Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  Terpsichore nudged her mother back. “I’ll work on it,” she said.

  Terpsichore and her mother took turns monitoring the gauge and putting in more fuel to keep it at a steady eleven pounds. One batch, two batches, three.

  Pop snored. Cally, Polly, and Matthew finally slept. It was just Terpsichore and her mother, working far into the night. It was free food, Terpsichore kept thinking. It was free food.

  Terpsichore was thrilled when a few days later Pop went in with Mr. LeClerc and Mr. Peterson on a smoker they could share. Smoking transformed salmon into chewy strips you could crumble into soup or gnaw on for a snack. It made salmon taste like something completely different.

  • • •

  The next shipment from Seattle brought cows. The twins named the Johnson cow Clarabelle. Mother was skittish at first around their new cow, but she was determined to learn to milk it. Her piano-playing hands made her a champion milker. Clarabelle produced more milk than they could drink, so Mother bought a butter churn and picked up pamphlets on making cheese from the Agricultural Office tent. With salmon, berries Cally and Polly had picked, their own egg-laying chickens, and cheese, milk, and butter from Clarabelle, gone were the weeks of nothing but pumpkin and sauerkraut. Gone were the days of relying on overpriced goods from the Palmer store. Terpsichore could make custards and muffins, bread pudding and berry cobblers, omelets and salmon in a dozen different ways. Matthew’s favorite word now was “more!”

  CHAPTER 25

  Palmer Colony Makes News

  ALL SUMMER, ARTICLES AND PHOTOGRAPHS ABOUT PALMER were appearing in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast. One woman got her picture taken with a pyramid of all the tins of salmon she had canned. A sketch artist drew a cartoon of a mother outside her tent with her washtub, laundry lines, and five children playing around her. A Baltimore photographer picked four boys to hold flowers and look sad at Oscar Eckert’s grave.

  “He should have picked us,” Cally said. “We sang at his funeral.”

  “Those boys didn’t even know Oscar Eckert,” Polly said.

  “I’m glad he didn’t pick you,” Mother said. “It’s ghoulish, taking pictures at a poor child’s grave.”

  And now there was news that Will Rogers, America’s favorite actor, was planning to visit Alaska to gather material for his newspaper column.

  • • •

  On the morning of August 14th, an excited crowd gathered on the shore of the Matanuska River.

  “I see it!” At the shout, five hundred heads turned skyward. Terpsichore clutched the batch of oatmeal raspberry cookies she’d wrapped in a dishtowel to protect them from the folks elbowing in at her prime position next to the ropes that cordoned off an improvised runway on the river.

  “That’s a Lockheed Orion model 9E Special fuselage,” Mendel told her and Gloria. “But you can see that Wiley Post has rigged it with a Lockheed Explorer Model 7 Special wing. See? It’s at least six feet longer than the regular Orion wing.” Mendel was gratified to see several grown-ups’ heads turned his way and nodding.

  Mendel spoke louder once he knew he had an audience. “And hear that engine? I bet it’s at least five hundred horsepower.” He pointed toward the bottom of the plane as it landed. “And they’ve replaced the fixed landing gear with floats. Wow! Look at the size of those floats! They look like they were designed for a bigger plane and could cause a problem.”

  The plane slid along the river with a rooster tail of spray and came to a stop. First out was Mendel’s hero, Wiley Post, who had flown around the world in only seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine minutes. He looked more like a pirate than a world-famous aviator, with his mustache and white eye patch. He stood on the wing and waved.

  After Mr. Post jumped off the wing onto a short pier extending into the river, Will Rogers filled the doorway. One of the newsmen used a microphone to be heard above the crowd trying to get Mr. Rogers’s attention. “How do you feel, Mr. Rogers?”

  The crowd hushed for the first words of Will Rogers.

  “Why, uh, why—wait’ll I get out, will you?” Mr. Rogers said. “I came to look around, not report on my health.” He joined Mr. Post on the pier and was quickly surrounded by colony administrators who would take Rogers and Post on a quick tour of Palmer before they took off again for Fairbanks.

