Bone River (9 page)

Pelicans flew in lines one after the other, their bodies elongated
Z
’s against the full gray of the clouded sky, more graceful than they looked on the ground—scarcely the same bird. Ducks and herons grouped along the shores, the ducks huddled into themselves against the cold. The culling bed was almost halfway between the Querquelin and Stony Point, and once we were there it was only work and hurry, a constant rhythm of shoveling up the oysters, checking them to make sure they were the palm size we needed and that there were none broken, which happened too often, as the Shoalwater oysters were delicate and thin-shelled and the tongs we used to harvest them were crude and too rough.

The water was cold, but at least it wasn’t raining. Junius had Daniel and me on the sloop, sorting through the shovelfuls he and Lord Tom tossed aboard. Once I showed Daniel what we were looking for, I left him alone. He was a good worker, quick to catch on, and I was grateful for that, at least, though the silence between us was strained.

The hold was half full before he said, quietly, as if to himself, “Christ, this is miserable work.”

“It’s worth it. And June and Lord Tom have it worse. At least you’re on the boat.” I glanced to where the other two stood in knee-deep freezing water as they shoveled oysters from the culling bed onto the deck.

My leather gloves were soaked through, my fingers numb. I picked up a handful of oysters, glancing through them before I dropped most of them into the hold and a broken-shelled one into the bushel we’d be taking home. Nothing to do but eat them.

He said, “So do I have any brothers or sisters? Or did they all run away to avoid this?”

The question surprised me, not just that he’d asked it but because of the stab of unwelcome pain it brought—surely I should be used to this by now. I’d answered such questions a hundred times, but coming from him it felt personal and somehow...accusing. “No,” I said shortly. “We’ve no children.”

He raised his gaze to mine, and I said quickly, wanting to stop that conversation before it went any further, “What sorts of things do you need to know for your story?”

He let me change the subject. “Anything you can tell me. Where you think she’s from. Who you think she might be.”

I laughed a little. “I’m a good ways from knowing any of that, I think. But I suppose that gives you some time to get to know your father.”

“I know as much of him as I want. The story is more important.”

“It’s a long way to come for just a story.”

“Well, they’ll pay me enough to keep my father-in-law happy for a bit.”

I looked up in surprise. “You have a wife?”

He shook his head and threw a handful of oysters a little too violently. “Not yet. A fiancée.”

“Oh. Will she mind your staying here for a time?”

“Not if it means we can be married,” he said. And then, “So who’s the Indian?”

“Lord Tom. He’s been with us since my father and I first came here.”

“A hired hand?”

“Much more than that.”

Daniel raised a questioning brow, and I found myself saying, reluctantly, “Papa and I found him at our door one night. His whole family had been taken by smallpox a few months before, and he was very sick with fever. He had no one else, and there was no doctor for miles, so we took him in. When he got well, he taught us the ways of his people—salmon fishing and smelting and things like that, and he was very good at trading, which was helpful to my father. After a while, we couldn’t do without him, and he was devoted to us both. When Papa died, Lord Tom stayed with me.”

Daniel nodded. I expected him to say something like, “But he’s a savage,” or to protest that I kept an Indian so close, but he
seemed to accept it without question. For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of shoveling, the clatter of oyster shells falling to the pile. Then Daniel said, “He doesn’t like you with that mummy. He spent the whole morning frowning at the barn.”

I was startled that he’d noticed it. “Tom’s like all his people. They’re afraid of dead bodies.”

“Why?”

“Because spirits are tricksters. They lure the living to the land of the dead.”

“Does he think she’s Indian?”

“I don’t know what he thinks except that her spirit is powerful and dangerous and will bring nothing but bad luck. No matter that she’s probably a century dead at least, and her spirit’s already passed over.”

Daniel glanced up from the oysters, his eyes the only color in a face washed pale by the cold. Again I thought of how like his father’s they were. He frowned. “What?”

“The Chinook believe the spirit passes after five years, and then it can’t come back. At least, that’s what all the stories say,” I explained. “So I don’t know why he’s so disturbed about this one.”

“So what do you mean to do with her?”

