A Sudden Light: A Novel (13 page)

I found quite a bit of material on Elijah Riddell and different mills opening and closing, and a big land deal that got pushed through, much to the dismay of the
Seattle Daily Times
reporter:
THE END OF THE FOREST?
the headline wondered. I also found a few stories on Roosevelt’s visit and his meetings with Elijah.

And then I found something in the
Republican
:

FORMER RIDDELL EMPLOYEE FEARS FOR LIFE

An erstwhile carpenter for Riddell Timber, who shall remain nameless to protect his innocence, has come forward to this reporter’s office with proof positive that activities of a diabolical and indiscreet nature have taken place over the course of many months at the construction site of The North Estate, Elijah
Riddell’s famously extravagant, fifty-plus-room “cottage” in the woods north of Seattle.

While few details were provided, said carpenter reports he was terminated after witnessing an undignified act being performed between “someone who looked to be Benjamin Riddell,” son of timber baron Elijah Riddell, and an unknown worker. The carpenter could not confirm the identity of either person involved, though he swears both parties were men. However, the carpenter is sure he saw what he saw, and, after seeing, was immediately sacked without cause or recompense. The carpenter claims that others have fallen upon similar situations and were told to keep their mouths shut. The carpenter now fears for his life, as retribution is clearly a possibility. The police department has made no arrests for indecency, and they say none will be forthcoming, considering it happened—if it happened at all—at The North Estate, which is outside of their jurisdiction.

I knew what “indecency” was code for: homosexual activities. So it was true. Ben was gay. Which was kind of weird, I remember thinking. I was fourteen, after all, and it was 1990, and there was a lot of talk about AIDS and everything. And I knew what being gay was, but I didn’t know how you ended up gay or not gay. I mean, I didn’t know at the time if it was inherited or just a lifestyle choice. Or if it was a tendency, and if you thought about it a lot, maybe you became
more
gay, but if you didn’t think about it at all, you became
less
gay.

I was confused about it enough to ask a librarian to help me. I screwed up my courage and found an older—possibly gay—librarian, and I asked him: “Were there a lot of gay people in Seattle in the early nineteen hundreds?”

He perked right up, as if historical gay Seattle were his specialty.

“Seattle has always been a gay city,” he said. “There was a tremendous gay scene in the thirties in Pioneer Square, which was nicknamed
Fairyville. Little-known fact: King County was named after Vice President William Rufus King, who just so happened to be—”

“Not after Martin Luther King?” I interrupted.

“No. It was named long before Martin Luther King was born. The mid-eighteen hundreds. King County was named after William Rufus King, known as Miss Nancy to his friends. He was President James Buchanan’s gay lover.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

“Gays are everywhere,” he said. “Throughout time.”

“So, it was common?” I asked. “You know, the gay thing?”

“The gay thing is
always
common. It’s just a matter of how it’s accepted by the culture of the time.”

I felt uncomfortable talking about the subject, but the librarian seemed pretty knowledgeable, and he was nice, and I needed to know more. So I pushed on.

“So if I were a gay man in 1903,” I ventured, “and if I were in my twenties and my father were a really rich and powerful guy . . . what would that look like?”

“Nineteen oh three? Rich guy? Seattle?”

“Timber baron. Really rich.”

“Your father would have considered it a youthful dalliance,” my librarian said. “He would have waited until you ‘grew out of it,’ and he probably would have arranged a marriage for you with a manly woman, who was likely a lesbian. You would have wanted to keep your money and power, so you would have agreed. You would have had your boyfriends on the side, your wife would have had her girlfriends. You would have gone to important social events together as if you were breeders. And almost everyone would have been happy.”

“What’s a breeder?” I asked. “And who
wouldn’t
have been happy?”

“Your
father
,” he said obviously. “He wanted heirs but wasn’t getting any. Breeders are straight people. The whole point of having a child is to keep the bloodline going. It’s the
only
point, really. I mean, unless you
enjoy mopping up poop and vomit and having angry teenagers scream in your face and force you to pay for college. Why did your father have
you
? I mean, the fictional ‘you’ of 1903. I’m not asking why
your
father had you. The father of the 1903 gay guy you’ve invented. Did
he
have a wife?”

