Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Peter Heiman’s father, the second of that name in Alaska and Elizabeth and Peter’s only child, had been, in turn, a gold miner, a big-game guide, a Bush pilot, a Bristol Bay fisherman back when the Bristol Bay fleet fished under sail, had maintained radios for the U.S. Navy on the Aleutian Chain, and when the Japanese invaded, joined the Alaska Scouts, also known as Castner’s Cutthroats, although as the second Peter Heiman was fond of saying after the war was over, Lieutenant Castner had disliked the name. They took the islands of Attu and Kiska back from the Japanese, during which action the second Peter Heiman was wounded and for which he was later awarded a Purple Heart by no less than Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., Alaska Defense Commander, Himself. There was a grainy black and white photograph (Alaska Magazine, “Forty Years After,” May/June 1984) with the second Peter Heiman looking gaunt and tired, standing in a line of other soldiers, and trying his best to throw out a negligible chest for General Buckner to pin his decoration on. He had the same narrow face, the same lantern jaw, and the same thick thatch of coarse dark hair as his father did in the sepia photograph of his parent’s wedding (Alaska Life Magazine, “Centennial Tales,” September 1967).

  After the war, the second Peter Heiman left Fairbanks for the Park and homesteaded eighty acres of land, established a profitable truck farm, and started a hauling business on the Kanuyaq River Highway, moving freight between the port of Valdez and the interior market town of Ahtna. Eventually he expanded operations to include Fairbanks and Anchorage.

  It was to Ahtna he brought his bride in 1946, an Isabella Chapman, daughter of a Fairbanks merchant. They had two sons, a third Peter in 1947 and then Charles in 1949.

  Peter was the first of the Peter Heimans to go to college, the University of Alaska. He was a National Merit Scholar (UAF student newspaper Polar Star, February 1969), and then he left school to join the U.S. Army and do one tour in Vietnam. He was back in Alaska by Christmas 1972, back in school in 1974, and had his bachelor’s degree in May 1975 (list of UAF graduates in May twentieth issue of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner).

  Charles followed his brother to Vietnam and didn’t come back. Obituary, November 24, 1971, Ahtna Tribune, Anchorage Times, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Two generations of war heroes and one war tragedy, Paula thought. Bad luck on the parents, and on Peter the Third, too, if he and Charles had been close.

  It seemed they had been. The third Peter Heiman went into business with his father’s backing, formed a trucking company, and made out like a bandit during the last half of the ‘70s and the first half of the ‘80s, back when oil was king. Every other load into Prudhoe Bay was a Heiman Trucking Kenilworth tractor-trailer (“Teamsters in Alaska,” CBS 60 Minutes, 1976). The third Peter had expanded into services, a sort of Kelly Girls for contract employees like plumbers, welders, carpenters, and electricians, so that he was sitting pretty when the bust came in the mid-’80s and the oil companies started looking around for contract employees who worked by the hour and didn’t come with all those expensive benefits attached, like health and retirement and investment plans.

  In the fullness of time Peter Heiman married, a roustabout he met overnighting at Galbraith Lake on a trip to Prudhoe. She was a big woman, big-haired and big-hipped and big-busted, and she lasted nearly two years (notice of divorce of Peter A. and Shirley F. Heiman, Ahtna Tribune, Anchorage Times, Anchorage Daily News, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, October 1977). The third Peter married again, a flight attendant with Wien Air Alaska he met on a trip to Anchorage to pick up a new rig. Another blonde, shorter, skinnier, and more fertile, Cindy F. Heiman divorced her husband when she caught him in bed with a third blonde in 1980, and when she left she took his son, the fourth Peter, and a good half of the business with her. (A delicious series of articles reporting the very juicy trial in the Anchorage Daily News, March and April 1981. The Times seemed to have stayed away from the story.) The third Peter then married the third blonde, a Bush pilot called Walkaway Jane after the second time she wrecked a plane and walked away from it, who promptly died in her next crash two months after the wedding.

