The Seal Wife (2 page)

PART ONE

JULY 10 , 1915 . He arrives in Anchorage without so much as a heavy coat or felt boot liners. Without matches, knife, or snow glasses. Having never held a gun. Sent north by the government, he makes the mistake of assuming he is going somewhere instead of nowhere: a field of mud under flapping canvas tents, two thousand railroad workers and no place to put them, a handful of women, and hour-long lines to buy dinner or a loaf of bread. A vast cloud of tiny, biting flies has settled in like fog, and mosquitoes swarm in predatory black columns. After a week he doesn’t itch anymore, but his skin feels thick, and the mirror in his shaving kit shows an unfamiliar face, cheeks puffed up red and hard and eyes narrow like a native’s. “Bigelow,” he says, to hear his own name. Silently, he tells the red face not to worry. Not to worry so much. Who doesn’t feel disoriented when he moves to a new place?

The surveyors who come north for the land auction look at the official blueprint he carries with him, stamped in one corner by the Weather Bureau, and then roll it back up and drop it in its tube. They give him a parcel of land by the creek and some advice on how best to spend his meager building allowance.

“Hire Indians,” they say. “And don’t pay them in liquor.”

So he uses a crew of Chugach to knock together the two-story station, a square room on the ground for bed and stove and table, and above it a square observation room outfitted with windows on all sides. Getting the carpenters is easy. For a fee, an agent negotiates the wage and the length of a workday. Directing the five men is another matter.

Given to understand, both by the Weather Bureau and by friends in Seattle with experience in Alaska, that Chinook is the lingua franca of the north, Bigelow owns a pocket dictionary of the jargon. Including translations of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance, it is no more than a booklet, and he memorized the few hundred equivalents on board ship as he sailed toward his new home, expecting to make himself understood by Indians, as well as by Russians and Swedes, anyone he might encounter there. But either he speaks it incorrectly—mispronouncing the words, stringing them in the wrong order—or the Chugach pretend ignorance.

“T’zum pe-pah tum-tum.” Bigelow shows them the government station plan.
Picture idea
is what he’s said, the closest he can get to
blueprint,
a drawing he wants them to follow.

The men don’t answer, they don’t nod. Instead, they laugh, as if they’ve never seen anything as funny as the weather observatory he intends for them to assemble from the piles of lumber he’s bought from the mill.

The only way he gets them to settle down to the job is by playing Caruso recordings, a tactic he discovers by chance when he unpacks and cranks his gramophone, just to see: does it still work? Yes, the tenor’s brazenly rich voice pours from the horn with effortless splendor, and all five of the Chugach sit down on the ground in shock, as if an especially potent and invisible medicine man has announced his presence. Placed on the flat rock Bigelow uses for table and desk, the black box of the gramophone shivers as it plays. One of the crew—the strongest, whose face has the bland and amiable quality of a prize steer—crawls under Bigelow’s tent flaps and refuses to come back out, not even after the gramophone’s needle has been lifted. When his brother at last coaxes him into the light, he makes a wide and terrified berth around the bewitched mechanism and runs back toward the town site. On subsequent mornings, all Bigelow has to do is slip the black disc from its envelope, and the remaining crew jumps to attention and begins hammering.

Grateful for his accidental success, Bigelow still finds something awful in it. Perhaps what he fears is true: he’s arrived in a land that will insist on its strangeness, where not only a dictionary but everything he’s taught himself will prove useless.

Blueprint discarded, Bigelow relies on explanatory charades, which work well enough—the men follow his gestures—but it doesn’t matter that he won’t pay them with alcohol. His carpenters spend their wages as they want; and while they arrive each morning ready to work, on time and seemingly sober, as the weeks wear on, the station they build gets drunker and drunker. Not a beam is level, nor a corner square, and the staircase, especially besotted, collapses before the top floor is finished. Lacking proper stringers, it falls down in the middle of one windy night, stricken timber groaning before the treads begin their precipitous descent. Awakened in his tent, Bigelow lights a kerosene lamp and carries it outside and through the open door. He is looking for a foraging bear—the only explanation he has conceived for the noise. But the station is empty, the stairs have fallen under the weight of their own instability, and Bigelow holds up the lamp to watch as shrouds of golden sawdust blow over their remains.

