My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (34 page)

And Mr. Capputo was going right along, making a production out of double-checking that he had the surveyor’s map, and a compass, and even a measuring tape.

From there, we drove down to the Tok River, and set out
in an open flat-bottomed boat that Mr. Capputo called a skiff. Huge pads of ice whisked by on the swiftly flowing river. The wind cut into our cheeks and eyes. I was glad we had on all of our warm clothes, plus fur hats that Mrs. Martin had insisted we wear.

“Don’t fall in,” Mr. Capputo said cheerfully. “You won’t last more than two minutes.”

Will laughed…then scoffed when I insisted on holding him close to me.

Finally, Mr. Capputo got us across the river to a rocky shore, hopping out in his thick leather boots and chaps to tether the boat to a huge spruce. Water splashed into the bottom of the boat and froze. Then Will and Trusty and I got out of the boat.

It took a few hours, but finally…finally…we were all standing by what Mr. Capputo proclaimed to be Will’s one square inch of Alaska. Will dropped to his knees and stared down at the tiny patch of frozen earth, covered in pine needles.

“This is it?” he asked—but not with even a hint of disappointment at that measly little dot of land, on which nothing grew, not even a whisker of grass.

“Yes, sir!” said Mr. Capputo heartily, as if it were truly possible to find the exact square inch.

It was close enough for Will. “It is. It’s…mine.” His voice quivered. Somehow, though, it sounded strong, shot through with conviction, awe, and wonder, as he claimed aloud his one square inch, seeing only it, blind to all the nearby square inches that were just as barren as his.

But Will, I knew, did not see hopelessness or barrenness.
He saw a little bit of land that was his, and he stared at it with such fierce intensity, like finding this one square inch, and claiming it for his own, was enough for him. Enough for a lifetime.

I blinked hard. Swore at myself—
I won’t cry.

Won’t think about how I taunted him about his desire to claim that one square inch.

How I crumpled his diorama.

I blinked again, looked away, but then felt Will’s intense blue eyes on me, pulling me to him as they always did. I saw the bright spots of fever in his face. I knew that the day’s trip had exhausted him, that he was burning up from the inside out. There would be no miracle. All the miracles the universe had for us had been spent on getting us here, to this one spot.

Will’s eyes grasped mine just as firmly as they’d grasped the land. “Is it mine just on the surface,” he asked, “or all the way down to the core?”

I managed to speak around the enormity of it all, to answer, “You own it, all the way down to the core.”

Just like, I thought, Will had a bit of me, all the way to my core, and always would.

He pulled off his glove, and I started to tell him, no, no, put it back on, but then he reached in his pocket and pulled out the little sandwich flag, the one I’d gotten so long ago, it seemed—an eon ago—from Jimmy.

“But—I thought—it was in the diorama—”

Will shook his head and grinned. “I took it out for good luck, right after we found out about Mama. Kept it in my pocket, like a rabbit’s foot. Same pocket where I have the carving of Trusty from Mr. Litchfield.”

Then he looked at Mr. Capputo, who seemed to understand perfectly. He opened his rucksack and pulled out an ice pick and mallet.

Then Will nodded.

Right in the middle of his square inch of land, Mr. Capputo drove a hole.

And in that hole, Will planted his little flag.

Claiming his land.

Claiming a miracle—his one square inch of Alaska.

October 26, 1967

W
aiting on the kitchenette table is a letter addressed to me, postmarked from Tok, Alaska. It bears a stamp commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the Alaska Purchase. I run my thumb over it, smiling at how Will would be able to tell me and anyone who would listen the details of that 1867 purchase. And then I swallow, blink hard. I would be glad, so glad, to listen.

In the bedroom of our tiny New York apartment, I hear Adam moving about, getting ready for dinner out with me and a few friends, some from his law practice, some from my office. I’m home late from work and need to hurry to get ready.

But I sit down and carefully open the letter. I know I’ll only think about it during dinner if I don’t read it. It’s another newsy missive from Josie Martin. All these years, she’s sent me updates, letting me know sad tidings (Mr. Capputo’s death a few years before, not long after Trusty died of old age), and, more often, happy ones, usually news about her and Ray’s oldest son, William—yes, named for Will—and
their three younger children, and about fun things like their big celebration when Alaska finally became a state, as Will always trusted it would, in 1959. This letter is about Josie’s new job as a teacher, about William’s big win in an ice-fishing contest.

