West of Here (47 page)

Buchanan could not be persuaded to stay ashore. The tides were in his favor, and dusk was approaching, and his wife was cooking hamburger steaks and fried potatoes.

As Adam approached the little red house with the willy-nilly shingles, Lord Jim’s wife emerged on the step to greet them. Her eyes did not question Adam’s Chinese companion.

Ida Balch cut an imposing figure for a woman five feet tall, for she was nearly as wide, and peered up at the world without deference. When not decidedly grim in facial expression, Ida was poker-faced. Not unlike Buchanan, she bore a flat nose, which she was not afraid to stick into things. In spite of her imposing veneer, Ida Balch was gentle of spirit and disarming by nature.

“I knew you would come,” she said, taking Adam’s hand between her own. “Jim said you would come.” She then lowered her voice in confidence. “The Shakers cannot cure my husband. He says that the healing is outside of himself, and that is the problem. The bells only give him a headache. I wanted to call for the white doctor in Port Bonita, the one with the funny smell, but Jim would not have it. He says that the white doctor is not fit for horses.”

“I brought a different kind of doctor,” Adam said, indicating Haw, who gave the slightest of bows. “This man once cured the Reverend Sheldon of talking.”

Much to Adam’s surprise, Haw soon called his right hand into action. Shushing the old Indian, he read Lord Jim’s pulse at the wrist and at the temple. Though confined to the bed, Lord Jim’s irrepressible voice was strong and steady as ever.

“What ails me,
cayci,
is a sickness of the spirit. The bottle has followed us to Jamestown at last. Two weeks ago I found Horatio Groves sick with the drink in a potato field. When I tried to take his hand, he spat in my face. He said, ‘Leave me. I am already dead, old man.’” Lord Jim turned his eyes toward the window.

Haw, his right hand having resumed its state of dangling inactivity, began laying out his herbs on the dresser with his left hand, as Adam pulled up a chair and sat across from Lord Jim, cursing himself inwardly for having not monitored the situation. He knew all along
that temperance in Jamestown was too good to be true. In spite of sovereignty, security, and religion, somebody was bound to weaken in the end. Somebody always did.

“Two days after Horatio Groves,” the old man continued, “John Johnson gave his wife and boy a beating in the street outside of the church. He was sick with whiskey, too. And the sickness has spread to his wife.”

Adam ran his calloused hands over his unshaven face, and stifled a sigh. “Where? Where is it coming from, Jim?”

“If I knew that,
cayci,
maybe I could stop it. But maybe not. Maybe Horatio Groves was right, and we’re already dead.”

“Horatio Groves was drunk. A drunk has already surrendered.”

“Perhaps.”

Haw pulled the blankets back and set his right hand lightly upon Lord Jim’s chest.

“Is the boy about?” said Adam.

Lord Jim closed his eyes momentarily. When he reopened them, he turned toward Adam, nodding grimly.

“You must not be angry,
cayci.
I wouldn’t have stopped him, even if I could have. He fled over a week ago. Back to the Siwash.”

Adam rose to his feet immediately.

“They tell me his time has come,” the old man pursued. “And that he has begun to talk. They say he speaks at Hollywood Beach, night after night. They say his words are strange and that they have a strange effect on the people who hear them.”

“Nonsense,” said Adam impatiently.

“That’s what some of the people who have heard him speak say. They say he speaks nonsense. But I don’t think so,
cayci.
”

“The boy’s never uttered a word in his life.”

“Then you must hear for yourself to believe. I’m too weak, or I’d seek him out myself and hear these strange words. Find the boy,
cayci.
Find your son. Hear what he says.”

“I’ll need a horse.”

“You will take mine.”

Shortly before dusk, Adam readied himself to leave for Port Bonita,
just as Haw was beginning to rub a poultice of herbs into the old man’s chest.

“You’re not going to cook me, are you?” Lord Jim said.

“No cooking,” said Haw. “Make better.”

As Adam mounted Lord Jim’s mare, a pale moon was just rising in the east.

OCTOBER
1890

It is said that Storm King remained upriver for five days and that he appeared on Ediz Hook on the sixth day, next to a white shark with hollowed-out eyes. It is said that the boy spoke to no one in particular, that he merely spoke aloud; that he walked the length of Hollywood Beach for three days speaking softly in a voice that was too deep to be his own and that his words were as puzzles. But nowhere does it say that his first words were not numbered among the English and Salish dialects that streamed from his mouth, nowhere does it say that among all of that language there existed no word or meaning to subscribe to the one utterance he would come to favor most, always at the end of sentences, like the word
amen
— the anomalous singsong
doon-doon, doon-doon.

It is said that he stood on a drift log, gazing out past Ediz Hook until the fires burned low and dawn appeared as a thin gray sliver on the horizon. It is said that during the night he had carved strange symbols in the sand, and it is said that the tide would not wash them away for six days. Nobody among the Klallam had thought to write these symbols down. But it is said that among them were the letter
K,
the letter
F,
and the letter
C.

OCTOBER
1890

Far out on Ediz Hook, Hoko spotted a tiny solitary figure standing on the inside edge of the natural jetty. She was certain it was Thomas.

When she was within shouting distance, Hoko called out his name and waved her arms in the air, but Thomas paid her no notice. He did not so much as glance in her direction as she approached

“I’ve been worried for you,” she said, when she was upon him. “They told me you fled Jamestown. They told me you were back at Hollywood Beach.” She rested her hand on Thomas’s shoulder, knowing that he did not like to be touched. Oddly, the boy did not pull away from her. His skin was hot to the touch. He was sweating, in spite of the chill. His lips were not moving. In his eyes, she could read only confusion.

“They said you were talking. I didn’t believe them.”

Thomas offered no indication that he could even hear her voice.

“We won’t go back,” she said. “You’ll stay with me. Things will be as they used to be.”

Hoko looked him right in the eye, knowing he did not like to be looked in the eye. The boy gazed steadily back at her without the slightest light of recognition. Behind his steely blue eyes, Hoko thought she caught a glimpse of what George Sampson called the Invisible Storm, and it sent cold fingers running down the back of her neck.

“First, we must make you well again,” she said.

To her further surprise, the boy allowed Hoko to take his hand, and she began leading him down Ediz Hook toward Hollywood Beach. The clouds on the horizon were draining of color. Darkness began to settle over Hoko and Thomas as they walked, and the lanterns of Port Bonita began to alight, along with the fires of Hollywood Beach.

“You must not listen to what they say about you,” Hoko told him.
“They want so badly to see you as something else; they cannot see you for who you are.”

The boy could summon only flashes of a recent past. A desolate beach, not so different from this one, the pounding surf, the urgent crowing of a dozen seagulls swirling above. The eyeless, bone-white carcass of a dogfish and its unaccountable significance. Apples and cigarettes and the cold metallic stink of armpits. Dry throat, and aching spine. Stinking rags, hatred, and the sting of fire and ice.

He could only understand the woman when she spoke English. He did not know if he was inside of his head or outside in the world. He did not know whether he was talking or thinking. He did not know whether he was deciding what happened next or whether what happened next was deciding him.

When he felt the simmering in the pit of his stomach rise up through him like a shiver, he began to vibrate, and he wrenched his hand away from the woman.

HOKO HAD SEEN
the boy shake, but never like this, never with his eyes rolling back inside his head, and his teeth clattering together, never until he collapsed on the ground, and began flopping about like a fish in the bottom of a canoe. Rushing to his side, Hoko tried to contain him. He was whipping his head side to side, and it was as though he had no eyes at all; they were all white. At the sight of them, Hoko scrambled to her feet and started running toward the fires of Hollywood Beach.

She returned, panting, several minutes later, Abe Charles in tow. The boy was lying still when Abe squatted down beside him. His eyes opened just as Abe looked down into his face.

“Little Storm King has awakened,” said Abe Charles.

“Don’t call him that,” said Hoko.

Abe looked up at her. “You should hear him speak.”

“He will not speak.”

“But he
has,
he
will.
”

“He’s sick. He needs to be cured.”

