Sarah Canary (19 page)

One - the essential thing about women is that they are all seducible.

Two - it is only natural for women to respond to men with devotion, and once a woman’s affections are engaged, she is bound to cling to the man with the unreasoning obstinacy of an oyster.

Three - it falls to the man, therefore, to prevent the attachment, or to honor it with matrimony. Any other course threatens not only the happiness but the sanity, sometimes the very life, of the woman. There was no creature more vile than the seducer.

Unless, perhaps, it was the man-hating woman.

Lydia started down the stony path to the footbridge. Adelaide made a grab for her skirt, but the wind took it away from her hand. ‘Wait for me.’ She followed Lydia, sticking whenever possible to the windless, dark places nearest the trees. She heard Purdy’s boots on the stones behind her. ‘Don’t try to stop us, Mr Purdy.’ Adelaide turned. ‘I have a gun.’

‘I remember that. You’re rather tedious on the subject.’

Lydia reached the bridge and began to cross. It was a suspension affair made of ropes and wooden slats. It swung in the wind even before Lydia stepped onto it. As she crossed, it bucked and plunged beneath her. Adelaide ran to catch up. Purdy stayed with Adelaide, matching her step for step.

They paused, panting, by the stream, which was much higher and wilder than it had been the night before. ‘I’m escorting you!’ Purdy had to shout to be heard above the water. ‘As a gentleman must. Ladies, even such independent ladies, cannot wander about lumber camps. Call it protection from the elements, if you like. I never saw so many peculiar things falling out of the sky as I have this morning.’ He stood too close to Adelaide. His breath was soaked with whiskey.

Lydia had long since made the other side of the creek and was loping away. Adelaide began to understand how Lydia had managed to elude the San Francisco police. She was so fast, moving in and out of the trees, with no hesitation.

Adelaide watched, allowing herself to imagine how, having forewarned the press, she would appear casually on the docks in San Francisco with the woman no man had been able to find. How she would speak for poor Lydia at the trial. Adelaide’s eloquence and Lydia’s pathos would save Lydia from the gallows. Adelaide thought for a moment of Lydia’s neck, which led her to uncomfortable doubts about the missing locket. She ignored them. The whole affair would have frontpage coverage from the moment they landed until Lydia’s release. The press might continue to call her the great magnetic doctress, winking, as if the needs of the body were a sort of joke played upon women, but, even so, they would have to take her seriously.

‘You don’t like men very much, do you, Miss Dixon?’ Purdy asked. His tone was accusing, but he had continued to smile. Did he really imagine that she didn’t remember how he had mocked her during her lecture?

‘I don’t like men like you very much,’ Adelaide said. ‘Why do you suppose that is?’ She didn’t bother to raise her voice. She didn’t care if he heard her or not. He wasn’t listening anyway. Adelaide decided to make him listen. She pulled the gun from her pocket and pointed it at him. The wind blew her hair wildly about her head, stinging her cheeks. She had to force herself not to close her eyes.

‘You have ink on your face.’ Purdy was still smiling. ‘Did you fall asleep over your love letters?’ He put his hand out as if he intended to wipe her cheek. ‘You’d be prettier without it.’

Adelaide stopped him by raising the gun. She resented his smile. She resented his hat. Most of all, she resented how safe he felt with her. She had a gun and she was still the one who was afraid. She had a gun and they were bouncing chairs out of second-story windows and she was still the one who was afraid. Men were dangerous and women were not, and when men loved women, women were still not dangerous to them, and when women loved men, then men were the most dangerous of all.

She had no more time to waste getting rid of him. She was so cold. She was losing Lydia. She needed to find a way out of Seabeck for the two of them, and the sooner, the safer. ‘Take out your gun,’ she said. Her voice was too quiet. He didn’t respond. ‘Take out your gun,’ she shouted. ‘Carefully. Now throw it in the creek.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’ She aimed at his face. ‘Skip it if you can.’

He stared at her for a moment, stepping back, the smile finally gone. Then he took out his gun and tossed it away, side-arm. She didn’t look to follow its movement, but she heard it hit the water. Once. ‘Now give me your knife. I know you must have a knife. Take it out carefully and throw it on the ground there. I
will
shoot if you do anything else. There is no one here to see.

‘Now!’ she shouted.

He removed a small pearled knife, something for cutting his nails, from his breast pocket. ‘I’m sure you can do better than that,’ Adelaide told him, sighting down the gun. He reached into his boot and pulled out a second knife, which had a long blade and no mother-of-pearl. He lobbed it to her. It landed in a puddle. ‘You just hold still, Mr Purdy.’ She stooped to pick up the knife, keeping the gun level and steady the whole time. Then, with the gun in one hand and the knife in the other, she began to back carefully over the footbridge. She could never hit him if he moved now; the bridge swung with every step and she swung, too, hardly able to stay upright with both her hands full. He shifted his weight. ‘No!’ she said quickly.

They stood watching each other, and the bridge swung less and less until it only trembled beneath her. She began to back up again. She was over half the creek. She was almost over the creek. She could see the white water in the spaces between the slats. The closer she came to the other side and the closer she was to making her escape, the more her nervousness grew. By the time she could see the other bank out of the corner of her eye, her tension was almost unbearable.

Then she bumped into someone stepping onto the bridge from the other side. Adelaide screamed. Her heart exploded in her breast. The gun went off. Purdy dove for the ground. She had been holding the envelope with her papers between her left arm and her body. Now it lay just past the bridge in the mud. Two more sheets of paper fell out, blew down the bank and into the creek.

Adelaide turned around. She had backed into a Chinese man, very short, no taller than she was herself, his hair tumbling out of his queue. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were somebody else. Please don’t shoot me.’ He had a blanket roll tied to his back and he held his two empty hands in the air.

Behind him, back by the trees, was a second man, much taller, with pale skin and pale hair. ‘Has Sarah Canary stopped shooting?’ His voice squeaked with the effort to be heard over the noise of the creek. ‘Why is she shooting, Chin?’ He crossed the patch of bare ground that separated them, looking eagerly and then less eagerly at her face. ‘She is
not
Sarah Canary,’ he told the Chinese man in a tone that suggested he had been contending this all along. The Chinese man remained frozen and frightened. ‘Who is she? Is she the Alaskan Wild Woman?’ When the Chinese man did not answer, the pale man shouted at Adelaide directly. ‘Are you the Alaskan Wild Woman? I hope not. Chin and I spent the whole day and the whole night on the
Biddy
coming in from Port Gamble, because we didn’t think the Alaskan Wild Woman would be you.’

A pamphlet had slipped out of the envelope at her feet, and muddy water was working its way through the cover to the pages inside. The pale man bent and picked it up for her, wiping it on the front of his coat. It was the popular tract entitled
The Victim of Seduction: An Affecting Narrative of the Tragical Death of Miss Fanny Salisbury, A Native of New Jersey
,
Who, Having Been Enticed From Her Widowed Parents and Basely Seduced By a Young Man of the City of New York, After Enduring Incredible Hardships in That City, Terminated Her Own Existence By Hanging Herself In a Forest Near Newark, on the 23rd of January Last.
He shook his head. ‘This is so sad, Chin,’ he said, putting the pamphlet back into the envelope and handing them both to her. ‘What are “widowed parents”?’

‘Who is the Biddy?’ Adelaide asked. Her heart had still not settled back into its usual rhythm. Perhaps it never would. Two more men who wanted Lydia. For what purpose? What was she to do?

‘The
Biddy.
She’s a sloop.’

‘A what?’ Adelaide was having trouble hearing him. She thought he had said something rude.

‘A sloop. The
Biddy
!’ he shouted. ‘You have ink on your cheek. Did you know that? It’s a word.’ He moved closer and bent over the gun as if he didn’t even see it, to get closer to her face. ‘It’s a word, but it’s in code.’

On the other side of the creek, Purdy got to his feet, wiping off his knees. Adelaide pushed the pale man away, swinging around again so that the gun was leveled at Mr Purdy.

‘Don’t you move!’ she screamed over the water to him. ‘Don’t you dare.’

‘Are you talking about the
Biddy?’
he called back. ‘The
Biddy’s
the mail sloop. In and out of Port Gamble. I was just on my way to her.’

‘When does she leave?’ Adelaide asked the pale man.

