Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  At the first rehearsal in the schoolhouse my legs were shaking so continuously that I had to hold onto a desk for support. And though everyone but me was wearing a parka and shoepacks—the temperature, that night, was below freezing—I burned and sweated and removed every piece of clothing I could decently take off. I tried several times to bolt out the door, but they would always drag me back. “No!” I shouted. “I’ve changed my mind! I can’t do it!”

  “Yes!” they shouted back. “You’ve got to!”

  Finally came the time for my first cue. Everyone looked at me expectantly, but I opened my mouth and gasped. I had forgotten my lines, every one. I had memorized them so well that I had been able to reel them off to my dog like a woman telling the dirt on a neighbor, but I couldn’t recall a one of them now.

  The cue came again, and with it a clue from the prompter. Suddenly my lines re-entered my memory, and I managed to fumble through the first scene of the play. Then I collapsed into a chair.

  On my call for the second scene, I found that I could actually walk, and, getting up from my chair, I took my place on the stage without assistance. I stumbled through the first few lines without mistake, but when a particularly long line came my way I said five words and stopped. The cast waited. I waited. There was hardly a sound but that of my heavy breathing. Finally I spoke. But the words I spoke were not the words of the playwright: they were my own. And to give them emphasis, I rolled my eyes and assumed the accent of an Ozark hillbilly.

  “By God, Stoddard’s lines are better than the lines in the play,” said the director when the laughter had died down. “Keep up that ad-libbing, Stoddard. It’s wonderful!”

  From then on, I gradually threw away the script until my part was pure corn, pure invention and had very little relation to the original play. Bill Rabick, the other lead, changed his part, too, and pretty soon the play was twice as long as the original, and twice—we thought—as good. All that was left of the first “Henry Gubbins’ Mail Order Wife” was the skeleton, and not very much of that.

  Two months later we put on a public performance at the schoolhouse in which we had done all our rehearsing. We played to a capacity crowd of 86, ad-libbing throughout, even to the extent of bringing in, in what we thought was a most natural and artistic way, the names of a few of the people in the audience. We were a hit! “Hot damn!” said the actor standing next to me while we took curtain call after curtain call. “We could run this thing for a year if everyone in the area weren’t here tonight.”

  “A year!” I whispered back. “All I can think about is how glad I’ll be to get back to my fire and chair.”

  And I was. Returning to my homestead that night, I was greeted by my faithful retainer, Ski, the malamute dog, like a successful knight returning from the wars to spend his declining days in peace. “Boy!” I said as I picked myself up from the snow where Ski, a bit over-enthusiastic, had planted me with her paws. “Am I glad that’s over!”

  A violent pounding on my door the next morning catapulted me just as violently from my bed. The cast of “Henry Gubbins” was waiting for me outside with a gleam in its collective eye. “We’re going on tour!” one of them shouted. “We’re putting on the play at Ninilchik next Saturday night!” said someone else. “Were going to Homer and Kenai, too!”

  “I’m going back to bed,” I whispered. “I’m sick.”

  Oh, you poor, misguided fools, I thought, when they had driven away. We’ll be butchered in Ninilchik, slaughtered in Homer, hanged in Kenai. It’s all very well to put on a play for a bunch of your indulgent friends, but performing before strangers—rough, tough fishermen who will cut us to shreds with their webbing knives if we don’t amuse them—well, that’s something else again. Oh, you fools!

  The Ninilchik performance was to be staged in an old school house on top of a hill above the town. It was a good spot, we figured, for a quick getaway—and by that time there were several of the cast members who, having gotten my idea about the folly of performing before strangers, were interested in a quick getaway. Hiding three toboggans at the rear entrance to the school so that we could be sure of making a mad dash to our waiting cars below—where special drivers had been bribed to keep the motors running throughout the duration of the play—we decided all was in readiness: the play could begin.

  The audience was composed of about a hundred grim-looking people, the men wearing their moose-skinning knives at their belts and the women, I imagined, holding frozen salmon heads on their laps ready to throw at the first bad joke. The patchwork quilt we were using for a curtain was pulled aside and the show was on.

