Читать книгу Under Nushagak Bluff - Mia Heavener - Страница 8

You see our prop is bent. I am pretty sure of it. Where the hell is everyone? Don’t people fish around here? This isn’t like the old days with the double ender sailboats where we could try to make an outrigger with the mast. We wouldn’t have to worry about capsizing then.

I was talking about Marulia, huh? Yes, there are so many things I wish I could share with you about her, like how she did her hair or whether she loved hard or just enough so it was easy to say goodbye. You might want to know these things about her one day, just as I wanted to know. Yet, your Nan spoke little of her mom. Yes, there were other stories, but not the juicy ones. So Marulia’s story is locked up with the village women, who prefer to talk over smoked fish and a cup of dark tea. The village women, you say? Oh yes. Wait till you meet them. They are round and skinny, loud and quiet. But it is the fat one you will like the most. But I am not there yet. You will meet her in time.

The sailboat remained latched to the skiff until it was clear to everyone that John was not leaving. His presence made Anne Girl restless, but she had always been on edge. Born on the shores of the salty waters in Nushagak, she grew up with mud in her fingernails and tundra leaves in her hair. The farthest she had traveled was to King Salmon, so that she could work in the cannery. She didn’t last long in that village, though. The buildings there were stacked against each other, and Anne Girl couldn’t breathe. It reminded her of flies swarming around a dead fish, and she felt like she was suffocating. She didn’t even make it to the run before she returned home to help her mother put up meat for the winter.

It was difficult for Anne Girl to sit too long in one spot. She found that if her hands kept busy, then she felt better, calmer. But once they stopped, a rising anxious knot formed in her stomach that made her want to run to that place where the tundra met the blue sky. Where there was an end to the earth. She was scared of the knot and always felt its presence, even during the summers when she was too busy fishing, berry picking, and gathering wood. Some days were devoted to avoiding its tightness, and when she was still short of breath after gathering wood for the maqi or putting up fish, Anne Girl understood that the knot might never leave.

One afternoon, Anne Girl and her mother pulled the cutting table down the beach where the salmon that Anne Girl had picked earlier lay gleaming on the gravel floor. The seagulls flapped in irritation and scattered as they approached but landed just far enough so that when the cutting began, their meals of guts and tails would be fresh.

While Anne Girl filled a bucket with water, Marulia stood near the table sharpening her uluaq with a round stone. She tested the half-moon blade with her finger before lobbing off the head of the first salmon.

“You were with that kass’aq again fishing today? He looks clumsy.” She grunted and threw the silver head in a bucket. They would have boiled heads sprinkled with wild celery tonight.

“Yeah, he’s no good at fishing,” Anne Girl agreed. She didn’t let on that John’s clumsiness made her laugh, that watching slime trickle down his forearms as he wrestled with a salmon made her want to reach out and pick off the scales that stuck to his skin. She could almost feel his arms beneath her fingertips and imagined how the coarseness of her own hands would soften against his.

“He’s staying at those missionaries’ place, then?” Marulia asked. “You know how long?”

Marulia didn’t give Anne Girl the chance to answer, and continued with her question. She set down her uluaq and waved her arm to the seagulls. “Did he invite you to the church, saying ‘Please join us for services and cookies. We are the only ones on the beach with cookies and Bibles in Yup’ik.’?” She chuckled to herself and remembered how when the Killweathers first arrived, they tried all kinds of ways to become part of the community. They brought cheese and offered to work with the elders. They did this so they could teach the way to heaven through the elders. Most were happy to learn, happy to sit down and eat new foods with bleached flour and sugar. But because she had lived with missionaries as a child, Marulia saw through Frederik and Nora and waited for them to scold the villagers as if they were children. Waited for them to demand an end to potlatches and ivory carvings.

“He’s supposed to go fishing soon,” Anne Girl said. She rinsed mud from the gills and fins, before plopping the salmon onto the table. He was supposed to leave at the next high tide, but part of Anne Girl hoped he would change his mind.

