Bo at Iditarod Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  After Jack washed the living room walls, he planed the rough edges off the outhouse seats. “Don’t want any splinters in your behinds,” he said.

  Then he made the beds with their old quilts and flannel sheets and pillows. Bo unpacked Graf’s red velvet bear and her much shabbier bear, set them tenderly on the beds, one on each pillow, and patted them lovingly.

  Jack smiled down at Bo. “Feels like home now, with your bears talking to each other,” he said.

  Buddy and Will knocked on the screen door to see if Graf and Bo could come out. Bo said they were too busy, but when the boys turned to go, they stopped and looked at the couch.

  “Got a davenport, huh?” Buddy said approvingly. Bo and Graf gave each other a look. Another name for it.

  While Jack was settling the little house to his strict standards, Arvid and Graf finished the tabletop.

  Jack spread the table with their old flowered oilcloth.

  “Nine feet this table is. Almost as long as our old one. Perfect. Can do just about anything on this table.”

  When they finally sat down to eat at the new table, which Bo and Graf had set with their old plates and cups, Jack looked well pleased. He liked it when everything was orderly.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BUDDY AND WILL

  BO AND GRAF were helping Jack put away the breakfast dishes when they heard feet pounding on the path to their door. Bo snatched the door open, and there was Buddy getting ready to knock, with Will behind dancing impatiently up and down on the path.

  “Can you come out?”

  They’d nearly finished settling in, so the papas said they didn’t need any more help.

  “Go have some fun,” Arvid told them. “You’ve been slaving away for days.”

  While Bo looked for Graf’s lace-up boots behind the door, Jack wiped his hands and asked the boys if they wanted a leftover biscuit and they did. Will took two.

  Bo laced Graf’s knee-high leather boots to save time. He could do it himself, but they were in a hurry, and hurry wasn’t a thing Graf was good at.

  When Graf’s boots were laced, they all ran off across the tailings.

  First Buddy and Will showed them the dirt airstrip at the edge of town. Buddy showed them what looked like a long hat with a pointy end attached to a tall pole.

  “That’s the wind sock,” he said. “The pilot could look at that and tell which way the wind is blowing. Got to know that when you’re landing planes.”

  “You know a lot about planes,” said Bo admiringly.

  “That’s because we got a job with the mail plane. Chuck—he’s the pilot—wires Sherwin when he’s coming and then we go tell Charlie the Tram, because he’s got to pick up the mail and take it to the post office, and then we go to Hardy and get Chuck’s lunch. We make a lot of money—five cents a trip.”

  After that, Buddy and Will showed them the jailhouse, which didn’t have any prisoners, and took them down to the creek to catch guppies.

  They all squatted by the creek and stared at the water. “We haven’t got anything to catch a guppy with if we see one,” Bo pointed out.

  “How bears fish,” said Will, “is they just scoop it out of the water and onto the bank.”

  They all stared at the water some more. “Hardly any guppies in here anyway,” said Buddy.

  “On our way here, we saw a mama bear with five babies,” said Bo. “Black bear.” Will and Buddy looked astounded, as they often did at the things Bo told them.

  “How can that be?” asked Buddy.

  “Well, our papas didn’t think they were all her babies because they were different sizes. Littlest one wasn’t any bigger than a rabbit,” she said.

  “Wow, I’d like to have seen that,” said Will.

  Bo thought of something even more amazing to tell them.

  “We have this friend in Ballard Creek, that’s Olaf,” said Bo. “He has a dog and a raven and a weasel and a porcupine and a ptarmigan. They all live with him and never fight.”

  Will looked at her with one eyebrow raised. “Go on,” he said. “No way a weasel’s going to live peaceful with all of them. Meanest animals ever, weasels.”

  “Except wolverines,” said Buddy.

  “Olaf’s weasel isn’t mean,” said Bo, stung by any criticism of Olaf’s animals. “I saw them lots of times. They’re all friends.”

  Buddy and Will just looked at each other. “Hmm,” said Buddy.

  They didn’t believe her, Bo could tell.

  Will jumped up. “Let’s take them to see Maggie!”

