Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “She told me the last time I ran off that if I did it again, I could just keep on going and never come back.”

  God damn Jane Morgan, Kate thought, and said out loud, “Parents lose their temper and say things they don’t mean sometimes, just like everybody else. And she did come.”

  “Yeah, well, she took her time. I been here a month. And don’t tell me she didn’t know where I am. If she had a brain in her head, she’d know where I was coming. I told her I never wanted to leave Alaska in the first place. I told her I hated Arizona. And Grandma hated having me.”

  “Johnny—”

  “She did,” he insisted, and then with a flash of perception older than his age he added, “I don’t blame her. She’s seventy-three and she weighs almost three hundred pounds. All she does is eat and watch soap operas. I’d be bound to make her get out of her Lay-Z-Boy once in a while. So I left. I told Mom I would. I told her that if I had to I’d hitchhike all the way back.”

  And he had, and the thought still had the power to make Kate’s blood run cold. It was over a thousand miles from the northern border of Washington State to Tok alone. She didn’t even know how many it was from Arizona to the border. “You never did tell me how you talked the border guards into letting you into Canada,” she said. “Or back into Alaska at the other end.”

  He dropped his eyes, blue eyes so like his father’s. “I didn’t ask permission,” he muttered, and Kate had visions of him wriggling through patches of dense undergrowth peopled by bears and wolves and moose.

  “Anyway, Mom’s dumb, but she’s not so dumb that she wouldn’t know where to start looking.”

  “She’s your mother, Johnny. You will speak of her with respect.”

  He was fourteen years old. He’d lost a father he worshipped a year before, and had turned his back on a mother he barely tolerated when he’d left his new home without permission two months before, to show up on Kate’s doorstep asking for—what exactly? she wondered now. A different mother? A home? Sanctuary?

  “I’mno mommy,” she remembered telling Jack once, and she still wasn’t. But she also remembered Jack saying to her, “Look out for Johnny for me” as he lay dying in her arms.

  “I hate Outside, Kate,” Johnny said in a low voice. He raised defiant eyes. “And I hate Mom for taking me there when I didn’t want to go. She knew I didn’t want to; I told her. And she made me go anyway.”

  She looked at him and she saw herself as a child, as aware, as determined, and younger than he was. When her parents had died, her grandmother had taken her to live in Niniltna. After one week of city life, Kate rose early one morning that December and walked the twenty-five miles from the village to the homestead, armed with the little .22 rifle her father had bought her and carrying half a loaf of Ekaterina’s homemade bread. There ensued a battle of wills between grandmother and grandchild the echoes of which still reverberated around the Park, and which resulted in Kate moving in with a crusty old widower with four sons, who had the virtue of owning the homestead next to Kate’s father’s. Abel Int-Hout wasn’t a tender or a loving man, but he was a decent and a capable one, and his, for lack of a better word, “stewardship” of Kate allowed her to spend much more time at home than she would have been able to living in town. It had also continued the lessons in self-sufficiency begun by her father when she had begun to walk.

  Town in this case amounted to a couple of dozen buildings, a store, a school, an earth station, and a permanent population of four hundred three, which included the dogs. Home in this case meant the one-room cabin she and Johnny were standing in and a semicircle of outbuildings sitting on the bank of a creek that ran through the heart of the Park. Step out in any direction and you’d run into a grizzly before you ran into another human being. Kate liked it that way.

  She looked at Jack’s son, and said, “I don’t want to go away, Johnny. I have to.” She shook her head when he opened his mouth to speak again. “If you want to stay here, we have to hire an attorney and work out some kind of custodial arrangement. That takes money. This job will take a month, at most two. No longer than the election.”

  Two months in the life of a fourteen-year-old was an eternity. “You don’t want me here at all,” he said.

  “No, Johnny, I—”

  “You don’t care about me,” his tone rough. “You probably didn’t care for him, either. You practically got him killed!”

