The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [21]
The hardest wait among them was Braaf's. Melander forbade him from further stealing until the final flurry of muskets and food on the date of the escape. How, then, to keep his fingers busy?
Melander had a part answer: a hank of hefty rope he passed to Braaf. "Work this in those lily hands of yours, as much as you can every day. Get calluses started, else you'll bleed to death through the palms once we begin paddling,"
But a man can't twiddle rope al! day, and—
"An Aleut calendar," Melander at last came up with, the fifth or seventh time Braaf asked him if there wasn't just one further item wanted for the cache, "Carve us one, so we can number our time on the way to Astoria, aye?"
Braaf smiled like a boy given a second sugar cake. "I know where there's one, I can get it this after—"
"No!" Melander swept a harried glance around, Braaf blinking up at him. "No, Don't steal one. Carve one. You may have never noticed, but there is a dif ference. Keep those damn fingers of yours at home, hear?"
So began Braaf's pastime of car very, a fine Kolosh slat of red cedar—Melander would not have wanted to ask how it found its way to Braaf—about the size of the lid of a music box and a half-inch thick shaved and shaved by him. Then the twelve rows of peg holes across for the months, and in those rows one hole for every day of month, Braaf next discovered that on the best-wrought of these calendars—Melander had neglected too to forbid borrowing for the sake of a look—the Russians marked for their Aleut converts the frequent religious days, a cross-in-a-circle penciled around four or five of the peg holes each month; the notion being that wherever an Aleut huntsman might roam in his fur harvest for the tsar, lie would have along this steadfast guide to orderly obeisance. Lazily crude, though, this penciling seemed to Braaf. He incised his crosses-in-circles. Finally, there was the peg, to keep track of the day of year much as count is recorded on a cribbage board. Braaf made his of walrus-tooth ivory, an elegant knobbed sliver like a tiny belaying pin.
"Aye, well," said Melander when Braaf shyly handed him the polished little board. "May our days be fit for your calendar, Braaf."
"Which is the one, now?" Braaf asked. "When we go?"
Melander plucked out the ivory peg, counted briefly along a row with it, inserted it.
"This one. Just here, Braaf. The day of days."
Night, the seventh of January, 1853. By the Russian calendar, the night after Christmas.
Karlsson staggered from the Kolosh village to the outside of the stockade gate, bounced hard against the wood, propped himself and threw back his head.
"'Be GREETed joyful MORNing HOURR,'" he bawled. "'A Savior COMES with LOVE'S sweet POWERR ..."'
"Shúsh! Christ save us, man, you'll have that sergeant down here," Bilibin called urgently, hustled from the hut sheltering him from the rain, and hurriedly worked the gate, "Quick, in, in ..."
From the dark beside the blacksmith shop Melander watched the gate crack open ever so briefly, then close. Two man-shapes bobbed together. Karlsson's slurred mutter and Bilibin's guffaw were heard, Melander swiveled his head toward the end of the smithing shop farthest from the gate and spoke:
"Now."
A piece of the darkness—its name was Braaf—disengaged itself and instantly was vanished around the corner.
Next Melander became motion. Across New Archangel for three hundred yards lie hastened, in black reversal of a route he roved one twilit evening a half-year ago. A different being, that Deacon Step-and-a-Half had been, not yet cumbered with a thousand miles of plan.
Outside the Scandinavian workers' barracks Melander halted and drew deep breaths.
For half a minute the rain ticked down on him.
Entering, Melander clattered the barracks door shut behind him, began to shrug out of his rain shirt, mumbled this or that about having forgot his gloves in the toilet, and was vanished out the doorway again.
A person attentively watching this arrival and departure would have had time to blink perhaps three times.
Wennberg had been idly stropping