Though Not Dead (2 page)

It was in this spirit that they gathered, family from Ketchikan, friends from Sitka, tribal members from Juneau, close kin from Fairbanks and kissing cousins from Circle, and shirttail relatives from Ahtna. They came from all the villages on the river from Tikani to Chulyin, all the villages on the road between Ahtna and Valdez, an astonishing assembly given the decimation of their ranks. Mac McCullough helped Elizaveta distribute the gifts, although many of the guests would not meet his eyes, deeply resenting the intrusion of this round-eyed gussuk into this most important, almost sacred, tribal rite. Instead, they looked at Elizaveta, with reproach. Elizaveta, who despite her parent’s death had something of a glow about her.

Well. They all knew what that meant. They accepted their gifts in a spirit of one part entitlement to three parts righteous indignation, gorged themselves on the thin stew made from last year’s moose and hunks of bread fresh made from the last of the village’s flour, and returned to their tents having taken only the most formal leave of their hostess.

The next morning the Sainted Mary was gone.

So was Mac McCullough.

“I don’t have it,” Elizaveta said, her face white and set, the glow erased from her features. They didn’t believe her, and they were not respectful when they searched her house. They threw everything out of the cache and unwrapped the pitifully few packets of moose meat left there to make sure that it was moose meat, they dumped out the nearly empty sacks of rice and beans and sugar and flour, and there was even talk of exhuming the bodies of her parents until some mercifully sane person pointed out that the Sainted Mary had been on display well after Lev and Alexandra were put into their graves.

When at last they were satisfied that Elizaveta truly did not have the icon, suspicion then naturally fell on the missing miner. He was gone. So was the icon. He must have stolen it in the night and made off with it. There could be no other explanation. What else could you expect from someone the other gussuks had nicknamed One-Bucket, allegedly for his ability to pull three hundred dollars’ worth of gold out of a creek in one bucket?
Gatcha
, that Elizaveta would shame herself and her tribe so by taking up with such a one.

The tribe fed runners on the last of the potlatch stew and dispatched them to Ahtna, to Cordova, to Fairbanks, and even farther afield with descriptions of the missing man and their missing treasure, seeking news, offering a reward for his apprehension and for the return of the Sainted Mary to her rightful place. Alas for their plans, a spring storm blew in off the Gulf of Alaska the second night after the potlatch and dumped twelve feet of snow from Katalla to Kanuyaq, rendering the roads and trails impassable and any efforts at tracking impossible. Neither One-Bucket nor the icon did they find, and as the days and weeks passed, Elizaveta, shunned by family and neighbors alike, grew even more thin and more pale.

A month after the potlatch came a knock at her door. She was afraid at first to open it. The knock came again, with more force and this time accompanied by a voice she knew. “It’s me, Elizaveta. Open up.”

It was Quinto Dementieff, a fellow student—and fellow sufferer—at the BIA school in Cordova. They had been friends since childhood, their friendship strengthened by the summer spent together on Lev’s gold claim.

She made him coffee, offered him toast from the batch of bread made from the very last bit of flour. There was no butter or jam for the bread, and no sugar or canned milk for his coffee.

He ate and drank without comment, and when he was finished he pushed the mug away and said, “Marry me.”

She had been sitting with her head bent over knotted fingers. She looked up at his words, astonished.

“Marry me,” he said again. “At least I’ll know you’ll be eating.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she dropped her head again. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

One hand slid over her belly. “You don’t understand, Quinto. I’m—”

“I do understand,” he said. He returned her wondering look with a level gaze. “Marry me.”

Her hand still on her belly, she looked around the room. “It’s not only that, Quinto. I can’t stay here. We couldn’t stay here. Everyone is so angry, so—”

“We won’t stay here,” he said. “We’ll move to Cordova. Mr. Greenwood says he’ll give me a job on the docks.”

“You talked to Mr. Greenwood about this?”

“I told him I was going to get married and I needed a job to support my wife and family. He’s a good man.”

Quinto Dementieff was the son of an Aleut father and a Filipino mother whose parents had been part of the wave of Filipinos who immigrated to Alaska to take all the good jobs in the salmon canneries for a paycheck half the size of what the born-in-the-territory locals would accept. Elizaveta had been an outcast from the morning after the potlatch. Quinto had been an outcast from birth.

