Cloudy, cool. Unsettling times.
Shorty leaves before dawn. He doesn’t need the obligatory supplies this time around; he holds a claim certificate in his pocket. He makes short work of packing his kit and heading back to Dawson. He stuffs oversized duffel bags and secures them with heavy rope. What he doesn’t use he will sell, and for a hefty profit.
“Some men get rich from the digging; others get rich off the diggers,” Shorty always said.
“So off he went, just like that. He said it weren’t a moment too soon, with Soapy dead and gone.”
Pearly relates the story to Eliza. Pearly’s eyelids look puffy, and red.
“So he’s going to join that crazy mass of humanity trudging north through Alaska again. And all the way to the Canadian Yukon, damn it all.”
Eliza wonders what has become of Greta Torgerson, with whom she had shared a bed in Seattle. She wonders if Greta was faint of heart.
Eliza knows that Shorty is not faint of heart. He would assay the masses of men littered about at the top of Chilkoot Pass and forge on from there. But Shorty told her it’s many hard miles into the heart of the Yukon: five hundred miles of rough and snow-packed mountain passes, wintry river valleys, and ice-crusted lakes. She’s heard it told that thousands of men—and women, too—stumble, scramble, slog, and scratch their way toward gold.
“Only one out of a hundred, no, maybe a thousand, will make it to Dawson,” Shorty had confided to Eliza. “Once there, the miners will find all the producing claims taken, and will be lucky just to make it there alive.
“Of course, my gold lays safe underground at the claim. Gotta get back, and the sooner’s the better. Carmack’s on guard for me, Bonanza Creek, it’s called now. Just a stone’s throw from Dawson.”
Eliza thinks of all that gold locked in the depths of the earth. She realizes now that gold beckons miners with all the cunning of a woman, blinding them with her charms and with the promise of uncovering her secrets buried deep inside.
THE CAFÉ IS EERILY EMPTY. A SUBDUED CHARLIE ADAMS delivers The Skaguay News at ten o’clock sharp. Eliza leans on her elbow at the counter and devours the lead article.
“Soapy Smith is dead! Shot through the heart, his cold body lies on a slab at People’s undertaking parlors, and the confidence men and bunco steerers which have had their headquarters here for some time, have suddenly taken their departure, the tragic death of their leader having completely unnerved them . . .”
The tick tick tick of the clock above the counter echoes in the near empty anteroom. Eliza moves from one task to another, her focus unnerved.
For nearly a week, Skagway waits to hear Reid’s fate. Eliza uses the time to clean the café again, beginning this time from the back of the shop toward the front. She cannot stand small talk, and attends to customers when she hears the tinkle of the bell above the door. Business is tentative, and slow.
The following weekend Eliza stays home from her regular visits to Pearly’s. She is in no mood for socializing. The next few days drag on, the clock and strangers Eliza’s only companions. Charlie Adams loiters at the Moonstone more than ever before, and Eliza packs a brown sack of treats for him every morning.
“Share these, now,” she says, as she presses the warm bag into Adams’s hands. “And don’t you be getting into any trouble, you hear?”
Pearly crashes through the Moonstone’s front door on Wednesday. She looks frantic. For a second Eliza worries that the news must be about Shorty.
“Reid’s gone. Just gone. I’d swear out loud if I had the heart.”
Eliza stares blankly at Pearly. She has no words. She thinks of Cilla and then of Reid’s cronies. She looks past Pearly at Reid’s empty chair in the anteroom of the café and fixates on the wooden slats that once supported Reid. She looks back at Pearly and wills herself not to cry.
“Damn it to hell.”
The few patrons that populate the café turn and face Eliza.
“Yes, you all heard me right. Damn it all to hell.”
THE NEXT DAY PEARLY AND ELIZA DON BLACK AND JOIN THE human parade for a mile east of Skagway for Frank Reid’s proper burial. Reid had died a miserable death, nearly two weeks after his fateful altercation with Soapy Smith on the Juneau Company Wharf. The funeral procession is a solemn affair, or at least as solemn an affair as Skagway can posture. A low murmur moves along with the crowd. Pearly’s heavily blackened eyes rim again with red.
“Death takes no bribes,” her aunt used to say.
Perhaps I should have stayed behind, Eliza thinks.
But no, Reid was one of Eliza’s best customers, and his cohorts still frequent the Moonstone. What she offers to the swelling crowd is her mutual respect. She stuffs her sorrow away and follows the procession the mile to Reid’s gravesite. By the time Pearly and Eliza reach the crude cemetery, Reid’s body has been swallowed by the ground. Eliza hates burials—too many memories of too many burials flood her mind. Dear sweet Ida. Jonathan’s classmates. Jacob, and of course Jonathan.
