Though Not Dead (22 page)

“The icon.”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Tyler’s been telling us about the Russian Revolution, and the massacre of the czar and his family. Did you know the Russian Orthodox Church made them saints?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and he showed us pictures of icons with their pictures on them. All kinds of gold and jewels. Is this icon like that?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said slowly. “I never saw it. No member of my generation has.” Maybe
treasure
wasn’t too overblown a word after all.

“Would the aunties know?”

“They might. All four of them were contemporaries of Old Sam. More or less.” She thought of Auntie Joy. She didn’t want to add to Auntie Joy’s pain, but she knew the reaction she’d get trying to ask questions of the other three. Auntie Edna would scowl and refuse to answer on general principle, Auntie Vi would scold and refuse to answer on the grounds that Kate was poking her nose into elder business (“You not there yet, Katya!”), and Auntie Balasha would smile and offer her fresh cookies and give Mutt some moose jerky and get her grandson Willard to service Kate’s truck and give Kate half a dozen jars of her justly famous smoked salmon to take home, all the while never answering anything to the purpose. Auntie Balasha was the most approachable of all the aunties, and without question the most inaccessible.

“You could ask them.”

“I could,” she said. Another gust of wind hit the house. “But not tonight.” She pointed at the table, and at his daypack sitting on one of the chairs. “Homework for you.”

“What are you going to do?”

She gestured at the boxes stacked in the living room. “Get Old Sam’s books up on the shelves.”

He grumbled less than usual over the homework, which led her to think better of Mr. Tyler than she already did. One good teacher made all the difference.

They worked away at their respective jobs for the next couple of hours to the sound of Jimmy Buffett. It wasn’t even October, so she wasn’t ready to shoot six holes in her freezer. Come to think of it she wasn’t ever ready to do that.

After the frenzied activity of an Alaskan summer—quick catch the fish, quick clean the fish, quick smoke and can the fish, quick pick the berries, quick make the jam, quick weed the garden and chop the wood and fix the roof and paint the shed and get your moose and fill the cache and make that last Anchorage run for new glasses and get your teeth cleaned and buy school clothes and supplies—you were just plain exhausted, worn-out, ready to crawl into a hole and sleep the winter away.

Winter in the Park, everything slowed down. You had enough time for the first time in months, enough time to sleep in, read a book, spend days experimenting with a new bread recipe until you got it right. You had time to snowshoe over to Mandy’s or spend an evening at the Roadhouse or a couple of days at Bobby and Dinah’s getting to know your goddaughter again.

So it was dark, so it was cold—so what? Kate never sentimentalized her life, but when you lived a subsistence lifestyle, if Alaskan summers were a time for nonstop work, then Alaskan winters were a time for nonstop leisure, at least comparatively.

Unless of course your surrogate father died on you, the son of a bitch, and seemed to have deliberately left a mystery to unravel that stretched back to before the moment of his conception.

She shelved a biography of Captain Cook by Alistair MacLean with unnecessary force.

Tomorrow she was going to go back into town and talk to Auntie Joy about Old Sam, and Elizaveta Kookesh, and Chief Lev, and find out who the hell One-Bucket McCullough was.

And then she was going to go up to Canyon Hot Springs to find whatever the hell Old Sam had left her to find.

Sixteen

A foot of snow had fallen overnight, and the day dawned with a high overcast that promised more snow but not right this minute. Her most recent experience in survival very much on her mind, she packed enough food and supplies and extra fuel for a small army into the trailer and hitched it to the snowgo before heading out.

On the way to Auntie Joy’s she detoured by Virginia Anahonak’s to see Phyllis, who confirmed that she’d waded through the snow to the cabin the day before. Phyllis was overjoyed to hear that she could move in that very moment. “There’s wood enough to last the winter,” Kate said. “It’s yours to use. I checked the oil drums; they’re about half full. There is flour and salt and sugar and butter and some canned goods, and sheets and towels.”

Phyllis started to cry again. “I spent last night packing.” She then shocked and embarrassed Kate by throwing her arms around her and kissing her, as Virginia watched from her open door, all eyes and ears.

“Uh, yeah,” Kate said, extricating herself from Phyllis’s embrace. “I’m heading out to the hot springs, I’d better get going so I don’t lose the light before I get there.”

