The Bully of Order
Read The Bully of Order Online
Authors: Brian Hart
For my wife.
A
fter the incident at the storehouse, Chief Manager Baranov called the men to the cobblestone beach. The remaining Aleuts were shackled there, kneeling in the rain next to the corpses of those that had been killed trying to escape. Baranov stood over the captives and explained the importance of private and company property and the benefits of drawing a wage. A pointless exercise, being that only a few of those gathered understood our language, and yet they all knew they were no better than slaves, wage or not, we kept them here, away from their villages and their families. At the finish, Baranov pronounced the terms of the enforcement of law, what was owed for thievery, and pointed to the bodies sopped in blood and the survivors nodded that they understood, and because we needed them and because I'd already pled their case, they were pardoned.
Weeks passed and I was leading a hunt around the point with some of these same Aleuts. On the leeward side of the island I shot a large otter, the first adult we'd seen in months, but when we came abreast we found it still splashing about. I took one of my hunter's harpoons without asking and ran it through. As I was fishing it back, the owner of the harpoon, an old man I'm fond of, said something to the boy seated behind him and they both laughed. I stopped what I was doing and asked what was so amusing and the old man surprised me and replied in English, what he called the Boston tongue, that I needed to beware of the bully of order. Although I speak some English I didn't recognize the phrase and asked him what it meant. The old hunter carried forth in his own language and soon he'd referenced the sea and the land, hunter and prey, husband and wife, father and son, mother and child, even slave and master; but in the end I still didn't see what he was getting at so I asked him who is the bully and what is the order and he said Baranov was and the fort at New Arkhangel was, and that was all. We loaded our kill and departed.
âFrom the journal of Timofei Osipovich Tarakanov, New Arkhangel, Russian-American Company, 1808
O
NE
T
he whistle tells us to move. Throw off the blanket, light the lantern. Floorboards like block ice, and coal-oil lamps flicker to smoke and muted brilliance to yep it's still all here and not much to see. Short on daylight through winter. Summer could fairly kill you with outdoor work. Animals know enough to choose one or the other mostly. But we aren't animals. We're still searching for the truth of this place, if we knew it or not. From bark to heartwood, work your way in. Dark to dark.
Draw you a map: Imagine the head of a rooster and its bleeding neck is the Pacific, comb points north. At the edge of the beak, fore of the comb, fore of the eye, the first river flows in, call it Hoquiam. Then, just above the beak's break, comes another, call it Wishkah. In the back of the bay, the main nozzle, the Chehalis, flows in a skein of sloughs to the bird's mouth. Follow the Chehalis upriver and soon, from the north, arrives the Wynooche. We're in the shadow of the Olympics here, gods above. Now, to the jaw, wattled, South Bay, we have the Johns and the Newskah Rivers, east to west, respectively. Rough outland country where the Soke settlement hides. Dark territory. Five rivers all told, makes a hell of a puddle. The Harbor proper is at the ridge of the beak, clotted around the Hoquiam and Wishkah Rivers. Flashed from a settlement to a town, kept hundreds, then thousands. There'll come a city, someday.
Directions: Ride the Great Pacific until you catch the perfume of profit and then cross the bar and follow the splinters, mud, and corpses inland. You'll find us among the booms, the mountains of sawdust gone to paste, toiling beneath the seditious cumulus rolling from our stacks.
Constellations, townships, lanterns, cookfires rise. A dream of riches.
The answer is no. The order is quick, no questions. Rain asks no questions. Cows haven't bawled yet and the roosters are stone. Dogs are snoring. Time to move though. The first whistle sounded ten minutes back.
A bent spoon in a jar of bacon grease. Smoke seeps from the cracks in the stove. Turn the screws. Breakfast is a battle won and the darkness relents, a degree, from black to shy of. The wind comes in easy from beneath the sill and makes the lantern smoke. Nail a shirt to it, stop it up. It's a dam with an ocean behind it. Whisper against the dawn.
More whistles say hurry and now it's all right I'm coming.
And outside, more smoke but brined. Neighbors is up. Walk with him. We'll be an army by the time we hit the gates.
“Mornin.”
“Mornin.”
“Goddamn dog in the path.”
“Not mine.”
“Not a dog.”
“Dead somethin?”
“Nah.”
“Drunk somethin?”
“Hear him breathin.”
“Should kick him for worryin me.”
“Bingham has seven boys, all taller than him.”
“My wife's barren.”
“She ain't your wife.”
“She's sleepin late whoever she is.”
“She ain't yours. Someday you'll catch the hook for it.”