He was still squinting at her face. ‘It’s the word
someday.
You have the word
someday
written backward on your cheek.’

‘When does she leave?’ Adelaide shouted to Purdy.

‘She leaves when I get there.’

‘Oh,’ said Adelaide. She took a deep breath to clear her head and calm her heart. ‘All right.’ She moved the barrel of the gun in a repeated semicircular gesture between the pale man and Will Purdy. She was telling the pale man to cross the bridge.

He was too busy reading her face to notice. ‘Someday what?’ he asked. ‘What does it mean?’

‘The Alaskan Wild Woman is in that hotel,’ Adelaide shouted. ‘Over there. I want the two of you to cross now. Go stand next to Mr Purdy. Do it as quickly as you can.’ She made the gesture with her gun again, a smaller, more hurried semicircle.

‘It’s a message for you,’ the pale man told her insistently. ‘It’s on
your
cheek. And it’s backwards. You’re supposed to read it in a mirror.’ The Chinese man sidled past with his pinched unhappy face, dragging the pale man along by his sleeve. ‘Don’t you wonder what it means?’ the pale man asked. ‘Yes, Chin. I’m coming. Don’t you wonder what it means, Chin?’ Every time the pale man took a step, the bridge threw the smaller Chinese man a few inches into the air. He clung to the ropes at the side, dancing desperately to keep his balance. When they were both across, Adelaide began using Purdy’s knife to saw through the ropes that held the bridge.

‘Wait a second!’ the pale man called back in surprise. ‘We may want to get back.’ The Chinese man spoke to him, said something Adelaide couldn’t hear. ‘But, Chin, she may not even be the right Alaskan Wild Woman. Then we’ll want to get back for sure.’

‘You’re making a big mistake here!’ Purdy shouted. ‘The sloop won’t leave without me. When I do get to the shipyard, you’ll still be sitting there, waiting, and sorry to see me again. Trust me for it.’

‘You
may want to get back,’ the pale man pointed out. ‘You may have left something in the hotel that you need. Did you ever think of that?’

Adelaide cut the last strands of the knots. Her end of the bridge fell away, landing in the water, dipping underneath, and then rising to the top, riding out its length, but held back finally by the ropes, which still anchored it on the other side.

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east. Adelaide put her weapons into her coat pockets and ran in the opposite direction, through the trees and toward the bay. Occasionally she saw part of a footprint, the cast of Lydia’s heel in the wet ground. To the best of her recollection, the shipyard was about three quarters of a mile away. Lydia seemed to be heading straight for it.

Adelaide caught up with Lydia in front of the Washington Mill Company lumberyard. A white seagull flapped through the air above her. Lydia was gazing up at it, her naked neck stretched and exposed. She seemed to be speaking. Adelaide could not hear it, but she saw the movement along Lydia’s throat. The rain had melted but not obliterated the lines of a baseball diamond.

The sun came up. Adelaide was filled with joy. She stood over the bare patch of ground that marked home plate, her hair wild about her face, her nose and fingers stinging with cold, and imagined she had hit a ball straight out at Lydia, straight out toward third. It touched down in left field, just where Lydia was, just barely fair, before it rolled underneath the pile of logs in the lumberyard and was lost.

~ * ~

10

Morning at the Bay View Hotel

Remorse - is Memory — awake—

Her Parties all astir—

A Presence of Departed Acts—

At window - and at Door—

Emily Dickinson, 1863

‘Would you like some chewing gum?’ Mr Purdy asked.

Chin turned to look at him. Purdy had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket and was unfolding it awkwardly with his gloved hands. The gum was inside. He held it out to B.J. ‘Thank you,’ said B.J., taking a piece and passing it to Chin. Purdy was already refolding his handkerchief. He opened it again and gave B.J. a second piece. Chin sniffed at the gum, which smelled of pine trees. He bit off a piece. Saliva filled his mouth, but the gum grew harder and harder. Chin chewed it into a small pebble, which he swallowed. The texture was somewhat medicinal and he hoped it might ease the stabbing pain he had in his shoulder from sleeping awkwardly on the sloop and carrying the bedroll. He took another bite, swallowed it, and shifted the bedroll from one side of his back to the other.