Bo at Iditarod Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  “Did you know there was no school here?” Bo asked.

  “Never thought to ask, never gave it a thought. Surprise to me that there aren’t more kids here.”

  “But how will you know how to teach school?”

  “Done it already,” said Jack. He laughed at the look of surprise on her face. “Taught one of the boys at the Circle diggings, an Albanian, to read and write one winter when things was slack. Back home, taught the girl I was going to marry and a young guy, kin to her.”

  “Did you have a school when you were little?”

  “No, we didn’t have no school. Fellow worked in the fields taught me. I was considerable older than you.”

  “Not Mama Nancy?”

  “No, she never had no schooling. But this fellow, Tandy, he didn’t learn to read till he was grown—learned from a friend—and then he taught me at night after he was finished working. It goes from one hand to another, like. I got to pass it on, and someday maybe you’ll have to pass it on.”

  “Do you like teaching?”

  Jack’s face went smooth like it did when he was thinking something nice.

  “I do. I like that look people get when they’re catching on to something.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair. “So we’ll teach you with all this Calvert stuff and then you can help Graf out.”

  “I think he already knows how to read,” said Bo.

  “Well, I don’t think so,” said Jack with a smile.

  “Yes, he knows all the names on the cans.”

  “Does he?” said Jack, his eyebrows raised in surprise. He thought a second. “Probably because of the pictures.”

  He wrote peaches on a piece of paper and then he went to the door. Graf was outside in the sawdust by the woodpile, building a house with pieces of the lumber Arvid had thrown out after he made the shelves and table.

  “Come ’ere, Graf,” Jack said. He showed the paper to him.

  “Know this word, Graf?”

  “Peaches,” said Graf. Bo looked sideways at Jack, an I-told-you look.

  Jack frowned and wrote another word. Milk.

  “Milk,” said Graf.

  “Some are like that,” said Jack, as if he wasn’t surprised. But his face looked as if he had never heard of such a thing before.

  Jack sat back down and picked up one of the papers on the table.

  “Here’s the thing. You got to have a name.”

  Bo looked shocked. “I have a name. You gave me Bo, and Papa gave me Marta. I have two names.”

  “Well, yeah, but you need a last name, too. You know, like Jack Jackson and Arvid Ivorsen. A first name and a last name. Like us.”

  “Well, everybody doesn’t have a last name. Lots of Eskimos don’t have a last name.” Bo wasn’t fond of change.

  “No, don’t seem necessary until you got to fill out these blanking papers. I’ve seen plenty people had to think of one when the time came to fill out some papers. Couldn’t leave the last name place empty.”

  “And Graf?”

  “Him too,” said Jack. “You heard the letter. His pa didn’t have no last name.” Jack bounced his pencil rat-a-tat on the paper, thinking.

  “Where I come from, lots of people didn’t have a last name of their own. Just named for the man they worked for.” Jack’s eyes squinched up. “Kind of like branding cattle,” he said. “Jackson was the man owned the place where my mama was born. All of them worked there on his place was called Jackson for a last name.”

  Jack’s face was still a moment, and then he smiled and tipped her chin up with his big finger. “So. What kind of last name would you like?” he said brightly.

  “Can’t we have your last names? Marta Jackson and Ivorsen?”

  “S’posed to have just one last name.”

  “Couldn’t we put them together?”

  Jack smiled his tucked-in smile that dimpled both cheeks.

  “Jacksonivorsen. Ivorsenjackson. Take you a month to say it, wouldn’t it?”

  Graf came into the kitchen, sat down on the other side of Jack, and watched them with his chin resting on the table.

  Jack wrote down one name, studied it, and crossed it out; wrote a dozen more, scowling at the paper.

  Jack suddenly smiled, looking pleased with himself. “Here’s an idea just come to me. Could maybe name you for the place you was born. Or maybe the river. You was born on the Yukon, Graf on the Koyukuk.”

  “No,” said Bo, frowning. “We like your names.”

  Jack could see he wasn’t going to sell that idea, so he went back to his paper. “Ivorsen Jackson,” he muttered darkly.

