Tisha (25 page)

“It’s pretty careless,” I said. He was feeling so bad about Mert that he had to get his anger out some way.

“Careless,” Uncle Arthur scoffed. “He ain’t careless. He’s crazy as a bedbug, that’s what. Ever see all them ships in his cabin? Ships all over the place. If he likes ships so much why didn’t he go to sea?”

He was talking about the pictures on Mert’s wall—prints and engravings of everything from full-rigged schooners to the Queen Mary.

He kept on complaining so much all the way over that I knew he was scared Mert was going to die. They’d known each other almost forty years. At the roadhouse they’d sit and play checkers by the hour, arguing over which one of them knew more about mining or where the best fishing was, or how to cook a porcupine or dress a hen.

The ground around Mert’s cabin was a junkyard of rotting sluice boxes and unused lumber. Like all the old-timers, Mert never liked to part with anything even though it was useless to him. Gear shafts and broken wagon wheels littered the ground along with a couple of pumps and an old steam engine, all of them covered with snow. And stacked in neat tiers was some heavy-gauge pipe that Uncle Arthur was always trying to get Mert to sell to him. Mert wouldn’t do it, though. It didn’t matter that the pipe was useless to him. It was part of his life.

“I’ll get that pipe, you just wait and see,” Uncle Arthur had told me once. “The day he dies it’s mine. We made a deal when we split up—first one of us that dies, the other gets his outfit. And missis, I can’t wait for the old fool to go.”

“You don’t mean that, Uncle Arthur,” I told him.

“I don’t, eh?”

He showed me how much he meant it when I was over at his cabin for dinner once. In a corner of the room was a coffin. “Cut the boards myself,” he told me proudly.

“How long have you been working on it?” I asked him. There were carvings all over it, of spades and mattocks, gold pans and sluice boxes. The work must have taken him years.

“Too long,” he said. “Every day the first thing I do when I go out the door is look to see if there’s smoke
comin’ from his chimney, but the ol’ fool just won’t die.”

Now that Mert was sick, he was heartbroken. He left me a short distance from the door. Before he walked away he said, “Missis, I’m sorry about what happened t’other night. Don’t blame it on Mert. He didn’t have aught to do with it.” I knew that without his telling me. Mert was just about the kindest and most harmless person in the area.

I had to knock a few times before Mert called out for me to come in. When I did I felt terrible. He lay on his cot, a couple of dirty pillows under his head. The stove was going full blast, and he was only a couple of feet away from it. When I said hello to him he shook his head, fighting off an attack of pain. I asked him if I could do anything for him but he shook his head again. His face under a few days’ growth of beard was pasty, and his waist-long hair, usually tied with a string, flowed over the pillow and all around him. The blue yachtsman’s cap that I’d never seen him without lay on the floor under his cot. His mouth kept falling open, and I could see by the way he’d clamp it shut that he was losing control over his jaw muscles.

The pain spasms finally passed, and after he took a couple of deep breaths, he said, “Like you to do me a favor—write somethin’ for me if you will. There’s pencil and pad in that top drawer … I’d write it myself,” he said as I went to the bureau, “but my eyes are a-goin’ bad.”

Even though he was dying, he was still ashamed to admit that he couldn’t read or write. I saw the letter he’d brought me to read a few months ago. It was tacked to the wall above the bureau along with some others he’d received in his lifetime. Some of them were so old the writing on them was yellow and the paper was shredding.

I got the pad and he told me to look inside of it. Opening it, I leafed through page after page of long division examples, some of them a whole page long. It’s what he’d come to school for—to learn long division. All his life, he’d told me, that was the only thing he
ever really wanted to learn, how to divide big numbers.

“I proved every one of ’em and they’re correct,” he said. “What do you think of that?” He was as proud as he could be.

“I think you really did it, Mert.” I sat down at the foot of the cot and found an empty page. “What do you want me to write?”

“My funeral service,” he said.

That hit me right between the eyes. Flustered, I said, “What for?”

“Cuz I’m gonna die.” He waved away any argument. “I’m gonna die an’ there’s no gettin’ away from it. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, I don’t know. But it’ll be soon.”

