West of Here (26 page)

What am I waiting for? thought Eva.

The headquarters of the
Commonwealth Register
comprised one high-ceilinged — though narrow and extraordinarily cluttered — warehouse smelling strongly of ink. The nature of the clutter, strewn defiantly about in bold strokes — an unapologetic clutter — spoke strongly of the paper’s editor, publisher, and chief author, W. Lane Griffin, a hawkish, prematurely aging, and altogether serious man, whose thin lips seemed somehow uncharitable, as though he were hoarding them beneath his ample mustache.

Griffin did not look up from his work when Eva made her entrance. As if to foil her entrance, Minerva began to fuss immediately.

“I want to start writing again,” Eva said, by way of announcing herself, over the child’s protestations. “And I want to write real stories. Stories that will make a difference.”

Griffin bestowed a quick disinterested glance up at Eva and her child before resuming his work. As if on cue, Minerva began to cry.

“It appears you’ve got your hands full,” he observed, scrawling furious notes on the pad in front of him. “This is a newspaper, not a nursery.”

It had often occurred to Eva that Griffin was not forward in his thinking, only extreme, and inflexible, and loud. Indeed, if Port Bonitans expressed an aversion to their colonist neighbors, or an outright contempt, if they were in any way threatened by, wary of, or otherwise disgusted with the colony, it was likely owing to the opinions of Mr. W. Lane Griffin, voice of the
Commonwealth Register,
that is to say, voice of dissent, dissatisfaction, and outrage. In spite of his extreme worldviews and his radical beliefs, Eva found Griffin’s
views to be quite pedestrian with regard to the specifics of gender. He was no more progressive than her brother, and if Jacob’s respect was hard won, it would be twice as hard to win Griffin’s. And Eva knew that Minerva’s caterwaul, now reaching a shrill crescendo when Eva needed it least, was certainly not helping her cause.

“I should think all that mothering would be enough to keep you busy,” he shouted over the infant.

“I’ve got two hands,” Eva called back. “And a brain. I’ll manage just fine.”

Just when it seemed Minerva had ceased her crying, the girl struggled for a few desperate gasps of air and started wailing anew.

Griffin ripped a page from his pad and started rifling through his desk drawer in search of something. “How would you like to cover the Broderson wedding?”

“That’s
not
what I had in mind,” Eva said, rocking the baby urgently.

“What then?”

“I’ll bring you a real story,” Eva said.

“Like you brought me a Mather story?”

“That’s not fair.”

“No?” said Griffin, looking up. “Bring me a story, then. A story that’s not about the railroad, not about the reserve, not about Harrison and his cronies. Bring me something local with national implications, something of import, something to rally these laggard souls, to mobilize their ideals, to grab them by the lapel and shake the apathy right out of them. Bring me a cause.”

“Count on it,” said Eva, turning on her heels and marching out of the office. She might have been flush with triumph had it not been for Minerva’s conniptions, which drew the attention of passing colonists. Though to attribute such motives to an infant shamed her, Eva couldn’t help but feel that the child had wished to deny her course all along. That Eva actually resented the girl for this perceived subterfuge shamed her still further, as she rocked the screaming infant briskly in her arms.

MARCH
1890

Adam awakened shortly after dawn to the trumpeting of Lord Jim’s rooster beneath the window. For nearly an hour, he lay in bed on his back, staring at the ceiling through the fog of his breath, listening to the rooster scratch at the frozen earth beneath his window. Adam tried for the tenth time to envision a future for Thomas but discovered instead that it was hard to see beyond Hoko. He would take the boy without her blessings if need be, but he could not take him without her knowledge. When he heard the soft patter of Lord Jim’s wife moving down the hallway toward the kitchen, Adam excavated himself from beneath a mountain of wool blankets and began to dress for the second time in five hours.

Shaving without the benefit of his mirror, which now bobbed on a gentle swell far beyond the breakwater of Ediz Hook, Adam cut his chin twice and pressed his thumb and forefinger firmly against the nicks until the bleeding stopped. Half an hour later, the cool air stung his face as he awaited the carriage to Port Bonita. Once again, he found his thoughts reaching backward to the beginning, though on this occasion, it was Hoko to whom he assigned his sympathies.

