Talking at the Woodpile (11 page)

“That's good law, very good law,” Victor said. “I like it.”

Craven Clutterbuck was superstitious beyond anything that could be considered normal. “I'm sure bad things will befall me if I don't complete my rituals,” he said. “I'm a fearful man.”

He had a full inventory of standard superstitions: black cats, walking under ladders and putting new shoes on a table. He was much more imaginative in the ones he invented for himself. In the morning he got out of bed, walked backward to the door, turned the door handle five times each way then hopped on one foot out of the room. He avoided crossing any street until he had recited the alphabet. If he got a haircut, he tipped the barber exactly seven cents in pennies, and he always said “sis-boom-bah” as he hammered a nail. All these actions and more he recorded in thick pencil in a lined scribbler. He made his entries daily.

His brother Buford and Victor the Gypsy watched Craven heading to work down Eighth Avenue. Every couple of steps he would hop.

“It's like he lives in a world of his own,” Buford said.

“I like it very much,” Victor said.

Neil and Faith were walking behind Craven on their way uptown.

“He and that gypsy are nutcases,” Neil said.

“You're the nut,” Faith said. “People had to blow you up just to keep you in order.”

Craven had organized and chaired the Dawson City Spiritualists' Fellowship. Young, blond Hudson Godwit was the secretary-treasurer. The group had no problem recruiting members; Dawson was full of people interested in spiritual things. Craven had more of a problem finding a place to meet, because proprietors were wary of such a group. But the Carnegie library had just recently been remodelled into a Freemasons' Hall, and the group rented a basement meeting room once a month.

Craven was sincere, but fake conversations with the departed and levitations unfortunately led the fellowship astray.

“See if you can contact my dead partner and ask him where he stashed that deed for our gold mine on Brewer Creek,” one old sourdough member asked.

“They're just a bunch of spook chasers,” Miss Mimosa Nightingale said to Mr. Cooper as she picked up groceries from his store.

“You got that right,” Mr. Cooper said, “but half the town will turn up for their meetings.”

“I tend to deal with reality, not half-baked ideas that have no foundation,” Mimosa said, handing her money to him with a henna-tattooed hand.

“I go to church,” Mr. Cooper said, and at that the conversation ended.

The DCSF sometimes met at Buford and Craven's house. Buford would have nothing to do with it. He left before the fellowship members arrived and returned home only after they left. On winter nights he would sit in the permafrost-tilted Occidental Hotel bar while they met, and in the summer he would walk the hills behind the house. He would make a joke when he came in the door by spinning around three times, bowing, whistling “Jimmy Crack Corn” and hopping on one foot around the kitchen table so that his great weight caused the dishes to rattle in the cupboards.

Craven was infuriated by Buford's disrespect. “Don't make fun of the spirits,” he warned.

Buford snickered and went off to polish his tooth.

Mimosa, an attractive middle-aged lady with dark hair and dark eyes, lived at the north end of Dawson City next door to Chief Daniel and his extended family. It was rumoured that she was to be married once at Mayo Landing, but the groom had jilted her. Grieving, she hadn't taken off her wedding dress for a week. The people in Dawson didn't know who he was, but someone had heard that he was dark and handsome and looked something like Victor the Gypsy.

Mimosa lived alone on an inheritance left by her father, who'd made a fortune on a claim twenty-seven above the Discovery claim. Robert Nightingale had been one of the lucky ones who'd lived and mined at Forty Mile, fifty miles downstream from Dawson, where George Carmack registered the Bonanza Creek discovery claim on August 21, 1896. The news of the gold strike had spread like wildfire, and like many others, he'd dropped everything and sped to the creek in time to make his claim. Once he got wealthy, Robert sent to Seattle for his bride, Mary. A year after her arrival, Mimosa, their only child, was born in a tent on the creek with a Chinese cook and a Norwegian schoolteacher acting as midwives.

“I never delivered baby before,” Changchang said.

“Ya, me neither, but I heard my neighbour in Fredrikstad explain it once,” Frieda said.