“Study, describe, answer what questions I can. Then Junius wants me to send her to Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian.”

Daniel tossed another handful of oysters. “What will this Baird give you for her? How much does one make on the dead?”

I didn’t like the way he’d worded it; his contempt of me was in every syllable. “I don’t know. But I’m certain Junius has some idea.”

Just then, Lord Tom brought the last shovelful, and he and Junius came aboard, their boots dripping water as they tried not to slip on the piles of oysters. I lowered the basket of broken shells
over the side to keep in the cold water until we returned from Bruceport, and then focused on sorting what was left, glad for the chance to ignore Junius’s son for a bit. His questions had been a bit too sharp—it was hard not to think that Junius was right about him. But I told myself that wasn’t fair. I hardly knew him, and he had reason to dislike us both. I couldn’t blame him for showing it.

We were well under way by the time the sorting was done. I tucked my gloved hands into my armpits to try to warm them. It was useless; they were too far gone, and I was looking forward to a visit to Dunn’s saloon once we’d sold the oysters, the warmth of many bodies, no matter how stinking the air.

Once we got closer to Bruceport, the wildlife gave way to bateaus, canoes, a roughly built clinker or two, and other plungers darting everywhere, their sails plumped with breeze as they made their way to Bruceport or Oysterville across the bay or any one of the tiny towns that had sprung up on these shores in the last twenty years, all of them dedicated to the oysters that were our own personal gold rush. Thank God San Francisco loved them so well.

Bruceport sat at the curve of the bay, fronted by mudflats and behind a raft of driftwood, huddled at the base of a forested hill that provided wood for the sawmill the men of the shipwrecked
Bruce
had started when they’d founded this place. There were no wharves—you couldn’t build one long enough to reach past the flats when the tide was out—the schooners from San Francisco just anchored out in the shallows and waited for the oystermen to bring them their cargo. And now that we were here, I realized it might be hours before there would be a visit to Dunn’s. The bay was full of plungers just like ours, all sidling up to the schooner whose keel was settled deep in the mud. Despite our hurry, we would be one of the last to sell, and there was no guarantee we would even empty the boat. If the schooner filled before they got to us, there would be none of our oysters on it.

Junius swore beneath his breath as he let the sail go slack to take our place in line, and I looked away, not wanting to catch his eye, feeling guilty. I saw Adam Leach’s boat at the ship now, loading oysters into the bushel baskets the men aboard lowered over the side. Quickly I looked about, calculating our chances. The schooner would take close to two thousand baskets, and each of the plungers in the bay held the same four hundred ours did. We would be lucky to unload half ours.

“
Wake kloshe
,” Lord Tom said quietly.

Junius said tersely, “Not good indeed.”

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked.

“We’re too late,” I told him. “The boat will be full by the time they get to us.”

But it wasn’t bad luck
, I told myself, refusing to look at Lord Tom. There had been a reason for our tardiness, though it didn’t make me feel any better to know it, given that the reason was me.

The loading always went quickly; it was only a few hours before it was our turn, and it went just as badly as I’d expected. We’d unloaded less than half the plunger before the men called down that they were full. We’d given them less than two hundred baskets. They threw down a little bag with gold pieces inside—a bit more than three hundred dollars, which wasn’t bad unless you considered that we’d been expecting more than six.

Junius emptied the bag out into his hand, and then he held out a fourth to Daniel. “Here’s your share, boy.”

Daniel stared at Junius’s hand. “How much is that?”

“Eighty dollars. It’s your—”

“No, how much in all?”

“Over three hundred dollars.”

“For two hundred baskets of oysters?” Daniel sounded incredulous. “They paid that much?”

Junius gave him a grim smile. “Don’t you know how much oysters are selling for in your own hometown?”

“I know they’re for rich men, and too expensive for me. I’ve never even tried one.”

“Well, that’ll change,” Junius said. He poured the rest of the gold back into the bag and tucked it into his pocket before he glanced regretfully at the schooner. “It should have been more. We’ll get here earlier next time.”

Lord Tom said, “It will be like this next time too,
sikhs
, unless the spirit quiets.”

