Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  It was Kyle who drew the obvious conclusion, toward the end of that year, at a dinner at Lowell’s in the Pike Place Market. They scored a table by the window and it was beer and clams all around as they watched the cargo ships, the ferries, and the passenger steamers move back and forth across Puget Sound. This time it was Sam’s treat, a thank-you for all the hospitality he had been shown over the past year.

  “You are really leaving then,” Pete said.

  Sam nodded. “I’ve got enough in the bank to make some kind of start back home. And my feet are itchy. It’s time.”

  “What about the icon?” By now Kyle had been admitted to Sam’s confidence.

  Sam sighed. “I have tried everything—the DMV, the Bureau of Vital Statistics, even the 1930 census at the local branch of the U.S. Archives. None of the Bannisters I’ve found in Washington state is the right one.”

  “Well,” Kyle said, considering, “he must be interested in Russian icons, which means he might also be interested in Alaska history. Did you ever think he might have gone to Alaska?”

  Sam stared at Kyle for several seconds. “No,” he said finally. “I did not.”

  Pete started to laugh, a deep, belly-shaking laugh that rumbled up out of the basement and rattled the glass bottles behind the bar.

  Kyle shrugged and grinned. “Just a thought. Seattle is often the last port of call before Alaska for people who are traveling there. Suppose Mr. Bannister was doing a little shopping while waiting for his ship to debark north?”

  “Suppose indeed,” Pete said. He examined Sam’s expression. “This not does appear to make you happy, Samuel.”

  “It doesn’t,” Sam said heavily. “It’s still pretty much the wild west up there. There is no transportation, no communications, and the only record keeping is by the Department of Interior and those records are kept in Washington, D.C. How the hell am I supposed to find him?”

  “You want the icon bad enough, you’ll find a way.” That came out a little sharper than Kyle had intended it to, and he smiled to take the sting away.

  Sam, sitting in the Capital Café in Juneau ten years later, thought, Easier said than done.

  He had returned to Alaska on the Alaska Steam ship Denali in the spring of 1947, and a long and tedious voyage it was, too. They stopped two days in Ketchikan, a day in Wrangell, a day in Petersburg, two days in Sitka, three days in Juneau, two days in Skagway, another day in Haines, and five days in Seward, before he finally got off in Cordova. He was one of two hundred passengers, a hundred and ninety-seven of whom were tourists, Alaska Steam having gone into tourism in a big way by then. The tourists on board seemed to find him colorful, or so they persisted in saying, delighted at this discovery of a real Alaskan among them. The attention drove Sam down into the engine room, where he lent a hand to the stokers until the indignant purser routed him out, scolding him for violating shop rules. After that he found a spot up top behind the stack where it was warm so long as he wore his parka. The purser, happy to be rid of him, found him a deck chair, and there he would retire with a book every morning after breakfast, not to be seen again until dinner that evening.

  It was the longest period of time in his life up to then that he had ever spent both awake and at his leisure. It had the charm of novelty. He watched glaciers glow a ghostly blue beneath a low cloud cover, a pod of humpback whales form a bubble net for a banquet of krill, eagles swoop down for a salmon snack, drifters launch skiffs to pick fish from nets whose cork lines bobbed off the stern like a string of pearls. Now and then a totem pole could be glimpsed through the trees, Sitka spruce become art in the sure hands of Tlingit master carvers. On the Wrangell dock Boy Scouts were selling garnets from the Stikine River deposits. In Haines it was strips of smoked king salmon, and in Seward it was moose nugget jewelry.

  He thought a lot.

  He hadn’t seen Joy in over eighteen months. He couldn’t help resenting the fact that she had never written to him, although he had never written to her, either, mostly out of fear that some member of her family would intercept the letter. She could have asked his mother where he was, or even passed on a message.

  Had she remarried? Single women were scarce in Alaska, especially in Bush Alaska, and Joy was still a young and attractive woman.

