Split Feather Page 8

  Yes, there was an eyeball in my mouth.

  Yes, it was gross. I held my breath and bit down.

  Huh, I thought, tastes pretty much like fish. Kinda chewy, like salty jelly, fishy and not too bad so long as I didn’t think about what I was eating. I chewed for a good long while, showing these people that I was not some chickenshit city girl, and spat out the hard center as Garvin had suggested. Nobody said anything, but there were a lot of smiles round the table, and Garvin winked at me again.

  The rest of that meal was pretty uneventful. I concentrated on my food, letting other people’s conversations wash over me like the river, soothing and constant. Every once in a while I’d sneak a glance at the old man—my grandfather, I kept reminding myself, my own flesh and blood—and it struck me how the other people deferred to him as if he was some kind of king. He didn’t have to ask to have his bowl filled with soup, and platters of bread and cheese and past-their-prime grapes were laid in front of him like offerings.

  He talked about the river, saying you could go down this channel now but that one was closed up, and how it’d probably be another couple of weeks or so before the barge could get through, and it looked like it had been a bad year for moose calves. The younger folk—everyone in the room, including me—hung on to his every word. It reminded me of the church services one of the mothers had taken me to, only without any singing.

  The door banged open again, and a guy probably my age walked into the cabin. Apparently knocking wasn’t an Alaskan thing. He froze when he saw the overfull room, and his eyes were a bit white around the edges.

  “Hey, Jesse, want some soup?” Trudy sang from her command post by the stove.

  “No, thanks, Aunt Trudy. Thanks, though.” The kid swallowed again, half-in and half-out of the room and looking like he wished he was somewhere else.

  “Something you want?” Grandpa John asked, scarcely glancing up from his food.

  Jesse startled, then nodded.

  “Yes, Grandpa John. Aaron and Slow Mo been working on the cabin out on Clam Lake, and they said someone else been there. They heard someone landing and taking off again three, four times. Near Oldtown, they said. Mo said he saw the plane and it didn’t have no call sign, and they heard nothing on the radio.”

  “Ahhhh.” Grandpa John set his spoon to the side, and a woman I didn’t know handed him a cup of coffee. “Poachers?”

  Coffee, I thought. Omigod yes.

  The kid shrugged. “Maybe. Mo thinks yes. Seems they been flying in low and silent, but ain’t been shooting nothin’ yet.”

  “Yet.” Grandpa John took a long pull at his coffee, and then chewed thoughtfully. “I want eyes in the sky for this one. Tell your Aunt Mel that I want Sam out there.”

  “Sam?” Jesse’s eyes went huge. “But Sam is…” He glanced at me, and his face went still. Secretive. “Sam’s… out.”

  Grandpa John set his mug down. His face was unreadable to me. “Send Sam.”

  “Yes, Grandpa John.” Jesse glanced at me one last time and then fled, door banging shut at his heels.

  Someone brought me a cup of black coffee. Strong black coffee, thick with grounds and almost too hot to drink. I took one cautious sip and decided I was never leaving this place. Hot, black, and strong enough to dissolve your spoon. These folks knew how to drink coffee.

  “Grandpa John?” I asked. It didn’t feel natural.

  Not yet, anyway, I told myself. Give it time.

  Nobody turned, but I could feel every eye in the room on me. The old man looked full on my face, and smiled.

  “Yes?”

  “That boy Jesse. He called you Grandpa John.”

  “He did.”

  “So… he’s my cousin?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  I blinked, and glanced around the room. “How many cousins do I have, anyway?”

  “Near as I can tell,” he drawled, making a show of looking around as well, “pretty much all of ’em.” The crowd erupted into laughter.

  I had to ask. “Grandpa, uh, John? How did you find me, anyway? Your letter didn’t say much.” The room went quiet. Everybody looked at the soup, the table, the ceiling… anywhere but at Grandpa John. Or me.

  “No, it didn’t,” he answered at last. “I’m sorry about that.” And he held his coffee cup out for a refill. The room sprang back to life, but everyone still avoided looking at me.

