Stone Cross

by Marc Cameron

  Telltale dots in the lines beneath Birdie’s bottom lip said her marks were skin-stitched. Tavlugun in her maternal great-grandmother’s native Iñupiaq, Birdie’s chin tattoo was comprised of three pencil-thin lines that ran from the base of her lower lip to the tip of her chin. Parallel, they were spaced a quarter inch apart—the width of the nail on the tattooist’s little finger. The center line was slightly wider than the outer two. It was applied with a technique called hand-poking, which was just what the name implied. Birdie preferred the skin-stitch, but that was just her.

  Birdie’s father, and his father before him, were Yup’ik from right there in Stone Cross, but her maternal great-grandmother was Iñupiat from Wainwright, clear up on the Chukchi Sea. The whites called them Eskimos. In some parts of the world, the term was offensive, but here in Alaska they used the term themselves. Birdie never met her great-grandmother, Bertha Sovok Flannigan, but she knew her namesake had been highly regarded for great wisdom and common sense. And Bertha had the same tattoo, and others as well. The stories said she had ornate designs tattooed on the inside of her thighs, so her babies would have something beautiful to look at when they were born. She was a fine woman to emulate, Birdie’s mother had said.

  There weren’t many tattoos today, not traditional ones anyway, and not given in the traditional way. But they were common in the old times, before the 1890s when missionaries came to Alaska. The Moravians who arrived in Bethel translated the Bible into Yup’ik, but virtually all the other religions forbade the speaking of Native languages altogether. They banned traditional dancing and drumming—and, instead of the old stories, they preached the Bible, especially Leviticus 19:28. By 1910 almost every indigenous person from Point Barrow to the tip of the Aleutians was Christianized. The old ways shriveled with each successive generation until they were good and dead.

  Great-grandmothers had tattoos, grandmothers had rosaries.

  Birdie Pingayak saw things differently. In her mind, preaching Leviticus 19:28 was cherry-picking. The same chapter that condemned tattoos talked about animal sacrifice and how a man should cut his beard. The elders who hired her as a teacher didn’t mind the tattoo, or, more likely, they’d grown numb to the sight of it by the time she finished college and applied for the job.

  At thirty-one, she was awfully young to be the principal of Stone Cross K–12, or any school for that matter. The two men and four of the five women who sat with her at the folding table in the gym were village elders, none of them under sixty years old. Ethyl Kipnuk sat to Birdie’s right with her head bowed in prayer. She was in her early fifties.

  All eight rows of bleachers were filled, from the edge of the basketball court to the cinderblock wall. Stenciled lettering said the Stone Cross girls’ basketball team had been regional champions four years running—two of those years with Birdie’s daughter, Jolene, playing forward. Birdie peeked through a half-open eye, scanning the crowd for the fifteen-year-old, who had apparently defied her mom and skipped out on the meeting.

  Birdie pressed back the urge to panic. She’d seen Sascha that morning, walking through the snow in the dark. He’d been out of state for a while after he got out of prison. She didn’t know where he’d gone, but that didn’t matter as long he wasn’t here. But now he was back. The court said he could come through town to visit family, but Birdie knew full well he came just to torment her—and see Jolene. So far, he’d never been stupid enough to come to the school. One of these days she was going to have to shoot him, but until then, she wanted to keep Jolene under her wing.

  Like the other women at the table, Birdie wore a traditional parka-like blouse of thin cotton called a kuspuk that hung to mid-thigh. Birdie’s was light blue with darker blue forget-me-nots, worn over a pair of not so traditional khaki slacks. Many of the others in the gym, both women and men, had on sweat pants. The loose kuspuk hid Birdie’s slender figure—a change from the norm of many Alaska Natives, male and female alike, ever since sugary pop and starchy foods had found their way into the bush diet of meat and fat. Birdie stuck to traditional foods—salmon, whitefish, caribou, moose, beaver tail, and wild berries. She had a teenage daughter to think about. It was hard enough raising a kid in the village without worrying about the problems brought on by a steady diet of cookies and cola. And anyway, a gallon of milk was fifteen bucks. The good candy bars were three dollars each. It didn’t take long to eat up a teacher’s salary if you didn’t supplement it with hunting and fishing.

  Birdie kept her head bowed, but opened her eyes a little wider. Where was that kid?

  As a rule, children ran wild in the village, considering all adults to be their aunties or uncles. Rubber boots, a T-shirt, maybe a hoodie when it got super cold, a basketball to play with—or a rusted bicycle if they were lucky—kids played outside in everything but a blizzard. Chronic coughs, snotty noses, runaway eczema, it didn’t matter. Tundra tough, they called it.

  She didn’t want that for her daughter. She wanted her here, where it was safe. Birdie knew all too well that fifteen was plenty old enough to get herself into life-altering trouble. Jolene had come home from her basketball game with two new hickeys on her throat. You had to stand still for someone to give you a hickey, and if a girl stood still long enough around some of these boys . . . Birdie didn’t want to think about that. The love bites weren’t the worst of it. Just last week, Sylvia Red Fox had looped the fiberglass band from a pallet of canned peaches around her neck, then put the other end over a door handle on the loading dock and sat down on the cold concrete to hang herself. Sylvia Red Fox had been fifteen. She’d seemed like such a happy girl, with a hickey or two on her neck—just like Jolene, who was not where she was supposed to be right now.

  Flutters of panic began to push their way into Birdie’s chest. Birdie raised her head now, joining the clandestine group of others in the gym who had their eyes open during the prayer, checking Facebook or sending texts. At last, Birdie located her daughter, sitting on the top row, her back to the mural of the school mascot, a howling timber wolf. She too surfed on her phone when she should have been praying. The schizophrenic emotions of wanting to bite her toes off or give her a hug ebbed and flowed in Birdie’s chest. She willed herself to relax with each breath. Sascha was nowhere to be seen. Jolene was okay, for now.

  The door prizes were good enough this time they’d had to set up two rows of plastic chairs in front of the bleachers to hold everybody. The village council offered three chances to win: ten gallons of gasoline, fifteen gallons of fuel oil, or a fifty-dollar credit at the village store. Many in the audience attempted to cool themselves with cardboard fans, made from the navy-blue boxes of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread. They put up with the stuffy auditorium air and uncomfortable seating in hopes of winning the gas for their ATVs or snow machines. At over seven dollars a gallon, it was by far the best of the three prizes. The fuel oil was second, and the store credit was nothing to sneeze at. Fifty bucks didn’t go far in bush Alaska. Ajar of peanut butter was twenty-two dollars. But free food was free food, even if you could carry fifty bucks’ worth home under one arm.

  Her panic gradually subsiding, Birdie glanced at the others sitting with her before she closed her eyes again. She’d known them all since she was a child and called them auntie or uncle.

  Martin Jimmy was on his feet behind a microphone at the end of the table, engaged in one of his notoriously long prayers in the Yup’ik language. Even the people with their eyes open pretended they were pious enough to enjoy it, but Birdie could hear the shuffling in the bleachers as people began to wish he would wind it down. The twelve teachers at Stone Cross school sat in chairs to the side of the gym under the basketball hoop. They were part of the community, so Birdie wanted them at the meeting. None of them spoke Yup’ik, so this was five minutes of phlegmy, wet-mouthed gibberish to their ears. Too bad, Birdie thought. It was actually a pretty good prayer.

  Martin Jimmy’s voice finally reached the crescendo that was his customary sign-off to the Holy Trinity.
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br />   The city secretary, Ethyl Kipnuk, scooted back her plastic chair and stood to brief the attendees about the upcoming visit of a federal judge. He was to help them decide a dispute over who owned a spit of land out by the airport—the residents of the city, which included everyone under the age of fifty, or the Native nonprofit shareholders who were alive in 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed. The land’s location made it worth a great deal of money and the disagreement over who owned it was no small cause for concern, even among individual families.

  Several people wanted to make their cases in this forum. Kipnuk listened respectfully, for that was the Yup’ik way, but when the opportunity arose, she reminded everyone that the judge was coming for that purpose. Some groused about him coming to the village at all. Birdie couldn’t help but agree.

  Representatives of the federal government didn’t have a great reputation for looking after the best interests of bush Alaska. Mistrust of gussaks—white people—in general ran deep in the Native community. Most of the teachers were gussaks. Newbies were not trusted. The priest, Father Nicolai, was white. He was married to a Yup’ik woman and they’d been in Stone Cross since Birdie was a child. Though not exactly revered, he was more than tolerated. The ones like Aften and Bobby Brooks, who’d returned to teach for three years running, even after experiencing firsthand the difficulties of life in a bush village, they fell somewhere in between.

  The city secretary reminded everyone that they were just a week away from the forty-day memorial service for Lyle Skinner, a sweet seventeen-year-old boy, as bright as Birdie had ever seen, who had shot himself over a girl from downriver. Like most in Stone Cross, the Skinners were Eastern Orthodox. Forty days from his death, his spirit could finally quit wandering. His family could lock their house if they wanted to—though few did out here—and turn off the light in Lyle Skinner’s room. They would take down the spruce branches they’d placed over the door so the departed could more easily find his way home if he wanted to stop by. They could now decorate his grave. They could stop mourning; though, from the look of his poor mother, Birdie doubted if that would be the case after four hundred days, let alone forty. The gym fell silent. Nervous coughs echoed through the bleachers. Everyone shuffled in their seats. The village was still raw from the recent death of Sylvia Red Fox. Birdie didn’t want to think about that one for too long.

  “I hear there was a Hairy Man sighting upriver,” a man on the front row said, changing the subject. A murmur of relief at the new subject rippled up and down seats like a wave. “Lots of folks out hunting this time of year,” another man said. “Everybody should remember and be watchful.”

  Even Birdie found herself nodding. She’d spent her college years at UAF in Fairbanks, away from village sentimentality and superstition. Her roommates had made fun of her when she told them about the Hairy Man or any of the numerous otherworldly beings that seemed as real as the nose on her face in the loneliness of the bush. Birdie was an educated woman, and still, she didn’t know what to believe. Was the thought of a hairy man wandering over the tundra any more incredible than Lyle Skinner’s spirit needing some spruce branches over the door to find his way back to his house?

  Stories about the Hairy Man went on for a full five minutes.

  Again, Ethyl Kipnuk listened quietly until she saw an opportunity to speak without interrupting. Birdie had concluded long ago that these meetings would have been half as long had a white person been running them—and twice as long if any Eskimo besides Ethyl Kipnuk had been in charge. It just wasn’t in Yup’ik nature to butt in while someone else was speaking.

  Kipnuk reminded everyone of the potluck the following evening to welcome Judge Markham, urging them to bring traditional Native foods. Eyes wandered, Sailor Boy fans flapped, some people dozed, until she mentioned that it was time for door prizes. Birdie was ineligible to win—a rule she’d made herself—so she drew the names out of a woven grass basket. Ethyl won the groceries. That pissed some people off, but not as bad as if she’d won the gasoline.

  People began to clear out once the door prizes were awarded, chatting with each other about the Hairy Man, or the visiting judge, or where the caribou were hiding this week. All of them ignored the rows of chairs on the gym floor as they walked past. Vitus Paul, the school handyman, would stack them. That’s what he got paid for. He was on the lazy side, and Birdie thought she might have to remind him, but he got right to it. The teachers pitched in too. Birdie nodded to several sets of parents and went to find Jolene so she didn’t slip out with the crowd. Birdie might not ask anyone else, but her own daughter was going to help.

  Two women in their fifties stood at the end of the bleachers chatting while they watched the chairs being stacked. Birdie knew them—she knew everyone in the village. These women were not bad people, but they were probably no more likely to help stack chairs than their grandkids.

  Birdie spied Jolene standing at the end of the bleachers, talking to Charlene Ayuluk. Charlene was a good girl. Never in trouble. Had her eyes on the Air Force after graduation. Jolene had trouble making friends sometimes, so Birdie decided to let her talk a minute. She caught the end of the women’s conversation while she stacked chairs.

  “. . . they used to have bigger parties when we were kids,” one of the women said. “They used to do up a big deal at Christmas.”

  “Those were good times,” said the second woman.

  “I know. Right?” the first woman said. “And remember, they used to plan a parade through the village. I wonder why they don’t do that anymore.”

  The second woman thought for a minute. “I guess we are they. Maybe we should plan something.”

  The first woman shrugged. “Maybe so.” She looked up at the clock on the cinderblock wall behind the basketball hoop. “Listen. I got The Big Bang Theory recorded. I gotta run and watch it before I have to cook dinner.”

