Fools' Gold (11 page)

Fujino survived to scream. He was cared for by the others in rotation. Finn, Phil, Henriette, one at a time climbed the stairs to see him. They looked in at the new door with its sap still running and listened to his complaints of itching and watched as he drew sharp fingernails across his thighs. His gums still held the dead color of lead in them and he talked. He screamed for Kaneda and for Kaneda's daughter.
“Kimie! Kimie!”
he said, using her given name bravely and for the first time.

Snow fell for three days and then stopped and turned concrete, a wave across the city. Doors would not open. The only way to leave the bath was through a window. The four stood in still positions until their muscles ached or they thought of Fujino. They stoked the fire or ate eggs and listened to the clucking chickens with equal disinterest, equally lost in thought. Phil imagined himself in heavy clothes, heading out the window and off toward his village. The storm had stopped so there was no reason for him to stay. He thought about offering to go to Kaneda to explain, but he did not. He pictured himself arriving at his winter village with hide strings around his neck, the golden snowflakes dangling. He would place one around the neck of each of his women, one atop the cool hut of his little sister, Nanoon. There would be movement in the village, and by now the ice of the bay would have holes in it for fishing. Phil had prepared everything for his return. He'd readied the supplies and the gifts and the money. By the time he got there the winter homes would be dug and warm and he would be able to speak as many hours as he liked each day with his children. He imagined the golden snowflakes as the talk of the town.

Phil turned from the window and picked up his pack. He visited each of the others where they stood, saying good-bye. He told them that he was long overdue at home, that they would meet again in the spring. He said, “Things look bad for the Japanese,” then backed out of the window, pack first, feeling the snow break under his feet. The three watched Phil walking away. He turned once, swatting the flank of the dead mule and grinning. They all heard the dull thud of the slap and saw the snow falling from the frozen body.

After Phil left, the rotation fell apart. Henriette alone sat in a chair at the side of Fujino's bed watching and noting each of his movements, everything he said, on pieces of paper. She had it in mind that she was his nurse, and nurses kept records. She liked it better upstairs, for her mind was more directly connected to what she saw. Unlike Finn and Ellen she was not given to living in her imagination. In her the past and the future met as they were supposed to. She relied on her senses as the others relied on their memories, as the others tried to understand their lives by thinking.

Henriette kept Fujino's room warm and marked everything she saw or heard or smelled on her pieces of paper. She told Fujino that there was no doctor but that time healed all wounds, and when he screamed for Mr. Kaneda she patiently informed him that Mr. Kaneda was not there. And when Fujino was quiet she entertained him by telling him stories, or by describing the world around them, standing at the window and telling him what she saw.

“It's all ice and snow, really,” she would cheerfully say. “There are no people and the ground is so pretty. The strangest thing I see is a dead mule who won't fall down but who stands in his frozen tracks staring right into the house. The poor thing. It's Finn's mule. Sometimes from this window I feel as if he is looking directly up at me, looking right up into the room here.”

No one knew how much of what Henriette said Fujino understood. He heard about the mule all right, for once he tried to question her about his own mule, but she would only say, “No, it's Finn's mule,” and then she'd carefully tell him that she hadn't seen anything of his since winter began.

In a week or so Henriette moved her cot into Fujino's room. “It's warmer in there and I can help him if he needs anything in the night,” she said. From below they could hear her talking. Or if they couldn't they knew she was busy writing, putting everything down in the little notebook that she made.

And Finn too now, as Ellen had been doing from the beginning, began moving in Irish circles, gliding over the smooth surfaces of memory, going back, much as he said he would never do. He stood in the frame of the window looking into the eyes of the snow-covered mule and saw himself reflected there twice, in perfect unison. Since childhood Finn had had the habit of talking to his mirror image, so why not into the mule's eyes? “Well, when are you going to make something of yourself?” he might ask, looking into pub mirrors or into the dirty glass above washbasins in lavatories.