  The play was a bigger hit than at Anchor Point. After the final curtain, the townspeople of Ninilchik poured onto the stage to congratulate the cast. Then the chairs were pushed back, a small orchestra tuned up and we all began to dance. “You’ll just have to do a repeat performance tomorrow night,” we were told. “We want to see it again.”

  But we didn’t feel like tempting fate a second time. Nevertheless, our reception in Ninilchik had put heart, blood and bones into all of us, and we talked about nothing else on our return trip to our homesteads but “how we’ll knock ‘em dead in Homer Friday night.”

  Backstage in the Homer Theater—a moving picture theater, with 250 seats—we bubbled over with exuberance. We were actors tried and true, and though the audience was bigger than any we had faced before, we were absolutely confident of success. We were feeling so good, in fact, that we assured each other that we would surpass, that night, our previous performances.

  To our horror, none of the audience laughed in the proper spots. They sat like statues, and hardly a person cracked a smile. I tried my corniest lines. No response. I wove the name of a local merchant into every scene. No one laughed. The only time they reacted was when, while stumbling off the stage in my role of Henry Gubbins, I accidently tripped and fell against the fake interior of our homesteader’s cabin and almost knocked it down. They laughed—but at me, not with me.

  In discussing our failure later, we could see no reason for it except that the audience in Homer was too sophisticated for our play. “They’ve seen too many movies,” someone said. “That means they’ve got something to compare with our brand of entertainment.”

  “Naw,” said someone else. “I think it’s because there was a high school play here two nights ago. Maybe they’ve had enough ‘dramy’ for awhile.”

  There was a glum silence. “Well, maybe Kenai’ll like us,” said someone finally—without, however, much hope in his voice.

  It took us two long hours to get to Kenai, 50 miles from Anchor Point, and on the night we traveled in that direction the thermometer had dropped to 30 degrees below zero. To the cast of “Henry Gubbins,” huddled in parkas in the back of a truck, it seemed like an endless ride. We sang to keep warm and to keep our spirits up, and I passed around a gallon of dried prunes I had brought along.

  Arriving in Kenai, we found we had plenty of time in which to move our simple props into the modern school building which was to serve as our theatre, hang up our curtain and set up the stage. Since Kenai was a fair-sized town, with a population numbering around 1000, we had planned our most elaborate performance. “Henry Gubbins” was to be stretched far beyond its usual limits and a couple of piano solos and another skit had been added to the program. And besides that, I had dug up some dirt on the local townspeople and was prepared to slip it into the action.

  The play went along smoothly—but a little too fast. To extend a scene in which I was supposed to be writing a letter to a lovelorn column, I sat there eating prunes and spitting the pits in all directions. The audience seemed to appreciate this piece of business so I kept it up until the entire stage was spotted. They howled when another member of the cast made his entrance on one side of the stage, slipped on a prune pit and slid clear across the stage and out of sight.

  While waiting for him to make his entrance again, I decided to do a little extra ad-libbing. Lifting a whisky bottle filled
with the traditional stage tea to my mouth, I was prevented from drinking it by a large “clunk!” The tea had frozen solid on its trip in the truck. Shaking the bottle up and down, I remarked, “Well, goldang. What kind of anti-freeze is Kenai Joe putting in his booze these days?”

  That line brought down the house: Kenai Joe was a well-known local bar owner.

  In another scene I mentioned the name of a man who had just been picked up by the game warden for shooting a moose out of season. The audience roared, but I didn’t learn why they found the line so hilarious until afterwards: it seems the wife of the unfortunate hunter had been there that night, accompanied by the game warden’s wife.

  Yes, our final performance was an unconditional success. Following the last curtain, we were fed by a local women’s club, after which we all retired to a nearby bar and dance hall to celebrate a successful run and danced and drank until morning. And as the star of the play, I was the most popular guy in town. I, who had been a stranger, a cheechako, a man to be looked upon with suspicion by the old-timers in the area, was a celebrity for the first time in my life. Everybody from Homer to Kenai knew me now, everybody wanted to congratulate me, and everybody’s wife and not a few half-Indian girls fought for the privilege of being my partner in the dance. Acting had been a strain, but if popularity was the result, it had been worth it, I decided.

