by Heacox, Kim
And now this.
Keb wobbled.
“Are you okay?” he heard Little Mac ask, as she braced to hold him up.
“Gramps?” James said with alarm. “You need to sit down.”
“No,” Keb said. “You need to stand up. You need to be stronger than you’ve ever been. Stronger than you can imagine. You need to give your mother something to believe in. Do you hear me?”
James stared.
“You are not dead. You are not broken. You still have those.” Keb pointed.
“What?” James asked, bewildered, alarmed.
“Your hands. You still have your hands.”
James stared at his hands. He turned the feather slowly. “What am I supposed to see?”
Sometimes the only thing we see is the thing we’re most afraid of. Still leaning into Little Mac, Keb tried to focus. Did he see a hint of amnesty in his grandson’s eyes? A kindness, a hope? Oyyee. . . . He took a ragged breath and heard himself say, “A light. Turn the feather just right and you’ll see a light, a little daylight in the night, a little blue in the black.” Suddenly he was more tired than he’d been in a long time. His legs turned to water and everything closed over him, as Old Keb Wisting, the last canoe carver of his kind, collapsed.
the raven, it was nothing
FAR TO THE north, in Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve, a soft rain fell as a woman named Anne moved about her government research boat. She decided the rain was more mist than rain, more patient than the downpours she had known in Hawaii. A rain taking its time. She let her boat drift and watched it swing to starboard, pushed by the tide; eager fingers of foaming water on the white hull. Green, gauzy trees formed a rainforest veil on the distant shore, as much a rendering of another place as the place itself. Beyond that, Anne imagined mountains that elbowed into the clouds.
She glassed in every direction with her binoculars. Where were the whales?
The channel narrowed. The waters swirled and eddied over a shallow bottom. She looked for rocks, signs of broken water that would betray their presence just below the surface. The boat continued to spin, slowly. Her nautical chart said that no navigation hazards existed in this channel. But in Crystal Bay, where channels and coves quickly filled with glacial silt, it was different. The land—the actual crust of the earth—depressed by a massive glacier that filled the bay only a few hundred years ago, now rebounded an inch each year. Shorelines shifted. Reefs played tricks. Nautical charts became obsolete; they deceived. A Tlingit legend said a dark spirit reached out and capsized boats. What to do? Take nothing for granted.
The channel widened. The waters sighed. The current slowed and the boat eased into it. A bowl of pink light, cradled in morning clouds, spilled against the snowy flanks of weathered mountains. Anne caught herself breathing. Thousands of birds chattered and splashed about: ducks, geese, gulls. A flock of sandpipers zipped by, flaunting their aerial supremacy: restless, northbound, so many miraculous beings fixed on stars and arcs of magnetism, wild and vast yet intimate and near.
“Hello, Alaska,” Anne heard herself say. “It’s good to see you again.”
Twelve years ago, fresh out of Juneau-Douglas High School, she couldn’t wait to get away. Now she was back, and near tears. She had Nancy’s ashes. Her sister’s ashes.
She hoped to find humpback whales moving with the moon and storms, flooding into Crystal Bay on the first strong tides of June, hunting for the fat-rich forage fish—herring, capelin, sandlance—they needed to replenish themselves after months of fasting and a long swim from Hawaii. She gave herself ten minutes, and with that gone, another five. Another two. Nothing. She pulled out her journal and wrote:
The sister had no suitcase
No way to say good-bye
She packed a duffel with long underwear,
An old hippie vest, a tie
She took the ashes too
Wouldn’t you?
The urn heavy and cold
Was she ever, truly ever bold?
Maybe now, somehow
Maybe here.
ANNE LISTENED, AND in her listening she forgot her deepest sadness and regrets. Her radio was off. Her National Marine Reserve supervisor, a by-the-book man she called Ranger Ron, would not approve. He had called her yesterday to remind her about the mandatory all-employee safety meeting at reserve headquarters in Bartlett Cove.
Yes, well, the whales came first.
