Sarah Canary Read online

  ‘But now her own child was coming. A girl. A misbegotten, hairy, ugly girl.’ The words came out of Harold’s mouth before he knew he was going to say them. Usually the baby was beautiful, at least, Harold was careful to add, in the eyes of her mother. Usually the sobbing maiden entrusted the child to the care of the wolf and slipped back to her husband and happiness. Anger and frustration were telling the story now; Harold was merely drinking and getting out of their way.

  ‘More wolves came to the cave. Whether they saw the dead cub and blamed the human for it or whether they were merely maddened by the blood of the childbirth is a question we will never be able to answer. In any case, they tore the Indian maiden apart with their pointed yellow teeth. Then they turned to her cub. The she-wolf shielded the baby from the pack with her body. She fought, taking and giving many injuries, until the blood-lust of the beasts was sated and they left her alone with the child.’

  Sarah Canary hummed. Sarah Canary trilled. Harold turned with his hand out, striking her with so much force, she was thrown sideways to her knees, where she remained, looking up at him with a face that was bestial in its lack of expression. ‘Or perhaps not,’ he said coldly. ‘Perhaps the woman we have here is the product of a different sort of union. Perhaps the sailor mated directly with the wolf.’ He was aware of the silence in the room again. Sarah Canary made no sound at all. The audience might have stopped breathing for all the noise they made. ‘The show is over,’ said Harold. He turned away from the woman on her knees. ‘Go home now.’

  8

  Harold Recites Tennyson

  Further than Guess can gallop

  Further than Riddle ride—

  Oh for a Disc to the Distance

  Between Ourselves and the Dead!

  Emily Dickinson, 1864

  It was strongly suggested to Harold that he join his audience in the saloon downstairs, where he could stand drinks for everyone out of the night’s profits. It might make him more popular, he was told. He could use a little popularity, he was told. He was told this two or three times and everyone who told him was wearing a pistol.

  Harold returned Sarah Canary to her room, checking the windows and locking the door from the outside. He went to his own room and picked up his own gun, stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. He could feel the cold of the metal even through his layers of clothing. He walked down the flight of stairs, arriving about the same time that the men who had come to see Sarah Canary were joined by the men who had gone to see Adelaide. There was no fireplace; the room depended on liquor and bodies for heat. Harold smelled sweat and cigar smoke and spilled whiskey. His boots stuck to the floor and made sucking sounds as he walked.

  Harold could see no way to buy drinks for one group and not for the other. He suspected that when the evening was over he would find the engagement in Seabeck had actually lost him money. His tentative plans had included touring the lumber camps with Sarah Canary. Now he thought it best to put more miles between Seabeck and the next show. He was thinking of heading down to Oregon. Or back to Steilacoom. When he was ready to admit that Sarah Canary was just not going to work out, then he could leave her, leave her somewhere safe, of course, and go back for the mermaid. Had the time come to do that?

  ‘What do you have?’ he asked Bill Blair, a half-breed Indian who owned the Bay View and tended the bar. Harold had met Blair earlier when he took adjoining rooms in the hotel for himself and the Alaskan Wild Woman.

  ‘More liquor than you’ll find anywhere else in the Washington Territory,’ Blair answered. ‘Just ask for it. Jersey Lightning, California port wine, grape brandy bitters. Whiskey, of course. Beer. Seabeck is seeing some fat times and I’m full-stocked for it. Sorry the show didn’t go better.’ Blair had not attended the show. Obviously, the men who had preceded Harold into the saloon had already been complaining.

  ‘Give everyone a drink,’ Harold said. ‘Give me whiskey.’

  A shadow passed in the doorway. Harold caught sight of a black dress and a white face. His heart beat twice, very fast, before he realized it wasn’t Sarah Canary. The woman was going upstairs, not down.

  ‘Miss Adelaide Dixon is on her way to her room,’ Blair observed. ‘Turning in early.’

  ‘And looking just like a lady.’ Someone behind Harold cleared the phlegm from his throat and spit. Harold turned. A man in kid gloves was seated among the mill workers, stroking a silk plug hat that he held over his lap. He had a white beard and a round face. ‘Which I assure you she is not. No more than I would be were I to put on a lady’s dress.’ A tarnished copper spittoon sat right at his feet and yet he had managed to miss it. The spittle glistened on the floor by the toe of his new shoe. He raised his glass to Blair. ‘I’ll have a Chinee Stinker,’ he said. ‘Made the way they used to make them in the old days when John Pennell, the mad squaw-master, ran Seattle.’

