by Don Reardon
The class laughed.
“Well, what about history? Why might history be important to you?” John asked.
Sharon, a skinny girl with glasses and hair always tightly braided, raised her hand. He called on her, knowing she would have a well thought out answer. From day one she had established herself as the brain of the class.
“If we can learn from our history, we can make better decisions and we can understand the world better,” she said, covering her mouth shyly when she finished.
“Right, Sharon. Great start,” he said. “But why might history be important to you, as Yup’ik students—Yup’ik people?”
“It’s not,” Alex said. “They want us to learn names and dates of old white and black people who are dead. I’ve got better things to do, man.”
“Exactly. Exactly, Alex. Yes! What if I tell you that none of what you’ve learned so far really matters?”
He looked at each of them. A few of them, including Sharon, seemed a bit befuddled. Alex sat back, pleased with himself. For the first time, John thought he might have a shot at reaching him, maybe all of them.
“Let’s start with the first dude you learned about in history. Who was it? One hint. He sailed the ocean blue …”
Jack, a quiet, sullen death metal fan, flipped his long hair and finished the rhyme. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
The rest of the class looked at Jack, surprised.
“It’s like a song lyric, dog. I don’t forget lyrics. Ever.”
“Yes. Columbus. Nice work, Jack.”
Alex sighed. “Oh man, Columbus sucks. He found the Lower Forty-eight, big deal.”
“Right again, Alex. But you’re not right about what he found. You’re right that Columbus sucked. He—well, let’s just say he wasn’t the kindest, most friendly explorer. Maybe we could say that what he was a part of is more horrible than you could ever even imagine. What if I told you that this first hero you learned about in history wasn’t who you have been taught he was at all? What if I told you that most of what you have learned and will be expected to learn”—he paused and held up their history book—“was a bunch of BS?”
“That would be pretty cool,” Alex said. “It would be like The Matrix. A conspiracy, man, the whole world school teaches us about is one big fat lie.”
IT TOOK THE GIRL AND JOHN four days of steady travel to reach the first village. He figured they made about three miles a day, maybe less. He half expected to find someone alive, someone who could take care of her or maybe tell them not to bother going upriver. Instead, little remained but the charred skeletons of the dead and their houses. He sat at the river’s edge watching the village for an hour before he decided it was safe enough for them to approach.
No smoke and no houses that looked livable told him all he needed to know. There probably wasn’t much of a reason to even waste the energy and walk through what remained, but if they could scrounge up a few pieces of wood they might be able to put together a fire for the night.
“Why is this village completely burned and ours wasn’t?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know,” he said as he took one last long look at the village, checking for any signs of movement.
“Do you think someone burned it to kill the disease?”
“I don’t know if that would matter. Could have just been a fire too, in all the chaos. It’s hard to say what happened as people got sick. People do crazy things when they’re scared.”
“When my family got sick, I tried to help as much as I could. Even my grandma said she remembered hearing about the sicknesses back in the old days. She said not many lived and times were really hard back then. She said it would be just like that. Just like the Great Death. She was right, I guess. I don’t know why they called it great. Death’s not very great to me.”
He pulled the sled and she walked slowly beside him. He kept the rifle at the ready as they entered what was left of the village.
“I think I smell burnt bodies,” she said. “I hope they weren’t alive.”
He turned away from one house, the walls and roof scorched, two half-burnt, half-decayed corpses stretched out on the bare floor joists, the plywood floor covering burned around the bodies, their jaws open, some teeth exposed.
“Will it be like this in every village?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does it look like?” she asked. “My sister Molly lived here with her husband and four of my nieces and nephews. Their house was three down on this side.”
She pointed toward a house with pilings that had burned, the house tipped on its side, a mound of twisted black sticks.
“There’s not much left here. Not much at all. Sorry.”
“Maybe she was in town. They were going to move to Bethel to get jobs. I hope they moved early. Maybe she’s safe. I hope the kids are safe.”
He picked up a few pieces of half-burnt wood and decided they’d camp away from the village. He couldn’t smell the bodies as she could, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t need to sleep near a crematorium.
“I think we’ll move a little more upriver, see if we can’t camp somewhere with shelter—in case it gets windy. Sound good to you?”
“Yeah,” she said. She turned and listened for a moment and he lifted the rifle.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“I heard something, and it feels like someone’s watching us.”
He spun slowly, trying to catch the slightest movement in the burnt houses around them. His eyes searched for tracks in the snow. Nothing.
An odd sound echoed through the suddenly still air, the sound of a single drop of water, magnified, almost comical-sounding. He turned and saw it—sitting on the flagpole outside what had been the village post office—a giant raven, coal black, staring down at them.
The bird made another water-drop sound and then squawked at the two of them and flew off.
“It’s just a raven,” he whispered, “trying to scare us.”
“Maybe he’s trying to tell us something. Yup’iks used to believe ravens were special a long time ago. Maybe they created the world, and the animals, and people. We never shoot them. Never eat them.”
“Or maybe he’s telling us he created this whole awful mess and that we should get moving.”
“Which way did he fly?”
“The direction we’re headed.”
“Can you still see him?”
“Yeah,” he said, and blinked the frost off his eyelids.
“Watch him,” she said. “Tell me what he does.”
“He’s flying away.”
“Keep watching.”
He focused his eyes as the bird flew upriver, almost out of sight. Just before it slipped from view he saw something, something he’d never seen before. The bird rolled, mid-air, almost like a fighter jet, turning upside down, free-falling, just for a second, then back to his normal position before he dropped beneath the horizon.
“Anything?”
“He’s gone. It looked like he dipped his wings or something, but he was so far away I couldn’t tell.”
“I hope that’s what he was doing. I hope. I hope. My dad said that hunters watch the raven and if he flies upside down he’s dumping luck off his back. Maybe he dumped some luck on our trail.”
He helped her sit down in the sled. He set the firewood on her lap, and they headed in the direction the raven flew, toward where the raven’s luck fell.
PART II
The
Monster
in the
Lake
A strange crocodile-like animal, known as pal-rai-yuk, is painted on the sides of umiaks and on the inside of wooden dishes by natives along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers … According to the traditions of the people of this district the climate in ancient times was much warmer than at present and the winters were shorter. In those days the mythic animals referred to were abundant in the swampy country between the two rivers.
—AS RECORDED BY
EDWARD NELSON, 1899
16
He wouldn’t have had the strength to unload the sled after loading the food and pulling it from the school, but he wasn’t about to leave it outside the old woman’s house for the night. The old woman and the girl helped him at the top of the stairs. They took the boxes and stacked them inside the arctic entry. The woman wouldn’t let him bring the cases of food into the house, and she refused his offer to go get more for her.
“I’ll leave a couple of cans of chicken and some peanut butter,” he said, knowing that she wouldn’t refuse him if the gesture came more as a statement or command than a question. She said nothing, and he knew her hunger would consume the superstition.
He removed a single canned chicken and a gallon can of pears. He took one of her big soup pots, opened the can of frozen chicken, and dumped it in. He poured some water into the pot from a brown plastic pitcher and put the can of pears directly on top of the stove and flipped it over every few minutes. When the can felt warm enough he opened the pears, dumped the pears in a bowl, and poured the sugary juice into a couple plastic cups. He handed one to the girl and offered the other to the old woman. She refused. He set hers aside and poured himself a cup. He sipped it slowly, savouring the sweetness, the cold syrup sticking to his dry mouth.
The old woman broke some tundra tea needles off a twig and set them in a pot on the stove. “Qia-qanaarituten?” she asked the girl. The girl just sipped from her cup of pear juice. “Why the girl not talking?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Let her tell you,” he said, stirring the pot of pears and the chicken.
After a long silence the woman asked him, her voice barely audible, “How did they die in there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe poison. They looked like they just fell asleep.”
The old woman stirred her tea and looked down at the cup of juice he’d set aside for her. “They heard the sickness was in the village and made an announcement on the VHF radio,” she began. “Everyone go to the school for a meeting, even the children. They said everyone had to go because the sickness was coming. Everyone would be safe at the school. I went and hid in the steam bath. I didn’t think they would say bring childrens to an important meeting. When I seen the village police coming house to house, I just hid. When the sickness came long time ago, the missionaries made us put signs up, a black X outside a house, and no one could leave or go into a house with a sick sign posted on the door. I thought that was what they would do here. Back then it was so bad. So many people would die. I remember a line of bodies all the way to the graves. Not enough people left to bury them properly. So scary back then. Worse than this time, but maybe only since I’m old and I seen a lot of bad things.”
Her tea started to boil. She tipped the pan and filled her mug. She gripped the mug with both hands and blew on the steam rising off it. She took a sip. They sat silently for a long time. He stirred the chicken. The good thing about the canned chickens was they were already cooked. All they needed was for the meat to thaw and get warm enough. He felt like Pavlov’s dog, his mouth no longer dry. The chicken smell coming from the pot was almost overwhelming. He knew their stomachs weren’t ready for chicken, but the broth would be divine. It didn’t take long before he decided that he would eat the meat, too. The hunger was too strong.
He poured the girl the last of the thawed pear syrup. “Here,” he said, “have more juice.” She took it without saying anything, drank it, and moved off to the bedding in the corner of the house.
“All night,” the old woman said, “the village was so quiet that night they all went to the school. I stayed in the steam bath. I heard some drumming for a while. Like they were having Eskimo dance. Then singing, mostly church songs. I wanted to go to them so bad. I wanted to see what those sounds were. I fell asleep. Then late, I woke up because I heard dogs barking and snow machines, and then motors. Then in the morning—nothing. They never came out from that place.”
“The generators,” he said. “There were two generators in the gym. The doors were locked from the inside. Keeping someone out, or making sure no one changed their mind. They probably ran the generators, and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“I should have been there with them. I should have stood up to those who were afraid of the sickness. Some of them would have lived. The children could have lived. Look at me. Look at you. Even I’m old, I’m still alive. I should have stopped them. How could they just let them all die like that? We survived other diseases. We don’t need to die like that, killing ourselves. Yup’iks were once warriors, you know? We fought to survive. We fought to protect the village. We didn’t just give up.”
“I saw what happened in some of the other villages,” he said, removing the pot from the stove, “what happened in ours. And Nunamuit. Maybe what happened in there wasn’t so bad. They would have just fallen asleep. No coughing. No fighting. No starving.” He began cutting apart the chicken with his grandfather’s old knife.
“Yup’ik people don’t steal from the dead,” the old woman said.
“I didn’t steal this from them.”
“You shouldn’t eat it,” the old woman said.
“That’s what I said about your duck soup.”
“It’s okay,” the girl said, sitting up. “Assirtuq. We can eat it. I told him we could take the food. It’s okay with them. I know it is. Maybe they left that food there for us. Maybe they protected it for us. So we can live. So we can fight back.”
“They used to say if we took things from the dead they would come back and haunt us,” the old woman said. “People had respect for the dead. You used to even see guns and valuable things at the cemetery and no one would touch them.”
The girl felt her way back to her spot near the stove. He held a bowl out to her and she took it. She inhaled deeply from the bowl, reached in with her fingers and removed a leg. The meat was lukewarm. She took a bite and chewed without looking up.
“How do you know this food is okay?” the old woman asked.
“Some things I just know,” the girl said. “Like I knew someone good would be here for us. Like I knew you would be here.”
They ate in silence until the girl set her bowl down and turned to him. She seemed to stare at him with her white eyes until he set his own bowl down, finished chewing a mouthful of chicken, and asked, “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“My little cousin Winnie, did you see her there? She had long, really long hair, almost to here.” The girl brought her hand to her waist.
John picked up his bowl and took another sip of the broth. His stomach churned and gurgled. He didn’t know if he could keep it down.
“Or Kall’aq, my other cousin? Really short, but tough. He had a big scar on his cheek, here,” she said.
“No,” John said. There were so many bodies.
“Or the twins. Gina and Paula. They’re two or three,” she said.
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to think I just didn’t feel like the kids were there in the gym,” she said.
“IT’S LIKE ALCATRAZ,” he said to Anna as they walked down the boardwalk toward the school in the grey light of the morning. The cold, damp air hung in his nostrils, reminding him of his grandfather’s root cellar. A musty smell, with a hint of winter and death, he thought.
He had given serious consideration to stealing a boat and fleeing the village, permanently. His students were great, but it was the confinement of the place that was getting to him. Not like the outside world, where he thought the blitzkrieg of media and consumerism might crush him. This was different. Those old worries were gone. Time had stopped. None of the old worries that created his anxiety were important any more. Anna had played a big part in saving him from those old days of a constantly knotted stomach and general unease with life. But now the inability to leave, to just pick up and go somewhere other than the school or their little shack and get away was beginning to
haunt him. His days and nights were spent confined within a fifty-yard radius. He needed out.
“I don’t know what to tell you. We’re stuck here. At least until Christmas break,” she said.
“You mean Slaviq? One day at Christmas is hardly a break.”
“Yeah, but airfare will be cheaper in January anyway—no one else will be celebrating Russian Orthodox Christmas. Two weeks is two weeks. We could go to Hawaii or something. Maybe you’re getting cabin fever.”
“No shit.”
“Maybe we should get one of those lights for when winter hits. You know, the kind they use for depression, for seasonal affective disorder,” she said.
“I don’t have depression. I just need to go somewhere other than this. You can’t even go for a walk here, for Christ sakes!”
His boot hit a patch of frost, and his foot slipped out from under him. He pitched off the edge of the boardwalk, his legs landing in the half-frozen muck as his hip slammed against the edge of the planks.
“Damn!”
He sat up and brushed off his pants.
“Ouch, that looked like it hurt,” she said, trying not to laugh.
“Go ahead, it’s funny. Laugh it up. Winter hasn’t even hit and I’m already going nuts here and you’re not taking me seriously. I moved to Alaska to be outside and get into the wilderness. We’re surrounded by water and trapped here. Trapped. So yeah, laugh at this too. Laugh at it all.”
He started to get up and she pushed him back down with a gentle shove. “Lighten up, tough guy,” she said. “I’ll find you a friend who can take you out for a boat ride or something.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your little pants-pissing snotty-nosed students,” he said. “And I don’t need your help finding friends.”
She extended a hand to help him up. When he didn’t take it, she pushed him again, only this time a little harder.
“I didn’t mean it that way, John. Get over yourself! You think I’m not tired of having nowhere other than my classroom to escape to? Listening to you sigh and mope and burp and fart your way around our little house?”