  He allowed himself to dwell on just how attractive. He’d known she was the one the moment he had seen her in Mr. Kaufman’s seventh-grade class. He had thought she had known it, too. He had been incredulous that she wouldn’t go against her parents’ wishes and marry him, and even allowing for the rough time Davy Moonin had given her during their short marriage, he thought her refusal to marry Sam the second time because she was barren was sheer folly.

  He’d seen enough of the world that he didn’t feel the need to rush out and personally repopulate it. They could have adopted ten kids if she’d wanted that many, and he would have fed them and clothed them and loved them all, but never so much as he loved her. He sure as hell wouldn’t have beaten any of them, something she couldn’t have said about the asshole who’d been her first husband. Her inability to understand that maddened him and—it was time to admit it—lessened his regard for her a little. This self-imposed banishment from the only place on earth worth living in had begun for her. He hadn’t cared about the icon itself as anything other than a means of winning her hand. All he had wanted was her.

  When he’d left Alaska, nothing had been more important than recovering the icon and returning it to his people. He’d fantasized about the potlatch that would be held to hail the conquering hero and the restoration of a piece of tribal history, an admiring Joy beaming at him from the sidelines, his mother wiping proud tears from her eyes, Joy’s parents resigned to the inevitable with good grace, or at least enough grace that they could no longer actively oppose his suit.

  The anguish of rejection and the remembered fury and frustration at her continued refusal to marry him was still there but no longer had the ability to hurl him into gloom and despair. His experiences in the Aleutians and in Seattle had seasoned him, matured him. He was a man full grown now, and full-grown men did not die for love.

  He would not die for love. If there was a sense of gritted teeth about the declaration, it was nonetheless sincere.

  Which left the question of the icon.

  If marriage with Joy was no longer on his to-do list, should he still pursue the icon? For what purpose? The tribal elders had not supported his marriage to Joy, with the possible exception of his cousin, Ekaterina. Ekaterina was a daughter of one of the Niniltna Shugaks, who like Joy had been married off to a son of one of the Aleutian Shugaks to cement their emigration into the area, and who thus might know a thing or two about marriages dictated by one’s parents.

  No, with the sole exception of his mother, he owed his elders nothing, less even than they thought. He wondered how many of them had known about his true parentage.

  He wasn’t as angry at Mac McCullough as he had once been, either. Mac, who struck Sam as a guy with an eye always for the main chance, had nicked the icon and everything else within reach that wasn’t nailed down, greatly helped by the fact that the local populace was laid out with the Spanish flu. Maybe he had loved Elizaveta, maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he truly had meant to come back, maybe he hadn’t. He’d told his story and made sure his son had seen it. Maybe it was even the truth.

  And maybe it wasn’t. Sam had thought about writing to Hammett, to see what he thought. By Seward he had discarded the notion. It didn’t matter, or it wouldn’t before much longer. Alaska was a place for starting over, whether you were new to the Territory or had been born there.

  So he had turned his back on the vanished Mr. Emil Bannister, and on the lost icon, and on Joy Shugak. He reached Cordova to find his mother gravely ill. He stayed with her until she died the following year, taking on the harbormaster’s job when the last one quit in a huff over a disagreement concerning back pay. The city council wanted him to take the job on permanently, but Sam wasn’t ready for a life
on shore. Besides, Niniltna was only a plane ride away, and he’d seen too many villagers in the Club Bar already. He wasn’t going to wait around for Joy to show up.

  When his mother died in the spring of 1948, he sold the house and everything in it. The following month he was talking to the skipper of a seventy-five-foot tender with a wooden hull, a high bow, a round stern, a deep draft, and a capacious hold. She’d been built in a shipyard in Ballard in 1912 and she’d been making her living in Alaska since 1914, fishing for herring and salmon mostly. She had started her life under sail, and had been converted to diesel in 1916.

  There was a roomy fo’c’sle forward and a two-story house, wheelhouse, and chartroom above, a galley, three staterooms, and a head on the main deck. The engine room was below and aft of the hold. Her name was the Freya, which, the skipper told him with a wink and a nudge, was the Norse goddess of love.

