Asylum--Chapter Eleven Thanksgiving

Chapter Eleven
Thanksgiving

Just before Thanksgiving, I flew to Fairbanks and Thomas picked me up. He talked for most of the drive to Taiga, telling me how his job was going. This time, clouds obscured Denali, though it was less than a hundred miles off the highway. Without the heights of the Alaska Range visible, the landscape was monotonous, just snow-covered spruce, with the birch and aspen empty of leaves. Compared to Eagle, with its mountains close behind the town, this landscape seemed too wide-open, too windy, too empty. I felt as dispirited and desolate as the surrounding forest. Thomas felt we had already started our adventure together in Alaska on my first trip to see him back in September. I could not tell him I was off an adventure of my own entirely, one that did not include him. 

On our anniversary, we went to the lodge north of town, which had the only restaurant in the area open in winter. I dressed for the occasion in black pants and a clingy red sweater. I felt overdressed, but wanted to look nice for Thomas.

“You look hot.”

“Thanks.”

I stared across the table at him. His face was full of hope and expectation. To him, all our past troubles were forgotten, and a bright future lay ahead of us. I saw in him what I’d always seen: intelligence, passion, and an appearance of strength that hid a certain vulnerability. We avoided talking about my writing or about San Jose and, instead, congratulated each other on our achievement in staying married for twenty-five years. Even though it was an arbitrary number to him, Thomas acknowledged it was a damn long time. It had been many hard-won years, but the anniversary felt less like a milestone than a grave marker. That evening was marking the end of something, and I felt nostalgic and deeply sad.

Thomas had been invited to play the violin at a local church, so on Sunday we went to the service. I sat in the pew as he played Bach’s “Arioso,” transported again by his artistry. His head was tucked down and he was looking at the floor, playing from memory. His dexterous fingers ranged up and down the neck of the violin with assurance, his body moving with the music, all rhythm and grace. I saw him as if through the wrong end of a telescope, distant from me and wholly apart. My eyes filled with tears as I realized two things: I still loved him very much; and I was starting to feel like he wasn’t my husband anymore. 

Thomas took me to the airport in Fairbanks early the next morning, and I insisted he drop me off instead of accompanying me into the terminal. Once inside I went to the local terminal to get on a plane not to San Jose, but to Eagle. I felt deeply duplicitous but excited about seeing Billy. On the tarmac, a pimply-faced kid took my bags and tossed them into the back of the Cessna, and then—to my surprise—he climbed into the pilot’s seat. I scrambled up onto the wing after him and clambered awkwardly through the tiny door. 

“It’s going to be a bumpy flight,” he said cheerfully. “It’s windy up there and it can’t decide which way it wants to blow.” 

The take-off was flawless, but once we were in the air, the plane dropped and lurched as the wind buffeted it. The pilot flew the plane like a two-fisted video game. He had a look of concentration on his face, but he was obviously having fun, confident in his ability to score high, keep us aloft, and get us safely to our destination.

“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” 

“Twenty.”

I reminded myself that plenty of young men in the military flew planes. Somehow, that thought was not much comfort in the tiny plane. Still, it was better than flying with the pilot Billy called “Sleepy Simon” because he had the habit of dozing off on the usually uneventful flight to Eagle.

We flew low with a clear view of the snow-covered mountains beneath us. The valleys were forested but the mountaintops were treeless—enormous sloping expanses of tundra, empty and wild. The flight took us over hundreds of miles of wilderness without any sight of human activity or habitation—no buildings, roads, airstrips—nothing but white mountains stretching as far as I could see in all directions, receding into the distance as if they were rolling like a vast ocean right over the horizon and around the world. As we neared Eagle, the pilot pointed out the bare rocky reaches of Glacier Peak. Finally, we banked over the frozen Yukon River, skimmed above the bluff, and flew low over the town. I was able to pick out the courthouse, the old schoolhouse, and the well house, just like on the map drawn by Lena. I even thought I saw Esther walking her dog.

All through the flight, I had been conscious of my wedding ring. I twisted it back and forth on my finger. I had never taken it off since Thomas, with great love in his eyes, had put it on my finger at our wedding. The letters “NMW,” inscribed inside the ring kept sounding in my head: “No matter what. No matter what.” Just before we landed, I slipped the ring off my finger and put it in my wallet.

The grumpy old man who took the mail from the plane to the post office reluctantly agreed to drop me off at Eagle Trading Company. I called Billy from the pay phone outside. The weathered building looked like a false front in a Western movie, but there was nothing fake about it. The lack of artifice was one of the things I loved about Eagle. A Native man was sitting on the bench by the door reading a newspaper called the Mukluk Telegraph. While I was waiting for Billy to arrive in Sherman’s truck, I browsed around the general store. The floor was slanted and my footsteps made the wide, uneven floorboards creak.

