West of Here (23 page)

Now and again, when Krig got restless, he bought a six-pack and drove the Goat the seventeen miles down to the Dungeness spit at night, where he stood high on the bluff, with a stiff wind rocketing past his ears, and looked west, back toward the lights of Port Bonita. Across the strait, over the moonlit whitecaps, the more impressive glow of Victoria, British Columbia, was visible, foreign and resplendent on the horizon, but Krig hardly looked in that direction at all. He always looked west toward Port Bonita. He could see Ediz Hook speckled with light, he could see the hulking shadow of the Olympics, awash in darkness. He could see KFC on the east end of town. He could almost see High Tide from his place on the bluff. And whenever he looked at P.B. like that, from the outside, all lit up and full of promise, it always called him back.

“Hey, Krig.” It was Molly. “You want another, or what?”

FEBRUARY
1890

The elk and fried potatoes on which the Potato Counter had dined late that evening with Lord Jim did not sit well in the hours approaching midnight. The prospect of confronting Hoko about the boy’s future in Jamestown weighed heavily on Adam’s mind as he roosted on the edge of the bed in Lord Jim’s guest room, wrapped head to toe in coarse wool blankets. Outside the wind was blowing fiercely off of the bay, rattling the thin glass window panes with each gust and setting the flame of the kerosene lamp to dancing.

Lord Jim had hardly eaten a thing at dinner. The old man had grown increasingly distracted as the evening wore on; it was clear to Adam that the chief was conflicted about the boy.

“And what if the mother should not wish to leave her livelihood with the Siwash,
cayci
? What then?”

“Then the boy must come alone.”

“What does the boy want?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants. He’s a strange boy. He wanders. It’s a wonder he ever comes back.”

“And you are asking me to stop this wandering?”

“Yes.”

“Mm.” Lord Jim lapsed into silence. He speared a square of potato but did not bring it to his mouth; rather, he spun it on his fork and set it back down on his plate next to the others. “What is it, do you suppose,
cayci,
that sets the boy to wandering?”

“He doesn’t know any better.”

“I see,” said Lord Jim, though he knew this was not true. A thing acts according to its nature; that is the way it has always been. Everything knows better. “And who is the boy’s father?”

Adam shot a quick glance out the window. “He doesn’t have one.”

“Everybody has one,
cayci.
”

“His father was lost upriver in a storm.”

“This is true?”

“It’s not important.”

“And what is important,
cayci
?”

“That the boy be looked after.”

Lord Jim retreated once more into silence.

“I will pay for his keep,” pursued Adam. “And for the mother’s, should she consent to come.”

But lying on his back in bed, Adam knew Hoko would never consent to come; he knew she would fight him bitterly, and the knowledge made him restless. He stood and gathered his clothing off the straight-back chair. He dressed deliberately, as though the act of dressing might make his clothing warmer, fastening each button with care, tucking wherever possible. Bundled up, Adam stole quietly down the hallway to the back door, which creaked on its hinges as he opened it against the wind. Squeezing through a narrow opening, Adam passed through and padded down the wooden steps into the night.

The wind was whistling between the row of darkened houses. The scene was perfectly desolate, more desolate somehow than if the little houses had not been there at all. Adam turned his fur collar up against the biting wind and trudged in darkness toward the shoreline. The snow had not stuck to the shoreline, and Adam felt himself drawn to the water’s edge, where he stood, face to the wind. Looking out over the choppy water, he could see the light of a distant steamer bobbing on its westward journey.

What if his life had taken a different path? What if he’d made different decisions, the ones he now knew to be the right decisions? Perhaps he would not be standing alone on the edge of the world at this moment but snug in bed with Hoko’s warmth pressed up against him, perhaps he would know then the fullness of belonging: a hearth, a vegetable garden, and a boy he could call a son. Why had he allowed his father to influence these decisions? What was it that he so feared about his father? He held in contempt so much of what he stood for, and fought for, and yet Adam forever decided in life as though he had
meant to please his father. And for this reason, though perhaps not this reason alone, Adam did not feel the fullness of belonging but the sting of an icy wind cutting his face like daggers.

