West of Here Read online

  Already, by the time Hoko arrived at her father’s house, several inches of fresh snow had gathered on the roof of the crude little structure, which listed slightly to one side beneath a great bare maple, several hundred feet off the left bank. The door rattled on its hinges when Hoko knocked. When her knocking failed to elicit a response, she pushed the door open, and it issued a squeaky protest.

  The fire burned low, and a feral stink pervaded the little shack. Her father was asleep in a chair in the far corner of the single room, in the glow of the dying fire. His blanket had slipped off his lap, but still clung to his ankles. Hoko knew it was whiskey sleep, because it was always whiskey sleep now. As she drew nearer, she could smell the stink of him, like rotting plums, and she guessed that he had fouled his pants, as had become his custom. How long before drinking made him so small that he became invisible to himself?

  “Father.” She could hear the rasp of his breathing. She gave him a shake. “Father.”

  Slowly his eyes opened, and he looked up at her.

  “Father. It’s Thomas. I think he’s lost.”

  His expression was fixed, as though the words meant nothing to him.

  “Listen to what I’m saying. He’s been gone two days. Nobody has seen him.” She shook him again, which caused him to smile stupidly.

  “Have you seen him? Has he been here?”

  The old man’s smile withered. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Without warning, he all but leapt out of his wooden chair, as though startled from it. The chair reared backward and rattled to the floor, and the old man’s feet became entangled in the blanket, and he fell forward to the floor with a crash.

  Hoko rushed to his aid. Kneeling beside him, she began to roll him over on his back, but he swung around on his own strength and began to thrash about, swinging his arms, and kicking his legs, and letting loose a terrible shout. With an errant fist, he caught Hoko under the jaw, and she reeled backward before scrambling to her feet.

  He struggled hopelessly to regain his own footing as Hoko fled the cabin into the night.

  the invisible storm

  DECEMBER 1889

  Ethan huddled beneath his wool blankets, hopelessly alert, still clutching his rifle with his good hand. What howling beast of the night was this that spoke in guttural tongues and circled the inside of his head? What frame of mind was this that he could not distinguish the real from the imagined? And what exhilarating new fear was this that defied expression?

  The snow finally let up altogether shortly before dawn. Ethan emerged shivering from beneath his blankets. His thumb was crooked and swollen but mercifully numb. He did not dwell on this state of affairs but immediately applied himself to reviving the coals.

  Thawing his bones over the fire, Ethan scanned the little valley laid out before him in a veil of white, no mark of man upon her. The country seemed less rugged beneath the snow, and the valley seemed wider. By the light of day, the wilderness appeared to harbor no mystery from him, nor present any threat to him. In fact, it seemed to beckon him. Ethan turned from the fire to reach for his bundle and spotted at fifty yards a doe grazing on the fringe of the woodline. Ethan could scarcely believe his good fortune. Breathlessly, he went for his rifle. The doe paid him no mind and continued to graze as Ethan took aim, steadying the rifle with some difficulty in the bridge of his numb hand. As he locked in on her, she looked up and froze momentarily. That’s when she gave herself to him. He saw himself hitting her before he ever fired.

  When the shot rang out with an echo, the rifle jerked back, and the doe gave a lurch, but did not fall. She righted herself, then careened forward and to the side as if to go down, but caught herself once more, and staggered a few steps before darting into the woods without her former grace. Ethan gave chase. He lost sight of her almost immediately. He came upon the spattering of blood in the snow but hardly paused to look at it. He scrambled up the hillside, and after twenty hard-earned yards he stopped, out of wind. He quieted his breathing and raised his rifle and scanned the cluttered understory for any sign of movement. But there was only stillness.

  After a fruitless hour of reconnaissance, which failed to yield so much as a stray track or broken limb, Ethan settled for a breakfast of dried prunes, a spot of bacon grease, and a handful of flour. The flour, however, did very little to slow the progress of the prunes and the grease, and Ethan was forced to pause frequently in his labors as the day progressed.

