Free The Bully of Order by Brian Hart

equilibrium, acting by weight alone with no motion. A deep calm filled me when I watched the ships.
    At home, the cold bones of the house were hardly welcoming, and sometimes it took all day for it to feel like someplace you’d like to be. After we finished the chores I often read to Duncan, whatever he liked. He had several favorites. The rain beat down on the roof, and we were dry and safe. More than anything I wanted him to grow up and be a man of his own, a better man. I wanted it soon, even though I knew that it wasn’t fair. He was only a boy, a child.

Jacob
1890
    I caught a steamship out of Westport, and when I arrived fresh and for everyone the New Face, I told all that would listen that I’d been crimped, drugged and dragged; shanghaied, comrade. Friendski. Remember me? Rampage of a story. With my cash out, new pals, like hens to scratch, assembled. I relayed how a man named Gibbons got me drunk in Montesano and I woke up passing the mouth of the Columbia. Which was true. Gibbons was no friend. I’d been around but not far—Oregon, California, a month at Cooney’s penitentiary not three miles from my front door—but I told them tall tales of how I’d been to Australia and seen brush fires burning from a hundred miles offshore. I had to tell them something, so I told them what I’d heard other people say. Heard about Australia in a redwood camp on the Smith River. Japanese whaling ships I’d heard about in Portland at a mudflat bonfire. Cliffs of Dover in a San Francisco whorehouse. Pygmy cannibals, same whorehouse, different room. Foolishness to think that after years away a person can return to an establishment that he was lastly thrown forcibly out of and be treated with any degree of kindness. Worse for me, though, was that they didn’t even remember me or care that I’d returned.
    Eli Bernhardt, a former patient, saw me and came over to ask what I’d been thinking, leaving without telling anybody. Called me Doc, like he hadn’t heard the news. “I’m not a doctor.” He apologized as if it was his fault and said he’d found a new doctor named Haslett, and by the way your wife is working for him. Wink. So there were no hard feelings. He remarked that I was bent lower than when I left and asked what had happened.
    â€œI did something to my back falling off a woodcart.”
    He looked me up and down like I was lying, but that was the truth.
    â€œRiding a woodcart on a ship?”
    â€œNo, before I got on the ship.”
    â€œRiding a woodcart when you were shanghaied?”
    â€œBefore that. In fact it was on my way to getting shanghaied.” I was wearing my broad-brimmed hat, tin pants, and Bergmans with the frilly false tongue, gleaming with bear grease. Everything I owned. A wad of money in my pocket the size of a child’s fist. They knew I’d been in the camps because I wasn’t dark and scurvious like a sailor returned from Australia, but pale and rope tough like them. Roll over the log and find a logger white as a grub. If a photograph were taken, I would be a creature of the main herd.
    At the Pioneer I found myself seated beside a wayward powder monkey who was often ringing the bell, and when we struck up a conversation I admitted to formerly being employed as a physician and he confided, yelled into my face like I was the mouth of a cave, that he had recently been a patient of Dr. Haslett’s, and “Whoowee, shoulda seen the nurse.”
    â€œThat’s my wife.”
    â€œYer wife? How is that yer wife if yer you?”
    The bartender and everyone down the line were listening, and honestly, I couldn’t answer that.
    â€œWe took the vows, all of it.”
    â€œHell of a world. She doin workin for that behemoth?”
    â€œI’ve been away.”
    â€œBut yer back.”
    â€œYes.” I yelled it. “Yes.”
    The powder monkey climbed up onto the upper rung of his stool and