by Stan Jones
“Why’s that?” Lucy asked.
“Jacob doesn’t like my mother and I don’t think he likes me, either. I bet he hasn’t said more than twenty words to me all the times I’ve seen him.”
Lucy stared at him. “What’s the problem?”
“I only found out today when I asked Martha to translate. Apparently he’s got a thing against the naluaqmiuts for generally ruining life for the Inupiat, and against Martha for getting involved with so many of them.”
“Like Ed and Carmen.”
“And Leroy. And maybe me, too, because I grew up with white people.”
Lucy clucked her tongue sympathetically. “Old people.”
“Some old people,” he said
She snapped her fingers. “You know who Jacob does like?”
“Who?”
“My grandmother.”
“Pauline?”
“Yep. She talks about him all the time when she comes back from visiting people at the center. There’s even talk . . .”
“What talk?”
“I’ve heard she and Jacob had something going after his wife died.”
“She won’t discuss it?”
“Not really,” Lucy said. “She just kind of grins if I try to ask.”
“Well, that’s not like Pauline.”
“I know. She’s so earthy. Usually sex, grocery shopping, and the weather are all the same to her. I think the difference is, this might have been while my grandfather was still alive.”
“No.”
“Yes.” Lucy was grinning now.
“Your grandmother and my grandfather.”
“Hey, it’s a small town with long, dark winters. If it wasn’t for the tepee creeping, everybody would go crazy.”
“This is Eskimo country.”
“All right, igloo creeping.”
“Wait a minute, we’re not cousins or something, are we?”
She laughed. “No, no, this was when Jacob and Pauline were both in their fifties. Long after my dad was born.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
She laughed again. “Anyway, I think Pauline would probably help us. Her English isn’t good enough for her to be a real translator, but she can bail me out if I get stuck with the Inupiaq. And I think she’ll charm old Jacob right out of his . . . well, right out of whatever he knows about your old angatquqs.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ACTIVE PARKED THE SUBURBAN at the senior center. Like nearly every other building in Chukchi, it boasted T1-11 siding and a shingle roof. A gaggle of four-wheelers and snowmachines were parked in front, along with two pickups and a rusted-out yellow Subaru.
The center was a three-spoked wheel with no rim. Each spoke was a wing where the elders had their bedrooms. The cafeteria, TV room, and administrative offices filled the hub.
Active checked in at the office and they found Pauline in a game of snerts with three other old ladies in the light pullover parkas called kuspuks.
“Hi, Aana,” Lucy said to Pauline, nodding to the other women at the table.
Pauline looked up from her cards through her big cataract glasses, smiled, and returned Lucy’s greeting. “And it’s good to see you too, Nathan,” she said. “You guys come over sometime, I’ll make some fish-head soup.”
“I’d like that,” Active said. “How about the second Tuesday of next week?”
Pauline grinned and shook her head, looking to Lucy for sympathy. “Same old Nathan, ah? So bossy.”
“Did you ask anybody about Saganiq and Natchiq?” Lucy asked.
“I asked these ladies here, but they don’t know anything. That right, Annie? June? Bessie?”
The snerts players nodded in unison, looking mildly crestfallen at their failure to be of help.
“Well, Nathan thinks his grandfather Jacob might know something. You want to help me translate?”
Pauline beamed and glanced down the hall leading, Active knew, to his grandfather’s room. Then she caught herself and looked serious. “Maybe Nathan will give me a ride to bingo tonight in his trooper truck, ah?”
It was Pauline Generous’s usual price for any favor he asked. He sighed in resignation. “With the flashers on,” he said.
“And the siren.”
He shook his head and masked a grin. “And the siren.”
“OK, I’ll help then.” She excused herself from the snerts game and they made their way down the hall to Jacob Active’s room.
Active saw through the half-open door that his grandfather lay sleeping on top of the bedcovers in the afternoon sun, Kay-Chuck playing softly from a little radio on a stand beside the bed.
