Authors: Lynn D'urso

Heartbroke Bay (31 page)

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay

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Progress is slow over the faint trail, and Hans requires frequent stops. Though the autumn cycle of frost and storm has thinned the brush, rendering the path more visible than when they followed it, bewildered and directionless, behind Negook, it frequently pales, drifts, and disappears into jumbled windfalls, where they are forced to cast about among fallen trees and thick alder until finding it again.

By noon the sky has turned the color of ashes, and only a pale, colorless light blots through the clouds. Cold sleet begins to fall, stinging their faces and hands. Only Hannah has gloves, and her skirts billow in the wind, pressing themselves against her legs. After months of manual labor, everyone’s clothing is ragged and patched, and the soles of their boots have grown thin. They look like a lost tribe of peasants, struggling along with their wounded, and the only sign of the wealth they carry is the weight of the packs that strain their shoulders.

The wind builds until by evening the miners stumble with fatigue and cold through a forest that sways and rattles at their passing. The sleet becomes a dry snow that blows hissing along the ground and curls about their legs in restless streams. At the junction of trail and river above the Tlingit village, Michael double-checks the load of his shotgun, mindful of the antagonism under which they last departed the settlement, then shouts an alert to the inhabitants.

“Hello, the village!” he yells. “We’ve come to hire a canoe.”

The only answer is the mistral sibilance of the wind. There is no chattering of children or barking dogs in reply. The air smells exclusively of snow; no odor of smoke comes to the miners through the belt of alder screening the longhouses from the trail.

Dutch says, “Probably all inside out of the weather,” but his voice lacks belief. The silence from the village is too complete, the quiet too intense. The air resonates with absence.

They huddle together, waiting, then Michael and Dutch shout again, “Hey, hello!” But the wind snatches and flings away their greetings. Harky shrugs and steps forward. Michael and Dutch follow. Hannah helps Hans shuffle along behind.

Dutch cups his hands to his mouth and shouts “Hello!”

“Shut up, Dutch,” says Michael. “They’re gone.” No living thing stirs among the longhouses. The village is deserted, and the cedar eyes of the totems stare down on an empty beach.

The cluster of miners comes apart, with Michael and Harky drifting down to the shore to stand at either end of the naked strand, staring out at the green and white surf. Dutch drops his pack, scuttles crabwise into the nearest longhouse, then emerges wild-eyed and frantic, sprinting toward the next. It, too, is empty, and he makes a strangled, whimpering sound. Hannah takes Hans by the arm, leading him like a child to the sheltered lee of an abandoned house, where they stand mute and stricken, consumed by the finality and completeness of their isolation.

Michael drops to one knee, staring at the empty sea. Dutch wanders in a circle through the village, crying out against his ruthless fate. Harky begins going from longhouse to longhouse, then searches each storehouse and shed, gathering bits of smoked fish, a small sack of something dried and lost, a scrap of bear hide, a bundle of twine.

The clatter of a small, dry bone rattling along the toothed jaw of a bear alerts Hannah and Hans to Negook’s presence behind them. The shaman carries the jawbone before him, stroking the teeth slowly with a rib. Dutch rushes over shouting, and Harky comes, too, bearing his small load of treasures.

“What’s happened?” asks Dutch. “Where’s everybody gone?”

Negook ignores the question, just keeps stroking the broken rhythm from his bones, staring at Michael, who comes slowly from the beach like a man approaching a gallows, until the Irishman is a few feet away. Negook casts the jaw at his feet.

“Klute-utardy tseek
.
”

Michael nudges the jawbone with his foot, touching the yellow canines with the toe of his boot, turning it slightly in the sand. Negook repeats himself. “
Klute-utardy tseek
. You killed the bear. Now the People are all gone.”

The others look to Severts, puzzled, and he lifts one shoulder in a shrug.

Hans, impatient with the shaman’s gibberish, points with his staff to the beach. “The canoes. They’re gone. We need to hire a canoe to get us back to civilization.”

Negook’s black eyes roll toward Nelson, taking in the sling around his arm and the hunched imbalance of his stance. “You’ve got a lot of gold. You should buy a boat.”

“We need food,” says Hannah. “We’re out.”

“You’ve got a lot of gold,” Negook says, his lips pulling back in a smile. “You should buy some food.”

“When will the canoes be back?” asks Dutch.

The shaman turns and shuffles away, bent and stooping as if carrying a heavy load. There is much work to do to placate Kah-Lituya, and he has no more time for fools. At the edge of the forest he pauses. “The canoes,” he says. “They will come back when it is safe. Maybe in the spring.” He shrugs his shoulders like the white men. “You should all be dead by then. When you are dead and it is safe, they will return.”

