Tisha (44 page)

Maggie took it pretty hard, as might be expected, and it worked a big change in her. Not that she became soft, just a little more tolerant. I knew that deep down she still felt that I had no business having Chuck and Ethel with me, that I was making a mistake, but
she didn’t look at them anymore as if they carried the plague or something worse. She even had them come over to the roadhouse every so often to play with Jimmy and Willard. Everybody else who’d been mad at me kind of eased up a little too. Maggie had a lot to do with it, I was sure. She swung weight in the settlement, and when people saw her having me and the children come over to the roadhouse they started acting a little more sociable. Then one night when I went over to the roadhouse to pick up Chuck and Ethel, Maggie asked me a question that surprised me.

Mr. Vaughn and Angela were there playing cribbage, and Uncle Arthur was helping Chuck clean the new .22 rifle I’d bought for him. I’d been so proud of him for how he’d acted during our “ordeal,” as Maggie called it, that I’d taken him into Mr. Strong’s store and told him to pick out anything he wanted. I’d had some misgivings when he chose the .22, but he knew how to handle it. He’d had one ever since he’d been five.

Ethel and Willard were playing back in the bunk-room, having a pillow fight and Chuck’s rifle was all apart, so I had a cup of tea while Uncle Arthur helped him reassemble it. Right out of the blue Maggie popped the question.

“You done anything about buying yourself a cabin in Eagle?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

“How come?” she asked me. “They don’t have any teacherage there for ya. You gotta provide your own quarters.”

“I know,” I said, “but I still don’t know whether I’ll be teaching at Eagle.”

“What makes you think you won’t?” she said.

She knew the answer to that as well as I and everybody else in that room did. Angela and Mr. Vaughn didn’t look up from their game, but they were listening to every word. They weren’t any crazier about me than they’d been before, but at least they said hello now whenever they met me.

“Well, nobody told me I
wouldn’t,”
I said, “but I didn’t think the chances were too good.”

Maggie’s Hp curled into that disgruntled sneer of
hers. “I know everybody on that schoolboard,” she said, “and if they got any objections I wanna hear about it … How much you want to pay for a cabin if they take ya?”

“I haven’t even thought about it,” I said.

“How big a one might you want?”

“Well … big enough so maybe Chuck and Ethel could have their own room.”

She didn’t bat an eye. “What do you think, Arnold?” she asked Mr. Vaughn deliberately. “Think it’ll be easy to find one?”

He mumbled something and Maggie said, “I didn’t hear ya.”

“I said probably,” he said.

“We’ll find you one,” Maggie said. “Far as I’m concerned a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush. We know what we got with you. Lord only knows what they’re liable to send out from Juneau if we let’m … From what I hear about that Rooney, she’s a real darb. Pinches the kids till they’re black and blue and goes ga-ga over everything that wears pants.”

Having Maggie on my side went a long way. Nobody came up to me and told me they thought any better of me than they had before. That wasn’t people’s way. It was just something I could feel, something in their manner. Like at the next dance we had. We didn’t hold one until the Friday after Maggie got the telegram from her husband. Up to then it just hadn’t seemed right to have one, to be dancing and laughing and having a good time when almost right next door Maggie would be sitting and wondering if Jennie was going to live or die.

When everybody came in they gave me a big hello or a howdy instead of just a grudging nod as they usually did, and a couple of them even talked about the weather with me. Now that spring was getting close everybody had their own idea about when the river was going to break up or when the creeks would be running so that sluice boxes could be set up. Nobody ever ran out of things to say about it and they didn’t generally talk about it with cheechakos or somebody they didn’t want to talk with in the first place. One or two
even made a point of admiring the map of Chicken on the wall. As big as it was, they’d never seemed to notice it before. Now they said they’d never seen anything like it, and how clever all the kids were to have made it.

