Reckoning of Boston Jim (5 page)

No, it is not sufficient to tell her stories of the theatre. Perhaps he could work for her, make a fence, chop down a tree or two. But she has Mary and Jeremiah to do such tasks. That Miss Frielan was no one's orphan niece, not with that Adam's apple bobbing in her throat, but she did hit upon the truth—obligations, ever obligations. The Dora woman asked that he bring her something. He nodded and so made a deal, and never has he gone back on a deal. That would upset the precarious balance in the world.

Now that the bottle of sherry is truly dead and gone Eugene has no excuse but to make his way down the hall. He pauses at a closed door. It was here he first saw Dora. She was carrying a mountainous load of sheets, was hung up on a doorknob, was tugging and turning and becoming enchantingly entangled.

He unwound her gently, gathered up the sheets from the floor, introduced himself and said “Poor pretty bird, to be caught up so.” She was speechless for the first and only time. He apologized for his sudden appearance, though he realized soon enough that it was the remarkable roundness of her eyes that made her appear so startled, so amazed. After that incident he saw her everywhere. It was as if she were multiplied, this Dora Timmons, this hopeless maid of all work. She is touching her finger to her tongue and then to the sad iron, is listening for the iron's slow hiss. She is polishing the limbs of the bronze at the foot of the stairs, filling small pillows with lavender and sage. She is working the pulleys of the chandelier in the entrance. He holds the lamp while she fills each portion with coal oil, then he pulleys it gently back until it is snug against the blackened medallion, in all as if he were a regular manservant.

What is it about her that drives him to distraction? She is not a great beauty. And she can barely manage the rightful exchange of conversation, has to be guided with interruptions that would be appallingly rude with anyone else. For Dora talks unrelentingly, her round eyes barely blinking, one story transforming into the next without a breath to allow a comment, a change of subject, a chance to escape. Indeed, Mrs. Jacobsen was correct when she said once that Dora could pinion people with her chatter as expertly as those naturalists pinion insects on a board.

The best explanation for her appeal, Eugene decides, is that her clothes always seem to be slipping from her, as if nudity is her natural state and her body is always straining toward it. It is her barely laced corsets, the flush to her cheeks, the dramatic panting after exertion, the perpetual half-pinned state of her hair, and that way she comes so close to people and peers into their eyes. She looks, in fact, as if she is forever hurrying from one liaison to the next. She is shocking really, deliciously so.

How is she faring? At this moment he feels near sick with worry. She had wanted so desperately to join him, but his reason prevailed. They would lose the land if both of them were gone. Squatters would take it. And the goldfields, by all accounts, were no place for a woman. And he would never forgive himself if on their journey they were attacked by a pack of bears. “Do not worry, my love, I will write each and every week,” he promised. “And you must write to me.”

“Ah no, no. You haven't taught me the letters yet. I can't write proper, Eggy, I can't.”

“Mrs. Smitherton will help,” he said. “Though I beg you, dearest, do not use that moniker in your missives.” Do not use it ever, he would have said, but by then she was in his arms, her breath warming his neck, his chest, and so forth.

“I will return, my darling, with fortune in hand. Do not trouble your heart.”

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Eugene raises an imaginary glass to Mary and Jeremiah who, though Catholic converts, have both been well vouched for. To the Smithertons, who have sworn to look in on Dora each and every day. They are an older, childless couple, both tall and thin and beaming with brotherly love. They are friendly with the Indians to the point of asking them to tea and serving them platters of vegetables from their very hands. They are friendly with the young pastor also, and come on occasion to his services at the butter church. When the pastor sees them there, as gravely polite as two children, his face lights up with the joy of the hunt and he expounds on the divinity of Christ, the vast evidence for it all, for they, being Unitarians, do not believe in such things. The eschewing of all meat but fish, however, seems to be their own peculiar affectation.