Middle (or late?) October

Our situation is desperate and growing more so every day. Michael killed a small goat and its mother this week, and we have dried and jerked the meat, but it is hardly enough to maintain our party for long. The roots of the wild celery and dark lily for which the old Indian Negook taught me to forage are readily available, but even a large serving does not seem to fill the belly and leaves one wanting. The meat of wild creatures is lean, and we crave fat. What I would give for a pound of butter or a pudding!
Hans is recovering from his injury and gets around well enough, but seems to have no strength in his arm. We worked to reinforce and sod the roof of the cabin yesterday—Oh Lord, doing so made me feel as if we shall never leave this place—and it was all he could do to lift the end of a beam. Harky suggested commandeering one of the native longhouses, but Hans and Michael argued that we are more likely to see a ship entering Lituya Bay for shelter than anywhere near the exposed coast by the village, and thus more likely to effect a rescue by staying here.

Hannah’s pen pauses as she weighs the risk of putting her next thought to paper, then shrugs. Who, besides herself, will ever see it? And if at some future date her journal is read by another, will she be alive to care?

I sometimes wonder if our circumstance is punishment for my recent actions. The affections involved are strong, but surely wrong, and I have strayed far. I consult the Good Book for guidance, but find little relief there. And the dietary restrictions of Leviticus and Deuteronomy certainly do not apply to the marooned!

The cabin is drafty and hard to heat, the appetite of the stove prodigious. With only one ax and one saw, feeding the fire all day and laying in a stack of wood for the night is a job for two men. Inadequately clothed in patches and rags, Harky and Dutch take turns supplying the stove, one outside cutting and carrying wood, while the other huddles inside near the fire, trying to get warm. Michael hunts all day and returns each evening chilled and exhausted. More often than not he is empty-handed. Hannah digs for roots and gathers what she can of berries, but the few that remain are often moldy, spoiled by the cycle of freezing and thawing that comes with the alternating rain and snow. Hans sits on lookout for a ship all day, then at night rotates with the others. Fatigue and hunger etch deep lines in their faces. The muscles of their bodies slowly give way to bone.

Harky gathers a last armload before retreating into the cabin, where he stacks the wood in a square rick at the base of the stove, then retreats to a bunk to warm himself beneath a damp blanket. Everything is wet—clothes, coats, bedding, and shoes—and as winter works its grip on the land amid unending rain and snow, the days are growing rapidly shorter. Clear sunshine is rare.

The incessant lapse and fall of the surf eats at Harky. His eyes grow dull and retreat deep into dark sockets. His shoulders are rigid with tension. He carries about him a silence that is easily mistaken for the quiet of one gnawing a grudge, which only Hannah recognizes as a mute withdrawal. She, too, finds herself reluctant to speak these days.

The miners settle into the evening amid the orange flicker and pop of the fire. The corners of the cabin are dark, the lantern unlit, the supply of lamp oil too precious to waste chasing shadows. Hans coughs outside, watching for rescue. Hannah and Dutch pick at a bucket of roots. Michael watches Hannah, hunger of another sort in his eyes.

To pass the time on his lookout beside the unlit bonfire, Hans falls into his favorite reverie, imagining the admiration of family and friends when he returns to Minnesota with his satchels of bullion.
I’ll have some fine boots made when I get to Seattle
, he tells himself, examining the worn leather on his feet.
Something in calf hide, with tooled heels
. As Hans repays his grubstake debt with a fantasy sack of nuggets dropped casually into his brother-in-law’s hand, a pale glow heaves slowly above the horizon. Sailing out of the northwest on a course for Cape Spencer, the passenger liner is already abeam of Lituya and less than a mile offshore when its broadside of dim yellow lights pierces Hans’s dream.

He stares a moment at the vessel’s advance, at the rise and fall of lights on the ocean swell, then scrambles to his feet, groping for the oil and matches. “Help! A Ship!”

The door to the cabin smashes open. Michael bursts outside, freezes at the sight of the passing ship, and is shoved stumbling as Harky bulls him aside. Hans fights the lid from the tin of oil, slinging streamers of fuel as the Texan strips the canvas from the stack of wood. Dutch comes hard behind Harky and runs to the beach, waving his arms and yelling.

Hans kneels, scratching match after match to the beacon fire; the sulfur punks and smolders against damp wood. In the dark he cannot find where the oil has wet the kindling. “Burn, damn you, burn!” He yells to Michael, “The matches are wet! Bring fire from the stove!”

Hannah emerges from the cabin holding the lit lantern above her head. Severts dashes back inside to fetch a faggot from the stove. Hans leaps to his feet, grabbing the lamp from his wife’s hand. The wick gutters and flares as he waves it in a frenzied arc.

The signal fire smolders. The distant ship shows its stern to the castaways. Its lights become a dim constellation. Michael fires the shotgun. Dutch waves his arms. Hans casts about for someone to blame.

“God damn it!” roars Harky, slamming a split of firewood to the ground. “God damn you blind piss-suckers!” He hurls another bolt into the darkness, throwing it like a curse after the retreating ship. In the shock of abandonment, Hannah realizes Harky has never used profanity in her presence without immediately apologizing.

The air in the cabin that night is thick with the smell of decay.