Between Two Worlds (21 page)

Smoke poured from a chimney of Peary’s cabin, and through its small, paned window came an orange glow. I heard sharp voices carried on bursts of wind. I was able to stand on a pile of planks and look through the window. Peary, Mauripaulak, and Duncan sat around the table by the fire. They talked fast, frowning. Then I heard my
name. I strained but couldn’t understand more. Duncan, facing the window, crossed his arms and flung words across the table at Peary. Mauripaulak was hunched over, weighted down by some worry. He poured a drink from a green bottle, the glass sparkling in the lamplight.

I made my way to the front and slowly opened the door. The room was separated from the entry by blankets nailed to the ceiling. I slipped inside. The voices and clinks of mugs kept on. Pegs for traps were on the wall. I gripped one, and finding a hole in the blanket, I peered through. The men’s faces shone out of the shadows, and their teeth flashed. Peary lifted a mug, full to spilling, but ignored it as he looked across the table to Duncan.

“There’s no use asking me, seaman,” Peary said. “I won’t do it. Never again.”

Mauripaulak frowned. “You look at her, Duncan, and you’re not seeing anyone else. You’re not taking in the whole situation. You’d regret it.”

They must be talking about
me
! I drew in a ragged breath, heavy with dread.

“Matt,” Duncan said, turning to Mauripaulak. “I’d give her a home and take care of her. It has nothing to do with the lieutenant.”

“You’re wrong.” Peary gulped from his mug and set it back down. “After what took place at the museum, the world’s eyes have been on me whenever anyone talks of Eskimos.”

I gripped the peg even harder.
What took place? My parents?
Had Peary lied? Were they murdered?

Mauripaulak sighed. “What’s best for the Eskimos is to stay where they live. Plain and simple.” He ran his hand through his curly black hair. “I have seen some things in my time. Nothing so bad as
that
.”

I pushed away the blankets and walked into the room, my feet burning with every step. “What are you talking about?”

For a moment the men didn’t move. Mauripaulak drew another chair to the table. “Billy Bah. Please sit down,” he said, and stood to help me to the chair. Close to the hot fire, I began to sweat but kept my furs on because I didn’t want these men to stare at my body. Duncan, who had stood, sat in the chair beside me. I let him take my hand in his large one, steadying me.

“Someone tell me. What did you mean about the museum?” I said.

I looked at each one’s eyes. They were not cold or angry, just sad.

Mauripaulak finally broke the silence. “Well, Billy Bah—”

“Don’t meddle with it,” Duncan warned, his voice low.

Letting go of Duncan’s hand, I faced him. “I need to know.”

“It happened—” Mauripaulak started.

Duncan slammed his hand on the table. “Don’t!”

Peary cleared his throat. “It’s better coming from me.” He took a drink. “After the Eskimos died in New York, the museum made them into an exhibit.”

“What?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

Duncan put his arm around me.

Mauripaulak took a breath. The
qallunaat
at the museum, he said, boiled the bones, then put shapes on them with wax to make figures meant to imitate who they were.

I shivered at the picture that formed in my mind. Figures for curious people to stare at. Statues with my parents’ bones inside, shown like Peary’s lifeless birds with glass eyes!

I shook and cried. Duncan drew me close. “I didn’t want to tell you. I knew it would make you sad.”

Then, as if to soften the horror in my face, Peary said, “The display wasn’t up long. People got angry, so the museum took it down.”

“After Minik saw it,” I said, piecing together what I’d heard from the sailors.

“Yes,” Mauripaulak answered. “The people at the museum tried to fool Minik. When his father died, they wrapped up a log in furs and pretended to give a funeral. But later the boy saw the exhibit.”

I had a bad feeling in my stomach. “Lieutenant Peary, what did they do with the figures?”

“The museum must have buried them.” Peary turned his eyes away. He was lying.

“Lieutenant Peary took no part in any of those things
at the museum,” Mauripaulak said. “Neither did I. Nor anyone you know.” When my parents were being kept at the museum, he said, Peary was home in Washington, DC, then traveling from place to place, seeking funds for future voyages. As for him, he went to see my mother and father and the others, first in the museum and later in the hospital. He did his best, also, to cheer up Minik. But Mauripaulak didn’t know anyone was planning such an exhibit, hadn’t seen it coming, and had no power to change what the museum did.

“There are some bad people in America,” Duncan said, “but most of us are good, decent folks. Not like those heartless people at the museum. Remember that.” He tried to take my hand, but I pulled away, rocking back and forth. Later, in private, I would pray that my parents’ spirits be released, to go into babies when the time was right.

Not everyone could be buried properly. Some fell through the sea ice, not to be seen again. Some were crushed under avalanches of rocks or snow. Rarely, old sick people went to drift off on ice floes alone, when they felt it was time to die. The spirits of all these people somehow transported themselves to where they needed to go. My parents had already found their way to the rock graves in Itta.

But that the
qallunaat
could be so senseless and cruel!

Peary eyed me. “Your year went well. I hoped your parents would have that, too. It ended badly.” There was a line of sweat across his brow. He wiped it. “I will never allow any Eskimos to come to America again.”

I turned to Duncan. “Were you making plans to take me to America?”

“Not unless you want it. Let’s talk about it another time,” he said gently.

“You tried to deceive me!” I said. How could he have discussed the idea with the men and not with me first? What other things should I have known and did not? “You weren’t honest. Just like the others, you betrayed me. You’re as bad as they are. Worse!”

