The Great Alone (98 page)

“Does she have a name?”

“I guess so.” Wylie pretended that he didn’t know it. He just couldn’t bring himself to talk about Lisa Blomquist.

In the latter part of May, the other colonists from Michigan and Wisconsin reached the Matanuska Valley, to bring the number of families to the planned two hundred. All had been on the relief rolls in their home states and had some farming background. The government had selected the volunteer families only from the northern tier of states, specifically the so-called “cutover” region that had been denuded of its forests by lumbering operations and had poor soil unsuitable for farming. The selection was restricted to that three-state area on the basis that its climate most closely resembled Alaska’s and the families, mainly of Scandinavian descent, could more easily adapt to the far northern climate.

The forty-acre tracts were chosen by lot, drawn by the head of the family. But very little land was cleared that first summer. The colonists and transients spent most of their time building a community center in Palmer for meetings and church services, and the farmhouses and barns on the individual tracts. But the work was slow, frequently hampered by the heavy late-summer rains typical of the region.

Wylie thought about Lisa Blomquist many times during that first year, wondering how she was getting along, and whether she was liking it here. As he helped his mother in the garden that summer, hoeing out the weeds, he wished he could show Lisa the six-pound turnips, seventy-pound cabbages, and giant-size potatoes they’d grown so she could see how vegetables flourished in the north’s long daylight hours. In the fall when he’d killed his first moose of the season, he wondered if she’d ever eaten its meat and whether she liked the taste of it.

Many times when he walked his trap line that winter, surrounded by the silence of snow, he stopped and gazed northeastward, toward the valley roughly fifty miles away on the railroad’s branch line to the coalfields—Matanuska Valley, closed in on three sides by towering mountain ranges. He hoped she wasn’t lonely.

The next year, grumblings of discontent were reported from some of the colonists. Before the summer was out, several of the original families gave up and went back to the States. Soon, more followed. But Wylie never found out whether Lisa Blomquist’s family was among the ones that left.

After a time, he stopped thinking about the twelve-year-old girl with blue eyes and honey-colored braids.

CHAPTER LIII

Anchorage, Alaska

June 1940

Wylie walked behind the pushmower, leaning his weight slightly into the handles to propel it along as the rotating cylinder of curved blades cut the yard’s long grass. His blue plaid shirt hung on a fence post, discarded after he’d finished mowing the lawn area in front of the boarding-house belonging to his Grandma Glory. The afternoon sun was warm on his back. Its heat, coupled with the slight physical exertion, raised a sheen of perspiration on his skin.

There was a certain pleasant monotony in mowing—walking back and forth, back and forth, the air scented with the fragrance of newly cut grass and filled with the droning whirr of the mower blades. He reached one end of the backyard and maneuvered the pushmower around to start back toward the other.

As he turned, Wylie noticed two people coming up the front walk to the boardinghouse. Normally he wouldn’t have paid any attention to such a common occurrence. Europe was at war, and most believed it was only a matter of time before the United States would become involved. The first steps in the long-neglected defense of the Alaska territory had begun with a four-million-dollar appropriation to build a cold-weather aviation laboratory in Fairbanks and a new Army post in Anchorage to be called Fort Richardson. Eight hundred troops from the Fourth Infantry Regiment had already arrived in Anchorage, bivouacking on the edge of town until the new fort was built. The military contracts had brought a horde of construction workers to town, all of them needing someplace to live.

It was a common sight to see men coming up the front walk of the Cole boardinghouse, but not two women, especially when one of them was young and pretty. Wylie stared appreciatively at the girl with the page-boy bob until the building blocked his view of her. Then he leaned again into the pushmower, briefly regretting that there were no rooms available.

Lisa Blomquist paused at the front steps and glanced at the large and rambling two-story building with a small picket fence bordering the flower beds in front. After five years of nothing but hard luck on their farm in the Matanuska Valley, her father had finally given up and found a job with a construction crew here in Anchorage. Now Lisa and her mother were house-hunting, trying to find a place to live here in town.

They’d been at it all day long, but something was wrong with every house they saw. Either the monthly rent was more than they could afford, or the house was too small, or too old, or in a bad neighborhood. Finally someone had suggested they go see Mrs. Cole, explaining that, in addition to this boardinghouse, she owned several rental properties in town.

Lisa followed her mother up the steps to the front door. A gray-haired Eskimo woman greeted them as they walked in. Lisa noticed the barely disguised look of dismay that crossed her mother’s face. “Mrs. Cole?” she asked hesitantly.

“No.” The heavyset woman smiled. “I am Matty Townsend. If you’ve come to inquire about rooms, I am sorry to say we are filled up at the moment.”

“No, I came to see Mrs. Cole about possibly renting one of her houses.”

“One moment. I will get her for you. Please make yourself comfortable.” She indicated the collection of chairs and sofas in the parlor off the entryway.

When the Eskimo woman walked away, Lisa followed her mother into the parlor. She picked up one of the magazines on the table and started to leaf through it while her mother wandered about the room inspecting its furnishings, enviously touching a porcelain vase and covetously eyeing a crystal lamp.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, Lisa laid the magazine back on the table and turned to face the doorway. A tall, slim woman appeared in the opening, her gray hair swept up and away from her face and coiled in a smooth chignon at the nape. Lisa was struck by the contrast between its light color and the deep black of her eyes. It was hard to guess the woman’s age. There was something so youthful about her as she walked into the room, smiling and confident.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said to Lisa’s mother. “I’m Mrs. Cole.”

“I’m Mrs. Blomquist and this is my daughter Lisa.”

“How do you do, Lisa.”

