Fools' Gold (19 page)

“Good sermon, reverend,” said Ellen, stepping forward. “A story I've never heard before.”

“Oh well…”

After the service there was a light snack, but nobody wanted to eat much. It was important to have an empty stomach on the day before a Christmas meal. Everyone seemed anxious to get home and to sleep as quickly as they could. As the Eskimos left, each took one of the candles and the reverend's house got darker and darker.

“I guess I won't light the lamps,” he said. “It is late and we must be up early with the gifts.”

The reverend, round with pleasure after his sermon, pointed toward the two sleeping areas, then stepped into his small kitchen, discreetly allowing the two women the freedom of changing their clothes alone.

“Nightgowns over clothing, clothing out from under nightgowns,” said Ellen. “Like this.”

Ghostlike, heads covered, the women undressed in their small tents. The Christmas packages were in a stack by the door, ready to be taken out into the later darkness. Candle wax froze warm in its run down the sides of the remaining candles, some burning faster than others. “Candles made from seals!” Henriette exclaimed when she'd first heard about them. And she could only imagine circus animals balancing flames on their noses.

Ellen went businesslike to bed, thinking how little sleep she would get before they'd take the packages out to that frozen tree. This was Christmas Eve. Other Christmas Eves stacked behind her like fence posts. She reached up and felt the skin across her face, looser than she remembered it. She locked her fingers at the base of her throat and prayed. Lord have mercy on poor Mr. Fujino. He died a terrible death and lived a good life. Lord keep Finn Wallace safe from himself and from his Catholic ways. Bless the reverend, who loves you, and bless Henriette, who is like a child. Ellen stopped, seeing herself kneeling at the side of her own child bed, large-bodied parents swaying above. God bless mother and father. I wonder do they live? Is father still stone-faced at his pub rail? Mother in her kitchen? And is grandmother's clock still smashed? Christmas Eve, oh how she longed to be home. Amen. She rolled to one side, ashamed. Who could have guessed the path my life would take? She heard her father's voice: “You'll be wishing for home with a passion far greater than the one which makes you want to leave. Mark my words.”

The reverend, ready for bed in the kitchen, saw the other room turn dark. He thought of himself as Joseph, saw himself waiting as Joseph might have, outside the manger, ready to tiptoe in, careful not to wake.

The reverend tiptoed in quietly, past the woman in his bed. He was as tired as Joseph and he wanted to be as quiet. Still, the sleeping figures drew him. He wanted to look into their faces, to pull the blankets warm around their necks. He stood for a long time, then touched the pelt-runged loft ladder and stepped, fur-footed, higher into the room. He looked, as before, straight forward through the darkness. The ladder was soundless so the reverend stepped higher, once, twice. Blankets dark as night wrapped the sleeping figure in the loft, a shadow etched on the dull light of the window. He remembered Ellen bound in her summer cocoon and wanted to see her again. How different she looked now. He thought of Mary, bone-tired from childbirth.

The sleeping figure turned on its side, then sat up, eyes wide, facing the reverend.

“What?”

Oh my God, Henriette! Joseph sped from the manger. The reverend's red face was hidden by the dark.

“I'm sorry. I wanted to see if you were all right.” Whispered.

“What?”

“Shh.”

Henriette, sleep falling from her like fish scales, misunderstands. “It's not time yet? It's not morning?”

“No. Be quiet. Don't speak so loudly.”

“Oh.”

“I wanted to see if you were all right. I'm sorry.” Nothing more to say. Wait until she lies down again, then back away. Make her lie down. Oh God, make her lie back down.

Henriette sat farther up, holding the bedclothes to her neck. She could see him now, a little, dark head stiffly balanced there. Must be terrified. Room's quiet, nothing could wake Ellen, she knew.

“I'm sorry,” the reverend said again. And then, “Morning comes early. You'd better sleep.”

Henriette pushed her hand slowly into the darkness, letting it meet the cool flesh of the reverend's cheek. Her fingers were on the side of his neck, rubbing. “It's cold in the house,” she said. She pulled him, nearly weightless, from the ladder, settling him on the loft floor beside her. Sweet Mary and Joseph …

“Thank you for your concern,” she said, whisper of whispers, laying the words in his ear like gifts.

