Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 Page 3

  He takes a big breath, in and out. The air smells of pine and moss. I think he wants to remember that.

  He stops at the first old stone, set flat in the ground, and scrapes some dirt aside so he can see the name and date and circumstances.

  ‘I know we won’t find him,’ he says. It’s the grave of Clarence Finn, 1907. ‘I just want to get a feel for the place.’

  Nonetheless, he checks each stone that’s not polished granite with a modern font. The older ones are matt and grey and look like slate. They date back as far as 1887—only 1887, despite how ancient they look, standing stones rocked back in their places, lettering worn flat or crusted with moss, like headstones in an English churchyard from the 1600s.

  While it could happen, it would shock us both, I think, to see a marker for Thomas here. My father would be on his knees, scrambling to clear grime and debris, gleaning whatever fragment of story he could, breaching the peace of the place and looking like someone in mad pursuit of buried treasure.

  We find the stones of Joe Juneau and, nearby, Richard Harris, both of them substantial, rectangular and set into the ground, with matching copper plaques, green with time and damp, acknowledging them as co-founders of the city.

  1899, 1907. The timing of their deaths has my father pacing, checking nearby graves, some with only names and dates, others with a story to tell. None with our man, though.

  He leans on a newer vertical stone and straightens his back, stiff after all the stooping. He lets himself smile.

  ‘Somewhere here, maybe,’ he says. ‘Unless he caught a ship out and…’ He shrugs, at the impossibility of that quest, as big as the world.

  He looks beyond the trees, his eyes adjusting to the greater distance and the brightness on the grass—it’s not direct sunlight, since clouds have set back in. On the far side of the cemetery, a backhoe is scooping up the rubble and smashed timber of a demolished house. There are gravestones of one kind or another all the way across the lawn.

  ‘I don’t know how good their records were in the early days,’ he says, shifting his stance, setting his forearm along the top of the stone in front of him and letting the granite take his weight. ‘Records of who went where.’

  Hope might know, but she might not. The ship leaves at three-thirty and there are thousands of graves, from the look of it.

  He points to a number marking one plot. ‘Pauper, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Looks like it’s been waiting a while for a headstone.’ I can make out a brass five and a six, but the rest is covered by grass. Someone is under there, presumably recorded somewhere. ‘We should eat.’

  He should eat.

  He checks his watch and nods. He points to a nearby bench and starts walking towards it, stepping carefully around the tussocks of grass. His ankles are too thin for his boots, bigger than sticks but not much.

  I packed pretzels, nuts and sultanas in a Tupperware container at breakfast. He tips some into his hand, keeping his attention on the amount. He drops some stuck-together sultanas back into the container and takes two more cashews.

  We lost my mother in the late nineties, and early this year my father had his own gruesome scrape up against mortality. He had his gall bladder out—it should have been routine—and a week later he was back in hospital with an abscess that wiped out much of his pancreas. If it wasn’t for Jenny being an infectious diseases physician, I don’t think he would have made it in time. For three days he was in intensive care, a pale shape pressed against white sheets, tubes in and out, feeding him, draining him, measuring. Jenny said we had to get ready to lose him, but I couldn’t. It happens or it doesn’t. There’s no getting ready.

  I sat next to his bed whenever I could. He wasn’t properly conscious. Seeing him there, ebbing away, I kept feeling I’d missed something, and wasn’t going to get another chance at it.

  I was laying off staff at the time, running a division of a mining services company that was grappling with the end of the China boom. I had one out-placement folder after another lined up, and meetings which passed by me as a series of blanks. Every reaction—the calm, the combative, the silent—took me by surprise, and then vanished behind the image of my father in that bed.

  But he made it. He escaped that bed, that fate, and here we are, in Juneau.

  I went in the second round of redundancies, a few months after the first. No meeting needed. I worked that one out myself.

  My father came out of hospital with diabetes and his belt taken in three notches. Even his skin was two sizes too big for him.

  In rehab, his ingrained stubbornness was for the first time interpreted as class, as quiet determination, something to be admired. ‘I wish everyone took to it the way Ken has,’ one of the nurses said. But he was just himself and unable not to be. A physio started calling him ‘the commando’—this white-haired old man, like a plucked old bird, working the hand weights—and then they all took to it.

  It changes some people, that close-up look at your own death. That’s how the story goes. It makes you take stock. But my father pushed through it by not changing. If it had turned him gentler, softer, perhaps he would be a shadow in a bed even now, or gone.

  He crunches on a pretzel, checks he hasn’t broken a tooth, keeps eating. He has three more sultanas in his hand and he arranges them into a line, like tablets.

  He is in my children’s lives. Not always a joyful presence, but he is there.

  He is a man of his generation, Lauren says, using it to explain a lot. He brought us up to climb trees, test our boundaries, solve our own problems, while he stood back. He prizes resilience above most things.

  He asked me to be part of this day, and it is not in him to ask for much. So I can’t say there has been no change at all.

  My father was a professor at the campus where I’m in contention for a job. They give out an annual microbiology prize in his name. While he has hinted at it, he has never asked directly if his name came up in my job interview. ‘It’s a big campus,’ he said. ‘Must be a bit to do, running property and facilities.’ It was his leap, not mine. And it’s only relevant to correct it if the job comes through.

  The backhoe’s shovel is on the ground. The driver is out of the cabin, smoking a cigarette and scratching his side.

  I check my phone. ‘Twenty minutes.’

  This time my father takes a mouthful of water when I offer it. He stands up to go, brushes crumbs from his hands and does a quick scan of the gravestones around us, in case a date or name might suddenly show itself.

  ‘I think we just follow the path to the main entrance and turn left.’ I flip the map around to show him the direction I have in mind. ‘It’s at least as direct and it avoids some of the hills. No need to do all that going up and down if we don’t have to.’

  ‘I bet he’s here.’ His whole life—my whole life at least—he has been one for evidence, and bet nothing.

  As we make the left turn onto Glacier Avenue, he remembers his camera and stops to take a flurry of shots back up the path and across the lawn.

  My father checks his watch. A minute later he checks it again. Ten minutes, nine minutes before he sees Hope’s face and learns whether she has something. He licks his lips. His mouth is dry. It is not the time to offer him water again.

  We pass an office building and a fire station, and another culvert that sends Gold Creek in a rush towards the channel. To our right, downstream, the concrete gives way to a rocky creek bed. It’s easy to imagine salmon there, launching themselves up to their spawning grounds.

  My father points to a motel, Nugget Lodge.

  ‘What would make you own a motel here?’ he says. There are three cars parked outside, all backed up to the building with their noses pointing across the rutted car park to the fence leaning over the top of the culvert. ‘There are no roads in or out.’

  Nugget Lodge looks close to fifty years old, two levels of rooms, iron railings painted the colour of rust, an external staircase. In dozens of m
ovies, in motels just like it, tricks are turned, deals are done, drifters drift.

  ‘No roads in or out of where?’ Willoughby Avenue runs past it. It looks to me no more landlocked than any other motel.

  ‘Juneau,’ he says, with more force than is called for, as if he’s shocked I wasn’t thinking it already, as if it’s a fact every competent adult has bedded down early in life. ‘The ice field starts behind the mountains and there’s no way through it.’

  He still has a superior look on his face. I know it without turning. I know the sound of that face, always have done. For him, any conversation is a chance to know more than someone else and to make a point of it. He’s worse under stress.

  If Hope has nothing, she would have told him, surely. It would be the decent thing to do, before he came all this way.

  He realises I’m not biting and says, ‘I thought there was one, a highway through it, when I looked at the satellite image on Google. I zoomed in and it was the US–Canadian border.’ He laughs, at being fooled by this straight line through the permanent bloom of snow.

