And She Was (32 page)

SUMMER 2000; SUMMER 1986

B
ellie watched Nicholas flick off the boat’s floodlights, his last act of a long trip. She’d seen him send the crew home, seen them walking eagerly back to their families. But he lingered, she believed, because he could not face Mary. Could not face the house so empty without the kids. Bellie had come for the children. As Ida reminded her, Nicholas was the obstacle to their return. Even childless, Bellie understood. They had always killed for the children. They were mothers first.

When the women had told her the story, her place in this chain, she felt as if she had joined hands with some power she had always sensed, just offshore, just out of reach. And now the hands of her ancestors held her ready for what would come next.

Strange, she couldn’t feel Nicholas’s anger any longer as he leaned against the boat rail and watched the shadows swaying across the deck. He had entered an in-between place where he was free from rage. Bellie remembered what Liz had said about him. That she had blamed him for the loss of a child to foster care many years ago, and the guilt she had felt later, knowing he was just another lost child himself. That his mother had cried for him as he sunk into drinking and fighting even as a teen. Bellie watched him light a cigarette and turn to the black water rolling between him and the bleak lights of town.

He did not hear her feet move down the dock, down the ladder, but she sensed that he felt them as she and the others descended to the boat. Bellie felt the boat whisper to him—intruder. Still it was too late. Liz drove the iron net hook across his neck just as he turned, just as he saw her. He went to his knees, pressing the blood back into his artery. It didn’t come fast at first and he had time. Time to see them in the leftover dock light that swept across the deck with each swell. Time to recognize each of them.

“Bellie?” His eyes fastened on her, and she felt his hope pool in her. Everything inside her screamed stop, but her lips never moved.

The iron thudded against the side of his head, and he couldn’t see her anymore. He is thinking of a dying promise, the one he has made every time. To be controlled, gentle, loving, to escape himself and become what he wishes he were.

“Bellie?” She never knew if this, his last word, had actually been spoken, or if she just felt it leaking from his mind along with the promises he has failed to keep. Nicholas died with the third blow, against his forehead.

Bellie and Anna heaved his body to the rail then rolled it overboard. It clung to the boat’s wooden hull at the waterline, pressed by the waves and familiarity.

When Bellie began to shake, when she could not climb the ladder back to the dock, Liz folded the girl into her arms. She smoothed the hair back from Bellie’s face, where it had stuck in the grease. “It never gets easier,” she said. “Never.”

The four women climbed to the dock, walked back to land, back to uncertain lives. One died six months later in her own home, wearing a housecoat and beaded slippers. One stayed sober for three months after the funeral until the body could be discreetly moved, and years later froze to death when she collapsed in the snow on her way home from the bar. One added a workshop to her store, a larger space to teach Aleut girls, and the occasional white woman, to split ryegrass and twirl it into baskets. And one found a white man to love and had two wise little girls.

And all of them watch and wait near tide pools and bar stools, in
long waving grasses and a neighbor’s open window, on round-weathered hills and the docks that bring newcomers. They pass from one woman to the next, always watching, always willing.

It doesn’t get easier. Never easy enough to see through the fathomless gray. To live with intention, in the full force of our own will, is the most essential and the most dangerous thing we will ever do. It is the act that makes us fully human.

I suppose you want me to tell you they were heroes nonetheless; even dark or fallen heroes we can still put our hopes in. Still look to. And I don’t know, all these years later, what they were, are. Monsters? Martyrs? Heroes? But I do know that their story, reaching back so long and stretching forward into uncertainty, has filled my hands.

I suppose you want me to tell you that I found Thad, after I finished college and found myself, that we married, had children. We want to believe in second chances. You would not want me to tell you they are rare. That I’m a cocktail waitress, still working between the tables. But a list of the whos, wheres, and whats would be illusions. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s not to trust in those. And who am I to tell you about second chances anyway.

I will tell you this much, that I found a man to love, had children, and cultivated friends. I have people around me for whom I would die or kill. I’m vigilant in watching out for them.

I will tell you I write to Bellie now and then. Our children are pen pals and send pictures to each other as if they were from distant countries. I will tell you that Liz wrote me once—a letter that stretched for pages and covered centuries. And I will tell you that in the back of a drawer in my desk I keep a turquoise-studded vial, but I have never looked inside, haven’t touched it for years. And I will tell you that I have settled someplace inland, someplace where the wind sweeps across the grasses, where I stand and cleave its current like a rock.

Cowboy died four years ago. He rested his massive head on my thigh one night, a last good-bye. I still cry when I think of those early years with him, when looking at the ugly dignity of his face taught me to
hope and to trust. I buried him under the rosebush by the back fence. Then I shook my son and daughter awake and led them to the yard. I kneel by the swing set on too-long grass and press my face into their hair. I take their hands in mine. “Say you will remember what I am going to tell you.”

“Yes, Mom,” they say.

I turn their palms up. “You hold your fate, your future right here in these hands. They are full. Do you feel it? Do you feel the weight?”

They nod, understanding only the strange urgency in my voice.

“Yes, Mom.”

I look into their faces and see innocence and trust. They do not understand. But they will. And if I fail, if life and God conspire to bring them, someday, to the edges of their worlds, empty and wandering, I will tell them it is here they can be remade. I will tell them to open their hands.

I will tell them.

F
or many readers the history of the Aleutians and the Aleuts portrayed in this book seems fantastical, unbelievable. I want to clarify what is fact and what developed from my imagination.

Each of the chapters focusing on the intergenerational groups of Aleut women is built upon historic events.

