Heartbroke Bay (8 page)

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Authors: Lynn D'urso

BOOK: Heartbroke Bay
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From the pocket of the soiled coveralls a knife sings into the air, the blade wavering back and forth in counterpoint to the motion of the ship. Its owner mutters a single word—“Whore”—before taking a step closer to Hans, who steps back until he comes to a halt against Hannah’s knees.
The movement of the bearded giant is studied and swift. Without rising from his seat, he grasps the knife wielder by the collar, and with a motion like that of a man pitching a bag of grain, throws him straight up, knocking his head against the unyielding underside of the deck. The sound is surprisingly hollow, like a boot being dropped. The knife clatters, and the giant catches the senseless mutterer as he falls, then eases him to the cabin sole with the gentleness of a mother laying a child to bed.
Leaning over the recumbent figure, the giant probes with a thick finger, delicately surveying the area of skull-to-deck impact. The wide brim of a Western-style hat that has seen a great deal of sweat and sun hides his eyes as he inspects the results of his work. Satisfied, he pats the greasy, disheveled hair of the unconscious man into place with a meaty hand and regards Hannah with eyes startling in their tenderness.
To her own surprise, Hannah ignores Hans’s injunction to “keep away” and goes to the wounded man. After righting and setting aside the bucket, she repeats the giant’s inspection. The stale smell of a body unused to washing fills her nose, and she breathes through her mouth as she examines her offender. “He seems well enough,” she observes. “He is breathing evenly.”
Hannah and the giant exchange looks, and he says, in a low voice, as if to explain the incident, “Heartbroke.”
“Do you know him, then?”
He pauses and shakes his head. Harky—for that is the man’s name—does not know the knifeman by name or face or history, yet knows him as he has known so many of the wounded. Whether by woman or life or God’s own cruelty, “heartbroke” is always the same. Nothing else can account for such madness.
Hannah waits for more until she understands nothing more will be forthcoming, then gestures to the man at her feet. “What shall we do with him?”
Harky considers a moment. The question could be one of whether to restrain, nurse, or punish. His shoulders are as wide as an ax handle, and when he shrugs, they move like the withers of a horse. “He’ll behave, I reckon.”
Hannah nods, accepting the bearded man’s guarantee of her safety, and thanks him. Hans, too, is grateful for Harky’s intercession and introduces first himself, then Hannah as “Mrs. Nelson, my wife.”
Harky shakes hands with Hans, then offers his hand to Hannah, who hesitates briefly before taking it. The paw is so large and powerful she feels as if she is placing her fingers into the mouth of a crocodile. But the thick fingers and broad, hard palm take her hand as briefly and gently as if it were capturing and releasing a small frightened bird.
“We’re traveling to Sitka,” says Hans, “looking for work. Our plan was for the Yukon, but we’ve been excluded for want of supplies.”
Harky nods. When he answers, it is with the hesitance and cadence of a man for whom speech is infrequent. “Me, too. Partner run off, took the supplies.”
“Do you mean to say you were robbed by your own partner?” asks Hannah.
Harky knits his brow before answering. “We only had half enough. Guess he figured that was enough for one.” The partner skedaddled in the night, crossing the border beyond pursuit. Nothing in his tone indicates he is angry or feels cheated.
“You’ve nothing left?” asks Hannah.
“I’ve got a kit.” Harky tilts his head toward a bundle under a bench beyond the unconscious madman—a few clothes and the bedroll he slept in as the partner robbed him.
Hannah places a hand on his forearm in sympathy and invitation. “Will you join us? Perhaps it is time for tea.”
Harky is about to decline when a meaningful look from Hannah spurs Hans to add, “My wife is English, so I’m afraid tea means dry biscuits and hard cheese. But we’ve plenty, so do join us. Bring your gear.”
Harky’s gait as he crosses the cabin to fetch his pack is awkward. He walks with a slight forward roll, feet splayed, and oddly balanced. He steps across the prostrate madman and bends to lift his pack, but the lunatic’s eyes spring open, and he screams. Swift as a trap, the knife sweeps up from the deck, slices across Harky’s stomach and stabs down hard into his boot.
Harky pins the knife with one meaty paw and draws back the other, then pauses a moment as if thinking things over before striking. The lunatic’s yell is cut off in midshriek.
The attack is over before Hannah can move. She watches, stunned, as Harky works the knife free of his foot, flips it away, and grasps the madman’s head in both hands.
“Don’t look, ma’am,” is all he says. From the vise of his hands and the bunching of his shoulders she realizes he intends to break the madman’s neck.
“Stop!” she cries, thrusting one hand forward. And again she is struck by the tender regard in Harky’s eyes, a deep brimming within the irises that speaks of long suffering as he looks up at her.
“Don’t kill him, Mr. Harky,” she pleads. “If you kill him . . .” She starts to say, “You shall regret it,” then says instead, “I must ask you not to do this.”
