The Sea Runners (24 page)

Almost nothing was said during eating, and less after. Karlsson watched Wennberg occasionally shake his head and tug at his whiskers, as if in wonder at where he found himself now. Hut none of his usual almanac of complaints, nor any newly-thought-up blaze to hurl at Karlsson. Just those grim wags of head.

Trying to hear into that silence, Karlsson knew, was going to be a long piece of work.

The morning showed the two that they were on a beach as fine as velvet, gray-tan and nearly a mile long. At either end of the sand arc rough cliff's rose and pushed a thick green forest up into the sky.

On the cliff rim directly over Wennberg and Karlsson one small tree stood alone in crooked dance, as though sent out by the others to dare the precipice.

Here the surf was the mildest they had seen, only a single wave at a time furrowing in from the ocean. Yet the crash of the water came large, entirely outsize. And out on the horizon the Pacific was playing with its power in another way as well. There white walls periodically would fling up and at once disintegrate in spray—waves hitting on reefs. Unnerving, these surprise explosions as if the edge of the world were flying apart.

This landing spot presented them what Karlsson had hoped profoundly for, a deep view of the coast ahead. What the two of them saw was a shattered line of headlands, shadowed by seastacks in shapes of great gray shipsails and dark tunnel mouths; sea rock various and jagged as a field of icebergs.

"Not that jungle, Karlsson." Wennberg licked his lips, wiped a hand across. "Not in goddamn night nor even dusk, we can't."

A pair of kingfishers eluded past, sent a jump through both men with their raucous rattle.

Karlsson returned his look to the tusked coast ahead.

..."Chose wrong," Melander told the bastard a time. "Brought you instead of your forge and anvil, they'd been easier to drag along this coast than you." Still, Wennberg's right. Two of us can't handle the canoe well enough. And if there's luck at all in life we ought be down far enough from those whale chasers....

The two were keeping obvious distance between one another this morning. And the dagger was a new feel along Karlsson's left side, inside his rain shirt where he had slipped it the night before; where lie would be carrying it from now on. He figured Wennberg was doing the same.

"Then the other time is now," Karlsson answered the blacksmith.

That day and all the next Karlsson and Wennberg pulled past shattered coast, watching into the seastack colonies and the warps of shore for Koloshes as boys would peer through a forest for sight of one another.

... Like trying to see through a millstone, this line of coast. There's this, the Koloshes don't seem to fancy the place either. Maybe better tomorrow. It's all dragging work, though. Hero on, just the two of us to paddle, thaf's what it'll need be. All dragging work ...

And each dusk, came ashore like old women stiff in the knees. Wennberg encouraged a fire while Karlsson gathered mussels or clams, whatever could pass as a meal. Only after they had food in them were they able to face the chores of night, finding water, wood supply, putting up the sailcloth shelter, laying groundcloth and blankets, covering the canoe against possibility of storm finding their night's cove. And after those, face the loneliness which occupied where Braaf ought to have been.

... It needs to be the pair of us against this coast now, blacksmith. Ironhead. Just that, no other load on our backs. You're five kinds of an ox but that much you can sec, when your temper isn't in the way. If just Braaf..."If" is fairy gold. Make it past, what happened. Ahead, we need to point. Wennberg, though: can I keep you damped down....

And again in the morning, nerved themselves and pushed the dark canoe into the surf of the North Pacific.

"Beach!" Wennberg was pointing. "Beach like heaven's own 1"

"What was that?" Night down over them now on this sand shore, Karlsson was at the fire boiling clams for supper when Wennberg came and tossed something into the flames.

"That Aleut calendar of Braaf's, found it in the bottom of the canoe." Wennberg picked up a drift branch to add to the fire. "Won't be needing it in eternity, him."

Karlsson reached, plucked the branch from Wennberg, with it flipped the little rectangle from the fire. Its edges were charred and the day-peg browned, but the wood was whole.

"What's that for, then?" demanded Wennberg. "Every damned day along here is every other damned day. It helps nothing to keep adding them up. Why count misery?"

"Maybe not. But this ought be kept." Karlsson set to shaving the char off the calendar with his dagger, then moved the peg the three days since Braaf had gone into the tide trough. A cross-within-a-circle. Russian holy day, Pure Monday or St. Someone's birthday or who knew what ... Karlsson realized Wennberg still was staring at him. "It's all we have of Braaf."