I thought about it a moment.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The librarian nodded at me and then scrunched his face and shrugged.

“Do you have a parent here or something?” he asked. “You’re asking a lot of questions that maybe you should be asking your parents. Sexual identity is more of a family matter than a library matter.”

“I’m not gay,” I said, catching his drift: he thought I was talking about myself.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “I mean, it is what it is. So it’s better to embrace the ‘is,’ because people can tear themselves up about it. That happened a lot in 1903. It just wasn’t out there like it is now, so gay people did terrible things to themselves to make themselves more ‘normal.’ But what is normal? I know a counselor you could talk to. He talks to teenagers about, you know, sexual identity issues. It’s totally low impact, and it’s not like he converts people or is looking for recruits. Do you have a parent here?”

“I’m cool,” I said, realizing we had morphed from gay history into gay counseling. “Thanks for your help.”

I went back to my microfiche reader and kept looking. Sure enough, about a year after the article insinuating indecency, I found another article. It was in
The Seattle Daily Times
, and it touted the engagement between Benjamin Riddell and Alice Jordan, eldest daughter of James J. Jordan, the railroad tycoon. Their engagement party, by invitation only, was scheduled for Saturday, September 17, 1904, and was to be held at The North Estate. All the leaders of Seattle would be in attendance, the article boasted.

Oddly, I found Benjamin Riddell’s death notice published in the Sunday edition, September 18, 1904, referring to his date of passing as
September 11, 1904. The notice reported that Benjamin “was an adventurer and a lover of Nature. His explorations took him deep into the forests and into the tallest of trees.” Benjamin Riddell, “an enlightened and kind-hearted spirit,” would be truly missed.

A month later, October 12, again in
The Seattle Daily Times
, the headline read:
FORTUNES OF RIDDELL DOUBLE IN SIZE
. And there was a long article about the merger between Riddell Timber and Northern Pacific Railroad, which had been whispered about for years and had finally been consummated. The consolidation of these industries “assures that Seattle will be the dominant city on the West Coast,” and the “living gold of the Pacific forests will continue to fill Elijah Riddell’s coffers.” It was noted that the deal went through in the wake of the “terrible accidental death of Benjamin Riddell, who was being primed to succeed his father at the helm of Riddell Timber,” and who had made it clear to everyone he spoke with that he would have carried with him “an agenda of conservation and a spirit of cooperation in working with President Roosevelt and his forestry lieutenant, Gifford Pinchot, with the intention of gifting millions of acres of pristine timberland to the United States government in exchange for a ‘considered and deliberate’ harvesting plan, thus preserving land for public use as well as reasonable private exploitation.” The article ended with a sardonic rejoinder: “We can only hope that the ghost of Benjamin Riddell lingers at The North Estate to ensure the spirit of conservation wins out over the spirit of decimation and deforestation, which is Elijah Riddell’s preferred method of wealth accumulation.”

What an odd way to end a newspaper article, I thought. And, as I considered the meaning, my stomach growled. I looked up at the clock and realized I was starving and it was already late in the afternoon. I made my way back to the bus stop on Second Avenue and bought a chili dog from a hot dog stand to hold me over. I rode the number 5 Phinney back north; the bus let me off two blocks from the gate to The North Estate. I waved at Val as I passed, and then I made the long walk down the twisting road and back to Riddell House.

W
hen I came down for dinner that night, I found my father sitting in the gentlemen’s parlor with a tumbler of whiskey. I joined him in the dark room.

“What did you discover today?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I replied. “I’m still confused about why Elijah changed. What made him switch from being a timber baron to being a conservationist?”

“Grandpa Abe said it was because Elijah was afraid of going to hell and facing all the people whose deaths he caused.”

“I
might
buy that.”

“Timber is the most dangerous industry in the world,” my father said. “The statistics, even today, are staggering. The number of deaths . . . And in brutal ways, being crushed to death by a tree that twists wrong, or losing an arm and bleeding out, or getting hit by a widow-maker.”

“What’s that?”

