In the past weeks I've had some extreme emotional upsets. I'm sorry for not posting. To make it up, I'm going to be publishing a few short stories I've written in the past. Enjoy!
"He's here! He's here!" shouted a brown-faced child as his feet pounded the pressed rock of our main street. The sound receded when the boy entered his house but began anew as he exploded down the front steps and headed to the post office. "Hurry! He's almost here, I saw him!"
The quiet street fluttered to life. Tiny pressboard houses spilled out their inhabitants and people began to make their way to the post office at the end of town. With a twinge of envy I trotted along a weedy path past empty salmon drying racks near the river. I hadn't far to go; at six years old my boundaries didn't extend far from home. The post office was only a short distance from the Tlingit salmon camp where the natives stayed during the salmon run. Mary Hutchins ran the office in the front half of an old gas station whose service bay had been converted to house our one grocery store. Many town folk envied Mary for her federal job, but no one could dislike her. She was short and stocky with auburn hair braided halfway down her back. She constantly smiled.
I pressed through the first-comers until I reached the flip-up counter that marked the boundary for all the adults in town. Mary let kids behind the counter-- especially on these occasions. She lifted me up to sit on her stool in the corner. In minutes, it seemed that the entire town had managed to squeeze itself into the office. We listened to each other breathe and glanced excitedly through the grimy window toward the street.
A figure passed by the window causing everyone to suck in his or her breath. The service door to the grocery store jangled open. The man who walked in was average in every way. He was neither too short nor too tall. He was not overly muscular, nor could you call him skinny. His dark hair and tanned face made him neither handsome nor homely, and no one had yet guessed where he came from. This man could walk through a hundred other Alaskan towns and cause no one to look twice. One would have to look twice to see him, in fact. His weathered clothing blended as well with the surrounding forest as the changing feathers of a ptarmigan. The fist person to see him in our town had the honored job of shouting the news to everyone who could hear, a task every child fiercely competed for.
Throughout history, wanderers have been called by many names. People feared the wandering Gauls for their pillaging, and later despised bands of traveling gypsies for their strange ways. Early settlers of the New World met tinkerers who walked the mountains and served as the first handymen. Ours was simply referred to as The Mountain Man.
Out of his colossal deerskin pack came the most delectable morsels a mouth could encounter. My favorite was the sweet smoked salmon. Thumb-sized nuggets of red salmon meat had been marinated in a secret recipe and smoked over a combination of hardwoods. I ate these morsels on the floatplane dock that bobbed in the river behind the post office. Jerked and smoked meats, sourdough starter, dried and smoked salmon, dried berries, syrups, bear lard, sweet seal blubber, roasted pine nuts, field greens, and sometimes candies were among the things we could expect to see. Any time Ziploc came out with a new bag size, it would inevitably wind up filled with goods on our post office countertop.
The Mountain Man didn't care who took how much of what. At the end of a visit he would re-pack his bag and sling it on his shoulder. He and Mary would walk through the grocery store while we all remained behind. His list varied constantly. Sometimes he would want a few cans of this and that, some dried goods such as flour, sugar, or salt, but on many occasions he would trade for cartons of ammunition. Mary gave him what he needed and sent him on his way. She tallied the price of everything he took and divided the price between the people in the post office. In this way, prices always varied.
It seemed that the Mountain Man didn't care how much or little his supplies cost; he would trade everything he had for 50 feet of cord and two pairs of wool socks. He did that once, in fact. Mary slipped a folding pocketknife into one of the socks on that occasion to try to make up for the difference. he came back three days later to return it. Mary tried to make him keep it, but he adamantly refused.
"Don't need it," he said. It was the first time I had every heard him speak. I was sitting on the stool in the corner, mouth full of his tangy sweet smoked salmon. We didn't see him again for eight months.
*****
I turned seven that spring. My mother was elbow-deep in flour baking me a birthday cake. She sang silly songs to me while I sat on one of our low-slung rafters. It was the only time I was every allowed up there and I felt like a Queen. Bundles of herbs hung from the beams by bright twists of ribbon. I liked to swing my feet between them and smell their aroma.
My house sat in a clearing with tall fir trees looming every closer. Given a few years, it would probably be overrun with them. A few more and the cabin would probably melt into the ground-- it was trying to do just that even when we lived there. I poked moss and mud into all the cracks I could reach, but each winter would reveal more by allowing the chill wind to blow through. I woke up many times with a skiff of snow on my blankets.
Mom kept the house warm with her cooking. Charlie-- mom's husband and I dare say my father, though I never considered him that-- liked good food and would allow mom to keep the wood stove piping hot all day long. She filled plates with warm fry bread and constantly had a bowl of sourdough rising or cooling in the window. When sourdough pancakes were through cooking in the morning, mom would immediately start a soup or stew that required cooking all day long. Only in the summer would she let the fires burn low.
My birthday was a special occasion for mom. I chose what we would eat for dinner and she would let me misbehave a little while she made me a cake. She had just finished one of her rhymes when Charlie nearly knocked the door off its hinges. He was a sour man on a good day. Mom told me he hadn't always been like that; that he used to bring her flowers and say sweet things to make her smile. Be that as it may, I usually found reasons to steer clear of him.
I knew from one look at his grim face and smell of sour mash whiskey that I should leave. I didn't quite make it off the rafter and was instead dragged down by my ankles. I hit the ground running, but Charlie still used his foot to shove me out. I knew he and mom were both yelling, but couldn't hear them for a strange ringing in my head. Like an animal, I tore through the brush-filled clearing, my footfalls muffled by the loamy soil. The salmon camp passed on my left, but still I ran. I ran until the darkness of the fir trees closed over me. My breath came in great heaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment