Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 (7 page)

Hope nods. He takes the pack as soon as it's off my back and pulls his iPad Mini out. He flips the cover open, flicks a switch and starts tapping at the screen.

‘Come on, come on…'

It comes to life and starts looking for a connection. He hands it to Hope so that she can enter the wi-fi password and then he goes straight to Amazon.

‘A few used hardbacks and paperbacks,' he says, eyes not leaving the screen. ‘But I can get it for Kindle now.'

As he makes the purchase, Hope packs the museum's objects into the record box.

‘The writer of the book,' she says. ‘I didn't meet him. We were in Honolulu then. Carl was stationed at Pearl Harbour. My friends here, they remember the writer as a giant, but I don't know. Maybe he was just tall. Things get exaggerated. It was before the time when people took photos of everything. I don't know for sure what he found. I don't know how much he wanted the book to be a true story.'

‘I want to make a donation,' my father tells her. He's already put his iPad down and unzipped his bumbag. ‘To the museum or the genealogical society or both.'

He starts pulling notes from the bumbag, as if a wound has opened up and he's gushing greenbacks.

‘Oh.' Hope steps back. ‘I don't know how. The museum people who take donations aren't here today. I don't know how to do a receipt.'

‘I don't need a receipt.' He folds up a wad of
bills, takes Hope's hand and presses the money into it. ‘I'll leave it with you. It can all go to your society, if that's easier. Buy more software, whatever you need to make it easy to do what you do. Or just buy everyone a drink or two.'

Hope drives a bottle green Subaru, with only the speckling of bugs across the front bumper and numberplate suggesting she lives anywhere near a frontier. It's a manual and she drives with the seat well forward and a cushion—a firm, angled wedge of foam—to lift her. In her small hands, the wheel looks big enough to turn a ship.

My father takes the front passenger seat, leaving me to move one of the two booster seats in the back. The boot is full, so I slide the seat next to me and keep a hand on it in case we brake suddenly. There is just enough room for
me to do up my seatbelt. The backpack ends up on my lap.

My father asks Hope when she lost Carl, and I wonder if Carl once drove the car, and was a better fit for it.

He tells her about my mother. I've never heard him explain my mother's illness to anyone. Not this way, with no corners cut. I've only ever heard him keep it to a sentence. He has worked out how to tell it, and I'm still not sure how to put it myself.

The course of Carl's illness was much the same as my mother's, difficult, downhill, with scattered false optimism most of the way. They are two people, Hope and my father, who are out the other side of that, changed by it and yet not, a new path found. She talks about her genealogy research, her look-ups for people around the world, all with threads connecting them to Alaska. He talks about staying on at work, and
then not, the hours that opened up and needed filling. I was off at the mines and heard none of that then. I asked him. At the time, of course, I asked him. But he was fine, always fine.

Their two old heads nod. The backpack brushes noisily against the back of Hope's seat. I ease it away and change my grip to silence it. I have one thigh against a booster seat, the other against the door. The booster seat smells of old spilt milk. I get motion sick in the back seats of cars. My father knew that once. But this trip is only a few minutes.

Hope parks near the Glacier Avenue entrance to the cemetery. I stay behind them on the walk in, the two of them still talking, stooped forward, sometimes rocking towards each other with the way their feet land on the uneven ground.

Thomas Chandler, Stanton Harper. Harlequin and Pierrot, touching at the shoulder. Proximity and closeness are not the same. I will get my
own copy of that photo. Who took it? Did he know them well, to pose them just that way? Or was he an itinerant photographer, arrived by steamer with his glass plates and flash powder for a few weeks in midsummer?

Who was it taken for? It was never going back to San Francisco, and probably not to England. It was for them, Thomas and Stanton. I can't believe it was for anyone else.

Hope turns at the row of posts marking the end of the laneway and the start of the cemetery. The sun has broken through the cloud for now and gleams on the damp grass. She follows a gravel path towards the cemetery's edge, but veers off it when we reach a stone cross.

The graves in this section are in deep shade, under the boughs of tall conifers, with smaller trees and shrubs screening them from the car park of the deli and gym beyond the fence.

