And She Was (15 page)

Looking out over a field of heather, its lantern blossoms tipping like tiny bells in the wind amid lacquer-shiny leaves, feeling close to pure in the lash of cold wind, I almost felt glad I’d come. For just one moment, the view, the bike, my sense of competence mingled, and I felt lucky to be me and to be here. I lifted the front wheel and turned the bike around.

The motor whined as I worked through the gears and got up to forty-five. With no windshield the wind stung my eyes, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to see if I went any faster, although I could tell the bike wanted to.

Before I headed home, I stopped back by the Old Voyagers. Because of my new bike, I was feeling cocky and willing to risk Anna’s derision.

She was wearing another L.L. Bean ensemble, pleated khaki trousers and a crisp pink oxford, completed with leather dock shoes and argyle socks. I didn’t know if she was a Bean groupie or just didn’t have any other catalogs to shop from.

“So, you finished the first book.”

I glanced up at my Aleut Mona Lisa. “Yes,” I lied.

Anna followed my gaze and her face softened as she looked at the print. She bent to heft a box from the floor to the counter. “All for you.” She shoved the box to my side of the counter. Her eyes locked on mine. A challenge.

I peered inside. Four books stared up at me, and judging from their height and the depth of the box, at least three books lay under each. And these were not casual books. These were the kind of books that could only be called tomes. I hefted the top one.
Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District
by Ivan Veniaminov. I lifted another.
A History of the Russian-American Company
by P. A. Tikhmenev.

I looked up at Anna, a book in each hand. “You ordered these for me?” Now I was feeling extracocky. I was actually winning her over.

She smiled, a true and gleeful smile. “I have given you
more,
” she said, and the smile stretched.

I smiled back, just as wide, swelling actually like I’d been knighted by the queen. “Great. How much?”

“Normally, two hundred eighty dollars, but I’ll let you have them for two-seventy.”

“Amazing generosity,” I said and pulled $300 in fives, tens, and twenties from my wallet, which was stuffed.

“You read all these and I may let you join my basket weaving class.” I heard her shoe soles tapping the floor as she filled out a receipt.

“Yeah, soon as I’ve finished my knitting class.”

Her face turned then and her smile arched up to reveal perfect teeth and allow a laugh. “Yes. First learn to knit, then I’ll teach you to weave.”

I could still hear her chuckling as I lugged the box out the door.

I had no problem with the road up to my cabana this time, despite the extra hundred pounds of paper in my saddlebags. When I switched off the motor, I gave the bike a pat on its politely sized gas tank. We were friends.

I unpacked the books, read the table of contents pages, and organized them into piles on the kitchen table. One stack for the slimmer books that I’d read first, another for those fatter ones with pictures on the cover that I’d get to later; and a third for those really fat ones with no pictures on the cover and university press stamps inside. I picked up a few dirty clothes on the floor and looked around at the bright room, not really lived in, just scattered with the trappings of habitation. The bookshelves were, for the most part, gaping holes. Two sets of dishes couldn’t even fill one cabinet. I’d never refilled Thad’s flower vases. I touched one of the little wildflowers now wilted over the side, shriveled and stuck to the wooden vase. Two slim dark petals broke and fell to the table. That’s when I felt my first flaking. I hadn’t noticed myself wilting or seen myself go brown, but standing there looming over those little dead petals, I knew decay had been working at me for
a while now. Like a painted Roman statue, too long in the sun and rain and wind, the surface weakens, a flake breaks loose, floats to the ground, and lies helpless on the pedestal. Then another. The form underneath begins to show, something less glitzy, less radiant emerges. As I stood there, I could feel the flakes falling. I didn’t know what to do, what expressions to wear, how to laugh or tilt my head or sit or stand. All these things usually came to me from someone else. Little hints that this tone or that look would work just right. But no one was here to give them to me. No one had been here for days, weeks. And that feeling from the bar lingered, whispering, “interloper, outsider, intruder.” Another flake fell. How many would it take before I was unrecognizable? And what was underneath? I needed Thad back before this went too far.

