Fools' Gold (2 page)

During their first week on the creek Kaneda built the water wheel. He made the axle shaft from a lean wooden pole, giving that portion of the pole that would go through the wheel a copper jacket. There was a perfect sandbar in the middle of the stream, a few meters from where they had camped. Fujino built a scaffolding on the bar and another on the solid tundra at the far side of the stream. Together they built a dam. They were able to channel all or none of the water toward their water wheel. When the wheel was in use the stream flowed its normal course, and when they channeled all of the water toward them the wheel stopped and the stream bed widened to within ten meters of their camp. They built a bulkhead along that shore, setting wood and stone into the earth and then flooding the area, giving them fresh water for drinking and bathing.

After the water wheel was completed, Fujino set up a hose that drew water from the stream and poured it over the axle for lubrication. The purpose of the wheel was to lift the water up, dumping it into a long wooden sluice. The sluice would have gates that could be pulled open to allow water to run through, or pushed down to stop it. When the sluice box was dammed the water wheel had to be stopped and the stream diverted over to the near channel. The sluice box ran downhill, so that even without the power of the water wheel the prospectors could empty it, simply by lifting the gate.

“If we find gold you must go back to Nome to register the land,” Kaneda said, the day after completing the work. “I will stay here.”

Fujino nodded. They had been working hard for a long time and were tired. He reached into a pack that was lying on the moss behind him and pulled out a large bottle of sake.

Kaneda said, “We will find gold enough to buy a better brand of sake.” He waited anxiously as Fujino heated the liquor in a tin pot.

“We are seventy li from the town,” Fujino said, staring into his cup. “How many thousands of li are we from Tokyo?”

Kaneda looked at the man and remembered how young he was. He knew that Fujino was interested in his oldest daughter. He had seen them talking together at the entrance to his home in Tokyo. Fujino had almost mentioned the girl twice during the long sea voyage. If he asks for her hand I will refuse, thought Kaneda. If he gets rich and asks again I will allow it.

Fujino was looking straight at him. “I will use the money I make to buy land in the center of Tokyo,” he said. “
Tokyo-no-mannaka
.” He stood up and wandered down to the stream. He cupped his hands and yelled, listening to his echo.
“Moshi moshi? Dareka iru no? Nihonjin iru no ka?”
He could hear only the short laugh of Kaneda now standing behind him.

“Loneliness,” said the old man. “You are so proud of your loneliness that you yell at the mountains. You are a modern man but our water wheel could have been built in the same manner five hundred years ago.” The sake spun lightly on his lips and the old man laughed.

“Only the voice of the modern man…” he said. “Ha ha. I've got it.

Only the voice of

the modern man disturbs the

peace of the river
.

“That's you. The modern man. Five-seven-five, too. Try to top it.”

Kaneda stepped back to the tent and to his blanket, laughing and muttering his haiku. After Fujino drank the rest of the sake he poured the water over the fire, listening to it hiss and die. And soon he too went to sleep, counting on his fingers, trying to think of a retort.

In a few days Finn was free of the women, though he didn't much like what they'd decided to do. They had taken jobs, both of them, as day laborers in the New York Kitchen. Ellen was a scrapper, pushing dried eggs and beef bones into the waste pits, and Henriette moved among prospectors taking food orders. Finn was with them when they saw the notice, but he'd not said anything against it. It was his job to see them safely off the ship, nothing more. Though he'd enjoyed once again hearing the soft strains of an Irishwoman's voice, he knew he'd be smartest not to get involved. They had cots to sleep on, those two, and that wasn't bad. There were few enough women in Nome with their own beds.

Finn was not a prospector. He'd heard what had happened half a century before in California, and he knew that the same thing would happen here. Oh, the wild fortunes would be made by the prospectors all right, but the moderate ones would be made by the others: the store owners, the builders, the publicans. Finn was good with his hands, and thought that, when the opportunity presented itself, he'd go into construction. He considered himself lucky, though at forty-five he hadn't yet much to show for it. In the nineteen years he'd been out of Ireland he'd worked on the railroad and been a salesman. And though he'd been more than a little successful as a salesman—women thought of him as handsome—he was here now with the idea of building a town.

