Heartbroke Bay (5 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
On the third day of their marriage, a sodden and sated Hans gives her a possessive, playful slap on her bare bottom and says, “It is time to head for Alaska, Mrs. Nelson. Time to get rich,” after which he shows her a newspaper he has saved in his luggage. A bold headline proclaims, “A Ton of Gold on Board,” above an engraving of a crowd of grinning men on the deck of a ship. Earlier in the summer the steamer had returned to Seattle from Alaska with several miners aboard, among whom was George Washington Carmack, an old sour-dough who had “dealt himself a royal flush in life” by bending to take a drink from a small tributary of the Klondike River and finding raw gold glittering in every crack of the creek bed. The latest shipment of veterans from the Klondike had disembarked in Seattle carrying satchels stuffed with more than three million dollars’ worth of bullion.
“They pitched nuggets of solid gold into the crowd!” Hans said, with something like awe. “Just tossed ’em around like they were nickels.”
Gazing at the picture of the ship and its prosperous cargo, he shook his head and said, “I aim to get my piece of that, Mrs. Nelson. I surely do.”
Dear Diary,We are bound north to the Alaska Territory. I am a bit frightened at these grand and sudden changes in my life, but have only to consider my new husband to be reassured. While certainly not the circumstances for marriage of which a young girl dreams, I am sure he will care well for me and our future is assured. As I write this, he is out to send notice of our marriage by telegraph to his family in Minnesota. When next I correspond with Poppa and Mother, it will be as Mrs. Hans Nelson, but I shall wait until we return, triumphant, from the goldfields and I am able to address the debt to Lord Hamilton. It is impossible to know what tale they will have heard of the events with Lady Hamilton, but I pray they will not judge me too harshly. My husband and I shall have the best reward, however. It will take some time and effort to realize our acquaintance, but I am sure we shall be comfortable and happy together.
In a hotel in Seattle, Hannah is bitten by a flea. The hotel, with its population of layabouts and drunken bellhops, frightens her; for hours after she discovers the insect, her skin crawls with the phantom sensation of invisible, many-legged things scratching and burrowing. She bathes in a pan of lukewarm water with a cake of hard soap that refuses to lather.
“A bit much, isn’t it, Mr. Nelson? Deplorable, really.” The marriage is too young for Hannah to find comfort in addressing her husband by his given name.
Hans, with American familiarity, has no such constraint. He swishes a razor in a pan of water, forms his mouth into an
O
to stretch the skin of his upper lip, and carefully draws the singing blade from top to bottom before answering. “I’m sorry, Hannah, but my wallet is a bit thin for anything better at the moment. My money will be better spent on tools and supplies for the goldfields, now won’t it? After all”—and he pauses to wipe the razor on a towel—“when I was borrowing the money to head for Alaska, I didn’t budget for the cost of a wife, did I?”
O
to stretch the skin of his upper lip, and carefully draws the singing blade from top to bottom before answering. “I’m sorry, Hannah, but my wallet is a bit thin for anything better at the moment. My money will be better spent on tools and supplies for the goldfields, now won’t it? After all”—and he pauses to wipe the razor on a towel—“when I was borrowing the money to head for Alaska, I didn’t budget for the cost of a wife, did I?”
Hannah does not look up from the basin of tepid water, fearing she is somehow being made responsible for their tenuous finances. With an effort to sound casual, she asks, “Our money is borrowed?” The water seems suddenly frigid, and a fatty scum floats on its surface. The idea of more debt chills her. Debtors lose everything. Margin calls and debt closed her father’s chandlery business. It puts women and children on the streets.
Equally casual, Hans wipes his face with the towel and bends to examine the shine of his smooth skin in the mirror. “Oh, yes. From my brother-in-law.”
“Right hard about it he was, too. I had to promise him a three-to-one return before the tight bastard would go along.”
A quiver flutters in Hannah’s stomach. Three to one? The word
usury
rises to her lips, and she bites it back. “How much have you . . . What is our debt?”
usury
rises to her lips, and she bites it back. “How much have you . . . What is our debt?”
Hans ignores the question and thumbs an imaginary spot from the front of his undershirt, before hoisting his galluses to his shoulders. “It hasn’t all been cream, Hannah. They kicked me out when I was sixteen.”
Whenever Hans thinks of his mother, Ula Nelson seems to loom, arms akimbo, with a look on her face hard and sharp enough to scratch glass. Widowed at a young age by an overturned reaping machine, Ula had raised Hans and one sister with the grudging help of her own widower father, a raspyvoiced old-country bastard who never lost his delight in telling Hans that such a stupid lazy boy would never have “a pot to piss in, ner a window to t’row it out of.” On his sixteenth birthday Hans had returned from a long, hot day of slitting throats and scalding hogs for a well-to-do neighbor, to find his grandfather sitting on the weathered porch, watching as his mother dropped the last of Hans’s possessions onto a meager stack in the yard.
“We can’t be feeding you no more,” was all she said, but the old man could not resist throwing in his two cents. “You kin come back when you have made somethin’ of yourself.”
Remembering, Hans bites his lower lip then swallows to clear the bitter taste of bile. “I will, too, by God. Just see if I don’t.”
There is a tremor in his voice as he mutters, “Always looking down their noses at me, just because my luck has been bad a few times over the years.”
Coming behind Hannah, he places his hands on her hips and bends close to her ear. “But now I’ve a lady for my wife. And we’ll show them, won’t we?” His nuzzling lips feel alien and intrusive as he whispers promises of the status they will have. While his hands roam, Hannah thinks of how the new homburg and fine wool suit, which had so impressed her at their first meeting, were purchased with borrowed money.