"All we—? Of
Braaf?
That hive of fingers—?"

Karlsson stopped work on the char but held to the dagger. He took long inventory of Wennberg. Finally, as if not at all keen on the result:

"Braaf happened to be a thief, and he happened to be as high a man as any. I know there's little space in there for it, but try to get both those into mind,"

"Karlsson, I'll never savvy you—" Wennberg's eyes slid from their lock with Karlsson's, The dagger had come up off the charred wood.

It paused. Then the blade thrust under the bail of the kettle.

The slender man hoisted the mealware from the coals and set it to the ground.

"Food," said Karlsson.

The coast uncluttered itself for them for the next three days. The beaches stayed steadily sand, and ample, while the oecan and continent margined struighter here, as if this ought be a careful boundary of truce. Waves ar rived eream-colored, then thinned to itiiIk as they spilled far up the barely tilted shore. Once in a while rocks ganged themselves along tide line, but nothing of the dour constant throngs of the days just past. The (lolloped stone islands quit off too, except the one early on Karlsson and Weiinbcrg's second morning of this new coast scape, a long stark bench out a few miles in the ocean.

One last new reach of coast, then, and its visible population only these two ki lined against their will, the one family of tfie kind in all creation, slim Swede and broad Swede arked in a Tliiigit canoe.

The beach at the end of the third of these days was widest yet. Wide as kingdom after the ledgelike Weeks to the north, somehow a visit of desert here between timbered continent and cold ocean. Five stints of pushing, each a contest against an ever more reluctant sledge, it took the pair of men to skid the canoe in beyond the last mark of the tide.

Scoured shore, too. Between surf and high tide line
no tiling but a speckle of broken clam and sand dollar shells, suggesting that only sea gulls prospered here.

Inland, the sand began to rumple. Over the line of dunes, like the spiking 011 a manor wall the top of forest showed.

"I ought go have a look," Karlsson offered.

"Look your eyes out, for what I care."

The dune grass poked nose-high to Karlsson and he climbed the crest of a sand wave for better view. Before him now, swale of more sand, a couple of hundred strides across. Then a second rumple of slope, scrub evergreens spotting this one. Tight beyond that, forest thick as hear hair.

Southeast, though; southeast, the magnetic direction of this voyage: southeast the spikeline of timber barbed higher. Two plateaus of forest spread into the horizon.

Karlsson hadn't the palest inkling of what would mark the river Columbia, whether some manner of Gibraltar attended it—from what Melander had told of the river's mightiness and to go by this coast's penchant for drama of rock, that seemed fitting—or whether sharp lower cliff, as at the Strait of Fuca, simply would skirt away and reveal Astoria. A considerable opening in the coast earlier this afternoon had shown the Swedes disappointment. Only bay or sound, not vast river mouth. Wennberg still was ¡11 a grump from it.

And here, put as wishful an eye to this set of bluffs as he could, Karlsson could not believe them into likelihood as river guardians. They rose inland from the shore a half mile or so, and did not shear away as if a river was working at them. Greater chance that they
wore just two more of all such continental ribs lie and Wennberg already had peered at on this coast.

... Not there then, where to hell is it? God's bones, how much farther?...

Eyeing around, Karlsson found himself unexpectedly longing for the narrow northern beaches, the wild scatter of seastacks, the tucked coves where they had made grateful camp. Even the clatter of gravel being shoved by the surf, he missed here. These milder beaches promised ease but nicked their prices out of a man. Mussels had vanished with the shore rocks, so desperation's larder here was clams, dug laboriously with Karlsson's ax. Pawing like twin badgers down into the tide line holes, Karlsson and Wennberg were all agreement on one thing, a desire for a spade. No, two things: the other, that boiled horse clams were furnishing survival but they were tough dismal fare after a day of paddling.

... Maybe tomorrow. Day of Astoria, maybe it'll be. Some day or other will be, ...

Karlsson faced back toward the Pacific. There was this, too, in his lack of preference for this new run of coast. On the sand expanse where the canoe stretched at rest and Wennberg was propping the sailcloth shelter, there was nothing whatsoever they could do to put themselves from sight. This beach held the canoe and its two men prominently as three sprats on a platter.

The rough tongue of the wind started on their shelter early in the night.

