Dead in the Water (12 page)

As Olga boiled water and made tea, the rest of the girls from the circle on the beach drifted into the house one at a time, taking a seat around the large, scarred kitchen table, warming their hands around mugs of hot tea and casting shy, surreptitious glances at Kate. After a while Sasha lumbered in, dressed in clean, dry clothes, her skin flushed with the heat of her bath and her wet hair slicked back like a seal's. She sat down on the floor close to Olga's knees and took up a handful of the white straw.

"What is all this?" Kate asked, gesturing at the haystack with her mug.

"The girls and I are weaving baskets." Olga whipped a length of damp sheeting from the back of the table and displayed the beginnings of a dozen baskets that at first glance seemed to be made of cloth.

"Oh," Kate said, on a long note of discovery. "You're an Attuan basket weaver."

"Unalaskan, now," Olga said, her lips curling ever so slightly. One of the girls gave a giggle, quickly smothered.

Kate touched one of the tiny things. It was soft, even silken to the touch. The weaving was very fine, the stitches minute. None of the baskets were more than three inches in diameter. Each one had the same intricate pattern woven around its base in a different color of grass.

" 'Baskets of grass which are both strong and beautiful,'

" she said softly. She looked up at Olga. "Captain Cook wrote that in his log, when he visited Unalaska in ."

Becky sniffed, disdain sitting oddly on her young face.

"The Unalaska baskets were very coarse."

"So I've read," Kate agreed. "The ones on Attu were supposed to be the best, weren't they?"

This time Olga sniffed, and being older and more experienced carried it off better than Becky had. It was a sound of profound disdain. "If you say so."

"I don't know anything about it really," Kate admitted, except for what I've read about it. And I've seen the baskets in the museum in Anchorage, of course. How long does it take you to make one of these?"

"Six months," Olga said. "Maybe six years."

Kate looked at her incredulously. "It's true," Olga insisted. "It depends on how big the basket is. A basket two and a half inches high takes about forty hours. But when the old ones made shrouds, it could take years to finish just one. Would you like to try?"

"Making a shroud?"

Olga laughed. "We'll start you on a basket."

There was a shuffling around the table as each girl found her own basket. Half a dozen dark heads bent forward, identical intent expressions on each small face.

Evidently this was serious business, and Kate said as much.

"One of these little baskets can bring as much as two hundred and fifty," Olga told her.

"Dollars?"

"Dollars," Olga confirmed with a twinkle in her eye.

Kate looked at the baskets the girls were working on with a new and growing respect. "This how you girls make your spending money?" Six heads nodded without looking up, six pairs of fingers worked steadily without missing a beat. Kate turned back to Olga and found a handful of the bleached grass under her nose.

"Peel the outer layers off, like this. You see?"

"Uh-huh," Kate lied. She got the definite feeling that Olga explained things one time and one time only.

"There are inner blades, here, and outer blades, what we call seconds. Keep them separate."

One blade of grass looked pretty much like another to Kate, but she sorted hers into what she prayed were the correct piles. "Okay."

"You split it, like this, with your thumbnail."

After nearly a month at sea on a crab boat. Kate didn't have much in the way of thumbnails and her first efforts were clumsy at best.

"All right," Olga said. "This is the spoke, and this is a weaver. The spokes are the frame, and the weavers are twisted around the frame. Okay. You take a piece of grass and twist it. Here, I'll start yours for you.

Remember, you work always from the bottom up, and clockwise."

"Who taught you how to do this, Auntie?"

"My grandmother, a little. The rest I taught myself by taking some old baskets apart."

"No one else does this anymore?"

"Very few. Many of the old weavers who were left died in the flu epidemic in 1919," Olga said, "and of course none of them told anyone else how they did their weaving."

"Why not?"

"Because every weaver had her own special weaving styles, and there was jealousy between the villages.

Each one always wanted to be the best, so each one kept her ways secret from the others." Olga sighed a little. "Now they are all dead, and the weaving is almost dead, too."

"Not as long as you're alive, Auntie," Becky said, and the girls giggled.

