by Heacox, Kim
“He did. I did. Everybody in Jinkaat did. Lots of people.”
“Well there you go. Your entire town is with you. I’ll tell you what, James Whoever-You-Really-Are, the whole world is out there pulling for you. Well, not the whole world, but some of it, the best of it. Have you thought about that?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Denver. I don’t see him anymore.”
“Do you miss him?”
“No—well, some. Him and my mom, they loved each other a lot, I think, once, when I was little.”
Keb said to James, “I remember the day you were born. Your mother cried with joy. After three daughters she finally had a son. She and your father performed magic on you: They buried your umbilical cord at the foot of an eagle’s tree.”
“They did?”
“Yes.”
“Tlingit magic or Arapaho magic?”
“Does it matter?” Marge asked.
James stared at her.
“Look,” Marge said, her voice quivering, “you need to go. Go find a fish or a flower or the great bird that gave you that feather. Get to know it and I promise you that fish, that flower, that bird, it’ll never lie to you.” Keb could see Marge crying. “Nature never lies, is all I’m saying. Your grandfather is old and you learn from him and he learns a little from you. You grow from each other. Even with your bum leg, you’re new, you’re a teacher, a carver. That’s what it comes down to, you and your grandfather and your friends, how you learn from each other; that’s a beautiful thing. You’re out there in a canoe in wild Alaska while the rest of America coddles and sanitizes its children. Live every moment, James What’s-Your-Name. Let nothing go unnoticed. Basketball is just another court in another kingdom filled with indoor people addicted to a box called television and a mythology called winning. You don’t need it. You’re the feather whisperer or some damn thing. . . . I don’t know. Maybe this is all bullshit. You’re the sports star who’s not who he used to be. You see beyond the obvious. Where others see black, you see blue.”
James turned the feather in his hand.
“Jimmy Bluefeather,” Little Mac said. “That’s you, James. You’re Jimmy Bluefeather.”
MARGE HUGGED OLD Keb and didn’t let him go. She pulled him to her with such ferocity that she nearly suffocated him—bosomed him to death. Not a bad way to die. Keb wanted to tell her stories about his carvings. About his travels and favorite boats and books, the ones Uncle Austin used to read. He wanted to tell her to go deep into her life, what remained of it; a fish cannot drown in water. But words failed him. He said nothing.
She let him go and walked away and didn’t look back. In minutes she was in the skiff with her sons, going full throttle beyond the headland and out of sight, out to where the sea writes eulogies and takes us away.
a place of safekeeping
BY MIDMORNING SWORDS of sunlight cut through the clouds and a plane flew low overhead, a Cessna 206 on floats, according to Kid Hugh. Might be a search plane, or a charter on its way to a fancy sportfishing lodge in Elfin Cove. Either way, Kid Hugh didn’t like it. Keb half expected him to shoot it out of the sky.
Back in the deep forest, Keb found the terrain such rough going—muddy and root-infested—that he sat down, his heart pounding. He tried to open his pills. Little Mac helped him and put each one in a spoonful of yogurt to make it go down better. James set up a tent near a game trail, and with Little Mac’s help put down a thick pad and a sleeping bag for the old man.
Keb had wanted to pick berries as he did with Bessie, years ago, deep in the forest and low to the ground where green was a texture, not just a color. Where moss made the best beds for naps, and you awoke beneath great trees that passed no judgment, and the woman you loved was perfect in how she loved you back and put her head on your shoulder and loved all the things you loved, and you knew without saying that every day was a gift, that you have to go hungry to become real. That’s what Milo Chen used to say. Truman too, writing his books. You have to suffer and come out the other side, find compassion in the emptiness. Respond by not filling it up. It’s no easy thing. It’s not what we build, Uncle Austin used to say. It’s what we leave alone that makes us who we are. Look around. We cannot improve this place. We can only honor it by receiving its bounty with wisdom and thanks. Go into the woods when your kids are young and gather devil’s club to make tea. “Alaska ginseng,” he called it. S’áxt’. Good for fatigue. Keeps you fit and able to split wood into old age. Bessie always made it just right. Remember how she let the kids run wild? Up the slopes and along the beach in bare feet, their prints so small next to the tracks of brown bear. When they and Keb said they were hungry, Bessie replied, “We don’t feed them when they fuss, we feed them when it’s time.” What feisty little things they became, Ruby and Gracie more than the boys. Bessie said those girls were born with their hands on their hips, saying no. After she died, the days were dimmer, the stars brighter. Keb never dated again. It felt better to live with the memory of Bessie than to find another woman. He still drank Alaska ginseng, when Gracie made it for him. He had some with him on this journey, in a Mason jar. The boys might need it, with so much paddling ahead. Crazy kids these days, going to the drugstore to buy cough syrup. “It’s all in the forest,” Bessie used to say. All you need is caribou leaf salve, devil’s club, and yarrow. Yarrow will cure anything. Uncle Austin used to say the best devil’s club grew on islands, with the leaves facing west.
