by Tara Neilson
“The boys aren’t going to like that,” I said. Mom had told us of the time she’d locked Jamie outside when he was seven, when we lived in Montana, to get him to respect her curfew. All it did was enrage him and he never forgave her or got over the psychological injury of being locked out of his own home.
“Too bad. They shouldn’t be so messy,” Megan retorted.
The first Jamie knew of it was when he and Shawn and the boys returned from whatever misadventures they’d been up to all day and tried to get inside. To his surprise, the knob resisted. The door was never locked—why would it be? He rattled it.
“Open the door.”
Megan stood at the door and shook her head. “No way. You guys will come in here and make a big mess, and me and Tara spent all day cleaning it up for Mom.”
“Open the door,” Jamie ordered with an edge to his voice. “Maybe you should let him in,” I said uneasily.
“No. You can all stay out there until they get back home.”
The knob rattled violently. Telling Jamie no, thwarting his will, was an excellent way to court death.
“Open. This. Door.”
“After all our work? No way. I told you,” Megan explained in the kind of voice designed to trigger a berserker rage, the kind Jamie was known to possess, “you’ll mess everything up.”
“You’re just making him mad,” I warned her.
“I don’t care how mad he gets. They’re not coming in.”
Jamie snarled, “Open the door or I’ll break it down!”
“You can’t do that. You’ll get in big trouble. Why don’t you go somewhere and we’ll let you in when—”
Ka-thunk!
Bare inches above her head, a sharpened welding rod stuck through the door. It was attached to Jamie’s homemade spear. Megan stared from it to me wide-eyed. A few inches lower and it would have gone through her head.
“Open the door!” Jamie roared.
Megan jumped to obey, putting her hand on the knob.
“No, Megan, don’t!” I exclaimed. “Are you crazy? Don’t let him in now. He’ll kill you!”
“I have to, he’s really angry.”
“Exactly! Don’t open it.”
She opened the door.
Jamie bowled into the house and grabbed her by the throat, lifting her off her feet. He was literally out of his mind with fury and choked her. Shawn and the boys followed him inside. Shawn laughed and seated himself on a stool, ready to be entertained, thinking it was more of the usual game of harassing Megan. But I could see Jamie had lost complete control of himself and Megan was in serious trouble.
“Oh, that’s so clever, Jamie,” I said. My first instinct was to grab his hands and pull them away from her throat, but I knew that would make him tighten his grip. I made my voice extremely dry and weary, using the tone that usually got through to him. “That’s such a great example for the boys. Showing how you can’t control your temper. Like you’re a two-year-old, or something.”
It worked. He let go of her and she fell to the side holding her throat, coughing and gasping.
Jamie turned and glared at me and I stared back.
“Why don’t you try acting your age?” I said. He grabbed a book and threw it at me. I easily dodged it and picked it up. “Nice. A Bible study book. Real mature, Jamie. Real mature.”
“Shut up, Tara!” He stormed off to his bedroom to nurse the aftermath of his bloodlust in private.
I’m sure he regretted his lost control. For one thing, as much as he liked toying with all of us, experimenting on us, and using us in his battle scenarios, he was actually very protective. The times when we went somewhere and some other kids thought they could pick on any of us, he’d step in and put a stop to it, intimidating anyone who tried to mess with us. And, despite having a big appetite as a boy who would grow to be over six feet tall as a teenager, he’d go without food to make sure the rest of us had enough when he felt it was necessary.
I always felt that his ever-ready rage was attached to his early frustrations with Dad, trying to get Dad to treat him as a father should. But Dad never really figured out how to be a father, especially with Jamie. Partly because he was oldest, and partly because Jamie was born thinking he was rightfully the center of the world, which didn’t sit well with Dad who was under the impression he occupied that position.
Shawn, not surprisingly, had his own father issues. He was devastated by the loss of his father, and not seeing him when he came up to visit as he always had before was hard on him. He tried to keep anyone from seeing it, but occasionally he let his guard down and I tried to find words to comfort him, but I never managed to assimilate Rand’s loss myself, so I didn’t know how he possibly could.
