Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  • • •

  With yet more snow, Terpsichore didn’t know if Mr. Crawford would be able to make it to dinner, but at three o’clock, she heard the bells on his sled and the enthusiastic clamor of his dogs. She opened the door to let him in. “We’re so happy you got here!” Terpsichore told him. “Come on in.”

  “It’s the popcorn man!” Cally and Polly each took a hand to lead him on into the house, but Mr. Crawford stayed just inside the door.

  “Need to take care of my dogs first,” he said. “Who wants to help?”

  As Terpsichore started to follow Mr. Crawford, her father interrupted. “I’ve heard sled dogs can be dangerous.”

  “Not these dogs,” Mr. Crawford said. “I treat them like family. In fact, they are my family. The only thing Terpsichore would have to worry about is getting her face licked off.”

  Terpsichore bundled up, but Cally and Polly stayed by the woodstove.

  “I hope I’m not being too forward,” Mr. Crawford said, “but can I invite myself and my dogs to spend the night in the barn? They could easily run the twelve miles home—it only took them an hour or so to get here, but I’d rather run them in daylight.”

  “Don’t even think about running home tonight,” Pop said. “We’ll move the settee in front of the woodstove for you, and Clarabelle and Smoky won’t mind the company of your dogs in the barn.”

  Mr. Crawford herded the dogs into one of the empty stalls, removed their harnesses, and checked their booties. Pop and Terpsichore found buckets for thawed water and broke open a fresh bale of hay for the floor of the stall.

  “Guess who I saw in town?” Mr. Crawford said. “It was Mendel with that dog of his. Mendel was on skis and Togo was pulling him into town so he could load up his backpack with supplies. Looked like they were both having fun.”

  “At least Togo was doing something besides scaring cats,” Terpsichore said. “Do you think Togo will grow up to be as helpful as your dogs?”

  “She’s off to a good start,” Mr. Crawford said. “You know,” he continued, “as I get older, I’m beginning to think living in town has its advantages: movies, hospital, more friends . . . It gets lonesome on the far reaches of the Butte.”

  He looked up from removing the booties on a dog that, true to prediction, wouldn’t stop licking Mr. Crawford’s whiskers.

  Terpsichore leaned over to pet the dog and giggled when it licked her face too. Its tongue was softer than a cat’s. “I promise to save you scraps from dinner,” she said.

  “They’d like that, Miss Terpsichore,” Mr. Crawford said. He stood and watched his “family” explore the confines of the stall and settle down in a cozy heap.

  After dinner, Mr. Crawford pushed back his chair. “This dinner is the best Christmas present anyone’s given me in years. And now I have something for you. Knowing this family’s penchant for books, I hope it’s something you’ll enjoy.

  “Before my first winter here I wrote down to Shorey’s Book Store in Seattle and had them send me up a crate of books to stave off cabin fever.” He opened a leather rucksack and drew out several books: Robert Service poems, Jack London stories, Ben-Hur, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. “Let me know when you’ve finished these and I can loan you some more.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Crawford,” Mother said. “You’ve been so good to us.” She reached over to look at the Twain book. “My mother used to like Twain.” She replaced the book in the stack. “I wonder what she’s doing this Christmas, without us.”

  “Maybe she could come up and visit,” Mr. Crawford said.

  “She may be here at the end of summer to take us home with her,” Mother said. She sighed and ran her fingers over the embossed cover of A Connecticut Yankee.

  “Maybe she’ll surprise you,” Mr. Crawford said, “and decide she’d like to live up here with you in Alaska, instead of taking you back to Madison.”

  “She’d never adjust to a life like this,” Mother said. She turned to Terpsichore and the twins. “Can you imagine your grandmother hauling water for her bubble bath? Or living without a radio or her piano? I still have a hard time picturing her now without a cook and chauffeur.”

  Mr. Crawford was subdued. “It sounds as if your mother married well.”

  “It depends on what you mean by that,” Mother said. “My father did well with the railroad until the crash. We had a fine house, but I’m not sure they were happy in it.”

