For
Josie and Gerry Ryan,
in gratitude for their custom of taking in strays
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Maps
1918 Niniltna
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
May 1943
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
1945 Niniltna
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
1946 Seattle
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
1956 Juneau
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
1958 Anchorage
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-two
1965 Amchitka
Chapter Thirty-four
1959 Anchorage
Acknowledgments
Family Tree
Also by Dana Stabenow
Copyright
1918
Niniltna
The black death didn’t get to Alaska until November. When it did, it cut down almost everyone in its path.
The territorial governor imposed a quarantine and restricted travel into the Interior, stationing U.S. Marshals at all ports, trailheads, and river mouths to interdict travel between communities. He issued a special directive urging Alaska Natives to stay at home and avoid public gatherings. Theaters closed, churches canceled services, schools were let out, but because of the inescapably communal nature of traditional life, Natives were infected and died disproportionately. In Brevig Mission, only eight of eighty people survived. In some villages there were no survivors at all. When the influenza pandemic passed late the following spring, those left alive were too weak to hunt for food, and even more died of starvation.
In Niniltna in March 1919, Chief Lev Kookesh and his wife, Alexandra, froze to death because they were too sick to get up and feed the fire in their woodstove. Four miles up the road at the Kanuyaq Mine, mine manager Josiah Greenwood lost his wife and both sons, and one out of four of his workforce.
Some of the uninfected turned to predation and thievery. Harold Halvorsen was beaten to death in a fight over his last bag of flour. Bertha Anelon was assaulted in her own bedroom and died of her injuries two days later, alone in the bed in which she had been attacked. The offices of the Kanuyaq Mine were broken into half a dozen times, the cash box stolen, the glass case housing the Cross of Gold nugget shattered and the nugget gone, the company files rifled and set on fire. Toilets and refrigerators were ripped out of mine workers’ homes as residents lay on their beds with no strength to resist. Food, clothes, photographs, personal papers, and jewelry vanished, most never to be recovered by their owners.
Empty homes where entire families had died were stripped and abandoned. Cemeteries overran their boundaries. After seeing their last living family member into the ground, many survivors left for Fairbanks or Anchorage or even Outside. Village populations halved by the epidemic were halved again by emigration.
Eventually, inevitably, people rallied. In Niniltna, the memorial potlatch for Chief Lev and his wife was seen by many as a start down the road of recovery from an eight-month-long nightmare of disease and death, a time to mourn the dead, a time for the living to nourish their souls and rebuild their homes and towns. Moving forward was necessary for survival, even if they also understood that life would never be the same for any of them ever again.
Organizing the potlatch fell to Chief Lev’s only child, Elizaveta, age seventeen. Her life had nearly been forfeit, too, except that someone had come to their house, a man, a young placer miner, miraculously uninfected, who told her he had been checking house to house for anyone left alive. He found her in her bed, suspecting her parents were dead in the next room but too weak to get up and find out. Now on her feet and like the rest of the survivors, thin and pale and grieving, she was determined to do her best by her tribe, by her parents, and by her chief. The girls from down at the Northern Light still living helped her wash and dress the bodies in their finest clothes. The young placer miner, named Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough, kindled a coal fire in the cemetery and used the heat to dig their graves in the still frozen ground.
Some remaining survivors weren’t too sick to grumble, starting with the scandal of women no better than they should be helping to lay out tribal elders. Elizaveta had always been a wild child, they told each other, although much of that could be laid at Lev’s door. He was the one who’d taught her to hunt and fish and trap in the first place, over the objections of his mother and her sisters and the rest of the elders. Theirs was a conservative and traditional tribe who thought a woman’s place was in the home, sewing skins and making babies. Lev had even allowed Elizaveta to spend the previous summer working his gold claim in the Quilak foothills, and with Quinto Dementieff there, too. Chaperoned by her father, it was true, but still.
That summer before the black death had been profitable for everyone. Lev had even opened a bank account in Elizaveta’s name. Alexandra was horrified, but Lev was adamant. “She earned it,” he told Alexandra, and handed the passbook to his daughter.
Elizaveta was thrilled. She felt a little taller with the passbook in her possession, more substantial somehow. When she went to Kanuyaq to clean house for Angie Greenwood, she looked at the flush toilet she scrubbed out every week in a different way. Suddenly no luxury was unattainable with your own money jingling in your pocket.
All that was changed now, of course. She had used all of her savings to buy gifts for the traditional gift giving at her parents’ potlatch, tools, blankets, kitchenware, jewelry, canned food, all of it ordered in bulk from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Then there was the cost of shipping it all to Cordova, from where by special dispensation of Mr. Greenwood it was brought in on the Kanuyaq River & Northwestern Railroad free of charge. Mr. Greenwood, a kind man, had always been punctilious about maintaining good relations with the people in Kanuyaq, white and Native, amateur and professional, and his own grief did not deter him now. When the day came, her parents’ spirits had no cause for shame at what was given to family and friends in their name. No shame either in the hall of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, which she had decorated with pine boughs tied up with green and red ribbons. It gave the long, rectangular room a celebratory, albeit somewhat Christmassy air. Mac had helped her put them up the night before, which was when it had happened, a delicious, delightful interlude of much mutual pleasure. It had been so long since Elizaveta had felt happiness of any kind.
The jewel in the crown of the hall’s decorations came when she placed the tribe’s icon at the head of the room, on a tall table with a round top, next to the sepia photograph of her parents. She had had the photograph blown up to a large grainy simulacrum of itself by a photographer in Seattle for a fee that had used up the last of her savings. Her father was seated and serious in his regalia, her mother standing behind him in beaded deerskin, one hand resting on Lev’s shoulder, an equally serious expression on her face. They looked stiff and very stern, not at a
ll the way Elizaveta remembered them. The frame was made of pine carved with rosettes and trailing vines and gilded with gold paint, a suitable testament to the importance of the people in the photograph.
The icon was a Russian Orthodox triptych, known to the Park as the Sainted Mary. There were three panels, depicting from left to right Mary holding the infant Jesus in a barn, Mary holding the dead Jesus at the foot of the cross, and a resurrected Jesus revealing himself to Mary before a rolled stone. The Sainted Mary was eight inches high, and all three panels together eighteen inches wide. It was made of wood that had been gilded by the original artist’s hand. The gilt was now tarnished and flaking. The illustrations were made of pierced and enameled metal with bas-relief figures. The frame was studded with dull colored stones, two missing from their bezels.
It was old, very old, no one could say how old. They knew it had come with the gussuks in their tall ships from across the sea, but no one knew how it had come into the hands of the tribe, although those who counted Tlingits among their ancestors could make a pretty good guess.
It was understood that it was not a personal possession, that the chief only held it in trust for the tribe. The icon had miraculous powers, among them the ability to heal. Most recently Albert Shugak had prayed to the Sainted Mary and had recovered the use of his legs, it was believed until then lost forever in the battle of Verdun. He had married Angelique Halvorsen six months later, and she was now pregnant with their first child, their family one of the few only lightly touched by the black death. The Sainted Mary also held the power to grant wishes. Almira Mike prayed for a son and within the year the Sainted Mary had answered with the birth of William, a happy, moon-faced child. Myron Hansen prayed to the Sainted Mary for a new boat, and his great-uncle in Seattle died and left him a fortune.
Since Chief Lev had had no sons, in whose custody the icon would next be placed was a matter of vital importance to the tribe.
For this and many other reasons, not least that after enduring the horrors of the past year the tribe was in sore need of something to show them that they were in fact still a tribe, with pride and traditions and a history going back ten thousand years, it was imperative that they elect a new chief as soon as possible.
It was in this spirit that they gathered, family from Ketchikan, friends from Sitka, tribal members from Juneau, close kin from Fairbanks and kissing cousins from Circle, and shirttail relatives from Ahtna. They came from all the villages on the river from Tikani to Chulyin, all the villages on the road between Ahtna and Valdez, an astonishing assembly given the decimation of their ranks. Mac McCullough helped Elizaveta distribute the gifts, although many of the guests would not meet his eyes, deeply resenting the intrusion of this round-eyed gussuk into this most important, almost sacred, tribal rite. Instead, they looked at Elizaveta, with reproach. Elizaveta, who despite her parent’s death had something of a glow about her.
Well. They all knew what that meant. They accepted their gifts in a spirit of one part entitlement to three parts righteous indignation, gorged themselves on the thin stew made from last year’s moose and hunks of bread fresh made from the last of the village’s flour, and returned to their tents having taken only the most formal leave of their hostess.
The next morning the Sainted Mary was gone.
So was Mac McCullough.
“I don’t have it,” Elizaveta said, her face white and set, the glow erased from her features. They didn’t believe her, and they were not respectful when they searched her house. They threw everything out of the cache and unwrapped the pitifully few packets of moose meat left there to make sure that it was moose meat, they dumped out the nearly empty sacks of rice and beans and sugar and flour, and there was even talk of exhuming the bodies of her parents until some mercifully sane person pointed out that the Sainted Mary had been on display well after Lev and Alexandra were put into their graves.
When at last they were satisfied that Elizaveta truly did not have the icon, suspicion then naturally fell on the missing miner. He was gone. So was the icon. He must have stolen it in the night and made off with it. There could be no other explanation. What else could you expect from someone the other gussuks had nicknamed One-Bucket, allegedly for his ability to pull three hundred dollars’ worth of gold out of a creek in one bucket? Gatcha, that Elizaveta would shame herself and her tribe so by taking up with such a one.
The tribe fed runners on the last of the potlatch stew and dispatched them to Ahtna, to Cordova, to Fairbanks, and even farther afield with descriptions of the missing man and their missing treasure, seeking news, offering a reward for his apprehension and for the return of the Sainted Mary to her rightful place. Alas for their plans, a spring storm blew in off the Gulf of Alaska the second night after the potlatch and dumped twelve feet of snow from Katalla to Kanuyaq, rendering the roads and trails impassable and any efforts at tracking impossible. Neither One-Bucket nor the icon did they find, and as the days and weeks passed, Elizaveta, shunned by family and neighbors alike, grew even more thin and more pale.
A month after the potlatch came a knock at her door. She was afraid at first to open it. The knock came again, with more force and this time accompanied by a voice she knew. “It’s me, Elizaveta. Open up.”
It was Quinto Dementieff, a fellow student—and fellow sufferer—at the BIA school in Cordova. They had been friends since childhood, their friendship strengthened by the summer spent together on Lev’s gold claim.
She made him coffee, offered him toast from the batch of bread made from the very last bit of flour. There was no butter or jam for the bread, and no sugar or canned milk for his coffee.
He ate and drank without comment, and when he was finished he pushed the mug away and said, “Marry me.”
She had been sitting with her head bent over knotted fingers. She looked up at his words, astonished.
“Marry me,” he said again. “At least I’ll know you’ll be eating.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she dropped her head again. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
One hand slid over her belly. “You don’t understand, Quinto. I’m—”
“I do understand,” he said. He returned her wondering look with a level gaze. “Marry me.”
Her hand still on her belly, she looked around the room. “It’s not only that, Quinto. I can’t stay here. We couldn’t stay here. Everyone is so angry, so—”
“We won’t stay here,” he said. “We’ll move to Cordova. Mr. Greenwood says he’ll give me a job on the docks.”
“You talked to Mr. Greenwood about this?”
“I told him I was going to get married and I needed a job to support my wife and family. He’s a good man.”
Quinto Dementieff was the son of an Aleut father and a Filipino mother whose parents had been part of the wave of Filipinos who immigrated to Alaska to take all the good jobs in the salmon canneries for a paycheck half the size of what the born-in-the-territory locals would accept. Elizaveta had been an outcast from the morning after the potlatch. Quinto had been an outcast from birth.
He had also been in love with Elizaveta since they were both ten years old. He reached out to take the hand resting protectively on her belly between his own and kissed it. “Marry me, Eliza. There will be many children. What’s one more?”
They were married by the justice of the peace in Ahtna just two days later. The resulting scandal almost eclipsed the loss of the Sainted Mary and kept the tribe’s gossips busy for a decade. Of all the people a chief’s daughter could have married, and she chose a Filipino! When there were so many good Native boys to choose from! That Eliza girl, so headstrong, so foolish; there was never anything to do with her. First she takes up with a gussuk who robbed the tribe of its most precious possession and then she elopes to Cordova with a Filipino. (Quinto’s half-Aleut side was easily ignored.) But it was only to be expected. Look at her father, a good man in most ways, and not a bad chief, but so lacking in wisdom in the raising of his d
aughter. Alexandra had tried to warn him, oh yes, but had he listened? Stubborn, pigheaded man, no, he had not, and see how it had turned out, Elizaveta married outside the tribe and the Sainted Mary lost to the tribe forever, looted by yet another white man who pretended to be their friend so he could steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and sell it Outside to make his fortune.
Elizaveta and Quinto settled in Cordova, two hundred miles away, at that time far enough not to hear all the whispers or endure the glares and the pointed fingers. “Easy to be shunned from a distance,” Quinto said cheerfully, and for the first time in months, Elizaveta smiled.
Her pregnancy was not an easy one, and their first and only child, a son, was born the following January.
They named him Samuel Leviticus Dementieff.
One
“He was eighty-nine,” Kate said, looking up from a file box.
“Well, we all knew he was older than God,” Jim said.
They were at Old Sam’s cabin, where Kate was sorting through the old man’s belongings. Kate and the aunties had decided that the potlatch would be on the fifteenth of January, which gave them a little over three months to label Old Sam’s possessions for the gift giving, and to allow everyone from Alaska and Outside who wanted to attend to make travel arrangements and contact friends and relatives in the Park for a place to unroll their sleeping bags.
It was also the day of the annual shareholder meeting of the Niniltna Native Association. The price of gas being what it was, travel to and from Niniltna was not cheap, no matter if you did it by plane, boat, pickup, four-wheeler, or snowgo. Plus, it cost the same to rent the high school gym for an event that lasted four hours as it did for an event that lasted all day. Kate Shugak was a frugal and practical woman.
There was a file marked “Will” in the back of the box. Kate pulled it out and opened it.
Jim looked at her bent head, and at Mutt, who was leaning up against Kate’s side. Whenever Kate was hurting, Mutt was always as close to her as she could get without actually climbing into her lap. Since Mutt, the half gray wolf half husky who allowed Kate to live with her outweighed Kate by twenty pounds, leaning seemed the better option all around.
Though Not Dead Page 1
