Tisha (23 page)

I’d offered him coffee, but he said he was drunk on love already and didn’t want to sober up. “Cab, I can smell what you’re drunk on and it isn’t love, I can tell you that,” I said.

That made him whoop up a storm. “Ain’t she some-thin’?” he said to Nancy. “Ain’t she really somethin’? Come on, Teacher, you gotta come over the roadhouse—just for a little while. I got all this money a-jinglin’ in my belt, and if I can’t spend it on the most beautiful gal in the Forty Mile what’s it good for?”

“You must have struck it rich.”

“I sure did,” he said craftily. “What I got on that sled a mine’s more precious than gold, grub or fire.”

“What have you got?”

“Never you mind,” he said. “Those delicate ears weren’t meant to hear things they shouldn’t.”

He was running liquor, Nancy told me after he left. “He runs it all over the Forty Mile.”

“Isn’t he afraid of getting caught?”

“Not him. He’s got the fastest dog team around, which is about all he’s got. The deputy marshal went after him once when he started selling it in the Indian village, but that didn’t stop him. He was so cocky he left notes for the marshal wherever he went, even told him where he was heading for next. The marshal kept on his trail for two weeks, then finally gave up. Cab’s team was just too good.”

I saw his team the next day, kenneled in back of the roadhouse. They were a mean bunch, but they looked fast: lean in the flanks and heavy in the shoulders. If Cab had wanted to make money honestly with them he could have. There were always people who were willing to pay top dollar for a man who knew the country and had a good team of dogs—metallurgists or businessmen who wanted to be mushed into the interior for one reason or another. It made me feel kind of sorry for him. He just didn’t want to do things the right way,
or maybe he didn’t know how. All he was interested in was wasting his time drinking and bragging about how he’d been in every cabaret and honky-tonk from Dawson to the Bering Sea. I more or less told him that when he took Nancy and me over to the roadhouse the next night.

“Teacher,” he said, “no truer words have ever been spoken. What I need is a good woman to keep me followin’ my star. Somebody like you.”

“Not me, Cab.”

“I’d take a vow that nary a drop would I touch, and I’d build you a cabin that’d be a palace.”

I told him thanks, but I intended to stay single.

“I tell you, Teacher, if you’d say yes, you wouldn’t be sorry.”

When he took Nancy and me back to my quarters he said he still wasn’t going to give up. It was a game to him now and he was enjoying it. He was heading down toward Tanacross the next day, he said, and he’d be coming back through Chicken in time for the next Friday-night dance. He’d try again then.

We told him to come on ahead because that was going to be the Thanksgiving dance. We’d be having a party and everybody was welcome. It was due to start in the afternoon with the Thanksgiving pageant the class was putting on, then there’d be games and supper and finally the dance itself. Cab said he’d be there, “and if the answer is still no by then, Teacher, I’m gonna mush up to the Arctic and never come back.”

“You better get an outfit together then,” Nancy told him, “’cause your prospects don’t look too good.”

The Friday-night dances were fun, but the Thanksgiving party was the biggest blow-out we’d ever had. We’d planned it for weeks and by the time Friday rolled around we were ready. The schoolroom really looked festive. The class had cut turkeys and pumpkins out of colored paper and pasted them on all the windowpanes. Streamers and paper chains hung from the ceiling. “B’Gawd, missis,” Uncle Arthur said when he saw it, “you can hang me if this isn’t the most Thanks-givin’est lookin’ place I ever saw in my whole life!”

By four o’clock there were so many people in the
schoolroom that even though an icy mist rolled in every time someone opened the door, we hardly needed the stove. Except for Fred’s mother, who was down with a cold, and his father, just about everybody showed up.

Nancy was the hit of the whole party, but before it started she didn’t even want anybody to look at her. She and I had cut her hair short the night before, then marcelled it the next morning. She’d put on the dress we’d made for her and I’d helped her put on lipstick and rouge, just about the smallest amount you could wear and still have it show, but as soon as she looked in the mirror it was all I could do to stop her from washing it off and jumping back into her bib overalls.

“Anne, I look like a flapper! Everybody’s gonna laugh at me.”

“You look beautiful,” I told her. And it was the truth.

“The dress is so short,” she complained.