Jonathan!
Eliza and Pearly do not tarry at the cemetery. Pearly and Eliza walk arm-in-arm, murmuring together, and hitch up their black skirts in the oozing mud of the well-worn trail. They dart behind the still-oncoming throng and weave behind the trail toward the hillside. There, in a small, largely unmarked gravesite, lie the remains of Soapy Smith, a hand written wooden sign adorning the bleak gravesite.
“Shame, such a damned shame,” Pearly says to Eliza. “But there’s a bitter justice after all. Did you see that the brute is buried outside the cemetery boundaries? Fitting, all’s I can say.”
Eliza and Pearly walk back to town in silence. Eliza returns to the Moonstone, unlocks the heavy wooden door, sits at an empty table. She rests her head on her forearms. After a quarter-hour, she rises, unfolds herself, and makes her way stiffly to the kitchen. She puts the kettle on to boil. The tinkling bell above the café door jingles. Men begin to shuffle in, scrape the chairs across the wooden floor, brood. A pall hangs over the establishment for the rest of the day, hushed murmurs, and more often than not, silence.
The hubbub of the dual deaths resonates for weeks, with swarms of reporters from as far away as Chicago and San Francisco coming to Skagway to cover the tragedy. A large contingent of reporters from the Show-Me state converges in Skagway throughout July. Smith’s widow is due in town any day from St. Louis. There are as many stories about the deaths as there are reporters, and after a while, whatever truths there may have been on the evening of the eighth of July are buried as surely under the ground as the rotting bodies of the vigilantes, and it is anyone’s opinion as to who indeed played the role of the hero and who played the role of the villain.
Eliza notices the flat accent of a fellow Missourian when she hears it, especially in the pronunciation of the state itself, with the flourish of the short “a” sound at the end of the word, a dead giveaway.
“Hail from Missoura, I do, yes,” a voice says, one of a handful of new customers who stops into the Moonstone. “Call St. Louie my home now. Name’s Jack Draper, St. Louis Globe-Democrat. And you’d be?”
The stranger proffers a card to Eliza by way of introduction.
“My family’s from down Columbia way,” Eliza says.
This piece of information has not passed her lips since coming to Skagway.
“Haven’t been back in near ten year, though.”
“You’re a long way from Missoura!” Draper bellows.
“Yes, that I am. I’m a long way from Missoura.”
Eliza busies herself with pouring coffee and ringing up the sale.
“Lot of folk in town covering the situation,” Eliza says. Calling the double murders “the situation” softens the heinous tenor of the subject, and minimizes it. Talk of murders doesn’t sit well with Eliza, under any circumstances.
“By chance, did you know the man?”
Draper talks out of the side of his mouth, as if a cigarette should be inserted into the opposite corner of his mustachioed lips.
“Didn’t know the man personally, no. But his legend grows every day, if you believe everything you read.”
“You mightn’t have a story to share, now would you, Ma’am?”
Jack Draper steals a sideways glance at Eliza.
Draper wears his pencil behind his left ear and his ever-ready reporter’s notebook protrudes from the hip pocket of his overcoat. He drums up conversation with all the locals, and writes furiously as he sits at a front corner table, sometimes until closing. He spends five days in Skagway, and makes friends on a dime. Eliza talks casually with Draper, but keeps her distance. No need dredging up Missouri memories, or trying to reconnect with her distant past. Business is up to speed, and Eliza wears herself out by day’s end.
Wise to keep my ears wide open, Eliza thinks. One can glean so much more from listening than from talking.
“Mrs. Waite! I just can’t get enough of these here cinnamon buns! How about indulging a fellow’s craving for a sweet tooth and giving up your recipe? I’d like it awfully well if my landlady could bake up a batch of these for me some dreary morning come fall.
“No, wait! That’s a pun, it is, wait and Waite! I’ve got me an idea here, Mrs. W!”
He pronounces it “dub-yah.”
“I’ll promise that you’ll see this recipe in print if you’ll give it to me. The Globe-Democrat’s got a new column for the homemakers, “From the Kitchen of the Missus,” I think it’s called. I could post your recipe; maybe call it “From a Klondike Kitchen.” Might have quite a following, all those homemakers in St. Louie wondering about who’s this Missoura woman up here in this far-flung city baking up the best cinnamon buns in the country.”
