Date: 1962
Recorded by: John Swanton
The Boy Who Loved Sparks
Dewie Nicholas Lee’s ancestral heritage included the invention of gunpowder and fireworks. His five-year-old hands ripped open the package of sparklers his dad, Ken Lee, had bought him for the Chinese Spring celebration.
Great-Grandfather Captain Jinks claimed it was an omen that the Southeast Alaskan town where he’d immigrated in order to work in the canneries had a mountain named Dewey. In Chinese, the name Dewei means “highly noble.” So, when Captain Jinks lived to hear his great-grandson screaming his first cry in the back room of the store, he said the baby boy should be named Dewie. Plus, the family having converted to Catholicism in the second generation, Dewie was given the middle name Nicholas after St. Nicholas, who is lesser known as a saint with a special power over flames.
Dewie’s father told him he was born in the year of the Fire Rooster. He didn’t much like roosters, but he liked the way the small sticks burned beside the house when he piled them up and lit them on fire. He had a great name. He especially liked his name because everyone who met him said, “Oh, Dewey, like the mountain?” Yes, Dewie like the mountain: the fire mountain.
His parents told the story of an average man, a cook, who mixed common kitchen ingredients to invent the first fireworks. And everyone in town knew the story of his mountain, Mount Dewey, up behind his church, St. Rose of Lima. There, a famous explorer built a huge fire on the hill. Also, Dewie had books filled with drawings of dragons. He loved Shenlong, the dragon that controlled the wind and rain. He was Shenlong playing down on the beach below the buildings. He was Shenlong running around the town, huffing air from his lungs. It worked: it was always raining in Wrangell.
The thin strip of metal rod dipped in charcoal, aluminum, potassium nitrate, and sulfur ignited fast. The sparks burned Dewey’s fingertips, and he threw the sparkler down on the floor. The embers flew out and hit his bedspread. Flames licked his pillow and, in seconds, engulfed his bed. The orange paper lantern hanging by his window exploded like a small firework.
Dewie ran out of his room, leaving the door open. He scampered down the narrow wooden set of stairs into his parents’ store. Pa and Ma, and sister Nancy were stocking shelves. Dewie ran past them and into the small kitchen in the back where he stood on his toes and pumped the old faucet, running ice-old water over the small burn on his finger.
From the store area, Nancy yelled, “Fire!”
Pa said something in a combination of Chinese and Tlingit, and Ma ran into the kitchen and scooped Dewie by the hand and led him out the kitchen door. The front doorbell dinged at the same time the bell on the police station rang out alerting townsfolk to the fire. Nancy followed a few seconds later and joined them on the street in front of the store. Outside, the wind blew like a mad dragon.
Soon, Pa ran out. Fire and smoke billowed behind him. In his hand, he carried a small metal bucket. Above him, fire leapt out of the bedroom window and onto the roof of the building next door, eventually spreading from building to building. Ma, very pregnant, moved them to the other side of the street. Dewie peered out from behind her skirt. Pa banged hard on the side door of Hammer’s Hardware, awakening Mr. and Mrs. Hammer, who clambered out on the sidewalk in their robes, red-faced.
The police station’s bell dinged, and the sirens wailed along with the strong wind whistling through the old false-fronted buildings. Ma led Dewie and his sister up the alley to St. Rose of Lima. Father Rapetti rushed past with two buckets in his hands. He told Ma to take the children up to the church and stay there. He didn’t know when he would be back.
Inside the church doorway, Dewie stood in his damp and smoky pajamas as the false-fronted buildings along the beach side burned like huge lanterns.
Later, after two cookies from Father Rapetti’s cookie jar, which the priest kept full for the children after Mass, Dewie started to nod off. In Father Rapetti’s apartment, he slouched down into the small sofa sitting below the large picture window. He dreamed of a red chrysanthemum firework blasting the night sky. It grew into a dragon and chased him down the boardwalk. He hid in the alley, crouched down by a silver garbage can. He removed the lid from the can and held it in front of him, like he’d seen the comic books warriors do. The dragon blew onto the buildings, crumbling their wood flesh into ash, and one by one the pilings buckled, tumbling their skeletal remains into the sea.