"For which you should be glad," Olga told them, "or you wouldn't be able to buy that new Michael Jackson album. No," Olga told Kate, "dabble your fingers in the water first. The grass must be damp to work. Not too much! Only wet down as much as you are going to use at one time. You have to wrap up what you don't use, and it will mildew if you put it away damp."

After straining and sweating an hour, Kate produced her first weave, a tiny circle of clumsy stitches that nevertheless was recognizable as the beginning of a basket. "Good," Olga said. "Now keep going."

Easy for you to say, Kate thought. "You've got a lot of grass here," she said, nodding at the pile on the kitchen floor. "Looks like enough to keep you weaving until next Christmas."

Olga shook her head and extended her arms in a circle, the tips of her fingers barely touching. "From this much grass, you get this many weavers." She put her right forefinger and thumb around her left wrist.

"That's all?"

"That's all," the old woman confirmed. "That's why it's important to pick the best grass."

"And where is the best grass?"

"Away from the salt water. Grass on the beach is too thick. It gets brittle after curing."

"So you pick in the hills?"

Olga nodded, her face bent over her basket, her expression absorbed as she conjured some especially intricate design out of the rim. "You learn where the good grass grows. If you keep picking in the same place the grass gets better."

"That's why we go back to Anua every year," Becky interpolated.

Kate broke a spoke. "Anua?"

Her voice must have sounded as startled as she felt because Becky cast her a curious glance. "Sure. It's where our family comes from."

"Oh." Kate began the arduous process of threading another spoke into the weaving, running through a mental list of questions to ask. She couldn't afford the appearance of prying or she would lose all the confidence she had gained so far. She recognized the investigator in her superseding the fellow tribal member and was momentarily ashamed of herself.

But two men were missing, and probably dead and she didn't like Harry Gault so she said in a casual voice, "So if you're from Anua, why do you live in Unalaska?"

"It was the war," Becky said. "Tell her the story, Auntie."

"It was the war," Olga said. Her voice dropped into a rhythm, slipping into it so effortlessly and so seamlessly that Kate didn't notice it at once. "The Japanese soldiers came.

"Then the army came.

"The army moved all of the people from the islands.

"They put them in towns and in camps in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.

"It was too hot up there for the people.

"Many of the people died.

"After the war, the army brought us back.

"The people that were left wished they had died with the others.

"The houses were gone.

"The villages were gone.

"Even the ones where there had been no Japanese.

"The army said they destroyed them because they couldn't leave the villages for the Japanese to use.

"We couldn't go back.

"There weren't enough of us.

"There was nothing to go back to.

"So now we live in a few villages instead of many.

"That's all."

The room was silent but for the rustle of grass. Kate kept her head bent over her basket. When she could speak, she said, "Do you ever go back to Anua?"

"Sure," Becky said, at the same time Olga said, "No."

The girl's eyes widened. Olga said easily, "Only for the grass. In June or July, when it is ready to pick. But mostly we use Chinaman's grass, raffia, that we buy from Outside. It takes too long to pick and cure the rye grass." The old woman smiled. "And the tourists can't tell the difference."

Kate grinned. Before she could reply, Sasha said suddenly,

"Home."

They all looked at her, seated on the floor, her crippled leg again twisted awkwardly beneath her. She still had the ivory knife, and with it she traced a pattern on the old linoleum floor, the yellowed ivory of the old knife looking odd against the cracked paisley pattern. Her brown eyes were bright and alert, the most alive features in that blunted face, "Kayak. Men. Thunderbird. Men.

Horne."

"That's the same story she was telling on the beach this morning," Becky told Olga. "What does it mean?"

Olga shrugged, and leaned forward to pluck the storyknife from Sasha's now limp fingers. "I don't know. What do any of Sasha's stories mean?"

"But her stories always make sense, Auntie," Becky protested. "Somehow, they always do. You just have to figure them out."

"Thunderbird," Sasha said clearly. "Men. Kayak. Men.

Home."

"See? She knows what we're talking about."

Olga looked at Becky. "The storyknife is just a toy, Becky. It makes Sasha happy to play with it. That's all."

