Enough.
This letter will be forwarded to you by my executors, after the fact, as it were. I wonder if Solomon would say that I brought the cancer on myself, saying no. Then why didn’t he come round anyway and carry me off? Why didn’t he insist?
It seems to me that our lives are consumed by countless wasting years, but only a few shining moments. I missed mine. Yes is what I should have said. Of course I should have said yes.
With fondest regards,
DIANA
P.S. Quite the best of recent gardening books is Christopher Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden. I’d send you my copy but I have written in the margins.
Six
One
1973. Following his hurried descent on Washington and his frustrating trip to North of Sixty, a weary Moses returned to his cabin in the woods. Strawberry, he discovered, was in a sorry state. He had put in ten days painting the Catholic church in Mansonville and had yet to collect for it. He was not only out his pay, but also the cost of the paint and the fifty dollars he had forked out to rent a spray gun. The new priest, a sallow young man, had assured him, “Your money is safe. It’s in the vault.”
“Let’s get it out, then.”
“There is a problem. The cleaning lady has thrown out the paper with the combination written on it.”
“Doesn’t anybody know the combination?”
“Not since Father Laplante, who preceded me here.”
Father Laplante was locked up in the Cowansville jail.
“But don’t you worry, Straw. I have written to the good people who installed the vault in 1922. Meanwhile your money is safe.”
Legion Hall rolled into The Caboose, bellied up to the bar, and asked Gord to bring him a quart.
“You buying?” Strawberry asked.
Without bothering to turn around, Legion Hall lifted a fat droopy cheek off the bar stool and farted. “I got good news for you, Straw. I just dumped a load of gravel at the church in Mansonville. Father Maurice is real upset. The company that installed that vault for them went bust in 1957.”
Moses was no longer listening. He was totally absorbed in a page of Time he had opened at random.
ALASKA’S SPEEDING GLACIER
A wall of ice seals a fjord, endangering nearby villages
The first person to report that something was amiss was Guide Mike Branham, 40, a strapping six-footer who each spring flies a pontoon plane lull of bear hunters into a cove on Russell Fjord, in Alaska’s southeastern panhandle. This year he discovered that things had changed: Hubbard Glacier was on the move—at a most unglacial pace of 40 ft. per day. “We saw the glacier advance like it never had before,” says Branham. That was in April. Within weeks, the leading edge of ice had sealed off the fjord at its opening, turning the 32-mile-long inlet into a fast-rising lake and trapping porpoises, harbour seals and the salt-water fish and crabs they live on.
The immediate danger, explained USGS Glaciologist Larry Mayo, is that the lake, now rising about 1 ft. a day, will spill out of its southern end into the Situk River, a salmon-spawning stream that is the economic lifeblood of Yakutat. “In another 500 to 1,000 years,” says Mayo, “Hubbard Glacier could fill Yakutat Bay, as it did in about 1130.”
“You’d better drive me home, Straw,” Moses said, staggering to his feet.
Moses curled right into bed and slept for something like eighteen hours. Waking before noon the next day, he settled his stomach with a beer bolstered by two fingers of Macallan. He showered, shaved with his straight razor, nicked himself only twice, ground some beans, and drank six cups of black coffee, shivers breaking through him in diminishing waves. Then he defrosted a couple of bagels, shoved them into the oven, and prepared his first meal in three days: an enormous helping of scrambled eggs with lox and potatoes fried in onions. Later he made another pot of coffee and sat down to his desk. A good start, he thought, would be to blow the dust off his pile of mimeographed copies of The Prospector and file them in chronological order. The Prospector (a weekly, price ten cents) was Yellowknife’s first newspaper. In the issue of February 18, 1939 Moses read that Mountain Music with Bob Burns and Martha Raye was playing at the Pioneer Theatre. The Daughters of the Midnight Sun were planning a dance at The Squeeze Inn.
Moses found the item he wanted in the issue of February 22, 1938. A big banner headline announcing:
RAVEN CONSOLIDATED POURS FIRST BRICK
Considerable ceremony attended the pouring of the first gold brick from the Raven Consolidated plant in the Yellowknife gold fields. The brick weighed 70 pounds and was valued at approximately $39,000.
Several company officials and a number of out-of-town guests attended a banquet Tuesday night to celebrate the event. Prominent among the out-of-town guests was Raven’s major shareholder, British investment banker Hyman Kaplansky.…
No imp leaning on a malacca cane appeared in Cyrus Eaton’s biography and there was no mention of him in all the material Moses had collected about Armand Hammer, another tycoon who had made his first millions peddling cough medicine during Prohibition.
Fragments. Tantalizing leads. Tapes, journals, trial transcripts. But so many pieces of the Gursky puzzle missing. Take Aaron Gursky’s case, for instance. Moses had been out west many times, seeking out old-timers who might remember Aaron, who had died in 1931.
Such a nice Jew.
A real good guy.
Some hard worker.
So far as Moses could make out, Aaron had been no more than a hyphen, joining the Gursky generation of Ephraim with that of Bernard, Solomon and Morrie. A shadowy presence, inhibited in the first place by his father’s mockery and then by the turbulence between his sons.
Then there was the problem of Ephraim. The Newgate Calendar entry aside, Moses could find little hard evidence of his sojourn in London or his voyage out with the doomed Franklin.
Ephraim couldn’t have been at ease in London, circa 1830. Henry Mayhew wrote of that time and place, “Ikey Solomons, the Jew fence, buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest.” He noted two distinctive races among the London poor. The Irish street-sellers, a numerous and peculiar people, with “low foreheads and long bulging lips, the lowest class of costermongers, confined to the simplest transactions,” and then of course there were the Jews. Mayhew deplored the prejudice that saw the Jews only as “misers, usurers, extortionists, receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers,” but he did allow there was some foundation for many of these accusations. Gambling was the Jews’ chief vice, he observed, just as the extreme love of money was their principal characteristic. But the Jews, he wrote, were also known for their communal spirit, contributing generously to Jewish charities, so that no Jew ever had to die in a parish workhouse. Remarkable, he concluded, “when we recollect their indisputable greed for money.”