Talking at the Woodpile Read online

  As they crowbarred boards from the walls, their teeth chattered, and they hunched their shoulders to draw their arms close to their bodies. Craven couldn’t look at Buford. The tooth was moving up and down like a needle on a sewing machine and beating out a staccato rhythm on the bottom gum.

  “Why don’t you send Morse code greetings to all our friends in Elsa while you’re at it?” Craven yelled.

  Buford stood for a moment with his arms piled high with wood and his nose running. Then he threw the boards at Craven’s feet and stomped off to the house, yelling over his shoulder, “Go to hell! Pack the wood yourself.”

  In the next few days their driveway piled high with snow, and the battery froze solid in their battered blue Ford Model T truck. By early January the cold and dark were straining relationships throughout the Yukon.

  One night, Craven woke from a restless sleep. He thought he’d heard someone calling his name. He looked across the room. Buford lay on his back with his mouth wide open, snoring noisily. The gold cap flickered in the oil lamp’s light like a one-ounce nugget. Craven knew the tooth had called him.

  “I’m coming,” he whispered and reached under his bed for his tool box.

  Silently Craven rummaged until he found an ancient pair of pliers. He walked across the room on his toes in his sleeping robe, poised himself over Buford and brought the pliers closer to the tooth. Just as the metal jaws were about to snap shut, the tassel on his nightcap brushed Buford’s face and woke him. Buford opened his eyes and screamed horrifically. Craven jumped up and ran madly around the room in circles.

  “You monster!” Buford yelled. “If Pa was here, he would kick your ass, you idiot.”

  “If Pa was here, he would smack you until that tooth dropped out,” Craven shouted back, waving the pliers at him.

  “Don’t ever try to murder Mabeleine again,” Buford cried. He pulled the pillow tightly over his head and rolled over muttering to himself.

  Craven was puzzled. Mabeleine? She must be an old girlfriend he’d never known about.

  At breakfast the next morning, Craven lied, “I did that because I had a vision in my dreams. I’ve found that poke of gold to pay you for your tooth.”

  Buford was skeptical. “A vision? A poke of gold? You tried to rip a tooth out of my head. Make no excuses.”

  “I did have a vision,” Craven said, “and it told me that this year’s Yukon River ice breakup is going to be exactly as it was thirty-eight years ago in 1896, on May 19 at 2:35 in the afternoon.”

  Buford shook his head and snorted a laugh. “This is all too crazy,” he said. “You’re crazy.”

  “Furthermore, with this information we’re not only going to win the gold, but you, my brother, are going to be remembered forever and go down in Dawson’s history. People will never forget how your tooth was pulled, and you will have all the attention you want.”

  “How’s that?” Buford asked.

  “You know how the tripod on the river ice is wired to a clock? When the ice breaks up, it trips the time. Well, because we know the time, we’ll attach your tooth to the tripod with fishing line. When the river goes out, so does your tooth. It’s a sure thing. Remember, I had a vision. You have to do this for history and the gold, Buford,” Craven said, pointing his finger in Buford’s face.

  Buford wanted to grab it and break the end of it off. Vision smishion, he thought. But he said, “I’ll think about it. But the thing is, once the tooth is pulled, it’s gone.”

  “But the story will live forever,” Craven said.

  “I don’t know.” Buford shook his head.

  Life around the cabin deteriorated after that. Buford was extra protective of his tooth and went to bed wearing an old baseball catcher’s mask that hardly fit his large, round face. Craven didn’t help matters by carrying the pliers around and snapping them open and closed. The sound sent chills up Buford’s spine, and he feared for his Mabeleine.

  At the dinner table one evening, Craven and Buford were peeling fruit for dessert.

  “Did you really have a vision, Craven?” Buford asked quietly as he reached for an apple.

  “Yep,” Craven said.

  “And do you think the river will pull my tooth and we will win the gold?”

  “Yep,” Craven said again.

  “Do you really think me and my tooth will be famous?”

  “Are you thinking of doing this?” Craven asked.

