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agony for twelve days, the church choir singing in an attempt to alleviate his misery and "bring him back
to God." What a hard way to go.
By the time I finished the short paper, the men had the wagon nearly loaded. They swung aboard with the
kit while I hoisted myself up to sit uncomfortably close to the wagoneer. He smelled worse than any of
the men on the boat, none of them paragons of hygiene. His face and exposed forearms were crusty with
open sores, and all his teeth were rotten. I would rather have walked alongside in the mud, but we were
off as soon as I was settled.
Icould have walked in a third of the time, too, as the tent town was waking up and the mud road was
crowded with people and animals. The wagoneer kept up a constant stream of muttered oaths that
exploded into shouted imprecations when necessary.
He did find us a place, though; a recently vacated square of almost dry dirt. Doc paid him and he amiably
helped the men unload. The things that were not too heavy for me to lift, I unloaded and stacked along
one edge of our temporary homestead.
We had gotten a sheet of printed instructions along with the tent, but they were nowhere to be seen. The
boys tried to improvise its erection while Doc and I searched for the directions. We found the sheet
eventually, safely hidden inside a box of dry goods, by which time the boys had strung together a
misshapen skein of rope and canvas. Several neighbors watched with interest.
The neighbors did help, though, once we had the canvas and poles laid out according to the diagram. It
was good to have several men pulling on the ropes. By the time we were finished, the canvas was tight as
a drumhead.
One neighbor sold me a bale and a half of straw for a dollar, and I floored the tent with that, to control
mud or dust, depending on the weather. It gave the place a pleasant smell and felt good underfoot.
I set about preparing a lunch of fried potatoes and bacon while the men moved the gear inside, and I was
overtaken with a sudden hollow feeling.
This was the end of the line for me. I had shepherded my boy to the beginning of the next stage of his life,
and from here on I was supernumerary, just a consumer of the goods they would be needing later on.
After lunch, Doc and Chuck went off to find a mule. Daniel and I washed the dishes in uncomfortable
silence. He felt it, too.
I skipped all of the things I wanted to say. "Would you come down to the dock with me? I have to book
passage." He came along with a silence that a passerby might have mistaken for sullenness. Neither of us
really knew what to say. I know that he was glad I was leaving, and felt uncomfortable about that.
It was not a place where you wanted to abandon your only child. The filth and smell bothered me less
than the ubiquitous opportunities for sin and excess. I knew him too well to give voice to my concern, but
he knew me well enough to read my thoughts.
"Mom," he said as we mounted the steps up to the dock area, "I want you to try not to worry too much
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about the..." His gesture included, as any gesture there would, a number of prostitutes and drunks. "I
think I can resist all that."
"I'm more worried about bears and desperados," I said, which at that moment was a lie. "Be careful and
watch your temper."
He nodded and smiled. "No more Pinkerton men. Oh...." He reached into his deep coat pocked and
pulled out the revolver. "We said you would keep this."
I hesitated, but took it. Spinning the universe off in a new direction.
None of the next day's southbound boats was going straight to Sitka, but they all put in at Juneau. I
booked on the latest morning one, leaving at ten.
We strolled along the boardwalk for a while, talking about inconsequential things. After a while I told him
I could make my own way back to the camp, and had some shopping to do. I gave him a half dollar and
bid him pick up a few bottles of beer-not whiskey!
When he was gone, I doubled back to a pawnshop we'd passed. The window was full of trinkets and
guns, but there was one thing that had caught my attention as an early Christmas present, a fine hunting
knife. From my Philadelphia kitchen I recognized the expensive Toledo steel, the shimmering rainbow of
its damascene surface. The handle and hilt were smooth horn and brass. A hefty man's knife, more than a
foot from pommel to point.
I bargained the shopkeeper down from fifteen dollars to twelve, which would actually have been a good
price back in the States. I also picked up a folding knife for Chuck and a fine tobacco pouch for Doc,
soft leather lined with gutta-percha.
Perhaps the knife was a symbolic exchange, weapon for weapon, though I don't think that occurred to
me at the time. I just remembered that the steel on his belt knife had been so soft it had bent while he was
prying open a crate, and I'd resolved to get him something better.
There was nobody at the tent when I got there, so I put water on to boil and set to scraping the mud off
my boots. The straw was luxurious under my bare feet. Nobody could see from the outside, so I left
them bare while I padded around preparing dinner. I felt a little exposed and forward when Doc came
home, alone, but he glanced at my feet and looked away, and then deliberately removed his own boots
and scraped them more or less clean, and set them outside to dry.
He offered to help with dinner, but there was really nothing to do. I was boiling the dried beef into a
chewable state. We each got a cup of broth from it, and he told me all about their adventures in mule
commerce.
After a few minutes' discourse on mules' teeth and coats and the mendacity of their owners, a sudden
obvious question occurred to me. "Doc-what on earth are you and the boys going to do with a mule?
You can't carry it in pieces over the pass."
He blinked a couple of times, sorting that out. "Nobody told you."
"Told me what? About a mule?"
"Rosa... things change fast here. We found out this morning that there was a way to bypass the long haul
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up the mountain."
"On a mule?"
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