The Singing of the Dead (6 page)

There was a knock at the door. It was Sam's best friend, Arthur Hudson. “I came as soon as I heard,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door.

Arthur had traveled the Chilkoot Trail with Sam in 1897. He'd staked the claim next to Sam's at Orogrande Creek, although he hadn't done as well as Sam. He'd been present at the Double Eagle Saloon on Christmas Eve two years ago; he might even have been one of the bidders. He had stood up for Sam at their wedding, and now he had traveled all the way from Orogrande to Rampart in the dead of an Arctic winter to see how she was.

She was exhausted from nursing Sam and the birth of the baby, and she gladly handed over the details of the business to Arthur. He moved Sam's body to the shed out back, as the ground was too frozen to bury him. He sent for canned milk from Circle City, and by the end of January the boy had begun to thrive. By the end of February Arthur had found a buyer, a trapper backed by the Hudson Bay Company. It wasn't much, he told her, but it would be enough to get her to Minneapolis, and the trapper wouldn't take possession until spring, when she and the baby would both be well enough to travel.

By the end of March, he was in her bed.

He'd wanted her; he'd never made any secret of it. And it was so very cold, alone in the bed she had shared with Sam. She couldn't keep herself warm, let alone the baby. Arthur built a cradle and placed it next to the fireplace, and devoted himself to her. He was very gentle and very determined.

She responded as best she could. She was grateful, and she wanted to show him that she was, but it was as if something inside her was frozen. It didn't help that the window of the tiny bedroom looked onto the back yard of the post and the shed where the body of her husband lay stiff and cold. Arthur understood, and made up curtains of grain sacks so she wouldn't have to see.

But Sam could see through the curtains. She could feel his eyes upon them as they came together beneath the bedclothes, straining for closeness, for climax, for physical relief, for cessation from worry, for ease of grief. Oh yes, he watched them in the cold and lonely reaches of the night.

Spring came, and warmer temperatures, and the ice in the river began to break with booming cracks that echoed up over the bank like thunder. Daylight lengthened and the temperature warmed, melting the high banks of snow next to the paths shoveled between the post and the outhouse and the wood pile. Tiny brown birds with golden crowns appeared and began to sing a three-note descant from the limbs of budding birch trees, and the light increased every day. She felt as if she were coming out of a long dark tunnel, and was dazed by this assault on her senses. One night she found true, unfeigned pleasure in Arthur's arms, and he smiled down at her as if he had known all along, and had only been waiting. The next day they buried Sam's body next to a hedge of wild rose bushes a half mile from the post.

One morning in late May when there was enough river to launch a boat, Arthur told her he was going to Dawson for supplies and the news. “I'll be back in a week, maybe two,” he said. He smoothed back one of her red-gold curls and added with a smile, “I'll bring back a pretty hat for your pretty hair.” She kissed him good-bye, and waved him off from the bank, baby on her hip, as he launched the skiff into the swift, silty waters of the Yukon. He rowed standing up, facing upriver, and just before he vanished around the first bank, he turned to wave one last time.

There were fewer people in Rampart now, as many had left to follow the gold to Nome and Fairbanks, and few of the ones who were left were speaking to her, so she was surprised when, ten days later, there was the sound of footsteps coming down the path to the front door. She had just risen to her feet, baby in her arms, when it opened without permission.

At first she didn't recognize him.

And then she did.

It was the Greek, the one who had bid in the auction at the Double Eagle.

Her first instinct was to run, but there was no place to go, and she was hampered by the baby. Desperate, she looked for a weapon, but Arthur had taken the pistol with him to Dawson.

The Greek watched her with those cold, acquisitive, and now possessive eyes, and laughed as he closed the door behind him.

W hy?” Johnny said. His tone indicated that no answer to his question would be acceptable.

Kate debated what to say, and fell back on the truth, or a piece of it. “We need the money.”

“For me?”

“Partly.”

“You don't need any money for me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

He stood in the middle of the floor of Kate's cabin, a one-room building twenty-five feet square with a loft, a wood stove for heating, an oil stove for cooking, an old-fashioned pump handle for water in the sink, a built-in couch covered in faded blue denim that ran around two walls, and shelf after shelf of books and cassette tapes. Kerosene lamps hung from all four corners. One sputtered. Kate took it down and made a business out of checking the fuel level, anything to keep from looking directly at the erect figure of resentment and rebellion that dominated the center of the room.