  “Who’s Maggie?”

  “She runs the post office,” Buddy said. “And she’s really skookum,” he said, flexing his arm like a prizefighter to show them how strong Maggie was. “Pa says she’s solid muscle. She hustles all the big freight boxes like they was nothing.”

  “She’s Athabascan,” said Will. “And Frenchie, her husband, he’s a Canuck. He works at Sather’s mine.”

  Bo didn’t know what any of those things were, but she’d ask the papas later.

  “Could we visit the girl who rode in the house?” Bo asked.

  “Nah. Edna lives at her pa’s mining camp in the summer.” Will pointed at the far hills. “A long way away. You’ll see her when she comes to town next.”

  “Oh,” said Bo, disappointed.

  * * *

  BO AND GRAF were almost struck dumb by Maggie. Not only was she thick and strong looking, she had a silver tooth that flashed in the sunlight.

  She beamed at Bo and Graf. “Frenchie already knows your papas,” she said. “Met them at the store.”

  The post office was just a little house on skids so it could be moved whenever it had to be. There were two rooms—the one in front had a little woodstove and a long table for sorting the mail. Maggie had been sitting at the table eating her lunch, pilot crackers and peanut butter.

  She sat back down again and asked them if they were hungry. Buddy and Will were, so she pushed the box of pilot crackers across the table to them and opened the can of peanut butter. She took a jackknife out of her pants pocket and wiped the blade on her shirt.

  “Use this,” she said, and Will took the knife to spread peanut butter on his cracker. Maggie inspected Graf while she chewed and swallowed. “Got some Indian in you. How old are you?”

  Bo could see that Graf wasn’t going to answer, so she said, “We don’t know yet because his folks are dead. But Hank—he’s a marshal—he’s trying to find out when’s his birthday.”

  “Whoa,” said Buddy, impressed. “I never heard of anyone didn’t know his own birthday.”

  “Shoot,” said Maggie. “Old days, my mama told me, no one knew their birthday, just winter, spring, summer, fall. That’s all they knew.” She got up and put the crackers and peanut butter on a shelf and asked over her shoulder, “That new boy out the Willard dredge. You meet him yet?”

  “No,” said Will. “We just heard he was there. You see him?”

  “No. Guys from Willard was telling me about him.”

  “There’s two kids I haven’t met,” said Bo. “That boy and Edna. I thought there would be more kids here, but that makes only six. I hope they come to town soon. There were fifteen kids at Ballard Creek.”

  “I suppose you want a girl to play with,” Maggie said. She threw a look at Buddy and Will and laughed. “Well, our Edna isn’t what you have in mind, I’ll bet.” Maggie ruffled Buddy’s hair. “I had six brothers, and I never wanted no sisters. Boys are more fun, you know.”

  “Here comes Charlie,” Buddy said, and Bo could hear the wagon crunching across the tailings. He didn’t stop at the front door of the post office; he went around to the back where Maggie kept the mail. Maggie opened the freight door, and Charlie looked down at her from the seat on the wagon.

  “Here’s the freight came last night,” Charlie said. “That box the boss at Kilbourne’s been waiting for.”

  “Good, won’t have to hear him carrying on anymore about how late it is,” Maggie said. She
strode to the back of the wagon, picked up the big box with a grunt, carried it into the back room, thumped it down on the floor, and dusted her hands. Buddy and Will gave Bo a see-what-we-told-you look.

  Before Charlie went back to the horse barn, Bo stood on tiptoe to pet Goldie, whispering her name to see her ears twitch. When she took her hand away, Goldie leaned her big head down and blew a prickly hot breath on Bo’s cheek.

  “That’s how she says thank you,” Charlie told her.

  Then the boys took Bo and Graf to see a mama who lived alone with her grown daughter, down at the end of the tailing piles, the other end of town.

  “She’s blind, Nita’s girl,” said Will as they walked.

  Bo had never seen anyone who was blind. Except Olaf’s old dog at Ballard Creek. In the sun you could see that he had blue circles clouding his eyes.

  “How’d she get that way?”

  “Born like that,” said Buddy, “but she can do lots of things.”