The reverend felt his head spinning. “I am very, very lonely,” he said evenly. And then he peered at her dark face and added, “At times.”

Henriette moved near him, pushing her breast to his head like a pillow. “I wonder if there is a colder spot on earth,” she said, pulling her blankets around them both.

The reverend couldn't speak. She, warming him, took the shaking of his limbs for cold and put him down on her mattress, arms around his shoulders lightly.

“There, there,” she said. The reverend's mouth wetted the outside of her nightshirt, mound of breast pushing his lips against his teeth.

“There, there,” she said, nursing him.

Oh sweet Jesus, thought the reverend. Mother of God. Was he freed from the confines of his body? He could feel nothing of his arms and legs.

“There, there.”

God, he felt sorry for Joseph, hands pushed into pockets, walking the lonely streets. Utter freedom. Glory be to God, did the man have a life of his own? Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. The reverend wet Henriette's shirt with his mouth and eyes giving her a second skin, soft as the breath of God. He closed his eyes vice tight, dams bursting throughout his body. Still the image of Joseph clung. “Go blind,” he told himself. “Go blind.”

“There, there,” said Henriette.

Finn and Kaneda ate a large meal and sat, in the aftermath, full-bellied, the dog between them cleaning himself like a cat. Kaneda counted his money. There was more than he expected there would be. There was the right amount of coin, but there was pure gold too. This man had brought pure gold all the way back from town, where he was supposed to have exchanged it.

“Gold,” he said, pointing at the delicate webbing.

“That's right,” Finn answered, head nodding vigorously. “From the beach placer. It's Fujino's share.”

“Fujino?”

“Share,” said Finn. “It's his share.”

The two men spent much of their time discovering ways to communicate. They used single words and drawings. They pointed to objects. Kaneda looked at the dog and said,
“Inu,”
until Finn did the same, the dog's eyes darting from one man to the other.

Time passed slowly. They went outside in the gray daylight for a while. They sang to each other. Finn cut blocks of ice from the stream bed and brought them into the room. He had a sharp knife and carved figures from the blocks. As he finished them he looked at Kaneda, asking him with his eyes to guess what the figure might be. He carved Fujino, head and shoulders protruding from the bath, mouth a gaping zero, then he let it melt away without explanation.

After the first few days Finn was careful not to mention Fujino by name. When it was dark and they had nothing to do, Kaneda would again begin to pray. He found his posture each night, then spoke to Finn a moment, then began to chant. Finn listened as if he understood, and each night, after only a few minutes, he'd begin to hear it as if it were Latin, and was impressed with the power of it. It took him back. As Kaneda prayed for Fujino, Finn swirled through the streets of Londonderry, in and out of memories. He followed himself as a boy and as a young man. The tone of Kaneda's voice brought him to it…. The priests and how they entered his life. His teachers had nearly all been priests, as many of his classmates were now, his own brother, his cousin. “Have you thought of a life of the cloth?” they'd say, but only to the best students, only to those who exhibited themselves properly. It had been a joke among the lower classes, among seamstresses and tailors and shoeshine boys. Have you thought of a life of the cloth? Oh how they'd laughed, holding up pieces of material and smiling through them.

Finn thought of crook-necked priests turned away from him, visible through the dim slats of the confessional. He had always tried to disguise his voice.

“I've had impure thoughts again, father.”

“What's that? Speak up son, it's hard to hear.”

“In my mind I have traveled a dangerous path.”

“And what path might that be?”

“The curve of thigh, the bend of knee.”

“Lust, my boy?”

“Yes, father.”

“And who was it? Toward whom were these thoughts directed?”

“Toward the girls I pass in the street. Toward the women friends of my mother. Toward those whom I happen to see in rooms. Toward my sister and the nuns of her school. Toward a woman that my mind has shown me, no one I have ever known, but someone who is with me always.”

“Toward your own sister and toward nuns?”

“Yes, father.”

“Shame on you young man. Shame.”

