And She Was (25 page)

“Did you see the name of the boat? Did you see who was waiting?”

Fenia toyed with the ends of her gray-streaked hair. “Of course.”

“We will tell Mr. Walton.”

Fenia laughed. “Yes, dear Mr. Walton.” She clapped, then held her hands up to cover her giggles.

Ida grabbed Fenia’s arm. “Why are you laughing? Families starve because the men spend what they make on drink. Some of the boys are drinking long before they should. Another generation of drunks born in all this filth and boredom. Your laughter is shame.”

“Our lovely Mr. Walton was at the beach as well. He only carried away what he could fit in his pocket. He’s such a handsome man. Don’t you think?” Fenia closed her eyes and turned her face to the misty sky. “We will have to show him the way. His death will be beautiful, like the others.”

Ida grunted in disgust. She refused to listen to Fenia’s perverse ramblings yet again. She turned and walked to the church, leaving Fenia alone, face uplifted, smiling slightly.

Within weeks of arriving, Marcus and other men had built the small church named after the one they had left behind, the Church of the Holy Ascension of Christ. Ida touched the treasured icons she had reverently hung on the rough plank walls. She was tired of the old woman’s feeble mind. It wasn’t the first time Fenia had talked of killing. Sometimes she claimed to have killed ten men when she was young. Other times, three. As a girl Ida had asked her mother about Fenia’s stories. Her mother’s reply had disturbed her. “Someday I will tell you more. For now, remember Fenia is not right in her mind.”

And so Ida believed that because Fenia was unwell, her stories were untrue. She believed this through the next two weeks, until the liquor ran dry again. Until the drunks were snapping at their children, slapping at their wives. She believed this until Irene’s husband died.

He must have hidden a bottle or two away. He was the only drunk in the camp that night. He passed out not far from the bunkhouse. The February cold crept into his arms and legs. He’d been asleep when it found his heart and finally his brain.

“He died without pain,” Ida said quietly to Irene as a small group left the makeshift graveyard behind the camp. The crowding trees cast shadows over the mounded ground. The people would not have chosen this burial ground far from the sweep of the ocean. Officials had chosen it for them.

Irene looked back at the grave. “He lived with pain; I am thankful he didn’t die with it.”

Ida noted the careful equilibrium of Irene’s face, the neutral poise
with which she held her shoulders, her arms, belying her resignation, her determination to meet her widowed future head-on.

“We must talk alone,” Ida said. She looked at Lizzy—the serious face, the hunched shoulders. The girl seemed permanently attached to either the loose folds in Irene’s skirt or her scraps of paper. She had always been quiet. But Ida could see that the slow degradation of her father had molded the girl into something she never was meant to be. A ghost of a girl, who did not speak with the excited voice of a child, but with the barely heard whispers of a broken heart.

“Go on ahead, Liz,” Irene said, gently prying the fingers from her dress. “Go.”

The women watched the girl step cautiously along the boardwalk toward the bunkhouse. “Eli was the one who always found paper for her.” Irene’s voice caught, then she inhaled slowly. “I don’t know what to do. She needed a father, even if a drunk one.”

Ida let a moment pass before beginning. “Fenia found where the liquor is coming from. I will always feel the shame of not telling you before.” Ida met her friend’s eyes. “I thought there was more time.”

Ida told Irene what Fenia had discovered—where the bootleggers were unloading, Mr. Walton’s involvement. They stood together under the giant trees. Leaves on sticks, the children called them. A steady rain plunged straight through the limbs. Although Ida had been living under this rain for months, it unsettled her. On Unalaska the rain never came so brazenly. It skidded, slanted, sneaked its way through the breathing wind. Here the rain hurled itself at her, aimed straight from the sky.

“Of course, Fenia wants to kill Mr. Walton,” Ida scoffed. “Old age has not made her any more sensible.”

Irene did not laugh. “If Mr. Walton is taking money, he must go before the boat can be stopped.”

“Are you as crazy as the old woman?”

“No. No. There are other ways to get rid of him. A letter could be written to Indian Services.”

“And what have they done with the letters the women have written about the bad water, the leaking roof, the endless macaroni, the full outhouse, the sick?”