Chuck was making out better too. His standing among the kids was upped practically from the first day of school. They stopped snickering at him and making fun of his accent. In fact for the first few days the boys all chummed up to him, wanting to hear all the gory details of how he’d found Jennie and Elmer and how Elmer had looked when he was dead and frozen. Chuck didn’t have too much to say about it and didn’t do any bragging, which impressed the kids more than if he’d gone on and on about it.

The only thing that didn’t change at all was the way things were between Fred and me.

“If you wanna teach in Eagle,” Maggie had told me in private, “you better behave. You got away with takin’ those kids. Start chasin’ after that half-breed again and you won’t get away with anything. Now don’t go givin’ me any Bolshevik speeches. I’m givin’ you the straight goods.”

I didn’t see him again for almost three weeks after he got back, and then only when he came in to pick up some hardware he’d ordered from Mr. Strong. He’d made up his mind he was going to stay away from me for my sake and that was that. No stain on my reputation was going to come from
him,
no sir. He showed up for the dance and when we danced together you’d have thought we were doing a minuet he held me so far away. I had the hope in the back of my mind that maybe Uncle Arthur would put on the
Home Sweet Home
waltz for us, but I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. It didn’t matter that Fred had saved Jennie’s life and even risked his own: he was still a half-breed and I was still pure Northern womanhood.

Sure enough, came mid-April Mr. Strong brought me the news that I’d been accepted to teach at Eagle. I was happy about it. Yet at the same time I wasn’t. Chuck and Ethel were worrying me. Ever since I’d
brought them back to Chicken we hadn’t been getting along.

More than ever, I wished that Nancy was still with me. Between the two of us we’d have been able to figure out what was wrong and do something about it. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out by myself. I had to keep after them all the time—to dress neatly, to be clean, to help me keep my quarters in order and to mind their manners around people. I wasn’t doing it just to be bossy. It was for their own good. Even though the uproar over them had died down, most people still looked at them differently than they looked at other children. If they did something wrong or got into mischief it wasn’t because they were kids and didn’t know any better. It was because they were Indian kids. Almost everybody felt that way, even people who liked them.

One day when Uncle Arthur gave Chuck some candy, he waved his hand tolerantly when I told Chuck to say thank you. “Don’t pay it any mind, missis,” he said, “they just don’t know any better.” He didn’t say “he.” He said “they”—those Indians. It was the same way with other people. Every time Chuck or Ethel made a mistake it wasn’t because things were new to them and they didn’t know the ropes. “They” just didn’t know any better.

It put me on the defensive. It shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have paid it any mind and seen it for what it was, ignorance, but I couldn’t. Stupidly, I felt that any criticism of them was criticism of me and I decided I wasn’t going to give people a chance to criticize. I made Chuck and Ethel toe the mark. Once we were in Eagle they’d have to take their place alongside of other children and I wanted them to be able to do it as fast as possible. Nobody was going to laugh at them or point out how different they were if I had anything to do with it.

I really kept after them. At the same time I nearly worked myself to death ironing dresses for Ethel, scrubbing, washing, and keeping my quarters neat so that people would have a good impression when they came.
I was especially tough with Chuck, always reminding him to hang up his clothes, not to throw things on the floor, to mind his manners, speak correctly, be good.

The two of them kept fighting me on everything, or at least that’s the way it seemed. Ethel started soiling her dresses, eating half the time with her hands and getting food all over her. She stopped picking up English too, and pretended she didn’t know what shoes or socks were. One time she got up on a chair, pulled down some of her newly-ironed dresses from the wall and stomped all over them. Chuck changed too. I had to force him to wash up all the time and getting him to take a bath was a major battle. He became lazy in his schoolwork and surly around the house. I even had to remind him to bring in wood where before he was always one step ahead of me. I began to feel that he and Ethel were in league against me, whispering together in Indian, laughing between themselves. If I asked Chuck what they were laughing at he said it was nothing. Sometimes I even thought of sending them back to the Indian village I was so disgusted.

Something had to give, and it did.

They both ran away. It wasn’t the first time for Chuck. The week before, he’d left the house and not come back until almost nightfall. Fit to be tied, I told him that if he ever did it again I’d give him a spanking.