She closed her journal, climbed onto the foredeck, and sat against the metal railing in her Helly Hansen rain pants and sou’wester slicker. She dangled her legs over the side, her feet snug in XtraTuf Neoprene boots. The double-tined Danforth anchor rested at her side on the scrubbed white deck. From her daypack she pulled out a small tin and opened it. She dried her fingers on a red cotton bandana and drew a thin line of marijuana into a square of cigarette paper. She rolled a joint, licked it shut, and held it. “Maui Wowie,” she said. “They’d fire my ass if they saw me doing this.”
Still holding the joint, she opened the Capital City Weekly and read about the Crystal Bay jurisdiction case. “We simply want the federal government to have some perspective and wisdom and let us have our lands back,” the paper quoted Ruby Bauer, “so we can pursue our dreams and maintain our cultural heritage. . . .” And make a ton of money in mining and zip-line tourism, Anne thought.
She didn’t buy it. What bothered Anne most was that Ruby was the daughter of Old Keb Wisting. How did that happen? Why did some girls get the good fathers, and others the bad? And why did some girls die young, like Nancy?
Deeper into the Capital City Weekly, Ruby appeared again, this time talking about an investigation into the Pepper Mountain accident that ended the basketball career of her “infinitely talented” nephew. “To see a God-given gift like that taken away at the beginning of a person’s life is a crime,” Ruby said. “That’s why we want to make sure we know exactly what happened. We want to know the truth. Nothing more, just the truth.”
The truth, Anne thought, there’s a slippery fish.
“Do you remember me?” she had asked Old Keb in the NMRS plane as she handed him his raven feather five weeks ago. Of course he didn’t. Yet she remembered him and was astounded by how little he’d changed. The open face, white hair, ancient hands, and kind eyes. What struck her most was how small he was, and how he seemed to regard everything around him as a breathing universe of water, earth, and air that flowed one into the other, and he with it. He had magic; he was magic, the grandfather she never had, the man who gave her a vision.
THE ROUND EARTH rolled. The rain stopped. The tide percolated softly against the hull. A bald eagle called through the wet air and Anne snapped from her reverie. Her hand, still holding the joint, began to shake. Must everything desirable be forbidden?
She stood and looked around. No whales.
For eight years she had studied humpback whales in Hawaii, their acoustics and courting and mating, their migrations and energetics, their complex social structure and language. Now here she was, back in Alaska where the magic began for her as a little girl, where she first fell in love with boats, whales, and wilderness; where hungry humpbacks from Hawaii spent their summers eating nearly half a ton of fish per day, and sometimes sang.
Alaska, yes, where Nancy died, and part of me died too. Dear God.
She put the Maui Wowie in the pocket of her blue uniform shirt, under the gold badge, and made her way back to the wheelhouse, still thinking about Old Keb. That’s when she stopped, breathless. Perched on the transom was a raven. It cocked its head at her but otherwise didn’t move. Neither did Anne. Her hand gripped the rail. Her heart fluttered. What speed and stealth had brought the bird here that she hadn’t seen it or heard it? She could feel it looking at her, looking into her, measuring her with its dark intelligence. It walked the rail with a shaman’s authority, black talons clicking on the white fiberglass, tapping out an ancient beat. Had it stolen the moon? Invented the night? Come as an echo of the Ice Age?
Whooosh . . . It lifted away on broad wings, circled once, and flew north into the mountains and glaciers until she could see it no more, until it became part of everything distant and abstract. Slowly, her heart calmed and her mind became rational again and she remembered the mandatory safety meeting in Bartlett Cove, and convinced herself wrongly that it was nothing. The raven, it was nothing.
Just a bird.
a soul on fire
SOME DAYS, THE pain never left.
