Fools' Gold (7 page)

Ellen sighed again and stepped across the room and sat a moment behind the counter. She took her cleaning rags and dusted more vigorously than she had that morning. She checked the chicken coops then smiled and moved the marble egg in under another barren bird. It was such a simple trick. She slid another warm egg into the box. Still, it was impossible to believe that she might double her yield.

Finn found Phil standing in front of the notices, looking over the lists of construction jobs. He walked up behind him and pointed, over Phil's shoulder, at the lonely name of Finn Wallace at the top of one of the lists.

“Sign here and you'll not regret it,” he said.

Phil turned around slowly.

“I'll work just a few weeks. Until winter comes.”

“Work with me,” said Finn.

“How are the women?” asked Phil. “I have messages for them from the reverend.”

“What we'll be doing is building Ellen's bath. She got the idea from the one she saw in your village.”

Phil nodded and Finn smiled. “Will you have a drink then? To liquefy the working relationship, so to speak.”

Finn pulled the tent flap back at the entrance to the Gold Belt but Phil hesitated before bending through. “I'm not sure they want me here,” he said quietly.

The owner called out in a friendly way, waving Finn over, but indeed giving Phil a long and hollow look. He moved like a janitor, pushing an old undershirt along the counter top of his bar. The only other customer in the place was the short man from the river bank.

“You've been making yourself scarce, have you not, Finn? What'll it be?”

Finn introduced Phil. He ordered beer and watched the owner watching Phil's face as the foam from the drink clung to his lips and ran down his olive chin. The short man stood near them drinking whiskey from a shot glass. He briefly looked in their direction but it was obvious to Finn that the man had forgotten him, had forgotten entirely their conversation at the beach. The man was dressed neatly, in clean clothes, and the hands that came out of his plaid jacket sleeves were hairless and delicate compared to his thick body. Finn wanted to tell the man they had met before and ask him to join them, but he was sure the man would refuse. There was something in the way he stood that made him unapproachable. Just the presence of the man made Finn want to watch himself, to be careful of the way he spoke to Phil and to the owner. He was aware of a desire to make a good impression on this man, a feeling that was rare in Finn's experience. He felt inferior.

The owner, rags moving, told Finn how unusual it was to have an Indian standing against the Spanish bar. “They come from far and wide,” he said, “but rarely do we get them from so near. Does your friend speak English? If he does I'll say he's the first I've met who's able.” The owner turned slightly and faced Phil. “Go ahead,” he said, “say something, Bub. I'm always looking for good conversation.”

The owner was smiling, but Phil felt angry and Finn's attention was split, half of it on the small man, who seemed not to notice them at all. “He speaks English,” Finn said, finally focusing. “You don't ask the Swedes and the Frenchmen for a sample of what they can say, do you? Why ask him?”

The small man still faced forward, but spoke, catching Finn's eye in the moving mirror. “Europeans are famous for their facility with language,” he said. “Alaskan Indians don't share that ability, so your man becomes a curiosity. Like a parrot among birds.”

“Right,” said the owner. “If the man speaks English, let's hear it. We could ask him questions about his people. Clear up some of the misconceptions.”

The man from the beach turned half-circle and faced them now, so Phil pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets and came up with some cash to lay on the lovely bar. He turned and stepped across the sawdust and out into the street without looking back.

“What a way to treat a man,” Finn said, looking hard at the happy owner. He wanted to run after Phil, but he had a full beer in his hand. The small man drank the remainder of his whiskey and left before Finn did, and Finn thought maybe he would say something to Phil, maybe apologize, maybe pat Phil on the back as he passed. When Finn left, the owner was dusting again. He found Phil standing sideways along one of the paths. They could both see the small man walking between two of the tents, heading back toward the beach.

