Reckoning of Boston Jim (6 page)

Then Eugene was asked his opinion on how the colony might attend to its future. He cannot recall by whom, but surely he was asked to stand and speak, surely. And so there he was, saying that in all his travels he had never seen a place where so many races commingle. He was inspired by the talk of the Judge and his law-making, as well as by the harangues of a barrister from Bath who he had met on the ship round the Horn. His theories stuck to Eugene, burr-like, almost without Eugene's noticing, as certain facts and theories often seem to. The barrister disembarked at San Francisco and left Eugene with his preposterous ideas. If Eugene ever sees him again he might well thrash him. For there stood Eugene, telling how the progeny of commingling have peculiar tendencies, criminal and otherwise, and that laws must be applied to these progeny accordingly or else colonies such as Vancouver Island would not thrive. He spoke of how a white father and an Indian mother create a Mestizo or Mestiza. An Indian Father and a Negro mother create a Zambo. A Chinese father and a Negro mother create a . . . it slipped his mind that one. But, yes, and a mulatto mother and a white father create a Cuarteron; a white father and a Cuarteron create a Quintero. And a white father and a Quintero? Now what do you surmise?

The Governor said that ciphering was never his strongest suit. The tone of his voice alone should have discouraged Eugene. Some of the guests looked bemused; yes, bemused at a man digging his own grave. The rest examined their silverware.

“White! Ladies and gentleman! That is, it is possible to come full circle.”

The room was silent. His glass was unfortunately empty; his throat was dry, the room fuggy and hot. Certainly he should have sat down then. He is as bad as Dora at times, the way he speaks with such reckless disregard.

The Governor hurled down his napkin. Stood. What did he shout? Eugene cannot recall, only that the other guests joined in, only that he was soon being escorted to the door, and then a slap of cold rain, a lash of wind. In short order he learned that many of the guests were retired company men whose wives had Indian blood, some even had Indian blood themselves. And though the Governor's father was a Scottish merchant, his mother was a Mulatta from Barbados. As for the Governor's wife, Amelia, she was the daughter of a Cree princess and a Nor'Wester. And thus it did indeed become complex, particularly now that their daughter Agnes was married to the Judge's English clerk Mr. Arthur Bushby.

≈  ≈  ≈

Eugene hauls off his boots and stretches out on the narrow bed, consoles himself with the thought that one day the event will sink beneath the surface of memory like the last vestiges of a shipwreck, until all that is left is a word, flung out like a faint call of distress.

The shacks of Humbolt Street are a jumble of canvas and weather-beaten wood, of racks festooned with fish, of refuse. A boy chases a wounded gull. A patch of wild rose quivers with songbirds. The mud flats gleam just beyond, and from somewhere comes a funeral lament.

Boston is recognized by many. They invite him to buy clams, baskets, woven platters, blankets and mats, each tribe with its own specialty. Women name their price in shillings, dollars, or whiskey. Men offer for those women who stare out blankly, who have been captured in raids or bought. A few Whitemen also offer for Indian women, or suggest a look inside their ‘dance halls.' This is a new trade, unheard of before the Whiteman came, and shared more or less equally by all the Peoples. Boston looks the women over closely, as he always does. He sees no sign of Kloo-yah, however, and so he walks west, past the Australia Hotel high up on its pilings and poles, then over the James Bay Bridge, and so onto Beacon Hill near where the horses race and the rich play their croquet and lacrosse and cheer mightily, as if a war were being won. There he makes a small fire and takes off his overshirt and sets out the needle and thread. He tucks the smoke pouch with its antique money into the torn pocket of his overshirt and sews it over three, four times. Tests its strength, then puts the shirt on again, relieved to know the money, that money, is where it belongs. Only now can he stretch in his bedroll, his head against his rucksack. As always, he waits for sleep to find him. He needs only three or four hours a night. Once it gave him some small satisfaction, this knowledge that he has more hours in his life than most.

The moon rises, is full overhead. The stars fade. “I oftentimes dream of my father,” the Dora woman said. “He's calling me, but I can't help him. And you then? Are you ever plagued by nightmares, Mr. Jim?”

