The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Hap’s Truck at the Gate

I did not cry. I want to say that plainly, because people think a woman who has just buried her husband cries at everything.

I had done my crying. What I felt standing at that safe was cold, and very clear.

Only three people had ever had the combination. Clay, me, and Clay’s older brother Rand, who had it from the year we put the safe in, when he still came out on weekends to help us move the sluice.

I went out and found Eli at the shop, greasing the loader.

He had grease to his elbows and a look on his face that told me he already knew something was wrong, because he had seen my truck stop at the gold room and not come on.

“Did anybody come up the road while I was gone?” I asked him. I kept my voice level.

He was seventeen and had just lost his father, and I was not going to put fear in his face if I could help it.

He wiped his hands slowly on a rag. “Uncle Rand came Sunday,” he said. “While I was at church in town. Hap told me he saw his truck at the gate when he drove by. I figured he was checking on things.”

Hap had the claim below ours, an old man with a white beard and a dog that rode on the hood of his side-by-side.

He had been on that creek longer than either of us had been alive, and he did not make up stories about other people’s trucks.

I told Eli what was in the safe and what was not. I watched him take it in. He did not swear.

His father never swore in front of me, and I had never heard Eli do it either. He just put the rag down and sat on the loader step.

“He wouldn’t,” Eli said. Then, after a while, quieter. “He would, wouldn’t he.”

Rand

You should know who Rand Halvorsen was, because I do not want anyone thinking he was a monster. He was not. That is part of what made it so hard.

Rand was fifty-two, five years older than Clay. Their father had staked our claim, and when he died he left Clay three quarters and Rand one quarter, because Rand already had his own ground over on Hunker Creek and had said he did not want to be tied to Bonanza.

For a long time Hunker was good to him. He had a crew of three and a newer excavator than ours and he used to tease Clay at Christmas about our old equipment. Clay would just smile and pass the potatoes.

Then, two seasons back, Rand’s ground went barren. It happens out there.

You follow the pay streak and one day it simply is not there anymore, and you are moving dirt at fifteen hundred dollars a day for nothing.

He let his crew go. He kept running alone, longer and longer hours, and by this summer everyone on both creeks knew his bank had called his note.

Men talked about it in the hardware store in low voices, the way you talk about a sickness.

Clay had worried about him all summer. “He’s too proud to ask,” Clay told me in July, standing at the sluice with his coffee.

“If he asked, I’d help him. You know I would.” I told him I knew.

Rand never asked. He came to the funeral and stood at the back and did not speak to me.

At the luncheon in the church basement he ate nothing and left early, and I thought it was grief.

That Saturday, three days after I found the safe open, I drove into Dawson for groceries and to put Clay’s death certificate on file at the bank.

I stopped for coffee at the bakery on Front Street because I could not face going straight home.

Two men from Sulphur Creek were at the next table. One of them was saying that Rand Halvorsen must have hit a pocket after all, because he had walked into the gold buyer’s on Monday with over two hundred ounces and told the old man it was the best Hunker gold he had cleaned up in years.

“Good for him,” the other one said. “Man was about done.”

I paid for my coffee and did not drink it. I sat in my truck on Front Street with the engine off and my hands on the wheel and watched the river go by brown and fast, carrying the first yellow leaves down toward Alaska.