by Don Reardon
“Are you done insulting me?”
“No. I’m just getting started, mister.”
He scrambled to his feet and marched, more carefully this time, toward the school, leaving her behind, for the first time ever.
NOT LONG AFTER SUNSET, the girl asked what Anna looked like, and he hadn’t been able to tell her. Not because he wouldn’t, but because he couldn’t. All he could see or remember was the sickness that had consumed her beauty.
“Did she have dark hair or light hair?”
He packed the snow for their bed by stomping around on the tarp and then kneeling in the empty sled. He pushed the snow on the edges to form a small wall, in case the wind picked up, and then started to
unload the sleeping bags from the pack.
“Did she have blue eyes?”
“Will you help me here? We need to get camp set up before it’s too dark.”
“It’s always dark for me, John. I’m not trying to make you mad.”
“It’s just that I’m tired. I could use some help,” he said.
She knelt down and felt for the backpack. She pulled the sleeping bag out and stretched it over the tarp. After the last blizzard he’d learned to fold the tarp with half of it beneath them and the other half wrapped around them to shield them from the unremitting winds. She took her grass bundle and placed it within arm’s reach.
He waited until she crawled into her bag before scanning the horizon one last time. They were easy targets out in the open and with a tarp covering them, constantly rustling; they would never hear an enemy’s boots crunching in the snow.
He secured the covering and removed his boots. He held his hands on his toes and tried to warm them. The girl was already feeling the strands of grass, the way she always did to find her starting point. He watched her until her fingers stopped and she sat up on her elbow with her body turned toward him.
“Some of my memories of what people look like are gone,” she said. “Now, for most of them, I only remember what they sounded like, or how they smelled. I hope your memories of her aren’t bad ones.”
“They aren’t,” he said, stretching out on his back and pulling the top of the sleeping bag up over his shoulders.
He didn’t want to remember Anna like that. So pale, so wasted, so far beyond the vibrant, healthy woman she had been. Her cheeks sunken, the skin stretched across her cheekbones, her lips dried, cracked, bleeding. Her eyes vacant, drying, helpless, with the life all but gone.
Even when he tried to imagine her before the sickness, he would see that face. The sick face. The face that begged for help, for him to do something. Those eyes that might have even questioned why it wasn’t him. Why he wasn’t sick, too. Why he couldn’t do anything to help her.
The image of those final days stained his most cherished memories of her. She didn’t wear a veil at their wedding. That was too old-fashioned for her, but if she had, in his dreams he would have lifted the thin white fabric to find the ghost who had been his wife.
“Describe her to me,” the girl said as she began weaving and braiding her strands of grass.
She was beautiful, he wanted to say.
17
“I want to go back in the gym,” the girl whispered after the old woman appeared to be sleeping.
“We have as much food as we can carry,” he said.
She propped herself up on her elbow, facing him. “No. I want to see if they are there.”
“Who?”
“My cousins.”
“They are there. Everyone was in there. Now get some rest.” He rolled over on his back, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. In the darkness of his closed lids he saw the beam from the flashlight moving over the dead in the gymnasium and what he didn’t see made him sit up with a lurch. On his hands and knees, he clawed his way to the door and heaved. The chewed chicken pieces and broth splattered against the plywood floor of the entry. His dinner wasted. He stayed on his knees, gasping at the cold air rushing past him into the house.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, standing over him. She ran a hand over the top of his matted hair. “What is it?” she asked.
“I told you stealing that food make you sick,” the old woman said from across the room. “The spirits gonna haunt you until you take it back.”
“It’s not the food,” he gasped as he fought another heave.
He could see the notebook sitting on the desk in the office. The three words, For the children, scrawled in black ink. “The kids,” he said to the girl. “You were right. I think I saw only one boy, maybe a couple of others. The rest were adults.”
“Shoulda been mostly kids in there,” the old woman said, sitting up. “You sure you seen only a few little ones?”
John crawled back to his bag. He was shivering and instantly hungry again. The bile burned at his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was raspy.
“Mostly adults.”
“Are the kids anywhere else in the school?” the girl asked.
“No,” John said.
“Maybe they still alive somewhere,” the old woman said, adding, “Even if they run away and become qimakalleq, you two gotta go find them.”
HIS STUDENTS WERE on to Columbus and they weren’t happy. He’d pulled an old Howard Zinn essay from a website, one that used excerpts from Columbus’s own journals, and had them read it. The assignment was to read the essay and then write Columbus a letter expressing their feelings. They read the essay together, and when they reached the end, he had them each turn their laptops on and quickly write the letter.
“Five minutes, as fast as you can. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or anything. Just get your gut reaction down. Give America’s dead old hero a piece of your mind.”
He took a sip of lukewarm coffee from his mug and watched them hunch over their keyboards. Even Alex, who had started the morning with attitude and a touch of anger he hadn’t seen before, was hunting for letters on his keyboard with two middle fingers extended as if he was giving the bird to the world.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Now quickly scan through what you wrote and pick a sentence or two you wouldn’t mind sharing with us. Someone want to start us off? Sharon? Thanks for volunteering.”
Sharon held her long braid of black hair against her cheek and cleared her throat. “‘What kind of hero makes mothers so scared they kill their babies to protect them from people like you?’”
“Ouch. Yes. Columbus will have trouble answering that one. Who else? Juliana?”
He was surprised to see the girl volunteer. She was a junior, cute, and painfully shy. She had said less than a hundred words to him since school started, and she hadn’t turned in a single assignment.
She held her hands over her mouth, looked down at her computer screen, and after what felt like several minutes of silence read in a hushed voice, “‘Dear Columbus, in all my years of school I remember only one name in history. That name belonged to you. I thought you were a brave hero, but the first words you wrote in your journal about those Native peoples? You thought they would make good slaves! Is this why you have your own holiday? Does our country celebrate you because you taught kass’aqs how to treat us Natives? Are you a hero in history because you showed the world we didn’t matter? The Native people should have taken their children and run when they saw you coming.’”
The girl stopped reading and held her hands over her mouth, tight, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just read. Alex began clapping his hands and the other students followed his lead.
“That’s good stuff,” Alex said. “Mine sounds stupid compared to that.”
“Beautifully done, Juliana. Thanks. Anyone else?”
Jack raised his hand. “I don’t want to read, but what Ju-Ju wrote made a question in my mind.”
“What’s that?”
“If our history books lie about Columbus and kids are taught he’s so great and did all these great things, what else do we need to learn about? What about here? What kind of stu
ff happened here when outsiders came to the Delta? I don’t even know, man.”
The class responded to Jack’s comments with nods and a general raising of their eyebrows.
He took another long sip of the lukewarm coffee, just to let the question linger for a moment. He’d hoped the Zinn piece would stir their minds, but he didn’t expect them to turn the question upon their own history of contact.
“Well, what do you know?” he asked them. “What do you know about your own history?”
They stared back at him for only a second or two and then began to lower their eyes.
“Do you mean our culture?” Sharon asked.
“Yes and no. I mean, what have you guys learned about your own history? How long have your people been here on the tundra? What was life like before gus-sucks and when they arrived? What happened when they came, or since then?”
They shrugged.
“Why you care about this stuff?” Jack asked. “This just a trick to get us to like school?”
“Good question, Jack. That’s critical thinking, my man. Question everything. Even question why someone like me is trying to teach you something. The truth? Well, I want to learn about this stuff too,” John said.
“Why do you care?” Alex asked.
“I guess because my grandmother was Alaska Native,” John said.
“Cool,” Sharon said, and her classmates nodded approval. “Was she Yup’ik?”
John shrugged. “I don’t know. My grandfather never told me,” he said. “Pretty sad, eh?”
Alex removed his baseball cap and set it on the edge of his desk. “I guess no one ever taught us that stuff about our ancestors neither, John,” Alex said. “That’s what’s pretty sad. It’s like they don’t want us to know the history of our own people.”
JOHN AND THE GIRL awoke to a light rain. The temperature felt as though it had risen twenty degrees overnight. The sky had lightened, but he worried the rain would continue and the ice would weaken and they would be unable to travel any farther.
He started a small fire with some driftwood and stretched his back. The warm air felt good, but odd, almost springlike. The air didn’t sting at his nose and his bare hands weren’t aching from constantly being cold.
The girl pulled back her sleeping bag and let a few drops of rain drip into her mouth from a hole in the tarp.
“A warm-up,” she said. “Chinook. That’s an Indian word, I think. I don’t know our word for it. I don’t know if we have a word for this kind of warm in winter.”
“I hope it doesn’t last. We’ll be in trouble.”
“Could last forever,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
The day before they had come across a fox with a fresh snowshoe hare kill, and he’d shot a round from his pistol in the air and scared the fox off. The girl called it the raven’s gift. She said that was the luck the raven gave them. He cut a small piece of the half-frozen meat from a back leg and roasted it over the fire. As the meat cooked, he wondered if it was the same fox he’d seen in the village.
“I heard the elders say that a long time ago it was warm here and that it could get warm again. King salmon would even spawn in winter when there was no ice,” she said.
“That’s impossible—the elders couldn’t know of a time like that. That would be tens of thousands of years ago. There’s no evidence in recorded history of a warm time like that.”
“So,” she said, pulling out a newly braided section of grass and sticking it in her bundle. She crawled out from her bag and pulled on her jacket. She began stuffing the sleeping bag into the backpack. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about how the rest of the world lives like the world is theirs. But when the world says that’s enough and when they get sick, and things aren’t working, like TV and computers, who is going to tell the story of your people? What could you tell your kids about you kass’aq people and how your people lived?”
He took a small bite of the charred leg. The outside was black, but the meat just below was still deep red, raw, and cold. “Who said I’m gus-suck? And who cares? I won’t be having kids,” he said.
“Even so, what could you tell them about how your people lived?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I could tell them nothing about my people.”
18
They stood outside the old woman’s house, and for the longest time no words passed between them. The old woman looked down toward the riverbank and then at the clouded white sky to the west. She looked back at them and then away again and squinted.
The girl kicked the snow crust around her black boots. He could tell she didn’t want to leave the old woman and that something else was bothering her.
“Another big storm coming soon,” the old woman said. “The bad month is coming, too. Maybe cold weather starts tomorrow night. If you travel like I told you, then you’ll be by Bethel when it storms. I don’t think you should go in that town. I told you that. I think the hunter came from that ways. He’ll be going back. Watch for him. Maybe wait for night and see if there’s any lights. Even before all this dying, on clear nights we could see the lights from Bethel and other villages in the sky. Not any more. The sky is always dark at night over that way now.”
She pointed toward the northeastern sky, and then said, “But if I seen lights in Bethel now, I think I would be scared.”
“Where are my cousins?” the girl asked, and then repeated something in Yup’ik in the same tone.
The old woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “If they are qimagalri, then they are out there somewhere. You know more than me about where they can hide. Maybe by the mountains, but I’m just an old woman.”
“Come with us,” said the girl. “We need you to find them. We need to protect them from the hunter. If he finds out they are alive, he will kill them all.”
“There’s nothing for me up that river,” the old woman said. “Now go, I want to get back to my fire.”
The old woman turned and slowly hefted herself up the wooden steps. She stopped at the top and turned back to them. “Trust her eyes,” she told him. “She sees more than me and you ever will.”
JOHN POPPED HIS HEAD into her classroom and watched as Anna helped one young girl pull her rubber boots on. The other students had already left for the day. She’d told him about this girl a few days ago. Something was happening at home, and every day the chubby little second-grader was reluctant to leave the classroom. Anna lifted up the girl and sat her on her desk. Tears streamed down the girl’s cheeks.
“Why don’t you want to go home?” Anna asked.
The girl tucked her chin down into her thin pink jacket, avoiding all eye contact with her teacher.
“It’s okay,” Anna said, “you can tell me.”
The girl whispered something, but John couldn’t hear her.
“Who is drinking at your house?” Anna asked. “Is there somewhere else you can go? Maybe I can walk you to your grandma’s house? Okay?”
The girl looked up and spotted John. Her face flushed and she lunged toward Anna and buried her face in Anna’s arms.
Anna held the girl and told him to get home, school was over for the day and he had work to do.
“What work?” he asked.
“You need to put some food on our table. Go home and get your rain gear on. You’re going hunting with Carl. I’m going to go for a little walk with Nina here.”
He started down the hall toward his room. She’d concocted some sort of plan, and just the thought of getting out was enough for him to forget their little squabble earlier that morning about whether they should spend the fifteen hundred bucks it would cost to leave during the holiday break, still three months away.
He pulled his jacket on and kicked off his loafers and began pulling on his green rubber boots, then returned to her classroom. She stood in the doorway, holding the little girl’s hand.
“My guns aren’t even here yet. Plus, I don’t have a shotgun.”
“You’re g
oing with Carl. He said you could use his gun until yours get here.”
“What are we going hunting for?”
“Birds, he said. I told him you’d meet him down at his boat around four.”
As he passed her in the hallway he stopped and kissed her. He patted the little girl on the head. “I’m sorry for today,” he said. “I just … cabin fever, like you said.”
“You just need some fresh air.”
He kissed her again. “Thanks, thanks for always saving me,” he whispered into her ear. “Isn’t she the best teacher in the world?” he asked. Nina looked up at him and smiled. She nodded and wrapped her arms around Anna’s leg.
“No swans,” she said. “I don’t think I can eat swan just yet.”
THE MORNING AFTER John spotted the fox with the hare hanging from its mouth, he cooked a single leg over a small driftwood fire. They had made camp in the willows along the river and he thought they should stay and rest for a day before moving on. He wanted to think the broth from the night before had given him a little boost of energy, because when he woke up, he felt stronger. One more night of rest and a little more protein and he felt they could push on and reach the next village.
The girl walked down to the riverbank and returned with an armload of driftwood. For a blind girl, she had an ability to walk over uneven terrain that impressed him. Initially he didn’t think she would make it very far with him, but she was slowly proving herself.
“That smells so yummy,” she said.
“It’s almost ready.”
“Upriver, I don’t know how far, we might see some moose or caribou. You could shoot one and we would have more than we could eat. We could follow the herd and have enough food forever. We would never go hungry again. That’s if you’re a good enough shot.” She paused and then added, “I jokes.”
She dropped the wood near the fire and warmed her hands.
“If it gets really cold,” she said, “we’re going to need a shelter, not just this tarp. You know, if your feet get cold you can put grass in your boots like I got. You need some?”