CINNAMON BUNS
Dissolve three tablespoonfuls yeast and one tea-spoonful sugar in one teacup of lukewarm tap water.
Let mixture sit in a warm place until it bubbles up.
In very large mixing bowl, beat two eggs well, then stir in one teacup sugar, pinch of salt, one generous teacup shortening, and three teacups warm water, then mix well and set aside.
Measure twelve teacups flour by lightly spooning into the teacup and leveling off with a knife.
Add yeast mixture to the egg/shortening mixture and mix well.
Add ten teacups flour one teacup at a time mixing with a large wooden spoon until dough is no longer sticky. Add up to two more teacups of flour if the dough seems too sticky.
Cover bowl with damp kitchen towel, let rise in warm place until doubled in bulk. Punch dough down, then transfer to floured surface and knead lightly.
Wipe out the large bowl and grease it with butter, then form dough into a ball and put into greased bowl and turn dough over once.
Cover bowl loosely and let rise again.
On a floured surface, roll dough out in the shape of a rectangle approximately ten inches by fourteen inches, and one-quarter inch thick.
Brush melted butter evenly over the surface of dough.
Sprinkle a generous amount of sugar over the melted butter, then sprinkle a generous amount of ground cinnamon in an even layer over the sugar.
Starting with one of the long sides of the rectangles, tightly roll dough up jelly-roll fashion to form a long “snake.” Cut roll crosswise into one-inch pieces.
Place the pieces cut side up very close together in four buttered baking pans. Cover loosely with a damp kitchen towel and let rise until doubled in bulk.
Bake until golden brown.
Makes sixty buns. A half recipe yields thirty buns, and halving does not compromise the recipe.
Prepare icing by mixing confectioners sugar with melted butter, cream, and vanilla until smooth. Top buns with icing and serve warm.
EVEN THOUGH IT’S THE HEIGHT OF THE ALASKAN SUMMER, Skagway shivers in the aftermath of Soapy Smith’s death. The entire city council has been forced to resign. No mayor. No town marshal. No police force.
Errant gunshots pierce already common chaos. Eliza keeps her firearm close. She takes to practicing her shot in the kitchen of the café. She loads the derringer with two bullets and clicks the barrel shut. She aims for a crude bull’s-eye drawn on thick brown paper affixed to the kitchen wall. She stands firm and fires. Bullets perforate the paper and layer themselves into the thick wooden wall of the cramped kitchen. She misses the center of the target and promises herself she will practice again soon.
No one ever stops in to ask what the ruckus is about.
A somber pall also hovers over Eliza’s Sunday night visits to Pearly’s.
“Skittish as a new stallion,” Pearly says. “I’m as jumpy as one myself. Heard tell that Shorty’s not the only one to get outta town. Why, Lester Edwards himself’s gone missing, he has, and Frank Pope, the scoundrel. A ne’er-do-well if I ever laid my eyes on one. Shoddy piece of flesh. At this rate, Cilla’s going to be lonely nights. All this burying has got me on edge.”
Eliza’s long-held secret rushes off her tongue.
“I’ve buried more than my share.”
The air spikes with the unsaid.
“Lost my boy, I did. Five years old. The smallpox. Hardest thing I ever did, burying that boy. Lost my husband, too, although I don’t think on him much. Fifty-eight people in three weeks, that’s the God’s honest truth. My boy—Jonathan—and a passel of his schoolmates. And my best friend, Ida. Doesn’t seem fair, all this dying.”
Pearly rises from her chair. In her stocking feet, she pads noiselessly across the layered tapestries on the parlor floor. She sits close beside Eliza, and strokes Eliza’s hair.
Eliza begins to cry.
Eliza’s first quiet sobs cause her shoulders to shake in a soft rhythmic pattern: up, down, up, down. Pearly digs her fingers into the mass of wavy copper to massage Eliza’s scalp.
Eliza’s sobs grow louder. Her shoulders heave upwards as she tries to catch a breath. And then, like a river that surges past an ice floe and unleashes its pent-up fury, great gushes of tears wrack Eliza’s lean frame. She chokes on her sobs and falls, exhausted, with her head in Pearly’s lap.
A strange calm settles over Eliza as she reclines there. Pearly hums under her breath; any noises that emanate from the streets of Skagway dull into the distance. The two sit in relative silence for the better portion of an hour until the silence cracks open, and the ship’s clock on the mantel strikes a sonorous decade of gongs, ten o’clock up. As if in a trance, Eliza gazes up at Pearly. Pearly’s eyes are moist.