Date: 1990s
Recorded by John Swanton
Assisted by Tooch Waterson
Speaker: Unidentified woman in the Zimovia Bar
In a Light Fantastic
Come, and trip it as ye go,
On the light fantastic toe.
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty
—Milton, “L’Allegro”
It was 1968. He ran down a shaft of light as if it were a staircase leading him to the ground. Around him, the soft rime of his breath sugared frost onto spruce branches. And as soon as his toes felt the snow-crusted earth, his feet spun and he ran across the mountaintops and slid down snowbanks. He beat feet through the bushes, downhill along the deer trails to the highway, bookin’ through the cobalt night down the middle of the yellow line toward town.
In town, he didn’t bother to stop for walls, garages, or kitchen windows, either. He was haulin’ right through the townfolks’ pads, where they assumed the power bumped as electricity shot sapphire sparks from the outlets—lightbulbs blew, toasters tazed, and Bewitched fizzled on the Magnavox. He jumped over backyard fences, doghouses, and a snowman with small stones curved up to form a smile. And when he approached one pad, he heard a baby wailing like an ache in its momma’s arms—it wasn’t expected to live much longer with its small wrinkled brain and all.
As he rushed inside through the patio door, the baby’s bawl caught him up and sucked him inside that baby’s mouth. At once, the baby’s eyes lit up and its skin darkened to the blackest blue. The momma, Jesse Edwin, gasped when she held the baby close to comfort him, nearly dropping him because his skin seared. At first, she thought the baby might be heading toward Jesus right then, but then the baby gurgled at her. It seemed he’d filled out his skin a bit and stopped arching his head back at that peculiar angle. Jesse and her husband were jazzed their baby was still alive and his head shaped itself back to normal—it didn’t matter that his skin was navy blue.
Jesse and Charlie renamed the baby Ray, and he grew up here on this island, the only blue boy—although Ray appeared more black than blue, depending on the cloud cover. Freaky thing about Ray, though, he grew up real fast, faster than normal, and he was always fruggin’ around the neighborhood as if he had somewhere else to go. And whenever his daddy and momma packed him up for church or a local picnic, he couldn’t just walk to the car—the boy had to run. And Ray couldn’t sit still and watch television, either. He had to be leapin’ off the back of the couch yelling cowabunga, waahoo, and shabang like Aristotle’s jumpin’ goats. The school specialists thought Ray was some kind of spaz and wanted to put him on a daily pill, but his momma said, Hell no, Ray’s a gift from God.
Within a year he was almost grown and girls would show up at his house and ask if Ray could come out and hully gully. He’d hold their hands and skedaddle his way down the mucky streets, poppin’ corn over mud puddles like James Brown. The young girls didn’t find him square at all. In fact, they thought Ray was groovy, so he always had a lot of girls skennin’ near him.
And after another year, when Ray got to be a young man, he was quite righteous. Both men and women thought he was far-out, the way he shot his magnetosphere through their bodies, arching east to west with his dynamo action—their eyes rolled back and their hair stood on end. Ray was quite the disturbance, townsfolk said, buzzing around the atmosphere of bouffant housewives and young folks in their miniskirts and culottes, polyester pantsuits and sideburns. And Ray, that cat sure loved to shang-a-lang at every dance at the community ha
ll, stompin’ the Mashed Potato and doin’ the Hanky Panky to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Everyone called him Ray Magic.
But one week, during the winter of 1972, the weatherman was broadcasting the news about a solar superstorm, and Ray got a bit nervous when he was in the deli buying his regular ham and cheese on wheat. He started jitterin’ and a hoppin’ on his toes as he listened to the broadcast on the radio talking about how 93 million miles away the sun was twistin’ a flash of solar flares. And right at that moment, the solar wind sailed past the Earth with all those charged particles being deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field.
