Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (28 page)

He knows he should pray. His God is unsentimental; he sits in judgment. There is no time left for Henry’s old prayer, the one he directs as much at his wife as at his Creator:
make me what I have not been yet, a good and providing husband.

At dawn on the day of arrival, Jane is up on deck again. The
Riverdale
has come to an enticing green island, its slopes furred with beech and ash; blue strings of smoke rise from the sheds. Grosse Isle is its name, she hears; it is where the sick must disembark. The ship pauses only long enough to set down the two gray-faced women from Liverpool. Jane watches their little boat bob toward the shore, with as much relief as compassion.

The sun is high by the time she glimpses the walled city of Québec on the promontory, pushing into the river like a sentry’s gun. The fiction on which she has lived for a year is about to come true. At the sight of its towers, Jane lets out a small moan. Has she not been brave long enough?

Soon Henry will be walking beside her, lifting the children to his shoulders, pointing out landmarks. He will make up to her for all the waiting. She leafs through the letters, hungry for a sentence she remembers, the sweetness of his admission that they should never have let themselves be parted,
but dont be discouraged Dear Jane.

This morning for the first time she lets herself taste how hungry she is, lets the children see her cry. But she shakes back the tears so she can glimpse the busy docks, the ladders that will set the passengers free from their prison.

Henry floats up from unconsciousness and wonders what Jane will do when she steps off the ship and he is not there.
P.S. Dear Henry do not neglect to meet us.
Which will win out, her panic or her anger? There is no letter he can write to tell her the end of the story. She will have to deduce it from his absence, interpret the suspicion in the faces of the French on the quay, read death in the yellow flags that mark the medicine stations.

Where will she go? Surely the Emigration Agent will take pity and pay her way to New London. Henry prays his wife will come safe through the plains shaking with heat, the summer storms, the waist-deep mud of Toronto, and reach her sisters before the winter and a cold like she has never known. How long before she hears for sure that she is a widow at twenty-six? Until then, will she keep writing letters? he wonders. No, Jane is a practical woman; she would not write without an address. That is how he picked her: as a fellow traveler in a whirling world, a rock in a hard place.

Leaning over the rails, Jane imagines the improvement; that slightly hunted look will be gone from her husband’s face. What a cocky letter he sent recently:
I am 14 lbs heavier than I was when I left and I Can go into the bush and chop a log.
But so much will be the same: his dark eyes, his sweep of hair, the way his hands will close around hers.

Maybe he will have brought some food with him.

How will she live, Henry speculates through his fog of fever? Will she and her sisters go into trade together? Or will she find some slow-moving neighbor to take on her and the children, some Irishman twice her age who will be husband and father both?

Will she still count the days she has to live without Henry in this country?

He will be there on the dock, for sure.
Without you I will settle myself no place,
he wrote in the letter that persuaded Jane to come at once, not to wait a month more, because you never knew what might happen.
And Jane Dearest anything I can do Shall be done to make you happy and forgive anything wrong in the foregoing.
Every letter is a promise, signed and sealed; they all end,
your faithful and affectionate husband until death.

His skin is cold and wet like a fish; the only water left in his body is on the outside. Henry licks his shoulder. He is sinking down below all human things. He is sliding into the ocean; he will not wait till her ship meets the land. He will sport around it like a dolphin, he will make her laugh louder than the gulls.

He shuts his eyes and swims down into the darkness.

Jane peers at the landing stage where the crowds are milling. That speck of black, standing so still, that must be him. His eyes, sharper than hers, will have marked her out already. What distances cannot be traveled by the gaze of love?

Counting the Days

All italicized lines are taken verbatim from the thirteen letters (May 1848–May 1849) between Henry Johnson and Jane McConnell Johnson published by their great-granddaughter Louise Wyatt in
Ontario History
(1948). You can find more details about the family in Wyatt’s introduction to the letters at http://ied.dippam.ac.uk/records/49618.

On landing in July 1849—and not finding Henry—Jane and the children went on to her sister Isabella’s in London, Ontario. Confirmation of her husband’s death from cholera did not reach her for three months. Within a year, Jane married a local farmer of fifty-three, William Nettleton from Belfast; they had seven more children.

