Free Wild Life by Molly Gloss

a proper Psyche knot, loose and charmingly curled at the nape, so there’s no mistaking my sex, and this gains me the desired effect when displayed against the cigar and clothes of a workingman. On the wharf, men who had newly come to town just stood and took a long look. Skamokawa people are hardened to my ways, though, and as a sign of their Western liberalism will make a show of imperturbability. Shopmen and farmers I knew tipped their hats with aplomb; which courtesy I returned by briskly dipping my lit cigar with my clenched teeth.
    There are two bootmakers on the wharf, one a Swede named Orvil Jurgensen and one a Chinaman whose name is unknown to everyone and believed irrelevant, since he has always answered to China Sam. China Sam is the only Celestial in Skamokawa who does not come and go with the cannery season, a distinction sufficient in itself to inspire my confidence. When I had left Melba’s shoes with him, and gone to Thatcher’s for the needles and matches and baking powder on her list, and wandered in and out of the confectioner’s on my own account, and put the little paper packages of notions and candies in the basket at Margaret’s head, we went (merry as a cricket, I’m afraid) down again to the wharf to await the
Lurline.
    And when the packet came and went without news of any kind, well, it took me aback. Of course, we will get a favorable letter this afternoon—I am fairly sure of it. But watching the
Lurline
steam away without word at all from Yacolt—just for that moment—I suffered a sudden terrible misgiving as to how this adventure might come out. And I suppose that moment of misgiving is to blame for my poor behavior afterward.
    I should have gone (of course) straightaway back to Melba with word that there was no word (and for not doing it, I have since been vehemently condemned). But I imagined she would come to this discovery on her own when the
Lurline
steamed past the house and I did
not come flying back at once with a wild look of triumph or of grief; and in my lowered mood, I frankly dreaded returning myself to the orbit of her overanxious hysteria. When I had stood some little while in disorder, watching the
Lurline
out of sight, I took it suddenly into my mind to go up the hill and see Joseph Sheets.
    He has queer ways, old Sheets, and the common run of the rabble is that he is a lunatic. Since I am held to be something of a lunatic too, I consider the old man a confederate. He has a little shack on top of a high hill that overlooks the three forks of Skamokawa Creek, and the light from his cabin at the summit can be seen from nearly any farm up the left, right, or middle fork—a night beacon for travelers. He is a recluse in most respects, though he will come down from his hill to lay in rice and flour, and on those occasions has been known to involve himself in a card game or two and play on through the night. He grows tobacco and strawberries on a couple of acres he has cleared at the top of his hill, and will sell to anyone who comes up there to buy them. Mother sent Teddy and me up that steep trail every strawberry season, and it was old Sheets (though he must not have been old in those days; do you suppose he was forty?) who taught my brother and me to roll tobacco leaves and smoke them, the most vile kind of cigars.
    It’s always my intent to conquer Sheets’s hill without dismounting, and I believe this is something I will one day accomplish; but it will have to be on a day when the mud is not sticky. In April, of course, it’s a hopeless ambition. I went up resolutely, standing on the pedals, but after a short, sweaty exercise, I stood off and pushed Margaret heavily up through the long aisle in the trees. That trail of his, not being of Wahkiakum Indian origin, is laid out in the White Man’s imperfect way, plunging almost directly up from the river bluff to the hilltop. The trees all grow straight from the sidehill, while