All the Winters After (6 page)

THIRTEEN

The front door closed again, and Nadia released a sigh so long and shaky she wondered how long she'd been holding her breath. From the bedroom window, she watched him taking long strides up the road. He looked more teenager than man, still gangly and long-limbed, still moving with the slightest uncertainty.

She collapsed into the desk chair, more tired than if she'd chopped and hauled wood all day, a fatigue that started in her chest and wrapped itself around her head. She tried to think logically. Although she felt as if she knew him through the stories, he was not the same person who'd been brought up in that house. Unlike Nadia, he had lived a life. He had gone somewhere, done some things. He most likely had a wife, children, an occupation. He was a musician, or perhaps a teacher of music.

He seemed upset but mostly gentle. She wanted to trust her instinct; she was older now, knew more. It was clear he had not decided what to do about her, and she imagined him changing his mind again and again with each turn of the road. Would he bring back the police, have her arrested? Would he head out to the village to ask questions? Would he return with supplies? Or with Lettie, if she was still alive? But he hadn't mentioned her, and Nadia had long feared Lettie dead, had mourned her ever since her last visit, when she brought not one but two truckloads of supplies and Leo, who was just a puppy then.

Perhaps Kache would bring his wife to talk with her. If he did go to the village…what if Vladimir charmed Kache into coming back with him, the way he had so easily charmed her father and the others?

She should leave. She forced herself to stand, and Leo stood next to her, wagging his tail, waiting for her next move.

She'd tried to leave several times in the past years after Lettie stopped coming. Nadia had hiked down to the beach and loaded the Winkels' faded orange canoe. Leo climbed in and sat perfectly still, although his anticipation was palpable as she climbed in, paddled. Always at some point, her nerve turned to nervousness. Where was she paddling to? And then what? And so she had turned around and paddled back, Leo's ears down as if he'd been reprimanded. “For this, I am very sorry. I am such the coward, Leo.”

Other times, she had hiked up to the road with a plan to walk into town and ask to trade animals for a new car battery and starter. She would offer chickens, a goat, whatever they wanted. But the downshift of a distant truck would send her into the bushes for cover. In her mind, Vladimir sat behind the wheel, and that was enough to put another end to her plans. By the time she retraced her steps, his face had faded, and she saw instead her father's kind face, heading to buy parts for his truck, and then her mother's, her sisters', her brothers' faces—all so much younger than they were now. But she had no way of knowing what the years had done to their faces. The guilt pushed her back into the Winkel house, back into bed until hunger would force her out of her self-pity, out to work the garden or to set the fishing nets and traps.

She walked down the stairs into the empty living room. Even with Leo at her heels, the emptiness had spread since Kache left. She took the dog's face in her hands. “I should not have shut him out like that, you say?” She tugged his ear. “But wasn't it so difficult? His asking these questions we do not know how to answer?”

Leo harrumphed and lay down next to the woodstove.

“You want him to come back? Like Lettie?”

Like Lettie.

• • •

All those years ago, Nadia had stayed in the house through the first spring without a sign of anyone. She'd lived off fish and clams and mussels and the plants she'd foraged—sea lettuce and nori from the bay, lovage, goose tongue, and yellow monkey flower greens from the land. She snared plenty of rabbits.

One day, she hunted for morels after a week of rain, her mouth watering as she thought of sautéing them in some of the wine she'd found in the cellar, along with wild garlic and a bit of fat from the spruce hen she'd shot the day before. But she sensed, as she walked toward the house with her basket of mushrooms, that someone was there, and she slipped behind the old outhouse to hide. Her heart seemed to beat through her back, thumping the wooden siding she leaned against.

A woman's voice called out from the front porch. “Well, whoever you are, you're trespassing on my property, but I'm not gonna shoot you. You might as well show your face.”

Nadia pressed harder against the building. It must be the owner. Nadia had thought it possible they would never come back. When she'd first found the house, she saw that no one had been there for months. Strangest were the signs that no one had lived there for more than a decade. The calendars, the newspapers, the magazines—everything stopped after May 1985.