Was it September? First day or two anyway. Keb could smell it blowing off the ocean. The taste of winter coming, change and darkness and storms. He could see it in the margins of yaana.eit, smell it in the tangy odor of beach grass and meadow sedges. Everything burnished. Cranes and geese and swans going south. Young gulls painted by an artist’s brush, testing their wings. Keb’s favorite month. It should have cheered him up. But he felt poorly. Even with Little Mac comforting him with her guitar. He missed cornbread and hot coffee; Marge’s lively banter. Bedded down, socked deep into a sleeping bag with his nose cold but his bones warm, he could hear James and Kid Hugh setting up a second tent. Talking. Arguing about where to go, how to proceed, how to avoid getting found, arguing about how to argue.
Then what? He must have fallen asleep.
He dreamed that he grew so old people saw right through him. Then he was young again, a thousand years ago, dreaming in a way that dreams make you new. He saw Uncle Austin on a pier, and a missionary telling him that if he didn’t follow Christ he’d burn in Hell for eternity. “Burn in Hell?” Uncle Austin said. “How hot could it be? And eternity—how long could it be?” The missionary quoted Luke, John, Matthew, Michael, Meatballs until Uncle Austin pushed him off the pier. The missionary windmilled his arms. The Bible sailed from his hands. No angel caught him. He made a big splash and came up swearing. “You want to test a Christian?” Uncle Austin said to young Keb. “Push him off a pier and see what he calls you.” As he said this, his nose became a beak. His eyes grew beady and black. Feathers covered his face. He wasn’t Uncle Austin, he was Raven, the trickster, his great wings flexing against the sky. “I have this relationship with change,” he said. “It keeps changing.” He laughed a back-of-the-throat chortle that rose into a full-bodied croak.
“I forgot to bless the canoe,” Keb said.
“You want to be like me?” Raven said.
“I should have blessed the canoe.”
“You worry too much.”
“When you die, do you see everybody you loved and everybody who loved you?”
“Love, love, love.”
“I should have blessed the canoe.”
“Worry, worry, worry. You simplify your life, Tlingit man, Norwegian man, German, Portuguese, hound dog man. You simplify, but it’s complicated, no?”
“So many people in pain. They need help. Father Mikal says Jesus healed the leopards. Why the leopards?”
“The lepers, he healed the lepers, sick people.”
“The
m too. The sick, the meek, the weak. Is there a devil?”
“Only in those people who believe in him.”
“I can’t pee like I used to. When I was young, I could pee my name in the snow. And Yevgeny Restin Gorborukov, oyyee. He could write his name and just keep going, write all of War and Peace. He had a bladder the size of Siberia. A good-sized pecker, too.”
“Pecker, pecker, pecker. Feather, feather, feather.”
“Do you want your feather back?”
“What feather?”
“I can’t believe I’m talking to a raven.”
“Believe it.”
“Am I dreaming?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“The pain was real, so much pain; they gave me morphine, in Italy.”
“You make no sense; I like you.”
“In the war, we slept on rocks because the rocks were dry and everything else was mud.”
“Mud, mud, mud.”
“There was no meat . . . the people in Italy, they ate pasta, no meat; they were all veggietarries . . . the word you call people who don’t eat meat.”
“Vegetarian. Old Indian word meaning, ‘bad fisherman.’”
“All the children were starving, in the war.”
