Tisha

by Robert Specht

  It was Mr. Strong’s sled. Chuck let out a yell and ran down towards the river and disappeared. A few minutes later I heard him yelling and calling to Mr. Strong, the sound of the bells on the sled getting louder and louder.

  I ran into the cabin and put Patricia on the cot, then went out to wait until the two of them appeared, making their way up towards me, Chuck hopping and jumping like a sparrow, Mr. Strong clumping along after him. I was so happy to see him that I threw myself into his arms and almost knocked him over.

  “Now, madam,” he cajoled, “don’t take on so. The situation is well in hand. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

  He hadn’t seen Fred, he said, but Fred had left word where I was at Steel Creek.

  He stayed long enough to bring Elmer’s body into the cabin, and there he left it covered with a blanket, the knife still clutched in Elmer’s frozen hand. Then we started out.

  We stopped only once on the way, at O’Shaughnessy’s, and then only long enough to take a hot meal and a short rest before we went on again.

  Later on, a few days after we were back and school was open again, the one thing that stuck in my mind was the moment when the settlement came into view. Ethel and I and Patricia were tucked away on one side of the sled towards the back, where Mr. Strong had made room for us among a whole load of parcel-post packages and dry goods. We were wrapped up pretty warm, the tarpaulin top over our heads like a tent. Chuck was sitting up in front with Mr. Strong. I didn’t know we were almost there until the sled stopped and Chuck came crawling back along the side of the sled and pulled up the tarpaulin. He didn’t want to be all alone up there with Mr. Strong when we came in.

  When he lifted the tarp, there was the settlement in the distance. Chimney smoke had darkened the snow all around it, making it look like a gray little island. Sure enough, everybody was waiting, a bunch of black dots speckled in front of the post office. When we came nearer the whole place looked strange to me, as if I’d been away much longer than five or six days. I felt as if I’d left it a long time ago, almost as a little girl, and now I was coming back all grown up.

  The horses started slowing down automatically as we neared the post office, and I lifted the tarp up to let everybody see we were in the back. But we didn’t stop there. Mr. Strong let out a shout and I heard his whip crack. The sled jerked forward and I caught a flash of the surprised look on everybody’s face as we went by—Mr. Vaughn’s all displeased at seeing Chuck and Ethel, Angela Barrett’s screwed up in anger. Mr. Strong halted the sled in front of the roadhouse and he’d already jumped down and was pulling the tarp back from us when everybody came running in.

  I was too stiff to move, and there everybody was, staring at me and the children, Mrs. Purdy startled, wondering where Fred was, nobody saying a word. I had Patricia beside me, all swaddled in a wolf robe with just an opening for her to breathe, so nobody saw her until I picked her up. Like everyone else, Maggie Carew and her husband had come running. As soon as Maggie saw what I was holding she knew right away it was Patricia and the life seemed to drain right out of her. Everybody else realized it too and they made way for her. I handed the baby down to her and she took her from me, her eyes asking the questions she couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud.

  Mr. Strong lifted me down from the sled and after that I hardly knew what was going on. Everybody was pressing forward, Mr. Carew asking me in a croaking voice where Jennie and Elmer were, Mrs. Purdy wanting to know about Fred, all the faces around me stunned, none of them angry anymore. Then Chuck and Ethel were beside me and Mr. Strong was herding the three of us into the roadhouse and trying to keep people back, telling them to give me a chance to get inside and warm up before they made me answer all their questions.

  XXIV

  For the whole first week I was back Maggie Carew made me and the children come over to the roadhouse for supper. She said that I’d been through an ordeal and that she wanted to make sure I had plenty of good hot food and didn’t wear myself out. I didn’t want her to go to any trouble for me, but she insisted. Her husband had left with Mr. Strong the next day, headed for Dawson, and she was all alone except for Patricia and the children. Having me there helped her feel better, she said, helped her feel closer to Jennie.

