Face the Winter Naked

by Bonnie Turner

  "Goddammit, everything I touch turns to crap!" He yanked off his cap and hurled it through the air with all his might. "She ain't never going to forgive me for putting her through all that." He removed his glasses, held them up to the light and saw scratches on the lenses. There were scratches and scars on his life, as well.

  He swung around as someone shouted from the road. Running down the street were three small figures, waving their arms and screaming, "Daddy's home! Daddy's home!" Behind them, an old man tried to keep up.

  Daniel hurried to meet them.

  "Daddy! Daddy!"

  He sat down in the dying fall grass and weeds, his arms flung out to catch them. In one delirious moment, they threw themselves at him. He fell over backwards, laughing and crying. His glasses fell off. Someone put them back on his face. Surrounded by his children, he looked up to see his dad.

  "I told LaDaisy you were coming," Saul chuckled. "She didn't believe me."

  His father hadn't changed a bit.

  "I'm glad you were here," Daniel said. "I got a lot to make up for."

  Saul nodded. "That girl had a hard time, son."

  He looked toward the house and Daniel followed his gaze. LaDaisy stood on the front porch with Chris, holding a small child in her arms.

  He mentally counted the months again. "She's mine?" he shouted at Saul, remembering he was deaf. "Really?"

  Saul grinned. "Sure as shootin' is. That's Mary."

  The kids smothered Daniel with hugs and kisses, and when they'd had their fill, he rose and went back to the house.

  LaDaisy held Mary while he looked her over. He made eye contact with his wife, tried to read beyond the obvious pain in her soul. Her tears were about to burst as he took the child from her arms and sat on the step holding her in his lap.

  "Well now, who is this pretty little girl?" Mary grabbed his glasses and babbled as he examined her ears surreptitiously and found the familiar crease in the earlobe. He looked up at LaDaisy and smiled. "Guess I know my own babe when I see her."

  Chris walked down the steps and was immediately captured by small children. Earl pointed to Daniel's gunnysack.

  "What's in there, Daddy?"

  Daniel winked at Chris, and Chris replied, "Dead chickens."

  "And a little box full of money I saved," Daniel said to LaDaisy. "Not much, but maybe it'll tide us over till I find work again."

  She shook her head. "Nobody's working anywhere, Daniel."

  He nodded. "That's true for most people. But I found a little work when I was gone, and a good job when I came back to Kan' City."

  "Why, that's—"

  "It's probably gone now, because I had to leave suddenly to come home." He sighed. "I didn't plan to come back till I could hand you a gunnysack full of money, LaDaisy."

  "I see."

  "He didn't have a gunnysack full of money," Chris said. "Just a cigar box."

  LaDaisy rolled her eyes, then opened the screen door as Daniel rose with Mary in his arms.

  "Well, after I rest a while, I'll go downtown and see if they'll give me the job back. But I ain't getting my hopes up."

  LaDaisy stepped aside and Daniel entered the house.

  "It's the place I longed for all the time I was gone," he said, "but was too stubborn to admit it."

  He shifted his daughter to his stronger shoulder, nodded and followed LaDaisy into the front room. She stood aside as he silently surveyed the familiar comforts of home: the davenport and rocking chair, the pair of knotty pine end tables he'd made for their first home, now scratched and gouged from his children's toys. He walked to the kitchen doorway. Nothing in there had changed since he left. But when he opened the icebox, he saw it was practically empty, and likewise the cabinets. I'm going to fill those up again.

  His eyes watered, and LaDaisy took Mary from him. He followed her to the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed as she put a clean dress on the baby. Through a film of tears, he spied the box on the dresser that held Wayne's baby shoes. He removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt sleeve. Then, feeling what might have happened to LaDaisy here with Clay, he stood abruptly, wiped his eyes, put the glasses back on and hurried out of the room.

  LaDaisy followed. "Daniel? What's wrong?" She sat Mary on the floor.

  He couldn't talk, just shook his head and went to stand before his walnut shelf with the broken mandolin parts. He removed his cap and held it almost reverently.

  She came and stood beside him.

  "Maybe you can fix it."

  "How did it get broke?"

  She took a deep breath and looked unflinchingly into his eyes. "I—I used it for a club. To protect myself."

  Daniel brought the splintered mandolin down from the shelf and examined it.

  "Clay?"

  She nodded, tears welling up again.

  "Then I hope you put a good dent in his goddamn stupid head."

  He laid the instrument back on the shelf and slipped an arm around her. She flinched at his touch, and suddenly, he knew without a doubt, if Shine had seen the image of Clay raping his wife, he would've had no problem killing his enemies in the war.

  "It's okay." He touched her wet cheek. "He can't hurt you anymore, LaDaisy." He nodded toward the mandolin. "I'm not going to fix that. You put it to good use. It's going to remind me the rest of my life I wasn't here to protect my family." He drew her closer, feeling the firmness of her body as she buried her face in his shirt and wept.

  They clung to each other as the sound of a banjo and clapping started up outdoors, and together, they walked to the door.

  "You amaze me," she told him at length, "bringing me another kid to take care of ..."

  "Well, I explained him to you."

  She shook her head. "Yes, you did. But now we have another mouth to feed. How are we going to feed five kids? Seven of us altogether, Daniel. Eight, counting Saul." She chewed on her lower lip, thinking.

  "I don't know," Daniel said. "But I can't send him away to shift for himself. I just can't do that, LaDaisy."

  "No, neither can I."

  "I'll find work. This depression can't last forever."

  LaDaisy became thoughtful. "Ida owns this property now."

  "Yes, that's probably right."

  "I'm just wondering. Maybe she'll let you rebuild that little house out back in exchange for our rent ..."

  "Now there's a thought." Daniel grinned. "You got a good head on your shoulders, you know that? It would give me something useful to do while I get our lives back together."

  LaDaisy watched the activities through the screen door, and suddenly she smiled.

  "Look at your boy. Fits right in, doesn't he?"

  Chris sat on the top step strumming George's beloved banjo, playing a decent rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again." In the yard, three children danced and sang while Grandpa Saul tapped his foot and clapped his hands.

  "Can you play 'Oh Susannah'?" Saul asked when the final note died away.

  "I don't know that one." Chris offered the banjo to the old man. "Here, you play it."

  Saul broke out in a big smile and took the instrument. "I'll teach you, young man!"

  The banjo man would like that. And George would be glad to know Daniel Tomelin finally came home, maybe to struggle and live on a shoestring a few more years, but at least he still had a family.

  ~The End~

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Lauren Baratz-Logsted for taking valuable time from her own writing to copy-edit my manuscript; Dan Coleman, Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri, for providing old city maps of streets and railroads; Renee Glass, Local History and Genealogy, Springfield-Green County Library, Springfield, Missouri, for researching early railroad lines and street maps from 1931; and how could I forget Google Earth, which allowed me to follow the same paths over hill and rail that my character Daniel traveled through Missouri.

  About the Author

  Born in Missouri in 1932, Bo
nnie Turner experienced firsthand the poverty and heartbreak of the Depression years. A proud survivor of the era, she now resides in Wisconsin—and still speaks fluent hillbilly with a southern drawl.

  © Copyright 2010, by Bonnie L. Turner

  Kindle Edition. All rights reserved.

  Other books by Bonnie Turner:

  The Haunted Igloo

  http://www.amazon.com/The-Haunted-Igloo-ebook/dp/B002G9BHI2/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

  For someone afraid of the dark, living in the Arctic is a severe test of courage. Ten-year-old Jean-Paul struggles to hide his fear and adjust to life in the NWT, where he is taunted by a group of Inuit boys because of his lameness caused by a birth defect. Forced imprisonment in a "haunted" igloo proves to be one of the most severe challenges to face Jean-Paul in the harsh Arctic environment.

  Chapter 1

  Jean-Paul shivered as he hid in the shadows behind the school. The late afternoon temperature was falling fast, and to make matters worse, the pup was driving him crazy, wiggling and squirming inside his parka. It was all he could do to keep her from falling out the bottom. He opened the coat a little and looked inside.

  “Shhh,” he whispered. “Someone might hear you!”

  Jean-Paul glanced quickly around the corner of the schoolhouse to see if anyone was coming, but no one was in sight. He sighed with relief. How very cold he was getting, with icy fingers of air creeping inside his hood to freeze his neck. He wished the plane would hurry and take off so he could seek warm shelter.

  Arctic days were growing shorter. Soon, darkness would come to the Far North, where Jean-Paul lived with his mother and father. Of course, it wouldn’t be pitch black, because of the stars, the moon, and the aurora borealis, with its colored bands of light waving through the arctic sky like giant searchlights, but it would be dark.

  It was Jean-Paul’s misfortune that he didn’t like the darkness. In fact, he more than disliked the dark; actually, he was deathly afraid of it.

  This would begin Jean-Paul’s second year of living at Aklavik, in the Northwest Territories. The Ardoin family shared a small cabin some miles to the west, beyond the native dwellings.

  Jean-Paul’s father, Cordell, was a geologist who had come to study the large deposits of pitchblende, discovered in 1930 at Great Bear Lake. That discovery had excited Cordell, for pitchblende contains radium, which the government wanted.

  His running off to the Arctic had brought Cordell much criticism. His wife’s family had thought him foolish. But Lise’s response was “So what?” And she went to the Arctic with her husband.

  Cordell spent the dark winter months writing children’s books, for then it was too cold for mining, and minerals were frozen beneath the ice and snow. But Cordell’s thoughts were never far from what lay hidden beneath the earth. Mixed in with the nouns and verbs and plots for his stories were the delights of radium, copper, and gold.

  Jean-Paul’s mother, Lise, sometimes helped her husband tan the fur and cure the meat, and she sewed the family’s clothing. This very morning she had sent eight beautiful pairs of caribou-fur boots to the Hudson’s Bay trading post. She hoped Cordell could trade them for some other useful items. Making the boots had been hard work, but they had turned out as waterproof as those the Inuit women made.

  Jean-Paul had his mother’s shyness, for Lise kept almost entirely to herself. As the months passed without a personal friend, and with another baby on the way, she seemed very sad to Jean-Paul. Of course, Lise had met the other people who lived in Aklavik, those speaking French, as she did, but even they seemed out of reach to her. But if the truth were known, Lise had never been a very social person outside of her own family.

  Now a sudden stinging blast of wind slapped Jean-Paul full in the face. He turned away and huddled against the back wall of the Mission school, a one-room building in which eleven students, mostly Inuits, were taught by Father Cortier.

  Jean-Paul listened closely for the sound of the plane. He listened so hard that it made his ears ache. Why didn’t it leave before he turned into a chunk of ice! He stroked the hidden pup again, but it had gone to sleep. He knew he couldn’t hide forever, but he had to be sure the trappers, hunters, and traders had left the settlement for good. He had heard his father talking with them. He knew they probably wouldn’t come again until spring. It took a very brave pilot to test the air currents over the mountains and frozen tundra in winter, especially since compasses went wild at the higher latitudes when almost every direction was south.

  “We need supplies,” Cordell had told Ola Hanson, naming off the staples Lise had listed: “Beans, salt pork, coffee, canned milk.” He shrugged. “It would be nice if you had a bag of potatoes.” He looked hopefully at Ola. But Ola shook his head “no.”

  “We have three mouths to feed,” said Cordell, “and another on the way. That’s not counting the dogs.”

  One of the traders, a big man with shaggy red hair and a beard to match, had laughed harshly. “If you get too hungry, you can always eat a husky! You ever eat dog meat?”

  Jean-Paul would never forget his father’s angry reply. “Certainly not! And I hope to God I never have to!”

  “Oh ho!” laughed the trader slapping Cordell on the shoulder. “Ah, sure you will! Someday when your beans and biscuits run out. When it’s ninety-five below, and snow up to your ears! Then you’ll eat dog. Roasted over a bed of hot coals, there’s nothing better when you’re starving. Wash it down with whisky or strong coffee! But you haven’t lived up here that long. You might have to learn the hard way!”

  That’s when Jean-Paul had made up his mind to hide a pup. He had taken it away from its litter-mates and had run off to hide. He was lucky no one had seen him, but he was scared to death he would be caught and punished. He felt that, since the pup was probably too small for sled pulling, a buyer might want it for only one thing: dinner. He could not let that happen! His stomach flipped and flopped now as he recalled how that man had spoken so horribly about eating dogs.

  There was another reason Jean-Paul had saved the puppy. Larger, more aggressive, animals tended to pick on smaller ones, just as Jean-Paul himself was bullied by some of his bigger classmates.

  Cordell had almost not brought Jean-Paul to the village this time, and Jean-Paul wondered if it was because of the way he limped. Surely his father didn’t want to be slowed down by a cripple. Cordell had never said as much, but Jean-Paul wondered if he really felt that way. How could any father love a son who was thin, lame, and smaller than most ten-year-olds?

  His mother had remained at the cabin this time, for trading could take all day. And besides, with both Jean-Paul and Lise, there wouldn’t have been enough room on the freight sled for all the supplies they hoped to buy.

  The trapping season would be better a couple of months later, when the fur-bearers’ pelts had grown thick and soft. Late winter would see Cordell bringing bundles of furs to trade. But today he and Jean-Paul had brought with them the nine husky pups from a litter Lishta had whelped three months before. The animals would bring good money. One of the pups was smaller than the others. This was the one Jean-Paul chose for himself.

  Now, Jean-Paul’s breath puffed out in a misty cloud as he opened his parka a little and reached inside. He removed a thick mitten and sank his fingers into the silvery fur. The pup peeked out of one blue eye, then went back to sleep.

  “They can’t have you!” Jean-Paul whispered. “They’ll never roast you over a campfire!”

  A sudden sound made Jean-Paul close the parka fast. He held his breath and listened. Oh no! Someone was coming! He pressed himself into the schoolhouse wall, hoping he wouldn’t be seen.

  But it was too late. Around the corner came Chinook and Aiverk and Nanuk, the three boys who teased Jean-Paul the most. They spied him at once.

  Their hoods were thrown back, even though it was cold and windy. Jean-Paul knew they were hardier than a boy from lower Canada who had once lived in a nice, warm house in town. The Inui
t boys were bigger than Jean-Paul, especially Chinook, and they looked bigger than ever as they stopped in front of him.

  “It’s Okalerk!” said Aiverk. “Why is Okalerk hiding behind the school?”

  The other boys laughed, and Jean-Paul shrank back as Aiverk stooped down to stare into his face. Jean-Paul knew that okalerk was the Inuit word for hare, and that the way he sort of hopped while walking made them think of a rabbit!

  Chinook also came closer. Light snow sparkled in his short dark hair. At thirteen, the Inuit boy was the oldest in Jean-Paul’s class, not to mention the most daring. His voice was musical and full of laughter as he questioned Jean-Paul.

  “Why are you here little okalerk Jean-Paul Ardoin?” He turned to Nanuk and Aiverk. “He must like school so much that he comes on Saturday and hides behind it!”

  “Maybe he’s waiting for a girl,” said Nanuk, who had a girl of his own. Thin like Jean-Paul, Nanuk sometimes had a nasty temper. He squatted before Jean-Paul. “Why are you hiding, Okalerk? If you’re waiting for a girl, you might have to wait forever!”

  The others burst out laughing. Jean-Paul’s parka wiggled suddenly and he put his hand up to make it stop. But the boys had already seen. Nanuk turned to Chinook and Aiverk.

  “Hey, he’s hiding something in his attigi!”

  Chinook said, “What have you got in there Jean-Paul Okalerk?”

  “N–nothing…”

  Aiverk reached for Jean-Paul’s parka. Jean-Paul was cornered.

  “No!” He pushed Aiverk’s hand away. “Let me go!”

  “Come on,” said Aiverk. “Let’s see what you’ve got!” Aiverk’s black eyes snapped with excitement.

  Jean-Paul was frightened as he looked from one boy to the other. “I’m just waiting for Pa.”

  “He’s waiting for his old man!” Chinook laughed. “Well, I saw Monsieur Ardoin just a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t looking for any okalerks!”