The next day, he fires his crew and they depart hastily, their termination having been accomplished by back-to-back performances of Verdi and Leoncavallo. It’s another month before Bigelow reassembles the stairs, the project slowed by a shortage of nails that plagues the entire settlement. Two crates of them are to arrive on the same ship that brings Bigelow’s windowpanes, but once unpacked, both boxes are discovered filled with misaddressed nutmeg graters—useless in a place without even one imported kernel of the spice; the Chugach buy the graters cheap and sew them to their dance rattles, and the nails that hold the crates together (along with nails salvaged from every other packing box on board) sell for ten cents apiece, nine cents more than Bigelow can afford.

But the conditions under which the territory’s official meteorologist sleeps and eats and works make no difference to the weather. Bigelow’s anemometer turns and clicks in the wind; his ground thermometers are sunk into the earth to the official standardized depths of 30, 60, and 120 centimeters; his copper siphon rain recorder, complete with tipping bucket and weekly float gauges, bolted to its thirty-centimeter platform. He has adjusted his aneroid barometer to reflect his position at forty feet above sea level, and housed it along with the wet and dry bulb atmospheric thermometers in the louvered shed he assembled upon arrival. His snow measurement apparatus—density tube and spring balance, as well as a Kadel snow stake—is poised for the first flake’s arrival.

Each morning he goes to the telegraph office, walking on boards laid over the mud. There he cables his observations on the weather to Washington, D.C., where bureau clerks and cartographers plot temperatures and pressures, precipitation indexes and wind speeds, from all over the country onto composite maps that reveal the direction and severity of storms, the arrival of killing frosts, the patterns of drought. Because of the earth’s rotation, winter storms that paralyze the east originate in the west, and Bigelow’s eight A.M. report will provide the Weather Bureau its earliest warning of trouble to come, as much as another day, or night, for farmers to thresh and for ranchers to gather their livestock into barns, for Great Lakes passenger boats to quickly find a port, for orange growers in Okeechobee County, Florida, to light smudge pots among their trees.

Bulletins. Warnings. Advisories. The Weather Bureau was once a division of the Army Signal Corps and speaks the language of alarm. Famous for its mercilessly swift transfers, for personnel orders effective within forty-eight hours, the bureau gave Bigelow just that long to book his passage and pack what he owned—no time to worry about where he was going until he was standing on the deck of the
Siren
as it left Seattle, his sudden apprehension almost something he could see, a lead-blue haze hanging over him, burnt off in spots by the hilarity of other passengers, fortune seekers from San Francisco and Portland and even New York, Chinese packed into steerage like consignments of firecrackers, a flock of Tanaina women returning from a year’s employment in Vancouver.

Not exactly seasick, Bigelow stood on the
Siren
’s quarterdeck, looking backward at the wake, trying to imagine what he’d hurriedly read about Cook Inlet: one of the greatest tidal differentials in the world, chunks of ice as big as houses, as big as courthouses, ebbing and flowing as much as sixty miles in half a day. All the epic white buildings he’d seen: St. Louis’s Festival Hall and her Palace of Horticulture. Chicago’s Art Institute. Supreme courts and municipal courts. Legislatures. Opera houses. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The Weather Bureau and even the White House itself, dome cracking and colonnade collapsing. Having lost sight of land, Bigelow saw all of civilization’s big white edifices turning and jumbling on great curling spits of freezing foam.

The fantasy of a city boy, he shrugged it off and went below deck, sat on his narrow bunk, and stared at the wall. For another eight dollars he could have had a porthole, he could have had the sky.

Except that it isn’t a fantasy; it turns out to be true. In October, ice appears. With his binoculars, Bigelow watches the last ships of the season stalk and catch great slabs of it, haul them up in nets, pack them in sawdust, and return south to San Francisco’s restaurants and butchers, to the ice cream parlors on Clay Street.

And in October, Bigelow receives an unofficial letter from a friend in the bureau, who warns that the department’s new budget hasn’t been approved, with salaries for Bigelow’s rank stuck at the impossible $1,100 per year. How is he faring in Anchorage? the friend inquires. Does a town so new have a pool hall or a dance pavilion or moving-picture shows? Is there any opportunity for social gathering, female company?

