Astray: Stories Page 6

  They all think him a cheerful character: the other fellows in the shop, his Frenchie landlady, and before that, the farmers he lodged with in exchange for kitchen work, down by the Great Falls. Henry Johnson cultivates a reputation for cheer. The way he sees it, it is only civil to Providence to seem grateful.

  It would surprise him to be told that he is eaten up with anger. Or rather, that anger serves Henry, devours whatever stands in his way: tiredness, inertia, despair, and loneliness. Plowing though six-foot snowdrifts, anger has burned in his gut and kept him warm, or warm enough to keep walking anyway.

  Henry credits Providence with bringing him so far, but it could be that it was anger that did it, anger that dragged him away from Antrim in the first place. Anger has carried him halfway across the world; he hopes to seed a little patch of the soil of this vast country with it.

  Something is burning in his guts now. His fingertips ache; he presses them against the wall outside the shop where he should be serving customers. He fixes his thoughts on Jane; everything will be ordinary again the minute she disembarks. Lying in Carrickfergus gaol, he used to conjure her up in the shadows: her stiff apron, her sandy hair coming out of its net, her huge laugh. Dear Henery. I hope your not reflecting on the past but always looking forward.

  His letters make casual mention of six weeks walk and five hundred miles. Some of the places he writes of or from have a familiar ring—Lucan, Hamilton, New London, where Jane’s sisters are—but others are like strange fruit in her mouth: Niagara, Montréal. Québec is her destination, but she had no idea how to pronounce it until she asked the clergyman on the opposite bunk. All she knows of this new world is words scattered on a page.

  The river is beginning to narrow around the ship. Jane stares at the green hills, the fields dotted with cottages and the occasional spire that hooks the light. I felt almost as if I was getting home again, Henry wrote in an early letter. But other times the strangeness of the place shows through his lines. He speaks of vast waterfalls, Indians, juice leaking from the trees. He assures her they need bow to no one in this country: The Servant eats at the Same table with his master. But on the outside of one envelope he scrawls, Bring the gun.

  The afternoon has dimmed around him and still Henry cannot move from the back wall. He has never felt this queasy since the days when he used to be a drinker.

  There is doubt in his wife’s letters, tucked between the lines of devotion. Jane reports that his mother hopes he will come back to the old country; that her parents advise her not to make the crossing yet; that she only wishes he had found a permanent job and could send money. She offers with one hand and takes back with the other. If you fall into your mind and would wish me to go to you I will, let the end be what it may.

  He turns and is sick into a bush. Its dark leaves quiver. Some foreign species; he doesn’t know its name.

  Wringing out the children’s rags in a bucket of seawater, Jane tries to imagine the country ahead of her. The ship sways, and brown water slops from the bucket onto her skirt. She wants to howl. But she will go up on deck and let it dry in the sun, then brush the worst of it out. She has no time to be weak. She is resolved not to be a burden. What is she bringing Henry, if not a capacity for endurance?

  The hard fact is, she needs him more than he needs her. For the past year, he has been an adventurer; she has been paralyzed, a wife without a husband. Sometimes she hates Henry for going on ahead, for being able and willing to do without her in a strange land. But this is how Jane knows her kin, by an occasional flash of a resentment so intimate that she never feels it for outsiders: the maddening itch of the ties that bind.

  Henry wipes his sour mouth on the handkerchief Jane embroidered for him two Christmases ago. He leafs through the worn letters for some magic phrase to calm him. But what his eyes light on is You might write to me far oftener than you do. Can she imagine what it is like to be here so many thousand miles from home, with no one to offer him a cup of tea or a word of sympathy?

  The hard fact is, he needs her more than she needs him. He suspects Jane of enjoying her new independence; more and more, she writes to him after making decisions, not before. Anger swells in his throat now; he can taste gall all the way down. But he recognizes this rage as a symptom of distance, the lengths love has to go to, the tautness of a marriage stretched like a tendon across a wide ocean. It costs them one and fourpence, paid in advance, to send each page.

