West of Here (14 page)

To see Jacob nodding his approval gravely at the pitch of Ethan’s excitement, to see him furrowing his brow in consideration of Ethan’s outlandish scheme, was bad enough. But to be imprisoned by motherhood, bound to a featherbed and shackled to the insatiable demands of another, while the word
destiny
crackled in the air like electricity between the two men, was more than Eva could endure. How was it that destiny forever attached itself to men? How was it that men presumed destiny to choose them? And what was the act of this presumption but to relinquish responsibility for their actions? And who was left to shoulder the burden, to suffer the consequences of these actions? While the men carried on about
putting the river to work
and
illuminating the darkness,
what great destiny had attached itself to Eva, if not domesticity?

It was agreed upon by the two men that as soon as Eva regained her strength, Jacob would accompany Ethan back to the homestead and see firsthand what grand possibilities the canyon presented. Until then, Jacob said he would make no promises, but Eva could see that her brother had already made up his mind. The fever was alight in his eyes, the spirit of adventure had seized him; the boy in him had awakened and the man was not far behind.

For six days, long after she had regained her strength, Eva remained in bed, saddled by Minerva and plagued by a simmering rage in her chest. Ethan returned by degrees to his dandified ways, his kissing seahorses and moth-eaten trousers, while Jacob grew rough around the edges, splitting alder with a day’s growth of beard, talking about
town
as though it were really a place, about the homestead as though he had carved it out of the wilderness himself. The words
progress
and
labor
were upon his lips, even as the words
financing
and
easement
took shape on Ethan’s.

When Ethan and Jacob finally took leave one gloomy morning in January, Eva met their departure with dread and relief. From the window, with Minerva fidgeting in her arms, Eva watched them go — Ethan lighting the way with his silver-eyed gaze, walking tall beneath the
weight of his bundle, Jacob a half-dozen paces behind, newly outfitted from top to bottom for the backwoods, from rifle to whipsaw, tottering slightly beneath his load.

While neither city life nor the silver spoon had prepared Jacob for the rigors of backcountry travel, he proceeded at a steady pace in Ethan’s wake as they trudged along the rutted settlers trail. He could scarcely keep his eyes on the sodden path. The scale of this wooded cathedral was out of proportion with anything Jacob had ever known or expected; colossal timber, wide as a steam engine at the base, tall and straight as the steel-framed towers springing up in Chicago, spread out in endless stands, with bark so deeply furrowed that a man could hide his whole fist in the coarse folds of it. Now and again, as they skirted the river, Jacob caught a glimpse of the Elwha through the trees, a flashing silver serpent as it roared down the mountain. The valley narrowed as they left the bottomlands behind, and the hills closed in on them from either side, until Jacob could see their snowcapped tops looming through the canopy. That he should be instrumental in taming this wilderness seemed impossible. That God had intended it to be tamed was a wonder in itself.

There was no fire burning at Indian George’s, and his canoe could be seen tethered to the far bank. Ethan gathered with no small relief that his Indian friend was still upriver at the homestead. Popping his head into the dank cabin, Ethan could see at once that something was amiss. The cabin had been turned upside down and inside out. The larder was upended in the corner of the room, where a ruptured sack of flour had erupted beside it, spewing a crescent of fine white dust upon the uneven floor. The lantern lay shattered in a puddle of kerosene, with the Holy Bible facedown beside it. Ethan suffered a pang of guilt as he surveyed the damage. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he would reward George for his loyalty and could not help but wonder how he’d earned such devotion in the first place.

The river was too fast and high to ford. Ethan and Jacob were forced to grope through thick brush along the bank for several hundred feet, until they reached a rocky bar, a short distance beyond which Mather and his men a week prior had felled a hemlock four feet in diameter
for the purpose of their crossing. Backtracking along the far bank, Ethan and Jacob picked up the trail near George’s canoe and proceeded up the incline.