  He breathed on the crown of his hat, then made a series of small circles with his cuff, polishing. He turned to Harold. ‘Who is more the lady – the woman who provides it for money but talks about it free, or the woman who talks about it for money but provides it free? My name is Jim Allen, by the way. Clerk at the Washington Mill Lumber Company.’ Jim Allen removed his gloves. He was wearing a fat gold ring with a large opal on his little finger. ‘Thank you for the drink,’ he added. ‘Sit with us?’

  His name made Harold think again of Jimmy. Harold sat down with his private flask of whiskey in one hand, the glass of whiskey he had just purchased from Bill Blair in the other. The liquor Harold had already drunk lit him up inside like a lantern, shedding light on everything around him, so the world was all edges and hollows and shadows.

  This was the dangerous stage of drunkenness, when the separate faculties of reason and vision and memory began to bleed into one another so you couldn’t be sure which was which. Harold saw each hair in Jim Allen’s chin, each color in each hair. He saw the reflection of his own face, diminished by the prescription glass of Jim Allen’s spectacles. He saw that he was really quite a little man, quite second-rate, and all the success in the world wouldn’t change that. So what did failure matter? Drink. Just keep drinking. He saw how Jimmy’s hand, with its ragged, bloody nails, had continued to clutch and open even after the bullet had gone right through it, like it was butter, and shattered his skull. Jimmy and he had survived the Battle of the Wilderness together when General Seymour’s Black Brigade, an all-Negro unit that was supporting them, had fallen. They had survived the fire after the battle when some of the wounded had clung to trees, trying to climb away from the flames until trees and bodies were fused together forever in ashy formations like giant sand castles. They had survived the march to Andersonville. And then Jimmy had just crawled into the deadline as if all that surviving didn’t matter at all. Harold held the whiskey flask so tightly his fingers began to cramp. ‘I’m Harold,’ he said.

  There was a second man at the table. ‘Will Purdy,’ Jim Allen told him. ‘Postmaster here in Seabeck.’ He turned to Purdy. ‘Harold,’ he said.

  Will Purdy was tall and thin, with dark brown hair and a curly beard. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He held out his hand. It was damp.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Pennell’s Mad House, Harold?’ Jim Allen asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah. Well.’ Jim Allen sighed philosophically. ‘Lovely times. When you pay cash, of course, you don’t have to ask if the lady is enjoying herself. Not that they didn’t.’ The lens of his glasses magnified the wink he gave Harold. ‘At the Mad House’ – Jim Allen’s voice rose reverentially – ‘they cared about their customers. They attended to the body and the soul.’

  ‘The women were tattooed,’ Purdy explained to Harold.

  ‘Tattooed? Well, I guess. One of Pennell’s ladies had an entire Clipper ship, The Flying Cloud, emblazoned across her chest. That’s not a sight you forget.’ Jim Allen thumped his glass on the table emphatically. The yellow Chinee Stinker rose in a wave toward the side. ‘And patriotic themes. A man who opens a thigh and fi
nds the face of Nathan Hale there, with the noose already on his poor neck, well, that man knows the moment when the spiritual and the carnal meet in happy union.’

  ‘So what was Adelaide like, Jim?’ a man at the next table asked. He was a smaller and a younger man, beardless, with a prominent red-veined nose. Harold recognized him. Third row. Fourth seat. Piercing finger-in-the-mouth whistle. ‘Did she heal you? Did you require a healing touch?’

  ‘I wouldn’t let a rude bouncer like Adelaide Dixon lay hands on me,’ said Purdy. ‘If I had a daughter like that, I’d drown her on the next steamer out of Hood Canal. We showed her, though, didn’t we, Jim? About halfway through the “lecture”, we got bored and Jim began to tell us about the new baseball field. After three years of carting sawdust from the mill to fill in the swamp next to the schoolhouse, Condon is finally ready to admit that his new field isn’t big enough.’

  ‘Any hit to left field lands in the logs. Do you play baseball?’ Jim asked Harold. Harold shook his head, both to answer the question and to express his sympathy over the situation in left field. ‘Automatic home run,’ Jim said.

