Though Not Dead (8 page)

Kate climbed down the ladder and looked at the back wall. Here Old Sam had spared no effort in a construction that must have taken more than one winter to complete. These shelves had been handmade from hand-fallen and hand-finished birch planks, and made with love and attention, too, the nails countersunk and filled, the edges and corners sanded into smooth, blemish-free curves. The shelves were staggered in size but never more than three feet in length, designed not to sink beneath the weight of what was on them, and the wood glowed from a continual application of hand-rubbed wax. It must have been the undertaking of several days every winter to empty out each shelf, wax it, polish it, and return everything to its proper place.

Every single shelf was filled, too, but not to overcrowding. You got the feeling looking at them that there would always be room for another can of Campbell’s tomato soup, or another box of .458 Winchester Magnum cartridges, and always, always room for another book.

Kate had been pacing herself because she hadn’t wanted to go for the books first thing, hadn’t wanted to reveal even to herself how shamefully eager she was to get her hands on the contents of Old Sam’s library. She looked at the recliner and imagined him sitting in it, footrest up, feet hanging over the end, a sardonic glint in his eyes.
Stop fiddle farting around and get on with it, girl.

She got on with it.

He hadn’t been a collector; every one of his books was for reading. She thought she might have acquired her habit of marginalia from him, so she was expecting the underlined passages, the scribbles in pen and pencil, the dog-eared pages, the occasional yellow highlighting. Truth to tell, it only made the books more precious in her eyes. His voice spoke out to her from those notes and scribbles, from beyond the grave they had laid him in on Sunday, a rush job before the ground froze so they wouldn’t have to put him in cold storage for the winter and bury him the next spring.

His interests were fairly narrow but within those confines pretty catholic. He liked Western fiction, so there was a lot of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and Rex Beach and Steward Edward White and Owen Wister and Jack Schaefer. There was even Wallace Stegner. “Eew,” she said. “Uncle. How could you.”

He was a hunter who liked to read about other hunters, so there was a lot of Robert Ruark, Peter Capstick, and inevitably, and here Kate stifled a groan, Ernest Hemingway. She pulled down the Capstick edition of Teddy Roosevelt’s African Game Trails and let the book fall open where it would, reading

After reaching Suez the ordinary tourist type of passenger ceased to be predominant; in his place were Italian officers going out to a desolate coast town on the edge of Somaliland; missionaries, German, English, and American; Portuguese civil officials; traders of different nationalities; and planters and military and civil officers bound to German and British East Africa. The English included planters, magistrates, forest officers, army officers on leave from India, and other army officers going out to take command of black native levys in out-of-the-way regions where the English flag stands for all that makes life worth living.

She laughed out loud at the last line, and replaced the time machine back on the shelf. Her hand lingered, though. She harbored a warm feeling in her heart for Teddy and his big stick. He had after all been the proximate cause of the creation of the National Park Service and of Yellowstone, its first park. He was one of the reasons there was any wild land left in the United States. Considering the robber barons he’d been raised with, that was no mean achievement.

What the hell. She took the book down again and searched further. Teddy Roosevelt had taken his son Kermit on safari in Africa in 1909, three weeks almost to the day after leaving office, and only eleven years before Old Sam had been born. Old Sam had seemed very much a man of the present, but it was impossible to deny the age you were born into. Women hadn’t been able to vote the year Old Sam was born. Orville Wright was still alive. A generation of women never married because a generation of men had been killed on the fields of Verdun, Ypres, and the Somme.

She looked up, puzzled. Why had Old Sam never married? His long association with Mary Balashoff declared his heterosexuality, so the obvious answer to many a crusty old bachelorhood was out. It wasn’t as if there weren’t women of his own generation around, and he would have been a superb provider. Any woman worth the name within fifty miles would have inveigled him down the aisle. Hell, one of the aunties for that matter. Three of them were much-married, and from what Kate had managed to glean from the rarely dropped reminiscence, they’d always had a weather eye out for a good-looking man. Auntie Joy was the only one who hadn’t remarried after her first husband had died. You would think …

Kate froze in place, one arm in the act of replacing the book on the shelf. “Holy shit.”

