Touch (16 page)

“Rum cake,” Rebecca said, and then she quickly spun away from the room.

OVER THE NEXT WEEK
, it kept snowing. Occasionally the snow would seem to lighten, and the sky would clear enough that the few flakes that still fell seemed like they had been orphaned by some greater storm, but it soon became clear that each slackening was followed by a redoubled effort. Jeannot cleared snow between the woodpile and the house, and when he was not shoveling he split wood frenetically. Martine, for her part, mostly kept to bed, sleeping like she was one of the animals that had gone to ground for winter.

Rebecca found herself polishing silver and trying to think of excuses to walk down to the tents and cabins on the banks of the river, to Franklin’s store. The miners continued to leave,
at times an unbroken stream of men and mules passing by the house and smashing down a path through the snow.

After a full week, and after Franklin did not come for Sunday supper, Rebecca told my grandmother that they needed to purchase soap. Rebecca pulled on her woolen underwear, her stout boots and heavy coat, and with mittens and a shawl, she stepped carefully through the snow. Alone in the forest, she kept her skirt hiked above her knees, gathering the trailing fabric so that it did not drag behind her. Beside her, where fleeing miners had not trodden down the snow, it easily would have reached her waist. Even the thought of trying to break fresh trails made her tired. Still, she was cheerful at the excuse to visit Franklin’s store. Though it was snowing lightly, it was not terribly cold, and she did not mind the air on her legs. She even began to sing a light tune.

The song fell away from her lips as she stepped out of the woods and saw the swath of beaten-down ground, the ripped and abandoned tents, the shambles that the departing miners had left behind. She had seen the men departing, but she was not prepared for this. Among the snow-packed streets that she could see from the hill, there were only a few dozen buildings of any substance; mostly, what lay before her was empty, flattened parcels of land where thousands of miners had packed their tents and departed only a few days or hours earlier.

The snow was falling slowly enough that it would have been idyllic if not for the desolation that the miners had left behind. Rebecca watched a few clusters of activity on the hill, men ferrying boards and scurrying to create structures that did not quite look like houses. She did not recognize the shaft mines that the men were trying to get started before the snow
buried everything, and she instead turned her attention to the other center of activity: one of the few well-built structures in town, Franklin’s store.

When she reached the building, she realized that the bustle was not a crowd, but rather a mob of thirty or forty men. They milled on the rutted street, Indians and white and black men and some so unkempt and dirty that it was impossible to tell which group they belonged with. A small group of Chinese stood off to the side, and there were even a few women—whores, by the look of them—mixed in with the mob.

So unassuming was the solitary figure on the porch of the building that it took Rebecca a moment to realize that the voices that were raised in anger were directed at him. Franklin stood with a hunch, like he was still behind a counter, and he had not taken off his shopkeeper’s apron. His hands shook as he raised them, attempting to quiet the yelling.

While the shopkeeper’s actions had no effect, the booming voice of Dryden Boon did.

“If you want to be alive to spend your gold at the end of the winter, Franklin,” Boon yelled, the voices of the mob dropping away almost immediately, “you’ll keep your prices where they were when this snow first started falling.”

Boon was a large man, his head above most of the crowd. Rebecca felt a sudden tightness at the sight of him. He had tried to pay her before, mistaking her for one of the women who had come to Sawgamet to work in a brothel.

He was well dressed and loud. His black suit and fine hat, his kid-leather boots and his close-shaven cheeks and chin, showed that he was not one of the miners, but someone who fancied himself as more important. He took a few steps
forward until he was standing on the bottom of the steps, yet even so, his head was almost even with Franklin’s.

“You know me, Franklin, and I wouldn’t begrudge you your profit, but there’s only so far you can push us. Even the girls,” he said, motioning to a pair of immodestly dressed women who stood near the front, “won’t stand for it. They’ll stab you in your black little heart during the night. And who knows what the Chinamen will do to you?” He turned toward the small huddle of Chinese men standing off to the side, bugged his eyes out, and wiggled his fingers. “Strange magic,” he whispered loudly, and at that, a number of men started laughing.

Boon, who had walked up the two steps to stand next to Franklin, turned to face the crowd, though he pretended to address Franklin. “Now, fair is fair, Franklin. Four dollars a pound is already too much money for potatoes, but that’s what you charged me last week. Today you want eight?”

“It’s the snow,” Franklin said. “I’m not sure when I’ll next be able to get supplies brought in.” He straightened up a little. “And if you don’t like my prices, Boon, you don’t have to shop at my store. You can bring your own goddamned supplies from Vancouver.”

Boon slid his arm around the shopkeeper’s neck like they were friends, and then he glanced to the side and saw Rebecca. He showed his teeth and then turned back to the shopkeeper. “Let me ask you, Franklin, if this fine lady over here,” he said, now pointing to Rebecca, “needed to buy a length of rope, would you sell it to her?”