“Come on now. Contrary to what you might think, I'm glad you're here,” the voice called. “You seem to be taking good care of the place. I'm going to fix us something to eat. I hope you'll join me in the kitchen.”

Eventually, Nadia did get hungry and cold. She smelled something meaty and sweet and delicious, along with smoke from the woodstove. Because she could not afford to pause to consider the consequences, she traversed the yard and climbed the steps to the front door without hesitation. She knocked on the door, which felt odd, and when an old woman with a white braid answered, Nadia held out the basket of morels like the neighbors attending a holy day feast back in the village. The woman smiled, her wrinkles a map of her long life. Repositioning her braid so it lay behind her shoulder, she thanked Nadia and took the basket.

She said, “You poor, sweet girl. I hope you like homemade beef vegetable soup and bread and chocolate chip cookies.”

Nadia had nodded, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes.

“Don't you worry now, you hear me? I'll tell you what. No one's going to badger you or make you go anywhere.”

And Lettie had stuck to her word.

• • •

If only Kachemak took after his grandmother. It seemed evident that “my nonmeddling gene,” as Lettie had called it, had not traveled down through the generations.

Already Kachemak had asked more questions than Lettie. And already Nadia had decided she needed to find some way to leave, and somewhere to leave to. Somehow.

FOURTEEN

Snag needed to call Nicole Hughes to get a ride to the Caboose chamber of commerce meeting. Kache hadn't returned the previous night, which meant Snag hadn't slept even one quarter of a wink. But he called from his cell phone that morning and told her he was fine, not to worry. When she tried to ask him about the homestead, he'd only said they'd talk later and hung up.

Snag cleaned all morning, cleaned over what she'd already cleaned in preparation for his arrival, because cleaning calmed her nerves. Not this time. Everything veered off course, as if the Earth had freed itself from its steadfast journey around the sun and decided to skedaddle over to Jupiter with a side trip around Mars on the way.

She should go out to the homestead. Obviously. But she didn't have her truck, which meant she'd need a ride out there, which meant whoever drove her might detect her own unbelievable capacity for negligence, which meant, in Caboose, perhaps forty-five minutes, tops, would pass before the town and its outlying communities would hear the whole humiliating story.

Besides, she really did have to get herself to the chamber meeting. She'd been heading up a project, trying to get the train running all the way to Caboose again. A long haul, so to speak, but they'd finally gotten approval from the railroad company and the Department of Transportation, which had already begun renovation on the tracks. Now the town squabbled about one major detail.

Way back, when Caboose used to be called Herring Town with the perfectly clever slogan
The End of the Line
, the herring boom brought the train, the train brought the people, the herring were loaded onto the train by the people—everyone was happy, and everyone got down on their knees at night and thanked the good Lord for the train and the herring in all its abundance. But then, as too much of a good thing is bound to do, the herring industry dried up from overfishing as fast as it came, and the town all but dried up, and the railroad company crowned Wilbur, Alaska, as its new end of the line, about seventy-five miles up the tracks. For some reason no one quite knew, a caboose was left abandoned at the end of the Herring Town Spit, that jut of land four and a half miles long, that long finger pointing to the mountains across the bay.

About fifty years after the herring left, someone came up with the idea of changing the town name, because calling it Herring Town was a bit like calling the Mojave Desert “Seaside.” A vote officially made it Caboose. They needed to change the slogan too, because it was no longer the end of the line, so some idiot, as far as Snag was concerned, came up with a zinger:
See the Moose in Caboose
. Wow.
That
was interesting. Moose appeared around every other bend in the state of Alaska and most of Canada. Not exactly bragging material.