Finn and Phil sat up to their necks in hot water, in the back room of Ellen's bath. Henriette brought towels and walked through the room carefully, not looking at either of the men. As soon as Ellen saw Phil she included him on her list of those who'd be allowed free baths, but he was absolutely the last. He and Finn would begin construction in the morning. They spoke over the cloth walls between the tubs of just how they would go about their work. Already they had enough lumber for the frame and knew where they could get more, but the price was high. Ellen would have to pay right now for the wood, though the payment due the two laborers could be made any time. They spoke between the baths, in and out of the two rooms of the establishment: “And upstairs will be the sleeping quarters,” Ellen told them. “Four rooms. One for Henriette and one for myself and two that we could let or that either of you could use.”

“I'll be building a house up around my own tent when this is finished,” Finn said, splashing.

Ellen lit a large fire in the front-room stove and they cooked fish, a salmon brought by Phil and given to Ellen and Henriette as a gift from the reverend. The two men dried themselves briskly in the hot bathroom, then dressed in warm clean clothing. The smell of salt salmon reached them. They'd bought a cot earlier and taken it to Finn's tent for Phil to sleep on. They would be roommates until the project was finished and Phil returned to the village. It was nearly midnight by the time they began the meal, by the time the sun finally finished disappearing over the rim of the earth. All four of them caught the festive mood that they remembered sharing at the village. They wanted it to continue. Ellen relinquished the last remnants of her first impressions of Finn, felt them slipping away like fishing line into the water. Henriette felt herself opening, blooming into full membership in the group. And Phil thought the three the most likable of the outsiders he'd met, excluding the reverend, and he was willing to live for a while as they did, to accept them as they were and to take what the city brought him. They laughed and stripped the salmon, eating everything. They held up the fine-boned skeleton and looked at each other through it. Finn called it a comb and pretended to run it through his hair.

“Don't laugh,” said Phil. “That is how such things are discovered.”

“Invented,” said Finn. “The comb was invented, not discovered.”

Phil leaned forward. “That is a good example of the extravagance of your language,” he told him. “You attach two words to the same concept thus making understanding difficult. Invention. Discovery. What's the difference?”

Finn, full of the warmth of the front-room fire, held the salmon bones in front of him, playing them like a harmonica. He followed the line that connected the words “invention” and “discovery” in his mind but could make nothing of them. He thought about the short man again, thought of him as inventing gold, then knew, suddenly, where he had seen the man before. He pictured those delicate hands stuck like flesh bumpers among the tears of that chandelier. He was Dr. Kingman, the man who, indeed, had invented gold in Alaska, had made the first big discovery. He had charted the course of the lives of all these men and of Finn and Ellen and Henriette. Only Phil was his equal, though Finn hadn't known it that afternoon in the bar. Finn saw the future tying him, tying his life, irreversibly to that of Dr. Kingman. Like invention and discovery they were on opposite ends of the same thread, not one without the other but both, like the two sides of the same gold coin.

Fujino couldn't sleep and was too excited to walk the hills. He had packed and repacked the finely webbed snowflakes, laying fine Japanese paper between them, trying not to let them crack or to let sections chip away from the patterns that had been formed. He was going to town, leaving in the morning. He would stake their claim and would see the varied faces of other human beings. He was hired as a translator, he often told himself, but hadn't spoken a word of English since his arrival. Fujino felt himself growing strong from the work, and as the weeks passed he realized that his body had adjusted itself, that he was equal to it. At the end of the day he was ready for rest and at the end of the night he was rested for work. Not like Kaneda. The old man needed him and there had been a subtle shift in the kinds of work they did. Fujino was working more, the old man less. Still the old man had a better eye for gold and better patience for scanning the muddy bottom of the sluice. Without him, Fujino knew, he would not have made a strike at all.

Often in the evening after dinner and directly after relating to Fujino some new aspect of Japanese history, the old man succumbed to such heavy sleep that nothing would wake him. Fujino sometimes sang then, from deep in his lungs, but the ashen face of Kaneda, his future father-in-law, would not move; his muscles were in total repose, skin hanging from his facial bones like chicken fat.

