Heartbroke Bay (30 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
When Severts breaks free above the tree line, he sees a pale shape ahead. Limping and staggering, the bear drags a foreleg, forcing itself uphill with a faltering three-legged gait at a range too great for the shotgun.
Michael watches as the bear pauses and looks over its shoulder. Settling its black eyes on him, it lifts its nose into the wind and pushes its nostrils into the creepers of his scent, searching for the identity of its tormentor. Finding nothing, it limps over the ridge, head drooping.
Michael follows, his legs beginning to shake and jitter from the strain of pursuit. He gasps, fighting for breath. The high, thin air snaps with frost, and the cold metal of the gun barrel burns his skin. Trickles of blinding sweat sting his eyes.
From the top, the ridge falls away in a steep crumble that spills down onto the glacier, scattering shards of shale into bottomless blue ravines. Michael wipes the sweat from his eyes and blinks at the sting of a sharp wind pouring up from the valley, then spots the bear thirty yards away, picking its cautious and shuffling way along the interstice of ice and stone.
Lifting the gun, he settles the bead on the slow-moving bear, pulls the stock hard into his shoulder, and takes a deep breath to quiet the trembling in his arms. The metal is cold against his cheek. The weight of the gun feels enormous. When he fires, the recoil nearly knocks him down. Bear and man stagger, propelled apart by the physics of death. The bear drops, slides, and rolls in a clattering avalanche of splintered schist before coming to a halt at the edge of the glacier.
Severts steps over the lip of the ridge onto the loose shale, faltering as the ground gives way beneath him. Sliding and tumbling, he edges downslope, glissading with the loose, shifting stone.
The bear lies angled into the sharp
V
of a crevasse. The ice shimmers with frost and as Michael advances, weapon at the ready, he can see the steam of his own breath. The bear’s eyes are half open, glazed and dull. Its lips curl in rictus, exposing the teeth and tongue. In death, the corpse looks small. With the golden light of its life gone, the remains are inert, dirty, yellow, and gray.
V
of a crevasse. The ice shimmers with frost and as Michael advances, weapon at the ready, he can see the steam of his own breath. The bear’s eyes are half open, glazed and dull. Its lips curl in rictus, exposing the teeth and tongue. In death, the corpse looks small. With the golden light of its life gone, the remains are inert, dirty, yellow, and gray.
Michael stares at the body from a distance, reassuring himself that the bear is dead. Then he removes a skinning knife from his belt and approaches. An overpowering stench of rot and sulfur rises from the carcass, and he gags, covering his mouth and nose with his hand. Stepping back, he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and breathes through it.
“Shit,” he says, stepping back again. “Shit.” And walks away.
When Michael emerges from the forest that afternoon, the earthquake has shaken a beam from the ceiling, and Hannah is working at an arrangement of poles and levers to raise it back into position. The canvas roof has been pulled back, and the stones holding it in place have been cast down. The sun is low on the horizon. A gentle surf eases ashore, tumbling a line of softly golden foam before it.
Michael looks about for any sign of the miners, then pitches in. Saying nothing about the bear, he shrugs when she asks about fish. “They’re played out.”
Hannah tugs at the canvas to stretch it tight over the beams. “The earthquake spilled the stew I was making. It was the last of the meat. We’ve nothing left but some berries. Berries and a few carrots.”
“They’ll be unhappy about that, won’t they?” says Michael, meaning the miners.
But the miners do not return. Day fades into night until stars begin to pinpoint the darkness. Inside the cabin, Michael listens for boot steps and runs his hands over Hannah until she pushes him away. “Not here.”
The fire burns down, is replenished, and burns down again, but still the men do not return. Hannah begins to fret, pacing the small confines of the cabin, puttering at projects by the light of the lantern, cleaning spotless pans, pushing away the urge to settle on Michael’s lap. The night is utterly still, and cold air flowing gently down from the glacier surrounds the cabin, creeping in through gaps between the logs.
“Where are they? Something has gone wrong.”
“No,” replies Michael. “They’ve just hit a good streak and can’t tear themselves away.”
“It is too late for that. Hans might work all night, but Harky and Dutch would not. I hope . . .” Hannah’s wish is interrupted by a
haloo
and the sound of steps. The door swings back, and Dutch enters first, followed by a shirtless Harky. The Texan carries Hans on his back, riding piggyback and clinging with one arm about Harky’s neck. Hans’s other arm is bound to his side by a strip of cloth. In the lantern light, his face is yellow with shock and pain.
haloo
and the sound of steps. The door swings back, and Dutch enters first, followed by a shirtless Harky. The Texan carries Hans on his back, riding piggyback and clinging with one arm about Harky’s neck. Hans’s other arm is bound to his side by a strip of cloth. In the lantern light, his face is yellow with shock and pain.
“Cave-in,” says Harky, lowering Hans to the ground. Nelson takes a wobbly step, then slumps to a bunk.
“That earthquake,” says Dutch. “We’d just barrowed out a load of ore, and Mr. Nelson started back inside, when she hit and the roof come down. Lucky me and Harky was still outside, or there wouldn’t have been nobody to dig us free.”
Hannah kneels beside her husband to inspect the bandaging, then sees it is Harky’s shirt, torn into strips. Hans flinches, pulling back when she probes at his side.
