And She Was (13 page)

Then one sunny spring he told her he was returning to Russia, that very day, and that the boys were coming with him.

“In Russia, they will be educated, learn to read and write,” he said, shoving her away as she tried to clutch at the boys only three and four, crying now, small brown hands clenched in fists. “Stop making a
scene. I will bring them back someday. They will be translators or company managers.”

“Then I will go with you,” Kristinia said, rising from the dirt floor of their yurt. “We will go to Russia with you. I will keep your house clean, give you more beautiful babies.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “My wife would not take you in. The children, yes. Not you. Not your Aleut children.”

She’d followed him across the beach, pleading as he made toward the skiff that would take him to the ship in the harbor. “How can you do this? I have given you everything.” She dropped to her knees in the sand, tearing at her clothing, her hair.

He did not turn. Even when the oldest boy slipped his grasp and tried to run back to her, he simply reached behind to grab the child.

As he lifted the boys into the skiff, she saw a woman rush the boat, grasping for another child. She saw a man raise a musket and fire. She saw the woman fall back into the water. She listened to the cries of her boys grow faint, then lost under the sound of waves.

It was only then that she heard it. Voices. Like hers. Circling the beach, lifting from the sand and over the ocean toward their sons. She turned toward the beach and saw the bodies of other women, collapsed on the sand. Hers were not the only children moving away from the island.

The scarves she still wore and the glittery beads around her ankles reminded her that her children were in a rich land, where such clothing and decorations were cheap enough to buy an Aleut woman.

Agripina watched her brother die in the early morning hours. His tongue grew black and swollen. Pustules rose, broke, and rose again across his face and neck. Agripina’s uncles, aunts, and mother took turns wiping his face and forcing the medicinal tea into his swollen lips. But he died with a last faint breath.

Agripina’s uncle, Aleksey, flung the wooden bowl holding the remaining portion of tea against the wall. Aleksey had been like a father to the young man. He had taught him to guide a kayak, to throw a spear, to carve a throwing board, and to tell a heroic hunting tale.

“Usilax says evil spirits are punishing us,” Aleksey said, his loss and
anger swirling together and filling the small house. “The ones who have brought this on us, they must be found.”

Aleksey pulled on his kamleika and threw open the door. Agripina knew he went to meet with Usilax and the other men who followed him. A sudden murky fear pooled in Agripina’s chest. Whom would they accuse? Aya maybe. She had left herself a target for many years with her strange ways. Or maybe one of the mothers who had been whispering about the good of the Russian medicine?

She watched her mother stroke the hair back from her son’s face. “What will they do?”

“We will see,” her mother answered, pouring more oil into her cooking lamp.

“Do you think the medicine could help?”

Her mother turned to her. “Agripina, God will decide. No medicines can interfere with his right to take people when he wishes. Such foolish talk. Have I taught you no better?”

“Aya says…”

Her mother shook her head. “Your great-grandmother’s mind was lost long ago. Even your grandfather knew this and did not listen to her strange talk. Do what I tell you and leave Aya to her nightmares.”

A week passed before Usilax called the village together. They met on the beach, still streaked with snow that lay like fingers reaching to drag the land into the sea. The wind had stopped, leaving the grasses and clouds motionless around them.

“Where is Aya?” Usilax demanded when he had surveyed the people and found her missing.

No one spoke.

“Go find her,” Usilax said, pointing at Aleksey.

Aleksey turned his short legs toward Aya’s house.

“Two more children have been taken and Aleksey’s nephew, like a son,” Usilax said. “The men have met many times, and I have been seeking knowledge of who has angered the spirits to punish us this way.”

He stopped speaking, his gaze ringing the circle of forty people. “Even the wind has left us.”

Agripina felt the same pool of fear, growing deeper now, reaching
into her belly and hips. She tried to catch Kristinia’s eyes, but the woman kept her head bent and shielded by her hood. Teresa, however, was looking up and out to sea, her hood back. Agripina watched Teresa like a hunter, waiting. Teresa could denounce Aya now, let the village know what her grandmother had commanded. It was the time to do such a thing. Agripina’s breaths shallowed as she waited.

