The Dead Go to Seattle

by Vivian Faith Prescott

  Inside the cabin, salmon chowder simmered in a pot on the woodstove. She placed two bowls, two small plates, and silverware on the table by the window. Grandpa brought the hot pot over and set it in the middle of the old plywood table. He never used a hot pad to protect the table. Heat rings staining it reminded her of a star chart. The new heat ring, bigger than the other rings, could be the sun.

  During dinner, Grandpa Isak told her that while she was out beachcombing, her dad had called on the radio. “He says he found you a job. He’s coming to get you next week. Thursday.”

  What? She didn’t want to go yet. She wasn’t ready. She’d never be ready. She still had to help put up more fish. Then she wanted to experiment with making low-sugar jam from the blueberries. She loved it here. It was so peaceful and quiet. The tide rolled up to the big logs on the beach near the cabin. The waves sounded like curtains in the wind. A kingfisher chattered from the roof in the mornings. Small boats zipped by, and whales puffed their breath into the air. Back in town, in her noisy neighborhood, five homeschooled kids lived next door. A chainsaw carver lived three houses down. Sometimes it seemed like he carved in her living room. Bears made better neighbors.

  After chowder and homemade biscuits she helped Grandpa Isak clean up the kitchen. Afterward, they played a game of rummy. There was no TV out here on this island. Tomorrow, they’d start the smoking fish process and then can it up for the winter. This was the best part of summer, when everything, even her hair, reeked of fish scent and smoke.

  When Tova finally crawled into her bed, it wasn’t even dark outside, though it was fairly late. She loved that about summer. Her bed sat below the open window and despite the lumps in the mattress, it felt good at the end of the day. The wind rattled the eaves of the old cabin as she started to fall asleep. Suddenly, she sat upright. She’d forgotten the driftwood on the railing. Through her bedroom window, she could see the front porch. The wood wasn’t on the railing. It had blown off. Darn. She liked that piece. It would have been a good one to add to her beach collection. At the end of the season, she usually returned home with assorted seashells, driftwood, and chunks of bear bread. She didn’t know what she was saving the stuff for. She put it in a wood box beneath her bed. They were stories for later.

  That night, breath from the ocean rose high into the sky, mixing with her dream world. At first she couldn’t tell if she swam underwater or walked on land. She turned when she heard the big puff of air. A large eye stared at her. She wasn’t afraid of the creature. She was curious. She knew it was a whale even though she couldn’t see its entire shape. Then she was on the beach again. Her feet stepped on the popweed. It was cold. She put her arms around herself. She could feel things in her dreams: a gray cold day, an empty stomach, a fluffy pillow. And she usually dreamed in color. At first everything in this dream was blue and now it was orange: seaweed, sky, sun. The cold and the color pulled her in, blended her with the land. She lay back, like she was a moon jellyfish floating on the ocean, but in this dream the water and the land were one. Then the dream took her with it, became a story like returning salmon in the current, like the morning sun rising over the islands. She circled the island, flowed along with it, rounding Point Highfield, past Deadmans Island, down Eastern Channel, and down around Southeast Cove and up past Old Town, and back up Zimovia Strait toward home.

  Outside, the small piece of driftwood absorbed the sea again, filling it to its seams. The ancient whorls of time the tree had once gathered in its rings now absorbed the knowledge of diatoms and seaweed, salt particles and sand. The driftwood grew and grew until it filled out its shape. The oil from the girl’s hands mixed in its skin and memory. And when the driftwood rolled and spun and balanced itself on the sea, the wood realized it had changed into something else. And the current took it back home, toward the old cabin with the porch next to the sea. And there, the whale blew its first breath high into the blue-dark night.

  Date: 1990s

  Recorded by John Swanton

  Assisted by Tooch Waterson

  The Woman Who Governs the Tides

  Kirsti liked to stand in front of her window naked. The urge to stand in front of any window, in fact, sometimes flooded her, filling her thoughts with silt. She couldn’t think clearly unless she was naked in front of the window. Today, though, she sat at a small table by herself at the Wrangell Public Library, a stack of books in front of her, and among them, Bathymetry Understood and Boater’s Bowditch. Books were good distractions from windows, from looking out at the ocean. The big picture window at home framed her in this world where she didn’t feel like she fit in, a Scandinavian woman among the Tlingits. Yet, she didn’t fit in in Petersburg either, the home of the Petersburg Vikings. Actually, she was Finnish. Grandma had told Mother who told her. The story was never the same when it was repeated. “Your great-grandmother was a prostitute who was working at the cannery in Petersburg. She got pregnant and a Tlingit couple adopted the baby girl and took her to Wrangell. Your grandmother was blonde and fair-skinned and was raised as Tlingit.”

  Sometimes the story would add a French prostitute, or a Filipino father, but as Kirsti stood in the window tracing her hands over her pale skin, her reflection told the story of dishwater-blonde hair hanging over her shoulders and a long lean body. She was probably Finnish. Based on what she’d read about their women and views on sex, she was most definitely Finnish.

  Her apartment sat up on the knoll with a view of the beach and the waves splashing on the rocks the city had piled to build the low road below her house. Every morning, she’d stand in the window, about nine o’clock, after her shower when she was freshest. In front of the window, the moon pulled her; the waves rose and fell, even though the waves couldn’t reach across the road, and up the grassy yard and the long driveway, to her apartment over the Troutte family’s garage.

  A week ago, she’d pulled her blinds for good. At first the waves out front of the harbor were calm, a bit too calm. Then they became violent, like they were rolling under her skin. A week ago, the police department had sent a young officer and she’d answered the door respectfully, in her bathrobe, loosely tied. The officer told her the neighbor, a mother of two teenage boys, complained she stood in the window with no clothes on every morning. What? She wasn’t showing off for the neighbors, she was letting the clouds caress her skin, the waxing moon sigh through her cells, the curl of wave rush over her thighs. They had been watching her? Maybe it would be better to live in Sitka, with the wet ocean on your upper lip, always ready to waft into your nostrils. She’d always wanted to live in Sitka. Sitka smelled more like the ocean than Wrangell.

  Who was she kidding, though? If she pulled the shades, if she no longer stood in the window, there would be consequences. So why was she sitting at the library next to the big window overlooking the street, and beyond, the ocean, provoking the high water swaying like a slow dancer against the seawall? Could she deal with the consequences of denying herself the pleasure of an open window, of framing herself in syzygy and neap tides? But, of course, people would have to deal with that. She was tired of dealing with things. Maybe she could move to Petersburg, where there were more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States, or so she was told. In Petersburg, fish guts smelled like money. But that idea soon waned like a faded yellow moon: there was a new man in town. She loved the new men who wandered into town and the stories they brought with them of the Outside, Down South, which was what townsfolk called the rest of the United States.

  Her grandmother had told her the new guy in town was a marine biologist. He’d already been all over town interviewing elders, attempting to learn the Tlingit words for the critters on the beach and the beach greens. This intrigued her because, since there was no college in Wrangell, she spent a lot of time at the library reading books, devouring books, actually. As for the men, it wasn’t their bodies she loved, it was their brains, the way they could tell her about the long bolt engine design on the new Merc outboard or the
I-beam structure in the hull of their skiffs.

  And, if she was honest with herself, she even liked local men. Dating them was a problem, though. In her experience, men wanted women to let them fix things, like the hot water heater whistling when she turned it up too high. She could fix that herself. She’d replaced the element in her oven, wired a new light in the dining area, made a shelf with her new miter saw, and screwed her entertainment center together without reading the directions. She’d been learning to fend for herself since she got a great job at Hammer’s Hardware. At Hammer’s they sold everything from cigarette lighters to skates of halibut gear. She knew where every nut and bolt, power saw, and fish hook was located. After a year of working there, locals started asking for her. They didn’t want the young men who worked there, or even the cranky owner—that old Norwegian, Mr. Gunnar Hammer—to help. Pretty soon she had dates. Quite often she’d be asked out in the nuts and bolts section, while she bent over digging through the bins, asking about the best way to screw in the bolts: an electric drill or a cordless? The question frequently ended with a date. Eventually the gentlemen would come over to her house to help her fix something.

  A man who fixed the light in the refrigerator stayed late and the tide had gone down to a minus 3.3 feet and everyone went clam digging. Someone even brought a bucket of clams for her. She’d made clam fritters for the next gentleman who came to fix the overhead light in her bedroom. She thought it might have been a short in the light switch.

  Another time, the high school principal helped her fix her bathtub leak. Later, he’d told her that when he saw her hair, the same shade as bull kelp, floating in the tub around her, it made her look like a mermaid.

  Up and down, and up and down, the tides went, moving pretty regularly for several years. She loved this regularity. But then, it seemed she’d begun to run out of loose door hinges and leaky faucets and her dates dwindled. Still, she helped everyone out at the hardware store. She still leaned over the bin of washers just so, and tightened her work apron, the one with the large screwdriver on it. Now she only noticed a scrawny arm or five o’clock shadow. She was bored. Maybe what she needed was not a date but love, real love, the kind rushing up the shore and holding you against a beach log. The kind swirling around your blue mussels and licked your supralittoral zone. After all, it seemed all her high school friends were now on their second husbands. But if she chose from the townsfolk, she’d have to pick a third cousin twice removed or a high school fling whose lovers she also knew. Now that she thought about it, what she needed was someone new in town, which is how she came to find herself at the library reading John R. Swanton’s Tlingit Myths and Texts. She needed to create her own myth.

  Kirsti’s story pulled toward her—a young man walked through the door lugging his heavy backpack. She tried to look away, but she noted the way he carried himself, like a hunter in the forest. Had she seen him around town before? She thought she had. He came right toward her and set his backpack on the large round table where she sat. As he settled himself into a chair, she bent her head, trying her best to read the story “The Woman Taken Away by the Frog People” when she felt her cheeks flush. Flustered is what her mother called it. “Now don’t go getting flustered, Kirsti,” she’d say. Flustered, she figured, was a sensation that happened when her body was acted on by the gravity of another body, when the strain on both bodies distorted them.

  The young man pulled a stack of books out of his backpack and then went over the librarian’s desk. She heard him say something about an interlibrary loan and then she looked down at his books. She ran her fingers across the book spines: Marine Mammals of Alaska, Life in a Tide Pool, Tlingit Language Dictionary. Her fingers traced a book of Latin terms for Alaska sea creatures. She loved Eumetopias jubatus, Megaptera novaeangliae, and Gavia pacifica. She knew some of them in the Tlingit language: taan and yáay and kageet, sea lion, humpback whale, and loon, terms her grandmother could remember, but the language had been dead in her family for a long time now. An aunt once mentioned something about relatives who were punished for speaking Tlingit, and she’d heard stories about kids being abused at the Wrangell Institute. Now, here was a guy from out of town trying to learn the Tlingit words. Good luck. People around here didn’t like to give up their stories. Share them, sure, over a cup of black boat coffee, or sitting side by side at a picnic table at City Park.

  The young man walked back over to the table. Kirsti was still flipping through his book. She saw him looking at her. “Oh, sorry.” She set the book back on his stack. “It’s just that new things interest me.”

  He sat down and held out his hand. “I’m Tooch. Tooch Waterson.”

  “Kirsti,” she said, feeling that same flush move through her body. “So, you’re the marine biologist?”

  “News travels around here,” Tooch replied.

  “We don’t call it news. We call it stories. Our stories travel fast and keep on going.”

  “Yes, that explains it,” he said.

  “Explains what?” Oh, right, sometimes when she talked in metaphors, people would politely excuse themselves. She fingered her hair, which was draped over a shoulder and hung down in front of her. She was comforted by her hair and often held onto a piece of it, like a baby sea otter clinging to bull kelp.

