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My thanks to Alfred Miller, who grew up in a town much like Iditarod Creek and who patiently answered all my questions; to my dear daughter-in-law Suzanne Hill, who, unasked, did the Internet research for me; and to Terry Sweetsir, who told me his tooth story so long ago.
For my accomplished grandchildren: Meghan, Hayley, Lex and Rowan, Hank, Ewan, Lewis, Jake, Ian, Aubrey, and Jack. And for the two I’ve borrowed—Max and Eliza.
—K. H.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE: THE PAPAS
CHAPTER TWO: THREE RIVERS
CHAPTER THREE: GHOST TOWN
CHAPTER FOUR: IDITAROD CREEK
CHAPTER FIVE: SWEARING
CHAPTER SIX: NEW HOUSE
CHAPTER SEVEN: BUDDY AND WILL
CHAPTER EIGHT: HOUSE WITH THE GREEN ROOF
CHAPTER NINE: THE DREDGE
CHAPTER TEN: IDITAROD CREEK LADIES
CHAPTER ELEVEN: VISITORS
CHAPTER TWELVE: TWO KINDS OF WRITING
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE STRAIGHT LADY
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DOC LARUE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A BIRTHDAY AND A NAME
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE DEACON
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DOUGHNUTS
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: FOURTH OF JULY
CHAPTER NINETEEN: AUGUST
CHAPTER TWENTY: WINTER COMING
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE PACKAGE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: CHARLIE HOOTCH
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: MEETING RENZO
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: FOUR MORE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: EIGHT CHARLIES
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE PIANO BOX
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: BRUISES
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: QUIET
CHAPTER THIRTY: ANOTHER BOY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: BACK TO WORK
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: EERO AND STIG
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
THE PAPAS
BO’S PAPAS were Jack Jackson and Arvid Ivorsen. She didn’t have a mama.
Bo started out with a mama, of course. Everyone does.
Hers was Mean Milly—not a nice motherly sort of person as anyone could tell from her name—but Mean Milly didn’t want the job of mama, so she took off. Just before she got on the steamboat headed upriver she marched over to Arvid, who was standing on the riverbank smoking a cigarette, and shoved her baby at him.
A few minutes later Jack came out of the mine cookshack and there was Arvid looking startled, standing on the banks of the Yukon with a baby in his arms, watching the steamboat go away.
Jack could see that Arvid didn’t know one thing about newborns because of the way the baby’s head was wobbling around. But Jack was an expert on the subject, so naturally they partnered up to take care of Bo.
And that’s how Bo came to have no mama and two papas.
* * *
SHE WASN’T long out of diapers when she found that it wasn’t the usual arrangement. And she could see that hers weren’t the usual sort of fathers. People meeting them for the first time would get this look on their faces the way people do when they come up against something out of the ordinary. Trying not to look surprised, trying to pretend they’d seen fathers like that lots of times.
For one thing, her papas were so much the same. Both massive, with bulging arm muscles straining the sleeves of their shirts. And very tall. You don’t often see one man that big, and so two of them together is the kind of thing you can’t quite take in for a minute.
Other than that, they were completely different. Arvid had ice blue eyes and straight Swedish hair, getting a little thin on top. He always swore in Swedish.
Jack was black with smoky gray eyes and a soft Southern way of talking. He hardly ever swore.
Bo called them both Papa, which might have gotten confusing, but it didn’t.
When Graf came along, the papas hardly blinked. Just added him to the mix.
Explaining about unusual things can get long and complicated, so when someone asked how he and Arvid came to have two kids, Jack would just smile and say it was downright uncanny how he and Arvid were always both there, right on the spot, whenever someone was giving kids away.
* * *
ARVID AND JACK had known each other a long time when they got Bo. Arvid came north during the big Klondike gold rush in 1897, and Jack came a few years later along with hordes of other men. That gold rush fizzled out fast, and most of those stampeders, disgusted and broke, couldn’t leave fast enough. But some, like Jack and Arvid, stayed—because they liked the mining life and because they liked the country.
Over the next twenty years Jack and Arvid often crossed paths in one mining camp or another, had a game of cards or teamed up to do some blacksmithing. They were both working at the Rampart mine when Bo happened to them.
Right after that, Jack and Arvid went to work at the Ballard Creek Mine up the Koyukuk River. Jack was the camp cook, and Arvid did the blacksmithing. But after they got Graf, the mine ran out of gold, closed down, and the papas had to find another job. They had to leave the place that had been Bo’s home for all of her life.
So they were on the way to their new job in a mining camp, which was far away in the Iditarod country. Down two big rivers and up two.
Down was easier because they could just glide along the cold river, using the long pole to steer. Up was harder because they had to travel against the current. Then they might have to use the little three-horsepower gas engine—but not any more than they had to because gas was hard to come by.
Bo and Graf were under the bow, snuggled into the billow of down sleeping bags their papas kept stored there. They crawled under there when it was raining or the wind was blowing.
