Not to us kids, anyhow.
Th
e hurt of Isaac’s absence slaps back and forth between us like a closed curtain over an open window. Aaka eyes it 65
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sometimes, then looks at Mom, but Mom doesn’t look back.
She just sighs and keeps on making their tea.
Aapa sits his Bible on the washstand in the corner, right alongside his typewriter, just like he always used to. And that’s where he stands, pecking the Good Word into Iñupiaq with his two old pointer fi ngers, letter by letter. Same as ever.
Me and Bunna are sitting by the door, waiting for Uncle Joe, and I am looking out across the room, remembering how it used to be when we were little—not so long ago, when I think about it. But it feels like forever.
We used to play cowboys and Indians here. Isaac was always the captive Indian—exploding out from underneath the bed, clawing his way across the plywood fl oor like a blind lemming and getting caught every time. I remember him bumping right into Aapa, once, making Aapa’s fi ngers slip from the typewriter keys. Making him type wrong.
Th
e words that came out of Aapa’s mouth that time were not good ones, not in any language. He reared up like a bear, raising his big old arm, ready to swat us. But before he could fi nish his swing, Aaka had her broom out, and Aapa stopped in midair, dropping his arm and bending his back with a little smile, like he was just waiting for Aaka to hit him. And she did, too—Aaka, hardly any bigger than us boys—she hit that broom so hard against Appa’s back, it cracked the handle right in half.
It makes me smile, too, when I remember Aaka, waving her splintered broom in the air, spitting mad, scolding Aapa like an angry squirrel.
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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e Aapa pulled his parka from the hook that time and
shuffl
ed out the door without looking back, his voice soft as rain. “You boys ever gonna learn?” He came back later, holding out a brand-new broom for Aaka like a stiff bouquet, smiling.
I sit here, nodding at the memory: Yes, we learned. We learned how not to talk in Iñupiaq and how to eat strange food and watch, helpless, while they took our brother away.
Th
ere’s a clatter of sound as an empty coff ee cup rolls across the fl oor. Mom sighs and mutters, “Clumsy.” Th
en she scur-
ries across the room to retrieve it.
Mom isn’t talking to any of us, really, but when her eyes meet mine, there are tears there, tears that make her eyes look like they’ve turned to water.
“Why can’t we just go fi nd him?” I whisper.
Mom looks at me, her eyes full of hurt and something else, something that makes me feel protective, suddenly, like I’m the parent and she’s just a little kid.
SONNY
—
Old Anna is gone now—that’s the only thing I know, reading Ma’s letter, all alone at Sacred Heart School after most of the others have left for home.
Nobody here knew a thing about Anna, who died in her sleep, all alone.
Old Anna and her canned peas. Th
at’s what she and I used
to eat back home when I used to chop wood for her. Canned 67
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sweet peas. We ate them together, after the wood was piled, the two of us sitting at her table, a can of sweet peas between us. I sure miss the sound of that spruce wood crackling in the barrel stove on a day when it’s so cold outside, the river ice cracks like gunshots. Us two enjoying the smooth taste of those peas and the smell of smoke, fi relight fl ickering on the walls.
Best candy there ever was, those peas. Anna kept them hidden in a case beneath her bed, and I was the only one she ever shared them with. And she’d always talk with me while we ate them, too, the rasp of her voice mixing with the crackle of the fi re, like they were both part of the same thing.
“Your mom still sell slippers to white people?” Th
at’s what
she asked last time I saw her.
I nodded. Yeah, Mom was still selling her slippers.
Anna nodded, too, but I could tell she wasn’t thinking about white people or even slippers so much as she was agree-ing with the way Ma did things. Maybe she was even a little bit surprised at how Ma went to Fairbanks and came back practically the next day with sugar and fl our and new clothes for all us kids, never even stopping off at the bars on Two Street like most folks did.
People always pay a lot for beaded Indian slippers, and Ma’s are the best, with big blue and red beaded fl owers on the toes, worked in a way that made them look more interesting than some people’s. Th
at’s how she got the money to send me
to Sacred Heart School, too.
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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e
“Because you’re gonna be a leader someday.” Th
at’s what
Ma said.
Old Anna never said it, but there was something in the way she nodded her head that time that let me know she agreed with Ma. I was gonna be a leader.
But now old Anna’s gone, and I’m all alone feeling like I didn’t do something I was supposed to do. Something important. Something I’ll never ever get to do again.
CHICKIE
—
I step off the plane and for a second I just stand there, sucking it all in: the smell of ocean and tundra and the sweep of sky.
