Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 (6 page)

The handwriting reminds me of my father's, as if the letter's something he's come up with. But this is the real thing, a man writing about his brother gone adrift, a continent and an ocean between them, and letters making their way by ship and coach and horseback. Edward writes expecting to wait, in a way that's hard to imagine now. I'd be on a plane as soon as I could if Jenny or Rowan was in this kind of trouble. One of us would be.

The letter covers four pages. My father skims them all, then goes back to the start to read them more closely.

‘Was there ever a reply? A reply from…' He reaches for the medical report and turns to the second page, running his finger down it. ‘Doctor Steele? My grandfather never mentioned one.'

‘We have no record of one,' Hope says. ‘Though outgoing correspondence often was
not recorded. Doctor Steele left in early 1896. He was here only one winter.'

My father sits back and stretches his legs under the table. He runs his fingers through his hair, raking them on his scalp and stopping to scratch the back of his head before picking up the letter again.

‘It's good to have this,' he says. ‘This and the hospital report.'

He tidies the pages and fits the paperclip back in place.

‘Your grandfather tried again,' Hope tells him. ‘There are two more letters.'

Each is a single page. The first, eighteen months later, asks if Thomas is still a patient at Saint Ann's and mentions a letter sent directly to him in the same post containing money. The second, a year after that, asks the same question, and asks if Thomas will ever be fit to come home.

My father points out a line and reads it aloud. ‘‘I have young children and a position at the London City and Midland Bank from which I am unable to take the necessary leave.'' He taps the page, and looks up at Hope and then at me. ‘It would have been a journey. A long way to come on the strength of one letter, sent years before.' He leans back in his seat.

‘So, Doctor Steele is gone by early 1896,' Hope says. I know the look on her face now. She has something. Her eyes are on my father, checking that he is with her, that he is ready. She has planned every moment, pacing each reveal like a celebrity genealogy show. ‘But then another doctor arrives. Doctor Stanton Harper. About him, we know quite a lot.'

She tips the record box towards herself and lifts out a book, a hardback with a tear in one corner of the dust jacket. The title reads
Northwest of Everything
and the front cover is a
black-and-white photo of Juneau, pale points of tents across the mountainside, the timber-built town taking shape.

‘It is a novel,' she says, ‘but it is based on truth. It is by the great-grandson of Doctor Harper.'

She turns the book around and taps the author photo. It's black-and-white, too, but from the 1980s, the thirty-something author gazing past the camera, curls of dark hair bursting out from under a striped beanie, his focus, perhaps, on a distant snow-capped peak.

‘Doctor Harper was a great correspondent.' She sets the book on the table, Juneau picture facing up. ‘He was well-read. He kept a journal. Your Edward was not the only family member to write enquiring of a loved one. Doctor Harper was known for his letters to families, especially of the dead. He would give information about the man's time in Juneau. He would talk to the man's friends. He could sum up a life quite
beautifully in only a paragraph. There are letters of appreciation in our records.'

‘But we didn't get one. A letter from him.' My father holds the book in both hands without shifting it from its place. The part of the dust jacket covering the spine has faded from black to grey and, at the top, it has begun to separate from the front. ‘Did Thomas not die here? Did he move on?'

Our ancestor is slipping away. Our ancestor is living a great long life elsewhere. Or dying nearby out of sight, somewhere in the permanent trackless snow and ice beyond the wooded slopes that drop to the channel. I don't know what my father wants, other than an answer, but a fear has surfaced in him that it has drifted beyond reach.
Something
. This morning he would have settled for something, and we have that already.

‘I can tell you he did not move on,' Hope says. She waits until she has caught my father's
eye. ‘And to look more at his life here, we should look further at the doctor. He came first from the east—that is where he was born and trained, before setting up practice in San Francisco. This is from the book.'

She moves her hand forward, and for a moment three hands are touching the cover. My father pulls back, keeping his elbows on the table.

‘He married Laura Heyward, from a successful San Francisco family. They had two daughters, but in late 1895 Doctor Harper left in a hurry. The book puts it down to an affair.' She shrugs. ‘There is no evidence or definite report. Whether the affair is believed by the novelist of
Northwest of Everything
or invented by him, I do not know. Her family supported her. She moved back to her parents' home. But they exchanged letters, Laura and Stanton, full of details, and this is what assists the novelist. It is clear from the letters that an error has been made by Stanton,
but it is not named. The title of the book comes from one letter, his first from Juneau.'

‘And Thomas is mentioned in the book?' My father's voice is breathier than usual, as if it might crack. His eyes open wider, a hint of the jaundice of his illness still in the whites.

‘No. And this is curious to me. Many people are mentioned, but not Thomas. There are pages missing from Thomas' medical records—that is not unusual—but by the middle of 1896, he is working for the hospital. He is fixing the roof, fixing the shutters. Thomas Chandler is doing this, being paid for it. And then there is this.'

She takes a ledger from the box and opens it carefully, at a marked page.

‘See the payment?' she says. ‘The novelist did not find this. It is contractor records, not anything to do with Stanton Harper. Not directly. But this is a deduction for board and lodging. In 1896, Thomas is living in a house
on the hospital grounds that is also lived in by Doctor Stanton Harper.'

‘So he gets better? There's some kind of remission?' My father watches Hope for a sign, a tell.

‘Yes. It would seem so.' She closes the ledger and returns my father's gaze. ‘And he is living in a house with Doctor Harper.'

‘A group house, for hospital staff?'

‘I don't think so. It was not a big place.' She pauses. I'm sure she has a scene in her mind—the house, the household, the doctor and the misfit, his head clearer for a time. ‘This was before the ladies arrived in town in big numbers, before the Red Dog and other establishments. Men were always in each other's company and some took comfort from that. This means different things, perhaps, to different men.' She nods, and draws my father into nodding with her. ‘You know Saint Nicholas' church? It was a
community undertaking to build it. The whole community, not just the Russian Orthodox. A doctor organised a ball to fund the start of it, in 1894. In June of 1896, Doctor Stanton Harper organised another ball, a midsummer costume ball, to fund the belltower and cupola. This was a grand occasion. There was an orchestra, ice cream, a photographer. And, so, there is this…'

She reaches to the bottom of her record box and produces another photo. It's about six inches by four, in portrait orientation, two men standing in front of a fabric backdrop, perhaps a theatre curtain. One is draped in a white smock with a row of four large soft buttons, also white, down the front. He is wearing a black skull cap, and his powdered face looks as pale as his smock. His lips are dark, his mouth is slightly open and his hands are raised in an expression of mock alarm. He is the character Pierrot, but with a short dark beard and moustache. Beside
him is Harlequin, his black mask held away from his face on a stick, the bright colours of his costume showing as shades of grey. His jacket is snug, with a white ruffle collar. The two men are positioned to face out, away from each other, each in his own character's pose, but their shoulders appear to be touching.

Harlequin is thin, but healthily so. He is staring straight down the barrel of the camera, affecting a look of mischief. He is, unmistakably, Thomas Chandler.

‘You can keep this copy,' Hope is saying. ‘I will email it, too. You know which is which? In the picture?'

‘Yes.' My father taps the picture on its lower border, under Thomas. ‘I think…I think we can say he's happy here.' His voice lifts at the end, as if by accident the observation has become a question. He glances at Hope.

‘Yes.'

I try to speak but nothing comes out. I start to clear my throat, but have to cough to do it properly. ‘Are the other photos from the night like this?'

‘Like this? In some ways yes, in some ways no. There are costumes, but the others are bigger groups or a man and a woman.' She looks at my father, but he's still focussed on the image. ‘I can find no other quite like this, two men only.'

‘What a special thing to have,' he says when he finally looks up. He turns to me. ‘Is there a place for it in your bag? Make sure it doesn't get bent. Put it in a book or something. My iPad Mini. It'll fit there, in the case.'

‘And soon after that,' Hope says, a serious tone back in her voice, ‘I am sorry to say, the story ends. There was an outbreak of typhoid fever early in 1897.' She opens a folder, leafs through the documents and draws out a single sheet of paper. ‘There were many cases in the hospital. A
significant number of deaths, processed quickly, buried quickly.'

