“Isn’t truth just generally inconvenient?” she said.
Franklin flashed his nice teeth. “S’pose so,” he said, sipping his milk.
“Before the dam there were ten andromonous fish species in the Elwha,” Hillary pursued. “All but one of them is extinct now. And all of it could’ve been avoided with fish ladders.”
“Fish ladders, huh? You don’t say.”
Franklin supposed he was still just a city boy deep down, still a son of Windy City steel and concrete, crowded el trains and noisy storefronts, because already he had a few questions that he was afraid to ask. For instance, how the hell’s a fish supposed to climb a ladder in the first place? Also, this was the first he’d heard about fish being transsexual. How was it that after eleven years in Port Bonita, gateway to the Olympic National Wilderness, the mysteries of nature were still foreign to Franklin? Fish run, tree harvest, snowpack; these were just phrases, things, to be quite honest, he didn’t even care to understand. The fact is, he could hardly stand the wilderness, it struck him as lifeless and dull. All those trees just standing around to no purpose. The deafening silence. The mosquitoes. Franklin felt no more at home in the wilderness than a giraffe might feel on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The fact was, he was a little terrified of the wilderness. Given the choice, he’d rather stroll through Cabrini Green waving a fistful of cash at one in the morning than walk through Lincoln Park at noon. And yet, not only had he applied for a position in this outpost a decade earlier, he’d even passed up positions in Muncie, Detroit, and Indianapolis — urban locales all, and all of them exponentially closer to Chicago. Only later did it occur to Franklin that he’d been trying to outrun anything.
“Any kids?” said Hillary, as though she were reading his mind.
“Naw, nothin’ like that.”
“Me neither,” she said.
“Never got around to it, I guess,” said Franklin. “Heck, I can hardly take care of myself.”
“I know what you mean.”
In the ensuing silence, Hillary downed her G and T in an effort to soothe her nerves. Franklin followed suit with his milk, grimacing slightly.
“Needs rum,” he said.
After the second gin and tonic, Hillary’s nerves settled into a pleasant state of arousal. It felt good being tipsy. Franklin got better by the sip. Maybe he was different than the others. At least, he didn’t talk about himself the whole time. Hillary felt something bubbling up in her chest that wasn’t tonic, as though the evening might be leading somewhere.
Franklin was also pleased by the evening’s progress. He wasn’t forcing anything, like he had with the Longaberger basket rep from Port Townsend or the administrative assistant from the women’s correctional facility in Purdy. Franklin was laying back, and everything was smooth sailing until shortly after the third round arrived, when Hillary asked him if he did much hiking.
“Heck no,” he said, waving it off, with a grin. “It’d be a cold day in you-know-where before you’d catch me walkin’ around out there. My idea of the great outdoors is a potted plant.”
Like an anchor chain, disappointment plummeted down the back of Hillary’s throat. Franklin could see it and was determined to recover from the misstep.
“’Course I can’t say I really ever gave it much of a chance. Never cared much for baseball until I saw Wrigley Field. So I guess I could be persuaded to give it a try. Can’t really judge a thing until you’ve tried it.”
It wasn’t that Franklin redeemed himself — because, let’s face it, this was a deal breaker — it was more that he tried to redeem himself that kept Hillary from slamming the door on the evening’s possibilities. Still, her interest was waning the more he tried to save face, and Franklin could feel it. It was time to push it, he decided.
He smiled over the rim of his rum and milk. “I gotta say, blind date and all, I wasn’t expecting anyone half as smokin’ as you.”
Hillary felt her face color, simultaneously thrilled and annoyed at herself for taking the bait. She had to admit she liked his directness, if nothing else.
“Really,” pursued Franklin. “Usually, I wind up with, well, you know — not that I’m Paul Newman or anything. But a fine-looking lady like yourself? Girl, you must be beatin’ ’em off with a stick.” Damn it, why did he always start talking like Bobby Brown? Bobby Brown never worked. It was too forward, it always had lewd undertones. But to Franklin’s surprise, on this occasion Bobby Brown worked, if not by way of its intended effect, then simply by its directness.