  “Sometimes we don’t know what we want most until the chance of getting it has passed us by,” Mr. Crawford said.

  What Terpsichore wanted most was to stay in Alaska, and she wasn’t going to let any chance to make that happen pass her by.

  CHAPTER 35

  The New House in Town

  BY LATE APRIL, PILES OF MELTING SNOW TURNED THE ground to muck so hungry it would suck your boots off. The old-timers called this season break-up, the time when the frozen river cracked open and began to move again. Mother called it a mess, and Terpsichore agreed. By late May the ground would dry out enough to plow. That’s what the optimists said, anyway.

  Meanwhile, Pop laid out planks between the house, the barn, the henhouse, and along the side of the road to the school bus stop so the girls and Mother could avoid the mud and come home with the number of shoes they started out with.

  Mother insisted that Matthew play in the house or the barn. Pop agreed. “Don’t want the mud to suck Matty down to his eyeballs!” He reached over to tickle Matthew on his tummy.

  “Eye-balllls, eye-balllls!” The word made Matty giggle more than the tickle.

  But this season brought good things too. True to his word, Mr. Crawford took the Johnsons into their woods to tap the birch trees before they budded out and the sap turned sour. For two weeks, Pop and Terpsichore hauled home fivegallon buckets full of sap. For hours, each batch steamed up the kitchen with a sweet smell that made everyone hungry for pancakes. Terpsichore was already planning a birch syrup glaze for salmon and chicken, and a dollop of syrup on the morning oatmeal and in mint tea.

  • • •

  One sunny day, when the snow remaining on the mountaintops etched a jagged line against a densely blue sky, Pop came back from town with something held behind his back. “Special delivery for Clio Johnson!” he said. With a flourish, he held out something wrapped in burlap and twine.

  Mother approached cautiously. “It looks like a bundle of sticks.”

  Pop jingled the metal tags on each bundle with one finger. “Come this summer you won’t say that,” he said.

  Mother leaned down to read the tags. “Sitka—that’s some kind of rugosa, I think.” She looked up at Pop.

  He grinned. “Right as usual, Clio.”

  “Nutkana—is that a rose too? And a rubrifolia. Three roses!”

  “I said you’d have roses in Alaska, and here they are. I read the nursery catalog at the store, and these roses are all supposed to be good in Alaska. In fact, the nutkana is the rose that grows wild along the roadsides here.”

  Pop held the prickly sticks out of the way as Mother moved in for a hug.

  • • •

  On one of the Johnsons’ Saturday trips into town for supplies and for the story hour Terpsichore still gave twice a month at the library, she noticed someone had chopped down trees and graded dirt on a plot of land not far from the school. “Who’s getting ready to build in town?” she asked.

  “I hadn’t heard about anyone building there,” Pop said.

  “I’ll find out,” Terpsichore said. While the rest of the Johnsons were in the general store, Terpsichore tromped through the mud to the big colony map by the post office that identified everyone’s parcels. The mystery parcel, which looked like about five acres, was surrounded by colony land, but was in a different color. Who owned that land?

  Terpsichore balanced on the loose boards serving as a sidewalk over
the mud to the architect’s office where two other men were looking at plat maps.

  “Mr. Crawford?” one of them said, as he read the name on the plat map.

  The other one shrugged. “Nobody I know.”

  But of course Terpsichore knew. It looked like Mr. Crawford was going to build in town, just as he said he might last Christmas.

  Terpsichore raced back—as fast as one could race through the muck—to the construction site. This time Mr. Crawford himself was there.

  “Are you building a house, Mr. Crawford?” she asked.

  He slid off the papery brown covers of a couple of spruce tips and popped them in his mouth like popcorn. “You guessed right, Miss Terpsichore. I bought that land when I first moved down from Nome, then decided I wanted to be farther out. But now I plan to spend at least the winters in town, and eventually year-round if things work out right.”

  “What kind of things?” Terpsichore said.