I scrambled for an observer, a safer perspective. I imagined myself in a movie, being watched, judged. The surface of my skin hardened and held. I measured paces to the kitchen table, wrapped a rubber band around my hair, and shoved aside a sweater to uncover the first Aleutian book, still not finished. Clutching it to my chest, I went to the window and read.

I imagined the half-underground homes that once slung low behind the beach. I could picture those first encounters with Russian sailors, the initial excitement to trade for rare metal. In the beginning the Aleuts hunted sea otters for the Russians willingly enough, although hostages were taken to ensure the islanders didn’t attack the outnumbered newcomers. But within a couple of decades, the Russians had virtually enslaved the Aleut hunters, forcing them to relocate to seal-breeding, seal-slaughtering islands. Meanwhile many of the Russians took up with the wives left behind. The czars did make decrees that the Aleuts be treated well. But as the Russians said, “We are here, and Mother Russia is far away.” Murder, rape, kidnapping often went unpunished.

To think about these things while living at the place they happened brought their histories close. I wondered what happened to the mind of a woman whose husband had been taken by force to hunt, who was made to cook, clean, and bed his enslaver during the months he was away. Did she seek revenge in small ways, spitting into dinner stews? Wetting sleeping blankets? Did she ever try to run? To kill? Or maybe
she went the other way. It’s not as heroic but probably far more practical. Did she accept him as the new alpha male, stronger than her last, more able to protect and provide? The book didn’t say; I could only imagine the thoughts of a woman in another time.

I leafed through books stacked on the table. Would any of them have the answers? Probably not. I’d read enough history to know that nobody had asked the women who lived through these things. The few priests and botanists and ethnographer types who accompanied the explorations in those first hundred years asked questions. They observed rituals, sketched homes and faces and tools, collected legends. But they didn’t ask the women. It’s not that they hadn’t wanted to know; it’s just that trying to figure out what a woman sees and thinks and feels is kind of messy and maybe scary. And besides, what’s a woman gonna do. She’s down for the count.

Darkness slowly invaded the hill. I stopped reading when I couldn’t make out the words anymore and stared out at the few lights below. I kept thinking about Little Liz and the blue marker and the old woman’s clean-up job. I had to pee, so I found a flashlight and trudged up the hill to the outhouse. The half-open door creaked softly on its hinges. I shone the light on Billy’s leather pants as I waited for my bladder to overcome the shocking cold on my ass. Because I kept leaving the door open, poor Billy had begun to fade and wilt with the dampness. The entire top of the poster had curled downward, and only the top middle staple remained. The effect was not good. Billy’s only redeeming physical characteristic is his sneer. Now all you could see was one of his skinny arms and his leather pants stretched in lines across his crotch. I leaned forward and ripped the poster down.

My flashlight caught the faded words underneath immediately. I shone the light across each line.

She took 19. Sent them away to white
[here the words had faded too much]
tree houses. She would have taken more. We did it like our mother’s mothers said, with dead-man’s fat
[another few faded words].
No one knew I let the gas on and lit the candle. I saw
[unreadable]
before I shut the door. I thought we would save some. 1968—one year past
.

I read the words several times, studying those faded parts carefully. Obviously this was not your classic outhouse graffiti. This was more like a diary entry recounting an event. But whose event? The “mother’s mothers” line pointed to a woman. And what event? Although the words didn’t say, I thought they pointed to a murder. The writer and someone else, or elses, had killed a woman because she took something. They had done it by setting up a propane leak. This had happened in 1967.

Sitting with my pants around my knees, pee threatening never to descend, shining a thin beam of light on an eighteen-year-old message, I took it as the honest writing of a woman who had killed another woman. For some reason, she had been compelled to write these few lines about it a year later. The victim had taken something so precious this woman had killed for it. A chill ran through me, which didn’t help my attempt to pee.

I concentrated hard and managed. As I finished up, I saw the lights go on in Mary’s cabana below. Just what I needed—the solidity of another person. I closed the outhouse door for once. I didn’t want to expose the words to the weather. I’d study them more closely in daylight.