“I can never thank you enough,” Phyllis said, sobbing.

“Don’t thank me, Old Sam did it. You need a ride?”

Phyllis wiped her eyes on her sleeve and gulped. “You’ve got a full trailer. Virginia will take me over, she wants to see the place anyway.”

Of course she did. Phyllis bolted back inside the house, presumably to grab her stuff, and Kate started the engine and got out of there.

She was an only child who’d been orphaned young and raised by two old men and one old woman, none of whom was comfortable with either emotion or gratitude. It showed.

*   *   *

Auntie Joy’s usual beaming smile was absent when she opened the door to Kate that morning.

“Hi, Auntie,” Kate said brightly. “Where’s your shovel? I’ll dig you out while you make me coffee, and if you’ve got any of those great cookies left I wouldn’t turn them down.”

Thus serving her elder’s needs as well as serving her elder notice that she was there for however long it took to get the story. In half an hour she had cleared the path between Niniltna’s main street and Auntie Joy’s front door. She leaned the shovel against the cabin wall, kicked the snow from her boots, and went inside. Mutt, who had provided an honor guard for the ungainfully employed, sat down square in the middle of the doorstep with an intimidating thump that was audible inside.

The round mahogany dining table was set with the full rosebud tea service this time, creamer, sugar bowl with the delicate lid, cups and saucers and dessert plates on a lace tablecloth. She’d even gotten out the rose flatware, which Kate remembered from back in the day when Auntie Joy still hoped the child Kate would succumb to the lure of ruffles and dolls and tea parties.

Yes, Auntie Joy had her own defenses. For one thing, Kate was immediately sidetracked into trying to remember how many of the fragile little cups the child Kate had broken before Auntie Joy finally put them up out of her reach.

It was odd, but however many cups Kate broke, there was always a full set the next time she appeared.

“Sit,” Auntie Joy said.

It was an order, not an invitation. Kate sat. Tea was poured, milk was added, sugar was offered, cookies were placed on dessert plates. Polite conversation ensued while the proprieties of Park hospitality were observed. Early snow this year. More on the way. Auntie Vi was wearing herself out changing the beds so often in her B and B, she was thinking of hiring help, perhaps a high school girl. Did Kate think Vanessa would be interested? The kids sure liked those new computers, and the things they found. Little Anuska Moonin had found a website—Auntie Joy was very proud of her mastery of this new word—a website that had tatting patterns by the hundreds. She had printed some out and brought them to her auntie. Such a thoughtful girl. Auntie Balasha had taken her grandson Willard to Anchorage for his annual checkup. Auntie Edna was still doing a roaring business in Filipino take-out from the back door of her house. Katya Clark was in preschool, and the principal had had to physically stop her father from wheeling his chair into the classroom to take up a permanent position along the back wall. He was armed, if the principal, a veteran himself, was not mistaken, with a 7.62-mm Tokarev automatic pistol that weighed over two pounds fully loaded, on the off chance any terrorists infiltrated the school during nap time.

Kate ate and drank and waited until Auntie Joy ran out of words. The silence that followed yawned between them, uneasy and fraught with portent. Kate put her cup down on its saucer with the exaggerated care she employed with all of Auntie Joy’s china, and said, “Auntie, there are things I must know so I can carry out Old Sam’s wishes.”

Auntie Joy put down her own cup with equal care and a certain finality. “All right, Katya,” she said. “I tell you, then.”

Kate had had her arguments prepared and ready to trot out, and she was caught flat-footed by this unexpectedly capitulation. “Why now?”

Auntie Joy shrugged. “I think about it after you leave other day.” She looked at Kate, the love and pride shining in her eyes like a beacon. Kate, as uncomfortable with love and pride as she was with gratitude, tried not to squirm in her chair. “You the one, Katya. You carry it all forward for everyone. I think at first too heavy for you, too much the weight on your shoulders. And what matter now, so many years gone by?”

Kate waited.

“But it matter to Old Sam,” Auntie Joy said. “Oh yes.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she said in a low voice, “To him it matter too much.”

“What mattered, Auntie? What mattered so much to Old Sam?”

