The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [31]
Has he seen her before, or has she—as is his sudden impression—existed in his mind all along? The way a longing, never articulated, might find expression in a poem or a painting. An unexpectedly high, clear note.
The final note sung, the singer opens her eyes and, perhaps startled by the light and the chaotic, disheveled crowd, closes her mouth and covers it with her hand.
“ ‘Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie’!” someone yells.
“ ‘Good-bye, Dolly Gray’!”
“ ‘Pretty Baby’!”
“ ‘Beneath the Moon’!”
“ ‘You Can’t Break a Broken Heart’!”
The English-speaking members of the audience—prospectors and shopkeepers, the barber who subdued the medicine man, as well as the man who lives in the Aleut woman’s house—call out sentimental favorites, and the singer looks from one face to another, smiling behind her left hand, crumpling her music in her right. Her fingers, Bigelow sees, wear no rings.
“Go on, then! What are you waiting for! Christmas?” The projectionist makes a swatting gesture, loops of film spilling over his boots, and the singer bites her lip. Red blotches appear on her white throat. She drops her sheet music and bends to pick it up, swaying slowly to her feet.
Eyes closed, nodding as if to find the tempo, she embarks hesitantly on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” chosen perhaps out of a democratic impulse, so as not to have to pick among the requests—either that or for its moral effect, an attempt to tamp down the unruly audience. She compresses her lips, drawing the first syllable out into a long, long, too long Mmmmmmm; but by the end of the verse the blood has drained from her neck back into her lungs, and the words swell and carry in a manner that would delight the most exacting revival preacher. The drunk Russians and Eskimos stop brawling to listen, and Bigelow forgets that he doesn’t like hymns, he even forgets that once, during the second verse of this particular hymn, his mother twisted his ear painfully, pinched and held it tight to keep him from fidgeting in church.
By the time the lights are once again extinguished, the last reel jerking over the projector’s sprockets, Bigelow has been shot through by so many piercing glorys and hallelujahs that he can think of nothing but holding that voice, kissing that voice, pushing his tongue farther and farther until he tastes its source.
BROKE, HE JOINS a crew digging trenches for power lines. Two dollars for a day’s work, and to get there he has to take a ferry. The boat leaves in the dark, he has barely enough time to stop at the telegraph office, and then he is pitching on rough seas for an hour to arrive at a little place called Salmonberry Creek, where they’re building a power station.
The job is to dig twelve feet down through what’s called glacial muck, a heavy blue clay, so heavy it’s like solid lead. He gets a lump of the stuff on the blade of his long-handled shovel, and it takes all his strength to heave it up onto the embankment. When he removes his gloves he finds blisters on his hands the size of dimes. He works shoulder to shoulder with Swede labor, not one of them under six feet tall and two hundred pounds. They drink Donnell’s horse liniment if they can’t get anything better, and the smell of it steams off their sweating backs.
After three days, Bigelow can’t close his bandaged hands around the handle of the shovel, but three days is six dollars, and six dollars buys him what he needs: rice and sugar and coffee and kerosene, and admissions to the tent theater, where he sits picking at the scabs on his palms, shifting from one numb buttock to the other, the only member of the audience who prays for broken reels and jammed projectors, for medicine men and drunken brawls,