  She blamed herself for what had happened. God was punishing her, she said, for something she’d done. He must have been, she insisted, because Jennie was the dearest and sweetest girl in the world, and had never harmed a soul. So she, Maggie, must have done something wrong. She tried not to keep asking me whether I thought Jennie would be all right or not, but she couldn’t stop herself. “What do you honestly think, Annie,” she’d ask me over and over. “You think she’ll pull through?”

  No matter how many times I told her I thought she would, she kept torturing herself by asking me more questions: how badly frozen had Jennie’s leg been? Her face? If she did pull through, did I think she’d lose her leg or part of her face? All I could tell her was that I didn’t know. When I told her how Jennie had tried to smile she broke down and wept.

  Even when Fred came back we didn’t know much more. He pulled into the settlement in the early afternoon eight days later, completely bushed, and a few minutes later we were all in the roadhouse listening as he told us what had happened. He’d mushed Jennie as far as Forty Mile, just as he’d set out to. There he ran into Percy de Wolfe, which was a stroke of luck. Known as the Iron Man of the North, de Wolfe carried the mail up and down the Yukon between White Horse and Eagle, and he had the fastest team in that part of the country. Almost minutes after Fred arrived, they transferred Jennie to his sled and he’d mushed off with her to Dawson. There was a telegraph station at Forty Mile and they’d wired the authorities at Dawson that Percy was carrying an injured woman who was going to need treatment. “Before I left,” Fred said, “Dawson wired back that there’d be a doctor at the hospital ready to work on her right away.”

  It wasn’t until the end of March, three weeks later, that Maggie received a telegram from her husband. By then the days were sunny and long. Gentle chinook winds were melting the snow so fast that traveling by sled was almost impossible except at night when the slush froze up. Mr. Strong brought the telegram in on his last sled trip of the season. It didn’t go into any details. It just said that Jennie had been in very serious condition for a while, but that she was going to pull through. Mr. Strong would tell her the details, the telegram ended. Mr. Strong broke it to Maggie as gently as he could. Jennie’s face wasn’t going to be scarred, he said, but they’d had to amputate her foot to well above the ankle.

  Maggie took it pretty hard, as might be expected, and it worked a big change in her. Not that she became soft, just a little more tolerant. I knew that deep down she still felt that I had no business having Chuck and Ethel with me, that I was making a mistake, but she didn’t look at them anymore as if they carried the plague or something worse. She even had them come over to the roadhouse every so often to play with Jimmy and Willard. Everybody else who’d been mad at me kind of eased up a little too. Maggie had a lot to do with it, I was sure. She swung weight in the settlement, and when people saw her having me and the children come over to the roadhouse they started acting a little more sociable. Then one night when I went over to the roadhouse to pick up Chuck and Ethel, Maggie asked me a question that surprised me.

  Mr. Vaughn and Angela were there playing cribbage, and Uncle Arthur was helping Chuck clean the new .22 rifle I’d bought for him. I’d been so proud of him for how he’d acted during our “ordeal,” as Maggie called it, that I’d taken him into Mr. Strong’s store and told him to pick out anything he wanted. I’d had some misgivings when he chose the .22, but he knew how to handle it. He’d had one ever since he’d been five.

  Ethel and Willard were playing back in the bunk-room, having a pillow fight and Chuck’s rifle was all apart, so I had a cup of tea while Uncle Arthur helped him reassemble it. Right out of the blue Maggie popped the question.

  “You done anything abo
ut buying yourself a cabin in Eagle?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “How come?” she asked me. “They don’t have any teacherage there for ya. You gotta provide your own quarters.”

  “I know,” I said, “but I still don’t know whether I’ll be teaching at Eagle.”

  “What makes you think you won’t?” she said.

  She knew the answer to that as well as I and everybody else in that room did. Angela and Mr. Vaughn didn’t look up from their game, but they were listening to every word. They weren’t any crazier about me than they’d been before, but at least they said hello now whenever they met me.

  “Well, nobody told me I wouldn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t think the chances were too good.”

