And She Was (12 page)

“Made it,” Bellie said. Wind battered the truck, lifting it in gusts and rattling the doors and fenders. Bellie reached for the mirror, which had remained intact on the floorboards. She killed the engine and began laying out lines. A sharp trickle of coke stung my throat as I took
in the view. The mountains looked like the soft bodies of women lying side by side. But gentle curves had been sliced away at the sea, the rock exposed like grayed bones. Sliced bodies surrounded by a voracious ocean.

A low hexagonal concrete structure bumped out of the bare rock at the top of the hill, close to the edge of the cliff. Its roof had accumulated enough dirt to support a tuff of lichen-moss hair.

“It’s a bunker,” Bellie said, pointing with her pink straw. “Come on.”

I could hardly shut the truck door against the wind and had to slam it with my body. We walked to the bunker across a carpet of black and silver lichen and crawled through the low entry. The floor was gravel. Inside the wind whistled through three slits that opened out on the bay. They were just big enough for a spotting scope and a pair of eyes. I ran my fingers along the lower frame and felt the grooves worn by countless soldiers as they slid their scopes in and out of the opening. I wondered who had been up here when the bombs fell and what he had done. The Zeros had probably been too quick for him to call out coordinates to the guys manning the big guns. Did he try anyway, needing to do something? Had he been paralyzed by fear, by indecision, and done nothing? Did he watch while others died?

I scooted to the side of the lookout to get out of the wind and lit a cigarette. Bellie bummed one. While she often had decent coke, she rarely had cigarettes. The smoke rushed out the door on a path of wind that shot straight from the gunnery slots to the entry.

“My mother was here for part of the war,” Bellie said. “They moved her and everyone else to a camp in southeast after the bombing. She didn’t come back for years. Said the soldiers had trashed everything. I wasn’t even born here.”

We talked for maybe another half hour, about her family, about men, about the island. As the coke wore off, Bellie became quieter. I crawled to the spotting slits and stared out through the wind. When I turned around, Bellie was crying. No shoulder shakes or sounds. Just her small palms covering a wet face.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head.

I crawled across the gravel on my knees. “Bellie,” I said, lifting one of her hands from her forehead. The brilliant birthmark, smeared
with tears, seemed to shimmer in the dim wetness. It wasn’t like me to try this hard, but something was shifting in me, a need was growing, nurtured by these unpredictable surroundings and the way they kept me off balance. And frankly, I felt sorry for her. After reading what those women suffered at the beginning, when the Russians came, I had a general sympathy-pity thing going for all the Aleut women. Especially Bellie, with her pudgy middle and her ducky kitchen and unicorn mirrors. I knew just enough to see them all as victims, even 250 years removed.

“Tell me,” I said.

She looked at me then, dropping one hand and pressing the other over the mark. Her eyes drifted past me out the gun sights and across the waves. “I didn’t know,” she said less to me than to herself.

“Didn’t know what?”

She was silent, but her fingers twitched, rhythmically pressing and smoothing the white mark of her forehead.

Sometimes when a friend cries, then refuses to tell you why, it’s because she wants you to work at it a bit. She wants to talk, but wants to pretend she doesn’t. I didn’t get that from Bellie. I let it go.

A few minutes later, her eyes were dry. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll walk down to the middens.”

I crawled after her. We started down a zigzagged trail that leaned inside lichen-encrusted outcroppings and patches of dark mossberries down to a narrow valley, emptying to the sea. We walked carefully and silently for twenty minutes. At the base I could see a mound of gravel and sand. Bellie jumped the last three feet of the trail and landed squarely on the sand. I jumped after her.

“We’re really not supposed to dig around here. It’s an archaeological site. Once in a while a couple of guys from some university come and poke around.” She lifted a silver chain from her shirt and held it up to me. At the end were three small beads. “I found these here. They’re bone beads.”

She sat down cross-legged and began running ringed fingers through the sand. I sat down nearby, pulled the Baggie tip from last night out of my jacket, and loaded my stubby pipe. We passed it back and forth for a couple minutes. It was good stuff. When I felt the change, I knew this was perfect.