  “More soup, Sigurd?” Trudy—Aunt Trudy—held up her ladle. Apparently my questions would have to wait. I sighed inwardly, but made myself smile as I handed my bowl over.

  “Yes, please.”

  She filled my bowl full to overflowing.

  I ate every bite.

  11

  I looked for myself everywhere, but I was nowhere to be found.

  In the way the old man moved, in the planes and shadows of his face, the shape of his hands, the way his laugh echoed around the little house we shared. I tried to see myself, but there was nothing of me there. Though I grew fond of him quickly—which would have surprised anybody who knew me—it was an outsider’s love, like the affection someone might feel for a beloved character in a book. It didn’t feel real.

  I’d read all the stories about reunion and there was always that one moment, the lightning strike that would hit the adoptee and they’d know they’d found their family, the people to whom they belonged. But not me. I was standing in the middle of a storm holding a lightning rod, and I still got nothin’.

  The aunts, uncles, the cousins—I still wasn’t sure who was supposed to be related to me by blood, or whether anybody in this town was really related or how that all worked. Everybody looked kind of like me, the way two trees might look alike, or two stones in the river, but none of them really looked like me-me. I was still standing out in the cold watching other people with their families, and wishing I belonged to someone, somewhere.

  Still, the trip wasn’t a total failure. I hadn’t been assassinated by a glitterpunk rock star, and though I’d been in Tsone for a whole week, nobody had noticed that I was crazy.

  Probably because everyone in Alaska is crazy.

  Grandpa John didn’t seem to sleep—he just worked all day and night. People would show up at all hours, and I mean all hours, because the sun never really set and the people were… is there a word for animals that aren’t diurnal or nocturnal? Omniurnal sounds like a gender-free bathroom. Biurnal, maybe? Anyhow, they’d stop by any old time and come right in without knocking, wake me up, and ask the old man for advice or help or just sit down and talk story. Will the barge come on time this year? Would a picnic at the Slough be a good romantic date? Any news on them poachers yet?

  He wrote a letter to a kid who was homesick and wanted to drop out of college, and another to a social services agency that wanted information on local standards of living. The old man asked me to proofread the first one. He wrote in big block letters, same as the ones on the card he’d sent me, but the kindergarten-like letters carried a world’s worth of wisdom. He didn’t ask me to read the letter he’d written back to the social services agency because he burned it and then went out and chopped wood for a good long while. The way he handled that splitting maul reminded me of the time a wrinkled-up old Krav Maga instructor with one bad arm had come to our club and mopped the floor with all our faces.

  I saw the look in his eyes when he came back in, dusting wood chips from his heavy tan overalls, watched the way people listened and deferred to him, and the manner in which he handed down his advice. In the back of my head, I could all but hear the theme music from The Godfather.

  The back of my head became a very busy place these days. My demon returned, skulking around the edges of my vision. She didn’t seem to like Grandpa John very much, or bears—she would disappear every time I rode by the dump, and for that reason alone I was tempted to spend more time there, but the garbage stank pretty bad, and there was usually at least one bear there rooting through the piles. Grandpa John said they were looking for sugary stuff, that bear
s are well known for their love of sweets… and coffee, too, he added.

  I think he was pulling my leg.

  It wasn’t until my demon reappeared that I realized I’d been hoping a trip to Alaska would fix my brain. I guess I thought that if I found my home, the place where I was born and the people I’d been born to, that the ugliness in my head would just clear up, the darkness would lift from my eyes and the demons and ghosts and weird voices would dissipate like fog in the sunlight, and my life would be lollipops and unicorns farting rainbows happily ever after, amen.

  No such luck. Any time I wasn’t around Grandpa John or uncomfortably close to a bear, my demon was back to her old tricks. I’d be trying to listen to one of my newfound cousins as they told me about life in the village, or my grandma Catherine—everybody had loved her, that was obvious. I’d ask what little they remembered of my mom, or about the exploits of their kids, none of whom I could keep straight.

