Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 (5 page)

‘Yes, smelly things. Almost as smelly as the mushers, their handlers.' She laughs. ‘The boys, they like it more than they think they will once they meet the dogs, then even more when the ride gets started. But Thomas Chandler.' She looks at my father. ‘Follow me.'

She leads us across the museum, her shoes click-clacking on the floor. She's wearing a
white top with a linen jacket and matching skirt. A cloud of sweet spicy fragrance drifts behind her. She could be a bank manager or real estate agent. Perhaps that's what she once did. I'd put her age at late sixties. Her suit is well-cared-for but not new.

We walk past a theatrette set up to screen a film titled
Juneau, City Built on Gold
. Beside it is a mining exhibit—sieves, pans and picks on hooks on the wall, and a wooden frame almost the height of the ceiling set up next to them. My father is close behind Hope and notices none of it.

It's a replica of a stamp mill. I saw another one in the BHP foyer in Melbourne years ago. I was early for a meeting not long after starting in the mining business with my freshly minted unremarkable commerce degree.

The year will come when mining will swing up again, but it won't take me with it. It won't be
part of my life to walk through polished granite foyers and sit in meeting rooms on the forty-somethingth floor pitching for business one PowerPoint slide at a time. It'll be a time for new grads, younger survivors. I never loved mining, or even liked it. It's where the opportunities were when I graduated. But there are conversations I'm trained to have, and am good at, that I won't be having again.

My father managed to go through his whole career without such a change of circumstances. Work was a certain thing for him, once he got tenure.

Hope leads us into a small office where she has a seat ready for each of us. There's a pile of files and old papers on the desk, next to a cardboard record box.

‘Is that…' my father can't finish his question.

‘It's everything I have. It includes our correspondence, the birth certificates you sent.'

She reaches out to the top folder as she steps around the corner of the desk.

‘Your father,' she says to me, ‘I had to make him send all kinds of stuff to prove he's next of kin. But that's the law.' She shrugs. ‘And he is next of kin so…' She pulls her chair out and indicates that we should take ours. ‘I have things.'

She sits and sets her forearms on the desk, one hand on top of the other in front of her. She has an earring in each ear, two small matching diamonds.

‘These are not all records of our correspondence.' She gives my father a serious look. ‘When I proved you are the one, Ken, the archives would release to you the hospital material.'

My father is leaning forward on his chair. His reading glasses are in his hands, still in their case.

In a movie, my character would touch his character's shoulder now. I pull my chair
forward an inch or two and settle into his peripheral vision. I have no idea what could go wrong now, or right.

‘First I have some items to demonstrate.' She pulls the box over and opens the lid. ‘These are not Thomas Chandler's, but they are 1890s. They are similar or even identical. There was a lot of similar equipment. Thomas was admitted to Saint Ann's Hospital on October nineteen, 1895. At that time, he had with him a burnt blanket…' She lifts a folded blanket from the box and sets it on the table. It's coarse, murky, with a faded blue stripe along one edge. ‘A frying pan and two knives.' She needs both hands to lift the frying pan. It's black and bent. It looks like it's tumbled down a river. ‘If a man has two knives, one is probably small, for fixing things, fine cutting.'

She passes a short knife to my father. He puts it down and fumbles with his glasses case. He
threads the arms of the glasses over his ears and blinks down at the knife. He picks it up again, places it across his open hand and lets it sit there, a fine tremor at his fingertips. He turns it over carefully to look at the other side. Its handle is fitted with ivory or mother-of-pearl, with the inlays attached by two loose rivets.

‘One knife is usually bigger, for bigger jobs.' Again, she uses both hands for the large knife.

Its wooden handle rattles and its blade is marked with rust. The blade and handle together are almost as long as a forearm. She sets it carefully on the table next to the blanket. My father places the small knife beside it.

‘Is that all he had?' my father says.

‘That is all.' Her eyes, like his, are on the array of measly goods. ‘And winter was coming.'

‘You couldn't survive a winter with just those things.'

‘No.'

‘Had he lost it all? Whatever else he had?' My father slides his hand across the table and rubs the blanket delicately. ‘What was he doing? Was he a prospector?'

‘With only this it's hard to tell.' She watches him touching the blanket but makes no move to stop him. ‘He was sick by then, so…'

She picks up the record box and tips it so that she can look inside. She lifts out a black-and-white photo, a recent print of an old image.

‘This is Saint Ann's Hospital at that time.' She sets the photo on the table. ‘The building on the right was the first, Father Althoff's house, which he gave to the nuns. The second was built in 1888.'

The first building is a clapboard house, part one-storey, part two-, with a long steep roof covering both parts, punctured by the metal pipes of two thin chimneys. It's easy to imagine a room for surgery and a kitchen on the ground floor,
and space for perhaps six beds upstairs. Or maybe that was the doctor's quarters and there were stretchers downstairs for the patients. The 1888 building looks as if it's made of whitewashed stone or brick. It's wider and deeper than the priest's house, and all two-storey. It is a building for a town, not a gold rush. A path leads from its front door, past the first building to an unpainted picket fence. Behind them there's forest, pines marching up a steep slope, a fringe of bare mountain above the tree line.

