West of Here (12 page)

The boat somehow defied the rapids long enough to clear the narrow passage the men had cut through the firs. She crashed on the rocks not five hundred feet upriver from the sandy bench of her conception. Her hull was battered well beyond repair and the hold was ruptured. The stores had been scattered. The collective force of the
expedition had been scattered, as though the wilderness had swallowed them up and spit them back out in pieces.

The men regrouped above the sandy plateau, where they’d established a camp a week earlier. In the clearing, they spread out all that remained of the stores. The losses were heavy but sustainable; most of the flour was lost, and nearly all of the meat, though it had been little to begin with. The sugar and coffee were total losses. The camera was lost, along with some of the survey gear. However, three of the five rifles had survived with no apparent damage. A single grip of tobacco had survived, albeit waterlogged, along with a precious little whiskey.

Reese built an enormous fire fed by the brittle skeletons of alders. The fire roared like a furnace, burned hot and smokeless, and the points of its flames lapped at overhanging limbs twelve feet off the ground. The entire camp bathed in its glow. The men gathered around the fire, as close as they could bear to stand, and felt the hot wind of it on their faces. Nothing was said. The whiskey was uncorked and imbibed sparingly twice around the circle. Now and again, someone tossed a dry fir bough into the inferno, and the tiny needles sparked and flitted like gunpowder as the fire consumed them in bursts of white light. And when the flames died down, the men sat on rocks and licked their wounds and contemplated the rumbling in their bellies. Haywood scribbled madly in his journal, which had survived miraculously unscathed, wrapped in oilcloth in what remained of the hold. Runnells mended his pants with a needle and thread, his swollen ankle propped upon a round of cedar. Reese cleaned the rifles, one by one. Cunningham, the gash on his forehead dressed with the aid of Haywood, huddled nearest the flames. He could not seem to get warm, his teeth clattered frightfully.

Mather leaned back against his rock, hypnotized by the fire. He felt at once dull and lucid as he watched the ring of orange coals pulse around the perimeter of the flames. All the adventure had been drained out of him, his manic appetite for the wild and undiscovered had waned, at least temporarily, and his mind set to other more familiar wanderings. His preoccupation with Eva Lambert had become, weeks into their
journey, a source of profound irritation to Mather. He was shamed by it, yet in his quiet moments he gravitated toward the thought of Eva like a moth to flame. The only act that might have relieved the shame and discomfort of Mather’s yearnings was unthinkable, that is, to have confessed to Haywood or, worse, to Reese, that the mere thought of a women’s swollen belly should cause his heat to rise.

JANUARY
1890

When Adam sent the boy away from his room, Thomas walked out backward, still clutching the shaving mirror in front of him at arm’s length, navigating his way through the threshold and down the stairs by way of its reflection. After a moment, Adam could see the boy through the dirty window, walking backward down the middle of Front Street, entranced by the reflected world as it came to him over his shoulder.

Adam clasped his leather case and snatched it off the foot of the bed, then made his way down the groaning stairs. In the lobby, he came upon Reverend Sheldon, who was talking emphatically in hoarse tones at the desk clerk on the subject of the latter’s moral fiber. The clerk listened impatiently, as one who knows a punch line, now and again scanning the lobby as though looking for an escape. Adam tried to soft-shoe past, but the reverend caught his eye and, without pausing in his harangue, signaled Adam to stay put by suspending a chubby index finger in the air.

“Fortitude,” Reverend Sheldon declared. “I’m talking about real guts, real moxie. That’s what you lack, son, moral fortitude, what the whole of this frontier lacks — and make no mistake, it
is
a frontier, gentleman, statehood or no statehood. And the evil oppressor that clouds these brackish backwaters, gentleman, is the devil himself, and the moral turpitude he inspires from all quarters. Look around you. Why he’s got you virtually surrounded, from that godless colony there, to those savages on the beach, to that abomination directly across the way. Remember, it’s the weak that run for the hills. The strong stand their ground and fight in the name of Alm —” Here, the reverend gave way to a fit of violent coughing, during which he employed the suspension of his other index finger to indicate that his
thought was not yet complete. The cough rattled in his barrel chest, doubled him over with its force, and his balding head turned bright red. He recovered at last, short of breath, sniffling, his eyes awater. “In the name of Almighty God,” he rejoined with considerable effort. Even as the clerk was grumbling a defiant
Amen
beneath his breath, the reverend turned his attention to Adam.

