In the cafeteria, a plate rattles violently, and Chickie goes cold with a sudden fear. When the tables and chairs start rattling, too, her muscles freeze. She needs to hold on to something but can’t. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe.
Th
e fl uorescent bulbs above her tap against each other, and the light fl ickers ominously. Nausea washes over her.
Sister Mary Kate comes fl ying out of the kitchen like a white sheet caught in the wind. “Run, Chickie! Run outside!”
Th
e sound of Sister’s voice is like a lifeline, pulling her up out of her chair, dragging her away, reminding her muscles 232
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to move, move, move. She wants to holler but she can’t fi nd her voice. All she can do is stumble behind Sister as though they’re connected by an invisible line, Sister, fl apping ghost-like in front, plates shattering to the fl oor behind with a brittle echoing sound.
Earthquake!
Even before he has a chance to name it, every nerve in Luke’s body screams the word. Running like crazy down the hall, down the stairs, along corridors, barely aware of all the others bumping and fl apping against each other like fi sh trapped in the bottom of a storm-tossed boat. Th
ey are trying
to run away from it, only they can’t because it’s everywhere, even outside.
Even in the sky itself.
Kids and teachers, nuns and priests, all of them outside, running back and forth, trying to decide which way to go, crying and praying and throwing themselves down onto the ground as if onto the back of a giant animal, galloping off into space. Trying to hold on. Everything jerked back and forth like somebody big is playing ball with the planet, somebody as big and mean as Father Mullen’s God.
When he looks up to the mountains, Luke feels suddenly dizzy: Even the mountains are rolling back and forth, back and forth. Like huge ships on an angry sea.
Good Friday, Father Mullen thinks. Good Friday.
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• • •
As the terrible trembling dies down, Chickie realizes, suddenly, that she and Donna are holding hands, clinging to each other’s fi ngers hard enough to crush bones, holding on as if their lives depend on it, neither of them aware of what they’re doing.
Th
eir ears fi ll with a sudden rushing silence that makes Donna feel a terrible loneliness, all of a sudden, like she’s standing on God’s runway, watching the last plane leave. She feels left behind again, even though she can still feel Chickie’s hand. She wants to run after somebody or something. Don’t leave! Don’t leave me!
She lets go of Chickie’s hand and sinks to the ground.
“Oh.” Breathing the word soft as a sigh.
And Chickie knows, feeling Donna’s fi ngers slip from hers, knows suddenly and certainly that there’s nothing else to say, nothing left in the whole wide world save the sound of that one word, rising up from Donna’s chest like a spirit departed.
Oh.
Th
eir fi ngers tingle as the blood rushes back into their hands.
Oh.
Th
ey both see it at the same time: Sister Sarah, lying on the ground, clutching her chest, motionless.
Luke had watched her fall, fl uttering down onto the still-rolling ground, weightless, as if gravity had departed from 234
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her skinny old body, her bones at last as light as bird bones.
He’d seen the fl ickering of her habit, watched Sister Mary Kate fl y down beside her, saw Father Flanagan running, running, his robes fl apping. And he imagined, for just a second, that the whole world was littered with the black-and-white robes of nuns and priests falling, dropped from the sky like fl ies or fl ags.
Th
e ends of his nerves are still jangling with the electricity of it. Even in the center of this sudden stillness, his blood still buzzes.
Th
e sound of things returns, piece by piece, but his head feels stuff ed with cotton, noises arriving slowly as if from a great distance: the staccato of scared girls, the squawking of the youngest ones, the sudden shriek of Sister Mary Kate’s voice, sharp as gunshot.
“Help! Oh help me! Please! ”
Sister Mary Kate is kneeling down on the ground next to Sister Sarah, and the pain in Sarah’s body is squeezing her face shut tight. Tight as an old fi st.
Father Flanagan is still running, his heart pounding in his ears, remembering suddenly just how far they are from everything civilized. Hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, if there is one left. For a second he even wonders if there really is any help left anywhere.
One of the boys could have carried her alone—it wouldn’t take two adults together, but they did it that way anyhow.
Sister Sarah and her skinny old body, as hollow as an empty seed husk.
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Luke goes cold inside, watching Father and Sister Mary Kate and all the kids, the way they move, everything fl owing as if in slow motion. Like he’s there but not really there, the same way he felt when they told him the news about Bunna’s death, that time.
Sister Sarah is gone. You don’t have to look at her to know the truth of it. You can feel it in the air.
It’s how the earth decides, he thinks.
Th
ey are walking in behind the slow string of nuns and priests and kids, moving cautiously as if afraid to disturb the ground again. Inside, the school looks ravaged, like somebody big ran through all the rooms swinging a two-by-four. Books spilled out of bookcases, windows broken, everything out of place, everyone scurrying everywhere, even into the nuns’
quarters. Th
ey’re so shocked by the sight of it all that nobody thinks about where they’re supposed to look or not look.
