Guardian Read online

  Plea for books and paper

  We slept well in the ship’s slow roll, lulled by the monotonous throb of the engine, and in the morning I made the same breakfast that would sustain us most mornings until Skagway—bacon and eggs and pancakes. We had a patent “Yukon stove,” safe to use on board. It had a hand-cranked fan to get the fuel alight—newspaper and a few lumps of coal, in our case.

  We moved through vistas of great beauty, the snowcapped Cascade Range to our right—though I had awakened to what I at first thought had been an unsettling dream, the boat hurtling out of control down an absurdly narrow cataract. In fact, it was half true; we had gone through the Seymore Narrows, all that water squeezed through a passage only a few hundred yards wide. By noon we had an unpleasant situation of an opposite nature—we moved into the open sea, Queen Charlotte Sound, and for several hours the ship was tossed around like a toy boat. Our kit was secure, but that wasn’t true of everybody’s. There was a fury of chasing around cans that rolled all over the deck, and inevitable disputes over ownership.

  One such dispute came to blows, and then the men circled each other with knives on the pitching deck, with an audience about equally divided between those wanting to stop it and those eager for blood. Eventually, the first mate fired a pistol into the air and declared in broken English that if one of them was cut the other one would die. With an exchange of profane language, the men retreated to their respective sides.

  Doc predicted the two would be friends again tomorrow—that they had just worked themselves into a situation where neither could back down without being humiliated in public. He was right; the next day I saw them chatting amiably together.

  By evening we were back in protected waters, and there were no more dramatic disputes during the three days we churned north to Fort Wrangell. I was amused to find that none of my three men had the slightest idea about how to make bread, though they were carrying over a thousand pounds of flour! They were going to live on flapjacks and hard biscuits. I taught them the rudiments, and by Wrangell each one of them could use the Yukon stove, with its baking enclosure, to make a thing that at least resembled a loaf of bread, though some of it was so dense it might serve better as a weapon than as food.

  Fort Wrangell was surprising, to put it mildly. My five-year-old Baedeker said it was “a dirty and dilapidated settlement inhabited by about 250 Tlingits and a few whites.” Instead we came upon a town that from the water appeared bigger and more prosperous than Dodge.

  (And indeed it had a connection to Dodge: Wyatt Earp had been marshal of both towns. The paper I bought on the dock noted that he had quit the post and gone north ten days after being sworn in. “Wrangell was too tough for him,” it said, but I supposed he was just marking time before heading for the gold.)

  We had to wait at anchor for a place at the dock, as there were two other steamers loading and unloading. One was taking on lumber; the fresh smell of pine wafted over the water. When the wind shifted, there were less pleasant smells from a fish cannery and a brewery.

  When we did dock, the first mate announced that we were staying overnight, leaving at first light. The Wrangell Narrows are difficult to negotiate even during the day; we didn’t want to be stuck in them after sundown. That was fine with us, after four days confined to the deck of the ship.

  The boys hurried off while Doc and I strolled down the main street—Front Street, which was really just an extended dock, boards spiked onto pilings. There was a temporary feel to it, and there weren’t nearly as many people around as the size of the place would justify. Doc eventually sorted it out in a conversation with a publican: A few months before, there might have been a thousand or more prospectors, headed up the Stikine River for the Teslin Trail to the Klondike. But that trail was rough and long, and now that the Chilkoot Pass was open, everybody went on to Skagway and Dyea. That was why none of the flyers or posters we’d seen had mentioned Fort Wrangell.

  We got to the end of Front Street and I saw a sign pointing toward the Mission School for Girls, and gave Doc leave to go back to a tavern he had eyed longingly. It was Saturday, so the school would probably be deserted, but I was curious. Doc protested that we’d seen some rough-looking men on the street. I opened my purse and showed him the Pinkerton man’s revolver.

  I didn’t see any men, rough-looking or otherwise, on the ten-minute walk to the school. It was a peeled-log structure with a tarpaper roof, and had seen better days.

