West of Here (8 page)

A team of six horses strained north down Front Street, heads down, shoulders slick with sweat, their nostrils huffing white plumes of protest against the cold air as they inched their way forward past the druggist’s. A huge length of fresh timber carved a furrow of mud and manure in their wake. Two doors down, the postmaster flipped his shingle and locked his door for the lunch hour. Gertie knew his lunch would include a visit to the Belvedere, specifically a visit to Peaches, the new girl who had taken to whoring like she was born to it.

Out of the dry goods doorway strode a strange haughty creature, a practically dressed women, very pregnant, who seemed to be in a hurry, trailing cornmeal from a ruptured sack.

“Looks as though you’re leakin’, ma’am,” said Gertie.

“Pardon me?”

“Looks like your sack went and sprung a leak. There, near the bottom.”

When the woman still failed to react to this information, Gertie wrested the bag from a startled Eva, turning it over on end, and handed it back with the breach on top, at which point Eva finally grasped the situation.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Which way you headed?” said Gertie.

“I’m quite all right,” insisted Eva.

“I can see that. I only asked which way you’re headed.”

“Toward the commonwealth.”

“Mind if I join you halfway?”

“I suppose not,” said Eva. In fact, Eva was pleased to be distracted from the knowledge that she’d secretly come to town not for cornmeal but with hopes of seeing James Mather before the expedition set out.

“So,” said Gertie. “You folks really a bunch of crackpots over there?”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t think either way. But that’s what I hear. Whole town says as much.”

“Tell me, Miss … ?”

“Gertie McGrew.”

“Tell me then, Miss McGrew. Am I a crackpot to believe in my own dignity?”

“Some might say. In my trade, anyway.”

“Am I mad to believe that every American ought to have the opportunity of liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That the wealth of this young country should be dispersed somewhat evenly without regard to birth or entitlement or sex? Am I mad to believe that a woman can do anything a man can do?”

“I’d say you’re mad on that count, most definitely.”

“Hmph,” said Eva. “Spoken like a woman who makes a living debasing herself.”

“Well now, I may be debased, but don’t get the idea for one minute that I’m doing it to myself, your highness. And as for a woman being able to do anything a man can do, I’ll just say I haven’t met a woman yet who could live three weeks without bathin’ herself. And I haven’t found one yet that delights in killin’ small things like a man does.”

“I suppose there’s some truth to that.” Eva stopped and offered a handshake. “I’m Eva Lambert. Pleased to meet you, Gertie.”

“Likewise, Miss Lambert.”

“Do call me Eva. Won’t you join me for a tour of the colony?”

“I’m afraid Hogback is as far as I go, Miss Lambert. I’m due to be debased again any minute now.”

“You treat it as though it were your calling.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m good at it.” It occurred to Gertie that Eva would probably make a hell of a whore, too, if she’d ever let her hair down and put all that willfulness to some use. “Well, then, I best be getting along.”

“If you should ever change your mind and find yourself in the commonwealth,” said Eva. “Mine is the door with the wreath.”

“I’ll certainly keep it in mind, Miss Lambert.”

“Eva.”

Gertie turned, lifted the hem of her dress, and took three steps toward the Belvedere before Eva beckoned her once more.

“There’s always room at the commonwealth, Gertie.”

Gertie thought about telling her that there was always room at the whorehouse but checked herself. “I’ll keep that in mind, Miss Lambert.”

JANUARY
1890

Long before
Old Anderson
came huffing and puffing around the spit into Port Bonita, Jacob Lambert had surrendered his steak and egg breakfast to the straits. His stomach was still mutinous, along with his general outlook, as he set foot on Morse Dock, and gazed upon the ragged settlement laid out in front of him. Unlike so many hopeful young men preceding him, Lambert saw no potential in any of it. A beach littered with savages huddling around fires. A muddy hill bristling with stumps. A cluster of oversized tool sheds, some of them on stilts, emblazoned with crude signs, masquerading as commerce. Not a brick building or a gas lamp among them. And all of it hemmed in by an impenetrable wilderness. He could scarcely wait to leave.

