Tisha Page 22

  “They’re going under, as you say, because they’ve been used.”

  “Used! Aw now, Cathy, where do you get that stuff from? Only person who ever used an Indian is another Indian. You don’t use these suckers. Bulldoze ’em maybe, but you don’t use ’em. What do you say, Titus?”

  “I listen what you say,” Titus said gruffly.

  “See what I mean?” Ben said.

  “I’d like to hear it too,” Cathy said. “What do you mean ‘bulldoze’?”

  “What I mean is that if it was the other way around, if the white man hadn’t bulldozed these people, they’d’ve bulldozed the whites.”

  “That’s some way to look at things,” Cathy said.

  “It’s not the best, but what are you gonna do when there’s no cop on the corner and it’s every man for himself? Hell, when I came into this country you didn’t mess around with the Kutchins—none of them—the Vunta, the Natche, the Tutchone. They were tough as they come. They’d walk right up to your cabin and tell you they wanted to make a trade with you, give you so much for so much. Nine times out of ten you got the worst of the bargain, especially if you were all alone. They didn’t threaten you if you didn’t trade their way, but when there’s just you, or maybe you and a partner, you weren’t about to tempt Providence. No sir, I’m telling you, they were tough. They didn’t steal—still don’t. If they wanted something they went and took it. That was their way.” He looked at Titus. “You tell me if I’m lyin’.”

  “You tell truth,” Titus said.

  “You betcha it’s the truth,” Ben went on. “They were a strong bunch. Why you couldn’t hammer a nail through the muscles of some of those braves.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “They got soft, I guess, lazy. Never thought much about it. You know?” he asked Titus.

  Titus thought it over, then he said, “Nothing.”

  “What does that mean—‘nothing’?” Cathy said.

  “Nothing. We are same as always.”

  “But you’re not,” Cathy said, “that’s just what we’re talking about.”

  “We are same,” Titus insisted. “We think same as before. Before white men came.”

  “What kinda thinkin’ is that?” Ben asked him.

  “Like hunter. Something turn up. Today hungry. Tomorrow big cook.”

  Cathy didn’t understand and neither did I, but Ben seemed to. “Huh!” he said. “I never thought of it that way. ‘Something’ll turn up.’ Damned if it isn’t the truth.”

  “How about letting us in on it?” Cathy said.

  “Think of it this way,” Ben said. “Before we came these people lived in sweathouses. They’re like igloos,” he said to me, “a wood frame with snow built up around it. The Indians weren’t any more sociable than they are now, so there was just maybe two or three families traveling together—one family to a sweat-house. They just drifted from place to place. Well, imagine living out there in all that wind and ice and the only thing between you and starvation whatever game you can take. Half the time they starved. Sometimes they’d go so long without eating they’d chew the rawhide off their snowshoes. They had a tough time of it even before the white man came—the women in particular. These people never did think too much of women. The squaws had it so miserable that sometimes if they had a little girl-baby they’d kill it so it wouldn’t have to suffer like them.”

  “They really did that?” I asked Cathy. She nodded.

  “They sure did,” Ben went on. “Now you ask yourself something—if them suckers had it so hard there must have been something kept ’em going, something that kept ’em alive. And they did. They had faith.”

  “You mean like faith in God?”

  “Their gods, the Spirits. Same thing, I guess. Anyway, they had faith, real strong faith—kind of faith the wolf has.”

  “What do you mean?” Cathy asked. “Animal faith?”

  “I mean hunter’s faith,” Ben said, “any kind of hunter, man or beast. Wolf’s got it. No matter how much his ribs are stickin’ out, he’s got the courage to go on, the faith that somethin’s gonna turn up. White men, they don’t think that way. They think like the beaver, put somethin’ away for tomorrow. The real hunter, and again I’m talking about man or beast, he doesn’t do that. That’s what the Kutchins were—hunters. They were born to it. Why they hunted moose by runnin’ ’em down on snowshoes. They could run all day, most of ’em. Try to put people like that to workin’ for wages, doing manual labor and they’re no good at it. That’s why white people think they’re lazy.”

