Free Astray by Emma Donoghue Page A

faithful and affectionate husband until death.
    His skin is cold and wet like a fish; the only water left in his body is on the outside. Henry licks his shoulder. He is sinking down below all human things. He is sliding into the ocean; he will not wait till her ship meets the land. He will sport around it like a dolphin, he will make her laugh louder than the gulls.
    He shuts his eyes and swims down into the darkness.
    Jane peers at the landing stage where the crowds are milling. That speck of black, standing so still, that must be him. His eyes, sharper than hers, will have marked her out already. What distances cannot be traveled by the gaze of love?
     
     
     
     

Counting the Days
    All italicized lines are taken verbatim from the thirteen letters (May 1848–May 1849) between Henry Johnson and Jane McConnell Johnson published by their great-granddaughter Louise Wyatt in Ontario History (1948). You can find more details about the family in Wyatt’s introduction to the letters at http://ied.dippam.ac.uk/records/49618.
    On landing in July 1849—and not finding Henry—Jane and the children went on to her sister Isabella’s in London, Ontario. Confirmation of her husband’s death from cholera did not reach her for three months. Within a year, Jane married a local farmer of fifty-three, William Nettleton from Belfast; they had seven more children.

THE YUKON
    1896
     
     
     
     

SNOWBLIND
    T hey were both heading for the Yukon goldfields when they ran into each other in St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Alaskan coast. Goat (named for his yellow goatee) was a Swede, and Injun Joe was from Iowa; folk said Injun looked more than half Indian but he didn’t know if it was true. They’d both turned twenty-two that July, and it was this coincidence that convinced them to hitch up. It has to mean luck, said Goat, doesn’t it? It had to mean something.
    Both of them had put their hands to just about anything since hard times got harder round ‘ninety-three. Injun had been an apple picker, a ranch hand, a slaughterman; he’d even done a few prizefights till an Irish boy blinded his left eye. Goat had played three-card monte and thrown drunks out of a whorehouse. They were both tough as hardtack, could tote seventy pounds, and scorned a quitter. Neither knew much about prospecting except that it was all they wanted to do. Goat said he was “gold crazy,” was that the phrase? It’d only been a few years since he’d come from Sweden with eighty-five cents in his pocket. His English was good but he didn’t trust it. He claimed he’d take a fifteen-dollarpoke of gold dust over a twenty-dollar banknote, he was sentimental that way, he just loved the sparkle of it.
    After paying for the boat ride up the Yukon, the two fellows were down to their sleeping bags, tent, and seven-odd dollars between them. But at least they’d found each other. You’d got to have a partner or you wouldn’t make it, that’s what the old-timers said. It wasn’t just that so much of gold mining took four hands, it was the risk of going off your head in the dark of winter. In Fortymile—the shack town just over the border into Canadian territory, where the two got off because Goat was sick of the tug of the boat against the current—they met a grizzled sourdough with six missing toes. He’d had a split-up back in ‘eighty-six, the two had divided their outfit fair and square, and the toeless man had left his former mate to work the claim. It was a whipsaw that did it, he said, whipsawing green logs put paid to many a friendship, because you got in a rage and couldn’t trust the other fellow was pulling his weight.
    The old sourdough asked Injun Joe if he was one of those lazy Stick Indians from the interior. Injun shook his head and said I’m from Iowa. Truth was, he would have liked knowing what he was or where he was from on his father’s side; his mother (pure Pole) had never said, and he’d stopped asking long ago.
    Fortymile