Jacob Active had creased brown skin stretched tight over his cheekbones and a shock of silver hair that stood straight out from his head like dandelion fuzz. He wore a hearing aid in his left ear. Its lobe was missing, taken by frostbite on the trail long ago, according to Martha. The right side of his face drooped from the stroke, and a silver thread of saliva trailed from that corner of his mouth. Beside the radio on the nightstand lay a pair of cataract glasses as big and thick as Pauline’s.
Nathan sensed Pauline beside him, and moved so that she could look in. Her face softened. “You want me to wake him up?”
Active nodded and the old woman walked to the bed, took a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand, and wiped the sleeper’s chin. Then she touched his arm. “Jacob,” she said. “Jacob, it’s Pauline.”
Jacob stirred and blinked, looking lost and confused. Pauline handed him the glasses. He put them on and peered about. “Ah, Pauline,” he said. Then came a few phrases of Inupiaq in the whispery old-man’s voice.
Pauline answered in Inupiaq, then stepped aside to show him who was with her. The old man smiled at Lucy and glanced briefly at Nathan, then away.
“I’m going to tell him why we’re here, then Lucy can talk to him,” Pauline said with a look at Nathan. She spoke again in Inupiaq. Nathan heard his own name, then Lucy’s, Victor Solomon’s, Saganiq’s, and Natchiq’s.
Jacob was silent for some time after Pauline finished, then he squinted and rattled off a burst of Inupiaq.
Pauline spoke again. Nathan heard his own name again, and the Inupiaq word for grandson. Then Pauline leaned over and spoke into Jacob’s hearing aid, so that only she and Jacob knew what she said.
Finally the old man raised his eyebrows and said, “Ee,” the Inupiaq word for yes.
Pauline rearranged his pillows and helped him sit up against the headboard, then turned. “He’ll do it, but he wants some tea. I could bring it while you guys get started, ah?”
She left the room. Lucy pulled a chair up to Jacob’s bed and took a seat. Nathan pulled up a chair, but a little farther off, and took out his notebook.
Jacob spoke in Inupiaq for a few seconds, then looked at Nathan.
“He says how is your mother and is she still with that white man?” Lucy translated.
“Tell him she’s fine, and, yes, she’s still married to Leroy, and she still loves her father.”
Lucy made the translation. Jacob frowned and looked away from them for a moment, then spoke in Inupiaq.
“He says he loves her too, and he’s sorry that some things can’t be helped when you get too old. But he does want to help you in your trooper work, so he will tell you what he can remember about Saganiq and Natchiq. He finds that he can’t remember what happened this morning, but things from his youth are as clear as if they happened yesterday. Still, he’s not sure he can remember all that he heard when he was a boy. But he will do his best.”
Active nodded. “That’s all I ask, Ataata.” He thought Jacob smiled slightly at the Inupiaq word, but it was impossible to be sure.
The old man spoke again through Lucy, Nathan interrupting with questions only when he couldn’t help himself. The account was halting at first, but picked up speed and assurance as it went on. It was as if one memory led to another, like the links in a chain.
“You want to know about Saganiq and Natchiq, ah? My dad
and the other people his age used to speak of them often when I was a boy. I think my dad knew both of them a little bit, maybe. Maybe when he was a boy he saw Natchiq sometimes. And that Saganiq, maybe he still lived around here until just before I was born.
“Anyway, my dad and those other people, they said Natchiq came from way up on the Isignaq River, around that place we call Rough Creek today. Nobody lives there any more, but, used to be, if you would go up there and look around in the willows, you could see the old pits where those people had their houses. One time I went up there with my dad and we walked around and dug down into a couple of pits to see what we could find. Dad, he dug up this old broken ax made out of jade, and he says, ‘Maybe Natchiq used this to chop a tree, ah?’ I don’t know if you can still do that today, since the whites made their national park up there.
