The Great Alone

by Janet Dailey

  “I didn’t feel like going home, so I thought I’d come by to see you.” She laid her pouch of books on the table, where Nadia had set out all the ingredients for the Russian holiday bread.

  “How’s Papa?” Nadia added some flour to the nutmeg and vanilla-spiced mixture of butter, eggs, and sugar in the large crockery bowl, then picked up a spoon to start stirring it in, awkwardly attempting to hold the bowl steady with her left hand.

  “The same.” Eva slumped onto a chair. “He just sits in his chair and hardly ever talks.”

  “He’s taking Mama’s death very hard.” After thickening the batter with flour, she added a cupful each of currants and nuts. “I knew he would.”

  Eva stared at the wooden spoon in her sister’s hand, watching its circular motion as Nadia attempted to fold the ingredients together. “I hate him.”

  The statement had the desired effect, as her sister finally took notice of her and let the spoon handle rest against the side of the bowl. “Eva! How can you say that?”

  “It’s his fault Mama’s dead. Even he says so. He shouldn’t have let those soldiers hurt her. He should have stayed in the room with her and not left her alone. She wouldn’t have gotten frightened and run out of the house if he’d been with her.”

  “That isn’t fair, Eva. He did everything he could for her. He couldn’t sit with her every minute. He needed his rest, too.”

  “He could have asked me to stay with her if he wanted to sleep.”

  “You know she only wanted Papa with her.” She picked up the spoon and started stirring the batter again. “What happened to Mama wasn’t his fault, and I don’t want to hear you say such a thing ever again.”

  “After the Americans came, we should have left with Uncle Stanislav, like Papa said.” She stuck her finger into the rich bread batter when Nadia paused to add more flour to the mixture, then slowly licked it off.

  “Maybe we should have.”

  Nadia’s unexpected agreement took Eva by surprise. Always before, her sister had denied such a suggestion, with the explanation that she never would have married Gabe if they had left.

  “But we didn’t go with Uncle Stanislav or Aunt Anastasia, so there’s no point in talking about it.” Her sister’s tone seemed unnaturally brittle. “You should be old enough to understand that we can’t change the past. If we could, there might be a lot of things we would do differently.”

  “What would you change?” Eva had always thought her beautiful older sister had everything. Everyone had always liked her best, with the possible exception of their grandfather. Otherwise she’d always been the favorite daughter, favorite niece, favorite cousin—favorite everything. She’d gone to the balls and concerts given at the governor’s mansion when Princess Maria had entertained there. She had married a handsome and important American. Nobody had ever laughed at Nadia, made fun of the way she looked, or called her names. She had never suffered the agony of not being liked the way Eva had.

  Nadia hesitated over her answer. “I would change what happened the night the soldiers broke in. I would have Papa make them leave.”

  Eva thought about that for a while, then nodded slowly. “That’s when everything went wrong. Nothing was the same after that night, was it?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “I hate them,” she declared vehemently.

  “Who?”

  “The soldiers.” She hated them for what they’d done to her parents and for the way they made her feel with their hurtful remarks. She hated all the soldiers. “Somebody should make them pay for what they’ve done. What about Gabe? Can’t he see that they’re punished?”

  “There’s … there’s nothing he can do.” Nadia added the last of the flour and tried to work it into the stiffening dough.

  “He could try, couldn’t he? He could talk to the general and—”

  “No!” The suggestion obviously upset her, although she tried to conceal it. “I told you there isn’t anything he can do. Please, let’s not talk about it. And don’t suggest it to him either.”

  “How can I?” Eva muttered. “I hardly ever see him any more. How come he was too busy to come to Mama’s funeral?”

  “Because he had important things to do.” But she didn’t say what they were.

  For some reason, Eva didn’t find that excuse very convincing. “He never comes over to see Papa.”

  “He’s been very busy.” Despite Nadia’s attempts to hold the bowl steady while she worked the flour into the dough, it kept shifting. Eva observed the wince of pain that flashed across her sister’s face as a sudden movement of the bowl sideways jerked at her injured arm.

