Reckoning of Boston Jim (16 page)

In the hold, ship's lanterns sway over bunks that are shielded from each other by grey canvas curtains. At the far end is a long, ridged table, and then their trunks. It will be a five to six month journey the secretary to Miss Burdett-Coutts warned her. Five to six months. Five to six months. It is a desperate refrain that Dora tries hard to keep at bay.

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“All accounted for, Mrs. Farthingham?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We have assigned bunks so as you do not quarrel. We will not abide quarrelling. You will have two meals a day and a draft of lime every other. You are to keep yourself clean and off the drink. You are not to fraternize with the other passengers. You are not to fraternize with the crew. You will be allowed out on deck in chaperoned groups of fifteen each. Each Sunday you will attend a service given by Reverend Holt. You are expected to be models to your sex. You are . . . now, what is that? Crying? Do I hear weeping?”

The weeping drops to a whimper. Dora cranes her neck and spies the four Grinstead orphans huddling behind the skirts of the older girls. One of the orphans is pressing her fist against her mouth. Her eyes are dark and large, an endless well for the tears pouring forth. The other three orphans hush her furiously. None of them seem more than twelve. All of them are miserable and thin, but none more so than this sobbing girl.

Poor child, Dora thinks. She nods at the girl and puts her finger to her lips, then suddenly wails out “Oh, me, ah!” and buries her face in her hands. The other women stand back as if fearing contagion.

“You're the weeper, then. Now what in God's name are you going on about. . . . What? I cannot understand you. What nonsense is this, woman?”

“Oh, me poor aunt, sir. Oh, I miss her so. Oh, she'll be so lonely.”

Mrs. Farthingham pats Dora's shoulder. “There now, have some courage.”

“You are not being held here against your will.” Mr. Scott says. “You may leave and return to your aunt. The anchor is not to be hoisted for some hours yet.”

“Ah, no, see, me auntie she's pa, pa, passed on. She's with the angels. Oh, gracious!”

“Then how can she be lonely?” Mr. Scott demands.

“Oh, ah, because she'll have no one to put flowers on her grave, gravestone, see.”

Dora's hands are wet with real tears. It seems she might be able to convince herself that she truly does miss this phantom aunt. It seems she might be able to convince herself of just about anything.

Mr. Scott throws up his hands and continues his instructions. Dora looks over once more. The Grinstead orphan is staring at her with mouth agape. She is not crying; indeed, she is now nearly smiling.

“What's your name, love?” Dora whispers.

“Isabel Lund.”

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Dora takes to seafaring as if she'd been born to it. She does not retch and keep to her bunk as so many of the other women do. She can barely wait to be on deck each morning. Ah, the wind! It smells like some-thing pickled and delicious. It smells enormous, if that were possible. And what sights! Flying fish and spouting whales and birds with wings wide as sheets and all under a sky constantly shifting in shape and size and character as if part of some vast cosmorama.

“Are you not afraid?” the other women ask.

“Not a mite,” she says. How can such a great vessel crack apart? And Captain Gringshaw—thick-armed and mutton-chopped, ablaze with brass buttons—isn't he the very picture of a captain? And look at the sailors swarming in the rigging, alike in comfort there as the gulls. When the ship plunges into troughs of waves she thinks of a swing in Hyde Park. What a delicious, shivery fear! That brief closeness to the sky. That swooping back to earth.

“You must have sea water in your veins,” Mrs. Farthingham says with admiration.

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A month out, the ship is afflicted with calm. The sails hang limp and the sun stretches hot on the deck. The sailors mend the ropes and slather metal rails with white lead and tallow. They keep their distance still, but the voyage has been blessed with enough good omens to balance out the women's presence. Porpoises have hurled themselves before the prow. An albatross followed them for a week. And so the sailors now wave to Dora and the other women when Mrs. Farthingham's watchful eye or Mr. Scott's walleyed one is momentarily elsewhere. The male passengers are becoming friendlier as well. They raise their hats and call out good day. For them, however, it isn't a fear of bad luck that makes them keep their distance, but a fear of their wives. Ah, well and so, Dora can understand the wives' thinking. For what sort of women would send themselves off to a foreign place to be taken up by miners and ne'er-do-wells or any man with a roll of banknotes? The several who hope to be governesses are acceptable enough, modest in their habits, books often in hand. But what to make of the Misses Finch, Hutchins, and Law? They saunter out on their chaperoned promenades in low-cut dresses and wink at honourable husbands, at not-so-honourable seamen. They make, in fact, no great pains to conceal their former, unmentionable profession. Just as unseemly is the Widow Dall. Two score and six and she has buried three husbands already. “I'll be onto number four, soon as I set foot,” she says. “I'll outlive a hundred men.” On several occasions she has been reeling drunk. When Mr. Scott or Mrs. Farthingham demand to know the source of her inebriation, she insists she is as sober as a judge she once knew, then laughs uproariously.