  His thumb rendered him all but useless with an ax, so he began the business of running his lines with a length of alder he reckoned to be a hundred links, planting stakes along his way. It took him the better part of the day to reckon 160 acres, which extended south into the valley and east across the narrow canyon, a crossing that warranted considerable effort. He descended the bank near the mouth of the canyon, following the river around a sharp bend where a chaos of logs glutted the stream, causing it to alter its course into two sluices running swiftly around the edges. Ethan crossed the logjam and ascended the canyon on the far side to the bluff until he was opposite his cabin. With one arm, he felled and limbed another thin alder and began running a line up valley. And even as he executed this job, his mind set to work on the future.

  How long before a road replaced the settlers trail? How long before the clatter and clang of industry ringed the harbor from Ediz Hook to Hollywood Beach? How long before other men of vision, men with furry gray eyebrows, clutching leather attaché cases, looked upon this place and saw the profound and inexhaustible possibilities? How long before money came pouring in from the east upon the hot rails of the Northern Pacific? How long before Port Bonita replaced Seattle as the jewel of the Washington Territory, Washington State, before it became a western terminus rivaling San Francisco? And who would join him in hitching their fates to this town, these hills, who would work beside him in harvesting the bounty of this wilderness, paving this road, ringing this harbor with industry? The fine ladies and gentlemen of the commonwealth colony? The rugged denizens of the west end? Certainly not the Indians. And wasn’t it fitting that in a place comprised purely of potential, a failed accountant with no reputation, five hundred dollars, and a moth-eaten suit should help lead this charge toward civilization? For wasn’t this man, in essence, all future?

  * * *

  UPON HIS RETURN JOURNEY, Thomas crossed the river again at Indian George’s, where he found the old man tanning a hide by the blue smoke of a fire. George left off working and watched Thomas shake the water from himself on the bank of the river like a wet dog. He directed a craggy smile at the approaching boy. Thomas tried not to look at the old man’s teeth, which were pointy in three places and too far apart.

  In a dream, as a child, George received a song, and the song was in Twana, and spoke of an invisible storm. Until George met the boy, he didn’t know the meaning of the song. Now, he thought he knew. The invisible storm lived inside the boy.

  “Your mother will be worried.”

  Thomas tilted his head and covered his eyes. When he uncovered them, George was still there.

  “Have you eaten?”

  Thomas cast his eyes down at his feet, and his lips began silently working on his words.

  “Come. I’ve got something for you.”

  Thomas followed him to the cabin door, but would go no further. On one occasion Thomas had entered the cabin, when he’d followed a pair of enormous curly-haired white men upriver. Thomas had not liked the smell of George’s place, or the fleas. Everything was too close together. It was dark, not night dark, but day dark.

  “Yes. Okay. I’ll bring it out. Go. Sit in the canoe.”

  But when George reemerged with the sourdough and jam, he found the boy exactly where he left him, except part of the boy was no longer there. His eyes were far away. He began to quake as though a cold hand were squeezing his insides, and his teeth began to knock, and his eyes looked ready to burst from their sockets. Suddenly, he jerked once, as though struck by a bolt of lightning, and went perfectly still.
>
  George was not alarmed. In fact, he took the shaking as a good sign. “I brought bread. Jam,” he said. “Come to the canoe.”

  Thomas did not budge.

  “Okay, here. We’ll eat here.” George brushed snow from the stump of a maple and sat down with the bread and the jam. Thomas stood in place, accepting a hunk of bread when George extended it but refusing the jam.

  Thomas ate in silence and avoided looking at George’s teeth. But he listened to the old man intently throughout the meal, and he enjoyed how, after a while, George made it a conversation all by himself. Sometimes there were words Thomas had not heard before. He put his lips silently to work on these words.

  George talked like a white man. That is, he talked a lot. More than his grandfather, even. Thomas believed that this was because George was lonely, not because he did not like silence. It was said that George had once had a wife, a young Squaxin woman, and that he’d lost her to smallpox. It was also said that he’d lost her to the bottle. It seemed she was the only thing about which George did not speak.

