Asylum--Chapter Five Open to the World

Chapter Five
Open to the World

Pleased by my interest in the cabin, Billy asked me shyly if I would like to stay for a dinner of salmon cakes, rice, and bannock. I’d never heard of bannock. It sounded like something an old man in a cottage in the Scottish highlands would eat.

 “It’s kind of a big biscuit you cook on top of the stove in a skillet,” Billy explained. “You’ll see. I hope you like it.” 

From a case of canning jars filled with salmon, Billy pulled out a pint jar, squinted at the label and said, “Mom and I canned this last summer when she was up here.”

When he told me she had stayed for three weeks, I thought of my own fastidious mother and couldn’t imagine her stepping into this unhygienic cabin, let alone staying for several weeks. Curious to learn more, I asked him to tell me about his mom.

 “Well,” he laughed, “my mom really does wear army boots. Still. She was an Air Force nurse up here in Alaska after the Korean War. Now she volunteers for an emergency rescue crew. They learned how to rappel off a bridge not too long ago. I think she was sixty-eight at the time.”

Billy opened the jar of salmon and dumped the fish into a bowl. “She’s really into this mountain man rendezvous, historic reenactment stuff. Last summer, she taught me how to make a fire with flint and steel. Oh, and one year she was the Arizona state tomahawk-throwing champion.”
  I couldn’t resist laughing. I didn’t recall ever seeing my mother throw anything—not even a rock in a river. 

 “You must be living the life she only dreams about. She must be very proud of you.”

He stopped and considered my remark. “I never thought of it that way. At the rendezvous, they give everybody a name that fits them. They call her ‘Stands Alone.’ That’s pretty much been true since my dad died when I was fourteen.”

 “I’m sorry. That must have been hard on you.” My own dad died when I was thirty-six, and I thought that was too young to have lost a father.

Billy cracked an egg against the edge of the bowl.

“It was.”

“What was he like?”

He thought for a minute. “When the rest of us went to church on Sunday, my dad used to stay home and bake pies.”

I imagined a sweet-faced man pulling a golden-crusted pie from the oven, pleased with his morning’s effort.

Billy continued talking while he added crushed-up crackers, stirred the salmon mixture, and formed them into patties.

“He used to raise chickens before we moved to Arizona, down near the Mexican border. Then he built houses. I’m a good carpenter’s helper, but I’m no carpenter.”

I looked around the cabin he’d built himself and thought Billy was being too modest. It was solidly built, with a main room about twenty feet long and fourteen feet wide, with a loft for storage and a small bedroom with a slanted roof that had been added on later. Because of the relatively high ceiling in the main room, the cabin didn’t feel cramped. Some of the older cabins in Eagle had roofs so low I wondered how anyone could stand up straight in them, let alone be cooped up there for a long winter.

I thought of Smokey and her husband, Scotty, spending months on end without leaving Thimbleberry Island. Scotty wasn’t much of a conversationalist, and my talkative grandmother took out her need to expend a daily quota of words by writing for hours in her journal. She said it was an “occupational hazard” from her days as a newspaper reporter. When Scotty got cabin fever he would escape outside, where he would cut wood or hike to the top of the island. When Smokey was feeling restless, she went down to the shore and chucked empty tin cans into the bay. I wondered how this bachelor coped with long days alone in his cabin.

The patties in the cast iron skillet were starting to scorch.

 “Sorry, I can only tell something is done when it starts to smoke. I cook by guess and by gosh.”

“Was that you who brought the salmon cakes to the potluck at Redmen Hall?”

I had noticed only that it was one of the rough single guys who had set the sooty skillet down amongst the white casserole dishes and scalloped-edged platters.

“Yes, that was me.”

As Billy combined ingredients for the bannock, he said, “My first winter here, I went through three big cans of Crisco. I ate a whole caribou and half a bear.”

I pondered the whereabouts of the other half of the bear until he explained he’d split the meat with his hunting partner, Harley. Billy shot the black bear up on American Summit, and it had somersaulted down the steep mountainside before coming to rest against a stand of brush. It had taken the both of them, Billy hauling from above and Harley pushing from below, to get the two-hundred-pound bear up to the road.

Billy mentioned it was getting to be about time to tap one of the birch trees in the yard. The sap rose so quickly in the spring it could fill a three-pound coffee can overnight. I told him it seemed like sap would be warm, like blood. No, he said, it was cool and clear, slightly sweet, hardly thicker than water, and not sticky.

  “So you boil it down into syrup?” I asked.

 “No, I just drink it.”

 “Straight from the tree?” I asked, incredulous.

He looked embarrassed, “Well, I pour it into a glass first. It’s a spring tonic.”