I set aside the letter, go to our tiny refrigerator, and pull out a bottle of white wine. I pour two glasses, start to carry them back to the bedroom, but the beautiful design of that stamp—a totem etched on a brown background—catches my eye again. I sit back down at the table, admiring and studying that stamp.

I’m thirty-one, a ’58 graduate of Parsons School of Design, working for designer Mollie Parnis at Parnis-Livingston and making plans to launch my own line of purses. Adam is the love of my life. Eventually, I know, we’ll marry and make beautiful babies, but in the meantime, we’re content to be together, sharing our hopes and dreams, exploring passion without inhibition.

And yet, there’s one way in which I’ve not opened up to him. All I’ve told him about Will is that he was obsessed with Alaska. That he died when he was eleven, on April 3, 1954, four months before I left Groverton for good to attend Parsons School of Design. He knows my full life story since I arrived at Parsons, but nothing else from before. Adam is curious to know more, and I know I’m not being fair, holding back like this, especially when I know his childhood stories so well that I can laugh at the inside jokes he and his parents and siblings, whom I love, make about their history together. But Adam never asks, never presses, not even when these letters arrive, just leaves them on the table for
me, trusting that when I’m ready, I’ll tell him the full story. It’s one of the many things I love about him.

But I always wonder, where would I begin? With that fateful morning, when I made a small choice to take Will by Stedman’s Scrapyard just to get rid of Marvel Puffs, so he’d be one box top closer to his deed to one square inch of Alaska?

Or should I fast-forward to visiting that square inch, and what happened after? I replay those events for the first time, until now keeping them tucked at the back of my mind.

Will asked the man at the Tok deed office to officially mark the deed as going to me. After we were home, Mr. Capputo sent a photo of him and Trusty—Mr. Capputo proudly holding up a huge salmon by his skiff, Trusty happily at his side. When Will started truly getting ill, the leukemia rapidly taking more and more of his strength, he’d stare for hours at that photo of Trusty. When he died, I insisted that the photo be buried with him. But I kept the wood carving of Trusty.

Later that spring, I graduated. Grandma held a party at Dot’s Corner Café for me—after all, her granddaughter was very important! Going to a fancy school in New York City! And on a scholarship, at that! Now I think about the people who were at that party.

Mr. Leis—by then completely confused by his surroundings—and Mrs. Leis, doing her best to take care of him. Mr. Leis died a month later and, to everyone’s surprise because she seemed so healthy, Mrs. Leis followed about a half year after that. I wasn’t particularly surprised. Mrs. Leis never liked being anywhere without Mr. Leis.

Daddy was at that party, his eyes still sunken and haunted both by the news about what had happened, in the end, to Mama, and by the death of his son.

MayJune was there, of course. Still grieving Joey, but smiling and kind and quietly wise as always, and chatting with Miss Bettina—birds on a wire, just like I’d thought of them at Will’s birthday party.

Babs and Jimmy were at the party. Babs looked sad, her eyes almost as haunted as Daddy’s. She’d come back to school in February, after a long stay with her grandparents in Virginia to recover from the “pneumonia” she’d had treated in Cincinnati. Jimmy and I talked and laughed, friends now and comfortable knowing that’s all we’d ever be.

Mr. Cahill, of course, was not there, but somehow he’d heard of it. (I suspect MayJune and Miss Bettina had something to do with that.) He sent me another letter, congratulating me, finally giving me an address and phone number and telling me to look him up once I got to New York. I did, and even attended the opening of his show “Persimmon Girl,” secretly smiling at being the inspiration for the abstract prints that looked nothing like me or any other girl, or even persimmons, but that received rave reviews from critics. We’ve stayed good friends ever since.

I’ve been back to Groverton twice since I left—once about a year after my move to New York, for Daddy and Miss Bettina’s wedding. For the first time I could remember, Daddy finally looked happy. Miss Bettina—who has told me repeatedly to call her Bettina, but I can’t quite drop the Miss—beamed. Grandma, of course, looked put out by the whole affair, especially with MayJune as Miss Bettina’s matron of honor and me as maid of honor. (“Who has
both?” Grandma groused.) But none of us paid any attention to her grumbling.

