Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 (3 page)

‘My goodness, an ancestor,' the woman cruiser says, smiling at my father and then at me. Her eyebrows are painted on, cocked and ready to
show surprise. ‘How special for you both. An ancestor in Juneau.'

My father wants to say something, but stiffens up. He makes himself return her smile and forces a small nod.

‘We're here to find out what we can,' I tell her. ‘About his time here.'

Thomas Chandler was sick. Physically ill, and mentally. He needed money. That's all we know. I am here, as much as anything else, to guide my father through the news of a horrible death, or through nothing, more nothing. Through gazing up from Juneau, or from the five-star luxury of a suite high on the departing
Radiance
, at the resolute mountains this side of the channel, wondering if Thomas' bones are there, or were there, separated from his story, his name, his people.

I have a range of worst endings in my head. My father might have more in his. Whatever
comes our way today, it falls to me to be standing nearby as we ease our way out of the Gastineau Channel this evening. Rowan would have left him to it, I think, but I could imagine our father, hands on the cold rail, staring at the clouds settling on the mountains before turning for inside and dinner, a vast brightly lit dining room, a table of seven high-spirited strangers, an eighth chair waiting for him. I can't let his journey end like that.

‘So, can I interest you in any, uh…' the man behind the counter says, indicating the ceiling-high stacks of merchandise with his hand.

The woman cruiser, I now see, is holding an oven mitt, with a spoon in a plastic case pressed into it. My father has never bought this kind of stuff, anywhere. He has never even bought a T-shirt for himself, never worn any he's been given, other than to mow the lawn. He wears a collared shirt every day.

‘Whose was the red dog?' he says. He pulls the edge of a T-shirt towards himself and arranges the front of it to highlight the logo. ‘It's a Scottish terrier, isn't it?'

‘Yes, yes, it is,' the man says, leaning forward to look. From his counter, the image of the terrier must be stamped on his retinas about a thousand times. ‘I think it was a previous owner, maybe in the seventies. It was always the Red Dog, but I think that dog was theirs, that particular one. He was always hanging around the bar. Sixties and seventies. There are folk who remember him.'

My father nods. It's an instinctive response to a pause. He seems to be studying the T-shirt.

‘We have a meeting at the museum,' I tell the man, and perhaps the cruisers. ‘You open at eleven for lunch, right?' My hand is on my father's arm, just touching his jacket sleeve, gone before he looks down.

‘Yes,' he says, before the man at the counter can answer. He pulls the zip of his jacket up another few inches. ‘Yes, we should keep moving.'

‘Wear Eskimo Parkas—Hold Guns!!' the sign at Alaskan Old Time Photos reads.

Before I can say anything, the promise of the pictures in the window, sepia-toned and old-timey as can be, has my father stepping into a break in the traffic to cross the road so that he can study them more closely.

He stops midway—the shop's purpose is unmissable by then—and looks lost for a moment before pointing vaguely along the street and saying, ‘I think we'll need to be on this side eventually. For the Russian church.'

Brand Alaska gets a good workout in the photos, with past cruisers costumed in groups
and camping it up in style—busty madams, waitresses flashing their suspenders, moustachioed villains with black oversized six-shooters. Eskimo parkas feature in only two, families doing their best Nanook of the North with harpoons, old rifles and stiffly taxidermied huskies against tundra backdrops. They're all grim-faced—it's the Chandler family portrait of 1890, transplanted. The bordello shots offer more scope for comedy, manageable bawdiness, silent-movie alarm.

My father is two shops ahead of me, scowling into the windows of the Alaskan Brewing Company, each with its own faceless mannequin frozen in a robotic Devo pose over a row of beer cans. He's staring at one featureless head, as though giving it a chance to account for itself. He notices me coming and turns back to the slow rise of Franklin Street.

His walk becomes a stride, hands coming out of his pockets. He zigzags around a dog turd that's already been smeared by the heel of a cruiser's sensible shoe. We pass a small paved park where two old guys are braving the fierce chill of the wrought-iron chairs and tables to play chess. Each is a humped pile of garments. No one moves, nothing moves, all hands are tucked somewhere warm while the contemplation takes place. My father is beyond them already.

