Well, that’s the story and there’s no end to it. There’s more than one thing that will make you hurt yourself and more than one that’ll save you.
Jesus, Ramona said.
Yes, Jesus, Grandma said.
There’s the picture of Poppa and Will on the wall, where they belong—in stockmen’s suits and French silk kerchiefs. And here’s the rest of us—you and Momma and Baby Dee and Gahno and me—gone to the Indians or to Dallas or to some of those strange places you favor. Except for Rose, who’s laying dead up town. At least we won’t have no one preach over her. She can take that comfort. We can just sing and tell lies when they all come back to the house, and the Indians can bury her the right way tomorrow. You and Baby Dee can do it right. Maybe Baby Dee will take a drink of his own whiskey today.
More stories? Ramona asked.
Snakebite medicine, Grandma said.
SNATCHED AWAY (1988)
Mary TallMountain
Athabascan, Koyukon, and Russian on her mother’s side, Mary TallMountain was born Mary Demoski in northern Alaska in 1918. She lived for many years in San Francisco and died in 1994.
NEAR FOUR MILE summer camp, the Indians were nudging their fishwheel into calmer water. The Yukon was in a fierce, frowning mood. It tossed spray hissing skyward, hurled it back down like heavy rain into the weltering currents. Where stubborn little creeks shouldered out insistently, the river surged to attack, writhing up in silt-brown rapids. Accustomed to its tempers, the men kept tending the wheel, which alternately plunged two carved spruce arms into the current to rotate with the tide. An oblong wire basket at the end of the arm scooped up fish; on the next rotation, as the arm tipped, the fish slithered into a box nailed to the raft deck of the fishwheel; the arm loomed up again like a windmill blade, fell back, and turned with the force of the tides. The ascent of dog salmon heralded the coming of autumn; fish flowed in a stream of silvery rose.
Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had drowned between Nulato and Kaltag.
Andy was the latest, and him only twenty-two.
The day in 1916 when Clem had unloaded his gear at Nulato Garrison, he had met fifteen-year-old Andy on the riverbank, where the Army had barged the new soldiers upriver. A crooked tooth leaning into his wide white grin, the lad had offered to help Clem with his violin and banjo cases. Even then, Andy was the best there was: hunter, fisherman, trapper, nobody could beat him. Only the river could have beaten Andy.
Clem’s boat chugged into the immense, misted expanses.
He wondered how Andy had felt, knowing himself caught, fighting. Did he see sky and trees flashing past? How long had he struggled, tumbled over and over in the fast rips out here where nothing existed to snag a man and hold him solid so he could keep his head above the deadly tides? Andy had never been found, though two months had passed. A cry had been heard on shore, but when the men got out and rowed toward the sound, only the voice of the river met them. Andy’s empty canoe had floated in a gentle riff behind the island of silt growing in mid-stream.
Their friendship had stretched through the years. Clem had eaten with Andy’s large family, gone with the men on hunting trips when he had leave from duty. He had thought the natives liked him as well as any Gisakk, the word they had for white men.
Clem thought of the afternoon he had spent talking on the riverbank with Andy and Little Jim. He thought Little Jim was related too, some way. Cousins, maybe? He couldn’t find out how these people were hooked up together. Something about the families, how their forebears were related, the kinship among the whole Athabascan people, was dim and old as time.
Clem glanced over at Andy now and then. He had already discovered that these natives didn’t like to be stared at; he tried to keep them from catching him. Andy didn’t seem to notice. In the tall grass he lounged on his side, wearing a white man’s wool shirt and store-bought overalls, chewing a grass stem, fur cap low over his eyes. He looked just like his father, Big Mike, the stubby Russian, the way Mike must have looked when he was fifteen and a lot skinnier. Andy’s eyes were fixed on the river. About fifty feet out, a small bundle came rolling down fast, something tied tight in a gunnysack.
“Hey what’s that?” Clem asked.
“Yeah,” Little Jim muttered.
“It’s a baby,” Andy said, following it with his gaze as it tossed and turned round and round downriver.
“What the hell?” Clem thought he’d heard wrong.