  The children are clamoring for some biscuit, despite the weevils. She has none, but she tells herself it will not kill them to wait just one more day. Jane squats down and holds them tightly round their waists, as if to squeeze the hunger pangs away. Alex and Mary both have her pale red hair; their three heads like a litter of foxes.

  Across the deck she sees those two women who came on at Liverpool, clinging to each other mutely as if they expect to be washed overboard at any moment. One of them bends over the water to be sick; the other one waits with a cloth to wipe her mouth. Jane envies them each other. She is so weary of the feel of children, even her own beloved children; she wants a shoulder high enough to lean on, arms as hard as her own.

  Henry has told his boss he is too sick to work, and now he is trying to walk back to his lodgings. He bends and retches onto the dusty ground as if voiding himself of thirteen months of self-pity. A passing lady withdraws her skirts. A priest tells him, in broken English, to go home. Henry is too weak to answer. He lets his head hang, and skims Jane’s letters through blurred eyes.

  Excuse bad writing and inditing, she wrote, as if every word were not a gift.

  Henry averts his face from the page and throws up again, though there is little left but bitter air. If he purges himself of all his past errors, maybe there will be space for happiness to come flooding in.

  His bowels have begun to churn. He tries to run. When shit sprays into his breeches and he doubles over, he is ashamed. But no one is paying him any attention; those who rush by are on business of their own. The streets are beginning to darken. Henry tucks the letters into his shirt and pulls his braces and trousers down, squatting to empty his bowels on the cracked ground. Pain spears him: the dark water keeps exploding. His solid flesh has become a bag of filth.

  At some point he fastens up his trousers for decency, for some kind of containment, and staggers down the street. But the cramps bend him in two, like low blows from an invisible enemy.

  Twilight finds him lying in a puddle of his own fluids, too weak to excuse himself when a woman stoops over him. She backs away, shouting something in French. He thinks he recognizes the word for anger. Who is angry? Then the woman shouts it again, and he recognizes the word like his own name.

  As the light fades, Alex chatters of hunters and bears; Mary kicks at the railings and wriggles as if she wants to slip through into the sea. You and them has never once been out of my mind and heart since I left you: that is from Jane’s favorite of the letters. She has taught the girl to say Dida, the first name Jane knew for her own father. Mary has no idea what the word means, and plays with the sound as a bird would. Neither child is old enough to understand that they have left the only country they have ever known, to settle in a new one. They will be Canadians; Jane mouths the word to herself. It is not a matter of choice. What choice have any of them made, when all they know is what they are running from, when Henry with his exasperating enthusiasm is leading them into the dark?

  Cholera, that’s what the woman said. Henry nods slightly. He is folded into a hospital bed like a leaf pressed in a book. The diarrhea is finished, and so is the vomiting; he has nothing left to offer up. He has given every drop in his body to this alien soil.

  Cholera, anger made flesh, the dull burning fuse in the guts, the bile spewing through the bodies of those who stay and those who go. A disease familiar to those who are herded from country to country, from city to city.

  This ward is filling up; the nurses run like messengers bearing secrets. Each new arrival is doled out forty drops of laudanum. He
nry can tell, by looking at the cadaverous faces around him, that his cheeks are concave, his eyeballs are sinking in their sockets, and he too has taken on a blue tinge, as if they are all part of the same boiling sea.

  He closes his eyes. He shuts his ears to the moans and retchings and convulsions all around him. In his mind, he reads fragments of letters. Our best Days are before us.

  It occurs to him for the first time that he may be dying.

  He knows he should pray. His God is unsentimental; he sits in judgment. There is no time left for Henry’s old prayer, the one he directs as much at his wife as at his Creator: make me what I have not been yet, a good and providing husband.

  At dawn on the day of arrival, Jane is up on deck again. The Riverdale has come to an enticing green island, its slopes furred with beech and ash; blue strings of smoke rise from the sheds. Grosse Isle is its name, she hears; it is where the sick must disembark. The ship pauses only long enough to set down the two gray-faced women from Liverpool. Jane watches their little boat bob toward the shore, with as much relief as compassion.

