"Ekaterina's family came first in her life," Harvey said, "but we were all her family." He spread his arms, encompassing the room, the city outside, the state beyond. "From Metlakatla to Kivalina, from Anaktuvuk Pass to Attu Island, from Anchorage to Barrow, from Nutzotin to Nome.
All this was her home, and all of us were her family. That we exist today is due to her, and to all the elders of her generation who fought not just for our rights, but for our very survival." He paused for a moment, letting them grieve their loss. His tone had changed when he spoke again, had become louder, clearer, more firm. "The passing of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak marks the passing of an age. That age, the age of living in the past, is done. The new age, the age of living in the now and working toward the future, has arrived."
There was a single clap of hands, immediately silenced. The room was heavy with a puzzled kind of expectancy, as they waited for what Harvey would say next.
"It is time," he said, "it is more than time for the Native corporations to realize that they are business corporations first, and Native corporations second. I say, as I'm sure Ekaterina would have said, that it's time to put away the beads and the feathers and integrate ourselves into the twentieth century." The rams' heads on his watch flashed coldly in the stage lights.
Kate, who had been moved nearly to tears by his previous words, raised incredulous eyes. Harvey was staring straight at her, in his steady gaze both a warning and a challenge. She looked around the room. Elders sat with faces like stone. Young people looked at each other, bewildered.
She turned her head to the right and she saw Olga, plump figure stiffly erect, brows drawn together, mobile mouth still. She turned to the left and saw Cindy, the planes of her broad face fined down somehow to their essential elements, all bone and strength. In that moment both reminded her so sharply of Ekaterina that she caught her breath against the pain.
Both were in traditional dress, Olga in sealskin and Cindy in caribou hide.
They looked at her, waiting. The whole room seemed to be waiting, even though Harvey was still speaking. Again Kate had the queer feeling of standing on the edge of an abyss, the vacuum left by Ekaterina's absence tugging her inexorably, unwillingly over the edge.
Olga carried a drum. A round drum on a thin frame, seal gut stretched across it and bound with caribou sinew. Without looking away from Kate, she tapped it once. The single, sharp note echoed through the great room, demanding to be heard.
Harvey looked up and frowned, searching for the interruption.
Olga tapped the drum again, and again it echoed around the room.
With the third strike it became a song.
In time with the beat, Cindy began to chant.
The chant was the chant of remembrance, the one the King Island Dancers had performed to open the day an hour before.
It was the same, and it was different.
Another voice joined Cindy's in the chanting. Another drum began beating in time with Olga's.
Against her will--or was it?--Kate felt her feet begin to move, her arms raise in the traditional movements, as if their paths were already marked out for her against the very air of the room. One of the King Island Dancers tossed something; she caught it in mid-air, a ringer mask woven of dyed rye grass, like a tiny fan, ornately beaded and trimmed with feathers. She slipped it over her right forefinger. A second followed the first and she slipped it on her left forefinger.
Olga drummed.
Cindy chanted.
Kate danced.
She did not dance alone. The outgoing chairman was the first to join her, the incoming chairman the second. Chairs disappeared from the center of the floor and a circle formed, stamping in unison to wake up the spirits, reaching for the sky to draw them in. No word was spoken; none was necessary. Axenia joined in, and Harvey. Lew stood pressed up against the wall, watching with a look both bewildered and apprehensive.
All danced, all together, all as one.
They danced the dance the missionaries had called heathen and satanic, they danced the dance their parents had been forbidden, they danced the dance their ancestors danced for a hundred and a thousand and ten thousand years, dances to mark a birth, to celebrate a wedding, to heal the sick, to mourn the dead, to thank Agudar for the good hunt, to pray to Maniilaq for guidance.
They danced the dance they would always dance, that their children would dance, that their children's children would dance, in joy and in sorrow, in entreaty and in thanksgiving, and, yes, with beads and with feathers, in button blankets and spirit masks, in kuspuks and mukluks, in jeans and Nikes.
The last note of the drum echoed across the room.
A thousand feet stamped in unison in reply. The building shook with the force of it.
The dance was done.
Kate returned the finger masks to the King Island dancer. She bowed her head to Cindy. She bowed her head to Olga. She walked from the room.
An elder of the church in Eklutna gave the benediction in a shaken voice, and the convention was over.
TWELVE.
