Bo at Ballard Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  Bo yanked at those curls with the brush, but they bounced back like springs, so she went outside to the rain barrel and dumped a dipper of water over her head. She bent over to wring her hair out, and just then, Jack came around the corner from the storage shack. He raised his eyebrows, asking a question. Jack never used any words he didn’t have to.

  “Yovela made me curly again,” she said, facing him with water dripping down her face.

  Jack smiled broadly. “I recollect how you hated it the first time she did that to you. Must have been two years ago.” He led her into the cookshack and got a towel to dry her hair.

  “Guess you’re not going to be a girlie girl,” he said. He brushed her hair out straight and did her braids up. “Maybe if you had a mama, or sisters, you might have gone that way. Too late now, I guess.”

  “Well, you don’t like it either, all that curly mess,” said Bo, scowling at him.

  “Hah, I guess not. I like things to be just what they is. No messing with them.”

  “Right,” said Bo. “Me too.”

  “You could tell Yovela that,” said Jack.

  “But Lilly and Yovela, they’re so fancy,” Bo wailed. “They don’t leave nothing the way it is. They’re just always cranking in those corsets and shining their nails and doing their hair.”

  “Well,” said Jack, “that’s kind of like their job. That’s why they call them fancy women, some places.”

  “I might hurt their feelings if I said I didn’t want to be like that.” Bo said.

  “That’s true,” said Jack. “Guess you don’t have any better friends than Yovela and Lilly. But you know, you just tell them in a nice way, tell them you don’t want to be fancy. You just want to be Bo. They’ll understand.”

  “Well, I’m not going to visit her anymore,” said Bo. “Not unless Oscar is with me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SURPRISE FOR OLLIE’S BIRTHDAY

  OLLIE DEGLAR was having a birthday party at the roadhouse. Everyone in town was going to be there. Jack had made a big cake for him, and now that the chores were done and the cookshack was spotless, Jack was ready to decorate it.

  Jack made cakes for everyone’s birthday. He had a special little kit of colors to dye the frosting and canvas tubes to squeeze the frosting out in lines. Bo would never miss watching Jack make one of his cakes.

  She liked to watch him get ideas. His gray eyes got a sort of still, quiet look as if he was waiting. Bo could see that ideas were things that just popped into your head if you waited. Like magic. But Jack could never tell her how it happened.

  “Just come to me,” he’d say.

  Bo tried to watch herself get ideas, but it was like trying to catch a butterfly.

  Every cake was something special. A round cake for Yovela looked like a hat with frosting feathers, almost like the one Yovela wore to be very fancy. He made a rainbow cake for Manuluk last year when she turned ten. He cut a round cake in half and stood both halves up on the plate on their cut ends to make the bow, and then frosted the bow with the different colors of the rainbow.

  “Rainbow colors have to go in a certain order,” Jack told Bo. “You can’t put the colors any old way. “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet,” he said. “That’s the way they go. Fix that in your mind.”

  Manuluk loved that cake so much she cried when her mother cut into it. Jack gave Manuluk a big hug and told her not to worry—he’d make her a rainbow cake every year if she wanted, so Manuluk stopped crying and ate two pieces herself.

  Ollie was a plain sort of person, so Ollie’s cake was not fancy. Jack made a long chocolate cake with a shorter cake on top so that the two layers made a kind of step.

  He slathered both cakes with frosting and then he put white frosting in his canvas tube for decorating. This was the part Bo liked to watch the most. Jack wrote Ollie’s name on top of the cake in big white frosting letters and then some numbers: 1859 and 1929.

  “What are those numbers?” Bo asked.

  “That is the year Ollie was born, and that’s the year today,” Jack said.

  “That’s how it is on the grave markers down in the burial place. Two sets of numbers,” Bo said thoughtfully.

  Jack looked at her with a funny expression.

  “That’s so,” he said. “That’s so.” He twisted his mouth in his thinking way.

  “I think I won’t use these numbers.” Jack took his big knife and swiped off the writing on the top of the cake. “Don’t want the cake to look like a gravestone.”