“You see him as weak instead of strong. Like a white sees him.”

“I’m his mother.”

The boy remained on his back, looking up at the moon.

Abe allowed the boy to get his bearings before he sat him up and helped him to his feet. The boy did not refuse his help.

“We’ll take him to my place,” Abe said. “He can rest there.”

The boy walked between them down Hollywood Beach. Hoko held his hand.

“He will be fine,” Abe assured her. “You’ll see.”

On the outside, he seemed fine to Hoko. His eyes were clear now, if not distant, and he appeared to be physically none the worse. But he was still not himself, still not moving his lips, still not tilting his head at the world like usual. She liked that the boy let her hold his hand as they walked, yet she felt she did not know whose hand she was holding.

They passed three fires before they got to Abe’s shack, where Abe immediately began stoking the fire and rearranging the clutter of his camp.

“There’s fish on the rack behind you,” he said. “And elk, too.”

“I’ve already eaten,” lied Hoko. “But maybe Thomas.”

Squatting on his haunches, the boy was transfixed by the fire. When the woman offered him salmon, he would not take it. When the man offered him a blanket, he would not take that. Finally, they let him stare into the fire. And though nobody noticed, there were soon tears streaming down his face.

After several more minutes busying himself, Abe sat down beside Hoko and offered her part of his blanket, which she refused. “He’s been shaking like that ever since he came back,” he explained.

“He’s ill.”

“It’s the spirits,” Abe said, scooting closer to Hoko, until their shoulders were grazing. He draped the blanket over her knees, and she accepted it. “Eight days ago, he carved strange figures in the sand. The tide didn’t wash them away for six days.”

Hoko looked into the fire. “He always carves figures in the sand.”

“Six days, woman. The tides ran right over the symbols — in and out, twenty times over — and the symbols would not go away.”

“Then he must have carved them deep,” she said.

“He knows things,” observed Abe.

“He hardly knows we’re here.”

Indeed, the boy seemed to pay no attention to them.

“I’m glad you’ve come back,” said Abe, leaning a tiny bit closer to Hoko. “Things are not the same without you.”

“I should never have let him take the boy,” she said, as though to herself.

“All of that is done, now. He is a man. Everything is just as it should be.”

Hoko shifted her weight away from Abe, and leaned into the fire. “He is a boy, and he will always be a boy.”

With a cold heart, Abe stood up to busy himself once more, and Hoko leaned back and pulled the blanket up higher, tucking her knees in tighter and watching her son from across the fire, perfectly placid, unaware of the tears drying on his cheeks as he stared into the flames. She did not remember falling asleep, only the instant before sleep washed over her, when she saw the boy rocking gently back and forth on his haunches.

When she awoke, the fire was dying and there was a slight breeze. The moon was nearly straight overhead flanked by towering clouds. Both Abe and the boy were gone. Down beach, one fire was burning larger than the others, and there were voices on the wind.

Hoko scooted in closer to the coals of her own fire and gave them a stir.

OCTOBER
1890

For nearly an hour that night, Storm King rocked silently back and forth on his heels in the glow of the fire as the Siwash gathered all around him. Stirred by the faint breeze, the flames lapped at the air in front of the boy while dark forms danced with a ghostly waver behind him. In the distance, the lights of Port Bonita were strung out east to west, with a smattering of new cabins aglow on the stubbled hillside and beyond. Behind the town, the mountains reared up in darkness.

The people began to grow restless. Each night the silence grew longer, they said. Each night the words that followed were stranger. George saw many familiar faces among the assembled: Abe Charles was among them, and Abe’s cousins Tilly Houghton and Lyle Groves. Even the Makah was there, the drunk with the dark-pitted face, standing near the back in his sullen manner. As always, his tiny companion was beside him, shifting about restlessly. Near the outer edge of the crowd, just inside the ring of firelight, the boy’s grandfather swayed side to side as though the breeze were stirring him. He looked ghoulish in the firelight, with his hollowed-out eye sockets.

When it seemed that his silence would never end, Storm King stopped his rocking back and forth, and his eyes grew wild in the firelight, and he spoke at last.