FOURTEEN
… a trade language of some kind probably existed prior to European contact, which began “morphing” into the more familiar Chinook Jargon in the late 1790s, notably at a dinner party at Nootka Sound where Capts Vancouver and Bodega y Quadra were entertained by Chief Maquinna and his brother Callicum performing a theatrical using mock-English and mock-Spanish words and mimickry[sic]of European dress and mannerisms.
At the bottom of high tide, sole, flounder, cod, and crabs drove in to eat from southern shores of the inlet, below Sammy’s office. Sometimes when the tide sucked back out there remained fish trapped in rock ponds. The smell around Vancouver was sometimes poisonous from the schools of dying fish. If the wind blew south off the water, nausea crashed over the whole township.
The office doorhandle wobbled around and a Hastings Mill messageboy slid in and noiselessly delivered a telegram folded in half. Toronto opened the paper, dented with type, and showed it to Sammy, who read: YOUR MOTHER DIED STOP FUNERAL SUNDAY STOP …
Sunday stop. Your Mother. He stared at the telegram for some time. In the weeks since his brother had left town, he’d been thinking about him. Dunbar. Again The Whore Without A Face. His brother and mother were dead. And the two telegrams were the most he’d heard from his father since his decision to move to Vancouver. There were more words in the telegram but they didn’t appear on the paper, they just appeared, as if transcribed from the cold heart of reckoning.
His wife was a destroyer. He blamed her. Slowly but surely she was bringing his whole family crumbling in on him.
His heart, a little bruised, compelled him to speak, and Toronto listened to him talk about his mother: During my boyhood I saw Mother as no different from a toy. She was a top that I let spin around the kitchen, preparing meals—a joy, she said—bouncing her off the walls a the living room with a duster in her hand while I followed, laughing at the brink a tears, spinning her further and further away from herself until my brother caught her, scolded me, and sequestered her in the library where she quietly, assiduously helped him study agriculture. Pardon me my reveries, Toronto. How are you? Sammy asked.
Better, said Toronto. Much better, thanks, sir.
Sammy had a peregrine falcon inside the bookshelf, on the topmost shelf, perched on a block of wood in its aerie between leatherbound journals of advanced teleological accounting, staring perpetually over its wing down at the two men seated in the office. There was the slope-shouldered redskin dripping India ink on a rulered page. And there was the immobilized one who looked back at the falcon with complicated envy.
I trust you with my innermost thoughts, said Sammy. I trust you with my deepest fears. My cruellest imaginings. My worst prejudices. I trust you without judgment or protest. And I trust you to keep it all a secret, as if from your own mind. And you have done so without fail.
Toronto nodded.
And I need that more than ever now. I have no defences against you or the world, Sammy said. I haven’t a single means a defence. I could die by your hands this very moment. Every word, I trust you not to strangle me with. These words are all I have. I don’t know how else to explain it. I barely enjoy life. I tell you. These journals feel like my only freedom from the prison a my blasted head. May I ask you a question?
Toronto nodded.
Are you telling me the truth? Are you feeling better?
Toronto tried but failed to convincingly nod.
I know you don’t want to, said Sammy. We must. We must see your father, your mother, your chief.
Yessir, said Toronto, but Indians might kill me.
You might still die if we don’t.
He didn’t tell his ward about the death of his own mother, to keep Toronto’s feelings uncomplicated. Still the Indian wept. He said: No one ever help me before.
Let’s find Molly and take you to see your peoples.
Little August Jack Khatsahlahno, not ten years old, stood under the Burrard Bridge and watched the waters of False Creek break along the pebbles and bleached shells with a sound not unlike footsteps. Jack did not know to whom the ocean walked, or for how many eons the ocean’s search had continued, but nevertheless the child was reckoned a genius by the members of the Snauq Indian reserve who had lived under this bridge since before there was a bridge, a Vancouver, a Whitemans. The Snauq had been living in this area so long, in fact, that their oldest ancestors had turned into stones, and so had their dogs. So no one thought he was being foolish, standing on the beach dreaming up ways to get attention, when this child skidded to a stop by the firepit in the middle of the longhouse to say there was a ghost on False Creek. And indeed, when Chief Chip-kaay-am and the others made their way down to the beach there was, as Jack had said, a ghost travelling towards them across the water. He paddled a cedar canoe, accompanied by two Whitemans, a man and a lady, as well as some cargo, namely a large wheeled chair.
When the canoe rubbed ashore, Chip-kaay-am held up his palm, made it clear he’d talk only to Sammy, and refused to allow any of them to disembark. He warned Sammy that if Toronto stepped foot on Snauq ground they’d instantly kill him. There were weapons among them. No one in the canoe was surprised to hear it. Toronto lowered his eyes. The three of them sat in the canoe, one behind the other with Toronto at the back and Sammy at the front and Molly in the middle, moving only their heads in the cradle of the waves, as Sammy reasoned with the Chief. English was not easy, so they talked partly in Chinook, and had to make do even as Chip-kaay-am grew more and more impatient at being misunderstood. There was no need for him to feel much afraid confronting these unarmed guests with two hundred armed Indians around him. He could have spoken Sto:lo with Toronto, but even the Chief was forbidden to speak to a ghost. Chip-kaay-am was flanked by two elders with stooped backs and forlorn eyes, each with a blouse made of woven cedar bark, one hooded, the other carrying an adze. The hooded old lady had both her legs slathered with black molasses. And even in the hands of an old woman that adze looked like a threatening tool, the way she clasped it to her breast so the stone blade glinted.
Sammy, meanwhile, continued to reason with the Chief. There seemed to be no reasoning with him. He was unflinchingly cross-armed. A Hudson’s Bay blanket was draped across his shoulder and over his hands. But unlike most of his peoples, who wore cedar, the Chief was dressed in a brown wool suit that fit him well considering his full belly. He was shoeless. The feet had blackened soles. He was packed solid from the toeknuckles on up. Seven feet above, the ridge on the top of his skull was pronounced even through his full head of white hair.
