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Nellie Thinks She Should Have Waited for the Boat
- Red Hen Press
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81 Nellie Thinks She Should Have Waited for the Boat —On the trail, Dawson to Fairbanks, May 1903 Tanana Station, fifty men, not one woman. We are the only two white women ever came here and still I am alone. She is no good at all. Travel without a woman seemed foolish, more foolish than leaving the boys and their father, ever drunk. Gold camp is harder for a woman than a man. For them, a home warms with us—fire our cooking, kindling our skirts. For us home calls in letters from sisters—a rough broom fashioned from dry birch twigs. A worn wringer steamed upriver is our sluice, our pay dirt. We know only two ways to mine miners. I was a fool to bring her from Dawson. He told me I would find Hannah out before I reached here, but I thought of work, the tubs, steam burning our hands back at the laundry. I thought another woman would help, feared loneliness among men, their cussing, spit. Ice, not steam, is the test of a woman. 82 The whores know: their cold art, picking pockets I patched. On this trail the ice destroyed her. Some days she would be all right, the next, not speak. What was wrong no one could tell. Her silence muffled in her coat, her eyes empty, blue as the sky above the ridgeline. I drove the brown horse and the load into here. Will drove the gray. Bill drove the dogs. Me, drawing over tussocks with that narrow sleigh and a top-heavy load. I never asked myself to do anything this hard, not leaving my husband, or my boys, back at the cabin. Some nights I was clear to the waist, upsetting on snow, flowing around in it to get straight again. When I harnessed him, one of the horses hit me in the mouth, broke my front tooth in half. I have the other half in my pocket. Some nights my clothes froze around me, circles of icy skirt, soggy wool, black boots cracked. [34.234.83.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:21 GMT) 83 Will would tell her to get me something warm and she would answer that she was as wet. I want to pay her her share. She can’t work for me no more. We will let her out. Free ourselves from the weight of her investment. We’ve enough to lug there, the grub, the sleighs, Will, his broken past, my broken marriage, soon the boys too. I’ll send for them. They can hunt. They’ll build cabins, stake claims, be more help than her. Buying out her share, she can’t say that either of us cheated her. I have stayed honest so far. I wish I had waited for the boat, wish there was profit in truth, but in a new camp land goes, pockets fill fast, staking first is the business. On this trip my regrets left tracks while my feet skated on the overflow, leaving a shadow, but it is all over now, the hardness of life. There is not another woman could or would do all I have done, or would have driven a horse on the road I did. ...