The Great Alone (69 page)

Her sister cowered on the floor, protectively hunched over her arm, her body shaking in silent sobs, but she made no sound. Eva wanted to cry, but she was afraid of drawing attention to herself, afraid of incurring his wrath.

“I warned you about lying to me again. Maybe now you’ll remember.” He stalked out of the room, grinding his feet in the flour and sugar and crunching the shards from the broken crockery bowl. Huddled against the wall, Eva didn’t move until she heard the slam of the front door. When she tried to stand, she felt dizzy, and gingerly touched the side of her throbbing head, her fingertips encountering a lump about the size of a goose egg.

As soon as the dizziness passed, she picked her way through the mess on the floor to her sister’s side and carefully helped her sit up, propping her back against a wall. Nadia’s face looked ghostly white except for one swollen, purpling-red patch along her jaw where Gabe had hit her. Eva looked at her worriedly, noticing the way she cradled the sling that supported her broken arm.

“I’d better get Grandpa.”

“No.” Nadia’s thready voice called her back when Eva started to rise. “You mustn’t … tell anyone.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“I’ll be all right.” Slowly she opened her eyes and reached to take hold of Eva’s hand, squeezing it tightly. Eva cried at the pain she saw in her sister’s pinched face, and tears rolled down her cheeks because she didn’t know what to do.

“He hit you.” It was difficult for her to comprehend that, even though she’d seen it.

“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have lied to him. I … Eva, you’d better go. He might come back.”

“You come with me. I don’t want him to hurt you again.”

“I can’t go. Papa …” Again she faltered. “This is my home. He is my husband.”

“But he beat you.” Eva suddenly recalled other times recently that she’d noticed bruises on her sister. She stared at the sling, the incidents finally connecting. “You didn’t fall on the ice. He broke your arm, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Nadia admitted, bowing her head. “I made him angry.” Eva couldn’t imagine her sister doing anything that would warrant such an awful punishment. She stared blindly at the door through which Gabe had disappeared. She kept remembering the way the soldiers had hurt her mother and the cruel remarks they’d made to her. Now Nadia had been beaten by her husband. She trembled with anger and confusion, wondering why men did these awful things.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Within a year of his wife’s drowning, Lev Tarakanov was dead. Some said he died of a broken heart. But his young daughter Eva regarded his death as an act of abandonment, and she hated him for it. She had needed him. Her abused and battered sister had needed him. But he had forsaken them and she would never be able to forgive him for that. Her grandfather and sister wept at his funeral, but she did not shed a tear.

The creditors took the house and all its contents and sold them to satisfy her father’s debts. Neither she nor her sister received any portion of the proceeds. Even Gabe Blackwood was upset about that, but there was no recourse. Theoretically, the confiscation and sale of the property was illegal. However, since Alaska was without civil law, there was no legal basis for the probation of wills or the inheritance of property. Penniless, Eva went to live with her grandfather, bringing with her only the few clothes she possessed and her mother’s Bible.

Life went on almost the same as before. There were still few nights when her sleep wasn’t disturbed by the carousing of drunken soldiers from the garrison. Her grandfather seemed to require little sleep and spent most of the nights sitting up with his old musket across his lap.

The years of 1871 and 1872 brought little change, except that the trickle of merchants and tradesmen leaving Sitka became a steady stream of disillusioned and disheartened families. A few prospectors arrived to take their place, drawn to Baranov Island by the discovery of gold-bearing quartz ledges in the area of Silver Bay. But the hard-luck miners couldn’t bolster the sagging economy. After braying the ore in a mortar, they usually obtained only enough gold to keep them in a grubstake.

Numerous claims were staked, but without law no legal claims could be filed. All the gold found was in hard rock, which required a sizable amount of capital to mine it and a stamp mill to crush the gold from the ore. Investors were leery both because of the absence of any legal claim to a mine and the cost of obtaining the gold from an almost inaccessible area where nearly all the supplies and equipment had to be shipped in.

