And She Was (30 page)

Liz lit the cigarette, exhaled, handing the lighter back to me. She smoked and looked over the dark bay for a few moments, the others beside us. The silence felt like the waiting moments before throwing yourself from a high dive, that exhilaration mixed with panic, all wrapped in knowledge that you would jump, and once you did, the descent would be uncontrollable.

It was Ida who spoke for them.

“Why do you hide your face?”

I slid my teeth against one another to keep tears back, feeling the peaks and valleys bumping along my jaw. I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t tell them I was ashamed of my face, my life, myself. “Fuck.” It was all I could get out.

And then Ida touched me. Just the gentle laying of a hand on my arm. “Who told you to feel this shame? You have been to the cave, taken something you shouldn’t.”

It was a statement, but I needed to treat it as a question, something with room for explanation. “I was just following you.”

“We know.” The sorrow in her voice broke something, and the tears came despite my jaw-grinding resolve. “What is this you have done?”

“I was curious,” I said, tasting tears at the corners of my mouth. “I wanted to know.”

“So now you do,” Ida said. “You have become like us.”

I lifted my face to tell her she was wrong. I was nothing like her, like Liz. She put her old hand to my mouth.

“Nothing will be easy again.”

The sky darkened as clouds moved in low, and a puff of air roused the grass around us for a moment, then dissipated back into the strange calm. And she told me a story. It reached back 250 years, leaped from woman to woman, and ended in the four faces before me. The faces of killers, tortured and courageous.

Five cigarettes lay on the ground between us, a measure of the time it takes to move from ignorance to understanding.

Bellie stepped closer. “You have to leave now, Brandy.”

I moved back, feeling the thrust of her betrayal. “What, you’re kicking me off the island? I thought we were friends.”

“We are.”

I stepped back again, looking at all of them as one. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

But I knew who they were. They were the island’s bouncers, and I’d just been kicked out. They were the island’s executioners, and I’d just been spared.

Anna stepped forward. “You wanted to know more, and now you know more than enough.”

Liz tossed her last cigarette, still burning, on the ground. “You use someone else’s hands. You hold nothing in your own.” She snatched my hand and held it palm up. “See? Empty.”

I yanked my hand away.

“The wind is not a river. Someday it will stop.” She grinned up at me with her rotting smile. “Go while it breathes.”

Her last words had an edge, angry, full of meaning I unexpectedly understood. They were angry that they’d had to admit so much to set me free. Angry at the risk.

Ida, Anna, and Liz turned away and started back to the fire.

“Liz,” I shouted.

She turned slowly back toward me.

“I forgive you,” I said. She simply stared at me, but I saw her face drop its ugly mask. Her eyelids lowered, squeezing forth a tear, then she was gone.

Bellie remained beside me for a moment. “Maybe I was wrong, what I said when you first came. Maybe you did belong here for a while.” She turned and left me too.

The wind blew up into her place, hitting my face in a sudden gust. It came on hard, flipping paper plates out of hands, sending the fire low then high. People yelled and ran inside. The cigarette blew out of my hand.

Fists clenched, hair blown straight back, I stood and opened my mouth to yell, to force them to hear how wrong they were about me, how right they were about me, how I hated them, how my gratitude felt like gravel tearing across bare knees. “You didn’t banish me. You know that? I knew it before. I knew your fucking weird island wasn’t mine. You know that? Do you hear me?” These thoughts formed into words, but these words never formed into sounds because I had swallowed the wind.

MARCH 1967

D
utch Harbor in the late 1960s was a world in waiting. It had been the center of the fur trade, a gold rush supply route, a military outpost. Now it was all but forgotten. But even a forgotten place has its purpose. The Department of Defense had noticed this remote outpost. On October 18, 1965, it tested an underground eighty-kiloton hydrogen bomb, four times more powerful than those dropped on Japan, off the coast of Amchitka Island at the western end of the Chain. Two larger bombs would be tested in the next six years, despite Alaskan protests. As an Atomic Energy Commission spokesman put it, “No realistic alternative is believed to exist anywhere else on American soil.”

Meanwhile most of the military installments—the submarine installations, the airfields, the bases, the radio and weather stations—along the Chain had been closed, leaving polluted bays and salmon streams, and hundreds of abandoned warehouses, barracks, cabanas, and Quonset huts along the beaches and into the hills. With this exodus of jobs and the decline in subsistence sea mammals and fish, an economic depression settled among the islands. After their internment, many Aleuts had not returned, and those that did abandoned their small villages for the comparatively bustling town of Unalaska. About 350 people lived in homes scattered among the debris of war.

Poverty and alcohol reigned in many families. Few were strong enough
to fight the forces consuming what was left of a people. Children were born with fetal alcohol syndrome, many were neglected, some abused. One small group of women tried to keep the promise of a future alive for yet another generation. The Sisterhood of the Russian Orthodox Church dedicated themselves to delivering aid to the remnants.

Liz let the door swing shut behind her. She counted the loaves of bread, jars of peanut butter, cans of beans and vegetables the family would need. Four children under ten, the grandmother, the mother. She added these needs to the list she kept in her head. Tomorrow she would collect what she could from those who had enough and see how far the supplies would stretch.

