Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [173]
The lower slopes of the mountains that surrounded Dawson were denuded of trees, the black stumps left behind like so many rotten teeth, and sickness lurked among the many people still living in tattered tents. The town was built on swampland, and all through the hot summer, with no proper drainage or sanitation, diseases like typhoid, dysentery and malaria took their toll. Scurvy was on the increase too, as were pneumonia and chest complaints.
The Front Street residents were mostly unaware of or uninterested in the plight of the poorer citizens for they could afford to keep their boilers, fires and stoves blazing away, their privies emptied and their larders full. Electricity had arrived, so had the telephone, and for those with adequate means, Dawson was as gay and colourful as Paris, even if it was bitterly cold.
Beth found she couldn’t ignore the plight of the poor and sick. Every day she made a large pot of soup and took it on a sledge up to Father William Judge, the frail and bony priest who ran a little hospital under the hill at the north end of Dawson.
To her mind, Father Judge was a saint. He worked tirelessly from early morning till late at night, wearing nothing but a ragged cassock despite the extreme cold. Beth suspected his nurses were not so pure, and stole from the patients while they lay dying, so she’d stay until she saw the sick drink the soup, to be certain it wasn’t being spirited away and sold somewhere else at a profit.
Jack was also becoming increasingly disillusioned about the way things worked in Dawson. Most people toadied to the rich and admired their flamboyant displays of their wealth, while doing their best to make sure some of it came their way. He found it offensive that many of the very richest people in town cheated the poor, paying them a pittance to do their laundry, chop their wood and other menial tasks. When One Eye ordered him to throw people out of the saloon who sat in the warm nursing one drink for long periods, Jack refused. He knew some of these men would die of cold in their tents and unheated cabins, and it was his view that One Eye should show some Christian charity.
There had been many spats between the two men, for One Eye showed no respect for Jack’s honesty or his humanity.
‘I’ve got to leave,’ Jack finally announced to Beth one night in November after the bar was closed. ‘If I don’t, one of these days I’ll lose my temper and attack One Eye. He’s watering down the spirits, he’s turned the girls into whores and takes most of the money they make, and I think he’s got the games rigged. I can’t stand by and be part of it any more.’
Beth had been horrified too when the four saloon girls began slipping off upstairs during the evening with men, for though none of them had been innocents when Theo took them on, they hadn’t been whores. Dolores had confided in her and said One Eye told them he would fire them if they refused to go with any man he ordered them to.
He had the girls over a barrel, and Beth had the utmost sympathy for them. None of them were outstandingly pretty or even very bright, and all the other saloons had their quota of girls, so they wouldn’t find work anywhere else. The best they could hope for was that one of the miners would take them for a ‘winter wife’, to warm his bed and cook his meals. But a cold, primitive cabin on the edge of town, with no money of their own and a man they didn’t love, was probably as bad as being a whore.
‘Where will you go?’ Beth asked Jack. The prospect of him leaving made her feel as though a cold steel clamp was being squeezed around her heart. She thought she’d come to terms with losing Sam and Molly, but when Theo left her it was as if every one of her past sorrows had come back at once. Without Jack, her one entirely true friend, she