“Nancy, you’ve seen the pictures in the catalog yourself. It’s no shorter than any girl your age is wearing now.”

She was scared and happy at the same time and I couldn’t blame her. I’d felt the same way when I wore my graduation dress. She was even more scared because compared to how she’d been dressing up to then she looked racy. Her old dresses had come down below her calf. This one had a sloping hemline that was about an inch below the knee. The only way I could finally get her to keep it on was to threaten to take off my own dress and wear bib overalls. It was one threat I didn’t want to keep, especially since Fred’s mother had made the dress for me and it was my favorite. A chemise with a flowered print, it had soft fur along the cowl neckline and insets of tatted lace along the bodice and the flounce. Mrs. Purdy had told me it was an old Eskimo design, but it looked smarter and more modern than anything I’d ever bought in a store.

When the first few people came in Nancy pretended to be busy at the stove and wouldn’t even turn around. She couldn’t get away with it when some of the children swept in, though. Jimmy Carew was in the lead and
he stopped short. “Who are you?” he asked. He didn’t even recognize her.

“Who do you think I am?” Nancy said grimly.

“Holy cow!” He stared at her, his mouth gaping. “Nancy, you look beyootiful!”

She was a hit all right. When Ben Norvall took a look at her, he rubbed his eyes in astonishment and started quoting Shakespeare. “‘But soft!’” he said, gesturing grandly, “‘What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.’ “

Nancy blushed beet-red, loving it. “Oh, now you get outta here,” she said, slapping his arm.

The only one who didn’t say something nice was Mr. Vaughn. Sure enough, he said she looked like a flapper. Nobody paid any attention to him, though. He was so old-fashioned that he wouldn’t let his daughters dance the foxtrot.

As soon as we counted heads and found everybody was there the class put on the pageant. It was about the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and what they went through during their first winter.

After that we had early supper, and everybody dug in. We’d all saved our appetites, and with Maggie Carew’s bear soup simmering on the stove to tantalize everybody, we were starved. Along with a whole load of oranges and apples, we’d had corn on the cob freighted in from Fairbanks, and everybody helped themselves to dozens of succulent moose spareribs, pickled caribou and dried king salmon. Willard Carew was sitting alongside me. He’d never seen whole corn before and was eating the cob and all.

“I sure don’t think much of this,” he whispered to me. “It’s makin’ me sick.”

“Try eating just the yellow part,” I told him. “Most people don’t bother with the rest of it.” He liked it a lot better after that.

We topped it all off with dried-apple pie and ice cream, but the best part of the whole meal were the apples and oranges. They’d cost us a lot—two bits apiece to have them shipped in, but they were well worth it. We hadn’t seen a piece of fruit in a couple of
months, and even though the apples were mealy and the oranges weren’t the best, everybody sat around biting into them and making faces at each other as though they were in heaven. I’d almost forgotten how sweet fresh fruit tasted.

Once the supper was over we cleared the tables out of the schoolroom, and after the women did all the dishes Fred struck up his banjo and the square dancing was on. Filled up as everybody was it took a little time for them to get going, but inside of an hour Rebekah had three skirts off and the lanterns all over the schoolroom were shaking as though there was an earthquake.

Cab didn’t breeze in until about nine, stomping in with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and gin in the other. I asked him to please take them out again because besides its being against the law, I didn’t think it was right to have drinking going on in the schoolroom. There were still plenty of people who you could tell were nipping from flasks on the sly, but at least they didn’t come out in the open with it.

Cab laughed and took the bottles out, but he must have hidden them outside somewhere and wrapped them up in furs so they wouldn’t freeze, because as the night wore on half the men in the place, and Angela Barrett too, kept making jokes about how they didn’t know why, but they just seemed to have to go to the outhouse more than usual that night. The whole bunch of them smelled like a brewery after a while and started reeling all over the place when they danced, hardly listening to the calls.

Cab was the worst, bragging and carrying on about his dog team without a stop. He went over to Joe Temple and said he’d heard Joe had a good team of dogs and he challenged Joe to a race. But Joe saw right away how drunk he was and said he’d heard about Cab’s team and wouldn’t go a two-mile heat with him even if Cab gave him a mile-and-a-half lead.