She was thirty that year and one of the most prominent women in Unalaska Village. She and her mother’s friend Ida belonged to the Sisterhood of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Ascension of Christ. She and the six other most active members of the Sisters held this town together, begging from the poor and giving to the poorer. It’s an old story—upon the often stooped shoulders of old women falls the burden of a crumbling culture. The anthropologists and sociologists say it’s because the men lose their protector roles in the first clashes and their provider roles in the invasion. They are no longer equipped to rescue anyone. But the women remain caretakers, they remain mothers. With their roles intact, they retain their strength. Liz knew nothing of the theories, but she believed that everything, the future and how the past would be remembered, depended on the Sisters and on her.

Walking the four muddy blocks to Ida’s house, Liz calculated supplies, counted needs. She bent to pick up a candy wrapper that stuck in the mud along the road. The wind had not blown for two days now. In the strange calm, Liz had grown more uneasy. “It is unhealthy weather,” men muttered to one another at the post office when they picked up the weekly mail delivery. “It is unhealthy weather,” women whispered as they passed each other in the narrow aisles of canned sardines and pilot bread at the store. “It is unhealthy weather,” they said as they sat with a bottle on the beach at low tide. “It is unhealthy weather,” Liz said now as she knocked on Ida’s door.

Ida was waiting in the kitchen, her hair tucked under the handker
chief married women always wore, a teapot warming on the stove, her great-granddaughter playing with pot lids. Liz sat down at the table and drew in the spices as Ida poured hot water over dark leaves in a strainer. She waited.

Ida asked about the families Liz had visited that day. She asked about supplies. They discussed the charity dance they were planning when the next Coast Guard vessel docked. When all the small things had been discussed, Ida paused to stir another lump of sugar into her tea. “Belinda, go see what Grandma has for you in her sewing basket,” Ida said. The six-year-old jumped up, scattering pot lids from her lap, and skipped into the back room.

“Four more,” Ida said, when the girl was gone.

Liz closed her eyes. “Who?”

“Prokopeuff’s three children. And Kathy’s new baby.”

“Do we have anyone left?”

Ida shook her head. “Busy Mouth rejected the Malkins. Said their place was too small and dirty. Said the oil stove sent too much grease smoke through the house.”

In the last year, sixteen children had been taken from their homes by Miss Holton, a state social worker flown out from Juneau to see what could be done about “the Aleut problem.” The Sisters had found a home for only one. Fifteen children had been sent to foster care on the mainland. White homes among trees, far from the ocean. Liz knew in her soul these children would never return. She felt the losses like they were her own. So few remained. Their disappearance was like the water sucked offshore before a tidal wave. The wave that would follow in the next generation, shrunken and misshapen by alcohol and poverty and loss, would take them all.

“This storm cannot be weathered,” Liz said, setting her tea down.

Liz was not given to easy despair. She had never let such words into the open before. Yes, she had thought them—that no solution existed, that she and the other women were patching holes in a boat with no bottom. But she had not said them before.

It marked the turning of her heart.

Ida waited. “We meet with Busy Mouth this evening. We’ll see.”

As Liz was leaving a few minutes later, Ida stopped her at the door with a brief touch. Liz knew her mother’s old friend wanted to give her
hope, something to hold. Ida looked into Liz’s eyes, an uncommon gesture. “The wind is not a river,” she said. “This too will stop someday.” It was a common proverb that Liz had heard others say in these bitter times. But Ida’s next words were not. “There are other ways,” she said, “if these do not work.”

A sudden heat warmed Liz’s chest. A flare that reached into the shadowed part of her brain, the part that held vague suspicion, an old knowledge her mother had almost spoken of the day she died. Irene had held her daughter’s hand. “Lizzy, I must tell you something heavier than the rocks and sands.” Liz, just twenty, and not yet willing to lose again, had shushed her mother. “You are too weak. Rest now. We will have time when you are better.” But they hadn’t. Liz wondered if she had stopped her mother’s words as much out of concern for her weakness as out of fear of what those words would be, for she had known for many years that her mother held a secret.

Then the flare was gone. Ida’s eyes fell to the floor and her hand left Liz’s arm. The door closed.

The village was dark and quiet as the women walked to Anna’s. Without wind, the town felt like it was waiting for something, Liz thought. She noticed that Ida kept looking behind her at the stretch of gray-framed buildings between the beach and the river. Anna lived in a two-house home. The war had left Unalaska one resource—wood in the form of hundreds of former military buildings. People had dragged many of them together, cutting passages between them to make for livable homes. Anna’s was right along the beach road, and Liz glanced back at the flat ocean before she entered. She and Ida drew chairs around Anna’s metal and Formica table, strewn with tea and
alodiks
. Miss Holton was already there, her binder opened on the pink and yellow mottled tabletop. She picked up a pencil and tapped its tip on a lined page.