  There was no sound inside, but when I pushed on the door, it creaked open. “Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

  It took my eyes a moment to adapt to the darkness within; the few windows were small and cloudy. A slight, gray-haired woman was seated at a desk opposite the door.

  “Sorry—I didn’t mean to intrude. …”

  “Oh, please do intrude. I’m grading tests.”

  I walked over and took her hand and introduced myself. She was Grace Loden. I told her we had something in common: I’d been teaching Sunday school to Arapaho Indians in Dodge City.

  “Mine are less fierce,” she said. “The Tlingits haven’t scalped anybody in almost fifty years. And those were Russians.” She stood up. “Let’s go outside. I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

  We compared notes. The Tlingit, despite their sometimes fierce appearance, aren’t especially warlike, and although they weren’t easy to convert, they did seem interested in Christianity, and were glad to have her teaching their daughters. The sons were another matter; they were taught by the island’s elders and shamans.

  Grace seemed about my age but looked older, her face seamed with lines of fatigue and worry. Her carriage was stooped. We went to a log propped on two boulders and sat.

  She gestured at one of the monuments. “You know the expression low man on the totem pole’? That’s me. The church that sponsors the school is in Sitka, four hundred miles away. They have their own concerns, including their own school. They do get some education money from the Territory, but it’s sporadic and unpredictable. And even once I have some money, I can’t just walk down the street and buy books and pencils and paper.

  “Sometimes we peel bark off the beech trees and write on it with ink made from berry juice. The children enjoy that but it’s distracting and makes a mess.”

  I told her that we’d be stopping at Sitka for several hours, and asked whether I could deliver a message from her. It’s easy to file a letter away, but a person standing in front of you has to be dealt with.

  She was effusively grateful. We went back to the mission school, and she lit an old-fashioned oil lamp, just a rush sitting in oil, and took it to her desk. It gave off a greasy, disagreeable odor, reinforcing the general smell of the place.

  “Seal oil,” she said as she sat down at her desk and took out a sheet of paper. “Sit anywhere, Rosa. This will only take a minute.”

  About forty small desks were grouped in three sections, clustered around a central potbellied stove. A chalkboard behind the teacher’s desk, and another on the opposite wall.

  There were charts with the alphabet and times tables, and, oddly out of place, a periodic table of the elements. Maps of Alaska and the world. Some student drawings pinned up, most of them crude, but a couple at one end, ink renderings of totem poles, showed a lot of care and skill. Their complex shapes would be hard to draw; I’d thought about doing that when we docked, but decided they would take too long.

  She sanded the letter and addressed an envelope while it was drying. We stepped out into the cool fresh air and she handed both to me. “Try to see Reverend Bower first. He actually controls the purse strings. If he’s not in, Mrs. Archer will do—you might want to talk to her anyhow, teacher to teacher.”

  The letter was an urgent request for secondary readers in history and religion, which could be hand-me-downs from the Sitka school, along with a standing order for pen points, ink, and loose paper of any description, preferably lined. She closed with a note of urgency: September is closer than it seems; my secondary st
udents need the novelty of new materials, or they may stop coming. Their parents won’t force them.

  I folded the letter carefully and put it in the envelope. I checked my watch and asked whether she would like to break bread with us aboard ship. She accepted avidly.

  The men were still out wandering through the town and woods. I fired up the stove and made us generous sandwiches of bacon and onion, with English mustard. The bread was Chuck’s latest attempt, not too stone-like. We had mugs of cool cider that had just begun to turn. While we were eating I started some bacon for the men and gave Grace an abbreviated version of our collective story.

  “Be careful in Skagway,” she said. “The town is run by a committee of thieves and rogues led by a man called Soapy Smith. There isn’t any real law other than what he wants to happen.”

  “We should be able to stay out of his way,” I said. “There must be thousands of people there.”