I pulled away, and before I knew it my arm swept across the table, knocking over mugs. The green bottle fell and broke into pieces. Sharp-smelling, yellow liquor poured out. I lunged, slipped on the liquid, and fell face forward on the floor. The piercing pain in my feet swept over my whole body. I began to sob.

Duncan turned me over gently and picked me up. “Let me go!” I yelled. I kicked and punched him as I cried. He held me, and I finally gave in, stretching up to circle his neck and letting myself be carried back to the cabin.

I lay in my bed, bound in blankets as tightly as if I were in a grave of stones, and tried to push away the image of my parents—wax figures. In an exhibit. If only Peary hadn’t invited them to go to America. If only they hadn’t desperately wanted to go. If only I’d kept my stories to myself.

I thought of a time about four years earlier, when I’d been married for just two moons. That day, Angulluk and
my father had helped Peary to move a gigantic boulder into his ship from a small island far to the south of Itta. It was a stone known by hunters of long ago to have fallen from the sky as a shooting star. We didn’t know why Peary wanted the stone but had agreed to help him. Above the
Hope
’s deck, the sky stone now hung from a crane on three chains like a giant water pot above a seal-oil lamp. Mauripaulak draped a red, white, and blue flag over it. A few summer snowflakes started to fall, whirling in a chilly wind.

Ally and my mother and adopted sister, Aviaq, standing near the bridge of timbers that connected the
Hope
to the island, watched as hunters and white men surrounded the sky stone. Peary held Marie high in the air for the crowd to see. Mitti Peary broke a bottle over the stone. Marie said, “I christen thee Ahnighito!” and the white men cheered. Their actions made no sense. The snow was falling more steadily now, and the winds were picking up speed. We waited for Peary to take us back to Itta, which he promised to do before going on the much longer journey to America.

By the time our family crowded into the ship’s saloon with the rest of Peary’s workers, the winds were howling. The sailing had to be postponed because a gale had risen from the sea. Aviaq clung to my mother and sobbed.

My people knew that the storm was a bad omen. The sky stone wanted to remain on the island. During the past few summers, it had broken Peary’s chains, ropes, and
winches, stubbornly defying all who tried to move it. The spirits were punishing Peary.

The next day, however, the weather cleared, and our sail to Itta was a smooth one. My mood remained low. Peary had offered to take several of our people to America when he returned with the sky stone. They’d come back to Itta with many riches the following summer. Against all reason and my protests, my parents had volunteered to go.

“You’ll hate spending your days cooped up inside a white man’s house. The crowds and the fast-moving, screeching trains will terrify you!” I said.

They wouldn’t listen. Two days later, alone with my
anaana
as she packed her
ulu
and her sewing things, I pleaded, “Stay here! You’ll be miserable there. And I’ll be miserable without you.”

“I want to see America,” Anaana said. “Your father and I are eager to go. I’d like to see birds as colorful as the feathers you collected. I’d like to see trees.”

I cried bitter tears. “Please understand. America is a terrible place. I’m tempted to go because I don’t want to be separated from you. But I could not bear the white man’s cities again. The sky is swallowed up by houses. The noises are unbearably loud. The air is full of bad smells. It’s hot. Did you not understand anything I was telling you?”

There was no answer.

I took another approach. “Don’t you want to stay, to care for Aviaq?”

“She’s coming with us,” Anaana said.

This was a blow!

“I’ve only had you for a short time, Anaana! Now you’re leaving.” Exactly two years earlier, I’d returned from America. This summer, within days of marrying me off, my parents had adopted Aviaq, almost as if to replace me. “I still don’t see why.”

“It’s a fine and rare opportunity. Peary wants the
qallunaat
to know more about us. And a few of us—the lucky ones—can learn more about them.”

“If you’re going to the white man’s land, you’re unlucky.” I tried one final argument. “Think of that stone and where it came from. Think of that storm. Aren’t you afraid you’ll go down in a shipwreck?”

“Of course I’m frightened, but your father and I have decided.” I could see the desire in her dark eyes. “You are grown up. You and Angulluk can take care of yourselves.”

“But who will take care of
you
in America?”

My mother looked at me, puzzled. “Don’t you think your father can hunt seals and walrus in America? Feed and clothe us as always?”

“No, you’ll depend on the
qallunaat
for every meal. You don’t understand! Stay here.”

Parents are not always wiser than their children.

A full moon of days passed at the fort, and my blisters went away. One foot was still reddish, and the other bluish gray. Both hurt when left bare.

Inside, I felt dead. “Talk to me,” Duncan said, squeezing my hand. I was too weary to make conversation or return the slightest affection.

Later, when I told Angulluk about my parents, he said, “It’s just a story, like other stories. When we were children we thought the
qallunaat
would eat us. Remember?”

“It’s true!” Rage erupted from inside me. It came out like a hoarse scream.

He watched me, puzzled. “Eqariusaq! I don’t know how you could believe such lies.”

“I wish it were a lie.” I balled up my hands and cried myself to sleep.

The men were eager to go back to Payer Harbor.

Peary drove the sled I rode on, and Mauripaulak the other, which was weighed down with food and everything from wood to kerosene. The sleds moved slowly over the
soft snow. Peary and I were sometimes forced to walk on our injured feet while the dogs pulled the sleds over rough terrain.