Tisha

  “Chuck?”

  He didn’t answer. Mr. Carew called to me from the roadhouse.

  “Somebody stuck again?” He was holding an armful of wood.

  “No. It’s all right, thanks,” I called back, then I lowered my voice. “Chuck, I wish you’d come out of there.”

  He didn’t answer me, and I waited to hear the roadhouse door slam before I said, “Chuck?”

  “Go ’way.”

  “It must be terribly cold in there … Won’t you come out?”

  “I never come out. I catch die, you no see me no more.”

  “I’d feel terrible if that happened.”

  “Oh, no. You no care. You be happy.” I could hear his teeth chattering.

  “Chuck, if anything happened to you I don’t know what I’d do. I love you very much.”

  He was furious. “You lie. You one sumbitch white woman tell big lie!”

  “You must be awfully mad at me … What did I lie about?”

  “You say you take care me. You no take care me. You make me go ’way Indian village.” He could hardly talk for shivering.

  “Chuck, I didn’t he to you. I want you to stay with me. Don’t you know that?”

  “Ev’lyn, he say when Mr. St’ong come he take me ’way.”

  “Can I come in, Chuck? Please?”

  There was a long silence, then the door moved. I pushed on it and it bumped against him. He was huddled on the floor, in the corner. I sat down between the holes. All I could see was the top of his head in the dimness, his breath misting up around it.

  “Could you come up here and sit with me?”

  He stayed put.

  “Please, Chuck. I want to tell you something.”

  He had trouble standing up, his legs were so cramped. He sat down beside me, trembling, and I put an arm around him. What a place to talk with somebody you cared about, I thought, sitting and freezing in an outhouse. The only consolation was that it was too cold to smell.

  “What Evelyn told you wasn’t true. I’m not going to send you away—not if I can help it. I want to keep you and Ethel with me, but I have to talk to your father first.”

  He relaxed a little. “Why you talk with my fodda?”

  “Because it’s going to be up to him.”

  He looked up at me and he almost smiled. “My fodda no care, Tisha. He say yes. I know he say yes.”

  “Whether he cares or not I still have to talk to him. I’m going to tell him what a fine boy you are and that I want you to stay with me. I want it very badly. You believe me?”

  His arms went around me and he hugged me with all his might. “I believe, Tisha. Oh, I believe too much.” He straightened up, happy. “I gonna tell that Ev’lyn he lie.”

  “Don’t tell her anything. Not yet. Let me talk to your father first, all right? Not a word. Now for God’s sake let’s get out of here.”

  After supper I skied over to see Joe. I’d never been over to his place, but I didn’t have any trouble finding it. He lived about a mile from the settlement on Stone-house Creek. All I had to do was follow a sled trail till I reached the creek, then follow the creek up the hill to his cabin.

  As many times as I had gone out at night alone it still scared me a little. There was no wind, and a bright crescent moon shone down. Everything was so still it was like being alone in a big wax museum. Nothing moved. Every twig, every bush that pushed up through the whiteness stood out in the pale moonlight. By the time I reached Stonehouse Creek, slung my skis over my shoulder and started up the hill I felt almost like two people, one of them breathing hard and making all kinds of noise, the other out there watching me moving along, a tiny speck in a big white sea. The hill was steeper than it looked, and before I was halfway up I was sorry I’d brought the skis. They weighed a ton.

  Joe’s dogs began to howl and act up before I reached the top. He came out to see what was going on and I waved to him.

  “Tea or coffee?” he called.

  “Tea!”

  He disappeared inside and came out again just as I reached the top. The racket from the kennel made it impossible to hear, so he didn’t say anything until we were inside.

  “No chaperone?”

  “I couldn’t get her to climb that hill.”

  He held out his hands. “I’ll take your duds.”

  I slipped off my parka and plopped down into a chair. He had a nice place, just the kind I’d have expected. There were a few guns on the wall—a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, a shotgun and a revolver—and they all were clean and gleaming with oil. He took as good care of his things as he did himself. He’d made a built-in basin for the kitchen counter, and on the shelf over it all his toilet articles were lined up neatly—hairbrush and comb, shaving brush and mug, shaving lotion and straight razor. The whole place was so neat and clean compared to mine I felt like a slob. With all the kids trooping in and out, my place was always a mess.

  He had a good library too. Some painted boxes nailed to the wall were filled with books: Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Milton. A can of tobacco and a rack of pipes sat on a crate beside a rocking chair. His cot was made army-fashion and was pushed against the wall. There were some nice furs he’d hung on wooden hoops. I couldn’t tell what they all were, but I recognized the silky rust-gray, almost topaz color of lynx, and two soft, shining pelts of silver and black fox.

  The only thing I didn’t like was the odor of all the furs that were piled on newspapers. They smelled rank. It was only too bad that the women who were going to wear them couldn’t see the whole sickening process of trapping, killing and skinning the animals they came from. They’d never wear them again.

  A few burlap sacks already crammed with furs were piled by the door.

  “That’s some catch,” I said.

  “Half of it’s last season’s.” He handed me a steaming cup of tea. “The price wasn’t that good, so I held onto them.”