Shawn held a special place in Mom’s heart and she loved telling him stories about hers and Rand’s childhood adventures. Every year she told him the same stories, but neither of them cared. They both loved the retellings. Our grandparents, to try to cheer him up when his parents had divorced, had named their commercial fishing boat the Shawno. (Grandma’s CB handle was Shawno Base.)
Every summer, as the longest day approached, we got excited knowing Shawn, with his intriguing differentness, as an ambassador from the outside world, would be coming to stay.
• • •
The other two cousins we saw regularly were LeAnn and JoDean (GiGi), Rory and Marion’s little girls. When we first moved to the cannery, JoDean was too young to stay with us—the one time we tried it, she didn’t last the full night and Dad had to take her back home in the skiff.
LeAnn visited more frequently and stayed for weeks at a time. She was like a little sister to us, being two years younger than Chris. She fit right in and could give Mom a run for her money when it came to sheer gullibility.
LeAnn was adorable, like a life-sized doll, with glossy dark hair and green-flecked brown eyes (that Mom called “breen”), and freckles sprinkled across her nose. Megan and I soon had her obsessed with Barbie dolls, and when she went home she spread the contagion to her sister, who was equally adorable with her straight blonde bob.
LeAnn and Mom had a meeting of the minds, or rather of the imaginations—both of them loved to play pretend and dress-up. Mom dressed LeAnn up as a pioneer woman, complete with bonnet, and dressed Chris as a mountain man trapper and took pictures. Then she dressed Robin up as a prince with an artfully created tinfoil crown and LeAnn as a princess and again took pictures, outside in the snow-reflected light against a snow-covered drift log. They looked like something out of a children’s storybook.
Chris and LeAnn dressed up as pioneers.
Another time Mom had us all dress up as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves—or the few dwarves we could produce. Mom asked LeAnn if she wanted to be Snow White but LeAnn insisted that she wanted to be the witch—it was a much juicier role for a little girl whose favorite pastime with Robin and Chris was to play a Dynasty-like soap opera game they called “Kill and Marry.”
However, when Mom whitened LeAnn’s face, made black circles around her eyes and placed a big wart on her chin, LeAnn looked in the mirror and was so terrorized by her own appearance that she burst into tears. She couldn’t be consoled until the witch was gone and her face was scrubbed clean of all trace of her. But only after Mom took her photos.
LeAnn brought the “pretend” out of us as we played in and around the Zippy, a boat Lance owned that was tied to a tree beyond the wanigan. He’d painted bright, garish images from the comic strip Zippy on it. We loved to pretend we were steering it far away, to wind up castaways on a Gilligan’s Island-type shore.
One day, Megan and I were playing with our little cousin on the Big Log, an enormous former tree that would one day provide most of the lumber for our six-bedroom home. As we sat there we heard eerie thumps far up the mountain, rhythmic and certain. “What’s that?” LeAnn asked, wide eyed.
It sounded to Megan and I exactly like the natives in Blue Lagoon that the two characters in that teen movie called the boogey
man. Staring at each other, we said simultaneously, in hushed voices, “It’s the boogeyman.”
LeAnn was horrified and worried about what he would do. Megan and I, infected by her absolute belief in what we’d said, were just as worried. We would hear the drums in the distance at odd times and the hair would stand up on our necks. Today, looking back, I suspect what we heard was the rhythmic hooting of grouse distorted by the distance and the forest.
• • •
Before Rory and Marion lived in Meyers Chuck, close enough for us to have LeAnn visit us more regularly, they lived farther south on Prince of Wales Island in a tiny community called Saltery Cove, where Marion’s parents and a couple of her five brothers lived. They once had Megan and me stay for Thanksgiving with them in the cabin the two of them had built.
They took us skating up on the lake, and Rory entertained us with a lively puppet show with Miss Piggy figuring prominently (he had her voice down perfectly). He had us rolling with laughter, partly out of surprise because he was always the quiet one in any gathering of adults. Though he did once climb the floathouse roof and drop some fireworks down the chimney while Mom was lighting a fire. When they blew up, she blew up, yelling at us kids until Rory sheepishly fessed up. She laughed at the sheer incongruity.
