“Keep your mouth shut, ya hear,” Joe said. He fired up the jeep and jerked it into gear. “This is between me and Him.”
Joe always called Dad “Him.” As if he wasn’t really our father, pushing him away as part of his escape.
I try to imagine how Joe remembers him now, but I can’t. I just see him the way I remember him, coming in through the chop in his rain pants and the wool sweater cut off at the elbows. He was too far away for the weakness to show in his face. One hand gripped the tiller while the other, brown and cracked like old cedar, waved to us in the sunset. Joe was like him but taller and leaner, the next best thing.
We unloaded the nets when Dad came in. Then we dragged the boat up high on the beach with the jeep. Joe and I were trying to do most of the lifting like Mom had told us. Last October, Dad had a heart attack, and he’d spent the winter recovering. Mom and the doctor told him not to fish, but he wasn’t that kind.
I emptied out the odds and ends of tools and bailing buckets that spent the summer in the boat. Joe and Dad unbolted the outboard motor and toted it and the gas cans into the plywood shed that squatted back in the alders along the bluff. With the help of the jeep, the three of us flipped the boat over on its gunwales so it rested on a pair of driftwood logs. Then Dad padlocked the shed and it was done. The last eight fish of the summer lay in the back of the jeep for canning, and when Dad passed me and tousled my head, I savored the last sweet smell of man sweat, salt, and salmon. The season was over.
Dad jumped into the jeep and honked the horn. “I’ll take the bluff,” I said. The jeep had to take the road up the creek bed through the bluff to the highway, but a person on foot could walk a hundred yards up the beach and climb a steep trail to our backyard. From where I stood on the beach the galvanized metal roof of our house was just visible through a wedge of spruce trees.
“Suit yourself, Humpy!” Dad yelled above the roar of the motor. Joe nodded his head approvingly. Maybe he was going to give Dad the word on the way home and didn’t want an audience. I hoped not. It would be good if we had the last night of the season without a fight, and it would be a fight. Or so I thought.
Our one-story log house squatted in the fireweed and wild geraniums on the bluff overlooking the inlet. From the back porch, we could look down on the fishermen, their open dories like water-birds all pointy in the front and wide behind, the cork lines of their nets like strings of beads across the tide. Farther out, the drift boats fished the tide rips that ran like rivers of current and had names like “clear muddy” and “middle rip.” Beyond them the giant container ships steamed up and down Cook Inlet to and from Anchorage. On the horizon stood two giant volcanoes with their noses pushed up in the clouds, spouting occasional puffs of steam. In the long light of a clear summer evening, the bluff seemed on the rim of the world and the boats and mountains fell away before me.
In the summer, we practically lived on the beach where the salmon ran in great schools along the shore, and we stretched nets from the beach to catch them. Each day I made a dozen trips up and down the bluff trail fetching tools, hauling food and messages. The base of the trail was a scramble of loose sand and coal chunks fallen from the bluff above. Where the trail ran over sandstone, there were steps chopped in it and a rope for safety; I’d quit using the rope last summer after weeks of Joe’s teasing. From there, I could scramble on all fours up a washout and over the lip to our backyard.
To the right was the garden where Mom spent most of her summer with her back to the water. To the left was the house guarded by giant spruces and surrounded with beds of pansies, poppies, irises, and forget-me-nots.
Usually when I climbed the bluff, I was escaping pirates or Nazi soldiers, but that day I was all in the present and laden with the empty end of summer. I paused and hung on the rope, gazing down the inlet. The Fergusons were still out hauling buoys and the Leman’s 4X4 was dragging a dory out of the breakers toward the bluff. In a week, the beaches would be empty, and the only tracks on the beach would be those of the jeeps collecting coal for the winter. And that wasn’t nearly as much fun as fishing.
I was watching the water, contemplating this passing of summer when Dad had his second heart attack. If I had ridden in the jeep I would have been there but instead I was on the bluff looking at the water, so I missed seeing my dad one last time. He and Joe had made it to the gravel shoulder of the highway before he stopped the jeep, grabbed his chest, and collapsed. I guess that’s why I remember it all so well. I remember how he looked coming in through swells with his hat tipped back and his brown hand waving. Waving to me, waving good-bye.
By the time I clambered up to the house, the station wagon was tearing out of the driveway with Joe at the wheel, leaving my older sister, Mary, standing on the porch screaming after it, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.
Dad’s first heart attack had come ten months before. He hadn’t come home from the hospital until Thanksgiving, but when he did we thought our troubles were over. As the evenings grew longer and the sun wasn’t much brighter than the moon, my father lost his warmth. He was weak and pale and angry, as if the winter had entered his soul and chilled his spirit. Our family was soon trapped in the midst of night and cold. The happy card games were gone; talk and laughter were muted. That entire winter, it seemed, we sat at my father’s side and waited.
Then, only weeks before summer when the days grew warm and light, we saw signs of hope. Dad seemed to face down the demons in his body and his familiar strength returned. His, and therefore our, infallibility remained untarnished. We would fish on. We did fish that summer, and I spent most of the summer on the beach.
It was the last day of salmon season when death passed among us. One week later, we buried him behind the church in a grave that overlooked Cook Inlet.
Chapter 2
Mom broke the news one Sunday in March when we were sitting at the kitchen table eating apple Betty for dessert. Joe was there, Mary, Mom, and me. Only Dad was missing, and we hadn’t gotten used to that yet.
“We have to move to Anchorage,” said Mom. Her voice was soft but strong, and I can’t think of a much harder thing she ever had to say. “You kids can stay with the Browns until school is over. But I’m going to have to go get a job. You know there is nothing here, no work for a woman, nothing that pays anything.” The strength was gone suddenly from her voice. She looked around the cabin with tears filling her eyes and leaking down her cheeks. “You’ll never know how hard this is for me. To lose him like this, and then this too. Your father loved it here, you know.”
I could only think of how it felt to hug her, how she was soft on the outside and hard underneath. Dad’s hugs were just hard, no softness, their strength right out front. I thought she could use a hug just then, but one from me wouldn’t help much.
Joe leaned back on his chair and looked at the ceiling. “It makes sense to me,” he said. Of course, it was fine with him. He had stayed too long already. “It’ll be better, you’ll see.”
I saw Mom’s pain as she swept the hair back from her face and held the coffee cup to her lips so that the steam from it rose into her nose and eyes. She did that when she was choosing careful words. “We don’t all feel that way, Joe. We don’t all want to leave.”
“He’ll be here forever,” I heard myself say, “and we’ll be back.”
I don’t know why I said it that way, like a kid could make decisions about such things, about anything, but Dad was buried on the bluff above the inlet. The log house he built and the land he cleared, the smokehouse and all of it would be here. It wasn’t going away.
Mary erupted instead of speaking, as she always seemed to do. “Joe doesn’t care about anyone but himself, Mom. You know that. No one cares what I want. No one asks me!”
“Now Mary.”