  *****

  A week later I turned up at a square dance in Anchor Point and was snubbed by one and all. I had shaved off my beard, and there wasn’t a soul who recognized me in the role of plain old, unassuming, unglamorous Gordon Stoddard.

  Chapter VIII—Ski and the Crazy Cat

  SKI, MY MALAMUTE DOG, was only six weeks old when Vern Mutch gave her to me as a parting gift in Homer. At that time, with the thick, heavy coat that gave her the appearance of being square in shape, the upright, pointed ears and the bushy tail arched over her back, she looked like a chow. But her coloring was all her own: she was mostly black, with white stockings on her legs, white on the tip of her tail and on her face. I was grateful to Vern: this friendly, wriggling bundle of fur would be the perfect distraction from my troubles and worries when I started life as a homesteader.

  I christened her “Ski” for Stariski Creek, and for whisky, for no reason at all. However, anyone who heard me yell “Damitski!” as often as I did would probably have interpreted the name as being totally of Russian origin and deemed it quite proper in this land the Russians had settled so long before.

  During our first couple of weeks together, growing like an expanding balloon and twice as lively, Ski slept at the foot of my sleeping bag in the pup tent I used for shelter while building my shack. One night, hoping for a good long sleep uninterrupted by her scratchings and snufflings, I put her outside. That she didn’t like. Ignoring the flap as a means of re-entry, she charged through the side of the tent like a bull through the brush, ripping a great, dog-sized hole and collapsing the tent poles so that both of us were engulfed, enfolded and surrounded by yards of musty, dusty canvas. In a matter of moments the tent was in shreds and a frightened puppy and an enraged homesteader were out in the cold, “Damitski!” I shouted. “Dammit!”

  Whenever I left the homestead for a day, I was in the habit of tying Ski to a tree that leaned at a 40-degree angle over the entrance to my tent. Before I departed, I usually fed her from a bucket of clam guts Greasy Grogan had given me after taking me clamming (he kept the clams), then hung the bucket about six feet off the ground on a branch of the tree. Returning at nightfall after a trip to Homer one day, I saw no signs of my dog. Suddenly I heard an almost human belch. I looked up at the hanging bucket. Peering over its side was the puppy’s head, a miserable, cross-eyed head, lolling on its neck like a broken toy. Ski had eaten her way through almost four gallons of clam guts and was so bloated she would have to be pried from the bucket. How she had climbed the tree has always been a mystery to me, but ‘it’s a cinch she never could stand the sight or smell of clam guts again.

  The malemute, an indirect descendent of the wolf, is a natural-born hunter—but not to the sportsman’s way of thinking. I had to get used to the idea that once a malemute sights game, nothing on earth can stop him from running it down and swallowing it whole in the shortest possible time. When Ski was still a fairly small pup, I took her with me on a visit to the Mutch home in Homer, where, in honor of my coming, Vern had planned to butcher a couple of chickens for dinner. Vern and I got out to the chicken coop just in time to see Ski dragging a protesting hen—a hen bigger than she was—through the slats. The other chicken was nowhere to be seen, but from the size of Ski’s belly we knew where it had gone. “There goes your dinner,” said Vern, sadly.

  Thereafter, to make up for the social blunder of my dog, I got into the habit of shooting spruce chickens along the road every time I drove into Homer to present to Vern. On one of these occasions I took Ski with me, leaving her in the car when I stopped in front of the drugstore. I joined Vern behind the counter, we got to talking and I forgot all about my chicken-killing dog. Suddenly I jumped up, knocked over a barrel and rushed outside. Just as I had suspected: Ski, her furry body covered with feathers, her jowls dripping with blood, was just finishing off the last of six spruce chickens. “There goes your dinner,” I said to Vern.