Th
e strangest thing is Sister Mary Kate’s rattail comb, standing upright in a cracked jar of cold cream, right there in the middle of the fl oor of her room like an alien fl ower.
In the cafeteria, there’s broken glass and spilled food everywhere, but Chickie’s glass of milk is still standing on the table, balanced on the very edge as if one sneeze could send it crashing to the fl oor.
“I’ll be darned,” Luke says, looking at it. “I’ll be doggoned.”
Amiq thinks of the Saint Christopher medal, swinging from the edge of a shelf in the empty bathroom, and he won-236
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ders whether it fell off into the sink, slid down the drain.
And a thousand miles south, on a remote beach on the southern edge of the northernmost state in the country, Father Mullen watches the ocean rise up over him, a great rushing wall, a ceiling of liquid dark cement raining down.
Riveted to the ground, he watches it sweep over him as inevi-table as night, watches as though he’s watching from a great, unbridgeable distance.
Gone.
It was a heart attack. Th
at’s what the whispers say about Sister
Sarah, and this seems right somehow, Donna thinks. As though Sister had planned for it in that stern, deliberate way of hers.
Th
ey bury her at the church graveyard in the woods behind the school. Th
e church was the only family Sister Sarah had,
Father says.
Perhaps Sister Sarah had been an orphan, too, just like me, Donna thinks.
Th
ey stand in the middle of the graveyard in the woods by the school—a smooth and grassy patch at the tail end of winter. Green things poke up through melting snow, and off through the trees somewhere one little bird tests her song against the crisp air. Sister Sarah would like it here, Donna thinks. Th
en, all of a sudden she knows that Sister
is here, as much a part of the place as that little hollow of snow and those waving willows. Donna feels her presence as sharp as birdsong, same as always. More real than Father Flanagan’s voice, washing over the top of them like water.
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Holy Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Luke sees a fl ash in the woods, and he’s pretty sure that nobody else but him sees it. Imagine that: an Eskimo from the tree-less tundra knowing enough about the woods to see the old Indian before any of the rest of them see him. But there he is, solid as rock, old Mr. Pete, standing in the cemetery right next to Luke and Chickie.
“What you doin’ here?” he says to Luke, his voice whispery rough. And for a second Luke is scared, just like the fi rst time.
Th
en he sees the smile. Th
e old, knowing smile, the one that
says, “I jokes.”
“Sending Sister home,” Chickie says.
“She already gone home,” the old man says.
Yes, yes she did, Luke thinks, suddenly.
“A heart attack is merciful. A heart attack is so merciful.” Sister Mary Kate mutters the words over and over, for days and days, her eyes fi lling up with tears. Luke feels bad for her because even though she never understood a lot of things, Sister Mary Kate was always good to them. But he can’t see how a heart attack is merciful. In fact, he can’t see anything at all merciful about death, period. He doesn’t even like the sound of the word mercy. Tastes like fake sugar, bitter on the tongue.
Th
ey say Father Mullen went down to the beach in Seward right before the tidal wave came in. Tsunami. Th is is the word
they use. Probably hit him broadside, like a giant two-by-four.
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Th
at’s what Luke thinks. Swallowed him right up, just like Jonah.
What did Mullen think when he saw that wave coming?
Wrath of God. Th
e words fl ash through Luke’s mind with
a sudden rush of sound and sense.
If he were still a kid, he’d want to warn Bunna about Father coming. Tell him to run quick, to get the heck out of there. Now he thinks maybe it’s the other way around, maybe old Mullen better watch out for Bunna. But then he realizes that even that’s not right. Th
ose two have gone to diff erent places, Bunna and
Mullen. Luke knows this as sure as he knows anything.
Bunna’s place is with Aapa and Aaka out on the tundra, wide open and golden and full of caribou. Hunting in the sunshine, the way it always shines in the summer at midnight back home. Soft and silent and dreamlike.
In Mullen’s place there’s a God that gets his energy from punishing people in a heaven so full of the righteous, a person could hardly breathe without pissing someone off . Luke almost laughs out loud: Bunna wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that.
He can’t quite explain it about that earthquake, but it’s like things were crooked before, and now they’re not. Like they weren’t lined up, but now they are.
Th
e earth is like that, Luke thinks. Flipping over and over and over again, trying to right itself, always trying to right itself.
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Epilogue ~ A New Gun
1965
LUKE
—
Th
e dogs are howling with voices that say a plane is landing, but there’s no plane, no distant buzzing in the clouds. It’s a new sound making them howl—Uncle Joe’s snow machine, come roaring into the yard, bright red and shiny new, the sound of it banging up against our ears like a blizzard against an old shed door.
