Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Okay, let’s get a little serious,” Kate heard Bobby say, and turned to watch.

  “All right,” Anne Gordaoff said, who never looked anything less than.

  “I have a friend, Mary Ellen. She’s Native.”

  Mary Ellen Chignik, Kate thought, a Native rights ac-

  tivist who spent more time in Juneau picketing than the legislature did in session. She lived and breathed confrontation.

  “She’s this amazing woman, really smart, really informed, knows a lot about Native culture and history.”

  Knows a lot about Athabascan culture and history, Kate thought.

  “We were at the Roadhouse a while back. She was talking about the Black Death, an influenza epidemic that was brought to Alaska by gold miners and reduced the Native population on the Y-K Delta literally by one-third.”

  “Yes.”

  “Turns out the Black Death Mary Ellen’s talking about hit in 1919.1 said, ‘Mary Ellen, that was the influenza pandemic that hit the whole planet after World War I. Over twenty-one million people died, not just Alaskans.’” Bobby paused. “She was angry with me. This is a smart woman, well-educated, a leader. But she didn’t want to hear that the Black Death hit everywhere, all over the planet. The Black Death was personal. The Black Death was brought to her tribe by Anglos, just one of many instances of white wrongdoing in Alaska. That’s the way she was told it, that’s the way she sees it, and that’s the way she’s going to tell it to her children.”

  After a moment of dead air, Anne said, “What’s your question, Bobby?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “I guess, why? Why was that her reaction? And why was she angry when I told her the truth about the Black Death?”

  Maybe it was the late hour. Maybe Anne Gordaoff had had a long day and a longer week, and the campaign trail was taking its toll. Maybe she had been infected with Park Air’s no-bullshit policy and made a snap decision to abandon discretion. Whatever the reason, her answer was blunt. “Political correctness sucks.”

  Everybody blinked, including Bobby. “Excuse me?”

  “Family pride is going to kill all of us if we’re not careful.”

  The A-frame’s large single room was crowded with Park residents, from Old Sam Dementieff to Billy Mike to Mac Devlin to Aunties Vi and Joy to Dan O’Brian. Even Bernie Koslowski was there, turning the Roadhouse over to the inmates for the evening. Native, white, fisherman, ranger, homesteader, miner, hunter, trapper, they were all listening to Anne Gordaoff. Behind her, Darlene looked, for a change, indecisive, as if she couldn’t decide whether to interrupt or let her candidate rip. In the end, it was obvious that Anne was on a tear and there was no stopping her, and Darlene was smart enough not to try.

  “For a long time,” Anne said, leaning forward and fixing Bobby with an intense gaze, as if she were talking only to him but pitching her voice so that everyone could hear, “for hundreds of years, the Alaska Natives and the Native Americans were subject races, subject to the will of a more powerful nation. Then, along about the Sixties, America woke up to the fact that the Native American population had dropped to less than, what, I think it was something like a hundredth of what it had been before Columbus hauled his ass across the pond, and suddenly everybody’s wringing their hands and bemoaning their brown brothers’ fate, damning Americans for the closet Nazis they were, and elevating the Native to the status of sainthood.” Her mouth pulled into a wry expression. “All of a sudden, the Native way of life is perfect, or was, before the big bad Western Europeans came along and ruined everything.”

  “And it wasn’t,” Bobby said.

  “What’s perfect? I know an Inupiaq elder from Barrow. She was telling me stories about life up there, about whale hunting, and the big dance festival they’ve got every winter, and the polar bears coming in off the ice so you have to be careful before you go outside so you don’t run into one.” She paused. “The one thing I remember most vividly is when she told me about the whale hunting, the strikes, the landings, the town getting together to butcher the whale and cut up the maqtaq. It’s a delicacy now, she told me, not a staple, and then she looks at me and she says”—Anne’s voice slowed and an almost imperceptible rhythm began to shape her words—“ ‘In olden days,’ that woman says, ‘we hunt to eat. Now we have stores. We buy food. Some years we get a whale; some years we don’t. When we get a whale, that’s a good thing for the people. It brings us together; it reminds us of the olden days.’

