Read Face the Winter Naked Online
Authors: Bonnie Turner
Face the Winter Naked (34 page)
Saul
nodded. "That girl had a hard time, son."
He
looked toward the house and Daniel followed his gaze. LaDaisy stood on the
front porch with Chris, holding a small child in her arms.
He
mentally counted the months again. "She's mine?" he shouted at Saul,
remembering he was deaf. "Really?"
Saul
grinned. "Sure as shootin' is. That's Mary."
The
kids smothered Daniel with hugs and kisses, and when they'd had their fill, he
rose and went back to the house.
LaDaisy
held Mary while he looked her over. He made eye contact with his wife, tried to
read beyond the obvious pain in her soul. Her tears were about to burst as he
took the child from her arms and sat on the step holding her in his lap.
"Well
now, who is this pretty little girl?" Mary grabbed his glasses and babbled
as he examined her ears surreptitiously and found the familiar crease in the
earlobe. He looked up at LaDaisy and smiled. "Guess I know my own babe
when I see her."
Chris
walked down the steps and was immediately captured by small children. Earl
pointed to Daniel's gunnysack.
"What's
in there, Daddy?"
Daniel
winked at Chris, and Chris replied, "Dead chickens."
"And
a little box full of money I saved," Daniel said to LaDaisy. "Not
much, but maybe it'll tide us over till I find work again."
She
shook her head. "Nobody's working anywhere, Daniel."
He
nodded. "That's true for most people. But I found a little work when I was
gone, and a good job when I came back to Kan' City."
"Why,
that's—"
"It's
probably gone now, because I had to leave suddenly to come home." He
sighed. "I didn't plan to come back till I could hand you a gunnysack full
of money, LaDaisy."
"I
see."
"He
didn't have a gunnysack full of money," Chris said. "Just a cigar
box."
LaDaisy
rolled her eyes, then opened the screen door as Daniel rose with Mary in his
arms.
"Well,
after I rest a while, I'll go downtown and see if they'll give me the job back.
But I ain't getting my hopes up."
LaDaisy
stepped aside and Daniel entered the house.
"It's
the place I longed for all the time I was gone," he said, "but was
too stubborn to admit it."
He
shifted his daughter to his stronger shoulder, nodded and followed LaDaisy into
the front room. She stood aside as he silently surveyed the familiar comforts
of home: the davenport and rocking chair, the pair of knotty pine end tables
he'd made for their first home, now scratched and gouged from his children's
toys. He walked to the kitchen doorway. Nothing in there had changed since he
left. But when he opened the icebox, he saw it was practically empty, and
likewise the cabinets.
I'm going to fill those up again.
His
eyes watered, and LaDaisy took Mary from him. He followed her to the bedroom
and sat on the side of the bed as she put a clean dress on the baby. Through a
film of tears, he spied the box on the dresser that held Wayne's baby shoes. He
removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt sleeve. Then, feeling what
might have happened to LaDaisy here with Clay, he stood abruptly, wiped his
eyes, put the glasses back on and hurried out of the room.
LaDaisy
followed. "Daniel? What's wrong?" She sat Mary on the floor.
He
couldn't talk, just shook his head and went to stand before his walnut shelf
with the broken mandolin parts. He removed his cap and held it almost
reverently.
She
came and stood beside him.
"Maybe
you can fix it."
"How
did it get broke?"
She
took a deep breath and looked unflinchingly into his eyes. "I—I used it
for a club. To protect myself."
Daniel
brought the splintered mandolin down from the shelf and examined it.
"Clay?"
She
nodded, tears welling up again.
"Then
I hope you put a good dent in his goddamn stupid head."
He
laid the instrument back on the shelf and slipped an arm around her. She
flinched at his touch, and suddenly, he knew without a doubt, if Shine had seen
the image of Clay raping his wife, he would've had no problem killing his
enemies in the war.