Sick, said Sammy in Chinook. Hyas sick. Wagh, he said in Chinook. Piu piu, he added for emphasis.
Shem, said the Chief. Mamook isick home, he said, pointing to the waters they’d just crossed, meaning to suggest they do the trip again posthaste.
No, not, wake, said Sammy, repeating himself. Snauq kumtuks la mestin. Snauq tamahnous mamook elann Toronto.
Kowkwutl mamook elann memaloost.
Not memaloost, argued Sammy, Toronto is alive. Moosum, Sammy said, koko moosum.
Cultus wauwau, said Chip, brushing him off.
Cultus wauwau is right, said Molly, balancing herself in the canoe rim as she started to climb off the boat. I’m bored a listening to you boys talk and talk. You’re never going to get anywhere with this man, Sammy. Chip-kaay-am, she said to the Chief, I’m getting off this canoe and don’t get tied in a knot over it.
Wa wa, said all the Indians when they saw her begin to move.
Enough cultus wauwau, said Molly, splashing up the beach to meet the Snauq, who retreated in a kind of fear, raising their arms and trying to intimidate her even as they backed away. She turned and waved for Toronto, as if he should follow her to the shore. Toronto was not given the chance to so much as swallow before the weapons started coming out in plain sight. The Indians positioned themselves like that, ready for anything, and Molly made it obvious the performance left her unimpressed.
Molly, said her husband, I believe it’s time you returned to the canoe before—
Oh, come now, Chinooky, she said.
Arrows pointed at you, said Sammy. Arrows, Chinook.
Pshaw, she said, arrows in the hands a sweethearts who never pierced more than fishscale. Toronto, will you assist me in taking Sammy’s chair to the shore?
You be careful, said Sammy to his wife as she splashed back into the water, leaned over the canoe, and tried to lift up Sammy’s chair. Help me, will you? she said to Toronto, and dutiful to the death, he obeyed her. He climbed off the boat, up to his knees in slippery green ribbons of seaweed. The Snauq hissed upon seeing him move, but what other choice did he have? Without the Erwagens what other life did he have? Exile. He heard the bows stretch back with arrows tracing him as he helped her lift the chair above the water and walk it onto the pebble beach. The ghost stood on the beach dripping.
Molly smoothed her half-soaked skirts and shook the water off her boots, arched her back, inhaled deeply and, making a clownish sort of walrus mouth, blew a ringlet of damp black hair away from one of her eyes. She was right. No one took a shot at her. She took out her change purse—they flinched as if she might have a pistol—squeezed apart its brass clasp, picked through the money, and asked for a third person to help carry Sammy off the canoe. Her nerve caused a minor furor among the Snauq, and at any moment a stray arrow was going to get shot off, so before things got retributional Chip-kaay-am quieted his peoples down again. Little young genius Jack was by this point at his Chief’s side. They conferred.
What is the child whispering to the Chief? asked Sammy.
Shh, said Toronto.
Whatever the child genius Jack Khatsahlahno and the Chief had conversated about, Sammy was lifted from the canoe by silent Indian men and chaperoned to the safe land of the Snauq reserve in his wheeled chair. Chief Chip-kaay-am was leading the way up the beach to the longhouse. Most of the Indians who walked beside him were unusually silent. When the road became too rutted for his wheeled chair, they carried him again. An old woman with blistered skin wobbled alongside sucking on her lip and coughing until the amount of phlegm brought her to a stop and she leaned against the wall of a salmon-smoking hut to catch her breath. There was the ghost, named Toronto in his afterlife, here walking unaccompanied through the village of his childhood, among family, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, his own mother, and still he walked alone. He was, Sammy noted, the darkest Snauq among them. He saw that Toronto was unable to resist staring down into a cedar box filled with pungent oolichan fish grease. Little Jack ran up beside Sammy and put his hand on the armrest of his wheeled chair and followed along for a few footsteps, staring into Sammy’s eyes until Sammy said: Klahowya, in the voice a man uses on a child, with discipline in mind. The very next instant, a score of bumbling children in woven clothing skipped around his chair in play circles as he rolled his way to the longhouse, all of them wanting to hear the crippled Whitemans say: Klahowya.
Molly rolled her husband past a Snauq crouched on the ground fanning a pile of white ashes that gave off a hot, clear, bread-scented smoke. Her hands were a hundred years older than the rest of her, but moved nimbly over the roaming heat. Molly leaned with her shoulder to get Sammy over a slow patch of mush, and whispered in his ear: Love you. She also kissed him half on his lips, half on his cheek, and he loved her. Such was his life, highs and lows and interminable anguish. The high cedar doors of the longhouse were carved with the design of a raven’s head tilted up, set inside the shape of a coin or shield. Sammy said: I’m looking forward to seeing the inside of the longhouse.
Oh yes, said his wife, as am I.
And then at the doors, the Chief turned to the couple and asked that Toronto enter the longhouse unaccompanied. Molly’s shoulders fell, and her chin stuck out. Girlish woman or womanly girl or performer, whatever it was made her say: No, we’ll come. For his safety we should.
The Chief waved his hand, no. The Snauq wanted to speak to Toronto in private. It was time for the ghost of Snauq peoples to return home. But he must do so alone.
No, said Molly, we want to come, too.
Dear, said Sammy.
What? I think it’s—
I go in alone, said Toronto. Is okay. Is okay.
The raven’s head and beak split open, and the tranquil interior darkness of the Snauq longhouse—perforated by bands of linty sunlight—held the soul’s own fragrance in its body. Not a house at all, but a creature, a sleeping beast. The great shadowy mysteries of the Snauq longhouse. And that brief encounter was all the Erwagens got before the doors shut again.
Those Indians who weren’t included returned to their chores. A man added another bale to the stacks of dogbane tied up and piled against the longhouse’s south wall. Beyond that, a long rope was tied between two trees where long fleshy sleeves of cedar bark hung to dry in the sunlight. A woman was lifting each tawny strip and rotating its position to give the other half some sun.
The Erwagens were left alone to wheel awkwardly around the Snauq reserve, first between the smaller log houses then finally making their way down to the beach, where the creek narrowed under the Burrard Street Bridge. They unnerved the ducks, who shattered the surface of the water as they took briefly to flight. A gull on a log raised its wings and jumped as the ducks passed, then resettled.
It’s pretty here, said Molly.
You’re pretty here, said Sammy.
I’m not pretty. I’m one a those ducks. I should flap over there with them and paddle along in the seaweed.
If those ducks looked like you, said her husband, the whole city would be swimming beside them.
Hm, said Molly.
Such as it was, the married couple were having trouble. It was at the beach, under the bridge, where they felt the need to reflect.
Molly said: There’s a man game on Sunday, and I want you to see it. I believe it will be our first official performance.
What have you been doing till now?
Rehearsals, she said. Auditions, she said.
Rehearsals and auditions, said Sammy. Hm, that’s not how I’ve heard it put before.
Sunday shall be altogether different. It’s truly ready for you to see now.
You’re certain?
Yes, I’ve decided.
It’s all arranged then.
Yes, I’d say it’s almost ready. I need only arrange for the competitors … but I need to know you’ll be there, yes?
Let me take a look at the calendar, he said. Traditionally, Sunday has been the day I spend at rest, he added.
I swear, if you’re not there to see it, I won’t speak to you ever again. I might live with you, but you won’t hear my voice.
Oh, come now. What if I have a crisis at the mill?
I swear. You don’t come, I button down the lips.
The lips, he said. But I love the lips.
Then …
It was low tide, and they looked over the wide bar—fifteen-twenty acres of rocky, shell-crusted beach that Sammy yearned to walk over. How he missed the simple chore of walking on a rocky beach, turning over stones, watching the crabs scatter, prodding the starfish. The sea, cold as granite, and silent. The waves squeezed lightly on the beach like toes curling.
Sammy saw how they fished here. The top halves of a long set of fences were visible in the water. Made of maple vine and cedar stakes driven into the mud, they corralled the fish from the opening in the strait, and as the fish swam into the narrow, the fences tapered to a point in the waters entering False Creek, trapping the halibut, mackerel, and smelts together for easy netting. On the beach he could see the round nets, their fine thread of stinging nettle spread flat and laid to dry. He saw the mossed slab of island in the water, a sandclot in the tidal surge and suck, a few hibiscus growing in the gaps.
That must be where they put their dead, said Sammy. Toronto told me that when they thought he’d died, they wrapped him in blankets and put him on smam-chuze, the island a the dead. This must be it, eh.
You never told me he said that.
I didn’t want to disturb you.
How well do you think you know me if you won’t tell me a delicious story like that?
Nevertheless, this must be smam-chuze, the Snauq’s island a the dead.
And he awoke …
Yes, said Sammy, and he awoke, almost suffocating inside the blankets, what he believes was the following night. He called across for help to return home, but no one answered him. It was as though he no longer existed. When he saw his mother at the beach, she fell to her knees and grieved to the island as if he had died, as if he wasn’t calling to her. She disbelieved in him utterly.
How very sad.
It’s become a sort a friendship between us, said Sammy. He was exiled from his family, and I exiled myself from mine.
He could see her thinking hard. Her eyes blinked especially hard. I like to know everything, she said.
Yes, I know, said Sammy.
She looked at the water. Oh, Chinook. You’re so smart, she said, lifting herself onto the toes of her leather boots, twice, before settling down. I’m sorry. I know you’d never conceal something from me intentionally. You’re much too good a man to do that.
Yes, he said, thinking of the telegrams he’d received and wondering why he couldn’t tell her about his mother’s death.
Behind them, they heard noises coming from the longhouse. As they listened closer, Sammy realized it was laughter. Peals of laughter.
Laughter? said Molly.
Sounds friendly enough, said Sammy.
I knew they would, said Molly. After all that holus-bolus, they welcomed him back in the end.
Greening treetops swayed in the breeze. The morning air was thickly fresh. The blowhards on the city’s streets were huffing and puffing about the man game, imitating moves and guffawing. They gassed on about work, what little of it there was. A lot of guys were wasting their breath on next Sunday’s meeting about the pestilent wind from the Orient, with speakers counting themselves among the Knights of Labour, according to the posters, which were everywhere.
With his head down, brushing dust from his whiskers, RH slinked in the door of the laundry, and with a less-thanrespectable nod of his head to the Chinamen who struggled with irons over whole hampers’ worth of Whitemans garments, each stack tagged with a card in Chinese, he proceeded past stacks of linens that waited to be spat upon and steamed of their wrinkles. With a shortage of labour, wait time for laundry in Vancouver, as RH well knew, was up to three days. His wife complained about this. Laundry was a concern. He knocked twice on a clapboard wall at the back of the store and no sooner had he rapped than a set of long-nailed fingers on the other side scrabbled and pried away a narrow splinter of wood at eye level to reveal the burning stare of a Chinaman guard, who let RH pass beyond into the realms of the unreal, the opium sellers’ cave.
What you want today, Mr. Alexander? said the dealer in less than a whisper.
RH passed him the money and he handed RH two balls of mud for the dimes.
The dealer covered his mouth with one hand. He said: I hope you know how to fight for your life, sir.
What d’you mean by that? RH asked.
San Francisco know everyting happen here.
What does he know?
This meeting Sunday … said the dealer, shaking his head with disapproval.
The Knights of Labour, thought RH, are going to get me killed.