Usilax was speaking of death and his journey to converse with the spirits when Teresa’s eyes suddenly swiveled to Agripina. The women stared at each other a long moment. Agripina saw nothing in Teresa’s face. Like her great-grandmother decades before, it was the waiting that shifted the sands of indecision in Agripina’s heart. Now as she stared at Teresa, she knew she wanted to kill. Agripina could not have said that she believed Usilax’s death would allow her people to live. Of such things she had no knowledge. Her desire was darker. She wanted to be part of what Aya had begun. She wanted to look into Usilax’s eyes and know she would kill him with her hands. She wanted the power Aya had found and taken for her own. She did not measure the distance between killing a whale and killing a man. The results were as close as the pebbles that nestled to form the beach—she would hold the power her great-grandmother had taken. And her people would live.

Teresa’s eyes broke away when Aleksey, clutching Aya by the meat of her arm, neared. Aya did not come willingly. Aleksey dragged her to the circle.

“Aya,” Usilax yelled at the old woman. “You are the cause of the death that eats at us.” He approached Aya, holding his hand in front of him as he neared her. “You will be like the dead.”

As he spoke the words of banishment, Aya crouched suddenly on the wet sand and lunged for Usilax’s legs. Her old arms circled his knees and sent him thudding to the sand on his back.

She was on him like a beast.

Aya’s gray-black hair fell around their faces as her few remaining teeth sank into his cheek, tearing.

Usilax screamed and shoved Aya to the side.

She rolled facedown on the beach, thrashing and biting into the sand. When two men lifted her by each arm, Agripina could see her face. Sand caked her lips, mixing with Usilax’s blood. Her eyes were no
longer eyes, but dark slits. She screamed and writhed under the men’s hands as they dragged her from the circle.

Agripina listened to the screams grow distant as Aya was dragged from the village. Even when the waves overpowered her great-grandmother’s voice, she knew Aya still screamed. A part of Agripina had expected this. But she imagined her great-grandmother serene, proud, accepting her fate and perhaps uttering a few wise, strange words. Now, the grotesqueness of Aya’s insanity dug into her like a clam into the sand. Aya may have been wise, Agripina thought, but she was also quite crazy. Perhaps the insanity would make death easier. Agripina imagined Aya sitting on a hillside overlooking the ocean. She imagined the long hair clinging inside deep wrinkles. The snow and cold settling over her great-grandmother as she waited for death. No one would offer food or shelter to Aya. No one would speak to her or even look into her eyes. She was dead to the villagers and would not live long on her own.

As the people hurried back to their homes, Agripina watched for a sign that Teresa or Kristinia desired to speak. But neither looked at her nor lingered on the beach. Agripina ran to catch up to her own family. She fell in beside her mother, who trudged with her head tucked despite the calm air.

“Mother?” Agripina said gently. She knew her mother had not been close to her husband’s grandmother, but still she imagined grief and loss within her mother’s silence. When her mother didn’t raise her head, Agripina tried again. “Mother?”

The family reached their home, and her mother shouldered past Agripina through the door without looking up. She filled an oil lamp and squatted over it, tucking her arms inside her kamleika. The rest of the family remained silent as well. Agripina watched them, rage and pity slamming her like waves. Did they feel nothing?

Her family did not speak of Aya. They would never speak of her again, as if she had never been. Agripina could hardly eat the seal her mother prepared. She listened to her uncles slopping the juices and watched them cut the meat at their mouths with their short knives.

Her stomach turned when she tried to chew, and she spit the meat on the floor. Agripina let her bowl fall and left, pulling her kamleika on before slamming the door as she stepped into the windless twilight.

She wandered across the village first, walking near the water. The tide was rising, and Agripina noticed the few pieces of driftwood pushing onshore. Without conscious thought, she marked where they would land. She walked past the
ulaxes
and farther around the eastern cliffs. She could not go far. The tide would cut off her path soon.

The thin light was almost gone when Agripina noticed the dark form of a person walking toward her. She wanted to turn back to avoid contact but realized how obvious her action would be. Instead she walked faster.

As she drew close, she recognized Teresa, slightly taller than the other women, her face not as round or as dark. The women stopped a few feet from each other. A blue-tinged moon brightened above the ocean as the darkness came. Agripina didn’t trust herself to speak. She watched the moon’s light trembling over waves, rising and falling like breaths, and waited.