  Both women waved sweetly as Birdie passed them, pushing a stack of seven chairs toward the storage closet. It would have been easy to blame village culture, but Birdie had seen the same behavior in Fairbanks. Stone Cross was just keeping up with the times.

  Jolene came by just then from the other direction, pushing her own stack of chairs along the gym floor. She didn’t speak to her mother, barely even looked at her, but she’d pitched in to help. Maybe Birdie wasn’t doing such a bad job after all.

  Vitus pushed a row of chairs past, causing a small group of milling people to open up and give way, giving Birdie an unobstructed view of Sascha Green’s face as he peered around the bleachers by the back door. He just stood there, staring at Jolene.

  Birdie had to clutch the chairs to keep from falling. She had to remind herself to breathe. He wasn’t supposed to have contact with Jolene. Ever. It was court ordered. She would have laughed at that had she not been so scared, so angry. He’d never come to the school before. Which meant he was getting bolder. The Troopers would never get here in time when he did decide to make a move. The village public safety officer was new. He was a hard worker, but he was too diplomatic, too kind. He had no idea what kind of person he was dealing with. It would take more than a Taser to deal with this problem.

  Sascha turned without acknowledging her, which made sense since she’d nearly killed him once before. He’d be back. Someday soon, she was going to have to finish the job.

  CHAPTER 9

  Aften Brooks walked straight to the kitchen as soon as she walked in the door. For the past hour and a half, she’d been trapped in the community meeting, unable to think of anything but calling Sarah Mead on the VHF radio. Attendance was mandatory and excruciating. Birdie decreed it. It was the right thing to do, Aften knew that, but like her grandad always said, it took a mighty fine meeting to beat no meeting at all. These village get-togethers were just so long, mostly because Yup’ik people were just so damned polite. Everyone who wanted to talk got the floor for as long as they wanted, and there were always those who wanted to talk . . . on and on and on. Aften usuall
y loved it—or at least she didn’t mind. The way these people switched so naturally back and forth between English and their back-of-the-throat, wet-mouthed Native language was pleasant to her ears. She understood a few words, and spoke fewer still without bringing giggles from her students, but loved the way it sounded.

  She hadn’t heard much of anything today. Her mind was too busy worrying about her friend.

  There was nothing but static on the VHF, so Aften hung the mic on the clip attached to her cupboard. Groaning with pent-up frustration, she leaned both hands on the lip of her sink. Snow whirled and looped in the wind outside the kitchen window, already piling up in drifts along the weathered siding of the neighboring duplex—more teacher housing—thirty feet away. A frozen caribou hide hung across the porch rail like an old and matted rug, flapping in the wind, rapidly covering with snow. The decapitated head from the same caribou stared back at her from under the porch.

  Aften looked at the radio again. Sarah hadn’t answered her all day. She couldn’t reach David or Rolf either. Everyone at Chaga had gone radio silent. The lodge had a satellite phone, but it was a handheld unit that had to be powered up with the antenna oriented in order to receive a call. Bush Alaska could be an awfully lonesome place and Sarah was new. Aften made it a point to talk to her every day, if only to say hello, to let her hear another feminine voice.

  Living in the bush gave you a sense of the flow of things. Disruptions to that flow seemed much starker than they did when you had more resources, more safety nets. Something was wrong. Aften could feel it.

  She was tall, slender, athletic. A streak of silver ran from her temple through dark, shoulder-length hair. It was a beauty mark she’d acquired in childhood when she’d fallen out of an apple tree and landed on her head. At twenty-seven, she already had three years teaching high school in Stone Cross under her belt. To her, teaching was more of a calling than a job. In the bush it was doubly so. She loved her students, the raw challenge of living in such a remote spot—but she had to admit it would probably account for more gray hair. The recruiter for the school district had found her at a job fair. He’d made it sound like a grand adventure—come north, teach some math, coach some basketball, discover yourself. Bobby was an outdoorsman to the bone. He hadn’t been too hard to convince. So they shipped a few household goods—mostly Bobby’s hunting stuff—and moved to Alaska as a package deal. Aften taught math and science, Bobby taught English and social studies, and they made this little village off the Kuskokwim their home.