My Name Is Not Easy (22 page)

Authors: Debby Dahl Edwardson

With Junior’s tapes you can almost see them dancing Eskimo dances. His tapes tell about what the leaders there are doing, too, like how they stopped the government from trying to blow up atomic bombs by Point Hope. One of Junior’s uncles wrote a long letter to the newspaper about it, and Junior is proud. We’re proud, too.

We listen with the machine in the library and afterward Junior fi lls those tapes back up again with his own words—

stories about Sacred Heart.
Our stories.
Junior tells how the dorms look and what kind of food the cafeteria has. He tells them things like how the river is frozen here and how we just learned to skate last week. We skated mostly on our butts, all right, which is exactly how Junior tells it.

Stories can make you laugh so hard it hurts sometimes and make you remember the good things so much it makes your throat get tight.

Today is going to be a good day and a good story for Junior to tell—the story about our fi rst time hunting at Sacred Heart
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B U R N T O F F E R I N G S / L u k e

School. And it starts right here in this shower room, where me and Bunna are shivering because even though we aren’t dirty, they make us take showers all the darn time, which is dumb because everyone knows that when you wash every speck of dirt off your body, it makes you get cold easier, especially now, with winter coming—and when you get cold, you get sick.

You can’t be a good hunter if you’re cold and sick all the time, and you can’t catch animals when you smell like soap, either.

But the moose we’re going after today already got caught—

caught by a truck. And now it’s lying dead on the side of the Sacred Heart road, and Father Mullen says I’m the hunter, so I gotta show them how to skin it. Truth is, I never even seen a moose before.

I step out of the shower the same time as Bunna, and the cold air hits us like ice water. We almost knock each other over grabbing at our towels. Bunna can’t hardly stop shivering.

“Alapaa!”

He says it without thinking, then gets real scared, looking around quick like he expects something bad to happen. Like maybe Father Mullen’s gonna step out from one of the stalls with his ruler and slap our butts. Tell us how we’ll never get to Heaven because we aren’t good Catholics.

All of a sudden I’m thinking about our little brother Isaac again, and my breathing gets trapped inside my chest.

“He’s gone to a good Catholic home,”
Sister Sarah said.

ese are the only words she said that time, and they were not good words. Not the words that Mom wanted to hear, either.

Mom cried when she found out about Isaac, and when Jack
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

tried to hold her, she hit him, and the next thing we knew, Jack was gone.

I told Mom I’d fi nd Isaac, but I don’t know how.

“It’s okay, Luke, it’s okay,” Sister Mary Kate said. “You have the faith of Abraham, remember that.”

But it’s not okay and I don’t want Abraham’s faith. I want my brother. Abraham’s the one who tied up his own son and got ready to give him to God as a burnt off ering, but then God gave him an old sheep to burn instead. Abraham’s son was named Isaac, too, just like our brother. Only God never stopped them from taking
our
Isaac away the way he stopped Abraham from burning
his
Isaac. Which is why I got no use for God. I fi gure if he’s gonna do stuff like that for one Isaac and not for another, then he isn’t fair. And if he’s going to do it to a little kid like our Isaac, then God is just plain mean, like Father Mullen, because Isaac been waiting his whole life to get big enough to learn how to hunt, and now he’s gone, so he’ll never learn anything. Not even how to skin a dumb old moose. Which me and Bunna are supposed to know how to do.

Bunna’s thinking about it, too. Standing there with his teeth chattering, he says, “How we gonna skin a moose? We never even seen one before.”

“Never mind,” I say.

“Never mind” is what Mom always says when she doesn’t want to think too hard about something.

Bunna looks at me. “But how we gonna fi gure it out?” he says. He says it like he knows I have the answer.

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B U R N T O F F E R I N G S / L u k e

I don’t, but I don’t say this to Bunna. Bunna expects me to just take care of it somehow, like I’m supposed to take care of everything, which makes me think about Isaac, again, his face pressed against the back window of the car, disappearing into the trees that time, and about me and Bunna running away through those same trees and getting caught, and Father saying it’s our job to go out there and hunt for them. Somehow I’m always supposed to take care of it, but how?

And all of a sudden, I’m mad. Mad enough to hit somebody. Hit Father Mullen, maybe. Hard.

Instead, I box at Bunna—Bunna, wrapped in his towel, his hair standing up every which way. Bunna ducks and laughs and tries to box back.

You can’t get mad when you box. Th

at’s what Father Mul-

len says. When you box, you have to put all your feelings away, because if you let your feelings get in the way, you might make mistakes.

Father Mullen never makes mistakes.

Father is perfect when he boxes, like a dancer moving just right to the beat of the drum. Like the dancers I can see when Junior plays his tapes, dancers moving to the sound of the drums until the beat of the drum and the movement of their bodies turns into one thing, one perfect thing. I never fi gured out a word for that thing, but I see it in the way Father Mullen moves when he shows us how to box, boxing all by himself against a boxer nobody else can see. After a while that boxer gets so real, you could almost see the outline of his shadow, right there next to Father, throwing feints. Trying to fool him.

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