Part 9 (1/2)
I hadn't heard him enter the room. But I smelled him, wood smoke and must. He was wearing jeans and a flannel s.h.i.+rt, but also had a kind of bib of bones and sh.e.l.ls and feathers woven together.
His face was burnt-bronze and heavily creased; he could have been forty or seventy. There was a little gray in the hair plaited into a large topknot. He regarded me with cool intelligence.
”This is Mrs. Hammarion, our new teacher for the older students.”
He touched my hand with his calloused one. ”You will also be at the mission,” he said with very little accent.
”That's right.” His face was gentle but his eyes bored into me.
”I'll see you there, then.”
”Gordon's a shaman, trying to understand our strange ways.”
”Very strange,” he said, smiling, still looking at me. Then he turned to Reverend Bower. ”Those poppies along the north wall are not going to thrive. They were planted too late, and don't get enough sun anyhow.”
”Can you transplant them?”
”Around to the front, some of them. Replace them with some things from the forest.”
”Fine. Thank you.” Gordon turned and walked away.
”Your gardener's a shaman?” I asked.
”The other way around, I suppose. He's a shaman who took an interest in our garden. Walked in one day about a year ago and told me what needed to be done. Works a couple of days a week, fifty cents a day, and he's magical with plants.”
”And he comes to the mission school?”
He nodded. ”Sunday school. Sits in the back and listens; never says anything. There for English, rather than religion, I think. He's a strange bird, but pleasant enough.”
Mr. Bower left me in the office for awhile to read the two contracts, church and state, binding me to Sitka for two years. If the boys came back with pockets bulging, I supposed I could leave behind the $180 a month.
School didn't start until September here, so I had more than a month to study Alaskan history and make up my lesson plans. For the other subjects, I could adapt my Kansan lessons, which I could teach nearly by heart. It was the same four grades, with fewer students.
I looked up at a light tapping on the doorjamb and was surprised to see Gordon rather than Reverend Bower.
”May I help you?”
”Perhaps we can help each other, Mrs. Flammarion. As we're both instructing the young.” He went on to explain that on Sunday evenings most of the Tlingit children came to his place for instruction in their own ways.
It was partly language instruction. Even the ones who spoke Tlingit at home tended to speak English among themselves-some a mixture of Russian and English, which was not music to his ears. His parents'
generation had fought the Russians, and the invaders had killed many of his ”uncles.” (I think in Tlingit the word included a larger group of men than his parents' siblings.) He offered the children instruction in the old tales and ways, saying everything twice, first in Tlingit and then in English. Would I be willing to come and help him with the translation? The Sunday school teacher who had left hadn't wanted to do it, and Gordon was afraid he was teaching them bad English.
His English was really rather good, considering, but it sounded like a wonderful opportunity for me, so I agreed immediately. He took a stub of pencil and drew a map, and told me to come at around sundown Sunday; remember to bring a lamp.
It was only after he'd left chat I wondered quite what I was getting into. Did he really need a translator, or was I being used for some less obvious purpose?
When Reverend Bower came back in, he clarified the situation a little. The previous Sunday school teacherhad given it a try, but he hadn't lasted an hour: the hut where Gordon instructed the young smelled so bad he couldn't breathe, and left in fear of becoming physically ill in front of them.
”Perhaps women are stronger in that regard than men,” I said. ”Babies aren't bouquets of posies.”
He was amused at that. ”We shall see, we shall see. I'm sure you'll find it interesting, though in a way it's counter to our basic-charge here.”
”Because we're supposed to convert them, and not the other way around?”
”Oh, I'm not afraid that Gordon's going to convert you to paganism. But you're right; our job is to Christianize and civilize the youngsters. Gordon's no ally there.”
”So I'll be a spy in the enemy's lair. I like that image.”
”Indeed. Maybe you can learn their tales well enough to portray them in a Christian light and use them in Sunday school.”
”Maybe.” The ones I'd read didn't have much potential.