Downing her G and T, Hillary felt the stirrings of an old recklessness. “What now?” she said.
seasons
MARCH 1890
One morning in early March, the suffocating cloud cover that had characterized the long winter finally lifted, and the cool crisp light of day slanted through Eva’s frosty window. Pulling herself upright beneath the covers, she discovered at once that the heaviness was gone from her limbs and that a certain clarity and sharpness had returned to her perceptions.
As she padded across the creaking floor to tend to the stove, she paused at the sight of Minerva sleeping soundly in her crib, her tiny pinched mouth pulsing, her little fists clenched and twitching ever so slightly. For week upon plodding week, in spite of her tired limbs and dull senses, Eva had attended to the infant’s every physical need. She had fed and bathed and clothed and quieted the child, and yet it was clear to Eva that she had failed miserably in the most basic measure of motherhood. She had forsaken her child, as sure as if she’d abandoned her on a doorstep.
After stoking the fire, and setting the pot to boiling, Eva retired to her desk by the window and reread her letter to Ethan for the fourth time, wondering if today were the day she would send it. Before she got halfway through the letter, however, just after I was unaware that the practice of husbandry now extended beyond the perimeters of matrimony and right before I have a moral responsibility to society at large, Eva calmly folded the letter twice, walked it to the kitchen and, pulling back the iron hatch, dropped the letter into the coals, which she set about stoking.
She’d been tough on Ethan, and she’d known it all along, known that those who’d abandoned hope would discourage hope in others, those who’d given up the pursuit of a dream — often long before the mad scramble had ever begun — would make it their business to obstruct the dreaming of others. And so it had been with Ethan. Eva discouraged Ethan’s dreaming without ever having put her own shoulder to the wheel. Yes, she’d relocated two thousand miles away; yes, she’d adopted a belief system, a philosophy; yes, she’d chopped a little wood, donned a floppy bow, made flapjacks, painted some seascapes, and written a few ephemeral pieces for the Register. But how had she really suffered by it all? By not being taken seriously? By not being heard? If so, it wasn’t for lack of complaining; she’d objected, dissented, refuted, opposed, torn down, cast aside, or dismissed everything the world presented her. If she had lacked a sympathetic audience, it was no small wonder. And hadn’t this child been part of Ethan’s dream? And hadn’t she denied him that, too?
When she could no longer see her own breath, Eva woke Minerva and lifted her from her crib, bundled in her nest of blankets, the mark of sleep still spread across her wrinkled face.
“Good morning,” Eva said, smoothing the downy hair atop the infant’s crown. “Things are going to be different now.”
Receiving this intelligence, Minerva cooed once and grasped at the air with tiny fingers.
“And what have we here?” Eva said. “Ha, why it looks like little mittens! And a little scarf.”
The girl began to fidget immediately, but suddenly Eva had patience to spare. Hoisting the bundled girl up in her arms, Eva walked her out into the crisp bright morning, where the child fell silent in the brilliant light. How clear and miraculous the world appeared in the light of a new day. How enlivening that first breath of cold air, how wondrous the crunch of fresh snow. To the south, Eva saw the mountains as though for the first time, every cha
sm, every cleft, every sawtoothed ridge against a crisp relief of deep blue sky. How tiny and restless the colony, with its little white houses and busy little chimneys, seemed in the shadow of such grandeur.
Minerva began to squirm in her arms. Lacking any immediate purpose, Eva plodded toward the hotel for the sake of plodding toward somewhere, until at last Minerva settled once more. Crunching down the snowy path toward the colony, she shielded the child’s eyes against the blinding sunlight. In the distance, the pounding of a hammer could be heard, soon joined by the reports of a second hammer, and the laughter of children from the schoolyard. A woman with a shovel was clearing the steps of the half-finished Opera House. A handful of men were at work beneath the boat shed, three on deck with ropes, and two on the scaffold alongside the hull, calling instruction out to one another as they guided a timber into place. A carriage man readied his team in front of the hotel. Even at a distance, Eva could see the fog of the horses’ breath. All around her was industry and purpose.