  “And then,” Anne said, “and then she dropped her voice so no one else could hear her say it, and then she told me, ‘I lived in olden days. Olden days was not so good. Nowadays is better, because everybody has enough to eat.’ ”

  Bobby, for probably the only time in his life, was at a loss for words.

  “If it really was the olden days,” Anne said, “and the town didn’t get its whale, it became the duty of the eldest and most useless of the tribe to walk out on the ice as far as they could and stay there until they died, of starvation or exposure, whatever came first.”

  “I thought that was just an old fairy tale,” Bobby said.

  “Not unless real people die in fairy tales,” Anne said. “And, yes, baby girls born to a tribe living on the edge of starvation were put to death as another useless mouth to feed too.” With deliberate intent, she looked at Dinah, still holding Katya on her hip. “You know who had to kill them?”

  “No.” But he did.

  “Their mothers.”

  There was another moment of dead air. “I’m not saying there weren’t real wrongs perpetrated against Alaska Natives and Native Americans,” Anne said. “Even Disney couldn’t pretty up what turned out to be genocide. But what I really hate is the mythology that seems to be growing up around this new awareness of Native life. Nobody talks now about the wars fought between tribes years ago, even though you can see examples of the armor the warriors wore into battle in museums, but you call your friend Mary Ellen the Athabascan an Eskimo one time and see what she says. And we, the Native peoples, a lot of us are buying into it, into the myth. Everything was wonderful then, everything’s lousy now, and it’s all the Anglos’ fault. Baloney. All that attitude does is nourish resentment, perpetuate stereotypes, and fund political campaigns. Turns us into victims. I am not in any way, shape, or form a victim. Rousseau has a lot to answer for.”

  “Who?”

  “Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher back in whenever, precolonial days. Inflicted the idea of the natural man or the noble savage on the rest of the world. I had to study him in Humanities at college, and I’ll tell you right now I never read such nonsense in my life. There’s nothing noble about hunger. Hunger is a stronger force than either fear or sex. It always, always takes priority. In the olden days, like my friend in Barrow knows only too well, the bottom line was you did what you had to for the tribe as a whole to survive, and if that included killing off the elderly when they became less of an asset and more of a liability or killing a baby because you couldn’t feed it, that’s what you did. It’s not about humanity or compassion then, it’s about survival. It’s easy to idealize that time retrospectively, when you’re full.”

  There was a brief silence. “Don’t be shy, Anne,” Bobby said. “Tell us what you really think.”

  Anne stared at him for a moment, and surprised everyone by bursting out laughing. There was a palpable lessening of tension in the room. “I don’t know where all that came from. I must be tired.” She looked up when Darlene put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a reassuring smile.

  “Okay, folks, you heard it here first. Anne Gordaoff is not a victim,” Bobby said into the microphone. “This is Park Air, taking you now to the studios of beautiful downtown Detroit, with some music to raise campaign funds by.” He put in a CD and pushed a few buttons, and the Temptations singing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” rocked out of the quadraphonic speakers in full surround sound.

  “Turn it down, Clark!” Dinah yelled, and he did, marginall
y, and caught sight of Kate, standing stock-still and staring at Anne Gordaoff with an odd expression on her face. “Shugak!” The wheelchair rolled forward like it was jet-propelled, and Kate emerged from her trance in time to sidestep the wheels and save her toes, only to be yanked into Bobby’s lap and thoroughly kissed. She disengaged herself with difficulty, after which Mutt reared up to pay Bobby her respects, which left him with a very wet face. “Goddamn!” he bellowed again. “You let the fucking wolf back in the house! I keep telling you no fucking wolves in the house!”

  Mutt, paws on the arms of his wheelchair, laughed down at him lupinely, not in the least alarmed at his tone of voice. He gave her an affectionate cuff and rolled over to the wood box, where there was always a Jurassic anklebone or two to keep the wolves at bay. “How the hell are you, Shugak?” Bobby said, dark eyes examining her for nicks and scratches.

  “I’m fine,” Kate said. “Really.”

  Easier to convince than his wife, or maybe just wanting it to be true, he accepted this. “Well, join the damn party! Gimmee some beer, woman!”

  “Excuse me a minute,” Kate said, and threaded through the crowd surrounding Darlene and Anne. She waited for Darlene to notice her, and when she didn’t, nudged her ungently in the ribs.

  “Hey,” Darlene said, turning. “Oh.”

  “I hear you’re looking for my kind of help,” Kate said.

  The door opened and another group of people jammed into the house. The noise jumped seven or eight decibels, and then a figure moving very fast shot around the pillar and hit the back door at a dead run. The screen door slammed sharply in its wake.

  “Johnny!” The voice, high-pitched and furious, bounced off the ceiling. “Get back here!”

  “I’ll get in touch tomorrow,” Kate said, and beneath Darlene’s astonished eye hit the floor and was under the counter that encircled the central pillar of electronic equipment. She scrabbled around the pillar, the snake’s nest of cables slowing her down.

  There was the whisk of rubber tires on wood. “And who might you be, madam?”

  “I’m Johnny Morgan’s mother, and I just saw him run out the back door. Let me by! Johnny! Come back here right now!”

  There was a brief scuffle, followed by an “Oof!” as someone came up against a solid wall of chest.

  “Do you have any identification, ma’am?” said Jim Chopin.

  There was the shuffle of a lot of feet, and Kate pictured everyone crowding around to watch, forming a barrier between Jane Morgan and the back door. One for Rats, Rats for All, she thought, and grinned in spite of the situation. She shook off a piece of coaxial cable determined to keep her beneath that counter forever and made a break for the door. Bodies parted and closed in behind her. She pushed open the screen door. It squeaked, loudly.

  “Who’s that? Johnny? Johnny, is that you? Get over here, right now! Johnny?”

  “Hey, lady, watch who you’re shoving,” Old Sam Dementieff growled.

  “Relax, jeeze, have a beer,” Mac Devlin said. “You busy tonight, honey?”

  “Ayah,” said Auntie Vi, “never mind these men, they just want to get you drunk and take advantage. Have some iced tea. We have lemon.”

  “I don’t want any beer or any iced tea! I want my son! Now let me through!”

  Kate slipped outside, dodged the northwest leg of the antenna tower, and trotted through the vehicles parked in the yard, over the bridge and down the road to where her truck was parked. Jolinny’s face gleamed white in the shadows beneath the dashboard.

  Kate climbed in and started the engine. “You’ll have to talk to her sometime, Johnny.”

  “Just get us out of here, okay?”

  Kate, in the full awareness that she was breaking half a dozen statutes and probably a couple of federal laws while she was at it, put the truck in gear and headed down the road to her homestead.

  3

  Paula Pawlowski was a writer.

  She had been rewriting the first four chapters of her novel for going on eleven years now. When she got them perfect, she was going to send it to Simon and Schuster, whose address she had found in a copy of the 1987 edition of Writer’s Market on the shelf at the Salvation Army.

  She’d recently given some thought to letting Hollywood have first crack. Steven Spielberg was an obvious first choice there, although she worried that he had a dangerous predilection toward the saccharine. He’d found ways to end movies on racism, the Holocaust, and World War II on an upbeat note, which said a lot for his abilities as a filmmaker but not much for the accuracy of his vision. Still, she owed him the right of first refusal for ET. Honor among artists, she thought, coining a phrase.

  She stretched and rolled her head back, left, forward, right. Microfilm was a wonderful invention, no doubt, but watching it spool past for more than two hours at a time tended to make her muscles cramp up. Not to mention making her seasick.

  Seated at a reader in the Fairbanks library, she compared the stack of microfilmed and microfiched issues of the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Times, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Alaska Journal of Commerce, and various public records going back sixty years that she had skimmed through with the stack that she hadn’t, and sighed.