  “What does all this have to do with faith?” Cathy asked.

  “Everything,” Ben said. “You’ve heard that faith moves mountains. Well, it does. Gives people strength. And it gave those Kutchins strength too. Faith. Today I’m going to bed so hungry I could eat my dog,’ they’d think, ‘but tomorrow I’m gonna come across a nice fat caribou and the whole bunch of us’ll have a big cook and eat till we’re sick. Something’ll turn up.’ Something always did, too. And one day something else turned up—the unjyit, the white man. Yep, the white man. And by God, here was the answer to a hunter’s prayer. ‘Behold!’ that Indian said, ‘Just look at that white critter, will you? Comes into this country out of nowhere and before you know it he’s building himself cabins ten times bigger than a sweathouse. And grub? Great Spirit, look at it all! He’s got it stacked in tin cans, in sacks, in boxes, shoots it without the least trouble.’

  “So the Indian went to this white man and he said, ‘Bud, I like your style. Want to live the way you do. How do I do it?’

  “‘Bring me furs,’ the white man says, ‘all kinds—lynx, muskrat and marten, black fox, red fox and wolf. I’ll take ’em all.’ ‘Easy,’ says the Indian. And he did it—stopped hunting food and started hunting fur, started trading for axes and traps and guns, flour and tea.

  “He stopped traveling from place to place and settled down where the white man was. For a while he didn’t do too bad. Missionaries came around and taught ’im all about Jesus Christ, which was fine with him, because the one thing he wanted to know more about was the God that had made this white critter so rich and powerful.

  “Well, I tell you, for a good many years that Indian was like a bear in a blueberry patch. He did real fine, kept them furs comin’ and lived better than ever he did before. Until the day came when it all went bad. The price of fur went down. Where maybe it took a stack of fur halfway up a man’s shin to buy a sack of flour, one day it took a stack up to his waist, then up to his shoulder. Then for a while the white man hardly wanted any furs at all. That Indian was stuck. From living in one place and eating the white man’s food, he’d gotten weak. Flour, sugar, biscuits—none of that stuff can keep you going for long. You need meat in the winter, good fresh meat with plenty of fat on it. But there wasn’t any meat around, at least not nearby. The white man had chased it away and the Indian, not being a hunter anymore, didn’t have the strength to go any long distance for it.

  “He was stuck all right. Every winter things got worse for ’im. Weak as he was, he picked up all the white man’s diseases—influenza, whooping cough, TB. The only thing that made him feel good for awhile was liquor, so he drank that whenever he could get enough money to pay for it. He got weaker and weaker, sicker and sicker. But no matter how weak or sick he got, he still held onto the faith that’d kept him going when he was a hunter—‘Something’ll turn up. Somehow I’ll make it through the winter.’ And that’s what keeps all these people in this village going even today—the faith that something’s bound to turn up. And that’s the awful part of it. This time it looks like it’s not going to. These people are on their way to the big El Dorado up in the sky. They’ve hit the sunset trail and they’re dying. All because of faith.”

  When he finished we were quiet. Even Cathy was moved.

  Titus reached over and touched Ben’s arm. “You tell story good,” he said, and when Ben remained silent he pointed
a finger at him. “Why you no say thank you?” He broke into a big smile and it made us all laugh.

  I couldn’t get over what Ben had said, though. “Does it have to be that way?” I asked him. “Isn’t there anything that can be done about it?”

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t know. Schoolin’, I guess.”

  “It’s not doing it so far,” Cathy said, “at least not here. The only reason most of these kids come to school at all is because it’s the warmest place in the village and I give them a hot lunch.”

  “Well then what can be done?” I said.

  “Raze this place to the ground,” Cathy said. “Burn it and move everybody up to the Chandalar country.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Northwest of here,” Ben said. “There’s a tribe up there won’t even let white men come near ’em except to trade once a year. They mushed up there to get away from the white man. Doin’ pretty well too.”

