The Raven's Gift (17 page)

“I don’t know what to tell you. We’re stuck here. At least until Christmas break,” she said.

“You mean Slaviq? One day at Christmas is hardly a break.”

“Yeah, but airfare will be cheaper in January anyway—no one else will be celebrating Russian Orthodox Christmas. Two weeks is two weeks. We could go to Hawaii or something. Maybe you’re getting cabin fever.”

“No shit.”

“Maybe we should get one of those lights for when winter hits. You know, the kind they use for depression, for seasonal affective disorder,” she said.

“I don’t have depression. I just need to go somewhere other than this. You can’t even go for a walk here, for Christ sakes!”

His boot hit a patch of frost, and his foot slipped out from under him. He pitched off the edge of the boardwalk, his legs landing in the half-frozen muck as his hip slammed against the edge of the planks.

“Damn!”

He sat up and brushed off his pants.

“Ouch, that looked like it hurt,” she said, trying not to laugh.

“Go ahead, it’s funny. Laugh it up. Winter hasn’t even hit and I’m already going nuts here and you’re not taking me seriously. I moved to Alaska to be outside and get into the wilderness. We’re surrounded by water and trapped here. Trapped. So yeah, laugh at this too. Laugh at it all.”

He started to get up and she pushed him back down with a gentle shove. “Lighten up, tough guy,” she said. “I’ll find you a friend who can take you out for a boat ride or something.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your little pants-pissing snotty-nosed students,” he said. “And I don’t need your help finding friends.”

She extended a hand to help him up. When he didn’t take it, she pushed him again, only this time a little harder.

“I didn’t mean it that way, John. Get over yourself! You think I’m not tired of having nowhere other than my classroom to escape to? Listening to you sigh and mope and burp and fart your way around our little house?”

“Are you done insulting me?”

“No. I’m just getting started, mister.”

He scrambled to his feet and marched, more carefully this time, toward the school, leaving her behind, for the first time ever.

NOT LONG AFTER SUNSET, the girl asked what Anna looked like, and he hadn’t been able to tell her. Not because he wouldn’t, but because he couldn’t. All he could see or remember was the sickness that had consumed her beauty.

“Did she have dark hair or light hair?”

He packed the snow for their bed by stomping around on the tarp and then kneeling in the empty sled. He pushed the snow on the edges
to form a small wall, in case the wind picked up, and then started to

unload the sleeping bags from the pack.

“Did she have blue eyes?”

“Will you help me here? We need to get camp set up before it’s too dark.”

“It’s always dark for me, John. I’m not trying to make you mad.”

“It’s just that I’m tired. I could use some help,” he said.

She knelt down and felt for the backpack. She pulled the sleeping bag out and stretched it over the tarp. After the last blizzard he’d learned to fold the tarp with half of it beneath them and the other half wrapped around them to shield them from the unremitting winds. She took her grass bundle and placed it within arm’s reach.

He waited until she crawled into her bag before scanning the horizon one last time. They were easy targets out in the open and with a tarp covering them, constantly rustling; they would never hear an enemy’s boots crunching in the snow.

He secured the covering and removed his boots. He held his hands on his toes and tried to warm them. The girl was already feeling the strands of grass, the way she always did to find her starting point. He watched her until her fingers stopped and she sat up on her elbow with her body turned toward him.

“Some of my memories of what people look like are gone,” she said. “Now, for most of them, I only remember what they sounded like, or how they smelled. I hope your memories of her aren’t bad ones.”

“They aren’t,” he said, stretching out on his back and pulling the top of the sleeping bag up over his shoulders.

He didn’t want to remember Anna like that. So pale, so wasted, so far beyond the vibrant, healthy woman she had been. Her cheeks sunken, the skin stretched across her cheekbones, her lips dried, cracked, bleeding. Her eyes vacant, drying, helpless, with the life all but gone.

Even when he tried to imagine her before the sickness, he would see that face. The sick face. The face that begged for help, for him to
do something. Those eyes that might have even questioned why it wasn’t him. Why he wasn’t sick, too. Why he couldn’t do anything to help her.

The image of those final days stained his most cherished memories of her. She didn’t wear a veil at their wedding. That was too old-fashioned for her, but if she had, in his dreams he would have lifted the thin white fabric to find the ghost who had been his wife.

“Describe her to me,” the girl said as she began weaving and braiding her strands of grass.

She was beautiful, he wanted to say.

   17   

“I
want to go back in the gym,” the girl whispered after the old woman appeared to be sleeping.

“We have as much food as we can carry,” he said.

She propped herself up on her elbow, facing him. “No. I want to see if they are there.”

“Who?”

“My cousins.”

“They are there. Everyone was in there. Now get some rest.” He rolled over on his back, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. In the darkness of his closed lids he saw the beam from the flashlight moving over the dead in the gymnasium and what he didn’t see made him sit up with a lurch. On his hands and knees, he clawed his way to the door and heaved. The chewed chicken pieces and broth splattered against the plywood floor of the entry. His dinner wasted. He stayed on his knees, gasping at the cold air rushing past him into the house.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, standing over him. She ran a hand over the top of his matted hair. “What is it?” she asked.