Front Street did little to elevate his opinion of Port Bonita. He did not venture to lay a gloved hand on the rail, as he crossed the board-walk. He raised his pressed pant legs and walked gingerly over the muddy hogback, not once losing his footing. But for a little mud on the toes of his shoes, he arrived on the far side none the worse for wear. He knew exactly where to go. Everything was oriented precisely as Eva had described it in her letters. And yet all of it was so much less than she described. Nobody was more susceptible to delusion than the ideologue. Who, but a Utopian, could turn mud into mana?

For the second time in a week, Eva found herself unpleasantly surprised by a caller as she opened the door to reveal her older brother, Jacob, brow deeply furrowed beneath the brim of his bowler. He stepped past her into the cramped foyer before she could say a word, and took a cursory look around. “Pack your trunks,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

“You’re doing no such thing.”

He grabbed her about the soft part of her arm.

She gave a cry and yanked her arm free and began immediately to rub the smarting area.

“Pack your trunks,” he said. “I won’t argue, and neither will you. I’ll warn you not to defy me, Eva. I’m in a foul mood. I fully intend to be home within the month, so you haven’t time to mount a resistance. Father has gone to great expense to —”

“And what are you? Father’s new man?”

“I’m your brother. Now, get a move on. There’s nothing to discuss, here, Eva. You’ve had your little Utopian vacation, and I’m taking you home. Don’t be a fool.” When he noticed that Eva was on the verge of tears, his manner softened. “Oh, Eva, be reasonable. This is no place for a child, and you know it. Let go of all this Haymarket Square nonsense, and come back to Chicago. You can’t very well spend your life painting seascapes and wallowing in the mud. Look around you. You need proper medical facilities. Now, I’ve been three weeks coming to get you; I’ve had much unpleasantness along my way, including fisticuffs with your young suitor Thornburgh in Seattle, and frankly, I’m just about out of —”

“I won’t go, Jacob,” she proclaimed, wiping her eyes. “I don’t care what anybody else wants. This is what I want.”

“And what exactly
is
this, Eva? No proper road, no electricity, no bank, no school, no —”

“There’s a school,” she said. “And there’s a
newspaper,
Jacob! How can you fail to see the significance in that?”

“A month ago you said your commonworth was a failure.”

“Common
wealth.
”

“You said they’d oversold the idea, that the people in town were unfriendly, that they deplored the colonists, that the weather was insufferable, and suddenly —”

“Well, I changed my mind, Jacob! I’m entitled to that!”

“You’re entitled to a lot
more
than that! And damn it, it’s time you start taking advantage of it instead of squandering every opportunity presented to you.”

“I’ll make my own opportunities, thank you very much. I’m perfectly capable of —”

“Of what? Look at the fine mess you’ve made of things! Pregnant, no husband, no father, living in a —”

“There
is
a father.”

“Oh, dear God, Eva, stop this nonsense, right now. That scoundrel is no more worthy of you than this place is wor —”

Suddenly, Eva cried out, her eyes as big as saucers.

“What is it?”

Eva clutched her belly and cried out again.

“Good Lord,” said Jacob, searching madly about the foyer for he knew not what.

WEARY OF VENISON
, Ethan was squatting by the fire at dusk in the shadow of his roofless cabin, frying a sockeye in a skillet, when he was startled by a voice.

“Hello again.”

Ethan spun around to discover Indian George standing three feet behind him on the bluff. The old Indian looked clownish in his ill-fitting white man clothes. He wore a high-buttoned waist coat, ten years out of fashion, and a shapeless felt hat atop his head. There was a dirty yellow bandanna tied loosely about his neck.

“Sorry,” said George.

“Lordy,” sighed Ethan. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you coming.”

“I tried to whistle,” said George, who attempted once more without success. “The air won’t sing for me.”

“How did you find me?”

“A white man is not so hard to track.”

Ethan finessed the skillet with his good hand. “Well, you’re just in time for dinner.”

George could not bring himself to look at the salmon; the thought of it made him queasy. “I ate already, thank you.” He squatted by the fire, but when he was confronted by the pungent odor of the fish rising from the skillet, he sidled back a few feet. “Your thumb is no good,” he observed.