As for Isabel, she, too, has taken to the sea. Her cheeks are flushed with colour. Her dark hair has gained a thickness and sheen. In all she is possessed now of a curious, elfin beauty that others remark upon and that Dora is becoming quite proud of, as if she had a part in working such change. At dinner they sit side by side and giggle over the sliding plates, Isabel in awe, as usual, over the abundance of bully beef and hard tack. At night they share the same bunk, often whispering until hushed. Dora tells Isabel of her family's sad fate. Isabel tells Dora of the orphanage. Cold and grey. Grey and cold. She doesn't recall her parents. Her life is a slate, waiting to be chalked upon.

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One night Isabel whispers: “Would you like a daughter, Miss Timmons?”

“What is that? Ah, well and so. Many daughters, hundreds and thousands of them.”

“Let me be your daughter. Oh, do.”

“Surely so, you are like a daughter, or a sister. When we are settled in the colony we will see each other often. We will go for ices. We will go shopping on a Saturday.”

“You will not let them marry me off to an ugly old man.”

“Issy, love, they're Christians. They'd not marry you off so young. They'll arrange a situation for you. Hasn't Mrs. Farthingham said so? You are to stay with a kind family in a fine house. Aren't the other orphans excited? You should be as well. In time you can choose whoever you like, from a hundred suitors, all handsome young men to be sure.”

“I don't want to go into a situation. I want to stay with you. I'll work hard. I'll be a great help to you.”

“Hush, now,” Dora says, though she should have said: “Oh, for certain. We'll all live together and be like a family.” But she will have trouble enough shifting for herself in this new colony, never mind taking care of another. Later, once the lamps are out, she hears Isabel softly crying. Her back is turned. It is a memory Dora will have to bear.

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They sail through past the Bay of Biscay, the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, the weather holding fine. “Mark my words all. If this continues we'll arrive a month ahead,” Captain Gringshaw announces. He inspects their quarters and asks how they are faring, nodding at their requests for more air, for better food. He gives seashells to the Grinstead orphans. Isabel's is particularly beautiful, is round and flat and bears the image of a many-pointed star. She accepts it with reverence, shows Dora how it fits perfectly in the palm of her hand.

The Captain is gallant to Mrs. Farthingham, but growing cool to Mr. Scott, takes him aside one day and can be seen shaking his head and pointing at an imaginary list. Soon after, Mr. Scott no longer draws the lock on the hold at night. But it is not just Mr. Scott's suspicious nature that likely irks the captain. Mr. Scott is growing more disreputable by the day. Untidy is no longer the word for him: slovenly, perhaps. Stains have blossomed on his trousers. His hair is uncombed, his hands grimy. And his eye. Is it possible it is more wayward than ever? “I'll be finding it in me soup next,” the Widow Dall says, glaring after Mr. Scott as he makes one of his many daily rounds.

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Boredom begins to afflict them all. Mrs. Farthingham orders a battle plan. The women are to help with the mending of the sailor's clothes. Short plays are to be put on; the governesses are to give readings. They read through Mansfield Park, David Copperfield, and Vanity Fair. Dora cannot bear to miss a chapter, likes Thackeray's Becky Sharp best of all.

“Don't be ridiculous. She is most unpleasant. Indeed, she is the villainess of the story,” says Miss Katherine Paul, one of the governesses.

“But I like the part where she's leaving school. She's so brave. She's like us going off to who knows where. Trying out her fortune.”