The trail leveled out in a small meadow bordered by a stream on the far side, running perpendicular to their path. Ethan spotted a buck at the stream’s edge and froze in his tracks. The beast did not startle easily; it stood still as a statue but for the plume of its breath in the cold air. He had no fewer than twelve points and was as big as a horse. Jacob had seen such antlered heads adorning walls in Chicago and Peoria and Detroit like trophies, but nothing in the glass-eyed gaze of these enormous heads had prepared him for such majesty. It did not occur to him, as he locked eyes with the beast, to level his rifle. It was as though the buck’s gaze held him captive. By the time Ethan whispered the directive, it was too late; the instant Jacob raised the rifle, the buck lit off into the brush.

A little ways north of the swamp, they scrambled up a rock spur that jutted out of the steep hill flanking them to the west. Dangling their legs over the side, they lunched on a half loaf of tough bread and a handful of smoked oysters. Even through the thick expanse of forest, they could hear the river in the distance, and when Jacob was moved to comment on the power of it, Ethan thrilled with propriety.

Soon after lunch they reached the bog, which was covered in patches by a thin crust of ice. The two men cut through the gulley, plowing their way down through four feet of snow. They were fighting their way back up the incline when the crack of distant gunfire froze them in their tracks.

THEY CAME FROM
the north, traveling up canyon along the wooded edge of the far bank, two of them, both heavily bearded, outfitted with packs and rifles. From his place on the knotted stoop, a post that had grown all too familiar in Ethan’s absence, Indian George recognized neither man. Though he could hear the brash tenor of their voices from across the chasm as they shouted back and forth, he could not discern their words. There was something crude in their
manner, but George could not say what exactly, whether it was their ragged clothing or the way they slung their rifles so casually at the hip, as though they belonged there. The presence of the strangers did not alarm George, however, until they began pulling up Ethan’s stakes along the eastern line and lobbing them into the canyon.

When George emerged from the darkness of the cabin clutching Ethan’s Winchester and a pocketful of shells, the strangers had vanished. He swung around the east side of the cabin, peering south along the rocky cleft, but he saw no sign of the two men. He scanned the wood line up and down the chasm, but they were nowhere in sight. Tentatively, he resumed his seat on the stoop, set the rifle aside, and listened.

Within a half hour, George heard voices from downstream. This time they were along the near bank, just below the head of the trail. He took up the rifle once more and slunk downhill toward the tree line. When he was parallel with the voices, he stopped. He could hear footfalls over the packed snow, and soon he glimpsed the two figures through the trees and squatted low as they passed. He picked up their trail and followed them stealthily a short distance, until he reached the wood line, where he watched the men cross the clearing toward the cabin. The taller man unburdened himself of his pack and ducked his head as he entered. The other man circled the perimeter like a sentry, arriving back at the stoop just before the tall one emerged with a kettle and a cast-iron skillet. He laid his rifle down on the stoop, along with the pilfered cookware. The short one then crossed the threshold into the cabin, emerging moments later with a pair of boots. He sat down on the stoop and wrestled his own shoes from his feet and aired them out. The tall man wasted little time in picking them up and slinging them into the abyss.

For ten minutes, George watched the men from his place along the edge of the clearing, clutching the rifle and wondering at his loyalty to a white man he hardly knew. It was soon apparent that the intruders had no intention of leaving. The two strangers surveyed the canyon in every direction, scratching their beards, shaking their heads, carving out invisible lines in the air. They stopped to smoke, and the lanky
one produced a flask from his hip pocket. He took two sips and was about to take a third before the stubby one wrested it from him.

Kneeling in the brush, George’s foot began falling asleep, and he grew impatient with watching. The flask of whiskey became a source of contention between the two men, who wrangled for control of it. The tall one managed to maintain possession of the flask and held it above his head, well out of reach of the little man, who jumped up and down like a terrier trying to reach it.

George leveled his rifle, took aim above their heads, and squeezed off a round. The shell struck the cabin a foot above the tall man’s head and rained splinters down on him. Before either of the thieves could snatch up their rifles, George squeezed off another round, which sent the men scrambling for cover.

