‘My Name Is Philomena’ by Robin Malcolm

In the days of the trapping old-timers and prospecting gold miners, when Seattle was a boom town full of timber barons drinking beside lumberjacks, when scoundrels were thick as flies and even upstanding citizens were known to rot like meat in the sun, there was a girl who did not know her name. That girl was me. 

I rather liked to think it might be something fancy like Anastasia or Katerina, but it did not matter because nobody ever addressed me by name. The crooked fur trader spat “girl” through his rotten teeth when he was sober, and nothing at all when he wasn’t. Prior to his mouldy cabin under the old-growth forest, I have no memory at all. Later, those who recognized my face upon their fair streets sometimes called me “otter girl” for the sea-otter pelt I wore around my neck. 

I did not like this title. I was quick to plant my feet and raise my voice to correct them. “My name is Beatrice,” I told the shopkeeper who gave me scraps from his dinner table in exchange for sweeping the walk each day. And “I am Alberta” I told the laundress who chased me from her sheltered doorway. 

The city was different then — a wilderness not yet tamed, only bartered with. The forested hills rose up out of Puget Sound like a bull in a bathtub, and people clung to its side like ticks. An oxcart road ended at the top of First Hill above the sawmill, and, from there, logs were greased and skidded down to Mr Yesler’s steam-powered sawmill against a tide flat on the bay. The smell was outrageous on Skid Road, as was to be expected when the city’s sewage, dumped straight into the bay, was generously returned with the incoming tide. The muck sucked and puckered at my feet as I stepped up onto the planking of the mill porch.