Heartbroke Bay (33 page)

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Authors: Lynn D'urso

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay
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With daylight comes the disheartening prospect of the country they must travel, and there is a brief, guesswork discussion to plot a route through the knobbed and broken mountains. As they climb, the snow underfoot grows drier and squeaks in the cold. On the slopes of steep ridges, Hans hacks steps with the ax, and the men pass Hannah from hand to hand across the dangerous traverses. Her cheeks feel frozen. Her fingers go numb.
After hours of climbing, they come to a place of such terrible perspective that they crouch down and stare, silenced by the great distances and spaces. The chalice of the mountains is filled to overflowing with a sea of ice; sidestepping peaks fade away into infinity. The air is thin and hopeless, and a vast silence fills the sky.
“Yield,” whispers a wind that freezes the tears in their eyes.
Overwhelmed by the impossibilities arrayed before them, they agree.
A north wind sweeps across the spine of the mountains, lifting a stream of fine, hard snow that stings their bare skin and smooths the outline of their tracks. They stagger in retreat, screwing up their mouths as if sand were being flung in their faces; their eyes burn from the white strength of the sun, and the cold saps the vigor from their limbs.
Harky stumbles, lamed by his freezing feet and by the weight of the gold on his back. Hannah’s fingers are without feeling. She trembles without cease. In the lee of a cliff, the sudden lack of wind gives the illusion of warmth, though moving air whistles above and behind them. Where the ice has separated from the cliff, a snow-packed
bergschrund
provides a small, secure place for the party to come to a halt and lower their packs for a rest. The slope below is steep, slick with frost, and gives way sharply to a void that hums with the vertigo of empty space.
“Fire,” says Harky, unstrapping the wood lashed to his pack. “We’ve got to warm up.”
Michael shakes his head, then mumbles through lips blackened and cracked from the cold, “We should keep moving. Get as far down as we can before dark.” He squints at the sun, measuring its arc above the southern horizon with the caliper of two extended fingers. “Two hours, maybe less.”
Harky does not pause in his preparations for a fire, untying the splits of wood and setting his heavy pack aside, hooking it on a sharp fang of ice protruding from the edge of the
bergschrund
.
“The ax,” says Harky, beckoning to Hans.
Nelson repositions himself, bracing against the rock face with one hand as he moves around Hannah and Dutch to split a bolt into kindling. Harky hands him a wedge of wood and watches as he kneels, places the butt of the wood against the ground and raises the ax, gripping it one-handed and high on the shaft. The first blow is weak; the wood bounces and falls without splitting.
Hans balances the log again, standing it upright on its end, and takes a firm, two-handed grip on the ax. The
thonk
of the blow is solid. The bolt splits cleanly along the line of its grain, leaps into two parts, and falls against Harky’s pack.
There is a snapping sound as the fang of ice on which the pack is hung cracks, then a moment without motion or sound before the pack begins sliding. The miners, dulled by the cold, watch as it slips away. The grating hiss of its motion grows as the pack accelerates down the slope, then ends as the pack flings itself over the edge of the abyss, disappearing without a sound into eternity.
The weight of the loss drops crushing and hard onto the cold-addled miners when Dutch thrusts out a hand and cries, unbelieving, “The gold!”
FIFTEEN
In the lee of every object, blowing snow aligns itself into dunes as smooth and perfectly curved as the inside of a seashell. A skin of ice scrubbed slick by the wind covers the bathing pond. The door of the cabin rattles. Inside, the four men and Hannah huddle around the stove, feeding splinters of wood to the fire, listening to the sound of surf pounding at the shore. Hannah stitches mittens of seal hide and canvas. The smooth, spotted furs—poorly tanned by a mixture of urine and ashes—leave a revolting smell on her hands.
Winter has brought seals crowding into the bay to feed and rest on the icebergs. Two days in three the wind rages so wildly that it would be foolhardy to leave the shelter of the cabin, but in the three weeks since they returned from the ice field, Michael has become adept at floating into the herd while lying in the skiff, shotgun braced against the gunwale to supply a steady aim. The flesh and organs of each seal he kills feeds the party for exactly three days. The miners’ stomachs bloat and cramp on the diet of pure meat, but there is enough to assuage their hunger. With Harky’s willing arms to cut firewood, they have time on their hands.
“Tell us a story, Dutch,” says Michael, hungry for diversion. “Another of your tales.”
Hans barks, “Bah!” and makes a dismissive slice of his hand through the air. Even in their tedious imprisonment, to solicit another of Dutch’s odd fantasies offends his practical, Nordic sense of life. Severts ignores him.
“What’ll you do after we get out of here, Dutch?” asks the Irishman, smiling. “Spin us a yarn.”
Dutch’s lips form an
O
. His wandering eye tracks an invisible mote as he replies, “Owyhee?”
“Hawaii?” asks Michael. “What about Hawaii?”
“Well, they’ve never seen ice there, have they?” says Dutch, shrugging. “After Lituya Bay, I don’t ever want to see no snow or ice again.”
“Amen,” agrees Hannah.
Encouraged, Dutch elaborates. “Never gets cold there in Hawaii, even at night. And there’s fruit on every tree, fruit of all kinds. Things you never seen in the United States, like papayas and pineapples, or them alligator pears.”
Dutch sighs and makes a show of smacking his lips. “Maybe I’ll take that gold and buy myself a little trading schooner. Just work around them islands, you know. Never get out of sight of a palm tree again for the rest of my life.”
Hans grunts, a nasty snorting sound. “You haven’t done your arithmetic, Dutch. We were wealthy before we took our little walk, but this ox here,” he says, jerking a thumb at Harky, who sits up at the gesture. “He made sure we won’t be leaving here rich.
