Tisha Page 21

  “Morning, Anne,” she said.

  “Morning. What’s it down to?”

  “Fifty-four.”

  Fifty-four below zero. Getting some bib overalls and a shirt, I hung them over the stove to warm them, then dressed quickly and brushed my teeth. Pouring a cup of coffee, I went to see the temperature for myself. Nancy had already rubbed a hole in the thick layer of frost that covered the window. I rubbed again and peered through. It was dark outside, but I could read the thermometer.

  “It was fifty-four. It’s fifty-six now.”

  I washed in silence, thought about breakfast, but had no appetite.

  Pouring another cup of coffee, I sat down for a minute on the unmade bed, trying to think what I should do next. Instead I thought of Fred, thinking that maybe he would come over and tell me that he had changed his mind, that no matter what anybody said or did he loved me. Over and over again I imagined all kinds of romantic scenes, but deep down inside I knew he wouldn’t be coming. He’d made up his mind and I knew him well enough to know he wasn’t going to change it.

  I did some washing just to keep busy, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling of being trapped. I kept wanting to go somewhere, anywhere, just to get out, and every fifteen minutes I’d look at the time, hoping that somehow another hour had gone by. In a couple of days I’d be leaving for the Indian village, and it helped a little to think about it. I’d be catching a ride with a freighter who’d passed through the day before with two big row-boats and a load of pipe on his huge double-ender sled. He was headed over to West Fork with them and wouldn’t be back for two more days. After I hung the wash in the schoolroom I did some ironing. Then finally I couldn’t stand being cooped up any longer. I started to get dressed.

  “Where you going?” Nancy asked me.

  “For a walk.”

  “Want me to go with you?” She knew how I was feeling. I’d told her last night that Fred was leaving. Even though she was glad for my sake, she was still trying to be sympathetic.

  “No.”

  “It’s pretty cold out there.”

  “I won’t go far.”

  I started to walk without even thinking about where I was going. A couple of times it crossed my mind that maybe I could go far enough so that I wouldn’t be able to get back and I’d freeze. Or maybe I could get caught in a blizzard. It was mean enough out so that it wouldn’t take long to freeze to death if I did. Gray and still, it was so cold that my parka was white with the frost from my own breath.

  After a while I found myself near Mary Angus’ shack. It looked so lonely and forlorn I almost started to cry. For the first time I really understood why she was staying here, how even though she was sick she could keep on living in a place like that. If you loved somebody enough you could live anywhere.

  From there I went towards the Purdy cabin. I stayed far enough away so nobody inside could see me, wishing I had the courage to go and knock at the door. I hung around hoping that if Fred hadn’t left yet I might see him and talk to him, but after an hour my feet began to sting and I headed back home.

  The next day I took a long walk over to the Forty Mile River. I was feeling so sorry for myself that I went out on the ice hoping I’d find a spot thin enough to break through. All I managed to do was stay out so long that I wound up with frostbite. I didn’t even know it until I got back and realized my toes were numb. Nancy had to help me bathe my feet in snow and then warm water. They were so badly frostbitten that the pain was agonizing before circulation came back, and I knew I’d never do anything like that again.

  Finally the freighter came back from West Fork and it was time to leave for the Indian village. Nancy came along. She was going to visit her family. She wasn’t anxious to, but she didn’t want to stay in Chicken all alone.

  It was a nice trip, easier than going by dogsled. The double-ender was fourteen feet long and built for carrying heavy cargo. Compared to a dogsled it was a luxury liner. We piled hay inside of it, and when it was too cold to sit up front with the driver Nancy and I scooted down under the tarpaulin cover and bundled up in fur robes. We followed the same route Mr. Strong took down the Forty Mile River, and we made it to the Indian village in a day and a half.

  It was dark when the sled pulled in, dark and windy. The cabins strung along the frozen river banks were black silhouettes against a bleak gray landscape. Cache doors banged in the wind and empty fish-drying racks stood like trembling skeletons.