THE YUKON

1896

T
hey were both heading for the Yukon goldfields when they ran into each other in St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Alaskan coast. Goat (named for his yellow goatee) was a Swede, and Injun Joe was from Iowa; folk said Injun looked more than half Indian but he didn’t know if it was true. They’d both turned twenty-two that July, and it was this coincidence that convinced them to hitch up. It has to mean luck, said Goat, doesn’t it? It had to mean something.

Both of them had put their hands to just about anything since hard times got harder round ‘ninety-three. Injun had been an apple picker, a ranch hand, a slaughterman; he’d even done a few prizefights till an Irish boy blinded his left eye. Goat had played three-card monte and thrown drunks out of a whorehouse. They were both tough as hardtack, could tote seventy pounds, and scorned a quitter. Neither knew much about prospecting except that it was all they wanted to do. Goat said he was “gold crazy,” was that the phrase? It’d only been a few years since he’d come from Sweden with eighty-five cents in his pocket. His English was good but he didn’t trust it. He claimed he’d take a fifteen-dollar poke of gold dust over a twenty-dollar banknote, he was sentimental that way, he just loved the sparkle of it.

After paying for the boat ride up the Yukon, the two fellows were down to their sleeping bags, tent, and seven-odd dollars between them. But at least they’d found each other. You’d got to have a partner or you wouldn’t make it, that’s what the old-timers said. It wasn’t just that so much of gold mining took four hands, it was the risk of going off your head in the dark of winter. In Fortymile—the shack town just over the border into Canadian territory, where the two got off because Goat was sick of the tug of the boat against the current—they met a grizzled sourdough with six missing toes. He’d had a split-up back in ‘eighty-six, the two had divided their outfit fair and square, and the toeless man had left his former mate to work the claim. It was a whipsaw that did it, he said, whipsawing green logs put paid to many a friendship, because you got in a rage and couldn’t trust the other fellow was pulling his weight.

The old sourdough asked Injun Joe if he was one of those lazy Stick Indians from the interior. Injun shook his head and said I’m from Iowa. Truth was, he would have liked knowing what he was or where he was from on his father’s side; his mother (pure Pole) had never said, and he’d stopped asking long ago.

Fortymile was more of a camp than any kind of town—it looked like a heap of garbage washed up on the riverbank—but Injun reckoned it had all they needed, for now. Since every man in sight was a prospector, whether a veteran of Dakota, Idaho, or Colorado, or a tenderfoot like Goat and Injun, it was like being in a gang. A gang of loners, if such a thing could be.
Outside,
that was what they called everything outside Fortymile.

McQuesten, the storeowner, never refused credit; he boasted that no one ever starved to death here, or not unless he was too stupid to roll from his bunk and crawl into town. Injun and Goat were able to outfit themselves at McQuesten’s on a promise of payback come spring. They kitted themselves out in gumboots, mackinaws, mukluks, and the broad-brimmed hats that kept off rock splinters. (After all, Injun was down to one useful eye already.) They filled a wheelbarrow with kerosene lamps, a panning tank, a stew kettle, a saw, and a couple of short-stemmed shovels, tin plates and forks, rope and coal oil, beans, cornmeal, baking powder, lard, salt, chocolate, and tea, and on top, a fragile-looking copper scales and a phial of mercury wrapped in a handkerchief. This mountain of gear was too precarious to wheel around the wilderness, so they left most of it in the back of McQuesten’s while they went off prospecting along the creeks of the Fortymile.

They’d pick a likely spot, spit in the can for luck, let the water wash away the mud, and peer into the bottom for the glitter. The first time they found some it had a startling greenish tinge to it. Injun let out a yelp like an injured dog, and Goat got him in a half nelson and kissed his ear.

This was why the Yukon was the place to be, even if there hadn’t been any real big strikes yet. In some goldfields, the stuff was veined into the hard rock, and only expensive machinery could blast it out, but the Yukon gave up her treasure casually to any man who took the trouble to look for it. Placer gold—free gold, some called it—lying around in the white gravel in the form of good coarse dust or nuggets even. This first spot gave five cents’ worth of gold dust from the pan, when Injun weighed it with slightly shaking hands. The toeless fellow reckoned eight cents a pan’s a pretty good prospect, he said, but Goat laughed and said this here looked pretty good to him. He wanted to stake their claim right away; Injun had to talk him into waiting to see if they could find a richer spot. (In Fortymile, Injun had got the impression Swedes were pitied for their willingness to stake a prospect other men would dig a shit pit on.)