It’s funny what you miss about a place. I missed seeing the ocean ice out there on the horizon, holding the wide-open world in place like a fence.
I don’t know the guy meeting the plane, and he doesn’t know me, either. From one of the villages, I fi gure.
“Where you going? Teacher’s place?” he asks.
I guess he thinks I’m one of the teachers’ kids.
“No. Th
e store.”
He looks at me funny, like he can’t fi gure out why a white girl would fl y all the way up here just to go to Swede’s dusty old store.
“Swede’s my dad,” I say.
He looks puzzled for a second, then smiles. “I’ll be darned.”
If I were smart-alecky, like Amiq, I’d say, “What the heck’s 69
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that supposed to mean?” But I’m not. And anyhow, I already know what it means. It means he doesn’t think of Swede as having a family, especially not a young one.
“You could climb up into that truck, and I’ll run you over there,” he says. He’s looking at my freckles and trying to pretend he’s not. Measuring my freckles against Swede’s, probably. “Could see Swede in you all right,” he says.
I lift my chin and look right at him. “How’s Aaka Mae?”
He knows who Aaka Mae is—everybody knows Mae and
everyone calls her Aaka, too, like she is the whole world’s grandma, which she pretty much is.
“Aaka Mae? Th
ey take her to Fairbanks.”
Fairbanks? It gets hard to breathe all of a sudden. I watch wordlessly while he heaves my suitcase into the back of his truck. Clouds of dust rise up behind us as the truck bumps along the dirt road, taking us to Swede’s store. All I can think is: Aaka Mae, gone.
LUKE
—
Th
e door swings open, and there’s Uncle Joe, holding his gun and grinning. Th
e sun shining behin
d his head looks like a
halo or something.
“So they gonna let you hunt down there?” he says.
Me and Bunna are suddenly tongue-tied staring at that gun, the one that never ever misses a shot.
“Sure,” I manage fi nally. “One moose or three caribou—
that’s one semester’s worth.”
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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e I don’t think Joe knows anything about semesters or tuition and I don’t think he cares, either. But I can tell by the way he looks down at his gun that he’s calculating moose and caribou to bullets.
Th
en he looks up—looks right at me, hard. “You take care of your brother, now, okay?”
I nod, looking at the gun, calculating the best way to angle the barrel, shooting through trees.
CHICKIE
—
Standing in the store, I suddenly realize that for some totally crazy reason, I actually missed the smell of Swede’s store, with its fox furs on the wall and cans of stove oil on the fl oor and its dusty shelves full of fl our and jam and coff ee and nails. Th ere’s
two ladies in the back of the store, one young and one old, debating about which fabric to buy, and this makes me realize, suddenly, that I missed hearing the sound of Iñupiaq, too.
And I especially missed the feel of Swede, crushing me up against his fl annel shirt without a word. We don’t need a lot of words, Swede and I, because that’s how we are. We always know what each other is going to say before we say it, so a lot of times we don’t even bother talking. Swede already knew about my fi rst question, for example. I can see it in his eyes when I pull away from his hug and look at his face.
He looks down, folding his arms across his chest like he’s trying to hug himself.
“Th
ey had to put her in a home.”
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Th
e way he says home makes it sound like it’s some new word, a word that has sharp, hissing edges and doesn’t have anything at all to do with family.
“Why?”
For a moment that word just sort of hangs there in the air between us like a hook.
“She needed to be there,” Swede says.
One of the ladies shopping plops a bolt of fabric on the counter and says, “Th
ree yards.” Th
en she turns back to
the older woman and asks, in Iñupiaq, if that’s going to be enough.
I stand there watching Swede measure the material,
thinking about how the English language makes me so mad sometimes. She needed to be there. How can a person use the word needed in a sentence that has nothing whatsoever to do with need?
LUKE
—
Bunna and I are standing by our duffl
es, all ready to go. It’s not
like the fi rst time we left, that’s for sure. I’m thinking about all the kids I’m going to see—Amiq and Donna and Junior.
I miss them all—even the Pete boys. Even Sonny, which surprises me. We are watching the plane land, and I’m already thinking about soaring back up into those summer clouds and landing in the middle of all those trees. I even miss the trees.