  “Would you like me to do that for you?” she offered.

  “Yes, thank you.” Nadia willingly relinquished the bowl of bread dough and moved away from the table, gently holding her sling-wrapped arm as if it pained her. “It’s surprising how difficult it is to do simple things when you have only one good arm.”

  “It must hurt.” Eva abandoned the spoon and began kneading the flour into the dough with her fingers.

  “Sometimes, but it’s getting better.” Her smile seemed strained. “You’ll have to take some of the kulich home to Papa.”

  “He won’t eat it,” Eva replied glumly. “He hardly eats anything. It doesn’t matter what I fix.”

  “That will change in time. His appetite will come back.”

  “No, it won’t. He doesn’t care about anything any more. If I didn’t come home tonight, he wouldn’t even miss me.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Yes. Mama didn’t want me in her room. Now Papa doesn’t even care if I’m there or not.”

  “He does care. He may not show it, but that’s only because he misses Mama so much right now. But … if he knew … you were hurting, he’d do something about it. Papa would. I know he would—if he knew.”

  “Are you crying, Nadia?” She thought she saw tears in her eyes.

  “My arm hurts a little, that’s all.” She turned away so Eva couldn’t see her face.

  From the front room came the sound of the door opening and a man’s heavy footsteps walking in. Eva frowned at Nadia’s visible start of alarm. She looked so frightened that for an instant Eva thought maybe some soldiers had come. But her sister turned and bustled quickly to the table.

  “I’ll finish that.” She moved the bowl away from Eva’s flour- and dough-sticky fingers. “You’d better go home before Papa wonders where you are and starts worrying.”

  “But who came in?” Eva didn’t understand why she was suddenly being sent away. “Is it Gabe?”

  “Yes.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and pleaded urgently, “Please, just do as I ask and leave. And don’t forget your school books.”

  “But—” Eva was confused.

  “Woman! Where the hell are you?”

  Surprised by the anger in the demanding voice, Eva turned toward the connecting door just as her sister’s husband appeared in the opening. His expression looked harsh and forbidding, his eyes small points of blackness. The smile, the engaging twinkle of his eyes were nowhere to be seen.

  “What’s she doing here?” He glared at Eva.

  “She stopped by on her way home from school,” Nadia explained anxiously. “She was just leaving.”

  “Have I interrupted something?” His gaze narrowed suspiciously, darting back and forth between the two of them. “I’ll bet you didn’t expect me home so early.”

  “I wasn’t certain what time you’d come home.” Her sister tried to sound very calm and unconcerned, but Eva heard the faint waver in her voice. She moved cautiously closer to the table, inching toward her book pouch. “I know how much you like kulich. I thought I’d bake some to surprise you.”

  “Now I see.” His glance fell on the tins of flour and sugar sitting on the table. “You’re making a surprise for me. I wonder if I had come home later whether there would be any left for me—or would you have given it all to that half-breed family of
yours? That’s what’s been going on, isn’t it? You’ve been slipping food to them behind my back. That’s why we never have any sugar or flour or anything else to eat in this house!”

  “No! I was making this for you, Gabe.”

  “Liar!” With an angry sweep of his arm, he knocked everything off the table. Eva jumped at the loud clatter of bowls, tins, cups, and pans as they fell onto the floor, scattering their contents amidst a rising cloud of flour dust. She heard her sister’s half-smothered shriek of alarm and turned, her eyes widening as she saw him spring on Nadia and grab the wrist of her broken arm.

  “Don’t hit me. Please, don’t hit me,” her sister sobbed.

  He slapped her across the face, then jerked her back to him with a hard yank on her wrist. “Don’t you lie to me, you little bitch.”

  “Don’t you hurt my sister.” Eva flung herself at him, trying to pull his hand loose from its grip on Nadia’s injured arm. “You let go of her.”

  She didn’t see the backhanded swing of his arm. Pain exploded in her head as its force catapulted her backward. She fell, striking the juncture of the kitchen wall and floor. For an instant she was too stunned to move.