“I had a son, too. Stillborn. Can’t say rightly who the father was, but I always like to think it was Steiner’s. God, I loved that man.”
The mention of Steiner shocks Eliza from her ease. She pushes the thought of Steiner far into the recesses and closes her eyes.
For the first time in the six months since Eliza left Mrs. Brown’s Boarding House for her own lodgings, Eliza doesn’t go home. She wakes at four a.m. nestled on Pearly’s couch, a fringed shawl draped over her. Eliza folds the shawl and straightens her crumpled dress. She slips her boots over her stockings and gathers her satchel. Mrs. Brown’s is bathed in a rare moment of quiet.
Eliza meanders through the alleyways toward the Moonstone. She notices for the first time that the burden of Jonathan’s memory, from his conception to his difficult birth to his short life, lifts like the smoke that rises above Skagway’s spotty skyline.
I am not the only one bearing this grief.
She realizes as she navigates her way through the mud and the manure that everyone must possess a storehouse of grief, here, a smithy opening his heavy rolled door, his weighty, measured movements penance for his suffering, there, a drayer heading to the wharf with his dappled team, his steady gee and haw marking time against the sure daggers in his heart, and ahead, a barkeep sweeping away his inborn anguish in simple, synchronous swiffs after the last of the drinking men headed home.
Yes, we are all of us wounded.
Skagway echoes an eerie silence. No gunshots. No yelling. No sounds except the gulls, ever ravenous and greeting a new day.
Eliza reaches her lodgings and fumbles for her large key. Up at four o’clock each morning in a land where the late summer sun barely sets allows for little sleep. But even though it’s summer, dawn remains chilly. Eliza has mastered her hairstyle and, by now, can fashion a swept updo in less than ten minutes. Her working uniform consists of a plaid flannel day dress covered by a large white apron. Every night after work, Eliza shakes the flannel dress out over the back stairway, its remnants of flour snowing off the dress into the purpling night. She hangs the dress by the doorway, where it acts like a curtain over the door’s small rectangular window, and keeps in some heat.
Eliza changes and clatters down the back stairway and into the kitchen. She feeds the stove a large armload of cordwood. In an hour flat she’ll be roasting and the first of her breads and cakes will be rising in the oven’s warmth.
She stirs the sourdough starter and retrieves flour and warm water. Her fingers thaw as she works the dough, a handful of bees slowly adjusting to room temperature, kneading multiple circles of yeast and flour. She wipes her hands on her apron and sets to grind the coffee. Its intoxicating aroma fills the kitchen. She measures the coffee: one, two, three, four heaping tablespoons into the bottom of the coffee pot and places the blackened kettle onto the cookstove. Flames lick upward and warm the iron surface, and, in turn, the bubbling coffee. Eliza breathes in, a deep, prolonged inhale. She thinks of Shorty up on his claim, and the poor pickings he must drink for his morning coffee, dregs used over and over again. She misses Shorty. No doubt Pearly misses him even more.
After work, Eliza wraps two leftover slices of cinnamon raisin bread and walks to Pearly’s. She aims to thank Pearly for her kindness the night before, two slices of yeast bread as an offering. She finds Pearly behind the boarding house in the waning sunlight, a sorry mess of chopped wood at her feet.
“Here, let me,” Eliza says.
Eliza takes the axe and swings it upward in a full arc before slamming the axe head on the cordage. The fir splits evenly in two, and Eliza gathers up the split log and stacks it against the back wall. Pearly looks agape at Eliza.
“Where’d you learn to chop wood like that? You’d think you’re a woodsman.”
“We all of us have our secrets,” Eliza says. “Just maybe some have more than others.”
She smiles at her friend.
“I’ll chop, you stack.”
A SHY THREE MONTHS LATER, “AND NOT A MOMENT TOO soon,” Pearly cries, Shorty bursts through the front door of Mrs. Brown’s with a smile as big as the sun. He drops his kit and rushes toward Pearly. He picks her up, swinging her around in his bear-like arms. Her dainty boots kick at the air, and her dress swings in wide circles.
He lets Pearly down and kisses her full on the mouth, right in front of Eliza. Eliza blushes and smiles at Pearly, whose lovely face peeks above Shorty’s massive shoulder. Pearly looks the schoolgirl, even though she nears fifty.
A foul smell of sweat, tobacco, and dirt envelops the parlor. Pearly doesn’t say a word. She nods to Eliza, an unspoken goodbye. Then she leads Shorty up the carpeted stairway, looking behind her as she ascends every tread so as not to lose sight of him ever again.