FOR NEARLY FIVE
months, through the bulk of a rainy spring and all of a short, mild summer in 1880, Hoko had managed to disguise her bulge beneath unseasonably heavy clothing. Her mother was not alive to notice the change, and her father, whose once frequent and adoring gaze had fallen off precipitously since the afternoon he saw Hoko with the Potato Counter near the mouth of Ennis Creek, was completely unsuspecting of any change. That is, until the chill morning in early fall, when Hoko, stretching hides for winter with her father, reached
up to lace a corner to the frame, and in spite of her bundled layers, revealed the thing for the briefest of moments, during which her father happened to notice. Before Hoko could lower her arms, he reached out and set his calloused hand on the thing, and a stricken expression took shape on his face. Hoko lowered her arms and lowered her eyes.

“Look what you’ve done,” is all he said. She felt the sting before he even slapped her. That was virtually the last thing he said to her until the night of the storm, when the boy made his entrance into the world.

Adam had been quick to notice the change, much quicker than Hoko’s father. He did not discover it hidden beneath Hoko’s bundles but in her eyes, often evasive since the night of their coupling. Near the end of spring, he detected fear in the girl’s eyes for the first time. And he saw something else in her eyes for the first time: a certain glaze on the surface. Seemingly overnight, Hoko went from a doe-eyed innocent to an embittered woman.

“The bigger I get,” she once said, when Thomas was just weeks from being born, “the smaller you seem to get.”

IF ONLY, ADAM
thought, ten years later as his carriage rumbled on its way west, I could do it all over again.

Not fifty steps off of the carriage in front of the Olympic, Adam chanced upon Hoko, perched on the steps of the hardware store, clutching a white infant wrapped in swaddling blankets.

“Whose?”

“A woman’s.”

“What woman is that?”

“Why do you always ask?” she said, pointedly.

It was a fair question, and Adam knew it. He could never resist the urge to ask. He was still counting potatoes after all these years, still demanding accountability from everyone whose path he crossed. And how did he account for the gruffness in his tone after all these years when he spoke to Hoko?

“I’ve come for the boy,” he said. “I’ve made arrangements. In Jamestown.”

Hoko looked at Adam impassively, then down at the baby, who was beginning to whimper. She rocked the child until it settled, and said nothing.

“He’ll be taken care of there,” Adam pursued. “And there’s a place for you.”

“I have a place.”

“A better place.”

“I don’t want a better place,” she said. “Not for myself.”

A young woman, presumably the infant’s mother, emerged from the hardware store with a small steel trowel and a rolled canvas.

“Ma’am,” said Adam, doffing his hat.

“Good day,” Eva said, and turned her attention to Hoko and the baby. “For heaven’s sake, let’s get out of this infernal cold.”

As Hoko was whisked away by the young mother down the muddy boardwalk, she looked back over her shoulder, and Adam would not soon forget the look on Hoko’s face, softer than he’d seen it in years, stripped of all anger, drained of all passivity, her dark eyes large and wounded, painfully alive.

Slowly, and to Adam inexplicably, Hoko nodded her assent.

ADAM FOUND THOMAS
alone beneath Morse Dock, standing with his arms akimbo and one eye closed as he stared straight up at the planks. The boy paid no mind to Adam’s approach, and kept staring up at the planks. After a moment, he covered the other eye, then both eyes, then uncovered them again and squinted fiercely. Drawing closer, Adam saw a nasty scrape on the boy’s chin, and bruising about his neck, and understood suddenly the reason why Hoko had consented to let him take the boy.

“Who did this to you?”

Thomas said nothing.

Adam took the boy’s chin in his hand and inspected his face in closer detail. He poked at the bruises, and the boy winced. He ran a thumb over the scrape and the boy grimaced. Somebody had gotten the boy around the neck — that much was clear. Not Hoko, Adam
knew, but more likely her father, who only got meaner with the passage of time. This, too, was Adam’s fault. Her father had no thirst for whiskey before Adam had come along and upset the balance of his life. Now he was all thirst. Adam recalled the first time he’d seen him drunk — in the middle of the day, on what might have been the very eve of his grandson’s birth. He was in town, spinning circles in the muddy snow and cursing the spirits. He spit and slurred his words. A string of saliva dangled from his chin. When he saw Adam, he stopped spinning and leered at him.

