Steam Laundry

Ellen Welcomes Three Guests: Postage, Medicine, Liquor

116 Ellen Welcomes Three Guests: Postage, Medicine, Liquor —Fairbanks, Alaska, October 1905 Three tenants occupy the table: my stamps, our bottle of aspirin, and Will’s bottle of whiskey, gleaming in a rectangle of sun. The sunlight bows to the gravity of their chatter, eavesdropping. In the cabin’s darkest corner the bed waits, quilt smoothed, slats quiet of creaks. Postage, medicine, liquor, what could they say? This morning they watched me stuff the woodstove with too wet wood, leave the door open, breathe life back into night’s faded fire. All night they listened to our breathing. They dole out scraps of comfort poured into the wide mouth of the morning’s longing. 117 Hope, a faded map, crumpled in my hands, guided me to this cabin, this new bed, built from the spruce off the cleared lot, its four posts still rough with bark. Now, remedy is my guest, borrowing the table. Stamps, lonely for envelopes, want for my words. The aspirin wishes to soothe, and whiskey to silence, hush the discomfort of a life, though new, still wanting. My son asks, Did you think you could leave everything on a riverbank and just drift away? No. I packed it myself, built this house, chinked logs, made curtains. I chose what to abandon and what to drag along. The half-empty whiskey, recites, only quieter, the same story my old husband, miles away shouted in a street muddy with spring. 118 I hear the river, a lull under the murmured quarrel of this camp. The story followed me like the ache that chases hard labor, stiff joints, soreness, expected, but not welcome. Alone in the cabin, I admire the sunlight, long to follow its example, to eavesdrop and pay attention to the small gifts waiting on the table, not wanting for anything more. ...