  “How did you know when Ollie was born?”

  “I asked him,” said Jack. “The thing about old people is, no one asks them enough questions. They get to thinking no one is interested. Said he was going to be seventy, so that’s 1859. That’s subtraction. When you get to school, you’ll see how it works.”

  Jack frowned at the cake. “Now what?” he said. Bo watched Jack’s face intently, trying to see the moment he got an idea, and where it came from. He scowled some more and twisted his mouth, and suddenly his frown went away.

  “Bring me the atlas, Bo.”

  Bo knew that was the big book with maps in it, because the miners used it a lot. Most of the time, they got the atlas when they were arguing about something. The atlas was to prove who was right about something, like the time that Lester said that London was on the same line as Sitka, and Paddy said he was crazy, it was no such thing, and they got out the atlas and Paddy was right.

  She didn’t know what Jack wanted the atlas for, but she didn’t ask, because in a few minutes she’d know. Jack always said don’t ask questions when there’s an emergency, and don’t ask questions if you’re going to find out right away by watching.

  Bo pulled the atlas out of its place on the shelf and hugged it to her chest as she carried it to Jack because it was very heavy. She dropped it on the table with a thump. Jack turned to a page in the middle that showed all the flags of the countries.

  “Norway,” he said, running his big finger down the page. “That’s where Ollie was born. Here’s what I was looking for. That’s the flag of Norway. That would look good on the cake, wouldn’t it? Not too hard to do.” Bo could see right away what a good idea that was. But she wished she knew where the idea had come from.

  Jack stared at the cake again.

  He mixed a little red color into some of the white frosting and then he made some blue. The Norwegian flag was a kind of sidewise blue cross on a red background with white outlining the edges of the blue cross.

  “Red, white, and blue,” said Jack. “Funny how many flags are red, white, and blue, like ours.” Bo tried to count the flags on the page that were red, white, and blue, but she lost count. There were lots.

  “If they asked me to make a flag, I’d use a lot more colors than this,” she said. “And different designs, not just stripes and stars. Too many stars. These flags are not very interesting. But I like this one with green leafs on it.”

  “That’s Canada’s flag,” said Jack. “Philipe is from Canada.”

  “Oh,” said Bo. “I will tell him I like his flag.”

  “He’ll be very pleased,” said Jack.

  He put the last white frosting line on the blue cross, and when he’d finished, Bo thought it was the most beautiful cake Jack had ever made.

  Then Bo and Jack cleaned up the kitchen, and Arvid came in from the blacksmith shop. They all took turns at the basin to wash their faces and hands. Arvid had to take a long time scrubbing his hands with the scrub brush because he worked with coal and lots of other dirty things. It didn’t do much good—Arvid’s hands never came clean.

  Jack and Arvid didn’t dress up. Arvid just changed into his clean work shirt. Jack didn’t need a clean shirt, since his shirt had been covered with an apron. But he put on his red suspenders because Bo liked them so much.

  Jack brushed out Bo’s tangled braids and braided new neat ones. He put a green ribbon on the end of each braid to match her dress, which was green calico printed with red
apples. Yovela had made it for her last year. Bo showed Arvid that it was getting pretty short.

  Arvid said, “Yovela always gives you plenty hem. I’ll just let this down next time I get a chance.”

  At last they were ready. They walked across the bridge, Jack carefully carrying the cake in front of him. Jack liked his cakes to be a surprise so he had put it in a box and covered it with a clean cloth. That way no one could see it.

  Almost everyone was there before them—all the children and most of the grown-ups, except a few men who were hunting. Jack put the cake on the table where Milo had trays of coffee cups set out and mason jars full of forks.

  When it was time, Milo called everyone to gather round. Jack took the cake out of the box while Milo pretended to be a trumpet making an important sound: ta-ta-tatata-ta-ta!

  “By golly,” Ollie said. That’s what he always said—by golly. The boys called him By-Golly-Ollie to tease him.