I glanced at his shelves. Apparently, he didn’t own a single glass. Instead, there were a dozen empty canning jars of different sizes and a collection of blue speckled enameled plates and bowls. I couldn’t imagine drinking sap right out of a tree, any more than I could imagine chewing a piece of tar pulled from a newly paved street, or eating a handful of clay dug from a riverbank. People did these things, or they used to, anyway. People I’d only heard or read about. And here was a guy standing in front of me who ate bears and drank tree sap. Whose log walls were hung with rifles, pistols in holsters, and large knives in leather sheaths. On whose windowsill sat a bag of lead shot to melt down into bullets. Who surrounded himself with the remains of animals he’d hunted or trapped: moose and caribou antlers, bear and caribou hides, and parts of Dall sheep, lynx, marten, snowshoe hare. This was his warm, dark lair, with small drifts of dirt and wood chips on the plywood floor and a couch covered with furs. I didn’t know if he was Davy Crockett or the bear himself. 

The salmon cakes were tasty, if a little on the overdone side, and the rice was perfect. The bannock was tough but edible. I was impressed with Billy’s ability to flip the bannock like a flapjack by tossing it up in the cast iron skillet and catching it again. After dinner, I was glad he did not suggest driving me back to my cabin immediately but asked if I wanted a cup of tea.

“Yes, that sounds good.” 

“Do you want it sweetened? I don’t have any white sugar,” he apologized. “All I’ve got is four gallons of honey—it’s pretty much crystallized, or I can chip you out a lump of brown sugar from this.” He prodded a twenty-five-pound sack with his foot. “It’s rock hard. Larry at the store sold it cheap because it was really old.”

“No, thanks,” I said, thinking of those pioneers for whom white sugar was a luxury—one of the few things they had to buy with cash. “I’ll drink it black.”

“Be careful. It’s hot.”

I wanted to say that’s why mugs with handles were invented, but I didn’t. I just scooted forward on the couch to take the canning jar, sending a shower of brown and cream-colored hair cascading from the caribou hide. I thought it only fair that, since he had told me about his interest—guns—I should tell him something about mine, so I talked to him about Smokey.

“I’m writing a book about my grandmother. I’ve always been fascinated by her, even though I only met her once, the time she came to visit us when I was ten. She’s the one who put the idea of Alaska in my head, and I haven’t been able to get it out since. I keep coming back here. I’ve been to Alaska six times now.” I ticked off on my fingers. “Once for Smokey’s funeral; once with my dad a few months before he died; and a trip with Ambrose a few years ago. Another summer I went to Thimbleberry Island. I was in Sitka last November and then in Skagway earlier this spring.”

“I had no idea you’d been to Alaska so many times,” Billy said.

“Yeah, I can’t seem to stay away. In Sitka and Skagway, I even found the houses where my grandparents had lived and talked to people who remembered them from fifty years ago.”

Billy nodded, as if this were ordinary, as if five decades earlier was just yesterday, like all his days were lived in a limbo to which a date or year was not attached.

 “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“No, go ahead.”

From under the couch, Billy pulled a gold mining pan that held a pouch of tobacco, a lighter, and a small camping equipment catalog. He tore out a rectangle of newsprint and expertly rolled a cigarette.

I paused and sipped my tea. Billy sat down beside me and lit his cigarette, quiet and attentive, so I continued.

“Smokey and Scotty used to send us all sorts of stuff. There was a totem pole, ivory jewelry, Eskimo yo-yos, and a bear skin and a deer skin. Our favorite was the skin of an unborn baby seal. I took it to school one time for show-and-tell. The fur was incredibly soft and covered with brown spots. We thought it was so sad that the mother had died. We never thought of the fact that someone—probably my grandfather—must have shot her.”

Billy nodded approvingly, as if dead animal parts were excellent and unsurprising gifts for suburban children. I had to admit, our living room with its staid sixties furniture had been enlivened by those exotic tokens of Alaska. I leaned my head against the bear skin on Billy’s couch. When I was a girl, I used to sit on our couch and bury my face in the stiff, scratchy fur of the black bear Scotty had shot, breathing in its strange wild smell.

“Smokey loved it on the island. Sometimes she wouldn’t go to Ketchikan for nine  months at a time and then only to go the doctor or the dentist.”

“I didn’t go to Fairbanks for five years after my Chevy truck wore out and my driver’s license expired,” Billy said, sitting forward and flicking the cigarette butt into the wood stove.

Half a decade without leaving Eagle. I could scarcely imagine it.

“I just stayed here and ordered my groceries from Span Alaska.”

