Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (5 page)

“It’s for you, to help you get well. It’s from Raven.”

“I know it’s from a raven.”

“No, not
a
raven. It’s from Raven, Yéil.”

James turned back to the TV.

“What color is it?” Keb asked.

“It’s black.”

“Look closer.”

“It’s black, Gramps. I’m not stupid.”

“Look closer.”

“What? What am I supposed to see?”

“Something to help you get better.”

“Get better? How am I supposed to get better? My life is ruined. It’s over. I might as well be dead.”

His words broke bones. Keb’s hand went heavy on his cane. Part of him faltered, another part straightened. A seventeen-year-old boy? His life over? Keb wanted to thump him over the head. No need. Little Mac did it for him. She came into the room and said, “Shut up, James. I’m sick of your bad attitude. We all are.”

James’s mouth fell open.

Little Mac began to cry. “We all feel bad for you, we do. But you’ve got to get it together. There are a lot of people way worse off than you.”

Keb flashed back to the foxholes in Italy where he’d seen a thousand boys dead in the cold morning mud. He’d almost been one himself. He could hear James and Little Mac exchanging sharp words, but didn’t catch them, torn as he was between his devotion and contempt for this fatherless kid. A few years back, when he was new at being a teenager, James seemed to take cold satisfaction in tormenting his mother and saying the old Tlingit ways were corny, that nothing could stop the future or preserve the past. He’d been cruel and unattractive then, a shadow of his father. Later, his hidden goodness required less digging. His basketball game soared. He found his smile, and seemed to take new pride in being Tlingit.

And now this.

Keb wobbled.

“Are you okay?” he heard Little Mac ask, as she braced to hold him up.

“Gramps?” James said with alarm. “You need to sit down.”

“No,” Keb said. “
You
need to stand up. You need to be stronger than you’ve ever been. Stronger than you can imagine. You need to give your mother something to believe in. Do you hear me?”

James stared.

“You are not dead. You are not broken. You still have those.” Keb pointed.

“What?” James asked, bewildered, alarmed.

“Your hands. You still have your hands.”

James stared at his hands. He turned the feather slowly. “What am I supposed to see?”

Sometimes the only thing we see is the thing we’re most afraid of. Still leaning into Little Mac, Keb tried to focus. Did he see a hint of amnesty in his grandson’s eyes? A kindness, a hope? Oyyee. . . . He took a ragged breath and heard himself say, “A light. Turn the feather just right and you’ll see a light, a little daylight in the night, a little blue in the black.” Suddenly he was more tired than he’d been in a long time. His legs turned to water and everything closed over him, as Old Keb Wisting, the last canoe carver of his kind, collapsed.

FAR TO THE north, in Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve, a soft rain fell as a woman named Anne moved about her government research boat. She decided the rain was more mist than rain, more patient than the downpours she had known in Hawaii. A rain taking its time. She let her boat drift and watched it swing to starboard, pushed by the tide; eager fingers of foaming water on the white hull. Green, gauzy trees formed a rainforest veil on the distant shore, as much a rendering of another place as the place itself. Beyond that, Anne imagined mountains that elbowed into the clouds.

She glassed in every direction with her binoculars. Where were the whales?

The channel narrowed. The waters swirled and eddied over a shallow bottom. She looked for rocks, signs of broken water that would betray their presence just below the surface. The boat continued to spin, slowly. Her nautical chart said that no navigation hazards existed in this channel. But in Crystal Bay, where channels and coves quickly filled with glacial silt, it was different. The land—the actual crust of the earth—depressed by a massive glacier that filled the bay only a few hundred years ago, now rebounded an inch each year. Shorelines shifted. Reefs played tricks. Nautical charts became obsolete; they deceived. A Tlingit legend said a dark spirit reached out and capsized boats. What to do? Take nothing for granted.

The channel widened. The waters sighed. The current slowed and the boat eased into it. A bowl of pink light, cradled in morning clouds, spilled against the snowy flanks of weathered mountains. Anne caught herself breathing. Thousands of birds chattered and splashed about: ducks, geese, gulls. A flock of sandpipers zipped by, flaunting their aerial supremacy: restless, northbound, so many miraculous beings fixed on stars and arcs of magnetism, wild and vast yet intimate and near.

“Hello, Alaska,” Anne heard herself say. “It’s good to see you again.”