  The colonists had been gossiping about all the excuses the administrators were going to have to come up with to explain why families were still living in tents and why there were piles of sinks with no plumbing fittings, crates of electric meat slicers when there was still no electricity, and only twenty hammers for the CCC workers who were supposed to be building houses.

  When the administration car returned after the tour, Terpsichore and her friends thronged back toward the river but were pushed toward the back of the crowd. How was she going to get Mr. Rogers the cookies? Rogers stepped over the rope farther down the line. “Mr. Rogers, Mr. Rogers!” she called.

  Mendel and Gloria called too. “We have cookies for you, Mr. Rogers!”

  One of the men just in front of them heard about the cookies. “We’ll get Mr. Rogers those cookies, Missy. For Mr. Rogers,” he said as he passed them along.

  “Thanks!” Terpsichore bounced on tiptoe, trying to keep track of her cookies as they were passed from hand to helpful hand to the front. She relaxed when she heard someone say, “For you, Mr. Rogers, compliments of one of our colonists.”

  By then, Mr. Post was already in the cockpit and Mr. Rogers had clambered up to the wing of the plane again. Above the shoulders of the men in front of her, Terpsichore could see the knot of his tie, his broad grin, and his Stetson hat.

  The sun had not yet set behind the mountains when Terpsichore, Gloria, and Mendel drifted back to their families’ wagons.

  Gloria exhaled in a swooning sigh. “Imagine, the most famous actor in Hollywood visited us right here in Palmer. Everyone back home will be so jealous!”

  Mendel sighed too. “Who’d have thought a flying ace like Wiley Post would ever fly to Palmer? I got to see him, eye patch and all.”

  Terpsichore couldn’t hold back a smile. “Do you think Mr. Rogers is eating one of my cookies right now?”

  “Probably,” Mendel said.

  “You betcha,” Gloria said.

  The three linked arms and agreed: When Rogers wrote about his visit, everyone in the country would know where to find Palmer on the map.

  • • •

  But the excitement over Will Rogers was not over. After supper the next day, the Johnsons gathered with everyone else near downtown Palmer at Pastor Bingle’s tent.

  Pastor Bingle had a battery-powered radio with antenna wire stretched along a barbed wire fence. At news time, he turned up the volume so everyone could listen to the broadcast from reporters following Mr. Rogers’s travels. What would Will Rogers say about Palmer in his interview?

  But instead of the lighthearted report they expected, a somber voice intoned the night’s news without preamble: “Will Rogers and Wiley Post, cultural icons of Hollywood and aviation, are dead. They lost their bearings in the fog between Fairbanks and Point Barrow, above the Arctic Circle. They landed to get directions at an Eskimo village. The engine failed on takeoff, and the nose-heavy plane plunged into the lagoon. It is believed that both men died instantly. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh may fly north to supervise the return of the bodies of Will Rogers and Wiley Post.”

  Mendel, who had sidled up to Terpsichore, was as pale as a winding sheet. “I was just being a smarty-pants, repeating what one newspaper article said about the floats being too big for the plane. Now I feel like I jinxed them.” He reached under his glasses with one finger to brush away a tear.

  Terpsichore patted him on the back. “You may be a smarty-pants, but you’re not a jinxer. It was just an accident.”

  She let her hand rest on his shoulder as she though
t about one of Will Rogers’s most famous quotes: “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

  Terpsichore knew it was a good attitude, but she was realizing that sometimes it took a while to know someone well enough to like him. To think that she hadn’t liked Mendel at all when she first met him.

  CHAPTER 26

  A Box from Below

  THE NEXT DAY BROUGHT GOOD NEWS. POP DROPPED THE box with a thud onto the table in the middle of the tent. “Special delivery for Miss Terpsichore Johnson!”

  Mother leaned over the box to read the return address. “What would my mother be sending you?”

  Cally and Polly fidgeted with impatience as Terpsichore cut each string and methodically folded the brown paper so it could be saved. Slowly, she lifted the flaps of the box and picked up a note addressed to her in Grandmother VanHagen’s old-fashioned script.