“I’m told you’re off to pay the natives in Jamestown a visit, Adam. It shall be my pleasure to join you as far as New Dungeness.”

Lacking both the patience and temperament required to find the reverend amusing, or in any way refreshing, the journey by carriage was interminable for Adam. Not only was the going slow over the muddy, rutted road, but the reverend, needing no encouragement from Adam whatsoever, spoke to no end on all matters right and moral, returning more often than not to the subject of the natives, a sore subject indeed, as he’d enjoyed so little success converting them.

“Powder and lead, that’s how they Christianized them in Vancouver’s day. And why not? What has all this
Great Father
nonsense profited us? I once met your beloved Chet-Ze-Moka. He was drunk in a wigwam with his genitals hanging out. One of his wives had a black eye. These are not wayward lambs, Adam. They’re savages down to their very souls. Born in sin. Salvation is beyond them. They’re every bit as bad as the Chinese. I’ve witnessed their ceremonies, their potlatches, and what have you, and they’re evil incarnate. Slaughtered dogs and idolatry. Face paint. Mummery.” This the reverend punctuated with a rasping cough, which gained momentum and soon racked his entire person. His eyes began to bulge and take on the desperate aspect of a drowning man, and his cheeks soon glistened with tears. Still, the moment he could apprehend his first breath, he persisted in his sermon. “They ate the dog, Adam, ate it raw. They blackened their faces. They crawled around wearing lizard heads, like men possessed.”

Nearly half of the road was washed out by a slide two miles east of town, and the carriage could scarcely pass without succumbing to the steep hillside. The snowfall was steady and wet, slush by the time it
hit the ground. The wheels churned up brown muck and threw a fine spray of grit in their wake. However, the traveling beyond the washout was relatively smooth. Adam might have let the road lull him to sleep, were it not for the reverend.

“Shakerism is not the answer. Shaking bells instead of rattles, defiling the name of Jesus Christ. Quivering like jellyfish. That’s no route to salvation. They’re still the warring, slave trading, superstitious heathens they were a hundred years ago. Three hundred years ago!”

Here, in the ruddy-faced reverend, with his high-minded moral vision and irrational fear of the natives, was Adam’s father revisited. And hadn’t Adam himself held these tenets of superiority to be true until he met Hoko? As a young man, hadn’t he felt that his father had been justified in reducing the chieftancy of Chet-Ze-Moka? Hadn’t Chet-Ze-Moka exhibited a dearth in the qualities of leadership? And didn’t this lack of leadership, along with the chief’s penchant for drunkenness, point to some weakness of character?

Adam remembered the funeral, remembered his father slandering the chief under his breath, even as the eulogy was being delivered. And young Adam’s only objection to these slanders was that his father’s voice might draw attention. It wasn’t until later, until Hoko, that Adam understood the qualities of leadership, understood that these qualities were not universal, that chieftancy to the Klallam, from its very conception, did not adhere to the same perimeters as the Great White Father, did not impose its will with a heavy hand where matters of free will were concerned, did not always issue edicts or make decisions or speak on behalf of the speechless.

The reverend was still talking when they came upon a lone figure walking east along the road.

Adam called for the driver to stop, but the reverend, upon inspecting the traveler, instructed the driver to proceed.

HAVING SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED
his herbal ministrations upon Eva, Haw was not afforded the benefit of a carriage ride back to his root cellar in New Dungeness. Instead, he set out on foot through
the soggy snow, his herb bag slung crosswise across his shoulder, his queue tucked beneath his wide-brimmed hat, as he slogged through the muck. He had trekked roughly four miles east when he heard the rattling approach of the carriage at his back. The carriage slowed nearly to a stop, then started again with a lurch. Then stopped once more.

