by Ed Ifkovic
“So Preston was born in Alaska?”
He nodded. “But Lionel died when his boy was small, falling into a river, freezing to death. And Tessa went to Fairbanks, where she married some rich man.”
“What about Hank?”
“Oh, Hank comes up for hunting now and then. But he has other guides now. I’m too old now. I just serve dinner.”
I was in a hurry to ask a question. “Sonia wrote Tessa a note. She mentioned that Tessa knew the players. From the North. Jack Mabie. Sam Pilot.”
Nathan looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“What can you tell me about Jack Mabie and Sam Pilot?”
Nathan shook his head. “Not good men. Sam is my blood, as you know. But the dark shadow of Jack, a vicious man.”
“You knew them?”
“Slightly. Sam from a nearby village, yes, of course. Once they stopped here. The two of them needed a place to sleep for the night, but the next morning silver dollars disappeared—and the two men. After that, I wouldn’t let Sam cross my doorway.”
“Was Jack really the meanest man in Alaska?”
He narrowed his eyes, and smiled. “I am always amazed that a man can label himself one way—and the world believes it.” A pause. “But he was evil.”
“A killer?”
He nodded. “In his younger days folks really feared him—walked the other way. He shot a trapper out in Venetie, a squabble over furs. A posse caged him, but Sam said he saw the whole thing. Self-defense. A lie. Nothing happened.” He clicked his tongue. “The pattern, you see. Jack robbed and cheated and—killed. A prospector in Dawson, we heard. An ambush in Eagle. Like the others who plundered the Arctic. Soapy Smith and his gang. Fred Hardy, who killed the Sullivan brothers at Unimak. Thieves who lay in wait for the gold-rushers on the White Pass Trail.”
“Did you ever witness a murder?”
A long silence. “Not witness firsthand—but here. Sadly.”
“Grandfather, maybe you shouldn’t…”
He held up his hand. “So far in the past, it’s—it’s like a story I was told.” His eyes focused. “But I didn’t see it. Jack lusted after a beautiful woman, a married woman who was frightened of him, a mother, a missionary wife, and Jack accused the husband of robbing his cache of pelts. This was 1925, maybe earlier—around then. Trumped up accusations, of course. But Jack accused—a lie—and the poor husband, a missionary who didn’t even trap, confronted Jack. I didn’t see what happened, but Jack Mabie shot the man in the heart. In front of his children.” He closed his eyes for a second, shook his head. “When we got there, the man was dead, a hunting knife lying near his hand. The wife screamed that Jack dropped it there, set him up, and Sam Pilot said no—the missionary lunged at Jack. A lie.”
“So Jack walked away.”
He nodded. “A miner’s court. You know, a bunch of local men got together, they listened to Sam, refused to hear the wife, and Jack and Sam rode off…”
“Into the midnight sun,” I said.
“Evil, evil.”
Noah interrupted. “It’s late. Time for bed.”
It was midnight. Looking out the window, Noah said the sky was clear now, the snow ended, and the heavens were brilliant with color. So Noah and I bundled up and stepped outside the cabin. What struck me first was the silence, except for a faint distant hum, which Noah said was the generator that gave power to the village. But it was the sky that held me: a wash of violet and blue and green and rose at the far north horizon, moving, dipping, swirling. Noah said, “If you whistle, they say the stream will come down to you.” The air glistened, wrapped around me. But it was too cold to whistle, and I rushed inside. There, Noah glibly quoted, “‘They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod; it was not good for the eyes of man—’twas a sight for the eyes of God.’”
“Let me guess. Robert W. Service.”
“Who else?” Noah laughed.
The old man watched us. “The aurora lights lead you to heaven. They are nothing more than the spirit of our dead who stay with us, quietly advising us. Our dead return in our dreams, and talk to us. My father often visits me.”
Noah kept repeating. “Bedtime. Bedtime. You two will talk forever.”