“Anyway, Natchiq came from up there around Rough Creek. There was just him and one sister, but I guess she died when she was little, because I never heard anything about her. So he grew up mostly by himself, just him and his mother up there on Rough Creek.
“When he was little, he would always help her out and he learned lots of things from her, like how to make a sod house or set snares for rabbit and ptarmigan, that kind of thing. What people needed to know to stay alive in those days.”
“What about his father?” Nathan asked. Lucy translated the question, and Jacob frowned in concentration for a moment.
“That’s a funny thing, those old stories never said anything about Natchiq’s father. Maybe his father died when he was little, or maybe his father left his mother for some reason. I never heard. The stories only tell about his mother, and how he always helped her out and learned things from her.
“But he also learned things himself just by watching and listening, and pretty soon he was the best hunter around that place. He could catch any kind of game. If it was squirrel or caribou or bear, didn’t matter, Natchiq could catch it. Or maybe the game gave itself to him because of who he was. That’s what some people thought.
“His magic or whatever it was started one day when he was out checking his snares. He came to a nice place by the river, so he sat down to rest on a piece of driftwood. Pretty soon he heard a little bird chirping. Then he listened close and he heard that it was chirping in Eskimo and it was saying, ‘Father and son, father and son.’ And then he went home saying it to himself. ‘Father and son, father and son.’
“After that, he went back to that spot whenever he could, because he always felt real peaceful and calm whenever he heard that little bird chirping, ‘Father and son, father and son.’ Then after a while, the little bird added to what he was chirping. He starts to say, ‘Father and son, the source of intelligence. Father and son, the source of intelligence.’
“Now Natchiq was getting home later and later every time and his mother was starting to worry. She asked him why he was so late, and he said he was just tending his snares, because that little bird never said, ‘Tell about me.’
“So Natchiq was going around saying to himself what the bird said—‘Father and son, the source of intelligence. Father and son, the source of intelligence’—and he went to his resting spot to hear the bird whenever he could.”
“What did he mean by that, ‘the source of intelligence’?” Nathan asked.
“Nobody ever really knew except Natchiq. Sometimes he called it his father. His father in the sky.”
“It sounds like the naluaqmiut God.”
“That was what a lot of people thought later on when the whites finally come into our country and started to talk about Jesus and everything. They thought Natchiq’s source of intelligence was God. But at that time when Natchiq was still alive, the Eskimos had never heard of God yet or seen any white people, and Natchiq never explained anything about his father in the sky.”
Jacob looked confused, and there was a hurried conference in Inupiaq. Then Lucy turned to Nathan. “He can’t remember where we were. Wasn’t he just telling us how Natchiq’s mother was starting to worry because he came home so late?”
Nathan nodded. Jacob picked up the story and Lucy continued translating.
“Sometimes Natchiq wouldn’t come home at night at all, and his mother got more and more worried. She kept asking, ‘Why are you gone so long? What do you do?’
“Suddenly he decided it was time to tell his mother, so he said he’d been listening to a little bird and he told her what it said: ‘Father and son, the source of intelligence.’
“When she asked him where it was, this source of intelligence, he said it was somewhere up above, but he felt so much reverence, he didn’t even dare look up to see.
“Now his mother was worried more than ever. She asked him, ‘Are you turning into an angatquq?’
“He told her not to worry, he wasn’t turning into anything. He was just listening and learning. He told her, ‘I know something is helping us, and that the little bird calls from somewhere. But I don’t know the source.’
“After that, his mother started to calm down for some reason, and never worried anymore. ‘I’m almost an aana now,’ she told herself, ‘but I never heard of the source of intelligence before.’
“One day Natchiq told his mother that his source of intelligence was saying it was better if he married a certain girl. He went off hunting to the north with some other men and when he came back, there was this girl in their camp who came to visit his mother. He asked her to eat with them and then after they ate, they were building a new sod hut when Natchiq put his head down and thought for a long time. When he looked up again, he said he’d been in a peaceful place, in contact with his source of intelligence. ‘It is better if I marry this girl,’ he said then, and that was how he got married.