IT WAS A CLEAR NIGHT WITH NO WIND. THEY TOOK OFF from abel's strip as a full moon crested Angqaq. The light was dazzling against the snow. Jack stood the borrowed Super Cub on her left wing and banked toward Kate's homestead, maintaining an altitude of a hundred feet and throttling back to just above stall speed when they reached the creek. He pulled the zipper on his parka up to his chin and folded open the window.
Behind him Kate opened the urn. They scattered Ekaterina'sashes all the way down the creek to its confluence with the Kanuyaq River, and down the Kanuyaq River to Niniltna and downriver to Prince William Sound. The urn empty, Kate let it fall, too.
The potlatch was held in the school gymnasium and included everyone in the Park; Bobby and Dinah, Mandy and Chick, Auntie Joy, Auntie Viola, Martin, Axenia, Dan O'Brian, George Perry, rangers, homesteaders, miners, loggers, Park rats, Aleuts. There were Eyaks from Cordova, Athabaskans from the Interior, Tlingits and Haidas and Tsimshians from Southeast, Yupiks and Inupiats from the north and west, all mourning their loss together. There was blood stew and maqtaq, macaroni and cheese, seal blubber and moose steak, pilot bread and peanut butter, Eskimo ice cream and alodiks. Kate gave away her grandmother's possessions, a mass of gifts and memorabilia that included baleen and walrus tusks, harpoons and Attu baskets, dance masks and stone lamps, countless carvings of wood and bone and ivory and soapstone, and skins of bear and seal and moose and caribou and wolf and fox.
The Association banner she gave to Billy Mike, who had been elected the new chairman of the Niniltna board.
Smiling, Billy promised Kate to remember what it stood for.
Smiling, she promised to remind him when he forgot.
Ekaterina's house by the Niniltna River she gave to Martha Barnes and her children.
A fat photo album, filled with the pictures of relatives and friends with which emaa had papered her kitchen wall, she kept for herself.
"What happened with Jane? What did the judge decide?"
A pleased chuckle rumbled up from the chest beneath her cheek. "The damndest thing. She dropped the case."
Kate infused her voice with surprise. "You're kidding."
"No, really, she flat dropped it." He grinned against her hair. The judge was so pissed off at her for wasting the court's time on a case that should have been settled before it ever got in front of him that he made Jane pay all the court costs."
"No."
"Yes."
"Outstanding." "We thought so."
Jack sounded very smug, but Kate didn't grudge it. She could not resist asking. "Why? Why'd she'd drop the case, I mean."
"Officially, I know nothing."
"Of course not."
"But her lawyer let it drop to my lawyer that Jane bounced a check off her. Her lawyer, not mine."
Kate turned her face to hide a smile in the front of his shirt.
"Really?"
"Really. So her lawyer fired her, and if she was bouncing ch
ecks off her lawyer she may have been bouncing checks all over town, and if she was bouncing checks all over town she probably couldn't get another lawyer."
"So Johnny's yours?"
"Mine. The judge made her say so, in court and in writing."
"Johnny happy?" He thought. "More relieved than anything, I think."
"Nobody likes being the bone the dogs are fighting over."
He winced at the analogy, which was too close to the truth for comfort.
"I guess not."
She raised her head and kissed him. "Congratulations, Dad."
"Thank you." He returned the kiss with interest, and shifted so she could snuggle comfortably back into his embrace. "Now," he asked the air over her head, "you want to tell me how you did it?"
She went very still. "What makes you think I had anything to do with it?"
"Simple. I know you. How'd you do it?"
Kate weighed the chance of maintaining her innocence against the tone of good-humored but relentless inquiry in his voice. It didn't look good.
"I broke into her house and stole her cash card, her PIN number and her account password," she said baldly. "I put about five thousand dollars' worth of stuff on her credit cards, I ordered a cashier's check for another five thousand dollars, and I took three hundred bucks cash a day out of her bank account. I figured if she was broke, she couldn't pay her lawyer, and I don't know any lawyers who work for free, do you?"
He'd suspected something of the sort but the breadth and thoroughness of the attack was a little staggering, all the same. "No," he said weakly,
"I don't."
You shouldn't have asked if you weren't prepared to hear the answer, Kate thought.
He didn't ask her where she had gone the morning after the attack on his townhouse, and prudently, Kate didn't volunteer. From time to time she still wondered about that copy machine and all those reams of paper in Jane's spare bedroom. Federal contract bids passed through Jane's hands continuously, blind bids that certain contractors would pay well to get an advance look at so as to alter their own accordingly. Reports of those kinds of shenanigans were in the papers every day. Must be a hell of a temptation to Jane. K-Y jelly didn't come cheap. And then there were all those expensive suits in the closet, and that very nice bank balance. Well, there had been.
