Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  While I was pondering my problem, it was solved for me in the form of a letter from one of my former fellow workers at the cannery in Kenai, George “Buffalo” Bison. “Come at once,” wrote George from Cooper’s Landing, a mining settlement far up the Kenai River. “There’s a construction outfit building a road near here. You can probably get a job.”

  It was the last part of September when I regretfully locked my magnificent front door, climbed into my car, took Ski over to board at Red’s and headed up the road again.

  Chapter XI—Home Brew

  COOPER’S LANDING consisted of a post office and three or four shacks perched on the banks of the Kenai River with the mountains looming behind. All of its inhabitants lived—rent-free, of course—on mining claims. But that didn’t mean that there was any mining done. In all the time I was there, I never heard of a Cooper’s Landing digging for anything more valuable than water.

  No, I’ll take that back: my friend George Bison, a fast man with a story, once spread the word that he had found some gold while digging the cellar for his house. Nobody ever saw the gold, but George listed his labor in digging the cellar as his “assessment work” on his claim for that year and got away with it, I’m told.

  George was a stocky, dark-complected man of about 40 who owned up to being one-quarter Indian, which may or may not have accounted for the way his scalp jumped an inch whenever he experienced an emotion. He and his wife, Clara, had arrived in Alaska during the same summer as I, a fact which, because we were all greenhorns together and therefore shunned by the bulk of the populace that year, had formed a strong bond between us.

  Probably the outstanding thing about George, as I look back on him, was his sense of “hospitality.” Before he had completed clearing the ground for his cabin, he had prepared a 30-gallon barrel of home brew against the coming of possible guests. And when a guest arrived, everything was dropped while George leaped for a glass, dipped it into the barrel and extended it, foaming and dripping, with a bow and a smile—then filled his and Clara’s glasses and continued to fill them until both hosts and guests were sodden.

  Blond, thin and nervy, Clara was her husband’s complete opposite in temperament and looks, and though she could empty a glass of brew with the best of them, she couldn’t hold it with the least. When sober, she was a fairly gracious hostess; when drunk, she was a fishwife. Needless to say, life was never dull at the Bisons’.

  After a couple of days of recovering from too much of George’s brand of welcome, I made contact with the road-building outfit George had mentioned in his letter and went to work on a culvert as a laborer. My job, for ten hours a day, six days a week, involved nothing more complicated than tightening up the thousands of nuts on the thousands of bolts which held the five-foot metal culverts together. As each section of each culvert was combined, I stepped forward with my wrench, poked the bolts through their holes, spun on the nuts and tightened them. A few days at this monotonous occupation and I was ready for the nuthouse, but the bank president’s salary I was receiving prevented me from bloodying my wrench on the foreman’s head, as I often felt like doing. For $200 a week, I would have tightened the nuts with my teeth!

  But I have an unfortunate habit: every time I do something very intensively during the day, I dream about it at night. Not good dreams, either: nightmares. In my sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of the Bisons’ bed—which was the only place in their 16×12-foot cabin they could find to put me—I tossed and groaned and tightened nuts all night long. One well-remembered night something awoke me, and I rose up in fright to find myself holding a violently struggling object in my right hand. When a piercing shriek shocked me fully awake, I realized what I was clutching: a human big toe, and not my own. I dropped it as though it had been a poisonous snake and pulled the covers up over my head.

  From the safety of my shelter I listened to a strange conversation. “George! George! Wake up!” That was Clara, and there was terror in her voice.

  “Mmmmmm? Mmmmmmm?” That was George.

  “Wake up! There’s something in this bed. It bit me!”

  “Why don’t you shut up and go to sleep? There’s nothing in this bed.”

  “Yes, there is! Yes, there is! It bit my big toe! George, I’m not going back to sleep until you search this bed.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll search the bed.” Silence. “Well, what did I tell you? There’s nothing here. You’re drunk, Clara. Just drunk, that’s all.”

