The Bully of Order (3 page)

A group of fishermen oared through Bellhouse's wake in their Columbia River salmon boat. A boy stood in the stern, to his knees in fish, slicing and chucking guts. The two sets of oars went endlessly, like dragonfly wings.

I stood and retrieved my writing tray from on top of the bookshelf and filled the inkwells and sat back down. With great pleasure I rubbed my stocking feet together and cracked my toes. When I was a child, my mother told me that I had beautiful feet, but the other children sometimes followed me and made fun of the way I walked. In the bedroom Nell kept a full-length mirror, and I couldn't pass it without wondering at the body I lived in. Thank Christ I wasn't a woman. Too ugly for the nunnery or the whorehouse. Napoleon said that women are machines for producing children. I believe that capacity and intent are two very different things. Nell had married down, and I was fine with that; she made me feel profoundly chosen.

The sun slid through the clouds and disappeared, and once it was gone I sat in the dark. My plans to pen a letter to my brother Matius went foggy.

“Nell,” I said. “Come in here for a moment, could you, please?”

“I'm busy, Jacob. What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

“We'll talk later.”

I hesitated. “Sorry to bother you.”

She appeared in the doorway. “You're not bothering me. What is it?”

“Sheasby's wall was smashed by an oxcart. Bellhouse stole another ship.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Don't smile about Sheasby's trouble, or the next misfortune will fall on you.”

“I'm not smiling.”

“You are. You need some light in here.”

I shook my head. She went to the table and lit the oil lamp. Her face changed, and I knew what she was about.

“When is your brother to arrive?”

The letter was in my desk, but I didn't need to look at it again. I'd more or less memorized it. “June, I would guess. He sailed from San Francisco the first week of April. How long did it take us to make our way here?”

“We stopped in Portland.”

“Matius is doing the same. Jonas is there with his young wife.”

“What kind of father follows the son?”

“He's visiting him. He's not following him.”

“Bleeding him dry,” she said.

“I know that you don't care for my brother, but he'll not cease to be family, not ever.”

“I don't understand why he feels compelled to come here at all.”

“He only wants to see how we've done for ourselves. For a visit. I haven't seen him for years. It's the longest we've been apart.”

“And the years have seen you in your best condition.”

“That isn't true.” I basked in the compliment.

“You've grown into this place. You've come into your own. I know Matius. He'll come here and try and weasel his way into the cracks. You'd think you were six years the elder instead of him.”

“He won't be here long. A brief reunion.”

There was a long silence. “You'll take your dinner in here?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“It'll be ready soon.”

There was something else I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't remember what. No matter. I wanted a drink, but after last time Nell wouldn't allow it, not with Matius on the way. What was allowed when it came to liquor was difficult to gauge. It was irrational for me to think that since she didn't care for my brother, she didn't care for me. She had her reasons. Matius had been awful at our wedding, fighting with Nell's uncle until they were both bloody, but there was more, a secret that she'd never told me. I knew what it was, though; I could guess, and on the nights when I couldn't sleep, there were times when I prayed for the sun to come up because I could just then get at the nature of Matius, and once I'd touched it, I couldn't easily put it down.

The gaslights in the street were lit, and their light smeared wetly on the grid and grime of the planked world. I took up my father's Lord Bury spotting scope and bumped the brass against the glass as I always did and then leaned back and peeped into Sheasby's windows. Curtains drawn wide; they knew they were being watched and behaved.

Pass me the squash, dear.

No coffee for me. I'll be up all night.

Wouldn't want that. We'd die of boredom.

But if I went to the bedroom window and looked toward the Line, I'd see something. At all hours you could see something there. Eight red houses in four blocks, last I heard. Twice as many taverns and trumpery shops to fleece the loggers. Haberdashers that'd sell you a suit of clothes that would fall off you in panels before you could get properly drunk. All the stinking, pitchy masses loaded into rooming houses built tall and teetering like real city tenements. The Line is the liver of this town; it holds all the poison and decides what to pass and what to keep. Ultimately it keeps us alive while promising to someday kill us.

