Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Auntie Joy shrugged. “I think about it after you leave other day.” She looked at Kate, the love and pride shining in her eyes like a beacon. Kate, as uncomfortable with love and pride as she was with gratitude, tried not to squirm in her chair. “You the one, Katya. You carry it all forward for everyone. I think at first too heavy for you, too much the weight on your shoulders. And what matter now, so many years gone by?”

  Kate waited.

  “But it matter to Old Sam,” Auntie Joy said. “Oh yes.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she said in a low voice, “To him it matter too much.”

  “What mattered, Auntie? What mattered so much to Old Sam?”

  Auntie Joy blinked away tears, and began to testify in a soft voice. Listening to her, Kate could feel the years roll away, to that fallow period following gold rushes and copper rushes and the First World War, when Alaska was only a territory, forgotten by most, with a population of less than sixty thousand people. There was nothing like regular air service. The roads were unpaved, unmaintained, and unnavigable most of the time. You ordered your groceries for the year from Seattle and had them shipped up by Alaska Steam, which offloaded them in Valdez or Cordova, and you either packed them into the Park yourself or hired P and H to do so at extortionate prices.

  “P and H?” Kate said.

  “Heiman Transportation, after.”

  Moose and caribou and salmon were the staples, Auntie Joy said, everybody hunted and everybody shared. More and more Outsiders came into the country, Filipinos to work in the canneries, Americans to mine for gold, Scandinavians on whaling ships. Inevitably, some married local girls and stayed.

  The Natives in the Park were much more conservative and insular when she was a girl, Auntie Joy said, and the elders were alert to the danger of their children marrying outside the tribe. It wasn’t forbidden, exactly, but it might as well have been because those who did so were never regarded as full tribal members again. Many moved away altogether, to Fairbanks and Anchorage and even Outside. It took the loss of many children to their families and another generation to relax those taboos.

  “Too late for us,” Auntie Joy said.

  “You and Old Sam?”

  Auntie Joy nodded, her face set in sad lines. “Then some parents send childrens to BIA school in Cordova. My parents send me there. Old Sam parents live in Cordova. He go to school there, too.”

  Auntie Joy’s eyes shone with a tender light unlike Kate had ever seen before. “He look at me. I look at him. We know.”

  The simplicity and truth of the words took Kate’s breath away. The two women sat in a silence that grew in length and sorrow. “What happened?” Kate said at last.

  “Then war comes.” Auntie Joy looked down at the table and said in a voice dropped to a whisper, “Sam join up.”

  “And you?”

  “I marry my parents’ choice.”

  Kate waited.

  “Davy Moonin. He one of them come from the Aleutians in the war. Viola’s cousins. They lose everything in that war, homes, villages, all. A lot of work after to settle them down. Many parents marry local girls to newcomers. For one thing, our men gone. For another, good way to make Aleutian Aleuts at home. Davy … Davy, he work hard, respectful of elders. Fisherman, so exempted from army service. My parents think a good man for me.”

  The remembered pain in Auntie Joy’s expression was obvious for anyone to read. Kate, caught between pity and rage, didn’t know what to say.

  Auntie Joy read Kate’s face without difficulty. “Not all his fault, Katya. He not my choice. He know. Make him angry. Resentful. He … unhappy. And there are no children. My fault again, he think.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I think so, too.”

  “It’s always a choice to raise your hand against someone else, Auntie,” Kate said, her jaw tight, and stopped herself when Auntie Joy looked away. “Is that why you went back to Shugak after he died?”

  Auntie Joy was silent.

  Kate took a deep breath and let it out. “And Uncle?”

  The soft light came back to Auntie Joy’s eyes. “After war, he come home to the Park.”

  “And you?”

  “And me.”

  Kate tried to remember how long Auntie Joy had been widowed. “Were you—free, then?”

  “Free.” Auntie Joy’s laugh was without humor. “What a word, Katya. In 1944 Davy delivering fish to tender, fall between boats, is crush. I am widow then, yes, but not free.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “No. Not free.”

  “Old Sam still wanted to marry you?”

  Auntie Joy nodded.