He said
no
, not mentioning that he has no dreams, bad or otherwise, and is glad of it, for he would not forget them as others claim to, once the eyes are washed, or breakfast taken, or once the forehead is exposed to the sky. At Fort Connelly, Lavolier scribbled down his dreams, seeing in them instructions from angels, warnings of damnation. The People near the Fort also saw dreams as full of meaning, as messages from the dead, as movements of vagrant souls. Kloo-yah dreamed of a woman with the head of a spider. She dreamed of it for many nights and said that the dream was for him, but how she could not say. She dreamed also of the wounds on his chest. It was as if they were her own, she said. She recognized the wounds as the symbols the Whitemen made and mouthed over, but she did not ask what the symbols spoke, and he did not tell her, fearing the power of the words as much then as he did now.

≈  ≈  ≈

Curios. Scientific instruments. Musical Apparatus. Ingenious Devices & Novelties. All Fit for the Most Discerning of Customers. Mr. Obed Kines, Proprietor & Expert.

Boston waits nearby until the shop opens for the day. It is new. A raw wood smell overlays that of peppermint and cigar. A flag with stars and stripes hangs overhead, proclaiming Mr. Obed Kines as an American from the Union States. He wears a paisley waistcoat and a tight high collar. He is red-faced and nearly bald and he rests his fists on the glass case as on something he has conquered.

The local curios are on a table by one wall. There is an entire tea set woven of birch bark, arrowheads with symbols in ochre, and argillite carvings made by the Haidas in their island strongholds to the north. Boston has heard that the Whites buy these carvings for their mantels. But she would not have a mantel, only a stove. For her windowsill then. But what would she make of such dark things? There is the beaver, the whale, the eagle. They glare and snarl. There is the carving of a man. His hands are shoved in his breeches, are close in upon his crotch. His features are that of a Whiteman, his expression one of idiocy.

“Pretty things I like,” she said. “And novelties. Not that I have such things in my home. No indeed.”

He peers into a stereoscope, into a miniature tinted scene of two women on the edge of a cliff. One is standing on the shoulders of the other, her arms held out for balance. The illusion of depth is so strong it seems she might at any moment tumble into the abyss. The Dora woman spoke of stereoscopes, said that Mrs. Jacobsen kept a lovely one in the parlour of the Avalon Hotel.

He straightens. Better to buy something she has not seen before, else she might wave the gift aside as she did the offering of the marten pelt, else he might have to start anew.

The brass ball fits into the palm of his hand. It opens to show a globe. The concave side of its casing shows the constellations, the starry arch of the heavens.

“The saviour of many a mariner,” Kines calls. He is attending to another customer, is wrapping a many-handled thing in swathes of brown paper.

Boston closes the brass casing and puts it down. She is not a mariner. It is a novelty, certainly, but a gift should be of some use. Now these.

Kines is at his elbow. “They do not come cheaply, sir.”

“That one.”

The music box is disguised as a prayer book. Kines demonstrates its repertoire of canticles and hymns. Church is not something the Dora woman mentioned with any enthusiasm. Boston points to an harmonium. Kines turns the crank. Boston knows the tune, Illdare having hummed it once.

“Bach,” Kines says, “a damned Kraut, but what of it?”

An assistant enters from a back room. He is a young man with freckled arms and teeth lapping his lower lip. He busies himself with checking through a sheaf of accounts that bear Kines' signature in a large, square hand. Customers come and go. Boston studies another music box, from which a porcelain lady slowly rises. She revolves on a velvet platform to a tinkling tune. Her infinite doubles, reflected in the mirrors behind and below, stretch back to a vanishing point. He has seen such things before; no doubt the Dora woman has as well. It would not be long before she tired of it.

“Are you searching for an item for yourself?” Kines asks.

“No.”

“A friend?”

“That one.”

“Ah, my most valuable item. It is an automaton. Direct from Europe.”

Kines places it on the counter. It is a hand's span wide. The dome arches over trees fashioned of what might be clay. Painted on the inside of the globe is a waterfall and a distant hill with a castle. Inside the globe is a couple in clothes the likes of which Boston has never seen. The woman's hat is a high cone; the man has shoes curled up like fiddleheads. They wait amid the trees, one opposite the other. Kines turns the key and they twirl about each other to a stately tune that Boston has never heard. A swan glides by, then vanishes behind the waterfall.