He pawed through the pile of junk mail on the couch and came up with a grocery catalog. The mail order company delivered food exclusively to isolated communities in Alaska and knew the kind of things people in the bush need or crave: Spam, powdered milk, Tang, pilot bread (a thick, round cracker), twenty-five pound bags of oatmeal, cases of canned fruit and vegetables, huge bags of M&Ms and peanuts in the shell. I thought it must be hard to subsist on such food, supplemented by wild game and fish, without fresh fruit or vegetables for much of the year.

“The summer I went to Thimbleberry Island, I kayaked there with a group of six volunteers. We were helping an archaeologist from the Tongass National Forest check on historical sites to see if they had been vandalized. We camped on a different island every night. On one island there was a really neat old still in the woods, all rusty, with dozens of bottles lying around. At Yes Bay, we surveyed an old cannery, and on another island we dug in a midden.”

“You find anything?”

“Just clam shells. The best thing was that we discovered a petroglyph of the sun carved into a rock. It had never been recorded before.”

I wanted to test Billy to see where he stood on the locals versus the National Park Service issue, but I was pretty sure I knew already, so I didn’t finish the story. What I didn’t say was that when we got to Thimbleberry Island, I was allowed to sleep in the cabin Scotty had built, but everybody else had to set up their soggy tents in the woods. Since the archaeologist was a federal employee, he wasn’t welcome on the property because, the owner told me, the “feds” had tried for years to get rid of him so they could burn down his cabin and return the island to its natural state. Eagle wasn’t the only place in Alaska where a government presence was unwelcome. It was ironic, because I knew that, of all the states, Alaska had the largest percentage of government workers. They’re good at conveniently forgetting that, I thought.

Billy looked up, wondering why I had paused.

“Anyway, we paddled ninety miles in ten days, and I’d never even been kayaking before. It was the most adventurous thing I’ve ever done.” Suddenly self-conscious, I said, “That probably sounds like nothing to you.”

“No, it doesn’t. I’ve never even seen the ocean.”

“You’re kidding, you grew up in Maine and you never saw the ocean?”

“I was only there ‘til I was eight. I guess my parents didn’t think it was worth the drive.”

I couldn’t help comparing this to my own childhood. While Billy was being raised on a hardscrabble chicken farm in rural Maine, I was living a block from the beach in a large old house with graceful arches and a living room dominated by an enormous fireplace and a parlor grand piano. Our differences lay not just in our current lifestyles but in our very origins.

“So is it crazy to keep coming to Alaska? My grandmother’s been dead for over twenty years.”

 “No. It does that to some people. Alaska, I mean. You know as soon as you arrive that you are meant to be here. My friend Merry says, ‘When you come into the country you just have to say, Take me!’” Here he threw his arms wide as if embracing the cabin, the whole woods outside and the wilderness beyond. “‘It changes you,’ she says.” 

Alaska had already started changing me. Wandering through town in the twilit nights, I would come back to my cabin with twisted pieces of driftwood, new green leaves, interesting rocks. I had to touch everything around me. I had to smell it all—the dry, clean scent of silt blowing off the riverbank, even the truck-stop odor of the oil drip stove. I had to taste it—food I’d never eaten before, like moose and dried salmon strips. And I had to listen—to the ravens talking in the trees, to the complicated crunching sound of ice at breakup, to the silence. For the first time in a long time, I was open to the world around me.

I realized that at some point I had stopped talking and Billy and I had been sitting quietly for some time. He was relaxed and still. A tranquility and strength emanated from him, warming me. I felt safe, comforted. It seemed I was just getting close to something here in Eagle, and yet it was the end of May already and I had to leave the next day. I wanted to stay in Alaska, to gain some of that strength myself, get closer to that sureness and peace.

I slipped my hand into his. Billy’s body suddenly stiffened but he did not move away, and his hand tightened around mine. His palm was slightly tacky with sap. We sat for several minutes and he did not loosen his hold.

“I was startled when you took my hand in the cemetery that afternoon. It was so unexpected,” he said.

It had been unexpected to me, too, but I offered no explanation. Indeed, I did not have one. If anyone had looked at my eyes right then, perhaps they would have looked just like Billy’s—all present, all here and now, no thought of the future or past. Just here. Outside of time.

I gazed at his finely shaped hands and the silver Navajo bracelet on his left wrist. With square-nailed thumbs and callused palms, his hands had a look of competence about them, like they belonged to someone used to working with tools or guns. He was wearing a close-fitting wool sweater, the kind with a reinforced patch at the shoulder that hunters wear. I wished he had his sleeves rolled up like he had at the potluck when I’d noticed his muscled forearms as he was wiping down the tables after the meal at Redman Hall. 