  Ollie’s face was red from the home brew he’d been drinking, and it got still redder when he looked at the cake.

  “By golly,” he said again. “The flag.”

  Everyone clapped and cheered for Ollie, and Lester began singing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which was another one of Bo’s favorite songs.

  Before they’d even cut the cake, the door burst open and in came Clarence, red-faced and panting. Clarence was the old-timer who worked the wireless.

  He was waving a piece of paper over his head. A wire.

  Everyone stood frozen in place to hear what Clarence’s news was. Their anxious faces made Bo suddenly afraid.

  But that anxiety only lasted a second. They could tell that it wasn’t bad news from the way Clarence was acting. He was so excited he was dancing up and down on his toes.

  “Wait till you hear this! Airplane coming! Coming here!”

  Everyone crowded around Clarence. Milo grabbed the wire from him and read it out loud once, and then again, as if he could hardly believe it. “Will Danfer flying his AJ-1 and Ted Smith, mechanic, coming from Nome to Ballard Creek, landing on the sandbar in front of town. An airplane,” Milo said softly. “At Ballard Creek.”

  “Best surprise I ever had for a birthday,” said Ollie.

  Oscar and Bo hung on to each other, hardly breathing. Nothing so exciting had happened in Ballard Creek before.

  It would be there in about a week. They’d wire ahead so that everyone would know when it was coming. The plane would make three stops, Candle and Bettles first. And then Ballard Creek.

  No one in Ballard Creek had ever seen an airplane except for Cannibal Ivan. When everyone had quieted a little, they ate Ollie’s cake and drank coffee while Cannibal told them all about the time he’d seen one in Fairbanks, the first airplane ever in Alaska.

  “See, they was flying around, these promoters, doing flying exhibitions anyplace they could—1913 it was. Wanted to make a lot of money, big hoorah with posters all over. Charged money for people to watch the plane take off and land at the ball field. But nobody sitting on the bleachers except the fat cats and women in their big hats. Everyone else got to see it free, because how smart did you have to be to figure out that if you climbed a tree by the ballpark or sat on someone’s roof, you wouldn’t have to pay anything at all?”

  Everyone laughed at the disgusted look on Cannibal’s face. “Tomfool people, those promoters.”

  He showed with his hands what the plane had done.

  “It took off and landed about a dozen times, tipping and turning up in the air, and the last time, the pilot threw out some balloons. They expected to sell that plane to someone, but no one was offering. So a few days later, they took it apart and shipped it on a stern-wheeler to the mouth of the Yukon and back to the States. I was on that steamer, the Molly B, saw the plane all wrapped up on the deck. Looked real little without its wings.”

  The whole country had been airplane crazy for years. Before Bo was born, some soldiers had flown from New York with four airplanes. They’d landed on a sandbar in the Yukon, and then they’d gone to Nome. Since then, the children in Ballard Creek had been playing airplanes with old boxes and slabs of logs from the sawmill.

  Now there were eighteen planes in Alaska, and all the men in Ballard Creek knew everything about those eighteen—their numbers and who owned them and everything that had happened to those planes.

  And now Will Danfer’s AJ-1 was coming to Ballard Creek.

  Lots of young pilots were going to villages around Alaska because they wanted to show how useful planes could be. They could carry the mail and fly people to places in an hour that would take days and weeks the old ways. Maybe save lives.

  It was the most useful invention that was ever invented.

  Waiting for the plane was going to be worse than waiting for Christmas or the Fourth of July.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE AIRPLANE

  NOW NO ONE in Ballard Creek or at the mine could talk of anything else but airplanes.

  All the miners who lived out on the trail past the mine walked into town through the slush and mud, and they filled up the roadhouse. No one knew when the airplane would come, but no one was going to miss it. They’d stay as long as it took.

  Clarence hardly ever left the wireless cabin, waiting to hear when the plane would come, and there was always someone crowded into the little shack with him. Two days, four days, five days, six days, seven days. It was a terribly long time to wait.