He had also been in love with Elizaveta since they were both ten years old. He reached out to take the hand resting protectively on her belly between his own and kissed it. “Marry me, Eliza. There will be many children. What’s one more?”

They were married by the justice of the peace in Ahtna just two days later. The resulting scandal almost eclipsed the loss of the Sainted Mary and kept the tribe’s gossips busy for a decade. Of all the people a chief’s daughter could have married, and she chose a Filipino! When there were so many good Native boys to choose from! That Eliza girl, so headstrong, so foolish; there was never anything to do with her. First she takes up with a gussuk who robbed the tribe of its most precious possession and then she elopes to Cordova with a Filipino. (Quinto’s half-Aleut side was easily ignored.) But it was only to be expected. Look at her father, a good man in most ways, and not a bad chief, but so lacking in wisdom in the raising of his daughter. Alexandra had tried to warn him, oh yes, but had he listened? Stubborn, pigheaded man, no, he had not, and see how it had turned out, Elizaveta married outside the tribe and the Sainted Mary lost to the tribe forever, looted by yet another white man who pretended to be their friend so he could steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and sell it Outside to make his fortune.

Elizaveta and Quinto settled in Cordova, two hundred miles away, at that time far enough not to hear all the whispers or endure the glares and the pointed fingers. “Easy to be shunned from a distance,” Quinto said cheerfully, and for the first time in months, Elizaveta smiled.

Her pregnancy was not an easy one, and their first and only child, a son, was born the following January.

They named him Samuel Leviticus Dementieff.

One

“He was eighty-nine,” Kate said, looking up from a file box.

“Well, we all knew he was older than God,” Jim said.

They were at Old Sam’s cabin, where Kate was sorting through the old man’s belongings. Kate and the aunties had decided that the potlatch would be on the fifteenth of January, which gave them a little over three months to label Old Sam’s possessions for the gift giving, and to allow everyone from Alaska and Outside who wanted to attend to make travel arrangements and contact friends and relatives in the Park for a place to unroll their sleeping bags.

It was also the day of the annual shareholder meeting of the Niniltna Native Association. The price of gas being what it was, travel to and from Niniltna was not cheap, no matter if you did it by plane, boat, pickup, four-wheeler, or snowgo. Plus, it cost the same to rent the high school gym for an event that lasted four hours as it did for an event that lasted all day. Kate Shugak was a frugal and practical woman.

There was a file marked “Will” in the back of the box. Kate pulled it out and opened it.

Jim looked at her bent head, and at Mutt, who was leaning up against Kate’s side. Whenever Kate was hurting, Mutt was always as close to her as she could get without actually climbing into her lap. Since Mutt, the half gray wolf half husky who allowed Kate to live with her outweighed Kate by twenty pounds, leaning seemed the better option all around.

Old Sam’s cabin was built on a floor plan common to the Park anytime between twenty-five and a hundred years before, a ground floor twenty-five feet square with a sleeping loft reached by a ladder made from two-by-fours. The rungs on the ladder were worn smooth from decades of use. Jim hoped that when he was eighty-nine his knees would be in good enough shape to climb eight feet up a vertical ladder to get to bed.

He looked back at Kate.

If she were waiting for him in that bed, he’d find a way.

The one room downstairs had a counter with an old chipped porcelain farm sink set into it, with shelves built into the wall above and below. The sink came with an old-fashioned swan-necked spout and two spoked faucets. Old Sam had tapped into public water when it had come into Niniltna twenty years before, but the outhouse was still outside. When asked why no indoor toilet, a growled “You don’t shit in your own nest” was his invariable reply.

There was an oil stove for cooking and a woodstove for heat and an old Frigidaire refrigerator that must have been added when they ran the power line out from Ahtna back in the sixties. More built-in shelves covered every inch of the back wall from floor to ceiling beneath the floor of the loft, one section for weapons and ammunition and the rest for books ranging from Zane Grey to a leather-bound, three-volume edition of the log of Captain Cook that made Jim’s mouth water just to look at it. A brown vinyl recliner with a dent in the seat the size of Old Sam’s skinny ass occupied one corner, next to a pole lamp and a Blazo box standing on one end. The box was covered with mug rings and was filled with a stack of magazines,
National Geographic, Alaska
magazine,
Playboy
. There was a workbench next to the door where Old Sam cleaned his guns and did the fine woodworking on projects he’d allowed Park rats to talk him into, wall shelves and cupboards, mostly, with an occasional bed frame or dining table thrown in.