  “I’m thinking,” Buford said, and bit into an apple. He always wolfed his food, and in one gulp he swallowed most of the apple.

  Craven stared in amazement. Where the tooth had once stood, there was nothing but an empty field. Buford hadn’t noticed that anything had changed. He got up from the table and went to nap on the couch.

  That night Craven woke with a great weight on his chest. Buford was perched on him like a gargoyle on a flying buttress with a pair of pliers clamped firmly onto his front tooth. Buford leaned closer, looking crazier than Craven had ever seen anyone looking before, and quietly said, “I too had a vision, Craven. It said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” For one second Craven was distracted and wondered when Buford had gotten religious. Then Buford gave a solid tug, and the tooth came out like a sink plug on a chain.

  He waved the tooth in front of Craven’s face. Craven went white and his eyes bulged. He screamed in pain, threw Buford off and ran with his hand over his mouth to find water and a towel. The pliers had axle grease on them and tasted terrible.

  “You idiot!” Craven screamed, spitting blood. “You crazy, out-of-your-mind idiot!”

  Neither of them slept for the rest of the night, each now being afraid of the other, and in the morning they silently turned their backs. They maintained monastic silence for months, which they both admitted was difficult in the small house. Craven didn’t even try to explain; he knew Buford believed with all his heart that he had somehow stolen Mabeleine.

  “Where is she?” he would ask in the dark of the night, causing Craven to rise up on one elbow and squint to see that his brother was still in bed. He wasn’t sure if Buford was awake or talking in his sleep. It gave him reason to be afraid.

  When the river ice broke up, the relationship thawed. Even Victor could see Buford was becoming depressed. One day Craven said, “I can’t see us going on like this, Buford. Either we settle this or we should sell and get separate cabins.”

  Buford didn’t respond for a few days, but then he agreed. “I can forgive you for losing us the poke of gold, since now we can’t pull my tooth on the trip wire, but I cannot forgive you for taking my tooth. Not just now, anyway.”

  “I didn’t touch your damn tooth. You ate it,” Craven said.

  Buford got tears in his eyes and turned his head away. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  Craven could see that he had to make up with Buford even though he was not guilty.

  “You should get new tooth for Buford,” Victor said. “His tooth was like friend, made him happy. People liked Buford with tooth.”

  Dr. Gillis was back for the summer, so Craven had him make a front-tooth bridge and encouraged Buford to get a full set of dentures.

  “I hate dentists,” Buford said, but he eventually gave in to Victor and Craven’s encouragement and had the work done. Once it was done, though, he refused to smile. “Makes me look like an idiot,” he said.

  A week after the dental work was finished, Craven noticed that teeth were disappearing from Buford’s head. He mentioned it to Victor.

  “Just wait,” Victor said with a wink. “I know what Buford is doing. Not happy.”

  Months later there was only one tooth left, and Mabeleine was back in her spot. Buford looked like his old self; people wanted to see the tooth, and his happy celebrity status returned.

  “I would like to go see Dr. Gillis again,” he said.

  Craven made an appointment.

  “You’re lucky you caught me,” Dr. Gillis said. “I’m leaving tomorrow, going back to Seattle. You’re the last patie
nt this summer.”

  When Buford emerged four hours later from the dentist’s office, he had a gold-capped tooth with a diamond insert. He was so happy he couldn’t stop smiling, and everyone got a good look at the new Buford. He walked around the restaurant like a peacock in love.

  He called the tooth Gertie after a gold-rush dance hall girl and kept a picture of her in his wallet.

  Townspeople called him Diamond Tooth Buford, or Diamond for short.

  “I love my name and I love my tooth and I love my brother who got me Gertie to replace Mabeleine,” Buford told everybody.

  After all the trouble, Craven now left Buford’s tooth alone and never found fault with him for anything ever again. Well, not for a while, anyway. He realized that a person’s happiness is much more important than a person’s appearance and that a quest for fame has to run its course.

  “And that’s a law of the Yukon, Victor,” he said.

  “That’s good law, very good law,” Victor said. “I like it.”