  Mr. Crawford smiled but changed the subject, pointing out where various parts of the house would go. “The kitchen will face east, toward sunrise, and I’ll have a study, bedroom, dining room, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and maybe an extra room just in case I think of another use for one. What else do you think a house needs?”

  “Mother misses a real bathroom, a water pump right in the kitchen, a generator for electricity, a windmill by the well to bring up water, a music room—one with a piano of course—separate bedrooms for all the children . . . Well, I guess you don’t have children.”

  Mr. Crawford patted Terpsichore on the head. “No, Miss Terpsichore, I never had children, but if I did I’d have wanted a kid just like you.”

  All the way back home, Terpsichore felt a lightness on top of her head, right where Mr. Crawford touched it, right where the soft spot was on a baby’s skull. Even though she wasn’t musical, someone would like a kid just like her.

  Pop wasn’t one to have to keep up with the neighbors, but when he saw the look on Mother’s face when she heard that Mr. Crawford had ordered a claw-foot tub, Pop started enlarging the tiny corner room that had the chemical toilet. He also ordered a real bathtub. Without running water they would have to heat water on the woodstove, then carry buckets of it to the tub. It would be a tub, though. One Mother could soak in for an hour. He dug a gravel-lined ditch for the water to drain into. He made a washstand for a pitcher and basin and laid a linoleum floor. It looked like a real city bathroom even if there was no plumbing.

  When it was done, the whole family circled around the bathroom door to admire the result. “I thought you were against running up more debt, Mr. Johnson,” Mother said. “If we leave in a few months it’s a waste of money.” She pretended to be mad, but her mouth twitching toward a smile showed she was pleased.

  “I admit we had lots of problems at first, Clio, but look what progress we’ve made already! We have a school and a hospital and plans for churches . . .”

  “Won’t we want to stay?” Terpsichore asked.

  Cally and Polly nodded in agreement with Terpsichore.

  “Only if I vote to stay,” Mother said. “You haven’t changed the bargain, have you?” She narrowed her eyes at Pop. “Or are you just trying to sway my vote.”

  “Of course I am.” Pop smiled.

  CHAPTER 36

  An Announcement

  AS GLORIA HAD PREDICTED, SHE GOT THE PART OF Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and Miss Zelinsky, after hearing the twins sing at church, made sure they got to lead all the first-, second-, and third-graders in the Munchkin songs. Mendel was working on special effects. Since Terpsichore couldn’t sing, dance, or make houses fly in a cyclone, she volunteered to make cookies to sell at intermission. If she wanted to take proper care of her pumpkins, she didn’t have time for rehearsals.

  Every school lunch hour and recess, Gloria handed Terpsichore her rumpled mimeographed copy of the script Miss Zelinsky had written for The Wizard of Oz, based on the book and using some of the songs from the old Broadway production. Huddling on the non-windy side of the school building, they would go through another scene.

  Terpsichore gently tugged on a section of Gloria’s hair, which was now halfway to her shoulders instead of a wavy bob. “Your hair is getting so long!” Terpsichore said.

  “My hair wasn’t long enough for two ponytails like Dorothy, so I started letting it grow as soon as Miss Zelinsky announced the musical,” Gloria said. “I knew I’d get the part, and all the great actors prepare for a role by getting into character.”

  “If you want to get into character as a Kansas farm girl, maybe you ought to help me in my pumpkin patch,” Terpsichore said.

  “I get into character enough on my parents’ farm,” Gloria said. “You were kidding, right?”

  “Yes, kidding!” Terpsichore said. “Where do you want to start?”

  “Where she meets the Scarecrow?”

  “Okeydoke,” Terpsichore said, and found the page.

  Gloria had underlined all her parts with red pencil, so Terpsichore’s job was to feed Gloria her lines, to say the lines of dialogue just before her next words.

  Between helping Gloria with her lines during the day and listening to the twins rehearse their songs in the evening, Terpsichore would have nearly the whole play memorized herself, even if she didn’t have a part.