The night before Thanksgiving, which we would be attending at a neighbor’s house, Marion decided to do something special with our hair. “Why don’t we put a nice ripple in it?” she suggested for me after she put big rollers in Megan’s hair.
She wet my waist-length hair and started making about a hundred braids by kerosene light. It took so long that Megan and the girls went to bed and Marion’s fingers began to give out. She had obviously underestimated how thick my hair was. She had to keep resting them and wondered aloud if she’d bitten off more than she could chew. But she was determined not to give up and finally finished the last braid.
The next day, before we set off for the neighbors with Marion’s food contributions, she let my hair loose.
When she stepped back to consider her handiwork, I had a two-foot afro sticking out on either side of my face, much to her chagrin and amusement. I think everyone had a hard time keeping a straight face when they saw my hairdo. I tried to think of ways I could tame it down, but I thought any efforts I made would backfire and embarrass me more. So I sat on the couch, hyperaware of the strange, extra personal space my distended hair entitled me to while Marion took pictures before we headed out.
It wasn’t any relief to me that Megan was also embarrassed by the way the fat curls Marion had given her were lopsided—fat on one side, limp on the other.
In our best clothes we trooped through the mud and seaweed and then a winding, narrow footpath to reach the neighbor’s house up on a hill. Inside, it was warm and surprisingly plush, with floral upholstery and thick carpet, which was unusual in the bush. The woman of the house was delighted to have young girls around and pounced on Megan and me, assuming that we would share her passion for all things “Princess Di.”
We’d never heard of such a person. This shocked and thrilled her. She wasted no time in piling glossy coffee table books and magazines into our laps, inundating us with images of the “Wedding of the Century.” While Megan was deeply absorbed in the pomp and fashions, I kept sneaking interested glances at the buffet being spread out on the table. I was determined to get closer acquainted with the peas and pearl onions in cheese sauce.
The woman regaled us with how long the veil and train were, and a bunch of other details that didn’t stick with me. Megan soaked it all up and would later adopt Princess Di’s haircut, but there was only one thing that stuck out to me. That is, besides the complete incongruity of a seemingly pragmatic adult (unlike our completely impractical mom, who didn’t surprise us with her interest in dead British Royalty, including her infatuation with Charles II) in a remote and rugged part of Alaska surrounded by sea, mountains and evergreens obsessing over modern British royalty.
The one thing that stuck with me was the information that Princess Di read and was related in some fashion to Barbara Cartland. Which—through the magic of the written word that could allow people existing in opposite stations of life experience the same emotions and story—made us related to Princess Diana.
• • •
Rory and Marion worked together as commercial fishermen on the Velvet, formerly her father Leroy’s boat. They retained the black color he’d painted it, which set off the bunches of brilliantly colored buoys and gave it a piratical air. When LeAnn and JoDean were born, Rory and Marion kept the girls with them on the boat when the fishing wasn’t too heavy. When they were under a tight timeline, they’d have the girls stay with us.
Despite the fun we always had when LeAnn stayed with us, for some reason she always seemed to attract injuries.
Like the rest of us, she loved swinging on the swing set Dad had built for us. He’d constructed it by topping three trees that formed an L. He then de-limbed the tops and laid them horizontally across the still-rooted trunks, fastened them in place, and hung homemade swings from steel eyes he’d screwed into the cross logs. No matter how hard we swung, high enough to put slack in the lines, gravity free for a thrilling moment before we were snapped back down—what we called “going to warp”—the huge, sturdy swing set never shook or budged. None of us ever got an injury playing on it, but LeAnn knocked out a baby tooth.
Another time, she got bitten by one of the dogs.
But once it was her sister who got hurt when she and JoDean stayed with us, when our neighbors—Sheila and her kids—still lived at the small cabin on the other side of the cannery. Sheila’s boys had a BB gun and despite Mom’s law that Robin and Chris not play with it, somehow it ended up in the backroom.