  The street curves to the right at a building with two weathered totem poles outside, one with a raven on top, one with an eagle. There are more birds on the mural behind them, in black, white and dusty red. Next door is an apartment block with ‘Fireweed Place’ on its plum-coloured awning and a sign reading ‘independent living for seniors’.

  At the start of his rehab a social worker visited him in hospital with brochures, all pictures of like-minded oldsters with glossy dental work, revelling in their new seniors’ living arrangements, browsing the shelves of large-print thrillers in the library or stooping to roll a lawn bowl. He is still in his own house, and determined to die there. That’s something he’s specified, to remove all doubt.

  My father fixes his eyes on something further down the street.

  Between Fireweed Place and a four-level concrete car park, a path leads to the steps that will take us close to the museum. There are two flights of ten or fifteen steps each. I point them out and he breaks from his stare and nods. He looks up at the top, then focuses on the bottom step.

  At the halfway point, there’s a landing with a bench seat. I get there ahead of him and wait, not on the seat but near it. I slip the backpack from my shoulders when he reaches me, but he keeps going, pulling hard on the railing of the upper flight of steps and stubbing the toes of his boots on the treads. At the top, he grabs hold of the stone wall and leans over it, staring wide-eyed at nothing in particular, breathing like a landed fish.

  ‘Channel…’ he says when he has the breath for it.

  We have a view over the rooftops to the harbour and its huge white ships, rising like castles, Douglas beyond them across the water.

  ‘We should take some photos,’ I tell him.

  His knees are bent, thighs jammed against the wall to hold himself vertical.

  ‘It’s probably my turn to take a few and this is a good spot.’ I take a step closer.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good thinking.’

  He flaps the side of his jacket to indicate the pocket with the camera.

  It’s new, I realise, when I take it out. He steadies his shoulders, trying to stop any visible heaving. He is a tourist nonchalantly taking in the view, even as his diaphragm and chest are working like a bellows to pull in big sly breaths.

  The camera autofocuses on cruise ships and random city buildings and I don’t fight it, snapping away until my father has enough breath in him to stand straight and step away from the wall.

  ‘You can cull them later,’ I tell him as I hand him the camera. ‘There might be one or two there worth keeping.’

  He nods.

  ‘I’m going to have some water.’ I swing the pack from my shoulder and pull a bottle out.

  As I take a swig, he says, ‘Yes, good idea. I’ll have some, too.’

  Across the road is a retaining wall with a large-leafed plant growing over it, then grass. Beyond that, trees hide all but the corner of the next building, which must be the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.

  From the end of it that’s visible, it could be a house, built mid-century by a judge or some other civic leader who wanted a place with size and stature, while avoiding all ostentation. It’s yellow, and surrounded by a neat lawn.

  The front of it betrays its status as a civic building. There is a long ramp up to the portico, which has posts for banners jutting out either side of the main entrance. Twin flagpoles stand in the grass with a plaque set between them.

  My father stops to look.

  ‘They always take the photos when the sun’s out,’ he says. He clears his throat. ‘The yellow’s a lot brighter then.’

  He clips the zip of his jacket together and pulls it halfway up. He pats the front of the jacket to make it sit right over the bumbag, then pulls the zip most of the way down again. Hope is somewhere inside the building, arms full of history or nothing, an email voice about to shift to human form.

  ‘I’m sure it’s okay,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a very sporty look.’

  ‘What?’ He’s still fiddling with the zip. ‘It’s new. I’m still getting used to it.’

  ‘You could unzip it for inside, probably.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’ He lets go of it and puts his hands to his sides.

  We’ve missed the start of the ramp—it’s back around the side—so we cross the road diagonally and take the steps at the far end. The front door is glass and inside most of the lights are off, the exhibitions no more than looming shapes. There’s a poster on the wall next to the door, with dour cross-legged boys posed in a black-and-white team photo. The current featured exhibition is about the Juneau-Douglas high school basketball rivalry in the early twentieth century. There’s no reason to check the faces in the picture, but I do, every one.