Ay, who knew we miss that cranky old man so much?

Auntie Joy. Auntie Joy and Old Sam. Auntie Joy and Old Sam?

Had Old Sam staked his homestead in Canyon Hot Springs to build a home for himself and his bride?

But if Auntie Joy’s grief was that of a lover, what had happened? Why had they not married?

A memory flashed into her mind, of deviled eggs, always a dozen, always served on Auntie Joy’s prized Alexandrine rose platter, always with exactly the right amount of mustard in the yolk mix, always with the finest dusting of paprika, always beautifully arranged on a lush bed of dark green lettuce. She had brought the same thing every time, to every single one of Old Sam’s summer’s end barbecues, for as long as Kate could remember. There was never any doubt about their reception, either, Old Sam invariably fell on the eggs as if he hadn’t eaten in a month.

Maybe those deviled eggs had been less substance than symbol.

She thought of all the things Old Sam had done for all four of the aunties. Hunted for their caches, filled their woodpiles, tuned up their vehicles, built on and plumbed their bathrooms. He was always available to patch a leaky roof or install a new light fixture. If memory served, Auntie Joy had always been first in the line.

Maybe service to the four aunties was a blind for service to one particular auntie.

She had not heard before now so much as a word about a possible relationship between Auntie Joy and Old Sam, but she knew from bitter experience that that meant nothing. That generation, as near as dammit Victorian in character and as personified by Emaa and the aunties and Old Sam, never told the children anything about each other’s personal lives if they could help it.

There was a whine from the door. She turned to see Mutt poking an inquisitive head in the door Kate had left open for light. “Nothing,” Kate said. “Go find yourself some lunch.”

Mutt disappeared. Kate looked back at the shelves. All the books and tools and other personal belongings—and the ammunition—all of it would have to be packed and stored at her homestead before she could let Phyllis and her baby move in here. The food, the dishes and flatware, the towels and linens, those would stay. It had been a nice thing to do for Phyllis, and she was sure Old Sam would have approved, but it also made that much less for her to pack up.

She fetched the flattened cardboard boxes she’d had stored in a corner of her garage against future need (no Park rat would ever dream of throwing away anything as useful as a cardboard box) and began. The ammunition and gun paraphernalia fit into one box, along with a collection of black-and-white photographs going as far back as the 1940s. She taped the box shut and wrote “Guns and ammo and photos” on the top in firm black Marks-A-Lot. It was a start.

She reassembled two boxes this time, one for books she wanted to keep, another for the ones she would give to the library. There were five bookshelves with five shelves each. The books were a mixture of hardcovers and trade paperbacks.

The first book, at the left of the first shelf, proved not to be a book at all but a spiral-bound notebook of lined pages used by schoolchildren before computers. Kate thumbed through the pages, which were filled with Old Sam’s handwriting. It was a collection of quotations, listed alphabetically by author. There was poetry, songs with all of their stanzas painstakingly copied down, and observant acerbity from many names she recognized and some she didn’t. “The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.” Robert Ardrey. Who the hell was Robert Ardrey? “… the human instinct to kill immediately any creature of a species not his own.” Kate recognized the name this time, Elspeth Huxley, author of a couple of those white-British-colonial-in-Africa memoirs, and as she recalled, two of the best of a very over-written genre. Kate’s copies had burned along with her cabin two, almost three years ago. Had Old Sam given her those books? She couldn’t remember.

“I am aware of what every single unwed person knows—that the world is always a little out of focus when there is no one who gives the final total damn about whether you live or die.” John D. MacDonald, and Kate would bet spoken in the voice of Travis McGee. A most uncomfortable passage altogether, given her speculations about Old Sam and Auntie Joy. And of course none at all about her and Jim.