  • • •

  “So,” Miss Zelinsky said one morning, “I have a few announcements to make. I know September is a long way off, but I wanted to get the word out now. If you hear of anyone who wants to buy a spinet piano, please let me know.”

  Gloria raised her hand. “But why are you selling your piano?”

  “Well, that’s the other part of the announcement.” Their teacher held her left hand in a shaft of sunlight so the tiny diamond chip could be seen even at the back of the room. “I’m getting married this September and moving down to Washington State. My fiancé has a piano too, so I won’t need mine.”

  Terpsichore, Gloria, and every other girl scrambled out of their seats to coo over Miss Zelinsky’s ring.

  While the other girls continued to titter and congratulate Miss Zelinsky, Terpsichore just thought about the piano. A spinet wasn’t as nice as the piano Mom had sold a year ago, but it was a piano, and since it was small, it would fit in their living room. Would a piano help make her mother vote to stay?

  Terpsichore broke into the other girls’ questions about what kind of dress Miss Zelinsky was going to wear for her wedding. “How much are you asking for the piano?”

  Miss Zelinsky was still blushing over her announcement and attempting to quiet the class, but she stopped long enough to answer. “I’m asking seventy-five dollars.”

  Giving up on regaining order, Miss Zelinsky dismissed class for an early recess.

  Terpsichore ran up to her teacher’s desk. “Please save the piano for me. I don’t have the money now, but I know I can raise it.”

  “How could you earn that much money in four months?”

  “Give me a chance.” Terpsichore all but knelt and clung to Miss Zelinsky’s skirts. “Please?” Her voice trailed off in a squeak.

  “All right. But my fiancé is coming up for the fair and taking me home the next day, so I can only give you until the last day of the fair, September fifth. If you don’t have all the money that day, I’ll need to sell it to someone else.”

  “Thank you, thank you! I know I can do it!” She didn’t know just how she would do it, though. Not yet. It would take a grown-up all summer to earn that much money. Other kids were babysitting now. Other kids were selling popcorn at the movies. What could she do that no one could copy? What could she do to earn that much money?

  CHAPTER 37

  The Pumpkin Plan

  POP FLIPPED THROUGH THE INFORMATION BOOKLET ABOUT Palmer’s first fair. “I heard the officials are sending copies of this booklet to every state in the union. We’ll
probably get lots of tourists coming up to see how many of us have lived through the winter without getting eaten by a polar bear or turning into Popsicles.”

  His voice trailed off as he read a page midway through the booklet. “They’re offering prizes for almost anything you can think of,” he said. “I might enter the woodworking division with my rocking chair, and, Clio, you should enter some of your fancy knitting.”

  He looked up, eyes wide. “Whooey! There’s going to be a twenty-five-dollar prize for the biggest vegetable grown in the valley!”

  “Let me see that!” Terpsichore snatched the catalog so she could read for herself. Twenty-five dollars was a third of the way to a piano. What could grow bigger than a pumpkin in one summer? Last year she’d grown large vegetables willy-nilly, in raw soil. If she got pumpkins twice as big as the ones she’d grown in Wisconsin by just throwing seeds in the ground, how big could one grow in soil that had been enriched with compost? And how big would a pumpkin grow if she pruned off all but one pumpkin on a vine and fed it milk, like Almanzo did in Farmer Boy?

  Terpsichore shoved the catalog back toward her father and wandered over to the warming shelf above the stove. She had planted her largest pumpkin seeds into Mason jars filled with compost-enriched soil to cocoon them. She poked the dirt in each jar with a finger. Too wet and they’d develop white mold. Too dry and the seed would never germinate. One of those seeds needed to grow a pumpkin big enough for Cinderella to ride in. One of those seeds needed to grow a winner.

  She pictured herself walking up the steps to the stage to shake hands with the mayor and collect the twenty-five-dollar prize. Wouldn’t everyone be surprised that the winner of the biggest vegetable growing contest was not an old-timer, but a soon-to-be twelve-year-old girl?