  “You should see her sew, and she can cook, too, just feels things with her hands. She comes walking with us lots, down to the creek and all.”

  When they got to the house, Will introduced them in what Bo thought was a very grown-up way.

  “This is Nita Paniyak and her daughter named Paulie. And this is Bo and Graf. They used to live on the Koyukuk.”

  Bo was delighted to see that Nita was Eskimo. Someone to speak Eskimo with!

  But as soon as Bo rattled off a few sentences, Nita looked startled and laughed.

  “Oh, my,” she said, and put her palms against her cheeks. “That’s another kind of Eskimo,” she said. “We live far away from those people, speak Yup’ik down where I come from.”

  Bo was very disappointed.

  “I didn’t know there were two kinds of Eskimo,” said Bo. “Me and Graf speak Eskimo like the people in Ballard Creek, but we don’t have anyone to talk to now. Just ourselves.”

  “Same with me,” said Nita. “No one to talk to. I never talked Eskimo to Paulie, and now I’m sorry.”

  Bo and Nita traded some words, but there weren’t any that were the same.

  Paulie’s eyes wandered around, and when she talked to them, she looked at the ceiling. She got up in a careful way, filled the teakettle, and set it on the stove. “We’ll have some tea,” she said.

  She took six teacups from the shelf and set them on the table next to the sugar bowl, and then, using a finger to find the precise place, she carefully put a cup full of spoons next to the sugar bowl.

  Paulie asked lots of questions about life in Ballard Creek. She touched Graf, to see how tall he was, and then she softly touched Bo’s hair, felt her long braids.

  “What color is your hair?”

  Bo didn’t know how you told about color to someone who couldn’t see.

  But Nita said, “Like the tall grass that grows down by the creek. Light, not dark like our hair.”

  “Oh,” said Paulie. “Like straw.”

  “That’s right,” said Nita. “Swedish kind of hair, people call it.”

  “Are you Swedish?” asked Paulie.

  “I don’t know,” said Bo. “I’m adopted. Me and Graf.”

  Nita looked at her gravely, and Paulie searched the ceiling with her dark darting eyes.

  “I’m adopted too,” said Nita. “But I always knew my real parents. They just had too many kids, so they gave me to someone who didn’t have any.”

  “That’s how it was in Ballard,” Bo said. “Gracie already had one baby, so she gave her new baby to Dishoo and Big Jim.”

  “So who are your mother and father now?”

  “We have two papas and no mamas,” Bo said as she always did, hoping she wouldn’t have to explain too much.

  “Oh,” said Nita calmly, not surprised. “Who braids your hair so beautifully?”

  “Oh, both of my papas can braid hair. Except Jack always does it tighter.” Bo put her fingers at the outside corners of her eyes and tugged. “He pulls my eyes tight, like this,” she said.

  * * *

  BO AND GRAF left the boys at Nita’s and made their way home across the tailings.

  Bo was thinking about what it would be like to have an older brother like Will. Will talked more than Buddy and ordered him around. When Buddy agreed with Will, he said “yeah,” but when he didn’t, he argued hotly. Bo smiled. She liked it that Buddy could stick up for himself.

  Arvid had been busy. He’d made four new long shelves that wrapped around the kitchen corner by the back door. And by the couch he’d made a shelf for their books and gramophone records.

  Jack had just come back from the store, and he set Bo and Graf to unwrapping a lot of packages tied in red string. “Don’t cut the string,” Jack warned. He was a devoted string saver.

  Bo and Graf handed him the cans, and Jack stacked them on the shelves in a certain strict order. Alphabetical.

  “Don’t want to waste time looking for stuff,” he said.

  “What’d you and the boys do today?” Arvid asked.

  “Buddy and Will didn’t believe about Olaf’s animals,” Bo told him.

  “Is hard to believe,” Jack said. “Need to get a picture. Too bad no one in Ballard has a camera.”

  They were almost finished with the house. Arvid put up pegs on the bedroom walls to hang things on. When their clothes were all hung on the pegs, you couldn’t see much wall.