“Baby. Throwed away.” Andy chewed fast, wagging the grass back and forth. “When baby come out, maybe he got bum leg, maybe no leg, or he come out wrong, head mashed. Women say he’s no good, tie him up, dump him over riverbank.” He appeared to draw in his breath, but Clem couldn’t fathom any change in his expression. “They use to do it in old time,” Andy said. “Things were worse then. They quit doing it, but sometimes women still throw them if they’re too bad.” Andy looked out over the river, barely rippling, shining, innocent. A flock of snowgeese, in formation passing south, announced their departure in ancient ceremonial voice.
Little Jim said, “Lots of babies die in old time. They get Gisakk disease. That mean white-man sickness. We got a doctor now, but when Grandfather was living it was real bad. The people name him Old Russian.”
Clem asked, “How did Old Russian get here on the river?”
Andy said, “Grandfather—well, he’s really my grandfather’s papa, you know, he come upriver with three Russians. We call them Gisakk too, like all white men. They talk-talk all the time, maybe we call them that name because they talk about Cossack, it go round, get to be called Gisakk.” Both men chuckled as if at an old joke. Andy went on, “But then came other Russians, buy furs from our people in our old hunting mountains, we call Kaiyuh. Those ones build big Russian kashim to live in, and traders post store, on the river south of where Nulato sits now.” He pointed the grass stem south. “Down there. That town is all gone now. Koyukuk warrior start war, burn down kashim, everybody die inside.” Silence followed while the men considered the ancient violence.
“After they die, sickness come,” Little Jim said. “First, it’s smallpox. Old people say Gisakk bring it, who knows where it come from. No way to write it down. That’s long time ago. Those people only talk, not read. Now we have this new sickness, this consumption, TB.”
“That pretty bad?” Clem asked.
Little Jim frowned. “Yeah, no way to cure that when it get ahold. If they could go Outside, there’s hospitals for it, but who could go Outside? Cost too much dinga.” He rubbed his thumb against his finger in the universal sign for money.
Andy swept his arm wide. “Many other ways to die, though,” he said, crossing his legs, settling deeper into the grass. “Sometimes a house catch fire, we fight it with river water, maybe people burn up anyway. Short life for some of us. That’s why our people get married so young.” He laughed.
Little Jim stared downriver. “Lots of people drown. The current play tricks, hide, next thing it’s got you. Pretty near got me, couple times.” He grinned. “We don’t swim. Nobody swims.”
“Jesus,” Clem said.
With a heave of brown water, the river slammed a log into the bow of the boat, jolting Clem out of his flashes of reverie. Whew! No damage done! Seven years ago, he would have been alert to the river’s tricks at a safe enough distance to get out of the way, he thought, steering away from the middle. The river hadn’t been too tough for him back then; he was already a rugged fellow fresh from cavalry duty on the Mexican border, lean as a malamute, hair a sunbleached shock against perennially brown skin. His intent sea-colored eyes incessantly changed with the lights, focusing as if to X-ray everything he saw. His air was alert and confident. Seven years on the Yuko
n had converted him into a critter tough as walrus hide. It was his first taste of the wilderness: raising dogs, training them for sled work and distance travel; running search-rescue missions by dogteam in winter, by motorboat in summer. All around him stretched the stark and beautiful land. He tried to write his feelings in notes of music on scraps like the secret fragments of a poet, but they escaped him.
Away in a corner of his mind, an old piano tinkled, playing Mary Joe’s favorites, “Yum Yum Waltz” and “Pitti Sing Polka.” The notes echoed tinnily in his head. At Ruby, a red-hot boom town, he had been playing the tunes steadily for the past three days and nights. The miners and whores had hollered for dance music. He had rounded up young Charlie Wilson, a native banjo picker, and they went up by motorboat. Those wild rough folks had insisted on high jinks and kept Clem and Charlie playing day and night. Wouldn’t let them rest, threw gold and dollar bills to them, yelled for them to keep going, offered bad bootleg he and Charlie waved away. The boys worked themselves so dizzy that Charlie had stayed on with kinfolks for a visit. Clem was dog-tired, he was homesick, he’d been away from Mary Joe too long already.