So Snag had devised a plan to get the railroad to consider bringing the train back for the tourists and thus reestablishing the old slogan, which would once again make sense. Caboose was one of the prettiest towns in Alaska. Although, she had to admit, Alaskans used the term
pretty
rather loosely when describing towns. Caboose was a typical frontier town, where mostly ugly buildings had cropped up as needed without much of a plan, but everyone said the setting on the mountain-bordered bay wasn't just one of the prettiest in Alaska—it was one of the prettiest in the world. The tourists flocked like locusts every summer; the road backed up with motor homes all the way to Anchorage. A major cluster. Bad for the environment, and hard on everyone's nerves, locals and tourists alike. So she got the railroad to agree to bring the train back. Hallelujah, right?

Wrong. Now that they'd started refurbishing the track, everyone was pissed over the fate of the caboose, the town mascot that sat at the end of the spit and currently housed a mini museum with photos and artifacts of the early Alaskan pioneers.

Snag wanted to have the original caboose refurbished and let it run as intended, at the back end of the train, with the pioneer memorabilia on display along with souvenirs for sale. A great story, extra publicity—just like the town that had once been abandoned, the old caboose had been reborn and had a new lease on life. Stuck for all these years, and then, finally, on the
move
. She could practically write the publicity materials in her sleep.

But a big chunk of the town had their Carhartts in a bunch over the idea.

“We can't move the caboose! It's what our town was named after.”

“The caboose,” Snag had reminded them, “will still be here twice a day. But it will have a purpose, just like its namesake. It will be alive again, just like our town. Come on, people. Let's just get a new caboose to stick out there and use the original as it was intended.”

She was beginning to realize she made up the entire minority on this issue. Snag, who'd been told by Marv Rosetter she could sell ice to an Inupiaq, had not been successful in convincing the people of Caboose of this one obvious solution. Another reason she should get herself to the meeting.

But Nicole Hughes didn't pick up the phone. Neither did Suz Clayton. Melanie Magee's line was already busy—with one of the others calling her, Snag suspected. They, of course, played on the side of the caboose keepers. And they had caller ID. So Snag could almost see them standing in their kitchens, listening to her ask if they might be able to give her a ride. They may as well have shouted into the receiver, “No, and
hell
no!”

She pulled on her coat, stepped into her boots on the porch, and started marching toward the chamber meeting. But as she walked, she thought of Kache. Again. Where was he? Had he gone to see Lettie? She didn't know that the homestead had been abandoned. Every time she said she wanted to go out there, Snag lied. She told her there were renters who didn't want to be disturbed. She told her the road was too bad and she'd get stuck. She told her maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe in the summer.

One day, after Lettie could no longer drive, she'd set out walking toward the homestead, but luckily, Snag had come across her on the way home from the Christmas festival meeting. Winter, dusk at two in the afternoon, cold. “Mom! What were you thinking?”

But Lettie hadn't answered. She just shook her head and turned toward the window.

Now, instead of going left toward the chamber, Snag turned right onto Willow and hiked up the street to the Old Folks'. She had to get to Lettie before Kache did.

FIFTEEN

Lettie closed her eyes again. If only the nurses and Snag would let her be for more than ten minutes so she could enjoy this remembering, which had become so clear, as if the past were happening to her once again.

This morning, she ventured all the way back to that time she first got tangled up with the idea of Alaska. She'd thought of herself as an adulteress, but not in the common sense of the word, of course. It was the land. Damn the land. It called to her, first in a whisper, its name,
Alaska
, soft down the nape of her neck while she hung out the clothes. Then it was everywhere. It took her over.
Alaska
,
Alaska
, the broom said.
Alaska?
the chickens asked. She carried a picture in her pocket—of some mountain range across an inlet of water—and she took it out so often it began to peel back from the corner. At night, while A. R. slept loud and hard, she lay awake and then dreamed wet, green, mossy dreams spilling one into the other. Thick, abundant dreams that tumbled her back into morning breathless and with a feeling she guessed was yearning.

A. R. told her to forget it. “One winter,” he'd said, “will send you back to Kansas, kissing the dry, cracked dirt, calling it the floor of heaven. Even
with
this great depression and all.”