  Maggie’s Hp curled into that disgruntled sneer of hers. “I know everybody on that schoolboard,” she said, “and if they got any objections I wanna hear about it … How much you want to pay for a cabin if they take ya?”

  “I haven’t even thought about it,” I said.

  “How big a one might you want?”

  “Well … big enough so maybe Chuck and Ethel could have their own room.”

  She didn’t bat an eye. “What do you think, Arnold?” she asked Mr. Vaughn deliberately. “Think it’ll be easy to find one?”

  He mumbled something and Maggie said, “I didn’t hear ya.”

  “I said probably,” he said.

  “We’ll find you one,” Maggie said. “Far as I’m concerned a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush. We know what we got with you. Lord only knows what they’re liable to send out from Juneau if we let’m … From what I hear about that Rooney, she’s a real darb. Pinches the kids till they’re black and blue and goes ga-ga over everything that wears pants.”

  Having Maggie on my side went a long way. Nobody came up to me and told me they thought any better of me than they had before. That wasn’t people’s way. It was just something I could feel, something in their manner. Like at the next dance we had. We didn’t hold one until the Friday after Maggie got the telegram from her husband. Up to then it just hadn’t seemed right to have one, to be dancing and laughing and having a good time when almost right next door Maggie would be sitting and wondering if Jennie was going to live or die.

  When everybody came in they gave me a big hello or a howdy instead of just a grudging nod as they usually did, and a couple of them even talked about the weather with me. Now that spring was getting close everybody had their own idea about when the river was going to break up or when the creeks would be running so that sluice boxes could be set up. Nobody ever ran out of things to say about it and they didn’t generally talk about it with cheechakos or somebody they didn’t want to talk with in the first place. One or two even made a point of admiring the map of Chicken on the wall. As big as it was, they’d never seemed to notice it before. Now they said they’d never seen anything like it, and how clever all the kids were to have made it.

  Chuck was making out better too. His standing among the kids was upped practically from the first day of school. They stopped snickering at him and making fun of his accent. In fact for the first few days the boys all chummed up to him, wanting to hear all the gory details of how he’d found Jennie and Elmer and how Elmer had looked when he was dead and frozen. Chuck didn’t have too much to say about it and didn’t do any bragging, which impressed the kids more than if he’d gone on and on about it.

  The only thing that didn’t change at all was the way things were between Fred and me.

  “If you wanna teach in Eagle,” Maggie had told me in private, “you better behave. You got away with takin’ those kids. Start chasin’ after that half-breed again and you won’t get away with anything. Now don’t go givin’ me any Bolshevik speeches. I’m givin’ you the straight goods.”

  I didn’t see him again for almost three weeks after he got back, and then only when he came in to pick up some hardware he’d ordered from Mr. Strong. He’d made up his mind he was going to stay away from me for my sake and that was that. No stain on my reputation was going to come from him, no sir. He showed up for the dance and when we danced together you’d have thought we were doing a minuet he held me so far away. I had the hope in the back of my mind that maybe Uncle Arthur would put on the Home Sweet Home waltz for us, but I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. It didn’t matter that Fred had saved Jennie’s life and even risked his own: he was still a half-breed and I was still pure Northern womanhood.

  Sure enough, came mid-April Mr. Strong brought me the news that I’d been accepted to teach at Eagle. I was happy about it. Yet at the same time I wasn’t. Chuck and Ethel were worrying me. Ever since I’d brought them back to Chicken we hadn’t been getting along.

  More than ever, I wished that Nancy was still with me. Between the two of us we’d have been able to figure out what was wrong and do something about it. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out by myself. I had to keep after them all the time—to dress neatly, to be clean, to help me keep my quarters in order and to mind their manners around people. I wasn’t doing it just to be bossy. It was for their own good. Even though the uproar over them had died down, most people still looked at them differently than they looked at other children. If they did something wrong or got into mischief it wasn’t because they were kids and didn’t know any better. It was because they were Indian kids. Almost everybody felt that way, even people who liked them.