Bo was trying to teach Graf how to think backwards. Graf had only belonged to them for a little while, so she wanted him to see how lucky it was that they’d all ended up together.
But thinking backwards took imagination, and she wasn’t sure Graf had any.
It was Jack who had taught Bo how to think backwards.
“A lot of little things have to happen first before a big thing can happen. Really tiny things—things no one would pay any attention to—could change someone’s life forever,” he said.
Like if Arvid hadn’t stopped to have a cigarette, Bo wouldn’t ever have belonged to the papas. Just a little, little thing like that had turned her life in a completely different direction.
Bo did a lot of thinking backwards. Jack said she was really good at it, because it was like anything else. If you practice a lot, you improve. But you could get carried away—go backwards on and on, all the way to the beginning of the earth.
You had to know when to stop.
The papas had pulled their yellow slickers on when it started to rain. Jack was hunkered near the bow, reading the water under the brim of his rain hat. Arvid was standing spread-legged for balance, steering the boat with the long pole.
If a wind whipped up and turned the river rough, or if the rain fell so hard they couldn’t see anymore, the papas would pull the boat up on the beach, and they’d wait it out.
But it wasn’t that bad yet.
It was noisy under the bow, the little wav
es slap-slapping against the bottom of the boat, the raindrops drumming over their heads on the wood of the bow, so Bo had to talk loudly.
“See, Max always brought the mail in the winter with his dog team and Silver was his lead dog. But Silver got a hurt foot, and Max had to put him in the sled. And he hooked up Frosty to take his place. But Frosty wasn’t as hard-pulling a dog as Silver, so Max was late with the mail.”
She paused dramatically. “See, if Max wasn’t late, he wouldn’t have been behind you and your dad. He would have been ahead of you. So he never would have found you in the mail shack. And you would have frozen. And it’s all because of Silver’s hurt foot!”
Bo thought she had told all this very well, but Graf just gave her a troubled look and didn’t say anything.
Bo decided to give up on thinking backwards.
“Do you remember your dad?”
He didn’t answer, and she hadn’t expected him to. Graf wasn’t a big talker.
His dad had died in that mail shack, but Graf never talked about anything that happened to him before they got him. Arvid said maybe he didn’t remember, and Jack said maybe he didn’t want to.
She snuggled down and pulled a sleeping bag up over her. The thrumming rain always made her sleepy.
Suddenly Graf’s head popped out of the sleeping bag, a tuft of hair standing straight up.
“He got sick.”
Bo nodded, startled.
“He had a fingernail was torn off.” Graf pointed to his index finger to show her which one.
“Oh,” said Bo, getting that lurch in her stomach that she always got when someone was hurt. “How did that happen?”
Graf gave a little shake of his head. Didn’t know.
Bo smiled. Graf had started to open up.
CHAPTER TWO
THREE RIVERS
WHEN THEY LEFT Ballard Creek, the boys from the mine had given them the records and the gramophone from the bunkhouse to keep them company on their trip.
Jack had fixed a place for it on the bow of the boat, tied it down with ropes to keep it steady. When the weather was good and the river was smooth, they played all their favorite songs: “Bye-Bye, Blackbird,” “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.”
It was a good thing they had their music, because the first river, the Koyukuk, was a long, lonely river. Five hundred miles, and they hardly saw anyone at all.
“Why aren’t there any people?” Bo asked.
“Hard country,” was all Arvid said.
But they saw fat porcupines waddling busily along the banks, and moose stripping the new green leaves from the willows. The moose were skinny from the long winter, their thick winter coats shedding off in ragged swatches.
When the moose saw the boat, they’d take fright—roll their eyes, heave their huge bodies back into the undergrowth, and disappear into the dark woods. Bo wished she could pet one.
Down the river they went—one papa minding the boat, reading the water, steering—while the other papa hunkered down in the boat with Bo on one big thigh and Graf on the other. And they’d talk about the things they were seeing.
Lots of trees hung over the river, straight out, barely clinging to the soil with their root toes.
“Look, Papa, those trees crowding behind are meanies. They just shoved and shoved until the front ones fell over,” said Bo.
The papas stayed away from the bank when there were trees like that.
“Be bad news to be under one when it falls,” Jack said.
Everywhere there were crowds of wild roses and bluebells, and around every bend, ravens high in the spruce trees screamed to warn one another when they saw the boat.
On the sandbars there were strange twisted driftwood shapes, the skeletons of those trees that had been pushed off the bank, and sometimes there were strolling pigeon-toed bears.
Once they saw a big mama bear with five cubs. Five. The littlest was no bigger than a rabbit.
“Likely that mama bear picked up another sow’s cubs for some reason, because look, they’re different sizes. Hard to believe it’s one litter,” Jack said. “I never heard about a bear having so many at one go. Maybe she’s just a good-hearted mama bear, taking in strays.”
Bo made up a story in her head about how the mama was raising all the orphans, like her and Graf, and she told it to Graf at night when they were tucked into their sleeping bags under the bow of the boat.