  “Were you born on a river?” Bo asked.

  “Mississippi,” said Jack, not looking up.

  Bo looked startled and darted her eyes at Graf. “We don’t like river names,” she said decidedly.

  Bo watched Jack scribble this name and that on his paper.

  “Your names both sound the same at the end,” said Bo.

  “They do,” said Jack. “Spelled different. Swede way with an e and my way with an o.”

  He rubbed his head. “Maybe just use the first parts. Like Ivorjack or Jackivor. Or use one son for both, like Ivorjackson or Jackivorsen. Marta and Grafton Ivorjackson. Marta and Grafton Jackivorsen.

  “Which one? Jack first, Ivor first?”

  He looked at Graf. Graf just shook his head. They could see he wasn’t very interested.

  “Well, leave it be. Let’s see what the Swede comes up with.”

  When Arvid came in from his shift, they showed him what they’d been thinking of.

  Arvid said the two names over and over, as if he were tasting something.

  “See, if you say Ivorjackson your mouth has to work too hard. But if you say Jackivorsen, it just slips out nice and easy.”

  They all tried it, and it was true. “But if you leave the end off, and it’s Jackivor or Ivorjack, that’s nicer and shorter.” He practiced both for a second, then decided. “No, it’s smoother with Jack first.”

  “So?” said Jack. “Marta and Grafton Jackivor?”

  Graf and Bo said “Jackivor” over and over, until they got silly and fell in a heap laughing.

  Jack shrugged on his jacket and headed out the door to work muttering, “Jackivor, Jackivor. Got to get used to it,” he said.

  Arvid wrote their new name on a piece of paper.

  “Now you practice writing this, Bo. Marta Jackivor. That’s your whole name.”

  And then he wrote Grafton Jackivor. “And you can practice that, Graf.”

  Bo practiced and practiced the new name, and when she looked up, she saw that Graf was practicing his, too, holding the pencil all crazy.

  But his writing was good.

  Though he’d never written a thing before.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE DEACON

  BO AND GRAF and Arvid had just gotten back from the swing and were settling down to a game of checkers before they went to bed. Bo told Arvid about a chunky little man who’d come on the mail plane.

  “Buddy said he was a preacher, come to visit Miz Eller.”

  “Oh?” Arvid said.

  “See, he came once before, and Miz Eller said all the Eller men had to go to a prayer meeting, and she put up a sign in the store. But Buddy and Will said old man Eller stood up to her, said he wasn’t going to tell his men they had to go to any prayer meeting. And Will and Buddy’s mom and dad had a row about it. And just the Mizzes ended up going to the prayer meeting. What’s a preacher, and what’s a prayer meeting?”

  Arvid tipped his chair back and laughed long and hard. “That Miz Eller,” he finally said. “There’s no end to the things she thinks of, is there?”

  “Well, what’s a prayer meeting?”

  “Beats me,” said Arvid. “Let’s play checkers.”

  * * *

  JUST WHEN THEY’D FINISHED that game and another, and Bo and Graf were in their pajamas, ready for bed, someone knocked on the door.

  When Bo op
ened the door, there was the man she’d been talking about. She darted a startled look at Arvid, who didn’t look at all surprised to find the preacher man on their doorstep.

  The preacher looked surprised, though—people usually did when they saw how big the papas were. “I’m Deacon Mitchell,” the man said, looking up at Arvid and mopping his face with a white handkerchief.

  Arvid bent a bit and shook the man’s hand. “Arvid Ivorsen,” he said, smiling sweetly, his special full-of-the-devil smile. He waved his big hand at the children. “And this here is Bo and Graf.”

  Arvid raised his eyebrows. “What can we do for you, Deacon?”

  The preacher shifted from one foot to the other and cleared his throat as if he was getting ready to give a speech.

  “Miz Eller, who is concerned about the spiritual welfare of the people of Iditarod Creek—a place that is virtually godless—has called to my attention the very odd fact that you have in your care two small children. Of irregular parentage.”

  “True, true,” Arvid said and waved his hand again. “Here they stand.”

  The preacher made a stern face. “May I ask if they are baptized?”