  One day when Uncle Arthur gave Chuck some candy, he waved his hand tolerantly when I told Chuck to say thank you. “Don’t pay it any mind, missis,” he said, “they just don’t know any better.” He didn’t say “he.” He said “they”—those Indians. It was the same way with other people. Every time Chuck or Ethel made a mistake it wasn’t because things were new to them and they didn’t know the ropes. “They” just didn’t know any better.

  It put me on the defensive. It shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have paid it any mind and seen it for what it was, ignorance, but I couldn’t. Stupidly, I felt that any criticism of them was criticism of me and I decided I wasn’t going to give people a chance to criticize. I made Chuck and Ethel toe the mark. Once we were in Eagle they’d have to take their place alongside of other children and I wanted them to be able to do it as fast as possible. Nobody was going to laugh at them or point out how different they were if I had anything to do with it.

  I really kept after them. At the same time I nearly worked myself to death ironing dresses for Ethel, scrubbing, washing, and keeping my quarters neat so that people would have a good impression when they came. I was especially tough with Chuck, always reminding him to hang up his clothes, not to throw things on the floor, to mind his manners, speak correctly, be good.

  The two of them kept fighting me on everything, or at least that’s the way it seemed. Ethel started soiling her dresses, eating half the time with her hands and getting food all over her. She stopped picking up English too, and pretended she didn’t know what shoes or socks were. One time she got up on a chair, pulled down some of her newly-ironed dresses from the wall and stomped all over them. Chuck changed too. I had to force him to wash up all the time and getting him to take a bath was a major battle. He became lazy in his schoolwork and surly around the house. I even had to remind him to bring in wood where before he was always one step ahead of me. I began to feel that he and Ethel were in league against me, whispering together in Indian, laughing between themselves. If I asked Chuck what they were laughing at he said it was nothing. Sometimes I even thought of sending them back to the Indian village I was so disgusted.

  Something had to give, and it did.

  They both ran away. It wasn’t the first time for Chuck. The week before, he’d left the house and not come back until almost nightfall. Fit to be tied, I told him that if he ever did it again I’d give him a spanking.

  This time he didn’t come back. When dusk settled in at about eight they were still gone. Uncle Arthur and a few others helped me look for them. We tramped thr
ough the wet woods, yelling and calling, but there was no sign of them. Around midnight everybody went home, telling me not to worry. “They’ll turn up, missis,” Uncle Arthur assured me. He and everybody else promised to help me look again in the morning if they didn’t. It was the beginning of May, the nights short and kind of dusky—daylight. I stayed out until past two before I gave up and went home to change out of wet footgear and go looking again.

  I couldn’t think about sleep. Just the thought that something had happened to the two of them kept me on the verge of panic Over and over I imagined them lying at the bottom of a cliff, or swept away by a swollen creek, or attacked by a bear. And over and over I asked myself why they’d done it. I’d been tough on them, I knew that, but I didn’t think I’d been bad enough to make Chuck do something like this. I had a cup of tea and I forced myself to sit down and try to think calmly where they might have gone. The first thought that occurred to me was that they might have headed for the Indian village. A couple of times when I’d bawled Chuck out he’d threatened to. If they were headed there it might take all day to catch up with them.

  The sun was nudging in the window, tinging everything with gold. I looked around the room, something I hadn’t done before. I didn’t see Ethel’s little red monkey around anywhere. It wasn’t in the schoolroom either when I looked, so she must have taken it with her. I noticed that Chuck’s rifle was gone too. And his parka. The last time I’d seen him he’d been wearing his mackinaw, which meant he must have taken the parka out some time before he left. The more I looked around the more I noticed things missing: a few of Ethel’s dresses, a dress suit I’d bought for Chuck, a couple of blankets, two pillow cases. There was only a little bread left in the breadbox, and I knew there should have been two loaves. Chuck must have been removing things bit by bit over the last few days and caching them somewhere. My heart started to pound: they’d taken too many things with them to carry them all at once, especially if they were going to the Indian village. If they were anywhere it was someplace in the vicinity. And if I was right there was only one place where they could have gone. I ran out.