He had them pinned in the cabin and made a deliberate approach, fishing for shells in his pants pocket as he came. When he reached the stoop, he tossed their rifles aside and ordered them out of the cabin. They complied with their hands out in front of them. The short one came first with snot in his beard. The tall one was still clutching the flask.

“We wasn’t plannin’ on nothing,” the short one said.

“Shut up,” the tall one said.

George shepherded them down the stoop and half way across the clearing before the tall one made a break for the woods. George leveled his rifle and took aim between the shoulder blades of the running man, who kept his arms in the air even as he fled. George fingered the trigger but did not fire. The barefoot man soon broke after his companion, and George lowered his rifle.

A few minutes later, Ethan and Jacob, still huffing from their clambering ascent of the gorge, came upon two bearded strangers a half mile from the homestead. They were seated shoulder to shoulder on a downed portion of cedar at the foot of a snag. They had no packs or rifles. The short one was barefoot.

JANUARY
1890

Had Doc Newnham not commented on the foolhardiness of the Mather expedition during his house call that morning, as he prodded Minerva with all manner of shiny instruments, James Mather might have been the furthest thing from Eva’s mind.

“Shouldn’t be surprised if they’re all dead of pneumonia by now. That is, if they haven’t starved to death,” said Newnham, donning his stethoscope. “I spoke with the man myself — this Mather, I mean — not three days after his arrival. He had me remove some sutures from his thumb. Said he stitched them himself. Hmph. Well, it was my opinion that the man was arrogant. At the very least naive.”

The thought of Mather out there fighting for his life in the belly of the wilderness caused nothing to thrill in Eva. Her face, which had grown pale and thin, did not color at the mention of his name, her eyes, rimmed with dark crescents, did not light up. Hardly was her curiosity aroused. Whatever crude thing she may have felt for James Mather had long since been swallowed by the darkness. Neither did the thought of Ethan or her brother offer Eva any light. Nothing had moved her in two weeks. Winter seemed to get gloomier by the day. Eva found herself fighting a heaviness of heart and limb unlike anything she’d ever known. Sometimes the child would wail for half an hour before Eva could summon the will to climb out of bed in the morning. She’d been to town only once in two weeks’ time. Hoko came for the laundry and to tend to the baby twice a week. What little time Eva could steal from the child, she spent not writing or reading or painting, but sitting in a dull stupor.

“Arrogance seems to be epidemic in these parts,” pursued Newnham. “What do you suppose Washington, D.C., is going to say when they find out these squatters have broken the reserve? Do you suppose
Little Ben is just going to stand by and watch as a bunch of rubes and rustics carve up his billion-dollar country? Do you think his benefactors will allow such a thing to happen? I hardly think so. And what about the arrogance right here in this colony? Printing your own money! Ha! Turning your back on the great republic. This place is no longer some distant frontier, it’s to be a state, and it shall have order, you’ll see.”

Minerva, with her intermittent cough, raspy breathing, and snotencrusted nose, suffered, according to Newnham, from a common cold.

“Steam inhalation daily,” prescribed Newnham, clasping his bag shut. “A few drops of camphor in a warm bottle nightly. And keep her away from that Chinese devil.”

Newnham secretly believed that the child’s coldlike symptoms were not due to wet feet or a winter chill but were extensions of a maternal neurosis. He had noted in a previous visit that the young mother neither wore a wedding band nor doted on the girl physically. It was true. Eva was no doting mother. Though she exercised the utmost patience in serving the child’s needs, her approach was in no way effusive. She did not tickle Minerva’s belly, nor marvel at her soft skin and tiny fingers or the cherubic roundness of her face. Eva told herself that she no longer resented the child, in spite of all she’d been forced to abandon in the name of Minerva: her independence, her professional life, her vitality. Likewise, she told herself that she didn’t begrudge the child for everything she’d been forced to endure: scabbed nipples and swollen feet and the constant state of servitude. But worse still were the hours without Minerva, when she had no purpose at all to move her, those horrible interminable hours spent by the window, gazing out at the snow, aching dully from the inside out, until Eva felt herself sinking into a dark morass of loneliness and apathy out of which she was powerless to see.