At night the two fellows lay back-to-back in their sailcloth tent, and in the mornings they counted their bruises; the man with the fewest had to boil the coffee. That was their first game but soon they had plenty. After another week they found a bend in a muddy creek that gave ten cents a pan, and Injun felt the glow of being right, as well as the giddy anticipation of riches. Goat marked out the five hundred feet he liked best; Injun blazed a small spruce tree and penciled on the upstream side,
One,
and their names.

That night they lay awake so long laughing and planning how to spend their fortune, they were baggy-eyed when they hiked into Fortymile to the Recorder’s Office. The two of them were so ignorant, they hadn’t realized that they were allowed a claim each, and that the discoverer of the strike was granted double, which meant three between them. They rushed back to their muddy creek the next morning and staked out another thousand feet, marking it
One Below
and
Two Below.
Injun put Goat down as the discoverer and himself as the second man, but that was just a formality.

In Fortymile they borrowed a mule to haul their outfit and a stack of raw lumber to their claim for building a tiny cabin. They left two stumps in the middle of the floor to sit on, and built bunks against the walls. The windows were deer hide (that was a tip another old-timer had given them); Injun was surprised how well they let in the autumn light. With a sheet-iron stove they were all set, and Injun soon had some flapjacks on.

At first he couldn’t get the knack of sleeping on his skinny bunk instead of back-to-back in the tent, but at least it was warmer. The walls smelled of sawdust, and pressed close, it was like living in a two-man coffin. Lucky we’ve got no third mate, he said in the dark.

Reckon so, Goat replied.

After a couple of days the cabin was fetid with smoke and feet. Injun pasted woodcuts from yellowed newspapers over the cracks:
Jumbo the Elephant,
and
Ladies Admiring Niagara Falls,
and
A View of Kew.
He found one called
The Forests of Scandinavia
to make his partner feel at home, not that Goat gave any sign of noticing. On the back, there was an article about some rich German with a bee in his bonnet about bringing all the creatures mentioned in Shakespeare to America; he’d released forty pairs of starlings in the middle of New York City. Bet they all got eat by nightfall, said Injun with a laugh, but Goat said naw, immigrants always take over, they’ve got fire in the belly.

In September, the leaves burned red and fell, and all the Yukon’s little veins froze up. Goat and Injun were so green, they’d never thought to wonder how to mine in the sub-Arctic winter. Sure, you have to burn your way down, said the Irish fellows on the next creek over. So every night the two partners lit a wood fire in their dig, and every morning they scraped past the ashes into the hot thawed earth. The greasy black shaft they hollowed out this way was barely wide enough to let one man crouch. The other would winch the bucket of muck up with a windlass, and pile it in a dump. It was a fortnight before they hit the pay streak—a dried-up creek channel—and started tunneling sideways along it. Already their pay-dirt dump was as high as Injun’s head. But the killing thing about northern mining, of course, was you never knew what you’d got till the spring melt.

Sometimes they got so tired of the crawling and scrabbling in the smoky dark, they splashed their faces with water and trudged into Fortymile. There was a snowed-in vaudeville troupe that gave the same turns every night till the crowd howled like malamutes. There were ten saloons, and the code was that any man who came in with a poke of gold dust to throw down on the bar bought hot hootchinoo for everyone in hearing, or real whiskey if a boat had come in. Fortymile men all seemed to have got strange nicknames like Squaw Cameron or Cannibal Ike. (Goat and Injun were too used to their own monikers to remember they’d ever been called anything else.) The stories told in the saloons were of gold men; lucky ones, unlucky ones. A drunken sucker who got tricked into buying what seemed like a worthless stake, but it turned out a bonanza in the end. A Forty-Niner who washed out thirty thousand dollars but got so fixed on the prospect of being robbed that he slit his own throat before anyone else could.