“Tay-equin,”
he said, his smile curling in on itself at the corners. He wiped the spittle from his chin and raised his right hand, leveling a finger right at Adam.

“Kwetceq,”
replied Adam soberly, turning his back on Hoko’s father. But as Adam continued on his way down the street — which was hardly more than a muddy slough in those days — he could feel the man’s finger trained on his back. In this manner, Hoko’s father followed Adam at a distance of a few paces, past the Belvedere and the Olympic, halfway to the hogback. Adam had wanted to stop, to spin around and confront the old man. But he didn’t have the courage. Deep down he knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on. So he kept on walking, and Hoko’s father kept following, pointing, sneering — silently, intently, hatefully. To this very day, Adam could feel that finger trained between his shoulder blades.

Letting go of the boy’s chin and tousling his hair, Adam reflected that the violence visited upon him was a blessing of sorts. Without the scrapes and bruises, Hoko surely would have resisted his will. But to her credit, the boy’s welfare outweighed her own stubbornness.

The next morning, following a half-eaten oyster omelet at the Olympic, Adam set out to retrieve the boy at the Siwash camp, when, at some distance, he spotted Thomas kneeling restlessly across the fire from his mother.

HOKO HAD RESOLVED
herself to be firm, to instruct the boy rather than release him.

“If your father were here, he would be proud of you,” she said. “He would tell you this is the right thing. Jamestown is where the Klallam will rise again.”

The boy was fidgeting, drawing his shapes in the sand.

“Look at me,” she said.

Thomas looked up at his mother with his distant blue eyes.

“Your father was a strong man; he would tell you to be strong. He would tell you to make him proud.”

Thomas knew that no such father ever existed, that his father had not been lost in a storm, only lost to Thomas. But sometimes he imagined this father, anyway, imagined him living upriver, moving stealthily among the shadows of the deep forest. He imagined his father coming downriver to claim him someday.

“You must do what your father would want you to do,” Hoko told him. An old guilt constricted these words. What was the purpose of the lie?

She reached out to him, but he did not reach back. “Go,” she said, her heart turning to liquid. “Make your father proud.”

THE BOY WAS
restless in the carriage, continually pressing his face to the rattling window, turning his head from side to side, bobbing it forward and back like a rooster. At one point he balled his fists up and hammered his lap with them.

“Easy,” Adam told him. “You’ve got to learn some control, boy. You can’t be acting up like that all the time.”

It seemed to Adam as if the boy’s body had a mind all its own. He noted with relief, however, that Thomas was no longer twitching as he had been in days prior.

“The Shakers would just as soon have you twitching, I suppose.”

THOMAS STOOD IN
the squelchy road as the Potato Counter settled with the carriage driver. The village sat facing the water on the edge of a large flat prairie strewn with old stumps. The two rows of houses
formed an almost straight line. The houses numbered fourteen in all, seven on each side, and they were mostly brown and red, but one of them was green. Looking down the middle of the street with his head tilted sidewise, first to the right, and then to the left, Thomas oriented himself. At the end of the lane stood a little white, steepleless church, tall and straight and mud-spattered along the lower edge. There were chickens at large in the muddy street, bobbing about aimlessly, and from across the meadow came the distant bleating of sheep.

The Potato Counter led Thomas right down the middle of the row of houses, and Thomas saw Indian faces peeking out from behind curtained windows, old men and women, mostly. There were no signs of children about the place. In a potato field beyond the town, Thomas saw a figure leading a horse toward the road. As they drew nearer to the shoreline, he could hear the lapping of the surf, and from somewhere behind walls he heard the dull ringing of bells.

Adam talked to the child as they made their way toward Lord Jim’s.

“You’re going to like it here, boy.”

Thomas knew that the Potato Counter was only reassuring himself.

“You stick to this place, or I’ll be forced to come after you, hear?”

It felt to Thomas as though they were walking slowly, for which he was glad. The smell of the place was not unpleasant, of low tide and manure and the heady smell of grassland.