And Luke didn’t feel helpless anymore, either.
“What time is it?” Junior murmured.
“It’s the right time,” Luke said, smiling to himself.
And Junior smiled, too, half awake and half asleep, squinting owlishly into the dark. “It is, isn’t it?” he said.
Th
e woods were dark, all right, but Sonny knew the way. Amiq, in fact, had been the one to show it to him. Th
is thought made
Sonny smile into the darkness. Made him laugh, almost. Th at
crazy Eskimo and his Eskimo hideout. Hiding out from the Indians.
Well, not this Indian. Not this time.
He walked through the woods without a sound—not one single twig cracking, not one stone rolling.
Amiq was right where he knew he’d be, too. He hadn’t even heard Sonny coming. Even now, he had no idea that Sonny was standing right behind him. He just sat there in his darkened hideout, staring morosely at the ground. Sonny leaned forward. Amiq wasn’t just staring at the ground. He was holding something, something small that dangled from a slender chain and twinkled in the moonlight, and he was staring at an empty vodka bottle that lay on the ground by his feet. Looking at it hard, like he expected it to say something.
Th
at bottle had been there longer than Amiq had been staring at it, you could tell. Something about that pathetic old bottle 221
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and the way Amiq was hunched over it, clutching whatever it was he clutched, was just too funny. Sonny couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing.
Amiq leaped up, the little chain swinging from his fi ngers like some kind of spent weapon.
“What the hell!” He glared at Sonny. “What are you doing here?”
Sonny grinned. “Looking for trespassers,” he said.
Amiq stood there for just a second, his fi sts up at his chest like a boxer. Th
en he started laughing, laughing so hard he
almost cried.
“Oughta beat the crap out of you,” Amiq said, almost choking on the words.
“Try it,” Sonny said.
“I jokes,” Amiq said.
He looked down at his hand. It was Donna’s necklace, Sonny realized, the one she always wore.
“Saint Christopher,” Amiq said with a silly little grin. “Th e
patron saint of travelers.” And they both laughed. “Don’t know how she managed to get it into my duffl
e. Or when.”
Th
en the two of them just sat there in the dark woods, their backs to the empty bottle, staring at the river and at the necklace, swinging from the ends of Amiq’s fi ngers like a bell.
“What kind of mess you got us in now, Amundson?”
“Ain’t your mess, that’s for sure.”
Th
ere was a crack of branches, and suddenly Junior was there with them, with Luke right behind him.
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“Yes it is. It’s everybody’s mess,” Junior said.
He walked over to them in that tentative way he had and sat down right next to them, shoving his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, like he was trying to apologize for something. With Junior, everything felt like an apology.
“We sort of had this idea,” he said, taking his glasses off and cleaning them on his t-shirt. He gave Amiq a small, near-sighted smile. “Civil disobedience, just like you said.”
And Luke, leaning up against a tree, smiled.
Old man Johnson, owner of Johnson’s Lodge and Bait, gives Junior a funny look when he says he has some papers that need notarizing. For a long moment, Johnson doesn’t say a word, just squints at the papers. Th
en he looks at Junior. Hard.
“Now, Junior,” he says. “You don’t expect me to believe that you had anything to do with that whole mess, do you? I sure never heard you talk like this before, the way this letter’s written.” He scowls at Amiq, standing there next to him, then looks back at Junior. “And that ad doesn’t sound at all like you, either, Junior.”
Mr. Johnson stands behind the counter of his store, which is attached to his lodge at the far end of the coff ee shop. Th e
sign that reads notary public hangs behind him on the log wall, framed. He doesn’t even notice Luke, hunched up in the shadows in the corner of the room.
“You’re not trying to say you’re the one who wrote ’em both, are you?” Johnson says.
“Yes, sir,” Junior says. “I am.”
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“Says here on this affi
davit you’re taking full responsibility
for the whole thing. . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son, I don’t think you want to do that.”
Chickie picks this exact moment to stick her little blond head into the lodge and stroll breezily over to the counter, where she slides onto the stool right next to Junior as easy as if it’s a classroom and the bell has just rung. She knows Mr.
Johnson—he’s an old friend of her dad’s from back when they both worked for the same trading company.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Johnson, he does want to do that,” she says sweetly. “And so do I.”
“What!” Old man Johnson just about launches himself over the counter. “Are you saying the two of you wrote it together? Come on now, Chickie, you’re daddy ain’t gonna go for that at all, and you know it.”
Chickie smiles. “Well, I’m afraid that just can’t be helped,”
she purrs. “And anyhow, Swede ought to be used to me by now, don’t you think?”
Johnson grins, despite himself, then frowns and shakes his head. “And you want me to notarize them?”
Junior can tell by the sound of his voice that Mr. Johnson is starting to feel trapped.
“Says right there you’re a Notary Public,” Chickie
announces, waving her arm at the framed certifi cation. “And I don’t see why we should have to go all the way to town when you’re right here.” She looks up and smiles sweetly, like a little girl talking to her daddy.
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Old man Johnson shakes his head, muttering, but it isn’t an angry sound. Th
en he goes over to a shelf and pulls out his
notary stamp.
“All right,” he says. “Sit down. Let’s get this over with. You just remember, now, that this here is a legal document, and you two will have to live with the consequences of it.”
When Johnson says the word consequences, he turns to look at Amiq, but Amiq is no longer there. Amiq is outside helping Sonny round up the others—Rose and Evelyn, the Pete brothers and the rest—all of them waiting to sign affi
davits.
Just like those duck hunters.
We are hunters, too, Amiq thinks, looking at them all and smiling: hunters for justice.
It feels, in fact, like one big communal hunting trip, with Junior as the unlikely guide, and the rest of them watching the horizon and waiting for their turn to shoot.
When Donna slips past him, Amiq tries to catch her eye, but she refuses to look. Even in the dark, though, he sees her blush. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her blush before. He smiles to himself. Th
en he realizes that’s he’s blushing, too.
Luke isn’t outside with the others. He’s right there, leaning up against the darkened wall inside, invisible almost, watching.
As Amiq slips out the door, Luke steps forward, right up to the counter with the
sign that off ers live bait and the cartoons about “the one that got away.” He stares at one of the cartoons, old and yellowed, and picks up the pen.
“I’ll be fi rst,” he says.
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“Not sure why you want to get mixed up in this one, Luke,” Johnson says.
“Yes, sir,” Luke says, not really hearing Mr. Johnson and not hearing the sound of Amiq and Sonny and all the other kids just outside the door. Not hearing anything except the sound of a small silence deep inside.
He looks at the form, looks at that word affi
davit and
remembers, suddenly, that other affi
davit, a long time ago, the
one that followed Isaac. But it wasn’t an affi
davit, Sister had
said—it was a permission form. Luke looks at the affi davit
laid out on the counter and thinks about the word permission.
How do you say permission in Iñupiaq, he wonders? If there is a word, he can’t remember it, doesn’t need it. He lifts the pen and leans forward. LEGAL NAME, the form asks.
Legal name? He puts the pen right there on that line and signs his name, his real Iñupiaq name, the one he left behind:
Aamaugak. He hears the sound of it as the pen scratches the paper, the sound of his mother’s voice, a warm, guttural buzz in the dusty darkness of Johnson’s Lodge and Bait.
Sometimes there’s nobody going to give you permission. Sometimes you just have to take it for yourself.
Johnson looks at his signature and frowns, but he doesn’t say a word. Th
en he signs it himself and stamps it “nota-
rized.”
Aamaugak. Luke thinks. What’s so hard about that?
As if on cue, everyone is now lined up behind him, waiting to sign. Everyone except Michael O’Shay, who is still sitting on the bench outside the lodge, staring off into the woods 226
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morosely until, fi nally, he’s the only one left. Sonny sticks his head out the door and smiles at him broadly.
“Okay, O’Shay. Your turn, my man.”
O’Shay frowns. “I don’t think so. My dad would kill me.”
“Come on, O’Shay, don’t be so damn white.”
O’Shay bristles. “As a matter of fact, I am white, and if I get expelled, I’ll be dead and white.”
“How the heck they gonna expel the entire student
body?”
O’Shay looks off into the woods thoughtfully. Th
en he
stands up.
“Oh, what the hell.”
“Here’s the real story, sir,” Junior tells Father Mullen, handing him the stack of affi
davits. “And we all wrote it.”
And that was the truth, the whole truth. It was no longer just one person’s opinion. It belonged to all of them.
Father leafed through the affi
davits, and all he said was,
“I see.”
What else could he say?
“I see.”
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Good Friday
MARCH 27, 1964
Father Mullen needs a break. Lord knows he needs a break. He needs a break from all those brats and their nonsense. Th at’s
why he’s here, isn’t it, walking the deserted beach of Seward, Alaska, which seems suddenly calm. Too calm. He sighs, thinking unaccountably of his mother. He doesn’t remember her, of course. He was just a baby. But sometimes, at odd moments, he feels her presence. It seems by turns to be both an admonishment and a comfort.
Lord knows he could use some comfort now.
He picks up a stone and tries to send it skating across the rolling, smooth skin of the sea the way he used to do on the pond back home in Missouri when he was a boy. It sinks on the fi rst skip. He watches it, absently, thinking about those Native boys, the ones he’s supposed to mold into Christians, the ones trying to break their thick, senseless skulls against the mold. Th
e beach is full of fl at, smooth stones perfect for skip-ping, but Father seems to have lost the knack.