  ‘I can’t abide these women’s-rights women.’ Purdy spat, briefly and accurately. ‘Unmarried croakers, the lot of them.’

  Jim Allen set his empty glass on the table with a decisive click. ‘You’ve put your finger on it. Unmarried. Soured throughout by disappointed affection. Miss Adelaide Dixon’s face tells the whole story. Some man has broken her heart and the rest of us must pay.’

  ‘If it were really rights these women wanted, they’ve only to ask,’ Purdy said. ‘A woman can coax a man into anything with a soft approach. What these women’s-rights women really want is revenge.’

  ‘You buying the next round, too?’ The fat man from the exhibition stood beside Harold’s chair. Harold looked up. He squinted but could not quite bring the man into focus. Two flat faces overlapped so that their noses were only an inch apart. Two fat right hands fingered two pistols at about eye level. ‘Sure,’ said Harold. ‘Sure I am.’

  ‘It’s usually understood that the fellow who treats has the floor,’ Jim Allen told Harold.

  ‘Jim was treating until you arrived,’ said red-nosed Jack. ‘Apparently he’s had a little windfall.’

  Jim Allen waved a hand modestly. ‘When a man comes into money, he shares it with his friends. You’d do the same.’

  Will Purdy raised his glass. ‘To the Washington Mill Lumber Company. To Company towns.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Jim Allen. They drank. Harold took one sip from his glass, one sip from his flask.

  ‘But tell us about yourself, Harold,’ Purdy asked. ‘How do you find yourself in your current line of work?’

  Harold coughed. ‘Just luck. I’ve always been a lucky sort. I won the woman in a card game up in the Yukon from the hunter who killed her wolf mother. Pair of black sevens. I played a bluff, and then it turned out I had the best hand anyway. Of course, she wasn’t much like you see her now.’

  ‘I didn’t see her,’ said Jim Allen.

  ‘When she first came to me, she was absolutely wild. A beast, really. Well, it was all she knew. I worked months to civilize her.’

  ‘I heard she was very well-behaved.’

  Jim Allen’s tone made Harold defensive. He took an angry drink, emptying the glass. Drops of whiskey clung to the hairs of his mustache. He licked them off. ‘What’s so damned great about being human?’ he asked. ‘What makes that such a damned prize?’

  Harold felt suddenly claustrophobic, packed into the small saloon with so many other sweating bodies. His tolerance for human company had reached its limits. He stood up, clutching his flask, and put the last of his Seabeck earnings on the bar. ‘Drink it up,’ he said to Blair. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  He went to the kitchen first for some bread and milk to take upstairs to Sarah Canary. He would never starve anyone into good behavior. He would never do that. Hunger was like having something alive and separate from you inside you, a beast that grew in your belly. If you gave the beast nothing to eat, then it ate you instead. Harold knew what it was like to feel those particular teeth. Rations at Andersonville had been carefully calculated. The men at Andersonville had not been starved into submission. They had been starved to death. The architects of Andersonville were great believers in death by natural causes.

  Liquor severed the connection between Harold’s will and his body while he was on the stairs. He made it halfway, balancing the plate on his hand and concentrating on holding the glass upright. Then gravity took him down two steps. He was able to stay on his feet and to save most of Sarah Canary’s milk. He leaned against the wall until he thought he was steady again. Up four more steps, down two. Up one. Down one. This was no good. Harold was forced to abandon the milk. Now he had one hand free for the stair rail. He pulled himself to the landing, spent several minutes inserting the key into the lock on Sarah Canary’s door, and went inside. Somewhere he had lost the plate with the bread on it as well. He couldn’t imagine where.

  Sarah Canary sat on the window seat, looking out. To her right, half a moon was rising over the tops of the ghostly trees. To her left, the bay glittered with icy waves. She had let the fire go out and it was as cold as the saloon would have been without the men and the drink. Her knees were bent up to her chest and her arms were around them. She rocked slightly, back and forth. Harold thought he heard the sounds of a bird leaving the window. Even through the glass he heard it, the puffing of air under curved wings. A sound almost like breathing.