She thought how nice it would be to have five children. In Ballard Creek, no one had five kids. Oscar’s mama had three, and that was the most anyone had. Bo popped her head out from under the bow.
“Papa, how many children can there be in a family?”
Jack raised his eyebrows and looked at Arvid. “What now?” he said.
Arvid laughed. “Family I knew in Washington had seventeen,” he said. Bo looked at him to see if he was serious, then went back under the bow. She was sure Arvid was joking.
* * *
BO HAD A LOOSE TOOTH, right in front on the top, in the exact same place Oscar had his first loose tooth. Oscar was Bo’s best friend in Ballard Creek. Oscar’s tooth fell out, left a wonderful bloody hole, and everyone in Ballard gave him pennies. Bo wanted to have hers fall out at Ballard Creek as well so she could show everyone, especially Oscar. And get pennies. But it hadn’t fallen out.
Her tooth had been loose for weeks, but this time when she prodded it, it didn’t pop back up again like it usually did.
“Papa,” she said urgently to Jack, “I think it’s coming out.”
Jack tipped her chin up with one big finger and said, “Yes, ma’am, just hanging on by a thread. Little twist and—”
Out it came.
Bo looked lovingly at the little white tooth in Jack’s hand. Then she got a can of tomatoes from the grub box to use for a mirror, and she examined her new hole from every angle in the shiny top of the can.
“I wish I could show Oscar,” she said.
* * *
THERE WERE LOTS of things for Bo and Graf to do in the boat. They’d stick their hands in the cold river and twist them this way and that to make the patterns in the water change—braided one way, braided another, wavy lines sideways, big waves that curled over.
And they could watch the clouds boiling and shifting into different pictures. Then they’d argue because they never could agree about what the pictures were.
They made some people out of funny twisted driftwood branches and played pretend with them under the bow, out of the sun.
Bo liked to imagine all sorts of adventurous things with their people, but as soon as she started with something like, “Pretend there are crocodiles,” Graf would frown.
“No! I don’t want my man to be scared.”
So Bo’d have to make her pretend not so dangerous and exciting.
When they were tired of doing those things, Jack and Arvid told them all the stories they could think of and taught them crazy old songs—“Polly Wolly Doodle,” “Keemo Kimo,” “Billy Boy.”
Jack made a checkerboard from a piece of driftwood and showed them how to play checkers with black rocks and white rocks for the checkers. Which they didn’t play at all by the rules.
* * *
ARVID SHOVED THE POLE hard into the river bottom, and the boat swerved and came to a stop, grating on sand.
“Time for lunch,” Jack said.
Jack jerked his chin at them and threw his thumb over his shoulder. That meant get off into the brush and pee.
Every time they stopped, the papas would make them pee. Even if they didn’t have to.
Bo and Graf wore all their winter gear because it was very cold on the river in early summer. So Bo had to struggle with her snowsuit as well as her overalls before she could pull down her panties and then she had to be careful not to pee on everything. And she had to be careful not to get her behind scratched by the evil thornbushes that were everywhere. But it was no problem for Graf. Just a few buttons to undo and that was it.
“It’s too bad that girls have such a lot of work to pee, when boys have it so easy,” she grumbled.
The papas didn’t have anything to say to that, just gave each other one of those looks and grinned.
Graf and Bo were so cramped up in the boat they nearly exploded with energy when the papas pulled off the river for lunch or to camp at night.
They ran and ran up and down the sandbar like wild things, covered themselves with sand, dug holes with anything handy, and looked for interesting rocks. They wanted to bring the best rocks with them in the boat, but the papas would just raise an eyebrow. No room for rocks, no kind of way.
* * *
AFTER MANY LONG DAYS on the Koyukuk, they took a right turn onto the wide, wide Yukon River. Bo and Graf were surprised to see that the Yukon was a completely different color than the Koyukuk. Like coffee with lots of cream.
“Full of silt,” Jack said. “And silt is bad news. You’ll see when I give you a bath.”
It was true about the silt. The water was scratchy on their skins, and there was powdery silt on their clothes after Jack washed them.
But the Yukon wasn’t a lonely river. A lot of boats were on the river now that it was nearly clear of ice.
Once they even met a boat with a gramophone like theirs playing on the bow. The sound of the two different kinds of music mixed together for a minute, and the men in the other boat waved and cheered at them as they passed, going the other way.
Here and there were wood camps with hundreds of cords of firewood stacked on the bank. Bo and Graf had never seen so much wood.
“The sternwheelers stop at these wood camps and the deckhands take all that wood down to the furnace room,” Arvid told them. “Got a huge furnace that makes the steam that turns the paddle wheels.
“But you’d never believe how much wood those boats burn up. Can’t go far before they got to stop and get another hundred cords,” he said. “All along the river here, you’ll see big naked places where every tree’s been cut for the boats. Makes you wonder.”
A big fishwheel, turning slowly, screek, screek, meant they would come to a fish camp soon. The fishwheels scooped up the fish heading upriver to spawn, hundreds of them.
Bo at Iditarod Creek Page 1