She keeps the document—it's a list—from us as she studies it, holding it up so only she can read it. She finds the section she's looking for.

‘Here.' She places it in front of us, pointing to the place. ‘There is an error. This is why it was not on the internet when you looked for it, Ken, in the Alaska Vitals.'

It is a page from a register of deaths, covering a week in February 1897.

‘This is a church record,' Hope says, ‘not a government record. The Territory of Alaska started recording deaths in 1913. So the Alaska Vitals for earlier were compiled later, from other sources.'

Below the name ‘Harper, Stanton L' is ‘Handler, Thomas C', both dead from typhoid fever on the same day. Their ages appear as thirty-three and twenty-two, their occupations
as doctor and hospital watchman/labourer. Stanton Harper has Boston as his birthplace, Thomas has a blank. Most of the other names on the page are typhoid deaths, too.

‘Thomas C Handler,' my father says. ‘Twenty-two.'

‘There is no Thomas Handler in Juneau at that time,' Hope says.

The story is over, the search is over. February 1897, twenty-two.

My father picks up the photo from the ball again and rearranges his glasses on his nose. He looks at it closely, going from one face to the other. ‘He was a good man? Stanton Harper?'

‘He was. I'm sure he was.' Hope waits, but my father doesn't speak. ‘Edward's second letter arrived shortly after. There was a new doctor then. People were leaving Juneau for Dawson City, for the new gold rush. The Klondike. The letter was filed. We don't know if Thomas died
in the hospital or at the house. Perhaps at the house. For both of them.'

My father looks up, over his glasses. ‘And where is he buried? Do you have any idea of that?'

‘An idea, yes. Only an idea. Nothing certain. You see this? These entries?' She points to a narrow column near the right of the page. ‘Place of burial? You see the ditto marks, the ‘do'?' She says it like the word, ‘do', not as ‘d, o'. ‘It cost five dollars to dig a grave in those days, and a casket cost twenty. And that was at the best of times. In the typhoid outbreak, there were many bodies needing quick burial and not many people to bury them. And miners dying with nothing but a couple of pans to their names. That is probably the ‘do, do, do' you see further down the page.'

The word ‘Evergreen' appears for one name, and ‘do' for the five below it.

‘Sometimes it just means the same cemetery but, in epidemics, it can mean the same grave. But there is no money for a stone, so…' She shrugs. ‘These men are somewhere in Evergreen Cemetery, in one of the older parts.'

‘Somewhere,' my father says. ‘Near Juneau and Harris, under the trees.' He straightens up and winces as his back catches. He rotates a few degrees, twisting to one side and then the other. He breathes out, and settles his hands in his lap. ‘I had a feeling he was there.'

‘Yes, but not just there,' she says. ‘Maybe not just there. Look at the ‘do' marks. He is not with that group. See? Stanton Harper, Evergreen. Thomas, ‘do'. Then another Evergreen and ‘do' many times. Stanton Harper is not in an unmarked grave. The hospital, the community, they paid his expenses. There is a stone. And beneath his ‘Evergreen' on the list, there is just one ‘do'. And that is Thomas. I spoke to others
in the Gastineau Genealogical Society, members who have done more of these ancestor look-ups than me, and they agree with me. It is likely that Stanton Harper and Thomas are buried in the same grave. And I can take you to it.'

It takes a moment for my father's expression to change. He had settled for that section of the cemetery, the greening bronzes, the patches marked only with numbers or with nothing, Thomas somewhere in there among the unnamed miners.

‘Yes,' he says. He starts to push himself up, as though we're leaving already. ‘Yes. Please.'

‘I have my car.'

My father is halfway to standing, his hands still on the arms of the chair, launch incomplete, as if there's a chance he hasn't got it right, there is no grave, we aren't going. He surveys the table—the pan, the knives, the blanket, the papers.

‘That book…' He points to
Northwest of Everything
. ‘Is it available anywhere? I want to know about him. Stanton Harper.' Before Hope can answer, he turns to me, and the pointing comes my way, too. Point, point, point. ‘The iPad Mini. There's free wi-fi here, isn't there?'