Tisha

by Robert Specht

  I heard Joan’s mother come up on the porch and knock. The sound seemed to come from another world. I must have told her to come in. When she did she saw right away that something was wrong. Joan ran over to her and told her that Chuck and Ethel had been taken away. She looked at me and asked me if it were true, but something was sticking in my throat and I couldn’t answer her.

  “Who took them away?” I heard her ask Joan.

  “Mrs. Barrett,” Joan said. “And Mr. Vaughn, and another man too.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” her mother said. “Anne, that’s terrible.” I saw her hand come over and felt it touch my shoulder. “When did it happen?” she asked me.

  I said, “Just now.”

  She wanted to know if she could do anything for me. I said, “No. Thanks. Thanks very much. You take Joan home. I’ll be all right.”

  After she left I sat listening to how quiet it was.

  My feet began to get cold, so I got up and looked around for something to do. I started to straighten things. If I could just keep busy straightening things up, I thought, I might be able to start thinking again, figure out what to do. I shut the bureau drawers, arranged the chairs around the table neatly and then went into the schoolroom to see what I could do there. The kids had left it in pretty good order so there wasn’t much to keep me occupied.

  The funny thing was that I couldn’t cry. I wanted to, I even tried to, but I couldn’t. If I cried I wouldn’t be able to think, and I had to do that. I had to think, figure out how to get Chuck and Ethel back. When I thought that, my mind started working again. That’s what I had to do, I realized—get them back.

  Tomorrow was Friday, then the weekend. I’d get someone to take me up to the Indian village then. Maybe Joe Temple would do it. Or Fred. I’d start out right after school. I’d miss a couple of days, since I probably wouldn’t be back until Tuesday or Wednesday, but I’d get them back.

  Somebody came up on the porch and knocked.

  It was Maggie Carew. She came in and stood in front of the closed door in her long blue coat, with her arms crossed. She made some kind of sound that could have meant anything from sympathy to “That’s that.”

  “Did you know they were going to do this?” I asked her.

  “I heard about it,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “What’s it matter?”

  “You can tell them there won’t be any school on Monday. Tuesday either.”

  “Oh …?”

  “I’m going up to the Indian village. I’m bringing Chuck and Ethel back.”

  “The hell you will.”

  “The hell I won’t. I’m going right after school tomorrow.”

  “You can save yourself the trip. Those kids are there to stay, thank God.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “You won’t. When Cab gets through tellin’ those Injuns what’ll happen to ’em if they let you have those kids they’ll scalp you before they let you so much as touch ’em.”

  “What can he tell them?”

  “That if they so much as let you look at those kids that’s the end of ’em. There’s a few of ’em work on the riverboat in season. A couple of ’em get work at the Prentiss roadhouse and some more at Eagle. He’ll tell ’em if they let you have those kids they won’t ever work for anybody around here again. He’s also gonna tell ’em that Strong won’t tote a goddamn thing in or out of that village either. Nobody will. If that ain’t enough he’ll tell ’em he’ll get the marshal after them. And believe me they’ll listen. So like I say, save yourself the trip.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “You’re darn tootin’ it’s the truth. Don’t believe me if you don’t want. Go on up there, but you’ll be goin’ on a fool’s errand.”

  I felt weak.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me,” she said. Then she softened a little. “They did you a favor, Annie. I know you liked them kids, but one day you’ll see how much better off you are without ’em. You’ll be teachin’ at Eagle next year now, at least if I have anything to say about it, and I do. You’ll see, Annie. You’ll see it was all for the best.”

  “I will, will I? I’ll tell you something, Mrs. Carew. You know what I feel like doing? I feel like leaving this place right now and never coming back.”

  “Don’t talk so. You don’t mean that and you know it.”

  “Oh I mean it all right. Do you realize what you’ve all done? Just because you’re mad about something, because you’re feeling mean about something, you’re taking it out on those kids.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talkin’ about. Nobody’s takin’ anything out on anybody.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, all right. Those kids weren’t hurting a soul. All they wanted was a warm place to stay and some decent food. And maybe a little kindness from people. Instead all they got was meanness.”