JoDean was a toddler and Mom had just laid her down for her nap when she heard an odd cry. A moment later LeAnn, only about four years old at the time, sauntered out and happily bragged: “I just shot my sister in the eye.”
Mom couldn’t believe her ears. It was obvious LeAnn had no idea that she’d done anything bad, so Mom rushed to the backroom to see what had happened. As it turned out, LeAnn had told the truth. She’d shot JoDean in the eye with the neighbors’ BB gun.
To Mom’s absolute horror, JoDean’s eye was swollen and streaming blood and tears. Mom wasn’t reassured when the boys told her that it had been loaded with popcorn kernels instead of BBs.
Mom couldn’t see what the damage was, but she’d heard somewhere that it was important to protect a damaged eye from light so she taped a fresh diaper around JoDean’s head. All her worst fears about being responsible for children in the wilderness had come true. And the worst part was it wasn’t even her own child who’d been injured.
She was terrified that JoDean would lose her eye if she didn’t get her to professional medical help as soon as possible. She got on the marine radio and an hour later a floatplane arrived. JoDean was so young that of course Mom had to go with her. She asked our neighbor Sheila to keep an eye on us, while we were left to wonder what the outcome would be.
The Coast Guard flew out to where the Velvet was fishing and airlifted Marion to the hospital in Ketchikan. When Mom saw her she was overcome and said, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” Marion didn’t say a word, just enveloped Mom in a hug.
Fortunately, JoDean’s eye was okay and her vision unaffected. She did, though, grow up to have one blue eye and one green eye.
During one summer, instead of the girls staying with us, Rory and Marion took Megan and me with them on the Velvet for a trip to Ketchikan.
It was early in the morning when Dad skiffed us to Meyers Chuck. The Velvet was still tied up at the dock and Marion suggested we climb into the bunks in the foc’s’le and sleep for the first part of the trip as LeAnn and JoDean were doing.
Megan was excited about the trip, but she had one major concern. She was prone to every kind of motion sickness there was, especially seasickness. We’d only been lying in the bunks as they vibrated to t
he rhythm of the engine for a little while, with the boat dipping heavily from one side to the other, when Megan groaned pathetically and said, “Tara, I don’t think I’m going to make it if it’s going to be like this the whole way. Check and see how far we’ve gone.”
I got up and checked out the porthole window and my eyebrows shot up. I turned back to Megan.
“What?” She clutched her stomach, her face glowing palely in the shadowy fo’c’sle that smelled of diesel, coffee, and a hint of raw fish.
“Um,” I said, trying to think of a way to break it to her gently, “we haven’t left the dock yet.”
The swaying of the boat was caused by Rory and Marion walking from one side to the other as they prepared the boat and untied it as the engine idled, warming up.
Megan was chagrined but decided that rather than climbing out and having Dad take her back home, she’d gut it out.
Fortunately, once we were underway the boat’s motion eased, especially after the trolling poles were let down, and Megan was okay for the rest of the long trip. Rory and Marion trolled their way to town so as not to waste a day of fishing.
I remember sitting outside on the hatch, watching Alaska go by in its shades of blue. I was reading Louis L’Amour’s Sitka and I loved that the characters in that book sailed right down the waters Rory and Marion fished.
We anchored up that night in a quiet, sunny spot—since it was summer the sun didn’t set till way past bedtime—and Megan and I slept on the floor in sleeping bags up in the pilothouse that was lit by undulating water reflections.
The radio had been playing all day and Megan and I were falling asleep to Gary US Bonds when Marion appeared at the steps that led down to the fo’c’sle. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I know you like listening to the music but I have to turn it off. I wish I could go to sleep to it, but I always end up listening to it and thinking about things and then can’t get to sleep.”
Marion was only eleven years older than Jamie, so in many ways she seemed to us more like an older sister than an aunt. She could transition between talking with us on our level to talking with Mom and Grandma about history, science, and religion, and then talking with the men and old-timers about their fishing, hunting, and trapping interests from the strength of her Alaskan experiences of building her own log cabin and fishing with her husband in often dangerous waters. We girls admired her, loved her, and wanted to be like her. And, when we married, we wanted to have a marriage like hers.