  “Well, so far I’ve heard I was a gay writer, a gay biologist, a gay photographer—” He paused and reached for his own black hair tied behind his head in a loose ponytail, with a beaded band around it.

  She let her hair fall from her hands. Was he trying to relate to her?

  “I’m doing research and working for an ethnographer recording First Nation stories.”

  “First Nation?”

  “Oh, sorry, Alaska Natives. I’m from the Interior. Telegraph Creek, up the Stikine. I’m an Interior Tlingit.”

  “Oh, I thought there were only Tahltans up there.”

  “No, there are both.”

  Kirsti fidgeted in her chair, linking her ankles and pressing them hard like a wind blowing steady across the ocean, inducing counter-rotating cells on her surface. Maybe this guy was one of those intellects who thought they could tell what a woman was thinking. She hoped not, because right now he was in her apartment, in her bed lying next to her with the curtains fluttering.

  “So, are you from Wrangell?” he asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Yeah, born and raised.”

  “Doesn’t that get boring?”

  “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I can’t really … live … anywhere else. I think about moving once in a while, but it’d have to be near water. I love the water, the Stikine, the Inside Passage.”

  “I know what you mean.” He picked up one of his books. He started to thumb through it. “I was raised by the upper rivers. But here, near the ocean, this is lovely. I’m drawn here too.”

  “Drawn?”

  “Well, my work draws me. I’ve been working in Wrangell off and on over the years. This time I’m studying the local beaches, their flora, and their creatures for the UAF School of Fisheries. I love naming things. Taxonomy, you know.”

  “I know. I love hearing the words …”

  “Really? You know, I’ve been having trouble lately because the tides around here are really weird. It’s November and we’re supposed to be getting higher tides, which means lower ones, too, but that’s not happening.” Tooch reached for his bright orange tide book. “See, this dot says it’s going to be a minus three-foot tide today, and it wasn’t. It hardly went out. Whenever I ask around town, people say it’s been like that for a while now but they have nothing to do with that. They tell me to call the government.”

  Kirsti smiled. “Yes, I suppose it’s been frustrating for everyone, especially the clam diggers and the fishermen who troll according to the tides.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about the stories here.”

  “Stories? I suppose.” Yeah, maybe she did know too much about everyone, all their countercurrents and undercurren
ts. “Well,” she said, standing, “I’d better go. I have to go home and see what’s wrong with my window in the living room. It leaks when it rains.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Of course it really wasn’t leaking, but she kept hearing his voice, as he lay on her pillow saying those Tlingit words, over and over again in her ear. She’d heard the language spoken a few times, and now she imagined those delicious sounds scraping the back of his throat. And the Latin, oh the Latin. There would be words she had never heard before, new meanings.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I live alone and have to fix my own stuff. You know that little tool with bent plastic handles. It looks like scissors.”

  “Pliers?” Tooch asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, that thing.”

  “Um … I can help you check the leaky window. I’m handy with tools. Helped my parents build their house.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But how about something for lunch in exchange? I’m tired of restaurant burgers."

  She smiled. “Of course, sounds like a deal.” Kirsti gathered up her books, shoved them into a big bag, and headed out of the library.

  Tooch followed her outside as she headed right toward the ferry terminal. At the terminal, she headed left, back the same direction, but down a small one-way street right next to the ocean. She turned to Tooch. “I like to walk along the seawall whenever I can. So I’m taking the long way home.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  She started to walk faster, taking brisk, long steps. This left Tooch a few paces behind. Soon she was about twenty-five yards in front of him, and she turned but only waited a few seconds. She continued to walk, with him following behind her. She’d been told she swayed when she walked. Hopefully, he didn’t find it odd. Her hair swung back and forth across her back. They walked along the seawall that had been built and rebuilt over the years. The tide rose higher, almost to the road, and, as she walked, the waves seemed to roll in and follow along behind her as if they wanted to lick her heels. She turned slightly again, checking on Tooch. Behind him, the water was calm. She nodded to him.