  Then the demon would start whispering in my ear about how none of this was real, none of these people liked me, nobody would ever love me, and I should just die.

  Demons are awesome like that.

  I tried to belong. I kept telling myself that I was home, waiting for it to kick in, like a second cup of coffee. But I supposed these things took time. After all, I’d been taken away when I was only four, and dumped back into the system by my a-mom when I was twelve. The years and the miles between then and now were impossibly long.

  If the reunion itself wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be, Alaska was better than my wildest dreams. The sky was so blue it almost needed a new color to describe it, the air sweet as mead, and the food. Omigod the food. Fish everything—salmon steaks, salmon patties, smoked salmon, salmon strips, sheefish and whitefish and grayling and pike. Aunt Trudy cut a pike into little cubes and rolled it in cornmeal, then pan fried that sucker and I thought I’d die it was so good.

  Someone else gave me a bowl full of lumpy stuff and said it was Indian ice cream, and I took it to be polite, but it wasn’t ice cream at all. It was fish creamed with fat, and sugar and salmonberries and crowberries. I pigged that stuff down like it was my last meal on earth and asked for more, and everyone laughed in a friendly way. I learned later that it was called akutaq, and that Outsiders generally don’t react to the taste by asking for seconds.

  I tried not to mind that they called me an Outsider. I tried not to mind that, aside from the superficial, I didn’t look much like Grandpa John or any of my cousins. I’d found more than I had any right to expect. I’d found people that looked enough like me to be familiar, and took me in no questions asked, and gave me fish to eat. Besides, this was just a visit. Spend the summer in Alaska, meet my people, do some fishing, right? Nothing crazy about that.

  It was a pretty simple plan. If only I could stick to it without fucking everything up.

  I wasn’t used to being around so many other people. Grandpa John’s cabin felt snug and comfortable when I was alone, or when it was just the two of us, but there were usually at least three or four other people around doing chores for the old man, or asking his advice, or playing chess. He was king of the world when it came to chess, apparently—I wouldn’t know, having a temperament that doesn’t lend itself to long games of cunning and strategy. I’m more suited to something like rugby. Or maybe demolition, if that was a sport.

  One particular day a bunch of people were crowded around the kitchen table, listening to what I think was a baseball game on the crotchety old radio and whooping it up. The radio didn’t work often—Grandpa John said that something about the Earth’s magnetic field played havoc with electronics and communications stuff. I hadn’t had even a single bar on my phone since arriving, and I’d learned that when folks wanted a plane or a barge to stop, they’d run a red flag up the pole by the itty-bitty landing strip.

  It was entertaining as hell at first, listening to folks who’d probably never watched a baseball game live—not that I had, either—but after a while the noise and the closeness started getting to me. There was too much noise, I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and the ringing in my ears had started up again. I growled at someone when he jostled my elbow, making me slosh my coffee. When that someone turned out to be a kid of eleven or twelve, I found myself the target of a roomful of disapproving side-eyes.

  I had to get out of there.

  * * *

  I’d only meant to step outside for a minute or two, maybe sit on the little porch and finish my coffee in peace, but an old walking stick in the corner caught my eye. Made of some pale wood slashed with red, and with a leather-bound grip, it was slender and beautiful. As crazy as it sounded, it felt like a call to adventure. Like it wanted to go for a walk with me and show me awesome places and secret things. So I slugged back my coffee like a boss and reached for the stick.

  It was lighter than I’d imagined, and on closer inspection I thought the red slashes were part of the wood, not painted. Maybe half a dozen leather thongs were attached at the bottom of the grip, and were threaded with shells and pebbles and one long, shiny black feather. It was really pretty, and I admired my new friend for a few minutes before stepping down from the porch and heading toward the river.

  I’d been warned not to go wandering off on my own—Tsone was a little speck in a great wilderness—but I figured I’d just take a short walk along the river. Rivers only flow one way, right? So I’d just turn around and follow it back when my head cleared up. Easy-peasy. The walking stick warmed to my touch and agreed with me.

  We’d just go for a nice little walk by the river.