I slid my other hand beneath the frayed cuff of his sweater and stroked his wrist lightly. The skin on the inside of his wrist was smooth and the veins and tendons stood out, raised and finely wound as bass strings, and I played my fingers over them slowly. Billy held his tea in his other hand but did not raise it to his lips. The minutes passed and the steam stopped rising from the jar, and still he stayed unmoving. He did not make a sound but he was fairly vibrating with attention, nervous and alert. His breath was rapid and light, his muscles tensed. I thought he might spring from the couch and bolt out the door if I moved too fast.

I was the one impelled to act, though I did not know what was driving me on. I felt strangely calm and utterly sure, with no doubts about what I was doing and no thought about where it was going, aware only of the next moment, the next breath, the next inch of skin I would feel beneath his sweater. My fingers reached the soft skin at the crook of his elbow and I made slow circles there. When I felt his arm grow heavy against mine, his fingers relaxed, I drank the last of my tea—cold now—and rested my head on his shoulder. The cabin was so quiet I could hear nothing at all.

 “I forgot other people breathe and are warm,” Billy said, then, with a note of wonder in his voice. 

Putting my arm across his chest, I drew him close. He put his head against mine and spoke, almost inaudibly, into my hair, “I haven’t been held in twenty years.”

Twenty years, an unimaginable length of time. Two decades ago, I was twenty-six and had just had my first child. I was glad I’d listened to the voice that had told me to go to him. I was happy I could give him this: warmth, breath, touch. I could feel him listening, straining to hear, to know, to feel what would happen next. I knelt on the floor in front of him and put my arms around him. He arched his back so my arms could slip behind him. His waist was so slim, my arms wrapped all the way around him, and I pulled him into me. His sweater smelled like wood smoke and something bitter, like green tea. His heart was thudding in his chest beneath my cheek. Slowly, I began pulling his flannel shirt out of his pants then slipped my hands beneath his shirttails. He caught his breath and his breathing became rapid and light. My hands lay flat against the small of his back until his breathing slowed again. 

I tugged on his sweater and he took it off and dropped it on the floor. I unbuttoned his shirt and he bent his head to watch me. His pale chest, his white core exposed, looked incredibly vulnerable. The red flannel kerchief tied around his neck was twisted and dirt-streaked. Beneath all those dirty clothes, the camouflage pants, the coarse wool sweater, he had a beautiful, clean boyish body—with the smooth rise of his chest muscles, the arc of his ribs, his flat belly that twitched beneath my hand like a nervous horse. My fingertips ran lightly along the edge of his jeans and traced the Eagle-in-flight on his brass belt buckle. He leaned forward to remove the knife he wore on his belt. I sat back on my heels and looked him in the face. He nodded slightly.

We both stood up, about a foot apart, not touching except for our hands. My desire was like a plumb bob sinking rapidly through the center of my body, down, down to where it stopped, quivering at the end of its line. I could feel myself swaying slightly on my feet, as if I might tip over right there and land face down on the plywood floor. There was an air of dizzying unreality.

 “Say something,” I said.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said with a catch in his voice, the sound of someone who has been offered an unexpected and generous gift and does not know if he should accept it.

 “Say you want me.”

 “I want you. Very much so.”

 “Say it again.”

“I want you,” he said. “I want you.” He gave a deep exhalation and said again, “I want you.” But still he made no move toward me.

 “Then what’s stopping you?”

“You’re not single.” He said, looking me in the eye. It was both accusation and question.

I brought him to me again. “I need this as much as you do,” I said, realizing it only as I spoke.

He tried to kiss me then, but as his lips grazed mine, I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, the bottom drop out of my world, and a sound burst out of me unlike any I’d ever heard before—half cry, half moan, half yes, half no. A kiss was too personal. It made it too real, and I veered away. Now it was I who was breathless, waiting. It scared me how much I wanted him. I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d wanted to.

Billy put his face against my neck and kissed me there. His hands started to travel over me, and he found the row of tiny buttons between my breasts. I looked down and watched in wonder as his hands—a strange man’s hands, strong and tanned, with a silver bracelet on one wrist—undid the buttons and parted the edges of my shirt. We moved to the bedroom and stood for a minute beneath the low slanted ceiling, holding each other. He pulled back the covers—a couple of tattered sleeping bags—and motioned for me to lie down on a grizzly bear fur. I removed my boots. The caribou hide on the floor was thick and soft beneath my feet. Lying down on the bed fully clothed, I watched as Billy slipped his red suspenders from his shoulders, took off his shirt, and let his pants drop to the floor. His pale body glowed in the northern twilight coming through a small window cut in the log wall. He climbed onto the bed and curled up against me, pulling the sleeping bags over us.