  Kate, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice, said, “And you refused him? Again?”

  The light in Auntie Joy’s eyes dimmed. “First my parents. They don’t like his father.”

  Which father? Kate almost said.

  “His father half Filipino. His grandmother all Filipino. Back then, my parents want me to marry Native only. No gussuk, no Japs, they said. To them all Asian men Japs. The war make them hate Japs. My brother die on Tarawa. No gussuks for their daughter. No Japs for their daughter. Only Native.” Her mouth twisted.

  “You couldn’t—”

  Auntie Joy’s eyes met Kate’s. “No. Not like now, childrens go their own way. Good thing,” she said, smacking her hand down on the table. All the china jumped. So did Kate. There was a muted “Woof” from the other side of the door, too.

  “So Old Sam wanted to marry you, and you wanted to marry him, but your parents forbid it.”

  Auntie Joy’s shoulders slumped. “Yes. Before the war, after the war. All the same, yes.”

  “He homesteaded the hot springs for you, didn’t he?”

  Auntie Joy rallied at this. “He homestead the hot springs because his mother say so.”

  “But … why?” Kate said. “Why on earth did she want him to stake his claim so far back in the mountains? There’s like five hundred square feet of horizontal land in the whole hundred and sixty acres, and either you bushwhack in on foot in the summer or snowgo in winter, or you don’t get there at all.” Did they even have snow machines back then? “How did she expect him to survive?”

  Auntie Joy spread her hands. “He say only that his mother say he must homestead there.”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed. “What’s up there besides the hot springs, Auntie Joy?”

  “He don’t tell me, Katya,” Auntie Joy said, in a manner that brooked no contradiction.

  This time Kate almost believed her.

  “Something else,” Auntie Joy said, in a voice so low Kate had to strain to hear the words. “One time, I have baby in the belly. Davy … our baby comes too soon.” Auntie Joy’s voice was the barest thread of sound. “After, no children for me.”

  Kate worked it out and was too shocked to be tactful. “Davy beat you into a miscarriage, you couldn’t have children afterward, Davy died, and when Old Sam came home you wouldn’t marry him this time because you were barren?”

  Auntie Joy avoided her gaze. “Every man deserve his chance at children, Katya.”

  “I’m raising a kid I didn’t give birth to right now, Auntie. God.” She shook her head. “And Uncle never married, and so far as I know never had children with anyone else. All this time you spent apart, and for what?” She saw the look of misery on Auntie Joy’s face and stopped herself before she went any farther. There was no point in telling Auntie Joy that all her life choices had been wrong. “What did Old Sam do then?”

  “Angry.” Auntie Joy sighed. “Very angry. He bring story home about his father, he say no reason no more why we don’t marry, times different anyway, he don’t care about kids. When I still say no, he—” Her voice broke and it took her a moment to recover it. “He go away angry.” Her mouth twisted. “I don’t see him again until 1956.”

  Over ten years. And then Kate said, “Wait, what? What story, Auntie? And which father?”

  Auntie Joy’s head came up with a snap. “You know about Old Sam’s father?”r />
  “I know my whole life I thought his father was Quinto Dementieff, and I know now there is a good chance it was some guy named One-Bucket McCullough. Are you saying Old Sam wrote it down?” Kate sat up straight in her chair. “Auntie,” she said, barely breathing the words, “do you still have it?”

  Auntie Joy rose to her feet and went to a chestnut armoire polished to a blinding gleam, hulking in one corner of the cabin. It was surmounted by what Kate thought was called a cornice, which overhung the armoire by a good six inches on three sides. She wondered where Auntie Joy had gotten it. She wondered how she had gotten it to Niniltna from wherever Outside she’d bought it, because nothing like that was for sale anywhere this side of Seattle.

  She wondered how Auntie Joy had gotten it through the door.

  Auntie Joy opened the doors and felt around inside. There was a click, and a hidden drawer popped out of the bottom.

  “Hey,” Kate said, and got up for a closer look.