Auntie Joy blinked away tears, and began to testify in a soft voice. Listening to her, Kate could feel the years roll away, to that fallow period following gold rushes and copper rushes and the First World War, when Alaska was only a territory, forgotten by most, with a population of less than sixty thousand people. There was nothing like regular air service. The roads were unpaved, unmaintained, and unnavigable most of the time. You ordered your groceries for the year from Seattle and had them shipped up by Alaska Steam, which offloaded them in Valdez or Cordova, and you either packed them into the Park yourself or hired P and H to do so at extortionate prices.

“P and H?” Kate said.

“Heiman Transportation, after.”

Moose and caribou and salmon were the staples, Auntie Joy said, everybody hunted and everybody shared. More and more Outsiders came into the country, Filipinos to work in the canneries, Americans to mine for gold, Scandinavians on whaling ships. Inevitably, some married local girls and stayed.

The Natives in the Park were much more conservative and insular when she was a girl, Auntie Joy said, and the elders were alert to the danger of their children marrying outside the tribe. It wasn’t forbidden, exactly, but it might as well have been because those who did so were never regarded as full tribal members again. Many moved away altogether, to Fairbanks and Anchorage and even Outside. It took the loss of many children to their families and another generation to relax those taboos.

“Too late for us,” Auntie Joy said.

“You and Old Sam?”

Auntie Joy nodded, her face set in sad lines. “Then some parents send childrens to BIA school in Cordova. My parents send me there. Old Sam parents live in Cordova. He go to school there, too.”

Auntie Joy’s eyes shone with a tender light unlike Kate had ever seen before. “He look at me. I look at him. We know.”

The simplicity and truth of the words took Kate’s breath away. The two women sat in a silence that grew in length and sorrow. “What happened?” Kate said at last.

“Then war comes.” Auntie Joy looked down at the table and said in a voice dropped to a whisper, “Sam join up.”

“And you?”

“I marry my parents’ choice.”

Kate waited.

“Davy Moonin. He one of them come from the Aleutians in the war. Viola’s cousins. They lose everything in that war, homes, villages, all. A lot of work after to settle them down. Many parents marry local girls to newcomers. For one thing, our men gone. For another, good way to make Aleutian Aleuts at home. Davy … Davy, he work hard, respectful of elders. Fisherman, so exempted from army service. My parents think a good man for me.”

The remembered pain in Auntie Joy’s expression was obvious for anyone to read. Kate, caught between pity and rage, didn’t know what to say.

Auntie Joy read Kate’s face without difficulty. “Not all his fault, Katya. He not my choice. He know. Make him angry. Resentful. He … unhappy. And there are no children. My fault again, he think.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I think so, too.”

“It’s always a choice to raise your hand against someone else, Auntie,” Kate said, her jaw tight, and stopped herself when Auntie Joy looked away. “Is that why you went back to Shugak after he died?”

Auntie Joy was silent.

Kate took a deep breath and let it out. “And Uncle?”

The soft light came back to Auntie Joy’s eyes. “After war, he come home to the Park.”

“And you?”

“And me.”

Kate tried to remember how long Auntie Joy had been widowed. “Were you—free, then?”

“Free.” Auntie Joy’s laugh was without humor. “What a word, Katya. In 1944 Davy delivering fish to tender, fall between boats, is crush. I am widow then, yes, but not free.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “No. Not free.”

“Old Sam still wanted to marry you?”

Auntie Joy nodded.

Kate, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice, said, “And you refused him? Again?”

The light in Auntie Joy’s eyes dimmed. “First my parents. They don’t like his father.”

Which father? Kate almost said.

“His father half Filipino. His grandmother all Filipino. Back then, my parents want me to marry Native only. No gussuk, no Japs, they said. To them all Asian men Japs. The war make them hate Japs. My brother die on Tarawa. No gussuks for their daughter. No Japs for their daughter. Only Native.” Her mouth twisted.

“You couldn’t—”

Auntie Joy’s eyes met Kate’s. “No. Not like now, childrens go their own way. Good thing,” she said, smacking her hand down on the table. All the china jumped. So did Kate. There was a muted “Woof” from the other side of the door, too.

“So Old Sam wanted to marry you, and you wanted to marry him, but your parents forbid it.”