West of Here (6 page)

When Hoko passed through their midst, all but the children paused in their tracks and stopped laughing, and no man tipped his hat. Cutting back along the Hollywood shore, she found the canoes pulled further upbeach than usual. The snow was not sticking on the shoreline, though it was accumulating in the wooden boats. An icy wind was knifing off the strait, and the fires burned slantwise with the force of each gust. Hoko could feel the rumble of the tide beneath her step, as she scanned the perimeter of each fire for Thomas, with no success.

She came upon Abe Charles squatting alone by his fire. As always, he was dressed like a white: laced leather boots and a wide-brimmed hat, a shirt of Scotch wool, and a buckskin jacket. He had a pipe in his pocket, and a rifle at his side.

“I’m looking for my boy,” said Hoko.

Abe spit into the fire and it hissed. He looked up at the swirling snow. “The spirits are running about,” he observed.

No matter how Abe cultivated his whiteness outwardly, he was still hopelessly Indian in his superstitions, a fact Hoko registered with impatience. “Have you seen him?”

“Maybe he’s chasing them.”

“Have you
seen
him?”

“No. But I saw your father, and I thought I saw a ghost.”

Without comment, Hoko left Abe squatting by the fire and continued
west. She could feel his sad eyes on her back as she trudged along the strait crunching clam shells. When she reached the mouth of the Elwha, she hiked upriver along the rocky bank the short distance to her father’s home, a weather-beaten structure, part cabin, part shack, sagging beneath the weight of its roof. There was a time when the boy’s wanderings brought him regularly to his grandfather’s, where the boy would keep silent company with the old man, seated on the porch for hours, watching the tree line undulate, and listening to the crows gathered in the maples. It was her father who taught the boy to build fish traps in Ennis Creek, and string nets, her father who told him the stories of Kwatee and the Great Spirit, and Thunderbird, her father who filled the boy’s head with words. But that was before her father began looking for answers in bottles. When the boy returned one afternoon with bruises and scrapes, Hoko forbid him to visit his grandfather. Yet the boy continued his visits, almost daily, in spite of her will, until the day he returned with a fat lip and a knot on his forehead. After that, the boy stopped his visits completely.

Already, by the time Hoko arrived at her father’s house, several inches of fresh snow had gathered on the roof of the crude little structure, which listed slightly to one side beneath a great bare maple, several hundred feet off the left bank. The door rattled on its hinges when Hoko knocked. When her knocking failed to elicit a response, she pushed the door open, and it issued a squeaky protest.

The fire burned low, and a feral stink pervaded the little shack. Her father was asleep in a chair in the far corner of the single room, in the glow of the dying fire. His blanket had slipped off his lap, but still clung to his ankles. Hoko knew it was whiskey sleep, because it was always whiskey sleep now. As she drew nearer, she could smell the stink of him, like rotting plums, and she guessed that he had fouled his pants, as had become his custom. How long before drinking made him so small that he became invisible to himself?

“Father.” She could hear the rasp of his breathing. She gave him a shake. “Father.”

Slowly his eyes opened, and he looked up at her.

“Father. It’s Thomas. I think he’s lost.”

His expression was fixed, as though the words meant nothing to him.

“Listen to what I’m saying. He’s been gone two days. Nobody has seen him.” She shook him again, which caused him to smile stupidly.

“Have you seen him? Has he been here?”

The old man’s smile withered. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Without warning, he all but leapt out of his wooden chair, as though startled from it. The chair reared backward and rattled to the floor, and the old man’s feet became entangled in the blanket, and he fell forward to the floor with a crash.

Hoko rushed to his aid. Kneeling beside him, she began to roll him over on his back, but he swung around on his own strength and began to thrash about, swinging his arms, and kicking his legs, and letting loose a terrible shout. With an errant fist, he caught Hoko under the jaw, and she reeled backward before scrambling to her feet.

He struggled hopelessly to regain his own footing as Hoko fled the cabin into the night.

DECEMBER
1889

Ethan huddled beneath his wool blankets, hopelessly alert, still clutching his rifle with his good hand. What howling beast of the night was this that spoke in guttural tongues and circled the inside of his head? What frame of mind was this that he could not distinguish the real from the imagined? And what exhilarating new fear was this that defied expression?