“What’s broken, Hans? Can you tell what damage is done?”
“Ribs. Something in my shoulder.” He winces as he breathes.
“He’s lucky,” says Dutch from over Hannah’s shoulder. “Big slab of rock missed him, but a support beam come down and got him. Took us a god-awful long time to move the rock and get to him.”
Harky settles to a bunk, lying back and throwing an arm across his eyes with a sigh. None of them has any knowledge of medical matters beyond sewing up cuts or lancing boils. He knows only that Hans spits no blood, so will probably live. There is nothing more to do.
“It’s time to leave,” says Hans. After three days of lying abed, he is sitting up again, pale and unshaven, asking for food. In spite of a cold, steady drizzle that moved in on a gusting wind the day after the earthquake, Michael’s shotgun has put a young sea lion in the larder, and the strong, gamey smell of it flows from a kettle on the stove. “Food’s about gone, and we won’t be able to open the shaft again before winter’s on us.”
Dutch mutters, “Aye,” now eager to be done with the wilderness. Michael nods slowly. Hannah is silent. Leaving means . . . what? A return to being Hans’s wife? The unthinkable stain of divorce? What of Michael? Her heart begins to ache in time with the steady plink of drops falling into a pan beneath a leak in the canvas roof.
Harky rises without comment, goes outside, and walks down the beach until the cabin disappears in the mist, then settles on a log to stare at the sea. He has not spoken since carrying Hans through the door, and the darkness of melancholia etches itself deep into his eyes. Since binding Hans’s injuries, the memory of countless wounds and bindings witnessed during the war have been drifting through his head as unceasingly as the near-freezing rain. The rain itself reminds him of a dreadful rainy day somewhere in Virginia when he had been chosen to participate in a firing squad ordered to execute a deserter. The deserter, a gaunt, gray-headed man with a poorly healed saber wound gaping at the junction of his shoulder and neck, had cried like a baby as he was tied to a caisson wheel with a paper target pinned to his shirt over his heart. Others in the firing squad had mocked the deserter, and Harky had wondered at his own lack of feeling as he pulled the trigger. He came to understand that the worst of the war was not in the killing, but in the extinction of all compassion and kindness in the human heart. Now he knows only that he is tired of the rumble of the glacier and the memory of cannon fire it stirs.
Sighing deeply, he pulls the horse pistol from his waist and hefts its weight in his palm. Peering at the end of the barrel, the black eye bored into blue steel, he places it against his temple, then tries it for fit in his mouth before groaning, shoving the gun back in its holster, and glaring at the sky.
“There is nothing we can do, Michael. It has to end.” Hannah speaks in a low voice as they scramble across a face of algae-laced rock exposed by low tide. Dutch is a hundred yards away, intent with a knife and sack, prying at limpets that cling to the stone. Michael carries a basket of sugar kelp. Boiled together, the seaweed and shellfish will make a poor meal, but are a change from roasted sea lion.
Michael kicks at a starfish, flipping it from the rock into the surging water. “Damnation,” he mutters. “If my luck was better, that rockfall would’ve made you a widow.”
Hannah gasps and covers her mouth with one ashamed hand, appalled not by the vitriol and violence that burns in her lover’s words, but because the same idea has slithered like an eel through the darker caverns of her own thoughts.
Michael’s voice cracks with frustration. “I’ve wanted it since the start, Hannah. I can’t . . . I can’t stand this.” The muscles of his jaw knot as he gnaws at his ire. “If he was gone . . .”
“Still, Michael, you mustn’t say such a thing.”
Michael stops, thrusts his hands deep into his pockets, and hunches his shoulders before speaking. “I been thinking. As soon as we’re out of here, I’m telling him about us. Then you won’t have any choice, will you? You’ll have to be with me.”
Hannah stares, frightened by the idea, then steps back as a wave strikes the rock. In the time it takes for the water to pull back and a second wave to rise, the impulse to believe that such a thing might be possible also rises; she and Michael could run away, go someplace new and start over. A third wave dashes the idea with the specter of exile; she would never see her mother or England again.
The water rushes out, foaming and hissing. Desire and impossibility surge within her. Michael mutters, “As soon as we’re back in civilization . . .” and a wave of hopelessness rushes over her; can he not see what it means to be a woman in a world where women like Hans’s “Black Mary” can be tarred and tortured for adultery? Or driven to prostitution like John Nightwatch’s illicit paramour?
“Are you mad?” she asks, but there is no heat in the words; her voice is weak with uncertainty.
Severts’s mouth turns down and tightens. He throws a brooding glance at her and does not answer.
FOURTEEN
Sunrise burns its slow way into the sky as the miners set out on the trail to the Indian village. A strong, cold wind pouring down from the glacier harrows the bay into rows of rushing whitecaps. Hannah pulls the door to the cabin closed and takes a last look at the sea, where the outflowing tide vexes an army of advancing waves.
On her back is a blanket wrapped around her meager store of clothes, a package of seal meat and berries, her Bible, journals, and a bundle of pressed flowers. Dutch and Michael each carry a share of the gold in their packs. Harky carries his own and the Nelsons’. Hans carries nothing and leans on a staff, his face tight with pain. The tools are abandoned, the ax wedged in the chopping block behind the cabin. The skiff has been hauled into the trees. Nothing is said about a return in the spring.
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