A Dinner of the Hours

by Miriam Trujillo

part 1

On a bright specious day in October, I received a letter slid under my door. It was in a battered envelope, grey and crusted around the edges. It bore no stamp but instead was sealed with bright green wax: the kind of seal I hadn’t seen since my youth. I thought this odd. However, opening the letter and pulling out the paper inside gave me an even greater surprise: The letter was in my own handwriting. I had never seen this thing before in my life.

Trembling a bit, I examined the paper more closely and read the words:

If you remember our old haunt and the place where our work began, meet me there for dinner tonight. You may not remember me, but we were best of friends when we first moved to Alaska and worked in Nome together on the Bering Sea.

I know you never left Nome, and I would like to see you again. I know you would like to see me. Please come to our old workplace, even though it is high and dry now, at 7:00 this evening. I will give you a feast of wealth and variety you won’t soon forget.

The letter was unsigned, but it did have some sort of mark at the bottom. I pulled out my glasses to examine it, but it seemed like nonsense: just a scribble. I had no idea who the note was from, but it made sense that someone I couldn’t remember wanted to see me so badly.

When I came up to the town of Nome, sixty-seven years ago, to work on one of the first gold-mining dredges in the North, I was the best worker they had and the most popular kid in town, to boot. Even when I was just a tender, they needed me like they didn’t need any other man. When they wanted an extra miner to work overtime, I was the one. If there was ever turbulence on the sea, they turned to me for comfort and to steer them home. Off the dredge, the girls in town would line up in Front Street just to see me go by. I would pick only the prettiest.

My company doubled its profits when I joined, and many assured me that it was due to my hard work and insight. My life was glorious in Nome sixty-seven years ago. It’s no wonder someone wanted to see me again after all these years. The similarity in handwriting was a coincidence.

At the appointed time, I pulled up to my old dredge. It was no longer on the ocean anymore, of course, after decades, but grounded in a pond on the tundra, off the Nome-Teller highway. The dirt road that led up to it was blocked off with a “No Trespassing” sign. Nobody went near it anymore except those heading to practice at the gun range and, of course, kids who would trespass anywhere they were told not to. It seemed quite deserted when I got out of my car and walked down the trail towards it.

It was proper October weather in Nome: clear but cold, 43 degrees or so. The tundra was all withered to brown. I wasn’t young anymore, and this cold was starting to chill my blood. I shivered with some irritation. If this person wanted to impress me, he could have treated me to a dinner at the Polar Cafe, or taken me to the BOT.

As I walked up the path under the bright Polar Sun, a song kept running through my head. Something classical and elegant that I must have used to lull myself to sleep one night. There never was much point to classical music other than to put you to sleep. I couldn’t remember what it was, though. It was odd that that nameless tune came to my head so urgently at that moment.

I finally reached the dredge. There was somebody there. His back was turned from me and his hair was long and fair. He looked far too young to have worked with me on the dredge, sixty-seven years ago. But, he had put out a strong plank of wood to make it easy for me to cross the moat, and I knew I was welcome.

So I straightened up, rubbed my hands together, and decided to give this fellow a chance. I crossed the moat and cleared my throat to let the stranger know he could begin to serve me his feast. He’d better be quick about it, I was thinking, because I didn’t see a feast in sight and I don’t think too kindly of people who make empty boasts and can’t keep their promises.

And then all thoughts fled from my head. The stranger turned around. His face was familiar to me from thousands of old pictures and older memories.

He was me.

I didn’t have a son. Not a son that I knew of. None of those women would stick around long enough. And no son ever looked so much like his father as that fair young man looked like me from the past. Every feature was mine; his build, his hair, even his smile, as he extended his hand and walked towards me, was mine. This was me when I came to Nome sixty-seven years ago.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said in my voice, “for many, many years.”

At moments like these, I tend to make a joke, always carefully calculated to make everyone’s day and set the topic onto a different path.

“But I only got your letter this morning,” I said.

The young man did not laugh. Instead, he looked straight at me like he knew what I was thinking before I thought it, and he said, “But we made our choice to meet again, sixty-seven years ago.”

Something about his tone, as it echoed in all that bright sunlight, made me uneasy. At his invitation, I walked onto the dredge and moved to the back part where there was indeed a long, low table, laid out with silver place settings. But the place settings were so many I couldn’t count them. And the table was so long that, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to stretch beyond the walls of the dredge itself and fade into the mountains.

“What is this?” I said. That weird old song was playing in my head, all out of nowhere, once again. “What are you doing? This is some kind of trick! Is this supposed to impress me?”

“Impress?” said the man like the word had a different meaning. His voice whistled off into the cold tundra wind. “Yes, it is supposed to impress you.”

He gestured me to sit down, at the place of honour I assumed it was, and so I did. The wind didn’t seem so cold at the table, and the song in my head grew so loud, as I sat, that I wondered if the man beside me could hear it too.

“We’ll feast soon,” he said, never once changing his tone. “But we must wait for the others.”

“The others?” I asked.

He gave me an odd look. “Yes, of course, the others,” he said. “You didn’t think it would just be me did you?”

I said nothing but pressed my hands up against my stomach. I didn’t wish to wait for dinner.

The man moved away from the table, and that’s when I saw it. He had on his finger my old ring. The ring that I thought was gone. I stirred, memories long suppressed flooding into my mind.

The ring should have been mine originally, but it wasn’t. Sixty-seven years ago, when I had only started work, I had come up with a friend. Well, a protégé might have been a better word for our relationship. He was younger than I, and he adored me. When I started reading about Alaska and dreamed of going there to find gold, he followed suit because he always did everything I did.

He and my sister fancied themselves in love, and she cried for days when he decided to go away. She claimed that I’d stolen him away from her, but she was too young and too sheltered to know what was good for her. It was a good thing I’d intervened.

So he’d come with me to Alaska and wrote to my sister every day against my express wishes. And, only a few days after coming, he found a priceless ring that had washed up on the beach. Nobody could claim it, but one of the gold buyers said it was worth tens of thousands of dollars and that he’d give us even more for it. My foolish young friend refused to sell it. He said it was for her.

I hated that. I hated him for costing us so much money. I used every bit of power I had over him to convince him to give me the ring for safekeeping until such a time as he should make his fortune and go back to my sister. Slowly I made a plan to sell it when he was least expecting it.

That was so much harder than I thought. We worked the same shifts. Every day, when we came back, he would take it from the place I kept it to look at it and think of my sister.

I despaired of what to do until, one day, all my problems were solved.

Proceed to part 2...