  ‘I suppose we knock,’ my father says, after staring through the glass. He raps three times on the door with his knuckles.

  We’re facing our reflections. My father stands a little straighter, unclips his jacket zip and clears his throat, again.

  ‘She might have nothing,’ he says, still facing the door. ‘We have to be ready for that. It’s good to have seen the place anyway. Juneau.’

  A light goes on inside and spills into the foyer. I can hear footsteps on the polished floor. Ceiling lights flicker into life, showing hulking pieces of gold-rush mining equipment and a life-sized reproduction of an old photograph, thin men with moustaches on the bank of a stream, panning for gold.

  Hope is sorting through the keys as she comes to the door. She’s compact and brown-skinned rather than tanned, her hair black threaded with grey. She looks up, smiles and waves. My father’s watching her, searching for a sign, but she’s focusing on the lock.

  She tries one key in the door and then another. The second works. She pulls the handle to swing the door open and steps clear as it gathers momentum. It clunks into place.

  ‘Ken.’ She comes forward with her hand out. ‘And this must be Tim.’

  It’s a surprise to hear my name from her. We’ve had no contact. I had pictured the introduction I would get, my father pointing me out as he moved past me, towards the evidence.

  She takes his right hand in both of hers, so he brings his left up, too. They shake firmly, then she lifts one hand free and pats both of his, which stay pressed together as if being blessed.

  ‘Hope,’ he says. His mouth stays open but no more comes out.

  ‘Come in. You must come in.’ Her accent might be Hispanic. It’s not strong. I had thought she was Tlingit, indigenous Alaskan. She steps back to take a proper look at us. ‘So, the great-nephew of Thomas Chandler. And the great-great-nephew. The next generation are on the dog-sled excursion, right? That’ll be fun.’

  ‘Hope mentioned in an email they’re proper working dogs,’ my father says over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, smelly things. Almost as smelly as the mushers, their handlers.’ She laughs. ‘The boys, they like it more than they think they will o
nce they meet the dogs, then even more when the ride gets started. But Thomas Chandler.’ She looks at my father. ‘Follow me.’

  She leads us across the museum, her shoes click-clacking on the floor. She’s wearing a white top with a linen jacket and matching skirt. A cloud of sweet spicy fragrance drifts behind her. She could be a bank manager or real estate agent. Perhaps that’s what she once did. I’d put her age at late sixties. Her suit is well-cared-for but not new.

  We walk past a theatrette set up to screen a film titled Juneau, City Built on Gold. Beside it is a mining exhibit—sieves, pans and picks on hooks on the wall, and a wooden frame almost the height of the ceiling set up next to them. My father is close behind Hope and notices none of it.

  It’s a replica of a stamp mill. I saw another one in the BHP foyer in Melbourne years ago. I was early for a meeting not long after starting in the mining business with my freshly minted unremarkable commerce degree.

  The year will come when mining will swing up again, but it won’t take me with it. It won’t be part of my life to walk through polished granite foyers and sit in meeting rooms on the forty-somethingth floor pitching for business one PowerPoint slide at a time. It’ll be a time for new grads, younger survivors. I never loved mining, or even liked it. It’s where the opportunities were when I graduated. But there are conversations I’m trained to have, and am good at, that I won’t be having again.

  My father managed to go through his whole career without such a change of circumstances. Work was a certain thing for him, once he got tenure.

  Hope leads us into a small office where she has a seat ready for each of us. There’s a pile of files and old papers on the desk, next to a cardboard record box.

  ‘Is that…’ my father can’t finish his question.

  ‘It’s everything I have. It includes our correspondence, the birth certificates you sent.’

  She reaches out to the top folder as she steps around the corner of the desk.

  ‘Your father,’ she says to me, ‘I had to make him send all kinds of stuff to prove he’s next of kin. But that’s the law.’ She shrugs. ‘And he is next of kin so…’ She pulls her chair out and indicates that we should take ours. ‘I have things.’