The weather tightened like a fist. By October the two mates had stopped shaving, since a beard was some protection even if it did form icicles around the mouth. Injun’s droopy Indian-style mustache flowed right into his side whiskers, he was like some old walrus, and Goat’s goatee had spread into a yellow thornbush. When it got to fifty below, they gave up digging, lay in their bunks half the day in the smoky cabin. One of them might lurch out with scarves wrapped round his face to hack a deep hole in the river for water, or hobble into Fortymile—they were both plagued with blisters and boils on their feet—to get another handful of beans on credit. Long nights they curled like grubs in their foul sleeping bags, listing fresh things they’d a fancy for: apricots, cherries, tomatoes. They sang “My Darling Clementine” and “Break the News to Mother” and other old tunes they could only half remember. Injun hummed hymns from his childhood and Goat dredged up some sad Swedish songs. What’s sad about them? Injun wanted to know, but Goat couldn’t translate the words, he said, they’re just sad.

The code was, show your grit, but help other gold men out, because otherwise who’d last a winter? A fellow was entitled to walk into your cabin while you were out, eat his fill, have a kip, and go on his way, as long as he left a supply of fresh kindling in case you came in frozen. Once Injun arrived home to find Goat talking Swedish with some block-faced stranger over the last of yesterday’s bread. He didn’t like the fellow’s manner and was glad he was gone in the morning.

That winter the mates made all the mistakes of all young men in too much of a hurry to ask. They got stomachache when they didn’t bother cooking their beans long enough, and toe rot from sleeping in wet boots. The one thing they knew never to do was let the fire die out, because of that popular story about the two partners discovered in an isolated cabin, stiff as rocks beside an icy stew kettle with nothing but a pair of partly cooked moccasins in it.

In the night Goat and Injun kept talking, speech slurred from numb lips, just so they’d know they hadn’t died. Your Yukon is a perverse kind of river, remarked Injun, did you know it rises fifteen miles from the Pacific and then meanders around for two thousand more before it falls back down into the Pacific?

Goat grunted as if to say he neither knew nor cared. After a minute he said this cussed place, why did Uncle Sam ever buy it off the Ruskies?

He didn’t, Injun corrected him, that’s Alaska, we’re in the Queen’s territory now.

Goat muttered something about what he’d like to do to the Queen.

Soap out that filthy mouth, said Injun, coughing with laughter, don’t you know she’s about a hundred years old?

Came a long blizzard when water iced on the walls two feet from the fire. Let me in before I freeze, said Goat, stumbling two steps from his bunk to Injun’s. Lying like spoons they shuddered up some warmth. Injun woke from a doze to find his hand on Goat’s britches and he couldn’t rightly have said whether it was him who’d put it there. His left hand was so numb it hardly knew what his right hand was doing and kept on doing. Then Goat thrashed round to face him and their breath was a hot Chinook wind.

What time is it, Injun wondered, what seemed like days later, and Goat said, what does it matter? They stirred and slept, touched and rolled and slept, couldn’t get out of the bunk except once in a while to throw a log on the fire. You do it. No, you! Numbskull Swede, lazy half-breed, they cursed each other with a curious fondness, tried to shove each other onto the floor, grabbed each other again. The wind made a fearful whining.

There was something wrong with their legs, they were bruised blue and red. Injun’s joints ached and his mouth tasted metallic, like blood. Is my breath bad? he asked. Goat, and his mate said, sure, but I don’t care. Goat’s face was strangely puffy. We’re a couple of beauties, he wheezed, laying his yellow beard against Injun’s bared chest.

Injun woke up later, unnerved by the silence. The blizzard had to be over. He was starving and sore. Slowly he heaved Goat against the wall, tucking the sleeping bag round him, and got to his feet. He took a sip of water from the cup on the stove. His face in the tin plate was weirdly mottled. What had they done to themselves? It occurred to him that they were dying and his heart lifted oddly.

It took Injun the best part of the day to stagger into Fortymile. My partner and I, we’re dying of gangrene, he told McQuesten, taking down his trousers in the back of the store. The owner snorted and said, don’t you fool boys know about scurvy? He sent Injun off with a bottle of lime juice, so sour it made him retch.

On the journey back, the sun came up over the ice, and Injun had forgotten his wooden mask with the slit in it. By the time he made it home he was so snowblind he was surprised he hadn’t stumbled into some abandoned shaft and snapped his legs. His eyes were full of scalding sand, the good one as bad as the bad; the whole world was scarlet with fire, and the more he rubbed, the worse it hurt. Goat laughed but spooned stew into Injun’s mouth like a mother.