As I made my way to Mary’s place, a skittish rain began, shy as a first recital. The first uncertain drop fell on my eyelid, then another on the back of my neck. It ran down my spine, and I shrugged my shoulders to stop its flow. I knocked on the door softly.

“Who is it?”

“Me, Brandy.”

She swung the door open.

“I saw your lights. I’m bored.”

“Come in. I’ll put on some tea.”

I followed her into a replica cabana, except she had added furniture, curtains, carpet. She had made a home. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Mary shrugged. “Thanks. Nick’s gone a lot. I get bored. Catalogs keep me busy.”

She had good taste, if a bit on the country-decor side. I noticed the shelves of collector teddy bears and the too-well-matched rug-curtain sets. I guessed her outhouse would have a matching toilet seat cover
and rug set too. And everywhere were pictures of two cute-as-a-button Aleut kids. She had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering one wall and not a book in them. They sagged with toys, Legos, and stuffed animals, laser guns, and Barbie furniture. A watermelon-colored buoy hung by a rope from the rafters, the traditional Dutch swing.

“You look better,” I said. Only a couple of yellowish spots showed where her bruises had been. Two of her fingers were still in homemade splints.

“Yeah,” she gazed down at her hand. “Sorry about that. Nick’s not so bad. He’s messed up about the kids being gone. He’s had it pretty rough. Sorry I woke you up.” She lifted her head to meet my eyes. “Thanks for what you did.”

I nodded, feeling awkward. “Who was that old woman at your sister’s?”

She put a kettle of water on the stove. She kept rubbing the scab on her lower lip with her upper lip. I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But, as I was learning, white folks are too impatient.

“Ida,” she said.

“How old is she?”

“No one knows. But I think she’s in her eighties. Looks a lot older though.”

She moved to the window and leaned against the frame while looking out at the dark valley. “She was old when I was just a kid. My brother and I used to watch her out in the bay. I think she had the last skin kayak left. She used to paddle out and around the island.” Mary smiled. “I remember her two sons kept trying to talk her out of it. They even had the elders come to her house one day to tell her she wasn’t allowed to go out alone anymore. It was too dangerous for an old woman.”

Mary covered her mouth as she giggled. “They say she laughed at all those old men and spat at them. I would have loved to have seen that. She must have been in her late sixties then.”

Mary was silent for a minute. When she spoke again her words were quiet and measured. “She didn’t listen. I think those old men were afraid of her. I never saw them try to stop her again. Not until her youngest son, he was only forty or so, drowned. She stopped then.”

I had one more question. I couldn’t come up with a good segue so I just asked.

“Do you know who used to live in my place? Like back in the sixties.”

“We moved in maybe ten years back. There’ve been four people since. The last were two young guys, white. Darlene Panov lived there a while. Before that I think Liz had the place. Ida said she moved into town in the late sixties, early seventies. Couldn’t get up the hill anymore once she started drinking so heavy.”

Liz. Of course, Liz. I must have gasped or something because Mary was looking at me funny.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t know it was Liz.”

“What was Liz?”

“Who had lived there.”

Mary turned back to the counter to measure out tea leaves. I studied the delicate white tea pot on the counter beside her. Yellow and purple flowers intertwined with green ribbon around the rim; another circle of flowers on the side.

“Anyway,” Mary said, pouring hot water into the pot, “thanks a lot for what you did.”

“Sure,” I said, inhaling the smell of spicy Russian tea. “You think you’d get the kids back if you left him?” It was my attempt to remind her of the connection, the trade-off. I suppose I could say that I just didn’t want her banging on my door in the middle of the night again. But that wasn’t really it. I felt responsible for her.

“That’s what the social worker says. But I don’t trust her. And I don’t know how we’d get by without him. I only work part-time at the grocery store.”

“Maybe they’d put you on full-time.”

“Maybe.” Mary’s eyes traveled to a picture of her and the kids, all dressed in navy with a professional background of fall leaves. The two boys looked to be school age, eight and nine, I guessed; the girl younger, maybe five. “I got to get them back. But I’m all he’s got. I love him.”