One entry brought her to a full stop. “All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage.” Samuel Johnson.

Old Sam had quoted that very passage to her last spring, standing in the clearing where they had shortly thereafter been charged by a very pissed-off grizzly bear.

She blinked several times, and looked down at the notebook. No leaving that behind, or donating it to the school library.

She put the notebook in her box.

The second book was
The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery,
by Padraic Colum, published in 1925 with illustrations by Wilfred Jones. The book fell open naturally to “The Children of Eric the Red,” surmounted by a drawing of a ship that looked more like something in Sir Francis Drake’s command.

The job took the rest of the day, not only because every third or fourth book tempted Kate to dip into it but also because every five minutes some Park rat would drop by. Many of them, after offering condolences, would wonder in a casual voice what Kate was going to do with this set of socket wrenches or that fifty-pound bag of flour, and oh by the way, had Old Sam said anything about the
Freya
and who might be running it next year, because they were going to need a good tender man down on the Alaganik next summer, and you couldn’t trust Ringo Rogers not to run the
Reckless
aground on the flats again and a whole period’s catch along with her. To all these inquiries and many more Kate replied with civil thanks and a vague “Don’t know yet.” It satisfied no one, but when she made it clear that was all the answer they were getting they would at least go away.

The drive-bys began to lessen as the light leached from the sky. Mutt had yet to return, so the hunting must have been either good or fun. Most of the books were in boxes when Kate came to an oversize ledger, bound in leather, with gilt lettering on the spine that had flaked so badly it was unreadable. She opened it and found it to be a sort of daily diary, written by hand in a penmanship strongly reminiscent of the writing on the homestead documents she and Dan had looked at that morning.

She switched on the floor lamp next to the recliner and held the open ledger beneath it, frowning over the spiky writing in the fading ink.

Paycheck arrived, only three months late this time.

In the A.C. Company we trust,

and in the pay packet finally, finally

a check for $12,000.00 to build the courthouse.

Mr. McQueen has very kindly found two adjoining lots

abandoned on Copper Way, a good location

in the very center of the town,

if town this may be called.

Two tracts of public land, each forty by one hundred feet,

one for the courthouse, the other for the jail.

I believe Mr. McQueen harbors designs on the position of Register,

which he may have with my very good will

and heartiest recommendation

if he continues in this helpful fashion.

Mr. McQueen. Mr. Frederick Cyril McQueen, perhaps? Kate flipped back and forth, looking for a date or a signature. She found both. The journal belonged to one U.S. Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt, a triple-barreled name if there ever was one. Below it was written the date, July 10, 1937, City of Ahtna, Alaska Territory.

Kate looked up. Well. Well?

Well, first of all, why Ahtna? Why not Niniltna? Ahtna had started life as a roadhouse, back when there was little more than a mule trail linking Interior Alaska with the coast. The populations of Kanuyaq, the mining town, and Niniltna, the good-time town four miles down the road, added together would have had a hundred times the population of Ahtna at that time. She looked at the date again.

And that would be why. The mine was about to go out of business, pulling the railroad ties up behind it as it retreated to Cordova and took ship for Outside. Kanuyaq and Niniltna were fifty miles off the main north-south route. Ahtna, on the other hand, was right on the road, roughly midway between Fairbanks and Valdez. Anchorage at that time was still barely a step up from the tent city it had begun as. In a territory the size of Alaska, with a population so widely scattered, travel time would be a big factor—it still was—and Ahtna would seem the most obvious choice for a sitting court.

If Mr. McQueen was in fact the same Frederick Cyril McQueen who had signed Old Sam’s homestead application and the other two documents as well, Kate could understand why Old Sam would want the ledger. But where had the old fart acquired it? Although as a one-time officer of the court she should probably be asking herself why the ledger wasn’t in an hermetically sealed storeroom in Juneau somewhere, part of the record of law and the history of the state of Alaska.