Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [156]
When she tried to stop thinking about her brother she found herself dwelling on the baby she lost and feeling desperate to see Molly again. She supposed this was natural; Molly was after all her only living relative now. She couldn’t count the times she had got out her photograph, drinking in her sweet face and curly hair, and thinking back to those early days when she’d fed and changed her.
Beth couldn’t expect Jack and Theo to understand her feelings about Molly, but it did give her some comfort that they felt just as keenly as she did about Sam. Maybe she had the lion’s share of memories and the blood tie, yet they had loved him too. The pain was still too raw for any of them to speak freely about their feelings, or to share their best memories of him. But maybe that would come in time.
They were close to Dawson City now, and the river Yukon was a seething mass of boats. Joining all those who like them had come down from the mountain lakes were many Sourdoughs. Beth understood the name came from the habit of old-timers up here keeping a small piece of bread dough in a bag inside their shirt so that it stayed warm and could be used like yeast to make the next batch of bread they cooked. These men were grizzled old prospectors who’d been holed up all winter at their claims on small creeks. Some of them had been in the region for years searching for gold.
The excitement that they were nearing their destination was palpable. People shouted out greetings; they wanted to share their stories about their journey and hopes for what lay ahead. But Beth and the boys couldn’t bring themselves to enter into conversation, for one mention of Sam might make them break down.
Beth hoped that everyone assumed their silence and grim faces were symptomatic of the fearsome heat and the tormenting mosquitoes, for that appeared to be making some people act irrationally. She and the boys had witnessed many vicious fights and slanging matches, usually between men who had soldiered amicably through so much already. Whatever it was that was causing it, it was terrible to see, for they seemed to hate one another like poison now, wanting to separate to go it alone. They watched two men on the bank, actually sawing their boat and provisions in half as they screamed abuse at each. Another couple were fighting for ownership of a frying pan, until someone else came along and solved the problem by throwing it into the river, so neither could have it.
It was a madness that Beth and the boys found impossible to understand. Sam’s death had made them realize how much they valued one another, and how little mere goods and chattels meant.
∗
Darkness never came now, just a slight dimming of the light around midnight, but by two in the morning daylight had returned. They would make camp on the shore just long enough to light a fire and cook a hurried meal, then set sail on the raft again, Theo and Jack taking it in turns to sleep. It wasn’t that they wanted to beat others to Dawson, for their hearts had gone out of that, but because they needed to be occupied. They realized now, too late, that it was Sam’s enthusiasm, cheeriness and constant optimism that had kept conversations flowing in the past, and without him there seemed nothing to say.
On the morning of 12 June, Beth was half dozing at the stern when she heard Jack shout, ‘It’s Dawson City! At last we’re there.’
They hadn’t known exactly where it was, and they’d been hugging the river bank for the last two days for fear of coming upon it suddenly and being swept past by the strong current. But as they rounded a rocky bluff, there it was in front of them. The fabled city of gold.
Beth didn’t know what she had expected it to look like, but the reality, a sprawl of tents, log cabins, false-fronted emporiums and teetering piles of lumber, wasn’t that different to Skagway. There was even the same black oozing mud.
Yet this mud stretched from the shoreline