  During the man-wife argument I lay as still as a corpse at a wake. And needless to say I didn’t get much more sleep that night.

  In the morning, after I had finished breakfast and was heading for my car, George intercepted me. “Say, Gordon,” he said. “What was the idea of playing around with my wife’s toe last night?” I had underestimated his astuteness.

  I opened my mouth, shut it again. Then I croaked, “George, you won’t believe this.”

  “It’d better be good,” said George, looking mean.

  “George, last night I was dreaming I was tightening a nut on a bolt on the culvert. Somehow Clara’s toe got into the dream. I thought it was a nut, I guess. Believe me, George, I was just tightening a nut!”

  George stared at me for a moment and then burst into raucous laughter. When he could talk, he choked, “Gordon, I believe you. But will Clara?”

  Maybe Clara believed me, but from the way she treated me from then on I gathered she didn’t like what she believed. Anyway, on the night after the toe episode I found my sleeping bag moved to a spot on the floor next to the home brew barrel. Heretofore, George had been unwilling to trust even his own brother that close to his liquid assets.

  The Bisons spent a great many of their leisure hours in visiting their numerous neighbors—the people who lived on mining claims on the hills above Cooper’s Landing proper—and testing the newest batches of home brew. Sometimes I saw them only once or twice a week, when they returned for a change of clothing. This left me in sole charge of the house, the livestock and the chores.

  The most important chore was that of building a fire in the stove—a barrel stove, like mine. One night when I returned from work it was so cold that I proceeded to the task immediately. To start the fire in a hurry, I poured some stove oil over the wood from a coffee can on a nearby shelf. When I threw in a lighted match, the oil flamed up but the wood didn’t catch. “Not enough oil,” I muttered, heading for a five-gallon “extra stove oil” container I knew to be outdoors somewhere. I stumbled around in the dark until I bumped into what felt like the war surplus gas can I was looking for. Filling the coffee can from it, I rushed back into the shack, opened the barrel stove door and slopped a generous amount of the liquid onto the still smoldering logs. Then I struck a kitchen match on the top of the stove and threw it in, too.

  Phwooooooom! I leaped back, throwing up an arm to fend off the explosive burst of flame. The coffee can dropped from my hand, and the fuel in it—which I realized now was not stove oil at all but a high-pressure appliance fuel used in Coleman lanterns—spread over the floor, caught fire and started to eat away at the dry floor boards and up my trousers.

  I was stupefied. I had a sudden vision of the Bisons returning to their home to find it a pile of ashes, and of me, down on my knees in abject apology, offering them my homestead in exchange. I felt like a drowning man going down for the first time. That thought reminded me of water and galvanized me into action. Snatching up two pails of soapy wash water from beside the door, I splashed their contents over the fire and myself. The water only served to spread the burning fuel over a wider area. Rushing wildly around, I entangled myself in a pair of George’s wet coveralls hanging from the clothesline stretched across the room. I snatched them down and beat at the flames.

  In a surprisingly short time the fire was out, but as I stood there, coughing and panting, I saw a flickering light under the floor boards. I opened the trap door leading to the cellar to find the floor joists and storage shelves ablaze. I grabbed a
kettle of cold moose soup from the kitchen stove and quenched the flames.

  Then, shaking with delayed reaction, I cleaned up the mess. When I was through, the cabin looked cleaner and neater than I had ever seen it before, and I was sure—or almost sure—that the Bisons, particularly if they returned during the night under the influence of home brew, would never notice that there had been a conflagration.

  But I was wrong. The next morning, the first thing George said to me was, “Gordon, was there by any chance a fire here last night?”

  “How did you know, George?” I countered, playing for time.

  “Well, my coveralls are missing a seat and a leg. Besides that, the smell of smoke was pretty strong when we came home last night. What happened, anyway?”

  I told him the story in a few short, humorous sentences, acting out my part in the fire with violent motions. This drew a few chuckles from George, and I knew that my position as star boarder was still secure.

  But when I had finished my tale George’s face grew serious. “Gordon,” he said, his scalp rising. “Thank God you were here to put the fire out!”

  And then there was the Sunday I shall always remember as “The Great Chicken Massacre.” For weeks I had been helping George with his nightly chore: putting 300 chickens to bed. This was no simple feat. It involved running each chicken down separately, capturing it amid squawks and flutterings, adding it to an underarm collection of two or three and flinging the lot into the very small chicken house and slamming the door fast. And as the chickens became faster and warier, the job took longer and longer—sometimes as much as two good, full hours.

  When all the chickens were ensconced in their undersized sleeping quarters they were a sight to see. If you opened the door a crack, you got the impression of an immense mass of eyes and feathers reaching from floor to ceiling. I used to get a kick out of the idea that if the key chicken at the bottom of the pile ever lost its balance, the other 299 would come tumbling down like a flood from a broken dam.

  Every night when we had finished our chore, George would go into the house and lay down the law to Clara. “Now, Clara, listen to what I say for a change!” he would shout. “Don’t let those chickens out tomorrow. Leave ‘em in. Gordon and I are sick and tired of chasing them all over the lot every night.”

  “But, George,” Clara would protest. “They’ll die! They’ll smother to death!”

  “I don’t care if they do! I oughta cut all their heads off, anyway. They’re not worth the trouble they cause.” But every morning Clara let the chickens out, and every evening, when I came home from work, George and I put them to bed. Finally George lost his patience. On a Saturday night, he announced to one and all that he was going to kill all the chickens the next morning and sell them in Seward.

  Sunday arrived and all the preparations had been made. George began the process by chopping off chicken heads with a double-bit axe. He then dipped the carcasses in a tub of hot water and hung them upside down on nails protruding from the side of the chicken house. It was my job to pull the feathers off and transport the bodies to the house, where Clara was waiting to eliminate the pinfeathers. Our work proceeded at a good pace with the help of a jug of Cabin Still Whisky.

  On my first trip into the cabin with a load of chickens, however, I found Clara seated on a stool beside the home brew barrel with a rubber tube in her mouth. Pausing only for a second in her project of syphoning home brew down her throat, she waved a hand vaguely and said, “Put ‘em down. Put ‘em down anywhere.” I laid the chickens on the floor beside her and left.

  On my second and third trips into the cabin the scene, except for the growing pile of naked chickens on the floor, remained unchanged. By noontime the number of plucked bodies in the cabin, their pinfeathers still where nature had put them, had risen to an even hundred and looked a lot like the funeral pyre of a defunct Hindu prince. And Clara, unperturbed, continued to suck on her tube.

  I decided to say nothing to George of the situation. I just went back to where he was still decapitating chickens and said, “When do we eat?”

  “As soon as I get through with this one,” he replied. “By the way: how’s Clara coming along with those pinfeathers?”

  “George,” I said, “you’d better go in and see for yourself.”

  George’s scalp lifted an inch and he turned and walked rapidly into the cabin. The door slammed shut, but from behind it I could hear the sharp words of a verbal battle. Then came a thump. Then another thump. I thought I’d better go in and see what was happening.

  I opened the door on a picturesque tableau. George was standing with an arm upraised, and in his hand was a chicken that he was just about to throw at Clara. On the opposite side of the room, Clara was in a similar pose—only she held a chicken in each hand. As I stood there, staring, they both let fly, and in a second the air was full of reactivated corpses, some of which, unfortunately, missed their intended targets and ricocheted off me. Plucked chickens were everywhere, and on the floor, where several of them had landed for the second time that day, a spreading puddle of home brew from the over-turned barrel added an extra stench—and the final touch—to the scene of carnage.

  Quietly I left the Bison mining claim, and on the following day I found new quarters. A couple of weeks later, having been laid off the road-building job, I returned to my homestead. I never did find out what happened to the Bisons or their chickens after that. I made no effort: I had lost my taste for home brew.

  Chapter XII—Neighbors

  THE BIG SNOWFLAKES drifted slowly past the window, then whirled away in a sudden gust of wind. Beyond them—if I took the trouble to wipe the mist from the glass—I knew what I would see. The ground would be invisible under its clean, white sheet—a sheet that would be, I was certain, fully one foot deep. The solid lines of spruce, standing up like groups of spun candy cones, would be broken here and there by a birch which bent precariously under its burden of snow like a fat man stretching for his toes. But there would be nothing else: no sign of life. The first real snowstorm of my second winter in Alaska was well under way.

  The wind died down. It was so quiet you could have heard a rabbit drop half a mile north. Snug beside the barrel stove with a new science fiction pocket book in my lap, I did take the trouble to lean forward and wipe the mist from the glass with my hand. Gazing down on the creek valley below, I echoed the words of the song blaring from the dry-cell battery radio: “Baby, it’s cold outside.”

  I chuckled, remembering how I had kidded my sister about the weather in Alaska. “If, as you say, it’s 30 degrees below zero outside,” she had written, “just how cold is it inside?” “Twenty degrees below,” I had replied by return airmail.

  That wasn’t quite true; it was warm, there beside the stove. Or at least my front was warm, and pretty soon I would turn my back on the fire and get that warm, too. In the meantime, I had everything I needed: a house of my own, a good book, plenty of food and lots of time in which to do nothing at all. What more could I ask?

  One of the nicest things about Alaska, I reflected, is the way the weather controls your life. You work hard during the summer, when the midnight sun gives you plenty of daylight hours in which to do it. But in the winter, when the snow and the cold and the lack of light make working outside virtually impossible, you can loaf through an entire season, if you want. And there’s nothing you can do to change the situation, so why worry about it?

  Naturally there are chores to be done: chopping firewood, emptying the garbage, cleaning up the house when there’s no more walking room left. But if something more important comes up—say an invitation to a pinochle session, or an urge to go hunting—these may safely be postponed until a more auspicious time. The point is: you don’t have to do anything.

  But as it happened, I did have a couple of plans for that winter: because the walls of the new cabin were still leaking a few icy blasts from time to time, I expected to do some inside finishing. And I hoped to dig a well in my cellar. But
I could take it easy. There was no hurry about it. I had the whole winter before me....

  When I finally got around to thinking seriously about my winter projects, it wasn’t necessary to toss a coin: I decided to do the easier job first. And luckily I had saved enough money from my Cooper’s Landing venture to finance the deal.

  I went into Homer and bought enough hardboard—a very cheap inside finishing material made of compressed spruce fiber—to cover all the floors and walls. For a week I slapped it on, enjoying the sight of smooth surfaces growing where rough surfaces had been before. And when I was finished, and after I had erected a partition to separate the kitchen from the living room, I painted the kitchen a pale green with water-base paint and suddenly had a light, cheery room. I left the hardboard in the living room its natural brown color and it looked like what it was intended for, too. In fact, the whole house looked a hundred percent better.

  But something was missing: a rug. Yes, I needed a rug for the living room, the room in which I slept and spent most of my time—a rug to keep my bare feet warm when I got up on cold winter mornings. The first chance I got, I drove into Homer and bought one—a green fibre rug, large enough to cover most of the floor. Proudly I laid it down. No other homesteader in the area had such a rug. In fact, no other homesteader owned a rug at all. Would they think I was trying to put on the dog? I didn’t care if they did.

  What next? Oh, yes: curtains and blinds. I wrote my mother in California and explained my needs, and very shortly some curtains arrived by air. The blinds came later—from a mail order house in Seattle.

  That did it. I had used up all the money I had put aside for inside improvements for the year. But now I felt that my house was something special, something unusual for the homesteading country. I could rest in peace.