“So he lived up there around Rough Creek with his mother and his wife and they had a happy, peaceful life, because he was a good hunter, and he had his source of intelligence in the sky.”
“And Natchiq said he was not an angatquq?”
Lucy started to translate, but Jacob raised his eyebrows and spoke first, apparently having figured Nathan’s question out for himself. Lucy waited till he finished, then delivered the response.
“He says Natchiq was not an angatquq. He hated the angatquqs.”
There was a tap at the door. Lucy opened it and Pauline came in, followed by an aide in a light green uniform carrying a tray with tea and a stack of pilot bread on it. The aide set it across Jacob’s lap and he helped himself with gusto remarkable in an eighty-two-year-old, Active thought. Pauline sat at the foot of the bed, one hand on his ankle, and watched as he ate.
When the pilot bread was gone, Jacob took a sip of tea, nodded at Lucy, and picked up the tale again.
“See, before Natchiq came along, the angatquqs ran everything. A few of them were good. They tried to help the people when life was hard. But most angatquqs used their power to take whatever they wanted—food, women, boats, furs, fishing nets, anything.
“They controlled everything by taboos. If your daughter got sick, it meant you broke some kind of taboo, even if you didn’t know it was taboo. Like if you ate caribou with your left hand instead of your right hand, maybe that was a taboo. But only the angatquqs would know. So if somebody in your family got sick, then you had to go to the angatquq. He would talk to his spirits, find what taboo you broke, and tell you what to do about it. Maybe you couldn’t eat any berries for a year, or any masru—”
Here Lucy broke into a brief discussion with Pauline, at the end of which Lucy explained—in English—that she hadn’t been able to think of the English term for the plant known as masru. But, with Pauline’s help, she now believed the white man called it the Eskimo potato.
At the sound of this term, Jacob’s face brightened momentarily and he raised his eyebrows, repeating the phrase in English. “Eskimo potato, ee, Eskimo potato.” Then he resumed the story, and Lucy resumed translating.
“Maybe you can’t eat any Eskimo potato for one year. And you have to pay the angatquq or yo
ur daughter still don’t get well.”
“The angatquqs got paid?” Nathan asked.
“Oh, yes, that was how they got rich. Sometimes an angatquq would be the richest man in the village, and he would have three or four wives maybe.
“A lot of the taboos had to do with women. Like when a young girl became a woman, people in those days thought she was unclean. So she had to live in a hut by herself, maybe for a year. There would be a bucket of water out front, but no one could drink from it but her.
“It was the same way if a woman was having a baby. She couldn’t be around other people. She had to go out in a hut or snowhouse by herself and have the baby all alone. No one was allowed to help or go around her for a few days. If she had a hard time, maybe she or the baby would die.
“Some taboos, maybe they were just to have fun with your kids. Like if the northern lights were out, you couldn’t whistle or they would come down and cut off your head, that was one taboo. But even today, a lot of old people still won’t whistle if the northern lights are out.
“A lot of other taboos had to do with food. Like how you couldn’t cut caribou skin during fishing season or you would die. Or if you ate beluga whale the same time you ate berries or anything else from the ground, you would die. Or during the dark of the moon, you had to put ashes on your food, or you would die unless you got an angatquq to help you.”
“The people let the angatquqs do this?” Nathan asked. “They believed what the angatquqs said?
“The people in those days never really believed anything. They just had fear. Their whole life was based on fear. They never had anybody to teach them any different till Natchiq came along.”
There was a tap at the door and everyone paused. The aide returned, now bearing a tiny paper cup with a tablet in it. “Time for his blood-pressure medicine,” she said.
She spoke to Jacob in Inupiaq, and he obediently downed the tablet, chasing it with the last of his tea. He raised the teacup and spoke to her, and she lifted her eyebrows and took it away with her.
