Now instead of going left toward the Chamber, Snag turned right onto Willow and hiked up the street to the Old Folks’. She had to get to Lettie before Kache did.
Lettie closed her eyes again. If only the nurses and Snag would let her be for more than ten minutes so she could enjoy this remembering, which had become so clear, as if the past was happening to her once again.
This morning, her mind took her all the way back to the time when she first got the idea of Alaska in her head. She’d thought of herself as an adulteress, but of course not in the common sense of the word. It was the land. Damn the land. It called to her, first in a whisper, its name, Alaska, soft down the nape of her neck while she hung out the clothes. Then it was everywhere. It took her over. Alaska, Alaska, the broom said. Alaska? the chickens asked. She carried a picture in her pocket—of some mountain range across an inlet of water—and she took it out so often it began to peel back from the corner. At night, while A.R. slept loud and hard, she lay awake, then dreamt wet, green, mossy dreams spilling one into the other. Thick, abundant dreams that tumbled her back into morning breathless and then with a feeling she guessed was yearning.
A.R. told her to forget it. “One winter,” he’d said, “will send you back to Kansas kissing the dry cracked dirt, calling it the floor of heaven. Even with this Depression and all.”
No, Alaska was strictly Lettie’s idea.
The man who’d bought the farm from them for practically nothing was the one who told them about homesteading up north. Lettie thought it his way of trying to redeem himself for taking their land and knowing there wasn’t a mud puddle in the United States they could buy with what he’d given them for it. He’d said, “In Herring Town you can get land for free. Just like in the West way back when, but there aren’t no Indians in Alaska—well, not the fighting kind.”
He’d handed her the photograph. “You just stake out the prettiest piece of property you ever seen in your lifetime,” he’d said. “Trees and meadows, lakes and mountains and the sea, too. And the moose and the berry plants, the fish and clams, the coal just waiting for you to pick it off the beach. None of them’s gotten word there’s a Depression going on.”
A.R. kept moping around after they’d sold the farm and most of their things and moved to town, into the apartment with her Uncle Fred. A.R. moped like a man whose dream had fallen down and died. But the farm wasn’t his dream, after all, she said carefully one morning, while he still lay in bed, smoking one cigarette after the other. “It was your daddy’s dream.” In a rare moment of intensity between them, she grabbed his arm, tight; her fingernails made grooves into his flesh.
“I think,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I think you gotta have your own dreams.” He looked at her, blank, apparently as puzzled by her tears as she was. She stood. Staring into the corner of the tiny, crowded bedroom, she tried to explain if only to herself. “It must be like what they say about religion. You can’t inherit your religion. I imagine the same’s true for your dreams.”
A.R. was a man resigned. Had he known, Lettie thought, he’d have been a man torn by jealousy. Because that place—that place she’d only heard about, only seen in a single photograph—had taken her over so completely she thought of little else. One night she woke from a dream that should have been a nightmare. But strangely, it wasn’t. Instead of feeling frightened, she felt a freedom that did frighten her more than a nightmare ever had. In the dream, A.R. passed on. Lettie cried. But she left the funeral before it was over, threw her bags in a car of a northbound train and jumped aboard with ease. Free.
The next morning she ripped up the photograph. The pieces scattered from her hand like snow. “Enough,” she said aloud. She hummed familiar tunes and tried to enjoy the sun on her arms while she hung laundry on the line, as she had before this whole nonsense got started.
But the nonsense refused to let go of her. In a pitiful desperation she pleaded with A.R., afraid of that dream of his death and afraid of her own … was it passion?
When he finally said yes, he didn’t let go gradually, he just let go. “Well, okay. We’ll go to Alaska.” And she did what anyone who’d grown accustomed to pulling with all her might would do. She fell flat on her keister.
“Well, what on—?” he said, reaching a hand over to help her up.
She couldn’t answer. Laughing, crying, laughing.
“Where did you come from, woman?” he asked, dusting her off. “And what on earth did you do with my Lettie?”
When she found her voice she said, “Thank you thank you thank you!” while she kissed him all over his face, feeling a tenderness toward him she hadn’t felt for a long time.
So many times over the next year anyone else might have shaken a fist at her, damned her for getting them there in the first place. But A.R. never did. Not even one I told you so.
There was the treacherous boat trip once they ventured outside the Inside Passage, where she clung to both the fear that they might die and the fear that they might not die, that death might not come and save them from the slamming, slamming, slamming of the sea.
But they survived somehow, and they arrived somewhere. It was called Herring Town. They trudged through icy waves, carrying their bags over their heads while waves leapt at them like children begging for a present. There were people on the shore, too. A man, a woman and—she counted them—ten children. Ten! The Newberrys. All of them round-faced and round-eyed, but their bodies were lean and muscled. All except for the baby, who was delightfully fat, and the toddler, who, later when the sun broke through and slapped color all over the place, ran along the beach wearing nothing but a dirty orange life preserver and a cow bell, his legs chubby and creased, his feet padding on the wet sand.
Frank Newberry had gotten word from the Rosses in Anchor Point, who’d gotten word from Uncle Fred’s next-door neighbor’s cousin, Beck Patten, that Lettie and A.R. were due to come in to Herring Town on the Salty Sally. For three days, the Newberrys watched down the inlet for the promise of Lettie and A.R.
Margaret Newberry clung to Lettie as if she were a long-lost sister. She stroked Lettie’s hair, most of it fallen loose from the bun she’d pinned it up in days before. A lifetime before. Lettie held her breath while Margaret stared into her face, inches away. Lettie knew she reeked of vomit and worse, but Margaret didn’t seem to mind.
Margaret reassured her, reassured her again. There would someday be a train connecting them to Anchorage, and a school. More talk of a store. A post office. And soon, a church.
What Margaret didn’t seem to know was Lettie didn’t need reassuring. A church? Why anyone wanted to worship God in a dark log hovel when a mere glimpse of the water, which went from green to red to pink to blue, depending on what the sun and moon were up to—not as it had been earlier with the torment of waves, but now white with the sun’s reflections, a thousand spots of light leaping and dancing—seemed a declaration to her, Let there be Light!
If she could, Lettie would have stripped off her vomit-crusted clothes, pitched them into the fire and worn nothing but a cowbell while she splashed in the icy waves.
Later, while the young women of Herring Town plotted their civilities, crowded around the Sears Catalog, and tended to their children, the men helped Lettie and A.R. stake out their land. She giggled at the kissing puffins with their strange hooked orange beaks and matching feet, cried when she first heard the lonely cry of a loon. Her heart jumped with the salmon in the river; when she saw their silver streaks through the clear water, she saw for the first time the invisible currents of her own life.
One night she pulled A.R. close to her, unlatched his trousers, snugged them down before he’d even stopped snoring. She was not that type of woman, really. She had always been a lady, though