This time he didn’t come back. When dusk settled in at about eight they were still gone. Uncle Arthur and a few others helped me look for them. We tramped through the wet woods, yelling and calling, but there was no sign of them. Around midnight everybody went home, telling me not to worry. “They’ll turn up, missis,” Uncle Arthur assured me. He and everybody else promised to help me look again in the morning if they didn’t. It was the beginning of May, the nights short and kind of dusky—daylight. I stayed out until past two before I gave up and went home to change out of wet footgear and go looking again.

I couldn’t think about sleep. Just the thought that something had happened to the two of them kept me on the verge of panic Over and over I imagined them lying at the bottom of a cliff, or swept away by a swollen
creek, or attacked by a bear. And over and over I asked myself why they’d done it. I’d been tough on them, I knew that, but I didn’t think I’d been bad enough to make Chuck do something like this. I had a cup of tea and I forced myself to sit down and try to think calmly where they might have gone. The first thought that occurred to me was that they might have headed for the Indian village. A couple of times when I’d bawled Chuck out he’d threatened to. If they were headed there it might take all day to catch up with them.

The sun was nudging in the window, tinging everything with gold. I looked around the room, something I hadn’t done before. I didn’t see Ethel’s little red monkey around anywhere. It wasn’t in the schoolroom either when I looked, so she must have taken it with her. I noticed that Chuck’s rifle was gone too. And his parka. The last time I’d seen him he’d been wearing his mackinaw, which meant he must have taken the parka out some time before he left. The more I looked around the more I noticed things missing: a few of Ethel’s dresses, a dress suit I’d bought for Chuck, a couple of blankets, two pillow cases. There was only a little bread left in the breadbox, and I knew there should have been two loaves. Chuck must have been removing things bit by bit over the last few days and caching them somewhere. My heart started to pound: they’d taken too many things with them to carry them all at once, especially if they were going to the Indian village. If they were anywhere it was someplace in the vicinity. And if I was right there was only one place where they could have gone. I ran out.

The spicy odor of willow buds was in the air when I reached the trail that led down to Mary Angus’ shack. The place was in worse shape than ever. Someone had taken out the window frame, and the stovepipe was gone too. As soon as I saw the place, though, I knew they were in there: the wolf robe was draped in the opening where the window used to be.

I pushed the door open and there they were, the two of them lying on a bed of spruce boughs, huddled together under a couple of blankets. Chuck’s .22 was
on the wall, along with their clothes. The food they’d brought with them was piled in a box.

I bent over them and stared at them a long time before I woke Chuck up. They were beautiful. I’d never realized how beautiful. I remembered them living here with their mother. They’d been cold and hungry more often than not, but that hadn’t mattered to them because they’d had
her,
the one person in the world they’d loved and trusted, the one person who knew them and understood them. Here in this shack she’d touched them and held them. Not me. Her. They hadn’t asked for me. Even though I was the only one in the world who cared anything about them, they hadn’t asked me to take them. I was a stranger to them. I fed them and gave them clothes, but I was still a stranger. So they’d run away from me and come back to where there was nothing but a memory—the memory of someone who’d held them close, spoke to them softly and loved them the way Granny Hobbs had loved me.

“Chuck …”

He woke up slowly. I watched his eyes, wanting to see what would be in them when he was aware of me, whether he’d be looking at a stranger or at someone who cared for him. What I saw hurt. He just stared at me the way I used to stare at my father when I wondered if he felt mean, telling myself that I didn’t care what he said.

“Morning, Chuck,” I said.

“What you want, Tisha?” It was a simple question, no more than that.

“I came to take you home,” I said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I stay for a while. Hunt. Get meat. Then I go Indian village.”

“The Indian village is pretty far away.” “You think I not find?”

“I guess you could. You’re a pretty smart boy. I just wonder why you want to go there.”

“I go live with Indian mudda.”

He meant Lame Sarah, the old woman he’d lived
with in the Indian village. “I see. I guess that means you don’t want to live with me anymore.”