Authors: Lynn D'urso
Heartbroke Bay (7 page)
Their own mound of supplies, large and cumbersome as it is, is woefully inadequate. Worse, there is little food to be had in Skagway and none at all at a price that will not empty their purse.
After dragging, sledging, and packing their burden back into Skagway, Hans falls into a black mood and walks away, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll be back later. Watch our things,” before disappearing into the crowd.
“Mrs. Nelson? Mrs. Hans Nelson?” The searching call comes to Hannah through the thin canvas wall of the tent. She hesitates as she tries to identify the visitor before throwing back the flap. “Here. In here. I am Mrs. Nelson. Where is Mr. Nelson?”
A small man in a coat sewn from a colorful Hudson’s Bay blanket bends down to peer in, removes a knit cap, and says in a voice with a Midwestern twang, “He’s up to the blacksmith’s there. Took a pretty good knock, and he’s asking fer you. Is that you, then, Mrs. Nelson? You’re Mrs. Nelson, are you?”
Hannah rises to her feet and reaches for her hat as she realizes he means Hans has been hurt. Casting a concerned look at the stack of supplies she has been charged with guarding, she hesitates, worried they will be pilfered, then hurries to follow the messenger as he trundles off before her, hurling bites of words over his shoulder as he elbows a passage through the damp-smelling crowd. “It was a nigger boy found him. Gangs all over the dam’ town. Behind the horse pens, knocked silly. I’m from Indiana, myself. So he was asking for ya, I come to get ya.”
Outside a blacksmith shop that reeks of hot metal and tar, Hans sits on a box, clutching a bloody rag to his head. After stopping in a saloon to ponder his troubles, he had been lured into conversation by a friendly stranger, then offered a drink. Two hours later, he awoke in a puddled alley, his mouth sticky, dry, and plated with the copper taste of the drug the stranger had slipped into the whiskey. Groping through his emptied pockets, he had staggered back into the saloon and confronted the stranger, only to be beaten with a sap.
The blanket-coated Hoosier stands back and chatters as Hannah pulls gingerly at the rag. It sticks to the wound with dried blood. “Ought to do something, but nobody does. They’ve killed a few fellows, too, for their pokes. Rigging card games and such. Call him Soapy Smith, got a real gang of cutthroats, but nobody does nothing.”
Shrugging, he repeats unnecessarily, “And they’ll kill ya, too.”
Hans leans against Hannah as they stagger back to the tent. “Just about cleaned me out. Got my wallet, all our cash. All we got left is . . .” He stops to feel about in the pocket of his vest with a forefinger and thumb. They emerge pinching a gold piece between a pair of smaller silver coins. “Jesus. Five dollars. Five dollars and fifty cents.”
Heavy rains fall that night, soaking the tent and everything in it. In their wet bedroll, Hans curls around Hannah, burning her neck with his stubbled beard.
The next morning a dark, mute beggar stops at the door of the tent. His face is dirt caked, lined with calamity, and as he holds out one filthy hand in silent supplication Hannah looks away, embarrassed by the proximity of such misfortune, and waits for Hans to say, “Scat.”
The beggar stands stock-still, hand distended, his unspoken request resonating in the air.
Hans shifts uneasily in his seat. Hannah looks to her husband, who does nothing, then breathes deep to gather her courage. “We’ve nothing for you,” she says, reaching for the flap.
Hans covers her hand with his own. “Wait.”
Reaching into his vest pocket, his fingers fish, pause, then fish again. And because in times of calamity people often do the unexpected, or because charity appeals when someone else has it worse, Hans passes into the beggar’s soiled paw two small silver coins.
There is no work in Skagway except that of a mule. Hans considers hiring out to bear loads of goods up the precipitous incline of the Chilkoot Pass, but the local strong-backed Indians have established a level of wages for which only the most desperate are willing to labor. Many lie broke and hungry in ragged tents in the mud. Hundreds compete for every job.
The surplus of bodies has spread out from Skagway, guaranteeing unemployment in the nearby settlement of Haines and overflowing into the mines eighty miles away at Juneau. Willing men idle as far away as Petersburg. Prices everywhere are outrageous; an egg brings a dollar, a pound of beans, three. Coffee is a luxury for kings.
