Tisha (20 page)

A little later Fred and I were close to Lost Chicken when we started back for home. It was getting dark already, so we took a short cut across some fresh snow, figuring we’d pick up the trail again just past Uncle Arthur’s place. The dogs had to break trail, leaping forward like fish breaking water, and it slowed them down, so we walked.

We found Uncle Arthur doing some “drifting” a little distance from his cabin. It was back-breaking work, especially for an old man like him, and he’d taken his parka off. He was all gnarled and twisted up from rheumatism and he must have been about seventy, but it didn’t stop him from working with a pick and shovel. They were lying beside the prospect hole he’d dug, along with his coat.

Inside the hole, which was about two feet deep now, he’d piled kindling and logs. He’d put a match to them and was climbing out of the hole just as we got there. The fire would thaw the frozen ground so he’d be able to dig down a little further. Eventually he’d dig down to paydirt—anywhere from twenty to forty feet—and if he got some good pans out of it he’d spend the summer mining the surrounding ground. If the hole didn’t pan out he’d prospect somewhere else.

“How you be, Missis?” he asked me.

“Fine, Uncle Arthur. You enjoying your cornflakes?”

“Hate cornflakes,” he said. “Gave’m to Mert Atwood. That dumb bunny’ll eat anything.”

I knew he’d say that, but I couldn’t resist asking him. Now that Mr. Strong was able to use his big sled he’d finally brought out the corn flakes Uncle Arthur had ordered—six cartons of them. But Uncle Arthur hadn’t really wanted them. Like a lot of other people in Chicken, Uncle Arthur felt that Mr. Strong was making too much money on his mail contract, so they ordered as many bulky things by parcel post as they could. The more space Mr. Strong had to give to parcel post, the less he had to use for freighting in the more profitable items that he sold in his store or that people ordered from Eagle. Uncle Arthur had hit on the perfect item to annoy him—cheap, bulky, and light enough so that the parcel-post rate was cheap, too. Now he had all the other old-timers ordering them. But Mr. Strong got back at them by not bringing them out until after the freeze-up, when he had plenty of room on his sled.

Uncle Arthur picked up his coat from the snow and put it on, throwing his head back so his beard wouldn’t get caught as he buttoned up.

“Gonna have penmanship drill tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

He never seemed to get tired of it, and if I didn’t have it on the day he showed up he sulked and complained.

“That the way the two of you come out,” he asked Fred, “on one pair of skis?”

“Yes.”

“Makes it pretty cozy, I guess, but I don’t know if it’s somethin’ the kiddies ought to see. Doesn’t set a good example, if you know what I mean.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. It made Fred and me uncomfortable. It was hard for me to figure him out. Sometimes I thought he liked me. Other times, like now, he’d be cantankerous.

Fred talked mining with him for a couple of minutes, then we left. I knew he was still bothered by what Uncle Arthur had said. Instead of the two of us skijoring
out, he slung the skis over his shoulder and held the dogs on the lead.

Once we were out of sight I took his arm.

“When are you going to take me on that snow picnic?” He’d promised to a couple of times already.

“I was thinking we’d go in a couple of weeks.”

“Why so long?”

“Have to go out on the trap line in a few days.”

I was disappointed. He’d be gone for about a week. What was worse was that he hated everything about trapping. Most of the time the animal was still alive when he got to it. Hissing and snarling with fear, it had to be clubbed to death, then skinned before the carcass froze. He’d told me all about it. The only reason he did it was because his family needed the money.

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” I said.

“Me too. I’m going to miss you.”

“Will you?”

“Yes I will.”

“I feel the same way. I’ll miss you too.”

If that didn’t let him know how much I liked him, then nothing would. He dropped the skis on the snow and I got all tensed up wondering if he was going to kiss me. I could tell he wanted to because he looked very serious. Suddenly I thought of what he’d said about going out on the trap line. “Fred, you’re not going to miss the dance, are you?” The Friday night dance was only a few days away.

“Don’t you worry, I won’t.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have midnight supper together this time?”