  “No, best not ask,” Arvid said pleasantly. “Our kids is heathens, pure and simple.” He leaned forward as if he were telling a secret. “Been speaking Eskimo since they were born. I figure myself that they’re possessed, and I don’t mess with it at all. And they can swear in several languages.” Arvid made a proud face. “Do you a treat to hear them carry on.”

  He tipped his head at Bo and Graf. “Go ahead,” he told them. “Swear some in Eskimo. Preacher wants to hear you.”

  The fat man pulled his handkerchief out again, wiped his forehead some more, and scuttled out of the open door.

  “Tell Miz Eller we appreciate her concern,” Arvid called after him.

  Arvid shut the door, and Bo and Graf watched him, astonished, as he laughed so hard he finally fell in a heap on the couch.

  “Oh, oh,” he moaned, “what a shame Jack missed that!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DOUGHNUTS

  ON THE 29TH of June, it snowed.

  Jack and Arvid said they’d known it to snow in the summer plenty of times. Of course the snow melted after an hour or so, and the next day it was hot, miserably hot, ninety degrees—a hundred degrees on the thermometer in the sun. Jack and Arvid had seen it that hot in the summer plenty of times too.

  “Think of it,” Arvid said. “Coldest day last winter was some sixty below. Today it’s almost a hundred and fifty degrees warmer.”

  Arvid hated the heat. He turned bright red, sweat poured down his face, and his clothes got wet through. Jack didn’t even notice the heat. He couldn’t turn red like Arvid, and he didn’t sweat, either.

  “Consider where I grew up,” he said. “This here is dry heat, not air so wet you could eat it with a spoon. Humidity. That’s the thing gets to you.”

  The next day Jack started his doughnuts. “Wouldn’t be Fourth of July if I didn’t make doughnuts,” he said.

  But he and Bo didn’t have to make them all by themselves this year. Carmen and Emma said they’d help too. Jack was very happy about that.

  “I was just thinking I’d bit off more than I could chew,” he told them. “In Ballard Creek we made four hundred, but we’ll need twice that many here. Lot more people here.” He rolled his eyes, just thinking about it. “You girls are going to save my life!”

  “Nothing to it,” said Emma cheerfully.

  So Jack mixed a huge batch in his biggest bowl and after the dough rose, Bo and Emma and Carmen rolled it out and started cutting. Jack borrowed a big piece of plywood from Hardy, and they set it up on sawhorses in the front room. That’s where they put the doughnuts to rise after they were cut out.

  It was very crowded with that big board in there, and Bo and Graf had to edge around it if they needed to go in the front room. When the doughnuts were puffed up just the way Jack wanted—almost light enough to float away—they took turns frying them.

  Carmen took the first turn after Jack showed her just how to do it. When they were brown on both sides, she lifted them out of the oil and onto a big towel. That was so some of the oil would soak into the towel. “No excuse for greasy doughnuts,” Jack said.

  Bo’s job was to toss each doughnut around in a bowl of sugar, and then she and Graf would carefully put them all into the burlap bag they’d borrowed from Sidney at the store. But somehow the sugar got all over Bo’s overalls and on her face and on the floor, and Graf was pretty well sugared too. And it crunched under their feet, which was annoying.

  When Will and Buddy came to the door to see if Bo and Graf could come out, they stared astounded at the piles of doughnuts Bo was busy sugaring.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Jack said. “Try them out!”

  So Buddy and Will started in. “I’ll bet I could eat a hundred,” said Will.

  But he didn’t last long. He was so stuffed with doughnuts after a dozen or so that he had to quit. Buddy didn’t eat as many as Will, but he put two in his overall pockets. “For later,” he said.

  “Now, here’s your job,” said Jack, who’d just thought of how the boys could make themselves useful. “Put this bag in the wagon and take them to Sidney,” he said. “We want the doughnuts for the Fourth of July fresh as the day they were fried.”

  Everyone had a freezer hole for their meat. If you dug down far enough to permafrost where the ground never thawed, everything down there would stay frozen.

  Jack said that was one of the most convenient things about living in the far north.