The first time Adam laid eyes on Hoko, she was hardly more than a child, with a broad smooth face and downcast eyes. She moved with the thoughtless grace of a child, murmured softly to her cohorts, grinning like a child, as by dim light her slim fingers worked strings of coarse cedar bark into something resembling cloth. And yet she was a woman, lithe and sure like a woman, smiling knowingly like a woman.

Adam was little more than a young man himself, collecting data for the Census Bureau, a job his father had finagled him in spite of Adam’s short list of qualifications. He wore the beard of a man, spoke in the low authoritative tones of a man, clutching his leather case like a man. But inside he was waiting to be found out like a boy. The man-boy spent the better part of a week sitting in the acrid blue haze of the longhouse on the bank of the Elwha, questioning the Siwash as to their numbers, quantifying everything under the sun — pigs and acres and salmon and death — an act that the Siwash could not be made to comprehend.

“What good is all your counting for my people?” Hoko’s father had demanded. “By counting you only make the world smaller.”

Adam felt the young girl’s eyes on him throughout his stay, and on those occasions when he looked back at her, she invariably bowed her head, not in shyness, it occurred to him, but in deference. The more Adam felt Hoko’s eyes upon him, the more he yearned to look back, an impulse that was not lost on her father, who was anything but pleased — indeed, no more pleased than Adam’s father might have been.

“I have only one daughter,” he said. “Mark that in your books.”

ON THE FOURTH
day, the Potato Counter left one of his slim leather books on the dirt floor beneath a bench in the longhouse. Nobody noticed when Hoko secreted the book away beneath her blanket. And
nobody noticed when she took leave of the longhouse early in the chill evening, clutching the book flat against her stomach. Though she had little interest in the book itself — did not in fact so much as open it while it was in her possession — she had seized it reflexively, without a thought. She knew already what populated its pages, for she’d watched for several days as the Potato Counter made his notations — numbers, the language of the white man’s stories. He asked questions and turned answers into numbers. Because numbers, he believed, were incapable of deception.

Hoko did not understand her intense curiosity regarding the Potato Counter, because it was new and came to her not through her mind but up through her body like a fountain.

Why had she taken pains by the river to rinse her face and tie her hair back and don the silver bracelet that had once belonged to her mother? What was it about the Potato Counter that stirred her so? Was it something he was — clear-eyed, sober, ruggedly handsome, perhaps? Aloof, unfeeling, distant. All she knew for certain was that she felt herself pulled toward him, as sure as if she’d been caught in a current.

At the Olympic Hotel, the desk man could not persuade Hoko to leave Adam’s leather book in the clerk’s charge. She was thus directed up the stairs to the second floor, where, at the end of the hall, she knocked on the door. Clearly, the Potato Counter had not been expecting anyone, particularly not a female caller, for he was shirtless and clutching a washcloth when he opened the door. He hastily retreated from the open door, where, out of sight, he wrestled a shirt on, and then beckoned the girl to step inside. When she entered the room, Adam was buttoning his shirt, with his face to the window. The room was empty but for the bed and a small end table, on which a tiny puddle was forming from the washcloth that dangled over the lip of a ceramic basin.

Buttoned up, Adam turned to face the girl, who looked more like a woman in the early evening light of the window than she had in the dull confines of the longhouse.

“I’m Hoko,” she said. “Like the river.”

“You’ve brought my book, I see. I hadn’t even missed it. And here I’m supposed to be collecting information, not losing it.”

She was gazing steadily at him now, and Adam could not withstand the power of her gaze. His eyes sought refuge in various corners of the room, as though he were looking for something, and indeed he wished he’d had something to offer her — a sweet, a biscuit, a cup of tea.

