A fine and bitter snow (6 page)

Mandy and Chick were in training for the Yukon Quest. "Every day at noon, like clockwork," Kate said, "I hear dog howls coming down the trail. I open the door and to what to my wondering eyes should appear but Chick, stopping by for cocoa and fry bread."

Ruthe and Dina laughed. "Thinks with his stomach," Dina said. "What I call a proper man."

Ruthe refilled their mugs. "I saw John Letourneau putting the moves on Auntie Edna," Kate said, stirring in evaporated milk. The quality of the silence that followed her remark made her raise her head.

At her curious look, Dina said, "Yeah, I saw that, too," and added with a sneer, "He's probably after her for that property she owns on Alaguaq Creek."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Ruthe said immediately. "I think Auntie Edna has more than enough charm to explain John's interest."

"Charm, schmarm," Dina said. "That man never does anything without an ulterior motive."

"That's not true, Dina, and you know it," Ruthe said, this time with an edge to her voice.

Kate stepped in to defuse the tension a little, although she was intensely curious as to why it had sprouted up in the first place. "He got a little tangled up in your cane, Dina, there on the dance floor."

"He sure did, didn't he? Can't think how that happened." She looked sharply at Kate. "Didn't see you out there."

They must have left before the conga line, Kate thought. "I don't dance."

"Hell you don't. Many's the time I've seen you whooping it up at a potlatch."

"That's a different kind of dancing."

"And why not dance them all? Dancing's good for what ails you. Kick up your heels and it lifts your spirits."

"It's good for your soul," Ruthe said.

Kate mumbled something, but by now the two old women were on the warpath.

"How's Johnny?" Ruthe said.

Like everyone else in the Park, Dina and Ruthe had a vital interest in the well-being of Johnny Morgan, who had come to the Park to live following his father's death. It was natural for them to ask, as Johnny was Jack Morgan's son, and Jack had been Kate's lover. "He's fine," Kate said.

Dina fixed her with a penetrating eye. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, too." Even if she did still wince at the mention of Jack.

Dina's fierce eyes saw an uncomfortable amount. "Huh," she said, lighting another cigarette. "Miss him?"

Kate took a deep breath. "Every day," she managed to say.

"But you're learning to live with it."

"Yes."

"And without him," Ruthe said.

"Yes." If the joy she found in sunrise over a world without Jack Morgan in it was not as strong as it had once been, it was no one's business but her own.

"That Ethan Int-Hout still sniffing around?"

"The boy's got the look of someone who knows his way around a bed, I'll give him that."

To her acute embarrassment, Kate felt herself turn a brilliant red.

"That might be none of our business, Dina," Ruthe said.

"Oh balls! Everything in this Park is our business," Dina said, and pointed her cigarette at Kate again. "Shit or get off the pot. It's not like there aren't men waiting around the block to step up if you'd look at them twice."

"I suppose," Kate said in a desperate bid for one-upmanship, "you would know."

Dina only cackled again. "You bet your ass, I would, sweetie. Whether I took 'em up on it or not." She looked at Ruthe and her eyes softened. "You bet I would."

Ruthe put her hand over Dina's.

Kate stood. "Time for me to mosey on home."

"Say hi to Johnny for us," Ruthe said. "I like him, Kate. He values his elders."

"He's been up here?" Kate said, surprised.

Ruthe chuckled. "On half a dozen occasions. Seems like old times."

"And give Ethan our love," Dina said, and cackled as Kate climbed back into her down overalls and parka and headed out the door.

3

The two gentlemen in question were both at her cabin when she got there. Mutt knocked Johnny off the doorstep and wrestled him across the snow, growling in mock anger. Ethan stood in the doorway, watching as Kate ran the snow machine into the garage. "I'll be in in a minute," she called, and after a moment she heard boyish laughter and fake growls fade as the cabin door was closed.

She topped off the snow machine's gas tank, checked the oil, looked at the treads. The ax needed sharpening, and so, too, it seemed, did the hatchet. She checked the rest of the tools hanging in neat rows from the Peg-Board while she was at it. The truck had been winterized and was parked as far out of the way as possible at the back of the garage. The woodpile was down to four cords, and although it had been a mild winter thus far, it wouldn't hurt to haul in a few more trees from the woodlot and replenish it. She visited the outhouse—plenty of toilet paper and lime—and the Coleman lantern hanging from the planter hook on the wall was almost full of kerosene.

It wasn't that she didn't want to see Ethan, and it wasn't that she didn't want to spend time with Johnny. She just wasn't used to anyone waiting for her when she got home. She kicked the snow from her boots and stepped inside.

It was a cabin much like the one she had come from, twenty-five feet on a side, with an open loft reached by a ladder. The logs had been planked over with a light pine and were sanded smooth and finished. The ceiling was Sheetrocked and painted white, making the interior much lighter than that of many Bush cabins. There was a large picture window to the right of the door as you faced in, and another large window over the sink, to the left of the door. Both windows faced southwest.