‘There,' she says when she finds the one
we're looking for. She stops and stands with her hands clasped in front of her, eyes down.

The stone is large, almost square, a mottled grey. Its edges and the letters on it have been recently cleared. ‘Stanton Harper, 1863–1897, A fine doctor, A man among men.'

My father smiles to himself, like someone who's just recalled a joke but is remembering with more intensity the happy circumstances in which he heard it.

‘He mentioned that in the novel,' Hope says. ‘The great-grandson, the author. He mentioned the wording. In his story, a daughter comes here years later. It's some consolation to her that her father was well thought of.'

I can see no border to the plot, just the stone set in the ground among grass tussocks, pine needles and leaf debris. A nearby stone is tilted at an angle, moss crusting its exposed corner, but Stanton Harper's is well set. I can picture the
bones down there, loose in a good pine box—four thigh bones, dozens of ribs, one complicated set of remains.

‘I told him,' my father says. His gaze is fixed on the stone. ‘I told him I would try. My grandfather. I was ten. It was the last time I saw him. I didn't realise it would be. I can still remember it. He smoked Woodbines even though they were common, and the smell was always in his clothes. He said…' My father stops to think about the words. ‘He said his father had told him to always keep an eye out for Thomas, any time he could. And that didn't happen. Couldn't happen. Thomas never came back. So I told him I'd find out. I told my father I wanted to write to whoever was in charge in Alaska, and he told me that whoever was in charge in Alaska was far too busy for such nonsense.'

He shifts his weight from one foot to another and rubs his back.

‘They'd had quite a falling-out at the time,' he says. ‘My father and grandfather. I found that out years later. It was over us migrating to Australia. My grandfather was afraid he'd never see us again. He was right about that.'

He rocks forward, then back again, catching himself before he overbalances. It's been two hours since the pretzels, too long.

‘I'm going to sit,' I tell him. ‘I'm going to sit on that bench over there and have a muesli bar.'

He blinks at me, still correcting his sway.

‘I suppose that means I'm doing the same,' he says.

By the time he sits, I have his muesli bar ready. He takes it in one hand and keeps the other anchored to the lip of the bench. He takes a bite and chews it.

He swallows it as quickly as he can and says to Hope, ‘I have diabetes.'

He holds up the muesli bar and shrugs. She joins us on the bench.

‘It's a beautiful place,' she says. ‘I think it is anyway.'

He nods, says, ‘Mmmm,' through another bite of muesli bar, crumbs cascading down the front of his open jacket.

I take his camera and photograph the headstone, making sure I get good close-ups with and without flash and some shots showing the surroundings. When I look over his way, he gives me a thumbs up. The legs of his pants have ridden up over his ankles and I can see his thick cream-coloured socks bunched above the tops of his boots. On the long high-backed bench, in front of the biggest pine tree around, he and Hope look small, him with his scrappy snacking and scrawny limbs, her with her hands in her lap, the two of them like a schoolboy and schoolgirl waiting for a bus.

I take a photo of that, too.

With his jaws still working on the last mouthful, my father stands and shakes off muesli bar fragments. He walks over, steadier already, and centres himself in front of the grave.

‘I wonder…' he says. ‘Would it be possible to add a headstone for Thomas? Would we have to prove that he was there?' He turns to Hope. ‘Would they let us do that?'

‘I don't know,' she says. ‘I could ask. I could definitely ask.'

The camera window has a date and time stamp in one corner. It's on Brisbane time, 5.50 am tomorrow. I check my watch.

‘It's ten to twelve.'

‘Already?' My father looks at the ground, at the weeds and dark soil, and takes a breath. He lifts his head, turns to Hope, and says, ‘Do they give you a lunch break?'

She laughs. ‘I'm a volunteer. And the museum's not even open today. I can take lunch until Wednesday if I want to. Well, maybe not till Wednesday. I have my granddaughter's birthday party at three. I made the piñata.'

‘Well, good.' He smiles.

He puts one hand on his bumbag. For a moment I wonder if he's about to start pulling money out again, but it's an unconscious gesture.