  Not only did George talk a lot, but Thomas also found George unique among Indians in that he’d lost his taste for salmon. He refused, in fact, to eat it. Not chinook, not coho, not silver, not even blueback from the Quinault. Niether smoked, filleted, nor slathered in whiskey.

  “The river is choked with salmon of every variety,” George complained. “I can hardly pole my canoe through them. I’ve been here many winters, and what do you think I ate all those winters? Yes, that’s right. I ate salmon. And more salmon. I have prepared this fish in a thousand ways, and it always tastes the same. I am done eating salmon. Trout, I will eat, fried in a pan. But not salmon. I will not even grease my saw with salmon oil. I’m finding that I like sourdough bread, though. The bread sticks to the inside of my stomach and I like that. It smells funny, but that’s okay.”

  Thomas smelled the bread and found that he rather liked the smell, sharp but smoky, not smoky like the Belvedere, but outdoor smoky. He liked that it tasted almost like it smelled, but not exactly. And indeed, the bread really did stick to the inside of your belly, and Thomas liked that, too. He wondered why anyone would put jam on it.

  “Your time is drawing closer,” said the old man. “You must know that. You must keep clean for your tamanamis, so you have no smell. You will get sick when he comes for you.”

  The boy was poking holes in the melting snow with his toe. His lips were not moving. His eyes were no longer far away. George could feel the invisible storm gathering inside the boy. Someday it would gather enough strength to unleash itself. And George believed it would come out like a dream-song for all the Siwash to hear.

  “More sourdough?”

  Thomas nodded without looking up from his feet. George tore off a hunk of bread and presented it to the boy, who immediately brought it to his nose upon receiving it.

  “Have the Shakers come for you yet?” George wanted to know. “If not, they will come soon. From Jamestown. They’ll want to put you to work, and that may be a good thing; you could do worse. They think the spirits are evil, but they have only given them new names. Don’t go with them. Wait until your time has come. Wait until the day you become a man. Only then can you decide what to do.”

  George disappeared into the cabin again and shortly reemerged clutching a length of leather dangling what looked like a bone filed to a point. Presenting it to the boy, who was intently smelling his sourdough as he turned it round and round in his hands, it occurred to Indian George that sometimes the spirits worked in mysterious ways.

  “Maybe one day you’ll meet the shark that’s missing this tooth. Or maybe it’ll be another. The shark is the truth.”

  The boy hardly seemed to notice when George strung the necklace on him.

  * * *

  NEAR DUSK, ETHAN set out from the little bluff to scavenge windfall from along the edge of the wood line. It was cooling down again, and the trees no longer dropped snow pats in the meadow. Ethan passed once more the spatter of blood left by the doe that morning, and he felt a pang of hunger. The heat of the blood had left small craters in the snow.

  It took Ethan less than fifty yards of scavenging along the wooded fringes to fill his arms. Just as he was about to circle back to the bluff, something caught his eye in the meadow to the south, a dark figure sprawled in the snow, about halfway to the head of the canyon. He set his load down where he stood, and set off to examine the figure.

  The doe was still breathing after all those hours. The breath bubbling from her nostril had tunneled a hole in the snow. Dark blood had coagulated around the ragged edges of the entry wound, where the shot had shattered her shoulder, exposing the bone.

  She’d lost a lot of blood. It spread out around her in the snow in the shape of a bell. Ethan could not gauge the extent of her suffering, nor did he wish to. The look in her eye was weak and placid.

  He went for his rifle.

  When he returned, he put the barrel to her temple and could not help but look into her eye once more, and when he did the trigger seemed to resist his pull.