He was a storyteller. Anne Girl wanted to share that with her mom, because if anyone understood a good story it was Marulia. Yet his stories were written in a different color than the silty green of the bay, and Anne Girl found herself thinking about them long after they parted ways on the beach. Steamships, Norway, trapping, Canada—they were words, yet he made them real and separate from the endless bluff that were her days. Anne Girl couldn’t explain it, especially to her mother when she was holding a knife.

The older woman huffed. Sweat had gathered around her neck and trickled down her back as she cut the meat. She wanted to warn Anne Girl that she never mixed with the fishermen and hunters who used the village as a pit stop. Most of the time they took what they wanted, but never stayed long enough to see who gave it to them. Kass’aqs only meant trouble when the fish came. They always smelled like booze and dirtied the village, especially after a good fishing season. Too much money in the bay made smelly, hungry men and babies. She didn’t have time for that, and she didn’t want Anne Girl to mix with them. But Marulia was silent for another reason. She felt this was her last summer. The pain in her gut had grown stronger, and it took all her strength to put up these strips with her daughter. Soon Anne Girl would be alone.

“I loved a kass’aq once. But he flew away.” Marulia grunted as she scraped the darkest blood of the salmon from its spine.

Anne Girl raised her eyebrows. She had only seen a plane a few times in her life, and she doubted her mother had seen as many planes, much less known someone who flew. Flying in Bristol Bay was new, and the whole village stopped and ran to the beach when a plane was circling the bluff. Whatever man her mom was talking about could not be a pilot. “Nah, you joke. There’s not even a place for planes to land here.”

“Kita.” Marulia handed Anne Girl the bloodless fish. “You going to change my story? Now, I loved a kass’aq once. He was pink like this meat and licked his lips to keep the cold from biting them. He fished better than your John too. We fished together, and when the bay dried up and all we caught was flounders and jellyfish, he stretched his arms up”—Marulia motioned with her hands, raising her bloodied fingers in the air—“and left.”

That’s what Anne Girl loved about her mother—how she held her hands above everything and said what she thought people needed to know. But despite her mother’s warnings, Anne Girl liked the fact that this blue-eyed man, who claimed to be a fisherman, didn’t know the difference between a king and a silver. Or that he didn’t know which flounders were good to eat and which ones were tough on the teeth. But she loved that he tried. He didn’t know it yet, but she would make him fish good.

“It’s time you find a man though,” Marulia said. She sucked in air to catch her breath. “What are you—twenty already? Going to dry out soon, you know. What are you waiting for?”

“For a tall Norwegian, maybe like your pilot,” Anne Girl answered. She flung two slabs onto the table. She felt the tension rise in her throat and debated whether to admit her feelings about John. His name was forming on her lips until she looked at her mother. Marulia’s head was bent down in concentration, taking large gulps of air as she tried to split the fish. Anne Girl couldn’t. Now wasn’t the time.

At the end of the summer, when the last of the fishermen pulled up their nets and returned to civilization in the States, John’s boat was still sideways with its bow pointing toward the peaks across the bay. Anne Girl had shrugged and said, “Hell, you might as well stay. But I better not have to ask Amos or Gil to push it off.” John smiled and promised that the sailboat wouldn’t be a problem ever again, that he wished he never saw the damn thing. “You going to the chapel this week? I’ll be there.”

The question caught Anne Girl off guard. He hadn’t seemed like the type to advertise the missionaries. She was disappointed and wondered if he was going to say something about being saved. Even some villagers on the bluff tried to corner Anne Girl and her mom. They would say that the women needed to get ready for salvation and Marulia would retort that she needed to put up fish for winter, and that they better steer clear of her. And yet they always returned. It burned Marulia, who would mutter in a nasally voice, “This is right—that’s wrong. Always something!” Out of respect for her mother, Anne Girl kept to herself. But it even bothered her when Nora first came around, urging her to go to chapel. She was tired of being tracked down and cornered—first the villagers, then Nora, and now John. Anne Girl swallowed and told herself that if she had to, she would suffer splinters on those hard, wooden benches if it meant she could sit next to John for an hour. No one said she had to listen. Two hours would be pushing it, though.