When the effects of the opium wore off and he was able to walk again RH returned to the tunnels, followed the wet dark underground route that took him to the Stag & Pheasant saloon, surfaced there in the ladies room, established his presence by ordering a whisky before saluting the patrons and rushing home. He credited the looks on everyone’s faces as uncloseted patricidal envy. Once inside his home he shut the door, locked it, double-checked it, shut the drapes, took a breath. Without so much as removing his coat or galoshes, RH met his wife in the den, where she’d readied the trays and pipes and lit the paraffin so that the moment he arrived they could set down to smoke, relax the niggling intellect, and sink into calumny.
At the opium den he’d bought an ounce of Ta Sin, with its especially coca aftertaste. It said on the tin: You will know no difference between day and night.
Minutes later, the smoke lingered in the air. His wife sat. He laid his head in her lap, holding her at the waist. The Chinamen. They’re going to kill me, he said.
I simply won’t allow it.
If it’s not the snakehead, it’s my own men.
They’ll have to come through me first.
Even this petty dealer. He knew I was marked.
Don’t talk like this, Mrs. Alexander said. You scare me. He raised himself from her bosom and went to rest on the day bed. She followed behind him and knelt at his side, watching him explore the snug chasm between the upholstered backrest and seat. He found a dirty penny, pocketed it, and collapsed in fatigue.
Ah, God, he said, near to tears. I cherish the smallest compensations.
Darling, no, please, she said, kissing his knuckles. I’ve been waiting to share this moment a tranquility with you. I cherish this time, too. Let’s think aboot your predicament after dinner. One must always make important decisions on a full stomach. For now, let us simply enjoy, as you say, our small compensations. I promise that no harm will … Her eyelashes fluttered and her neck bundled up as her jaw fell open with a dry smack. The cords of her neck blooded her mind. He knew where she was because he was there too. In too deep.
The sun was a vein of gold capping a lion’s jaw of blue mountains. Great schooners sat anchored on their quiet reflections in the waters of English Bay. Up the beach, Toronto shook hands with Joe Fortes, who sat himself on a log overlooking the gentle crests falling on the sand. The Negro looked neither disturbed by the sunset nor at peace with it.
The two men talked briefly.
Fortes asked him: You wanna go for a swim with me?
Nah, said Toronto. Not today. Feel sick. Only stop to say klahowya.
Well, too bad. Even now?
Better.
What kind a sick you been?
Toronto pointed to his stomach and rear end.
They fixed you? Fortes asked.
Hoping so, said Toronto.
Damn, a swim do you good, no?
No, said Toronto.
I love a swim. Always have. Ever since I been a little boy it’s been my belief that a swim in the ocean ever day is good for your health. Your lungs. Your muscles. Your joints. You feel good after a swim. Even your confidence is helped by learning to swim.
Toronto was looking southwest over the bay in the general direction of his Snauq Indian reserve, unseen behind a voluminous white mist. Where you come from, Joe? he asked.
Maybe this story’s familiar to yours, said Fortes. Place called Barbados. Plenty far south from here. You in a boat for months. I learn to swim on my island.
You live on island?
Water not like here. Very warm, so warm. Beautiful island. You go around Vancouver in short pants you catch pneumonia. In Barbados, you swim all year round.
The waters of English Bay turned apricot as they rippled. Then plum. An evening wind picked up. A soaking wet Fortes was still seated on the log and Toronto remained standing beside him and they watched the sun go down. The blue herons returned to roost in the park’s big-leaf maple trees, one after the other, shouting husbands returning with dust in their hair after a long day of neck-breaking labour. Then, as if experiencing a memory shared by every Vancouverite that ever was, Toronto watched Fortes bolt down the beach at a heavy clip, kicking sand, and dive headlong into the inky waters. He stood up from the first few strokes and hooted, wiped his face and scalp and turned to look back at Toronto. Come on in, Fortes said. Water’s all warmed up.
No, Toronto shook his head, smiling. In fact, he had to be off, he had to go. He called out goodbye to Fortes, and Fortes stood with his fists on his hips, keeping his balance in the tide, and bid Toronto a perplexed goodbye.
You just gonna leave me out here alone? Come on, a swim be good for ever one.
Toronto was deep in the trees again. The jungle of Indian skookum. He knew it well. His path turned north at a mammoth red cyprus tree uprooted many years ago by shifting sand. From the darkened base where a cavernous muck formed inside the trunk and its tangled root system spoked out in every direction there were already two strong new saplings four feet high, green as can be and aimed for the sky. One of Toronto’s relatives once told him that when an old tree falls, Salish go look for petrified elk dung underneath its tentaculate roots. This old tree’s roots were cinder black, sashed with bright moss. The elk were no myth. No Whitemans ever saw elk, but Indians had lived here for three thousand years and still occasionally unearthed petrified elk antlers, even centuries after they’d been hunted to extinction.
He walked through the sloping dark trails towards the squatters town near Lost Lagoon where Clough lived. He’d never been to Clough’s place before, so it was going to take him a moment to locate the right lean-to. He picked his way through, eyeing the driftwood abodes with sheet metal roofs and the great variety of indigent who pimpled this landscape. Sore faces, dug deep with scars and troubles, great sacks full of defeat slung below their eyes. Men sat on flipped-over buckets and smoked pipes and watched Toronto, slow-cooking skewers of grey squirrel over the smoking coals of a campfire. Hooch bottles were strewn everywhere.
Got any chickamin? begged one guy, too drowsy to even raise his hand.
Naw, sir, said Toronto. He knew he’d figure out where Clough lived if he followed the smell of all the animals. Clough’s makeshift poundkeep. The manure smell. Mildewed oat smell. The mutts barking. Clough’s shack was the only one that had a fence around it. He slipped, muddied his hands, got up, studied and sniffed, wiped the mud-only grub on his legs, and when he came to knock on the door to Clough’s shack, he cleaned them one last time.
