When the grassy trail met the gravelly beach, Marulia paused in mid-stride. Her eyes fell toward the cannery and the cluster of buildings that were oddly silent on this day. Usually at the height of the summer, the noise was endless, reaching across the bay with an arm of money. As more fish were delivered, the canning machines coughed and steamed all night long, louder than the seagulls who squawked as they claimed the discarded guts, eyes, and heads. It was a never-ending chatter between the cannery and the gulls. Everyone wondered how the missionaries could stand to listen to all the noise rattling their windows. It was worse than the screeching coming from the chapel organ.
Marulia clicked her tongue at the chapel’s growing steeple as if it were a large tooth feeding on the villagers. She wondered why they stayed when their congregation was a rotating tide of drunks and repentant sobers. It made her dizzy just thinking about it.
“I hear there’s a new one staying with them,” she said, pointing to the missionaries’ home. “Got lost or something in the storm. How can anyone get lost here?”
Anne Girl made no answer, but she grinned at her mother’s backside, because her senses were correct about the new man in the village. Anne Girl’s abdomen hadn’t stopped fluttering since the day of the storm, and all the teas on the tundra gave her no relief. Of course this had to be because he was staying with the Killweathers. Who in their right mind would want to stay with them? He probably had nowhere to go.
She had been inside the Killweather house only once. When Nora and Frederik first arrived, everyone visited them, brought them akutaq, stinky head, and secrets of the tundra so they could look at Nora’s pale face and Frederik’s glasses. Anne Girl hadn’t brought anything to share, because she had only wanted to see the inside of their home. Nora, with her long skirts that danced around her body when she walked, gave the impression that her house was pink and smelled of June. Anne Girl expected flowers in vases on every windowsill and honey set neatly on the table. Yet, although the missionary’s wife had honey on her table, her house wasn’t nearly what Anne Girl had expected, as the main room was a small, yellow square with a narrow doorway to the kitchen. How much Anne Girl had wanted to see the kitchen, to know if it was as clean as Nora carried herself. She wanted to count how many pots and pans Nora had, to see if it explained the many boxes that followed the Killweathers upon their arrival. But Nora wasn’t giving tours, and all Anne Girl could do was stare at the large cross on the wall and wonder why it didn’t have two crosses like the one she had seen at the cannery store. Marulia had said that the cross was “them Russians” still praying for fish, since they took all the seals. This cross had been different. Everything about these missionaries was different. They planned to stay.
“Maybe he knows them,” Anne Girl said, although she didn’t think so. She felt that this new man was an accident waiting to collide, and he probably ended up at the Killweathers’ because he didn’t know any better. She wondered when they would finally meet, because there was no way she was going to invite herself over for tea.
Two steps behind her mother, she walked quickly along the shore, feeling the wind beat against her cheeks, until Marulia stopped suddenly. She pointed at the loose gravel, where their skiff was supposed to be anchored. And it was anchored; it was more secure than they had hoped, and Anne Girl could hear her mother’s teeth grinding in long, slow circles, filing her teeth down to her nerves.
A double ender turned on its side balanced on top of their skiff; the mast dug deep into the gravel as if it had finally found its roots on the beach. A large wave had picked up the boat and placed it perfectly into the bed of their skiff. The wooden frame of their skiff stretched and bowed under the weight, and it appeared that its seams were breaking, flattening the ribs into twigs. A gray seagull with a black-tipped beak strutted along the mast while eyeing the women. Marulia clicked her tongue and tapped the wood.
“Some storm to make boats fly like this. Probably had spirits running like crazy.” She waved over her head. “Funny that I don’t see any other boats on this beach.” Marulia sighed and looked up and down. Her hand went to her chest as if to make sure her heart still moved against its cage. It wasn’t the broken shape of the skiff, Marulia knew, that caused shortness of breath. This was different, as if something were growing branches in her body, stretching itself from her chest to her gut. “Akeka,” she muttered under her breath.
“No, it’s that man’s who’s staying at the Killweathers’. Didn’t even know how to anchor his boat,” Anne Girl said. “It’s too late in the summer to repair the skiff. Everyone’s fishing and no one is going to want to patch a boat.” She ran her hand along the wooden seams of the boat and felt the creases beneath her fingertips eat at her skin. Her hand paused at the wooden cleat that was sheared off, exposing the brightness of the brown grain. She imagined a thin man with long legs that made catwalking up and down the rails easy. He was blond with cheeks that slightly reddened against the wind, and so his skin was smoother than the bay when the water was like glass. He was completely unlike any villager or cannery man with the tough skin, and Anne Girl couldn’t decide whether she should put a hole in his boat or ask him if he wanted to join her at the next potlatch.
“He must be pitiful with this kind of boat,” Marulia said. Her fingers lingered in the air, painting it. “I heard that he don’t know how to fish. I heard he can’t sit still during church.”
“You hear a lot.”
“I do,” Marulia conceded and tapped her forehead. “I hear more than you think.”
Anne Girl saw hours of labor wrapped in the coils of rope that were knotted around the sailboat. They definitely would need help from some of the men in town to free the boat from the skiff. It was nothing but a bloated tree. She tugged on one end of the rope, but when it didn’t budge she thought of the Killweathers’ visitor and decided that even if he was good-looking, she hated him.
With her hands still on her hips, Marulia stared at the boat that jammed her skiff into the bank. She ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “Makes you wonder why he couldn’t see the cannery. All that wood piling is hard to miss, you know? You need to tell him to get his boat off our skiff.”
Two
Despite the storm, the salmon quickly returned to the bay as they always do, and in the next high tide, Anne Girl found her net loaded to the gills. Her skiff was still trapped under the weight of the sailboat, and in order to pick out the salmon, Anne Girl had to pull the net onto the beach. She cursed the tide and John the entire time. That morning, Marulia had woken up ill and her skin was hot to touch, but she pushed Anne Girl out the door so she could make medicine teas. So Anne Girl picked alone, thankful, because she knew that today she would see John Nelson.
Although she was ready to meet him, had him traced out in her mind of how they would look standing next together or lying side by side, she didn’t hear his quiet approach. The salmon had her complete attention. She bent over each one and pulled and yanked them out until silver was flying all around her, raining silver dollars. She would ask him how he came this far north. No, she would tell him that she was going to burn his boat for firewood. No, she would tell him to go home, because