  His eyes were swimming. Kate took a deep breath and didn’t make the mistake of offering an embrace that would undoubtedly be rejected out of hand and which might even spur flight. She had no wish to go chasing through the forest that started on her doorstep after a young man who was too upset to remember any of the survival skills she’d taught him over a series of summer weekends during the last three years.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d accused her of killing his father. It wouldn’t be the last time she didn’t deny it. Jack had been at George Perry’s hunting lodge because she had been there, plain and simple. She didn’t blame herself, exactly, at least not anymore, for his death, but she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t duck out of what she was responsible for, either. Jack had loved her, had followed her into the wilderness, and had not come out again.

  “Look out for Johnny for me, okay?”

  She waited until Jack’s son had regained some of his composure, carefully not looking at him while he did so. The books on the shelves looked dusty. Usually she had them out so often they never sat in one place long enough to gather dust. “And then there’s school,” she said. “You’ll need money for college.”

  His head came up and he said, voice steadier, “Dad had an education insurance policy. Not that it matters, because I’m not going to college anyway.”

  “Really,” she said. “You’re not going to college?”

  “No. I hate school. Everybody there’s a bunch of donothings and fuck-offs. They’re not learning anything. They’re just hotrodding around, drinking, doing dope, chasing girls, and stealing radios out of cars.”

  “I—what?”

  “I’ll keep going until I’m sixteen,” he said, jaw coming out. “Dad explained, the law says I have to go until then. But after that I don’t have to, and I won’t.”

  “And you were planning on doing what, instead?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Fish, maybe. Commercially. Or guide. Or subsistence. Like you.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again. “You don’t want to work that hard, Johnny.”

  “Why not? You do.” He nodded at the cabin. “And you’re doing fine.”

  “I’m not getting rich at it.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not starving, either. Neither will I.”

  She stared at him.

  “So we don’t need any money,” he said. “You don’t have to go on this job, and I don’t have to leave the homestead.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “we do, I do, and you have to.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will,” she said through her teeth, “if I have to pick you up and carry you.”

  “I’ll run away,” he said. “I don’t want to live in Niniltna.”

  “You have to go to school; you just told me you knew that yourself.”

  “I’ll commute,” he said. “I can ride a bike in until it snows and then I can ride a snowmobile. You did.”

  “You’re not staying here by yourself,” she said distinctly.

  “Why not?” he demanded, words straight and sure as an arrow. “You did.”

  They glared at each other.

  Standoff.

  When no one answered the front door, Kate went around to the back, Johnny trailing reluctantly behind. She found Ethan seated on a kitchen chair balanced on its hind legs with its back against the corrugated plastic of the greenhouse wall, shooting slugs off the late crop of red cabbage with a BB gun. On the ground at his right was a twelve-pack of Corona, a lime, and a paring knife. On the ground at his left was a Rottweiler with a slo
bbery grin and a lordly sense of his own dignity. He rose to his feet and paced forward to touch noses with Mutt. Nobody wagged any tails but nobody growled, either. “Hey, Gort,” Kate said, and got a head shoved beneath her hand in reply.

  Around the corner came Gort’s twin sister. “Hey, Klaatu,” Kate said. Klaatu touched noses with Mutt, used the rest of her energy for a perfunctory tail wag, and flopped down in Gort’s vacated shade with a voluptuous moan.

  Pop! went the BB gun, and another shiny, slimy black slug fell from a leaf, which was mostly holes by then.

  “Hey, Ethan,” Kate said.

  “Kate,” he said without looking around. Pop! went the BB gun, thud went another slug, and in celebration Ethan drained the bottle in his left hand.

  “This is Johnny Morgan,” Kate said. “Johnny, this is Ethan Int-Hout. Abel was his dad.”

  Johnny looked Ethan over with no visible approval and didn’t bother to say “Hi.” Ethan looked back and didn’t bother to say “Hi” back.

  Kate walked over to the twelve-pack and looked inside. There were ten bottles left.

  Ethan did look at her then. Seated, his eyes were level with hers, a direct, piercing blue. His hawk-featured face was set, and his rare, warm smile was not around that morning. He hadn’t bothered to shave, not for days, and on the olfactory evidence Kate was willing to bet that he hadn’t bathed in longer. “Where’s Margaret?” she said. She looked around, noticing for the first time how quiet it was in the Int-Hout homestead. Since Ethan had moved back the year before with his family, a jolly, zaftig, redheaded wife and a set of rambunctious and equally redheaded ten-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, she would bet it was never quiet.