I’ve paid attention to what drugs are good for what activities. Mushrooms are great for watching really odd movies and northern lights. Opium is just right on a summer night at the top of a mountain overlooking the lights of a city. Coke for parties and late-night conversations. And let me tell you, pot is perfect for sitting on a wind-sheltered sand midden thousands of years old and running your fingers lightly under the surface, feeling. The grains flowed over the thinly covered bones of my hands in a sensual tickle. Rivulets of sand ran off the sides of my fingers, scattering veils of dust as they fell. I listened to the waves breaking on rocks at the end of the valley. My hands knew more than me. They slithered through the sand; my body scooted to follow. Bellie and I grew farther apart then back together as we chased our hands through the sand. I found an arrowhead, broken or never finished at the tip. Then my fingers pinched around something tiny and hard. I lifted it out of the sand and held it up. A tiny white bead, its center unevenly carved.

“It’s a calcite bead,” Bellie said, taking it in her hand. “A gift from the sea. They aren’t that common.” She stroked it smooth of sand. “It’s a woman’s bead.”

I watched her fingers clamp over it and her eyes shut.

“Well?” I said. “Are you going to give it back?”

She held her hand over mine. “Thanks for what you did for Mary,” she said and let the bead drop in my palm.

“No problem.” I shoved the bead deep into my jeans pocket and lay down on the sand while Bellie continued to search. I couldn’t imagine finding anything better.

FEBRUARY 1838

E
arly explorers estimated fifteen thousand Aleuts had lived on the islands before the Russians came. A hundred and fifty years later, the famed John Muir expedition found only 2,369. Tuberculosis, venereal disease, alcohol, forced labor, and malnutrition had obliterated as much as 90 percent of the Aleut people.

The atrocities of conquest had also taken a toll. In 1796, Hieromonk Makarity, the first Russian priest to visit Unalaska, learned from Aleut
toions
that Russian fur traders were stripping village food supplies and abducting men and women—forcing the men to hunt sea mammals and the women to become companions. Makarity gathered six predominant Aleut men and journeyed across the ocean and Siberia to bring their complaints to the Russian emperor. He did nothing. Makarity and the Aleut men, who had spent years on the journey, died on the return trip when their ship sank not far from Unalaska
.

When a smallpox epidemic swept the Aleutians in 1838, the Aleuts were already an endangered people. The Russian government ordered vaccinations, and local priests administered the shots. But far from the Russian strongholds, in remote coves and guarded bays of Unalaska, there remained villages that had not succumbed entirely to the new ways. They had been baptized by traveling Russian priests, but their lives were little changed. Strong shamans remained true to older paths. Vaccinations

failed to reach several of these villages, and the epidemic raged, taking entire families, leaving villages empty to the wind and the rain and the fog
.

Sometimes an idea is born and threads itself through the generations of a group set apart. It grows slowly, taking sustenance from fresh atrocities that feed its central tenet. Not many can hold such a young idea. It needs a legend, a womb of knowing people, and darkness. Aya’s mind was such a place. Inside the folds of its memories, an idea lived. It preyed on her like a parasite, feeding on what she saw.

People said Aya lived so long because her mind had been taken out to sea, keeping her body from knowing when to die. Her great-granddaughter believed them. She also believed the sea had given Aya something back, a sign of respect for the old woman to wield on dry land.

Even as a child, Agripina had sensed that her great-grandmother was different. She had felt the old woman watching her, measuring her from the beginning. People told stories about Aya. Agripina used to watch her great-grandmother’s shriveled face, trying to look inside her eyes and see if they were true. Now at nineteen, Agripina believed everything.

Aya had never married, although she had taken many lovers, some married, some nearly boys. She had many children. Three girl babies had died as children. Six strong sons grew old and died in this village. One son, Algemalinag, had become
toion
of a village to the east. He had perished with the priest and other men forty years before. Aya had warned him not to go, that no Russian
toion
would care that the Aleut women were being taken as captive Russian concubines, or that Aleut hunters were forced from their villages to faraway islands to hunt fur seals. But Algemalinag had believed the priest, he’d believed that words could make a difference. When Algemalinag didn’t return, his wife and children along with the others had abandoned their village and joined Aya’s.

Agripina sat at her brother’s side in their family
ulax,
fanning him with a grass mat. His fever was peaking, and Agripina knew he would die. Already her emotions were pulling back, like a snail’s foot retreating into the protection of its shell. Agripina had seen too much death, and the numbness that follows tragedy had already invaded her heart.
The children had gone first. Six new graves mounded under the waving grass above the village. Now even adults were falling. The Russians called it smallpox, but the Aleuts had no name for this strange disease that killed in days.

