But still I hear myself say, “It’s just that the way they live and do things is so different from, well, from the way I was brought up and the way we do things. I mean, Mother Maurie’s house looks like something out of a magazine, and Steffie always looks like she’s going out to tea with Queen Elizabeth.”
Tom snorts a chuckle. “Yeah, well. I know what you mean. Sometimes it gets to me, too. But it wasn’t always like that. When Steffie and Ellie and I were kids, the money was a lot tighter. I remember plenty of hand-me-down clothes from the cousins, and lots of secondhand furniture. I remember when Mom’s end tables were wire spools with cloths over them. But in the last ten years, since the equipment dealership took off, Dad’s been able to do better for the family. And he likes that. He likes giving Mom and the girls nice things, likes living good with new furniture, and indulging Steffie and stuff. Hell, I know he can remember enough hard times for us. He’s worked damn hard to get the family where it is; don’t look down on him for liking to flash around that money isn’t so tight for them anymore. It’s a point of pride for him. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to look down on us for being broke, and having to keep things simple and cheap. He knows where that is, too.” Tom sounds a little hurt that I would find his family’s prosperity daunting.
“I know, but …” This time even I can hear the whine in my voice, and I stop a fraction of a second before Tom says, “Hush. Stop it, now. You’re just working yourself up over nothing. Relax. They’re going to love you. All you have to do is just relax and be yourself.”
“Okay,” I concede. I can hear his unspoken hope that I’ll stop chewing on my worries, and let him doze again. So I lean back in my own seat and close my eyes. I pretend to sleep.
Fairbanks, Alaska,
1963
Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.
And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.
I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.
The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.
Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.
But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge of the true forest, are twiggy blueberry bushes, bereft now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.
He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.
He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.
He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.
He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows.