by Don Reardon
“It’s not a toddler, it’s a baby,” she said.
He yanked hard on the sled, but as if in response to his anger, it didn’t budge. He groaned and pulled again and started forward. He glanced back over his shoulder and she was still standing where they had stopped.
“Come on!” he yelled. He didn’t want to stop again. The sled was moving and for the time being he had forward momentum. If they could just make it another half mile or so before dark.
He looked back again and she was gone.
He stopped and turned, and then felt a tap on his shoulder. He spun around, half expecting to see someone holding her, a shiny blade to her throat, or a pistol to her head.
“Why are you stopping again?” she asked.
He swallowed and licked at his cracked lips. “I wanted to make sure no one was following us,” he said. “Help me pull this. I’m tired of pulling.”
He helped her take hold of the rope and together they began towing the toboggan. The girl was strangely quiet for too long, and after a while he began to feel guilty. He was about to say he was sorry when she said, “My grandpa first told me about the Big Mouth Baby when I was just a little girl, and maybe tonight, if you’re not so crabby, I’ll tell you the story.”
22
On the first night of camping with the old woman, they all curled up beneath the blue tarp and stared up at the dark cloud-covered sky. The old woman slept holding her shotgun on her caribou skin, wrapped in her blanket, on the side closest to the crackling fire, and the girl in the middle with him beside her, braiding her grass with the old woman watching closely, giving instructions in Yup’ik every so often.
“Will you tell us a story, in kass’atun, so John can understand?” the girl asked.
“It’s fine. I don’t need a bedtime story,” he said.
For a long while the old woman said nothing. Then she clicked her tongue, sighed, and began a story. “Ak’a tamaani, a long time ago, there was a shaman called Big Belly.”
“Big Belly—Big Mouth Baby—I’m seeing a pattern here,” John joked.
“Shh,” the girl whispered. “We don’t interrupt stories, John.”
“Sorry.”
The old woman continued. “He wasn’t always called Big Belly. I forgot what they call him before his belly got so giant, but he was a good shaman. He would travel under the ice and bring good luck to the hunters. The hunters wanted luck, so they cut a hole in the ice, but the shaman used his magic and could tell there was already another evil shaman travelling under the water, so he said he would wait for that shaman to go back to his village. But the men didn’t listen and they forced him to go down under the ice. Just like he thought, he ran into the evil shaman flying beneath the ocean, and when one shaman met another they would use their magical powers and fight. When they encountered each other, they had a huge battle. The other shaman was evil and more powerful and he broke the good shaman’s back. When the fight was over the good shaman went home, but he was swollen from the seawater and his back was broken with a giant hump like a brown bear. Using his arms, he pulled himself into the village. He asked one of the strong young men to hit him in the back with a club. The young man clubbed him four times until his back was straightened. His back was fixed but he started to miryaq, throw up, salt water all over the man’s house. Everything smelled like the ocean. Even though he was real sick, and vomited all that water, his belly stayed big and bloated like a frog stomach until he died. He never went under the ice again, and from then on they called him Big Belly.”
“Cool. I’ve only ever heard scary stories about shaman,” the girl said.
“Shamans were important back then. We had good shamans and bad shamans. The shamans were our priests, our doctors, our counsellors. The people would go to them when they were sick, if they wanted a baby, or if they needed luck hunting. This was before we knew about hospitals and Jesus and heaven. Back then those shamans could travel to places and talk to animals, giants, and even the little people. Bad shamans would put spells on enemy villages and make people sick or crazy, but good shamans could heal the sick and change the weather and bring animals during times of starvation. Back in those days of the shaman, Yup’iks could become animals and animals could become Yup’iks. There was just a thin skin, like the surface of the water or young river ice, that separated the worlds.”
“Maybe the hunter is a bad shaman,” the girl said.
The old woman sighed. “I don’t think he got any powers,” she said.
“Did you ever see a shaman?” the girl asked.
“No. They were gone already, I think. Or they were afraid of the missionaries and didn’t let people know they had the magic. My grandmother used to tell me about a shaman she knew. One of the last medicine men she saw. He had only one arm and he carried a spirit wand. She said that wand had a carved ivory head with sharp teeth and eyes that were always watching you. I used to have bad dreams about that little stick with a head on it, even I never seen that shaman or his cane.”
“What other kinds of magic did the shamans have?” the girl asked.
He was glad to have the old woman there to answer the girl’s nightly routine of endless questions. The chatter filled the void of silence and kept him from having to think about anything other than what the old woman was talking about, even if most of what she said made little sense.
“They used bird feathers like wings and would soar up into the sky like ravens and see the world below. They could fly to the moon in times of hunger, where there were many animals, and bring one back to refill the earth. They could pull a wolf skin over their head and become a wolf. Others would go beneath the ice and go where the seal spirits were and ask them to return to feed the people. In hard times we always relied on the shaman. They even say some of them could go into the future and come back and tell about what they seen there. I heard of one shaman who told the village to burn his body and then the next day he came back cold and wet, but alive. I remember stories of one shaman who went down under the ice and when he returned he had eyes like snow, a white-eye shaman, with beautiful snow-coloured eyes like you.”
“Like me?” the girl asked. “He was blind?”
“No one is blind,” the old woman said.
The fire popped in the silence as the girl imagined the possibility. She turned away from him and coughed into her sleeping bag.
“If I was a shaman, what could I do?” she asked.
“Maybe if you had those kind of shaman magic the world wouldn’t be this way. You could transform us all into whatever we needed to be. Maybe you turn this guy into a bird so he can fly wherever he thinks he needs to go. Me? I want you to turn me into an old bear. Always warm. Always fat,” the old woman said, and laughed.
“If I had those powers I would … I don’t know what I would do,” the girl said.
“Time for rest, girl,” the old woman said.
The two stopped talking for several minutes. The old woman’s breathing slowed and he could tell she was about to fall asleep. From the tone of their voices when they spoke, and their easy, relaxed breathing, the two were on some sort of happy campout. He was cold, but comfortable, maybe too comfortable just listening to them and not thinking about anything else.
“Were they born as shaman or did they have to learn how to use the magic?” she asked.
“Naam,” said the old woman, one of the few Yup’ik words he’d learned from his students, which simply meant I don’t know.
“If I was a shaman, I would fly above the tundra and find my cousins,” the girl said.
AN HOUR BEFORE CLASS one morning, Alex came in, sat down at a desk, removed his cap, and put his head in his hands. His long black hair fell, covering both his hands and his face.
“What’s wrong, Alex?”
John moved to the desk beside the boy.
“You okay?” he asked.
The boy said nothing, and John could see his legs trembling under the desk. John sat for a while, silent, giving the boy
time.
After a while John just started to talk, mostly because the silence was making him uncomfortable.
“The other night I went hunting with Carl. He was telling me about the gold mines that might be developed up the Kuskokwim River and the big one near Bristol Bay. He says those mines could really hurt the river and the culture. He doesn’t think anyone will care about the effect this will have on people in the villages downstream. I was thinking that students like you could make a difference. If you wrote, like you do in your online journal, so the rest of the world could hear your voice, well, that could really make a difference. There’s no voice from this part of the world. I’ve been impressed as hell with your work, Alex. I just wanted you to know that.”
“I don’t even know why I’m talking to you,” the boy whispered. “Didn’t sleep last night. Couldn’t.”
John had been waiting for a chance to talk to the boy alone, to make a serious connection, and he could feel it coming.
“My cousin in Kuigpak died,” he said with almost no emotion.
The boy kept his head down, but John could see tears dripping onto the shiny grey surface of the desk. He reached a hand out and patted the boy’s back.
“I’m sorry.”
“He hanged himself in the maqi. He put on his basketball uniform and tied an anchor line around his neck inside the steam bath. My older brother lives in Kuigpak. He found him.”
John got up and got some Kleenex from his desk. He set a handful on the desk. “Here,” he said.
“He emailed me, two days ago. Never said shit about wanting to die. Just said I could have his old autographed Kobe Bryant poster next time I went over. I just thought he didn’t like Kobe no more.”
Alex wiped his face and turned to John. His eyes were bloodshot, angry.
“You know how many funerals of people who did this I been to in my life?” he asked.
John shook his head.
“Too many. One time I tried to add them all up. I stopped at thirty-two and lost count. And you know what? We’ll all go there, to Kuigpak, the whole village will go. I’ll miss a week of your classes, and no one will say it’s wrong. Not one person will stand up at his funeral and say he shouldn’t have done that. No one will say we need to stop killing ourselves here. No one will. Not one single person. And then someone else will do it. We’re like the Arawak people after Columbus came to their island, man. We’re killing ourselves to avoid this shit life.”
“Why do you think that is?” John asked.
“It’s our culture not to talk about it, they say. We don’t talk about the dead. We don’t say bad things about the dead. You don’t say anything about them. But I don’t think the Yup’ik people lived here for thousands of years by killing themselves.”
“Maybe you should write about his loss, then. Write how you feel and share this burden.”
Alex stood up and wadded up the tissue into a tight ball. “Write? Write about what? What good will that do? Maybe some kass’aq like you is going to fly in here with a new program and save us from ourselves?”
He put his cap on, flipped the desk over, and stomped toward the door.
“No,” John said softly, “you’ll need to save yourself first and then help save the others.”
“Save this!” he said, stopping at the doorway and holding up his middle finger.
He leaned his forehead against the door jamb and took a deep breath. “Sorry, John. I’m just hurting inside, you know? I’m going to go to his funeral and then I don’t know what. I need a break from all this, this place. Maybe go to Anchorage or Bethel for a while. Maybe stay in Kuigpak with my bro. Help him out. He’s a wreck. Worse than my cousin was.”
“You’re not dropping out, are you?”
“No, I’ll come back. You’ll see me again. You’ve been a pretty cool teacher, John. I learned more from you than in my whole high school days put together. Sad thing is, what I learned is that I don’t know nothing about my culture and that I can’t trust yours, theirs I mean, but still, that’s more than I’ve ever learned. I guess that’s something. See you, man.”