  “Margaret’s not here,” he said, squinting down the barrel of the BB gun, seeming to debate whether or not to take another shot. He did. “Damn,” he said, “missed him,” and lowered the gun again.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “She took ‘em.” He leaned the gun up against the greenhouse wall and stood up, towering a foot and a half over Kate. Johnny’s eyes widened. “Come on, I’ll make some coffee.”

  The kitchen was a mess, the sink filled with dirty dishes, the top of the cooking stove encrusted with blackened grease. Ethan didn’t apologize, and he didn’t try to stop Kate when she started in on the dishes while they waited for the kettle to boil.

  The coffee was instant. Kate hid a wince and loaded in the creamer. Johnny’s cocoa was instant, too, but the marshmallows, though stale, melted in a satisfactory manner. After Ethan cleared the chairs around the kitchen table of unopened mail, dog-eared catalogues, a Shooter’s Bible, and a stack of Aviation Week magazines, they sat down, still in silence.

  Usually, Kate was comfortable with silence. It was why she lived alone on a homestead in the middle of a twenty-million-acre federal park, twenty-five miles away from the nearest village over a road that was impassable to anything but snow machines in the winter and to anything but the sturdiest trucks in the summer.

  Ethan’s silence was palpable. He was angry, but he wasn’t sulking over it. She decided there was nothing for it but to wade in. “I need a favor, Ethan,” she said. She wasn’t happy asking and, although she tried hard not to let it show, Ethan, when he bothered to look up, could see it in her face. For the first time that day he smiled.

  He’d always been able to read her, from the day they shared what was her first kiss at the top of Widow’s Peak after an hour’s hike one hot day the summer she was sixteen. He was back from his freshman year of college and they were both working for his father, tending the dogs and the farm while Abel was out setnetting with Old Sam Dementieff and Mary Balashoff on Alaganik Bay. They’d spent the morning clearing alders off the airstrip and the afternoon hilling potatoes, and when Ethan suggested a picnic as a reward, Kate had been all for it.

  Ethan was the second of Abel’s four sons and the closest to her in age. A three-year difference at five and eight or ten and thirteen might as well be thirty, but at sixteen and nineteen the distance had suddenly narrowed. Ethan came home and for the first time Kate noticed how attractive his smile was, how smart and funny his conversation, how capably he shouldered the business of the komestead. Ethan came home and for the first time noticed that Kate had breasts and a figure to go with them, and a smile that, when she bothered to use it, melted him right down to the marrow in his bones. His marrow had been melted before, of course; he was self-aware enough to realize that his looks and his talent at center on the basketball team would get him most of the girls he wanted without too much effort. The girls at UAF did nothing to disabuse him of this notion, especially the girls in the Wickersham Dorm, for whom the jocks of Lathrop Dorm (basement, basketball; first floor, hockey; second floor, swim team) were a specialty.

  So when Ethan looked at Kate when he returned home from school that June, it was with the eye of a newborn connoisseur. She was aware of him. He could tell that from the sidelong glances, the occasional soft blush, the not-so-accidental bumpings of arms and hips, but he made no move until his father was safely out of the way. Even then, he waited until the work of the day was done, and felt virtuous in doing so.

  Kate at sixteen had never been kissed. Truth to tell, no boy had ever had the courage to so much as try to hold her hand. It might have been the force of her grandmother’s personality, or the power Ekaterina had over the tribe, but it might also have had something to do with Kate’s air of self-containment, of assurance, of capability. She didn’t give off vibes like she needed anybody in her life, let alone a guy. Her classmates saw her as smart, and some of them translated that as arrogant, and some of them translated that as eccentric. She was quiet and some of them translated that as stuck up, others as shy. She had no close friends. She had no boyfriends.