  The sun is high by the time she glimpses the walled city of Québec on the promontory, pushing into the river like a sentry’s gun. The fiction on which she has lived for a year is about to come true. At the sight of its towers, Jane lets out a small moan. Has she not been brave long enough?

  Soon Henry will be walking beside her, lifting the children to his shoulders, pointing out landmarks. He will make up to her for all the waiting. She leafs through the letters, hungry for a sentence she remembers, the sweetness of his admission that they should never have let themselves be parted, but dont be discouraged Dear Jane.

  This morning for the first time she lets herself taste how hungry she is, lets the children see her cry. But she shakes back the tears so she can glimpse the busy docks, the ladders that will set the passengers free from their prison.

  Henry floats up from unconsciousness and wonders what Jane will do when she steps off the ship and he is not there. P.S. Dear Henry do not neglect to meet us. Which will win out, her panic or her anger? There is no letter he can write to tell her the end of the story. She will have to deduce it from his absence, interpret the suspicion in the faces of the French on the quay, read death in the yellow flags that mark the medicine stations.

  Where will she go? Surely the Emigration Agent will take pity and pay her way to New London. Henry prays his wife will come safe through the plains shaking with heat, the summer storms, the waist-deep mud of Toronto, and reach her sisters before the winter and a cold like she has never known. How long before she hears for sure that she is a widow at twenty-six? Until then, will she keep writing letters? he wonders. No, Jane is a practical woman; she would not write without an address. That is how he picked her: as a fellow traveler in a whirling world, a rock in a hard place.

  Leaning over the rails, Jane imagines the improvement; that slightly hunted look will be gone from her husband’s face. What a cocky letter he sent recently: I am 14 lbs heavier than I was when I left and I Can go into the bush and chop a log. But so much will be the same: his dark eyes, his sweep of hair, the way his hands will close around hers.

  Maybe he will have brought some food with him.

  How will she live, Henry speculates through his fog of fever? Will she and her sisters go into trade together? Or will she find some slow-moving neighbor to take on her and the children, some Irishman twice her age who will be husband and father both?

  Will she still count the days she has to live without Henry in this country?

  He will be there on the dock, for sure. Without you I will settle myself no place, he wrote in the letter that persuaded Jane to come at once, not to wait a month more, because you never knew what might happen. And Jane Dearest anything I can do Shall be done to make you happy and forgive anything wrong in the foregoing. Every letter is a promise, signed and sealed; they all end, your faithful and affectionate husband until death.

  His skin is cold and wet like a fish; the only water left in his body is on the outside. Henry licks his shoulder. He is sinking down below all human things. He is sliding into the ocean; he will not wait till her ship meets the land. He will sport around it like a dolphin, he will make her laugh louder than the gulls.

  He shuts his eyes and swims down into the darkness.

  Jane peers at the landing stage where the crowds are milling. That speck of black, standing so still, that must be him. His eyes, sharper than hers, will have marked her out already. What distances cannot be traveled by the gaze of love?

  Counting the Days

  All italicized lines are taken verbatim from the thirteen letters (May 1848–May 1849) between Henry Johnson and Jane McConnell Johnson published by their great-granddaughter Louise Wyatt in Ontario History (1948). You can find more details about the family in Wyatt’s introduction to the letters at http://ied.dippam.ac.uk/records/49618.

  On landing in July 1849—and not finding Henry—Jane and the children went on to her sister Isabella’s in London, Ontario. Confirmation of her husband’s death from cholera did not reach her for three months. Within a year, Jane married a local farmer of fifty-three, William Nettleton from Belfast; they had seven more children.

  THE YUKON

  1896

  SNOWBLIND

  They were both heading for the Yukon goldfields when they ran into each other in St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Alaskan coast. Goat (named for his yellow goatee) was a Swede, and Injun Joe was from Iowa; folk said Injun looked more than half Indian but he didn’t know if it was true. They’d both turned twenty-two that July, and it was this coincidence that convinced them to hitch up. It has to mean luck, said Goat, doesn’t it? It had to mean something.