At last Teresa spoke. “God created such beauty,” she said, turning to Agripina. She spoke her next words hesitantly. “People should not die under such a moon.”

“No,” Agripina said. “They should not.”

“Perhaps Kristinia would walk with us under this moon?”

“She may.” Agripina felt the air stir and turned her face into the returning wind.

Kristinia had come. She had lost two children to a Russian man and two to a Russian disease; she would not lose another.

“I will take the knife to Usilax’s throat for my children,” Kristinia said as the three women walked late into the night. “It is my right.”

Kristinia’s willingness, eagerness to kill Usilax surprised Agripina. She would not understand for many years what it was that crept into Kristinia’s mind, into her body as she watched her children taken, then watched them die, as she held the one that remained against her body, wrestling against a world that refused her will. She would not understand the full vicious rage of motherhood until she looked into the face of her own first infant years later. But she would remember the bite of Kristinia’s words and the look on her face. That night,
Agripina only thought that perhaps what Aya said was true. Perhaps their great-grandmothers’ acts had marked them before they were born.

The next day they hiked to the cave. Although only one had to enter, they each wanted to, drawn by a desire to cut through the bodies and release the power. Agripina wondered as she held her oil lamp to the walls, from which of these men Aya had eaten.

Agripina was surprised she felt no fear here in the cave filled with the warm, dry breath of mummies. She placed several bits of dry flesh into a sealskin pouch. An arrow of light sliced through the cave opening. It faded before reaching the back wall. Agripina walked around the jagged oval. She counted the bodies stacked on wooden frames, some partly obscured by rock sloughing from the walls. She guessed at least twenty men lay here waiting. Probably even older bodies lay behind these, buried by earthquakes and time.

Agripina exited last. She and the other two women stood outside the entrance, looking down at the waves licking the rocks below. Each had a small bag weighted with a bit of the flesh from a Dry One. Agripina longed to speak about what they had done, about what they would do, but as she looked at her friends, she recognized her own feelings in their faces. Like her, they did this because they were meant to, because their lives now followed the line of more distant choice.

She saw the short-handled ulu as she was about to start down the back side of the cliff. It lay on a shelf an arm’s reach below. Kristinia and Teresa followed Agripina’s gaze. The rounded blade with its carved wooden handle had not been worn by the weather.

Agripina knelt to reach for it. Her fingers slid over the handle. She held the ulu before her.

Teresa and Kristinia studied the blade. It was a woman’s knife, designed to carve tough blocks of blubber and skin.

“It’s Aya’s,” Agripina said.

Seeing the ulu, holding it, Agripina sensed the substance of the act of killing for the first time. This edge would slice into living skin, find the lines of blood and cut their paths. She drew its serrated edge across her palm, from the base of her little finger to the base of her
thumb. Her blood rushed from the cut, ran over her wrist and dripped, bright red and eager down the face of the cliff, a stain on the gray rock. She looked into Teresa’s and Kristinia’s faces and knew their minds held the same images and the same mingling of revulsion and desire.

The women did not have to speak what they knew, that Aya had placed her ulu here for them to find. That she had smoothed their path in doing so.

Kristinia reached for the knife, which Agripina let slide away from her bloody hand. Kristinia tucked it inside her kamleika and turned toward the backside of the cliff and the path down to the beach. Agripina and Teresa followed.

They had to work quickly if they were to use the gift Aya had given. Aya could not live long alone, and although the villagers might believe her spirit would kill, they would even more quickly blame her living body.

The killers met in the early hours before dawn, around the eastern cliffs at low tide. They peeled back their hoods and faced one another. The bits of corpse were no longer filled with the fat of life as the corpses of their great-grandmothers’ time had been. No one had placed the honored whale hunters in this cave for many years, and old bodies were mummy dry. Agripina mixed the dry, black flesh with seal oil until a thick grease formed, as Aya had instructed. The women washed their hands, rubbing wet sand in broad strokes until the skin broke. They rubbed fat into the lines of their palms and onto the smooth skin of their foreheads and broad cheeks.