“She wasn't making a whole lot of sense,” Bella said. “Said we needed to send for help-and I'm thinking, ‘A doctor? It's too late for a doctor’-and she's saying no, someone much better, much smarter than that.” Bella stopped. “Well. If this Saburo had been so smart, I don't think she would have found herself in this predicament in the first place. Course, I didn't tell her that.”
Bella looked in her mug once more. “Imagine they're expecting you back about now,” she said, but she didn't make a move herself.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Baby died,” Bella said. “Was dead. Told you that.”
“But who did you-”
“Aw,” Bella said, “this part of the story ain't worth the telling. What you might call a medicine man, a shaman: that's what she wanted. Hell of a bad idea, turns out. Oh, we got this man-young man- down visiting from Lower Kalskag. He comes in-drunk as a fart- I'm ready to turn him out. But Lily, she was beyond hollering by then, just screeching, and the fact is, none of the other aunties wanted to be in there. I didn't want to be in there. I don't think this shaman much did, either. But we left, he went in, and-” Bella thought about this for a moment, and then drew herself up before going on. “The next morning, it's just Lily lying there, wrecked, like something'd exploded. And she won't talk, but she don't have to. No baby. No shaman. No father. She's in there all alone.”
CHAPTER 16
WHEN I GOT BACK TO TODD FIELD, THERE WAS A MESSAGE waiting from Gurley. They'd arrive late that afternoon. Continue my preparations. Tag along on a reconnaissance flight, get a better idea of the terrain.
I'd assumed Lily had all the knowledge of the “terrain” that we would need, but with all the other supplies for our expedition secured, I had nothing else to do, and so hopped on a flight the next morning.
To my surprise, the crew hardly protested at my joining them-the flights were so boring, they said, they'd love someone like me along. When I asked what that meant, I was greeted with some mumbles and laughs, and I realized they knew about Shuyak and the infamous sergeant who jumped out of planes.
I disappointed them. I got up to look out the window once we were in flight, but I didn't jump. And the landscape disappointed me. Or rather, shocked me. It was the first time in my life that I have ever seen that much nothing. No balloons. No bombs. No soldiers. No smoke, no villages, no people, not even animals, at least animals visible from the air. And you couldn't see fleas from this high up.
We flew for hours over the same terrain-grasses, a clump of scrub alder here and there, mountains in the distance, and everywhere, water puddling and flooding, curling and spilling from one spot to another via waterways fat or thin. If the angle was wrong, or right, the water's surface would catch fire with the reflection of the sun, and if you didn't look away in time, that burst of sun would stay with you, even after you'd blinked. It glowed behind your eyelids, and then reappeared in some other portion of the sky-sometimes looking briefly like a balloon, if that's what you were looking for, or a second sun, which, if you thought about it (and we didn't), was no less impossible to believe.
WHAT RONNIE HAS always found difficult to believe is that Alaska 's mosquitoes bother him more than me. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the departure of his tuunraq, but Ronnie has always been impotent when it comes to Alaska 's unofficial state bird. Mosquitoes have driven him crazy every summer, especially during what became our annual expedition into the delta. As soon as we were clear of the city limits, the mosquitoes would descend on Ronnie, masses of them, until any remaining patch of exposed skin bore at least one or two drops of blood. Honestly, they never found as much interest in me, a fact I attributed to the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church's path to salvation, and one that Ronnie attributed to my love of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.
We'd go for a month or more. Originally, the trips were designed to get me out and around to some of the smaller villages and seasonal camps that would emerge each summer over the delta. But in recent years, Ronnie and I had done a kind of joint revival wherever we stop; I said Mass in the morning, he told stories and attended to shamanic requests at night.
Our pairing was both fun and funny, and surprisingly collegial. Even before he'd gotten wind of what we were up to at the hospice, my bishop frowned on such professional camaraderie. He'd liked things better, it seemed, when Ronnie had been more serious about trying to do me in. Try to pin my boss down on the issue, and the good bishop would always laugh and say “Now, I'm not about to tell you we need to go back to the days when missionaries outlawed dancing and we shipped the kids off to boarding school, but-”
“Then don't,” I'd say, and things between the bishop and me would be set for another six months or so.
I see now, of course, how it was all adding up.
One thing I never told anyone was how I liked the traveling part of the trips best. Once we'd arrived somewhere, I was Father Louis, and in demand for a steady stream of confessions, baptisms, Masses, a calming word solicited here, a scolding one requested there. But traveling from one spot to another-in a beat-up old skiff that Ronnie had helped me find and repair-I was no one again, just a man out enjoying the widest skies on earth.
Ronnie stayed up most nights. More often than not, I did, too. Because whatever skills Ronnie lacked as a shaman, he more than had as an amateur astronomer, or meteorologist, or skywatcher. It wasn't that he knew scientific names, or that he had a talent for predicting the weather (although he was fairly good). He simply had a way of using the sky as a canvas at night, using it as a means of telling a story. He'd analyze the way the winds were pushing a cloud, point out how the sun this far north was always fighting to keep from sinking below the horizon. In time I learned that you could get at least half the story from watching his hands alone, the way they moved a cloud or poked a hole in the blue and let a star shine down.
It sounds funny, I know, to be so fascinated with another man, let alone his hands, but it has something to do with being a priest. No, not in that sense, thank you, but more of a professional interest. A good priest is sensitive to his hands the way a pianist might be to his. They are essential to his work-praying, celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass, offering communion, the sign of peace. It's well known, at least among missionaries, certainly among Jesuits, how Isaac Jogues, Jesuit missionary to Canada in the 1600s, had to later receive special dispensation from the Vatican to say Mass. His hands had been mutilated during his tenure in North America, fingers frozen or eaten, and without the pope's express permission, he would have been considered unfit to serve at the altar. (Jogues's later plea to return to Canada was reluctantly granted, but his arrival coincided with sickness and blight. The Mohawks took this as evidence of sorcery and cut off his head.)
I think the real reason I admired Ronnie, or those hands of his, was that he clearly had never used his hands the way I had mine. He was a drunk, a failure, a grifter, but the earth was no worse for his being on it. If Saint Isaac Jogues had ever descended from the sky during one of those trips in the bush, he would have reached for Ronnie's hand first, and Ronnie would have taken it, whatever condition Saint Isaac's hand was in, and shook it firmly. Ronnie had a grudge against missionaries but admired men who, like him, had survived.
More to the point, if Jogues ever dropped down, Ronnie would have been the first to see him. Ronnie was always looking up, especially in summer, especially out in the delta. He had a theory that if you sat in one spot long enough, stared at the sky carefully and remembered all you'd seen, you would be the wisest man in the world. All the knowledge of the world was contained in the skies, he said. He was going to write it all down one day, he swore, a book ofamirlut, an atlas of clouds, and it would sell better than any bible. I asked him how he'd ever manage to chart on paper something that was always changing. He shook his head at my stupidity. “Not a map of where things are now,” he said. “No: where they will be.”