Had it ever happened? It made Finn smile now. He'd left the confessional like a crab, jacket pulled high over his head, priest peering out. “Who's that? What boy walks like that?” Perhaps not. Perhaps it's a story from a mix of memories, bits of a dozen confessions remembered as one. Finn thought of priests confessing to priests, of nuns confessing … “I'm in love with one of the priests, father.” Bur-headed confessor perks up. “Which one is it? It's not me, is it? Which one?”

Finn laughed inwardly and came back to Kaneda, who was still chanting, still nailing the soul of Fujino to the walls. He could hear bits of familiar prayers in the old man's speech. The church, it's like flypaper; did he ever think he was away from it? Foolish man. You can't escape.
You
are what ties you to it.
You
are the temple and the source of it all. Finn turned and cracked the hide door. Black night froze them in once more, its cold breath touching his face, but in a moment quiet hit the room like an explosion. The prayer was over. Wide-eyed Kaneda, tired, looked at Finn, waiting for a glass of whiskey. Finn poured. It had become his job at the end of prayer to tend to thirsts. “Cheers,” he said. “Cheers,” said Kaneda, his first new word.

Kaneda drank the liquor down, worn throat dying for it. He had been hurrying again, taking shortcuts because the listener was a foreigner. There were gaping holes in his history, Fujino would be appalled at what he was leaving out. Still, the gist of it was there. And the order was correct, and the style. It's only the speed that he'd worried about. He covered fifty years tonight. Just enough to finish the seventeenth century.

The stockings were laid at the base of the frozen tree before any of the children were awake. The night before, the reverend had told the women not to worry about oversleeping. “One of the things about me,” he said, “I can get up whenever I want to. I just repeat the time to myself before I sleep, and sure enough, that's the time I wake up.”

They had laid the packages on a blanket, hoping they'd be free of ice and easy for the children to pick up. The dark morning air hit their lungs like knives. They worked quickly, silent as foxes, then scurried back to the reverend's house for a cup of the coffee brought to him from Nome. A gift from Ellen and Henriette.

Christmas had made Ellen expansive. She'd slept well and had the reactions of the children to look forward to. She supposed it wouldn't be a bad life, living here. Ellen sang to herself, hands warmed over the stove. The reverend and Henriette stood behind her, not looking at each other. Henriette leaned toward him, occasionally letting her hand touch his, but the reverend stood straight, trying to think of other things, humming along with Ellen, giving her cause to turn and look at him.

“As much as Henriette is a singer you are not,” she said, smiling. “But don't let it worry you. Christmas gives us hope.”

They sat in the candled room, in three chairs equally spaced and facing each other. Still hours to daylight, Christmas morning. Henriette looked at the reverend and remembered the feeling she'd had when Fujino first took sick. She could be of some use to this man, help him, be the one he relied upon, the one that gave him strength. His mouth upon her breast had warmed her over, made her remember what it was like not to be alone. She would not be a nurse to him, but she could perform a service as valuable. She got up and went to the kitchen for more coffee.

Gray light brought Phil first, then others, carrying parts of the Christmas meal, building fires, reheating, slicing slabs of seal. The children had their stockings and wore them like slippers, warm-footed, throughout the house. They hung the necklaces around their necks, or tied them to the tops of the stockings and let them trail behind. Everyone brought their drawings and set them around the room for everyone else to admire. They would ask Ellen and Henriette to make comments on each, not as drawings, but as snowflakes. Not as paper, but as gold.

The reverend gave his gifts to Ellen and Henriette. “My mother was French and taken with jewelry,” he said. “I have no more use for it.”

In each of the packages a pair of earrings, Henriette's long and silver, Ellen's neat and round. “I know there's not much chance to wear them here,” he said, “but my mother would have liked to see them used.”

Ellen thanked him, holding the jewelry in her warm hands. Henriette hooked the earrings to her ears and ran to see herself in the small cracked mirror of the kitchen. She felt like spinning around, and swung her head to make the earrings move. “I'll wear them rain or shine,” she said. “I'll never take them off.”

Phil gave each woman small bone carvings that he had done. “They are made from the tusks of a walrus and will give good luck,” he said. “Always remember, however, to leave them home when you go walrus hunting.”