  “Not from me, they didn’t. Anyway it’s all water over the dam now. No use cryin’ over spilt milk.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Now looka here, I just come over to be nice. I don’t know what you’re blamin’ me for. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “You could have stopped it. They’re children, Mrs. Carew—just little kids. What were they doing that was so terrible? Who did they hurt? Don’t you realize what that Indian village is like? Don’t you realize that you might as well have sent them to the electric chair?”

  “I mind my own business.”

  “Is that what you’ll tell Jimmy and Willard if they ask—that you let two kids be taken away to starve or freeze to death because it was none of your business? I’m ashamed of you.”

  She walked out. If she thought anything at all about what I said, she kept it to herself.

  My hands were sweating and cold. I went over to the stove to warm them. I hadn’t felt so bad since Fred had walked out on me. My mind was going a mile a minute. I tried to think where Cab was now. He’d probable gotten to Stonehouse Creek already. From there …

  An idea hit me and I tried to put it out of my mind, but it kept coming back so strong that finally I knew I had to try it. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I put on a few pairs of socks under my moccasins, got my parka and went out.

  There were some thin snow flurries in the air. Dry as sand, they swept in veils along the ground. I made pretty good time. It only took me twenty minutes to get to Fred’s house.

  Isabelle answered the door, surprised to see me.

  “Is Fred home?” I asked her.

  “Out in back, Miss Hobbs. Come on in, I’ll go get ’im for you.”

  “I’ll talk to him there.”

  I went around the back to the stable. I could hear him using the grindstone. He was sitting down, working the treadle, sparks flying from the ax he was holding. He looked up, and as soon as I saw him I could feel everything I’d kept bottled up inside me start to spül over. I was able to blurt out, “Fred, they took Chuck and Ethel away from me,” and then I was in his arms blubbering and carrying on. He kept trying to get me to tell him what happened, but I couldn’t. Every-time I tried I’d start crying all over again. Finally when I was able to control myself I hiccupped it all out. Mrs. Purdy came in right in the middle of it and wanted me to come into the house, but Fred said maybe it’d be better if I stayed there with him.

  “We’ll be in in a couple of minutes. Go on back in the house, Ma,” he said gently.

  She left and I finished telling him the whole story, including what Maggie Carew said about my not ever getting Chuck and Ethel back once they were in the Indian village.

  “They didn’t have any right to do that,” he said. “They didn’t have any right at all.”

  “Fred, will you help me?”

  “How?”

  “Go after Cab with me.”

  “Now?”

  “Ri
ght now. Right this minute. Please, Fred. If we can get to Cab before he reaches the Indian village I’ll be able to talk to him, reason with him. I know he’” let me have them back if I can just talk to him.”

  He didn’t say anything. “Fred, please. Please help me, otherwise I’ll never get them back.”

  “How long ago did Cab leave?”

  “About an hour.”

  I was asking a lot, I knew that, and I made up my mind that if he said no I wouldn’t ask him again.

  “You sure you want to go after him?” he said. “I do.”

  “Is he toting anything else on the sled?” “Whiskey.”

  He thought about it. Then he said, “Go on home. Put on your warmest clothes and pack some spares—spare parka, moccasins, socks, underclothes. I’ll be by as soon as I can.”

  I nearly knocked him over I hugged him so tight.

  “Get going,” he said.

  I flew getting home, and I was ready in twenty minutes. I didn’t know whether he wanted me to pack food, so I put together some frozen beans, tea and some meat. Then I sat down to wait. I wondered what his father and mother would say to him. They’d try to keep him from going and I couldn’t blame them. After a half hour I wondered if they’d convinced him.

  A few minutes later I heard a shout and the sound of a sled approaching. I ran to the door, but it was someone else, someone carrying a passenger. The sled pulled up at the roadhouse. I shut the door.