Almost since they’d arrived, she and others had been writing letters. To Indian Services, the governor’s office, Congress. Nothing had
changed. Many women complained about the unsanitary conditions that bred disease, but Ida’s letters raged against the pay-your-own-way system. Although they’d been uprooted and placed in an isolated camp hundreds of miles from home, Indian Services expected the men to find jobs on other islands to support their families. Those who didn’t were made to feel like beggars. The system incensed Ida. How dare anyone call her a freeloader after taking everything from her. Now the worthless new schoolteacher was writing letters herself, saying that Ida was a troublemaker and not to pay any attention. It was worse for Marcus. He found jobs now and then in Wrangell, working for a logging outfit or a fish processor, but in between he had little to do but wait. None of them did. In Unalaska, he’d been self-sufficient with his own boat and skill acquired from years plying the gray waters. He’d lived with a modest pride in his ability to provide and to give his surplus to others. Here he had nothing to show for those long years of work, nothing to give his children but stories from the past.

“Well, what should be done then?” Irene asked.

Ida shrugged. She had no answers.

Ida expected Fenia to come to her. That evening when the children were playing hide-and-seek among the blanket walls, Fenia led Ida outside. They stopped at the cabin Irene and her children had been quarantined in after the visiting doctor had diagnosed her son with tuberculosis. Irene left him in the care of three other families, who had also been quarantined.

“Lizzy is acting strangely,” Irene said as she and Ida followed Fenia. “I couldn’t find her yesterday and looked everywhere. Do you know where she was?”

Ida shook her head.

“In the outhouse. She was sitting there, crossed legs, drawing on the walls with charcoal. The walls were nearly black with bits of writing. I made her wash it off. But this morning I go to do my business, I find another wall covered. I don’t know what to do.”

“Is this such a bad thing? With all she’s been through, maybe writing in the outhouse is not so bad. Maybe she’ll learn to write letters better than ours. Letters people will read.”

Irene sighed.

Fenia led them through a February evening to a repaired storage shed. High gray sky capped the night in a waiting thickness void of wind. The women settled themselves on crates of macaroni and canned beans. Ida turned to Fenia. “Go ahead. Say what you want to say.”

Fenia tilted her head to the left, listening to something only she could hear, then pulled her knees together and leaned forward. “I was so beautiful.” Fenia giggled, covering her mouth with a hand, gnarled clawlike in its age. “All the men, heading north to Nome or the whaling grounds, wanted me. I tried my best to love every one. They were handsome men, so tall and hopeful. Your mothers and I watched these men, for some of them became too entranced by our Aleut girls.

“It was your mother, Irene, who crushed their heads. She said it made her ill. But these were poor men, who didn’t know how to love. I helped them find the way. They all died with a taste for what love could be like.”

Fenia told the story, slightly changed as she remembered it. “When your mothers’ mothers’ mothers were young, they took something from the dead ones in order that their village would live.” Fenia’s words were unfiltered by emotion, dense and low like the clouds. “Your mothers and I, we knew when our grandmothers told us that we had been born for this. We were marked. And you are marked.”

Ida remembered her mother speaking of a time forgotten, just after the first white men came. When the Destroyer had taken the food and weapons. When the men were gone and babies starved. Ida stilled inside. Her familiar ruffled interior flattened smooth like a cove sheltered from the wind. The story reflected in the still water with a clarity that merged the hearing with the doing. Ida knew this story was true.

She had always done her best. She had learned to cook and sew from her mother. She had found a hardworking, loving man, who could get along with white men and didn’t need more than he had. They had saved enough to buy their own boat, and before the children came, Ida had gone with Marcus to the fishing grounds, stringing lines, knocking the life from flapping halibut, reckoning position through thick fog, scrutinizing the cannery scales. Later she had borne children and watched them well. Marcus worked hard in dangerous waters. Ida kept her house smelling of bleach and tea, stayed away from the lazy, the
drunks, the gossips. The sweat of her labors leaked from her, mingling with the gray ocean and the bending grass. She thought it was enough—to keep her own family safe. But as she watched young men turn to sodden drunks, as she saw young women give themselves to the soldiers at the base with a despair that tore chunks from her heart, as she saw the ranks of those who could not feed themselves or their families swell and swell again, she wondered if she was wrong. If her family was larger than Marcus and her children. In moments when her work was done and she had no easy way to stop her thoughts, she could smell the decay deepening, eating away what was left of her people. And in those moments, came a fleeting, desperate longing to do more.