“A dead limb that gets hung up in the tree. When you start to chop down a tree, it’ll come loose. And they can be huge. Grandpa Abe didn’t spend much time in the field, but when he was younger, Elijah sent him to inspect cutting sites. And he said he once saw a guy drinking a cup of coffee and a widow-maker came down so fast, by the time he heard it, it was too late. A big branch crushed his skull, drove it right into the ground. Grandpa Abe said the man’s arms and legs kept on moving. Twitching. He said it was like when you step on a spider and its legs keep squiggling around.”

“That’s disgusting, Dad,” I said.

“I’ve got more. The topper who was a hundred fifty feet up. He took a swipe with his ax and the whole tree beneath him crumbled. It had some kind of fungus, you know? It was rotten, but he didn’t inspect the base properly. A hundred fifty feet up. Straight down. Thud.”

“Nice.”

“And you’d think at least it’s a pleasant outdoor job, clear-cutting trees. But no. In those days, the conditions were horrible. They made them work long hours, and they’d be in camps without running water or toilets for months at a time. Disease and vermin were rampant. And when they let them go into town, all the men got drunk and went to the brothels, which were full of STDs. There was this guy in Aberdeen, Billy Gohl, the Ghoul of Grays Harbor. He murdered hundreds of men in his bar. He had a trapdoor he dropped the bodies through to a boat under the dock, and then he’d go through their pockets for money and dump the bodies in the bay. And Elijah Riddell—and all the other timber barons; he wasn’t alone—did nothing to stop any of it. They didn’t improve working conditions until they were forced to by the government. They didn’t compensate the families of the men who died on the job. They didn’t help the towns with law enforcement. They just sat around in their fancy houses in Seattle and Olympia and Tacoma, smoking cigars and sipping brandy and eating elaborate meals prepared by world-class chefs. So I guess, if Grandpa Abe was right and Elijah saw the light, he’d
have to do some pretty serious penance if he wanted to avoid punching his ticket for hell.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s weird.”

“What is?”

“I’m related to them. It seems like a whole different world.”

He and I both looked at the portrait of Elijah, our patriarch, towering over us in the parlor.

*  *  *

After dessert, Grandpa Samuel asked if he could go down to the barn to work. Serena gave her permission under the condition that he not do any more sanding. “You’ve already had your bath,” she said. “I won’t give you another, and you know how you itch if you go to sleep filthy.”

I asked if I could go along to keep him company, but really, I wanted to go because I wanted to know what exactly it was that he
did
in the barn. Grandpa Samuel was excited by the prospect.

“I like company,” he said. “No one ever visits me in the barn, unless Serena brings me lunch. She doesn’t do that very often.”

“That’s a very generous offer,” Serena said to me. “I’m sure Grandpa Samuel would love some company, and it would give your father and me a chance to catch up a bit on the old days.”

We walked down to the barn together. It was evening, and the breeze off the water stirred the warm air. The sun had slid behind the jagged maw of the Olympic Mountains. I could taste salt in the air; I could smell the grass. Faintly, a freight train sounded its horn in the distance.

“Are they really saluting Elijah Riddell?” I asked when I heard it.

“That’s what my father told me,” Grandpa Samuel said. “I don’t know if anyone remembers.”

“Remembers what?” I asked after a few steps.

“My grandfather died before I was born,” he said, “so I don’t know. But he made this place. Seattle and Shelton and Aberdeen. He built the
Northwest. And then he gave it all back. Everything except what my father had taken for himself.”

“Why did he do it? Why did he give it all back?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and we continued walking a bit before he added, “Isobel knew.”

“What did Isobel know?”

“If you feel you don’t have enough, you hold on to things,” he said. “But if you feel you have enough, you let go of things.”

“How much is enough?” I asked after a few paces.

“I don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug, and we arrived at the barn.

It was quite large, as far as barns go—Riddellesque, one might say—with massive sliding doors on one end that looked to be rusted shut by the weather and the years. The boards that made up the barn’s walls were easily a foot wide, abraded by decades of rain and wind, but still in remarkably good shape considering the age and unfinished nature of the building. Centered along the broad side of the barn was a small door, flanked by long, low windows. Grandpa Samuel led me to the door and inside; he flipped a light switch, and fluorescent work lights flickered to life, revealing a dusty, disheveled woodshop.