Harky stares at her a moment, then slowly relaxes his grip and eases the unconscious man’s head to the deck, kneels a moment, then rises.
“Guess we can tie him up or something.” His tone is doubtful, and he looks more doubtful yet, as Hans and the other passengers burst into action, calling for the ship’s crew to bring ropes and take the man away. He does nothing as the knifeman’s arms and legs are lashed, nor does he assist during the melee as the captive is hoisted up the companionway and dragged away to confinement. He watches with what to Hannah seems great sadness.
Harky sighs, “He won’t live long anyway.” Meaning that in a land as rough as the territories, one so unhinged as the madman cannot escape a bullet indefinitely. Only reluctantly does he yield to her request that he open his knife-sliced shirt for inspection.
“We must see to your wounds,” she insists, then gasps, not at the miracle that has seen Harky’s wool shirt laid open with only a small, bloodless line across his stomach to show how close the blade passed, but at a welter of puckered scars crisscrossing his chest and belly.
Harky looks away, embarrassed, and mumbles, “The war.” By fits and starts he reveals how at the age of fifteen, having already grown large on a diet of Texas beef and endless stacks of his mother’s thick potato pancakes, he had run away to join the army of the Confederacy and fight for the South in the Civil War. During the fighting, no matter what tree or stone he had sought shelter behind, some part of his large body had protruded. Over four years of war, the slapping sting and burning irons of passing bullets had gouged a multitude of red furrows and grooves across his shoulders, neck, arms, breast, back, stomach, and buttocks. By the time he was nineteen, he had been wounded twenty times.
When Hannah kneels to draw the raveled gray sock from his foot, she is further shocked; there are toes missing and divots of flesh gone from ball to heel. Harky cannot bring himself to describe to a lady how an exploding canon shell at Gettysburg had blown him out of his boots and concussed his spine to such a degree that for the rest of the day, the night, and all of the next day he had lain deaf and paralyzed, unable to resist, as battlefield rats gnawed his feet. All he can do is finger the hole in his boot to show where the lunatic’s blade pierced the gap where his toes had once been.
Harky breaks the awkward silence that follows by digging in his pack and saying, “I’ve got dried apples.” When Hannah looks perplexed, he adds, “For tea?”
By the end of the day when the ship comes to anchor, an affiliation has formed among the trio, with Hans and Hannah doing the bulk of the talking. Harky’s answers are slow, and he offers little of himself, though it is clear from the way his gaze lingers on Hannah when he thinks she is not looking that he is much taken by her good manners and decorum. He seems content to sit in her company without speaking.
That night in muted conversation in their bunk, Hans teases Hannah that she has a new admirer. She nestles under his arm and denies it, smiling. “He is . . . ,” she says, feeling for a proper word, “my protector.”
“But does he seem a bit sad to you?” she asks.
Hans fingers a knot in a deck beam above their bunk and thinks a moment before answering. “Yes, I suppose he does. But I’ve known others like him, old graybeards who fought in the war and have difficulty enjoying themselves. When I was a boy, an acquaintance of my grandfather grew so melancholy he killed himself by drinking lye.”
Hannah thinks of the gun she glimpsed in Harky’s pack while he was digging out a replacement shirt and struggles for a moment to resolve the kindness in his eyes with his readiness to break a man’s neck. It was a large gun, of the sort she has heard called a horse pistol, and it gleamed with the sheen of steel that has seen much handling. She wonders if Harky has ever contemplated suicide.
Harky, wedged in his bedroll on deck between the mast and a locker holding fenders and mooring lines, is not thinking of suicide, though he has many times in the past. He thinks instead of the only woman he has ever lived with, puzzling over what it is in Hannah’s manner that brings Marta Gutiérrez to mind. Like all of her people down in Mexico, Marta’s eyes were brown, not gray like Hannah’s, nor did she have Hannah’s fine figure. Marta was built low and wide, more, as Harky liked to tease her, for holding her ground than for being admired. Marta would laugh and wrap herself around him at his teasing, claiming to be his
gordita
; he in turn was
popo
, for Popocatépetl, the largest volcano in her district, for both his size and a tendency toward sudden anger that had dogged him for years after the war.
Harky sighs to think of the day Marta asked him to leave. All her brother Alvaro had done was throw a stone at a dog, but the sound of its yelping was enough to send Harky into one of his red-eyed angers, and he had dislocated Alvaro’s shoulder. Marta had not screamed or yelled or grown angry herself, but only placed a hand on his arm and told him that living with a volcano was no longer possible.
Harky groans and pulls the bedroll tighter. If he is not grateful that the wild angers have abated over the years, he is at least relieved, even if all that has been left in their place is an intermittent gray hollow. He is almost asleep when it comes to him that Hannah’s hand on his arm had felt like Marta’s.

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