by Janet Dailey
“Others have done it,” Ace reminded her as he started the car’s engine. “Some families have homesteaded land in the valley. You ate some of their food for dinner.”
“But look at the number of people who gave up after a couple years,” Glory replied. “You’ve flown over that valley many times, Ace. You know how many homesteads have been abandoned as well as I do.”
Wylie remembered seeing them, too, and hoped that Lisa’s parents didn’t become discouraged and quit. He hated to think that he might never see her again. His father’s response offered him some reassurance.
“But the government is behind this project. There’s already four hundred transients from the CCC camps along the Pacific Coast there at Palmer, setting up the main camp and tents for the colonists to live in until houses can be built. The transients are going to help them clear the land, build the houses and barns, make the roads, and build the bridges. These colonists aren’t going to be doing the work all by themselves the way the homesteaders before them had to.” Ace rolled up his window to keep the dust from blowing inside the car as they picked up speed on the open street.
“Some of the local people aren’t too happy about the transients that have been brought in,” Trudy said. “A lot of people here depend on the summer jobs they get on the railroad or the road commission crews. They’re concerned this cheap labor from outside will take their jobs.”
“It seems to me if the people of Alaska are going to be concerned about something it ought to be Japan,” Ace stated grimly. “I flew a couple of cannery boys to Nushgak on Bristol Bay this past week. While I was there, I talked to one of the hands on a fishing boat. He said they’d spotted a Japanese ship in the Aleutians. He swore they were taking soundings, and he said it wasn’t the first Japanese they’d seen in Aleutian waters.”
“I think everyone in Alaska has been worried about Japan since it marched its armies into Manchuria four years ago,” Glory replied.
“Why shouldn’t we be? The western Aleutian Islands are only six hundred and fifty miles away from the Japanese military bases at Paramushiro. When that Naval Disarmament Treaty expires next year, the U.S. better start building some bases in those islands. You mark my words, we’ll be going to war with Japan. I just hope before that happens the Congress starts listening to people like General Mitchell or we’ll be utterly defenseless in an attack. Right now, all we have is four hundred soldiers sitting in the Chilkoot Barracks. There’s no airstrip, no road to it. You can get to them only by tugboat.”
Glory remembered the warning General Billy Mitchell had given when he’d spoken to the House Military Affairs Committee this past February. He had referred to Alaska as “the key point of the whole Pacific.” “He who holds Alaska holds the world,” he’d told them. “Alaska is the most strategic place in the world. It is the jumping-off place to smash Japan. If we wait to fight her in the Philippines, it will take us five years to defeat Japan.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Wylie spoke up. “If the Japanese attack Alaska, I’ll take you and Grandma Cole to a safe place in the mountains and teach you how to cook over a campfire.”
It was a comment made half in jest, yet Glory suspected that such a prospect was the sort that appealed to a fourteen-year-old’s imagination. She wouldn’t be surprised if Wylie could live off the land. More than once Ace had commented after returning from a hunting or fishing trip with Wylie that his son seemed more at home in the woods and the mountains than he did in his own house.
For his age, Wylie was extremely resourceful, and his mind was like a sponge when it came to picking up native survival lore, from making his own snowshoes and snare traps to building a snow cave or stalking game. He’d had Matty teach him how to make his own mukluks and parkas, and Billy Ray had shown him how to utilize bones to make weapons.
Just this past winter, Wylie had gone with Ace on a flight, but a bad storm forced them to land on a frozen lake. Strong winds had threatened to flip the aircraft on its back and Ace hadn’t been able to find any way to tie it down. At that point, Wylie had chopped a hole in the ice, stuck the tie-down rope in it, then urinated in the hole. In that sub-zero cold, it had frozen within minutes, securely anchoring the plane.
Ace was disappointed, although he hid it well, that Wylie didn’t share his love of flying. To Wylie, flying was merely a means to get to some remote region.