I did not go home for Grandma’s funeral, a few years later. Daddy and Miss Bettina understood. But a few months ago I went home for MayJune’s funeral. She died in her sleep at age 102. I stayed with Daddy and Miss Bettina in the little house on Elmwood, and I was happy to see that Miss Bettina had completely redecorated and refurnished it to her own taste.

While I was back, I visited with Babs. She had attended Kenyon College for two years before marrying an older man, who moved his medical practice to Groverton just for her. She says she’s happy, with her lovely home and husband and three children, but I didn’t see the glow of joy about her that I saw in Josie Martin. We talked about Jimmy, always sharing news whenever one of us received it. He’s happily married, an attorney at a nonprofit focusing on workers’ rights issues in Washington, D.C.

At last, I pick up the glasses of wine, head back to my and Adam’s bedroom. Adam is in our tiny bathroom; I hear the sounds of shaving, him humming, and this makes me happy. I put the wineglasses on the bureau, slip out of my pumps, open the top bureau drawer to select a fresh blouse…and then something moves in me, a little voice saying,
Now…now is the time. You can be late for dinner…but now is the time
.

I close that drawer, kneel, open the bottom drawer—still where I keep my lingerie, and under that, the items I most wish to protect. My fingers move aside bras and panties and slips and the little wood carving of Trusty and a sachet, this one Chanel No. 5, a gift from Adam.

My hand shakes, just a little, as I pull out the framed deed. I sit on the edge of my and Adam’s bed and study the signatures, barely legible, of Austin Perkins, the man at the deed office who officially marked the deed to transfer Will’s land to me, and of Ray Martin, our witness, and our own signatures.

And for a second I’m back at that place where Will and I knelt, suddenly clasping each other and staring down at a frozen square inch of land in the Alaskan wild, knowing we’ve done the impossible by making it to this spot, and that our little toothpick flag won’t last more than a few days, or maybe hours, to mark our having been there, that it will soon be swept away by ice and snow and wind, but then—in the way that scenes change and fuse and multiply and fade and merge in dreams and memories—I also see us looking up, as if someone has gently tucked a loving hand under our chins and tilted our faces, so we can watch the sky fill with the northern lights, a grand celestial dance of great swaths of tangerine and azure and teal, veils between our momentarily earthbound selves and all that is possible and infinite, rippling and swaying and lifting so that we can feel, just for a second, the enormity of all that lies beyond, waiting for each of us.

“Donna?”

I look up at Adam coming out of the bathroom, bare chested, and my heart surges with love and desire for this man with whom I know I’ll spend the rest of my life. He quietly sits down next to me, waiting. Finally, I move so he can better see the frame I’m holding, and at last, I begin.

“This,” I say, “is my deed. To my one square inch of Alaska.”

S
o many individuals and organizations provided support—practical and emotional—that sustained me on the journey of writing this novel.

First, thank you to my wonderful husband, David, and our beautiful daughters, Katherine and Gwen, for bestowing upon me endless patience when I asked, yet again, “Are you sure I can do this?” by answering without hesitation, “Of course!” I can’t begin to describe how much all those long discussions about the novel and your comments on early pages—especially in the early stages before I dared share this work with anyone else—meant to me. Endless love and thanks to all three of you.

Thank you to a lovely book club, the Goddesses, particularly “Supreme Head Goddess” Barbara Heckart, Lee Huntington, Judy DaPolito, and Mary Ann Schenk. These Goddesses might be surprised to learn that the very first flicker of the idea for this book was lit during a book club discussion at Mary Ann’s lovely home when they began talking about “square inch deeds in cereal boxes in the 1950s” for some delightful reason (although it had nothing to do with the book we were discussing.) But perhaps, in
their infinite wisdom, these Goddesses wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Thank you to the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District for a 2011 Literary Artist Fellowship and to the Ohio Arts Council for a 2012 Individual Excellence Award. Both awards were based, in part, on early chapters of this novel, and both awards enabled me to focus on my work as a novelist. I’m honored to be a recipient of both awards and proud to live in a region and state that supports and celebrates the arts, and understands that the arts ennoble and encourage its citizenry.