Junius rolled his eyes. “Well, maybe we’ll be lucky and the mummy will be on its way to Baird by the time the next schooner’s in. So who’s for a drink? I could use one myself. And something to eat.”

We beached the plunger and covered the remaining oysters with a wet tarp, and then we all went ashore. Oysterville was the biggest town on the Shoalwater, but Bruceport was next with its two hotels, two stores, and a school. There were about twenty families’ worth of houses, and a score of saloons that catered to oystermen and sawmill workers. The streets were packed mud, and watering troughs made of rough-hewn wood and filled with rainwater were here and there, though there were few horses to take advantage of them. A boat was more useful in these parts. A few pigs wandered about, poking at trash piles or the unsavory things hidden in potholes, shooed away by a housewife hanging her laundry or dumping a chamber pot into a cesspool.

Dunn’s saloon perched just on the other side of the driftwood raft that separated town from beach, and therefore was often the first to see the gold coins of the oystermen when they came ashore again after selling to the schooner. It was a ramshackle place, gray and weathered, with moss growing on its steeply pitched roof, and it always looked about two minutes away from collapsing in on itself. But it had been there as long as I could remember. Groups of men squatted on the dirt outside, playing monte or the Chinook game
la-hull
, with its disks
of wood colored black or plain. It was a favorite among both the Indians and the oystermen who had been here from the earliest days. Lord Tom and I had spent many evenings playing it, but it bored Junius.

Inside was a roughly planed floor smoothed by years of footsteps, scattered with muddy sawdust and some tables and chairs. The saloon was as full as I’d predicted it would be, gold pieces changing hands so quickly they flashed in the dim light. As usual, I was the only woman there.

Junius brought a bottle of whiskey to the table and three glasses. He poured the liquor and shoved one each to Lord Tom and Daniel before he swallowed his own in one gulp. “I’ve ordered chowder,” he said.

“Your wife doesn’t get a drink?” Daniel looked at me. “You work as hard as they do. Seems you should get the same reward.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t want it.”

“You don’t like it?”

Junius said, “
I
don’t like it.”

I looked up quickly and said, “I...drink affects me...too much.”

Daniel said, “Well, I guess an old man with a young and pretty wife can’t want her enjoying herself too well, can he?”

Junius said, “You’re on thin ice, boy.”

Daniel took a sip. “So how did you two meet, anyway? Let me guess—you were drinking whiskey and this old man actually looked good to you—enough so that you could ignore that he already had a wife.”

His tone was light, conversational, but the words were blistering, and I didn’t know which I felt more—anger or guilt.

Junius rose. “That’s enough, boy. This is none of your business.”

“Oh, I’d say it was,” Daniel said, unfazed. His eyes glittered in the dimness of the bar. “Given the circumstances.”

I looked at my husband. “Sit down, June.”

“I won’t have him insulting you. He’s reduced twenty years of marriage to a crude joke.”

“Twenty
years
?” Daniel choked on his drink. “You’ve been with him twenty years?” He looked at me. “You must have been a child.”

I swallowed my dislike and my offense. I reminded myself that he was my stepson, that I deserved at least some measure of his anger and disdain, that Junius did. As calmly as I could, I said, “I was hardly a child. I was seventeen.”

Daniel said, “Seventeen?” He laughed as if he couldn’t believe it. “No wonder.”

“It wasn’t like that, boy,” Junius said tightly.

“Really?” Daniel raised a dark brow. “It never occurred to you what a good swap it was? A tired wife and a boy for a pretty girl?”

It seemed so dirty and sordid when he said it. The heat came once more into my face. I opened my mouth to protest.

Lord Tom reached across the table before I could say anything, clapping his big hand onto Daniel’s, holding him still. “Enough,
tenas kahmooks
. You know nothing.”

Daniel looked taken aback. I saw anger sweep his expression, and then it faded, and he gave a short, tight nod. Lord Tom lifted his hand and sat back again.

The bartender called Junius’s name, and he and Lord Tom went to get the chowder, leaving me alone with Daniel, where I did not want to be. When they were gone, he turned to me and asked, “What was it he called me?”