  She nodded. “Maybe fifteen thousand, this time of year. Eager to get over the pass before the first snow. Your timing is pretty good—though if you want to make some money, rather than going through the slow torture of carrying all this stuff to the Yukon, I’d put it up for sale on the dock in Skagway! You’d probably get twice what you paid for most of it, and get back to Seattle before you see a flake of snow.”

  I laughed at that. “I’ll suggest it. Somehow I doubt that my boys will have much enthusiasm.”

  I was starting to worry about them. Some of the passengers and crew were coming back, and though the crew were jabbering in Russian, it was pretty obvious that we hadn’t stopped here just for the water. A cluster of girls apparently no older than Daniel stood on the dock and waved at them, giggling.

  She followed my glance. “Your boy is … not experienced?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m almost certain not. Likewise Chuck, if my instincts are at all good.”

  “We have several girls a year made pregnant by sailors and tourists,” she said. “They have to go some-place else. It’s sad. Some of them wind up in Seattle or San Francisco, with only one way to make a living. Or even worse.” She paused, looking at the girls waving. “Or better … the shamans have ways to stop the pregnancy.”

  “Murder the unborn child?” Of course I knew about that in “civilized” society.

  “They don’t see it that way,” she said, her face set in a way that reinforced the downward lines.

  Chuck and Doc came up the gangway carrying a basket and a fish, a large salmon. They’d been shopping. “Fresh caught,” Doc said. “It only cost a quarter.”

  “Smoked venison,” Chuck said, “a penny a strip.”

  “But it won’t keep,” I said to Doc.

  “Won’t have to. I’ll cut us off four steaks and shop the rest around. Guarantee I’ll get more than the quarter back.”

  Daniel came aboard with a strange unreadable look on his face. Oh no, I thought. But he had one hand behind his back and held it out to me.

  It was beautiful. On a leather thong, a cross carved from ivory, with a circle in its center, elaborated with complex intaglio. Red jewels were set where Jesus’ hands and feet had been.

  “It’s Russian style,” he said. “It might be old.”

  I put it around my neck and kissed him. To my surprise, he kissed me back. “We won’t be together, Christmas,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  I found my voice and introduced Grace. They all talked while I busied myself making sandwiches. Cutting the onions brought tears.

  A horrible accident.

  In the morning we could appreciate the sailors’ concern over the Wrangell Narrows. We had to negotiate a slow winding course marked off by buoys and stakes, sometimes with only a couple of yards’ leeway.

  Most ships would steam straight up to Juneau, but the White Nights had cargo bound for Sitka, the territorial capital and the only large place in Alaska with a Russian population. The ship was carrying books and magazines in that language, and cases of vodka, which at that time was not well known in the United States.

  So we turned west and then backtracked south for a day. The prospectors grumbled about it, but of course I didn’t mind—a few more days with my son, and an exotic small city to visit.

  We were about twenty miles from Sitka when disaster struck. There was an explosion belowdecks, followed by an unearthly noise: the shriek of steam escaping, combined with a man’s dying wail.

  They brought him up on the deck. I hope never to see a more horrible sight. The flesh from one side of his face had been flayed off completely, nothing but glistening grayish bone and the ruin of an eye. His throat and shoulder on that side were just a mass of gore, and most of his upper body was as red as a lobster. As they laid him down on the deck, he took a few bubbling breaths and was still. The anchor chain rattled down.

  The prospectors and sailors stood around his body in a silent circle. Then one of the crew came to his side and fell to both knees, put his hands together, and said what must have been a prayer in Russian, ending in a sob.

  Two men went below and returned with a coffin. It was sobering to note that they were prepared for death that way. I wondered how many such boxes they carried.

  The first mate issued a few quiet orders, and most of the crew went off to lower a boat. It drifted away from us with three aboard, who raised a simple lateen sail and then moved swiftly downstream.

  Leon, the crew member who was easiest with English, explained the situation to us. It was plain luck, he said, that many more were not injured or killed. The boiler’s emergency valve apparently got clogged—it was like a pressure-cooker plug of soft metal—and before anybody saw what was happening, a seam burst. The dead man, Pyotr, had been the only person on that side of the boiler.