  For a moment both women forgot the painful topic under discussion in a mutual admiration of the cunning little drawer that fit invisibly into the base of the armoire. Auntie Joy closed the drawer again and showed Kate the latch that released it. “That is really clever,” Kate said, closing the drawer and opening it again. She stood back and looked at the armoire. “You’d never know it was there if you didn’t compare the outside dimensions to the inside ones, and maybe not even then.” She even got down on her knees to examine the foot of the armoire at close range. “Man, it fits together so well, even close up you can’t tell the drawer from the base. Whoever did this knew what he was doing and then some.”

  She pulled herself together. The air seemed suddenly thick with secrets—Park secrets, tribal secrets, family secrets. Secrets in the frickin’ furniture.

  She sat back and stared at the foot of the armoire. She knew a sudden impulse to leave the drawer shut and turn away.

  In the nine days since Old Sam had died, it was as if someone had focussed the lens through which she viewed the history of her family in the Park. Things, people, events that had seemed to her clear, fixed, and immutable were now blurred and less substantial. It was unnerving to lose that kind of solidity, that kind of permanence at your back. Somehow she knew that she was never again going to be able to look over her shoulder without fearing that the view had changed from the last time she had seen it.

  She felt unsettled, and apprehensive. She looked up at Auntie Joy, who stood with her hands folded in front of her, waiting.

  Up to you if you want to know or not. Auntie Joy might have spoken the words out loud. Kate wiped suddenly sweaty palms down her jeans and reached inside the armoire to feel for the latch. The drawer popped open again.

  They both stared down at the contents, a tattered, nine-by-twelve box tied up with string. “Is that it?”

  Auntie Joy nodded.

  “May I take it and read it?”

  “No.” At Kate’s expression Auntie Joy said, “Read here. Samuel give that story to me.”

  “He threw it at you, you said.”

  “He leave it with me,” Auntie Joy said again. “He never ask for it back.” She hesitated, looking half defiant, half fearful, and all stubborn. “You read it here.” She reached for the box and gave it to Kate with both hands and part of a bow, as if she were handing over the keys to the kingdom to the heir apparent, which maybe she was. “You understand when you read it.”

  “Understand what?” Kate said.

  Auntie Joy pointed at the recliner. There was no gainsaying that finger, and it wasn’t like Kate was going to wrest the box from Auntie Joy’s hands and depart the premises. She wasted a moment or two hoping that the new storm louring on the southern horizon would hold off another day, and subsided into the chair with equal parts resignation and anticipation.

  The string was kitchen string, the box the thinnest of gray cardboard, the pages loose and numbered top right, fifty-three in total. The paper was onionskin, aged and translucent and fragile, and the text had been typed on a manual typewriter with the e and the i out of alignment and the q, the d, the o, and the p filled in. It was double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and it had been edited by hand.

  The story began without title or preamble, on the first page, halfway down.

  Halfway through the manuscript she raised her eyes to see Auntie Joy watching her. “Jesus Christ, Auntie.”

  Auntie Joy, that prim and proper woman of faith and goodness, didn’t so much as wince at Kate taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Read more,” she said.

  1945

  Niniltna

  Sam slammed out of Joy’s cabin in a rage that kept him going all the way to Ahtna. There he went straight to Bea’s, ordered his own bottle of the good stuff at a prohibitive price he ignored, and towed January Jane upstairs. JJ, so called because of her ability to warm up a man even in the depths of January, had cause to complain of his roughness. As angry as he was, Old Sam would never hurt a woman. Besides, he’d read between the lines, he knew what kind of a marriage Joyce had had with Davy Moonin, and part of his rage was at that dead man. No need to take it out on JJ, though, and he apologized and finished his business at a more considerate pace.

  “What had you so wound up, anyway?” JJ said, reaching over the bed to where he’d dropped the bottle.

  Under the influence of whiskey and sympathy, Sam told her more than he might have otherwise.

  “So first she wouldn’t marry you because her parents said you weren’t good enough, and now she won’t marry you because she can’t have kids?” JJ said.

  “That’s about it,” Sam said, getting angry all over again.