We finished the paperwork and Reverend Bower gave me a twenty-dollar advance, which I didn't need but didn't refuse. I took his advice and went down to the newspaper office, where there was a bulletin board with notices of rooms and homes to rent and buy.
There was a room only a block from school, which would be handy in rain and snow. But I was intrigued by a one-room cottage being built on the edge of town, a small log cabin. A hundred-dollar deposit would secure it for me.
The rain had stopped, so I followed directions out to the lot and found them working there, a white man and a Negro a.s.sisted by two Tlingit boys.
The short muscular Negro, Saul Johnson, owned the lot. So far the cottage was nothing but a cleared area with three courses of logs laid around a simple stone fireplace and a doorway, but he showed me the plans and said I would be able to move in in three or four weeks.
I wasn't sure they could do that, but the place was hard to resist, surrounded on three sides by forest, the front porch looking out over the bay and mountains. You could smell salt on the breeze.
I gave him half the hundred-dollar down payment, the other half due when I moved in. Walking back down the hill, I wondered whether I had been too impulsive, and decided not. Besides the reasonable price, the quiet setting, and the lovely view, I was excited at the prospect of moving into a place that was all my own, with no previous inhabitants. It was a first for me, and at forty years of age, about time.
(The next day Mr. Bower expressed surprise that a Southern lady would enter into a contract with a Negro man. I asked him whetherhe would and he said yes, probably; Mr. Johnson was new in town but had a good reputation as a worker. I didn't pursue it beyond that, I hope leaving him slightly embarra.s.sed. In fact, the only two people I missed from our life in Philadelphia were Negroes, Sue Anne and Jimmy.) My rented room was small and close, so I spent most of my days in the school library, working on my lesson plans but also idly reading. When the weather was fine-not often!-I would go outside to draw and paint, knowing there would be little time for that after school started.
Letters, leavings.
It was almost three weeks before I got a letter from Daniel. It had been twelve days in transit, which I would come to regard as swift, and was crumpled and mud-stained but legible.
They had made good time after the ”elevator” had lifted them and the mule up to the top of the pa.s.s, and at his writing had just arrived at the Yukon River. There were boats and rafts for sale, but at ridiculous prices, so they'd begun collecting materials for a steerable raft.
He didn't say whether they planned to negotiate the river with a mule on board. I wouldn't want to be the mule-or the people!
They were all in good health and had had no trouble with the other adventurers; in fact, there was a friendly spirit of cooperation amongst most of them. Everybody in it together and plenty of gold to go around. I suspected it would be more compet.i.tive when they actually arrived in the Yukon goldfields.
The Sunday school was an odd challenge. I had both whites and Tlingits, from age five or six on up.
Most were under fifteen, but there were several adults of both races the first couple of weeks, obviously making sure I was worthy of their children.
And Gordon, always coming in a little late, standing silently in the rear.
No one paid closer attention than he. He never spoke, but it was not-as some of the adults must have thought-either deference or contempt. He was there to observe, and he missed nothing.
The evening sessions led by Gordon were fascinating. He rarely went longer than an hour, often stopping in midstory, leaving us hanging till next week. The parables were amusing, sometimes fantastic, sometimes more or less down to earth, about what happens if you don't follow tribal rules-”sin and suffer,” as we say.
After a month or so, though, I realized there was a big difference between his stories and the ones I told in Sunday school: his weren't ”sin and suffer; then see the error of your ways and become a better person.” His were ”do the wrong thing and pay for it,” period, as often as not with death. They reminded me strongly of Edgar Allan Poe's macabre tales.
I could sympathize with the fellow who took a whiff of the inside of the hut and fled back to civilization. It was pretty abominable, but I'd been living in close quarters with a bunch of prospectors, who aren't exactly dainty. The human smell didn't bother me so much as the rancid seal oil they used for lighting-and when the weather got cold that would be doubled and redoubled by the smell of their parkas, sealskins poorly cured and worn inside out.