Bigelow crumples the letter and shoves it into his pocket. $21.16 per week is not nearly enough. At least, it won’t be in December, when he has to spend that much on light and heat alone. He chews his lower lip, thinking. All right then, he’ll find extra work. He will when he needs to.

It may be that his pay is insufficient, but Bigelow has discovered something. In Alaska he is his own boss. For the first time in his life, he can order his days as he sees fit. He can build what he’s seen in those minutes before he falls asleep, drawn on the red insides of his eyelids. Equations that he knows by heart, sketches he’s copied onto scraps and into margins, analyses of friction impacted by velocity and altitude: a kite, a two-celled box kite that will soar above his station on the creek, whole miles higher than any kite has ever flown before. A way to understand not just the air, but the heavens.

Bigelow digs out his friend’s letter, smoothes it to read the date. August 8, 1915. More than a month has passed. Already he’s hired and fired the Indians. He’s traded his father’s watch chain and fobs for a parka with wolverine trim. He’s eaten strawberries that have grown to the size of fists in the long summer light.

And he’s seen the Aleut woman. He’s followed her along the town’s new main street.

AT FIRST HE THINKS she might be a deaf-mute, but she isn’t deaf, because she startles at the diagnostic noises he makes, dropping an armload of wood, clattering a pan on the stove. And she isn’t mute, either. She cries out in the bed, mews and moans and even, sometimes, giggles.

It is snowing on the day he follows her home. Small, dry flakes blow like dust behind the lenses of his glasses. Eleven degrees at noon, with a shifting wind, first from the west, then from the north, then west again. On his way from the cable office he breaks a bootlace, and when he bends to fix it, knotting the two ends together, it breaks in a new place. So he stops at Getz’s General Merchandise.

She has three tusks of walrus ivory and a bundle of pelts, red fox mostly, pups and summer skins not worth more than a dime apiece. She leans forward over the wide counter to point at what she wants in exchange—tea, tobacco, toffee, a bottle of paregoric. Her arm up, her ungloved fingers outstretched, she waits until Getz takes each item from the shelf, slaps it down on the counter in a manner intended to convey impatience and condescension.

At Getz’s, payment is accepted in a number of forms: gold, flake or nugget; coins, American, Russian, and Canadian; skins— sable, marten, mink, otter, seal, rabbit, lynx, wolverine, caribou, bear, wolf, moose, fox, lemming, beaver—anything bigger than a rat that has a hide to tan; and miscellany, blankets, boots, eggs, nails, needles, knives. Two walls of the store are devoted to complications of equivalence, and while certain values are not negotiable—gold is gold, and it is twelve dollars an ounce, this is painted on the wall in black—the worth of an egg, for example, goes up and down according to the number of chickens that make it through the winter. And that population depends on how many have worn themselves out laying without cease when days are twenty hours long. So Getz inscribes the cost of eggs in chalk.

“Not un—uh, ornamental,” he says, noting how Bigelow stares at the woman. With one proprietary elbow pinning down the pelts, he ties her purchases together with twine. “If the war paint don’t bother you.”

As if she understands, the woman turns and stares back at Bigelow, her jaw thrust forward, unapologetic, even defiant. In what way does she see him? How does he look to her? He thinks of himself as handsome—handsome enough, anyway—with a broad face, pale blue eyes almost too widely set, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that balances the eyes. There’s nothing sharp in his face, nothing mean. His big forehead appears even bigger because of his fair eyebrows, his slightly elevated hairline. As for her: black braid, black eyes, black buttons on her bodice, and little black lines drawn on her chin. She watches Bigelow watching her, and her pale tongue comes into the corner of her mouth.

Bigelow forgets his broken bootlace and follows her out the door and up the frozen rut in the middle of the street. The three tins swing from her hand, now hidden in its sealskin mitten; the brown bottle gleams in the other. She walks without once looking back at him, without turning her head to the right or the left, neither slow nor fast, steps as neat as stitches, and he stumbling and slipping ten paces behind the back of her parka.

By the time she reaches her house he’s caught up to her, and when she opens the door he goes in after her, sufficiently amazed by his own boldness to leave the door ajar. A dusting of snow collects in his wake. She puts her packages down on the table, picks up her broom, and sweeps the flakes outside before they have a chance to melt.