  I was ready to give up after another half hour went by. And then suddenly there he was.

  I told him what food I’d packed, but he said leave it. He had everything we’d need for a week, he said.

  “A week!”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take us to catch up with Cab or what we’re liable to run into. If the trail is bad we may need everything we have.”

  “Somebody just mushed in to the roadhouse. Maybe you can ask him.”

  We went over together. The man who’d come in was a freighter, carrying a passenger to Fairbanks. The two of them were eating when we walked in. The passenger was a Dawson banker and the driver was trying to wolf down a steak and answer Maggie Carew’s questions at the same time. She was worried and so was her husband. Angela Barrett was there too.

  “You didn’t see a sign of them at all?” Maggie was asking the freighter. She was badly upset.

  “Only sled I seen was Cabaret Jackson’s, ’n’ that was about two hours ago,” the driver said.

  Her husband was trying to calm her down. “Now, Maggie, they coulda hit some bad weather and holed up in any number of places.”

  “You bet your boots they did,” the driver said. “There was a stretch back there day before yesterday where I didn’t make more’n a mile the whole day.”

  “How about when you passed Jamison’s,” Maggie asked him, “d’you see any smoke?”

  “Didn’t get that near,” the driver said. “I stayed on the river all the way from Bonanza Bar till I hit here.”

  “What’s the trail like through Franklin?” Fred asked him.

  “Drifted in,” the driver answered. “Unless you got somethin’ won’t wait I’d advise you to stay put.”

  “You’re goin’ after Cab,” Maggie said to Fred.

  Fred nodded and Angela Barrett said, “I hope he kills ya.”

  “Shut up!” Maggie snapped at her. Maybe she’d have felt the same way as Angela if she wasn’t so worried about Jeannette and Elmer, but she didn’t give a hoot right now about anything or anyone but them. “Be on the lookout, will you, Fred?”

  “I will,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be worried if I were you. Elmer knows this country. He wouldn’t do anything foolish.”

  “I know he wouldn’” Maggie said, “but they should’ve at least been at Steel Creek when this man went through there. He says they weren’t. Last time anybody saw ’em was at O’Shaughnessy’s.”

  “They told me at Steel Creek nobody had been through for two days,” the man said.

  “Maybe Elmer didn’t stop there,” Fred said. “Maybe he stayed on the river and then cut across to Liberty.”

  “You keep a sharp eye out,” Maggie said.

  Fred said he would, and a few minutes later we were by the sled. The runners had frozen in,

  “Gee!” Fred yelled.

  The dogs dug in, then swung to the right, and with a crack the sled was free.

  He told me to get in, but I suggested that I run along with him for as long as I could hold out to save the dogs work.

  “You’ll be doing plenty of that,” he said. “We better save you as much as possible.”

  “Mush!” he yelled once I was in. And we were off.

  For the first few miles we moved along fast. The dogs were eager and the hills were gentle. Then the trail toughened, and I got out to trot alongside or help push and shove the sled through scrubby spruce, down and up sharp banks and across hummock-littered tundra. I kept watch for anything that might make the sled tip or get caught, and for a while I congratulated myself. I was pulling my own weight on a tough trail. Then I became careless and didn’t see a rock slick with ice. One of the runners ran over it, the sled tipped and before I could stop it it nosed off the trail and into a drift. The two of us struggled to get it out, but a runner was caught on something. We couldn’t budge it.

  “We’ll have to unpack some of the load,” Fred said.

  “But we’ll waste so much time!”

  “Nothing else we can do,” he said.

  We worked at unpacking slowly—too slowly, I felt. Mad at myself for being so careless, I tried to work fast. Fred kept stopping me. “Slow down,” he said.

  “He’ll get away.”

  “You’re not in the schoolroom now. You’re on the trail. Slow down and keep that scarf over your face.”

  I knew he was right. You had to pace yourself, not move fast enough so that you started breathing through your mouth, taking freezing air into your lungs. It was the first rule of the trail—don’t exhaust yourself. We had to take off half the load before we could free the runner, then reload, again working at the same maddening slow pace.