That night, Ray went to the center of Shakes Island near the big totem pole. In the middle of the island he started side-kickin’ his “Freddy” and flapping wings to Jackie Lee’s “Duck,” while trampin’ the frozen grass. Around him, the cottonwoods were crackin’ with ice. And that’s when the plasma squeezed toward Earth with rapid spasms of magnetotail and took Ray by the hand, trying to bag him. It yanked him hard up, trippin’ the light back up those stairs. But, you see, Ray had adapted to our tunes. He was always hummin’ to “Light My Fire” and whistlin’ “Dock of the Bay,” so he yanked himself back down again.
And when the fuzz found him the next morning, on the grassy field at Shakes Island, Ray was blue naked, talking thick and pointing to the sky. The fuzz said he was mumblin’ something strange over and over again. They assumed he was pixed. So they wrapped him in one of them scratchy wool blankets and took him to the Salvation Army where Major Hallelujah gave him a couple sets of clothes and a pair of work boots. But all Ray could do was mumble, and he couldn’t even remember his name, although everyone in town knew he was just Ray.
And after Ray tripped, he couldn’t dig the daylight anymore. His eyes had turned ice-blue and though he could still see, he put on a pair of shades and sat out on a rusty metal folding chair in front of Sally Ann’s, the Salvation Army’s thrift store. And that’s when I saw him there, that blue man. I’d come from the coffee shop and heard the skinny on Ray’s down-and-out story, so I fumbled in my purse for spare scratch. I walked up to Ray and he looked up at me and started to mutter. I held out the money and he grabbed my wrist. I looked down and where he clutched my wrist, my hand had melted off, wetting our feet in a big puddle.
I said, “What-say, Ray, take off them shades and look at me.”
He did. His eyes shown turquoise. Bands of light snapped in his irises. This time he said clearly, “Ma’am, I’m not blitzed. I am the Northern Lights.”
And I said to him, “I know, Ray, I know. Remember me?” I leaned in and blew a soft rime chillin’ against his cheek. “We’ve panked in the crystal blue persuasion before: I am Snow.”
I let my robe fall open and he stepped in next to my cirque. At once I compressed under the weight of us, like crystals near their melting point, semiliquid and slick. We filled in the spaces where they touch and stick, jerkin’ the breath from between us, rockin’ up to bubbles. Suddenly, Ray freefell toward the treetops with me, and I laughed at the reflection of him arcing, a blue-beat swing above me. He stepped with his feet apart, hands at his sides, swinging his weight left foot to right foot, both knees bending, and with a small kick, Ray shifted his light to the blue-beat flyaway.
Date: early 1990s
Recorded by John Swanton
Assisted by Tooch Waterson
A Blanket on the Sea
Tova felt herself drowning as she fell into the bedcovers beside her best friend, Fern. Fern leaned over and kissed her. They explored each other’s mouths with their tongues. Thirteen-year-old Tova closed her eyes, afraid if she opened them, the blanket separating the world beneath the ocean and the people on land, would be broken. It was like in the story her elders told about the creation of the killer whales where the young man, Naatsilanéi, lifted a blanket on the sea and went down to the land of the Sea Lion people. There, the Sea Lion tribe gave Naatsilanéi instructions on how to carve a monster from yellow cedar in order to kill his own brothers who’d left him for dead.
Tova had always been fascinated with the old stories, especially the creation stories. What did the yellow cedar log feel like being transformed? It must have thought it would live out its life as a tree, then possibly a log. The yellow cedar log had no idea it would change. Its long shaggy bark and pungent, oily wood was going to be carved with teeth and a blowhole.
She pressed her eyes tightly together until Fern said, “Open your eyes and look at me, okay?”
Her heart thumped. Was this what it felt like to be in love? The adults she knew didn’t talk about love. Fern and the other girls from school gossiped about sweaty junior high boys. No one talked about if they loved girls. Well, they did, sort of. They drew glyphs on one another’s backs in the dark during slumber parties, whispering against one another’s cheeks. She had felt it first when Fern had touched her back with her fingertip, making the spiral petroglyph on her back, swirling it round and round, until the tide came over her like it did on the rocks on Petroglyph Beach.