I’m holding Uncle Joe’s gun with Bunna right next to me like a sergeant at arms. Mom is standing off to the side, 72
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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e looking lonely. Jack’s gone now, has been for months. No one’s sure where he went, and none of us miss him much, either, except for Mom. I put my arm around her, looking down at the gun, proud of myself. I want her to be proud, too, but Mom’s not looking at the gun; she’s looking fi rst at Bunna, then at me, then back to Bunna, like she’s trying to memorize our faces, trying to keep herself from crying by looking extra hard. And then Uncle Joe is here, striding cross the tarmac and smiling big as day.
“Hey!”
He nods at the gun one last time. “I’m only loaning her to you, remember. Don’t you forget to bring her back.”
I hold the gun up, smiling as hard as a person can smile.
“I won’t,” I say.
“Yeah?” Joe winks, which makes his whole face wrinkle up like tissue and makes me notice, for the fi rst time, all those little wisps of gray hair around his ears.
All of a sudden I want to say no—no, don’t get gray hairs, no, don’t let us get on this plane, no, don’t let us leave with this gun of yours.
But before I know it, I’m sitting in the seat by the window, listening to the rising roar of the engine and watching everything get smaller—and smaller—and smaller.
CHICKIE
—
When we land in Fairbanks, all I can think about is the word home, the home where Aaka Mae is at—somewhere here in 73
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Fairbanks. Where exactly is it and what’s it like? Th e home I
am imagining is a very lonely place. I look around and spot the little knot of Sacred Heart students congregating in the corner of the airport. Like orphans. Watching them, I have a sad thought: I’m halfway to being an orphan myself, Swede getting older and all.
How come I always have to think like this? I try to make my mind go somewhere else by imagining myself way up high, looking down at this fi dgeting little fi stful of kids, standing together at the Fairbanks airport, the boys making jokes and the girls ignoring them. Th
en I have another one of those
thoughts: Maybe someday all of us will be like Aaka Mae, sitting in homes that are not really homes. All alone and forgotten.
Suddenly, Evelyn hollers out my name, and I run to her like I’m running to meet a long-lost sister.
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PART II
The Day the Soldiers Came
1961–1962
We are living underground and we are many.
I can’t see the others but I can feel the warmth of their bodies and feel their hunger, too.
Th
eir hunger is my hunger.
Up on the surface, there is meat, frozen meat.
We know this.
“Is it warm enough to go up?” they ask.
“Too cold,” I say.
We all know the danger of cold and so we sleep, dreaming our collective dream.
Sleep until the time comes.
Sleep.
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Rose Hips and Chamomile
SEPTEMBER 1961
DONNA
—
We work in the garden, Sister Sarah and I, silent as stones. In the quiet between us, you can hear the things you can’t hear when people are talking and making noise. Like birds way up high, calling back and forth to each other, and the soft sound of wind tapping against the birch trees. Yellow leaves fl oat down around us like feathers.
Sister stands to move from one part of the garden to another. Her habit fl ickers in the light, casting shadows where she walks, and I think of myself, always living within the shadow and light of the nuns.
Th
e fi rst one was Sister Ann. I really didn’t understand that she wasn’t my real mother. It was winter, cold enough to freeze our blankets to the wall, and all anyone ever said was, her time to leave the Mission has come.
I thought I was going to leave wit
h her, but I was
wrong.
I watched her dash out across the runway, her white habit 77
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
slapping in the wind, the wind that is always with us. Slapping back and forth across her legs, telling her to stay.
She pressed something cold and fl at into my hand, and I stood there clutching it for dear life, watching her leave without me. Because I knew right then, without anybody having to say it, that I couldn’t run after her, couldn’t even say how much I wanted to.
She had tears in her eyes, too. Th
is is what I saw. Tears
that made her eyes look shiny when she turned to look back at me—me, standing still and dumb on the edge of the tundra, unwilling to believe the truth of what my eyes were seeing.
I watched her step right up into the belly of that metal bird, watched the plane lift off toward Heaven, watched it fade into the roaring sky, my momma with it. Gone forever.
Because I knew, even then, it was forever.
And I didn’t make a single sound, either, because little as I was, I knew I was supposed to hide my feelings. I don’t remember ever not knowing this.
Th
e last thing Sister Ann told me was to have faith,
because everything happens for a reason. I didn’t understand what she meant then and I didn’t know anything at all about reasons, but I believed her. I have always believed her. And I still remember the words of the prayer she taught me: “Guard well Th
y inner door where we reveal our need of Th
ee.” I am
always guarding my inner door, keeping people away.
It was a Saint Christopher medal she’d given me and it had the year engraved across the back of it, like a secret message: 1953. I rub my thumb against those numbers now for 78
My Name Is Not Easy Page 7