“Losing the big half of the gold like that, we’re back where we started. We’re splitting half a pie now, and your little piece won’t be buying any schooners.”
Harky’s eyes slit shut, and his whiskers twitch as he chews at his cheek. The muscles of his shoulders and neck bunch as he swallows against the burning rise of bile.
Hannah carefully places a mitten on the table beside her, works the needle into the spool of thread, and says, “It was an accident, Hans. I don’t think anyone can argue that.”
Hans tries to stare Hannah down, then growls, “Well, all I’m saying is that it’d be fair if he didn’t get the same share of what’s left as the rest of us.”
“Aye,” agrees Severts, “and it was your ax work that knocked the pack loose, Mr. Nelson. Maybe that ought to have some effect on your share. And after all, going into the mountains was your scheme, wasn’t it? Just a little stroll on a frozen lake, you said.”
Michael eyes each of the prospectors before continuing. “And don’t forget, I’ve lost my boat. Maybe I should be repaid for that before there is any splitting.”
Hannah senses the emotions in the cabin rising to a flood stage and stands, straightening her skirts. “Please, Mr. Severts. And you, too, Hans. We’ve worked hard together and have much yet to face. Affixing blame for the accident will improve neither our fortunes nor our comfort.
“We made a contract and must live up to our agreement. We share equally, win or lose.” Saying so, Hannah looks across the stove at Michael and sees a twitch lurking at the corner of her lover’s mouth and a narrowing of his eyes, then feels herself coloring as she thinks of her own hypocrisy toward the contract of marriage.
“Well spoken, Mrs. Nelson,” says Michael with his best Irish charm. He smiles, but there is a cold flicker—whether warning or invitation Hannah is not sure—behind his pale blue eyes. “And two shares are certainly better than one. As a couple, that is.”
“How’s that?” asks Dutch. “You mean Mrs. Nelson is to get a share, too?”
Harky looks puzzled. It takes Hannah, too, a moment to understand Michael’s meaning. She has never expected to share squarely with the men, and wonders if Michael’s apparent intention to include her in the spoils is a genuine desire to treat a woman fairly or a part of his fantasy that she will run away with him and thus enable him to recover a larger share of the gold.
Hans, sniffing a fresh opportunity, sits upright and answers Dutch in a too-bright, matter-of-fact tone that fails to cover his own surprise. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Nelson must receive a full share. After all, she has worked very hard, too, and taken the same risks.”
Hannah sees the cards fall. She deserves a full portion, but her husband argues for it not out of fairness but out of self-interest, expecting any share allotted her to become his own. If she argues against it—and she will not, she tells herself, dispute her own interests—she will incur Hans’s wrath. She knows if she insists on equality it will strain things with Dutch and Harky, who, though kind and considerate men, cannot quite enfold the idea that a wife should gain equally with her husband. She realizes they will surely resent such a division—an unattractive consequence to suffer when confined within a small, dark cabin. Faced with this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t prospect, Hannah does what the rules of society demand women do—she remains silent.
“I’ll bring more wood,” she says, pulling on gloves and wrapping a scarf about her neck. Severts stands, offering to help.
At the woodpile Michael uses the ax to break a frozen bolt of wood free from the stack. The winter sun is so low and weak it is possible to stare directly into it without being blinded, and the demarcation between sea and sky is blurred by blowing snow. Michael holds out his arms for Hannah to stack firewood in the crook of his elbows and says in a low voice, “I have to be with you.”
Hannah bends to the wood, avoiding Michael’s eyes, and kicks at a frozen stick of kindling. “I cannot, Michael. We never should have started.” It has been more than a week since their last shivering assignation.
“I love you, Hannah. I want you to go with me when this is over.”
Hannah feels the welling burn of a tear start at the corner of one eye; he is so earnest, and his plea cuts at her heart. The vista of a pale and loveless lifetime with Hans stretches out before her, but deserting him is impossible; she cannot imagine returning to England bearing the stain of divorce.
“No, Michael. It would never work. My father and mother . . . They would never forgive me.”
Michael’s mouth twists, and his face crumples. He sags as if struck with a club, and for a moment Hannah fears he will cry. But then he straightens, clenching his jaw.
“I see how it is,” he says, a vein pulsing at his temple. His lips pull tight, and he slams a booted foot into the woodpile, tumbling the rick to the ground, turning everything he feels into anger, as men do when the need arises to protect themselves from hurt.
When he speaks again, his voice is as sharp as a splinter of glass.
“Too fucking—
fookin’—
good for the likes of me, are you?”
Michael’s anger strikes Hannah like a fist to her solar plexus. She hunches, bends at the waist, the breath driven from her body, and her hand springs to her mouth. She wants to take him by the hand, to tell him how wrong this is, to say that she has given him all that she can but that she cannot forsake who she is so easily, or how she fears the inevitable retribution adultery must bring, but he storms away, kicking at the ground like a small boy.
Shocked by the strength of Michael’s anger, Hannah remains at the woodpile, stunned beyond any awareness of passing time, shivering at the burn of tears freezing on her cheeks until awakened by the pain of frost eating its way into her toes. Straightening her shoulders, she rubs at her nose and eyes with one mittened hand before gathering an armload of kindling and returning to the cabin. Once inside, she is careful to hide her red, swollen eyes, and busies herself with a simmering pot and spoon.

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