I like it.
Uncle Joe is kneeling on the seat on one knee, holding hard onto that machine’s handles like it’s a big animal that needs taming. Isaac sits behind him, grinning hard. His face has grown up, but it’s still the same old face, and every time I look at it, it feels like a miracle.
We found him with that ad in the Dallas paper: Looking for Isaac. It took a lot of people helping—kids and adults, both. O’Shay’s dad did the legal stuff , and Father Flanagan found the money. But we did it. We got him back.
Me and Mom stand at the doorway, watching that snow 240
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E P I L O G U E ~ A N E W G U N / L u k e machine fl ash past us, watching its runners carve a wide circle in the snow. Th
e dogs lunge at the ends of their lines, yapping
at the edge of that circle like it’s a border to a new country, their mouths snapping open and shut with a voiceless violence. It’s like a movie with the sound turned off , watching those dogs lunge and snap into the roar of that machine.
Th
e sun against the snow is bright enough to burn your eyes.
“Too much racket!” Mom hollers. “You gonna shake
peoples’ ears off .”
Joe cuts the engine and steps off the machine, never even hearing Mom. He has his gun, his brand-new gun, and he stands in front of that snow machine with that gun strapped across his back like a hunter with a big, shiny catch.
“How you gonna hunt with all that racket?” Mom calls.
Even though it’s quiet now, the sound of that machine echoes in our ears, and Mom is yelling like it’s still a competition between the two of them.
“Forget the noise!” Isaac hollers back. “It’s the speed that counts!”
“Th
is thing goes fast enough you could jump on the back of a running caribou,” Joe hollers, then winks at me. “Or rope
’em riding by.”
Mom is kneeling down next to Pakak, her lead dog, trying to calm him down, a wisp of gray hair falling across her cheek.
“And what good’s all that speed if it can’t even fi nd its way home in a storm?” she asks Pakak.
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• • •
Isaac’s right, though. It’s the speed of things going faster and faster in this fast new world—that’s what’s gonna count, not the noise.
But not right now. Right now, as we sit down to eat, all that matters is us, sitting here at our own table eating frozen fi sh quaq until our stomachs grow warm and our eyes grow sleepy and the world gets slow. All that matters right now is that I’m home and Isaac is fi nally home, too. And being home is good because I can lean back in my chair and say, “Where’s the seal oil?” saying it in Eskimo like I never even left, never even went to Sacred Heart School where they don’t know nothing about seal oil, not in any language.
“Where’s the what?” Uncle Joe says.
I’m slicing off a buttery smooth slice of frozen fi sh, suddenly aware of the fact that both Uncle Joe and Mom are looking at me funny, both of them real quiet.
“Misigaaq, ” I say again, the Iñupiaq sounds tickling the back of my throat.
“Missy-gaq, ” Joe says, sliding the jar across the table, mimicking the way I’ve said it, making me hear how funny it sounds, Catholic-shaped on my Catholic-trained tongue.
“What kind of talk they teach you down there in that place?” Joe ask
s, laughing. “Swahili?”
And I laugh, too, although there’s nothing funny inside my laughter. Inside there’s words I can hear, clear as birdsong, words I will never ever say again. Words that make me feel like 242
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E P I L O G U E ~ A N E W G U N / L u k e those dogs out there snapping and lunging, voiceless against the roar of the future.
But never mind, because when the time comes, we’re
gonna shake everybody’s ears off ; that’s what I think. Shake them good with the sound of all us kids come home, full of new ideas, loud as engines revving. Th
e future may be slick
with Latin words and loud machines and the kind of laughter that burns your throat, but it’s gonna take off like a shiny new snow machine, ready to go anywhere. Everything, both good and bad, all messed up together. Th
at’s what I think.
Uncle Joe is done eating, and he’s standing in front of me now, holding his new gun, the gun with the site that’s never less than a hair from right. He isn’t laughing anymore.
“Guess you’re ready for a new gun by now,” he says, his voice soft.
Guess I am.
We’re roaring across the snow-fi lled tundra on his snow machine, me and Joe, caribou scattering before us like brown stones rolling across a white run. Joe is focusing on one caribou, a weaker one that’s fallen to the side of the herd. As we get closer and closer, we can see the animal’s breathing grow labored, see its eye, straining backward, watch how it marks our approach with a look that speakes of resignation. Joe turns his head sideways without taking his eyes off that animal.
“Ready?” He hollers.
I nod my head. I’m ready.
“Hang on!” he yells, raising his body up and leaning out 243
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toward the caribou as we close in on it.
My Name Is Not Easy Page 21