Agripina held a bowl of thickened tea to her brother’s lips. When he had first fallen ill, she had nursed him with devotion, telling him stories of their adventures together. She reminded him of the time, as seven-and eight-year-olds, they had packed food and determined to journey into the interior to find the village of the Outside Men, that mythic clan on whom her people blamed the small calamities—broken weapons, missing food. “Did we even make it past the second peak?” Agripina had asked. “Then the clouds came and the rain. Remember how I cried and you held my hand?” She reminded him of the bird nests they had raided and the driftwood houses they had built. At first, he’d listened, laughed even. But that was days ago. Agripina had seen no sign in the last two days that he even knew she was there. And her heart had closed itself as his awareness sunk beyond her grasp. He would die.

He turned his head, trying to avoid the stink even now. She forced the liquid in. The shaman, Usilax, had told her to make him drink every few hours. Her brother moaned and turned his head from side to side. Agripina had not seen Usilax’s herbs work on any of the sick.

Usilax had always been a creeping sort of man. Agripina and her friends called him Crabman, but only when he couldn’t hear. Not just the way he walked, scuttling on bent knees, but also the way he scavenged from people’s minds, pinching bits of gossip and reading unguarded faces. He’d refused baptism and a Christian name, hiding inland when the priest came. As the death toll grew, Usilax had begun to speak of evil spirits, punishment for unseen deeds. The village
toion,
along with many of the strongest men, had been taken several years ago to hunt for the Russians off distant islands. Without leadership, Usilax had stepped in. The people watched one another. Accusations began. Agripina knew if the sickness didn’t end soon, they would begin betraying one another in hopes of finding out who was to blame. The newcomers were watched especially close. Four more had come last spring after abandoning their dead village. Agripina had seen three such waves of remnants absorbed into her village. Although no one
counted, she knew what it meant. The Aleuts were dying. And now Usilax meant to discover who was bringing this death upon them.

Was it her? Agripina wondered, for sometimes she felt a blackness in her, like a dark cliff exposed only when the tide fell.

As she set aside the remaining tea, the door blew inward, whipping a snarl of snow inside. Aya shuffled through, struggling to close the door, then squinted into the dim room. She wore her hair cut blunt across her forehead and knotted at the back, refusing to let her bangs grow long as so many of the women did now. Her face creased into angled planes, shielding her thoughts with age.

“Agripina,” she said roughly. “I want to speak with you.”

“Grandmother, come in. Sit down.”

“Not here. In my house I will talk.”

“He must not be left alone.”

Aya looked at her fevered great-grandson. “You nurse a dead man. It does not matter. Come with me.” Aya turned and pulled the door open again. She did not bother to shut it.

Agripina jumped up and ran to the door. She saw Aya’s back disappearing into the blowing snow. The old woman rarely spoke, and something about Aya’s demand left Agripina feeling honored. She shut the door and leaned against it. Should she follow? She went to her brother and wiped the sweat from his cheeks. But Aya was right, he would not live.

After filling an oil lamp to keep her brother warm, Agripina slipped on her kamleika and stepped into the storm. The walk to Aya’s house was difficult against the wind-driven snow. Aya lived at the edge of the village, in what Agripina sometimes thought of as self-exile. Her
ulax
was the old style with the entrance on the roof. Agripina climbed up and lifted the hatch, descending the ladder into the warmth of her great-grandmother’s home.

Agripina was startled to see two other women sitting near Aya. She knew both well. Teresa and Kristinia had played with Agripina as a child, like older sisters. Kristinia had lost two of her three children to smallpox. Teresa had lost her grandfather.

Aya didn’t look up as Agripina entered. She sat on the floor, shredding a piece of grass into whisper-thin strands on the back of her long, hardened thumbnail.

“Sit here beside me,” Aya said.

Agripina looked at Teresa and Kristinia with a question.

Both women shook their heads.

“Of course none of you know why I have called you here,” Aya said. “Silly girls. What would your great-grandmothers think, watching you now?” Her eyes pinned each woman.

The old woman’s perception always startled Agripina. She saw things without looking. She knew things without being told. To Agripina, her great-grandmother’s awareness felt not so much a violation of her thoughts and feelings but a comfort. Her great-grandmother knew her and yet granted a rare approval.

“I will tell you the secret. The birth of the stories you have heard about me, about others. I will tell you everything.” Her voice was hard like waves rolling boulders under water.

A ripple of excitement passed through Agripina’s chest. At last, she thought, I will know. Aya is trusting me with the truth.

“Don’t be pleased with yourself,” Aya spat at Agripina. She pointed the end of her stiff weaving grass at one woman then the next. “You will never be the women you once were after you know what you are to do. Your great-grandmothers knew. This is no honor. It is duty and comes with a price higher than you can imagine.”