Now if he turned sideways his image in the eyes of the mule turned sideways as well. He saw himself as two small marchers who had timed their turns so perfectly that even the most demanding drill sergeant would not be able to find fault. It had been that way in school if he remembered correctly. Boys lined up on the playground as if they were soldiers. He remembered cold knees more than anything else. It had been so long since he'd let himself slide into Ireland this way. No good living in the past was his motto. Still, if he turned in the room now he knew he would find Ellen standing, swaying in front of another window, and if he asked her something it would take a moment for her to respond and he would be able to see in the tightening of the muscles on her face the stages of her awakening. It was like being alone in the house, except for the cries of the man upstairs.

Whenever Finn thought of Fujino he thought of Kaneda and knew he was responsible. Hadn't it been he, after all, who'd asked the young man to stay? He could remember telling him how happy Kaneda would be with the extra gold. And wasn't it time to wonder about the nature of the accident? Accident—it was suicide, however unlikely. Still, if Finn knew anything about the Japanese it was that there was a connection between them and suicide. He had read it or heard it somewhere. He even knew the word,
harakiri
, or something nearly like it. Finn remembered that there had been a boy in school who'd taken his own life and left a note saying he was not a coward. He had leapt off a cliff and onto the rocks below because of the taunting of other boys, Finn among them. Still, that boy was a boy who demanded taunting. They had all done pensum. Finn and some of the others took flowers to the boy's mother and had them scattered back in their faces for their trouble. They had gone to the funeral as a group and stood in school rows behind the teacher priests. Finn remembered praying for the boy's soul. He prayed hard, his every muscle tight and straining, though he didn't think it would do much good. He knew that a boy was not supposed to take his own life and so it would be very hard going no matter why he had done it. He had prayed, therefore, not so much for the boy as for his own part in the boy's fall. He hadn't a lot of guilt, but he had had some. He had been what might be called a medium taunter, the only hard evidence against him being a time he'd knelt down behind the lad and let another boy push him over. Finn could still remember the feeling of the boy's buttocks and legs rolling over his back. The boy had fallen and cracked his head on the hard dirt and Finn had stood up and offered the boy his hand, which he immediately pulled away when the lad reached for it. On the day of the funeral and for weeks after, Finn had dreamed that he knelt at the edge of the jagged cliff and let the boy be pushed over him onto the sharp rocks below. He had dreamed of extending his long arm toward the boy. Off the cliff his arm would go, fluttering like a scarf in the boy's crushed face. They had been terrible dreams and he ran to confession with them and with his part in the taunting as well.

“He was an odd boy and you may know that God does not hold you to blame,” the priest had said.

“Father, forgive me for I have sinned.”

“Do three Hail Marys and feel yourself cleansed.”

“In my dreams he fell across my back and onto the rocks below.”

“He was a strange boy…”

Three times he'd gone and on the third he left the confessional feeling the weight of the boy's death falling from him. Later the priest invited him to tea and that night he slept soundly and saw the dead boy smiling and running on the playground, kicking a football with speed and precision past Finn and past the others.

Finn had not thought of the dead boy in years, but now with Fujino the memory of him came back. He knew Fujino would not die. It had been a fortnight, or nearly that, and if he were going to die he'd have done so by now. Pensum. That strange schoolboy word. The memory of it made him realize how his language and his life had changed since leaving Ireland. Hadn't he cleansed himself of it yet? Couldn't he be sure of himself even now, after all these years? He was like a fighter between rounds, he was, taking a moment of reflection in the eyes of a dead mule.

Finn looked up and noticed that it was snowing lightly again. He could hear the mumbling above, and when he looked at Ellen he found her looking back at him. He was hungry, bloody hungry, but the fire had nearly died away. He would build it up again and Ellen would prepare a meal. Phil must be nearly home by now. He could make the trip in winter as fast as most of them could in summer, him being an Eskimo and all.

