“And he comes to the mission school?”
He nodded. “Sunday school. Sits in the back and listens; never says anything. There for English, rather than religion, I think. He’s a strange bird, but pleasant enough.”
Mr. Bower left me in the office for a while to read the two contracts, church and state, binding me to Sitka for two years. If the boys came back with pockets bulging, I supposed I could leave behind the $180 a month.
School didn’t start until September here, so I had more than a month to study Alaskan history and make up my lesson plans. For the other subjects, I could adapt my Kansan lessons, which I could teach nearly by heart. It was the same four grades, with fewer students.
I looked up at a light tapping on the doorjamb and was surprised to see Gordon rather than Reverend Bower.
“May I help you?”
“Perhaps we can help each other, Mrs. Flammarion. As we’re both instructing the young.” He went on to explain that on Sunday evenings most of the Tlingit children came to his place for instruction in their own ways.
It was partly language instruction. Even the ones who spoke Tlingit at home tended to speak English among themselves—some a mixture of Russian and English, which was not music to his ears. His parents’ generation had fought the Russians, and the invaders had killed many of his “uncles.” (I think in Tlingit the word included a larger group of men than his parents’ siblings.)
He offered the children instruction in the old tales and ways, saying everything twice, first in Tlingit and then in English. Would I be willing to come and help him with the translation? The Sunday school teacher who had left hadn’t wanted to do it, and Gordon was afraid he was teaching them bad English.
His English was really rather good, considering, but it sounded like a wonderful opportunity for me, so I agreed immediately. He took a stub of pencil and drew a map, and told me to come at around sundown Sunday; remember to bring a lamp.
It was only after he’d left that I wondered quite what I was getting into. Did he really need a translator, or was I being used for some less obvious purpose?
When Reverend Bower came back in, he clarified the situation a little. The previous Sunday school teacher had given it a try, but he hadn’t lasted an hour: the hut where Gordon instructed the young smelled so bad he couldn’t breathe, and left in fear of becoming physically ill in front of them.
“Perhaps women are stronger in that regard than men,” I said. “Babies aren’t bouquets of posies.”
He was amused at that. “We shall see, we shall see. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting, though in a way it’s counter to our basic charge here.”
“Because we’re supposed to convert them, and not the other way around?”
“Oh, I’m not afraid that Gordon’s going to convert you to paganism. But you’re right; our job is to Christianize and civilize the youngsters. Gordon’s no ally there.”
“So I’ll be a spy in the enemy’s lair. I like that image.”
“Indeed. Maybe you can learn their tales well enough to portray them in a Christian light and use them in Sunday school.”
“Maybe.” The ones I’d read didn’t have much potential.
We finished the paperwork and Reverend Bower gave me a twenty-dollar advance, which I didn’t need but didn’t refuse. I took his advice and went down to the newspaper office, where there was a bulletin board with notices of rooms and homes to rent and buy.
There was a room only a block from school, which would be handy in rain and snow. But I was intrigued by a one-room cottage being built on the edge of town, a small log cabin. A hundred-dollar deposit would secure it for me.
The rain had stopped, so I followed directions out to the lot and found them working there, a white man and a Negro assisted by two Tlingit boys.
The short muscular Negro, Saul Johnson, owned the lot. So far the cottage was nothing but a cleared area with three courses of logs laid around a simple stone fireplace and a doorway, but he showed me the plans and said I would be able to move in in three or four weeks.
I wasn’t sure they could do that, but the place was hard to resist, surrounded on three sides by forest, the front porch looking out over the bay and mountains. You could smell salt on the breeze.
I gave him half the hundred-dollar down payment, the other half due when I moved in. Walking back down the hill, I wondered whether I had been too impulsive, and decided not. Besides the reasonable price, the quiet setting, and the lovely view, I was excited at the prospect of moving into a place that was all my own, with no previous inhabitants. It was a first for me, and at forty years of age, about time.
(The next day Mr. Bower expressed surprise that a Southern lady would enter into a contract with a Negro man. I asked him whether he would and he said yes, probably; Mr. Johnson was new in town but had a good reputation as a worker. I didn’t pursue it beyond that, I hope leaving him slightly embarrassed. In fact, the only two people I missed from our life in Philadelphia were Negroes, Sue Anne and Jimmy.)
My rented room was small and close, so I spent most of my days in the school library, working on my lesson plans but also idly reading. When the weather was fine—not often!—I would go outside to draw and paint, knowing there would be little time for that after school started.
Letters, leavings.
It was almost three weeks before I got a letter from Daniel. It had been twelve days in transit, which I would come to regard as swift, and was crumpled and mud-stained but legible.
They had made good time after the “elevator” had lifted them and the mule up to the top of the pass, and at his writing had just arrived at the Yukon River. There were boats and rafts for sale, but at ridiculous prices, so they’d begun collecting materials for a steerable raft.
He didn’t say whether they planned to negotiate the river with a mule on board. I wouldn’t want to be the mule—or the people!
They were all in good health and had had no trouble with the other adventurers; in fact, there was a friendly spirit of cooperation amongst most of them. Everybody in it together and plenty of gold to go around. I suspected it would be more competitive when they actually arrived in the Yukon goldfields.