The boy gave a half-wave and disappeared down the school hallway.
“THE BIG MOUTH BABY is a monster everyone knows about,” the girl said as she tucked her grass weaving away and pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin. “I’m surprised you never heard about it. Maybe one of the scariest of our stories.”
“I’m not really into hearing a bedtime story,” he said, “especially not a scary one.” He wiped at the frozen balls of snot beneath his nose with the back of his hand. His knees hurt and his toes ached from hunching over the small pile of kindle. He’d spent too much time and energy trying to get the thin green willows to ignite, and now the only burning was happening at the tips of his fingers.
“A woman really wanted to have a baby,” she began.
John resigned himself to listening, figuring that at least if she was telling stories, she couldn’t ask more questions.
“She went to the shaman and said, ‘We have been trying to have a baby, with no luck.’ The shaman told the woman, ‘You will have a baby, but you must promise me that you will feed and care for this baby no matter what happens. No matter how the child looks or acts, you must love it and show it to everyone.’ The woman agreed. The shaman danced and said some spells over her. She went home and soon was pregnant.”
John interrupted her. “And then let me guess. The baby was born with a giant-ass mouth. I think I get the rest.”
The girl ignored him. “This was in the old times when a woman gave birth by herself or only with the help of her mother. This woman was in the back of the sod house, and the people didn’t have walls then, in those underground houses, only grass mats that they used for beds and for privacy. She made her mother leave and gave birth behind one of the grass walls. She didn’t let anyone see the baby, and she just tucked it away in the back of the house, in a dark little corner, and covered it with caribou hides and grass mats so no one would see it.
“The baby would cry and cry and the mother would tell her daughter that she shouldn’t be ashamed of it and she needed to breast-feed it and show the child to everyone like the shaman said. But the daughter refused. The daughter would go to the back of the house to feed the baby, and never showed it to anyone. The mother finally peeked between the grass strands in the wall and could see the baby. It had a mouth that covered most of its face, stretching from ear to ear. And the teeth. The baby had rows of long, sharp white teeth.
“The mother reminded her daughter not to be ashamed of the baby, but she still refused. She kept the child in the back of the dark house, always covered. One night the mother heard a strange crackling noise coming from the back of the house. She lit the seal-oil lamp and peeked through a crack in the wall and could see it. The baby could already crawl, and he sat on top of his mother. He’d been breast-feeding and eaten his way into her chest. Blood covered his face, and the crackling she heard was the crunching of her daughter’s ribs.
“The mother quickly put on her parka and ran to the men’s house. She told them the Big Mouth Baby had eaten her daughter and would come for them next if they didn’t escape,” the girl said. Her voice dropped to a whisper, as if she’d scared herself with her own story. “The people quickly and quietly ran away from the village and never returned.”
“That’s it?” he asked, with a chuckle. “That’s your scariest story?”
“Well, there’s more, but that’s the scary part,” she said.
“What’s scary about that?” he asked.
She wiggled her sleeping bag closer to him and pulled the top closed until she was speaking through a small, mouth-sized hole.
“The Big Mouth Baby is still out there,” she whispered, “still crawling around in the brush along the river, looking for people to eat.”
23
He crawled back into the snow cave and closed up the entry hole with the old woman’s garbage can lid. On his hands and knees he crep
t to his sleeping bag, which the girl had pulled out for him. He thought the girl and the old woman were asleep, tired from the day’s journey, but they weren’t. They waited until he settled in.
“What does it look like?” the girl asked then. “Did you see anyone?”
“I couldn’t see much,” he said. “Still a ground blizzard. The wind is letting up some, though. I could see plenty of buildings still standing. I could see the air tower, some houses. The big fuel tanks look different—burned up, I think.”
“You seen any lights?” the old woman asked.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what he saw. The town didn’t exactly look inviting. And he couldn’t say for sure if he’d seen anything at all.
“This is bad. No one’s alive in Bethel either?” the girl asked in a whisper, as if she couldn’t believe or didn’t want to believe.
He pulled his bag up around his shoulders and then took off his wool hat and stuck his pistol in it near his head, where he could grab it quickly if he needed to.
“There’s people there,” the old woman said after a long silence. “Too many for them to all die. But some of them might be not the good kind, too. Bethel scared me even before this bad thing happened. Never much liked going there. I don’t know why you wants to go to Bethel. We should keep going upriver. We should just go right past that place. Nothing for us downriver, and nothing there, not in that town. Nothing.”
“What do you think, John?” the girl asked as the old woman tried to muffle another cough.
“I think if she knows something, she should tell us.”
“I know they aren’t there,” the old woman said.
“But you don’t know where they are, either. Right?” He sighed and turned away from them.
“You know,” the old woman said to the girl.
“I don’t. No. I don’t,” the girl said.
“You do,” said the woman. “If they are still alive, you can find them.”
He dug a small handful of snow out from the wall of their dark little cave and put it into his mouth. They should have chipped and melted some ice or chopped a hole in the river. He was thirsty and his lower lip had started to bleed from the hunk of chapped skin he’d bitten off.