The snow finally let up altogether shortly before dawn. Ethan emerged shivering from beneath his blankets. His thumb was crooked and swollen but mercifully numb. He did not dwell on this state of affairs but immediately applied himself to reviving the coals.

Thawing his bones over the fire, Ethan scanned the little valley laid out before him in a veil of white, no mark of man upon her. The country seemed less rugged beneath the snow, and the valley seemed wider. By the light of day, the wilderness appeared to harbor no mystery from him, nor present any threat to him. In fact, it seemed to beckon him. Ethan turned from the fire to reach for his bundle and spotted at fifty yards a doe grazing on the fringe of the woodline. Ethan could scarcely believe his good fortune. Breathlessly, he went for his rifle. The doe paid him no mind and continued to graze as Ethan took aim, steadying the rifle with some difficulty in the bridge of his numb hand. As he locked in on her, she looked up and froze momentarily. That’s when she gave herself to him. He saw himself hitting her before he ever fired.

When the shot rang out with an echo, the rifle jerked back, and the doe gave a lurch, but did not fall. She righted herself, then careened forward and to the side as if to go down, but caught herself once more, and staggered a few steps before darting into the woods without her former grace. Ethan gave chase. He lost sight of her almost immediately.
He came upon the spattering of blood in the snow but hardly paused to look at it. He scrambled up the hillside, and after twenty hard-earned yards he stopped, out of wind. He quieted his breathing and raised his rifle and scanned the cluttered understory for any sign of movement. But there was only stillness.

After a fruitless hour of reconnaissance, which failed to yield so much as a stray track or broken limb, Ethan settled for a breakfast of dried prunes, a spot of bacon grease, and a handful of flour. The flour, however, did very little to slow the progress of the prunes and the grease, and Ethan was forced to pause frequently in his labors as the day progressed.

His thumb rendered him all but useless with an ax, so he began the business of running his lines with a length of alder he reckoned to be a hundred links, planting stakes along his way. It took him the better part of the day to reckon 160 acres, which extended south into the valley and east across the narrow canyon, a crossing that warranted considerable effort. He descended the bank near the mouth of the canyon, following the river around a sharp bend where a chaos of logs glutted the stream, causing it to alter its course into two sluices running swiftly around the edges. Ethan crossed the logjam and ascended the canyon on the far side to the bluff until he was opposite his cabin. With one arm, he felled and limbed another thin alder and began running a line up valley. And even as he executed this job, his mind set to work on the future.

How long before a road replaced the settlers trail? How long before the clatter and clang of industry ringed the harbor from Ediz Hook to Hollywood Beach? How long before other men of vision, men with furry gray eyebrows, clutching leather attaché cases, looked upon this place and saw the profound and inexhaustible possibilities? How long before money came pouring in from the east upon the hot rails of the Northern Pacific? How long before Port Bonita replaced Seattle as the jewel of the Washington Territory, Washington
State,
before it became a western terminus rivaling San Francisco? And who would join him in hitching their fates to this town, these hills, who would work beside him in harvesting the bounty of this wilderness, paving
this road, ringing this harbor with industry? The fine ladies and gentlemen of the commonwealth colony? The rugged denizens of the west end? Certainly not the Indians. And wasn’t it fitting that in a place comprised purely of potential, a failed accountant with no reputation, five hundred dollars, and a moth-eaten suit should help lead this charge toward civilization? For wasn’t this man, in essence, all future?

UPON HIS RETURN JOURNEY
, Thomas crossed the river again at Indian George’s, where he found the old man tanning a hide by the blue smoke of a fire. George left off working and watched Thomas shake the water from himself on the bank of the river like a wet dog. He directed a craggy smile at the approaching boy. Thomas tried not to look at the old man’s teeth, which were pointy in three places and too far apart.

In a dream, as a child, George received a song, and the song was in Twana, and spoke of an invisible storm. Until George met the boy, he didn’t know the meaning of the song. Now, he thought he knew. The invisible storm lived inside the boy.

