West of Here (28 page)

The rain had let up and the sun was darting in and out of clouds, shining silver on the wet pavement. The acid began running a cold electric finger up the boy’s rib cage and into his throat. Drifting toward the center of town, Curtis felt his eyes begin to outgrow their sockets. His stomach made a fist. The veil of reality began to take on that threadbare look, and Curtis knew that soon he would be able to see right through the fabric. He gave a shiver and fired up a Salem.

There came an instant when Curtis was coming on, when he knew he was about to relinquish his tenuous grip on the ordinary; it arrived as a ticking behind his eyeballs and a fluttering in his chest and a heartbeat in his skull. The world began to pulse with color, and invisible things began leaving their signatures all around him. And he gave into this slackening perception of the ordinary, so that he might glimpse the world underneath.

Now and again Curtis awakened in flashes and found himself in unfamiliar places — kneeling on riverbanks, riding in canoes, swimming
through darkness toward an orange glow. He walked outside of his body and saw things he could not comprehend yet somehow recognized — tiny laughing people made of forest and sunlight. He witnessed himself, shivering on the bank of a river in an animal skin rug, his skin rubbed raw, waiting for he knew not what.

APRIL
1890

Thomas slept on a straw mat at the foot of an empty bed formerly belonging to Lord Jim’s daughter, Lila, who was in turn forced to share a room with her parents across the hallway. In spite of Lord Jim’s entreaties, the boy would not sleep on the mattress and refused to sleep with anything but a goatskin rug, a state of affairs for which Lila chastised the boy endlessly. Some nights, early in spring, when the wind howling off the bay sliced through the thin walls and rattled the windowpanes, the boy awoke shivering and huddled about the flame of a candle for warmth. Other nights the boy was troubled by dreams. One dream in particular would not let him rest.

He dreamed of the Siwash standing in a field at the edge of a high bluff. It was the dead of night in the dream, and the moon cast a purple glow upon his people, who stood expressionless, as still as statues — 132 Indians in all, scattered along the edge of the bluff, with no one stationed closer to the edge than his mother, her braided hair pulled back tight, her arms at her sides, gazing hypnotically over the ledge, where a hundred feet below, a riotous sea pounded the shoreline. Behind the Siwash, the mountains reared up like shadows. Indian George stood near the boy’s mother. He was wearing a scarf over his face, like he did when he cleaned fish for market. Flanking his mother on the opposite side, Abe Charles, dressed like a white, clutching his rifle, stood stupefied. Stone Face was not far behind Abe. The pits of his face were deeper in the moonlight. He was smiling, just barely. Next to Stone Face, Small Fry, peering out of yellow eyes, was smiling, too. Farthest from the bluff’s edge, in the field of long grass, the boy’s grandfather squatted on all fours, his toothless maw wide open as though he were screaming. But the old man made
no sound. Nobody or nothing made a sound except for the waves assaulting the shoreline.

High on a hill, the Belvedere Man stood tall in the moonlight with folded arms. And looking down on the Siwash, he spat on the ground.

Four times the boy had the identical dream.

Thomas was instructed in many things at Jamestown. He was taught by Ida Hall how to milk a goat and to pin laundry on the line like a woman. By Cook Dan Solomon, he was taught how to mend a fence and shingle a roof. Begrudgingly, Lila taught the boy to lead a horse by bridle, taught him to round up chickens and pin them to a stump, and with an enthusiasm Thomas found unsettling, the girl demonstrated how to behead the hens with an ax, laughing as the headless things darted blindly and furiously about the yard.

The boy had a way with horses, a fact Lord Jim soon took note of.

“They trust you,” he told him one day, as the boy ran a hand down the gray mare’s neck and withers. “This horse is a good judge of character.”

Much to Lila’s dissatisfaction, the old man taught Thomas to ride on none other than the gray mare generally reserved for Lord Jim himself. The boy was a natural, though his style was unorthodox. He rode high in the saddle at a canter, like General Custer, with one hand clutching the saddlehorn. The mare was very responsive to the reins, although Thomas hardly made use of them. The beast anticipated the boy’s every move. Every afternoon, regardless of the weather, the boy rode the mare — through the potato fields, across the creek, into the foothills to the banks of the Dungeness, until the two were as graceful as one.