Hannah counts and recounts the dollars hidden in her journal; there is not enough for a return passage to Seattle. She calculates, figures, and refigures, then proposes to Hans that selling their outfit will fetch a sufficient sum. He mutters a curse in reply, wipes at a plate of beans with a crust of bread, then grips himself and tries to speak with calm and reason; retreat would be futile. There is no work elsewhere since the collapse of the railroads. Men and their families are going hungry in every state in the Union. Better to stay the course here in the north, find a way to get in on the gold. But first there is the winter to survive.
The next day after a walk, Hans throws himself down on the wet cot. “I hear there’s a lumber boat leaving for Sitka.”
The old Russian capital lies on the outer coast nearly two hundred miles away to the southwest. Skagway’s boomtown hunger for building material and firewood has completely stripped the surrounding countryside of timber-grade trees. The few remaining are small, crooked, and grain-twisted from incessant gales, but Sitka’s moderate maritime climate provides trees that are immense and straight.
“I reckon it pays to freight lumber to Skagway. That ought to mean there are sawmill jobs in Sitka,” he mutters. “We might as well go find out. Things can’t be any worse there than here.”
“Perhaps I can work, too. There must be something I can do,” says Hannah.
Hans shakes his head, sitting up and reaching for his wife’s hand with a mixture of righteousness, pride, and tender concern. “I can’t have it, Hannah. No wife of mine is cuttin’ fish in a cannery or spooning hash up to a bunch of trashy boomers.” He shakes his head emphatically. “It’s just not for a lady.” Then he drops his brow into his hands. “Don’t know how we’ll get there, anyhow. Five dollars won’t get us on the boat.”
Hannah stares at the mud beneath her feet. Her toes have not been warm for days, and she feels like crying. “I have some money,” she says. Reaching for her journal, she is enfolded by a regret she cannot name.
Sixty of the one hundred and eighty-three American dollars pressed flat in her journal go to the lumber boat’s captain. Hans appropriates the remainder to refill his plundered purse. Hannah does not mention the forty English pounds pressed between unwritten pages in the back of her diary. While he sees to their passage, she carefully rips a seam from her one good whalebone corset, folds the bills lengthwise, and stitches them smoothly along one polished stay.
Emptied of its cargo of planks and beams, the lumber ship rides high, lightly ballasted by a cargo of broken humans. A north wind screams in the rigging, driving vapors of black exhaust from a sputtering engine into the forepeak, where a dozen men and one woman squat on wooden benches, huddling together against the gunwale-to-gunwale wallow of a following sea. The smoke stinks and coats Hannah’s nose with the gummy flavor of kerosene. One by one the cabin’s occupants add the sound and smells of seasickness to the discomfort of the voyage.
There is no heat in the forecastle, and the air is clammy with their breath. Sea air permeates everything, weighting and dampening their clothes with salt. Hannah, like the others, hugs herself in a stupor and dozes, deadened by the slow, pile-driver rhythm of the waves.
A deckhand comes below with a wooden bucket of saltwater and slops the contents across the deck, swirling the rejected contents of outraged stomachs about their feet before it dribbles into the bilge.
“’At’s your head and slops pot, too,” says the deckhand, setting the bucket on the planked sole and giving it a nudge with his foot. When he grins at Hannah and chuckles, she sees that his teeth are gray.
A muttering man among the huddled passengers wears greasy coveralls and boots of vulcanized rubber. The skin of his hands and face flakes in red patches. A cracked gleam sparks in his glance. Beside him sits a man so large and dark he consumes space the way a cavern absorbs the light of a candle, his face hidden beneath a sprawling salt-and-pepper beard.
The mutterer reaches with one booted foot for the bucket and skids it ringing and empty across the deck to rest before him, then rises. When he stands and reaches for his groin, working his hand into his fly, Hannah realizes he intends to urinate. Looking up to protest, she sees wet, contorted red lips splinter into a grin. The man leers, enjoying the shock on her face. Beside her, she hears Hans shout “not in front of my wife!” and sees him rise to his feet.
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