  Cannibal and Nels Niemi from the creeks were in the wireless shack playing checkers with Clarence when the wire came. Nels and Cannibal ran out into the street, whooping and carrying on. They didn’t even wait for Clarence to print it out.

  Everyone who was in town came running to hear what the wire said: “Leaving Bettles at 3:45. Ballard Creek at 4:30.”

  Cannibal saw Bo and shouted, “Go tell the boys! Go tell the boys!” Bo threw a troubled look at Oscar. She wanted to go tell the boys, of course—she didn’t want them to miss it—but she was afraid that the plane would come while she was telling them. But then she turned and ran as fast as she could across the bridge to the mining camp.

  Bo ran so hard the bottom of her feet hurt from pounding on the ground. As soon as she yelled the news to Jack, she ran back across the bridge.

  Everyone in town was crowded down by the sandbar where the plane would land.

  Bo pushed through the grown-ups to get to the edge of the bank with Oscar and the other children. The children held hands and braced their feet to keep from being pushed into the water by the crowd behind them.

  “Quiet! Quiet!” the grown-ups kept telling everyone. It had to be quiet so they could listen for the plane.

  Bo was looking at the sky so hard, she felt as if her eyes were bruised. It seemed like a very long time before they saw something way down the river, high in the sky.

  “Looks like a dragonfly,” said Oscar. The dragonfly got bigger and bigger and then it looked like a small bird and then like a raven and then they could hear it. That made it real, that little sound.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” said Bo, and clutched Oscar’s hand. It sounded like the engine on the winch at the mine. Or maybe more like Arvid’s sewing machine.

  It got closer and closer, and then they could see the four wings and they could see two heads inside the plane, one in front and one in back.

  And then it was right over their heads, flying low over the town up toward the roadhouse. Everyone left the riverbank to follow it, never taking their eyes off it for a minute. Bo’s throat was sore from screeching. She tripped and fell because she wasn’t watching where she was going.

  The plane tipped sideways and made a circle around the roadhouse, and everyone followed it around and around, stumbling and falling in the cold mud left from the melting snow.

  Everyone ran. Even all the old men and old women were running as if they were young again. They ran, heads up, craning their necks, following the plane as if it had strings and was pulling them. To the back of the roadhouse and then
back to the front again the plane circled, with everyone following.

  Bo fell again, and this time, strong hands reached for her and swung her up. It was Arvid. He didn’t take his eyes off the plane or stop running. He just set Bo all muddy and wet on his shoulders, the way he used to when she was little.

  “Gonna be trampled,” was all he said. The roaring, rackety airplane suddenly came down lower, right toward the roadhouse, and everyone screamed, terrified. It was going to knock the roadhouse down! Then it missed the roadhouse—it was coming right at them!

  Arvid was swearing fiercely in Swedish. From Arvid’s shoulders, Bo saw old Nakuchluk standing stock-still in the path, her mouth open, but Bo couldn’t hear her screaming over the sound of the plane engine.

  The plane circled around once again, suddenly dipped a little to one side, and there it was, landed on the sandbar.

  It happened so quickly that all the people around the roadhouse had to run back down to the bank.

  Bo held her breath until the propeller in the front of the airplane stopped spinning. Then the dreadful noise stopped.

  The two men in the plane climbed over the side. Bo shrank down on Arvid’s shoulders, frightened because they didn’t look like real people. The fliers had huge black eyes like dragonflies, but then they pulled the eyes off their faces and let them dangle around their necks.

  “Like snow goggles,” Arvid told Bo. “Keeps the wind out of their eyes.”

  The fliers were laughing and waving at everyone. Bo was sure they’d had a good time scaring everyone, watching them scream and run. They looked pleased with themselves, like Sammy or the other big kids did when they jumped out at the little kids and scared them.

  Two of the old-timers—Jimmy the Pirate and Sol—waded through the water to get to the sandbar and were shaking the pilots’ hands so hard Bo thought it looked like they were pumping water.