  We all looked at Titus. He shook his head.

  “No. We live here. We stay here.”

  “And die here,” Cathy said. “Maybe I’m pessimistic, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t see how this village is going to make it. We’ve got two children and a newborn babe dead so far, and the worst part of the winter is yet to come. And when it’s over, when spring is here again, what’ll happen? The old people and the women and children will go to the fish camp and some of the men will go to Eagle to find jobs. They’ll cut wood for the riverboats, work on the boats as deckhands, then they’ll all come back here and go through another winter. What you said is true,” she said to Ben. “Almost everybody here is living in the past.”

  “Not everybody, Cathy,” Titus said. “Some, they learn. Little children get educate, every year learn more. Read. Write. We learn,” he said emphatically. He went on to say that the Indians had never had it easy, that for them to go north and try to live the old way wouldn’t accomplish anything. Their life was here.

  Listening to him talk, slowly, confidently, and thinking about what Ben had said, I finally realized what Cathy meant when she’d told me I couldn’t judge these people by white standards. They were doing the best they knew how, and the last thing in the world they needed was to have people look down their noses at them. They had guts.

  The next day, when Mr. Strong and Nancy came through to pick me up I was almost looking forward to being back in Chicken. I’d left there hoping I’d never see the place again, but staying with Cathy made me realize that my troubles just weren’t that big. When the two of us said goodbye and I thanked her for letting me stay with her I meant it. I’d learned a lot.

  XV

  We arrived back in Chicken on New Year’s Eve, and Maggie invited us to a party at the roadhouse. I didn’t feel like going. Instead I stayed home and wrote a letter to Fred. I told him exactly how I felt. I missed him badly, I wrote him. I never knew it was possible to miss somebody so much, and all I did was think about him. I told him that I was mad, too—mad because he was wrong. “You may say you did it for me,” I wrote, “but I wonder. I wonder if maybe you just didn’t really care about me that much. Maybe you were just trifling with my affections, and when it really came down to it you just took the easy way. If you did then I want you to write and tell me. I can take anything as long as it’s the truth …”

  When I finished the letter I felt better. I put it in an envelope and stamped and addressed it before I could change my mind about sending it.

  I sat and read for a while after that. Occasionally I’d hear whoops and hollers and square-dance music from the roadhouse. I didn’t have any desire to go over there, though. Nancy had tried to get me to come, but I’d told her there wasn’t anybody there I wanted to see. It wasn’t that I hated them, because I didn’t. Not now, anyway. For a few days I had hated them with all my might. Now I didn’t know how I felt towards them—indifferent, probably. All I wanted was for school to open so I could get busy again and not have time to think.

  I was still up when twelve o’clock came and everybody started hooraying and whistling and banging on pots. Then they started singing Auld Lang Syne and that almost started me bawling, it made me feel so lonely. Someone came running towards the schoolhouse just as they got towards the end. It was Nancy. She burst in and there were tears in her eyes. “Anne,” she said, “I just wanted to come over and wish you … wish you a—” That was a far as she got before she rushed over and threw her arms around me and then we both started bawling. She kept saying over and over how bad she felt for me and I kept saying she shouldn’t, the two of us crying so hard I couldn’t tell whether I was consoling her or she was consoling me. We had such a wonderful cry that when it was over we almost smiled. “Please come on over, Anne,” she said. “Everybody wants you to—Uncle Arthur and Joe and Maggie Carew, everybody.”

  I said no, I was too tired. And I was—all kind of cried out and empty. “You go on and have a good time,” I said. “You deserve it.” She did, too. She’d been looking tired lately and I was worried that she was pushing herself too hard at school.

  After she left I took out the letter I’d written to Fred and thought about whether to send it or throw it in the stove. I almost threw it in before I made up my mind I’d send it. After that I made a New Year’s resolution that from now on I wasn’t going to think about anything but teaching school and doing my duty, and I was going to do the best job I knew how. It made me feel better right away.