  Well, Sam had a history of falling in love at first sight. He haggled on the price and had enough money left over for repairs. When the papers were signed Sam took her to Seward and put her in dry dock. He installed a new engine, a new drive shaft and propeller, and a new boom and tackle. He remodeled the house so he didn’t have to go out on deck to go to the head or climb to the wheelhouse, and he finished off the job with a new coat of paint, black hull with a white trim line and white house with black trim.

  The last thing he did was write to Pete in Seattle, to ask him if he still had the brass ship’s compass in the teak box Sam had seen in his shop the first time he’d gone there. Pete did, allowed as how he could only have parted with it to Sam, and insisted on its being a gift instead of a purchase. The compass was installed with due ceremony on the wheelhouse console.

  Over the next twenty years there wasn’t one of the thirty-six thousand miles of coastal Alaska the Freya didn’t work, from Metlakatla to Kaktovik. The 1920 Jones Act had cleared Alaskan waters of foreign-owned competition, and Sam took full advantage of it. He took employers where he found them, the U.S. Navy in the Aleutians when they needed someone to run a load of supplies to those poor bastards manning the strategic intercept station on Amchitka, Alaska Steamship when they needed help delivering the goods to Barrow, Alaska Packers for picking up herring and salmon during the seasons when the price was right, the Forestry Service when they needed a tow for a log boom.

  He had a good eye for crew and a keen nose for a buck, and he kept his eyes open on the job, learning the Gulf of Alaska and all its many moods by heart. There was always someone willing in every port, so he hadn’t lacked for company, either. He hardly ever thought of Joy, unless it was with the indifferent curiosity of an old friend.

  Or so he told himself.

  It had been a pretty damn good decade, taken all in all, and the last thing he needed now was to go tarryhooting off on some silly quest after a piece of wormy wood and cheap gilt that could have at this point little meaning for his tribe, cultural, historical, or sentimental, and certainly had nothing at all to do with him.

  So of course that was exactly what he did.

  He did some snooping around the capitol and learned that Emil Bannister lived in Anchorage and was considered to be one of those behind-the-scenes political powerhouses, involved in everything from shipping to banking. He was a boon companion to the Bells, Pilzes, and Heimans and a charter member of the Spit and Argue Club, whose members had their fingers in every commercial pie north of the fifty-three. He had the ear of the territorial governor and was on the correct side of every issue from fish traps to statehood.

  Sam made friends with an aide to one of the Anchorage representatives, from whom he learned that Bannister was partner in a consortium that was drilling exploratory wells on the Kenai Peninsula, hoping to strike oil. Sam remembered running supplies to a cannery in Tuxedni Bay and being beguiled for an evening by the old caretaker with tales of drilling for oil at Iniskin in the 1890s, but this was the first he’d heard about oil exploration on the Kenai.

  He told his crew he was moving the Freya to Cook Inlet in hopes of scaring up some work running supplies for the exploration companies there. Five of his six hands were from Southeast and he paid them off in Juneau and left the next day. Cook Inlet was a dicey proposition, an ever-changing bottom caused by a constant flow of glacial silt pushed around by forty-two-foot tides. He put the Freya at Nikiski’s rudimentary dock and went ashore. The next day he returned with a handshake contract to ferry supplies between Seattle and Nikiski for the Richfield Oil Company. He spent most of the following year in transit on the Gulf of Alaska.

  Pete was dead by then, but Kyle was still at the old stand in Seattle, and Sam had a standing invitation to dinner whenever he was in town. The house in Wallingford was by now fully restored to sleek and gleaming health. Kyle had bought out Pete, opened a storefront in downtown Seattle, and opened a second store in Snohomish, which, he informed Sam, was rapidly becoming the antiquing capital of the Pacific Northwest. He had acquired a live-in friend that Sam didn’t much like the look of. The friend returned the feeling with interest, and when Kyle sent him off on a spurious errand Sam cocked an eyebrow. Kyle sighed. “I know, but what can I do? I love him.”