As Ida listened to Fenia now with this strange new calm, those thoughts settled deep. She felt their weight like a rock thrown into the sea that has no choice but to sink. It was true, those quick, desperate thoughts; she had been born into a purpose, as great as her people had been once.

Fenia’s hand came down around Ida’s knee. “You feel it, don’t you?”

Ida nodded, the slightest assent.

“It was the same for me.”

Fenia rocked slightly and stroked her own arm through her coat as she sketched out her plan. They would take Mr. Walton like their mothers had, alone on the beach. Fenia would hold him as he died.

The stories and the knowledge coming as they did all at once overpowered Ida. She couldn’t begin to think, to plan. But murder. This was more concrete. She focused on it with a biting intensity.

“Killing Mr. Walton would do nothing,” she said. “Another manager would be sent. Another manager bribed.”

Irene nodded. “Best to stop the liquor runners.”

Ida looked at her friend, dismissing Fenia with a turn of her shoulders. “How?”

The women were silent for a moment. An idea pulled itself together in Ida’s mind. “They can’t bring liquor if they don’t have a boat.”

“But they do have a boat.”

“You and I know boats.” Ida smiled, the idea a bolt of hot joy. If they sunk the boat, the bootleggers would be hard-pressed to find another. With the military commandeering half the tugs and trawlers, oceangoing boats were scarce and expensive. It could take months or longer.

Ida and Irene nearly forgot Fenia as they laid their plans. The old woman’s desire to kill was lost in the strategies curling between their minds, which emerged a completed circle.

Ida heard the wind caress the sides of the storage shed, heard the creak of branches rubbing against one another. “How will we know when the boat is returning?”

They turned to Fenia, needing her strange mind at least for this.

“I will know,” she said, and neither asked her how. “But your way is like a rudderless boat; no control. You think killing is a bad thing. But you will understand better someday. You were born to understand.”

In the next days, Ida spent many hours in the tiny church, kneeling, eyes closed or gazing at the Virgin. She asked God to direct her, to tell her if what they were about to do was right. She heard the gathering of her own surety and sent her gratitude toward heaven.

Fenia told them after dinner, “The boat comes tonight.”

Ida didn’t try to sleep. She lay beside her husband, her mind alive with fear, excitement, hope. She did not think about the immediate consequences of what they would do. She knew only that this would be the last liquor coming into the camp for a time. The crew could find another boat, but it could take months. Dry months. Living months. And they could take care of other boats the same way. Perhaps a legend would arise. Boats that carried booze to the camps were cursed.

She and Fenia met Irene at the back of the bunkhouse. They carried no light as they followed the snow-spotted trails behind the camp until one branch cut to the right, back to the beach. They came out on a low bluff above the beach at high tide. They hopped down and moved quietly to the small skiff they had hidden in the brush.

Fenia pulled out the tobacco tin she always kept tied round her waist inside her dresses and opened the lid. She dug her finger into the thick grease, offering a scoop to each of the women. Fenia rubbed the dead-man’s fat against her palms. When they were slick, she rubbed her palms across her forehead and cheeks. The last bit she placed on her tongue and closed her eyes.

Ida hadn’t known if she’d be able to do this. A part of her thought it silly anyway. She did not believe in magic or mummy power. But here in the night with the ocean lying at her feet, the ancient ways flowed forward across time. And when she thought of what she would do in the coming hours, she decided perhaps she could believe.

She rubbed the fat into her hands and her face. Its stickiness surprised her. The taste she never knew. The fear in her body had dried her mouth and coated her taste. She placed the fat on her tongue, like communion bread, and swallowed.

They carried the skiff to the waterline. Fenia stepped over the side and settled near the stern. Irene and Ida pushed the stern into the waves and stepped in. Ida pulled the oars, wrapped with pieces of a worn skirt, from along the keel and slid them through the locks, also ringed with cloth. She pulled with the starboard oar until they were parallel with the beach then slowly and steadily rowed around the point of land to the south.