Читать книгу Under Nushagak Bluff - Mia Heavener - Страница 6

The tide is still going out, so we may have a while on this sandbar. Not much we can do now but sit and wait, because there isn’t a fishing boat for miles. I don’t see one, do you? Well, don’t blame me. You’re the one who needed to get off shore, who wanted to run from the village. Now here we are—in the middle of the channel with our kicker prop run aground and our hull sucked to the silt. It’s not good to have your stern anchored, but you already knew that. Let’s worry about capsizing when the tide shifts. It will probably happen. I don’t mean to scare you, but it will. You know how it goes when waves hit you from both angles. And all it takes is that one rogue wave. Happened to a crew out in Kvichak Bay last year. Remember?

My girl, I’m sorry. I’ll start with that. One, for maybe cutting your life short. But if we get off this bar there will be a time when you’ll want to know your father. And you will look for him in the eyes of strangers and cannery men to see if they match your own. And you’ll ask and beg me to tell you where he is. You might even want to hit me. But I’ll have to tell you, I don’t know. The story that you are really searching for doesn’t sleep with me. Your story is different, one that could be told by the shape of the beach we just left. It is years before me. And it begins with a storm—one of those kind that everyone remembers.

Yet, few outside the Bristol Bay region in Alaska knew about this rare summer storm that gutted the beach of Nushagak Village during the height of the red salmon season. The rising tide could have washed away the dock and all the homes along the shore, and the reports in Anchorage would have still been about the new air navigation silo that recently opened in King Salmon. The Japanese and the Russians had been seen scouting out the islands farther down the chain, and territory lawmakers were anxious to announce Alaska as the first line of defense.

But all the talk of self-defense and the war coming to the territory matters little to our story. As you know, the war came and went, but on that day it was the storm that brought Anne Girl out of her house. Very few things caused Anne Girl to panic, especially a few droplets of rain. Not even the crossways wind made her shudder. But on that day, in that storm, Anne Girl felt a change coming her way. Perhaps it was the seagulls climbing and diving that made her think of her future. I know it’s hard to understand what I am getting at, but one day you will understand why I am telling you. You will want to know.

Coastal storms bring gifts. For Anne Girl, the sharp smell of salt and bloated salmon brought in from the storm would be forever linked to John Nelson’s stringy, yellow hair. Before she had even met him, she felt his arrival and blamed him for all the scattered driftwood, the knotted net, and her mother’s blunt tap on her shoulder, telling her that it was time to inspect their skiff.

Although downpours and floods were common in the bay, they rarely occurred in the summer when the coast was littered with double-enders and drift nets, when the fish were so thick you could walk across the bay on their dorsal fins. But when the swells curled into themselves and the sky rattled with lightning that only God could have sparked, all the fishermen in the bay, including Anne Girl and her mother, Marulia, pulled up their boats to wait it out.

Around the same time that Anne Girl and her mother were tying an anchor to their coiled net so that it wouldn’t float away, John Nelson grounded his sailboat several miles down the beach. Anne Girl felt the bottom hit and clutched her stomach as the boat skidded onto the gravel, grinding her abdomen into a knot. Her mother nudged her, and said that now wasn’t the time to rest. The water was rising.

Two days after, when the clouds parted and the mountains across the bay could be seen rising out of the silty green water, Anne Girl and Marulia returned to their skiff. Marulia could hardly wait until the whitecaps no longer frothed before gathering her boots and gloves. She poked Anne Girl with a bent finger that was stiff from years of sewing fur parkas. “We have to see if we still have a skiff left. The ghosts from the Aleut wars might have sailed off with it. Or maybe they drowned on the way. Better yet, huh.”

Anne Girl peered out the window and saw only grayness beyond the waving grasses. Although the beating wind had paused for the moment, the rain still raced towards them like shooting pebbles. There seemed to be a lot more weather coming with the promise of more wind. Even the gulls squawking above agreed with her, but Anne Girl wasn’t about to say anything. Her mother already had her gloves on and a hood wrapped around her face like a tight bonnet. She tapped her finger impatiently on the door frame as she waited for Anne Girl to get ready.

Outside, the air was damp with hints of an early winter—the fire-weeds were bent low and their tips had begun to seed. Anne Girl followed her mother down the grassy path toward the beach. The grass stalks were wet, and she felt the cold rise in little bumps on her legs, numbing her skin. But Marulia walked as if she didn’t notice, as if she were floating across the grasses to the beach.

Marulia’s home was exactly in the middle of the village, in the lower section of the bluff, and from her bedroom window Anne Girl could hear the entire village play out its drama before her. During the summers, when the cannery was open, she could see all the movement in the new part of the village, where the houses progressively grew taller on stilts and the land flattened into a beach that projected out into the bay. Where the houses ended, the cannery began with rows of buildings that always had fresh, painted siding and clean white steps. Even at midnight, Anne Girl could see the cannery working around the clock, taking in salmon and more salmon. And if she shifted her head slightly toward the bluff, she could see the years worn into the grassy paths and trace the village’s movement up the slope as it tried to escape the annual floods. But even with her generous view, she always felt too far from either side of the village. The bluff side and the sod homes with crumbling clumps of grass and dirt reminded her of the tundra across the bay, where it was said that the salmonberries grew so thick that they could not be picked. There was the chapel, a clinic, and newly whitewashed homes that were too square and clean for her. There was an order on that side of the village that made her feel as if her qaspeq was a sloppy shirt rather than a loose pullover that allowed the salt of the bay to move through her.