"It's
okay." He touched her wet cheek. "He can't hurt you anymore, LaDaisy."
He nodded toward the mandolin. "I'm not going to fix that. You put it to
good use. It's going to remind me the rest of my life I wasn't here to protect
my family." He drew her closer, feeling the firmness of her body as she
buried her face in his shirt and wept.
They
clung to each other as the sound of a banjo and clapping started up outdoors,
and together, they walked to the door.
"You
amaze me," she told him at length, "bringing me another kid to take
care of ..."
"Well,
I explained him to you."
She
shook her head. "Yes, you did. But now we have another mouth to feed. How
are we going to feed five kids? Seven of us altogether, Daniel. Eight, counting
Saul." She chewed on her lower lip, thinking.
"I
don't know," Daniel said. "But I can't send him away to shift for
himself. I just can't do that, LaDaisy."
"No,
neither can I."
"I'll
find work. This depression can't last forever."
LaDaisy
became thoughtful. "Ida owns this property now."
"Yes,
that's probably right."
"I'm
just wondering. Maybe she'll let you rebuild that little house out back in
exchange for our rent ..."
"Now
there's a thought." Daniel grinned. "You got a good head on your
shoulders, you know that? It would give me something useful to do while I get
our lives back together."
LaDaisy
watched the activities through the screen door, and suddenly she smiled.
"Look
at your boy. Fits right in, doesn't he?"
Chris
sat on the top step strumming George's beloved banjo, playing a decent
rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again." In the yard, three children
danced and sang while Grandpa Saul tapped his foot and clapped his hands.
"Can
you play 'Oh Susannah'?" Saul asked when the final note died away.
"I
don't know that one." Chris offered the banjo to the old man. "Here,
you play it."
Saul
broke out in a big smile and took the instrument. "I'll teach you, young
man!"
The
banjo man would like that
. And George
would be glad to know Daniel Tomelin finally came home, maybe to struggle and
live on a shoestring a few more years, but at least he still had a family.
~The End~
Acknowledgments
Special
thanks to Lauren Baratz-Logsted for taking valuable time from her own writing
to copy-edit my manuscript; Dan Coleman, Missouri Valley Special Collections,
Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri, for providing old city maps
of streets and railroads; Renee Glass, Local History and Genealogy,
Springfield-Green County Library, Springfield, Missouri, for researching early
railroad lines and street maps from 1931; and how could I forget Google Earth,
which allowed me to follow the same paths over hill and rail that my character
Daniel traveled through Missouri.
About the Author
Born
in Missouri in 1932, Bonnie Turner experienced firsthand the poverty and
heartbreak of the Depression years. A proud survivor of the era, she now
resides in Wisconsin—and still speaks fluent hillbilly with a southern drawl.
© Copyright 2010, by Bonnie
L. Turner
Kindle Edition. All rights
reserved.
Other books by Bonnie
Turner:
The Haunted Igloo
For
someone afraid of the dark, living in the Arctic is a severe test of courage.
Ten-year-old Jean-Paul struggles to hide his fear and adjust to life in the
NWT, where he is taunted by a group of Inuit boys because of his lameness
caused by a birth defect. Forced imprisonment in a "haunted" igloo
proves to be one of the most severe challenges to face Jean-Paul in the harsh
Arctic environment.
Chapter 1
Jean-Paul shivered as he hid in the shadows behind the school.
The late afternoon temperature was falling fast, and to make matters worse, the
pup was driving him crazy, wiggling and squirming inside his parka. It was all
he could do to keep her from falling out the bottom. He opened the coat a
little and looked inside.
“Shhh,” he whispered. “Someone might hear you!”
Jean-Paul glanced quickly around the corner of the schoolhouse to
see if anyone was coming, but no one was in sight. He sighed with relief. How
very cold he was getting, with icy fingers of air creeping inside his hood to
freeze his neck. He wished the plane would hurry and take off so he could seek
warm shelter.