What am I waiting for? thought Eva.
The headquarters of the Commonwealth Register comprised one high-ceilinged — though narrow and extraordinarily cluttered — warehouse smelling strongly of ink. The nature of the clutter, strewn defiantly about in bold strokes — an unapologetic clutter — spoke strongly of the paper’s editor, publisher, and chief author, W. Lane Griffin, a hawkish, prematurely aging, and altogether serious man, whose thin lips seemed somehow uncharitable, as though he were hoarding them beneath his ample mustache.
Griffin did not look up from his work when Eva made her entrance. As if to foil her entrance, Minerva began to fuss immediately.
“I want to start writing again,” Eva said, by way of announcing herself, over the child’s protestations. “And I want to write real stories. Stories that will make a difference.”
Griffin bestowed a quick disinterested glance up at Eva and her child before resuming his work. As if on cue, Minerva began to cry.
“It appears you’ve got your hands full,” he observed, scrawling furious notes on the pad in front of him. “This is a newspaper, not a nursery.”
It had often occurred to Eva that Griffin was not forward in his thinking, only extreme, and inflexible, and loud. Indeed, if Port Bonitans expressed an aversion to their colonist neighbors, or an outright contempt, if they were in any way threatened by, wary of, or otherwise disgusted with the colony, it was likely owing to the opinions of Mr. W. Lane Griffin, voice of the Commonwealth Register, that is to say, voice of dissent, dissatisfaction, and outrage. In spite of his extreme worldviews and his radical beliefs, Eva found Griffin’s views to be quite pedestrian with regard to the specifics of gender. He was no more progressive than her brother, and if Jacob’s respect was hard won, it would be twice as hard to win Griffin’s. And Eva knew that Minerva’s caterwaul, now reaching a shrill crescendo when Eva needed it least, was certainly not helping her cause.
“I should think all that mothering would be enough to keep you busy,” he shouted over the infant.
“I’ve got two hands,” Eva called back. “And a brain. I’ll manage just fine.”
Just when it seemed Minerva had ceased her crying, the girl struggled for a few desperate gasps of air and started wailing anew.
Griffin ripped a page from his pad and started rifling through his desk drawer in search of something. “How would you like to cover the Broderson wedding?”
“That’s not what I had in mind,” Eva said, rocking the baby urgently.
“What then?”
“I’ll bring you a real story,” Eva said.
“Like you brought me a Mather story?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No?” said Griffin, looking up. “Bring me a story, then. A story that’s not about the railroad, not about the reserve, not about Harrison and his cronies. Bring me something local with national implications, something of import, something to rally these laggard souls, to mobilize their ideals, to grab them by the lapel and shake the apathy right out of them. Bring me a cause.”
“Count on it,” said Eva, turning on her heels and marching out of the office. She might have been flush with triumph had it not been for Minerva’s conniptions, which drew the attention of passing colonists. Though to attribute such motives to an infant shamed her, Eva couldn’t help but feel that the child had wished to deny her course all along. That Eva actually resented the girl for this perceived subterfuge shamed her still further, as she rocked the screaming infant briskly in her arms.
the right thing
MARCH 1890
Adam awakened shortly after dawn to the trumpeting of Lord Jim’s rooster beneath the window. For nearly an hour, he lay in bed on his back, staring at the ceiling through the fog of his breath, listening to the rooster scratch at the frozen earth beneath his window. Adam tried for the tenth time to envision a future for Thomas but discovered instead that it was hard to see beyond Hoko. He would take the boy without her blessings if need be, but he could not take him without her knowledge. When he heard the soft patter of Lord Jim’s wife moving down the hallway toward the kitchen, Adam excavated himself from beneath a mountain of wool blankets and began to dress for the second time in five hours.
