Read Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel Online
Authors: Kim Heacox
Tags: #Fiction, #Native American & Aboriginal, #Family Life, #Coming of Age, #Skins
Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel
Bluefeather
A NOVEL
KIM HEACOX
Text and cover photo © 2015 by Kim Heacox
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heacox, Kim.
Jimmy Bluefeather : a novel / Kim Heacox.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-941821-68-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-941821-87-9 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3608.E226J56 2015
813’.6—dc23
2015007906
Edited by Tina Morgan and Kathy Howard
Design by Vicki Knapton
Published by Alaska Northwest Books
®
An imprint of
P.O. Box 56118
Portland, Oregon 97238-6118
503-254-5591
The characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
For the wild inhabitants of Icy Strait
a face like the surface of water
removed and strangely dispassionate
first you need to learn the language
you only have to master yourself
a discovery of your deepest knowing
to save a life is no easy thing
to die we must forget, but also be forgotten
“The canoes of these people are made of light wood, called
chaha
[red cedar], which grows to the southward. A canoe is formed out of a single trunk, and is, in some instances, large enough to carry sixty men. I saw several that were forty-five feet long; but the common ones do not exceed thirty feet. When paddled, they go fast in smooth water. The largest are used for war, or for transporting whole families from place to place. The smallest serve for fishing, or other purposes that require but few hands. They are ingeniously constructed.”
CAPTAIN UREY LISIANSKI, 1814
A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803–06
[journal entry from Sitka, Alaska, 1805]
the weight of air
USED TO BE it was hard to live and easy to die. Not anymore. Nowadays it was the other way around. Old Keb shook his head as he shuffled down the forest trail, thinking that he thought too much.
“Oyye . . .” he muttered, his voice a moan from afar.
He prodded the rain-soaked earth with his alder walking cane. For a moment his own weathered hand caught his attention—the way his bones fitted to the wood, the wilderness between his fingers, the space where Bessie’s hand used to be.
Wet ferns brushed his pants in a familiar way. He turned his head to get his bearings, as only his one eye worked. The other was about as useful as a marble and not so pretty to look at. It had quit working long ago and sat there hitching a ride in his wrinkled face. The doctors had offered to patch it or plug it or toss it out the last time Old Keb was in Seattle, but he said no. Someday it might start working again and he didn’t want to do all his seeing out of one side of his head. He was a man, for God’s sake, not a halibut.
A wind corkscrewed through the tall hemlocks. Old Keb stopped to listen but had problems here too. He could stand next to a hot chain saw and think it was an eggbeater. All his ears did now was collect dirt and wax and grow crooked hairs of such girth and length as to make people think they were the only vigorous parts of his anatomy. He always fell asleep with his glasses on, halfway down his nose. He said he could see his dreams better that way, the dreams of bears when he remembered—when his bones remembered—waking up in the winter of his life.
Nobody knew how old he was. Not even Old Keb. He might have known once but couldn’t remember. Somewhere around ninety-five was his guess, a guess he didn’t share with any of his children, grandchildren, great-grand-children,
great-great grandchildren, or the legions of cousins, nephews, nieces, friends, and doctors, who figured he was close to one hundred and were on a holy crusade to keep him alive.
All his old friends were dead, the ones he’d grown up with and made stories with. He’d outlived them all. He’d outlived himself.
He was born in a salmon cannery in Dundas Bay to a mother and father who managed to die before Keb had any memories of them. His mom was a beautiful woman (he’d been told), a Tlingit Indian with some Filipino and Portuguese thrown in, who got crushed by a tree that a good-for-nothing logger said would fall the other way. His dad was a Norwegian seine skipper who got drunk and walked off a pier and drowned. His Uncle Austin, his mother’s brother,
du káak
, a
k
aa sháade háni
clan leader, raised Keb and his brothers and sisters on the other side of Icy Strait from Crystal Bay, the memory place where long ago his people hunted and fished and picked berries and made the stories that held them together. All this before a great glacier got the crazy idea to come down from its mountain and swallow the entire bay like a whale swallows herring. Gone, every living thing buried in ice, the earth pounded silent beneath a cold carved moon. The hungry glacier evicted Old Keb’s Tlingit ancestors and forced them to paddle their canoes south across big water where they built a new village—Jinkaat, Keb’s home.
It’s written in the rocks, Uncle Austin used to say. Nature doesn’t lie. It might not tell you what you want to hear. It might be a brutal truth. But it is the truth.
Keb reached the outhouse and fumbled through the door and sat as he always sat, folded into himself. He thought he heard a
woolnáx wooshk
á
k
, a winter wren, a walnut with wings, and so believing sketched in the missing notes with his imagination. Notes like water over stones. He thumbed through the catalogs and magazines on the bench next to him. Eddie Bauer, whoever he was. Cabela’s. Good fishing stuff in there. L.L. Bean. Why so many catalogs? Why so many magazines? Why so many of so much? He found a big glossy report from the Coca-Cola Company. What the hell? Yes, he remembered now. He’d been to California a few years back to see Ruby’s son, Robert, the sugar water man who worked sixty hours a week for Coca-Cola Company and was hoping to move to the big office in Albuquerque, Albany, Atlanta, Atlantis, something like that, some place far to the east. Robert was married to a white woman named Lorraine who had expensive hair, a poodle on Prozac, and a cat named Infinity. Boy could she talk. Talk all day, talk all night. Talk, talk, talk. She had a little phone attached to her ear and even talked in her sleep. The only thing she let interrupt
her from talking to one person was the chance to talk to somebody else. She spent all her time at the mall shopping for time-saving devices and lived with Robert in a big house next to a million other big houses all different but all the same. Big houses on big streets with names like Shadowhawk Drive and Peace Pipe Lane. Big houses Keb remembered with sadness and fatigue, how the hot sun burned its way across thirsty country and stirred everybody up. Got them speeding in their shiny cars and eating so much fast food that—what? What happened? Keb didn’t know. So many cars and people, all chasing the sun. A beautiful madness, California. Could they still slow dance after eating all that fast food? Slow dance the way he and Bessie used to?
“Eyelids,” Lorraine told him. “People can tell you’re getting old when your eyelids sag.” She was scheduled to have hers lifted, along with everything else.
Robert the Sugar Water Man would spend all day Saturday in his driveway washing and cleaning his Mercedes. That’s how it is in California, he said. Your car is half of your personality. He’d wax the cleaner and clean the wax and buff the wax and clean the buffer until Old Keb got tired just watching him.
Keb never did own a car. Just trucks. Fords, Dodges, GMs, every one a rolling box of rust that died and was stripped for parts at Mitch’s Greasy Sleeves Garage. Come to think of it, he never did take comfort in a car or a truck like he did in a boat, out on the water, under the pull of the moon and tides. Skiffs, trollers, seiners, gillnetters, even the old gray punt he traveled in with Uncle Austin. All of his best memories were in boats, memories shaped like the boats themselves. Graceful, curving, and languid; exotic and erotic as a woman, the feeling of falling in love and falling beyond that.
Rowing with your heart.
And don’t forget canoes.
Yakwt lénx’
, large canoes. And
yakwyádi
, small canoes. And
yáxwch’i yaakw
, canoes with high, carved prows, and
seet
, a small, nimble canoe with a pointed prow. Canoes with flat bottoms, like
ch’iyaash
, from the up-north town of Yakutat, good for moving up a shallow river, and
xáatl kaltsá
g
aa
, the toughest canoes of all, with twin prows to push aside solid ice. Keb’s best boats were the ones he learned to carve with Uncle Austin, and later, the ones he carved himself and gave away. The ones he built for friends, long ago.
