Bo at Iditarod Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  “Jack makes bread different,” she said.

  “This is sour rye,” Eero said. “Finnish rye. Takes some getting used to. Buddy here, he can’t get enough, but Will don’t like it.”

  The knot was called a bowline, and while they ate their bread, and Buddy cut himself some more, Eero showed Graf each step over and over, slowly. When after a few tries, Graf got the knot to pull tight with the right-sized loop at the bottom, he gave them all a joyful look.

  “Do that a couple times a day till your fingers know it without your thinking,” said Eero. “No sense learning things with your brain. Got to learn them with your fingers. Unless your fingers got it memorized, your brain will forget it quick.”

  Eero didn’t offer to teach Bo knots, and Bo was glad, because she was pretty sure she’d never be able to do it at all.

  Another old man came in the door carrying a package wrapped in brown paper. Bo knew it came from the store because it was tied with red string like the packages the papas had brought home.

  He was just the opposite of Eero, very tall and thin, almost as tall as Jack and Arvid. But kind of bent over like the tall reeds that grew along the creek at Ballard. He set the package on the dresser under the window and then held his hand out to Bo.

  “Stig Koskinen,” he said. Then he bent very low to shake Graf’s hand. Stig jerked his head at Bo.

  “Your mother?” he asked Graf.

  Graf didn’t get a joke very often, but this time he laughed at Stig. Then he said, “She’s my sister. Bo.”

  Bo felt a funny pinch in her chest. My sister. It was the first time he’d ever said that.

  Stig poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the woodstove and sat down next to Bo. His hair was a wild crop of white, and he had thick bushy eyebrows that went every which way.

  “Bo—” he started, but Bo interrupted him.

  “I know. Eero told me. It’s a boy’s name in Finn country.” She looked at him from underneath her eyebrows.

  Stig laughed. “I got a feeling you don’t like that very much,” he said. “But in lots of places, it’s ordinary for names to be all mixed up. Lots of Eskimo names are for both boys and girls, you know. Used to always name a baby for someone just died, and so they had names could be used for both sexes. Baby was supposed to be that person come back to the world, see.”

  Bo looked startled. “Our Eskimos didn’t do that,” she said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Your Eskimos?” Stig asked.

  “Where we come from, Ballard Creek,” she said.

  “Oh, those are a different kind of Eskimo. Kobuk Eskimos, speak Inupiaq. I was talking about Yup’ik, down where me and Eero used to mine.”

  “That’s what Paulie’s mother said,” Bo told him. “I never knew before that there were more kinds of Eskimos than our kind.”

  “You speak Eskimo?” asked Stig.

  “Oh yes,” said Bo. “And Graf, too.”

  “Good to grow up where there’s more than one language,” said Stig. “Your age, I could speak Finnish and Saami.”

  “What’s Saami?”

  “They live where I was raised,” said Stig. “Some people call them Lapps. Tell you all about them sometime.”

  “Some Lapps came to Ballard Creek when I was sick last year,” Bo said.

  “Reindeer herders,” said Stig. “Lapps is a name other people gave them. They don’t like it. They’re Saami. People got a right to be called what they want to be called.”

  Bo nodded. She thought so too.

  She was learning a lot visiting the people in Iditarod Creek.

  There were newspapers glued carefully over all the walls. A lot of the old cabins in Ballard Creek had been papered in newspapers to keep the warm in, but Bo could tell the ones on Stig and Eero’s walls weren’t in English. “Are those Finn newspapers?” she asked.

  “Right,” said Stig. “Finnish, you say.”

  “Nels Niemi back home was a Finn, a Finnish man,” said Bo. “His sister Asa came to live with him last year, and everyone said he was lucky to have a partner who could cook.”

  Eero and Graf had their heads together, almost touching. Eero was showing Graf another knot—the half-hitch—and he didn’t look up when he said, “Good to have a partner.”

  Stig poured himself more coffee. “Your papas been partners for long? Me and Eero been partners for thirty-five years.”