  Cathy was as glad to see me as I was to see her. Neither of us had talked with a girl near our own age since the last time we saw each other. The first night we stayed up until almost three in the morning and she told me why she had come here. She was writing a thesis on the Athapascan Indians of the Forty Mile for her doctorate. She was on her second year here and would have liked to stay on for another. But a lot of white people had written letters to the Alaska Native Service about her, saying that she was “spoiling” the Indians, so she had a feeling this was going to be her last winter.

  She was from upstate New York, a graduate of Columbia University. I felt like a hick next to her. Not that she put on the dog, she was as natural as could be, but she’d seen plays on Broadway, read everything Sinclair Lewis wrote and had even met people like John Barrymore and Katherine Cornell.

  That first night turned out to be practically the only chance we had for a really good talk. A flu epidemic had started a week before, and from the next morning on, Cathy didn’t have too much time to herself. She’d taken in two little girls whose parents were down with it. Caring for them and keeping up with all the other things she had to do didn’t leave her much time.

  I didn’t think I’d be affected by the village the way I’d been the first time, but I was wrong. When I made the rounds with Cathy the next morning I was horrified. In one cabin after another families huddled around small stoves that smoked and sputtered with green wood, or else they lay in tiered bunks, shivering under thin blankets. And everywhere there was coughing, eyes that watered, cheeks flushed crimson.

  In one cabin there were seven children, the oldest about eleven. Every one of them was hollow-eyed and needed a bath and a good meal. Cathy went in to change the bandages on a little boy who’d burned himself. I flinched when I saw the burn: his whole forearm was raw. It happened to kids a lot, Cathy said. They huddled too close to the stove in their sleep, and sometimes they’d let a hand or arm fall against it. In the same cabin she changed the dressings on a little girl’s neck. The ones she had on were filthy, and her long hair clung to running sores.

  Cathy really gave it to the father, Arthur Jack. He was sitting on the bottom tier of a bunk, glassy-eyed and smelling of whiskey even though it was only about eleven o’clock. She asked him in English what he was going to do about getting some grub and some wood. “Soon. Soon I get,” he said thickly.

  “When?” Cathy asked him. “After all your kids are dead?”

  “Tired now. Sick.”

  “Drunk you mean.”

  “You no mind business,” he warned, making a fist, “get good beating.”

  His wife, a little hunched-up woman, sat in a corner mending a snowshoe. She had a black eye and one side of her mouth was all puffed up.

  Cathy didn’t bat an eye. “You touch me and Titus Paul will hit you so hard you’ll never lay a finger on a woman again.”

  He glowered at her, but that was all. Back at her place I told her that for a few seconds I was afraid he might have hit her.

  “He wouldn’t dare. He knows what Titus would do to him if he tried anything.”

  Titus had lunch with us that afternoon, and from the way Cathy acted around him I could see she was pretty fond of him. I couldn’t understand why, though. He was a tough customer. With that tight-skinned face of his and eyes that bored right through you, he reminded me of a lizard. The scars all over his neck didn’t help either. He hardly said a word the whole time he was there. He didn’t speak English very well, and when he did speak it you’d have thought he was Mos
es the way he made pronouncements. About halfway through lunch Cathy asked him if he was going out trapping soon and he barely nodded. “I asked him what kind of dogs he had.

  “McKenzie River Husky,” he said.

  The McKenzie River Husky was supposed to be the true Northern dog. It had a strong wolf strain. You could see it in the long slanting eyes, the muzzle, and the coarse short hair. I told him that Fred favored the Siberian husky and the malamute.

  “McKenzie River Husky better,” he said flatly. “More smart. On trail, take harness off McKenzie River dog, he run for timber, not come back till feeding time. Good strong dog. You have dogs?”

  I said no and he didn’t bother to look at me again. Cathy told him about her visit to Arthur Jack. “He’s beating up Minnie again and drinking too much. Will you talk to him?”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t those kids of his are going to die.”