Twelve years ago, fresh out of Juneau-Douglas High School, she couldn’t wait to get away. Now she was back, and near tears. She had Nancy’s ashes. Her sister’s ashes.

She hoped to find humpback whales moving with the moon and storms, flooding into Crystal Bay on the first strong tides of June, hunting for the fat-rich forage fish—herring, capelin, sandlance—they needed to replenish themselves after months of fasting and a long swim from Hawaii. She gave herself ten minutes, and with that gone, another five. Another two. Nothing. She pulled out her journal and wrote:

The sister had no suitcase

No way to say good-bye

She packed a duffel with long underwear,

An old hippie vest, a tie

She took the ashes too

Wouldn’t you?

The urn heavy and cold

Was she ever, truly ever bold?

Maybe now, somehow

Maybe here.

ANNE LISTENED, AND in her listening she forgot her deepest sadness and regrets. Her radio was off. Her National Marine Reserve supervisor, a by-the-book man she called Ranger Ron, would not approve. He had called her yesterday to remind her about the mandatory all-employee safety meeting at reserve headquarters in Bartlett Cove.

Yes, well, the whales came first.

She closed her journal, climbed onto the foredeck, and sat against the metal railing in her Helly Hansen rain pants and sou’wester slicker. She dangled her legs over the side, her feet snug in XtraTuf Neoprene boots. The double-tined Danforth anchor rested at her side on the scrubbed white deck. From her daypack she pulled out a small tin and opened it. She dried her fingers on a red cotton bandana and drew a thin line of marijuana into a square of cigarette paper. She rolled a joint, licked it shut, and held it. “Maui Wowie,” she said. “They’d fire my ass if they saw me doing this.”

Still holding the joint, she opened the
Capital City Weekly
and read about the Crystal Bay jurisdiction case. “We simply want the federal government
to have some perspective and wisdom and let us have our lands back,” the paper quoted Ruby Bauer, “so we can pursue our dreams and maintain our cultural heritage. . . .” And make a ton of money in mining and zip-line tourism, Anne thought.

She didn’t buy it. What bothered Anne most was that Ruby was the daughter of Old Keb Wisting. How did that happen? Why did some girls get the good fathers, and others the bad? And why did some girls die young, like Nancy?

Deeper into the
Capital City Weekly
, Ruby appeared again, this time talking about an investigation into the Pepper Mountain accident that ended the basketball career of her “infinitely talented” nephew. “To see a God-given gift like that taken away at the beginning of a person’s life is a crime,” Ruby said. “That’s why we want to make sure we know exactly what happened. We want to know the truth. Nothing more, just the truth.”

The truth, Anne thought, there’s a slippery fish.

“Do you remember me?” she had asked Old Keb in the NMRS plane as she handed him his raven feather five weeks ago. Of course he didn’t. Yet she remembered him and was astounded by how little he’d changed. The open face, white hair, ancient hands, and kind eyes. What struck her most was how small he was, and how he seemed to regard everything around him as a breathing universe of water, earth, and air that flowed one into the other, and he with it. He had magic; he
was
magic, the grandfather she never had, the man who gave her a vision.

THE ROUND EARTH rolled. The rain stopped. The tide percolated softly against the hull. A bald eagle called through the wet air and Anne snapped from her reverie. Her hand, still holding the joint, began to shake. Must everything desirable be forbidden?

She stood and looked around. No whales.

For eight years she had studied humpback whales in Hawaii, their acoustics and courting and mating, their migrations and energetics, their complex social structure and language. Now here she was, back in Alaska where the magic began for her as a little girl, where she first fell in love with boats, whales, and wilderness; where hungry humpbacks from Hawaii spent their summers eating nearly half a ton of fish per day, and sometimes sang.

Alaska, yes, where Nancy died, and part of me died too. Dear God
.

She put the Maui Wowie in the pocket of her blue uniform shirt, under the gold badge, and made her way back to the wheelhouse, still thinking about Old Keb. That’s when she stopped, breathless. Perched on the transom was a raven. It cocked its head at her but otherwise didn’t move. Neither did Anne. Her hand
gripped the rail. Her heart fluttered. What speed and stealth had brought the bird here that she hadn’t seen it or heard it? She could feel it looking at her, looking
into
her, measuring her with its dark intelligence. It walked the rail with a shaman’s authority, black talons clicking on the white fiberglass, tapping out an ancient beat. Had it stolen the moon? Invented the night? Come as an echo of the Ice Age?