  The conversation threatened to descend into melancholy, so Sam told him about finding Emil Bannister. Kyle positively glowed with excitement, even positing the possibility of traveling north with Sam on the Freya to meet the man in person. This caused Sam to choke on his after-dinner coffee, and they had a good laugh.

  The following July he docked with a load of pinto beans and drill pipe when Richfield brought in the Swanson River discovery well, which tested out at nine hundred barrels a day. It was Alaska’s first commercially viable oil discovery.

  Sam was invited to the celebration, and ate ham hocks and beans washed down with large quantities of beer, surrounded by accents that ranged from Houston, Texas, to Dallas, Texas, with maybe a little Oklahoma thrown in there for seasoning. For sure he’d never seen so many cowboy boots outside of a Randolph Scott movie.

  A couple of roughnecks got into an argument over who had been throwing the chain when the well came in, and Sam thanked the rig boss for his share of the celebration but said he had to get back to his boat now. The rig boss, a big man with a big belly and a big bald head named, originally, Tex, said, “Need you to run around to Seward, grab the latest shipment of freight off the docks, bring it right back here.”

  “Can do.” Sam stood up, and Tex escorted him to the dock. En route a skinny little guy with a face like an orangutan named, originally, Okie, came rushing up in excitement to tell Tex than one of the partners had flown down from Anchorage with his son and wanted a tour.

  Father and son appeared a few moments later, and Sam found himself shaking the hand of Emil Bannister, a fair man of medium height, in his mid-forties, with an incipient pot belly straining the vest of his three-piece suit. He had a shrewd eye and the indiscriminate and ingratiating smile of a politician. “Isn’t this something?” he said, beaming. “First commercial discovery of oil in the territory. They can’t say no the next time we come asking for statehood now, can they?”

  Sam said no, they probably couldn’t. Inevitably, Emil’s next question was how long Sam had been in the state. His eyebrows went sky-high when he heard the answer. “Not many of your generation can say that,” he said. “Most of the Alaskan-born are my son’s age.” Before Sam could point out that Alaska Natives pretty much had the drop on everyone else in that regard, Emil said sharply, “Erland! Get down off that thing.”

  The boy, who was up on a forklift being shown the controls by the operator, flushed and climbed down again.

  “I didn’t bring you down here to get covered in grease,” Emil said. “Now shake hands with this good gentleman.”

  “Hello,” Sam said, holding out his hand. “I’m Sam Dementieff.”

  And found himself staring into a face last seen in a hospital ward on Adak Island, fourteen years before.

  Twenty-eight

  It was full dark by th
e time she let herself into the town house. She went into the living room and sorted through Jack’s selection of music, settling on a compilation of live Jimmy Buffett performances and cranking up the volume so that it sounded like Jimmy was in the kitchen with her. She put the takeout pad thai in the microwave and sat down to the fresh spring rolls while it was heating. She was polishing off the last one when her phone rang. “This is Kate.”

  “Hey.”

  It was Jim. “Hey,” she said indistinctly.

  “Feeding your face?”

  “It’s what I do best.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  She swallowed. Mutt trotted in from the next room, ears cocked. “Your love slave says hi.” She held the phone up so Jim could say, “Hey, Mutt!”

  Mutt gave a happy yip in reply. Kate put the phone back to her ear. “I gather you’re still in California?” A thousand miles from her.

  “Not so much,” he said.

  She sat up. “Are you on your way home?” She was already making plans to pick him up at the airport. She looked at the kitchen clock. If he was about to get on a plane, flying in from LA would put him into Anchorage well after midnight. No problem, she could—

  “I’m on the road,” he said.

  She was confused. “You’re driving home? What, you bought a car?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  Apparently, she would not be picking him up at the airport any time soon. She leaned back again, and tried not to sound as sulky as she felt. “What’s going on?”

  He sighed. “This’ll take a while.”

  She crossed her feet on the table, ignoring the microwave dinger when it went off. “I’m all ears.”