No, Alaska was strictly Lettie's idea.

The man who'd bought the farm from them for practically nothing was the one who told them about homesteading up north. Lettie thought it his way of trying to redeem himself for taking their land and knowing there wasn't a mud puddle in the United States they could buy with what he'd given them for it. He'd said, “In Herring Town, you can get land for free. Just like in the West way back when, but there ain't no Indians in Alaska—well, not the fighting kind.” He'd handed her the photograph. “You just stake out the prettiest piece of property you ever seen in your lifetime,” he'd said. “Trees and meadows, lakes and mountains and the sea too. And the moose and the berry plants, the fish and clams, the coal just waiting for you to pick it off the beach. None of them's gotten word there's a great depression going on.”

A. R. kept moping around after they'd sold the farm and most of their things and moved to town, into the apartment with her uncle Fred. A. R. moped like a man whose dream had fallen down and died. But the farm wasn't
his
dream, after all, she told him carefully one morning while he still lay in bed, smoking one cigarette after the other. “It was your daddy's dream.” In a rare moment of intensity between them, she grabbed his arm, tight; her fingernails made grooves in his flesh.

“I think,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I think you gotta have your
own
dreams.” He looked at her blankly, apparently as puzzled by her tears as she was. She stood. Staring into the corner of the tiny, crowded bedroom, she tried to explain, if only to herself. “It must be like what they say about religion. You can't inherit your religion. I imagine the same's true for your dreams.”

• • •

A. R. was a man resigned. Had he known, Lettie thought, he'd have been a man torn by jealousy. Because that place—that place she'd only heard about, only seen in a single photograph—had taken her over so completely, she thought of little else. One night, she woke from a dream that should have been a nightmare. But strangely, it wasn't. Instead of feeling frightened, she felt a freedom that
did
frighten her more than a nightmare ever had. In the dream, A. R. passed on. Lettie cried. But she left the funeral before it was over, threw her bags in a car of a northbound train, and jumped aboard with ease. Free.

The next morning she ripped up the photograph. The pieces scattered from her hand like snow. “Enough,” she said aloud. She hummed familiar tunes and tried to enjoy the sun on her arms while she hung laundry on the line, as she had before this whole nonsense got started.

But the nonsense refused to let go of her. In pitiful desperation, she pleaded with A. R., afraid of that dream of his death and afraid of her own…was it
passion
?

When he finally said yes, he didn't let go gradually—he just let go. “Well, okay. We'll go to Alaska.” And she did what anyone who'd grown accustomed to pulling with all her might would have done. She fell flat on her keister.

“Well, what on—?” he said, reaching a hand over to help her up.

She couldn't answer. Laughing, crying, laughing.

“Where did you come from, woman?” he asked, dusting her off. “And what on earth did you do with my Lettie?”

When she found her voice, she said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” while she kissed him all over his face, feeling a tenderness toward him she hadn't felt for a long time.

• • •

So many times over the next year, anyone else might have shaken a fist at her, damned her for getting them there in the first place. But A. R. never did. Not even one
I told you so
.

There was the treacherous boat trip once they ventured outside the Inside Passage, where she clung to both the fear that they might die and the fear that they might
not
die, that death might
not
come and save them from the slamming, slamming, slamming of the sea.

But they survived somehow, and they arrived somewhere. It was called Herring Town. They trudged through icy water, carrying their bags over their heads while waves leaped at them like children begging for a present. There were people on the shore too. A man, a woman, and—she counted them—ten children. Ten! The Newberrys. All of them round-faced and round-eyed, but their bodies were lean and muscled. All except for the baby, who was delightfully fat, and the toddler, who, later when the sun broke through and slapped color all over the place, ran along the beach wearing nothing but a dirty orange life preserver and a cowbell, his legs chubby and creased, his feet padding on the wet sand.