  “What’s under the note?” Cally and Polly’s hands darted toward the box, but Terpsichore batted them away.

  “The note will explain everything,” Terpsichore said. She read aloud:

  Dear Terpsichore,

  I’m proud of you for attempting to bring civilization to Alaska Territory. All the books have bookplates with my name on them so you can round them up again when it’s time to come back home to Wisconsin.

  With love and affection,

  Grandmother

  “With love and affection,” Terpsichore repeated to herself. Whenever they visited Grandmother in Madison, Terpsichore had felt like Grandmother paid more attention to the twins. But maybe it was just because the twins always demanded Grandmother’s attention, while Terpsichore hung back. But now, when Terpsichore had asked for Grandmother’s help, she had given it right away.

  Mother leafed through an old New Yorker that Grandmother had packed on top of the books for her. “Well, the news is old but I’ll at least have new short stories to read.” She laid the magazine on the table for later. “What did Grandmother mean about bringing civilization to Alaska?”

  “I wrote to Grandmother and the Girl Scouts and the Red Cross, asking everyone for books so we could have a library. Grandmother was the first to send something.” Terpsichore’s voice trailed off as she excitedly sorted through the books in the box. Grandmother had sent a wonderful selection! All together there were thirty-six books, a good start to a library.

  Mother picked up a copy of Anne of Green Gables. “My old copy! See, there’s my mother’s writing on the title page: To Clio, from Mother and Father, Christmas, 1911. I remember that Christmas; I was ten then, the same age you were when we gave you your copy.”

  Terpsichore glanced up and grinned. “Good tradition, Mom!” She picked up a copy of A Daughter of the Snows, by Jack London. “This is perfect reading for Alaska, isn’t it?” She opened it to the title page. “Here’s an odd inscription: ‘From Nate to Happy, with love.’ Who were they?”

  “I don’t recognize either of those names,” Mother said. “Grandmother must have bought the book secondhand, which isn’t like her.” She put the book in Terpsichore’s stack of grown-up fiction.

  “Where are you going to put the books?” Mother asked.

  “I thought we could keep them here,” Terpsichore said.

  “This isn’t the most convenient place for everyone,” Mother said. She probably meant it wouldn’t be convenient for her to have people barging into the tent at all hours, and Terpsichore could see her point.

  “The community center?” Pop offered.

  “These are Grandmother’s books,” Terpsichore said. “We have to make sure each person signs for the book, so we can get it back again.”

  Mother said, “I’ll ask Pastor Bingle if his family can find someplace in their tent for them if the library’s only going to be open a few hours a week. His tent’s near the middle of town and it’s a little bigger than ours.”

  That evening, Terpsichore began her first task as operations manager of the Palmer Library. She turned to the first page of the composition book she planned to use as her accessions log. Which book would have the honor of being number one? She finally decided to enter the first batch alphabetically by title and wrote in her best handwriting:

  No. 1, Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery, on loan from Mrs. Thalia VanHagen, August 16, 1935.

  • • •

  After Terpsichore and Gloria’s story time that Saturday, Gloria and Mendel piled into the wagon to come home with the Johnsons and see the beginning of the collection for the library.

  Gloria shuffled through the fiction stack. “Do we get first dibs on reading new books?”

  “Why not?” Terpsichore said. “That should be one of the privileges of being a committee member.”

  Mendel sorted through the nonfiction without finding anything he wanted to read. “What’s our next step, Trip?”

  “Madam Operations Manager, or Terpsichore, if you please. I’ve logged in each book and started making catalog cards. While I finish those, one of you can write up the circulation cards and paper clip them to the first page, and one of you can make the spine labels and tape them on. You can ask me what Dewey number to use for the nonfiction.”

  “I have the neatest printing. I’ll do the circulation cards,” Mendel said.

  Gloria cut a tidy rectangle from plain white paper, wrote the first letter of the last name of the author, aligned it neatly a half inch from the bottom of the spine, and taped it on. “Like this?” she asked.