“I told you stealing that food make you sick,” the old woman said from across the room. “The spirits gonna haunt you until you take it back.”

“It’s not the food,” he gasped as he fought another heave.

He could see the notebook sitting on the desk in the office. The three words,
For the children
, scrawled in black ink. “The kids,” he said
to the girl. “You were right. I think I saw only one boy, maybe a couple of others. The rest were adults.”

“Shoulda been mostly kids in there,” the old woman said, sitting up. “You sure you seen only a few little ones?”

John crawled back to his bag. He was shivering and instantly hungry again. The bile burned at his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was raspy.

“Mostly adults.”

“Are the kids anywhere else in the school?” the girl asked.

“No,” John said.

“Maybe they still alive somewhere,” the old woman said, adding, “Even if they run away and become
qimakalleq
, you two gotta go find them.”

HIS STUDENTS WERE on to Columbus and they weren’t happy. He’d pulled an old Howard Zinn essay from a website, one that used excerpts from Columbus’s own journals, and had them read it. The assignment was to read the essay and then write Columbus a letter expressing their feelings. They read the essay together, and when they reached the end, he had them each turn their laptops on and quickly write the letter.

“Five minutes, as fast as you can. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling or anything. Just get your gut reaction down. Give America’s dead old hero a piece of your mind.”

He took a sip of lukewarm coffee from his mug and watched them hunch over their keyboards. Even Alex, who had started the morning with attitude and a touch of anger he hadn’t seen before, was hunting for letters on his keyboard with two middle fingers extended as if he was giving the bird to the world.

“Time’s up,” he said. “Now quickly scan through what you wrote and pick a sentence or two you wouldn’t mind sharing with us. Someone want to start us off? Sharon? Thanks for volunteering.”

Sharon held her long braid of black hair against her cheek and cleared her throat. “‘What kind of hero makes mothers so scared they kill their babies to protect them from people like you?’”

“Ouch. Yes. Columbus will have trouble answering that one. Who else? Juliana?”

He was surprised to see the girl volunteer. She was a junior, cute, and painfully shy. She had said less than a hundred words to him since school started, and she hadn’t turned in a single assignment.

She held her hands over her mouth, looked down at her computer screen, and after what felt like several minutes of silence read in a hushed voice, “‘Dear Columbus, in all my years of school I remember only one name in history. That name belonged to you. I thought you were a brave hero, but the first words you wrote in your journal about those Native peoples? You thought they would make good slaves! Is this why you have your own holiday? Does our country celebrate you because you taught
kass’aqs
how to treat us Natives? Are you a hero in history because you showed the world we didn’t matter? The Native people should have taken their children and run when they saw you coming.’”

The girl stopped reading and held her hands over her mouth, tight, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just read. Alex began clapping his hands and the other students followed his lead.

“That’s good stuff,” Alex said. “Mine sounds stupid compared to that.”

“Beautifully done, Juliana. Thanks. Anyone else?”

Jack raised his hand. “I don’t want to read, but what Ju-Ju wrote made a question in my mind.”

“What’s that?”

“If our history books lie about Columbus and kids are taught he’s so great and did all these great things, what else do we need to learn about? What about here? What kind of stuff happened here when outsiders came to the Delta? I don’t even know, man.”

The class responded to Jack’s comments with nods and a general raising of their eyebrows.

He took another long sip of the lukewarm coffee, just to let the question linger for a moment. He’d hoped the Zinn piece would stir their minds, but he didn’t expect them to turn the question upon their own history of contact.

“Well, what do you know?” he asked them. “What do you know about your own history?”

They stared back at him for only a second or two and then began to lower their eyes.

“Do you mean our culture?” Sharon asked.

“Yes and no. I mean, what have you guys learned about your own history? How long have your people been here on the tundra? What was life like before gus-sucks and when they arrived? What happened when they came, or since then?”

They shrugged.

“Why you care about this stuff?” Jack asked. “This just a trick to get us to like school?”

“Good question, Jack. That’s critical thinking, my man. Question everything. Even question why someone like me is trying to teach you something. The truth? Well, I want to learn about this stuff too,” John said.

“Why do you care?” Alex asked.

“I guess because my grandmother was Alaska Native,” John said.

“Cool,” Sharon said, and her classmates nodded approval. “Was she Yup’ik?”

John shrugged. “I don’t know. My grandfather never told me,” he said. “Pretty sad, eh?”

Alex removed his baseball cap and set it on the edge of his desk. “I guess no one ever taught us that stuff about our ancestors neither, John,” Alex said. “That’s what’s pretty sad. It’s like they don’t want us to know the history of our own people.”

JOHN AND THE GIRL awoke to a light rain. The temperature felt as though it had risen twenty degrees overnight. The sky had lightened, but he worried the rain would continue and the ice would weaken and they would be unable to travel any farther.

He started a small fire with some driftwood and stretched his back. The warm air felt good, but odd, almost springlike. The air didn’t sting at his nose and his bare hands weren’t aching from constantly being cold.

The girl pulled back her sleeping bag and let a few drops of rain drip into her mouth from a hole in the tarp.

“A warm-up,” she said. “Chinook. That’s an Indian word, I think. I don’t know our word for it. I don’t know if we have a word for this kind of warm in winter.”