Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4

Inkerman & Blunt Publishers Pty Ltd

P.O. Box 310, Carlton South

Victoria 3053, Australia

www.inkermanandblunt.com

First Published by Inkerman & Blunt in paperback and ebook form in 2016

Copyright © Nick Earls 2015

The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is copyright. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, and apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher

Book design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Cover and internal images by Virginia Kraljevic,
virginiakraljevic.com

Typeset in 13/16 pt. Granjon by Mike Kuszla, J & M Typesetting

Printed in Australia through Book Production Solutions

National Library Catalogue-in-Publication

Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

Title: Wisdom Tree: five novellas / by Nick Earls

ISBN: 9780992498573 (paperback)

Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree

Notes: Gotham—Venice—Vancouver—Juneau—NoHo

Dewey Number: A823.3

Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

Title: Juneau / Nick Earls

ISBN: 9780994480811 (paperback)

Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree: 4

Dewey Number: A823.3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1

GOTHAM

2

VENICE

3

VANCOUVER

4

JUNEAU

5

NOHO

4

JUNEAU

M
y father has both hands on the wet railing, bracing himself against the depthless view. He is in his walking boots already, rubber soles steady on the humming steel deck.

There is fog in the Gastineau Channel. I can just make out the boxy shapes of houses, outlines on the dark hillside. A single car makes its way along a street, only its headlights visible, moving faster than us, but not much. The ship's foghorn sounds a long metallic note that fills the air, as if it's a reverberation from the entire channel, from the mountains themselves.

I ask my father what he hopes to find, and he says, ‘Something.' He keeps his eyes on the fog, checking it for details, anything to measure against the Alaska of his imagination. Anything to begin this day. ‘The truth. Some sign of him. Why he never came home.'

His jacket is zipped up against the cold and his hair is still damp from his shower, parted and slicked against his head, white curls starting to lift away from the back of his neck, finding their own shape again.

‘I don't expect I'll get all that,' he says. ‘I'd settle for something.'

I know Thomas Chandler from one photograph only, a family portrait taken at the gate of their Dorset farm when he was a teenager approaching his father's height. Thomas and my great-grandfather, Edward—his older brother—are standing at opposite ends of the group, with their father and two young sisters between them.
Edward is immediately to his father's left, his shoulders drawn back like a soldier on parade. He is the tallest of them all, though it might just be his posture. Their mother sits in front on a wooden chair, nursing a baby.

It is tempting to say Thomas looks haunted, but they all do. They are keeping as still as they can, their eyes wide and fixed on the camera box. It's a portrait from around 1890 and all family portraits from 1890 look like that, lean people in their best dark clothes, staring down death.

Thomas was gone from Dorset by 1893. In 1895, he wrote a letter from Alaska, from a hospital in Juneau.

My father fumbles his swipe card as he pushes it back into his bumbag. Every passenger has to swipe on and off the ship—all two-and-a-half
thousand of us. The card clips the zip, flips from his hand and drops to the deck. A crew member bends to pick it up, and his head and my father's almost meet. My father reaches for the table edge and straightens up again, leaving it to the much younger man to make it all the way to the floor.

‘There we go, sir,' he says in his West Indian baritone, placing the card back in my father's hand.

This time, my father tucks the card away successfully.

‘You have a great day in Juneau, folks.'

My father's hand is still guarding the bumbag as he thanks him, keeping the card trapped, but the crew member is already turning to the passengers behind us with their arms full of coats and bags and cameras fresh off the scanner. This is any day in port for him, and it's his mission to keep the elderly and their possessions united through the security checks and onto land.

Lauren is ahead of us, with Sam and Hannah, the three of them already in daylight, clunking down the ramp to the wharf. The sun has burnt the fog away.

My father looks up at the sky as he steps out. It's bright blue now, a few high clouds blowing by. With his attention no longer on his feet, his next step is less steady, and another crew member reaches for his elbow. The crew are lined up at every turn, every uneven surface. After a few more steps, my father stops and peers across the wharf, past the huge timber welcome sign, past the neat curved garden bed behind it and the nearby row of ticket booths. He's looking at the buildings on the far side, all of them shops now.