Billy began stroking my hair. “I can’t believe how fine these hairs are,” he said, blowing at the nape of my neck. I did not wear pierced earrings, and he marveled at my “unmarred ears.” He tried to kiss me, and I let him this time. He supped at my lips, a small, thirsty animal, returning again and again. It was if he were tasting something and trying to put into words exactly what it tasted like, his kisses asking a question he had long wanted to ask. And with my soft mouth, I was drawing off some of his solitude, siphoning the cold and silence out of him. 

Unsure how far I wanted this to go, it was hours before my clothes were fully removed. But Billy was patient and waited as I edged closer and closer to the danger point, until finally—past midnight—the last of my clothes lay on the caribou hide. We touched each other, lightly, tentatively, almost in disbelief. I had never thought I would feel such a body as his again—young and slim and hard. I marveled at the feel of him on top of me, the slope of the small of his back down to his buttocks, his muscled arms, his boyish hips. His soft beard against my face, his rough hands on my shoulders, my belly, my breasts. His skin was clean, sweet, and salty at the same time.

 “Your skin is so soft,” he said, and brushed my nipples lightly with his fingertips the way one would stroke the nose of a horse.

It was incredible to me I was letting a stranger touch my body. I realized with amazement that I did not feel ashamed or even very self-conscious. It astonished me not only that someone would want my body, but that it was able to bring pleasure—to him and to me. Not just pleasure, but more. It was giving him something nourishing, like my body was hot soup and a warm bath after being out in the rain for twenty years. After twenty-five years of a difficult marriage, I felt emptied out, like I had nothing to offer. I was broke emotionally. All I had left was a body—a warm, womanly body—capable of giving simple, loving kindness that would comfort Billy and make him feel connected to another human being.

I could feel the years of solitude seeping out of him as he lay on top of me. I wanted to draw out the cold, too, the deep chill of all those winters alone. I wanted more—to fill the corresponding emptiness inside myself with him, all of him. Finally, in the strange underwater glow of the arctic dawn, I whispered my permission and he complied. Politely. Hungrily. Completely.

After a few hours of sleep, Billy drove me back to my cabin to get my luggage. I would leave that morning on the first boat of the year, heading upriver to Dawson in Yukon Territory, five hours away. I would stay overnight there, then take an eight-hour bus ride to Whitehorse, Canada, spend the night, fly to Juneau, and change planes in Seattle before finally arriving home. As he stood watching me pack, he said quietly, glancing down at the floor. “I’ve never done that before.” 

“Done what before?” I asked, distracted by trying to stuff a slippery raincoat into a pocket of my backpack.

  “Made love.”

I stopped, raincoat in hand. To hide my astonishment, I stepped quickly to his side, kissed his cheek and said, “I thought you were just out of practice.” From the look of embarrassment, wonder, and gratitude on his face, I felt as if I’d given him a gift he appreciated beyond measure.

He smiled and let out his breath. 

At the Yukon Queen, I stood on the boat ramp and gazed at his face. It appeared more open than it had just the day before. He was standing up straighter and no longer looked like a man hiding from the world.

“Billy, you look different.”

“I believe it. I feel different.”

I felt changed, too, as if I’d awakened from a long, deadening sleep. Just as my skin had come alive at Billy’s touch last night, so my whole being seemed to have come alive to the world around me. The air off the river felt charged with moisture and meaning, and I looked forward to sailing up the wide Yukon.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever come back here. Do you want me to?”

He looked over my shoulder, surveying the river for a moment. “I’m grateful for the time we had together.”

I was both relieved and disappointed at his answer. I walked onto the boat and he stood on the riverbank, watching me go. 

Before I left, I heard that someone described me as “the woman who’s been ghosting around town.” If I was haunting Eagle then it was only fair, for it haunted me when I got back to Washington. I could no more get that strange little place out of my mind than I could get its silt out of the backpack in which I had carried home all the smooth rocks and pieces of driftwood I had found. I thought of the letter a local woman had written to McPhee, which I’d found at the historical society: “There may be more Alaska river silt in your veins than you had realized seeped in.”

When I got home, the Yukon’s fine silt worked its way out of my clothes and backpack, sifting down onto my books and papers. As I resumed my daily life, my imagination returned again and again to the shy figure in camo clothing who had appeared, all cleaned up, in the doorway of Redmen Hall, cap in hand, to ask me to go down the river in his canoe. It ran over and over through my head like a child’s rhyme, “Would I go with you in your canoe, just the two of us, the two?” And my answer was always yes.