The baby was delivered without a problem. When news of the birth spread up and down the creeks, the homesick miners showered Mary with gifts.

Robert was handsome, and Mary was strikingly beautiful. Mimosa grew up a beautiful woman. She was also highly intuitive. She read cards, palms, tea leaves and whatever else a person might want. These were all props, but she used them to make it easier for people to understand her readings. She only had to hold someone's hand for a moment to understand that person. Sometimes even that wasn't necessary.

“I have to humour people with the cards, otherwise they won't believe I can do it,” she told Craven once. “I think I can be of help to people, but at times I hate my intuition. It tells me too many things.”

Craven was very interested in Mimosa. “Beautiful and an oracle,” he sighed.

Mimosa liked Craven. He was honest and her friend, but she didn't agree with his spiritualism.

“Those table levitations, trumpet blasts from the other world and fortune telling aren't real, Craven. Don't be taken in by that nonsense,” she said, “especially if you are asked to pay money for it.”

Some people didn't like Mimosa; they thought she dabbled in dark subjects. Others were drawn to her and sought advice. Chief Daniel and his family visited her often. They had a secret that Mimosa had asked Chief Daniel never to tell anyone. The secret was that Mimosa could heal; she had healed the Daniel grandchildren when they were ill with the influenza.

“Everyone will be at my door if they find out, and I will be a spectacle,” Mimosa said. “Besides, it drains my energy. I can only handle a few healings in as many days.”

Chief Daniel and his wife Martha knew healers well and kept the information between themselves. If a healing was necessary, they asked Mimosa first and kept their pledge of secrecy.

“That woman is evil, I just know it,” Neil O'Neill said. “Anyone that can read the future in tea leaves has to have held hands with the devil.”

“You are the devil,” Faith said. “You lie and steal.”

One Monday midmorning Hudson Godwit's long legs sped him up the middle of Second Avenue toward Mimosa's house. He was carrying a still-warm pancake wrapped in a tea towel. As he went by Cooper's Grocery and Hardware Store, Mr. Cooper was sweeping the boardwalk and called out to him, “What have you got there, young man? Looks like you're being chased by a fire.”

“You won't believe this, Mr. Cooper, but what I've seen in this pancake that my mother cooked me this morning is amazing.” He pulled back the tea towel to show the markings on the cake. “See, it's a message, and I'm taking it up to Mimosa to read.”

“You'd better get going before the ravens try to take it off you. Hey, if she tells you who will win this year's Stanley Cup, let me know.” Mr. Cooper laughed and went back to his sweeping.

Mimosa was waiting at the door when Hudson arrived. “I've been expecting you,” she said.

Hudson laid the pancake down and started to explain.

Mimosa signalled with a finger for him to be quiet. She glanced at the pancake and then, for theatrical effect, ran her hand over it as if it were a burning flame. It was the only way she could get him to believe, but pancake or no pancake, there was something she had to tell him.

Hudson was entranced.

Mimosa closed her eyes, bent her head back and hummed a few bars of a tune she'd heard earlier on the radio. Then she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open as if she had returned from another world, and spoke in a calm voice. “This is only for the present, Hudson. You are going to be given an opportunity to become something you always wished for. Your life will change for the better forever.”

“Wow,” Hudson said. “That is significant. I've always wanted to be a writer and reporter.”

“Of course,” Mimosa said, leaning back in her chair.

The light from the window shone on her, and Hudson thought how attractive she was. If only he were older.

Mimosa was looking out the window at the Daniel kids playing in their yard next door, and without looking away, she said, “There are plenty of fish in the sea, Hudson.”

“I have to go, thank you,” Hudson said and went to pick up the pancake.

“Leave that here,” Mimosa said, placing a finger on the pancake. Hudson obeyed and opened the door to leave.

“Tell Mr. Cooper to put his money on the Montreal Maroons.”

“Yes ma'am, I will,” Hudson said, then did a double take. He hadn't mentioned hockey.

When he was gone Mimosa fed the pancake to her little black dog Weasel.