The mule's head was clear to them for only a few hours each day. It was like a sundial, letting them gauge the hours of daylight, letting them know that the shadow they saw quickly passing down over its eyes was the shadow of night. The sun came through the windows briefly, like the dull back of a rolling whale, and then was gone. Finn slept more hours each day than he ever had, and Henriette sat rocking on the stiff hind legs of the straight-backed chair, drawing the shades if the sun shone in, remembering the way sickrooms were supposed to be and keeping everything quiet and dark. Her eyes reddened and from that she got the feeling of satisfaction that she believed belonged to nurses. When she came downstairs for meals, she ate quickly and talked to the others about the condition of the patient, about the amount he was eating and drinking, about the general state of his skin. She told them everything except what he said. That was in writing, and the act of transcribing it made further discussion seem an impossibility.

Henriette wore heavy clothes around the house; she wore her sealskin jacket with her heaviest dress underneath. She seemed always to be cold, but when Ellen or even Finn tried to talk her down the stairs to be for a moment next to the bigger fire she resisted.

“I've got my place and my job to do,” she said once. She climbed the stairs with a smoking tray of food and closed the bleeding door behind her, leaving Finn and Ellen alone again.

Finn said, “Daylight's gone. I had thought to go out.”

“It's not too far to the Gold Belt that you couldn't get there and back without freezing.”

“It mightn't be a bad idea,” he said vaguely, already searching for his greatcoat. “I've been staring through this window so long that I feel like a painting and it my frame.”

Ellen, casting her eyes toward the ceiling, said, “Bring back some beer. It might revive the young man's spirits.” Finn was fitted into his outside clothes but hadn't yet started toward the window.

“Wouldn't you consider coming along?” he asked. “I've seen proper women in the place before. Think of it as a change of scenery.”

It was a matter of form, his asking. Ellen had been inside Irish pubs as a girl and could remember the smell of stale talk and ale. She remembered rubber faces turned on their stools to look, to see who'd come in, and she could recall the voice of the owner as he called to her father, “Lem, it's your girl come to fetch you home.”

Had she come full circle then? Finn stood with his hand out, waiting. He too realized that she might go with him. His standing there reminded Ellen of herself waiting for her father to make up his mind. Even if he took an hour, once she'd let him know she was there she could not speak again, and looking at Finn, she knew that he too would wait for her without speaking.

“You don't think I'd be hindering the fun of it?”

Finn smiled broadly and moved toward her. “Not in the least,” he said. “It's something we both need. We could make a night of it, really we could.”

He took Ellen's heavy coat off its hook and held it open for her now like the cape of a matador. Ellen walked to the window and looked out at the dark. “Time seems to mean nothing,” she said. She stepped into her coat and selected one of the skin-and-fur caps that they'd collected over the past few weeks. They could hear Henriette talking quietly in the room above them. One of the things Ellen had noticed about her bath was how clearly sound traveled. She didn't like that. She wanted silence from the occupants of the rooms. She wanted the effect of privacy.

Finn opened the window and they backed out, stepping quickly onto the crusted snow. Stars were dim and dusty and the nearby tents were dirty next to the white snow. They stopped for a moment and looked through the front window of the bath. This was the mule's view. They saw the empty room and the clean table and the red glow from the stove. It didn't seem nearly as cold as they'd expected it would. Though the path between the tents and bath had filled with snow, they found it well packed and easy to walk across. Only occasionally did one of them step through the top crust. Mostly the snow held them, let them step on its crisp top without breaking.

The Gold Belt was not the only saloon in Nome, but it was the largest and it was the only one that had the frame of a building built up around it. The tent flap opened precisely where the door would be. The room was smoky and full, but they found a corner table and sat down. It was dark. There were dozens of girls wearing long trousers and wool shirts whereas before they'd all dressed as ballerinas. There was music and loud talking and they were forced to wait for a long while before being served. Neither of them spoke. They looked around the room, so different from the one in which they'd spent the last days. Even Ellen felt a certain release, a certain sense of celebration. More people were arriving; no one was going home. The owner spotted Finn and waved. Business was booming, though it was not yet four o'clock in the afternoon.