The scope was said to have been at Antietam, but it didn't have a scratch on it. Twenty thousand dead if there was one. My father let me look upon it but never hold it or look through it. In this way too he limited my reach, by hand and by eye. After my wedding I stole the scope and the cedar box it traveled in and added it to the accumulation to be picked up by the freighters. Judgment is left to those with failed lives, and to God. Therefore, get in line.

Duncan was walking now, running too, until he fell. My son, my lineage, the march of time; he kept mostly in the kitchen and in the bedroom with his mother. He was beautiful like her, and that was a blessing. I can't say what he got from me, maybe his eyes—not the color but the actual hard marbles. During the day, in quiet moments, when I was downstairs, I could hear his bare feet banging against the floor above. I would look up and follow the sound and toy with the strange thought that bones grew, lengthened and grew. Trees grow, but lumber doesn't. Towns grow, and graveyards. My son's bones were growing while millions were dead in the ground and in the sea, uncountable. Twenty thousand in one day. Here again was the confirmation: a single face means nothing. And my brother was coming, profiled on deck, rolling waves, seafoam. What did that matter? I wanted to impress him, always had, and he was coming to see me.

I truly enjoyed these moments, my time alone in the evening. Sanctuary was a word that came to mind when I shut the door behind me. Everyone should be so lucky to have a warm, safe place and a family to share it with. Soon I'd be able to spend more time at home. I'd already hired Miss Eakins to assist and clean up. The old woman was about as gloomy as a turkey vulture, but a great help in matters of consequence. You couldn't shake her. In time, as the Harbor grew, I thought I could find a partner and we could share a practice and eventually I wouldn't have to work at all. Because the stress on a charlatan is real. “Trust,” my father used to say, “is found in the eyes,” and then he'd pause. “And bank accounts. Trust is also found there. Churches too. The eyes, money, and God.” No wonder he was broken and penniless. Failure is more often delivered by maxim than by silence.

Matius was arriving by ship but the trains were coming too, railroad grade was being cut, steel promised to every town. And that was the anthem of the Harbor: “The Railroad Is Coming.” I imagined myself the Harbor and my brother the railroad.

When we first tied up on the Wishkah, we'd neither of us, Nell or myself, ever seen a place so dark and slick and brooding, treacherous as a wounded animal; and we'd come from Cleveland and then north from San Francisco, meaning we'd seen more than our share already. We'd even, for the sport and excitement and because we'd never make the same journey twice, stumbled in the wet muck of Portland and saw our first real coast Indians there, camped on the banks of the Willamette, and joked that the Harbor can't be much worse than this, but it was; it was much worse. The trees of the coast were big enough, though, thousands of them, more than could be believed, and there was water to grow them till the end of time and on the mudflats coming in there'd been fowl that blocked out the sky when they flew, and farther in, near the mouth of the Hoquiam and the sorry settlement that polluted it, we came upon Indians paddling quickly with the tide in their sleek canoes. They looked just like the drawings I'd seen in books, as if they were pretending for our benefit. War paint. Deadly savages. I was afraid of them to the very bottom of my balls. Captain Gray must've felt the same when he arrived in 1792, because when the Indians came out to meet his ship he blasted them to pieces with a nine-pounder. Cannons, I suspect, are the true final refuge of cowards.

“There's been an accident,” Nell had said. She stood weakly on her sea legs, pale, not ready for this, her first steps on the shoddy wharf, bent nails pounded flat like drowned worms. We'd been traveling for over a month, and we were finally and completely sick of it all and each other.

I nodded, ignored her. I couldn't believe my eyes. The bastards hadn't even finished logging the streets or any of it. I'd never seen such a mess. The trash we'd passed on the Hoquiam was no better or worse. Town versus encampment versus battlefield. In contrast, a gold camp would be the peak of urbanity. It looked like something seen under a microscope tumbling and wet and then suddenly enlarged and not of this world. Welcome the mastodons and pygmy horses.

“Don't believe the pamphleteers,” my father had told me.

“I'm not a fool. I can see the sense and the nonsense in them. I read closely, Father, every word.”

“They've already set the hook in you.” He hooked a finger in the corner of his mouth and gave it a tug and laughed, stopped all at once and grimaced. “Protect your family. I can give no better advice than that.”

“I will.”

