The Raven's Gift (5 page)

“I’m from the Midwest,” Anna said. “He’s from Wyoming.”

“Midwest, ah? My first girlfriend was from Chicago.”

Anna chuckled and squeezed John’s leg. “I’m happily married, Del,” she said, “but I’ll keep you in mind if I need an upgrade.”

A Yup’ik woman with short jet-black hair emerged from the post office. In one arm she carried a baby, in the other a large parcel. Three kids trailed behind her.

“You guys will have to scoot together,” the driver said.

Anna slid across the seat and the family climbed into the Suburban. The three kids piled into the seat beside them, and the mother and the baby sat in the front. Anna made a funny face at John, and he knew what she was thinking, always the overprotective one. No car seat for the baby.

“Swanson’s Store,” the mother said. The kids stared at Anna and John without saying a word. “Don’t stare, you!” the mother commanded. The kids looked away, then looked back. John winked at the boy and he smiled. “Sorry,” the mom said, “we just moved to Bethel from the village. They’re still getting used to so many
kass’aqs
. That’s you guys. I’m Molly.” She reached back and offered her hand to Anna and John. They shook. Her hand was soft, warm. John wondered if he’d squeezed too hard because she turned her eyes away from him. “These are my kids: Val, Mik-Mik, Marylynn, and baby.”

“You guys are cute!” Anna said, patting the girl beside her on the head. John hoped she wasn’t already breaking some cultural rules.

“She’s ugly like a ling fish!” Mik-Mik said.

“You’re a stinky blackfish!” Marylynn retorted.

“No name-calling,” their mother said. The kids fell silent again.

The cab pulled back on the roller coaster road. Anna tapped the driver on his shoulder and asked, “Hey, what’s the deal with those giant tanks? Are those fuel tanks?”

Off to the right of the road sat a complex of huge white containers, at least a dozen of them. It reminded John of pictures he’d seen of oil complexes in the Middle East.

“They don’t drill oil here, do they?” Anna asked.

Their driver laughed. “Here? No way. I wish. We wouldn’t be so damn poor then. That place, we call the tank farm. It’s our local fuel supply. All of our gas and heating oil for the whole town and all the river communities is stored there. They bring it up the river on a fuel barge. The last barge will be here in a few weeks, before freeze-up. My new taxi, a sweet 2004 Buick, will be on this next barge. That’s the jail, and that is YK, the regional hospital, right there.”

He pointed off to a yellow space-age building on his left. Like almost all the buildings it sat high off the ground on stilts of some sort, except this one had rounded walls and windows that looked like portholes.

“It looks like a submarine!”

“Yellow submarine, they call it. Like the Beatles song. Classic. They’re just starting to remodel and repaint it. Locals are sorta pissed. We like to be a bit different here in Bethel.”

Molly laughed with him as the cab hit another giant heave in the road.

“Yeah, different, for sure,” she said. “So many kinds of people. Everything is
so
expensive. I wish we could have just stayed in the village. No jobs there, though. Too depressing.”

The cab took a hard left and pulled into a dusty parking lot and stopped.

“Here’s the cultural centre,” he said.

John started to unload their bags while Anna went to pay the driver, who stayed in his seat.

“How much do we owe you?” she asked.

“Fourteen dollars.”

“What? It says seven.”

“The trip from the airport to town is seven. You and him equals fourteen.”

“I told you things was a rip-off,” Molly said.

“Hell,” the driver said, “if this is your first time in Bethel, the ride’s on me.”

“Really? Thanks,” Anna said. “What about them?”

“Yeah. My ride better be free then, too. I’m new to Bethel, too,” Molly said.

“Yeah right, lady.”

“We’re paying for them, then,” Anna said. “How much?”

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“What?”

“Five of them.”

“Pay him,” John said as he pulled his backpack from the rear seat. “They said they’d reimburse us.”

“But twenty-five?”

“Just pay him for us,” John said.

“No, I’m paying for
them
.”

She ducked back in the taxi, paid the driver, shook Molly’s hand, patted the kids on the head again, and closed the door extra hard. As the cab drove off, she tucked her wallet back into her satchel. “The least I could do was help her,” she said.

“You’re generous to a fault, you know?”

“There are worse faults to have, Johnny,” she said, pinching his butt.

He stretched and took a deep breath of the air. It smelled heavy, wet; a cool, swampy dampness hung in the breeze. A few mosquitoes
began to gather around their heads and she swatted at them. Houses and buildings were the only thing between him and infinite horizon on all sides of the town.

THE NIGHT BEFORE he found the girl, the night before he planned to start walking, he tore the shrink wrap off a ream of notebooks and took the top one, a red-covered lined one, and opened it to the first page. He took a No. 2 pencil, pre-sharpened, from a box of office supplies in the corner, and tried to write. He didn’t know why he felt like picking up the pencil, or what compelled him to do it, but when he had the paper there in front of him he couldn’t do a thing. No words. Nothing came to him.

He set the graphite tip to the page. Just enough moonlight came through the small attic window that he could still see the blue lines on the paper. The pencil didn’t move. Each exhale of his breath hung around his head and disappeared, only to be followed by another.