Uncle Arthur always brought his ancient gramophone to the dances and along about eleven o’clock the square dancing stopped and everybody danced to the scratchy records he put on. He always saved the
Home Sweet Home
waltz for last and nobody knew when he was going to play it. When he did, it was the signal for each man to run and grab the woman he wanted to take to the roadhouse for a midnight supper. I’d ended up with Mert Atwood one time and Joe Temple the other, but never with Fred. Uncle Arthur
always made sure we were too far apart to get to each other.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Fred said, “but I think the odds are against it. Wouldn’t do for you to end up with a half-breed.”

It was the first time he’d ever said anything like that.

“I know, but will you try anyway?”

“I have. I even know what color the label on that record is, but Uncle Arthur’s pretty cagey.”

“What color is it?”

“Green.”

“You’re really smart. I never thought of that.”

I’d stayed as close to him as I could without stepping on his feet, so if he wanted to kiss me he had all the chance in the world. He looked at me in that serious way again and even before his arms went around me I knew he was going to. He was still holding onto the dogs’ lead line, and I thought to myself that if one of those dogs pulled on the line now I’d kill it. But they all stayed quiet. And then Fred’s mouth was on mine. I felt gawky and nervous at first and my heart was pumping like a steam engine, then all of a sudden I was feeling warm and wonderful, as if this was where I’d always been headed. After he kissed me he held me away from him a little and the way he looked at me I knew he’d always cared for me more than he’d let on. A lot more. Then his mouth was on mine again.

His parka was open at the neck and when I laid my head against his shoulder I could feel the heat coming from his body. He smelled of wood smoke. I wished we could go somewhere where we could be alone and sit and talk and hold each other.

“I shouldn’t have done that, Anne.”

“Why not?”

“You know why. There’s a lot of difference between us.”

“Does that mean you want me to become a Democrat?”

I don’t know what made me say it. Usually I was the serious one between the two of us, but it made him
laugh, and he took me in his arms and kissed me again.

We found a place to sit down on a small shelf of rock right over a creek bottom. Fred cut some spruce boughs for us to sit on and we leaned back, me in the crook of his arm. There was some scraggly brush right in front of us, so unless somebody knew we were there we couldn’t be seen from the trail. It was a cozy spot and we snuggled together for warmth. After a while I said, “You still think you shouldn’t be kissing me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“Anybody sees us you’ll be in for trouble.”

“How about you?”

“There’s nothing anybody can do to me.”

I wasn’t as sure as he was. “That day Mr. Vaughn picked on me I think he ended up more mad at you than at me.”

“Probably,” Fred said.

“Doesn’t that bother you, people feeling that way?”

“No.”

“It bothers me, makes me feel as if I’m in prison.”

“Oh, maybe it bothers me once in a while,” he admitted, “with people like Strong, or the Carews, but not with the likes of Vaughn. If somebody doesn’t know me, what do I care what they think about me?”

“I was afraid he was going to beat you up that day.”

“Not while I had that baseball bat he wouldn’t.”

“Would you have used it?”

He smiled. “Not if I could have run.”

“You mean you
would
have used it?”

“If he’d really tried to hit you, I guess so … I don’t know.”

We started talking about what he wanted to do in the future. He’d worked for wages a few times and he hadn’t liked it. What he wanted more than anything was to be on his own. He and his father had plans to buy a tractor. With it, he said, he’d be able to do ten times the mining they were doing with pick and shovel now.

“How would you get it in here?” I asked him.

“By airplane, have it shipped in piece by piece. It’d
be expensive, but it would be worth it.” Eventually he wanted to have his own airplane too, he said. There were a million things he wanted to do. He wanted to travel and he was thinking that if everything worked out the way he wanted he might even try farming. He felt it could be done, that anything that was done in the States could be done here. He loved it here.

“You just look out there,” he said. “It’s so big and beautiful it makes you feel wonderful just to be alive. I couldn’t even think of living any place else.”

I’d never heard a boy his age talk that way. The boys I’d known were all interested in going to work for some big company or other, getting an automobile and maybe buying a house one day.

We were still talking when all of a sudden a gust of cold air hit me. It was as if a giant box of dry ice had dropped on us. It took my breath away.

