explorer's nephew, Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Not here: the white North hath thy bones, and thou

Heroic Sailor Soul!

Art passing on thy happier voyage now

Toward no earthly Pole.

An afternoon in Sir Hyman Kaplansky's library had been sufficient for Moses to determine that luxuries of a sort were not unknown on the
Erebus
and the
Terror
. Each of Franklin's ships had a hand organ, capable of playing fifty tunes, ten of them psalms or hymns. There were school supplies for instructing illiterate sailors, mahogany desks for the officers. The
Erebus
boasted a library of 1,700 volumes and the
Terror
1,200, including bound copies of
Punch
.

For the voyage through the Northwest Passage the officers packed all the finery appropriate for a ball. But, unlike the natives, they had no animal skins that could be worn in layers, providing ventilation to prevent sweat from freezing on a man's back. Putting in at Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, they did not bother to acquire any teams of sled-dogs. Neither did they take on board a translator or a hunter, though none of their company knew how to take a seal or a caribou. So, in their last extremity, Franklin's men were driven to boiling each other's flesh. And seemingly not one of them, save for Ephraim, survived their northern ordeal.

A framed copy of the notice that appeared in the Toronto
Globe
on April 4, 1850, hung over Moses's bed.

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN'S EXPEDITION

Copies of the following advertisement have been forwarded by the admiralty to the authorities in Canada:

£20,000

REWARD WILL BE GIVEN BY

Her Majesty's Government

To any Party or Parties, of any country, who shall render efficient assistance to the crews of DISCOVERY SHIPS
Under the Command of

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN
1.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve the crews of Her
Majesty's Ships
Erebus
and
Terror,
the sum of

£20,000

OR
2.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve any of the Crews of Her

Majesty's Ships
Erebus
and
Terror,
or shall convey such intelligence as shall lead to the relief of such crews or any of them, the sum of
£ 10,000

OR
3.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall by virtue of his or their efforts first succeed in ascertaining their fate,
£ 10,000
W.A.B. HAMILTON
Secretary of the Admiralty.

Admiralty, March 7th, 1850.

Why, Moses wondered, returning to the riddle again and again, hadn't Ephraim told his tale, claiming the ten-thousand-pound
reward? Why did he deny intelligence of either the
Erebus
or
Terror
to McNair, pretending to be a runaway off an American whaler?

There was another problem.

Neither Ephraim Gursky nor Izzy Garber were listed in the Muster Books of the
Erebus
or
Terror
(available at Admiralty Records, Public Records Office). But they had been there Moses knew, oh yes Ephraim Gursky had been there, and Izzy Garber as well.

Two

Following his arrest, after his ill-fated bug-hunting expedition with the Sullivan sisters, it was Newgate for Ephraim; and in that dark and fetid hole—as he told Solomon some seventy years on, a raven perched on his shoulder, the two of them warming themselves under the shifting arch of the aurora on the shores of Great Slave Lake—he met the man who met the man who would lead him and now Solomon to this place. Ephraim shrunken now, but still frisky, saying: “He was an old Orkney boatman with a bad milky eye and a spongy grey beard and he stirred me as never before with his tales of his journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Lieutenant John Franklin, as he then was.”

It began innocently enough, Ephraim explained, when he cursed the jailer who once again had served them rancid sausages. This roused what at first glance appeared to be a sack of bones flung into a corner of the communal cell in the felons' yard, causing it to splutter and sort itself out, assuming the shape of a tall emaciated man, his lips chalky, his hair matted and his beard a filthy tangle. “Young man,” the boatman said, “you are looking at somebody who was once grateful for the putrid powdered marrow bones and horns of a deer that had already been picked over by the white wolves and the black ravens of the barren land.”

“Tell the lad what brought you here, Enoch. Why it's bound to be a leap into the dark for you.”

“A Jezebel of a daughter bore false witness against me.”

“I thought it was poaching on the Tweed,” another voice called out.

“Poaching,” somebody else put in, “but not on the Tweed.”

“His son-in-law's slit it was.”

Ignoring their lascivious laughter, the boatman sucked sausage into his all but toothless maw. “Why, when there was no
tripe de roche
to be had we boiled scraps of leather from our boots and praised the Almighty for providing it. And such was the cold that when we still had it our rum froze in its cask. Aye, and all that time we had to keep watch on the Canadian
voyageurs,
a thieving lot, and that Iroquois heathen, the treacherous Michel Teroahauté. But the worst of it was we did not know whether poor Mr. Back, lusting after that Indian harlot, had perished on his trek or would return to us with supplies.”

Seizing Ephraim by the elbow, turning his own face aside the better to fix him with his good unclouded eye, he told him how the white wolves bring down a deer. “Those ferocious predators,” he said, “assemble in great numbers where the deer are grazing. They creep silently toward the herd, and only when they have cut off their retreat across the plain do they begin to race and howl, panicking their prey, tricking them into fleeing in the only possible direction—toward the precipice. The herd, at full speed now, is easily driven over the cliff. Then the wolves, their jaws dripping saliva, descend to feast on the mangled corpses.”

The boatman's eyes flickered upward and in an instant he was asleep, his mouth agape. Ephraim shook him awake. “Tell me more,” he said.

“Have you any tobacco?”

“No.”

“Gin?”

“No.”

“To hell with you then.”

The next morning the boatman's only response to Ephraim's questions was a bilious glare. He was intent on the lice in his beard, flicking them into the flame of a candle.

Out for exercise in the men's courtyard Ephraim, ignoring his cellmates, strolled up and down, surveying the rough granite walls of the enclosure. He sighed at the sight of the revolving iron spikes near the summit, possibly fifty feet from the ground. It would be impossible, he calculated, for him to squirm between the
chevaux de frise
and the masonry. And even if he could manage it, the
cunning bastards had implanted yet another barrier above. A row of sharp, inward-projecting teeth rising from the top of the slimy wall. Hopeless, he thought.

Later in the day an anxious Izzy Garber hurried to Newgate and arranged to meet with two of the turnkeys at the George. The chaplain of Newgate, the Reverend Brownlow Ford, was already in place, soused, lolling on the sofa with the hangman Thomas Cheshire. Old Cheese, recognizing Izzy, raised his glass to him, his eyes charged with rancour:

By noose and gallows and St. Sepulchre's Bell