With everything
battened down, me a-steering and Tilly chopping ice, we held on half the
night, till I plumped the sloop ashore on Porcupine Island, and we
shivered it out on the beach; blankets wet, and Tilly drying the matches
on her breast.
"So I think I know something about it. Seven years, Dick, man and wife,
in rough sailing and smooth. And then she died, in the heart of the
winter, died in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station. She held my
hand to the last, the ice creeping up inside the door and spreading thick
on the gut of the window. Outside, the lone howl of the wolf and the
Silence; inside, death and the Silence. You've never heard the Silence
yet, Dick, and Gawd grant you don't ever have to hear it when you sit by
the side of death. Hear it? Ay, till the breath whistles like a siren,
and the heart booms, booms, booms, like the surf on the shore.
"Siwash, Dick, but a woman. White, Dick, white, clear through. Towards
the last she says, 'Keep my feather bed, Tommy, keep it always.' And I
agreed. Then she opened her eyes, full with the pain. 'I've been a good
woman to you, Tommy, and because of that I want you to promise--to
promise'--the words seemed to stick in her throat--'that when you marry,
the woman be white.
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