‘There'll be something,' I tell him, and he says, ‘Of course there will. This is just the tourist bit.'

Beyond the park, the tourism push is dwindling. Businesses front the street with the pizzazz dialled down, cutting hair or making coffee for locals who know where to find it.

A parking lot to our right shows how thin this part of Juneau is, with the flank of an
evergreen-clad mountain only another block back. I suppose there were dirt tracks here once, miners' shacks clustered on the more easily tamed slopes. A gold rush builds a city before anyone can pause and decide if there's room for one.

We've been rising since we left the port, but North Franklin is a more noticeable incline. On either side are pastel-coloured wooden houses—the chalets in the mist of our arrival, perhaps, though it's also possible those were on the other side of the channel. The ship turned in the fog, but I don't know when.

Anywhere the concrete is cracked or pavers have gapped, there's exuberant weed growth that looks like bunches of salad leaves. Summer has passed through here and seeds are germinating and going mad while they can.

My father is heading for Fifth Street. There's another chalet-style house at the intersection, pink in this case, with salmon shutters and a
station wagon parked on gravel, vines and weeds sprouting beside it and clambering up the white fence pickets. Beyond it is the Russian church.

My father strides towards it, crossing the road at an angle, without looking left or right.

The church is octagonal and no bigger than a park band rotunda, white with blue trim and base, topped with a gold onion-shaped cupola and cross. The belltower is separate, or attached to the back of it, its bell a little lower than the cross. The church takes up no more room than a suburban house block.

Its fence is missing a picket near the sign where my father stops for breath. He reaches out and grasps the picket tops, locking his elbows, keeping his back straight. He is red-faced, his scalp pink beneath his white hair, his chest lifting and falling inside his jacket.

‘We could get a cab from here,' I tell him, but his eyes are on the sign.

He is making a show of reading it, of being in this spot for that purpose only.

He points to the date the church was built. 1894.

‘He was here then.' He glances to either side, as if Thomas might step out from behind a house in his drab 1890 Sunday best and explain himself.

My father shuffles around on the concrete so that his back is to the fence. His hands find two more picket tops. He's standing like a diver now, an old ropey diver on the blocks, arms back and out to the sides, but lost in a jacket with the shapes of its own shoulders pushed up near his ears. He's scanning the hillside, the streets leading to sheer drops, or to the channel. I'm sure he's shown me old-time photos taken from this spot or close to it—tents on the slope, slab huts with roofs pitched against the snow, a town developing as mining boomed.

When his breath is back, he unzips a jacket pocket and draws out a compact silver camera, fiddling with it, peering at its small screen until he's satisfied with the settings. He snaps shots of the church and its surrounds. It's a process, methodical, not to be interrupted. He pushes the gate open over a weed bloom and strides up to the building with all the authority of a bishop.

Towards the back, the slope of the block brings the windows down to head height. He pushes himself up on his toes to look inside. He holds his camera to the glass, his hand cupped around it, snaps a couple more shots, then steps back to check what he's got. There's a white screen with gold edges to its panels framing the left of the picture he shows me. It's the wrong angle to see details, but I can make out saintly icons and a row of dark wooden lecterns against the far wall. Other than that, the space
looks empty, dormant, even though it's merely between services.

He lifts the camera up for another burst of photos, changing the angle this time but getting no more detail than before.

Two sides further around the octagon, he puts his hand on the building, on a broad white plank that might be original. At first I think it's a matter of balance, but he couldn't be steadier. It's contact, perhaps. Physical contact with the Juneau of the 1890s, when a saw passed through this timber, with human hands on it, and other hands held the hammers that banged in the nails. Perhaps Thomas Chandler's hands, or the hands of someone who knew him, drank with him, laughed with him, fought with him. At the very least, Thomas must have known about this place, seen it perched on the hillside. My father is touching that certainty.

A car drives past, an SUV with mud sprayed up its side, an infant in a baby seat in the back, its head lolling to the side in sleep. A Juneau family going about its business. We are as still as trees, the two of us, and no one notices.