Noise of the sailcloth bucking woke Wennberg a minute after Karlsson.

"Blowing solid, sounds like," the blacksmith imparted. And the next minute, was slumbering again.

Karlsson, though, still lay awake when rain began to edge into the wind sound.

By morning, the storm was major. The tide was up so alarmingly that Karlsson at once went and drove a stake of driftwood into the sand with the flat of his ax, as a mark to watch the inflow against. Sails of spray flew in off the wave crests, and the wind struck so strong now that even its noise seemed to push into Wennberg and Karlsson. And all that day as the two hunched under the shelter when they weren't having to foray out for firewood or to try to dig clams; all that day, downpour. At New Archangel they had known every manner of rain, but none of it anything to this. This was as if the sky was trying to step on them.

The Indian arrived at the Astoria customs house with an item and a tale. South from the village bis people called Hosett he had gone to hunt seals but soon sighted instead a great tangle of kelp brought inshore by the tide, and the kelp had seined in with it the body of a white person. Now be had adventured downcoast aboard a lumber ship to report of this find. "Tole," the native said, the coastal jargon word for "boy." Not until he pantomimed and pidgined the description of a downy
fluff of beard did the customs collector grasp that a grown man was being depicted.

With thought of the days of sloshing canoe travel it would take to reach the coastal spot and return, the customs collector prodded hopefully: And ...?

And the Indian had done the disposition, rapidly buried the corpse in hope that the spirit had not yet got out of it. But had thought first to clip proof for his report. He handed the customs collector a forelock of straw-colored hair.

That the weather since Christmas had been violent against vessels trying to cross the bar into the Columbia River was all too well known to the customs collector.
Merrithew, Mindoro, Vandalia, Bordeaux
—two barks and two brigs, they all had gone to grief along this rageful coast in these weeks.

Taking up his pen, the collector wrote the native his paper of reward:
The bearer of this, Wha-laltl Asabuy, hat assisted the duties of the Astoria District of Customs Collection by his report of...

He then turned to his daybook and began the official epitaph of Braaf:
body, supposed from one or another of the vessels wrecked north of Cape Disappointment during this fearful winter, has come ashore near the Makah village of Hosett.—It is that of an unknown young seaman, light hair, roited-faced ...

By the end of the day, rain still blinded the coast.

Karlsson took out the Aleut calendar from the map case where he was keeping it now. Moved the peg rightward one hole. A moment, contemplated the little hoard.

... Might as well know as not. Pass time by counting time, that's one way, ...

It came out a few weeks worse even than Karlsson had thought. Since they had left New Archangel sixty-four days.

Russian Christmas more than two months into the past. In the woods edging Sitka Sound, now buds of blueberry would be beginning to swell.

Karlsson looked across to Wennberg; decided the arithmetic of their situation would not be welcome news in that quarter; and put the calendar back into the map case.

"Småland," said Wennberg, startling him.

Karlsson waited to see what venture this was.

"Småland. What sort of place's that? What I mean, what'd you do there?"

Karlsson eyed the burly man. There had been a palisade of silence between them, the only loopholes Wennberg's curses against the weather and Karlsson's setting of chores. All other conversation the storm's—low grumble of surf, ‹'bickers of wind, drone of rain on the shelter cloth. Into the night now, Wennberg evidently was at desperation's edge for something other to hear than weather.

... Come off your tall horse, have you?...

"Farmed. My family did." Melander's description of farming arrived to mind. "Tickled rocks with a plow, more like."

"'If stone were hardbread Sweden'd be heaven's bakery,'" Wennberg quoted.

"Yes. And the family of us, living at each other's elbows. Left the farmstead when I was thirteen, me."

Karlsson reached a stick, tidied coals in from the edge of the fire. These days and weeks of his mind always leaning ahead, aimed where the canoe was aimed, it had been a time since lie thought back. But memory, always there in its bone bouse. What can it be for, remembering? To keep us from falling into the same ditch every day, certainly. But more, too. Memory we hold up and gaze into as proof of ourselves. Like thumbprint on a window, remembering is mindprint:
this I made, no one else has quite the pattern, whorl here and sliver of scar there, they are me.
Karlssoil was in Småland now, hills of pine forest, cottages roofed with sod and bark—and yes, stone in the fields and rye short as your ankles and a Karlsson tipped from the land to find what livelihood he could....