  Her day job was also that of a writer, of technical reports, grant proposals, position papers for political candidates of any party, and press releases for corporations too small to have their own PR departments. She was a good writer and better still, she was fast, but even so, sometimes there just weren’t enough writing jobs to make the payment on the Airstream trailer parked on a weedy five acres that was all her mother had left her when she died of smoke inhalation in another trailer parked on that same lot five years before. The Airstream had a built-in double bed, a tiny kitchen, and an even tinier bathroom, but it had running water, at least in the summertime, and in the Park, where homes, of any kind, from a one-room, two-by-four tarpaper shack to a split-level ranch brought in premium prices, she was lucky and she knew it. True, January’s heating bill sometimes hit three hundred dollars, but at least it was better than her friend Lillian, who had moved in with a man she didn’t even like that much just for a warm place to stay.

  She who moves fastest moves alone, Paula thought to herself, and bent back over the reader. Her job was to look at the incumbent’s family history going back as far as there was any in Alaska. “Don’t get ridiculous about it,” Darlene had said. “Don’t go back to the Russians or anything, but take a look, see what pops up. If you spot anything with potential, let me know.”

  For “anything with potential,” read any nasty surprises Anne Gordaoff could attack Peter Heiman on, like a secret abortion, a messy divorce, an unacknowledged child, an indiscreet affair, a lie on a Permanent Fund Dividend application, a too-large and too-obvious quid pro quo from a lobbyist anytime during the past eight years Heiman had been in office.

  At the last minute, as Darlene was leaving, the campaign manager had stopped in the doorway of the Airstream and added, “Look up the Gordaoff family history while you’re at it, too.” She saw Paula’s raised eyebrow. “If there’s anything to find, you find it first.”

  Paula had shrugged. “Okay.” She’d worked for Darlene Shelikof before, on other campaigns, on political action committees, on lawsuits. She was a good researcher, and she was for hire. One thing about this campaign was that it was extremely well funded. Peter Heiman had tried to hire her, and Darlene had outbid him, which had to be the first time that had happened to an Alaskan Republican since the early days of the pipeline.

  Speaking of Peter Heiman—she sighed and bent over the reader once more. Peter Heiman had been elected senator from District 41 eight years before and had been returned to office four years after that with minimal opposition. That was before the legislature and the governor had pissed off everyone in rural Alaska by ignoring, avoiding, bullshitting, and otherwise bypassing the hot-button issue of subsistence to the extent that they had managed to overturn a publicly mandated demand to submi
t the issue to a general vote. The legislature’s passive resistance on the issue of subsistence was what had put sovereignty on the map as an Alaska Native issue; if their own state government couldn’t or wouldn’t give them preference to hunt and fish, particularly in times of game shortages, they’d sidestep it and appeal to the federal government for the authority to oversee their own lands and waters, and take that, Juneau.

  The sting was all the sharper since the Native community had put the current governor and half the legislature in office, with endorsements from most of the Native regional corporations and a little matter of two hundred fifty-three votes from the tiny—and closest to the International Date Line—Native community of St. Martha’s and therefore the last to be counted after voting day. Two days later the hottest selling item in St. Martha’s was a T-shirt, the front of which read, “ST. MARTHA’S—THE LITTLE TOWN THAT ELECTS GOVERNORS!” Eighteen months later the hottest selling item in St. Martha’s was that same T-shirt, the back of which now read, “AND AREN’T WE ASHAMED OF OURSELVES.”

  All of which only went toward making Anne Gordaoff’s chances of attaining office better than even.

  But Peter Heiman’s credentials were impeccable; he was a card-carrying Alaskan old fart. His grandfather had come north with the U.S. Department of Agriculture right after the Alaska Purchase. (“Seven cents an acre! Did we take the Russians to the cleaners or what?” Peter Heiman was reported to quote his grandfather as saying in a profile in 1986, front page, Metro section, News. Paula noted that Peter’s grandfather had died in 1943, and Peter hadn’t been born until 1947.) The first Peter Heiman had been a farmer, sent to Alaska to oversee operations at five experimental farms (Homer, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Rampart, and Sitka) to see what would grow in Alaska and what would not. He had some success with crab apples, and even more with a gold miner’s sister who shot the Lake Bennett rapids in 1898 along with the rest of the stampeders. At least she said she was his sister, and her alleged brother backed her up, but with a lot of those old gals you never knew. Once she was married, Elizabeth Heiman settled into a life of quiet and what looked to Paula like stiflingly dull respectability.