Despite the warmth in the greeting, Lisa felt strangely shy and tongue-tied, very much the country hick. She tried standing a little straighter, emulating the woman’s erect carriage, a look emphasized by the heavily padded shoulders of the royal blue dress she wore. Not even her clothes had the dowdy look of an old woman’s, Lisa realized. Women of comparable age in Palmer were either plump or bags of bones, their skin lined and wrinkled like a prune. She’d never seen anyone like Mrs. Cole before, except maybe in the movies.

Lisa was so intent on studying the woman that she missed the conversation between Mrs. Cole and her mother. She couldn’t even remember hearing their voices until Mrs. Cole took a step backwards toward the doorway. “Excuse me a minute. My grandson is out back. I’ll have him take you over to see the house.”

As she left the room, Lisa turned to her mother. “She seems very nice.”

She sniffed in disapproval. “She
claims
she’s a widow. I suppose she could be.” Her eyes swept the room and its contents. “But I have my doubts that this was always a boardinghouse.”

“Mama.” Lisa was shocked by the insinuation that this might once have been a house of ill repute, and that Mrs. Cole had owned it.

“I have been told by more than one person that it isn’t wise to ask too many questions about a woman’s past here in Alaska. It’s been said that many men who have become leading citizens in the community married ‘fallen women.’ They claim there were so few decent women in Alaska during the early days that the men, in desperation, took the other kind for wives.”

“Mama.” Lisa was embarrassed that her mother would even suggest that Mrs. Cole might have been one of those—and strongly suspected that she was jealous.

When Mrs. Cole returned, she was accompanied by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a blue plaid flannel shirt. His face looked as if it had been chiseled out of bronze. His eyes were almost black, like his grandmother’s, but they lacked their warm sparkle. His seemed more guarded and watchful.

“I’d like you to meet my grandson, Wylie Cole. This is Mrs. Blomquist and her daughter Lisa. They presently live in Palmer, but her husband has been hired to help with the building of the new Army fort here in Anchorage. They’re looking for a place to live here so he won’t have to commute back and forth to work.”

Lisa Blomquist. For an instant, Wylie was too stunned to do anything except stare at the girl. Immediately his mind flashed back to that first meeting five years ago. She was the right age. The pigtails were gone and the color of her hair was maybe a shade or two different, but her eyes were still big and blue. Wylie was sure there couldn’t possibly be two girls named Lisa Blomquist living in the Matanuska Valley; she had to be the same one he’d met.

She stared at him intently, but without a flicker of recognition in her expression. She didn’t remember him. Wylie felt deflated by the discovery and wished he could jog her memory, but claiming a previous acquaintance was one of the oldest lines in the book. He covered his disappointment, realizing that he’d obviously not made as much of an impression on her as she’d made on him.

“It’s a pleasure.” He addressed both Lisa and her mother. “My car’s outside. I’ll be happy to drive you over to see the house.”

Wylie. It was an unusual name, yet somehow it sounded familiar to her. Lisa couldn’t think why until she was seated in the back seat of the Chevy, then she remembered that the pilot who had been killed in that plane crash near Barrow, Alaska along with Will Rogers, had been named Wiley, too. At the time, everybody had been talking about it. She remembered the pilot’s name because it had been the same as that boy she had met— That was it, she realized. She was almost positive his name had been Wylie Cole. But it was so long ago. She leaned forward in her seat, straining for a look at the driver’s face. The black hair and eyes, the Indianlike profile—it had to be him.

She wanted to say something, to mention their past meeting, but with her mother sitting there in the front seat beside him she couldn’t bring herself to do it. So she sat back in her seat and stared out the window, now and then stealing glances at the back of his head, wishing she had the nerve to speak up.

At the house, Wylie showed the mother and daughter through the rooms. Completing the circuit, they came back to the starting point in the front room. Wylie halted. “Was there anything else you’d like to see, Mrs. Blomquist? Are there any questions?”

“I think I’d like to take another look at the kitchen. It seemed a little small.”

“Go right ahead. Take all the time you want. I’ll wait here for you.” He didn’t feel like accompanying her.

“Aren’t you coming, Lisa?” Mrs. Blomquist asked as she started toward the kitchen located in the rear of the house.

“No, I … I think I’ll wait here.” Her back was to him as she spoke. He studied the natural luster of her light brown hair, long and sleek with the ends turning under to brush the tops of her shoulders. He wanted to reach out and touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked. She watched her mother leave the room, then turned and hesitantly smiled at him. “It’s a nice house.”

“Yes.”

“I know this question will probably sound funny.” She seemed very nervous and self-conscious, as if she wasn’t altogether sure she should be saying any of this. “But … is your father a bush pilot?”

“Yes, he is.” Wylie frowned at her curiously, wondering what had prompted the question.

“I thought so.” Her lips parted in a wide smile that seemed to light up her face. “We’ve met before. I don’t know if you remember—”

“—the dinner at the community hall for the colonists on their way to the Matanuska Valley.” Wylie smiled broadly.

She stared at him in amazement. “You do.”

“As I recall, you had pigtails about down to here.” He drew a line across the top of her collarbone, unable to resist the urge to touch her, however briefly.

“And my brothers thought you were an Indian.”

“That’s right.”

She seemed to glow with happiness. “Do you still like to hunt and fish? I remember you telling me—telling us how you had killed a grizzly bear that winter.”

“I still do.” He caught the sound of her mother’s footsteps and Lisa glanced in the direction of the kitchen.

“It’s a nice house,” she repeated.

“I hope your parents decide to rent it.”

“So do I.”

“If they do, we’ll probably see each other again.”

“We probably will.” She seemed to be as pleased about that as he was.

“Maybe we could even take in a movie some Saturday night,” Wylie suggested as her mother came into view.