The car slows approaching the corner and turns into North Franklin.

My father lifts his hand from the building, straightens his jacket and clears his throat.

Back towards the gate, there's a perspex-covered board displaying photos of rotting stumps that have been replaced by a recent fundraising drive. There's a page about the fragility of the building, encouraging further donations, though rain has made its way under the perspex at the corner and the ink has lifted and drifted across, ghosting half the final paragraph and leaving a wavy blue high-tide mark against the remaining words.

My father takes photos, three before he's happy he's lined the board up the way he wants. The camera gives a metallic hum as he shuts it down. He slips it back into his pocket.

‘Okay,' he says. ‘Good.'

He checks his watch. His museum guide, Hope, is somewhere in this city, living her life, keeping her discoveries to herself for another forty minutes.

‘So, the cemetery?'

He nods. ‘Cemetery, then museum.'

‘So where are we now, exactly?' my father says, reaching for the map. There's a tone to it, as though I might have done something inexact and parental oversight is now necessary.

‘This becomes 12th.' I point to the spot. Franklin and Main Streets have taken us higher,
but now we are over the ridge, a low shoulder of Mount Juneau, and most of the way down the other side. ‘There's Gold Creek, that culvert we just crossed. Then we go down Irwin, which should take us there. Exactly as planned.'

With his thumb and index finger he spans the distances—here to the cemetery, here to the ship, the cemetery to the museum. With all the twists and turns and climbs it doesn't measure much.

‘Would you like some water?' I swing the pack off my shoulder to get a bottle out.

‘Water?' He looks at the pack. ‘No. We've only just started. Thanks.'

He holds the map out to me. As soon as I take it, he's moving again.

Irwin Street is narrower than 12th, with faded, cracked bitumen and darker patches where it's been repaired. Where it swings to the right, a path leads straight ahead among tall
trees, with an expanse of recently mown lawn beside them.

‘This is it,' I tell him. ‘Evergreen Cemetery.'

‘Really? It…' He holds his hand up to block the light and looks down the path through the trees. Further along, there are headstones, tilted with shifts in the earth. ‘Okay.' He studies them closely, as if he's counting them. ‘If he didn't make it out of Juneau…' He points into the gloom, his finger ticking, unsteady. ‘He'll be here, more than likely.'

He takes a big breath, in and out. The air smells of pine and moss. I think he wants to remember that.

He stops at the first old stone, set flat in the ground, and scrapes some dirt aside so he can see the name and date and circumstances.

‘I know we won't find him,' he says. It's the grave of Clarence Finn, 1907. ‘I just want to get a feel for the place.'

Nonetheless, he checks each stone that's not polished granite with a modern font. The older ones are matt and grey and look like slate. They date back as far as 1887—only 1887, despite how ancient they look, standing stones rocked back in their places, lettering worn flat or crusted with moss, like headstones in an English churchyard from the 1600s.

While it could happen, it would shock us both, I think, to see a marker for Thomas here. My father would be on his knees, scrambling to clear grime and debris, gleaning whatever fragment of story he could, breaching the peace of the place and looking like someone in mad pursuit of buried treasure.

We find the stones of Joe Juneau and, nearby, Richard Harris, both of them substantial, rectangular and set into the ground, with matching copper plaques, green with time and damp, acknowledging them as co-founders of the city.

1899, 1907. The timing of their deaths has my father pacing, checking nearby graves, some with only names and dates, others with a story to tell. None with our man, though.

He leans on a newer vertical stone and straightens his back, stiff after all the stooping. He lets himself smile.

‘Somewhere here, maybe,' he says. ‘Unless he caught a ship out and…' He shrugs, at the impossibility of that quest, as big as the world.

He looks beyond the trees, his eyes adjusting to the greater distance and the brightness on the grass—it's not direct sunlight, since clouds have set back in. On the far side of the cemetery, a backhoe is scooping up the rubble and smashed timber of a demolished house. There are gravestones of one kind or another all the way across the lawn.