The Raven's Gift (15 page)

“No one expects high school kids to know what their future holds,” Anna said.

“Yeah, but not just that. The question really took them back. I mean—I tried to reword the question. You know, what will they being doing in ten years, and that drew even less of a response. Michael, that tall, skinny, talkative kid? He said they don’t think about the future like that. It’s against their culture, he said.”

“To talk about the future?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I misunderstood him, or they just didn’t quite get my question. This chili is as ready as anything from a can will be.”

He began filling two blue plastic cereal bowls with the meatless chili. She took her bowl, sat down, and pushed her spoon around the bowl.

“You’ll do fine, hon,” he said. “Just give them some time. I would guess that with those young ones, they’ll be a bit shy at first and then you’ll have to beat them off you with a stick.”

“Yeah, well, if tomorrow doesn’t go any better, I might get a stick, and then you might be teaching here alone.” She pushed her bowl away and he pushed it back to her.

“Eat. You’ll need your strength to swing the stick tomorrow.”

THE GIRL AND JOHN awoke to a rare clear, crisp day that reflected against the snow a blinding white and forced him to squint until his forehead burned like an ice cream headache. A strong wind pushed at their backs, and he was happy to not have to worry about frostbite on their faces. Travelling went smoothly enough that his mind wandered back to thoughts of Anna and their first night together. He forgot the blind girl walking beside him, and the toboggan with their gear, a few cans of food, and her grass bundle. For those few moments he was in an anchored rowboat, rocking with the waves, in the middle of a lake, naked from the waist down, with Anna on
top of him. Above them, the stars of a Wyoming night sky pulsed.

The memory slipped away when the girl asked if they could stop for water, but that night, when the two of them made camp beneath the stars, exhausted, the memory came back, and he escaped to the boat again. She rocked with the waves, dropping down onto him, letting her long brown hair fall over him, covering her eyes, and when she lifted her lips to him, her withered face twisted with pain, and she coughed and lurched toward him.

“John? John? You’re nightmaring again,” the girl said, gripping his shoulders.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Anna … That was your wife?”

He nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see his head move. The girl smiled and returned to her work with the grass.

“It’s okay. You must have been dreaming of her,” she said, and put the end of one grass stalk into her mouth.

He tried to close his eyes, but as soon as he did, Anna’s face would reappear, the horrible image hanging in the sky above him. He tried to see through it, to the stars, but it wouldn’t go away.

“What did she look like?” the girl asked.

He couldn’t answer her. She waited for a while, and then asked another question. He knew she changed the subject for him.

“It’s clear tonight. Can you see the northern lights? We say those are spirits playing in the sky. I heard elders say they will even come get you if you whistle at them. So don’t whistle. Are they there?”

He stared out at the black above them, speckled with faint stars, but no wisps of aurora.

“Nope. Just the stars.”

“Are there any satellites? I remember seeing those blinking lights travelling across the sky. My brothers said that’s where we got our TV shows. I wonder if we still had electricity if we could get TV still. You think there’s still TV anywhere?”

He scanned the sky. He hadn’t thought about satellites. Were they still transmitting? Could they tell him anything he didn’t already know? If he spotted one, what did that mean?

He closed his eyes. She was gone.

“I don’t see any,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

   15   

T
he girl’s body trembled. She had backed herself up against the side of the gym door, away from the two of them. She held her eyes shut tight, her face shielded from his view, her body curled as if trying to shrink out of sight.

“I know her,” the man with the burns on his neck said. “I can’t believe the little blind one is still alive.”

“Shut up,” John said to the man, and then turned to the girl. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Her nostrils flared and her white eyes narrowed, as if she could see the man standing in front of her.

“Little Bug,” the man said. “She’s one of my kid sister’s girls. Lying little bitch made some bullshit story up and got me kicked out of our village.”

John pointed the gun at him. He eased him back a few steps against the other side of the wall.

“That’s enough,” John said, pressing the pistol into the man’s chest.

“She’s my relative. Take the food and go. I’ll take care of her. We’re family.”

“I don’t think so. Step back.”

John knelt down beside her. Tears wet the sides of her cheeks, and the muscles in her jaw trembled. “Is he who he says?” he asked.

She nodded.

“He’s your uncle?”

She nodded again.

One of her hands had found the ice pick, which he’d left against the door frame. She scraped with her thumbnail at the cold steel.

“What do you want me to do?”

She took a deep breath, then let it out in stuttered white bursts that steamed from her nostrils. She took another and it came out smoother.

“John,” she whispered. He leaned in close to her. “Let me talk to him.”

He stood up and motioned to the man with the barrel of the pistol. “She wants to say something to you.” He crossed the hallway as the man approached the girl. John watched, but he was also thinking about the food stacked in front of him. His stomach burned. Nothing sounded as good as a big spoonful of peanut butter. Chicken sounded better, but he knew it would be a while before he could dig into a chicken leg without getting sick.