The old man insisted I have his room, though I protested not very much. His bed—layers of caribou and fox hides piled high, soft and cushy, near a cherry-red-hot stove—dominated a quiet room, Spartan almost, with a rack for clothing, one pineboard bureau, some makeshift shelves. No windows.
Noah and his grandfather slept in the front room, both wrapped in blankets and pelts, close to the oil-drum stove. Lights off, one kerosene lantern flickered in a corner, the room peaceful. Outside the wind roared and shrieked and moaned. I heard the sled dogs howl—or, I thought, is that the sound of wolves? I shivered. From the front room came the soft whispered voices of Noah and the old man, talking softly, back and forth. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but now and then I heard chuckling, suppressed laughter. I smiled, lulled by the warmth of their whispering. Then, suddenly, the buzzing stopped, as though by signal, and I heard faint snoring. I slept.
Now and then in the long night I’d awaken and forget where I was, but the smell of burnt wood, acrid and rich, and the sighing from the men feet away, soothed me. At one point I woke and caught the last fragment of a dream: my father Jacob, a young handsome man with a moustache and a Prince Albert coat, was talking to me, whispering. In the darkness I cried out. I drifted back to sleep. In my dreams I was alone on a vast tundra, snow fierce, wind deafening, and the sky above was heavy with stars and wisps of undulating light. I buried myself in a snow cave, mole-like, so that I was encased in a velvety cocoon, and the snow was not cold but warm to the touch, invitingly so. I could almost taste it. As I folded my arms around my body and pulled up my legs, I heard a raven, hovering nearby, not really cawing but talking. I woke from my dream, and it rushed upon me, and I wanted it back because it was so beautiful and it belonged to me.
Chapter Twenty
I woke refreshed, the hum of soft voices drifting in from the front room. When they realized I was awake, the men bustled about, and the aroma of toasted bread and strong coffee came to me.
“Vun gwinzee,” Noah said, grinning. “Good morning.”
He said the weather was fine, and we’d be leaving in a couple of hours. He’d sent one of the twins to see about the plane, warming it up, readying it, checking for splintered propellers, a broken strut, anything that might have happened during yesterday’s flight. I didn’t care, really. I thought I could linger in Fort Yukon for days. But, of course, I couldn’t, nor could Noah.
But I’d woken up with a few questions, and I didn’t know how to ask the old man. After eating breakfast and too many cups of hair-raising coffee, I asked about the old hospital, even the Episcopalian mission, and the Indian school.
“Tell me about the schooling,” I probed.
“Two schools, as I told you,” Noah said. “One for Qwich’in kids, and one for the children of the whites. I remember reading a tattered Dick and Jane primer with some of the pages missing. To me, it was like reading science fiction. Who were these people? Once, telling a story in class, I faltered, called a bear a ggagga, our word, and I was sent home.”
“Horrible.”
“Well, the laws have changed,” Noah acknowledged. “One school for all now, even though it’s been ignored in some places.”
The grandfather added, “Having two schools was always a real problem, though.”
“Why was that?”
“The children of mixed marriages. So many white men, trappers, hunters, end up with Dené women, often marrying them, and the children are half-breeds. Some of the white men wanted their children in the white school, so that’s where they went. One foot in one world, one in another. Most half-breeds went to the mission school.”
&n
bsp; “Such intermarriage isn’t a problem?”
“Not really, but two different cultures. Well, there’s bound to be trouble. And there are always some souls—Indian and white—who blame the others for their sad lives.”
Noah left to check on the plane, and so I sat with the grandfather, and the old man suddenly looked worried.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Noah is precious to me.”
I nodded.
He presented me with a gift, a carved walrus-ivory figure, smooth and elongated, and staring at it I realized it was a boy, an abstract rendering perhaps, but a simple piece. “I made this decades ago. When Noah was leaving for prep school in Massachusetts. It reminded me of him somehow.”
I held it in my hand. “I can’t take such a gift.”
“I no longer need it,” he insisted. “Noah is always with me now.”
I closed my fingers around the statue, so light in my hand, so delicate. “Thank you. I’ll cherish it.”
“That’s why I’m giving it to you.”
I relaxed in my seat and stared at the old man.
“You want to ask me something?” he said, smiling.
“As a matter of fact, I do. I didn’t want to bring it up with Noah here. But yesterday you were talking of Hank and Tessa, the old days up here, and I started to think of something…”
“I know. I saw your curiosity. So I ended up giving you so much of the story…”
“But not enough, I’m afraid.”
“You have a question?”
“Questions,” I emphasized. “I keep coming back to Sonia’s note to Tessa. Jack Mabie. Sam Pilot.”
“I don’t think Tessa ever knew Jack Mabie.”
“Maybe, maybe not. She can’t be trusted. But in her missionary days she had to have heard of him.” I thought of something. “The missionary who was murdered by Jack. Tessa must have known him?”
Nathan sat up. “Of course.” A look of panic in his face. “Yes, they did know each other, but when he died she was long gone to Fairbanks.”
“But maybe Sonia knew that…that connection.”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t know…”
“I have the feeling the answer to Sonia’s murder is up here.”
“In Fort Yukon?”
“Maybe. Somehow up here.”
“I can’t see how.” I saw him thinking. “Let me show you photographs of those years.”
Nathan walked to a bookshelf and pulled out an oversized scrapbook. A wisp of dust flew into the air. “Good housekeeping,” he joked, his fingers brushing away the thin layer of dust. “Appropriate for an old relic—our young lives.”
He sat down next to me and placed the scrapbook on the table. Black pages with Kodak photographs inserted into corner wedges. He started to leaf through the pages. “Let me find a photograph of Tessa and her husband.”
I touched his wrist. “Let me see the others,” I told him.
He smiled, indulged. “Words most people never hear when threatened with an evening of family or vacation photographs.”
For the next half hour, slowly, quietly, enjoying the exercise himself, Nathan shared different snippets of the Fort Yukon of fifty years back. “Noah’s father,” he pointed.
“Looks like him.”
“Noah as a little boy.”
“Looks like him now—looks mischievous.”
“Too smart for his own britches.” But there was pride in his voice.
Self-consciously, he pointed to a snapshot of himself—a regal-looking young man at a salmon skein, brawny, thick-chested, a shock of long black hair. He joked, “That man reminds me of myself as a young man.”
A picture of Maria and Noah, both fifteen or sixteen—tall, striking, smiling at each other, a backdrop of the Episcopalian chapel.
Nathan sighed. “Happy days. Noah ready to go off to boarding school. Maria to Fairbanks to work in someone’s kitchen.” He tsked. “A life that went off the rails.”
“I’ve met Maria.”
“She avoids me, Edna, though I beg her to visit me here. She is my granddaughter.”
He thumbed through some pages. “Here, look. The visiting missionaries.”
A grainy snapshot of a small cluster of people congregated before the Episcopalian chapel. “Tessa,” he pointed.
Unrecognizable. Yes, slightly chubby, but the bright-eyed attractive young woman holding onto the arm of a smaller, wiry man bore little resemblance to the mammoth Tessa.
At the corner of the photograph a small child gazed at the camera, his arms circling a small ball. A head of curly hair, a frail face.
I nodded at Nathan. “Preston?”
“When he was innocent.” He squinted at the photograph. “He’s maybe two or three then. A toddler.”
I laughed. “When we were all innocent at that age.”
But Nathan’s face suddenly twisted, and his fingers twitched. “I’d forgotten…”
“What?” I peered at the crowd in the photograph.
His fingers touched a man’s head. “Ned Thomas, the Episcopalian missionary. His…his beautiful wife.”
For, indeed, the woman standing next to him was beautiful. Lithe, willowy, her fingers touching the large wooden cross she had hanging around her neck.
“What?” I repeated, impatient.
“I’d forgotten. Tessa was close to them.” He turned to look in my eyes. “The man shot to death by Jack Mabie. And got away with it because of Sam Pilot. An innocent man of God, slaughtered.”