I have had a lifetime of reading my father's silences. The people passing us just see an old guy sizing up the view, but I know he's imagining the 1890s, placing tents and shacks from black-and-white photos in the scene.

I hold my spot behind him, making them walk around me, giving him time.

From the top of the ramp, modern Juneau looks Nordic, like Narvik or Tromsø, but the mountains are even more present here, more of a force, muscling right up against the buildings and herding them into a cluster at the edge of the water. Everything I can see of the city is made small by the peaks behind it, the government buildings low concrete cubes with windows dotted in, houses more compact versions of the same shape, built to box in the heat.

The Norwegian fjords were the site of my only other cruise so far, with Lauren before the kids came along. That was three days, though, and this voyage is a week, with Juneau day five and Ketchikan to come. We are not natural cruisers, not inclined to consign ourselves for days on end to decks full of the same Midwest Rotarians, retired franchisees and other jokey spenders of
their kids' inheritances. From the moment we boarded in Vancouver, the five of us have moved in close formation through the
Radiance of the Seas
, but despite that conversations strike up at the lifts, the buffets, even the hand sanitiser stations. They are a gregarious people, cruisers, and not deterred by closed body language.

‘So, where you guys from?' Our accent is usually their way in. Lauren is best placed to take it from there. She does small talk well and never lets it get past medium-sized. I've been waiting for them to ask if I'm on vacation, backing away with that question in mind, but of course they all just assume it. Can you take a vacation from nothing?

‘You brought your dad along,' they say instead. ‘Great.'

And then my father says, ‘I brought them along,' every time, in that clipped tone of his that suggests it should be obvious. And he lifts his
chin and draws his bony shoulders back inside his oversized tracksuit top, and they misread him as some eccentric patriarch, throwing his fortune at his family and gifting them exotic locales. No family is that simple, though it was his idea, and he did insist on paying.

We have never holidayed with my father before, not even for a weekend. If Thomas had stayed on that farm in Dorset, we would not be here now.

It could have been my sister Jenny and her family here with our father, but she's indispensible at the hospital, the way she tells it, and I can't say that's not right. It could have been our brother Rowan, but he has court dates in his diary well in advance. I am not here as my father's firstborn or most favoured, but as his most available.

I have a second interview for a job as soon as we get back, a position managing some assets
at the Saint Lucia uni campus. It's a couple of rungs down from the job I am qualified to do there and might have applied for at a better time.

‘That's good, Tim,' Lauren said when I told her they wanted to see me again. ‘Of course they should want you.' No eye contact. ‘They'd be lucky to get you.' No congratulations.

Her response was perfectly on the money, as usual. Congratulations would have killed me. Congratulations would have been right if I'd scored the job twenty years ago, one step after starting out. I am not an easy person to help through failure, but who is, really?

Lauren, Sam and Hannah have their backs to Juneau, waiting for us to disembark. Sam's hands are in his jacket pockets and he's looking at his foot as it draws broad wet lines out from a puddle. Hannah is wearing her beanie and matching gloves, even though it's at least as warm as a Brisbane winter morning and they
never leave her wardrobe there. Minimum eleven, maximum thirteen was the forecast on the daily briefing sheet that was slid under our cabin door some time before dawn.

She waves at her grandfather, with a circular motion like someone cleaning a window. It's Alaska, it's cold, I have gloves—that's what she's saying. He lifts his hand and waves back, making his wave into a rough semicircle to acknowledge hers.

Yellow plastic temporary fencing is being unloaded from two utes parked on the boardwalk. By this afternoon, it will be set up to corral the five hundred passengers deciding to board at the last minute.

‘So, do we get to pat them?' Hannah's saying to Lauren when my father and I reach them.

They're booked on an excursion to a husky farm, including a sled ride.

‘Probably,' Lauren says, her tone set for expectation management. ‘The website said probably, remember? Though it might just be the puppies at the end.'