  Jack put curtains up in the kitchen and living room, the red and white ones he’d made for the cookshack in Ballard long ago. It made Bo feel happy to look at them.

  The summer sun came in at the kitchen window and slid across the new table, and the shiny clean little house was already like home.

  But they would never, not ever, get used to the sound of the dredge.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HOUSE WITH THE GREEN ROOF

  BO AND GRAF were more curious about the people who lived in the house with the green roof than they were about anyone else. That house was quiet—no smoke from the chimney, not a sign of anyone since they’d moved in. Buddy and Will told them the men who lived there were out at the mining camp where Edna lived, doing some work for a few days.

  But the next morning, Buddy and Will were grinning when they came to collect Bo and Graf. “They’re back,” Will said. “Come on!”

  Bo and Graf hurried to finish the dishes while Buddy and Will ate the rest of the biscuits.

  When they were going out the door, Will said, “They’re both Finns, Stig and Eero. Only Finns we got here. We got lots of Irishmen and Montenegrins and a zillion other countries, but only two Finns.”

  “Oh,” said Bo happily. “We have Finns in Ballard Creek. Arvid always says Finns are more stubborn than Swedes.”

  Will looked perplexed. “Is that a good thing?”

  Bo stopped walking and looked at him uncertainly. “Well, I thought it was.”

  When Will tapped on the open screen door, Bo looked up at the green roof. It was tin just like their roof, but it had been painted that beautiful color. Bo didn’t know you could paint tin roofs.

  One old man was alone in the house, sitting at the table. He was Eero, short and round and bald.

  “These here are the new kids. Bo and Graf. Got two papas and no mama,” Will said, pleased to have something unusual to tell Eero.

  “And one papa is a nigger, and one is a Swede,” Buddy said just as proudly, for the same reason.

  The smile fell off the old man’s face as he swiveled his head to look at Buddy.

  “That’s a bad word,” Eero said slowly. “Nigger.”

  Buddy and Will stared at Eero, dismayed. Bo looked uneasily from the boys to the old man and back again.

  “I never knew it was bad,” Buddy said.

  Will looked at Eero pleadingly. “Everybody always called, you know, Nigger George that.”

  “Everybody,” said Eero in a disgusted way. “Don’t want to go through life doing what everybody does. If everybody does something, you can be pretty sure you don’t wa
nt to be doing it.”

  Eero glared at the boys for a minute and then he ran his hand over his shiny head. “I know you didn’t mean nothing,” he said, his voice kinder. “Just let that be the last time you use that word. Ever.”

  Will and Buddy nodded, still looking uncomfortable.

  Bo looked from face to face, not understanding anything. “What’s a nigger?”

  Will looked at Eero anxiously before he answered. “You know, like your papa. Dark.”

  “What do you call people who’re not dark?”

  Will looked at Eero again, but Eero just looked back at him, his eyebrows raised, waiting for him to answer. Will made a puzzled face and lifted his shoulders. “Just regular people, I guess.”

  Eero rolled his eyes, but Bo nodded. Another thing to ask the papas.

  Eero’d been working with two pieces of rope, joining them together into a long piece. He gestured for them to take a seat around the table.

  “This is called splicing,” he told Bo and Graf. “Better learn how to do this. Never can tell when a rope’ll give out on you.” They watched him for a few minutes while he twisted the strands of rope together.

  “Bo,” he said thoughtfully. “In Finland that’s a boy’s name. Lots of Bos in Finland.” Bo had nothing to say to that, because she wasn’t sure whether she liked to have a boy’s name.

  “Eero taught me and Buddy to do knots,” said Will. “I know sixteen different kinds now.”

  “Well, I know fourteen,” Buddy said.

  Eero stopped splicing.

  “Maybe time for you to learn knots too?” he said to Graf. Graf looked startled and then pleased, so Eero picked up a short piece of rope and began to show Graf a knot.

  “Cut some bread,” he told the boys, not looking up from the knot. Buddy looked happy.

  “Eero makes really good bread,” he told Bo. The bread was dark and had little seeds in it that Bo didn’t like. She put a lot of butter on her piece, and it tasted better.