  “That was smart.”

  “Same thing anybody would do if they could afford it, but most of these old-timers can’t. That’s how you make money in this country—have enough money so you can hold out for your price.”

  The cup felt nice and warm. Joe poured himself some coffee, then took a bottle of Canadian whiskey down from the shelf.

  “Mind?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  Just to be courteous he offered me some. I said no and he poured some into his cup. “Skoal,” he said, taking a sip.

  “Joe—”

  “Don’t say a word. I want to see if I can guess what this visit is all about. You didn’t come for my company, I’m sure of that. Or for supper—it’s too late. I guess I give up.”

  “It’s about Chuck and Ethel.”

  “What about them?”

  “Can I have them?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am.”

  He laughed. “What do you want them for?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You’re asking me to give you something. I want to know why you want it.”

  “Joe, I just want them.”

  “Good enough. Take them.”

  I’d expected him to say no and I had a dozen arguments all ready. Now I hardly knew what to say. “You mean it?”

  “Sure. You know you’re going to get people all riled up, though, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Doesn’t that suggest anything to you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that ever since you’ve been here you’ve been getting them riled up.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “Whose else is it? You’re a genuine card, let me tell you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You mean it doesn’t seem peculiar to you when a young single girl decides all of a sudden that she’s going to play mother, especially when she knows that everybody isn’t exactly fond of the offspring she’ll be playing it with.”

>   “I’m not playing anything.”

  “Then why not avoid a whole mess and let those kids go to the Indian village where they belong?”

  “Joe, you know what that Indian village is like. It’s not a place for a dog, much less for children. Don’t they mean anything to you at all?”

  “No.”

  “How about Mary—did she?”

  “What’s she got to do with this?”

  “You’re asking me questions. Why can’t I ask you?”

  “Mary and I were finished over a year ago. I didn’t ask her to come out here. She came on her own. I tried to get her to go back a half a dozen times. I told her I’d give her enough money to tide her over the winter if she would, but she wouldn’t.”

  “She must have loved you an awful lot.”

  “That was her hard luck.”

  He knew how cruel that sounded, but he didn’t apologize. He took a long swallow of coffee, finishing it. Then he got up. “Why’d you come into this country?” he asked me while he poured himself some more.

  “To see it.”

  “No wonder you go around like Little Miss Muffet. Everybody took bets the day you arrived. Half of them bet you’d last about a month after freeze-up and the other half bet you’d stay and freeze to death.”

  “Sorry to disappoint everyone.” I started to get up.

  “Don’t get so insulted.” He made a motion for me to sit down and poured some more whiskey into his coffee. “It’s about time somebody told you a couple of things. The first is that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to get your nose out of the air and stop judging people so much. Maybe you came here for the fun of it, but nobody else did. They came to make a strike, get rich and move on, because that’s all this country’s good for.”

  “You sound as though you don’t like it here,” I said.

  “You’re beginning to get the idea.” “Then why do you stay?”

  “For the same reason everybody else does,” he answered. “I can’t afford to go. Two kinds of people live here—the ones that have investments, like me, and the ones that don’t have enough money to pack up and get out, like these old-timers who have it in the back of their mind that they’re gonna hit a big pay streak one of these days. That’s why they hang on even though their bones ache and they’d like nothing better than to hightail it for California and forget this place ever existed.”

  The whiskey had relaxed him, or maybe he simply needed to talk. He stopped long enough to take a deep breath.

  “Maybe you don’t like the way I treated Mary, but what do you know about her and me? She knew what she was doing. I never told her I was gonna marry her, even though there were times when I thought about it. But all I’d have to do was think to myself, what happens when I go Outside—when the two of us go Outside? What could I say to people when I introduced her? ‘Here y’are folks, meet the wife. She knows everything there is to know about curing fur, making jerky, drying fish, chopping wood or sewing mittens. Just don’t talk to her about politics, literature, current events, art, mortgages, or anything else like that.’ “

  I tried to interrupt him, but he wouldn’t let me. “Well, the problem never came up, because we broke up. I didn’t want her to come out here, but she made up her mind she was gonna do it and that was that. I gave her just enough grub to keep going, hoping she’d go back to the Indian village. She wouldn’t. So I thought if I simply didn’t give her anything she’d be forced to go back. Well, it didn’t work. She made up her mind she was gonna stay, and when an Indian gets it in their head to do something, nothing gets it out.”

  I got up and asked him to let me have my parka.

  “I’ve got a couple more things to say,” he went on, “then if you want I’ll walk you back to your place.”

  “I can make it on my own,” I said.

  He took my parka down from the rack and handed it to me. “Have it your way,” he said, “You stepped on a lot of toes since you’ve been here and if you weren’t as nice a kid as you are you wouldn’t have gotten away with it. Or maybe it’s just that you’re a kid and so everybody looked the other way. If people don’t like Indians they don’t like Indians and that’s their business. I’ve got nothing against Indians myself, but I’m not about to Start lecturing other people on how to feel toward ’em, and that goes for half-breeds too. Fred Purdy did you the biggest favor in the world when he pulled out of here, only you don’t have enough sense to see that. This is his home. He has to live in this country. He’s not about to make it tough on himself by messing around with a white girl. He did the right thing by you. You ought to be grateful. Instead you have to go ahead and stick your foot right smack in people’s faces again and take these kids. Well I’m telling you you’re making a mistake.”

  “You all done?”

  “All done.”

  “You asked me before why I came into this country. I’ll tell you the truth. I thought I was going to find something wonderful here—everything I ever dreamed about. Maybe that’s stupid, but that’s what I thought. Well, I found out one thing. People here aren’t much different from the ones back in the States. The only difference is that here they can do anything they want, which means acting just about as mean and selfish as they can.”

  “You want a soapbox?”

  “I’m just telling you how I feel.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Anne, put on some rouge and lipstick, have some fun, and stop worrying about the underprivileged.”

  He looked so smug and superior I felt like gnashing my teeth. “Joe, honestly, I’d really like to give you a punch. All you’ve told me so far is that you don’t like the country and people around here don’t like Indians. Well, if I want to like both of them that’s my right—and I’m getting sick and tired of people looking at me as if I’m a nut because of it.”

  He smiled. “It hasn’t stopped you so far. Go ahead, take the kids. Do what you like with them. Just remember they’re still part savage.”

  “If they are it’s probably the part they got from you.”

  I thought he’d get mad at that, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Forget it.”

  I started to go. “I can still have them?”

  “They’re all yours … Wait a minute.”

  He walked over to one of the burlap sacks and ripped it open. Peering inside, he pulled out first one, then another black fox pelt. They were perfectly matched and worth a lot of money. He fluffed them out then clamped the snouts together and draped them around my neck.

  “Peace offering,” he said.

  The way he was smiling made me feel sorry for him. His cabin was neat, and he was pretty well off, but when it came right down to it, all he had was a comfortable place to be lonely in.

  “Thanks, Joe.” I said. “Will you do me one more favor? Don’t say anything to anybody. There’s no use in anybody knowing until Mr. Strong comes in.”

  He said he wouldn’t.

  Outside, when I got to the edge of the hill and looked down, I couldn’t bring myself to push off. I was scared I’d run into a tree.

  “What’s the matter?” Joe asked.

  “It’s pretty steep.”

  “That it is.”

  I put the skis together and sat down on them. “Don’t laugh,” I said. “Give me a push.”

  He pushed me off. Halfway down the skis separated and I went tumbling. The skis went on down without me.

  I could hear Joe laughing. “Still in one piece?” he called. He didn’t have to raise his voice. It carried clearly.

  “Just divine.” I did a quick dance step that made him laugh even more, then I collected the ski poles and the furs and walked and slid down the rest of the way. He was still in a good mood when I reached bottom and started strapping on my skis.

  “So you think we’re all mean, eh?”

  “Sometimes. Not most of the time.” It felt strange to be talking with him as if we were in the same living room and not a quarter of a mile apart. �
�How about you? You really think this is such an awful place?”

  “Sometimes. Not most of the time … Sometimes I stand up here and I look out over everything, and then I think, it’s all mine. All of it. I don’t have to buy it, pay taxes on it or worry about it. It’s mine.” He was quiet a few seconds and I thought he was going to go on. Instead he just said, “Well, goodnight, kid.”

  “Goodnight, Joe.”

  I felt good all the way home.

  Ethel was asleep, but Chuck was still up. When I told him the news he let out a yell and hugged me. “I know you make him say yes, Tisha, I know you make him say yes!” He was so excited he didn’t fall asleep until after ten.

  “What do you think Mr. Strong will say?” I asked Nancy later on. He’d be expecting to take Chuck and Ethel back to the Indian village along with Mary’s body.

  “He’ll be speechless,” Nancy said.

  “Be nice if everybody else was too.”

  “Don’t you worry, they won’t be.”

  XVIII

  On the days Mr. Strong came into the settlement I always let the class out about fifteen minutes before he arrived. On those days there were always at least one or two visiting dog teams tied up by the roadhouse. They belonged to miners and trappers who’d mushed in either to pick up goods or to send stuff out. One minute they’d be lying in the snow all quiet, maybe sleeping, the next they’d be lifting their heads, then getting up and stretching. After that, between them and the local dogs it was pure pandemonium—barking and howling that kept getting louder and louder until owners and drivers put a stop to it. Sure enough, if it didn’t happen to be a stray animal or a stranger that had started them off, fifteen minutes later Mr. Strong’s horse-drawn sled would come rumbling into the settlement How they could tell he was on the way nobody knew, but they could.

  This time they started barking right after lunch. As soon as the class heard them everybody stopped work and listened, waiting to make sure it wasn’t something else. Even though it was just about the right time there was no guarantee it was Mr. Strong. There wasn’t even a guarantee he’d come in at all on the day he was supposed to. Too many things could hold him up: heavy drifts, a sudden storm or an accident. Now that it was February the weather was especially freakish. The past few days you couldn’t even hang out wash. No sooner would you get it on the line than it froze, and then the wind would bang it up against you hard enough to hurt.