  He dragged the carcass all the way back to the cabin, leaving a bloody swathe in the snow as he progressed. He returned for his wood, tended the fire, and dressed the doe according to some vague notions. He found the hide to be tougher than he anticipated. The work was messy, and Ethan discovered that the job did not entice his appetite, and he wondered at his own vitality. But later, forcing himself to eat, he found that the fresh meat put his stomach at ease, and not long after dark he was heavy with sleep.

  potato counter

  DECEMBER 1889

  Hoko knew that Adam would have questions because he always had questions; it was not only his job to ask questions but his line of defense, too. In his days with the census, his inquisitive nature had earned him the name Potato Counter among the Klallam, for he had counted everything under the sun, every chicken, horse, and potato, it seemed.

  Hoko watched him, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead as he strode down the beach toward her with the heavy determined steps of a white man, as though the ground were not there to accommodate his steps but only to slow his progress. When he drew near, she could see the cruelty in his blue eyes without looking up, she could see his set jaw, and his straight upper lip, and feel the rock hard stubbornness of his will and know that it was etched in the lines of his stubbled face. Hoko also knew, however, that something soft in him still remained, where she herself had hardened. She knew that Adam would not sit by the fire, he would stand, because he always stood.

  “Where is the boy?” he said.

  “Around,” she said.

  “Around the school?”

  “Yes,” she lied.

  Adam peered east down the shoreline past the long line of canoes and fires. Maybe a hundred Indians were scattered up and down the beach in groups. There were a few civilized faces among them.

  “You haven’t been about the Belvedere with a bucket of clams, have you? Because I’ve heard talk. And I need no more proof than the drunkenness up and down this beach to know that whiskey is in good supply.”

  “I have no thirst for it,” she said.

  “Has the reverend been about?”

  “I don’t know. I have no thirst for that, either.”

  “Hmph,” said Adam, looking back down the beach. “Well, this is no good. This is no damn good. Look at you people.”

  Hoko said nothing. Out beyond Ediz Hook, she saw the gray black plume of an approaching steamer, even as the wake of the last passing steamer was still lapping at the shoreline.

  Without the census on which to hang the information he collected, Adam discovered the realm of general inquiry was an uncomfortable one for him, especially with Hoko.

  “Yes. Well. How are you, then?” he said, finally.

  “I am the same.”

  “And the boy?”

  “He is the same.” Hoko did not look into his eyes but kept her gaze locked on the blurry outline of Vanc
ouver Island. The place had once seemed so close.

  “What do you do for money?”

  “Things for white women.”

  “What things?”

  “Tend to their children and laundry.”

  “Well, try tending to your own.”

  The words hardened in Hoko’s ears like wax.

  “I have something for the boy,” Adam pursued. “Back at the hotel.”

  “He needs nothing.”

  “It’s a book of lists, he likes lists. It’s bound in leather.”

  “I know the book,” she intoned.

  Adam glared down at her, and something in him tightened. “Don’t act superior, woman. Because we both know the truth.”

  Hoko gazed impassively out across the strait. “Yes,” she said. “The truth.”

  Adam’s hand shot up in a flash, but he caught it there before it could act further, and he lowered it slowly. As he strode past her, he gave her a push on the back of her head. “Just send the boy to me. I’m at the Olympic.”

  At the third fire Adam came upon, two Klallam men were scuffling on the ground, and a third was reeling drunkenly around the periphery of the action, shouting lewd encouragement at the combatants. All three wore flannel shirts. The face of the circling man was very dark and badly pitted, and seemed to be made out of stone. He reminded Adam of the Klallam chief Chet-Ze-Moka, whose funeral he had attended, a decent white man’s burial. Chet-Ze-Moka, who had seen the coming of the first white settlers and lived in spite of himself to see the death of the founders. Chet-Ze-Moka, whom civilization had baptized in rum, whom the white man called friend, then dubbed clownishly the Duke of York, whose proud chieftaincy was reduced by Adam’s father shortly before he died, some say stinking of liquor.

  “Who sold you the liquor?” Adam asked Stone Face.

  The Indian stopped circling, but his eyes did not stop circling in his head. “If I told you,” he said, with a smile, “I couldn’t get more.”