My Name Is Not Easy (59 page)

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

• • •

But not right now. Right now, as we sit down to eat, all that matters is us, sitting here at our own table eating frozen fi sh
quaq
until our stomachs grow warm and our eyes grow sleepy and the world gets slow. All that matters right now is that I’m home and Isaac is fi nally home, too. And being home is good because I can lean back in my chair and say, “Where’s the seal oil?” saying it in Eskimo like I never even left, never even went to Sacred Heart School where they don’t know nothing about seal oil, not in any language.

“Where’s the
what
?” Uncle Joe says.

I’m slicing off a buttery smooth slice of frozen fi sh, suddenly aware of the fact that both Uncle Joe and Mom are looking at me funny, both of them real quiet.

“
Misigaaq,
” I say again, the Iñupiaq sounds tickling the back of my throat.

“
Missy-gaq,
” Joe says, sliding the jar across the table, mimicking the way I’ve said it, making me hear how funny it sounds, Catholic-shaped on my Catholic-trained tongue.

“What kind of talk they teach you down there in that place?” Joe asks, laughing. “Swahili?”

And I laugh, too, although there’s nothing funny inside my laughter. Inside there’s words I can hear, clear as birdsong, words I will never ever say again. Words that make me feel like
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E P I L O G U E ~ A N E W G U N / L u k e
those dogs out there snapping and lunging, voiceless against the roar of the future.

But never mind, because when the time comes, we’re

gonna shake everybody’s ears off ; that’s what I think. Shake them good with the sound of all us kids come home, full of new ideas, loud as engines revving. Th

e future may be slick

with Latin words and loud machines and the kind of laughter that burns your throat, but it’s gonna take off like a shiny new snow machine, ready to go anywhere. Everything, both good and bad, all messed up together. Th

at’s what I think.

Uncle Joe is done eating, and he’s standing in front of me now, holding his new gun, the gun with the site that’s never less than a hair from right. He isn’t laughing anymore.

“Guess you’re ready for a new gun by now,” he says, his voice soft.

Guess I am.

We’re roaring across the snow-fi lled tundra on his snow machine, me and Joe, caribou scattering before us like brown stones rolling across a white run. Joe is focusing on one caribou, a weaker one that’s fallen to the side of the herd. As we get closer and closer, we can see the animal’s breathing grow labored, see its eye, straining backward, watch how it marks our approach with a look that speakes of resignation. Joe turns his head sideways without taking his eyes off that animal.

“Ready?” He hollers.

I nod my head. I’m ready.

“Hang on!” he yells, raising his body up and leaning out
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

toward the caribou as we close in on it.

You can see the muscles bunched up on its neck, round as rope. Its nostrils are fl ared, and its eyes are rolled back, running, always running.

All of a sudden Joe leaps off the machine and lands square on its back, his knife raised. I pull back on the handles and swerve away, the wide-open tundra fl ying by me like a big white bird. I take one long, icy breath and smile.

It tastes like life, that breath.

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Author’s Note

My Name Is Not Easy
is a work of fi ction, but the story of Sacred Heart School and its students is based on a number of real places and real events in Alaska history. Prior to the Molly Hootch settlement of 1976, which required the State of Alaska to fund schools in even the smallest and most remote Alaskan villages, there were virtually no high schools in the vast region known as

“bush” Alaska. To earn a diploma, children from the Bush were forced to travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their homes to live at distant boarding schools for months or years at a time. Many were sent away at very young ages.

Virtually all of these students were Native Alaskans, and most attended schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Aff airs, such as Mount Edgecumbe in Sitka, Alaska, and Wrangell Institute on Wrangell Island. Some traveled as far as Chemawa, in Oregon, and Chilocco, in Oklahoma. And some attended Copper Valley, a parochial boarding school located in the vast central portion of Alaska known as the Interior, a school that educated both Native and non-Native students.
My Name Is Not Easy
is based on the many stories I have heard from the alumni of these schools, most of whom are my contemporaries, close friends, and relatives.

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