“It was wrought by a master Venetian craftsman for Duchess Saphina herself, a woman of gross appetites, as are all aristocrats. The dancing woman is in her likeness, down to her dimpled cheek. The man is Antonio, one of her many lovers, a captain of the guard who was banished when the Duke became suspicious. Lovesick Saphina ordered the automaton made so that each night she could see herself in her lover's embrace, so that each night she could relive the night they first met, when first they danced to the strains of the very music that you hear now.”

Boston has never seen the like. It will be enough, more so. It is an ingenious thing. Still . . . he lifts it to see the mechanisms beneath. Such things are plagued with rust, with delicate spokes and cogs that break at a nudge, or work only for the one who displays them.

“What's the cost?”

“Ah, you must understand, given the story behind its creation . . .”

“Some story don't make it worth more.”

“I should think it does.”

“Ten pounds. Give you that.”

Kines smiles broadly. “I do not accept pounds. A monarch's head does not belong on a coin, nor a bill. It belongs on a spike.”

“Dollars then.”

“One hundred.”

“What fool do you take me for?”

Kines frowns and reaches for the automaton. Boston is handing it to him when the assistant, crouching below the counter, grunting over a crate, straightens abruptly and bumps against Kines. There is a fumbling as of three incompetent jugglers, and then a shattering.

To gold by the fistful! The cartload! The motherlode!” Eugene calls and raises his glass to the other men clumped about him in the saloon of the paddlewheeler
SS
Champion. They are anchored in a sheltered bend of the Fraser River on an evening that is cool and faintly misty. Whale oil lamps sway overhead amid the pall of tobacco smoke. A night bird flaps against the window.

The men raise their bottles and glasses.

“Here's to chasing, how it say, the Gold Butterfly!”

“
Salud oro. Nada mas pero oro.
”

“
D'or! D'or!
”

“To gold and the bleedin' captain! He says this girl's the fastest, if she ain't we'll use his bones for fuel!”

Laughter. Shouts. A dangerous edge to the whole gathering. But Eugene knows it will not turn, close though it may come. There will not be that sudden shift from joviality, sizing ups, verbal parlays, into accusations, flying fists, knives and pistols. It is his particular gift, this being able to predict the life of a revelry—if one is about to begin, how it will end, if it is possible to create out of sullen looks and tired companions an evening worthy of remembrance and retelling. He would rather, say, have the gift for poetry, be as Shelley, Keats and Byron and live passionately through words alone. He would rather, even, have the gift for mathematics and plumb the secrets of God's universe, like Newton, or like that chap with the telescope. But, ah, one must make do with one's own gifts.

Eugene looks to the two men who must be brothers, both being pale and thin-faced and both wearing near-identical apparel: fustian jackets and corduroy trousers and neat caps on black curls.

“Welsh is it? How do you say gold then, in Welsh?”

“
Aur
,” says the one. He is not smiling, nor is he drinking.

Eugene growls in imitation and the men about him laugh. He is speaking of the unnecessary difficulties inherent in the Welsh tongue when an American of some kind interrupts him. “If you say that word ‘gold' too much it don't make no whoreson sense. You start thinking maybe that ain't the word. Could be any old fart-ass sound. Who decided it'd be that word, not something else?”

“Gold is our word, is German word,” a man says jovially. He is thick-bellied and dressed as if for a Sunday outing, has a great silk handkerchief with which he expertly blows his nose. Even Eugene, fond as he is of good apparel, had the sense to wear his blanket coat, his broad-brimmed hat. His checkered frock coat and trousers, his cravat and waistcoat, his collars and top hat, are all nicely packed, at the ready for a suitable occasion, which this, most assuredly, is not.

“Your word is it?” the American says, half rising from the table. He is a ludicrous specimen. Is a jockey-sized, arm-flailing, revel-wrecker who can barely sit still and have a civilized drink.

“Gentlemen! Friends! It scarcely matters. Words are the one thing shared by all. They are free. Ale, however, is not.” Eugene shakes the jug at an Italian who is dozing on the bench, nose buried in his beard. “You are standing treat next, sir. We agreed, a round each to wash down that abysmal feed.”