“Ah, God, Hannah. I just want . . . I want so badly to . . .” And because there is no choice but to believe, she holds his head to her breast while he makes promises to care for and cherish her.
Dear Diary,We shall have to work very hard. Poor Hans. He adores me so much—and I him, I am sure—that he sought overly hard to impress me and perhaps exaggerated his situation out of ardor. It is not the bargain I presumed to be making, but still a fine one, to be so loved, isn’t it?
Seattle is an accumulation of weathered gray buildings under a sky of the same drab shade. A rash of cobbled shops line muddy lanes, all selling the same prospectors’ things, and with prices for an ever-dwindling supply of shovels, hammers, boots, blankets, packs, and pans doubling daily, the moss-rotted boardwalks are peppered with those too poor to buy a miner’s outfit. Hans is frantic. “A few months ago, passage to Alaska cost two hundred dollars. Now the thieves booking for the steamship lines are demanding a thousand!”
The heartless triaging of humans becomes an economic filter, a merciless Carborundum that grinds away the poor and the hobbled, those less able to pay. This is also a great kindness, for those who arrived in the first waves of immigration to Alaska and the Yukon are already dying in great numbers, though the days of summer are benevolent and gentle. They disappear into crevassed glaciers, fall from crumbling precipices, or are murdered by brigands like the infamous Soapy Smith gang of Skagway. They run screaming into the endless forests, where they perish of exhaustion after losing their minds under the torment of a million mosquitoes. An appalling number commit suicide, overcome by a landscape so vast and strong that the burden of their own smallness becomes too great to bear.
A derbied huckster sells Hans and Hannah the last available bunk on the
Pegasus
, a seventy-foot harbor tug, converted rudely into service as a passenger liner. After boarding, they discover that Hannah is the only woman on board and that their berth has also been sold to a schoolteacher from California. Hannah negotiates and reasons, but Hans grows impatient and waves a work-knuckled fist until the unfortunate teacher evacuates the bunk to build a nest on the deck.
Pegasus
, a seventy-foot harbor tug, converted rudely into service as a passenger liner. After boarding, they discover that Hannah is the only woman on board and that their berth has also been sold to a schoolteacher from California. Hannah negotiates and reasons, but Hans grows impatient and waves a work-knuckled fist until the unfortunate teacher evacuates the bunk to build a nest on the deck.
Hannah leans into Hans at the bulwark, the weight of his arm pleasant across her shoulders. In the cool, moist air, the steam of her own breath twists and rises, as if her core boils with life, and together they watch the heavy mist obscure the retreating shape of the city.
Pegasus
rolls and steams through the green waters of the San Juan Islands at a subtle speed. Proper steamships overtake her, shouting of their superior bulk with insulting whistle blasts, while the captains exchange obscene gestures from their respective wheelhouse windows. Aboard the
Pegasus
, the men smoke and mingle, telling each other briefly of their previous lives and discussing at great length their strategies for obtaining riches. There are many opinions on matters of geology and minerals, and the smoothly planed wood of the galley table is soon covered in penciled designs that a new-comer might take to be engines of war, instruments meant for storming castles or raining a shower of boulders down upon approaching ships, but which instead describe wash-boards, sluice boxes, and odd, hieroglyphic machines for crushing stones. Hannah observes that among the would-be prospectors it is the most poorly informed who hold forth the loudest and longest, and that all of the raucous, late-night discussions are pervaded with a sense that there may never be another opportunity like this to grab at easy wealth.
rolls and steams through the green waters of the San Juan Islands at a subtle speed. Proper steamships overtake her, shouting of their superior bulk with insulting whistle blasts, while the captains exchange obscene gestures from their respective wheelhouse windows. Aboard the
Pegasus
, the men smoke and mingle, telling each other briefly of their previous lives and discussing at great length their strategies for obtaining riches. There are many opinions on matters of geology and minerals, and the smoothly planed wood of the galley table is soon covered in penciled designs that a new-comer might take to be engines of war, instruments meant for storming castles or raining a shower of boulders down upon approaching ships, but which instead describe wash-boards, sluice boxes, and odd, hieroglyphic machines for crushing stones. Hannah observes that among the would-be prospectors it is the most poorly informed who hold forth the loudest and longest, and that all of the raucous, late-night discussions are pervaded with a sense that there may never be another opportunity like this to grab at easy wealth.
Pegasus
plows north, shouldering apart the water with her stem. Hannah sits in a canvas deck chair on the bow, watching the world rise before her, staring ahead to where the mountains paralleling the strait converge in a shallow
V
. Hour after hour the hammering beat of the steam engine throbs through the hull, until it seems her heart must begin to beat in time with the whooshing spin of the pistons. She goes once to the stern but the sight of the wake peeling and unfurling away from the ship and a seemingly endless line of islands and peaks dropping slowly below the horizon serves not as a change of view but as a too-graphic reminder of how all that she has ever known or been part of is slipping away, disappearing perhaps irredeemably and forever behind them. Bracing herself against a quickening trepidation, she turns on her heel and returns to the bow, resolving to look only forward.
plows north, shouldering apart the water with her stem. Hannah sits in a canvas deck chair on the bow, watching the world rise before her, staring ahead to where the mountains paralleling the strait converge in a shallow
V
. Hour after hour the hammering beat of the steam engine throbs through the hull, until it seems her heart must begin to beat in time with the whooshing spin of the pistons. She goes once to the stern but the sight of the wake peeling and unfurling away from the ship and a seemingly endless line of islands and peaks dropping slowly below the horizon serves not as a change of view but as a too-graphic reminder of how all that she has ever known or been part of is slipping away, disappearing perhaps irredeemably and forever behind them. Bracing herself against a quickening trepidation, she turns on her heel and returns to the bow, resolving to look only forward.
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