  The day was warm and inviting, the sky a perfect deep blue, and the waters called to me, soothing and deep, whispering of long, slow secrets. The river called to me and I answered, glad to leave the press of people behind, eager to listen to the song of the currents and the birds in the willow trees and the silence of the great wide sky.

  Reaching the steep bank I clambered and slid down, setting loose a little avalanche of dark soil and snagging my shoelace on the roots of a tall spruce. Because I wanted to, and because I could, and maybe because I’d loved Mark Twain as a child, I took off my shoes and socks and carried them with me.

  I’d expected to be walking on sand—every beach and riverbank I’d ever seen before was sand and pebbles—but the banks of the Kuskokwim are made of sterner stuff. A heavy mud-gray silt clay, cold and unyielding, it sparkled in the sunlight and promised not to betray my secrets. My footprints filled with water and then smoothed out again even as I watched, fascinated.

  Placing my shoes one in front of the other, I pointed them in the direction I meant to go—downstream—just in case someone came looking for me. I didn’t expect to go very far.

  Barefoot, I followed the river’s slow meanderings, listening to its soft voice singing over the mud and silt, whispering through the willow switches, laughing as it hit a snag and wound its way round and round again before wandering on. The silt pressed up against the soles of my feet, urging me on, and in no time at all I’d passed out of sight of the road and Grandpa John’s house and all memory of civilization. I had fallen through the looking glass, and in that moment I caught a glimpse of the real Siggy. For the first time since I could remember, I liked what I saw.

  This Siggy was young, strong as spruce roots, deep as the river, and beautifully suited to this place. I was a part of this glorious whole, and I belonged here every bit as much as the willows, the water, and the raven who circled overhead laughing at my wide-eyed wonder.

  “Hello, Grandfather!” I called to him. That’s what Grandpa John called to the ravens who came begging for scraps of bacon. The bird laughed again, qa’hoq, qa’hoq, and almost it seemed as if I could understand him. I hadn’t expected that a bird might be interested in humans or human ways. I hadn’t expected that air could be so clean it had a taste, or that cold river water washing over my feet would feel like a blessing.

  I hadn’t expected to fall in love.

  Here was the home I’d been
searching for all my life, here was the part of my heart that had been missing, here was the family I’d longed to belong to. Grandfather Raven flew overhead, calling out again, the breeze sang through the willows and ruffled my hair, the earth and the air embraced me. I breathed deep, deeper, filling my lungs, my heart, my body, all the way down to my toes. I wanted to kiss that earth. I wanted to fly up, up into that perfect sky and dance with Raven, I wanted to hold it all in my heart forever and never let go. I flung my arms out wide, for once not caring who might see, not caring if they thought I was crazy.

  I might be crazy, but at last I was home.

  The raven overhead did a sudden barrel roll, probably because he could, and then shot off downriver, mocking my earthbound feet. Never one to turn aside from a dare, I took off running, laughing as I went, the old walking stick hitting the silt with every third or fourth stride, thud-thud-thud like a drum. Raven rolled through the air again, dove down into the trees and shot up like an arrow, laughing. I raced behind him, limbs flailing, heart pounding, breath scorching my lungs, leaping over a downed spruce tree like Superman.

  It felt like I could run forever. I felt like I had been running forever. Only now, instead of running from myself, I was running toward myself. Letting go of Siggy, I became one with the earth—I tucked the cane beneath my arm, and I flew.

  Eventually, of course, me being me, the headlong flight ended in disaster. I tripped over a piece of driftwood and went down hard, tumbling ass-over-teakettle until I came to an inglorious rest with my face in the river, my butt in the air, and the walking stick digging into my gut. Raven lit briefly in a strand of willow, quite near, tipped his head to one side and regarded me with his beak partway open in what I am very sure was a silent laugh.

  Then he launched himself up, up, up, gone.

  Sitting up, I twisted the river water from my hair, spit out as much silt as I could manage, shook myself like a wet dog, and headed back upstream. I was cold and wet, gasping for breath, and utterly, utterly happy.