  The third Peter didn’t marry again. He tended to his business, buried his father next to his brother when the second Peter died in 1994 (obituary, December 1994, Ahtna Tribune, Cordova Times, Valdez Star, Valdez Vanguard, Seward Phoenix-Log, Anchorage Daily News, the Times was out of business by then, Eagle River Star, Frontiersman, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Juneau Empire), buried his mother next to his father when she died in 1995 (obituary, Ahtna Tribune, Anchorage Daily News, June 1995), and took over as the heir and sole proprietor of Heiman Transportation and Service Corporation, Inc.

  By then he was already a state senator, and from all indications (AP photos of the third Peter dining with the governor in Juneau, conferring with the senior U.S. senator in Washington, D.C., shooting grouse with Alaska’s U.S. congressman in Oregon and, of much more interest to Paula Pawlowski, seen in the company of every mover and shaker of any importance in Alaskan politics for the previous ten years, some of whom were still out of jail) a successful one.

  She took many notes, followed by a lunch break.

  When she got back to the library, the greasy burger and fries from the Sourdough Cafe sitting uneasily between her chronic heartburn and her incipient ulcer, she went back through a lot of the same spools looking for the name Gordaoff. She was in Fairbanks in the first place because both the Heiman and the Gordaoff families had a lot of history there. Plus, she wasn’t paying for it. She wasted a moment speculating as to where all the Gordaoff campaign funds were coming from, decided she didn’t care so long as her checks cleared the bank, and got back to work.

  The Gordaoff family was no less distinguished than the Heiman family, and with a lineage that went a lot farther back. Anne Gordaoff’s grandmother was a feisty little (four feet five, “The Little Lovelies Who Would Be Miss Fairbanks,” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 1910) Athabascan woman, who married an Irish con artist with fingers in every pie south of Livengood, and who when those pies began to burn started drinking and beating his wife. She made Alaskan history by being the first Native woman ever (and the only one for a long time afterward) to sue her husband for divorce, get it, get the kids (there were four, two adopted), and get all the property that hadn’t been gambled away. There were a lot of photographs of her, a tiny woman with dark skin and straight black hair piled high on her head. By all accounts Lily Gordaoff MacGregor oversaw her husband’s business interests with so attentive an eye and so firm a hand that she became something of a local real estate magnate.

  Paula did some more digging and her eyebrows rose a little. Lily Gordaoff MacGregor had been a landlady of some consequence, owning an office building on Cushman, two boarding houses, one in Livengood, one on Wicker-sham, and—this time Paula’s eyebrows rose very high indeed. She grinned down at the Fairbanks tax rolls for 1915. Lily Gordaoff MacGregor had been the owner of record of two houses on Fourth Avenue between Barnett and Cushman Streets in Fairbanks, Alaska, also known as the Fairbanks Line. Men had been lining up at the Fairbanks Line from 1906, when the Fairbanks city fathers created it at the behest of Archdeacon Stuck. The Fairbanks Line was, in fact, the longest-running and certainly one of the most profitable red light districts in Alaska and possibly the entire American West until its closure in 1955.

  Paula toyed with the idea of selling this information to Peter Heiman, and then decided against it. When you offer yourself to the highest bidder, you ought to stay bought. She looked down at the tax rolls and grinned again. Any professional worthy of the name would say the same.

  In 1919 the influenza epidemic had carried off two of Lily’s children, which two were not called by name in that issue of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. All the June 12th article said, and on the front page, too, was that Lily Gordaoff MacGregor was moving her family to Cordova, where she had relatives, and that she would be sorely missed by all who remained behind.

  Quite a tribute for a white-run newspaper of the time to pa
y to a Native woman. Paula was impressed. She ran the spool backwards, and her attention was caught by a headfine datelined Niniltna, a village in the Park that comprised the greater part of Anne Gordaoff’s chosen district. She had to rewind to find it again. Someone had been killed, murdered, a woman, in the spring of 1915.

  It had nothing to do with Anne Gordaoff, of course, but the circumstances listed in the paper were such that Paula might be able to work them into her novel. The third chapter could use a little spicing up, and what better for spice than a discretionary helping of blood and guts? After all, everyone loves a murder.