Wylie showed all the signs of becoming a loner. In that, he reminded Glory of Deacon. Wylie, too, wasn’t the kind to indulge in idle conversation. Trudy said that sometimes hours went by without him uttering a word. And he had Deacon’s poker face, seldom letting his feelings show.
Even though he wasn’t an unruly boy, he had discipline problems in school. If a teacher told him to do something that didn’t make sense to him, he wouldn’t do it. His resistance grew in proportion to the pressure applied. Glory sometimes wondered if Wylie had inherited that trait from her—and his love of hunting from the blood of the Indians and the Russian promyshleniki. Maybe Wylie was the sum total of all his ancestors mixed together.
“Say, Wylie, who was that pretty girl I saw you talking to tonight?” Ace teased. “Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself a girlfriend?”
“Dad,” Wylie protested, reddening slightly.
“Would you look at that, Trudy. Your son’s blushing.”
“I am not.” But his face felt hot, and growing hotter. He scrunched a little lower in the front seat, hoping his mother and grandmother wouldn’t notice his embarrassment. “She was just some girl from one of those colonist families. She was just asking me a bunch of questions about Indians and polar bears.”
“Does she have a name?”
“I guess so.” Wylie pretended that he didn’t know it. He just couldn’t bring himself to talk about Lisa Blomquist.
In the latter part of May, the other colonists from Michigan and Wisconsin reached the Matanuska Valley, to bring the number of families to the planned two hundred. All had been on the relief rolls in their home states and had some farming background. The government had selected the volunteer families only from the northern tier of states, specifically the so-called “cutover” region that had been denuded of its forests by lumbering operations and had poor soil unsuitable for farming. The selection was restricted to that three-state area on the basis that its climate most closely resembled Alaska’s and the families, mainly of Scandinavian descent, could more easily adapt to the far northern climate.
The forty-acre tracts were chosen by lot, drawn by the head of the family. But very little land was cleared that first summer. The colonists and transients spent most of their time building a community center in Palmer for meetings and church services, and the farmhouses and barns on the individual tracts. But the work was slow, frequently hampered by the heavy late-summer rains typical of the region.
Wylie thought about Lisa Blomquist many times during that first year, wondering how she was getting along, and whether she was liking it here. As he helped his mother in the garden that summer, hoeing out the weeds, he wished he could show Lisa the six-pound turnips, seventy-pound cabbages, and giant-size potatoes they’d grown so she could see how vegetables flourished in the north’s long daylight hours. In the fall when he’d killed his first moose of the season, he wondered if she’d ever eaten its meat and whether she liked the taste of it.
Many times when he walked his trap line that winter, surrounded by the silence of snow, he stopped and gazed northeastward, toward the valley roughly fifty miles away on the railroad’s branch line to the coalfields—Matanuska Valley, closed in on three sides by towering mountain ranges. He hoped she wasn’t lonely.
The next year, grumblings of discontent were reported from some of the colonists. Before the summer was out, several of the original families gave up and went back to the States. Soon, more followed. But Wylie never found out whether Lisa Blomquist’s family was among the ones that left.
After a time, he stopped thinking about the twelve-year-old girl with blue
eyes and honey-colored braids.
CHAPTER LIII
Anchorage, Alaska
June 1940
Wylie walked behind the pushmower, leaning his weight slightly into the handles to propel it along as the rotating cylinder of curved blades cut the yard’s long grass. His blue plaid shirt hung on a fence post, discarded after he’d finished mowing the lawn area in front of the boarding-house belonging to his Grandma Glory. The afternoon sun was warm on his back. Its heat, coupled with the slight physical exertion, raised a sheen of perspiration on his skin.
There was a certain pleasant monotony in mowing—walking back and forth, back and forth, the air scented with the fragrance of newly cut grass and filled with the droning whirr of the mower blades. He reached one end of the backyard and maneuvered the pushmower around to start back toward the other.