“Would you like to sit down?” Then, realizing that there wasn’t a chair, he smiled sheepishly. “Hm. Well. Homey, isn’t it? You could …”

Hoko perched on the foot of the bed with her hands in her lap, watching him silently, as Adam began to move without purpose about the room. Finally, he decided he was looking for somewhere to set the book and dropped it on the bed. He could feel her eyes upon him all the while.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat beside her on the bed.

“Look here,” she said.

When he leveled his unsteady gaze at her, she set her hand against his unshaven face.

“You should go,” he said, regaining his feet.

She stood without taking her eyes off of him.

“Go on,” he said.

But the moment she was gone he ached for her in spite of himself, so much so that he felt himself growing beneath his denim trousers, and he admonished himself for this.

Now, standing on the shoreline at Jamestown, sleepless and all but shivering as the cold wind cut him to ribbons, it occurred to Adam in retrospect that he had always held Hoko accountable for everything that had later transpired between them; had Hoko not forced him time and again to reject her advances, he would not have grown progressively frustrated by these temptations, would not have let his frustration harden into something akin to hatred.

When Adam turned toward the little village of Jamestown, he could see the lamplight still burning in the window of Lord Jim’s house.

FEBRUARY
1890

For nearly two weeks after their raft excursion had met its abrupt and disastrous end, the beleaguered Mather party contended with wet, heavy snow along their overland route. The elements proved to be a much bigger obstacle than the terrain itself. Though the hills were heavily buttressed and growing steeper along their upriver course, the Elwha valley continued to offer relatively wide passage. The country was still thickly wooded, but the understory had grown somewhat sparse, and the brittle vegetation offered little resistance against machete, ax, and boot. The slushy snow played havoc with their snowshoes. Further complicating their travels was the loss of Daisy. Down to one mule, the men traveled heavy in the shadow of their packs, forced to drag with ropes what Dolly couldn’t bear.

But all was not somber at the end of each day. Supper, no matter how paltry, along with the comfort of a crackling fire, never failed to lift the party’s spirits, if only a little. Layers of leather and wool were shed, clothing was strung on lines to dry, aching backs were stretched and rested, bare toes wiggled in the firelight as the men dined on bacon grease and flour and a precious bit of meat. And they talked as men will talk, of exploits and dreams and even small defeats. However, it was generally but never verbally agreed upon that conversation should not veer toward the home fires, and so each man’s domestic longings remained in isolation but were expressed without words — by silence, distraction, long looks into the fire.

In the art of conversation, Cunningham leaned heavily on his medical exploits in Tacoma: bullet wounds and shattered legs, two cases of typhoid, one emergency appendectomy performed on a bandstand amid an electrical storm, goiters the size of cantaloupes. Mather, for
his part, told frequently of his formidable Canadian adventures, including the Riel Rebellion, in which Mather had narrowly escaped the Frog Lake Massacre.

Runnells continued to confirm his status as a man of few words, content to whittle sticks and organize stores, now and then assenting or dissenting with a grunt or a guffaw. Reese, meanwhile, proved increasingly preoccupied with the mule, by whom he began to station himself at mealtime, and whom was frequently in recent days — to the silent disapproval of the other men — the recipient of his supper scraps.

Haywood’s silence was generally understood. While Mather might have led them, Haywood in large part directed them. More than anyone, Haywood observed, not only in the geological details that were his charge but also in the subtle underpinnings of the party’s morale, the direction of the wind, the state of supplies, along with any and all signs of the promised land. Though he was usually scribbling in his journal — mapping, logging, musing — Haywood remained at attention around the fire, at times offering perfunctory commentary, even as he mapped and logged, but rarely initiating conversation.

“Now
those
were mountains, gentleman,” Mather said one evening. “
These
are merely hills, bumps, trifles. Ask Haywood about the Rockies. Charlie, how big were the Rockies?”

All eyes turned to Haywood.

“They get bigger every year,” Haywood observed wryly, without looking up from his pad.

“There, you see. And so will these mountains,” said Mather. “That’s a promise. All of this will get bigger. Whatever we put behind us in this wilderness, gentleman, will get bigger and tougher with each passing year. That’s how it works. Take it from me.”