“We’d better get back,” Fred said. “Temperature’s starting to drop.”

I couldn’t understand what his hurry was. We weren’t more than half an hour away from the settlement Ten minutes later I realized what he meant, though. Ice fog was swirling around us and I could feel the cold nipping at my body, almost like teeth, trying to pull the heat out of me. It made me realize what it must be like for Fred to be caught in that kind of freeze when he was out trapping in the middle of nowhere. The ice fog became so thick that we had to depend on the dogs to stay on the trail. If I’d been alone I’d have been scared, but as long as I was with Fred I wasn’t All the way back I felt as if I were part of him, his body pressing against mine, lean and strong.

By the time we reached my quarters the thermometer outside the window read thirty-five below zero. When he’d called for me it had been zero.

Nancy had a roaring fire going in the stove, but even so there was frost along the far walls. Fred stayed long enough to warm up, then headed for home. “See you Friday,” he said.

I felt so good I wanted to sing out and dance around the room. I had more energy than I knew what to do with, so I washed some clothes. I sang
Row, Row, Row
Your Boat,
scrubbing up and down on the washboard to keep time.

“Boy, are
you
happy,” Nancy said.

“Happy? Of course I’m happy. I’m always happy.”

“Not like you are right now.”

“Fred and I had a nice time.”

Fred was a kind of a taboo subject with her, so she didn’t say anything. I could tell something was on her mind, though.

She waited until after supper to bring it up.

“You mind if I tell you something, Anne?” she asked me while we were doing the dishes.

“Go ahead.”

“Sure you won’t mind?”

“Is it that bad?”

She shrugged. “Well… There’s a lot of talk goin’ around about you and Fred.”

“What kind of talk?”

“You
know. That you and him are hangin’ around each other too much.”

“Let ’em talk.”

“Some of it’s pretty salty.”

“For instance.”

“Ah … you know what I mean.”

“Who’s doing the talking?”

“Mr. Vaughn, Angela, Harry Dowles—all of ’em.”

“I don’t care about them.”

“They’re not the only ones. A lot of other people don’t like it either. A couple of ’em have already written to Juneau about you.”

“I guess there’s not much I can do about it.”

She’d been washing the same plate for the past minute. Finally she dipped it in the cold water and handed it to me to dry.

“If he was any kind of a man,” she said, “he’d stay away from you. He oughtta know how people around here feel.”

“He does.”

“Then why does he keep comin’?”

“Because we like each other.”

She rested her hands on the rim of the washtub. “Anne,” she said, turning to me, “you’re so good you
don’t even realize what you’re doing. That man’s a breed. The way you act towards ’im is, well …
you
know, like somebody who’s more than a friend.”

“Is that the only way you think about him, Nancy—that he’s a half-breed?”

“Well he is.”

“Does that mean he’s less of a person?”

“I never thought about it much.”

“I’m pretty fond of him—and more than just as a friend.”

She picked up a cup and started washing it I couldn’t read her expression, but she was unhappy.

“We could talk about it if you like,” I said.

“No, that’s all right,” she said quietly.

For the next couple of days it stayed so cold that Nancy and I warmed up the bed with hot rocks before we got in. Even then we tossed a coin to see who was going to get in first, and when we woke up in the morning the blankets were stuck to the wall. On Thursday it dropped to forty below, and even though we moved all the tables in the schoolroom close to the stove, Willard, Joan and Lily couldn’t work for their feet being so cold. We finally had to move the whole class into my quarters and let the little ones sit in the bed.

When Uncle Arthur showed up for school he said that if it was this cold and here it was only November, we were probably in for a three-dog winter. I asked him what that was and he said that a one-dog winter was nothing. You stay warm at night with just one dog in bed with you. A two-dog winter, now that was tough, but a three-dog, “Well, missis,” he said, “it gets so cold the smoke freezes in the stovepipe.”

That was an exaggeration about the smoke, but it was close. Up until the cold weather hit that week I never understood why Mr. Strong kept such a big supply of laxative pills in his store. I knew after it did, though: nobody wanted to go to the outhouse until it was absolutely necessary, so by the time you went you needed all the help you could get.