Touch (26 page)

“It’s a river,” Pearl said.

“It’s unfrozen already?” Though they were in the woods, Jeannot stopped and tried to peer through the trees, as if he might see the river.

“No, not the Sawgamet. A new river made of meltwater. It’s a churning madness. The water is running over the snow and cutting its own path.” Pearl shrugged. “Maybe it is above the Sawgamet, following the same channels, the same furrows in the earth, but I would not be able to tell.” He gestured to the trees that they walked through, the tips and branches that lay at their feet. “Even with this furious melting, there is still fifteen, twenty feet on the ground. I would have walked by you if the roof of the mill had not been peeking from the snow, and if I hadn’t seen your burrow and your grand staircase.”

When they came out of the trees, they stopped to look at the water. Like Pearl, neither Martine nor Jeannot could tell if the raging water followed the path of the Sawgamet, or if it followed some different course of its own choosing. The water ran wide, one hundred feet across, and frothed and churned like they had never seen the river do, even in the violent spring melts. Broken trees and boulders swam by them, heading down and away with no remorse.

“Look,” Martine said, taking Jeannot’s attention away from the water. They could see hints of the village before them. It appeared as though there were only a half-dozen houses, their third-stories resting on the snow like buildings of only a single floor. They could see two scantily clad women sitting on what must have been a porch roof, and further down, the first appearance of a shelter near the mines.

THEY SPENT SEVERAL HOURS
digging and looking for Franklin’s store before they finally came upon it, Jeannot’s shovel
bouncing off the rooftop. He banged the handle of the shovel against the roof several times, and after a short pause he heard a muffled yell and a knocking return. While Jeannot shuffled back to the mill to get his ax, Pearl brought Martine over to the brothel. The whores greeted her with hugs and wonderment at the size of her belly. They made her sit in their overstuffed chairs, bringing her soup with a slice of fresh-baked bread, and rubbing scented lotion into her swollen feet. She was so firmly ensconced in her comfort that she did not even realize Jeannot had returned and was hacking at the roof of her brother’s store.

The roof surrendered quickly to the blade of Jeannot’s ax. When he smashed through, opening a hole the size of a dinner plate, he saw Rebecca and Franklin’s upturned faces. They stood beneath the gap staring up at him, blinking like owls astonished to see the day.

“You put a hole in my roof,” Franklin said, a note of confusion in his voice, as if that was all he could think of to say after so many months buried beneath the snow.

“I’m trying to get you out.”

“Wouldn’t digging have done less damage?”

Jeannot rested the ax head on the lip of the hole and then let out a laugh. “You’ve got me there, Franklin. I got so excited at the sight of the roof that I didn’t even think of trying to find the door. Martine will be glad to see you well. And speaking of which, step back a ways. I’ve already put a hole in your roof, I might as well make it big enough for you to come out of.”

He swung with his ax, smashing and broadening the opening, and then, more gently, smoothing it out. When he was finished, Franklin pushed his counter under the hole, stacked
a crate on top of that, and while he pushed from below and Jeannot pulled from above, the men helped Rebecca out.

At the sight of Rebecca—pregnant, though not quite as large as she herself was—Martine broke into tears. She was, she said to her sister-in-law, relieved to not have to give birth while buried under thirty feet of snow. She had been expecting the baby at any moment for the past few weeks, and in the overstuffed chair, with the soup finished and her brother’s wife before her and bearing the same bloated belly that she had carried for far longer than she had expected, she felt like she had experienced some sort of salvation.

Jeannot, Franklin, and Pearl decided that it made the most sense for them all to move into the brothel while the snow kept receding. Jeannot did not say anything about the pernicious limitation of the almost-depleted food supply at the mill—though I am sure that he and my grandmother were not the only people in Sawgamet to resort to eating human flesh to survive that winter—but he did agree that it would be nice to have some company for a while. That night, they had a festival of sorts, with cakes and a roasted goose that Pearl brought down with a shot from his rifle.

The next day, Franklin opened the store to Pearl and the women in the brothel, helping all of them crawl through the hole in the roof. They bought thread and needles, silk, bottles of ink, and toilet water. Though it nearly broke his heart to do so, my great-uncle charged them barely more than it had cost him to bring the supplies in, and he freely shared his flour, sugar, canned fruit, and tea with the women of the brothel. In return, over the next several weeks, they cooked for and pampered his sister and wife.

Franklin, Jeannot, and Pearl spent their days helping to dig out the five mining camps that showed signs of life. Where a roof still stood over the pit mines, Jeannot chopped his way through. The men usually came out slowly and warily, pale and blinking like moles, scared of the brightness of the day. Their clothes hung off them and their cheeks were hollowed out, like they had spent the winter carving at their own flesh rather than the ground. The miners were weak and smelled so badly that the madam insisted that they bathe in a large copper washtub set on the porch roof before they be allowed to enter the brothel. Each man took his turn, stripping and adding his clothing to a pile to be burned, then scrubbing himself in fresh hot water that the women from the brothel carried pot by pot up the stairs and passed out the window.