‘It's on me,' he says. ‘I'd like to eat Alaskan salmon in Alaska, but I'd like to eat it somewhere that does it well.'

‘Oh, sure,' she says. ‘You got to know the right place.'

My father turns to the grave one last time, gazes at it long and hard and then says, ‘Okay.' He lifts his shoulders and looks off through the trees, as if making a deliberate effort to reset his focus.

He steps past the nearest upright headstone and starts to make his way to the path. Hope is beside him while I'm still packing the backpack. He says something that makes her laugh, but there's a car revving beyond the trees and I don't hear it.

When I reach them, the conversation seems to be on salmon again, or still. It's my father talking, mostly.

‘Is there somewhere near the cruise ship terminal that does good salmon?' I ask Hope as soon as there's a chance. ‘We have to meet the others there at midday, near the Mount Roberts cable car.'

‘Oh, yeah,' she says over her shoulder. ‘There's the Twisted Fish. It's good, for sure.'

‘Is there any chance they do sushi?'

She thinks about it. ‘No, I don't think so.'

My father makes an ‘Mmmm' noise. ‘I'm
sure Hope can point out a good sushi place on the way there.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘I can point out two.'

‘Kenny's on Front,' she says, though the name is plainly visible on the tall yellow timber building, above a sign billing it as a ‘wok and teriyaki sushi bar'. ‘Best way from the wharf is to come down Franklin, then Front is the first left after you see the Alaska Hotel on the right.'

My father says nothing. He doesn't even turn to see what Kenny's looks like. Hope has parked to show me where it is, down a side street. I pull out our Juneau tourist map and crease it to mark the location.

Hope flicks her indicator and the Subaru moves back into the traffic. She drives us to
the end of Main Street, past City Hall with its massive Tlingit creation-story mural. The first of the big ships, the
Statendam
, appears to our right. We turn onto Franklin at the Red Dog. There are still some cruisers about, still mooching, pointing, posing for photos, not buying precious stones, though many have probably gone on excursions or to the olde time frontier shows that were among the Juneau options on the cruise company's website.

I'm picturing a live version of the photos in the studio window further down the block—Wyatt Earp, bad guys with droopy moustaches stealing bags of nuggets and dust, bursts of ragtime piano, a hooker with a sassy mouth and a heart of gold. I can see them in a period theatre, hands held across the stage for the final bow, gold glitter flung out over the audience, heavy burgundy curtains shuddering across and
closing. The curtains from 1896, from the ball photo.

If that's how it goes, it will be because it's what the cruisers want, and no local should have to take the rap for that. For putting on a show, entertaining, filling seats and keeping actors in work. Even if they're ducking the story—the thousands of small, hidden stories—of an Alaska that's more beautiful and more stark, infinitely more interesting.

We have glimpsed it, my father and me, two cruisers among the thousands in town for the day.

Thomas Chandler, Stanton Harper—they had less than a year.

My right foot is starting to go numb. I twist in the seat, but I can only move an inch or so. I shift the weight of the bag from my right thigh to my left as much as I can.

We pass the wharves. The
Radiance of the Seas
runs the length of two large car parks, its hull a fresh, clean white in the muted light. The sun has gone again. There is rain in the west. Cable cars swing as they leave the Mount Roberts Tramway building heading for the sky, most of them empty.

We turn immediately after the entrance to the minibus area, into a smaller restaurant car park. It has the usual Juneau array of utes and four-wheel drives, all wearing sprays of grime and bug remains. One spot is occupied by rusty lobster traps piled on top of each other. They are ugly enough to be the real deal, not for show. We are exactly level with the bow of our ship.

There's a rush of cool, briny air when I open the door. I lift the backpack out and prop it against the car. The queasiness of the drive hits me as the breeze catches the sweat on my scalp and face.

‘It's been good every time I've eaten here,' Hope says to my father, taking a critical look through the windscreen at the Twisted Fish. ‘So, I hope it's good today.'

‘I'm sure it will be.' He glances her way and smiles. ‘
Mi hablo mucho esperanza
.'