Tisha Read online

  “Mr. Strong’s a little old-fashioned,” Joe said to me. “You know, white man’s burden and that sort of nonsense. The last I heard he was trying to get the town council in Eagle to pass a law saying the Indians had to be out of there by sundown.”

  “Who says that’s a bad idea?” Mr. Carew asked. “I’m no crazier about siwashes than he is. Half-breeds either for that matter.”

  While we were talking Mr. Vaughn came in. Living right next door to me, he’d dropped in a couple of times while Fred and I had been working. He’d stayed about an hour each time, offering advice and telling Fred how things should be done, but he hadn’t lifted a finger to help out. A widower, he told me he’d raised his three girls practically by himself. I’d heard him yelling at them once or twice, and just before Joe had come over earlier I’d heard him slap one of the twins when she dropped something and it broke.

  After Mrs. Carew poured him a cup of coffee he just sat and listened for a while. Finally he asked me what kind of teaching I was going to do. “Are you going to get fancy and teach a lot of tripe, or are you going to teach the three R’s?” Somehow, the way he said it put me on the defensive.

  “I’ll teach the best way I know how, I guess. Arithmetic and reading are important, but there are other things too.”

  “Such as?” Mr. Vaughn asked. He had a goiter as big as an orange on one side of his neck and I kept trying not to stare at it.

  “Literature and poetry. Civics, music.”

  “Sounds pretty fancy, all right,” Mr. Carew put in.

  “Sounds that way to me too,” Mr. Vaughn said.

  “Hey, give her a chance, will you?” Joe said. “She hasn’t even started yet.”

  “What’s wrong with us being interested?” Mr. Vaughn said. “That’s why we have a school board.”

  “I’m glad you are,” I said. “Does the school board meet very often?”

  “When we think it’s necessary,” Mr. Vaughn answered. “We’ll let you know when we think we should have a meeting.”

  A little while later Joe walked me back to my place. It was clear out when we’d gone into the roadhouse. Now it was so misty you could hardly see three cabins ahead.

  “What’s a sy-wash?” I asked him.

  “Siwash? An Indian.”

  “That’s what I thought. Is it an Indian word?”

  “French. Sauvage. Savage, The old-timers weren’t too finicky about their accent.”

  He came in with me and built up the fire in the stove. I thanked him for the supper.

  “My pleasure,” he said. “We’ll have to get together again soon.”

  “Maybe after I get settled.”

  “I have plenty of time till trapping starts. You name it.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Joe. I feel a little funny about going out with you.”

  “Why?” He saw I was embarrassed. “I see … Mary Angus?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t let that worry you. We split the blanket a while back.”

  We dropped the subject and after a couple of minutes he left.

  The next day while Fred and I were working I asked him about Joe and Mary.

  “It’s pretty much of an old story,” he said. “Mary lived in the Indian village and Joe was doing some mining near by. They fell in love and took up housekeeping. They were like man and wife for a long time untill they finally broke up about a year ago. Then a few months ago Mary came out to be with him. I don’t think he really wanted her to, but she’s still in love with him, so she did.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “About a half-mile from here, on the way to my house.”

  Later on we stopped off at her cabin when Fred took me over to his house. It was a lovely walk, the sun settling down behind the mountains in a sea of liquid gold. The woods were silent except for here and there a few camp robbers hopping around in the trees, having some last minute arguments. We followed a wide trail alongside Chicken Creek, then turned north after a quarter of a mile.

  Mary Angus’ place was stuck back off the trail. There was so much buckbrush and willow growing up around the back of it that I didn’t see it until Fred pointed it out. He’d said it was just an old line shack, a place put up by a trapper to stay in overnight as he moved along his trapline, so I hadn’t expected it to be much. But it was awful—an old weathered shack that looked as if one good wind would blow it right over. A stovepipe leaned out of the roof and a couple of broken window panes had rags stuffed in them. It made me think of the greasy little shed the Rag Man used to live in when I was a little girl back in Evansville. None of us kids even knew the Rag Man’s name, but every so often we’d go over to the junkyard where his shed was and throw stones at it until he came hobbling out on a heavy old cane. Then we’d run away screaming. We were so afraid of him that whenever I did something bad my father used to threaten to give me to him.

  Mary Angus was out in front sawing some wood, and when she turned around it was hard for me to believe she was the same woman I’d glimpsed a few days ago. I’d had the impression then that she was beautiful. And at one time she must have been, with a lovely long face and dark eyes that were slanted a little. Now, although she was probably in her mid-twenties, she was old and tired. Her face was pock-marked and there were dark circles under her eyes. She was flushed and perspiring from the work she’d been doing. When Fred introduced us she smiled and I felt worse than ever. Most of her back teeth were gone. “I… am … happy … to … see … you,” she said in this tiny little voice. It was like a little girl reciting. Fred had told me she didn’t speak English too well, so I spoke slowly.

  “I’m glad to meet you too,” I said. “Is Chuck around?”

  “In cabin. He sick.”

  “Can I say hello to him?”

