Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

Revolver (2 page)

BOOK: Revolver

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Wash Day, night

“Y
ou smell so much nicer now,” Anna would tease her little brother, each and every Wash Day. There were enough years between them that they'd never been rivals, only friends, and until Nadya had come along, Anna had been Sig's mother as well as his sister.

These days he felt as if he had two mothers, and God knew there were very few years between the two, with Anna now a woman and Nadya twenty-five years younger than her husband.

But this Wash Day, there had been no bathing, no talk, no laughter, and no Einar.

The threeâSig, Anna, and Nadyaâhad waited all afternoon, until the bickering between the two women who were not his mother grew so bad that without explaining where he was going Sig decided to head out and look for his father. At least he could meet him halfway home on the track and ride back on the sled.
Maybe Einar would flick the dogs into a run and they'd rush like the north wind through the scrubby trees surrounding the lake.

Even in the depths of winter, Sig spent much time outside, thinking, thinking, thinking. Trying to work out what to do with himself. When they'd arrived in Giron, he'd spent a couple of solitary years in the school the mining company had opened in town, but though he learned a little, he learned little about people. He'd always been the misfit boy, the newcomer, son of the new assay clerk who seemed to think he was too good to live in Giron like the rest of them. Turning fourteen, Sig had left school. Now he had to decide what to do with his life, when in truth there was small choice but to join the mine, like everyone else. From time to time he would help Einar at the Assay Office, but otherwise he chopped wood, mended fences, repaired the cabin, looked after the dogs, and, trying to find himself, got lost in the forests instead. And though he spent much of his time looking, thinking, watching, he could never quite shift the feeling that he was waiting for something.

Maybe it had something to do with the life they'd led. What is it that gets lost, gets lost somewhere in the snow, when you spend almost all your life on the run, with no mother and the cold snapping at your heels every moment of every day of every year?

Whatever it was, Sig didn't even know its name.

Growing impatient to see his father, he'd shuffled into his boots, then fetched his skis down from the pegs under the eaves at the short side of the cabin, and poled away across the track, glad to be out listening to nothing but silence. His skis had tugged in the snow as he went, and he knew he should have done what his father had been telling him to for days: rub a candle across their flat fat faces.

“Even whalemen rub oil on the bottom of their whaleboats,” Einar had said, “so the water doesn't stick. And
you
can't see the point of a little wax on your skis!”

It had been hard going, and Sig was just wondering whether to ignore his father's advice again and risk the much easier and much shorter trip to Giron across the ice, when he looked out across the frozen lake.

He stopped.

There was a black smudge on the ice, a quarter of a mile out, maybe more. His mind slowed for a moment, as it made a connection. He told himself that the smudge could be anything, but he knew this sight: the black on the white. Sometimes there'd be a murder of crows hopping around the smudge, the carcass of a reindeer that had fallen for some reason in the snow. The crows were bold, unafraid of humans, and would only flap lazily away at the last second, as Sig and Einar approached to inspect the dead beast, its ribcage already stripped bare by
the birds. Sig remembered the very first time he'd seen such a thing; he'd been perhaps eight years old. His father had beckoned him closer to have a look, but Sig kept his distance, not scared, not upset, but just watching.

It was starting to snow.

He looked up and down the track again, straining his ears, but he could hear nothing. He looked back at the dark blotch on the whiteness. It hadn't moved. With that, he turned his skis and slid down the lake shore.

He tested the first few feet of ice with his pole. It held, but that proved nothing; only his full weight would be a true test. He looked out to the black dot and for a second couldn't see it, then there it was again, slightly off to his left.

Suddenly, despite the cold and the freezing air catching in his nose, he began to prickle with sweat. He had realized something. The smudge lay exactly on a path to the cabin if you were to come straight from Giron, which he could place precisely from the sky-high plume of smoke and steam that rose eternally from the iron works. A path that would go dangerously near the river mouth.

Then Sig knew exactly what had happened.

Heedless of weak ice, ignoring the creaking beneath him, he pushed onto the lake and poled his way with silent desperation toward the smudge. It took very little time for the dot to become a distinct huddle, and then a whole series of shapes.

When Fram, the lead dog, saw him, she began to bark a welcome. She stood, and this made the other three dogs get to their feet too, but Sig was staring only at the shape of his father lying on the ice.

The horror of seeing his father frozen to death hammered into him, but there was something worse. As Sig looked frantically but hopelessly around, he pieced together what had happened, and he knew his father had died an utterly pathetic and pitiful death.

