Unruly Souls by Kate Samuels

Author:Kate Samuels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Portland, Weird Portland, Fantasy, Unruly Souls, Kate Samuels
Publisher: Harkraven Press
Published: 2021-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Unruly Souls

A mighty civilization was rising up out of the wilderness, and the vanguard of this civilization was a group of unruly souls who secured their place in the new world with either gold coin, law books, and politics or with daggers, fists, and revolvers. Pity the poor jack-tar who, after months at sea, comes with hopes of finding hospitality and succor in such a place.

—Barney Blalock, The Oregon Shanghaiers

Way back when Portland was a field o’ stumps and the saloons were a city block long, twelve seasick Quebecois sisters and a piano disembarked the paddleboat. Only two spoke English. They was pious little things, folks say, but they rolled up their habits and got right down to work. They tossed the mice and squatters and the nest of tree octopi outta the saggy house the bishop gave ’em and opened the doors of the first female academy west of the Mississippi. By the end of the month they was teaching three Catholics, two Jews, an Episcopalian, an’ a sasquatch. Soon they was an institution, with bells in the cupola and a high wall made outta ship’s ballast all round the garden. Unwed mamas with nowhere else to go tossed their girl babies over that wall. The sisters’d find ’em in the bushes in the morning, like presents dropped by the thunderbirds. It weren’t pretty, but it were Portland.

Mebbe them sisters thumped the Bible a bit, but there was plenty in Portland in those days that needed a thumping. Wheat and lumber and canned salmon rolled up and down the river on barges, and barges meant sailors, and sailors meant saloons and boardinghouses and gambling dens and opium hells and houses o’ ill repute, and that was just the aboveground bit. The real evil was underneath. Picture this: you’re an honest lumberjack out to imbibe his wages. Or mebbe—just for the sake o’ argument—you’re a gift from the thunderbirds, dressed up in the old Irish groundkeeper’s trousers an’ cap, lookin’ to see what’s on the other side o’ that ballast wall. You’ve got your pick o’ saloons—there’s more o’ them than churches, and they’re bigger. Let’s say you belly up to that shiny brass-railed bar and don’t pay any mind to the faint square outline round your stool. You down a bit of whiskey. It’s a little sweet, but let’s say you don’t know whiskey ain’t supposed to be. The room goes a bit swimmy. An’ by the time you figure out why there’s a square drawn round your stool, it’s too late, ’cause you and the stool are falling through it. And when you wake up, the world’s bobbing, and when you grope toward the patch o’ light, and drag yourself up a ladder, you come out on the deck of a sloop, surrounded by the choppy gray Pacific. Next stop, Shanghai.

Able-bodied seamen sell for fifty dollars a head. Everybody knows who’re the fellas raking it in. Jim Turk. Bunko Kelley. And the king o’ the crimps himself, the fella they call Ringtail Coates.

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