  She gave Fred a quick questioning look and he nodded slightly. When I asked Fred about it later he told me that white people didn’t usually go into Indians’ cabins, at least not white women.

  Inside, the odor was so bad I almost gagged. It was like being in a tiny foul hell. The floor was dirt, and Chuck was lying on some kind of fur robe, a couple of dirty blankets pulled over him. The small Yukon stove was going full blast and there was some gray stew bubbling in a coffee can on top of it. An oil lamp on a shelf gave off a faint yellow light. It was a nightmare, the smell from a slop jar so foul I had to breathe through my mouth. Chuck had a cold. I stooped down alongside him.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked him.

  “Bad sick,” he murmured.

  He looked it too. If I could have I’d have taken him home with me right then and there. He needed a clean bed, some good nourishing food and a place where he could breathe.

  I heard a little sigh. It was from his sister. She was lying fully clothed on some kind of small wooden frame lashed together with leather strips. She was asleep.

  “You take care of yourself,” I said. “FU see you in school when you’re better.”

  He didn’t answer. He wasn’t in any shape to be interested in me, school, or anything else. I went outside so furious at Joe Temple I wanted to scream.

  “How can he let them live like that?” I asked Fred when we went on. “Can’t he help them out at all?”

  “He probably would if Mary would go back to the Indian village,” Fred said.

  “Couldn’t he at least move her into one of those empty cabins in the settlement? A couple of them are ten times better than that shack.”

  “The people there don’t want her.”

  “Fred, that’s inhuman. Joe lived with that woman. Those are his children. It’s all wrong.”

  “There’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

  “There has to be.”

  “What Joe does is his business—his and Mary’s. That’s the way it is.”

  He didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I didn’t say anything more, but I was a little disappointed in him for saying something like that.

  His own house was bea
utiful, a big log cabin that was built on a knoll. A few outbuildings were around it, and telescoping out from the rear of it were a couple of smaller cabins. I’d seen other cabins built the same way, added on to like that. I asked him why people did it.

  “The only time you can build is during the season—that’s about four months. So you build your main cabin, then keep adding on every year.”

  As soon as I walked in I realized why his mother had thought my place looked so terrible. She had a lovely home. The whole place sparkled with friendliness and good cheer. Potted plants and growing herbs lined the windowsills and three braided rugs lay on the highly polished floor. I couldn’t get over it, especially since the Purdys had made just about everything that was in it themselves, from the glass-fronted cupboards in the kitchen area to the bright curtains on the window sewn from flour sacks.

  It was a nice evening, with everybody talkative and good-humored—and a delicious dinner to boot. The only one who didn’t have much to say was Fred’s father. After I was introduced to him, he disappeared into one of the back rooms, and during supper I almost had the feeling that if he could have he’d have eaten by himself. The only time he really said anything was when I asked him where he was from. “New England,” he said. Then, as if he didn’t want me to ask any more questions, he asked me where I was from. I told him, and that ended the conversation between us. Right after dinner he excused himself and went into the next room. For the rest of the evening I could see him through the curtained doorway, working on a crystal radio he was making.

  Before I left Fred asked me if I’d ever seen gold in the raw. I told him no, so he took a preserve jar down from a shelf. He handed it to me and everybody laughed when I nearly dropped it. It was about ten times heavier than I’d thought and it was filled with dull yellow flecks mixed with black powder. “That’s flour gold,” Fred said. He brought over another jar that was filled with nuggets ranging in size from pin-heads to little pebbles. The two jars had their whole season’s cleanup in them—maybe two thousand dollars worth of gold. It wasn’t very much for a family to live on, but Fred said they expected to do better next year. They were going to prospect some ground during the winter that they thought would have some real good pay in it.

  The next afternoon I got to see some gold mining done. Fred took me over to Lost Chicken Hill, where Uncle Arthur and Mert Atwood were going to be sluicing for the last time. “They don’t have much of a setup,” he told me on the way, “but you’ll be able to see what it’s all about.”

  “How come they’re the only ones still mining?”

  “They have a little water left. Nobody else has. No water, no mining.”

  “What do you mean ‘no water no mining’?”

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve got to wash tons of dirt to get a few ounces of gold. You can have the richest ground in the world, but if you can’t pipe water to it it’s not worth a cent. The run-off’s all gone now. The rivers, the creeks—they’re all low. There won’t be enough water for mining again until after the winter’s over and the snow starts to melt.”

  “How about for bathing? I notice the creek in front of the schoolhouse is low too. Suppose it dries up?”

  “It’ll freeze before that happens.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Chop ice or go bathless.”

  “I’ll let you know what I decide.”

  “Oh I’ll know, don’t you worry.” He laughed. “Everybody’ll know.”

  It took us a half hour to get there, through a couple of canyons and over a stretch of tundra, then across a hillside that blossomed red with waist-high fireweed.

  The two men were waiting for us, their sluice box set up on a slope. About ten feet long and open at both ends, it looked like a small gangway. Alongside of it was a big heap of pay dirt they’d excavated with pick and shovel. There must have been a couple of tons of it.