Frank Newberry had gotten word from the Rosses in Wilbur, who'd gotten word from Uncle Fred's next-door neighbor's cousin, Beck Patten, that Lettie and A. R. were due to come in to Herring Town on the
Salty Sally
. For three days, the Newberrys watched down the inlet for the promise of Lettie and A. R.

Margaret Newberry clung to Lettie as if she were a long-lost sister. She stroked Lettie's hair, most of it fallen loose from the bun she'd pinned it up in days before. A lifetime before. Lettie held her breath while Margaret stared into her face, inches away. Lettie knew she reeked of vomit and worse, but Margaret didn't seem to mind.

Margaret reassured her, reassured her again. There would someday be a train connecting them to Anchorage, and a school. More talk of a store. A post office. And soon, a church.

What Margaret didn't seem to know was that Lettie didn't need reassuring. A church? A mere glimpse of the water, which went from blue to green to red to pink, depending on what the sun and moon were up to—not as it had been earlier with the torment of waves, but now white with the sun's reflections, a thousand spots of light leaping and dancing—seemed a declaration to her,
Let there be light!
Why would anyone want to worship God in a dark log hovel?

If she could, Lettie would have stripped off her vomit-crusted clothes, pitched them into the fire, and worn nothing but a cowbell while she splashed in the icy waves.

Later, while the young women of Herring Town plotted their civilities, crowded around the Sears catalog, and tended to their children, the men helped Lettie and A. R. stake out their land. She giggled at the kissing puffins with their strange, hooked orange beaks and matching feet, cried when she first heard the lonely cry of a loon. Her heart jumped with the salmon in the river; when she saw their silver streaks through the clear water, she saw for the first time the invisible currents of her own life.

One night, she pulled A. R. close to her, unlatched his trousers, snugged them down before he'd even stopped snoring. She was not that type of woman, really. She had always been a lady, though a rather plain one. But Alaska was no place for a lady; the men in Kansas said that to A. R. Even the men on the boat said it. She kissed A. R. on the mouth, and he stopped snoring with a snort. And then he said her name, as he'd been saying it for the past few months—with a question mark. “Lettie? Lettie?” but then “
Lettie
…”

She wanted to give him some of this… What was it? Abundance. It spilled up and out and over her. Let him see it, experience it.

“Now…now…now,” she said, arching her back, thinking that if A. R. went deep enough, he might touch this something inside her, take part of it for himself.

• • •

The scent of the land got inside her too. A damp, sprucy, smoky, salty scent that she fancied. She smelled it in her own hair, in her clothes, and on the tips of her fingers.

She worked harder than she'd ever worked on the farm, right alongside A. R. and the other men. There was a difference between Lettie and the other women—they all soon recognized this. Instead of dissention and jealousy, the difference bore a mutual respect. Lettie had no children. And Lettie did not come to Alaska as a generous submission to her husband's quest. Alaska was Lettie's quest.

Quest
. Was that the right word? Yes, she decided.
Quest
and
question
too. Alaska was her question. The one she'd had to ask. She'd been a woman who had asked few questions. Her life had been a series of neatly laid out stepping-stones, provided for her convenience. She had taken them one at a time, never skipping one or turning over another, never prying one loose to see what might lie underneath. She'd never gotten her feet muddy, so to speak. And then the next expected step was gone, simply not there. She and A. R. had not conceived. There were no children. She hadn't questioned that either. Not really. Tried not to think about it, mostly. Just stayed perched on and busy with the farm and A. R.

Until the photograph.

• • •

“Mom? Are you awake?” Snag again. Snag, always trying to reel her back in to the hospital when Lettie just wanted to stay on the land.

Oh, the land. The dream she and A. R. once had to hand it down to their children and grandchildren. She must talk to Kache, tell him what she'd done, get him to go out and see if Nadia was still there. For all she knew, the poor girl was gone now, or worse, dead. As dead and gone as A. R. himself.

Except there he'd been, as close as her own hand, there in her remembering.