His biceps were numb from the kick of the tiller against him; that fast leaping current was deadly; he kept veering into it. Twenty- and thirty-foot trees tumbled up like matchsticks, roots clawing toward the sky. He swung over, pivoted the boat into still water. Even after he dropped anchor, the river kept grabbing, trying to yank him back. He knuckled his eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw tall green reeds in a slough sixty yards off. Suddenly a clump of ducks rose, bunched, started climbing. Shots cracked. Clem flattened fast. Four birds dropped; the flock fluttered south out of gunsight.
Who the hell is it? I didn’t see a boat, he thought. Nothing moved. Then Floyd Tommy pried out of the reeds, holding a bunch of mallards. He ambled over. “Got a couple.” He held up the birds. “I come down here early, before the sun. Sometimes a few duck stop here.”
“Nice fat mallard,” Clem said.
“Not so bad, been feedin’ all summer.” Floyd’s gangling young body was wet to his waist.
“Scared them up, I guess,” Clem said, climbing out of the boat, his red rubber Pacs plopping in the water. Ice tingled clear through the heavy rubber, the thick wool socks, on up the long johns.
“Feeding off of the bottom,” Floyd said and grabbed a duck by its ringed neck, and a second. He dropped them on the grass. “Grub for the pot, anyways.”
“That’s swell. Thanks.” Clem admired the birds, the green shine of their feathers.
“Nothing extra,” Floyd said.
Clem fished out a tin of King Albert. “Take a smoke,” he offered.
Floyd pocketed the tobacco. He coughed deeply and spit. The spit hung on a weed, a strand of pink swaying in the wind. He walked away and Clem saw his sharp shoulderblades, thin butt. Consumption, he thought. Kid shouldn’t smoke. Sorry I gave him tobacco.
Clem crawled up the bank, lay flat under a tree. Fine here, let his whole body go quiet, he thought, let the stillness float into and around him while he stared at the scrambled pale sky.
Kid’s cough made him think of Mary Joe.
Right after Clem had come to Nulato, he’d struck up an acquaintance with Cap Jaeger, the trader. They played fiddle and guitar for dances, with Freddy Kriska jingling and clinking away on his banjo. They practiced in Cap’s store.
One evening Clem went outside to take a breath. Mary Joe was sitting on the porch step. He couldn’t resist. He laid his hand on her gleaming, waist-long hair, bound with a bright purple band. “What a beautiful girl,” he said. Once he’d seen her running through the village, hair flying, had seen that even in shapeless trousers and faded cotton shirt, she was lovely.
She got up; her smile seemed to glow in the dusk as she floated closer in a movement sensuous as a cat’s; they faced each other. He smelled wind and furs, and something elusive like sweet grass.
They stood motionless, barely breathing. Then she broke the hush. “I’m about as tall as you, Clem Stone. You’re my brother’s friend. You know, Andy. I come and listen to you play music, but I always go away. This time, I risk it.”
“That’s no risk, girl. I’m not dangerous,” he murmured. The very air felt electric with the closeness of her.
“Oh, yes, you are,” she said. She pulled out a large white handkerchief, coughed lightly into it. A tingling—was it a foreshadowing of an unknowable sorrow?—shivered along his nerves. Somehow, he sensed, it broke an impasse.
She told him she’d just turned twenty-one. She lived with her father, her brother Andy, and a younger brother, Steven. Her mother, Matmiya, two sisters, and a third brother had died of TB. Times were bad for the people. She did laundry for soldiers at the station. They wore “Alaska Warmies,” a special Army issue of long johns, and the damned brown Army soap shrank them midget-sized. Mary Joe had a special way to wash them. It kept her busy, along with looking after her menfolk, getting in a little fishing, tending a few traps.
Just surviving, she had skills he’d never known existed. The traps and snares she so carefully laid, empty when the animals couldn’t come out to tackle the howling cold. Wolves running hungry. Moose, caribou, galloping broomstick thin before the wolves.
And in the village, the hungry children.