Arctic days were growing shorter. Soon, darkness would come to the
Far North, where Jean-Paul lived with his mother and father. Of course, it
wouldn’t be pitch black, because of the stars, the moon, and the aurora
borealis, with its colored bands of light waving through the arctic sky like
giant searchlights, but it would be dark.
It was Jean-Paul’s misfortune that he didn’t like the darkness. In
fact, he more than disliked the dark; actually, he was deathly afraid of it.
This would begin Jean-Paul’s second year
of living at Aklavik, in the Northwest Territories. The Ardoin family shared a
small cabin some miles to the west, beyond the native dwellings.
Jean-Paul’s father, Cordell, was a
geologist who had come to study the large deposits of pitchblende, discovered
in 1930 at Great Bear Lake. That discovery had excited Cordell, for pitchblende
contains radium, which the government wanted.
His running off to the Arctic had brought
Cordell much criticism. His wife’s family had thought him foolish. But Lise’s
response was “So what?” And she went to the Arctic with her husband.
Cordell spent the dark winter months
writing children’s books, for then it was too cold for mining, and minerals
were frozen beneath the ice and snow. But Cordell’s thoughts were never far
from what lay hidden beneath the earth. Mixed in with the nouns and verbs and
plots for his stories were the delights of radium, copper, and gold.
Jean-Paul’s mother, Lise, sometimes helped
her husband tan the fur and cure the meat, and she sewed the family’s clothing.
This very morning she had sent eight beautiful pairs of caribou-fur boots to
the Hudson’s Bay trading post. She hoped Cordell could trade them for some
other useful items. Making the boots had been hard work, but they had turned
out as waterproof as those the Inuit women made.
Jean-Paul had his mother’s shyness, for
Lise kept almost entirely to herself. As the months passed without a personal
friend, and with another baby on the way, she seemed very sad to Jean-Paul. Of
course, Lise had met the other people who lived in Aklavik, those speaking
French, as she did, but even they seemed out of reach to her. But if the truth
were known, Lise had never been a very social person outside of her own family.
Now a sudden stinging blast of wind
slapped Jean-Paul full in the face. He turned away and huddled against the back
wall of the Mission school, a one-room building in which eleven students,
mostly Inuits, were taught by Father Cortier.
Jean-Paul listened closely for the sound
of the plane. He listened so hard that it made his ears ache. Why didn’t it
leave before he turned into a chunk of ice! He stroked the hidden pup again,
but it had gone to sleep. He knew he couldn’t hide forever, but he had to be
sure the trappers, hunters, and traders had left the settlement for good. He
had heard his father talking with them. He knew they probably wouldn’t come
again until spring. It took a very brave pilot to test the air currents over
the mountains and frozen tundra in winter, especially since compasses went wild
at the higher latitudes when almost every direction was south.
“We need supplies,” Cordell had told Ola
Hanson, naming off the staples Lise had listed: “Beans, salt pork, coffee,
canned milk.” He shrugged. “It would be nice if you had a bag of potatoes.” He
looked hopefully at Ola. But Ola shook his head “no.”
“We have three mouths to feed,” said Cordell, “and another on the
way. That’s not counting the dogs.”
One of the traders, a big man with shaggy red hair and a beard to
match, had laughed harshly. “If you get too hungry, you can always eat a husky!
You ever eat dog meat?”
Jean-Paul would never forget his father’s angry reply. “Certainly
not! And I hope to God I never have to!”
“Oh ho!” laughed the trader slapping Cordell on the shoulder. “Ah,
sure you will! Someday when your beans and biscuits run out. When it’s
ninety-five below, and snow up to your ears! Then you’ll eat dog. Roasted over
a bed of hot coals, there’s nothing better when you’re starving. Wash it down
with whisky or strong coffee! But you haven’t lived up here that long. You
might have to learn the hard way!”