Inside Clough’s hut they heard Toronto’s tentative rap and everyone turned their head to the door to look, except for Molly, who kept her eyes on Furry, and Furry, who kept his eyes on Molly.
Daggett, Clough, Campbell, Smith, Boyd, and Meier stared at the door until Daggett barked: Well, don’t just stand agape—somebody answer it.
Too early? asked Toronto when he stepped inside.
No, right on time, Molly said, and rose from her seat. Furry and Daggett and then Clough rose from their seats, each following Furry’s lead and putting on airs. Each and every man tipped his hat in respect for her. She was too pretty. None of them had spoken from their proper mouths. In the presence of a real lady, they’d been reduced to teary-eyed stupefied Duh.
She said: We have a deal?
Furry smiled. One brown tooth showed. He said: Yeah, I guess we do.
Why, just listen here, Mrs. Erwagen, said Clough. If nobody else’s going to speak from the gut right now, then let me be the first to spleen a little. I got more than competition on the line here. All these men, their respectability among their fellows. You put it all in danger with your plans. You know that don’t you? Comprehend one thing, Mrs. Erwagen. These men play along because we kumtuks what’s to benefit. Long run, short run. We see opportunity. So don’t expect we just lay down and let you rub our bellies like dogs. When it comes to the man game, we intend to never get beat. So this better not be some trick.
Isn’t, said Molly. How could it be? We’ll see you Sunday, then.
Sunday, said Furry.
Toronto was as keen to know what she’d said to Furry & Daggett as she was to know what happened to him in the longhouse. He tried with body language, but she remained stoic and introspective and didn’t notice his head-bobbing, just as he had consciously ignored her head-bobbing after the longhouse. They retrieved the canoe and began the portage home along Coal Harbour. He was in the back using his paddle to steer while she thrust with great strength up at the front, cutting the waves and stirring up phosphorescent algae below. Three in the afternoon, the clouds so thick it was nighttime already. He faced her back, within the wind of her berry scent.
Soon she said: Sammy told me aboot your family problems. Aboot your death … had I known, Toronto … this, we could a solved this so simply and easily long ago. You see that I’m quite resourceful. I only wish you felt more trust. Toronto, there is so much a the world, a huge incalculably vast world, and yet this Earth is nothing but a speck in the infinite. You’re reunited with your family. In the eyes a your people, you are reborn.
Yes, ma’am, said Toronto as he paddled.
Does it feel like so, like a rebirth?
Mrs. Erwagen, yes, ma’am.
Yes, I can feel you have a much stronger presence behind me right now even as I paddle. Yes, I almost don’t need to turn around to see you. I can see you. Look, your face is the reflection a the moon on the water. Toronto, it may not seem as though I think aboot you, but I am beside myself to know how much you suffered in my presence. And without my full knowledge. And to deliver you back to your world, your soul. Oh, Toronto. How does it feel?
No way I can explain how.
Toronto, I simply must know, you simply must tell me what made you all laugh so much in the longhouse.
She approached the question with her usual grace and sensitivity. The waves lapping at the birchbark sides, the masculine freshness of the night air, the shattered clusters of stars above them, and her back to him. She was right to say she didn’t need to face him to see him. His soul was back. The ache and wonder and colour of a soul in all its moods. In the rhythm they shared paddling the canoe he felt comfortable enough to explain one final humiliation on his path to recovery, on his path to what amounted to a Snauq’s rebirth.
Toronto explained to her with his halting tongue how inside the longhouse Chief Chip had recited an old ghost story aboot the Snauq. The story was about how a Snauq boy who lived many generations ago died tragically. When the men went to hunt one morning at dawn for rabbits, the boy followed his father and his uncles into the woods, hoping to prove that he was as good a hunter as his father. The young boy crept soundlessly under the arms of the slouching ferns to wait for his prey. His father crouched with a spear in a similar position hidden in a great thicket of moist foliage. In the same instant his father heard a rabbit leap into the green grass clearing, his son was just pouncing to surprise the soft light creature as well, and as the rabbit’s ears pricked up and the frightened thing scuttled off, his father stabbed the boy clear through his ribs, fixing his chest to the ground. Father and son looked at each other with terrible shock and remorse. He held on to his father’s spear bored through him with bloodied hands. Everything in his heart quickly soaked the earth under his father’s feet. Later, the son’s body was wrapped in ten of his father’s blankets and laid on the island of smamchuze out of reach of night’s wolves. At the first break of dawn after the boy was laid to rest, the father was awoken from a fitful, grieving sleep by a noise he recognized only too well. He was in his bed along with the others in the longhouse, and there was the sound of the embers crackling in the firepit, but this was different, this sound was much closer to his bed. And he distinctly heard what sounded like the breaking of plant stems and kindling. The exact noises he heard before he drove the spear into his son’s back. And then, before his eyes, he saw his son. His son was standing in front of him. My son, he cried. You’ve come back. He reached out his arm to touch his son’s chest, which had begun to bleed. My son, he said, and there no was time for the man to react except in horror, as he saw his touch once again transform his son into a gruesome, bruised shadow. Its formless shape dropped over him, baring its slobbering yellow teeth, and strangled the father to death in his bed.
Then, said Toronto, Indian man behind me grip his fingers around my neck. Strangle me.
Strangle you? said Molly.
I tried scream, said Toronto, but, Chief said, man’s grip impossible. Ghost who talk to Snauq, we kill one more time.
Toronto’s face had turned purple then green, his toes had started to twitch. His eyes gushed tears. His gums bled. His tongue fattened and dried. When finally the fingers let go of his neck, Toronto fell to the ground gasping and huffing dust. Then the Chief asked Toronto to show him the problem, and in a daze he proceeded to lower his britches and show the Chief the danglers in front of the community. At first only the Chief laughed, then everyone joined in. Toronto was lying on his stomach on the dirt floor of the longhouse with his pants around his ankles.