For a month, ever since his arrival, Finn had drifted with the milling crowd, waiting for his opportunity. He listened to the accents and the different languages. There were other Irish, there were Asians, Indians, Frenchmen, there were Jews. He floated through the restaurants and bars, careful about the spending of his money. He watched men, hundreds of them, fanning over the tundra to work the mines during the day and closing in on the town in the evenings or on weekends. There was a sense of generosity, one toward the other, each man knowing he would strike. Finn adjusted himself to the mood easily. He discovered one night that the owner of the Gold Belt saloon was Irish, and from then on that was where he spent his time.

This evening Finn pulled on his heavy boots and waded into the low surf for loose bark and driftwood. He leaned it against his tent to dry then stoked his stove with the previous day's collection and sat alone in front of the fire's red glow. At ten o'clock Finn changed his shirt and stepped out into the bright night. The Gold Belt would be full now and it would be proper for him to make his entrance. This pub had a wonderful game, a contest really, and though Finn had been signed up for days, tonight was the first time that he'd actually be allowed to play. There could be only one contestant at a time, and tonight, after the long wait, it would be Finn. He worked his way along the soft sand paths, two gold coins heavy in his pockets. He felt the heft of them, one to each side, like the weight and balance of his father's gold watch.

The Gold Belt stood opposite the New York Kitchen, and as Finn passed he saw Ellen and she saw him. She leaned against the handle of a long broom just at the entrance, her hair a shambles, her eyes gone tired. Finn slowed some and, looking in her direction, turned and stopped.

“Top of the evening,” he said.

“It's a different world here, I'd say,” said Ellen. “At home the pubs'd be closed by now.”

“Oh yes,” said Finn. “But the longer hours take away the tendency to gulp.”

The weight of Finn's two coins stood him evenly in front of her. It takes an Irishwoman to criticize the drinking habits of strangers, he thought. Finn asked after Henriette and inquired as to the difficulty of the work. He spoke politely, but he had the contest on his mind and in a moment excused himself and stepped toward the bar.

From the cool path Ellen watched him go and watched the movement of the miners through the smoky tent flaps. Mouths were wide, heads were thrown back, but somehow no sound reached her. Strange that pubs were so open here. One could walk by and see directly in. At home they were always closed, political. At home men drank and talked darkly, their heads just off their pints. Ellen could remember her father coming in, always at ten after the closing hour, the gist of an argument still with him. He would stand in their narrow hallway looking down into the kitchen, but he'd not see her until his thoughts caught up with him. And then he'd throw back his head, his features turning fatherly once again and he'd laugh…. But not here, she thought. No serious talk here. She could see faces that she knew from the New York Kitchen, and she could see Finn, standing at the bar, holding a fistful of it. The first joke she could remember was her uncle quoting from the Bible: “As it says in the book of Guinnesses…” he'd said, and it had taken her years to understand.

Ellen stood transfixed in the shadows. Now, after such a short time, she was beginning to say “prospectors” just as she used to say “farmers.” She laid slabs of beef or fish before them; she carried dozens of brimming mugs of coffee, placing one in front of each dull face. Ellen sighed and stepped back into the kitchen and began clearing the dirty plates away. She had to bend to get into the corners where the ceiling sloped to the wall. She guessed among her traveling companions it would be those two Asians who'd make it. The Japanese. They'd left for the unclaimed lands on the very first day. A people like that, shifty-eyed and small.