That’s when Jean-Paul had made up his mind to hide a pup. He had
taken it away from its litter-mates and had run off to hide. He was lucky no
one had seen him, but he was scared to death he would be caught and punished.
He felt that, since the pup was probably too small for sled pulling, a buyer
might want it for only one thing: dinner. He could
not
let that happen!
His stomach flipped and flopped now as he recalled how that man had spoken so
horribly about eating dogs.
There was another reason Jean-Paul had saved the puppy. Larger,
more aggressive, animals tended to pick on smaller ones, just as Jean-Paul
himself was bullied by some of his bigger classmates.
Cordell had almost not brought Jean-Paul to the village this time,
and Jean-Paul wondered if it was because of the way he limped. Surely his
father didn’t want to be slowed down by a
cripple
. Cordell had never
said as much, but Jean-Paul wondered if he really felt that way. How could any
father love a son who was thin, lame, and smaller than most ten-year-olds?
His mother had remained at the cabin this time, for trading could
take all day. And besides, with both Jean-Paul and Lise, there wouldn’t have
been enough room on the freight sled for all the supplies they hoped to buy.
The trapping season would be better a couple of months later, when
the fur-bearers’ pelts had grown thick and soft. Late winter would see Cordell
bringing bundles of furs to trade. But today he and Jean-Paul had brought with
them the nine husky pups from a litter Lishta had whelped three months before.
The animals would bring good money. One of the pups was smaller than the
others. This was the one Jean-Paul chose for himself.
Now, Jean-Paul’s breath puffed out in a misty cloud as he opened
his parka a little and reached inside. He removed a thick mitten and sank his
fingers into the silvery fur. The pup peeked out of one blue eye, then went
back to sleep.
“They can’t have you!” Jean-Paul whispered. “They’ll never roast
you over a campfire!”
A sudden sound made Jean-Paul close the parka fast. He held his
breath and listened.
Oh no! Someone was coming
! He pressed himself into
the schoolhouse wall, hoping he wouldn’t be seen.
But it was too late. Around the corner came Chinook and Aiverk and
Nanuk, the three boys who teased Jean-Paul the most. They spied him at once.
Their hoods were thrown back, even though it was cold and windy.
Jean-Paul knew they were hardier than a boy from lower Canada who had once
lived in a nice, warm house in town. The Inuit boys were bigger than Jean-Paul,
especially Chinook, and they looked bigger than ever as they stopped in front
of him.
“It’s
Okalerk
!” said Aiverk. “Why is
Okalerk
hiding
behind the school?”
The other boys laughed, and Jean-Paul shrank back as Aiverk
stooped down to stare into his face. Jean-Paul knew that
okalerk
was the
Inuit word for
hare
, and that the way he sort of hopped while walking
made them think of a rabbit!
Chinook also came closer. Light snow sparkled in his short dark
hair. At thirteen, the Inuit boy was the oldest in Jean-Paul’s class, not to
mention the most daring. His voice was musical and full of laughter as he
questioned Jean-Paul.
“Why are you here little
okalerk
Jean-Paul Ardoin?” He
turned to Nanuk and Aiverk. “He must like school so much that he comes on
Saturday and hides behind it!”
“Maybe he’s waiting for a girl,” said Nanuk, who had a girl of his
own. Thin like Jean-Paul, Nanuk sometimes had a nasty temper. He squatted
before Jean-Paul. “Why are you hiding,
Okalerk
? If you’re waiting for a
girl, you might have to wait forever!”
The others burst out laughing. Jean-Paul’s parka wiggled suddenly
and he put his hand up to make it stop. But the boys had already seen. Nanuk
turned to Chinook and Aiverk.
“Hey, he’s hiding something in his
attigi
!”
Chinook said, “What have you got in there Jean-Paul
Okalerk
?”
“N–nothing…”
Aiverk reached for Jean-Paul’s parka. Jean-Paul was cornered.
“No!” He pushed Aiverk’s hand away. “Let me go!”