  JJ soothed him with an adroit caress. She was a professional, adept at turning anger to the purpose for which she was paid. After another interlude they lay together long into the night, talking. He told JJ how Mac McCullough had saved his life in the clean-up operation on Attu, about the dim suspicion that had been born next to Mac’s deathbed on Adak, about meeting Dashiell Hammett, about the news of Mac’s death that had come to him with the story of Mac’s life.

  She listened because she was paid to listen, and she filed it all away.

  * * *

  The next day, without regret, he left most of what remained in his wallet in Bea’s rapacious palm, nodded a greeting to Albie Anglerandt who was on his way in, and hitched a ride up the Glenn Highway to Tok. There he hitched another ride down the Alaska Highway with a couple of guys from Wallace, Idaho, driving a Lincoln Zephyr. The Alcan, shoved through in one hell of a hurry three years before to provide support for the war effort, was pretty much in the same condition the U.S. Army had left it. Most of it was in Canada, who weren’t that interested in maintaining it. Much of the trip was spent digging the Lincoln Zephyr out of the mud, but twenty days later they made Spokane, where they parted company.

  Old Sam hitched across Washington state to Seattle, where he bunked in at the local Salvation Army, always good for a meal and a bed, until he found a room in a boardinghouse that was reasonably clean. The following week he got a job in Ballard working for a marine contractor who was happy to find someone who knew a bow from a stern and who put him to work tearing down PT boats for conversion to commercial fishing. Two and a half weeks and a considerable bump in salary later, he was supervising the night shift.

  But the job was only to pay his way, to pay for food and clothing and a roof over his head, and build a stake for the trip home. No, his purpose in Seattle was personal.

  He was determined to track down the curio dealer to whom Mac had sold the icon at dockside just before the Pinkerton agent had picked him up. If Mac hadn’t lied to Hammett, if Hammett hadn’t just made it up out of whole cloth, if Old Sam had in fact sold the icon to a dealer on the Seattle docks, it was a safe bet it was to someone in business in Seattle. Someone in business twenty-five years before, true, but he had to start somewhere. Every afternoon before he went to work and every weekend was spent tracking down every antiques dealer, junkyard,
thrift shop, and curio store in the Yellow Pages, from Seattle north to dingy Lake City and south to boomtown Kent. He was bitten by a Doberman pinscher in a junkyard, escaped barely virtu intacta from a woman twice his age who was selling chipped tea sets on tatted doilies in a dusty one-room shop on First Avenue that looked sadder than she did, and learned a great deal more than he wished to about Hull Pottery piggy banks, first of all that they even existed.

  It was a hopeless task and he knew it, but he was determined to exhaust every possibility. Somewhere at the back of his mind lingered the hope that if he returned to Niniltna bearing the icon, proving his worth to the tribe, Joyce would be his reward. By then, perhaps enough time would have passed that Joyce would have gotten over her marriage, and maybe, too, by then she would miss him as much as he missed her. He could give a good damn about having kids, it was Joyce he wanted. It had always been Joyce.

  Trudging through this odyssey, he was still trying to assimilate the story of his own unknown history, set down in stark black-and-white in unsparing prose devoid of judgment or sentimentality. Not to mention through a third-party filter. Oh yes, Hammett had made a good story of it, in part, Sam had to admit, because it was a good story. He wondered what Joyce had done with the manuscript, if she’d kept it or burned it, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see it ever again. The words on the pages were burned on the inside of his eyelids.

  Herbert Elmer McCullough, also known variously as Mac, One-Bucket, and Scotty, had been a liar, a cheat, a confidence man, and a thief. He’d been born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Scots immigrants who booted him out of the house when he was caught seducing the upstairs maid, so add conscienceless Casanova to the list of his lifetime achievements. He’d come north during the Klondike Gold Rush, and according to him—and at this stage Samuel Leviticus Dementieff (bar sinister McCullough) was not in a credulous mood—had made a good living out of salting and selling gold claims.

  He’d migrated from the Klondike into Alaska and arrived in Niniltna in company with the Spanish flu. It would have been entirely in character, Old Sam thought, for Mac to have brought the flu bug in with him.