He was telling the truth, trying to be offhand about it, even a little tough, so I wouldn’t start pitying him.

“If you want to shed some tears you better go outside.”

“I’m not going to cry,” I said, “but if you don’t mind my asking, why do you want it done now?”

“Cuz it makes me sick the way everybody carries on when they plant ya—sayin’ all kinda lies, ’n’ the poor sap they’re plantin’ can’t say a word back.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Mert. I don’t really know anything about writing a funeral service.”

“It’s simple,” he said. “I’ll be a’lyin’ in here, up on that there table. All you gotta do is write down some things about me an’ Uncle Arthur’ll say ’em. That’s all there is to it.”

“What kind of service do you want?”

“Good one. Want some honest things said.”

“I meant religious, like a special psalm that you might—”

“Hell, no! Don’t want any of that organ music junk. Don’t believe in it. But you got the idea. I knew you were the one to do it.”

“But I don’t know what you want, Mert.”

“You say some things an’ I’ll tell you if it sounds right to me.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say. It seems to me that
if you really want an honest service you might know what’s best to say. You know yourself better than anybody else does.”

He thought about it. “That’s a good idea,” he said finally. “That’s a humdinger of an idea.” He paused, thinking. I kept pad and pencil ready.

“Say something like this,” he said. “Say I been a good miner … Say that all the time I been here in the Forty Mile I liked it here. Say everything’s been ?-one and that I didn’t have no kicks at all.”

He stopped and I scribbled it all down, then he thought again. “Say I wanted to mine an’ I mined. Say the only thing I wished was I’d struck some rich pay ’stead of just makin’ a livin’.”

After I got it all down I asked him if there was anything else. He shook his head.

“We should have some particulars,” I said. “When were you born?”

“Why you wanna know that?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to put it on your gravestone … Or maybe for legal reasons,” I added lamely.

“We don’t need that. I won’t be havin’ no gravestone. Say this instead. Say when I come into this country—’97 I think …” His eyes lit up as he remembered. “Say that there was gold everywhere you looked in those days—poor man’s gold, gold in the water you washed with, gold in the mud on your boots …”

By the time I finished putting it down he was staring past me vacantly, still thinking about the past. His mouth hung slack.

“Mert …”

His jaw clamped shut and he saw me again. “If you want to,” he said, “you can put in what I done while I was here—minin’, fishin’, an’ huntin’.”

“Don’t you think there ought to be
something
religious?”

“Fine with me,” he said. “We’ll take care of it right now. You put in there that I don’t believe in church or ministers nohow. Don’t believe nothin’ about ’em. Say that.”

“That’s the way you want it?”

“That’s the way … When I meet my Maker, I’ll
meet ’im the way I always did. By myself. Them church busybodies been gettin’ in the way too long.”

He was hit by pain again and when it was over he looked as if all the blood in his veins had turned to dust. “Say one more thing.” He spoke so softly that I could hardly hear him. “Say that everything I got goes to Art—Arthur Spratt—my friend these many years … He’s to take charge of my funeral. He knows what I want.”

I wrote it down and he scrawled his mark under it.

On the way back I couldn’t help thinking how brave Mert was. He had next to nothing, a dirty old cabin out in the wilds someplace and nobody to take care of him in his old age. But he never complained, just kept on going year after year.

When I got back to my place, I almost missed seeing the skis leaning up against the wall on the porch. I had to look at them twice before I realized whose they were, saw the holes for the extra straps Fred had put on them for me. For just a second I couldn’t believe it, but when I opened the door there he was, sitting on the couch having a cup of coffee.

He’d come back from Steel Creek a few hours ago, he said.

“Why’d you have to come over now?” I said. “I look terrible.”

“You look pretty as ever to me.”

“Can you stay for supper?” I asked him.

“No, I haven’t been home yet,” he said.

The three of us talked a while longer, and then he asked me if I’d like to go for a walk.

“Sure.”

“If anybody’s gonna take a walk it’ll be me.” Nancy said to me. “You already had your walk. I’ll go on over to the roadhouse.”

“Sure.”

I almost asked her to stay. Even before she went out I could tell something was coming, something I didn’t want to hear. “Feels like I haven’t seen you for years,” I said after she was gone.