  “Couldn’t we have gone around all this?” I grumbled, tossing a package of raw meat into the sled.

  Fred pulled his scarf down. “Take a look over there.” He pointed to the distance. “See that saddle between those two hills?”

  I could see it through the grayness—a dip stretching between two crags that rose up above the timber line.

  “We’re heading for that,” Fred said. “It’ll be a long trip. You won’t make it if you don’t take it easy. We’ll go as fast as we can.”

  I felt small. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Forget it. We’ll catch up with him, don’t worry.”

  Once we left the tundra behind it was like moving along in a slow-motion dream, following a trail that wound ahead without any end, dipping across a creek, narrowing around a hill, then around still another hill when that was left behind. The dogs never let up, troting along at a fast willing pace when we hit the flats, digging in almost as if they enjoyed it when the going was rough. Night came on fast and black and the Northern lights billowed like curtains across the starlit sky. We didn’t talk. There was no need to, even if we weren’t using all our strength to keep up a steady pace. We were on the trail, stumbling along, snowshoeing across snow ten feet deep, plodding through drifts and sometimes sailing when the trail was smooth enough.

  We reached the base of the saddle three hours later, a long slope of white with nothing to mark it but the twin lines of Cab’s sled running up as far as we could see. And alongside of it were the small footprints of Chuck and Ethel. I wondered how they were making out, whether Cab was pushing them too hard or being impatient with them. Halfway up, Ethel’s footprints stopped and I could see where she’d sat down. She’d been too tired to go any further. Cab had gone on a short distance beyond, then come back, picked her up and brought her to the sled.

  I thought that when we g
ot to the top of the pass, maybe by some miracle we’d be able to spot Cab’s sled, but we didn’t. It was too dark to see anything but endless stretches of black forest and the dark winding outline of the Forty Mile River.

  The ride down was worth the climb. For two miles straight Fred rode the runners, the only sound the squeaking of the sled and the plop plop plop of the white clods the dogs threw up behind them. I wondered how they could do it, go on like that for hours taking that burning cold air into their lungs. But they did. They even gave each other a playful nip once in a while when they didn’t have to pull too hard.

  We rode down a long slough to the river, then once we were on it we went like an express train, swinging around big drifts and patches of rough ice. Again Fred was able to ride the runners for long stretches and I hardly had to get out. If we hadn’t been chasing Cab I’d have been in heaven. The moon came out after a while. The river widened, and we began to pass little islands. We were sailing along so smoothly that even Fred must have let his guard down, because without any warning Pancake suddenly veered off to the right and Fred lost his balance. He fell off the runners, fought to stay on his feet, then jumped back on. Pancake was still moving to the right, making a wide sweep. “Haw!” Fred yelled at him, but he kept moving until Fred had to stop the team.

  Fred went up to him and he was really mad. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he yelled. “Don’t you have any better sense than that? You nearly killed me, you blasted fool!” He said a couple of other things that weren’t very complimentary. Pancake hung his head and took it all. “Now you damn well better go where you’re supposed to,” Fred warned him. Once in back of the sled he yelled haw, but sure enough Pancake veered off to the right again.

  Fred stopped the sled again and this time I thought he was really going to give it to Pancake, but he didn’t. Instead he looked over the area that Pancake had been so stubborn about avoiding, scanning it carefully. He’d told me long ago how many times a man had to depend on his dogs to stay alive and as it turned out this was one of them. “Well I’ll be damned,” he finally muttered.

  He went to Pancake then, got down on his knees and put his arms around his neck, then he rubbed his cheek against Pancake’s head, telling him what a good dog he was. I didn’t realize what it was all about until Fred showed me. “See that over there—where the snow’s a little darker, almost a little yellow?” I saw it finally. It was like a shadow. “It’s a warm spot,” Fred said. “Water. At the least we’d have wound up with wet gear. Probably worse. Pancake smelled it.”