Everything cost two to three times as much as in the Lower 48. In addition to staples and snacks, household products and hardware items, there were some unexpected items on the shelves. Was there really a pressing demand in town for pickled pigs’ feet? In the way of fresh produce, there was a bin of potatoes and another of onions, and a couple of wrinkly tomatoes in the refrigerator. A man with a hills-of-Georgia accent and a long white beard eyed me curiously before exiting the store with his diamond willow walking stick and a pack of Lucky Strikes.

When I pulled a dollar bill out of my wallet to pay for a pack of gum, my wedding ring came flying out and hit the counter with the unmistakable sound of solid gold. I recognized the trim, rather proper-looking woman at the cash register as Marshall’s wife, Carol. If he was the elder statesman of the town, then she was the grand dame. Carol looked up and saw my ring spinning on the counter. It made a slow loop before rolling off the edge and disappearing onto the floor.

“I think it went under the counter,” she said icily.

I got down on my hands and knees to look for the ring, wishing I could disappear. Welcome to Eagle, I thought. Why didn’t I just arrive in town wearing a scarlet A on my parka?

I came down with a cold the day after I arrived. I spent the afternoon lying on the couch with my head on Billy’s lap. He had taken my advice and gotten a cat, a gentle little thing he called Bitty. He amused me with the story of how he had gone to pick her up at the house of a friend whose cat had just had a litter of kittens. Billy brought along a cardboard box to transport her in the truck, but he hadn’t thought of the fact that he’d previously used it to store marten furs. When he tried to put the kitten into the box, it could tell only that it was being shoved into a dark place that smelled of a wild predator, and she clawed her way up Billy’s arm and leapt off his shoulder. He had a heck of a time catching her and getting her home, where he carefully applied antiseptic to his scratches.

I drifted off to sleep with Bitty lying next to me, purring. When I woke, Billy was staring down at me with a concerned, protective look on his face.

“You looked so beautiful and peaceful,” he said. “Stay right there, I’ll make you some tea.” He tucked a blanket around me and started heating water in the tea kettle. He opened a jar and pulled out a handful of dried flower heads.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Yarrow. It’s also called soldier’s wort. They used it in the Civil War. It staunches bleeding and you can pack it into a wound and it clots things up. It’s good for colds.”

I watched through half-closed eyes as Billy put the yarrow in a canning jar and poured hot water over it. Bitty was twining herself around his ankles, asking to be fed. Billy looked down and said “What say ye, cat?” Steam curled up from the Mason jar full of pale yellow tea. The late afternoon sun came streaming in the window, glowing richly through the jar of honey on the counter. I felt warm and drowsy and well cared for.

In the summer, when I was writing to Billy a couple of times a week, I’d sent him a picture of myself in sixth grade. I was wearing an ugly orange and green striped dress, and my long hair was pulled neatly away from my face. He had remarked how trusting I looked. He kept it on the shelf next to the wood stove.

When Billy came over to the couch to give me my tea, I looked up at him gratefully.

“I see her eyes again,” he said. “That trusting girl.”

An old-timer named Homer showed up unannounced the next afternoon. A gaunt man, he had prominent cheekbones and a nose disfigured by frostbite. With his white canvas anorak and moosehide mukluks, he could have been a northern adventurer of the previous century. After a nod of hello, he refused a chair and sat on an overturned bucket near the wood stove. He accepted a cup of tea with his good hand. His other hand and arm hung, largely useless, at his side, perhaps the result of a stroke. Billy rolled cigarettes for them both.

At one point, he casually removed one of his mukluks and pulled up a misshapen thing on his foot that once must have been a sock, and put the mukluk back on. Then he took out a lighter and burned off a thread hanging from his anorak sleeve. He made these minor adjustments to his attire completely without self-consciousness, as if we weren’t there—the habits of someone used to living alone.

. There were long spaces between their exchanges and they both seemed comfortable with that, just sipping their tea and smoking. I was not so much bored by their slow manner of speech as lulled by it. Chainsaws, four-wheelers, big government, and guns. None of these things concerned me.

My interest was awakened when Homer started talking about his new cabin. It was the first winter he’d spent there.

“What was wrong with the old one?” I asked. I’d seen it from the road, a tiny log cabin with a hobbit-sized door.

“Too big. Felt like I was living in a ballroom with no dancing partner.”

So he’d built one even smaller. Eight-by-ten feet. 

“How do you like the size?”

He said sheepishly. “I could do with a bit more room.”

“Like how much?” I asked, imagining doubling it, perhaps.

He held his hands two feet apart. “About this much.”