The Sunday school was an odd challenge. I had both whites and Tlingits, from age five or six on up. Most were under fifteen, but there were several adults of both races the first couple of weeks, obviously making sure I was worthy of their children.
And Gordon, always coming in a little late, standing silently in the rear.
No one paid closer attention than he. He never spoke, but it was not—as some of the adults must have thought—either deference or contempt. He was there to observe, and he missed nothing.
The evening sessions led by Gordon were fascinating. He rarely went longer than an hour, often stopping in midstory, leaving us hanging till next week. The parables were amusing, sometimes fantastic, sometimes more or less down to earth, about what happens if you don’t follow tribal rules—“sin and suffer,” as we say.
After a month or so, though, I realized there was a big difference between his stories and the ones I told in Sunday school: his weren’t “sin and suffer; then see the error of your ways and become a better person.” His were “do the wrong thing and pay for it,” period, as often as not with death. They reminded me strongly of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre tales.
I could sympathize with the fellow who took a whiff of the inside of the hut and fled back to civilization. It was pretty abominable, but I’d been living in close quarters with a bunch of prospectors, who aren’t exactly dainty. The human smell didn’t bother me so much as the rancid seal oil they used for lighting—and when the weather got cold that would be doubled and redoubled by the smell of their parkas, sealskins poorly cured and worn inside out.
You really can get used to almost anything, though, and the discomfort I endured was more than paid back by the respect I got from the children. While it lasted.
Many of Gordon’s stories were about the Ra
ven, who was a trickster, but also a sort of Prometheus figure—he tricked the various gods and titans into giving up the sun, fire, and, most of all, the tides, so the sea would yield its bounty. These stories didn’t have people in them, except as godlike personifications.
One story that still haunts me, though, had only people, and a mysterious machine.
Two women went up into the mountains to gather berries, leaving the rest of the tribe on shore. They were repairing boats and nets, drying fish, and so forth. It was a lovely clear day, and the children were playing on the beach.
Coming from far away, a large kite drifted toward the shore, trailing a long tail that almost reached the ground. One of the children chased after it, but once he took hold, it lifted him off the ground. His playmates tried to drag him back to earth, at first playfully, and then in earnest. It lifted them off the ground, too.
The men looked up from their boats and nets, hearing the children’s fearful cries, and ran to rescue them. One by one, they also were lifted from the shore. The women saw what was happening, and abandoned their food preparation to try to drag the men and children back down. All of them were pulled up into the sky as well, and rose toward the sun and out of sight.
The two women who had been gathering berries in the mountains came back down to this mysterious sight: the camp was completely deserted, but there was no sign of violence. Evening fell and then the morning came, and they were still alone. They assumed that some supernatural force had taken the tribe away, and they would just have to wait until it, or some other force, brought them back.
They continued the routine business of staying alive, gathering shellfish and roots and berries. It soon became obvious that one was pregnant, which was a mystery, since she had not been with a man. It turned out that she had been impregnated by a magical seed she had eaten in the forest.
She gave birth to a boy, and the women were determined to raise him the right way to become a powerful shaman, which was arduous. Every morning he bathed in icy water. He scourged himself with branches and purged his body with strong herbs.
At a young age he began lifting rocks on the beach, larger and larger ones. Finally he was even able to tip the largest boulder, just by planting his feet and giving it all the strength he could muster.
When he was barely the age of a man, one of the women, now old, saw a sight she couldn’t believe: From far out to sea, a kite drifted toward shore, carrying on its long tail all the missing tribe. She called to the boy, and he ran down to the shore to meet it.
When it was directly over him, he grabbed the feet of the lowest woman. The kite tried to lift him off the ground, but he fought back with all his might.
Just when it seemed he was about to be defeated, his feet began to grow roots—his father had been a tree, after all—and they went deeper and deeper, holding the kite fast while the women, and then the men, and then the children, climbed down to safety. The boy released the kite, and it drifted off into the sky.
End of story. I asked Gordon whether the members of the tribe had aged while they were in the air, and he said no; the children were still children. Where did he think they had gone? He laughed and said, “Someplace that was not here.”
Of course, at the simplest level, the story is just a Tlingit version of “say your prayers, obey your elders, eat your vegetables; grow up strong and good.” But that’s not really what it’s about. It’s a mystery tale, about life and loss. And, I’ve come to believe, it’s about not needing to understand.
When Gordon recited the story, surrounded by rapt children in that dim fetid hut, I had the feeling he was telling it to me; for me. A few months later, I would know that that was true.
School started in September, and I was soon immersed in a hectic but satisfying routine. The white boys and girls at Sheldon Jackson came to learn trades as well as the conventional three Rs; the Tlingit school, which grew out of the Presbyterian mission, was primarily a trade school, with a little book-learning thrown in.
I divided my labors between the two. For four days of the week, I taught high school courses in the concrete octagon of Sheldon Jackson. Fridays, I went to the Sitka Industrial Training School, where the boys studied carpentry, machine work, and carving; the girls learned to sew and cook and clean. For a short while, they could put down their tools and pick up books, a change of pace that was appreciated and resented by about equal numbers.