But, lured by the rich specimens of gold-bearing quartz they had found, the prospectors searched the mountains, seeking that elusive ledge with a vein of pure gold that might open the palms of the tight-fisted investors. Sitka was the place they went to obtain supplies and let off steam after weeks, sometimes months, alone in the mountains.

It was virtually impossible for Eva to step outside the door of her grandfather’s house without seeing a drunk staggering down the street, whether it was a soldier, Kolosh, or miner. To venture beyond the doorstep invariably meant subjecting herself to their derisive hoots and insulting remarks. When the school closed its doors in the spring of 1873 because of a lack of funds to pay the teacher, Eva was glad, because it meant she no longer had to walk daily that gauntlet of verbal abuse. By then, her hatred of the soldiers had expanded to include all men except her aged grandfather and the church priest.

As she reached puberty, she learned the meaning of the word “fornication.” Exposed as she was to the soldiers, miners, and prostitutes who frequented the saloons, she gradually came to understand what the soldiers had done to her mother. Eva could imagine nothing worse. The very thought filled her with revulsion and increased her loathing of men.

She was glad she didn’t have her mother’s blond hair that had so fascinated the soldiers. Her older sister, Nadia, did, and Eva had seen the bruises she received from her husband. She was glad her face was all broken out with pimples, that her mouth was too wide, her lips too full, and her eyes too close together. She was glad they called her “frog face” and left her alone. Being pretty was a curse, and she was lucky that she wasn’t damned with it.

Late one spring night Eva lay awake in bed watching the dancing northern lights perform their magical ballet in the sky beyond her window. The shimmering blue and green colors of the aurora borealis reminded her of Nadia’s satin brocade ball gown—a gown that her husband had ripped to shreds during a recent rampage. As she watched the undulating waves of turquoise lights, they became the brocade material being violently torn into strips of ragged cloth. She turned from the sight and stared at the dark shadows of her room, preferring their empty blackness to the savage beauty outside.

When she heard the faint scrape of a footstep at the back stoop, she stiffened tensely. Her grandfather was
inside
the house. She had heard him moving around the parlor only a moment ago. Soldiers. It had to be, she concluded. No one else would be sneaking about behind the house. Knowing that her grandfather’s hearing wasn’t as keen as it once had been, she scrambled out of bed, grabbed up her robe from the foot, and ran to warn him.

“Grandpa.” Calling softly, she darted to the chair where he sat dozing and gently shook his shoulder to waken him. Startled, he snorted and came instantly alert.

“What is it?”

“I heard something behind the house,” she whispered. “I think someone’s out there.”

Just then they both heard a sound at the door. Her grandfather rose from the chair holding the long musket in both hands. He moved to the kitchen doorway.

“What is there?” he demanded gruffly in English. “Speak or I will shoot.”

“It is I.” The reply was made in Russian. “Dimitri Stanislavich. Open the door.”

Eva dashed past her grandfather and unbarred the back door to pull it open, shaken by the fright her cousin had given her—and angry, too. “Why do you come sneaking around in the middle of the night?” It didn’t matter that it was usually the hour he came, or that it had been months since they’d seen him. “We thought you were soldiers trying to break into the house. Grandpa could have shot you. It was a stupid thing to do, Dimitri Stanislavich, coming here in the middle of the night. He should have shot you just to teach you a lesson.”

“Is this how a man is to be welcomed home by his family?”

“How were we to know it was you?” She smelled the liquor on his breath and stiffly moved away from him.

Her grandfather struck a match and lit the oil lamp. Its flare of light reached out to embrace her cousin in his seaman’s clothes as he shut the door and stepped into the kitchen.

“We received no word that your ship was in port, so I was not expecting you,” her grandfather said, then gestured toward the table and chairs. “Come and sit down.”

