Read Online The Bully of Order by Brian Hart - Free Book Online Page A

guts like that must be lovely. To know your throat’s slit and keep smiling.

Nell
1889
    D r. Haslett helped me organize the sale of Jacob’s equipment. It was crated and shipped to Seattle, all of it. In order to keep the bank away I held nothing as precious and got rid of everything I could.
    I found work in the bakery and it kept us fed, but the hours were difficult. There was no sympathy for me because of what Jacob had done, how he had lied. Women treated me as if I’d stolen their husbands, and most men just laughed in my face. I wasn’t anything to them. I had to lock Duncan in the apartment when I went to work because no one would watch him for me.
    Eventually Mr. Hayes sent boys over to post notice on the apartment door. I was so angry, with my last dollars I hired men from the livery to freight our few belongings to Matius’s claim. I’d tried to sell it before but had no legal right to do so. Moving there, it was the end, where I never wanted to be.
    Nearly two hours by wagon, an hour if we took the ferry, and another to walk the mud road from the Wynooche dock to the house. The direction was east, northeast. I found a map with the deed in Jacob’s desk. We took the ferry. It was a new ship operated by a husband and wife from Minnesota. We were alone on deck. The freighters had taken the road.
    I’d heard people complain about the noise of steam engines, but I’ve always found them calming. As we chugged upriver on the shoulder of the tide, we passed by the sloughs of various legend; corpse farms, keepers of lost children, sad and desultory mires. At one point I thought I could see the shadow of the arch of a bridge through the trees. No sign of the freighters. They were well ahead. All this circumnavigation, as if anything would ever be easy or nearby. I was told ours was the second to the last stop on the ferry route. The dock was new and well tended, just on the lee side of the unsure mouth of the Wynooche. When we gained the road, the workmen bid us good day and I asked if any freighters had passed and they said yes and pointed at the wagon ruts.
    The walk was pleasant and we saw deer through the trees, so I ducked down and held on to Duncan and we watched them until they wandered off. They never saw us, or if they did, they didn’t care. In time we came to a road that branched, but the freighter’s tracks continued. I led Duncan down the lane. There was a homestead there, but it had been abandoned. The door was nailed shut and the windows boarded over. Some of the chimney stones had fallen and sat jumbled in the tall grass. There was a grave in the trees, with a wooden marker that was soaked through and mossy. Back on the road we could hear men logging in the distance, the thud and ring of an ax, the breaking timbers. Duncan hadn’t said a word since we got off the ferry. I touched his cheek and kissed his head and he smiled at me.
    â€œWe’re kings,” he said.
    â€œHow do you mean?”
    â€œWho else is here?”
    â€œNobody, but it doesn’t make us kings.”
    â€œWhat would?”
    â€œThere are no kings here, and there never will be.”
    â€œWhat about a queen?”
    â€œA queen and a prince maybe, but no kings. The kings are all gone.”
    â€œWill you read to me when we get there?”
    â€œYes. After we eat. Are you hungry?”
    â€œYes.”
    We followed the wagon tracks of the freighters through a gap in the trees into a meadow, and there it was. Relief is what I felt, and I said my thanks that it was a new place and apparently well built. Long live the queen. There were seven windows (shuttered) and two doors (bolted from the outside), single story, shake roof and shingle siding. If Jacob had built it, I would have been overjoyed. But he did, didn’t he. It was ours. I must never forget that. No one had taken any time with anything but the house and the barn and the privy, and outside of the hand pump