  “Oh my,” said Bo. It sounded like a forever long time to her. She twisted one of her braids to help her think. “My papas weren’t partners before they got me. Jack said he and Arvid just partnered up the minute they got me because they knew I wasn’t going to be a one-man job.”

  “Well, that’s how partners is,” Stig said. “Don’t partner up till you’ve got a job too big for one. Sometimes one of you works for a grubstake while the other is out prospecting. Hard country without a partner. Need someone to watch your back.”

  “The man Ballard Creek is named after—he got eaten by a bear, and so all the men in the mine named Ballard Creek for him. His partner still lives there, and he still misses him,” Bo said.

  Stig took a sip of his coffee. “Course, partners don’t always get along. Split up more often than not.”

  “My papas are good-natured,” Bo told him, thinking of what Will had said.

  “Good-natured is about the best you can get in a partner,” said Stig. “Beats strong, or smart, or honest, or rich.”

  Eero raised his eyebrow at Stig.

  “Well,” said Stig, “maybe good-natured don’t beat rich.”

  “My best friend at Ballard Creek was Oscar,” Bo told them. “Everyone used to say we were partners. I wish I could write him a letter, but I don’t know how to write yet. My papas said they’d write it for me when they get time.”

  “Well, now,” said Stig. “Here’s a man with plenty of time. That’s me. Living right next door to you. You just come here and tell me what you want to say, and I’ll write it down. You can take it to the post office, and it’ll be off to Ballard Creek in the next mail plane.”

  Bo felt a rush of happiness.

  “Yes,” said Bo. “Oh yes, thank you.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT when Bo and Graf and the papas were finishing dinner, she remembered some of the questions she’d been meaning to ask the papas. “What’s Athabascan?”

  “That’s a kind of Indian here in Alaska. Like those people at the wood camps and the fish camps,” Jack said. “Likely Graf here is part Athabascan.”

  Jack had a cigar Hardy had given him, and he was doing something interesting to the end of it with his pocket knife. “There’s Eskimos and Indians, you know. Different ways. Different talk,” Jack said.

  “And what’s a Canuck, then?”

  “That’s a name for someone from Canada.” He looked up at her. “Why you asking?”

  “That’s what Will and Buddy said Maggie and Frenchie were,” Bo said. “Athabascan and Canuck. There are a lot of names for what kind of person you are, aren’t there? Like when Sandor used to call Tomas a Polack. That meant where he came from, I forget the name of the country. And Buddy said you were a nigger. But it didn’t mean where you were from. He said it was the word for brown people like you.”

  In the sudden stillness when Jack and Arvid looked at each other, Graf scowled at his fork and growled, “Eero said nigger is a bad word.”

  Arvid looked grim.

  “Mmmm, mmm, mmmmm,” hummed Jack, which meant there was something to deal with.

  He held a match to his cigar and puffed on it till the end glowed.

  After he blew out the smoke, Jack said, “Sometimes nigger surely is a mean word. Sometimes it’s just a word. Like when Will said it.”

  Jack gave them his two-dimple smile, his that’s-just-the-way-it-is smile. “You know, there’s a lot of mean words out there. A lot. No end to mean names.”

  Bo and Graf were frowning at the papas, troubled.

  “Guess you two didn’t know the
re were mean people in the world,” Arvid said sadly.

  Bo and Graf looked at each other. “Miz Eller,” Graf said, pointing his chin in the direction of the Eller house.

  Jack and Arvid grinned delightedly. They’d already heard a lot about Miz Eller.

  “Right!” said Arvid. “Miz Eller. Now, she’s the kind wouldn’t use mean names ’cause it’s not genteel, but she’s mean every other kind of way. There’s genteel meanness and plain meanness.”

  “I swear I’d rather deal with plain meanness,” Jack said with a laugh. “Any day of the year.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DREDGE

  ARVID AND JACK went to work on the dredge as soon as they were settled in the house. They’d lost so many weeks of work traveling to Iditarod Creek they had no time to waste. Jack worked nights. He got home from the dredge at six in the morning just as Arvid was ready to walk out the door to do his day shift.

