BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (41 page)

But I remember everything about it. And after
they disinfected my wounds, sewed me up, and sent me to my mother's
house in Cabin John, I spent two days fitting the pieces
together.

When I mentioned on the scow that he and
Jessie helped rescue me from the mine at Rock Run when I was a
child, Zimmerman didn't seem to remember the event. He couldn't
have, because Gig Garrett wasn't there.

But Garrett's description of his time in the
Yukon rings true to me. Chilkoot Pass, the lakes and rapids,
tramping up Bonanza Creek with Sam Nokes before the Klondike
strike, Circle City, Dawson, Rampart – every episode seemed more
immediate than the ones in Henry's story. Garrett knew the terrain
and characters Henry encountered, but he had to imagine a journey
that took place three years after his own. That's why he initially
failed to note that steamers were plying the upper reaches of the
Yukon by 1899. Henry would have seen them.

Wylie was an invention of necessity. Even
while posing as Zimmerman, Garrett couldn't accept blame for his
actions or admit his irrational fears. He assigned them to Wylie
instead. But on the scow Zimmerman still had to convince me he'd
turned against his adopted brother Gig Garrett and allied himself
with Drew. That's why when I asked him early on whether he thought
Gig had killed Jessie, he said 'there's a part of him that done
it.' The part of him he later named Wylie.

So I believe the real Henry Zimmerman lived
up to his word. He tried to help Drew bring Garrett in for
fingerprinting. During his time with Garrett in the Yukon, Henry
saw what his adopted brother had become, and he couldn't avoid the
truth anymore. He was ready to help implicate Garrett in Jessie's
death, before his brother's delusions killed or crippled anyone
else.

Drew found Henry waiting on the towpath that
night, and they went to Garrett's cabin together. Even if I'd gone
with them and managed to find a path that didn't alert the dog, he
would have been waiting for us. Gig Garrett was a hard man to sneak
up on. He told me that Tuesday night, and I take him at his word.
If Drew and Henry had waited for me, I'd have been shot and killed
alongside them.

So why didn't Garrett kill me on the scow
when he had the chance? That's the question I can't answer. He was
wounded and losing blood – maybe he wasn't strong enough. But he
found the strength and time to smash the cask and set it on fire
with the coals. And he managed to knife my hand to the floor. Why
not stab me in the heart or cut my throat? Or finish me off with
the pistol grip?

If he was driven by fear, maybe he recognized
the fears that have been whittling away at me for so long. Being
trapped in a small place. Being burned alive. Maybe he wanted my
death to be the fruition of those fears.

Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he decided
to spare me from my demons because he wants to be spared from his
own.

I doubt I'll ever know. The furtive heroin
seller who passes through Cabin John and calls himself Zimmerman
has never sought out the survivors among his Williamsport family
and his forsaken friends. No one who sees him now knows anything
about his past. It will be easy for Gig Garrett to disappear
again.

Yesterday I cleaned and sharpened the knife.
I pull it from my coat pocket. The engraved initials HZ are worn
but still legible near the base of the blade. Where the front of
the gravestone meets the ground, I etch a shallow trench with a
broken stick, then insert the knife and press the dirt and grass
closed over it.

The knife is all that's left of Henry
Zimmerman. His willingness to confront Gig Garrett left him shot,
burned, and buried in another man's grave. Since Drew's murder,
Zimmerman has served as the personification of my guilt and anger
and doubts. Now I'll bury them alongside him. I hope they stay
buried.

I have one more grave to visit tonight, on
more familiar ground at St. Gabriel's. Then I hope to let go of the
dead and make amends with the living. Starting with Clara and
Winnie.

************

Thanks for reading BURYING ZIMMERMAN, the
second novel in the River Trilogy. If you enjoyed it, I’d greatly
appreciate a brief positive review on Amazon or Smashwords. If
you’ve recently finished SWAINS LOCK, you’ll know who left the
whiskey on the scow, and you’ll have a more informed perspective on
Gig Garrett's irrational fears. Those fears resurface in book three
of the River Trilogy, IF IT IS APRIL. You can find a brief
description of all three novels at
http://rivertrilogy.com
.

Setting a work of fiction in the Klondike
gold rush seems gratuitous, because the unembellished narratives
written by men and women who were part of it are almost beyond
belief. No aspect of Gig Garrett's or Henry Zimmerman's journeys
stretches the reality experienced by the gold-seekers who came
first in small groups, then by the hundreds, and finally by the
thousands.

The combination of fin-de-siecle timing and
the Yukon's relative inaccessibility made the Klondike campaign
"the last great gold rush," in the words of the late Canadian
author Pierre Berton. In the ensuing decades, technological
progress made it possible to reach remote mining regions by air and
strip out buried minerals with steam shovels. Pan-wielding pioneers
gave way to mining engineers with clean fingernails. That evolution
was already underway as the Yukon gold tide receded.

If I had to recommend just one book on the
Klondike stampede, it would be Berton's KLONDIKE: THE LAST GREAT
GOLD RUSH, 1896-1899. The story you just finished owes a tremendous
amount to this gripping and exhaustively-researched survey. But
Berton's book isn't your only option, because two accounts written
by actual participants are equally compelling.

Tappan Adney set off for the Klondike shortly
after the gold ships reached San Francisco and Seattle in 1897. He
was a reporter for Harper's Weekly¸ and he joined the stampede to
chronicle it with writings, illustrations, and photos. Adney was
also an accomplished whitewater canoeist and a capable outdoorsman,
and in his 1899 memoir THE KLONDIKE STAMPEDE, he explains
everything from the design of sled-dog harnesses to the techniques
of placer mining with a graceful and economic style.

And the account I turned to when I wanted to
see and feel what the first wave of Yukon sourdoughs experienced
was William B. Haskell's TWO YEARS IN THE KLONDIKE AND ALASKAN
GOLD-FIELDS, published in 1898 and available through Google Books.
It's hard to finish Haskell's story without swallowing hard in
empathy and awe.

The same emotions are triggered by Arthur
Arnold Dietz in his 1914 memoir MAD RUSH FOR GOLD IN THE FROZEN
NORTH. The ordeals his party experienced on the glaciers eclipse
anything found in my novel.

Lael Morgan's 1998 non-fiction work GOOD TIME
GIRLS is a nice complement to Berton's overview, since it describes
the important role that free-spirited young women played during the
stampede, both in Dawson and in the Alaskan mining camps that
sprung up later.

Finally, the 1895 book by Veazie Wilson that
Zimmerman mentions, GUIDE TO THE YUKON GOLD FIELDS, really exists
and is available from Google Books. If you read it you'll see that
I owe much more than the photo on
http://rivertrilogy.com
to
its author. Wilson's book can still do for today's readers what it
did for his contemporaries: blaze a path for the imagination to
follow.

Edward A. Stabler