There was an oil stove for cooking, a woodstove for heat, a small table that looked leftover from the fifties with a Darigold one-pound butter can sitting in the middle of it, stuffed with paper money and change. An L-shaped couch had been built into one corner, covered in blue denim that looked as if it had been pieced together from old Levi's. The kitchen counter held a shallow porcelain sink mounted with a pump handle; open cupboards above and below were filled with canned goods and sacks of flour, sugar, and rice. Shelves ran all around the walls, filled mostly with books, but there were also decks of cards, board games, and a cassette deck with tapes. A .30-06 rifle and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun were cradled in a rack over the door, ready to hand, boxes of ammunition on a shelf nearby. There were no family pictures, although there was a large, thick photo album sitting on one shelf. A tiny ivory otter, perched on his hind legs, thick fur ruffled from
the
water, looked at the room through gleaming baleen eyes.

There was a basketball rolled into the crease of the couch, and a guitar hung from a hook next to the door, but otherwise the room was a reflection of someone who liked to cook, read, and listen to music. Someone self-contained, self-sufficient, content with her own company, having no need in her day-to-day life for a telephone, cable TV, or Net access.

Someone, perhaps, who placed a high value on the qualities of solitude and silence.

Every lantern was lit, and the kettle was steaming on the woodstove. Dirty dishes had been washed and put away in the cupboard and the counter swept free of crumbs. The loaves of bread from that morning's baking were wrapped in tinfoil and the kettle of last night's stew had been removed to the cooler on the porch outside the front door. The cushions on the couch were plumped up, the books on the shelves were lined up. The cassette tapes were stacked in neat piles, labels out. Except for on the guitar, there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere.

It wasn't that she wasn't a notorious neatnik. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate someone doing her chores for her. It was just that she was used to doing for herself. It made her inexplicably uneasy to be done for.

Still, she managed a smile for both man and boy. At face value, they were both well worth it. Ethan looked like a Viking, tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes; his forebears could have come from anywhere so long as anywhere was Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. Johnny was at that ungainly stage of adolescence when his limbs were growing out beyond his control, but he would be tall, too. He bore a striking resemblance to his father, thick dark hair over a heavy brow, deep-set blue eyes, firm mouth, strong chin. He would never be handsome, but his face, once seen, would never be forgotten.

"Hey," she said, shrugging out of her parka.

"Hey," Ethan said, catching it and leaning down to kiss her at the same time.

Johnny was sitting at the table, hunched over a book, and Kate instinctively pulled back. Ethan maintained his smile, but there was a frown at the back of his eyes. "Had dinner?"

"Yeah, I had dinner up to Ruthe and Dina's."

Ethan's lips pursed in a long, low whistle. "Lucky girl. They have pie?"

"Rhubarb and something extra."

"I'm jealous."

"It was good," Kate admitted. She pulled her bibs down and hung them next to the parka. The coat hook was crowded with Johnny's and Ethan's parkas and bibs, and hers were elbowed onto the floor. She picked them up and jammed them on the hook again. This time, they stayed.

"I was about to make some cocoa."

"I'd like that. It was a long ride home."

Ethan turned to the kettle. "What were you doing up at the old gals' place?"

"I went there to ask them to help with Dan."

"Ah." He was silent for a moment, measuring cocoa and honey and evaporated milk into three mugs. "I wasn't expecting you to charge off that way this morning when I came galloping over with the news."

Kate raised one shoulder. "He's a friend."

"Urn." He brought her a mug. It had miniature marsh-mallows in it. She repressed a shudder.

He gave a second mug to Johnny, who grunted a thank-you without looking up, and came back to sit next to where she was curled up on the couch. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the burl-wood coffee table, about the only piece of furniture in the room that had any pretension to style. "What did Dina and Ruthe have to say?"

"Well, they weren't surprised. They said the current administration wants to drill for oil in the Arctic, and it follows that they—the administration—will try to get rid of every bureaucrat who thinks otherwise."

"They don't have the votes in Congress, do they?"

"Ruthe says they don't." Kate tried to drink some cocoa without allowing her lips to come into contact with the marshmallows. It wasn't easy. "But I don't think she or Dina have a lot of confidence that the situation is going to stay that way."

"You for it or against it?"

"What? Drilling in ANWR?" Kate thought about it. "I don't know. I've gone back and forth on it. I've been to Prudhoe Bay; they did a good job there. Then I think of
Valdez,
and how badly they did there. And then I think—" She stopped.

"What?"

"Well . . . well, it's just that maybe, once in a while, we should let a beautiful thing be, you know?" She looked at him. "What else is left like that?" She looked at Johnny, still hunched over his homework. "What do we leave behind when we're gone if we move into it now with D-nines?"

Ethan finished his chocolate. "I'm for it."

"You're for drilling?"

"Yeah. There'll be jobs, Kate. It's easy for you to say let it be, but I've got kids to support and educate."

"Your father raised four sons single-handedly before there was an oil patch."

"I'm not my father."

They were both angry, both aware of it, and both made a conscious decision to pull back from that anger. Ethan leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. "Where'd you get this table, anyway?"

"Buck Brinker made it for Emaa," she said. "I brought it home when she died."

"Thought I recognized the work. Nice piece."

"I like it. What did you do today?"

"Chopped wood."

"Filled up your woodshed?"

"Nope." He stretched, his joints popping, and gave her a lazy grin. "Filled yours."

"Oh. Ah. Well. Thanks."

"Thank me later."