“Trust only the Smithertons, and Mary and Jeremiah,” he told Dora time and again. It is not that she is a bad judge of character. She does not judge character at all. She sees a halo of good around everyone. He gathers that her father was the same. Certainly she speaks well of Thomas Timmons. Eugene wishes he could speak so well of his father. But no, his father, Sir Alfred Hume, had the rude, bleary stare, the rumpled clothes, the general ill temper of one rousted rudely from sleep. He was from a line of sons who had steadily milked the family fortune, leaving Eugene with nothing to rely upon but his wits and fine bearing. Thank Christ for Aunt Georgina, the forgotten widowed sister to his long dead mother. After visiting her countless times she gave him five hundred dollars as well as the idea that the colonies would be a fine place for a man such as himself. “I suggest that you stay and never return,” was her sage advice.

He leans against the door, opening it with his weight. His supplies are heaped in one corner of the small, gabled room, are soon to be packed in his three trunks and good sized rucksack. He has a linen shirt and one of blue serge, a pair of moleskin trousers, and one of wool, socks, collars, an anorak, a blanket coat, a broad-brimmed hat as well as a top hat with hat box, a bed roll, a canvas tent, a compass, a barometer, a leather-bound notebook for the writing of his memoirs, a sketch pad (for he had some talent at sketching as a boy), a rifle, a new revolver, a matchsafe, a knife, a kettle, a fry pan, a folding candlestick, a leather drinking cup, three jars of antimacassar oil, good wax candles, a book jack, a lantern, a portable writing set with desk, a travelling games board, a moustaches comb, a clothes brush, a kerosene lantern, a brass telescope, a stout walking stick, and several books of poetry, as well as other sundries. Most importantly, he has several copies of his letter of introduction should he meet with the scions of the goldfields. The letters, impressively affixed with a large red seal, outline his three years at the college of Oriel, his year as a commissioned lieutenant, his posting in the Crimea. They extol his character, mention that his father was knighted for service to the Queen, and hint that an Earl lurks somewhere in his family tree. Every time he handles them he is glad that he found that out-of-work clerk. The man had such a fine hand and such a way with signatures.

Finally, for his adventures as a gold miner he has brass tweezers for plucking gold, a tin pan, a pickaxe, a magnifying glass, and a magnet, which the provisionist told him he would surely need, though for what purpose Eugene did not ask, not wanting to prove himself a green hand. The tome on alchemy, though not useful exactly, will no doubt provide him with amusing anecdotes with which to regale companions. Food and shot he intends to purchase in Yale.

And thus he is ready, is he not? There is no reason to delay. He has been newly shaved, his boots newly blackened, has had himself photographed at Fardon, Maynard and Dalby in full miner's garb. He has not neglected his soul, either. He went last Sunday to the Iron Church, famously sent over from England, each piece ready to fit with the other as if it were a giant child's toy. A wonder, all agree, down to its iron pews and iron staves. Unfortunate that it made rain sound as gunshots and the rustling of garments like sails cracking on the high seas. Indeed, on the morning Eugene was there he heard not a word of the Reverend's blessing.

He nudges the pile with his boot. The room is not as large as the one he had previously. If it were then he would be able to organize his supplies properly. But no, in this room the roof slopes so sharply he must get on his knees to perform his morning ablutions at the wash basin. But the lesser space was to be expected. He doubted the wisdom of staying at the Avalon at first. Mrs. Jacobsen's fury when she discovered Eugene and Dora embracing in the pantry—perhaps more than embracing—had been positively Shakespearean. Except for the odd retort, however, she has come around. In any case, it is difficult to have a grievance with a woman who adores you. And where else can he stay for such a pittance? After buying his supplies he has one hundred and seventy pounds left to his name. This hundred and seventy pounds seemed a goodly enough sum until he learned, to his astonishment, that it would be just enough to travel to the goldfields and set himself up. He considers again that Mrs. Jacobsen's offer is not in any way possible. Not that it would be the worst of fates to have such employ. There would be some dignity in it. But how the tongues would wag! He is thirty-one. By no means a stripling, but hardly doddering either. And Dora. It is soothing, at times, to listen to her talk. It is like the burble of water over stones. And what a relief to not have to be the fulcrum upon which a gathering balances, as he is often expected to be. But other times her talk becomes tiresome, yes, tiresome. It is as if she has the souls of twenty women and they all must have their say. Often he is certain his future does not contain her, and then she looks at him in just such a way and they tumble into their bed and he hushes her quiet, laughing as he does so, insisting that the Smithertons a good mile off might well come running to save her from marauding Indians. And thus he falls in love with her for the hundredth time, the thousandth.

