Reckoning of Boston Jim (42 page)

“Ah, I nearly forgot. I must warn you, Mr. Hume, that Kinnear and Jevowski are about.”

“Kinnear? Jevowski?”

“The sharpers from whom you rescued my clerk. In Yale?”

“Ah, yes, quite so. Surely they cannot still hold a grudge. I shall buy them some champagne, yes. And you as well. Come, your honour, Matthew. I owe you. I have not forgotten your generosity.”

“I would take up your offer, Mr. Hume, but I am occupied at the moment. And do not worry about repayment. The lunch was my pleasure.”

Eugene watched him leave with something like exasperation. Felt much as a child might when given a bemused glance, a pat on the head.

≈  ≈  ≈

When the noontime arrives Eugene sets aside his portion of cold beef and settles against a stump. “I might take a nap, gentlemen, if that is acceptable.”

“Rest all you want, Doc!” George shouts.

Lorn scowls. Or is he deep in thought?

“Is there something vexing you, Lorn?”

“Not at all. Just seems that lately you're doing a lot of napping and whatnot.”

Eugene reminds him that it was he who realized where the gold could be found, he who encouraged them all to invest in the Dora Dear.

“That's true enough. Just worried you might be getting that sickness again.”

“I am feeling fine, thank you. I apologize. I thought. . . . Well, shit.”

Eugene closes his eyes, wishes away the thumps and slooshes. Only several weeks more if the weather holds. And then the mud and water will begin to freeze and he will return to her. Napoleon, Lorn, and Langstrom have agreed to stay on through the winter to watch the claim even though Eugene has reminded them that it is well-known that he is a friend of the Judge, that terror of claim jumpers.

Ah, let them stay and shiver here then, if that is what they desire. Let them watch the mercury freeze. He will take Barnard's new coach from Quesnel to Victoria. It seems years ago now that Eugene posted a letter to Dora by the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers while Barnard himself waited and offered unasked-for advice. Astonishing how quickly a letter carrier can become a man of substance. Astonishing how a journey that took five weeks now takes only a week or so. Yes, he must be frugal now. He must not go to the towns. He must be certain he saves enough for a pillared house, for silken dresses, for the wedding. He is a man of his word, a man of honour. He will buy Dora status. She will have lessons in managing servants, in dressing, in speech. Dora. Ariadne. His father. The Judge. They clatter through his imagination like bone puppets on a stage.

≈  ≈  ≈

“Mr. Hume, can you hear me?” Napoleon is studying him with the same quiet intensity that he studies his drying herbs, his bottles and concoctions.

“I am resting a little longer. I hope that it is not objectionable.”

Napoleon's voice booms in his ear. “The fever has returned.”

“Nonsense, man.”

“How is your throat?”

“Sore, yes, sore, but only because my humours are balancing themselves out. I have not drank spirits for several days, you see.” He struggles to his feet, but it is as if Napoleon's utterance of the word “fever” has brought it on in full. “Damn you,” he says. Lurches onward. Napoleon shouts to the others. The whiskey jacks hurl upward past the knoll. Eugene watches them. Imagines taking wing. A shadow on a rocky outcrop forms into the vague shape of a man. “You there!” Eugene shouts, desperate to ask the man a question, though what this question is he cannot recall, not for the life of him.

The figure melts even as Eugene stumbles forward, even as the others catch him and lower him to the ground.

The Hume has been ill four days now. He is kept in the cabin. Napoleon Beauville collects roots and buys powders from Tang Lee's store. The others take turns at the sickbed. Boston sleeps only in fits. Eats next to nothing. Does nothing because there is nothing he can do and yet he is more clear in his understanding than he has ever been. He understands now why Kloo-yah returns to him unbidden each night. He understands why his ears have been ringing with the cries of Illdare and the fort men as the People overwhelm them. And he recalls, finally, the words of the man whose face is in shadow, always in shadow: “You owe me, boy. You owe James Milroy. I saved your worthless flesh, and now I'll mark it like it's mine. You're the bad luck that wrecked us on this godforsaken shore, knowed it. Should have killed you when I found you stowed away in my hold, thieving my stores. Now you owe. You owe.” It worked some magic. For the sense has been growing all of Boston's life, a great unease, as if the world itself is growing more and more unbalanced. The woman, this Dora, she is not of the spirit world herself. Spirits cannot manage the faint throb of a blue vein at the temple, the sweet stale odour of womanly sweat. But they are directing her, of that there can be no doubt. They sent him into her memories so that he might realize the importance, not only of her return of his money, but also of her stories, of her request that her husband be returned to her. The spirits sent the changeling Girl as well so that he might be set back on the proper path. They did all this so that he might know that all his fine exchanges cannot balance his poor ones. So that he would know that this is his reckoning.