“The unpleasant part comes later, I assure you.”

Unpleasant is a favourite word of Miss Paul's. She is a plain woman with thin hair and a constant sniffle. Mrs. Farthingham has put her in charge of improving the reading and writing skills of the women.

“Learning can be unpleasant,” she tells Dora. And then later: “I have never had a more unpleasant task than teaching you to read.”

“Ah, my mother tried as well. But the words, they crowd together when I'm looking at them. They switch places even. It's like they're playing tricks on me.”

“You are being ridiculous again. You must simply apply yourself.”

“Here, let Isabel read. She's doing so well, she is. She'll be a scholar soon enough.”

The governesses work so hard that Dora feels that she, too, must do her part to alleviate the tedium. She tells the other women about the drapery, about Mr. Haberdale the Younger and his peculiar wooing. She tells them stories of her own devising and stories she has heard through others. The women listen and nod. “Thank goodness this is a long voyage. Or you might never get through all your stories,” says Miss Joanna dryly. Dora agrees. She is full of stories, full of a numb kind of hope.

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“Have you ever been feeling that, Mr. Jim? As if the future were a fine carriage waiting for you. All you need to be doing is step into it.”

Boston said that he'd never been in a carriage, fine or otherwise, not adding that he'd also never dwelled on the future, that the past filled his mind enough.

“Ah, well and so,” the Dora woman said and slapped at a gnat that was troubling her neck.

The jail is quiet now. The boy Farrow is no longer crying. The Dupasquiers are no longer laughing over cards. Even the snoring has subsided. No, he has never dwelled on the future, never thought past the next trapping season. But now he has no choice, what with his obligation to the Dora woman. Why would anyone dwell on the future? The future—unlike the past, unlike the present—is mutable and can expand to an infinity of choices. It is as vast as an ocean, and as deep, and is inhabited by every unknown thing.

By late morning of the second day rain curtains the canyon. Within the hour Eugene's boots are as live things. They squelch and burp; they chafe his toes; they slip out from under him, as if playing tricks. The rain fills the brim of his hat then sloshes off in small waterfalls. The anorak, bought in Victoria, guaranteed to keep Noah dry, is soaked through. The road, now no more than an extravagant ledge, churns with mud. The canyon here is perhaps a mere hundred feet across, has a sparser growth of nettled trees, is a tableau of wet browns and muted greens. Below are pillars of rocks inset like a haphazard staircase for some great, multi-legged beast. The dun river roils with spring melt. Foam hoists a splintered tree, hauls it down. The roar is a constant that would drive a man mad if he dwelled here. This must be the Upper Canyon, the Great Canyon, the Hell's Gate Canyon. This was where canoes, rafts, steamers, were smashed by the river's tumult before the building of the road ended the hauling of cargo by water. This was where the Indians ambushed miners and sent their decapitated bodies downriver. Back in '
58
, Duteau said. Not now. Now the Indians are appeased or else dead from the pox. Now they are apparently cowed into submission like Hank's tribe.

He puts Ariadne between himself and the river, glances above at regular intervals. Sings and whistles and hums. Is comforted when a group of men come up from behind him. He would like to fall in with them, but they are moving fast, with heads down, give only silent, hunch-shouldered greetings. Americans? British? Far-flung inhabitants of the Empire? Who can tell? In the blur of the deluge their rucksacks give them the appearance of lurching hunchbacks.

“I'd welcome a bloody cave at this moment, Aire, never mind a roadhouse.” There was one not far back. A beastly looking place, but it would have sufficed. According to his map, Boston Bar is the next place that offers rest and repast. He repeats the words: Boston Bar, Boston Bar, trying to think of a suitable rhyme to put to song and comes up with nothing except
far
. The Duteaus might have informed him when it was best to depart. Otherwise he would not have moved to the spot nearest the fire as the others left at first light. He would not have indulged in more coffee and watched Oswald move with the heedlessness of a child's crank toy, nor watched the competent, comely Mrs. Duteau kneading bread. And when he was prepared to depart, Ariadne proved her muley nature and had to be hauled by both Eugene and Mr. Duteau onto that “ferry”—truly no more than a precarious raft—and even then she hawed as if she were being led to slaughter.