As he turned, Wylie noticed two people coming up the front walk to the boardinghouse. Normally he wouldn’t have paid any attention to such a common occurrence. Europe was at war, and most believed it was only a matter of time before the United States would become involved. The first steps in the long-neglected defense of the Alaska territory had begun with a four-million-dollar appropriation to build a cold-weather aviation laboratory in Fairbanks and a new Army post in Anchorage to be called Fort Richardson. Eight hundred troops from the Fourth Infantry Regiment had already arrived in Anchorage, bivouacking on the edge of town until the new fort was built. The military contracts had brought a horde of construction workers to town, all of them needing someplace to live.
It was a common sight to see men coming up the front walk of the Cole boardinghouse, but not two women, especially when one of them was young and pretty. Wylie stared appreciatively at the girl with the page-boy bob until the building blocked his view of her. Then he leaned again into the pushmower, briefly regretting that there were no rooms available.
Lisa Blomquist paused at the front steps and glanced at the large and rambling two-story building with a small picket fence bordering the flower beds in front. After five years of nothing but hard luck on their farm in the Matanuska Valley, her father had finally given up and found a job with a construction crew here in Anchorage. Now Lisa and her mother were house-hunting, trying to find a place to live here in town.
They’d been at it all day long, but something was wrong with every house they saw. Either the monthly rent was more than they could afford, or the house was too small, or too old, or in a bad neighborhood. Finally someone had suggested they go see Mrs. Cole, explaining that, in addition to this boardinghouse, she owned several rental properties in town.
Lisa followed her mother up the steps to the front door. A gray-haired Eskimo woman greeted them as they walked in. Lisa noticed the barely disguised look of dismay that crossed her mother’s face. “Mrs. Cole?” she asked hesitantly.
“No.” The heavyset woman smiled. “I am Matty Townsend. If you’ve come to inquire about rooms, I am sorry to say we are filled up at the moment.”
“No, I came to see Mrs. Cole about possibly renting one of her houses.”
“One moment. I will get her for you. Please make yourself comfortable.” She indicated the collection of chairs and sofas in the parlor off the entryway.
When the Eskimo woman walked away, Lisa followed her mother into the parlor. She picked up one of the magazines on the table and started to leaf through it while her mother wandered about the room inspecting its furnishings, enviously touching a porcelain vase and covetously eyeing a crystal lamp.
At the sound of approaching footsteps, Lisa laid the magazine back on the table and turned to face the doorway. A tall, slim woman appeared in the opening, her gray hair swept up and away from her face and coiled in a smooth chignon at the nape. Lisa was struck by the contrast between its light color and the deep black of her eyes. It was hard to guess the woman’s age. There was something so youthful about her as she walked into the room, smiling and confident.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said to Lisa’s mother. “I’m Mrs. Cole.”
“I’m Mrs. Blomquist and this is my daughter Lisa.”
“How do you do, Lisa.”
Despite the warmth in the greeting, Lisa felt strangely shy and tongue-tied, very much the country hick. She tried standing a little straighter, emulating the woman’s erect carriage, a look emphasized by the heavily padded shoulders of the royal blue dress she wore. Not even her clothes had the dowdy look of an old woman’s, Lisa realized. Women of comparable age in Palmer were either plump or bags of bones, their skin lined and wrinkled like a prune. She’d never seen anyone like Mrs. Cole before, except maybe in the movies.
Lisa was so intent on studying the woman that she missed the conversation between Mrs. Cole and her mother. She couldn’t even remember hearing their voices until Mrs. Cole took a step backwards toward the doorway. “Excuse me a minute. My grandson is out back. I’ll have him take you over to see the house.”
As she left the room, Lisa turned to her mother. “She seems very nice.”
She sniffed in disapproval. “She claims she’s a widow. I suppose she could be.” Her eyes swept the room and its contents. “But I have my doubts that this was always a boardinghouse.”
“Mama.” Lisa was shocked by the insinuation that this might once have been a house of ill repute, and that Mrs. Cole had owned it.