Franklin looked over at Rebecca, and as he locked eyes with her, she could see that something seemed to break. He
slumped over a little more and his voice was quieter when he responded. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t sell to you, Boon, but I’m not making you buy.”

Rebecca watched as Boon tightened his arm, making Franklin cringe.

“So you’d sell me a length of rope, then? Because I’m going to be needing it to string you up.”

“You’ll not threaten anybody, Dryden,” a loose-limbed man said as he pushed through the crowd, walked up the steps, and then stepped in front of Boon and the shopkeeper. That man—Pearl—had the same thickened French accent as Franklin’s. Rebecca had seen him working at Jeannot’s mill, though Pearl had said little to her.

I’d asked Pearl about this incident once, when I was twelve or thirteen, after Great-Aunt Rebecca had told me her version of the story, but Pearl had looked at me as if I’d claimed the ability to fly. Still, despite his insistence that he was not there, both Rebecca and Franklin named him as the man who stepped in.

“You’ll get the hell out of here, and when you come back”—Pearl turned to my great-uncle—“Franklin will have decided that the prices he had last week are fair. Franklin?” Franklin nodded.

Boon smiled, and Rebecca thought he gave her a little glance. “Ah, Pearl, and just when I was thinking it might be best to kill him and have it done with anyway.” He pulled his arm off of Franklin’s neck, ruffled the man’s hair, and said, “A misunderstanding, huh, Franklin?” Then he turned to face the crowd. “How about it? I’ll stand you all to a drink.”

They cheered, and most of them followed Boon down the
street, a few others—Pearl included, despite denying that he had been there—drifting off to their cabins or their mines. Rebecca stayed where she was. Slowly, hesitantly, Franklin looked up at her. He seemed sad, like some conversation had passed between them, but Rebecca did not understand what it had been. She took a step toward him, but he turned away and went into the store.

The snow was packed down on the street in front of the building. That was something good about the cold, Rebecca thought. Instead of rutted mud and precarious boardwalks, she could walk where she wanted without worrying about being sucked into the muck or dirtying her dress. The snow that fell from the sky balled tighter and seemed as if it turned to ice for a moment, pelting her face and stinging her, and she shook herself out of her daze, following Franklin into the store.

He did not look up when she entered, and she stood by the door, unsure what she should do.

“That wasn’t something I wanted you to see,” he said. His voice was quiet and trembled, but it startled Rebecca a little. She was, she realized, not expecting him to acknowledge his embarrassment.

“You didn’t come to dinner on Sunday,” she said by way of a reply.

“Would you still have me?”

“For dinner?” She pulled down her shawl and stepped closer to him. Still, he did not look up.

“Not for dinner,” he said. “Would you still have me after seeing that?”

“I would have married you already,” Rebecca said, “if
you’d but ask.” She tried to keep her voice light and warm, as if it would be enough to cause his chin to float up, despite a stomach that felt ready to drop below her, but Franklin did not move. He kept his head down, like he expected a scolding. Franklin had been so proper with her, not taking advantage of her for so much as to hold her hand.

WHEN SHE TOLD ME
this story, my great-aunt gave a terrific smile and said, “I decided it was time to risk seeming indelicate.”

“Indelicate? Hadn’t you just told him you’d marry him if he’d but ask? You don’t consider that indelicate?”

“And are you the one telling this story?” she said, but I could tell that she enjoyed seeing me attentive, just as I am now tolerant of the questions my daughters ask of me when I repeat these same stories for them.

Franklin would not look up at her, so Rebecca stepped behind the counter where Franklin was seated and gently touched her hand to his cheek. And then leaned down and kissed him.

As my great-aunt was telling me this—with Virginia sitting beside me and knitting a scarf—my great-uncle came into the parlor and sat beside her.

“And then what happened?” he said, taking her hand.

“And then we were married,” Rebecca said. “And then we were buried.”

I
HAD GROWN UP USED
to the idea that the float was a time for waiting: waiting for the men to return to the village from Havershand, for my father to bring Marie and me presents, for a last flush of celebration before the winter. But the year I was eleven, the float did not occasion much change in our daily life. I’m sure the men did not return from Havershand any quicker that year, but without having my sister there to ask me daily when our father would return, it felt like it.

When the men came back from the float, the new priest who had come to replace Father Hugo accompanied them. He was young, and handsome, and charming, still carrying a thick accent from the Ireland he’d left only a few years earlier, and I overheard Mrs. Gasseur laughingly tell my mother that some of the women were complaining that the Catholic priest was not allowed to have a wife like the Anglican priest. By this time I had grown used to living in my stepfather’s house, the difference in Sunday services between his church and our old one. Likewise, Jeannot’s presence in Sawgamet
had become familiar, comforting, even with his vain pursuits in the woods.

Life did what life does, and progressed, and I found myself thinking less and less often of my father and my sister. And then came the freeze-up.

The river froze quick and flat and calm, and it was not long before afternoons and Sundays meant skating and hockey as long as there was light. That year, parents were careful to tell their children to stay away from the tip of the channel.