  Which was why Ethan’s obvious attention hit her like a ton of bricks. Tall, good-looking, funny, smart (even then Kate couldn’t abide stupidity), competent at whatever he turned his hand, and best of all, someone with whom she was familiar, someone with whom she already had history, someone who didn’t require the elaborate ritual of inane chatter and silly giggles and he-told-my-brother-and-my-brother-told-me conversations and slap-and-tickle games that preoccupied her contemporaries. This was Ethan, and it was obvious that he was interested. It was enough to make every female nerve in her body sit up and take notice. The three weeks between Ethan coming home and Abel leaving were the longest and most excruciating three weeks of her life.

  The homestead was at fifteen hundred feet, on the edge of the wide, level valley that made up the center of the Park. Widow’s Peak was another thousand feet up, a mere foothill to the Quilaks looming behind. It was a clear day, and they fancied they could see all the way to Prince William Sound. “Think they’re catching anything?” Ethan said as he unpacked their picnic.

  Kate shook out an old olive green Army blanket. “I hope so. I haven’t had any salmon out of the Sound yet this summer.”

  Ethan sat back on his heels and narrowed his eyes against the sun. “If I’d known that, I would have brought you one out of the creek myself.”

  Kate hoped her skin was too dark and the light was too bright for him to see her blush. “No, I meant salt water fish. They’re always fatter than the ones you catch in fresh water.” She changed the subject. “Do you want a fire?”

  “Do we need one?”

  She looked up to meet his eyes and flushed again. “I guess not,” she said, and reached for the Spam sandwiches.

  They ate mostly in silence, because Ethan, after all, also had been raised in what Robert Service had called “the hush of the Great Alone,” but when their meal was over and they were packing the debris into their daypacks, he found occasion to brush her hand with his. It felt exactly as if an electric spark had leaped between them, and she jumped. He grinned, and leaned in.

  She didn’t move during that first kiss, curious at the touch of his lips on hers. He drew back and looked at her. “Come on, Kate,” he said, his voice husky, “kiss m
e back.”

  She wouldn’t admit to not knowing how, but she let him teach her, and oh my, did it feel good. So did his tongue delicately tracing the whorls of her ear, his teeth at the base of her throat, his hand cupping her breast, his knee rubbing between her legs. She felt like she’d been run over by a truck, a big one; she had no breath to protest, and no will to, either.

  She was naked, and he was shirtless and starting on the zip of his jeans when the Super Cub buzzed the top of Widow’s Peak on a short final into the homestead. It was Abel, flying back from Alaganik Bay after the Fish and Game had closed the bay to fishing for the week, and he got an eyeful.

  Abel asked Ethan one question when they got back down to the homestead. “You use a rubber?”

  Ethan set his jaw. “We didn’t get that far,” he muttered finally, when it became evident that his father wasn’t going to let it go.

  That evening, Abel flew Kate to a one-man placer gold-mining operation near Nizina. Seth Partridge was the miner, and Micah Int-Hout, Abel’s third oldest boy, barely thirteen and no competition for Ethan, was already apprenticed to him for the summer. Seth agreed to take Kate on, too. She spent the rest of July and most of August pining for Ethan and the astonishing feelings he had coaxed from her body, and learning how to alter the course of a creek with a D-5 Caterpillar tractor. When she got back to the homestead, Ethan was already back in Fairbanks. The next summer, Abel found him a job in Anchorage.

  Two years later, upon graduation from high school and at the insistence of her grandmother, Kate went to Fairbanks and joined Ethan in the ranks of the student body. Ethan knocked on her dorm room door on the day after she arrived. “Hi,” he said, and smiled, and she toppled over the same edge she had been teetering on two summers before. She wanted him, she wanted him so much her teeth ached. It seemed that he wanted her, too, and only the fact that they both had roommates kept them out of each others’ beds for as long as it did. They necked a lot, squirming together on a chair in a dark corner of the Student Union Building, taking time out up against a tree in the middle of running the Equinox Marathon, in the back row of the campus theater during a showing of Psycho. “I think it’s going to fall off before I get the chance to use it again,” he groaned one evening in the Lathrop lounge, when they were interrupted by a horde trouping in to watch Dallas.