When you lived on the ragged edge of North America, a thousand miles north of Seattle, where the Pacific was not pacific and storms slammed into high mountains and glaciers skulked in valleys and silent bears made tracks up your spine, you knew as Keb knew that dying was an art when done right, and no final act should be without mystery and grace. More and more though, men died in the wreckage of their own lives, shadowed by false prophets, lost in the thumping, grinding world those same men created for reasons that didn’t seem reasonable anymore. Remember Reggie Plant? His brain soft with whiskey, he walked in front of a loaded gravel truck and let all ten tons roll right over him. People said he wasn’t too recognizable after that, not that recognition gets you into heaven. And Gil Johovic? Stubborn old goose, he took off in his skiff in an Icy Strait gale; said he wanted to catch a fish. They found his body washed ashore a week later. Never did find the skiff. A shame. It had a fine four-stroke outboard on it. Billy Mills got too confident in his Cessna and surprised nobody when he disappeared over Lynn Canal. George Bethany overfilled a backhoe tire and blew himself into the rafters of Mitch’s Garage where he hung on a lag bolt until the volunteer fire department pulled him down. Gus Talzic got frostbite when he went winter deer hunting with a hole in his boot. A patient man, he waited until the gangrene marched up his leg and into his crotch before he went to see Miss Byers, the nurse practitioner. He was never the same after that. Neither was Miss Byers.
Old Keb missed his cribbage games with Gus and George, the three of them planted in Keb’s carving shed, eating cornbread and venison stew. He could work long and hard and never tally all the ways his friends had died. Not one had lain down on a bed of moss to let the country swallow him. Not one had paddled away in a canoe. It seemed a fine way to go, one that appealed to Old Keb, a lot more than courting cancer, ending it all in a hospital, kept alive until your wilting was complete. Uncle Austin got so sick and frail that all he did was sleep. So did Samson Ehlme, a good carver in his day. He lost so much weight that his coat hung on him like laundry on a tree. He had a disease named for a famous baseball player back in the 1930s. It messed up Samson in the legs first, then climbed into his lungs and filled them with water. But it kept his mind sharp, a dirty trick and a tough end for the big Swede, a cold, windswept man. Two of Keb’s brothers died of cancer, and his sister Dot, and his wife, Bessie, twenty years ago. Even in her final days, surrounded by family, she did more giving than all of them, dying as she did without complaint. “I am grateful,” she said. Those were her last words. Keb had lived too long without her. So much cancer these days, it was a cancer of cancers. And if cancer didn’t get you, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s would, your body loaded with mercury and other bad stuff, your brain turning to oatmeal. Remember Rita Killbear? She said what bothered her wasn’t that life was so short, but that we’re dead for so long.
They were gone, all his dearest friends, his deepest love. He had no more illusions of turning full-faced to the sun. Everything was more alive than he’d ever be; every day harder than the one before. He felt as if he were cheating, breathing air that belonged to others. He could remember the names of friends who’d died seventy years ago but not the names of his great-granddaughters who walked at his knees, chirping like birds. He had to find strength in surrender. If a messiah can be born in a manger, can’t an old man die in the forest, on a bed of moss? Or better, in a boat? A canoe?
RUBY’S TRUCK ROARED up the hog-backed road and stopped at the carving shed, its windows filmed with summer dust after three weeks without rain. It sat there running, a living thing, doglike, panting in the heat. Nobody got out. From his rocking chair inside the window, Old Keb watched that truck catch its breath, sitting on its blue tail of hot exhaust. It turned off, and for a moment the quiet was big again, the way Keb liked it. James got out the passenger side and slammed the door. Using a metal cane—his knee in a brace—he hop-stepped across the clearing to his Aunt Ruby’s house, where she hadn’t lived since she moved to Juneau. He went inside and slammed that door, too. He was the best door slammer in town these days. Gracie got out on the driver’s side and stood there wearing the weight every mother wears who gets more than she bargained for. She leaned her broad frame against the truck and looked up, as if hoping some clarity might fall out of the sky.
When she was little, about three or four, Gracie loved to play hide-and-seek with the bigger kids. She’d stand in the middle of the meadow with her hands over her eyes, hiding from the entire world, invisible in a child’s logic. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. Ruby, eleven years older, would yell, “Gracie, you’re standing in broad daylight. We all see you. You have to hide behind a tree or something.” Unyielding, Gracie would hold her hands over her eyes until the seeker pegged her. Each time she’d drop her hands, her face alight, her laughter filling the sky, her little mind oblivious to rules and the importance of winning. It was the happiest Keb had ever seen her.
Keb considered going out to visit her, at the truck, but that required standing up and moving and was no small task when his joints worked like rusted oarlocks. She came in and walked across the creaky wooden floor; flipped on the single bare lightbulb that hung over the kitchen table. Her eyes adjusted to the evidence of frugal living.