  “Eva!” Distantly she heard her sister call out her name before the outcry of alarm was choked off by a sharp groan. Gradually the pain began to center on one side of her head, leaving a bruised soreness to claim the rest of her. “My arm!”

  “I’ll break it again if you don’t tell me the truth.” Gabe’s threatening response dimly penetrated Eva’s consciousness. She tried to sit up. “You were going to give that kulich to her, weren’t you?”

  “I was going to … send one loaf home … for Papa.” Her pain-strangled answer broke on a sob. “Only one, Gabe.”

  “I’ll bet it was only one.”

  Eva heard the strike of another blow and looked up as the force of it knocked her sister to the floor. She fell on her broken arm and cried out sharply. Eva wanted to go to her, but Gabe was standing over her sister. She was frightened of what he might do to her if she tried to come between them again. The excruciating throbbing in her head hadn’t abated from the last time.

  Her sister cowered on the floor, protectively hunched over her arm, her body shaking in silent sobs, but she made no sound. Eva wanted to cry, but she was afraid of drawing attention to herself, afraid of incurring his wrath.

  “I warned you about lying to me again. Maybe now you’ll remember.” He stalked out of the room, grinding his feet in the flour and sugar and crunching the shards from the broken crockery bowl. Huddled against the wall, Eva didn’t move until she heard the slam of the front door. When she tried to stand, she felt dizzy, and gingerly touched the side of her throbbing head, her fingertips encountering a lump about the size of a goose egg.

  As soon as the dizziness passed, she picked her way through the mess on the floor to her sister’s side and carefully helped her sit up, propping her back against a wall. Nadia’s face looked ghostly white except for one swollen, purpling-red patch along her jaw where Gabe had hit her. Eva looked at her worriedly, noticing the way she cradled the sling that supported her broken arm.

  “I’d better get Grandpa.”

  “No.” Nadia’s thready voice called her back when Eva started to rise. “You mustn’t … tell anyone.”

  “But you’re hurt.”

  “I’ll be all right.” Slowly she opened her eyes and reached to take hold of Eva’s hand, squeezing it tightly. Eva cried at the pain she saw in her sister’s pinched face, and tears rolled down her cheeks because she didn’t know what to do.

  “He hit you.” It was difficult for her to comprehend that, even though she’d seen it.

  “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have lied to him. I … Eva, you’d better go. He might come back.”

  “You come with me. I don’t want him to hurt you again.”

  “I can’t go. Papa …” Again she faltered. “This is my home. He is my husband.”

  “But he beat you.” Eva suddenly recalled other times recently that she’d noticed bruises on her sister. She stared at the sling, the incidents finally connecting. “You didn’t fall on the ice. He broke your arm, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Nadia admitted, bowing her head. “I made him angry.” Eva couldn’t imagine her sister doing anything that would warrant such an awful punishment. She stared blindly at the door through which Gabe had disappeared. She kept remembering the way the soldiers had hurt her mother and the cruel remarks they’d made to her. Now Nadia had been beaten by her husband. She trembled with anger and confusion, wondering why men did these awful things.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  Within a year of his wife’s drowning, Lev Tarakanov was dead. Some said he died of a broken heart. But his young daughter Eva regarded his death as an act of abandonment, and she hated him for it. She had needed him. Her abused and battered sister had needed him. But he had forsaken them and she would never be able to forgive him for that. Her grandfather and sister wept at his funeral, but she did not shed a tear.

  The creditors took the house and all its contents and sold them to satisfy her father’s debts. Neither she nor her sister received any portion of the proceeds. Even Gabe Blackwood was upset about that, but there was no recourse. Theoretically, the confiscation and sale of the property was illegal. However, since Alaska was without civil law, there was no legal basis for the probation of wills or the inheritance of property. Penniless, Eva went to live with her grandfather, bringing with her only the few clothes she possessed and her mother’s Bible.

  Life went on almost the same as before. There were still few nights when her sleep wasn’t disturbed by the carousing of drunken soldiers from the garrison. Her grandfather seemed to require little sleep and spent most of the nights sitting up with his old musket across his lap.