This night, though, even the old man stayed awake in speculation as to what the changes might be in the new city of Nome. When they arrived Nome was only tents, and lumber piled like collapsed houses. What would have happened in all this time? They could imagine streets that ran smooth and parallel. It was something, Kaneda had said, to be in on the building of a city. They talked and what they imagined constructed on the brutal shore was a small Tokyo. Each in his imagination had raked the tents and the milling men from the beach just as one might rake an area in preparation for the landscaping of a garden.

The two men talked to each other as if sharing the same vision. They got great satisfaction from what they thought had become of the city. Kaneda showed no sign of going to bed, and though the sake had been gone for weeks they allowed themselves the drunkenness of reflection.

Fujino would leave in the morning, carrying the golden snow-flakes and the claim papers. He would take the mule and try to make the journey quickly. While he was gone, it was decided, Kaneda would also rest. He would keep the mine in operation, but would be satisfied, not with half, but with only a third of the gold per day that they had been accustomed to. Fujino was not to hurry, and was not to brag about the claim or show his purse unnecessarily around the new buildings of the town. It was very exciting. Kaneda really wished he could be going too, or that he might be the one to go since only one could.

At the height of their excitement, when conjecture had grown and they were happy, Fujino mentioned Kaneda's daughter. It was a mistake, he knew, but he did not run after his words with apologies or quick changes of subject. “More than anyone else I miss your daughter,” he said, and they both remained quiet. It was not for Fujino to speak now. He would wait. Such a thing was unheard of, but surely Kaneda had recognized the unexpectedness of it, the way it escaped as from a locked cell. Fujino would not look at the old man. They sat like two Buddhas, teacher and student. He could expect nearly anything: a burst of anger, a laugh. The old man pushed another piece of bark onto the fire and began to speak.

“Our nation of Japan is in reality one family,” he said. “Perhaps I am involved with its history for the same reason that another man might be interested in retracing his family tree.”

Fujino listened sitting up, head bowed deeply toward the fire.

“I wish my branch of the family tree to grow well and I wish my grandchildren to bear my name and understand life precisely as I do.”

The old man stopped again but Fujino did not look up. What was he saying? What did it mean? There was nothing but silence again. Ah history! Kaneda had been thinking of Japan as a family and had remembered several events in the family history that Fujino still had not been told. Tonight he would tell about events he himself could half remember. As a young man, for example, he saw with his own eyes the black ships of the American fleet as they entered the port of Shimoda. He would not speak of his daughter again so Fujino relaxed and began to remember his upcoming journey. He still sat stiffly before the fire, but he thought of Nome. He listened to the old man's melody, a slow introduction, then a detailed description of the large-boned face of Commodore Perry.

Finn and Phil bought heavy canvas aprons and filled their pockets with long nails. They dug a square trench and worked for twenty hours mixing concrete and pouring the bath's foundation. Finn insisted that it all had to be done at once, and that if they watched their starting time they'd be able to do the entire job during daylight hours. They had enough wood for the frame and had a promise of more wood, a promise that they would not have to stop for lack of supplies. Above the swirl of tents, here and there, other such frames were rising. Occasionally they saw an entire finished building side, blond boards reflected in the sun.

Phil knew the ground and said that poles should be hammered into it, the tops of them surfacing and sticking like earth fingers, just into the hardening cement. That was what they had done with the reverend's house. It would keep the structure in place for several seasons, perhaps longer. They were going to put the building up around Ellen's tent; there was no other way. Later they would unfold the canvas, tuck it out through the door and then complete the interior. The ground floor of the building would have a high ceiling, but the upstairs would be small, enough space for a man to stand up, but no more. The idea of a bath had caught on, it seemed. Ellen told them that they were getting twenty customers a day, enough to pay for supplies and to pay Henriette and give Finn and Phil some of what they were owed as well, as a show of good faith.