Shaving without the benefit of his mirror, which now bobbed on a gentle swell far beyond the breakwater of Ediz Hook, Adam cut his chin twice and pressed his thumb and forefinger firmly against the nicks until the bleeding stopped. Half an hour later, the cool air stung his face as he awaited the carriage to Port Bonita. Once again, he found his thoughts reaching backward to the beginning, though on this occasion, it was Hoko to whom he assigned his sympathies.
* * *
FOR NEARLY FIVE months, through the bulk of a rainy spring and all of a short, mild summer in 1880, Hoko had managed to disguise her bulge beneath unseasonably heavy clothing. Her mother was not alive to notice the change, and her father, whose once frequent and adoring gaze had fallen off precipitously since the afternoon he saw Hoko with the Potato Counter near the mouth of Ennis Creek, was completely unsuspecting of any change. That is, until the chill morning in early fall, when Hoko, stretching hides for winter with her father, reached up to lace a corner to the frame, and in spite of her bundled layers, revealed the thing for the briefest of moments, during which her father happened to notice. Before Hoko could lower her arms, he reached out and set his calloused hand on the thing, and a stricken expression took shape on his face. Hoko lowered her arms and lowered her eyes.
“Look what you’ve done,” is all he said. She felt the sting before he even slapped her. That was virtually the last thing he said to her until the night of the storm, when the boy made his entrance into the world.
Adam had been quick to notice the change, much quicker than Hoko’s father. He did not discover it hidden beneath Hoko’s bundles but in her eyes, often evasive since the night of their coupling. Near the end of spring, he detected fear in the girl’s eyes for the first time. And he saw something else in her eyes for the first time: a certain glaze on the surface. Seemingly overnight, Hoko went from a doe-eyed innocent to an embittered woman.
“The bigger I get,” she once said, when Thomas was just weeks from being born, “the smaller you seem to get.”
* * *
IF ONLY, ADAM thought, ten years later as his carriage rumbled on its way west, I could do it all over again.
Not fifty steps off of the carriage in front of the Olympic, Adam chanced upon Hoko, perched on the steps of the hardware store, clutching a white infant wrapped in swaddling blankets.
“Whose?”
“A woman’s.”
“What woman is that?”
“Why do you always ask?” she said, pointedly.
It was a fair question, and Adam knew it. He could never resist the urge to ask. He was still counting potatoes after all these years, still demanding accountability from everyone whose path he crossed. And how did he account for the gruffness in his tone after all these years when he spoke to Hoko?
/> “I’ve come for the boy,” he said. “I’ve made arrangements. In Jamestown.”
Hoko looked at Adam impassively, then down at the baby, who was beginning to whimper. She rocked the child until it settled, and said nothing.
“He’ll be taken care of there,” Adam pursued. “And there’s a place for you.”
“I have a place.”
“A better place.”
“I don’t want a better place,” she said. “Not for myself.”
A young woman, presumably the infant’s mother, emerged from the hardware store with a small steel trowel and a rolled canvas.
“Ma’am,” said Adam, doffing his hat.
“Good day,” Eva said, and turned her attention to Hoko and the baby. “For heaven’s sake, let’s get out of this infernal cold.”
As Hoko was whisked away by the young mother down the muddy boardwalk, she looked back over her shoulder, and Adam would not soon forget the look on Hoko’s face, softer than he’d seen it in years, stripped of all anger, drained of all passivity, her dark eyes large and wounded, painfully alive.
Slowly, and to Adam inexplicably, Hoko nodded her assent.
* * *
ADAM FOUND THOMAS alone beneath Morse Dock, standing with his arms akimbo and one eye closed as he stared straight up at the planks. The boy paid no mind to Adam’s approach, and kept staring up at the planks. After a moment, he covered the other eye, then both eyes, then uncovered them again and squinted fiercely. Drawing closer, Adam saw a nasty scrape on the boy’s chin, and bruising about his neck, and understood suddenly the reason why Hoko had consented to let him take the boy.