“You've swallowed their poison—it's in your belly even now.”

No, I thought. No, it was only the strictest analysis that had led me to the Harbor. And the pretty pictures and promises of wealth unbounded. I believed in the West and the wide openness of a man's future. To me, independence was a man's gift to himself, the only one to be received with honor. I was going, and I was taking Nell with me. Fire the cannons: I was gone. Oh sweet Christ I was on my own.

So there it was: sloppy piles of turned earth, logs jutting, fires smoldering. They couldn't make it worse, but God they were trying. The hovels—they weren't houses—were made of red cedar shakes and lacked proper windows, shutters and no glass, somehow purely Puritan, like we'd caught them mid-exorcism. Where do y'all burn yer witches? The rain wasn't strong but it was persistent, and even when it stopped the dripping kept its spirit alive until it returned. Everywhere I looked they'd cut down trees too large to move or do anything with, as children might do. I wanted to scream and stamp my feet.

“There, Jacob. Do you see?” Nell said.

I still couldn't quite hear her. So much was not there and not happening on the shore. I'd expected infinitely more than this. Other passengers were coming down the wharfage now, and a boy was pushing luggage on a cart, the wheels sounding like drums over the water, faster and faster. I followed Nell's gaze and a mule cart appeared, bouncing over the torn ground, a man's half-shod feet hanging out the back. The driver and another man stopped and unloaded the limp body onto the stoop of a building with a red X painted on the door and then got back on their cart and were off.

“They just left him,” Nell said. “You should go help, shouldn't you?”

“Maybe he's not so badly hurt. He could be drunk.”

“You don't think he's dead, do you?”

“Of course not. He's sleeping one off, is all.” I put my arm awkwardly over her shoulder, but she didn't curl into me like she did yesterday; she pulled back and looked at me with open-faced incredulity.

“I've never seen a place that made me want to get blind drunk. I didn't know they existed.”

“We'll be fine,” I told her.

“What is this? This isn't it, is it?”

“It's home. We're home.”

A lie dovetailed to the truth.

We took a room in the only hotel, the Regal, a place that has since been converted into a billiards hall, but it was nice enough when we were there, all fresh paint and drafty carpentry, splinters and sawdust. At the Regal we could look out over the water, much as we did now. I fell in love with the storms then, grew lusty for wind and tumult. Duncan was conceived and born in the same room, that's how long we stayed at the Regal. I cried tears of joy as I caught him. The first hands to touch him. My son. Nothing is as real or as unreal as that. Matters of life and death. Gulls and rain at the window, the end of the world or the beginning, and in my hands was life that came from me. I don't believe I'd ever cried until then; there was no subset of emotion or intention or guilt. It was like being swamped by a wave, and at that moment I glimpsed the seeds of religion.
And fires eternal in thy temple shine.
Dryden, if only that were true.

From our window the powerful tides were large enough to watch and wonder at, the stumps rising and falling like concatenate and diurnal creatures that subsisted on mud alone. God, was it a big wet mess of a place. Not that it's improved much. Some of the roads are planked now and we have proper buildings, some of them quite nice with ornate woodwork and various styles of shingles due to our ever-expanding selection of mills and carpenters. Our shipyard is growing, too, and that's a real business. A battlefield doesn't have a shipyard. Still, the Harbor remains a mean, ignorant cousin of civilization. I see a passable mind, but cruel; a functional form, but twisted and ugly. What we lack in greatness we make up for in possibility. And what am I but another spark in this great conflagration of business and empire building? What am I but a man indicative of all I see?

Duncan was suddenly loose from the kitchen and coming at me, nearly knocked over my tray, ink sloshed onto the blank page. I caught him by the arm and steadied him, and when he was still, I let him go. A gust of wind. “You'll be running the streets soon,” I called after him. “Running the world.” He stopped and stared at me, swayed, swayed deeper, and fell over. I felt guilty as if I'd lied to him, because I had. He was angelic, unmistakably Nell's; but at over two years old, and with a growing vocabulary, he still hadn't called me father. There were moments when I'd rather stare into the sun than into my son's eyes. Surely, one was more damaging than the other. Nell came and scooped him up and without a word took him back into the kitchen.