At Industrial, a lot of my work was elementary, making up for what the Tlingit children had not learned. I made sure they could parse sentences and do outlines, both of which seemed foreign to their nature, and had them write book reports that they would have to read in front of the classroom. Just like their white counterparts, some hated it and some were natural hams. It was funny to see the influence of Gordon on some of them, speaking in a low, serious voice; punctuating their talk with sweeping gestures.
Every week or two I got letters from Daniel or Doc. It was obviously real labor for Doc, a neat printed text deeply grooved by his pressure on the pencil. Daniel’s letters started out chatty and long, describing life in the camp and Dawson City. As winter fell, his notes grew short and almost terse.
Their claim was about fifteen miles out of town, on Gold Run Creek. With all three of them working, they were just staying ahead of their expenses, but a lot of their time in September and October had gone toward building a makeshift cabin sturdy enough to get them through the arctic cold. Their first snowfall was in September, and though they preferred it to the rain, they knew what was coming. The ground would be frozen rock-hard, and to run it through the sluice they’d have to pour buckets of boiling water on it.
Still, Doc especially was cautiously optimistic. Several people had made rich strikes on the creek, within a mile or so of their claim. Patience and hard work would do it.
I wished that Daniel would echo the sentiment.
My own cabin was finished on time, and it was a pleasant refuge from Sitka’s gray cold and nearly constant rain. I had minimal furnishings—table, chair, bed, wardrobe, and bookshelf—but they were adequate. If I’d had guests, they would have to sit on food crates or the footlocker I’d carried all the way from Philadelphia.
That was one thing that sustained me. As simple and crude as my surroundings were, they were heaven compared to the cold and perverse servitude I’d endured in that huge mansion. At another level, not as silly as it may sound, anyone who’s gone through the protracted anxiety of preparing and hosting a formal dinner for twenty can take real pleasure in dumping a can of beans into a tin pan and warming it in the fireplace.
By November, I was in a state that might be called extreme happiness punctuated by occasional despair. (The doctor I would have twenty years later would nod wisely and say “manic-depressive.”) The school and missionary work were both going well. I had a basic vocabulary of Tlingit—far more than most whites managed, or bothered, to do. The children responded in a spirit of fun, acting as affectionate tutors.
But I was worried about my boys, worried sick, as winter closed in. Daniel no longer told me how many ounces per week they were extracting, which I assumed meant there were none. They spent a lot of time scavenging for wood to burn, and were eating nothing that they hadn’t carried up. Doc said they might sell the mule, because there was no forage for it and feed was dear. That would seriously isolate them; fifteen miles through snow was a long haul.
As winter deepened my mood darkened. The days were short and cold; I would leave for school in the dark and return to the cabin in the dark. I was facing my first Christmas without family. Reverend Bower sympathized; he said his own first Alaska winter had been terrible. But you grew to like them. If you survived the first one, I thought.
My world fell apart first by degrees, and then by sudden shock.
The Tlingit children stopped coming to Sunday school. When I went to Gordon’s Sunday sessions, they would avoid me.
They even stopped coming to the Tlingit school on Fridays, the day I taug
ht there. Mr. Bower and the sheriff went through the village door to door and told everyone that the parents could be fined if the children didn’t attend.
I asked Gordon to find out what was going on, and he traced it to an unexpected source: Dmitri Popovitch, the Russian priest. Evidently jealous of my success, he had intimated to his old-lady congregation that the source of my power was unnatural. I was a witch.
In a Tlingit family, when a grandmother lays down the law, you obey her. Gordon said he would try to talk some sense into the women. A shaman’s word should mean more to them than a priest’s.
While this was going on, the worst storm of the year piled snow on ice while I taught the last day of class before Christmas. On the way home I fell several times, and arrived at the cabin sore and soaked and freezing.
I bolted the door behind me and crossed the room slowly, groping, to the table where I felt candle and matches. With one match I lit the candle and a couple of peg lamps, and then the main kerosene lamp, for its smoky warmth. When I went back to snuff the peg lamps, I saw that I’d trod upon a letter that had been slid under the door.
It was from the Yukon Territory, the address barely legible, a pencil scrawl unlike Daniel’s schoolboy hand or Doc’s careful printing.
With curiosity rather than premonition, I took a paring knife and slit open the worn foolscap and carried its scrawled message back to the lamp. It was from Chuck. The letter is long since gone, but I think I have the wording set in my memory:
Mrs. Flammarion, both my Pa and your son are murdered. A drunkard fell upon Pa on the street in Dawson City, thinking him someone else, and when Dan went to his aid the drunk shot them both with a pistol. When he seen what he had done he shot his own self, but not to much effect, and he will be hung this week. But my Pa and Dan died right there, shot in the heart and the head, while I was out at the claim, and by the time someone got me the terrible news and I got me into the town, they was both froze solid in back of the doctor’s office. I don’t know no way to tell this to make it gentle. It’s the worst thing that ever happened.