"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

of admonishing Daniel not to go in over his head, but kept silent.) The prospect of almost
two weeks of doing nothing was pure balm after the past few days of frantic activity and
worry.
We had left Edward behind for good. I looked at Daniel, with his scruffy beard
and rough clothes—his ridiculous floppy sourdough hat—and realized his father wouldn't
recognize him in a million years.
A modest proposal.

The steamer put in at Nunaimo as the sun was setting, to take on coal, and we were
allowed a couple of hours on shore. The boys took the first hour, and came back merry
from a pub.
Doc and I walked into town, enjoying the neatness and quiet of it. Roses
everywhere, their heavy perfume a welcome respite from the barnyard smell the deck had
when the ship wasn't moving.
"Rosa, I have a matter to discuss with you," Doc said, and from his evident
nervousness I was pretty sure what it was going to be. "I don't reckon you have to say yes
or no now, but you know, when we get back from the Yukon, I might could be pretty
well set up, and a woman could do worse than me."
"A woman could do a lot worse than you right now, Doc." The future, about
which I had avoided thinking, whirled through my mind in all its permutations, mostly
dismal. I was tempted to tell him the simple truth—that in the eyes of the Lord I was still
a married woman—and not give him false hope.
But we do live on hope, and he was headed for a burdensome time, and he was
the protector of my child. A single thought struck me with electrical force, profound in its
element of apostasy: If God is just he will forgive me.
"Let me think for a moment." We sat on a bench under a guttering gaslight and I
took his hand in both of mine, a rash and forward gesture in that time.
"People change over time," I began.
"Not so much at our age, Rosa."
"True enough. You may be gone for years, though, and we've barely had a week
to come to know each other. Let me only say this: that I pledge not to marry any other
man until we meet again. Then we can see. Will that do?"
"More than I've got the right to ask." He took my hand and pressed it gently to his
lips, a touching courtly gesture from a tough man. A man I "might could" grow to love.
We sat there holding hands for a few minutes, watching the lights of Vancouver
coming on, across the bay. Then we wordlessly walked back down to the harbor, hand in
hand.
There is some world, I'm sure, where Doc's vision of the future worked out. He
made a fortune in the goldfields and came back to me; we married and were blessed with
a late child, and lived happily ever after in Missouri. Not this world, though. This world I
brought into existence by grieving.
When we got to the dock, he unrolled his pipe from its chamois wrap, and tamped
precious tobacco into it, something he did only a few times a week. I remember the
smells—leather and the sulfurous match, coal gas sputtering in the dock lights, the sweet
briar aroma as he puffed it alight—I've never liked tobacco, but whenever I smell a pipe I
think of Doc, even today, and of the worlds that are and were and might have been.
Plea for books and paper.

We slept well in the ship's slow roll, lulled by the monotonous throb of the engine, and in
the morning I made the same breakfast that would sustain us most mornings until