“Crushed it,” said Ethan.

“Ah.” The old Indian surveyed the little valley in the waning light. Beyond the foothills, the peaks of the divide were socked in by dark cloud cover. More heavy snow was imminent. George had visited this very spot as recently as high summer, when the evening hours were filled with the ghostly trilling of marmots and the tin whistle of thrushes from across the canyon.

“What brings you up here, George?”

“Postmaster sent word. It’s your woman. Her time has come.”

Ethan dropped the skillet and practically leapt to his feet.

“Sit,” said George. “We’re out of day. We’ll have to wait for morning.”

“But we can’t wait! I have to be there!”

George broke into a craggy smile. “Not really, you don’t.”

Thus began the longest night of Ethan Thornburgh’s life. Oblivious of Ethan’s hand-wringing preoccupation, or perhaps because of it, George talked incessantly throughout the ordeal. Ethan had never heard an Indian talk at such length. His voice flowed as constant and steady as the Elwha. He sung the praises of sourdough bread endlessly, complained about the preponderance of salmon glutting the Elwha, wondered aloud as to the origins of the
first
sourdough bread, inquired as to whether Ethan happened to know where he might acquire some different
varieties
of sourdough bread, and just when it seemed he’d exhausted the subject altogether, Indian George pulled a half loaf of sourdough from his coat pocket and commenced eating it pinch by pinch. But even the tough, impossibly dry bread could not slow the river of his voice.

And all the while, as George’s voice sounded in the night, punctuated intermittently by the popping of the fire, Ethan’s thoughts raced and bounded in his head. He shifted restlessly on his haunches. Morning seemed so remote that it would never arrive. He ached to be in town with Eva. His only comfort was the knowledge that all the parts of his new life were fitting perfectly into place, engaging harmoniously as though by some process of mechanization: Eva, Ethan Jr., all the blessings that were due to him as a man. In those moments when his mind took firm hold of this idea, he sunk into a sort of reverie. And it was during one of these reveries that Ethan was struck
as though by lightning with the single greatest idea of his life, the one idea among all those scribbled notes and tossed off scratchings that would prove the key to unlocking his future. What serendipity, what power of fate was this at work, that he had only to stumble upon his destiny, had only to wade through a swamp in his undershorts, to claim this canyon without even knowing why, to squat on it and daydream until the moment arrived when its purpose was delivered to him? The heat of inspiration suffused his whole body.

Indian George stopped talking when he saw Ethan climb mechanically to his feet and proceed, as though in a trance, to the edge of the chasm, where he stood looking down at the dark restless form of the river rushing through the canyon. And after a moment, Ethan began to laugh, a big hearty gregarious laughter that wracked his body and filled the night. The laughter of a god smitten with his creation. And Indian George began to laugh, too, not even knowing the source of his own mirth.

THOMAS STOOD JUST
inside the door of Adam’s sparse little room at the Olympic. His cheek had only recently stopped stinging from the slap his mother had issued him upon his return from the hills.

“Go to the Potato Counter,” she’d told him. “He’s at the Olympic.”

With a bittersweet hard candy lodged between his cheek and gum, Thomas’s lips set silently to work over the handwritten columns inside the leather bound book. Adam went about the business of packing his open bag on the bed, now and again sneaking a sidelong glance at the boy. The twitches were getting worse. They were coming in fits. Adam observed a new strangeness in the boy. He seemed at once closer and further away. His expressions were less benign, sharper. He was lean and spindly and round-faced as ever, but there was something in his bearing that suggested manhood.

Some of the handwriting was slanty, and some of it was in a loopy hand, and the columns were uneven, which Thomas liked, but not too uneven, and the feel of the leather spine was smooth and cool in his hands. He did not like the columns with the numbers, the way
the fours were too different to have the same meaning, and how all of the numbers kept changing their meaning, how they didn’t really mean anything until they were attached to something else. And he didn’t like the way that some of the zeros didn’t connect. He liked the ink blots, but not the ones touching the letters or numbers that didn’t come first, and not the ones at the top of zeros. Thomas liked the words better than the numbers. They were even less exact than the numbers, but they told better stories than the numbers, which could only go up or down.