I felt a chill go up my spine as I stared at the man who’d shortly be one of Jack’s victims. A pleasant face, long, almost bony, a strand of blondish hair drifting down over his forehead.
“I’d forgotten,” Nathan mumbled. “So sad to see this. A man taken away from his wife, his children.” He drew his face near. “This photo is—maybe a couple years before. Preston born in 1921. I remember that.”
“And then Tessa’s husband died.”
His eyes flashed.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m gossiping, Edna. Tessa, the missionary with the party gown in her closet, flirted with this Ned—much to the horror of his wife. For years. Rumors of an affair, nasty, talked of. A long-standing secret affair, supposedly.” He winced. “Horrible rumors that little Preston was Ned’s child.”
“Possible?”
“Who knows? Tessa retreated into her marriage. Her church. But the rumors persisted. Ned and Tessa. And Lionel in the dark. So devoted to his God that he had no eyes for the real world.” A smile. “Although he liked the Indian women.” He chuckled. “My, my, I am a worse gossip than Noah.”
“Then he died?”
“Rumors that he killed himself in the icy river. Someone whispered to him about Ned and Tessa. I never believed that.”
“But then she left Fairbanks—and Ned was murdered.”
“Yes,” he said, “two or three years later, maybe more. Tessa was in Fairbanks.”
“A new page of her life began there. She forgot about God.” I paused. “Sonia’s note, Nathan. Somehow she connected Tessa to Jack’s murder of Ned Thomas.”
“Both missionaries.”
“Preston’s real father?”
He hesitated. “A rumor.” He stared into my face. “And decades now in the past.” He sighed. “Tessa demanded no one tell Preston—even to this day.”
“But perhaps he found out. Maybe…”
“But Jack still lived.”
He frowned. “And someone still wanted him dead.”
“And Sonia was convinced…” Another pause. “But what?”
There was whooping and yelling outside. Noah had returned, but he was romping with some frisky children, including the twin boys, his cousins. They were rough-housing, tumbling into one another,
rolling onto the ice-packed ground, the air filled with their infectious laughter, and they were sputtering in Qwich’in. I stood by the window, watching, enjoying the scene. At one point Noah looked up, spotted me, and started to wave, just as one of the boys barreled into him, pulling him onto the ground. I heard his throaty, high-pitched laugh.
Hurriedly, I said to the grandfather, “Tessa’s husband died young—?”
He smiled. “Not murder, Edna Ferber. Lionel drowned in icy water.”
“You liked Preston?”
“I knew him as a little boy. As a man, I hear he presents problems.”
I smiled back at him. “So I gather.” I looked at him. “From this isolated village, you seemed to have learned a lot.”
“In the early years, Hank visited, talked a lot. Even Tessa sent letters. An interesting lady, that Tessa, one who has drifted from child of God to Satan’s daughter. She seems to have passed some of that legacy to Preston, the wastrel.”
I grinned. “I love that word. How did you hear that?”
He grinned. “Noah is a gossip, too.”
“Nathan, the roots—maybe here. Jack and Sam had murderous lives here. The three murders in Fairbanks. It’s just that I can’t find the connection. Sonia was on to something. Tessa is afraid of something.”
The old man spoke rapidly. “You’re making me question a lot of things, Edna.”
He stopped abruptly. Noah came tumbling in, snow-covered, black hair slick with ice pellets, cheeks reddened, eyes flashing.
“My cousins get all their manners from the huskies they sled with.”
His grandfather stood and moved to brew hot tea. “You overgrown boy,” he said to Noah, who beamed.
But, as he sipped his tea and watched his grandfather pack a bag of food for us—“Grandfather, you know we do have food in Fairbanks”—his mood shifted. He grew quiet, holding the cup with two hands, blowing on the hot liquid. Then it was time to say goodbye, and I saw him stiffen. Yes, back to Fairbanks and all that nonsense. Yet, I told myself, he probably underwent a similar metamorphosis whenever he left the idyllic village of his boyhood. A bone-marrow-deep melancholy.