  The years of 1871 and 1872 brought little change, except that the trickle of merchants and tradesmen leaving Sitka became a steady stream of disillusioned and disheartened families. A few prospectors arrived to take their place, drawn to Baranov Island by the discovery of gold-bearing quartz ledges in the area of Silver Bay. But the hard-luck miners couldn’t bolster the sagging economy. After braying the ore in a mortar, they usually obtained only enough gold to keep them in a grubstake.

  Numerous claims were staked, but without law no legal claims could be filed. All the gold found was in hard rock, which required a sizable amount of capital to mine it and a stamp mill to crush the gold from the ore. Investors were leery both because of the absence of any legal claim to a mine and the cost of obtaining the gold from an almost inaccessible area where nearly all the supplies and equipment had to be shipped in.

  But, lured by the rich specimens of gold-bearing quartz they had found, the prospectors searched the mountains, seeking that elusive ledge with a vein of pure gold that might open the palms of the tight-fisted investors. Sitka was the place they went to obtain supplies and let off steam after weeks, sometimes months, alone in the mountains.

  It was virtually impossible for Eva to step outside the door of her grandfather’s house without seeing a drunk staggering down the street, whether it was a soldier, Kolosh, or miner. To venture beyond the doorstep invariably meant subjecting herself to their derisive hoots and insulting remarks. When the school closed its doors in the spring of 1873 because of a lack of funds to pay the teacher, Eva was glad, because it meant she no longer had to walk daily that gauntlet of verbal abuse. By then, her hatred of the soldiers had expanded to include all men except her aged grandfather and the church priest.

  As she reached puberty, she learned the meaning of the word “fornication.” Exposed as she was to the soldiers, miners, and prostitutes who frequented the saloons, she gradually came to understand what the soldiers had done to her mother. Eva could imagine nothing worse. The very thought filled her with revulsion and increased her loathing of men.

  She was glad she didn’t have her mother’s blond hair that had so fascinated the soldiers. Her older sister, Na
dia, did, and Eva had seen the bruises she received from her husband. She was glad her face was all broken out with pimples, that her mouth was too wide, her lips too full, and her eyes too close together. She was glad they called her “frog face” and left her alone. Being pretty was a curse, and she was lucky that she wasn’t damned with it.

  Late one spring night Eva lay awake in bed watching the dancing northern lights perform their magical ballet in the sky beyond her window. The shimmering blue and green colors of the aurora borealis reminded her of Nadia’s satin brocade ball gown—a gown that her husband had ripped to shreds during a recent rampage. As she watched the undulating waves of turquoise lights, they became the brocade material being violently torn into strips of ragged cloth. She turned from the sight and stared at the dark shadows of her room, preferring their empty blackness to the savage beauty outside.

  When she heard the faint scrape of a footstep at the back stoop, she stiffened tensely. Her grandfather was inside the house. She had heard him moving around the parlor only a moment ago. Soldiers. It had to be, she concluded. No one else would be sneaking about behind the house. Knowing that her grandfather’s hearing wasn’t as keen as it once had been, she scrambled out of bed, grabbed up her robe from the foot, and ran to warn him.

  “Grandpa.” Calling softly, she darted to the chair where he sat dozing and gently shook his shoulder to waken him. Startled, he snorted and came instantly alert.

  “What is it?”

  “I heard something behind the house,” she whispered. “I think someone’s out there.”

  Just then they both heard a sound at the door. Her grandfather rose from the chair holding the long musket in both hands. He moved to the kitchen doorway.

  “What is there?” he demanded gruffly in English. “Speak or I will shoot.”

  “It is I.” The reply was made in Russian. “Dimitri Stanislavich. Open the door.”

  Eva dashed past her grandfather and unbarred the back door to pull it open, shaken by the fright her cousin had given her—and angry, too. “Why do you come sneaking around in the middle of the night?” It didn’t matter that it was usually the hour he came, or that it had been months since they’d seen him. “We thought you were soldiers trying to break into the house. Grandpa could have shot you. It was a stupid thing to do, Dimitri Stanislavich, coming here in the middle of the night. He should have shot you just to teach you a lesson.”