“Hi, Pops.”
“Hullo.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“How about I make you some waffles?”
“Okay.”
She lit a cigarette, pulled butter and syrup from the fridge, and said heavily, “Did you hear? James got into an argument with some of the Greentop boys at Shelikof’s. I wasn’t there but everybody’s telling me about it. I guess he accused Charlie of skidding the logs up on Pepper Mountain and making things more dangerous than they needed to be.” She blew out smoke, sucked in another deep drag, blew out again.
Keb shifted. “Skidding the logs?”
“Yep.”
“That’s not good.”
“I know, Pops. That’s why I’m telling you. I guess the troopers have been talking to everybody who was up there.”
Poor Gracie. Every kindness the years had shown Ruby had been cruel to her. Ruby the elegant kittiwake, Gracie the honker goose with flat feet and a pear-shaped figure in baggy pants and teardrop glasses, her uncombed hair piled on her head. Keb could see she wasn’t well, her color wasn’t right. He struggled with his feet. He had to get his shoes off. An old Norwegian Tlingit can only absorb so much bad news with his toes bottled up. Uncle Austin used to say, “Never trust a man who takes away your language or makes you wear tight shoes. You want to understand the world and where you came from? You want to know who you are? Free your toes.” Let them breathe.
“Nobody should make trouble with the Greentop boys,” Keb said.
Gracie dabbed cigarette ashes into an empty Dinty Moore can. “I told James that. He got mad at me. I can’t tell him anything anymore. Nobody can.”
Keb said nothing.
“What’s he supposed to do, now that he can’t play basketball?”
“I’ll handle that,” Keb said, too softly for Gracie to hear.
“You know, he started dating Little Mac when Tommy was sweet on her. There are hard feelings there, too.”
Keb warmed at the mention of Little Mac. Part Chinese and part Scottish, with a little Tlingit and Filipino thrown in, she was a one-girl melting pot. “Chop Suey,” the other girls called her, fighting off envy and losing every time. As a kid, Little Mac would pop wheelies on her bike, eat apple cores, a
nd skip rocks. She could outrun and out-spit most boys her age, and she grew into a beauty made all the more beautiful by the way she moved, a young confident woman who never learned to fear the future. Keb loved her questioning intelligence, the fact that she was incapable of holding a grudge in a town built on them. Now sixteen, she had breezed through her junior year at a Seattle high school and returned north to spend another summer with her family in Jinkaat, where every logger and stevedore hit on her without success. Nearly a century ago, her great-grandfather, Milo Chen, had worked the salmon cannery in Dundas Bay with Keb’s pregnant mother, Nora. When Nora’s water broke and the cannery foreman told her to keep working or she’d lose her job, Milo, the hardest worker of them all, got onto his knees and delivered the baby—little Keb—while a dozen salmon-packers did double-time to cover for him. Milo cut the umbilical cord with a bone-handled filet knife, held Keb over his head, and sang a Mandarin blessing as pure as rain over rocks. He put little Keb on his mother’s chest and finished sixteen hours of packing salmon to make rich men richer down in Puget Sound.
After Keb’s mother and father died, the salmon industry collapsed and the Dundas Bay cannery closed down. Keb was about twenty by this time, back when Uncle Austin found Milo back-bowed on a construction job in Juneau, pouring concrete for two dollars a day. What exactly had Milo said when he held little Keb over his head? Uncle Austin wanted to know. “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey,” Milo told him. “We are spiritual beings on a human journey, born into our lives for one reason only: to seek the road that makes death a fulfillment.”
“Keb Zen Raven,” Milo called the boy. “The philosopher bird.”
All these years later, people in Jinkaat made a sport of watching Little Mac, Milo’s great-granddaughter, the way she moved on coltish legs and wore her beret and tied patterned scarves in her faded jeans; how she kicked rusty beer cans down the road and waved at passersby, no matter that they didn’t wave back. What suspicion they must have felt, watching her commit the sin of being different in that breezy way of hers, with that look in her eyes that said she was a continent away.