  Terpsichore scrutinized Gloria’s work. “Perfect!” she said.

  Like the parable of loaves and fishes, when Terpsichore put out the first batch of labeled books from her grandmother to share, more books appeared from nowhere, slipped under the flaps at Pastor Bingle’s tent or at the Johnsons’.

  Box after box of books arrived after Grandmother’s. Some were from places Terpsichore had written to, and others were from places her grandmother must have contacted: women’s book clubs, assistance leagues, and churches. Grandmother should almost be an honorary member of the Palmer Library Action Committee!

  Terpsichore pulled the latest five boxes of books out from under her cot to show Gloria and Mendel.

  “Hot diggity!” Mendel said. “We allotted you a dollar for postage stamps and see what we got! Good work, Operations Manager.”

  Gloria was sorting through copies of Movie Mirror and Screenland. “Keen-o! Some of these magazines are only a few months old!”

  Terpsichore’s heart hardly had room for itself in her chest. Instead of whining about not having a library, she had taken action. Well, she and her friends had taken action. “You guys are the best!” she said.

  Gloria stood. “Absolutely-tootly the best Library Action Committee ever!”

  Mendel stood too. “I second that sentiment!”

  CHAPTER 27

  Sixth Grade in the New School

  ON AUGUST 19, THE FIRST DAY AT THE NEW PALMER school, Terpsichore met Gloria by the front entrance. Gloria twirled to show off her new yellow slicker with metal toggles like you’d see on a fireman’s jacket. She paused with her back to Terpsichore to show off what she’d done: She’d spelled out G-L-O-R-I-A in four-inch-high letters with white first aid tape.

  “Do you like?” Gloria asked. “I got the idea from a photograph in one of the American Girl magazines the Girl Scouts shipped up. By the end of the day, everyone will know my name. And that’s not all I got. Here, hold my lunch and satchel for a minute.”

  She unclasped the toggles on her raincoat. “My first straight skirt and a matching sweater set.”

  Terpsichore sighed. It was what she had wanted too, but her mother said it was too expensive, even with her father now working part time at the lumber mill. Some folks were running up debt, ordering willy-nilly from the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, but not the Johnsons.

  “What did you get for school?” asked Gloria.

 
Her mother had made her a navy blue corduroy skirt with an elastic waist and a double hem, so she could still wear it if she grew another six inches this year like she had the last. With it, she wore a plain white shirt with a Peter Pan collar and a red paisley bow her mother had made from a scrap in her sewing basket. She had black kneesocks with the tops folded over a rubber band to keep them up. Before she left home, she had felt grown-up, wearing a skirt and blouse instead of a puffed-sleeved dress like the twins. She wilted when Gloria frowned.

  “It looks like a uniform for a kid in an orphanage,” Gloria said. “But don’t worry, it’s not totally hopeless. First off, that Peter Pan collar is too goody-goody, especially with that bow.” Gloria untied the bow and retied it like a loosened man’s tie, unbuttoned the top button on Terpsichore’s shirt and lifted the back of her collar. “There! Almost like Katharine Hepburn. She likes simple clothes too, so maybe that’s your look.”

  Terpsichore wrinkled her nose and flinched when Gloria spit on her fingers and took a wisp of hair from one side of Terpsichore’s forehead, shaped it into a coil, and stuck it to her forehead.

  The first bell from the school tolled.

  “Whoopsie doodle,” Gloria said. “We’d better shake a leg.”

  The final bell rang just as Terpsichore and Gloria were hanging up their coats on the hooks at the back of the room. The sixth-grade classroom smelled like new wood, paint, and floor polish. Mendel was just hanging up his coat too.

  “Isn’t that your girlfriend?” Terrible Teddy poked Mendel and snickered.

  Mendel locked eyes with Terpsichore, but only for an instant. “Nah,” Mendel said, turning away. “I was just helping her out with her library project. I wanted to make sure she got some decent stuff, like Amazing Stories, not just girly stuff like Nancy Drew.”