In the sanctuary at Sacred Heart School, hundreds of miles 228
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north of Seward, Father Flanagan pauses, briefl y, to wonder if they aren’t overdoing it a bit, making these kids sit through Mass more than once in the same day. Even if it is Good Friday. Making them say Mass every day, for that matter. Th
ere are better ways to model Christian charity, one would hope.
Luke Aaluk, in the bathroom at the Sacred Heart dorm, doesn’t think much of Christian charity, but he would agree with the part about overdoing it. He stares at his refl ection in the steamy mirror of the shower room, altogether sick of stepping out of squeaky showers, freezing cold, of getting dressed in stiff white shirts and choking ties and mumbling the words to Mass over and over until none of it makes any sense in any language. When he goes home, he’ll for sure go the rest of his life without ever taking one more single stinking shower or wearing one more stiff white shirt or sitting through one more mumbling Mass. Th
at’s his particular vow for this particular
Good Friday, and he thinks it’s a good one.
Chickie Snow is not inclined to make vows right now. She takes her cookie and her glass of milk and sits down neatly at the table, all alone in the cafeteria. It’s a secret she and Sister Mary Kate share: her own private treat ever since that time when she fi rst came to Sacred Heart and got lost in the woods.
Fresh cookies and milk.
Even though she hasn’t said it out loud, she thinks of 229
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Bunna and feels those words catch in her throat: fresh cookies and milk.
Milk. Bunna never liked milk.
Donna kneels on the cold fl oor of the Sacred Heart chapel, feeling that wordless sense of understanding that comes sometimes. She can’t quite say what it is she understands, but it makes her feel happy, fi lled with a sense of belonging as wide as the ocean. It comes to her when she least expects it: in the hush of Sister Sarah’s garden, in the sweet soprano of all their voices singing together, and right here, in the dusky, cold sanctuary with the swish of Father Flanagan’s robes, whispering against the edge of it like slow waves on an endless beach.
Sister Sarah kneels, too, nearly invisible in the darkness. Her old joints ache, stiff against the chill air. When she kneels too long, it always hurts to stand again. On days like today, she wants to pray to put a stop to it all.
No, don’t make me stand again. Let me go home.
Amiq, stepping out of the shower, studies his face in the mirror. Th
e Saint Christopher medal Donna gave him hangs on
the metal shelf below the mirror. Saint Christopher Protect Us, it pleads. Amiq only takes it off when he showers and hardly ever looks at it anymore. Like it’s a part of him. He looks at it now and is suddenly struck by how strange it is—some white guy in a robe, leaning on a cane with a kid on his back. How had he come to attach any importance to a thing like that—a 230
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big gold coin, like a piece of foreign currency washed up from the shore of a distant county?
Strange, the way things take on their own meanings.
Chickie sets her glass of milk on the table, watching the way the milk makes little circular waves in the glass,
thinking about Bunna, feeling way down deep inside herself the place that still belongs to Bunna, remembering Sister Sarah’s prayer: Guard well thy inner door where we reveal our need of Th ee.
Chickie will guard Bunna’s place forever and ever. If there really is a forever and ever.
Eternity. Father Mullen feels himself on the edge of it, at a deserted beach on the edge of a northern continent watching the ocean rise up into a massive angry swell so large he thinks he may have imagined it, may have imagined everything since one nameless sunny morning in Missouri on the shore of a boyhood pond, long forgotten.
A candle jerks, suddenly, in the Sacred Heart Chapel, snuffi ng
itself out.
Snuffi
ng itself out. Th
at’s how Father Flanagan describes
it to himself, startled at the thought of a candle, unattended, snuffi
ng itself out in the House of the Lord. He hears, in his mind, a sudden roar so strange, he dismisses it as impossible.
Th
e pipes are rattling, Amiq notices. Th
e pipes always rattle
when the little kids sneak down into the basement to swing 231
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on them. He remembers when he was one of the little ones, daring Sister Sarah to come swat him down.
Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, Amiq thinks, watching the medal swing back and forth on the edge of the rattling metal shelf. Traveling, he thinks. His whole life has been about traveling. Traveling away from everything he ever knew—the tundra, the ocean, the sound of the language and the feel of the wind . . .
Th
e pipes complain with a loud crack, and the sink
jumps.
“Hey!” Amiq hollers, holding on to the sink. “HEY!”
He imagines those little kids—a whole herd of them—
jumping up and swinging from one pipe to the next, yodeling like little Tarzans, then leaping off suddenly into the jungle of the boiler room.
Where the heck was Sister Sarah?
My Name Is Not Easy Page 20