Later that week Hudson received a letter in the mail from the publisher of the
Whitehorse Star
newspaper, asking if he wanted to be a reporter for Dawson City. Hudson was overjoyed and responded with an emphatic “yes.”

Hudson told Craven the good news and of his meeting with Mimosa.

“Did you return a gift to Mimosa? You must always give something, not as payment but to complete the circle of giving.”

The next day, Hudson personally delivered a package of candy wrapped in white and tied with a bow.

“Why thank you, Hudson, how very thoughtful and sweet of you,” Mimosa said as she patted his cheek.

I'm in love
, Hudson thought.

Buford had little respect for fortune tellers, but he had a ton of curiosity. He sat in the truck on Second Avenue outside City Hall as Craven went in to pick up his cheque for repairing the town's boardwalks. He watched Mimosa in her colourful flowing skirt, hands bedecked with jewellery and long hair flowing, as she walked home with a package under her arm.
She looks like a gypsy
, he thought.

At that moment a raven swooped, and Mimosa called to it. The bird landed in front of her and waddled ahead, leading the way. It kept this up for the next block, when it cawed and flew off.

Strange
, thought Buford.

At that moment Buford decided to see what she was all about and to ask her for a reading. He hopped out of the truck and followed her up the sloping street, past the Palace Grand Theater and Lucky Inn Restaurant, to her home.

Buford knocked on the weather-worn door, out of breath. The place needed repair and paint. He thought that this woman needed a man.

The door swung open, and Mimosa stared Buford coldly in the eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked through her teeth.

He was caught off guard and stammered, “I've come about a reading.”

She smiled a wicked smile and asked, “Are you sure?”

Suddenly Buford was very much aware that something he considered ridiculous could be serious. Furthermore, now that he was up close, her beauty and directness intimidated him.

“Or are you here because I need a man?” she asked.

Buford had to think fast, so he lied. “I've been thinking about this for a long time. My brother Craven said I should do this.”

She knew it was a lie. “Oh, now it's your brother who sent you. That's strange, because I know Craven quite well, and he never mentioned this to me.”

They stood in the doorway for another awkward moment. Then she moved aside and said, “Come into the parlour. I'll read your cards.”

Buford felt trapped and heard the unspoken words “said the spider to the fly.”

Mimosa looked at him and smiled again. He was now totally unnerved.

As he squeezed into an overstuffed chair, Mimosa reached up to a shelf for a deck of tarot cards wrapped in velvet.

A cloth with numbered spaces trimmed in gold covered the table. She handed the cards to Buford and said, “Shuffle.” He obediently shuffled the deck and handed it back to her.

She spread out the cards like a fan. “Pick ten, take your time, and lay them on the spaces face down. Do you have a question for the cards? If you do, don't tell me. I'll answer at the end.”

For the next hour Mimosa read the cards, telling Buford where he was in the present, what lay above his head in life, his immediate difficulties, what stood in the way of his goals, what others knew about him that he didn't know and what the next six months of his life held.

Buford had nothing to say when the reading was finished. He thanked Mimosa and got up to leave.

Mimosa was putting the cards away and, without looking up, she said, “The answer to your question is absolutely no chance whatsoever.”

Buford knew he shouldn't have been thinking those thoughts about her.

“What a pile of crap that was,” he told the early afternoon barflies lined up on stools at the Occidental Hotel. Shaking his head and muttering under his breath, he took another long drink of beer and said, “That's one lonely woman up there. She thinks she can read a deck of cards and tell you things about yourself that you didn't even know. Crap, that's all it is … crap.”

Buford was a little drunk when Craven found him. “I thought you were going to wait in the truck. I've looked all over for you.”

As they drove home, Buford bad-mouthed Mimosa. Craven slammed on the brakes and came to a sliding stop on the side of the road.

“Get out of this truck right now,” he yelled. He raised his foot and kicked Buford out of the door.

Buford rolled down the shoulder into the ditch. He was getting up and dusting himself off when Craven came around the side of the truck yelling. “You idiot! You had your cards read and now you're criticizing Mimosa. Do you want to bring bad luck down upon us, you imbecile? Why are you talking this way about such a nice person anyway?”