  Mimosa Nightingale

  Craven Clutterbuck was superstitious beyond anything that could be considered normal. “I’m sure bad things will befall me if I don’t complete my rituals,” he said. “I’m a fearful man.”

  He had a full inventory of standard superstitions: black cats, walking under ladders and putting new shoes on a table. He was much more imaginative in the ones he invented for himself. In the morning he got out of bed, walked backward to the door, turned the door handle five times each way then hopped on one foot out of the room. He avoided crossing any street until he had recited the alphabet. If he got a haircut, he tipped the barber exactly seven cents in pennies, and he always said “sis-boom-bah” as he hammered a nail. All these actions and more he recorded in thick pencil in a lined scribbler. He made his entries daily.

  His brother Buford and Victor the Gypsy watched Craven heading to work down Eighth Avenue. Every couple of steps he would hop.

  “It’s like he lives in a world of his own,” Buford said.

  “I like it very much,” Victor said.

  Neil and Faith were walking behind Craven on their way uptown.

  “He and that gypsy are nutcases,” Neil said.

  “You’re the nut,” Faith said. “People had to blow you up just to keep you in order.”

  Craven had organized and chaired the Dawson City Spiritualists’ Fellowship. Young, blond Hudson Godwit was the secretary-treasurer. The group had no problem recruiting members; Dawson was full of people interested in spiritual things. Craven had more of a problem finding a place to meet, because proprietors were wary of such a group. But the Carnegie library had just recently been remodelled into a Freemasons’ Hall, and the group rented a basement meeting room once a month.

  Craven was sincere, but fake conversations with the departed and levitations unfortunately led the fellowship astray.

  “See if you can contact my dead partner and ask him where he stashed that deed for our gold mine on Brewer Creek,” one old sourdough member asked.

  “They’re just a bunch of spook chasers,” Miss Mimosa Nightingale said to Mr. Cooper as she picked up groceries from his store.

  “You got that right,” Mr. Cooper said, “but half the town will turn up for their meetings.”

  “I tend to deal with reality, not half-baked ideas that have no foundation,” Mimosa said, handing her money to him with a henna-tattooed hand.

  “I go to church,” Mr. Cooper said, and at that the conversation ended.

  The DCSF sometimes met at Buford and Craven’s house. Buford would have nothing to do with it. He left before the fellowship members arrived and returned home only after they left. On winter nights he would sit in the permafrost-tilted Occidental Hotel bar while they met, and in the summer he would walk the hills behind the house. He would make a joke when he came in the door by spinning around three times, bowing, whistling “Jimmy Crack Corn” and hopping on one foot around the kitchen table so that his great weight caused the dishes to rattle in the cupboards.

  Craven was infuriated by Buford’s disrespect. “Don’t make fun of the spirits,” he warned.

  Buford snickered and went off to polish his tooth.

  Mimosa, an attractive middle-aged lady with dark hair and dark eyes, lived at the north end of Dawson City next door to Chief Daniel and his extended family. It was rumoured that she was to be married once at Mayo Landing, but the groom had jilted her. Grieving, she hadn’t taken off her wedding dress for a week. The people in Dawson didn’t know who he was, but someone had heard that he was dark and handsome and looked something like Victor the Gypsy.

  Mimosa lived alone on an inheritance left by her father, who’d made a fortune on a claim twenty-seven above the Discovery claim. Robert Nightingale had been one of the lucky ones who’d lived and mined at Forty Mile, fifty miles downstream from Dawson, where George Carmack registered the Bonanza Creek discovery claim on August 21, 1896. The news of the gold strike had spread like wildfire, and like many others, he’d dropped everything and sped to the creek in time to make his claim. Once he got wealthy, Robert sent to Seattle for his bride, Mary. A year after her arrival, Mimosa, their only child, was born in a tent on the creek with a Chinese cook and a Norwegian schoolteacher acting as midwives.

  “I never delivered baby before,” Changchang said.

  “Ya, me neither, but I heard my neighbour in Fredrikstad explain it once,” Frieda said.