His body lay twisted on one side, arms splayed slightly above his head. His legs and the bottom half of his torso shone with the gleam of ice, the rest of him did not. For some reason he had taken one of his gloves off, a ridiculous thing to do in this cold. His Assay Office satchel lay on the ice, and then Sig saw the little matchbox, and the jumble of matches near his father's hands, which looked like a microscopic version of the logjams the timbermen make on the river in summertime.

None of it made sense until Sig saw what a stranger to the North might have missed. A slight disturbance, a couple of jagged edges with less frost aging than the rest, sticking up out of a patch of ice. Sig knew what it was.

It was the weak spot on the ice, the hole his father had fallen through, a hole from which he had somehow managed to scramble out and which had already frozen over again in the merciless cold.

The ice on Einar's body showed he had fallen in up to his waist, perhaps his chest. If he had gone right in, the lake would never have let him go again, and even so it must have taken a heroic effort to drag himself free.

Sig saw the whole scene now as if he'd been there.

He saw his father pulling on the ganglines of the dogs' harnesses, the dogs themselves fighting to stay on their feet, claws scraping frantically. Somehow he gets enough of his body out of the hole and hauls his legs up after him. He knows he has to work fast. His clothes are already freezing onto him, and though home is only a mile distant, he'll be dead before he gets halfway. Unless he can make a fire.

He has no wood, but then he sees clearly. The sled is made of wood; there are papers from the mine office in his leather satchel. And he's got matches. But with gloved hands he can't even get the box out of his pocket.

He risks pulling off one glove with his teeth and fishes the box from inside his fur-lined parka, but it's bad now, his body is shuddering with great convulsions, as the ice forming on his legs and feet greedily sucks away his body heat. He drops the matchbox in the snow and, kneeling down, it takes many attempts just to get his fingers, already numb, to close around it.

At last, at last, he holds it fast, then realizes he should have got the papers and broken up the sled first. He wants to cry, but he can't. He can't even think straight.
He pulls at his satchel with his gloved left hand, but even that is hard because he can no longer control the muscles in his arms.

Knowing his chances are slipping away, he pushes the matchbox open, but then he shivers and pushes too far. Box and tray separate and all the tiny wooden lifelines spill into the inch of snow on the frozen lake.

Sig sees it all, just as if he'd been there. He knows he'll never forget it to the end of his own days. He wonders what it's like to die. To die alone.

Now, Einar knows he's dead. He can't pick the matches up with his bulky, shaking gloved hand, and he can't pick them up with his free hand because it has frozen into an unworking claw. Frantically he tries to push the heads of the matches against the striking paper on the side of the box. He tries to use his lips to pick them up, but it's no good; he's lost all feeling in his face.

Finally, with a hideous irony, his fumblings against the box randomly strike head against paper, and a small chemical miracle invented by some Swedes, involving among other things glass, phosphorous, sulphur, and potassium, occurs out there on the frozen lake in the middle of a Northern nowhere. A single splutter of flame catches as the match head ignites, lying on the ice. It burns halfway down the wooden stalk of the match, and all Einar can do is watch it burn for a second, and then die.

An hour later, and he's dead too.

Sun Day, early morning

“H
ave faith. Be brave, Sig,” Anna had said, and they'd gone, leaving him with Einar. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, then stopped himself, remembering it was a gesture of his father's.

Sig had heard stories that when you freeze to death, the last thing you feel is a wonderful warmth spread through your whole body, filling you with joy. He hoped it was like that for his father, but a bit of him, in the corner of his mind, wondered how anyone actually knows. Again he was reminded of his father, who would always say, “Know what you can. Know
everything
you can know.”

All Sig knew as he knelt by his father was that suddenly there had been the sound of skis shushing up behind him, and Anna and Nadya were there.

He remembered little of the hurried plans. Anna and Nadya had come fully dressed for the snow; they'd seen Sig on the ice and had rushed out to intercept him. The
snow sifted down at them insistently, and hesitantly they managed to lift Einar onto the sled, trying to suppress their panic, pushing aside the shock of seeing Einar dead. The ice had complained and whined, yet none of them spoke of the sudden frozen end that could take them at any moment. With Einar on the sled, they made it to the cabin, running onto the land before the creaking and cracking could shatter their nerve entirely.

There had been a short, silent standoff as they wondered who should go and who should stay, and in the end, Sig, seeing the discomfort on his sister's face, had said, “You two go. I'll wait.”

Nadya squeezed his hand.

“Bravely done,” she whispered.

Then the two women had gone to town for help.

“Be brave,” Anna had said. She was trying not to cry. Nadya had said nothing. There was an empty look in her eyes as if the cold landscape had taken possession of them. They'd set off with the dogs once again, Anna driving the team, standing on the runners, Nadya sitting where Einar had lain. Sig watched them vanish, and between the smoky trees and the gray snow in the dusk, they vanished very quickly indeed. He headed back to the cabin.