  First thing when he got home, Jack had to repair the damage. Arvid always left the kitchen in an uproar when he cooked breakfast for himself—scrambled eggs burnt on the bottom of the skillet, pools of ketchup on the table, oatmeal spilled on the floor, and the bread sliced all crooked. Jack truly hated it when anyone sliced the bread crooked.

  While Bo and Graf were eating breakfast, Jack’s bread dough would rise, and as soon as breakfast was over and the dishes were done, Jack would put the loaves in the oven to bake while Bo and Graf did the dusting.

  There was always dust over everything because the wind blew dirt off the tailing piles, and there was no green thing growing to hold it down.

  Jack hated ordinary dust bad enough, but this dust was something special. “God almighty,” Jack grumbled. “Never saw the like. Dust, and two minutes later, it’s all over everything again. And gritty to boot.”

  Jack bought two feather dusters at Sidney Cohen’s store. Bo and Graf had never seen a feather duster before, and they thought of a lot of things to do with them—like playing war—when Jack wasn’t looking. Which sort of got the dust all scattered around again.

  They skittery-skattered the dusters along the windowsills where the dust lay the thickest and along the shelves in the living room. They dusted the chair rungs and the top of the wood box and everyplace else that dust could come to rest.

  But even standing on a chair, Bo couldn’t dust the new shelves Arvid had made in the kitchen. So Jack did that, which Bo thought was fair, because he and Arvid were the only ones who could see the dust up there.

  Jack had to go to sleep at noon so he could get up and go to work again at six. Bo and Graf could go out in the afternoon, and they had plenty to do in the house as well—quiet things that wouldn’t wake Jack up. So it worked out fine.

  Jack left for his shift as soon as Arvid came home to eat dinner with Bo and Graf, the dinner that Jack had been cooking on the back of the stove all day.

  Bo had a lot to tell Arvid every night while they were having supper.

  Arvid always said he didn’t know how she ever got a mouthful, she was so busy talking. Graf mostly just shook his head to agree or said “yeah” once in a while. But every so often, he’d put his fork down and stare at Bo.

  “Uh-uh,” he’d say, meaning that’s not right. And he’d tell his side of the story.

  Arvid sawed wood every night and then he split it and made kindling while Graf filled the wood box. Bo washed the supper dishes while she played records, and after the chores, there was time to play checkers or take a walk.

  Then Arvid got them washed up and in bed, shiny clean and tired, and read them something from a magazine till they fell asleep.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING Jack took Bo and Graf to watch the dredge work.

  The dredge made such a shocking noise up close that both Bo and Graf put their hands over their ears.

  The dredge was longer than anything Bo and Graf had seen before. Longer than the scow on the Koyukuk, longer than the sternwheelers they’d seen on the Yukon.

  The huge house thing on it was covered with tin, and the sun glared off of it so brightly they could hardly look at it.

  The dredge sat on a barge that floated on metal balloons—pontoons—on the dredge pond. There was a long metal rod called a spud on the front of the dredge, which twisted itself into the ground, loosening the gravel. Then the barge swung screeking to the left side, and another spud came out to grind some more.

  When there was a lot of loose gravel, a line of dredge buckets slammed and rattled down a moving ladder, and each bucket tipped forward to scoop up the dirt the spud had loosened. Then the bucket slid underneath the ladder and another bucket took its place in front.

  Bo tried to count how many buckets were lined up, scooping, pulling the buckets to the inside of the dredge. She had to give up because they never sat still. Jack told her there were thirty-six.

  At the same time that the buckets were pulling gravel inside the dredge, gravel was spitting out the back, making more tailing piles.

  Jack had to bend way down and shout in her ear. “That gravel going out the back,” said Jack, “that’s what’s been sluiced already, has the gold washed out of it.”

  Graf was looking miserable with all the noise and clanking. It was upsetting, Bo thought.

  Jack shouted some more. “The sluice boxes are inside there. The gold drops down to the bottom of the sluice boxes, just like at Ballard Creek. Except what took us months to do there takes an hour here.”

  In Ballard Creek, the men went underground down a long shaft with their picks and shovels to dig. Then they’d put that pay dirt in a bucket to haul up to the top of the shaft with steam power. That was called drift mining.