He imagined that the pencil would start moving, as if some unseen hand would wrap itself around his and write. He would call out to the spirits and become a human Ouija board, and he would have the answers he needed. They would tell him it was okay through the scratch scratch of the pencil against the notebook paper.

The pencil didn’t move, and he was too scared to call out because he knew no one would answer.

   5   

H
e’d been staring into the bowl of broth, a thin brownish liquid, just listening to the girl and the old woman speaking in their tongue. Hearing their quiet voices, the rhythm of the words he would never understand and didn’t need to, felt hypnotizing. He didn’t care what they said. He just wanted to sit, absorb the warmth of the stove, the heat from the bowl.

“She wants to know why you won’t eat,” the girl said. “And she wants to know why you won’t let me have soup.”

He stirred the broth with a plastic spoon and looked once again at the blackened pot sitting on the woodstove. The head of a duck peered out at him from the brown bubbling liquid.

“I don’t think we should eat it,” he said.

“Why? We need to eat something other than that canned fruit,” the girl said.

He poured the contents of his bowl back into the pot. The soup and a few chunks of dark brown meat fell in with a plump. His stomach grumbled.

“I’m not eating it, and neither should you,” he replied.

She lifted her bowl to her nose and inhaled a single long, deep breath. She held it, as if she was savouring the smell and drawing strength from it.

“But it smells so good,” she said. “It smells okay. She caught it this
summer. Cooked it up just for us. We eat when someone offers food.

It’s rude not to eat her soup.”

The old woman responded to her concern. “
Assirtuq
.”

“She says it’s good.”

“Of course she does,” he said.

“You think it might make us sick?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s duck.
Duck
.”

The old woman reached over and squeezed the girl’s arm. She spoke for a second in Yup’ik, and the girl raised her white eyes toward him.

The girl said quietly, “She says you can’t let fear eat you like it did all the others.”

“What do you mean?”

The old woman sat up from her place beside the woodstove and moved toward a stack of blankets in the far corner of the one-room house. He noticed the wooden panelling had all been stripped off. Probably burned for firewood. All that was left were the wooden supports, a thin stuffing of pink insulation, and the outside plywood covering. The inside of the house became the inside of whale’s stomach, the flimsy wooden house frame becoming giant rib bones with the walls closing on him. He took a deep breath and tried to relax.

“Have you seen the hunter?” he asked.

The old woman turned back and looked at him. She pulled the bundle of blankets to her chin. “You should listen to your hungry stomach,” she said.

“I’ve got to eat it,” the girl said, moving her spoon in small slow circles. “I miss real foods, our Native foods. I’m starving for them. I don’t care if this is duck.”

“Go ahead, then. Eat it.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll be fine. Who is he, the hunter? The man on skis. Was he here?”

The girl took a small spoonful and held it in her mouth. He
swallowed hard, and turned away from her. The old woman threw a wool blanket toward them.

“Here,” the old woman said to him, and then turned to the girl and asked something in Yup’ik.

The girl shook her head and said, “
Qang’a
.”

“What did she ask you?”

“She wants to know if I sleep with you.”

“With me, or near me?”

“To her there is no difference,” the girl said.

“What did you tell her?”

The girl didn’t answer. She set her spoon on the floor where she sat and lifted the bowl to her lips.

“She knows English, why doesn’t she just ask me these things?” he asked, and then turned to the old woman. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”

The old woman pulled the blankets over herself and turned her back on them, her words floating across the room, quiet, barely audible, and to him, completely foreign.

The girl finished licking the rim of her bowl clean and then ran two fingers around the inside and caught the last of the duck soup. She gave a long satisfied sigh, followed by a soft burp, and said, “She says, because you won’t listen anyway.”

HE SAT IN THE BACK of the conference to avoid the crowd and pored over a heavy three-ring binder containing the school district’s new high school curriculum. Anna sat toward the front of the large room, chatting with other new teachers. She did the socializing for them, and he had no problems with that set-up.

The next session was the one he looked forward to, a break from all the school district’s goals and priorities and all the new educational buzzwords. The schedule simply called the next in-service topic
Camai!
He knew this word worked as a simple greeting, pronounced
juh-my, from the morning welcome from the district’s superintendent. The words
Introduction to Yup’ik & Cup’ik Culture
formed the session’s subtitle.

Two Yup’ik women, dressed in brightly coloured hooded smocks took the stage. The speakers chirped with feedback as the younger of the two held the microphone to her mouth and smiled at the audience.

“Camai.”

“Juh-my!” the crowd responded, with far too much enthusiasm.

“
Quyana tailuci
. Thank you all for coming. That first word,
quyana
, is the first word you should all learn. In Yup’ik it means thank you. Pronounced goy-yan-na. I’m Nita and this is Lucy. We work at the District Office in the Yup’ik Immersion Program. Today we want to take some time to tell you a little bit about our culture and share with you some teaching ideas to take with you when you go out to teach in the villages.”

Anna turned back and gave him the thumbs-up, as Nita passed the microphone to Lucy and turned on the computer projector beside them.

“As Nita’s getting our slide show ready, I thought I would tell you about the clothes we’re wearing. These are called
qaspeqs
. Mostly women wear them, but sometimes men, too, for special occasions. They are great in summer when you’re picking berries or cutting fish because the hood keeps the mosquitoes out and this big pocket on the front can hold all your snacks.”