“Feels that way to me too,” he said. He was all tensed up and nervous.

“Want some more coffee?”

“Thanks.”

“Since when did you get so polite?” I said it as a joke, but it didn’t sound funny. It sounded stupid.

He got up from the couch and went over to the potbellied stove while I poured his coffee. I heard him open it up, then take a couple of pieces of wood from the woodbox and heft them in.

“Anne …”

I put his cup down on the edge of the cookstove. Somehow I had a good idea what he was going to say, and I didn’t turn around. I braced myself, waiting for it.

“I’m going away,” he said.

“Where to?”

“Steel Creek. There’s some guys doing some winter mining there and they can use another hand.”

“How long will you be there?”

“Till June.”

Till June. I’d be gone then.

I still didn’t want to ton around, but I picked up his cup from the stove and put it down on the table. I was as numb as if somebody had grabbed the back of my neck and was shaking me.

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow.”

That hand on the back of my neck felt tighter than ever. The gas lamp threw our shadows on the wall. I was almost surprised to see mine there. I felt as if I’d faded away to nothing.

“I don’t want to go, Anne. I don’t want to go at all. But I have to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Not once these people turn against you, and that’s what they’re doing. Come spring you won’t have a job in Eagle or maybe anywhere else in Alaska. They can write letters to the commissioner that’d curl your hair.”

“They already have. I’m not scared of them.”

“I am. Not for me. For you. For you, for my mother and my sister.”

I think I must have groaned then, I felt so awful. “Oh Fred …”

He was as miserable as I was. “Don’t you see, Anne? There’s nothing else I can do. I’ve thought it over and over. I can’t do you anything but harm. I don’t have a thing right now. I can’t give you anything, I can’t take care of you.”

“That’s what your mother said to me.”

“There was a nurse up at Fort Yukon. About a year ago. She was white. She fell in love with an Indian minister, a really fine man. Everybody liked him, but once they found out that he and that nurse were in love with each other they made life so unbearable for the two of them that she finally went Outside and the Bishop had to transfer him to another parish. You see what I’m trying to say?”

“No.” I knew he was doing it for me and that he thought it was the right thing, but he was wrong. And yet I didn’t know how to make him see it.

“I’d better go,” he said finally.

I moved over to him and my arms went around him. “Please, Fred. Don’t.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t have to.”

I knew he’d made up his mind and I kept trying to think of a way I could change it. Maybe he didn’t know how much I loved him, I thought. Maybe if he did—if he really knew—he wouldn’t be able to leave.

“Hold me …?” My mouth searched for his and I pressed myself against him, hoping it would tell him how much I loved him, hoping he’d realize there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to make him stay. At first I thought he was responding, reaching for me. Then he gripped my arms and held me away from him. “Anne, will you try to understand …!”

“You don’t have to go right now,” I said desperately. “We can talk a while. Just stay until Nancy gets back.”

He hesitated. He didn’t want to leave, and for a moment I thought maybe he wouldn’t. But then he let my arms go and he was moving to the door. I didn’t want to beg him, and I guess I should have had more pride than to do it, but right then I didn’t care about
pride or anything else. I didn’t care what Miss Ivy or anybody else had ever told me about what was right for a self-respecting girl to do and what was wrong. All I cared about was him, holding him and having him close to me. If I could just keep him close to me now, I thought, he’d stay.

“Please, Fred,” I asked him, “don’t go. I love you so much. It isn’t fair.”

“Anne, don’t let’s do it like this,” he said, his voice hard. “I’m going.”

That stopped me almost as if he’d slapped me. I was acting cheap. I let him go. He said something else before he went out and closed the door behind him, but I didn’t listen. I heard him walk off the porch and move off around the back and I kept thinking it wasn’t fair. I’d never loved anybody as much in my entire life as I loved him and now he was going away from me for the stupidest reason in the whole world.

“It isn’t fair,” I said, starting to cry. “It isn’t fair at all.”

It wasn’t until later on, long after Nancy came home and the two of us went to bed, that I realized what he’d said before he went out. He’d said,
I love you.