  The baby was delivered without a problem. When news of the birth spread up and down the creeks, the homesick miners showered Mary with gifts.

  Robert was handsome, and Mary was strikingly beautiful. Mimosa grew up a beautiful woman. She was also highly intuitive. She read cards, palms, tea leaves and whatever else a person might want. These were all props, but she used them to make it easier for people to understand her readings. She only had to hold someone’s hand for a moment to understand that person. Sometimes even that wasn’t necessary.

  “I have to humour people with the cards, otherwise they won’t believe I can do it,” she told Craven once. “I think I can be of help to people, but at times I hate my intuition. It tells me too many things.”

  Craven was very interested in Mimosa. “Beautiful and an oracle,” he sighed.

  Mimosa liked Craven. He was honest and her friend, but she didn’t agree with his spiritualism.

  “Those table levitations, trumpet blasts from the other world and fortune telling aren’t real, Craven. Don’t be taken in by that nonsense,” she said, “especially if you are asked to pay money for it.”

  Some people didn’t like Mimosa; they thought she dabbled in dark subjects. Others were drawn to her and sought advice. Chief Daniel and his family visited her often. They had a secret that Mimosa had asked Chief Daniel never to tell anyone. The secret was that Mimosa could heal; she had healed the Daniel grandchildren when they were ill with the influenza.

  “Everyone will be at my door if they find out, and I will be a spectacle,” Mimosa said. “Besides, it drains my energy. I can only handle a few healings in as many days.”

  Chief Daniel and his wife Martha knew healers well and kept the information between themselves. If a healing was necessary, they asked Mimosa first and kept their pledge of secrecy.

  “That woman is evil, I just know it,” Neil O’Neill said. “Anyone that can read the future in tea leaves has to have held hands with the devil.”

  “You are the devil,” Faith said. “You lie and steal.”

  One Monday midmorning Hudson Godwit’s long legs sped him up the middle of Second Avenue toward Mimosa’s house. He was carrying a still-warm pancake wrapped in a tea towel. As he went by Cooper’s Grocery and Hardware Store, Mr. Cooper was sweeping the boardwalk and called out to him, “What have you got there, young man? Looks like you’re being chased by a fire.”

  “You won’t believe this, Mr. Cooper, but what I’ve seen in this pancake that my mother cooked me this morning is amazing.” He pulled back the tea towel to show the markings
on the cake. “See, it’s a message, and I’m taking it up to Mimosa to read.”

  “You’d better get going before the ravens try to take it off you. Hey, if she tells you who will win this year’s Stanley Cup, let me know.” Mr. Cooper laughed and went back to his sweeping.

  Mimosa was waiting at the door when Hudson arrived. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said.

  Hudson laid the pancake down and started to explain.

  Mimosa signalled with a finger for him to be quiet. She glanced at the pancake and then, for theatrical effect, ran her hand over it as if it were a burning flame. It was the only way she could get him to believe, but pancake or no pancake, there was something she had to tell him.

  Hudson was entranced.

  Mimosa closed her eyes, bent her head back and hummed a few bars of a tune she’d heard earlier on the radio. Then she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open as if she had returned from another world, and spoke in a calm voice. “This is only for the present, Hudson. You are going to be given an opportunity to become something you always wished for. Your life will change for the better forever.”

  “Wow,” Hudson said. “That is significant. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and reporter.”

  “Of course,” Mimosa said, leaning back in her chair.

  The light from the window shone on her, and Hudson thought how attractive she was. If only he were older.

  Mimosa was looking out the window at the Daniel kids playing in their yard next door, and without looking away, she said, “There are plenty of fish in the sea, Hudson.”

  “I have to go, thank you,” Hudson said and went to pick up the pancake.

  “Leave that here,” Mimosa said, placing a finger on the pancake. Hudson obeyed and opened the door to leave.

  “Tell Mr. Cooper to put his money on the Montreal Maroons.”

  “Yes ma’am, I will,” Hudson said, then did a double take. He hadn’t mentioned hockey.