“Good thing you wouldn’t,” Cab said. “That bunch you got wouldn’t be no more match for my dogs then a string of asthmatic poodles.”

After a while I didn’t even want to dance with him, he was getting so wild.

The square dancing ended about ten o’clock, a little earlier than usual because it had been a long day. Everybody was hungry again, though, so we were still going to have midnight supper over at the roadhouse. I should have known something was going to happen when Uncle Arthur and a few other men started talking with Cab about how fast Fred’s team was. Everybody knew Fred’s dogs were not only good, but the best-trained of anybody’s around here, so I didn’t realize that they were trying to start something. Cab buttonholed Fred and was all for having a race with him right then and there. “I just mushed ’em fifty miles to here and I’ll put ’em up against yours right now.”

Fred said no, he’d heard that Cab had come in second in the Annual Dog Derby at Fairbanks last year and he wasn’t in that class. That should have settled it, but it didn’t. Later on I found out from Nancy that Uncle Arthur and a few others had kept bending Cab’s ear about Fred’s dogs, leading Cab on and getting him steamed up. She said she thought they were telling him things about Fred and me as well, but she didn’t know for sure. Whatever they said to him, Cab cornered Fred again just before the dance was over, but Fred wasn’t having any of it.

“I’ll make it over any distance you want,” Cab said, “over any country you want.”

“Thanks, Cab, but I’m not a racing man.”

Cab had that stubborn look that said there was just one thing in his mind and he wasn’t going to be talked out of it. “If you’re scared you’ll look too bad we can make it a fifty-mile mush and I’ll give you an hour head start.”

“Cab, I just don’t want to race you.”

“Hell, I hear them’s all Indian dogs you got anyway. Ain’t worth the fish ya feed’m.”

Fred walked away from him, but Cab was back to the same song again right after Fred and I danced a fox-trot. By this time his eyes were all bloodshot and he was getting mean. I was hoping that even if I didn’t end up with Fred when the
Home Sweet Home
waltz went on, at least I wouldn’t end up with Cab. He was willful when he was sober, drunk he was impossible.
But when the
Home Sweet Home
waltz did go on I was flabbergasted: for the first time Fred was right beside me.

That was the loveliest waltz I’d ever danced with anyone. For the first time in my life I really felt beautiful. Just having Fred look at me the way he did made me whirl around that floor as if we weren’t in a dinky little schoolroom somewhere out in the wilds, but in the grand ballroom of a palace.

Before the waltz was over a whole bunch of people had already left so that they could get to the roadhouse and be served before the crowd. Nancy had ended up with Cab and as the rest of us were leaving they came over to Fred and me. “You’re pretty lucky there, boy,” Cab said. “How about tradin’ off partners? No offense, Nancy.”

“No thanks, Cab.”

Cab wasn’t too happy about it.

In the roadhouse Fred and I sat at the end of one of the long tables. I wished we could have had the table for two, but I didn’t care. Just having midnight supper with Fred was enough. We could hear Cab yelling all the way over on the other side of the room, still challenging anybody in the house to a dog race. Then I heard somebody say something about Fred and a few men laughed.

I didn’t pay any attention to what was going on after that because Fred and I were talking, but when we were almost finished eating Nancy came over. She leaned down close to me. “Anne,” she whispered, “if I were you and Fred I’d dog it outta here fast. Somethin’s goin’ on.”

“What is it?”

“Trouble. You better go as soon as you can.”

I told Fred what she’d said. We looked over at the other table. Angela Barrett was just about as drunk as Cab and she was staring over at Fred and me with hate in her eyes. There wasn’t too much talk coming from where Cab was, just some murmuring, but there was something in the air, all right. Fred and I got up and he went to pay for our supper.

“Hey now, Teacher, you ain’t leavin’ so early, are ya?” Cab yelled out.

“Sure am, Cab. I’m dead tired.”

He got up from the table and made his way towards us. “Hell, you don’t have to go yet,” he said. I said I did, but he had something in his mind and didn’t even listen to me, just asked me the same thing over again. Fred brought my coat over and Cab tried to take it from him. “You just give that coat to me and I’ll take care of ’er. She can’t go home yet. It’s too early.”