“I forgot to send the message.” As Dimitri swaggered over to a chair, he noticed the ancient musket that stood propped against the wall. “If you had fired that thing, I wonder which of us would have been more severely hurt. Let me get you a new rifle, Grandpa.”

“That one I know how to use. It is good enough.” With hands braced on the table, he lowered himself onto a chair, betraying the brittleness of age in his slow and careful movement. “We should have
petnatchit copla
to celebrate your safe return from the voyage. Eva Levyena, bring us glasses and the bottle of vodka from the cupboard.”

If her grandfather had asked, Eva could have told him that her cousin had already celebrated his return. But the customary “fifteen drops,” which usually meant half a tumblerful, was a Russian gesture of welcome and hospitality, commonly extended to all who entered the household. So she fetched the vodka and glasses from the cupboard and brought them to her grandfather.

She noticed the way his hand trembled as he poured a healthy portion of liquor into each glass tumbler, and realized that Dimitri’s arrival had left him shaken. Eva had always viewed her grandfather as a strong, stalwart protector, afraid of nothing; but watching him now, she realized he was a weak old man. Next to him, her cousin Dimitri looked incredibly strong and vital.

Dimitri seemed to notice the haggardness, too. “You look tired, Grandpa. You should be in bed sound asleep.”

“It isn’t wise to sleep too soundly.” He darted a glance at Eva, then lifted his glass to take another drink of vodka. “Now that you’re home again, perhaps I’ll be able to rest a little easier,” he said to Dimitri, then carried the glass the rest of the way to his mouth.

Ever since she had moved in with her grandfather after her father’s death, he had sat up nights. She had never questioned it, because it made her feel safe and protected, knowing he was on guard. She suddenly realized that her grandfather didn’t stay up out of concern for his own safety. He did it to protect her. Eva had never really perceived his action in that light before. Now that she did, she felt bad about it. She realized that, although her grandfather was old and tired, he was willing to sacrifice his rest, maybe even his life, for her safety and well-being. He was doing it for her.

Before he died, her father had sat up many a night, but his sleeplessness had been caused by feelings of guilt and remorse over her mother’s death, not by any desire to protect her from harm. By example, her grandfather had shown her the true meaning of family responsibility and devotion. More clearly than before, she saw how selfish her father had been. She moved to stand behind her grandfather’s chair, deeply touched by his sacrifice.

“You’d better rest while you can,” Dimitri said in response to her grandfather’s comment. “Because I won’t be here very long.”

“You will be leaving again soon?”

Eva heard the note of regret in her grandfather’s question, yet it seemed to make no impression on Dimitri as he nodded affirmatively and then explained. “Colby is closing down his saloon here and moving to Fort Wrangell on the Stikine River. I’ll be sailing out of there from now on.”

The announcement was made so carelessly that for an instant Eva couldn’t actually believe he meant he was leaving. Then she noticed the rounded droop of her grandfather’s shoulders and knew it was so.

“Then you won’t be coming back here.” Whenever her grandfather spoke in that emotionless voice, it was a disguise for something that deeply affected him. Eva realized how much he had counted on Dimitri, even though he was away most of the time.

“I might run a shipment of liquor in now and then.” Dimitri shrugged.

Eva clutched the chair back, her fingers tightening on the wooden slat. “How can you just go off and leave us here alone like that? Don’t you care what happens to us?”

“Now, now, Eva.” Her grandfather tried to calm her. “Dimitri is a navigator. That’s how he makes his living.”

“He makes his living by smuggling liquor in for the Americans and by poaching otters and seals. He doesn’t even trade with the Kolosh any more.” Everyone thought she was too young to know what was going on, but she did.

“It is his business, not ours,” her grandfather reproved gently.

“He has worked for that man Colby for so long he’s become like the Americans.” Eva was angry and refused to be silenced. “He thinks only about making money and doesn’t care what happens to his family. Grandpa is getting old, Dimitri. He needs you here.”