Is that how you died, too? said Molly. Were you killed by a hunter?
No, said Toronto. I killed by coho.
A salmon?
Brother schwack me over face with dead coho. Fall my head on rock, eh. Died that way. Waked up later in blankets up a tree, way out on island. I climbed down. When family sees me, Snauqs shrink away. Call me ghost. To Snauq, I was ghost. A ghost talks to Snauq must be killed one more time.
We three are all secretly ghosts, said Molly. Me, you, and Sammy. Perhaps Sammy most a all, eh, wouldn’t you agree.
They were almost home. They docked the canoe and came up the shore, walking down the street towards their house, their footfalls illuminated by flickering gaslamps all along the way.
Exiled, said Molly, and especially my husband. As they took the steps to the verandah, she reached over to touch Toronto.
He still felt her hand on his forehead, where she petted him with great sympathy there on the verandah. And as he instinctively leaned towards her, she embraced him, smoothed his hair, and whispered: Oh, I love you so, Toronto. I trust you’ll continue to stay with us? We’d be heartbroken if you left us now.
And he said this was where he belonged.
You’re too late, said Daggett. He hadn’t even changed positions. He was still seated in the same chair as when Molly had come to visit an hour ago. Most of his crew were outside smoking and practising with Clough. Daggett didn’t even properly look at RD Pitt; he was the kind of guy who was hard to look at. The way the cowboy dressed, talked, walked, and thought was all wrong, and to look at it straight would be like a concession. We just set up a man game for that very day, Daggett said, and thumped his fist gently on the table like a gavel.
A man game? Why mess with that? I thought you hated Litz and Pisk.
We sure as hell do.
Then why have truck for their fools’ parade? It’s a damn shame, too. We could use your strength to rid this city a the Yellow Peril. Besides, you owe me a favour.
What’s that?
Alls I done for the labour movement in this town? You’d be out a job if t’weren’t for me. I expected you all at this meeting, goddammit, show this town is unified behind the goal.
To rid this fucking town a the Chinamen.
Bah, I’m done with that route. A man grows up sometime around thirty and starts worrying aboot himself and not the other guy. I don’t need to be an injury to others no more, said Daggett.
Horseshit, said Pitt.
We’ll not squander our talents on you, said Furry.
On me? What talents on me? Brawn? Mettle?
Listen, Pitt, Daggett said. See, the way I grew up, I’m trained for pain. First thing I thought to do when you stepped in: kill him. Same thing I always think. That’s one way to go through life. But me and Furry are devious motherfuckers. We’re after one thing, and that’s chickamin. Knocking his granite knuckles against each other, he added: Even when I lose everything, still I gain.
That’s not the voice a no killer, said RD Pitt, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms.
’The fuck you know aboot a killer’s voice?
You ask me square, I tell you square, said Furry. Kumtuks?
Pitt looked at the dirt on his work-beaten hands, the calluses and scars, the long brown nails, and had nothing to say.
Yeah, I kumtuks, said Pitt, leaning forward on to the table and using his thumbnail to pry moose-jerky loose from his buckteeth. The gristle hit the table.
Ask me what you want to know, said Furry. Ask me.
RD Pitt looked up again from under his Stetson. He mulled for a while, then finally asked: Did you kill that snakehead?
Yeah, ha ha. That’s what I thought, cowboy. Can’t even look me in the eye. I took some men off the shelf. God forgive me. You want me to start listing. Yeah, I cut the snake to pieces like firewood and burned him the same. Daggett was there, he can tell you.
I accompliced that crime, said Daggett.
But that’s not why I’m sitting here listening to you bark like a seal pup, said Furry, and you’re the one asking me the fucking favour.
No, no. Learn your manners, cowboy. Now I get to ask a question, eh.
O-kay.
You ever paid back any favours?
Hell’s bells, yeah, Pitt said. Who do I look like? Alls I got is my balls and my word.
Furry grabbed Pitt’s right wrist and pinned it to the table. Everyone backed off. Pitt shrieked. Furry untucked a handaxe from his belt loop and Pitt started to cry and his knees buckled so that his eyes were level with the table. Please please, no, cried Pitt.
Spread your fucking fingers before I take off the whole goddamn hand, you worthless mule.
Trembling, the fingers eventually did as told.
For what seemed like forever Furry held his axe above his head, waiting, his eyes on Pitt’s hand until with vicious speed the axe came down hard on the table, clipping the long grubby moon of Pitt’s index fingernail. Furry wrenched the axe out of the table but didn’t let go of Pitt’s hand just yet.
The fingernail lay there on the table like a dumb smile. It took Pitt awhile to accept the fact that his hand was still in one piece, and he stood on his knees weeping over the lost nail.
Nine more, said Furry.
Nine more? cried Pitt.
I cut you, then we go to the fucking Knights a Labour meeting. I trim your nails, I go to the man game, and you owe me a very big favour.
The homes on Dupont Street were supposed to remind Sammy of Victorian mansions, but with the expensive finials and other artisanal touches at best imitated here and at worst replaced by mildewy walls and tarpaper rooftops and all the cookstoves burning away. The homes on Dupont Street were to him like pretty faces on rotting decapitations. Sammy was upset to find that Wood’s’ front door resembled his own in all respects, right down to the knocker. Same exact door. He looked up at the windows and then down the street, and saw that candles were lit in all the windows on all the floors of all the houses, and that at every entrance a glowing red paper lantern swayed in the breeze. A girl on the second floor of Wood’s leaned her elbows on the windowsill, purple shutters open, smoking a cigarette, swaying her rump. It was quite cold out for a lady to be seen smoking. At the thump of interior noise, she pushed herself off the sill and turned to look into her room and said: Yeah?, folded the shutters closed like a wink, gone.