  Malemutes have another undesirable trait, I discovered: They won’t stay home. Ski was no better than the rest, but if she wandered away and was gone all day she at least returned in time for dinner. Eventually, however, she took to wandering in the direction of Greasy Grogan’s cabin, and when he began to feed her better food than I could provide, she began to stay away for days at a time. Greasy then gave me an Alaskan name: The Homesteader Who Carries His Dog Home Over His Shoulder,

  As the snow began to blanket the country and Ski grew so large she was beginning to elbow me for floor space in my shack, I built her a house of her own. It was a pretty fancy house, with 90-pound roofing on top, tarpaper upholstery inside and a wall-to-wall gunnysack carpet. No other dog, I felt, had ever had it so good. Ski, however, took one look at her new home, then proceeded to rip the gunnysacks out and tear the wallpaper off. She left the roof intact, but only, as far as I could tell, because she liked to climb up onto it and peer in through my window to see what I was doing inside. And when the snow was a foot deep, she ignored the dog house entirely and buried herself in the snow, using her big, bushy tail as a nose warmer. Only when the thermometer dropped to 10 degrees below zero did she return to her house. And even then she didn’t need to: by that time her coat, with the heavy undercoat nature provides, was so thick that she could have stood—and even enjoyed—much lower temperatures than that.

  During the first cold spell my dog and I had a serious misunderstanding. One particularly icy night I fell asleep in my sleeping bag with a still-burning cigarette between my fingers. Dreaming that I was fighting a forest fire, I awoke choking with smoke. I jumped up, threw open the door and tossed the flaming bag out into the snow. Then I slammed the door, and, shivering in my long underwear, looked out the window. The fire seemed to be out, but Ski was sniffing at the bag. Suddenly she grabbed it and dragged it into her house. “Oh, well,” I thought. “It’s no good to me anymore.” I built up a fire in the barrel stove, rolled up in my two remaining blankets and tried to get back to sleep. But I continued to shiver. Cursing, I got up and built the fire higher. But it was no use: I was still cold. Finally I made a decision. Rushing to the door, I threw it open, leaped the few feet to the dog house in snow that froze my bare toes as they landed, and snatched the bag out from under the sleeping dog. Ski put up a valiant fight for her newly-acquired property, putting all forty pounds of muscle into hanging on to her end of the bag. But I was not to be defeated. With a superhuman effort, I wrenched the bag from her grasp and leaped back into the cabin. Climbing into my bed, I found that there was still enough of it to keep me tolerably warm. But Ski’s howling at the moon, a heart-rending song of frustration and rage, kept me awake for the rest of the nig
ht.

  For exercise, Ski and I used to go hunting together, I on snowshoes, she following in my trail. These were the times when she displayed a wicked sense of humor. When I had stopped to examine a track, she would come up behind me and place a large, solid paw on each of my snowshoes. Not realizing she was there, I would take one step and fall flat on my face. And then—I’ll swear it—she’d laugh. Life, to Ski, was just one long, delightful game.

  There were times, though, when I tried to impress upon her the seriousness of pioneering in Alaska. I had found an old sled someone had abandoned on the beach and decided it was time Ski did some useful work around the place. Making a harness out of old parachute webbing and rope, I tied the dog to the sled, piled on all the firewood it would hold and yelled, “Mush!” Ski looked back over her shoulder at me with a pained expression. She didn’t move.

  Removing a few of the logs from the sled, I walked ahead of Ski toward the shack. She lunged after me, afraid of being left behind, and the sled, unnoticed, came tumbling after. At the shack, I unloaded the wood, turned the sled and Ski around and started back for another load. When Ski leaped to follow the sled catapulted forward and smacked her sharply in the rear. Yelping in outraged surprise, she rushed past me, knocked me into a snowbank and disappeared down the path leading to the highway. The last thing I heard was a yelp of pain. Then silence.

  When I caught up with my dog I was treated to a ludicrous sight. The sled had gone off a bluff into the trees below, and it was hanging, caught in the branches, from one of them. And hanging from the sled, still in her harness, was Ski. Trussed up like a Christian ready for burning at the stake, she looked utterly miserable, and the eyes she turned on me at the sound of my steps were full of reproach. Never again could I lead her to within twenty yards of a sled.