Eugene's eyes are as dry and raspy as balls of twine. His joints ache as if they have been nailed together. Night. The stove gives off a hellish heat. He is lying in a stew of his own sweat that is rank with sickness. The blankets are leaden slabs spiked with wire. His name floats just beyond his grasp. He hardly cares. What matters is this raging thirst. The heat. The wretched air. It is cutting off his breath. Is it the cholera he has? Ah, God. Has he returned to Sevastopol? In the harbour the corpses are as thick as schools of fish, but they are not turning as fish do, all at one mysterious cue, but bobbing senselessly this way and that, each in its own lonesome death.

He twists his neck. A man sits at a table, sleeping with his head on his arms. He is young, blond-bearded, a long thin pipe near his hand. The place is empty otherwise. Eugene wishes to beg the young man's forgiveness, but why? And why, for that matter, is he here? He should be with his wife. Her name? He has forgotten. Ah, his father is here. His hair is in frightful disarray, and he glares, how he glares. “Failed, have you, Eugene Augustus? Failed is it?”

Eugene gasps out an explanation. He had not wanted to be a soldier. It was just that the uniforms were so splendid, and the crowds cheering the departure were so jubilant and so certain of victory, so proud of them all. So proud of Eugene Augustus Hume.

What does Eugene want? Truly want? He has forgotten. It was so clear once. No matter, all he wants at this moment is water. Coolness. He shoves the blankets aside. He is naked but for a night shift that hikes up and shows islands of curious rashes on his belly and thighs. Dora, that is the name of his wife. She is gay, robust. Her golden hair twists to her hips. She is standing at the fence of a stone house that is covered with flowering vines. Now only a silver light, a wind that fills his lungs. His feet are bare on the stones, on the layer of snow that is not enough to cool his tongue. Not near. He could drink a river dry. Some distance off lanterns hang in the black. A muffled thumping. Ah, but for silence, cool silence. The creek. Below. A mine. Companions. Wealth. The earth drops under him like a wave. He stumbles. Doesn't fall. The embankment is impossibly long. He can hear the rush of water. Can see the stars spattered in the firmament. He falls before the creek. The stones burrow into his knees. His hands are shaking as he cups the water to his face. On the other side is a figure formed of shadows. A crashing of brush. Dora? She has come. She said she would not leave him, not ever. He is wading toward her, swimming. Small stones scrape his chest. Her face, silver and round in the waters of the creek, shimmers just beyond his grasp.

They have him in a small room. He is tied to a chair, for he has given them considerable trouble.

“Shall we start again?”

Boston stares at the floor planks. Chief Constable Chandler sighs in disappointment, says he can wait all day. He is a clean-shaven, jowled man whose flesh hangs heavily on his bones. He is standing to one side of Boston. Constable Bearn, hare-lipped and stocky, stands on the other. A clerk is seated at a small table with an inkwell and paper before him. Boston has seen him in town, following the Judge about. The clerk is nervously stroking his beard, which is very dark, and so long that it flows under the edge of the table.

The silence stretches. Bearn looks at Chandler with raised brows, a balled fist. Chandler shakes his head, then, true to his nickname, Whistling Pete, begins to whistle a tune that is slow and melancholy. Boston has never heard it before and suspects it is of the man's own devising. He seems the sort. “Beware the inventive man,” Illdare told Boston and held up an ingenious tong made by the new blacksmith. It was January of
1842
, a Tuesday, and ice marbled the pathway to the trade room; a mottled rat scuttled over the counter.