Affection for her family was part of the whole business of hunger, he thought. It hadn’t been like that with his folks, back in California. Hardly a time he could remember when Pa or even Ma showed their love for him and brother Jass, except when they were tykes, and then it was like he dreamed it. Becky, his mother, was always wrapped in thought, eyes far away, lips moving. How badly he wanted to get into her head! She kept her thoughts wrapped up inside, the way she wrapped her outside, in dark dresses and big white aprons with tails that tied round and round and hid her tiny waist. He hoped she was happy at last. She’d finally married Balch Jopson, the hired man, after she divorced Pa. Right away, Pa married that woman from Hoptown. Pure orneriness. Pa had that terrible temper . . . suspicioned Balch and Becky so hard he finally had to leave her. Clem frowned. He’d never figured out why as a kid he’d been jealous over Becky and Balch too . . . Vaguely, he knew he’d inherited a trait of jealousy. He supposed he’d got it from Pa. When he thought of Mary Joe and Taria, he got too mad to talk. She had married that old man when she was fourteen, had a son the next year. Not long ago, Taria had gone down to live in Kaltag and had taken their son with him. Why had she let that boy go, and him only five? When Clem tried to talk to her about it, she always got him off the track with a funny remark or dinner on the table, or lovemaking, anything to derail him.
Mary Joe was jealous too, in her secret way. There was the day he’d been talking to young Talla and Mary Joe came along the boardwalk, stalked right up to them, and walloped him a good one on the jaw. She never mentioned it afterwards, but it kind of lay there between them. Mary Joe had wanted one of those little medicine sacks made of caribou hide, to hang on her belt. He’d asked Talla to make one, and he’d been telling her how the initials ought to be. Mary Joe thought he was sparking the girl! Well, jealousy or no, Clem and Mary Joe had given Lidwynne and Michael enough love to last a lifetime.
His mind magnetized to a worry that had been shoved back, these few hectic days. He and Mary Joe were about to lose their kids. She had found out from Doc Merrick that she had consumption, and he had offered to adopt them. Mary Joe had got so worked up over that, he realized, she’d forgotten Clem’s last hitch was about up. Strange, but no use worrying yet. He’d just have to let things take their course. Hell, like he always figured, it would come out in the wash. . . .
A jay screamed from a lodge-pole pine. Clem stood, whirled his arms, kneaded his shoulders, took a fast run along the beach and back. New energy shuttled through his blood. Kicking the boat off, he noticed his tiller arm had eased up. He’d make it. He had a damn good bulge of strength in those biceps. But his calculation had misfired again. As usual, he had underrated the river. The da
mned thing yanked him every which way. Time blurred. No-Oy, as the natives called the sun, was well up the sky. Its light dazzled him and he centered in again on the tiller. God! that sprint of energy hadn’t lasted! At last, through his daze, he saw Pete Slough alongside. Soft grayblue wings of a pair of teal flapped, rose. His eyes swarmed with blurs as he turned from the river glare, staggered stiffly up the bank.
Willy Pitka was netting whitefish in the ruffled water of the slough. He hauled in three fish, ten to fourteen inches long, threw them into a washtub. Willy looked as if he had always been there. He was strong, fierce-looking like most of the Ten’a Athabascans; good hunter, ten kids working every day, well fed. “Fishing pretty good today,” Willy said, pointing to the nearly filled tub.
Clem pummeled his cramp-knotted arm, “Good big fish,” he said.
“You come down from Ruby, yah?” Willy eased the handwoven net into the water. It flowed between his chunky fingers, barely rippling into the water.
“Been playing for a dance up there,” Clem said, walking back and forth, the numbness inching out of his knees.
“River pretty fast, plenty wood coming down,” Willy said.
“It was real bad a few miles. Got tired fighting it and stopped up yonder, below Tommy’s camp. Floyd was getting a few mallard.”
Willy nodded. “There’s a few places up there, duck come every year about this time. Floyd knows them pretty good. Oh, yeah, you got to watch that river.”
“Need eyes in back of your head. Easier in winter when she’s frozen over,” Clem said.
“You still got your lead dog, Beauty?” Willy asked.
Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers Page 9