I’ve never visited a bordello, he said; and was silently wheeled to the door by his ward, where he waited below the red paper lantern that in the breeze flickered its candleflame.
Klahowya, darling, said Madam Peggy, bending to put her hands on her knees to speak with him, exposing her cleavage to his eyes. You must be Mr. Samuel Erwagen. Her pearl and silver necklaces swayed in his face; Father’s cane reared itself in his mind. Welcome, sir, to Wood’s. I don’t believe we’ve ever had the pleasure. You must come in, dear. Make yourself comfortable. Or I mean—. Have a place for you right here. Does Toronto need to—I’m not supposed to have Indians in here is all. If you can wait outside, sweetheart. I know how to wheel a chair. I’m stronger than I look. Oh, she said, and put her fingers on Sammy’s shoulder, touching his cheek, alerting his ears. It was all happening so quickly. Let me introduce you to a few a my little angels, she hushed into his ear, tickling it something fierce.
The girls in the parlour were all half-dressed together on a long sofa with clawfeet and purple cushions. Rose, Lily, Mary, Sable, and Dixie. She chided them for not sitting upright in front of a gentleman, and with a narcotic, shouldery squirm they made a big deal of yawning and folding over one another, and seemed to one by one fall asleep on one another’s thighs again. He was alarmed by their naked legs, the first he’d seen after his wife’s.
She wheeled him down a narrow hallway and through a second room much like the parlour, though its benches made no sense with the round tables. The air proved rank with tobacco. Was this a second sitting room for men with appointments; he wasn’t sure. He had only a moment to look before she fit him into her office, weaved around and sat on the table edge in front of him, eased her hair behind her shoulder with a swivel of her neck, crossed her arms among her pearls and smiled warmly. What can I do you for, Mr. Erwagen? Any flowers in my bouquet interest you?
No, I assure you, that’s not why I’m here.
Sure aboot that?
Fair madam, I find your line a business quite foreign to my needs.
I see. Yes, well, I shouldn’t try to fool around with you.
I don’t expect you to think beyond your own enterprises.
She looked at her slippers, thinking. Finally she said: I don’t think nothing till I see money. And turning once again to face him, he saw that her face had completely transformed. The sweetness was drained away. So what can I do you for, then? she said with this new face.
You’re acquainted with my wife, correct?
I know a her.
How well? You know her personally?
Can’t imagine how the two, her and myself, could ever know each other personally, Mr. Erwagen. Alls I said was …
She told me you helped her with the man game, said Sammy, boldly. It was a ghastly hunch, but he’d carried it around in his mind for some time now and was grateful to at least summon the courage to start asking what he most wanted to know from this cunning woman.
Peggy’s office was strewn with pillows. What wasn’t threadbare was stained. A single painting on the wall, small enough to put under your coat and featuring a long narrow dirt road curving into a dark forest like a question mark, was not what Sammy had expected for decoration. There seemed to him great exhaustion of sin upon this entire place.
Ms. Erwagen’s mind can be a geyser, said Sammy.
That’s what this town needs, Peggy said, checking her vanity for dust with a long index finger, finding none and so continuing her speech. More influence upon the masculine side, more pursuasion by the feminine side, to get this town on balance. I must say that I admire a lady who’s not afraid to get involved with these men. Before your wife Molly? These men never talked to no lady such as your wife. Not the way she commands. Otherwise, they don’t know nothing else but how to dominate. My girls? Imagine if they were out in the street the way it is in cities. My little flowers are too fragile for street corners. Without my protection? Oh, this place’d be some kind a Hell without Dupont Street and us madams, that I can promise.
She dropped her arms, stared at him as her mood blackened. Taking a deep breath, she seemed to challenge herself to recover from the spell, and he watched her turn to face the cabinets and begin rubbing the edges of each polished shelf for motes of dust.
You tricked me, didn’t you? she said. Your wife never told you anything aboot me, did she? No, I fell right into that. Fool. What’s made you go prowling around like some dog sniffing for scraps?
Listen, I trust my wife more than I trust you. She obviously tells me more than you. I am asking you to disclose what you know.
What do you hope to gain from all this?
A more accurate sense a history.
Spit on it. Your wife she’s a unique girl, eh? If there’s ever a lady to care for you, she’s the one. I liked her the minute I met her. Might be the one and only time I ever was surprised to see a stranger in my bedroom. My door is always locked. But there she was. How she got in, no idea.
Molly is very resourceful, said Sammy.
I open the door and damn, there she is. She was standing there in the middle a the room. I mistook her for a ghost. All in white linens, very flattering, shapely clothes. Her green eyes there shining out from that perfect face and great mane a black hair. Oh, she is too lovely for earth. At first glance, well, she frightened me more than any po-lice bust.
When was this, that you first met?
I’ll tell you something you should know, Mr. Erwagen … We only met that once. I never saw her again.
When exactly?
After that first meeting, said Peggy, standing and turning away from his eyes so as to better conceal her mendacity. After that, she always got her men to carry messages to me. Not even messages on paper, mind you. Just words she wanted to relay. I knew my responsibility. I distributed gossip and turned the rumour mills. And kept her secret. Gossip. I knew and I agreed to play my part. To help her, your Molly. How could I not? You see, for a lady to approach me. It’s been an honour, Mr. Erwagen. That’s alls I can say. It’s been a true honour to help your wife.
When she was done prattling on, Peggy continued to nervously comb her hair through her hands.
When did you first meet then? Sammy asked.
Oh, well, inspector, when was it, last fall? I believe, yes. Yes, she said she’d begun a new project. Rehearsals, was how she put it.
Yes.
And that’s the only time I ever recall conversating with her, that I can remember. I never saw her again. Well, that’s it, really. As I recall, she asked if I would agree to help.