Chandler pauses in his whistling. “Come now, you must have a name.”

The Dora woman asked if he was truly from Boston, or if he was just an ordinary American. “In the Chinook lingo all the Americans are called Boston men, aren't they now?” He shrugged and said that some still used the term. He could have said more. Could have said he had no true name, just as he had no true birthday. He could have told her of Milroy, the blade in the firelight, the muttered incantation. She might have had some answer to it all.

Chandler comes to the end of the tune. Gestures to Bearn who gives Boston an expert wallop that resounds in the small room. Arthur starts. The ink trembles in its jar.

She will remember the name of Boston Jim because she had
found it odd. And an oddness is the only thing that enables others to recall a person they have met only once. And so she'll remember him, remember his name, and she'll not understand that he was protecting the Hume—her husband, lover, what he was called mattered not. She'll not understand that, although he failed to bring the Hume back alive, he'd tried to return at least some portion of him to her. She was the one who told him of this custom after all. She was the one who told him of the poet Shelley and how he drowned and how, on his funeral pyre, his heart had not burned and so his friend had snatched it from the flames.

Boston spits out blood, a tooth. The men take form again. He says the name slowly, under his breath. Surprising that the name has no substance. He has always assumed it would, that it might choke him by its mere utterance.

“Speak up,” Chandler says.

“James Milroy.”

“Lovely. Well, where are you from Mr. Milroy?”

“Boston.”

“You have some proof of this? Someone to vouch for you?”

“Got proof.”

“Well?” says Chandler.

Boston tells them to unbutton his shirt. Bearn snickers.

“It's there,” Boston says. “Your fucking proof.”

Bearn takes out his knife. He slices through Boston's shirt and
undershirt, the blade scraping from his belly to his neck. Boston's chest is very pale compared to the rest of him, so rarely has it been bared.

“I'll be fried,” Bearn says.

“Well, Mr. Milroy,” Chandler says. “Worried you would forget who you were?”

Boston says nothing.

“Such a quiet man for an American. But we have British law here. We have a determination to discover truth. Perhaps, then, you shall be so kind as to tell it to us.”

“Told you.”

“We don't believe you.”

“That's your damn problem.”

“I rather think it's more yours, seeing as you are the one who will be tried for murder.”

“Didn't kill him, the Hume.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Tell us the story again. I am slightly confused.”

“Me too,” Bearn says.

“Shut up, Constable.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Drowned.”

“He drowned, did he?” Chandler asks and smiles.

A cart rumbles past outside. The clerk scratches furiously at the
papers, recording it all, and the sound of the scratching is that of a blue jay scratching at the window of Boston's cabin. It was trying desperately to get out, though how it had gotten in he couldn't say. He killed and ate it and then swept the blue feathers from the hearth.

“Hauled him back to shore, but he was already dead. He's a fool. Never seen such a fool.”

“Ah, so it was a rescue you were attempting. Intriguing.”

The clerk pauses in his writing and mops at his brow with a handkerchief. The Dora woman spoke of handkerchiefs. “We had the loveliest ones in our family shop. Ones with pictures from the Duke of Wellington's funeral and from the Crystal Palace. They weren't for using; they were so people wouldn't be forgetting things. So as they could tell their children about what they'd seen and done, like.”

Perhaps a simple handkerchief would have sufficed. Perhaps that was what the Dora woman meant.

“Mr. Milroy,” Chandler says.

“Rescue. That was it.”

“Ah, well, you see, though you say it was a rescue attempt it certainly didn't look like that to Mr. Hume's partners. Indeed, to them it looked like something far more foul.”

“Was it for some rite or other?” Bearn asks. “I've heard of the Indians in Canada carrying on like that.”

Chandler turns to Bearn. “Damn you, I'll ask the questions. . . . Well, was it some rite or other?”

“Not an Indian. Wasn't no rite. Was to even things out.”

“Ah, revenge. That's not particularly original. I put it to you, Mr. Milroy, that you were waiting to rob Mr. Hume. Indeed, that perhaps you justified doing so because he did you some injury in the past. He was an annoying man, after all, the sort who is always putting his foot in it, or so I have heard from Mr. Bushby here, and others.”