  She glanced at her watch. Three-forty-five. Her time was bought and paid for until five. She wondered what Anne Gordaoff’s stand was on subsidizing the arts.

  She decided Anne was for it.

  RAMPART

  JANUARY 14, 1899

  The man died at five minutes past two o’clock in the morning. The boy was born at three.

  They had moved to Rampart from Dawson the previous spring along with fifteen hundred other stampeders. At first it was the same there as it had been in Dawson, a lot of people who would speak to Sam Halvorsen but none who would deign to notice the Dawson Darling, no matter how respectably married she could now claim to be. Sam Halvorsen was the scion of a wealthy and respected Minneapolis family who had made money in lumber, and Rampart, for all its small size and remote location, was like many of the gold towns of the north filled with people of similar backgrounds, people who, if they didn’t know Sam’s family, had at least heard of it, and displayed their disapproval of his marrying so far out of his class by soundly snubbing his wife.

  “What do we care?” he said, tumbling her into the bed of the tiny bedroom at the back of the tiny cabin on the bank of the Yukon River. “I’ve got you, what the hell do I want with a bunch of snobs hanging around getting in the way?”

  But she thought he did want them, and it worried at her.

  She was, in fact, his lawful wife. They had married in March, three months to the day from when he had snatched her from the Double Eagle stage in Dawson.

  He had enough of his father in him that the cabin, built of logs and insulated with sod, was solid and as air-tight as anything in the Arctic was at fifty-two below. The post took up most of the space, with a tiny bedroom in one corner, just wide enough for the bed, which was a big one to accommodate the length of Sam’s legs. “And yours,” he had said before investigating their cumulative length in painstaking detail.

  Ah, she loved him, how she loved him. She now thought she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him, standing so tall and so angry next to the door he had just come through, fresh from the claim on Orogrande Creek he had sold the month before, looking for nothing more than a cold beer and an honest game of poker.

  Instead he found her, prancing around nearly naked in front of a lot of drooling idiots with more gold than sense, for sale to the highest bidder. “I knew you were my wife,” he told her later, “and I sure as hell didn’t know what my wife was doing up on that stage.”

  It was a week before they got out of bed, a month before they’d left his cabin, two months before they realized that her auction had made even wide-open Dawson City too hot to hold them. They hadn ‘t been able to find a minister to marry them, and had had to fall back on an itinerant preacher headed for Nome, riding a bicycle down the frozen Yukon River. They followed him as far as Rampart, where Sam built their post and she filled it with goods to sell. He put in a few tables next to the Franklin stove they brought in from Outside, where Sam ran a few card games, losing more than he won, but “hell,” he’d said when she remonstrated, “I already won the big pot,” and kissed her.

  That fall, the ax had slipped when Sam was chopping their winter’s supply of wood. He’d cut his leg, not badly, and the wound had seemed to heal. It had opened again in November, though, and become infected, until great dark streaks ran up his leg. She had sent for a doctor from Dawson, another from Fairbanks, depleting funds already low from lack of sales due to the stampede for the new gold fields at Nome. No one had been able to help him.

  “Take care of that boy, Darling,” he said at the last, his voice slurring. “Take him to my folks in Minneapolis. They’ll look out for you both.”

  But she knew, as she sat next to what was now his funeral byre, that the Halvorsens in Minneapolis would have nothing to do with her or her son. The Darling’s Rampart neighbors had been faithful correspondents.

  She had fifty dollars in scrip, a few silver coins, and two small pokes of dust received in payment from a couple of miners laying in supplies for the winter, and who had pretty much cleaned out hers. She had her clothes. And she had a new-born baby rooting at her breast for milk that wasn’t there.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Sam’s best friend, Arthur Hudson. “I came as soon as I heard,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door.

  Arthur had traveled the Chilkoot Trail with Sam in 1897. He’d staked the claim next to Sam’s at Orogrande Creek, although he hadn’t done as well as Sam. He’d been present at the Double Eagle Saloon on Christmas Eve two years ago; he might even have been one of the bidders. He had stood up for Sam at their wedding, and now he had traveled all the way from Orogrande to Rampart in the dead of an Arctic winter to see how she was.