“War, war, war.”
“Nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be anymore.”
“Wake up.”
“The whites came. They said nobody owned the land unless we had a piece of paper to prove it. The missionaries built six churches in our town. They thought we really needed help.”
“Wake up, wake up, waaaake uuuup.” Raven gave a loud croak and jumped up and down, and flew away.
Keb awoke with a start, confused, heart pounding, hands clasped over his chest, the light low and dusky, the air, cool. He took a moment to remember where he was . . . who he was. An old man with all his accomplishments behind him, until now. Have I slept all day? He fumbled for a light and flicked it on. Another sleeping bag was next to his, empty, and next to it, Little Mac’s daypack and guitar case. He struggled with the tent zipper until he got himself outside wearing only boxer shorts, bare feet gripping the wet mossy earth beneath tall, silent trees, his mind slowly retelling what it was like, long ago, to be a young Norwegian Tlingit, living by wits and balance and poise. And toughness, always toughness. Bathing in the sea, fishing waist deep in rivers, spearing salmon, rubbing your skin with rocks, pushing through the cold. Was the other tent nearby? And Little Mac, James, Kid Hugh? Steve the Lizard Dog? Had they left him? Have they left me?
Is this my place?
He gave himself a moment to let his one good eye adjust. He pulled on some clothes and found the game trail and hobbled his way down to the beach, feeling his way with nine toes. A campfire came into view, the sounds of chatter. Steve barked when Keb smacked his shin into a beach log. Pain shot up his leg, but Keb made no sound, as Uncle Austin had taught him when hunting deer. Swallow your pain. Even when the bear took his toe, Keb didn’t yell. A flashlight beamed onto him. He heard James tell Steve to shut up. James got to his feet. “Hey, Gramps, we thought you were asleep.”
“I’m awake.”
“You hungry?”
“Hungry? Yes, maybe. You never knew your Grandma Bess. She died when your mom was just a teenager, the age you are now.”
“I know. Come on, Gramps, have something to eat. We’ve got lots of food.”
“Now your mom is sick.”
“I know, Gramps. She’ll be okay.”
“I forgot to bless the canoe.”
“Come on down to the fire, have something to eat.”
What they were eating was cigarettes and wine from a box. Seeing Steve sitting there with his lips peeled back, teeth folded into a stupid grin, Keb got the idea he’d been smoking and drinking too. Most dogs curl up by a fire and fall asleep. Not Steve. He sat with the boys and laughed at their jokes, might have told a few himself. Kid Hugh sat next to him, oiling a Colt .44, spinning the chamber, checking the trigger and action. Little Mac fingered her guitar.
“I’m dreaming a lot,” Keb said. “Dreaming in Tlingit, seeing things, hearing things—xóots shakdéi saxwaa.áx—maybe I heard a bear’s voice.”
“Not on this island, Gramps. There are no bears on this island.”
Kid Hugh said something about them not being very smart, having a fire on the beach with everybody in Icy Strait looking for them, and Elfin Cove not far away, and the troller fleet just out around the corner. Planes coming, going.
“We’re forty miles from Jinkaat,” James said. “Lots of people build fires on beaches. Fishermen do it all the time.” Kid Hugh shrugged and filled a paper cup and offered Keb some wine. “You see the stars?” James said, pointing to the inky sky. Keb looked up and gave his grandson the satisfaction of nodding. The watery stars had winked out on him years ago. Nothing was as bright as it used to be.
“Clearing storm,” Kid Hugh said.
Little Mac put a heavy shirt over Keb’s shoulders. She gave him a squeeze when she did, and resumed strumming the guitar.
“I like it here,” Keb said.
“Me, too,” James said. “It’s peaceful.”
