The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

The safe door was standing open when I walked into the gold room. Not forced. Not scratched.

Just open, the way you would leave a cupboard after you had taken the last of the flour.

I stood in the doorway with my overnight bag still on my shoulder and my keys still in my hand.

It was a little after ten in the morning, the third Wednesday of September, and the sun was coming in flat across the plywood floor.

Inside that safe there should have been 212 ounces of gold. That was our cleanup, the whole season’s work off the cut on our claim, poured into jars and labeled in my handwriting the week before Clay died.

There was nothing in there now but the two empty jar lids and the little brass scale Clay’s father had bought in 1971.

Somebody had set the scale on the shelf very neatly, as if that made it better.

My name is Wynn Halvorsen. I was forty-four that fall. For nineteen seasons I ran the wash plant and kept the books on our family placer claim, up a little tributary of Bonanza Creek, about a half hour out of Dawson City.

My husband Clay ran the excavator. He had run it since he was nineteen, back when his father still had the claim and the two of them used to argue over where the pay streak went like other men argue over ball teams.

In August, on a warm Tuesday, Clay’s heart gave out in the cab of that excavator. Our son Eli found him. Eli was seventeen.

He climbed up on the track and opened the door and his father was leaning against the glass like he had only closed his eyes for a minute.

He was forty-seven years old. We buried him in Dawson on a gray morning with the whole creek standing in the cemetery, men in clean work jackets holding their caps, women with casseroles waiting in the backs of their trucks.

Three weeks after the funeral I drove the six hours down to Whitehorse to sign the papers that come after a death.

The bank, the insurance, the mining recorder’s forms. I was gone four days. Eli stayed home with the dog and the plant.

Now I stood in the gold room and I did the arithmetic without wanting to. Two hundred and twelve raw ounces.

Placer gold sells below spot once the buyer takes off for refining and silver. Call it twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars a raw ounce. Close to four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Canadian.

That money was not a fortune to us. It was the season. It was the fuel bill, about fifteen hundred dollars a day for the excavator and the loader, all summer long.

It was the payment on the wash plant note, due at the bank on the fifteenth of October.

It was whether Eli and I would have a claim to come back to in May.