  Sarah Canary ignored him. He pulled the flask of whiskey from his pocket and unscrewed the lid. ‘We’re going to have to take the cheapest way back to Port Gamble,’ he said. ‘Do you know what that means? Indian dugout canoe. Over the canal. If the weather’s as bad as it’s been, we’ll overturn and we’ll drown. You’ll drown. Even if you can swim, your skirts will fill with water and sink you. I won’t drown. I’ve survived against odds worse than these before. Nothing’s ever killed me yet.’

  He took a drink. For a moment he considered the possibility of tattooing Sarah Canary. Something big. Something brazen. He dropped the idea. Good money after bad.

  Sarah Canary sat and rocked and stared out the window. The moonlight came in at an angle, silvering the few gray hairs she had. It was kind of pretty. Kind of like frost. Her dress and her face took on a yellow cast. A cloud passed over the moon so that Sarah Canary flickered into blackness and then out of it again. She made small, birdlike noises with her tongue and her oversized teeth.

  ‘Damn you to hell anyway,’ said Harold quietly. Looking out the window, he tried to guess if it was going to rain tomorrow. There was a ring around the moon. It either meant that it was going to rain or that it wasn’t. He couldn’t remember which. But didn’t it always rain out here on this godforsaken coast? Could you ever go wrong predicting rain? Harold’s head was spinning and he could hear his own heartbeat, increasing incrementally in volume until it exploded in his ears, reminding him that, in spite of everything, he was still alive.

  He fell onto the window seat next to Sarah Canary. Her shoe touched his thigh. She did not draw away. ‘It’s very cold, isn’t it?’ Harold said to her. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Her hair stood out from her head in a sort of nimbus. He moved closer, reached out to her knee and ran his hand down from it toward her foot. She twitched slightly, like a dog having a dream, but she looked out the window and not at him. She warbled. Harold closed his hand over her ankle, then began speaking softly:

  ‘“And by the moon the reaper weary,

  Piling sheaves in uplands airy,

  Listening, whispers, ‘T is the fairy

  Lady of Shalott.”

  ‘That’s poetry.’ He returned his hand to her knee and this time he stroked upward along the thigh. ‘That’s Tennyson. I could heat you up,’ Harold said. Her dress began to move up her leg under his hand. She kicked him suddenly, perhaps reflexively, catching him just above the elbow. It didn’t really hurt, but the ki
ck had enough power to push her away, to slide her further along the window seat. She still wouldn’t look at him. His hand closed on her ankle and he pulled her back. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘That I should do all the work, make the engagements, plan the shows, do the shows, and that I should sit afterwards, drinking with the men you’ve disappointed and buying them drinks, and I should get nothing back? That I should feed you and shelter you and lose my damned money on you and get nothing? Does that seem fair to you? Does that seem right?’ He pulled her foot into his lap and tucked it between his two legs, pressing against it, rubbing himself to life with the sole of her shoe. He opened his legs to undo the buttons at her ankle. Sarah Canary kicked again. Her foot escaped from his hands and her heel dug into his crotch, filling him with blunt, pervasive, and utterly compelling pain. He couldn’t see through it. He couldn’t hear through it. He couldn’t speak through it. He could only live through it.

  When he recovered, Sarah Canary was standing away from him, beyond the splash of moonlight in the room. Her head was down and she was hugging herself, her arms crossed, her hands on her shoulders. Like a stone angel. Like the angel over someone’s grave. She stared out past him from her lowered face in the shadows.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t seem fair to me,’ he whispered. His voice rose. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’ He lunged for her but missed, hitting the nightstand instead, knocking the washbasin to the floor, where it shattered. Water stained the wooden floor dark as blood.

  Harold stood for a moment, swaying and considering. He took a step toward Sarah Canary and his shoe came down on the broken china and the water. He slid to his knees and then collapsed in an attitude of despair, his forehead resting in a puddle on the floor. ‘God,’ he said. He covered his ears so his heartbeat wouldn’t be so loud, but this only made it worse; his hands shut out all the other noises and his heartbeat echoed off their cupped walls. Jimmy had died just this way, in just this position, with his head in the mud and his hands on his ears, listening to the last sounds of his heart. Harold sat up quickly as soon as he remembered. ‘Don’t do this to me,’ he said. He was begging. ‘Don’t do this. Please.’ And then he softened his voice, made it as coaxing as he could. It wasn’t a skill he’d practiced much. ‘Good girl. Be a good girl. Come over here.’ Sarah Canary had disappeared.