Did Keb hear a longing between his words, mixed with satisfaction? A blue flame of desire? All his life Keb had known men unconcerned with their own improvement, or with anyone else’s. Lately he’d seen in James a desire to learn and care for others that warmed the old man. Warmed him deeper than any fire. Small gestures, but also big. Remember Jasper Jakes? He never went into the woods or slept on the ground or learned the songs of birds, or received mentorship of any kind. Nobody had high opinions of him so he compensated by having high opinions of himself. Drank himself to death. Remember Conner Young? His style was not to have one, to be invisible, vaporous, scented to persuasion. He stood for nothing and in the end stood not at all. And Todd Bankovich? Hated his job and complained about it up until the day it killed him; got very quiet after that. Never took a canoe journey. And Carla Howe? So sad and precious and all the more precious in her sadness. Such wreckage. So many crushed spirits. How to make a meaningful life? “Get back,” Keb said. Back, back, back . . . to the land, the sea, the great glacier that shapes everything . . . even you and me.
“What’s that, Gramps?”
“Get back.”
Little Mac began to strum the guitar with greater force, and the three kids sang words to a song written when their parents were young.
Sitting on a log, Keb wrapped his arms around his knees and pulled them to his chest and rocked to the beat as Little Mac’s voice floated over James’s and Kid Hugh’s, searching for the harmony. Bessie could always sing harmony. Soon James and Kid Hugh were on their feet, wine cups in their hands, dancing in and out of the fire, laughing and leaping over the flames. Not to be left out, Steve ran around the fire and barked as if he too were a rock star.
“It’s the Beatles, Gramps. You like the Beatles, right?”
“The Beatles, yes.” Bessie liked the Beatles.
“You hungry, Gramps? I’ll make you something to eat.”
“Tell a story, Keb,” Kid Hugh said.
A story?
The stories that brought greatest satisfaction were the ones Keb had learned from Uncle Austin. “These are not my stories . . .” Uncle Austin would begin. He had learned from his elders, and they from theirs, that story was a place of safekeeping, a bloodline, a tree. Taken together, they were the library of your people. A history. You learned them and preserved them by telling them well. So it was that Old Keb began, “These are not my stories,” and Kid Hugh refilled his cup and the wine made him warm and the night scrolled back on itself and the stars shone brighter than before, entangled in the tops of trees.
WHEN KEB AWOKE, Steve was barking. James and Kid Hugh stood on shore facing the sea, Kid Hugh with the Colt jammed in his belt. The fire was out, the sun up. On the water, not far away, a white yacht lay at anchor, and nearer, two strangers approached in a small inflata
ble boat, one with his back to the beach, pulling on plastic oars, the other waving. Everything made close—too close—by the clarity of the day.
a discovery of your deepest knowing
THE TIDE HAD climbed to within a few feet of the cold-coals campfire. Did the stars still shine overhead, beyond the brilliant blue? Keb rubbed his eyes. He saw James focus binoculars on the lettering on the yacht. “Etude,” James said to Kid Hugh. “What’s an etude?” Kid Hugh had the good sense to pull his shirt over the Colt and throw a blanket over the deer rifle.
The two strangers wore red French berets and wide collared shirts, and belts made of hippie ties looped through khaki shorts. “Bonjour,” one called as he stepped ashore.
Little Mac sat next to Keb and said, “Etude means ‘study.’”
“Gud murneeng,” the other stranger said. If what he said after that was English, Keb got none of it. Words spilled from his mouth in soft vowels, wet with dew, a birdsong language. When he got no response from James or Kid Hugh, the first stranger walked up the beach to Old Keb, and reached down to give his greeting. Such an angular face: sun-browned, deep-eyed, thick wavy hair, a chin five days from the last shave. Sandal-footed, Mediterranean, halfway around the world. He looked like a prophet forty days into the desert, the kind of man who eats books, not food, his elbows so loose they could bend both ways, his legs like cooked pasta, knobby knees. He seemed engaged with everything around him. He walked farther up the beach, dropped to one knee, held a rock aloft and called to his friend.
The second stranger wheezed by on his own pasta legs, heavier than the first, more fettuccini than spaghetti. The kind of fettuccini Galley Sally used to make. Soon the two Frenchmen had a dozen rocks in their hands, and were chattering like small birds. Out came a hand lens, and a small hammer.
Keb’s head hurt. He regretted sleeping on the beach, and drinking crappy wine. He asked Little Mac for water. As he drank, a troller plied its way west toward Cross Sound, the mast rolling on a gentle swell. “We need to be more careful,” he said. “Hide better, and bless the canoe. We need Nathan Red Otter to—”