At the end of each day, the boy was tired in a way he had never been tired. He sat every evening at the table with Lord Jim and his wife, and Lila, who pinched the boy under the table and ground her heel into his bare foot. Thomas did not care for Lila with her pointy gaze and cruel laughter. She often speared food off his plate when her parents were not watching, which Thomas did not mind so much at first, as he hadn’t yet developed a taste for Jamestown food. They ate steamed turnips and potatoes and carrots. Lamb, and chicken, and more potatoes. Only infrequently did they eat fish, and hardly ever clams.

After a while, Thomas rarely thought of the Potato Counter, who
had not shown his face in Jamestown since leaving him there, and gradually Thomas felt a sense of belonging in the little village. There were no bottles in Jamestown to darken the spirits of the people, no Stone Face or Belvedere Man to threaten them. Save for an occasional stopover by carriage, there were no whites at all in the settlement. The Jamestown Klallam were different from the Siwash Klallam. Lord Jim called them sovereign, which Thomas took to mean that they were like whites. They lived as whites with their eyes trained on the future. They dressed as whites and governed themselves as whites. And like whites they counted.

The Jamestown Klallam went to church daily, congregating in the mud-spattered building at the end of the row. In spite of his initial reluctance to enter its windowless confines, Thomas grew to be comfortable in the place, grew accustomed to the bells, which rang dully and tinnily like cowbells. He enjoyed arranging the candles on the prayer table. Each day he kneeled upon a thule mat before the altar and configured the candles in a manner that was almost symmetrical. Always, he lined the crosses along the outside border, but not quite perfectly straight. And when the Shakers filed in clutching their bells, sober and calm, something happened to them in the holy light of the candles. They began to tremble like horsetails in the wind. They quivered and writhed, as the spirit coursed through them like an electric current, until the bells began to ring of their own accord. And Thomas found that he himself began to vibrate with the spirit.

Daily, Lord Jim sat Thomas down on the dusty floor at his feet and gave the boy puzzles and nettle tea to calm his perpetual fidgeting. The old man’s face looked like a plum withering on the vine. His movements were slow and deliberate. His willowy voice burbled on like a stream.

“We do not need Bibles here. The gospel does not require a book,” he told Thomas. “It is already written inside of us.” Reaching down, he set his palm on the boy’s chest and another upon his forehead. “The spirit sings inside of you. It sings in your bones. What does it say? Listen to what it says, Thomas.”

Thomas listened for the spirit, which he soon identified as the simmering thing inside of him. Lord Jim urged Thomas to contain this thing, to let it work through him, rather than consume him. The spirit wrote words on the inside of the boy’s head. Soon he began to string these words together, and the words set the boy in motion in a new way. He began thinking of things that were yet to happen, goats yet to be fed, fences yet to be mended. His wandering ways ceased. He moved about in his new world deliberately. His feet took him from one place to another, as though there existed nothing in between the two places. Even his mind, when it set to wandering, never wandered far before it arrived at some purpose. When he counted, the numbers became the things he was counting, and he no longer preferred odd numbers to even. A line was no longer a line, but a boundary, beyond which the boy was free to pass, if he pleased.

Thomas supposed that he, too, had become sovereign.

One morning, as Thomas was scattering feed for the hogs, he spotted Horatio Groves crossing a nearby potato field on foot. Thomas liked Horatio Groves more than all the Jamestown Klallam, save for his mentor, Lord Jim. Horatio often talked to Thomas as though the boy were not even there. Like Indian George.

Halfway across the field, Horatio dropped to his knees and began digging a hole in the ground with his bare hands. After several minutes, he pulled a small wooden box from the hole and dusted it off. Thomas was squatting behind the water trough now, watching intently as Horatio clutched the box close to his body and hurried on across the field, disappearing into the toolshed behind Cook Dan Solomon’s house, where he closed the door behind him. Thomas watched the shed for a good while, but Horatio Groves never reemerged.