“I have been told by more than one person that it isn’t wise to ask too many questions about a woman’s past here in Alaska. It’s been said that many men who have become leading citizens in the community married ‘fallen women.’ They claim there were so few decent women in Alaska during the early days that the men, in desperation, took the other kind for wives.”
“Mama.” Lisa was embarrassed that her mother would even suggest that Mrs. Cole might have been one of those—and strongly suspected that she was jealous.
When Mrs. Cole returned, she was accompanied by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a blue plaid flannel shirt. His face looked as if it had been chiseled out of bronze. His eyes were almost black, like his grandmother’s, but they lacked their warm sparkle. His seemed more guarded and watchful.
“I’d like you to meet my grandson, Wylie Cole. This is Mrs. Blomquist and her daughter Lisa. They presently live in Palmer, but her husband has been hired to help with the building of the new Army fort here in Anchorage. They’re looking for a place to live here so he won’t have to commute back and forth to work.”
Lisa Blomquist. For an instant, Wylie was too stunned to do anything except stare at the girl. Immediately his mind flashed back to that first meeting five years ago. She was the right age. The pigtails were gone and the color of her hair was maybe a shade or two different, but her eyes were still big and blue. Wylie was sure there couldn’t possibly be two girls named Lisa Blomquist living in the Matanuska Valley; she had to be the same one he’d met.
She stared at him intently, but without a flicker of recognition in her expression. She didn’t remember him. Wylie felt deflated by the discovery and wished he could jog her memory, but claiming a previous acquaintance was one of the oldest lines in the book. He covered his disappointment, realizing that he’d obviously not made as much of an impression on her as she’d made on him.
“It’s a pleasure.” He addressed both Lisa and her mother. “My car’s outside. I’ll be happy to drive you over to see the house.”
Wylie. It was an unusual name, yet somehow it sounded familiar to her. Lisa couldn’t think why until she was seated in the back seat of the Chevy, then she remembered that the pilot who had been killed in that plane crash near Barrow, Alaska along with Will Rogers, had been named Wiley, too. At the time, everybody had been talking about it. She remembered the pilot’s name because it had been the same as that boy she had met— That was it, she realized. She was almost positive his name had been Wylie Cole. But it was so long ago. She leaned forward in her seat, straining for a look at the driver’s face. The black hair and eyes, the Indianlike profile—it had to
be him.
She wanted to say something, to mention their past meeting, but with her mother sitting there in the front seat beside him she couldn’t bring herself to do it. So she sat back in her seat and stared out the window, now and then stealing glances at the back of his head, wishing she had the nerve to speak up.
At the house, Wylie showed the mother and daughter through the rooms. Completing the circuit, they came back to the starting point in the front room. Wylie halted. “Was there anything else you’d like to see, Mrs. Blomquist? Are there any questions?”
“I think I’d like to take another look at the kitchen. It seemed a little small.”
“Go right ahead. Take all the time you want. I’ll wait here for you.” He didn’t feel like accompanying her.
“Aren’t you coming, Lisa?” Mrs. Blomquist asked as she started toward the kitchen located in the rear of the house.
“No, I … I think I’ll wait here.” Her back was to him as she spoke. He studied the natural luster of her light brown hair, long and sleek with the ends turning under to brush the tops of her shoulders. He wanted to reach out and touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked. She watched her mother leave the room, then turned and hesitantly smiled at him. “It’s a nice house.”
“Yes.”
“I know this question will probably sound funny.” She seemed very nervous and self-conscious, as if she wasn’t altogether sure she should be saying any of this. “But … is your father a bush pilot?”
“Yes, he is.” Wylie frowned at her curiously, wondering what had prompted the question.
“I thought so.” Her lips parted in a wide smile that seemed to light up her face. “We’ve met before. I don’t know if you remember—”
“—the dinner at the community hall for the colonists on their way to the Matanuska Valley.” Wylie smiled broadly.