Tisha (43 page)

Chuck’s head popped out of the sleeping blanket. He eased himself out of it, shivered, then slipped on his parka. He watched while I tried to get Patricia to take the bottle again.

“Baby no hungry,” he said.

“She is hungry, Chuck. That’s why she’s crying. She hasn’t eaten in a couple of days. I don’t know what to do.”

Chuck wiggled his fingers in front of her. She stopped crying to look at them, then he put a finger in her hand. She grabbed onto it and held it for a few moments before she let it go.

“Tiny liddle baby,” he said.

“Did you ever see anything like this happen?” I asked him. “I mean where a baby wouldn’t eat?” I was so desperate I was asking an eight year old for help. He shook his head.

I tried the nipple again, but it was the same. She took it, then spat it out and started crying. I handed the bottle to Chuck and put her over my shoulder. The bottle seemed bigger in his hands, awfully big. Maybe that was the trouble. She hadn’t eaten in two or three days and she was weak. Maybe she was too weak to hold onto the nipple. “Chuck, get me the first-aid kit. It’s over there on the shelf.”

He brought it over. There was a medicine dropper in it. Unscrewing the cap on the bottle, I asked Chuck to hold it, pulled some milk up into the dropper and put it in her mouth. She wouldn’t take it, but I kept at it. For I don’t know how long the milk kept dripping out of her mouth. Then when I was almost ready to give up she
began holding on to some of it. First just a few drops, then more.

“She’s taking it, Chuck.”

He leaned over her, interested. She fussed and fumed, frustrated every time I pulled the dropper out to fill it up again, but she was taking it, all right. When she dropped off to sleep there was about an inch and a half of milk gone from the bottle. She hadn’t taken much, hardly more than a couple of mouthfuls, but at least she’d taken something.

I put her back in the fruit crate, then set about getting a meal ready. The dog came over to the stove while I was cooking. I sent him out to do his business and he was at the door again almost right away, scratching and whining to get in.

Ethel woke up just before the meal was ready and the three of us sat down and ate—biscuits and stew. When we were done Chuck and I did the dishes and Ethel sat beside Patricia, talking to her. I couldn’t seem to get my mind going. What I needed to clear it was about twelve straight hours of sleep. I felt as if I was going to burst out crying any minute. I wondered where Fred was, how he was making out. If the weather kept up like this it could take him four or five days to reach Forty Mile, with stopovers for sleep. If it eased up he might make it in two.

With the dishes done the three of us sat on the cot while I fed Patricia again with the medicine dropper. Chuck was thumbing through a yellowed magazine. He pushed it over to me and pointed to a page. It was a drawing of a trim, neatly dressed housewife standing alongside of an electric washing machine. She was barely touching the clothes as they went through the wringer and dropped into the laundry basket.

“You like?” Chuck asked me.

“I sure would,” I said.

“One day,” he said, “I have lotsa money. I buy for you.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“You no more wash and wash and wash.” He imitated me scrubbing at the washboard. “How much cost it that?”

I looked at the price. “A hundred and two dollars.”

He thought about it, but didn’t say anything.

The Terwilligers’ dog woke up and sniffed the air. Then it began to whine. A few seconds later a wolf howled somewhere. It wasn’t the long lonely cry, but the excited hunting call and it was answered right away by the other wolves. I wondered if they had somehow found their way into the slough bed.

Chuck said something to Ethel in Indian. She answered,
“Aha”
—yes. I thought it was something about the wolves. I asked him what he’d said.

“I tell Et’el this good place, ask she like stay here. She say yiss.”

He was still worried about going back to Chicken. I wondered what
would
happen when we got back, what Mr. Vaughn and Angela Barrett would say. But I didn’t really care one way or the other. They didn’t seem important anymore, not after all this. The only one I was concerned about was Maggie—what she’d be going through when she found out about Jennie.

Time passed. We couldn’t go outside, so we made the best of staying inside. To pass the time we played games—Hot and Cold, Hide the Thimble. Their favorite game was one they made up themselves. They’d run across the room and I’d try to give them a light whack on the bottom as they went by. If I missed they won.

Each time Patricia woke up, every hour or so, she took a little more milk. I kept trying her with the nipple, until finally—it must have been almost a day later—she took it. She finished a whole bottle, then threw half of it back up, but she was getting stronger. In the next few hours she took two more half-filled bottles.