“Little Bug, I never thought I’d see you again,” the man said, and as he said this she stood, swinging the ice pick like a baseball bat. The side of the heavy steel bar smashed against the side of the man’s head, sending him to the floor. Before either of them could react, she jumped on top of him, thrusting the bar sideways against his throat, pinning him. He gasped for air and tried to push her off. His starved muscles could do little against her rage.

John started to step in, but once he saw the girl had the upper hand he stood by with the pistol pointed at the floor, his finger beside the trigger.

The girl’s breath came from her mouth in frosty bursts. The man quit struggling.

“You going to kill me?” he gasped. “You blind little bitch? Try check if you can.”

“Why would God let someone like you live and so many suffer? Why?” she cried.

She pressed the bar harder against his throat. Blood seeped through the black hair at his temple.

“Why did all those good people in there have to die and you live?”

The man looked up at John. “Please,” he gasped, “she’s crazy.”

“I wish that water had burned your eyes … Tell him how you got your burns.”

“Please,” he begged again, “I can’t breathe.”

“Tell him what you did to me!” She lifted one knee and pressed her kneecap against the bar. The man started to choke and convulse.

A DOZEN STUDENTS all at different ability levels filled the desks of his classroom. This was his challenge. It didn’t take either of them long to realize that the village kids had already known more teachers in their life than most graduate students. Just a quick glance at the file cabinets with different folders from different years, he could see the turnover in teachers from year to year was incredible. There had been one constant in their academic lives—inconstancy.

For all he knew, he and Anna might not be there the next year either, so he decided to quietly stuff the district curriculum guidelines in his desk and find a way to show his students how to teach themselves.

On the day he started the new approach, he sat for a while at his desk, with a smile, just looking them over. They would peer up at him and then glance away, shyly. They were a patient group. Five boys and seven girls. They sat at their desks, some of them with light jackets on, all of them wearing T-shirts, jeans, and Nike or Adidas basketball shoes or knee-high black rubber boots.

Alex, the kid with the Bulls cap, John pegged as his biggest challenge in maintaining any sort of respect with his students, tried to hide the pinch of snuff in his lip as he asked, “Why you always smiling at us, John?”

He wouldn’t tell Alex to spit out the snuff and go to the principal’s office. He knew there were more important battles to win.

“Why am I smiling?” He stood up and walked to the whiteboard.
“You guys have told me that you don’t think any of what you have learned in school is important, that it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Right?”

“Well it don’t,” Alex chuckled. “You see any Eskimos using geometry shooting ducks?”

The class laughed.

“Well, what about history? Why might history be important to you?” John asked.

Sharon, a skinny girl with glasses and hair always tightly braided, raised her hand. He called on her, knowing she would have a well thought out answer. From day one she had established herself as the brain of the class.

“If we can learn from our history, we can make better decisions and we can understand the world better,” she said, covering her mouth shyly when she finished.

“Right, Sharon. Great start,” he said. “But why might history be important to you, as Yup’ik students—Yup’ik people?”

“It’s not,” Alex said. “They want us to learn names and dates of old white and black people who are dead. I’ve got better things to do, man.”

“Exactly. Exactly, Alex. Yes! What if I tell you that none of what you’ve learned so far really matters?”

He looked at each of them. A few of them, including Sharon, seemed a bit befuddled. Alex sat back, pleased with himself. For the first time, John thought he might have a shot at reaching him, maybe all of them.

“Let’s start with the first dude you learned about in history. Who was it? One hint. He sailed the ocean blue …”

Jack, a quiet, sullen death metal fan, flipped his long hair and finished the rhyme. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

The rest of the class looked at Jack, surprised.

“It’s like a song lyric, dog. I don’t forget lyrics. Ever.”

“Yes. Columbus. Nice work, Jack.”

Alex sighed. “Oh man, Columbus sucks. He found the Lower Forty-eight, big deal.”

“Right again, Alex. But you’re not right about what he found. You’re right that Columbus sucked. He—well, let’s just say he wasn’t the kindest, most friendly explorer. Maybe we could say that what he was a part of is more horrible than you could ever even imagine. What if I told you that this first hero you learned about in history wasn’t who you have been taught he was at all? What if I told you that most of what you have learned and will be expected to learn”—he paused and held up their history book—“was a bunch of BS?”

“That would be pretty cool,” Alex said. “It would be like
The Matrix
. A conspiracy, man, the whole world school teaches us about is one big fat lie.”

IT TOOK THE GIRL AND JOHN four days of steady travel to reach the first village. He figured they made about three miles a day, maybe less. He half expected to find someone alive, someone who could take care of her or maybe tell them not to bother going upriver. Instead, little remained but the charred skeletons of the dead and their houses. He sat at the river’s edge watching the village for an hour before he decided it was safe enough for them to approach.

No smoke and no houses that looked livable told him all he needed to know. There probably wasn’t much of a reason to even waste the energy and walk through what remained, but if they could scrounge up a few pieces of wood they might be able to put together a fire for the night.

“Why is this village completely burned and ours wasn’t?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know,” he said as he took one last long look at the village, checking for any signs of movement.