“He revised his will only last month.”

Kate was sitting at the chrome-legged dining table in the center of the room, on one of three mismatched chairs. The table had a lazy Susan in the middle of it, filled with salt and pepper shakers, a sugar bowl, a Darigold one-pound butter can with a plastic lid, a bottle of soy sauce. Old Sam liked his sticky rice, a legacy of his half-Filipino father.

Had liked. It was still difficult to accept the fact that the old man was dead. It was especially difficult to imagine life in the Park going on without his acid, perspicacious, and occasionally uncomfortably prophetic commentary. Old Sam had been an entire Greek chorus all by himself.

“He had a lot of stuff,” Jim said. “Do you want help?” It was Monday morning, and he was past due at work.

She looked up. “Less than two weeks ago.”

“What?”

“He revised his will less than two weeks ago.”

“Maybe he had a premonition.”

She snorted. “There was never anything the least bit fey about Old Sam.”

Jim thought of the old man built of bone and sinew, quick, smart, smart-assed. Indomitable, indestructible, and until the day before yesterday, immortal. Kate was right. If anyone had ever lived in the real world, it had been Old Sam Dementieff. Jim was going to miss the hell out of him. “Do you need help here?” he asked again. “I can take a day.”

“Thanks, but I got this.” She tucked a strand of short dark hair behind an ear, exposing the high, flat cheekbone and the strong throat bisected by the long scar that had faded over the last eight years to a thin white line. With hazel eyes set in skin darkened to bronze by the summer just past and a full seductive mouth set over an obstinate chin, she was a five-foot, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound package of dynamite clad in black sweatshirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes.

His dynamite. The pronoun came to him without warning, and under its influence he stepped forward to pull the file from her hands. “Come here.” He picked her up and sat down again on the chair, setting her on his lap.

She didn’t protest. Her head found a place on his shoulder instead, and a moment later he felt the warmth of her tears soak through his shirt.

“Hey,” he said, tipping her head up.

She took a shaky breath and tried to smile. “He’d make fun of me if he could see me now.”

“Bullshit,” Jim said. “He’d be proud you cared enough. Listen, Kate. He went out the way we all wish we could go. He hunted his own moose, packed it home, butchered it out, and threw a feed for everyone he loved. Damn fine feed, too.”

Her smile was wobbly. “Yeah, it was.”

“And then he turned off the engine and left the shop.” Jim’s shoulders rose and fell in a slight shrug. “What do you Injuns say? It was a good day to die.”

She sniffed and gulped back a laugh that was half sob.

He leaned in, his lips moving across her skin, sipping at the salt tears. Her breath caught, warm on his cheek, and her head turned so her mouth was close to his. He accepted the invitation and their lips met in a long and gentle caress, his hands warm and strong at the back of her neck and on her hip.

It was becoming less frightening to him, this need he found to comfort, to console, to demonstrate an affection that had nothing to do with sex. Although if the nearest bed hadn’t belonged to a man not dead forty-eight hours … He raised his head and hazel eyes met blue in a long look. “Better?”

She was a little flushed, and the full lips quirked at the corners. “An effective laying on of healing hands.”

He grinned and kissed her again, quick and hard. “I’ll lay more than that later.”

She laughed.

Old Sam would have, too.

*   *   *

The loss of Old Sam Dementieff notwithstanding, Jim drove to the trooper post with a lighter heart. Probably part of that was due to Kate’s being as willing to accept his comfort as he was unafraid to give it. They’d been circling each other for so long, wary, suspicious, and let’s face it, just plain scared of all the baggage loaded on that slow-moving barge called relationship
.
You couldn’t move a barge on its own, you had to hire a tug. Up until Kate, the women with whom he’d kept company had lasted the length of a ride in a cigarette boat between Miami and Havana. Sometimes it felt like he’d served more time for Kate than Jacob had for Rachel.