The only thing I’d have wished for was some uninterrupted sleep. Patricia wouldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time even after she started taking the bottle. Sometimes she’d cry for what seemed hours, and I’d walk up and down with her in a daze untill she settled into an uneasy sleep and I’d do the same. I started to get cabin fever, snapping at Chuck and Ethel for no reason at all, then hating myself for it. They were helping out as much as they could, bringing
in wood and snow, helping with the dishes and keeping things in order. Chuck even warmed the bottle and helped me feed the baby once.

After two days of it the time came when I just couldn’t bring myself to wake up. Patricia began to cry when we were all asleep. I nudged Chuck and asked him to put the bottle in the saucepan, then I gave Patricia to him and told him to wake me when the bottle was ready. I ducked down into the sleeping bag and that was all I remembered until I woke up some time later to hear her crying again. I didn’t know how long I’d slept but Ethel and Chuck were awake. She was sitting on their sleeping bag holding Patricia. Chuck was at the stove, warming a bottle.

“Chuck, how long have I been asleep?”

He shrugged. “Long time, I think.”

I got up, feeling pretty good. “Don’t you have any idea how long?”

He shook his head. “You give me baby. I give milk for him. He go sleep, I go sleep. He wake up, I wake up, Et’el wake up. You not wake up. You have one good sleep.”

I took Patricia from Ethel. “You and Ethel fed her?”

“Yiss. I do good?”

I hugged him. “You did marvelous. I needed that sleep bad.”

He beamed. “You happy me, I glad.”

“Happy? I adore you. And that goes for you too,” I added to Ethel.

Only then did I notice how quiet it was. The wind had stopped blowing. I went to the door. Outside the sky was bright with stars, the air still. It was so bitterly cold that my breath snapped into crystals. I came right back in.

From then on I wasn’t worried about a thing. I knew we’d make out and that someone would come for us eventually. All we had to do was wait.

The next day the weather was lovely. The sun shone bright in a cloudless sky and it was warm enough to walk around with parka hoods down. Chuck and Ethel went out early and busied themselves building a “roadhouse,” then played hunter for a while. In the afternoon,
I brought one of the sleeping bags outside, laid it against a stump and just sat taking in the sun with Patricia on my lap. The sun felt so good that I started to drowse, listening to Chuck make the sounds of a rifle as he tried to “shoot” Ethel the Moose or Ethel the Caribou for the nth time. I heard her squeal with delight as he missed her, then silence as she fell and he started to carry her back to the roadhouse for skinning and eating. Then I heard another sound, a sound I’d become so familiar with the past few months that I knew I wasn’t hearing things. It was coming from the direction of the river. I opened my eyes to see Chuck and Ethel standing stock still, listening. They’d heard it too.

It was Mr. Strong’s sled. Chuck let out a yell and ran down towards the river and disappeared. A few minutes later I heard him yelling and calling to Mr. Strong, the sound of the bells on the sled getting louder and louder.

I ran into the cabin and put Patricia on the cot, then went out to wait until the two of them appeared, making their way up towards me, Chuck hopping and jumping like a sparrow, Mr. Strong clumping along after him. I was so happy to see him that I threw myself into his arms and almost knocked him over.

“Now, madam,” he cajoled, “don’t take on so. The situation is well in hand. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

He hadn’t seen Fred, he said, but Fred had left word where I was at Steel Creek.

He stayed long enough to bring Elmer’s body into the cabin, and there he left it covered with a blanket, the knife still clutched in Elmer’s frozen hand. Then we started out.

We stopped only once on the way, at O’Shaughnessy’s, and then only long enough to take a hot meal and a short rest before we went on again.

Later on, a few days after we were back and school was open again, the one thing that stuck in my mind was the moment when the settlement came into view. Ethel and I and Patricia were tucked away on one side of the sled towards the back, where Mr. Strong had
made room for us among a whole load of parcel-post packages and dry goods. We were wrapped up pretty warm, the tarpaulin top over our heads like a tent. Chuck was sitting up in front with Mr. Strong. I didn’t know we were almost there until the sled stopped and Chuck came crawling back along the side of the sled and pulled up the tarpaulin. He didn’t want to be all alone up there with Mr. Strong when we came in.