  The men in the boat were going to Sitka to arrange for a tow. There was no way they could repair the boiler with the tools on board. We would be in Sitka for as long as it took us to repair or replace the boiler.

  The prospectors accepted this with uncharacteristic silence, after the sudden confrontation with mortality.

  The crew took the coffin below, and the mood became less morbid. I remained deeply shaken, and Daniel was pallid. When the men started loud talk and laughter, I wanted to shush them—but of course they were only dealing with it in their own way. There was a lot of whiskey going around, and some of the crew came up on deck with a ceramic jug of vodka, which they poured into small glasses, to drink in single gulps. The prospectors traded with them, and pronounced it firewater, I believe as a compliment. The Russians said no; water of life. A young man offered me a glass, but I declined.

  (If it had been wine, I would have taken it gladly, for its calmative effect—but my recent experience with whiskey had taught me to expect the opposite from spirits.)

  I had never felt so conspicuous, for being the only woman on board. Some of the men might have expected me to faint or weep at the horrible sight—or at least go to the rail and vomit, as many of them had—but I’ve never thought the “weaker” sex was actually weaker in that regard. From childbirth, I knew more about pain and gore than most of them. From three miscarriages, I knew enough about horror. Seeing a stranger die was nothing compared to having life within you die, and expelling the remains.

  (Our house in Philadelphia had had a fainting couch, which I would sometimes resort to when I couldn’t stand Edward’s company. It probably made him smug in his masculine superiority.)

  It was still light around nine, when the rescue tug clattered up the strait. She came alongside and threw a couple of light lines over, tied to thick hawsers. The crew hauled in the hawsers and made them fast to cleats, while others were cranking up the anchor, shouting directions and orders around in Russian. Without being able to understand a word, you could hear the impatience, the need for haste. There wouldn’t be any moon, I knew, so it would be pitch dark for a few hours around midnight, and the captain probably didn’t want to be stranded by dark, the way we’d been in Wrangell.

  We made good
time, though, and the channel markers as we approached Sitka had bobbing lamps. The first mate announced that we would be in port at least two days; if anybody wanted to take a room ashore, a crew member would be keeping watch over our kits.

  That sounded good to all four of us, and we were the first down the gangplank. There was a boy waiting there who asked whether we wanted rooms, and led us two blocks to the Baranoff Hotel, an unprepossessing two-story shack with whitewash that had gone gray.

  Inside, the smell of fresh coffee, and an old woman whose chirpy alertness made me feel like a heavy sleepwalker. Her rooms were nine dollars a night, meals included. That seemed high—a month’s rent in Dodge—but none of us had the spirit to argue over it.

  Daniel was still sleeping soundly after I’d arisen and had breakfast—as were Chuck and Doc, and for the same reason; I sincerely hoped their whiskey wouldn’t run out before they got to Skagway. I left Daniel a note and got directions to the Sheldon Jackson Industrial College, to deliver Grace’s plea for books and supplies.

  The morning was bright and cool, the salt breeze refreshing. Plenty of people and traffic for such a small place—but at that time Sitka was still the territorial capital, as well as Alaska’s oldest city. The Russian influence remained here and there. A church bell rang the hour, eight o’clock, and when I glanced up the hill at the sound, I saw it was an Eastern Orthodox church, the one where the crewman would be buried today.

  The Sheldon Jackson School wasn’t hard to find, the only octagonal building made of concrete in Sitka, or Alaska, or possibly North America. In the foyer there was a chalkboard with names and room numbers.

  Halfway around the octagon I found the door to Benjamin Bower’s office open. He was a large florid man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He was jacketless, wearing a plaid weskit with a heavy golden watch chain. Busy watering flowers at the window, he made a startled little jump when I tapped on the door.

  “Reverend Bower?”

  “Come in, come in.” He turned his attention back to the watering. “Fast work. Commendable.”