Now, Tova opened her eyes. She pulled her head back from Fern’s and took a breath. The heat between them was thick and hot, and the mattress beneath her sunk with her weight. She was drowning and could no longer stop water from flowing into her lungs.
She was familiar with the feeling of drowning. She’d drowned once. She was nine years old, when her dad, Karl, tossed her into the harbor. She remembers how the cold water ached on her knees. They still ached once in a while.
“You’ll thank me later,” Karl said, as he tossed Tova into the harbor. “My dad did it to me.” Tova knew better than to argue with her dad. She knew better than to cry, or fuss, or scream, or even frown. Sometimes, she knew better than to be human.
Her mother, Mina, shopped at the grocery store with her little brother. Tova had gone down to the boat to help her dad stick fishing gear for the spring halibut opening. He’d taught her how to use a fid and tie a ganion when she was five years old. She’d gotten really good at it. Her dad often showed off her skills to his drinking buddies, making her stick a skate of gear while they watched.
After she’d been thrown in the harbor, she thrashed around. Man, it’s cold. Think. Think. She could float in the bathtub when the water reached as high as the overflow drain and she sucked in air. She turned over on her back and floated, then turned on her front again and started to dog paddle toward the dock. As she reached the dock, she raised her hand up to her dad.
Karl ignored her and unclenched her hand from the decking and flung her backward. “No, get used to it. Swim around a bit.”
Tova turned over on her back and fluttered her arms, imagining herself making snow angels. Southeast Alaska water was nearly as cold as the snow, and she shivered, her lips turning blue. The water tickled her ears and she heard her dad holler something. What did he say? She didn’t care. She ignored him, floating farther and farther from the dock. Her dad hollered again. She took a deep breath and inhaled something she could not name, something keeping her buoyant, her chest high.
Her dad screamed at her again. She turned her head slightly. He stood on the dock, hands on his hips, his face turning red. She kept going, swimming on her back toward the boat ramp on the other side of the harbor, watching the clouds shapeshift above her into a large killer whale swallowing the last of the afternoon blue sky.
Date: 1989, June 4
Recorded by Tooch Waterson
Deadmans Island
She opens her eyes and remembers that she is an island. Latitude 56°29'37.35"N. Longitude 132°22'13.56"W.
“What to do with a dead Chinaman,” the white folks considered. I and all sentient beings … Cannery worker, far from your homeland, your head was severed, and your arms and legs free floated in the barrel. I embraced your disembodied life. I washed the salty brine from your body, washed you with rain. It was 1890. The government will come for you, you said. May no one ever be separated from their happiness.
My prayers for you lasted
one hundred days. According to your religious beliefs, I prayed every ten days. The path begins with strong reliance.
It is not horror to consider you, barrel after barrel, no—person after person, held in my lap, embraced in my arms. We told each other we were islands. We brought each other to life. We were each other’s bodies, mouths open, our words circled like a current.
I performed your rituals. I cleaned you with a damp cloth dusted with powder. My body, like a water bubble, decays and dies so very quickly.
I am but a small island, at the mouth of a bitter river, only big enough for a few houses. But who would live here anyway with such a current and icy winter winds? Instead, together we imagined my house covered in red paper, mirrors taken down, a white cloth over my doorway, a gong at the entrance.
I dressed you in your best mourning clothes: white, black, blue, or brown. Never red. I only had a small piece of fabric, an old linen apron that had washed up last year. Just like myself all my kind mothers are drowning in samsara’s ocean.
The old stones and a patch of dirt was our geomancy. The “lucky day and hour” was chosen. The April wind was cool, clouds soft, a pale blue sky. The snow geese returned that day to the river flats.
I placed the coffin on the rocks, your head facing the inside of my belly, which would be the “house.” I offered you duck, Hudson Bay tea, and Tlingit rice. I had no portrait of you; instead, hemlocks scratched your image into air. Just like the shadow of a body.
The Dead Go to Seattle Page 6
