Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 by Earls Nick

Author:Earls,Nick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkerman & Blunt

‘The Devil. Men on black horses.’ My father scowls, keeping his finger in the margin next to the part about sleeping with a knife. ‘Halifax is the Halifax in Nova Scotia, presumably. We know he made landfall there, or think he did.’ He is picturing this Thomas, lost in Alaska, lost in his head. He looks up at Hope. ‘I imagine we would call this schizophrenia now?’

‘I’m not a doctor, but…’ She finds a reference low down on the second page and points to it. ‘Developmental insanity. That’s the diagnosis. I googled it. It would now be schizophrenia, yes. Very likely.’

Thomas’s injuries and other physical features are marked on a sketch of a body—a fractured left arm, an old break to the right leading to shortening by more than an inch, two new wounds to the scalp, bruising across his abdomen and to one thigh, no significant abdominal tenderness, mental processes slow, poor eye contact.

My father takes his glasses off and rubs his forehead, pushing his fingertips back and forward, ridging the skin. However the family photo from 1890 appears—the absence of warmth, the shared commitment to no more than stillness—there would have been help there, surely. Help Thomas couldn’t expect alone, and in Alaska.

‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble,’ my father says, fitting his glasses back into place and then peering over them to focus on Hope.

‘No trouble,’ she says. ‘I enjoy playing the sleuth from time to time.’ She smiles. ‘And you want to know.’

My father nods and smiles, too. ‘Well, thank you.’

Schizophrenia. It fits better than many things with the few details we know, and with his only letter home. ‘Not right in the head’ was how he put it himself, though he made more of the pneumonia and his arm fracture—‘a fall’ was how he accounted for that—and the letter was mostly to say he was alive and to ask for money.

‘And my days are my own since Carl passed,’ Hope is saying. ‘Mostly. My grandchildren are at school now or doing sports. Sports and ballet. Carl was my husband. He was very sick and that was a full-time thing. Anyway, this teaches me a little more about Juneau. I’m not from here originally. We met in San Diego, Carl and me. He was in the navy. So, I like these…explorations. I find myself looking at Juneau with your Thomas in my head, thinking, ‘What was he doing this day or that day? What did he do at night? Where might I find some other thing about him?’’

‘Well, they’re lucky to have you here,’ my father says. ‘This is marvellous, what you’ve done.’

‘Ken…’ She touches her document pile. ‘I’m only just beginning.’

‘Hope,’ he says. He points a finger into the air, like a boy scout testing the wind. On the rare occasions when I saw him lecture, it’s a gesture I noticed him use to make a point. ‘Esperanza.’

She laughs. ‘Si. Me llamo Esperanza. But Hope is easier here, and just the same. I am from Guadalajara.

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