  She was exhausted from nursing Sam and the birth of the baby, and she gladly handed over the details of the business to Arthur. He moved Sam’s body to the shed out back, as the ground was too frozen to bury him. He sent for canned milk from Circle City, and by the end of January the boy had begun to thrive. By the end of February Arthur had found a buyer, a trapper backed by the Hudson Bay Company. It wasn’t much, he told her, but it would be enough to get her to Minneapolis, and the trapper wouldn’t take possession until spring, when she and the baby would both be well enough to travel.

  By the end of March, he was in her bed.

  He ‘d wanted her; he ‘d never made any secret of it. And it was so very cold, alone in the bed she had shared with Sam. She couldn’t keep herself warm, let alone the baby. Arthur built a cradle and placed it next to the fireplace, and devoted himself to her. He was very gentle and very determined.

  She responded as best she could. She was grateful, and she wanted to show him that she was, but it was as if something inside her was frozen. It didn’t help that the window of the tiny bedroom looked onto the back yard of the post and the shed where the body of her husband lay stiff and cold. Arthur understood, and made up curtains of grain sacks so she wouldn’t have to see.

  But Sam could see through the curtains. She could feel his eyes upon them as they came together beneath the bedclothes, straining for closeness, for climax, for physical relief for cessation from worry, for ease of grief. Oh yes, he watched them in the cold and lonely reaches of the night.

  Spring came, and warmer temperatures, and the ice in the river began to break with booming cracks that echoed up over the bank like thunder. Daylight lengthened and the temperature warmed, melting the high banks of snow next to the paths shoveled between the post and the outhouse and the wood pile. Tiny brown birds with golden crowns appeared and began to sing a three-note descant from the limbs of budding birch trees, and the light increased every day. She felt as if she were coming out of a long dark tunnel, and was dazed by this assault on her senses. One night she found true, unfeigned pleasure in Arthur’s arms, and he smiled down at her as if he had known all along, and had only been waiting. The next day they buried Sam’s body next to a hedge of wild rose bushes a half mile from the post.

  One morning in late May when there was enough river to launch a boat, Arthur told her he was going to Dawson for supplies and the news. “I’ll be back in a week, maybe two,” he said. He smoothed back one of her red-gold curls and added with a smile, “I’ll bring back a pretty hat for your pretty hair.” She kissed him good-bye, and waved him off from the bank, baby on her hip, as he launched the skiff into the swift, silty waters of the Yukon. H
e rowed standing up, facing upriver, and just before he vanished around the first bank, he turned to wave one last time.

  There were fewer people in Rampart now, as many had left to follow the gold to Nome and Fairbanks, and few of the ones who were left were speaking to her, so she was surprised when, ten days later, there was the sound of footsteps coming down the path to the front door. She had just risen to her feet, baby in her arms, when it opened without permission.

  At first she didn’t recognize him.

  And then she did.

  It was the Greek, the one who had bid in the auction at the Double Eagle.

  Her first instinct was to run, but there was no place to go, and she was hampered by the baby. Desperate, she looked for a weapon, but Arthur had taken the pistol with him to Dawson.

  The Greek watched her with those cold, acquisitive, and now possessive eyes, and laughed as he closed the door behind him.

  4

  Why?” Johnny said. His tone indicated that no answer to his question would be acceptable.

  Kate debated what to say, and fell back on the truth, or a piece of it. “We need the money.”

  “For me?”

  “Partly.”

  “You don’t need any money for me.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  He stood in the middle of the floor of Kate’s cabin, a one-room building twenty-five feet square with a loft, a wood stove for heating, an oil stove for cooking, an old-fashioned pump handle for water in the sink, a built-in couch covered in faded blue denim that ran around two walls, and shelf after shelf of books and cassette tapes. Kerosene lamps hung from all four corners. One sputtered. Kate took it down and made a business out of checking the fuel level, anything to keep from looking directly at the erect figure of resentment and rebellion that dominated the center of the room.