She didn’t speak for a few minutes. The women waited in silence, frightened, wary, excited. Then Aya seemed to soften. “It was your great-grandmother, Kristinia, who came to me with the idea.” Aya set aside her pile of split ryegrass and smiled. “She spoke about seal clubs, and I thought the worst of her. That she meant to trap me. For I had been thinking of hunting too.”

Aya told the young women everything. She spoke of the corpse slowly turning to a mummy, of the fat they had tasted. The change she felt and the first whale. She told of the other hunts, the seals they killed the next spring at the rookeries, the fat sea lions. She talked of the strength her arms found and Tugakax’s sharp aim.

“When a few of the men who escaped returned the next year, we put aside our weapons and kayaks. We met with other villages, and the young women found new husbands. Many hunters took more than one wife even though they would not have been judged able to support them in other times. None would take me. None would take your
great-grandmothers.” Aya bent forward, her hair like a shield guarding her face. “Your great-grandmothers and I had broken the band of sinews that had kept us safe since our people came to these islands. We had broken it with our teeth and tasted it with our tongues. There was no way to spit it out; it soaked into us like water into sand. It soaked into our wombs and waited for daughters to be born.”

Aya’s story thrilled Agripina in a way she hadn’t expected. Taboos against women hunting were strict, and Agripina had been taught since she was a child to avoid handling her father’s and brothers’ throwing boards and spears. She believed that women were made wrong for hunting. Yet, her great-grandmother’s story flicked at the edges of a question that had formed a scab inside her. Underneath lay a shiny pink wound called resistance, defiance. Now she knew she had been born with it, the legacy of her great-grandmother’s sin.

“These stories you hear. They are just stories told by people to explain what they do not understand. We were supposed to die, to starve as so many others. But we refused. Your grandmothers and I, we took our fate from God’s hand. The spirits have hunted us since that day. And they will hunt you.”

Aya stopped and stared at each woman in turn. “You must kill Usilax.”

Agripina held her breath, willing her eyes to remain on the hands in her lap.

“The Russian doctors have medicine that can stop people from getting sick,” Aya said. “In Illiuliuk the children are well. It is only in villages with arrogant shaman like Usilax that people still die. I have heard mothers talk, saying they would like to get this medicine. Usilax shouts that they are causing the sickness by their failure to believe. He is killing our people with his cowardice. Once he is gone, the mothers will be heard.

“You must do this thing. Your great-grandmothers and I have decided.”

Silence invaded the underground room, curving thick around the women’s bodies.

“Our grandmothers are dead,” Teresa said finally. She stared at Aya.

Aya’s dry laughter puffed from her lips. “Ah, foolish girl. Your great-grandmother knew better than the rest of us what it meant to live in suffering times. She gladly took the task upon herself, and gave it to
you, the daughter of so much pain. She sits behind you even now. It is the dead who make all the difficult decisions.” Aya continued to laugh, the sound settling like dust. “Go now. I do not want to hear your protests.”

The three women rose and climbed the ladder, eager to get away from Aya’s madness. As they reached for the hatch, Aya spoke once more. “This is your place,” she said. “You are our daughters, and we chose this for you long ago.”

Agripina let the hatch fall and descended to the ground. The three women stood for several minutes, showing their hooded backs to the angled snow. Teresa stomped her small feet and crossed her arms. “Your grandmother is crazy, Agripina,” she said, her face, telling of her mixed blood, hidden by her kamleika hood.

“This is true,” Agripina answered.

“I will not speak of this again,” Teresa said and turned to find her way home.

Agripina glanced at Kristinia. Did she see something shining in her friend’s eyes, under the red scarf she always draped over her head? If any of them should be willing to kill, it was Kristinia.

Kristinia had returned to the village just one year before. A Russian crew had taken her husband along with other men several years ago, and Kristinia had gone with one of the Russians just after her baptism. For many seasons, she lived with her white husband, receiving colorful scarves and glass beads, and food for her betrayal. At first she had stayed for the sake of her two children, her fully Aleut children. Without the Russian’s supplies, the children would not have lived, she may not have lived. Her own husband had not been able to stop the Russians, but at least this white one protected her from the others. She’d seen enough unattached women raped and whipped and speared to understand the trade-off. But as the seasons passed, she stayed because she had grown used to him and knew she enjoyed a luxury many others didn’t. And they had had children. Two baby boys and a girl.