  When school opened again I could feel almost from the first day that something was different about me. I wasn’t short with the children or anything like that—we still sang in the morning and had as much fun as before—but I made them work harder. They only had till June to get all the schooling they could, I figured, and they were going to get it. And that went for Rebekah too. I’d been kind of pussyfooting around with her, scared to come right out and teach her for fear of what people might say. Knowing it, she never asked any questions and just picked up what she could, but she was dying to learn. From then on I treated her like everybody else, called on her for answers, gave her assignments and let her know she was expected to learn as much as she possibly could. It was just what she’d been waiting for and she loved it.

  Not one person said a word about it to me either.

  People must have noticed I’d changed, because they acted differently towards me, as if I wasn’t a kid anymore—or a cheechako either for that matter. They stopped asking me things like whether it was cold enough for me or not and what I wanted to be when I grew up. When Uncle Arthur and Ben Norvall came into class a couple of days after school opened they started kidding around right away. I usually let them get away with it, but this time I told them that I’d appreciate it if they’d calm down until recess when we could all have fun. They did it too, without even looking at me cross-eyed. I felt a little bad about it when it came to Uncle Arthur because Mert Atwood had died the day before and he wasn’t feeling too good. They both stayed, though, and just to please Uncle Arthur I gave penmanship drill.

  I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I felt different, all right—as if all my life I’d been trying to be what other people like my parents or Mr. Strong or all the people here in Chicken wanted me to be. Now I was going to be myself. I wasn’t going to be hard to get along with, or go out of my way to say anything mean, but from now on people were going to have to take me for what I was. It was the way Cathy Winters felt, I realized. I knew now why she’d answered Mr. Strong the way she had. I still wouldn’t have answered him like that myself, but I’d care just as little as she did about what he thought of me personally. It was as if I’d grown up all of a sudden, as if up to then I’d been a girl and now I wasn’t anymore.

  A couple of weeks after school started I got a letter from Fred. He hadn’t been trifling with my affections at all, he wrote. He cared for me more than he’d ever cared for anybody in his life.

  I did what I thought was right, Anne. I didn’t do it because I was scared of anybody. I can’t tell y
ou how much it turned me inside out to come here, but I did it because I love you so much that there was nothing else I could do.

  God, how I wish I was on my own and could do just what I want! That’s the thing that really hurts—that I love you so much and there’s nothing I can do about it. I keep thinking that some day maybe I’ll be able to, and then I also think that when that day comes you’ll probably be married to somebody who loves you as dearly as I do.

  If I can take it, I’ll be staying here until summer, so I won’t be seeing you for a long time. Maybe never again. I don’t know. I just want you to know that I love you deeply, but I am not going to take up any more of your time. Come the summer you’ll be going to Eagle to teach and then you’ll probably forget all about me. And maybe that’s the best thing.

  I read the letter over and over, and every time I saw the words if I can take it I winced. On the way back from the Indian village I’d asked Nancy how Fred was doing at Steel Creek and she’d told me he was lonely. “The other miners aren’t too friendly to ’im,” she’d said. “They don’t like to work alongside natives or halfbreeds. They won’t even let him bunk with ’em.”

  “Where is he staying?”

  “Ma and pa rented him the workshed back of the roadhouse.” She was embarrassed. “It’s not too bad, Anne. It’s a pretty good place. I mean it’s nothing like Mary Angus’ place. It’s got a wood floor and it’s clean.”

  Every time I’d thought about it I wanted to kill somebody. Fred lived in a workshed all by himself when here he had the most beautiful home of anybody and a family that loved him. And it was all my fault. He hated working for wages, and on top of it he had to work with men who didn’t even want him. He must have been miserable, but all he’d said about it was if I can take it.

  I wrote him a letter telling him I thought he should come back. “We don’t have to see each other at all,” I ended it.