Help how?
Encourage the men, like I says. Encourage them to gamble. Encourage them to gamble on the man game instead a all the other ways the men around here wile away the hours. I gather she understood we were in competition for the dollars in these men’s pockets, see. She respected my business sense. I’m a capitalist, Mr. Erwagen. Same’s your boss at Hastings Mill. No different at all. I respect leadership. Talk to me aboot love, I can tell you I don’t know the first. But when it comes to money, power …
Molly is very skilled at seeing the world from another’s point a view. It’s much more difficult to see the world through her eyes.
Always the case with true beauty, said Peggy. No point even trying. You might as well try to lay an egg. When did you first meet her?
Peggy was acting naive for Sammy, but he was already too suspicious to be convinced by her shy manners. Instead he noticed that her hands were like a man’s, two bony insects with leathery legs. A farmer’s hands with the long painted fingernails of a delicate concubine.
You know why else I came here, said Sammy. Don’t try to fool me. I see what you’ve accomplished.
Darling, I’m clueless. Tell me.
Don’t play the peon. Dunbar.
A who?
Dunbar, my brother. There’s no use denying it. He spent some time here. My brother’s last days on earth were in the clutches a one a your notorious whores. Now out with it, woman.
Dunbar? Peggy said, as if relieved the subject was finally broached. Was that his name? What a tragic face. Worse than yours. Oh, you think she had something to do with that as well.
Excuse me, said Sammy, sputtering at Peggy’s unexpected accuracy.
Darling, she had as much to do with that as me and you. Why did Dunbar come to me, if I may ask, when your own homestead … only minutes away?
Well, I …
No. Dunbar came to me because a the tar-black, sick, degenerate lowliness in his soul. I seen a lot a heavy-headed men. I seen a lot a lost souls, dead souls, rotting souls, raped souls, you name it. But for a man who could walk and talk, he was the most truly dead-looking I ever seen. You must a saw that yourself.
I never characterized him quite that way before, but, yes.
The orphanage nuns taught me at least one good thing, she said. A man who got no soul, you do what he says or it’s trouble, and you get him out your door soon as you can.
Yes, he said, thinking of how quickly he’d rooted Dunbar out of his own house not so long ago. Sammy’s gaze fell downward to the Persian rug on the floor of Peggy’s room, covered in dirt and hair.
And anyways, if we’re being on the level, wasn’t your wife preoccupied that night with a game? said Peggy. She had regained her full voice, that low-swinging criminal burr he was frightened of and beginning to enjoy. She almost laughed, but her smoking habit turned the laugh into a cough. Don’t you know your own wife? Would the Molly you know—.
As I said before, it was you I suspected …
Peggy found her way back to the table edge in front of him as she spoke. No, that’s what you’re telling yourself maybe, but that’s not why you’re here. I’m no murderer, Mr. Erwagen. Your brother chose her knowing.well. I told him myself who she was. He went in to her room knowing. I’m not peddling in violence here. That’s not my business. I don’t let my girls be flogged or birched and I don’t murder customers. There’s none a that here. You want to meet her, I can tell.
May I?
She’s far too delicate. The most delicate.
Why did you let my brother?
Came in here all hunched over from the cold and tears in his hollow eyes. He told me he’d left his wife in Wyoming and had got no relations from her in so many years anyways. It was a pitiable story.
I insist I be allowed to meet her.
Nothing doing.
I insist. There’s ten dollars in my pocket.
Damn you men. You’re all the same. Your wife, she pays me nothing for the honour. I respected you, Mr. Erwagen, until you offered me the money.
She took the ten-dollar bill from his pants, went to unlock the door that connected her suite to the one beside it, and got set to roll Sammy into the blight.
Through the doorway, he saw into the room where The Whore Without A Face lived. At the far end of the room he saw a stained-glass window, and through it light bled across all the surfaces. She lay in her bed, facing the window, just beginning to realize that it was not only Peggy who was entering. She began to turn, the black hood locked to her neck by its leather collar, a cigarette pressed to the fabric at her mouth. She paused, took the cigarette in her fingers, and a bud of smoke appeared to leak from her hood into the atmosphere, where he saw every carbon mote in the light streams. As The Whore With No Face began to speak so did Peggy, and Sammy interrupted them both.
Peggy, would you mind leaving us for a moment? I have words I’d like to speak to her in private.
Yes, I must—
I’ll call for you, thanks, said Sammy, and watched to make sure she shut the door properly before he returned his attention to the girl on the bed.
Dun-bar, she whispered. Her arms covered her bare chest as if to show modesty in the presence of a lover.
She said his brother’s name once more and he answered this time: Yes, he was my brother.
Why you—, she said. Her voice was gentle as tissue paper. You did. You promise you return to me.
He did, said Sammy. She did not understand yet that he and Dunbar were different people.
Yes, she exclaimed, nearly in tears. First love I ever see again.
But, no, it wasn’t me, said Sammy. It was my brother. Why did you …
She flinched. He expected her to. As she twisted her legs to one side on the bed and sat in that position, the sun shone through the side of her hood. The fabric was veil enough to see at best a shadow of her features underneath. What he saw conformed with no shape he knew for profile or portrait; rather, he saw another mask, this one carved from solid wood, exaggerated to barbaric proportions, with a screaming mouth, flared nostrils, and ridged cheeks. She caught sight of her shadow on the bed, the silhouette and the cloth, and she moved; the view was gone as quickly as it had come.
He understood his brother. The repellent features were concealed and, after a fashion, morbidly desirable, censured as they were by the glossy, almost perspirant finish of her black hood.
Why you no move? she said.
I almost died.
Wa, she said, upset at once and on her feet, now in front of him.
This was his opportunity. He was alone with her. There might not ever be another moment like this in his life when suicide was within reach. Why he didn’t choose suicide, as his brother had, was what shocked him.