When Ellen finished for the night she walked once more past the Gold Belt and saw Finn again, holding his black mug up timelessly. It would be a shame to go directly to bed but she'd not be going into one of these saloons. Saloons indeed. Pubs was what they were no matter what fancy name you gave them. She walked between several of the tents, her black shoes twisting on the soft ground. Here, as everywhere, there was a mixture of sand and moss. She left the path, popping from between two tents to walk on the beach for a while. The tents behind and beside her glowed pale and ghostly in the night, and she could hear voices from within them. Men were making plans, women laughing. Was it the same everywhere then, Ireland, America, Alaska? If it was, then what was there to gain anywhere in the world? Ellen looked at the water. She looked at herself standing there in her black dress, the waves stepping loudly toward her. She raised her arm and spun around in the wet sand until her hair pushed against her forehead, the ends of it flowing into the gray night. She pointed east and then south a little. Follow your finger to Ireland, she thought. Hullo, daddy, what time is it there? Are you home from the pub yet? She spun a little more and danced a little. The tents, the sea, the tents. Oh how she'd spun in the fields of Ireland: the house, the fields, the house. She slowed a little, tired. She came back along the rim of the horizon, pointing at each dim star, looking, trying to find a familiar constellation.

Inside the Gold Belt Finn drained his pint and took another from the owner, a man who was praising the beauty of his own bar.

“…and with so little good hardwood around,” he said. “It comes from the Philippines and there's not a scratch on it. It's used to the dainty drinking habits of the Spanish, I suppose.”

The owner pushed a large cloth about as he spoke, polishing one place or another, not getting far from his conversation with Finn. The bar too had come on the
Portland
, a few voyages ago, but though the tent was large, the bar, with its dark red grains, would not quite fit. It pushed against the end of the tent and against the flaps. Before winter there would be a building big enough to make the bar look small, but now it was grotesque.

Finn looked at his long reflection in the warped mirror behind the bar. It made him look thinner than he was, made him think less of himself. The mirror was attached to the canvas wall and was never still, so that in its reflection a calm man looked nervous.

“I'm heavier than I appear to be,” Finn told the owner. “I'll not be fooled into thinking I'm not.”

“Only another half hour until midnight, then we'll see.”

The owner was referring to his contest. “Worth your weight in gold,” he called it, a game he'd invented and one that had filled his saloon with hopefuls each night of its running.

Finn looked from the mirror to his body. He checked his pockets for extra weight and then slipped his boots from around his thick feet.

At exactly midnight four women dressed in the costumes of ballerinas walked to the front of the tent and began unlacing the canvas, untying it from the wooden pegs in the corners. They rolled the tent sides up, exposing the twilight. A breeze lifted papers off the tables and moved the dust around the floor.

One of the girls came close to Finn. “The trick is in the sacks,” she said. “Only the ones near the bottom are correctly marked.”

The customers moved their chairs around so that they were facing a small platform. Several more of the bar women came forward carrying chains and lengths of hollow pipe and began assembling a huge balance scale on the platform, one which in every detail except size matched the scale in the assayer's office. When the scale was complete, the plates on either side of it sat firmly upon the wooden stage; one was empty and on the other was a straight-backed chair. The scale had a crank in the back of it, and at its side someone had placed a wheelbarrow full of sacks, sand representing different amounts of gold dust, the weights clearly marked on the outside.

“I'm on then,” said Finn, walking around the beer stains in the earth to the place where the scale was constructed. The owner was there waiting for him.

“Here's our candidate,” he told the calming crowd. “Finn Wallace from Ireland, who should have it down for he saw it done here last week and then the week before. But for those of you who have come by ships still weighed in the harbor I'll explain that all the man needs to do is place these sacks on the scale to the one side, and then place himself upon the chair over here. After he is ready I'll crank him, and the sacks too, high up off the ground, and we'll all watch the central needle just as we do when we are weighing our own week's work. If he is within a pound, or within two, he'll receive a pack mule and sundry equipment and goods, enough to allow him to strike out on his own. Also, and perhaps he'll feel it's more important, he'll win an entire night's drinking, compliments of the house.”

The owner stood down and looked toward a girl, who brought Finn forward. From the open side of the tent dim stars could be seen. The crowd was quiet; the wind blew in without notice. Finn walked over to the wheelbarrow and began placing twenty-pound sacks on the scale. He chose only those sacks near the bottom, setting the others aside.