I’d realized by then that not everyone in Eagle lived like Homer and Billy’s other friends, in small cabins with outhouses and root cellars, without running water, and even a few without phones or electricity. Some people in town or the village lived in regular homes heated with fuel oil and even had their own wells, with the luxury of simply turning a faucet to enjoy a hot shower. Satellite dishes sprouted from an occasional rooftop. These were residents with regular or seasonal jobs: school teachers, tribal administrators, government workers. I’d learned of well-educated professionals who’d made the deliberate choice to move to Eagle (as opposed to those who’d just fled to the end of the road), leaving behind jobs such as social worker, college teacher, probation officer, and small business owner. Eagle had the reputation of being full of nothing but oddballs and refuseniks of modern life, and that had been my initial impression, as well. But the truth was not as simple as that. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, why these middle-class people had left behind homes, and perhaps families, in the Lower 48. Had they been drawn as inexorably as I to life in the north?

One morning, sitting down with what had become my favorite breakfast—bannock slathered with butter and honey—I found a handful of my letters stuffed into a crack in the couch. I’d sent Billy so many letters that they’d drifted into windrows in various places throughout the cabin, piled on bookshelves and chairs. I suggested he use them as fire starter but he soundly rejected that idea.

While we ate, we talked about food. I was no connoisseur, but it astounded me the things I had eaten that Billy had not: papaya, mango, casaba melon, Caesar salad, French dressing, pastrami, tortellini. The list went on. But what was equally extraordinary was the number of things he had eaten in addition to the Alaska staples of caribou, moose, and black bear: deer, elk, grizzly bear, lynx, mountain lion, beaver, raccoon, porcupine, muskrat, squirrel, snowshoe hare, cottontail rabbit, jackrabbit, and rattlesnake as well as robins, blue jays, quail, grouse, Canadian goose, mourning dove, and various ducks including blue winged teal, shoveler, and mallard. To me, a mallard was a tame duck that eats stale bread by a pond in a city park, not something you would kill and eat. I sat there, aghast. I felt slightly nauseated at the thought of Billy eating muskrat (“greasy”) and beaver tail (“fatty, gristly white meat”), and what he said was the nastiest thing of all—barbecued raccoon. 

I went and lay down on the bed, which was covered with a quilt made by a local woman from old jeans Billy had found at the dump. She’d sewn souvenir patches of eagles, moose, and bear onto many of the squares. I ran my hand over one that read, “Eagle, Alaska” and another, “Alaska or Bust.” 

I’d made it to Alaska once again, but, as always, I’d been presented with something that challenged my perceptions of what was normal or even moral behavior. As songbirds, robins were illegal to hunt. No question there. But the rest? How could I be critical of Billy for killing out of necessity, out of hunger, maybe even out of curiosity, when for me, the messy business of slaughtering animals was conveniently out-of-sight, out-of-mind, a matter of selecting an anonymous cut of meat in a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. The more time I spent in Eagle, the more I saw the complexities of what had first appeared to be a simple life, the choices to be made, the risks to be taken.

To take my mind off of all those dead animals, which Billy could tell upset me, he told me a story about going to the DMV the previous winter. Even a trip to the DMV, which, in the city was a minor inconvenience involving little more than a tedious wait, in the bush could be a difficult and even dangerous endeavor.

His friend, Bear, the man I’d seen at the post office where a wolf pelt hat, was taking his snowmachine to Tok to get tested for his commercial driving license. It was safer to travel with two people, but a snowmachine carrying a passenger was difficult to balance and uncomfortable for both people involved, so Billy stood and steered his dogsled as it was pulled behind his Bear’s snowmachine. It was March and the snow was too soft during the day, so they had traveled at night. 

“A hundred and seventy miles in the dark! You went all that way just to get a license?”

“I had to get at least a state I.D. card so I could go to Dawson as soon as the Yukon Queen started running in the spring,” he explained. “I had a tooth that was killing me, and I wanted to get it pulled. Dentists are a lot cheaper in Canada.”

“You must have had driver’s license at some point. What happened to it?”

With a look of chagrin, he said, “I sent it to a girl in Fairbanks. I answered a personals ad, and she asked for a picture of me. I didn’t have one so I sent her my driver’s license.”

“The original. Not a photocopy?”
“Yes.”

“Now why you would do such an idiot thing?” I laughed incredulously.

“I wanted to prove I trusted people, so she’d know that I was trustworthy, too. She never sent it back.”

 “Of course. So what happened on this trip to Tok?”

“Not much. It was cold. The ride was pretty rough, but the worst thing was that we bought some beer and put it in the sled. When we got home, most of the cans had worn through and the beer had run out.”

I could understand his downcast expression. In this damp community where alcohol could not be sold, the loss of a case of Coors was a serious blow. No wonder he made his own beer.