Reckoning of Boston Jim by Claire Mulligan

the James Bay Bridge, and so onto Beacon Hill near where the horses race and the rich play their croquet and lacrosse and cheer mightily, as if a war were being won. There he makes a small fire and takes off his overshirt and sets out the needle and thread. He tucks the smoke pouch with its antique money into the torn pocket of his overshirt and sews it over three, four times. Tests its strength, then puts the shirt on again, relieved to know the money, that money, is where it belongs. Only now can he stretch in his bedroll, his head against his rucksack. As always, he waits for sleep to find him. He needs only three or four hours a night. Once it gave him some small satisfaction, this knowledge that he has more hours in his life than most.
    The moon rises, is full overhead. The stars fade. “I oftentimes dream of my father,” the Dora woman said. “He’s calling me, but I can’t help him. And you then? Are you ever plagued by nightmares, Mr. Jim?”
    He said no , not mentioning that he has no dreams, bad or otherwise, and is glad of it, for he would not forget them as others claim to, once the eyes are washed, or breakfast taken, or once the forehead is exposed to the sky. At Fort Connelly, Lavolier scribbled down his dreams, seeing in them instructions from angels, warnings of damnation. The People near the Fort also saw dreams as full of meaning, as messages from the dead, as movements of vagrant souls. Kloo-yah dreamed of a woman with the head of a spider. She dreamed of it for many nights and said that the dream was for him, but how she could not say. She dreamed also of the wounds on his chest. It was as if they were her own, she said. She recognized the wounds as the symbols the Whitemen made and mouthed over, but she did not ask what the symbols spoke, and he did not tell her, fearing the power of the words as much then as he did now.
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    Curios. Scientific instruments. Musical Apparatus. Ingenious Devices & Novelties. All Fit for the Most Discerning of Customers. Mr. Obed Kines, Proprietor & Expert.
    Boston waits nearby until the shop opens for the day. It is new. A raw wood smell overlays that of peppermint and cigar. A flag with stars and stripes hangs overhead, proclaiming Mr. Obed Kines as an American from the Union States. He wears a paisley waistcoat and a tight high collar. He is red-faced and nearly bald and he rests his fists on the glass case as on something he has conquered.
    The local curios are on a table by one wall. There is an entire tea set woven of birch bark, arrowheads with symbols in ochre, and argillite carvings made by the Haidas in their island strongholds to the north. Boston has heard that the Whites buy these carvings for their mantels. But she would not have a mantel, only a stove. For her windowsill then. But what would she make of such dark things? There is the beaver, the whale, the eagle. They glare and snarl. There is the carving of a man. His hands are shoved in his breeches, are close in upon his crotch. His features are that of a Whiteman, his expression one of idiocy.
    â€œPretty things I like,” she said. “And novelties. Not that I have such things in my home. No indeed.”
    He peers into a stereoscope, into a miniature tinted scene of two women on the edge of a cliff. One is standing on the shoulders of the other, her arms held out for balance. The illusion of depth is so strong it seems she might at any moment tumble into the abyss. The Dora woman spoke of stereoscopes, said that Mrs. Jacobsen kept a lovely one in the parlour of the Avalon Hotel.
    He straightens. Better to buy something she has not seen before, else she might wave the gift aside as she did the offering of the marten pelt, else he might have to start anew.
    The brass ball fits into the palm of his hand. It opens to show a globe. The concave side of its casing shows the constellations, the starry arch of the heavens.
    â€œThe saviour of many a