  I was afraid I’d be in the way, but they went out of their way to make me feel welcome. I liked Mert the best. He was the one who’d brought me the bear lard. A barrel-chested little man, he was so shy that the first few times I asked him something he took off his yachtsman’s cap each time he answered. They’d dammed up a stream farther on up the slope, he explained to me, then they’d dug a trench from it all the way down to one end of the box. As soon as I was ready, he said, he’d go up and let the water go.

  “You worm-eaten dub,” Uncle Arthur bawled, “why you think she came over—ta spend the day with ya?”

  Mert started up the slope apologetically. “Somethin’ wrong with his cerebral machinery,” Uncle Arthur complained. “Been goin’ around with ’is hat off too long. Froze ’is brain box.” He rested a hand on the sluice box. It was like a claw. The two last fingers were gone and the rest looked as though they’d been badly burned. Fred told me later that they’d been frozen.

  Mert didn’t come back for ten minutes. A few minutes after he did the water began to seep down the trench. Before long it was gushing down and running through the box pretty fast, gradually building up force. As soon as it had a “good head,” as Uncle Arthur called it, the two men started shoveling in the paydirt. The water swept it right through the box. Even rocks as big as a fist clattered along easily. And that was all there was to it, Fred said, whatever gold was mixed in the dirt would drop to the bottom of the box where it was caught in the “riffles,” wood slats. The dirt and rocks were washed through, running down to the bottom of the slope, where they added to the other tailing piles already built up by earlier sluicings during the season. Now I understood what Fred had meant. Pay dirt without water was just ordinary dirt.

  It was over in about twenty minutes, when the water ran out, and Uncle Arthur and Mert leaned against the box, sweat staining the back of their shirts. They were both staring down at the muck in the bottom of it. Their final cleanup was down there. Four months’ work with pick and shovel was ended.

  I thanked them for letting me come over, then we left. On the way back I asked Fred if he knew how they’d done.

  “Not too good,” he said. “They never do.”

  “Never?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then why do they do it?”

  “It’s better than working for wages.”

  When you looked at it that way, maybe he was right. My father had worked down in the mines all his life, six days a week, and he had nothing to show for it. However little Uncle Arthur and Mert had, at least they were their own men.

  “Now that everybody’s done mining, what do they do?”

  “Get ready for winter. Trapping’ll start around the beginning of November.”

  “Why wait so long?”

  That made him laugh.

  “What are you laughing for? Is that a dumb question?”

  He said, “No,” but he was as amused as Chuck had been at the idea of fruit growing on trees. “You see, when you go out trapping,” he explained, “you’ve got traps to tote, food and supplies, and sometimes you go pretty far. Then you’ve got to tote the furs back. You need a sled for all that.”

  “And for a sled you need snow.”

  It was a dumb question, all right. We both tried to keep a straight face, but it was no use. One look at each other and we were laughing.

  Later on I asked him why the place was called Lost Chicken.

  “Somebody found it once, then lost it. By the time they found it again they’d named Chicken Chicken.”

  “They must have lost a lot of places, those old prospectors.” Besides Lost Chicken I’d heard of Lost Delta and Lost Fork.

  We worked for another two days before my quarters and the schoolroom were finally finished. When they were done you could see the difference right away. Fred had glued the canvas back on the walls where it had been peeling and patched the bad spots, the tables and chairs in the schoolroom were sturdy, and I even had a “blackboard”—a couple of dark green window shades tacked to beaver board. He’d also made me a couch for my quarters by nailing th
ree boxes together. Maggie Carew gave me a mattress for padding, and covered with a blanket and pillows it looked fine. He stayed for supper, and before he left we had a cup of cocoa and some cookies to celebrate.

  “I’m really grateful to you,” I told him. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t helped me so much.” I meant it too. A lot of people had loaned me things and even lent a hand once in a while, but he’d done just about all the work.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I was glad to help out. Maybe I’ll drop by after school tomorrow and you can tell me how you did.”

  “Will you?” I’d told him how scared I was.

  “Sure.”

  We sat talking for a while longer. He didn’t want to go and I didn’t want him to either, which really surprised me. Usually I never knew what to say to boys when I was alone with them. But with him it was just the opposite. Here we’d been together for practically three whole days and I felt I could have gone on talking to him the whole night. I’d never met any boy like him. He said he’d only gone as far as the sixth grade in school, but he read everything he could get his hands on and he was interested in everything—history, current events, motors, even metallurgy. He’d taken me for a walk to show me around and pointed out all kinds of rocks and minerals, white quartz with glints of pyrite in it, lodestone, feldspar. I’d never heard of most of them. He said he had a book about them and when I asked him if he’d lend it to me so the class could start a rock collection he said he’d be glad to.

  He was just getting ready to leave when there was a knock at the door. It was Mr. Vaughn. “I brought you over the flag,” he said.

  It was for the pole outside. He’d had one of his daughters wash it for me.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “You didn’t have to bring it over special, though. The girls could have brought it with them in the morning.”

  “No trouble,” he said.

  He kept standing in the doorway. “Schoolroom all done?”

  “Ready and waiting. Did you want to see it?” I asked him.

  “Wouldn’t mind at all.”