When he lifted the tarp, there was the settlement in the distance. Chimney smoke had darkened the snow all around it, making it look like a gray little island. Sure enough, everybody was waiting, a bunch of black dots speckled in front of the post office. When we came nearer the whole place looked strange to me, as if I’d been away much longer than five or six days. I felt as if I’d left it a long time ago, almost as a little girl, and now I was coming back all grown up.

The horses started slowing down automatically as we neared the post office, and I lifted the tarp up to let everybody see we were in the back. But we didn’t stop there. Mr. Strong let out a shout and I heard his whip crack. The sled jerked forward and I caught a flash of the surprised look on everybody’s face as we went by—Mr. Vaughn’s all displeased at seeing Chuck and Ethel, Angela Barrett’s screwed up in anger. Mr. Strong halted the sled in front of the roadhouse and he’d already jumped down and was pulling the tarp back from us when everybody came running in.

I was too stiff to move, and there everybody was, staring at me and the children, Mrs. Purdy startled, wondering where Fred was, nobody saying a word. I had Patricia beside me, all swaddled in a wolf robe with just an opening for her to breathe, so nobody saw her until I picked her up. Like everyone else, Maggie Carew and her husband had come running. As soon as Maggie saw what I was holding she knew right away it was Patricia and the life seemed to drain right out of her. Everybody else realized it too and they made way for her. I handed the baby down to her and she took her from me, her eyes asking the questions she couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud.

Mr. Strong lifted me down from the sled and after
that I hardly knew what was going on. Everybody was pressing forward, Mr. Carew asking me in a croaking voice where Jennie and Elmer were, Mrs. Purdy wanting to know about Fred, all the faces around me stunned, none of them angry anymore. Then Chuck and Ethel were beside me and Mr. Strong was herding the three of us into the roadhouse and trying to keep people back, telling them to give me a chance to get inside and warm up before they made me answer all their questions.

For the whole first week I was back Maggie Carew made me and the children come over to the roadhouse for supper. She said that I’d been through an ordeal and that she wanted to make sure I had plenty of good hot food and didn’t wear myself out. I didn’t want her to go to any trouble for me, but she insisted. Her husband had left with Mr. Strong the next day, headed for Dawson, and she was all alone except for Patricia and the children. Having me there helped her feel better, she said, helped her feel closer to Jennie.

She blamed herself for what had happened. God was punishing her, she said, for something she’d done. He must have been, she insisted, because Jennie was the dearest and sweetest girl in the world, and had never harmed a soul. So she, Maggie, must have done something wrong. She tried not to keep asking me whether I thought Jennie would be all right or not, but she couldn’t stop herself. “What do you honestly think, Annie,” she’d ask me over and over. “You think she’ll pull through?”

No matter how many times I told her I thought she would, she kept torturing herself by asking me more
questions: how badly frozen had Jennie’s leg been? Her face? If she did pull through, did I think she’d lose her leg or part of her face? All I could tell her was that I didn’t know. When I told her how Jennie had tried to smile she broke down and wept.

Even when Fred came back we didn’t know much more. He pulled into the settlement in the early afternoon eight days later, completely bushed, and a few minutes later we were all in the roadhouse listening as he told us what had happened. He’d mushed Jennie as far as Forty Mile, just as he’d set out to. There he ran into Percy de Wolfe, which was a stroke of luck. Known as the Iron Man of the North, de Wolfe carried the mail up and down the Yukon between White Horse and Eagle, and he had the fastest team in that part of the country. Almost minutes after Fred arrived, they transferred Jennie to his sled and he’d mushed off with her to Dawson. There was a telegraph station at Forty Mile and they’d wired the authorities at Dawson that Percy was carrying an injured woman who was going to need treatment. “Before I left,” Fred said, “Dawson wired back that there’d be a doctor at the hospital ready to work on her right away.”

It wasn’t until the end of March, three weeks later, that Maggie received a telegram from her husband. By then the days were sunny and long. Gentle chinook winds were melting the snow so fast that traveling by sled was almost impossible except at night when the slush froze up. Mr. Strong brought the telegram in on his last sled trip of the season. It didn’t go into any details. It just said that Jennie had been in very serious condition for a while, but that she was going to pull through. Mr. Strong would tell her the details, the telegram ended. Mr. Strong broke it to Maggie as gently as he could. Jennie’s face wasn’t going to be scarred, he said, but they’d had to amputate her foot to well above the ankle.