He draws the lace curtain aside. The dawn sky is the shade of an old bruise, the street a mess of mud and animal droppings. A thud, and a cur comes yelping out of a tin shop. Someone shouts in Russian. He pushes the window up, leans out. No, not Russian, but something like it. Were you in the Crimea? Were you at Sevastopol? He is often asked this when he makes mention of his soldiering. Yes, indeed, he was Lieutenant Hume for nearly a year. Sometimes he also mentions that he had a splendid uniform. He should boast more of his soldiering adventures. Colour them in mightily. In this place it seems de rigueur. He has met a man who sailed with Sir John Franklin, another who escaped from South Sea Cannibals, another who discovered a new species of beetle. Everyone here is a Darwin, a Byron, a Wellington. But, no, he does not boast of that time. For it only brings back the disorienting roar of the cannons, the gun smoke, the reek of spilled bowels and guts, all of which made for the understandable error of running to the left instead of the right. Once separated from his battalion what else was he to do but take cover under the masses of the newly dead? Should he have stood up, shouted and so been shot through the heart? Ah, but no matter how he justifies, no matter how he re-imagines the scene, he has to admit some lack of foresight, courage even. Yet he survived, did he not? He was encouraged to sell his commission shortly afterwards, which he was glad enough to do, a Lieutenant's pay being meagre at best.

The cur disappears into an alley. He will go to sleep when he sees a living soul. Ah, there, a cluster of Indians on the James Bay mud flats. The tide is low. They must be gathering clams or some such. And now two young swags coming from a night on the town, exclaiming about a Miss Frielan. “Imagine hitching yourself to a girl like that!” says the one.

“She'd be always floating off, wouldn't she,” his friend says.

“True. And what's bloody worse, she'd always know what you were thinking.”

Laughter and back clapping. Now a woman hurling ashes into the street. The first Whiteman then, not counting the town crier. There, Mayor Harris, all three hundred pounds of him, making his ponderous way over the James Street Bridge. He is on his way from his butcher shop to the so-called Birdcages, that tasteless conglomeration of architecture that passes for the halls of government. Eugene would even now be striding those boards if not for that damned dinner party, the one he attended in the spring of '
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, when first he arrived. Yes, if not for that he might even now be insisting the streets be wholly lit with gas, the spirit prices regulated, the bathhouses inspected. Why had no one forewarned him of the idiosyncrasies of the colony? Come now, Eugene Augustus, why had you not attended to your observations?

Consider. At that fateful dinner the servants wore morning suits when they should have worn black. One looked a half-breed; the other was a Chinaman whose long queue Eugene swore he saw dipping into the soup. The table was so full of epergnes and wilted flowers that Eugene soon enough gave up engaging the people opposite him in conversation, fearing for his neck. Behind him an unshielded fire blazed high in the grate. Governor Douglas sat at the head of the table. He was a burly man with the countenance of a drover. His dinner jacket fit him badly and was bristling with medals and epaulettes, lace and gold chains. His hair stood out on either side of his head like grey handles and at dinner he sawed at his bread with a knife, not once did he break it by hand.

Next to the Governor sat one of his lively, dark-eyed daughters (the Governor's wife was indisposed, always indisposed) and then Arthur Bushby, the young, gladsome clerk of the High Judge. The High Judge, the much admired Matthew Baillie Begbie, was not in attendance, much to Eugene's disappointment. Arranged down the table were the worthies of the town and their wives. The men had weather-battered faces, their wives unfashionable dresses. All ate with a gusto Eugene had not seen since his time in the army. Ah, but when in Rome. Thus he sampled every morsel offered, the clam soup, the roasted salmon, the saddle of mutton, the oysters and pigeon pie, the assorted creams and ices. He sampled as well as the sherry, claret, punch, champagne, port and Madeira. How could he not, given the numerous toasts to the Royal Engineers? They who were building such a splendid road, who have kept the colony from falling into American hands. Fortunate that a rebellion will soon be keeping the Yankees occupied. The guests looked vaguely downward when they spoke of America, as if America were a lesser form of hell. The absent High Judge was toasted also, such a remarkable figure, such a paragon of English justice, not for him the law of the bowie knife and the Yankee colt.