  He didn’t say he would and he didn’t say he wouldn’t.

  After he left I asked her if he was the chief and she said no. “He swings a lot of weight, though. I used to go to the Council about people like Arthur Jack. All they did was have a meeting and tell them to change their ways and then they’d do whatever they wanted. Titus Paul’ll tell him he’ll break his neck if he doesn’t get out and do some work. He’ll listen to Titus, for a while, anyway.”

  Titus was sort of the unofficial head of the village, she told me, one of the few Indians the whites couldn’t boss around. When he was little he’d gone to a boarding school for Indians at Carcross, in Canada. The school had been run by whites and was finally closed when the authorities found out that the kids were starving. Some of them had even been beaten to death. Titus was lucky to be alive. The scars on his neck were from glandular TB, the running sores that so many children in the village had. His were especially bad because the way the people at the school had treated the sores was to plaster them over with plain adhesive tape. “By all rights he should hate whites,” Cathy said, “but he doesn’t. He’s not fond of them, but he doesn’t hate them.”

  “Honest to God, Cathy,” I told her. “I don’t know how you can bear to stay here.”

  “Somebody has to do it.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh yes you would. From what I hear you’ve stuck your neck out a few times already.”

  “That’s different. What I can’t see is doing things for people when they won’t do anything for themselves.”

  “Anne, I told you when you first came through here,” she said sharply, “that you couldn’t judge these people by white standards.”

  That got my Irish up.

  “Cathy, you have to have some kind of standards. Can’t they go out and just cut enough wood to keep warm, or put up meat for the winter?”

  “They’re doing the best they can. They just don’t think about the future the way white people do. They did fine before the white man came along. Look at this.” She took a stone ax down from a shelf. “This is what they used before the whites came—stone, stone tools, stone weapons. And they survived. So don’t try to tell me they can’t do things for themselves.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. Now they’ve got more—axes and hatchets, knives and rifles. They have everything you can think of, so how come they just sit around and starve?”

  “Because they’re weak. Before the whites came these people were hunters. Their diet was almost all meat and that practically raw. They had the strength to go out and take some game. Now they eat the white man’s grub—flour, sugar, canned goods, junk. And they drink his liquor …”

  I dropped the subject, but I still didn’t understand. When I’d gone out with Cathy in the morning the first thing I’d noticed was the empty space alongside so many cabins—an empty space that should have been filled with cords of wood. Alongside Cathy’s place and the church and a few other places the wood was neatly ricked up, but at least half the rest had almost none. Yet nobody stole wood from anybody else. I could remember how, when I was a kid, my brothers and I used to slip down to the railroad tracks at night with burlap sacks and pick up whatever coal had fallen off the cars. It was stealing, but everybody did it. And I knew that if I were living here—or any other white person for that matter—and my kids and I were freezing to death, I’d sure have stolen wood from somebody. Yet nobody did. As far as I could see they were practically committing suicide. It just didn’t make sense; if these people made out all right before the whites came, how come they couldn’t do it now when things should have been easier for them?

  I didn’t find out until the next night, after the dance in the church.

  It was the last night I was there and I wasn’t looking forward to the dance. I figured that with all the hunger and sickness around, it wouldn’t amount to much. I couldn’t have been more wrong, though. The church was packed, with pews pushed back against the walls and a huge oil drum heater that sent out enough heat to bake everybody twice over. The Indians cured their leather with urine, so what with all the parkas and the moccasins, the air took getting used to at first. Once the dancing started, though, there was so much noise and fun I forgot all about it. Most of the men wore bib overalls and a shirt, but the girls were really gotten up, bright combs in their hair, plenty of bracelets and colorful kerchiefs around their necks.

  Cathy looked lovely. She had on a dress that I wouldn’t have dared to wear, but on her it was exquisite. Made of caribou skin that was as soft as chamois, it had a fox collar that showed part of her back. It was almost like a long parka, except that it was split to the thigh, and the hem, trimmed with beadwork and fur, came to a point in front and back.