“She ain't cooked me breakfast for a month.”
“I don't know why you think she would.”
“She knew what she was doin.”
“No one does.”
“Go on and kick that fucker and see who it is.”
“It's Bingham,” I said. “I can tell by the coat.”
“Kick him anyhow. Seven boys and he's drunk in the mud.”
“You'd be the same.”
“I'd be workin em like dogs and countin my money.”
“Step to. Gone be late.”
“I'm never late.”
“Watch the puddle.”
“Goddamn it.”
“I gave warning.”
“Yesterday,” Neighbors says, kicking the slop from his boot, “after the crane cracked and smashed that Chinaman, the
Jenny
's bosun said to me: This is war but bloodier.”
“Nah, I seen war and this is darling compared.”
In the beginning there was a whistle. The beginning was fifty-one minutes ago. Since then they'd been arriving, entering the side doors and disappearing into dark corners. The boilers topped off and fires built, stoked and clamped down. Dirty fingernails tapped at the hidden charms of murky gauges. The lumber pilers teetered in the yard among the bunks with their horses and trucks and tied on leather aprons and gloves, stretched their hands like chicken butchers. No gulls or any other birds yet, just the easy sound of the rain and the rigging of the ships. The mill lights came on in rows and yellowed the ground in the yard, and then the yard lights came up and the pilers dawned universal squints. The dogger, a man named Johnson who replaced a man named Cooper, climbed into the carriage on the headrig. The peanut whistle sounded in the engine room and the headrig rumbled to life, the monster amid the steam. Swink and swimbel. They settled in. Still wet from the walk, the heat of the pipes and the distant boiler are a comfort, for now. Dutifully snapping, the drive belts whipped by and swirled the air. The oiler, Diderot, scampered from beneath the runout table with his gun, off to the edger like a rabid squirrel. Beamis, the planerman, slow starting, still sharpening his knives, one and then the other, finally wrenched them down. He pulled the handle and took a last glance, a last breath. Time to swim deep into it, time to go like hell.
1886
T
he story of civilization
is written in the mud between the bay water and the plank road, and the tide was on the flood but not there yet. The wind and the spattering rain made arcing, graceful sweeps onto the black water; sagging triangles of foundering sails, seams of current like spilled rigging. And if I opened a window the smell would come wetly into the room and with it all the riotous sounds of the street and the docks. Rotten visitor, dead fish on the boiler, soggy dog. Mine was a king's terrace, bay window overlooking the bay, imagined bretèche. No, not as safe as that. I was a pine marten stranded midriver during the flush.
Across the street, market day on the wharf. Women hauled their children among the vendors, bought fish and new potatoes, sacks of coarse flour, careful always to veer away from the drunken loggers and shore-shocked sailors, crippled beggars and instrumented buskers: ignorant conscripts all. A few boys with serious faces were stick-fishing among the pilings, rigged for sturgeon but undersized to haul one in. Westward, the ships were three deep at the docks, loaded to their scuppers with lumber; brigs and barks, steamships too. Latecomers were anchored outside, drawing slack, twisting and bowing lightly, impatient at their tethers. They'd come from all over the world to be here, followed the stars until the stars disappeared. Safe harbor, our Harbor, not so deep but wide and scrimmed by enough timber to choke every saw in the hemisphere. From the mudflats to the sea blite, from the tidal prairie to the dark woods. The cocoon was finally splitting open on this world: sails of ships, papilio.
A crash suddenly broke through the din, so powerful I felt it in the floorboards of our second-story apartment. Looking down into the street, I saw an oxcart with a broken axle turned on its side, its cargo of milled beams tumbled into the road and onto the walkway, resting against Sheasby's wall. The six oxen were still linked in pairs by chain and oxbow, but they'd left the cart behind and were loafing westward along the wharf toward the docks. I watched as the bullwhacker and his boy tried to bring them under control with a whip and a lead, and they nearly had them when a pack of local strays shot from the alley to give chase and turned the oxen back toward the wreck. The big animals sought shelter on the walkway but they were too heavy and splintered the boards. The dogs leaped onto their haunches, teeth snapping, and drove them again into the street, through a hitching post, trampling the two horses tethered there, one of which did not rise again. Onlookers ducked into doorways, hunkered in the alley, hid behind roof posts. Women on the wharf gathered their children and backed toward the water; others just ran away. Some of the stevedores hurried over from the docks to see if they could help, but there was nothing to be done except stay clear, let the beasts rage, and if they fell in the harbor, shoot them so they didn't suffer.