Later in the day, Thomas walked to Cook Dan’s toolshed to satisfy his curiosity. When he pushed the slat door open on its rusty hinges, a blob of light flooded the little shed, illuminating Horatio Groves slumped in the far corner between a rusted plow and a tiny workbench, clutching a bottle to his chest.

“What are you looking at?” he said bitterly. “Shut the door.”

Thomas shut the door but not before crossing the threshold, and now he stood in total darkness with Horatio Groves.

“Don’t just stand there,” said Horatio. “Speak.”

When Thomas failed to speak after a moment, Horatio snorted. “You’re not touched by spirits. You’re just crazy.”

Never had Horatio talked to him like this. Thomas heard a swish and the gurgling of liquid as it splashed against the bottle neck.

“You’re nothing,” observed Horatio. “Just like the rest of us.”

The smell of the whiskey filled the dusty darkness.

“Get out of here,” spat Horatio. “Before I wring your neck like an old hen.”

Thomas backed up against the door, pushing it open, and this time Horatio Groves shielded his eyes from the light.

That night, the boy dreamed once again of the Siwash, but something was different. This time his people were not silent. This time Thomas heard the moans of his grandfather, lowing like a wounded bull. He heard Stone Face slurring his speech and Small Fry laughing. He heard the soft, frightened murmuring of Siwash elders gathering at the edge of the bluff.

In the night when the boy awoke shivering and huddled around the flame of his candle, one word was written larger than all the others inside his head as he stared into the flame, and that word was
ceqwewc.

“To undo the damage,” Lord Jim once instructed, “first, you must make them see.”

APRIL
1890

Six dozen strong, eager men with big appetites, twenty and thirty and fifty years old, gnashing their teeth, shouting themselves hoarse, as they carved and hammered and blasted the canyon to dust for weeks on end. Twelve and fourteen hours a day, inch by inch, they did the impossible: they moved the river. From the vantage of the rip-rap bank, standing astride boulders, Ethan watched his destiny unfold, watched as load after load of gravel came down the mountain by flat-car to fill the breach, saw it dumped into the river by the ton, until at last, on a crisp clear afternoon in early spring, flanked by a foreman and engineers, Ethan watched the debris break the waterline, and he felt his heart thrill as the river began to back up into the diversion channels, creeping toward the flood plain. And still, Ethan was restless, still he yearned for the dam itself, yearned to see its concrete bulk rising from the canyon floor, yearned to feel the surge of the giant penstocks as they inhaled the river, its turbines churning water into luminous dreams. It wasn’t enough to divert the river, or even stop it in its course; Ethan longed to see the power of the river transformed, longed to see its wild essence burning incandescent in sitting rooms and stations from Morse Dock to the east end.

And what to fuel these dreams of incandescence, if not the sweat of Port Bonitans? At what cost were dams and nations built? Money. Money for manpower and the infrastructure to support it, money for titles and acquisitions, and money to grease the wheels of fortune. Money for rails and rolling stock, money to grate inroads and clear timber, money to turn mountains into dust. Money for the great barge-mounted dredges soon to arrive from Seattle, money for concrete and the power to mix and move it. Every steel cable crisscrossing the canyon, every heavy-headed maul hammering the earth, cost
hard currency. And the money flowed, arriving invisibly from Chicago to fuel the beast, but never without strings, always burdened by demands and unreasonable expectations. Still, the money came without fail, and Ethan put it to work.

And who to keep this revenue streaming but a man of Jacob’s distinction, a Lambert and, by his very birthright, a captain of industry. Who better to see the big picture than a man from the east? Like brothers, they quarreled in the dusty light of the office, to the ceaseless accompaniment of blasting, like distant mortar fire.

“Don’t be naive, Ethan. You can hardly expect them to provide the capital and not gain by it. They’re not a bank, they’re shareholders.”

“They’re investors, Jake.”

“Precisely.”

“
We
are the investment.”

Jacob laughed. “I see. Is that how you see it? I rather think our shareholders are under the impression that a hydroelectric dam is the investment, Ethan. Or, to put it more precisely, the power that dam will one day generate.”

“They’ll get their share,” grumbled Ethan. “That’s what they paid for. But no more, I tell you. I don’t intend to let them steamroll the interests of this town. Without this town, there would be nothing to invest
in.
”