  Both of them had put their hands to just about anything since hard times got harder round ‘ninety-three. Injun had been an apple picker, a ranch hand, a slaughterman; he’d even done a few prizefights till an Irish boy blinded his left eye. Goat had played three-card monte and thrown drunks out of a whorehouse. They were both tough as hardtack, could tote seventy pounds, and scorned a quitter. Neither knew much about prospecting except that it was all they wanted to do. Goat said he was “gold crazy,” was that the phrase? It’d only been a few years since he’d come from Sweden with eighty-five cents in his pocket. His English was good but he didn’t trust it. He claimed he’d take a fifteen-dollar poke of gold dust over a twenty-dollar banknote, he was sentimental that way, he just loved the sparkle of it.

  After paying for the boat ride up the Yukon, the two fellows were down to their sleeping bags, tent, and seven-odd dollars between them. But at least they’d found each other. You’d got to have a partner or you wouldn’t make it, that’s what the old-timers said. It wasn’t just that so much of gold mining took four hands, it was the risk of going off your head in the dark of winter. In Fortymile—the shack town just over the border into Canadian territory, where the two got off because Goat was sick of the tug of the boat against the current—they met a grizzled sourdough with six missing toes. He’d had a split-up back in ‘eighty-six, the two had divided their outfit fair and square, and the toeless man had left his former mate to work the claim. It was a whipsaw that did it, he said, whipsawing green logs put paid to many a friendship, because you got in a rage and couldn’t trust the other fellow was pulling his weight.

  The old sourdough asked Injun Joe if he was one of those lazy Stick Indians from the interior. Injun shook his head and said I’m from Iowa. Truth was, he would have liked knowing what he was or where he was from on his father’s side; his mother (pure Pole) had never said, and he’d stopped asking long ago.

  Fortymile was more of a camp than any kind of town—it looked like a heap of garbage washed up on the riverbank—but Injun reckoned it had all they needed, for now. Since every man in sight was a prospector, whether a veteran of Dakota, Idaho, or Colorado, or a tenderfoot like Goat and Injun, it was like being in a gang. A gang of loners, if such a thing could be. Outside, that was what they
called everything outside Fortymile.

  McQuesten, the storeowner, never refused credit; he boasted that no one ever starved to death here, or not unless he was too stupid to roll from his bunk and crawl into town. Injun and Goat were able to outfit themselves at McQuesten’s on a promise of payback come spring. They kitted themselves out in gumboots, mackinaws, mukluks, and the broad-brimmed hats that kept off rock splinters. (After all, Injun was down to one useful eye already.) They filled a wheelbarrow with kerosene lamps, a panning tank, a stew kettle, a saw, and a couple of short-stemmed shovels, tin plates and forks, rope and coal oil, beans, cornmeal, baking powder, lard, salt, chocolate, and tea, and on top, a fragile-looking copper scales and a phial of mercury wrapped in a handkerchief. This mountain of gear was too precarious to wheel around the wilderness, so they left most of it in the back of McQuesten’s while they went off prospecting along the creeks of the Fortymile.

  They’d pick a likely spot, spit in the can for luck, let the water wash away the mud, and peer into the bottom for the glitter. The first time they found some it had a startling greenish tinge to it. Injun let out a yelp like an injured dog, and Goat got him in a half nelson and kissed his ear.

  This was why the Yukon was the place to be, even if there hadn’t been any real big strikes yet. In some goldfields, the stuff was veined into the hard rock, and only expensive machinery could blast it out, but the Yukon gave up her treasure casually to any man who took the trouble to look for it. Placer gold—free gold, some called it—lying around in the white gravel in the form of good coarse dust or nuggets even. This first spot gave five cents’ worth of gold dust from the pan, when Injun weighed it with slightly shaking hands. The toeless fellow reckoned eight cents a pan’s a pretty good prospect, he said, but Goat laughed and said this here looked pretty good to him. He wanted to stake their claim right away; Injun had to talk him into waiting to see if they could find a richer spot. (In Fortymile, Injun had got the impression Swedes were pitied for their willingness to stake a prospect other men would dig a shit pit on.)