  “That dirt we moved in Ballard? What took us one winter, they do in a week here with the dredge. In one summer, it can chew up and spit out that whole valley there, all the gravel the town is on now.”

  He laughed at the look on Bo’s face. “I can’t believe it myself,” he said. “And I don’t much like the whole idea. Look at the mess it makes.”

  “Doesn’t it ever stop?” asked Bo.

  “Just a few minutes every day. We can go look at what’s inside later. Maybe Arvid will be working in there today. First we’ll go up to the cookshack and you can meet Louise. She’s the cook. And the boys. They’ll just be eating now.”

  In the cookshack, Jack introduced Bo and Graf to all the men who sat eating at long tables. Not as many as the men at Ballard Creek.

  “I thought there would be more of them,” Bo said.

  “Don’t forget they run two shifts here,” said Jack. “And remember, it don’t take so many men to mine as it did at Ballard.”

  All the men had something to say and looked so happy to see them that Bo felt at home right away.

  “Sit right down by me,” one man said, scooting over on his bench. “How about some cake or pie? Louise makes a rollicking good pie.”

  When the cook set two pieces of pumpkin pie down in front of them, Jack said, “This here is Louise. Don’t give her no trouble, or she’ll thump you!” Bo could tell Jack was kidding because of the way Louise was smiling.

  She was a plump woman, covered in a huge apron. She bent and touched Bo’s cheek with one finger.

  “I have a granddaughter just your age,” she said. Then she went back to the counter to get another piece of pie for Jack.

  The men were almost as noisy as the bunch at Ballard Creek, Bo thought happily. They kept asking questions: How did they like the trip on the river? Were they in cahoots with Buddy and Will, getting up to no good? Did your brother knock out that tooth? Was Jack ever mean? Just tell them, and they would fix things.

  Bo was delighted with them, but Graf was not happy. He began to growl in Eskimo, talking to the table like he always did. “Too noisy,” he was complaining. Bo told him it was just the same back home. Didn’t he remember when everyone was in the cookshack?

  “What’s that you’re talking?” asked the man who was sitting next to them.

  �
��Eskimo,” said Bo. Some of the men began to laugh.

  “Well, now, I never took Jack here for no Eskimo!”

  Jack’s laugh crashed out, and all the men laughed with him. Bo could see that they all loved teasing as much as the boys at Ballard Creek had.

  After the men had clumped out of the cookshack to go back to work, Jack introduced them to Archie. Archie—a little man with wispy gray hair—was the dishwasher, like their Gitnoo had been back home.

  Bo and Graf were startled when Archie walked toward them, bobbing and limping.

  “Archie froze his feet in overflow when he was driving dogs to the coast,” Jack said. The little man nodded at them in agreement. “They cut off all his toes at the hospital.”

  Bo’s stomach lurched.

  “See, I can walk without toes,” Archie said, “but I’m very tippy. I stuff the toes of my boots with extra socks, and that helps, but I still got to be careful. Can’t go racing or nothing. I’ll show you,” he said, and he sat down on a low stool and started to unlace his boots.

  “No,” said Bo in a horrified way. “It always makes my stomach go all funny when I see someone’s hurts.”

  Archie looked disappointed, but he stopped unlacing.

  “Going to show them inside the dredge now,” said Jack.

  “Come back, come back anytime and visit,” Archie said.

  Bo smiled at him. He really was very nice. “Thank you,” she said. She elbowed Graf.

  “Thank you,” said Graf. Then he said, “I wanted to see your feet.”

  * * *

  INSIDE THE DREDGE, it was too noisy to bear. It made Bo feel a little sick.

  They met the dredgemaster and the dredge crew, all of them bustling about. Arvid, they said, was out at the shop.

  One of the oilers looked as if he’d taken a bath in oil.

  “That’s my job when I’m on shift,” Jack said.

  “You never look that dirty,” said Bo.

  “I take a shower and change my clothes before I come home,” said Jack. “Can’t stand being that dirty one minute longer than it takes.”