Whooosh . . . It lifted away on broad wings, circled once, and flew north into the mountains and glaciers until she could see it no more, until it became part of everything distant and abstract. Slowly, her heart calmed and her mind became rational again and she remembered the mandatory safety meeting in Bartlett Cove, and convinced herself wrongly that it was nothing. The raven, it was nothing.

Just a bird.

SOME DAYS, THE pain never left.

When you lived on the ragged edge of North America, a thousand miles north of Seattle, where the Pacific was not pacific and storms slammed into high mountains and glaciers skulked in valleys and silent bears made tracks up your spine, you knew as Keb knew that dying was an art when done right, and no final act should be without mystery and grace. More and more though, men died in the wreckage of their own lives, shadowed by false prophets, lost in the thumping, grinding world those same men created for reasons that didn’t seem reasonable anymore. Remember Reggie Plant? His brain soft with whiskey, he walked in front of a loaded gravel truck and let all ten tons roll right over him. People said he wasn’t too recognizable after that, not that recognition gets you into heaven. And Gil Johovic? Stubborn old goose, he took off in his skiff in an Icy Strait gale; said he wanted to catch a fish. They found his body washed ashore a week later. Never did find the skiff. A shame. It had a fine four-stroke outboard on it. Billy Mills got too confident in his Cessna and surprised nobody when he disappeared over Lynn Canal. George Bethany overfilled a backhoe tire and blew himself into the rafters of Mitch’s Garage where he hung on a lag bolt until the volunteer fire department pulled him down. Gus Talzic got frostbite when he went winter deer hunting with a hole in his boot. A patient man, he waited until the gangrene marched up his leg and into his crotch before he went to see Miss Byers, the nurse practitioner. He was never the same after that. Neither was Miss Byers.

Old Keb missed his cribbage games with Gus and George, the three of them planted in Keb’s carving shed, eating cornbread and venison stew. He could work long and hard and never tally all the ways his friends had died. Not one had lain down on a bed of moss to let the country swallow him. Not one had paddled away in a canoe. It seemed a fine way to go, one that appealed to Old Keb, a lot more than courting cancer, ending it all in a hospital, kept alive until
your wilting was complete. Uncle Austin got so sick and frail that all he did was sleep. So did Samson Ehlme, a good carver in his day. He lost so much weight that his coat hung on him like laundry on a tree. He had a disease named for a famous baseball player back in the 1930s. It messed up Samson in the legs first, then climbed into his lungs and filled them with water. But it kept his mind sharp, a dirty trick and a tough end for the big Swede, a cold, windswept man. Two of Keb’s brothers died of cancer, and his sister Dot, and his wife, Bessie, twenty years ago. Even in her final days, surrounded by family, she did more giving than all of them, dying as she did without complaint. “I am grateful,” she said. Those were her last words. Keb had lived too long without her. So much cancer these days, it was a cancer of cancers. And if cancer didn’t get you, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s would, your body loaded with mercury and other bad stuff, your brain turning to oatmeal. Remember Rita Killbear? She said what bothered her wasn’t that life was so short, but that we’re dead for so long.

They were gone, all his dearest friends, his deepest love. He had no more illusions of turning full-faced to the sun. Everything was more alive than he’d ever be; every day harder than the one before. He felt as if he were cheating, breathing air that belonged to others. He could remember the names of friends who’d died seventy years ago but not the names of his great-granddaughters who walked at his knees, chirping like birds. He had to find strength in surrender. If a messiah can be born in a manger, can’t an old man die in the forest, on a bed of moss? Or better, in a boat? A canoe?

RUBY’S TRUCK ROARED up the hog-backed road and stopped at the carving shed, its windows filmed with summer dust after three weeks without rain. It sat there running, a living thing, doglike, panting in the heat. Nobody got out. From his rocking chair inside the window, Old Keb watched that truck catch its breath, sitting on its blue tail of hot exhaust. It turned off, and for a moment the quiet was big again, the way Keb liked it. James got out the passenger side and slammed the door. Using a metal cane—his knee in a brace—he hop-stepped across the clearing to his Aunt Ruby’s house, where she hadn’t lived since she moved to Juneau. He went inside and slammed that door, too. He was the best door slammer in town these days. Gracie got out on the driver’s side and stood there wearing the weight every mother wears who gets more than she bargained for. She leaned her broad frame against the truck and looked up, as if hoping some clarity might fall out of the sky.