“I must tell you, I don’t believe I have any options right now.” She sucked on the eraser end of her pencil. She looked at the three women seated around her, then quickly withdrew the fleshy eraser from her mouth and set the pencil down. Her fingernails, trimmed and bare, tapped at the thin handle of her teacup. Her auburn hair, curled in
waves, slid across the shoulders of her pressed navy dress. A row of white rickrack edged her collarbone in tiny teeth. Even sitting, she rose above the small Aleut women. Liz wondered if she had any awareness of how awkward she was, how ugly, how out of place.

She had answered a newspaper ad for social workers in bush Alaska. Fresh out of Biola College in Southern California, she had been eager for the job. For the adventure, certainly, but it was more than that. She wanted to make a difference. She wanted every child to have what she had taken for granted—a working father, doting mother, grass in the backyard, a swing set, twelve years of public education. She’d been appalled to learn that Unalaska had only four teachers, most of whom fled after putting in a year on this forlorn island. She’d been appalled that any student who wanted more than an eighth grade education had to travel to boarding schools in Sitka or Oregon. She’d been appalled that so few teens chose to continue their education and that so few parents forced them to.

As she looked at the women around her, she was again appalled that they could not understand what was happening to their children. Many ran about in dirty clothes and weren’t fed with any regularity. The Aleut custom of extended relatives watching one another’s children often meant that nobody was watching them. Meanwhile husbands and wives were drinking and fighting, and grandparents were trying to feed their grandchildren when they hardly had enough for themselves. The “Aleut Problem,” she had decided, could only be fixed by creating a new generation, educated and acclimated to a better way of life.

“I know you have tried,” she told the women, “but really it’s better this way. You’ll see.”

Anna shook her head. “We will find the homes you require. There are others who will come forward.” Anna set her teacup carefully in its saucer. “I have written to Juneau. I’ve told them we can care for our own children. That the rules can be changed so we can keep our children. We need to wait for their response.”

Miss Holton winced. She pursed her lips just so for a soundless drink from her cup. She reached for Anna’s forearm and patted it three quick times. “Now, Anna, we’ve discussed this all before. The state is not going to further endanger children to allow for native customs. Just
because you’ve been to college outside doesn’t mean you understand what is best for the children.”

“Several good families have offered,” Ida cut in.

“You know these people won’t do.” Miss Holton sighed. She flipped through her notebook, unlatching its rings to pull out a sheet of paper. She handed it to Ida. “I’ve shown you the guidelines before. I don’t know why you persist in bringing me families that don’t even begin to meet these requirements.”

The faces of the three women remained blank. Miss Holton sighed again. “Look here,” she said, pointing to a line of text. “Right here. It says, ‘Prospective families must be able to provide each child with a safe and stable home.’ The last family you gave me all slept in one room. That simply isn’t a stable home. Where did you think they were going to put the two foster children?”

Again silence. At last Liz said, “The Malkins are a good family. Their little ones go to school, eat, wash. They sleep in one room. Our homes are small. The children like sleeping together.”

“Now, Lizzy, I know you people are used to living in small spaces and sharing rooms, but times have changed. Alaska has been a real state for more than ten years. Your people have to start behaving like American citizens. You can’t keep doing things like you’ve done them in the past.”

“Two more families will be found,” Liz said, “with big houses.” Her mouth twisted at the edges. “A week is needed.”

“I’m sorry, but no. I don’t have a week. I’ve made arrangements for the four children to fly out on Friday. We’ve identified a home in Seattle.”

Even Miss Holton felt the dark rage around the table. It poured from the three women who did not speak but could not hold it back from their eyes and the flare of their nostrils.

“I know this is hard for you,” she said, her voice warm with her conviction and sympathy. “But you have to see that this is for the best. These children will be better off on the mainland. What schooling do they get here? What future do they have? You have to put the children first. When will you learn that?”

She looked at Liz the longest. The two women were not far apart in age, and Miss Holton believed if any of them could be made to understand, it would be Liz.

But Liz refused to look up from her tea. Her hands remained still in a circle around the cup. It was not the first time she had heard such talk, and she felt the expectation Big Mouth placed upon her. It baffled her. Liz did not understand the way these white people thought. How could sending children away from home, from their people, ever be best? How could they not see to the next generation when so few would remain? How could a bedroom help a child whose people were drowning? Did one child mean more than the people to whom that child was born?

She did not ask Busy Mouth these questions. Nor did Anna or Ida. The answers never made sense.

A day later Liz sat near the stove in Rita Katovich’s kitchen. She had been there two hours already. Rita had lost her husband last fall in a fishing accident. Her children were nearly grown and only two remained at home. The Sisters had not asked Rita before because they knew she was barely holding on. But with the promise of double food deliveries, Rita had lowered her eyes and said yes. She would move Nicholas to the couch; he was rarely home anyway, fishing, staying with friends at Nilkolski for weeks at a time. Timothy would move into her bedroom, a sheet hung for privacy. With a bedroom freed, she could take one child.

“This is temporary?” she asked again when Liz rose to take her teacup to the counter.

Liz nodded. She felt Rita’s fear of being alone, of empty cupboards, of sons moving off under an overcast sky. “A couple of men will come to patch that roof and fix the door tomorrow. Busy Mouth can be expected within a couple of days.”

“What will she do?”