“She told me the last time I ran off that if I did it again, I could just keep on going and never come back.”

God damn Jane Morgan, Kate thought, and said out loud, “Parents lose their temper and say things they don't mean sometimes, just like everybody else. And she did come.”

“Yeah, well, she took her time. I been here a month. And don't tell me she didn't know where I am. If she had a brain in her head, she'd know where I was coming. I told her I never wanted to leave Alaska in the first place. I told her I hated Arizona. And Grandma hated having me.”

“Johnny—”

“She did,” he insisted, and then with a flash of perception older than his age he added, “I don't blame her. She's seventy-three and she weighs almost three hundred pounds. All she does is eat and watch soap operas. I'd be bound to make her get out of her Lay-Z-Boy once in a while. So I left. I told Mom I would. I told her that if I had to I'd hitchhike all the way back.”

And he had, and the thought still had the power to make Kate's blood run cold. It was over a thousand miles from the northern border of Washington State to Tok alone. She didn't even know how many it was from Arizona to the border. “You never did tell me how you talked the border guards into letting you into Canada,” she said. “Or back into Alaska at the other end.”

He dropped his eyes, blue eyes so like his father's. “I didn't ask permission,” he muttered, and Kate had visions of him wriggling through patches of dense undergrowth peopled by bears and wolves and moose.

“Anyway, Mom's dumb, but she's not so dumb that she wouldn't know where to start looking.”

“She's your mother, Johnny. You will speak of her with respect.”

He was fourteen years old. He'd lost a father he worshipped a year before, and had turned his back on a mother he barely tolerated when he'd left his new home without permission two months before, to show up on Kate's doorstep asking for—what exactly? she wondered now. A different mother? A home? Sanctuary?

“ I'm no mommy ,” she remembered telling Jack once, and she still wasn't. But she also remembered Jack saying to her, “Look out for Johnny for me” as he lay dying in her arms.

“I hate Outside, Kate,” Johnny said in a low voice. He raised defiant eyes. “And I hate Mom for taking me there when I didn't want to go. She knew I didn't want to; I told her. And she made me go anyway.”

She looked at him and she saw herself as a child, as aware, as determined, and younger than he was. When her parents had died, her grandmother had taken her to live in Niniltna. After one week of city life, Kate rose early one morning that December and walked the twenty-five miles from the village to the homestead, armed with the little .22 rifle her father had bought her and carrying half a loaf of Ekaterina's homemade bread. There ensued a battle of wills between grandmother and grandchild the echoes of which still reverberated around the Park, and which resulted in Kate moving in with a crusty old widower with four sons, who had the virtue of owning the homestead next to Kate's father's. Abel Int-Hout wasn't a tender or a loving man, but he was a decent and a capable one, and his, for lack of a better word, “stewardship” of Kate allowed her to spend much more time at home than she would have been able to living in town. It had also continued the lessons in self-sufficiency begun by her father when she had begun to walk.

Town in this case amounted to a couple of dozen buildings, a store, a school, an earth station, and a permanent population of four hundred three, which included the dogs. Home in this case meant the one-room cabin she and Johnny were standing in and a semicircle of outbuildings sitting on the bank of a creek that ran through the heart of the Park. Step out in any direction and you'd run into a grizzly before you ran into another human being. Kate liked it that way.

She looked at Jack's son, and said, “I don't want to go away, Johnny. I have to.” She shook her head when he opened his mouth to speak again. “If you want to stay here, we have to hire an attorney and work out some kind of custodial arrangement. That takes money. This job will take a month, at most two. No longer than the election.”

Two months in the life of a fourteen-year-old was an eternity. “You don't want me here at all,” he said.

“No, Johnny, I—”

“You don't care about me,” his tone rough. “You probably didn't care for him, either. You practically got him killed!”

His eyes were swimming. Kate took a deep breath and didn't make the mistake of offering an embrace that would undoubtedly be rejected out of hand and which might even spur flight. She had no wish to go chasing through the forest that started on her doorstep after a young man who was too upset to remember any of the survival skills she'd taught him over a series of summer weekends during the last three years.