When the grassy trail met the gravelly beach, Marulia paused in mid-stride. Her eyes fell toward the cannery and the cluster of buildings that were oddly silent on this day. Usually at the height of the summer, the noise was endless, reaching across the bay with an arm of money. As more fish were delivered, the canning machines coughed and steamed all night long, louder than the seagulls who squawked as they claimed the discarded guts, eyes, and heads. It was a never-ending chatter between the cannery and the gulls. Everyone wondered how the missionaries could stand to listen to all the noise rattling their windows. It was worse than the screeching coming from the chapel organ.

Marulia clicked her tongue at the chapel’s growing steeple as if it were a large tooth feeding on the villagers. She wondered why they stayed when their congregation was a rotating tide of drunks and repentant sobers. It made her dizzy just thinking about it.

“I hear there’s a new one staying with them,” she said, pointing to the missionaries’ home. “Got lost or something in the storm. How can anyone get lost here?”

Anne Girl made no answer, but she grinned at her mother’s backside, because her senses were correct about the new man in the village. Anne Girl’s abdomen hadn’t stopped fluttering since the day of the storm, and all the teas on the tundra gave her no relief. Of course this had to be because he was staying with the Killweathers. Who in their right mind would want to stay with them? He probably had nowhere to go.

She had been inside the Killweather house only once. When Nora and Frederik first arrived, everyone visited them, brought them akutaq, stinky head, and secrets of the tundra so they could look at Nora’s pale face and Frederik’s glasses. Anne Girl hadn’t brought anything to share, because she had only wanted to see the inside of their home. Nora, with her long skirts that danced around her body when she walked, gave the impression that her house was pink and smelled of June. Anne Girl expected flowers in vases on every windowsill and honey set neatly on the table. Yet, although the missionary’s wife had honey on her table, her house wasn’t nearly what Anne Girl had expected, as the main room was a small, yellow square with a narrow doorway to the kitchen. How much Anne Girl had wanted to see the kitchen, to know if it was as clean as Nora carried herself. She wanted to count how many pots and pans Nora had, to see if it explained the many boxes that followed the Killweathers upon their arrival. But Nora wasn’t giving tours, and all Anne Girl could do was stare at the large cross on the wall and wonder why it didn’t have two crosses like the one she had seen at the cannery store. Marulia had said that the cross was “them Russians” still praying for fish, since they took all the seals. This cross had been different. Everything about these missionaries was different. They planned to stay.

“Maybe he knows them,” Anne Girl said, although she didn’t think so. She felt that this new man was an accident waiting to collide, and he probably ended up at the Killweathers’ because he didn’t know any better. She wondered when they would finally meet, because there was no way she was going to invite herself over for tea.

Two steps behind her mother, she walked quickly along the shore, feeling the wind beat against her cheeks, until Marulia stopped suddenly. She pointed at the loose gravel, where their skiff was supposed to be anchored. And it was anchored; it was more secure than they had hoped, and Anne Girl could hear her mother’s teeth grinding in long, slow circles, filing her teeth down to her nerves.

A double ender turned on its side balanced on top of their skiff; the mast dug deep into the gravel as if it had finally found its roots on the beach. A large wave had picked up the boat and placed it perfectly into the bed of their skiff. The wooden frame of their skiff stretched and bowed under the weight, and it appeared that its seams were breaking, flattening the ribs into twigs. A gray seagull with a black-tipped beak strutted along the mast while eyeing the women. Marulia clicked her tongue and tapped the wood.

“Some storm to make boats fly like this. Probably had spirits running like crazy.” She waved over her head. “Funny that I don’t see any other boats on this beach.” Marulia sighed and looked up and down. Her hand went to her chest as if to make sure her heart still moved against its cage. It wasn’t the broken shape of the skiff, Marulia knew, that caused shortness of breath. This was different, as if something were growing branches in her body, stretching itself from her chest to her gut. “Akeka,” she muttered under her breath.

“No, it’s that man’s who’s staying at the Killweathers’. Didn’t even know how to anchor his boat,” Anne Girl said. “It’s too late in the summer to repair the skiff. Everyone’s fishing and no one is going to want to patch a boat.” She ran her hand along the wooden seams of the boat and felt the creases beneath her fingertips eat at her skin. Her hand paused at the wooden cleat that was sheared off, exposing the brightness of the brown grain. She imagined a thin man with long legs that made catwalking up and down the rails easy. He was blond with cheeks that slightly reddened against the wind, and so his skin was smoother than the bay when the water was like glass. He was completely unlike any villager or cannery man with the tough skin, and Anne Girl couldn’t decide whether she should put a hole in his boat or ask him if he wanted to join her at the next potlatch.

“He must be pitiful with this kind of boat,” Marulia said. Her fingers lingered in the air, painting it. “I heard that he don’t know how to fish. I heard he can’t sit still during church.”

“You hear a lot.”

“I do,” Marulia conceded and tapped her forehead. “I hear more than you think.”

Anne Girl saw hours of labor wrapped in the coils of rope that were knotted around the sailboat. They definitely would need help from some of the men in town to free the boat from the skiff. It was nothing but a bloated tree. She tugged on one end of the rope, but when it didn’t budge she thought of the Killweathers’ visitor and decided that even if he was good-looking, she hated him.

With her hands still on her hips, Marulia stared at the boat that jammed her skiff into the bank. She ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “Makes you wonder why he couldn’t see the cannery. All that wood piling is hard to miss, you know? You need to tell him to get his boat off our skiff.”