“Come on,” said Aiverk. “Let’s see what you’ve got!” Aiverk’s
black eyes snapped with excitement.
Jean-Paul was frightened as he looked from one boy to the other.
“I’m just waiting for Pa.”
“He’s waiting for his old man!” Chinook laughed. “Well, I saw
Monsieur
Ardoin just a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t looking for any
okalerk
s!”
There was that word again! Jean-Paul shouted, “I’m not an
okalerk
,
Chinook!” The pup wiggled again at the sound of his voice, and Jean-Paul hoped
it didn’t wet inside his parka. “You stop calling me an
okalerk
!”
The three boys roared with laughter.
“Go away,” Jean-Paul said. “Pa will come—”
Chinook brushed snow from his hair. “And your pa will say, ‘What
very nice friends you have, Jean-Paul, dear!’”
Tears sprang into Jean-Paul’s eyes, but he looked at the ground so
they wouldn’t see. Then the pup yelped.
Nanuk moved quickly and yanked open Jean-Paul’s parka. The pup
jumped out and landed in the snow. Aiverk picked up the squirming ball of
fluff.
“Just a pup!” His eyes narrowed, and he tried to look mean. “Where
did you steal the pup,
Okalerk
?”
“I didn’t steal her!” Jean-Paul reached for the pup, but Aiverk
jerked it away. “Please, Aiverk, give her back! I didn’t steal her, she’s
mine.”
Chinook scratched the pup’s head. “Nice dog, Jean-Paul. You must
have taken it from someone. Why else would you hide it?”
Jean-Paul was really crying now, and he didn’t care who saw.
“I—I was just keeping her warm,” he said. “I didn’t want her to
get cold.” He reached out again. “I want my dog back, Aiverk!”
“Give the baby his dog,” said Nanuk. “We got better things to do.”
Aiverk gave the wiggly pup back to Jean-Paul. “Here, take your
stolen dog,
Okalerk
. I don’t want to be caught with something you
stole.”
“If you were bigger and meaner and stronger,” said Nanuk with a
laugh, “you could join the Ice Patrol. But we don’t want a crying sissy in our
club, right guys?”
“Frozen Eyeballs would be a good name for him,” chuckled Aiverk.
“Frozen
Okalerk
Eyeballs!”
Jean-Paul tried to ignore their taunts. He put the pup back inside
his coat and turned to leave. Having his father find him with the dog would be
better than being teased to death.
From the direction of the river came the sudden roar of an engine.
It sputtered a few times, then died. Finally, it caught and raced up
powerfully.
Chinook shouted, “Hey it’s the plane! Come on, let’s go watch it
take off!”
Jean-Paul had also wished to see the aircraft lift off from its
runway on the frozen river, but he sighed with relief as the boys tore off
around the corner of the building. For one thing, they wouldn’t tease him any
more that day. For another, it had started snowing a few weeks before. Soon it
would be nearly impossible to fly into or out of the Northwest Territories.
“You’re safe,” he told the pup. “I’m going to take care of you
now.”
It was nearly dark when Jean-Paul left his hiding place. He hadn’t
meant to stay away so long, but he also hadn’t planned to return to the trading
post until he was sure the traders were gone.
The main street of Aklavik was almost deserted. As he walked back
to the Hudson’s Bay trading post, a sickening feeling nudged into Jean-Paul’s
throat. He had never lied to his father. But he had already thought up a good
one.
Jean-Paul did not have to look far for Cordell. The tall,
wide-shouldered man with thick black hair and a bushy beard tromped down the
steps of the trading post. He strode quickly to his son and faced him with his
huge hands on his hips. It was almost too dark to see the man’s eyes, but Jean-Paul
knew they’d be flashing fire.
“Where have you been?” Cordell roared.
Knowing how angry and worried his father must be, Jean-Paul could
do nothing but stare at the ground. He shuffled the toes of his boots in the
snow. Words got stuck in his throat.