But, Kate had decided, along with everything else, Johnny didn't need to see his mother go to jail for bribery. Not yet, anyway. When he was older, maybe. If in future Jane started harassing Jack and Johnny again, Kate would have to rethink her decision. For now, she let it lie. "Did you arrest the brunette?" she said, without much interest. "What is her name, anyway?"
"Myra. Myra Randall Wisdon Hunt Banner King. Randall was her maiden name. Wisdon was her first husband, storekeeper in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Hunt was a banker in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Banner was a wildcatter out of Lubbock, Texas. While he was out drilling dusters, she ran off with King, all the way to Alaska."
"Goodness me."
"Yeah, she'd been working her way up the food chain for a quite a while."
"Any of her husbands survive her besides King?" "What a suspicious broad you are," he said comfortably. "Yes. They all did. The stakes were never high enough for murder before King."
"Will King testify that he heard her say she admitted to killing Enakenty?" "So far, he says yes. We'll see what he says when we get to trial. Right now he's mad. Later on he'll see how foolish he looks, and realize how little he's going to enjoy sitting up in court and testifying to it."
"You're such a cynic."
"Trust but verify," he replied. "Morgan's Fifth Law." "I thought it was the Sixth."
"Whatever. At any rate, we've got her cold on attempted murder on you, so she'll be spending some time as a guest of the state."
"She going to roll on Dischner?"
"Already has. The problem is we only have her word to go on, and it ain't gonna be worth much in court against Dischner."
"I don't doubt Dischner will be indicted," Kate said. "Tried is another story."
"The loose lug nuts," Jack said, "the trashed house, the drive-by, all those have the earmarks of a summa cum laude graduate of the Dischner School of Not Guilty by Reason of an Expensive Lawyer."
"No argument here."
"He has defended some lowlifes some say even mob connected lowlifes At least his firm has. He must have contracted out for the job."
"No argument here, either."
"But we'll probably never know who to. He's too smart for that." Jack sighed. "He'll walk again, won't he, that son-of-a-bitch." The words were spoken with only a trace of bitterness. They might fail of indicting Eddie P. this time, but there'd be another chance before long, and Jack wasn't going anywhere. "What about the UCo contracts? Can the new board prove kickbacks?"
"They've got about ten different accountants and lawyers looking into it now. I put them on to Gamble, to see if they can scare up some racketeering charges. You might get Dischner yet."
"Maybe." Jack sounded about as convinced of that as Kate felt. "What happens with Iqaluk now?"
"It looks like it's going federal."
"Which way?" "That," Kate said, "is in the laps of the gods. Billy Mike promised me that he and the board will lobby that it be made a national park. The Raven board says they will, too."
"You don't sound too sure."
"I'm not. King swore he'd bag the operation but the word will get out, it's inevitable, and as soon as people know there's oil there there'll be another fight between the greenies and the oil producers and the state and the Natives, just like ANWR all over again." The prospect was not a pleasing one. Still, Ekaterina had never shirked her duty, and Kate would not shirk hers.
My life is changing, she thought.
The prospect did not fill her with anticipation.
"Will you be in the fight?"
She pondered his question, and the memory of that podium flashed through her mind, on stage in front of a room full of a crowd of cheering people. It was quickly succeeded by a vision of Iqaluk, glacier and stream, mountain and river, lakes and shore. The air was still clear, the water still ran clean. It had to stay that way. It had to. "I think I might have to be," she said slowly. "Dan O'Brian said he would help.
Give me pointers on dealing with the bureaucrats, like that."
"He want Iqaluk for the Park?"
She laughed a little. "If Dan O'Brian had his druthers the whole state would be a federal park."
"It'll be a long fight, Kate."
"Years," she agreed. "A lifetime, even. But for now, while it's in limbo, Iqaluk is safe."
They watched the moon emerge from behind Angqaq, bathing the mountains and valley in pale light. It was cold, and getting colder, and he shivered inside his jacket. "About time to go in?"
"In a while."
"You seem--" He hesitated.
"What?"
"I don't know. Awfully calm?"
She sat up and looked at him. "Would you feel better if I gnashed my teeth and tore my skin and ripped my hair out at the roots?"
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell Page 27