‘Where is this?' My father picks the photo up by its white borders to take a better look. He works his way across it bit by bit, looking in each window. ‘Can we see it?'

‘You know Saint Nicholas', the Russian church?' She checks to see that my father nods, that the reference means something. Perhaps it was her suggestion that put it on our agenda before coming here. ‘It was one block from
there, corner of Fifth and Harris. But the first building…' She reaches across to place a finger on it. My father sets the photo down again to let her do it. ‘It was replaced in 1897. The second has been gone a long time, too.'

‘Oh.' My father sits back.

His eyes are still on the picture, and he reaches forward and moves it into better light for one more look, white buildings against a mountain backdrop, long gone. Hope lifts the box and sets it aside.

‘But the records are not lost.' She puts her hand on the pile of documents. ‘Some of them. There are not complete records from the 1890s, but sometimes our luck is good.' She moves one folder aside and opens the next. ‘The notes of his admission.' She takes out two photocopied pages and sets them next to each other on the table. ‘Tim…' She indicates with her hand that I should move closer.

My father shifts his chair to make room and slides the pages across so that we can both see them. The notes are longhand, in disciplined looping letters. The examination is recorded in a kind of doctor's code, but most of the rest of it is clear enough.

‘The Devil. Men on black horses.' My father scowls, keeping his finger in the margin next to the part about sleeping with a knife. ‘Halifax is the Halifax in Nova Scotia, presumably. We know he made landfall there, or think he did.' He is picturing this Thomas, lost in Alaska, lost in his head. He looks up at Hope. ‘I imagine we would call this schizophrenia now?'

‘I'm not a doctor, but…' She finds a reference
low down on the second page and points to it. ‘Developmental insanity. That's the diagnosis. I googled it. It would now be schizophrenia, yes. Very likely.'

Thomas's injuries and other physical features are marked on a sketch of a body—a fractured left arm, an old break to the right leading to shortening by more than an inch, two new wounds to the scalp, bruising across his abdomen and to one thigh, no significant abdominal tenderness, mental processes slow, poor eye contact.

My father takes his glasses off and rubs his forehead, pushing his fingertips back and forward, ridging the skin. However the family photo from 1890 appears—the absence of warmth, the shared commitment to no more than stillness—there would have been help there, surely. Help Thomas couldn't expect alone, and in Alaska.

‘You've gone to a lot of trouble,' my father says, fitting his glasses back into place and then peering over them to focus on Hope.

‘No trouble,' she says. ‘I enjoy playing the sleuth from time to time.' She smiles. ‘And you want to know.'

My father nods and smiles, too. ‘Well, thank you.'

Schizophrenia. It fits better than many things with the few details we know, and with his only letter home. ‘Not right in the head' was how he put it himself, though he made more of the pneumonia and his arm fracture—‘a fall' was how he accounted for that—and the letter was mostly to say he was alive and to ask for money.

‘And my days are my own since Carl passed,' Hope is saying. ‘Mostly. My grandchildren are at school now or doing sports. Sports and ballet. Carl was my husband. He was very sick and that was a full-time thing. Anyway, this teaches me a little
more about Juneau. I'm not from here originally. We met in San Diego, Carl and me. He was in the navy. So, I like these…explorations. I find myself looking at Juneau with your Thomas in my head, thinking, ‘What was he doing this day or that day? What did he do at night? Where might I find some other thing about him?''

‘Well, they're lucky to have you here,' my father says. ‘This is marvellous, what you've done.'

‘Ken…' She touches her document pile. ‘I'm only just beginning.'

‘Hope,' he says. He points a finger into the air, like a boy scout testing the wind. On the rare occasions when I saw him lecture, it's a gesture I noticed him use to make a point. ‘Esperanza.'

She laughs. ‘
Si. Me llamo Esperanza
. But Hope is easier here, and just the same. I am from Guadalajara.' The way she says it, the G
of Guadalajara is no more than a breath. ‘
Hablas Español
?'

‘Hardly. A little.
Mi no habla mucho
.' My father starts to smile, but catches it on the way out and his cheeks go pink instead. ‘Margaret, my wife, lectured in Spanish.' It comes out sounding hesitant, as if Spanish isn't something he should own up to. ‘We were both at the university. I went to Mexico with her. Twice. Not Guadalajara though. Sadly.'

‘Dad was a microbiologist.'

My father's head turns jerkily towards me at the sound of my voice. The move makes the legs of his chair scrape on the floor. ‘I was here all along,' I want to tell him. ‘I've been here all day.'

‘Thomas…' Hope says. ‘I have more.'

She rearranges her pile of papers, as if the thread of her story's been lost and she's trying to pick it up again.

‘Ah, yes, here.' She finds several copied sheets joined by a paperclip and hands them to my father. ‘His brother's letter. Edward. Your grandfather…'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Yes, I know the handwriting. I had letters from him when I was a boy.' He tugs at the paperclip, bending the corner of the pages over before slipping it off. ‘And this has been on file here all this time, this letter from him in England…'

He sets the first page down for us both to read. The writing is a well-schooled sloping cursive. Edward had joined the bank by 1896, and would soon be a manager.