By the time they had dug out all five camps—nearly forty men in all—Jeannot, Franklin, and Pearl had heard the same story many times. The men working to exhaustion in their mines, at first not even realizing the direness of their situations, too excited by the idea of gold. Then, later, after it was too late to flee, rationing beans and biscuits, then resorting to butchering mules—or worse—and sucking on ice to create the illusion of fullness. The miners came out with such little strength that they often allowed themselves to be carried to the brothel like infants, and for the first few weeks the women treated them as such; it was not until near the end of August that they became paying customers again.

Most of the miners came back to health well enough, my grandfather told me, though one man never recovered his sight. He was part of a syndicate of five men who had been kept warm underground by the presence of a hot spring that
they had accidently uncovered. They had no fire and only enough candles and oil to see them with light through to January. They had spent nearly six months in complete darkness, eating uncooked beans and hardtack, learning that they could not trust the sound of each other’s voices. It quickly became commonplace among them to lay their fingers upon a speaker’s face, trying to divine intent and emotion through feel. Aboveg-round again, the first four men kept their eyes tightly closed against the brightness, only opening them slowly and gradually over the course of a week, but Alfred alone among them had opened his eyes to greet the sun immediately upon leaving the mine. Alfred’s eyes, so used to being without light, did not distinguish between the blindness of the dark and the blindness of the sun, and his eyes turned milky and forever sightless. Though he was an agreeable man despite his blindness, my grandfather said he could not stand to be near him, and was glad when the man went east to be with family; Alfred’s frosted eyes brought back the memory of the rancid meat smell and the fish-pale flesh of the hag who had temporarily stolen Flaireur’s voice on my grandfather’s first night in Sawgamet, the gagging taste of Gregory’s flesh in his mouth.

They unearthed a sixth mine as well, but there were no men left alive, only a fat and bored mule and the picked-clean skeletons of nearly a dozen miners. Though Pearl suggested they shoot the animal and leave the whole lot in their mine as a tomb, Jeannot convinced him that they might need the animal in the coming months.

After they finished digging out the mines, they saw a wisp of smoke past where they thought any man might be, and they came across the rooftop and stovepipe of a small cabin barely
sticking out from the melting snow. When they dug out the door enough to open it, they found Xiaobo, the Chinaman who had been hired to work for Jeannot and my grandmother. He seemed as if he had lost his senses; he was naked and yelled at them, trying to push them away. They forced him into clothing and brought him back to the brothel, and though he calmed down and stopped slapping at them, it was a few days before he spoke English.

While Pearl, Jeannot, and Franklin dug and the women in the brothel took care of nursing the miners back to health, there was little thought of the saloon owner who had treated my great-uncle so poorly, Dryden Boon. Perhaps had Boon been a more likable man he would have been dug out sooner, but as it stood, his body was only discovered in mid-August, nearly a month after the snow had stopped falling. Nobody could figure out how Boon managed to get outside of his saloon, buried headfirst in the snow, but it was one of the women from the brothel who first saw his boots. More people saw his calves and knees stick into the air as the snow melted around him. After my grandfather, Jeannot, and Franklin dug him out, they put his body on ice in the empty stables behind the blacksmith’s shop with the bodies of the other men—and even a few women—that they had found in the snow, in crude cabins, and in one collapsed tent. They did not know how many others had been swept away by the floods, but in the stables, as the snow continued to melt and the sun returned with the fury of a lover scorned, like it was trying to recapture the winter glory that it had lost, every few hours one of the men had to shovel more ice and snow onto the corpses.

AS THE SNOW MELTED
and settled, men began to return to Sawgamet in a trickle, five or six a day. The snow had been light elsewhere. The miners said that even a few hours’ walk away the ground had been clear since May. Downriver thirty miles, a new gold strike had created the town of Havershand almost overnight, and the men who came to Sawgamet were those who had come to Havershand too late or who did not remember that Sawgamet had seemed on the verge of playing out even before the snows came.

The runoff from the melt scoured Sawgamet clean, taking whatever gold remained from the ground, removing the abandoned tents and poorly built or half-finished cabins, taking the detritus of the men who had fled, sweeping it into the river. Miners working the banks downriver in Havershand fished out useful bits, picks, shovels, and tin pans.

When Jeannot tried to return to the mill to gather a few tools, the meltwater turned him away. The water ran so swift and cold down the slope and through the woods that he could not make his way through it for fear that he might be swept away along with the debris that raged along the new-formed river. Ultimately, after waiting for a few days, Jeannot hiked through the snow and up into the hills behind the meadow before coming down from above. Standing on the slope, he could see that the mill had remained untouched, but the melting snow had taken away the ashen remains of their house, it had taken all of the old cabin except for a few logs, and most importantly, the floods had removed the barrel of bones that
had been buried in the snow. Alone among the wreckage he found an embarrassingly dry copy of a Bible.

It was, he and Martine agreed, glancing nervously at the Bible, a message, and they began to believe that Martine’s extended pregnancy—extended beyond reason, beyond the counting that was normal—was part of some punishment for the way in which they had survived the winter. At the brothel, Jeannot went downstairs and knocked on a few doors until he found the room where Xiaobo slept, thinking the Chinaman might have some herbs that would bring about the child’s birth.