“Your mother will be worried.”

Thomas tilted his head and covered his eyes. When he uncovered them, George was still there.

“Have you eaten?”

Thomas cast his eyes down at his feet, and his lips began silently working on his words.

“Come. I’ve got something for you.”

Thomas followed him to the cabin door, but would go no further. On one occasion Thomas had entered the cabin, when he’d followed a pair of enormous curly-haired white men upriver. Thomas had not liked the smell of George’s place, or the fleas. Everything was too close together. It was dark, not night dark, but day dark.

“Yes. Okay. I’ll bring it out. Go. Sit in the canoe.”

But when George reemerged with the sourdough and jam, he found the boy exactly where he left him, except part of the boy was no longer
there. His eyes were far away. He began to quake as though a cold hand were squeezing his insides, and his teeth began to knock, and his eyes looked ready to burst from their sockets. Suddenly, he jerked once, as though struck by a bolt of lightning, and went perfectly still.

George was not alarmed. In fact, he took the shaking as a good sign. “I brought bread. Jam,” he said. “Come to the canoe.”

Thomas did not budge.

“Okay, here. We’ll eat here.” George brushed snow from the stump of a maple and sat down with the bread and the jam. Thomas stood in place, accepting a hunk of bread when George extended it but refusing the jam.

Thomas ate in silence and avoided looking at George’s teeth. But he listened to the old man intently throughout the meal, and he enjoyed how, after a while, George made it a conversation all by himself. Sometimes there were words Thomas had not heard before. He put his lips silently to work on these words.

George talked like a white man. That is, he talked a lot. More than his grandfather, even. Thomas believed that this was because George was lonely, not because he did not like silence. It was said that George had once had a wife, a young Squaxin woman, and that he’d lost her to smallpox. It was also said that he’d lost her to the bottle. It seemed she was the only thing about which George did not speak.

Not only did George talk a lot, but Thomas also found George unique among Indians in that he’d lost his taste for salmon. He refused, in fact, to eat it. Not chinook, not coho, not silver, not even blueback from the Quinault. Niether smoked, filleted, nor slathered in whiskey.

“The river is choked with salmon of every variety,” George complained. “I can hardly pole my canoe through them. I’ve been here many winters, and what do you think I ate all those winters? Yes, that’s right. I ate salmon. And more salmon. I have prepared this fish in a thousand ways, and it always tastes the same. I am done eating salmon. Trout, I will eat, fried in a pan. But not salmon. I will not even grease my saw with salmon oil. I’m finding that I like sourdough
bread, though. The bread sticks to the inside of my stomach and I like that. It smells funny, but that’s okay.”

Thomas smelled the bread and found that he rather liked the smell, sharp but smoky, not smoky like the Belvedere, but outdoor smoky. He liked that it tasted almost like it smelled, but not exactly. And indeed, the bread really did stick to the inside of your belly, and Thomas liked that, too. He wondered why anyone would put jam on it.

“Your time is drawing closer,” said the old man. “You must know that. You must keep clean for your tamanamis, so you have no smell. You will get sick when he comes for you.”

The boy was poking holes in the melting snow with his toe. His lips were not moving. His eyes were no longer far away. George could feel the invisible storm gathering inside the boy. Someday it would gather enough strength to unleash itself. And George believed it would come out like a dream-song for all the Siwash to hear.

“More sourdough?”

Thomas nodded without looking up from his feet. George tore off a hunk of bread and presented it to the boy, who immediately brought it to his nose upon receiving it.

“Have the Shakers come for you yet?” George wanted to know. “If not, they will come soon. From Jamestown. They’ll want to put you to work, and that may be a good thing; you could do worse. They think the spirits are evil, but they have only given them new names. Don’t go with them. Wait until your time has come. Wait until the day you become a man. Only then can you decide what to do.”

George disappeared into the cabin again and shortly reemerged clutching a length of leather dangling what looked like a bone filed to a point. Presenting it to the boy, who was intently smelling his sourdough as he turned it round and round in his hands, it occurred to Indian George that sometimes the spirits worked in mysterious ways.