The conquest of the Aleutians by Russia was brutal, decimating as much as 90 percent of the Aleut population within a few decades. Many Aleut groups did become virtual slaves to Russian fur trading companies. We don’t know if any groups of women broke taboos to hunt sea mammals during the Russian-Aleut War. We do know that many starved. As a mother myself, I imagined what a group of women with starving children would be willing to risk to protect their children, inventing a group of women who did venture into the male role as sea hunter.

The Aleuts did mummify their dead, often placing them in seaside caves. Archeological evidence and legends suggest some groups only mummified revered community members while other groups mummified most of their dead, even children. We do know that substances concocted from these mummies were considered to have protective and magical powers, used in sea-mammal hunting, perhaps as part of a mixture that included plant poisons. Some legends suggest the concoction was sometimes rubbed into the face and hands. A few documents suggest these concoctions were ceremonially eaten, although this evidence is debated in anthropology circles.

The journey of Hieromonk Makary is entirely true. This tragic hero, along with six Aleut leaders, traveled for years across the Bering Sea,
across Siberia and back, to protest the brutal treatment of Aleuts by the Russian Emperor. They drowned within miles of their home.

The Aleut Mona Lisa is a real sketch, titled The Woman of Ounalashka. The original now hangs in the Museum of the Aleutians in Dutch Harbor.

A small pox epidemic did sweep the Aleutians in the 1830s. Although the major port communities were largely vaccinated by Russian Orthodox priests, some small villages were destroyed during the epidemic.

During the Nome Gold Rush, Dutch Harbor was a stop over for hundreds of ships waiting for the Bering ice pack to break. By all accounts, the town became a rough place each spring as hordes of would-be miners flooded in. Although there were certainly prostitutes working these visitors, the murders were entirely from my imagination.

During World War II, Japan did bomb Dutch Harbor, killing soldiers and disabling ships. The Japanese also captured and occupied two Aleutian Islands. Aleuts all over the Chain were forcibly relocated to camps in Southeast Alaska, which were notoriously unsanitary, ill equipped, and poorly managed. In writing about the Etolin Island camp, I combined the documented stories from several camps, some of which were plagued by liquor problems. The sinking of a bootlegging boat is entirely imagined. The plight of these interned Aleuts is not. Death rates at many of the camps increased by three fold, and half of the Aleuts interned never returned to the Aleutians.

The plight of the Attu Aleuts is entirely true. They were taken to Japan as prisoners of war, where half died of disease and starvation. When they returned, they found their village had been destroyed by U.S. forces.

The 1960s removal of Aleut children from Unalaska is true. A social worker removed nineteen children in eighteen months, nearly emptying the village of children. The Sisterhood was a real group of women who tried to stop the exodus, failed, and disbanded shortly thereafter. The murder of this social worker is entirely from my imagination.

The Aleutians and the Aleut people are fascinating. I invite you to read more from some of my favorite nonfiction resources.

Prehistory

Lost World
by Tom Koppel

Constant Battles: Why We Fight
by Steven A. LeBlanc

Ancient Men of the Arcticby Louis Giddings

Conquest

Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture 1741–1867 by Hector
Chevigny

World War II and Evacuation

When the Wind Was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II by
Dean Kohlhoff

The Thousand Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians
by Brian Garfield

Koga’s Zero: The Fighter That Changed World War IIby Jim Rearden

Tatiana (fiction) by Dorothy M. Jones

Other

Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir by Ray Hudson

Seven Words for Wind: Essays and Field Notes from Alaska’s Pribilof Islands by Sumner MacLeish

T
his book is a conspiracy of sorts. Partly because I wrote it sometimes in the dark of night in a silent house. And partly because I felt clandestine, ashamed to call what I was doing work, because it rarely was. But mostly because I didn’t write this book alone. I conspired with others—along phone lines and through e-mails and on my front porch and in bars and on road trips and through the mail. We did it everywhere.

And these are the people, my coconspirators, I wish to thank.

Rick Knecht, Douglas Veltre, and Lydia Black, my archaeology and anthropology experts, for keeping my Aleutian history and prehistory as close as we could make it. And for devoting your work to investigating this fascinating place and people.

Claire Wachtel, my editor, who frustrated and confused me—and who will consider that a compliment—and made me think and write harder than ever.

Marly Rusoff, my agent, my fairy godmother, for liking my stuff enough to say yes.

My critique group—Jake How, Debbie Burke, Marie Martin, Leslie Budewitz, Dixon Rice, Jerry Cunningham, Karen Wills, Todd Cardin, Jeanne Jackson—for your generosity, not just in giving sturdy, difficult critiques but also for velvet gloves and soft voices.

My friends Kim Kozlowski, Keirsten Giles, Kathleen Brown, Jessica Lowell, and Dana Haring for helping me craft not just this book but a wild and rich life. For devoting as much passion and intellectual acumen to a discussion of boots in one minute and a dissection of theology the next. And then in the turn of a cocktail napkin, focusing all that intelligence and compassion on one of us who was wronged or simply defeated.

My sisters, Wendy Shaw and Jana Ozturgut, destined for author-dom themselves, for the culture we created as children and hold dearly as adults. Wendy, for half the good lines. Jana, for nurturing freedom in me.

Jane Dyson, my mom, for setting me on a course that has satisfied my hunger for the unknown, for challenges. Fred Dyson, my dad, for the story with its foggy lakes, and silent canoes, buried gold, and a world of intrigue and possibility. For never checking the price on a book.

Mark, my husband, for the countless nights on the front porch with a bottle of wine and an idea to track or a character to flay. For your mind and your heart. Simon, my son, for bringing to me an understanding of the power—the vicious, all-consuming power—that is motherhood.