  The dance itself was less rackety than the ones at Chicken because hardly anyone wore boots or shoes. The men were better dancers, too. In Chicken the men used to get so rough at times that I’d be scared of getting knocked out by an elbow. Here, even though there was plenty of whooping and floor-stomping, there wasn’t anything rowdy about it. I didn’t see any of the men ask a woman to dance. They’d just go over and lead her out on the floor and that was that. The people who weren’t square dancing stood on the sidelines tapping their feet and clapping in time to the music, some of them chanting Little Brown Jug or Turkey in the Straw in their own tongue.

  I danced the first couple of sets with Ben Norvall. He’d left Chicken a couple of weeks ago to come here, where he was living with Mary Magdalene. Face flat as a pie, and a lump of snuff always tucked inside her lower lip, Mary was strong as a football player. When she didn’t have a lip full of snuff she smoked a smelly old pipe. Ben wasn’t any prize package either, so they were about even. Besides beginning to smell bad again, he was full of mischief and was always stirring up trouble. Once I sold him a gallon of kerosene and he went around to everybody asking how much they’d paid me for a gallon; then he said I’d charged him ten cents less. It wasn’t true, but it brought three or four customers down on my neck before I straightened it out. Ben was always doing things like that. He especially enjoyed getting people mad at each other by telling them what other people had said about them. In every place that he’d lived he’d eventually get on people’s nerves so much that they’d finally tin-eaten to burn down his cabin if he didn’t get out.

  Between sets he told me that he was going back to Chicken when I went back. “These people just don’t appreciate me,” he said, “so I’m gonna siwash it back to my own people.” It was the exact same thing he’d said when he left Chicken, which probably meant he’d worn out his welcome here fast.

  After the second set was over I was sitting down for a rest when someone came over and stood in front of me, his moccasin tapping the floor in time to the warm-up music. I looked up. It was Titus Paul. He didn’t say a word, just held out his hands and kept that one foot tapping. Up until then I wondered what Cathy saw in him, although when he walked in earlier all dressed up in beaded leather vest and broad-brimmed leather hat he looked kind of dashing in an ugly way. The way he was lookin
g at me now, though, I automatically gave him my hand and let him lead me out on the floor. He was as good a dancer as Fred, maybe even a little better.

  After I danced with him, no sooner did I sit down than there was another Indian standing over me, smiling and tapping his foot. It was that way for the rest of the night.

  The dance didn’t break up until after two. Ben Norvall and Titus came back with Cathy and me to her house, the four of us fighting a wind that blew down the frozen river so hard we had trouble keeping our feet. The moon was out, bouncing off the parts of the ice that the wind had polished. We sat around with our parkas on until the fire that Titus built up in the stove was going strong.

  “How’d you enjoy the dance?” Cathy asked me.

  “I liked it … You’re a good dancer, Titus.”

  He didn’t say anything, just glanced at me with those lizard’s eyes of his.

  Ben was sitting back in an overstuffed chair that was leaking cotton padding, his feet in front of the open Stove door. “That all you can do is grunt when a lady pays you a compliment?” he asked Titus.

  There was a long pause, then Titus said slowly, “Thank you.”

  “That’s the trouble with you Indians,” Ben said, needling him, “you don’t talk. If you did you wouldn’t be in the fix you’re in.”

  “What’s talking got to do with it?” Cathy said.

  “White people like a man to talk, say what’s on his mind. That’s the way they get to know him. With Indians it’s the other way round. They get the feel of you by just sitting quiet. If they don’t like what they feel they walk away. Isn’t that right, Titus?”

  Titus nodded.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Cathy asked.

  “Nothing at all if this was an Indian world, but it isn’t. It’s a white one. The trouble with these people is they don’t understand that. That’s one reason they’re goin’ under.”