Haw sat with his hands piled in his lap across from the two whites and did not venture to speak. The lean and rugged man wore a stubbled growth of beard and had an irritable gaze that forever sought freedom from the cramped quarters of the carriage. He wore his hat low on his forehead. He seemed to be holding in a sigh, as he peered out between the half-drawn curtains at the passing landscape. The portly one with the sweaty forehead was talkative to the point of distraction. This, Haw soon gathered, must be the source of the other man’s irritability. The fat one had a deep, productive cough, which frequently doubled him over and seemed the only thing capable of slowing down his opinions. In those rare moments of silence afforded by the fat man, Haw listened to the squishing progress of the horses.

Throughout his ramblings, not once did the fat man condescend to address or even look at Haw.

“… all this talk about nation building and industry, and they’ve left God right out of the equation. Now, that’s what I call arrogance.”

Adam reckoned the miles to Jamestown to be about six by the time they passed the elk herd moving through Messing’s homestead.

“… how does one build a nation under God, when all the work is being perpetrated by the mongrel races? … how can one possibly expect to fly the flag of heaven over this godforsaken outpost, when there’s a coolie under every rock …”

The Chinaman looked impassive. Adam wondered at his English. He wondered also at the contents of Haw’s bag.

“… the missionary approach is obsolete. At some point it becomes necessary to divide and conquer the spiritually bereft. At some point you can’t indulge them, at some point you’ve got to rain fire and brimstone down on the Sodomites of this world, Adam.”

When the reverend surrendered to his most violent fit of coughing
yet, when his face turned red as the rising sun, and his eyes looked fit to burst out of his head, Haw was moved to action. He pushed the doubled fat man upright and placed the palm of his right hand lightly upon the reverend’s windpipe, and the coughing decelerated almost immediately. With his free hand, Haw rummaged in the leather bag around his neck, producing a small brown bottle, which he opened dexterously with one hand and placed beneath the reverend’s nose, instructing him to breathe. A pleasant odor pervaded the carriage. The reverend soon gathered his breath, but before he could resume talking, Haw presented him with another bottle, this one a little larger, and instructed the reverend to partake of it. When the reverend declined, Haw encouraged him further.

“Sip sip. No whiskey, no whiskey. Medicine.”

The reverend conformed to Haw’s wishes, in spite of his own, and sipped from the bottle. Haw resumed his own seat, leaving the bottle to the reverend, who grimaced as he wiped his mouth and tried to pass the bottle back to the Chinaman.

“Sip sip,” said Haw.

The fat man complied, a little less than tentatively on this occasion, and soon resumed his monologue. “To begin with, we’ve got to level the Indian classes, roll up our sleeves and stamp out this potlatch business once and for all … burn this Babylon to the ground … obliterate this cesspool of iniquity …”

But as the Reverend progressed his tongue grew heavier, and his opinions lost their razor sharpness, and Haw smiled inwardly. The difference in the reverend was not lost on Adam, who seemed finally to have released the sigh he’d been holding in for so long.

Within a half mile, the reverend was awash in a dull silence, and his eyes were glassy, and he slumped so that his head and shoulder were pressed against the vibrating side of the carriage, and the smallest of smiles took shape upon his lips. And neither Adam or Haw could belie their own smiling eyes when their gazes crossed.

JANUARY
1890

The reverend, having slept through his stop at New Dungeness, was still out cold late in the afternoon, even as the carriage lurched to a stop in Jamestown. Adam tilted his hat to Haw, ducked out of the carriage, and hopped off the runner into the slushy road. He dug in his pocket, settled with the driver, doffed his hat once more, and began trudging down the squelchy lane toward Lord Jim’s house.

Fifteen years prior, Lord Jim, refusing to accept the conditions of relocation, rallied a handful of Klallam to pool five hundred dollars for the purchase of some two hundred acres of cleared meadow and sandy beach along the strait east of New Dungeness. They left the lower Elwha and the Siwash behind and moved some twenty miles east. They burned the cedar stumps out of the ground; planted wheat, potatoes, turnips; began raising chickens and swine. They built a village facing the water of thirteen houses and a little white church, and they named it Jamestown in recognition of Lord Jim. They started a temperance society and collected signatures from every last denizen of the village. But in seizing their destiny, they had unknowingly surrendered federal recognition. It would take 107 years to win it back.