It wasn't the first time he'd accused her of killing his father. It wouldn't be the last time she didn't deny it. Jack had been at George Perry's hunting lodge because she had been there, plain and simple. She didn't blame herself, exactly, at least not anymore, for his death, but she didn't, couldn't, wouldn't duck out of what she was responsible for, either. Jack had loved her, had followed her into the wilderness, and had not come out again.

“Look out for Johnny for me, okay?”

She waited until Jack's son had regained some of his composure, carefully not looking at him while he did so. The books on the shelves looked dusty. Usually she had them out so often they never sat in one place long enough to gather dust. “And then there's school,” she said. “You'll need money for college.”

His head came up and he said, voice steadier, “Dad had an education insurance policy. Not that it matters, because I'm not going to college anyway.”

“Really,” she said. “You're not going to college?”

“No. I hate school. Everybody there's a bunch of do-nothings and fuck-offs. They're not learning anything. They're just hot-rodding around, drinking, doing dope, chasing girls, and stealing radios out of cars.”

“I—what?”

“I'll keep going until I'm sixteen,” he said, jaw coming out. “Dad explained, the law says I have to go until then. But after that I don't have to, and I won't.”

“And you were planning on doing what, instead?”

“I don't know yet,” he said. “Fish, maybe. Commercially. Or guide. Or subsistence. Like you.”

Kate closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again. “You don't want to work that hard, Johnny.”

“Why not? You do.” He nodded at the cabin. “And you're doing fine.”

“I'm not getting rich at it.”

“Yeah, but you're not starving, either. Neither will I.”

She stared at him.

“So we don't need any money,” he said. “You don't have to go on this job, and I don't have to leave the homestead.”

“Yeah,” she said, “we do, I do, and you have to.”

“I won't.”

“You will,” she said through her teeth, “if I have to pick you up and carry you.”

“I'll run away,” he said. “I don't want to live in Niniltna.”

“You have to go to school; you just told me you knew that yourself.”

“I'll commute,” he said. “I can ride a bike in until it snows and then I can ride a snowmobile. You did.”

“You're not staying here by yourself,” she said distinctly.

“Why not?” he demanded, words straight and sure as an arrow. “You did.”

They glared at each other.

Standoff.

When no one answered the front door, Kate went around to the back, Johnny trailing reluctantly behind. She found Ethan seated on a kitchen chair balanced on its hind legs with its back against the corrugated plastic of the greenhouse wall, shooting slugs off the late crop of red cabbage with a BB gun. On the ground at his right was a twelve-pack of Corona, a lime, and a paring knife. On the ground at his left was a Rottweiler with a slobbery grin and a lordly sense of his own dignity. He rose to his feet and paced forward to touch noses with Mutt. Nobody wagged any tails but nobody growled, either. “Hey, Gort,” Kate said, and got a head shoved beneath her hand in reply.

Around the corner came Gort's twin sister. “Hey, Klaatu,” Kate said. Klaatu touched noses with Mutt, used the rest of her energy for a perfunctory tail wag, and flopped down in Gort's vacated shade with a voluptuous moan.

Pop! went the BB gun, and another shiny, slimy black slug fell from a leaf, which was mostly holes by then.

“Hey, Ethan,” Kate said.

“Kate,” he said without looking around. Pop! went the BB gun, thud went another slug, and in celebration Ethan drained the bottle in his left hand.

“This is Johnny Morgan,” Kate said. “Johnny, this is Ethan Int-Hout. Abel was his dad.”

Johnny looked Ethan over with no visible approval and didn't bother to say “Hi.” Ethan looked back and didn't bother to say “Hi” back.

Kate walked over to the twelve-pack and looked inside. There were ten bottles left.

Ethan did look at her then. Seated, his eyes were level with hers, a direct, piercing blue. His hawk-featured face was set, and his rare, warm smile was not around that morning. He hadn't bothered to shave, not for days, and on the olfactory evidence Kate was willing to bet that he hadn't bathed in longer. “Where's Margaret?” she said. She looked around, noticing for the first time how quiet it was in the Int-Hout homestead. Since Ethan had moved back the year before with his family, a jolly, zaftig, redheaded wife and a set of rambunctious and equally redheaded ten-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, she would bet it was never quiet.