  Sidney would put the doughnuts down in the hole, and the doughnuts would freeze just like the meat did.

  After Buddy and Will hauled off the last hundred to Sidney’s, Carmen and Emma were red-faced from the heat in the kitchen and looked pretty bedraggled.

  Jack blew out his cheeks. Whew.

  “Got to do this all over again tomorrow,” he groaned. “And then once again.”

  After the first day, no one even wanted to try the doughnuts. And by the time they’d made eight hundred of them, Emma said she’d sworn off doughnuts forever, and she hoped Tom would never think of asking her ever to make doughnuts for him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FOURTH OF JULY

  THE WEATHER WAS BEAUTIFUL for the Fourth. It always was. Bo thought there must be some sort of rule about it.

  Best of all, the dredges were silent. It was quiet, so quiet. All the mines were closed, and Arvid and Jack had the whole day off, like everyone in all of the mining camps around Iditarod Creek. The Fourth of July was the most important holiday in the year.

  Bo and Graf were jittering around, half wild, impatient for the papas to eat breakfast, clean up, get dressed.

  “We’ll be right on time.” Arvid laughed down at them. “You’ll see!”

  Stig and Eero came by to see if they were ready. They could talk about nothing but the arm-wrestling contests. All the men for miles around had been talking about wrestling for weeks.

  There was a muscle man at the Kilbourne dredge who was big on bodybuilding. He worked out with dumbbells all the time and was really skookum. They had figured Jack and Arvid would be his biggest competition, until Arvid hurt his arm at the dredge. It wasn’t cured up yet, so he wouldn’t be doing any wrestling.

  “It’s up to you, Jack!”

  Stig felt Jack’s arm, and Jack pumped it up with a braggy face to show him that it was in good shape.

  “You’ll do,” said Stig.

  Buddy and Will popped their heads in the door, but they were too impatient to wait. “See you down there!”

  * * *

  IDITAROD CREEK was a shockingly different town on the Fourth of July.

  They could hear the hullabaloo of the crowd when they came out of the house. Bo and Graf darted frightened looks up at the papas.

  “Just ready for a good time,” Arvid reassured them. “Blowin’ off a little steam.”

>   When they could see the huge mob of miners, Bo and Graf clutched the papas’ hands. They’d never seen so many men all together in their lives.

  Every square inch around the hotel and the store was full of men, loud and boisterous, calling out to one another.

  Bo looked up at Jack in dismay. “We didn’t make enough doughnuts!”

  “No,” Jack said with a big laugh. “You can never make enough, but it’ll have to do!”

  Sidney had dumped all the doughnuts into four big washtubs, and the men were already helping themselves.

  When they saw Jack, they cheered “hip, hip hooray!” to thank him for the doughnuts. Bo and Graf looked at each other, proud.

  A big red, white, and blue banner was stretched across the front of the hotel. FOURTH OF JULY IN IDITAROD CREEK 1930 it said in the fancy kind of letters that Bo liked so much.

  The contests were just starting, so they were right on time, like Arvid said. Not the same contests they’d had in Ballard, because most of those had been for kids. These contests were a lot noisier and a lot rougher.

  Yoshihiro and Haruto were the marshals. Marshals, Jack said, were to be sure that no one cheated. They were standing very tall, and Bo could see from their faces that they liked being the marshals very much.

  The tobacco-spitting contest was first. The men lined up at the starting line, chewing and chewing their hunks of tobacco, the muscles of their jaws clenching and twisting, getting the tobacco juicy enough. When Yoshihiro blew the whistle, the men pushed out their lips and thin brown jets of tobacco juice shot out. A long way! Bo and Graf were impressed.

  Bo didn’t know the man who won, but he was from the Eller dredge, and his friends lifted him on their shoulders and carried him around while the men from the other dredges booed and shook their fists at them.

  They were so loud and crazy even Bo hid behind the papas, like Graf always did when it was noisy.

  Jack entered the wood-splitting contest, but he didn’t come close to being the fastest.

  “You can be big, or you can be fast,” Arvid told them. “But you can’t be both.”