Becky's mouth closed and she bent back over her basket, a tinge of red creeping up into her cheeks.

"Tell me about the storyknife, Auntie," Kate suggested into the uncomfortable silence that followed. "I've never seen one before. It's beautiful."

Olga looked down at the ivory knife she held in her hands. "My grandmother gave it to me. My great-uncle made it for her when she was a little girl. It's a toy. A girl's toy. We use it to draw stories in the sand, and in the snow."

"Where did it come from? The custom, I mean ?

Olga shrugged. "Some people say it used to be a real knife. That the Eskimos used it to cut snow into blocks for igloos. All I know is I got this one from my mother.

My mother got it from her mother. Other girls had them when I was a child. It was a custom." She handed the storyknife to Kate.

Kate accepted it in reverent hands. The handle was carved with the stylized likeness of a sea otter floating on his back. In spite of the wear and tear caused by at minimum four pairs of grubby little hands, each individual whisker stood out on his tiny face. He stared up at Kate, expectant. The ivory seemed to grow heavier in her hand. Kate cleared her throat. "Are they always made from ivory?"

"No. Some are made from bone or wood."

"It's a beautiful thing, Auntie," Kate said, handing it back. "And valuable. It should be in a museum."

"And would a museum take it out and play with it?"

Olga demanded, and gave a snort. "Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched. Here the girls play with it, and it tells them stories."

Which made it something more than just a toy, Kate thought. She looked down at the rapidly shredding beginning of her basket, and said ruefully, "I don't seem to be doing very well at this, Auntie. I guess I'm just a cultural illiterate."

"Nonsense," Olga said briskly. "It takes practice, like anything else. You will take some grass with you when you leave, so you can work at it on your own."

Wonderful, Kate thought, but said meekly, "Thank you, Auntie."

"And now more tea? And some alodiks?"

"Alodiks?" Kate said.

The old woman looked at her reprovingly. "You have no Aleut?"

Kate shook her head.

"Because your grandmother wanted you to?" Olga guessed shrewdly, and laughed, a loud, cackling laugh, at Kate's expression. Kate was relieved when Olga turned to the stove, and even more relieved when alodiks proved to be nothing more than fried bread.

A few minutes later Olga put a plateful of the stuff in the middle of the table, puffed up and golden brown.

Everyone around the table made a concerted grab, not excepting Kate.

"There were killer whales in the bay this morning, Auntie," one of the girls said around a mouthful of fried bread.

"Ahhhhh," Olga said. "Killer whales in the bay." The smile faded from her face and she shook her head gravely.

"What does it mean?"

"Killer whales in the bay?"

"Yes. Do you know what it means?"

"I know only what everyone knows." Olga worked her next few stitches without speaking. The girls ceased their giggling and whispering, and as the silence gathered and grew, Kate had the feeling of a curtain about to go up.

When she spoke again, Olga's voice fell again into a kind of singsong, with a full-stop pause at the end of each sentence. It was subtle but clear. It wasn't as if Olga banged a drum on the downbeat at the end of every line, but Becky and her sister began nodding their heads slightly to the beat. Kate had noticed a similar kind of cadence to Olga's story of the Aleuts' exile and repatriation during and after World War 11, and now consciously scanned the old woman's words for rhythm. She found it, and repetition, and internal rhymes, and alliteration.

Without moving, the girls seemed to draw tighter together in their circle, intent, absorbed, almost hypnotized, acolytes hanging on the words of their priestess.

"When killer whales come to a bay with a village,"

Olga chanted, "they come hungry for someone's spirit.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"Someone is going to die.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"The people know.

"When the killer whales come

"To a bay with a village

"It won't be long.

"Maybe one month.

"Maybe two.

"When the killer whales come

"Someone dies in that bay.

"When the killer whales come.

"That's all.'"

As she spoke the last words, Olga looked straight at Kate. She held her gaze for a long moment, before her eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat. The skin there began to itch beneath that intent gaze. Kate held perfectly still. "That was a beautiful story, Auntie," she said. "You're a poet."