He'd closed the fire down a little before going to bed, now that it was full of food and eating slowly but happily. He looked at the narrow bed where Einar and Nadya
slept, and at the bench where Anna put her mattress every night. He had a choice of beds now.

Then he looked at his father on the table, and he opted for his sacks of flour in the freezing larder, leaving the warmth of the cabin to the corpse.

In the pale morning, rubbing his arms to get the blood moving, Sig stumbled into the light.

His father had moved. He looked as though he were sleeping, turned on one side with his arms and legs now gently folded beside him.

Sig rushed over to the table, a stupid hope rising to his lips, and then he saw his father's face, and he knew he hadn't come back to life. His body had simply thawed and relaxed, the rigor mortis passing too, but there was no life in his eyes, nor breath in his mouth, already starting to pinch into a death mask.

Sig collapsed back onto the chair behind him and stifled the tears that began to burn in his eyes, because he understood it would not help to cry.

Then there was a knock at the door.

It wasn't God or the Declaration of Independence that made all men equal. It was Samuel Colt.

ANON

1899 Nome

66 LATITUDE NORTH

Frontier

A
greed brought them, and now it seemed as if that greed would kill them. Ice-bitten and hunger-eyed, Einar Andersson stood on the beach, very near the creek that had started the whole damn thing, and wept. It had been his greed, his weakness, and it was his guilt that he fought to ignore now.

Tears froze to his eyelashes and his cheeks, and he rubbed them away with a sealskin-gloved hand before they could frostbite him.

Away, almost on the horizon now, was the boat.

He had pleaded with the captain, pleaded, begged, offered bribes he did not have, and all for nothing.

The captain was not a bad man. Einar knew that. But though the captain was not a bad man, he was a stubborn one, a quality perhaps a ship's captain needs when sailing northern seas.

He'd given Einar the chance to speak, at least. Many would not even have bothered with that courtesy in this faith-deserted place, but the captain had stood on the beach beside the very last rowboat to put out to the ship.

“What would you have me do, Einar?”

The captain put a thick-gloved hand on Einar's shoulder. Einar pushed it away.

“She's dying. Don't you understand? She's dying.”

The captain looked at the ice-rimed stones on the beach, shaking his head. He turned and barked orders to his men, then spoke quietly to Einar.

“Then I am sorry, sir, but your wife is already dead. God be with you.”

He turned to go and Einar grabbed wildly at his arm.

“Wait!” he cried. “Please! A day or two and, God willing, she'll be well enough to move.”

The captain tugged his arm free, scowling at Einar.

“What would you have me do?” he repeated, angrily this time. He jabbed his hand toward the sea horizon.

“The life of your wife against two hundred and fifty souls on that boat? Is it a gamble you want me to take?”

Einar opened his mouth but could not think what to say. He closed it again and watched as the captain stepped over the stern of the long rowboat even as his men shoved it into the near-freezing water, its motions already slowing in the plummeting cold. Very soon, the captain knew, and Einar knew, the water would slow to the point where
it froze, froze solid in strange waves and ridges near the shore, smoothing to form an ice sheet that within a few weeks would reach clear across the Norton Sound and far out into the Bering Sea, to the Pribilov Islands, over five hundred miles away.

Now Einar watched the boat go.

The last boat. There would not be another for seven months. Not until the ice melted in the late spring.

The boat dwindled, barely seeming to move yet getting smaller with every second. In the stillness of the late morning, the sounds carried across the sea with ease. He heard the tolling of the ship's bell, and he remembered it was Sunday. In his mind he saw the pastor calling the faithful to a secluded corner of the deck for prayer, asking the Lord for safe passage to their destination, two thousand miles and more to the south.

Einar watched the boat go, as some stubbornness of his own told him that whatever might happen in the next seven months, he'd be standing on this beach when the first boats returned. He would nurse Maria to one ending or another, but whatever else, he would stand on that beach next May, as if he'd never moved from the spot.

Suddenly he realized the boat was no longer there to be seen.

So. He turned his back on the sea and looked at the Cape Nome Mining Camp. A few dozen tents. A handful
of clapboard shacks formed what was optimistically being called Front Street, as if this place was a town.

Their home for the next seven months. At least one of the shacks was theirs. They might just make it. As for Maria, only God knew, but then with a surge of fear tightening his throat, he thought of the children.

Little Anna, only ten, andâheaven!âhis boy, Sigfried, half that.

He put his head down and walked back up the beach, hearing a last toll of the ship's bell as he went.

Greed had brought him; only Faith would save them.

Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour. The revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant.

WALT WHITMAN. 1857

BOOK: Revolver

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