Alaska (138 page)

Nate, of course, was first out, for the access door was on his side, and when Killer saw him alight the dog leaped into his arms and whimpered the equivalent of sobs of joy, and when LeRoy edged himself out of the plane, the dog ran to him too, licking at him as if past enmities were forgiven. But when Flossie descended, a person Killer had never seen or smelled before, he started at her with a menacing growl. Giving him a solid kick, Nate snapped: 'Down, you damned fool. She's the one who rescued you,' and to Killer's dismay, his master turned away from him and took Flossie in his arms.

WHEN THE TWO FLATCHES RETURNED TO THEIR CABIN AT Matanuska, LeRoy convened an emergency session of the family, to whom he reported: 'Flossie's been kissin* a half-breed named Nate Coop.'

'He the one who owns the dog?' Elmer asked, and LeRoy said: 'The same,' and the whole weight of the family fell upon silent Floss
ie.
Elmer pointed out that 'acrost the states of the two Dakotas and all of Minnesota, no marriage of a white man to no Indian woman, or vicey versey, has ever worked. It's agin the law of nature.'

Hilda Flatch, generous in most of her judgments, warned: 'You know him for four days!

Ridiculous! Besides, Indians drink. They beat their wives and ignore their children.'

And LeRoy said, with a perspicacity that surprised everyone: 'Why would you bother with a half-breed when you have that perfectly good Vickaryous boy available?'

And suddenly Paulus Vickaryous, scion of the Finnish 839

family about whom the Flatches had always been cool, became a paragon, a young man who knew how to farm and who had acquired land of his own, a responsible fellow who attended the Lutheran church regularly and saved money. He was, according to Flossie's family, about the finest young American or Canadian of this generation, and they began inviting him to dinner.

He was a tall young man with the attractive light-blond hair that nature had given the Finns, whose fair skin could attract even the slightest of the sun's rays that hit their forbidding land. He was well educated, well mannered and as good a farmer as Elmer had said. There was no conceivable reason why a girl like Flossie would not want to marry a man as promising as Paulus, except that she had lost her heart to Nate Coop, his mountains and his dog.

So after young Vickaryous had been rebuffed three or four times in ways so blatant that he could not fail to receive the message, he stopped appearing at the Flatch cabin, and the restrained fury of the Flatch family began to envelop poor Floss
ie.

Day after day she heard stories of how Indian men mistreated their women, and of how no Indian could ever stay sober three weeks in a row, and of how, if you took a hundred miners, Indian or white, ninety-six of them never amounted to a damn. An outsider, listening to the Flatches berating their headstrong daughter, would have concluded that the girl was a delinquent who merited the scorn she was suffering.

And certainly the listener would have supposed that young Flossie would never again be allowed to speak with her Indian half-breed.

But in this extremity she found a powerful champion, one prepared to sweep away the cobwebs of the past and misunderstandings of the present. The presumptive widow Melissa Peckham had remained at Matanuska as the representative of the Alaskan territorial government and it was often her counsel that enabled the teetering settlement to find a stable balance. She met with wives unable to accept the interminable winters: 'You should have seen the Klondike in February. I made fifty, sixty pancakes at a time. Stacked 'em outside the cabin, dealt 'em off one by one as the hungry men came in. Frozen solid the pancakes, not the men. Thaw 'em out. Heat 'em up, douse 'em in syrup, and away we go. One stack would last maybe two weeks.'

To the husbands defeated by floods and freezes she said: 'Now, Mr. Vasanoja, do you think for one minute that life back in Minnesota would be one bit better for you if you returned? For the banker, already there with his millions stolen from the poor, yes, it would be better. And for the 840

sheriff with his big Buick, yes, lots better. But for you, a Finn with no savings?

Mr. Vasanoja, did I ever tell you about how my man Murphy rode a bicycle a thousand miles to find his gold mine, and found nothin'?' Missy had in her youth spoken flawless English, but in the gold fields she had on occasion adopted the language of the frontier until she sometimes spoke like the toughest woodsman.

It was this woman, a sixty-six-year-old social worker and mining-camp veteran, who now stepped in to defend Flossie Flatch. Meeting with the girl's distraught family, she glared at them and said: 'You remind me of law sessions they used to have in the gold fields before the North West Mounted moved in. Some miner would do somethin'

the rest didn't approve of, so they'd hold a court in a saloon, and eight men who'd done a lot worse things would pass judgment on him. Ridiculous.' She glared at the older Flatches and said: 'You're doin' the same with Floss
ie.
You're really not qualified to judge. This is a new world with new rules.'

When she had their attention she said: 'Of course he's a half-breed, but so is most of Alaska, one way or another. I've seen a score of good marriages with full-blooded Eskimos and Indians. You, LeRoy, you fly the Venns around, don't you? Surely you've seen that young Venn's wife is a half-breed, haven't you? Chinese and Tlingit. And those very wealthy Lincoln Arkikovs down in Juneau Siberian and Yupik. My daughter married an Arkikov, and I'm damn proud of her family.' And then she uttered the simple statement that summarized so much Alaskan life: 'You want to be happy up here, you better learn the rules.'

'But don't the Indians always drink too much?' Hilda Flatch asked, and Missy snapped: 'Sometimes. Alcohol and suicide, the twin curses of the native people. But in good marriages the risk is no greater than with white men and women in general.'

'But how would a half-breed like him ever find a steady job?' Elmer asked, and this infuriated the feisty older woman: 'Mr. Flatch, you amaze me. You want guarantees. I don't see you with a steady job. When my husband was alive he used to ask me: ”Why doesn't a reliable man like Elmer Flatch get himself a steady job?”and I said: ”Looks like to me he's makin' a better livin' than you are.”'

Allowing this sharp attack to relax, she asked for a drink 'Anything handy' and said with a gentleness much removed from her previous arguments: 'Now listen to me, you too, Floss
ie.
Years ago, in Chicago, I was a fairly acceptable-looking young woman.

Straight teeth, nice hair, a good education. I've never married. Always fell in love with men

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who already had wives. Great, wonderful men, best in the world, but never free to marry me. So ... Life conies at you in a thousand different forms, and you better be prepared to accept it when it comes along. Because if you miss it, the years stretch out forever, bleak and lonely and meaningless.'

When no one commented, she said with a renewed brightness: 'So, you fine Flatches who aren't really as fine as you think you are, nor am I, nor are the Vickaryouses that you've been courtin'... It was an accident, a cruel accident perhaps, that this Flossie, who is such a good girl, flew into that mining camp and met Nate Coop. I know nothin' about him except that he took great pains to save his dog. You took your sister there, LeRoy, hotshot pilot, so the blame's on you. Could be the best thing you ever did, because I am going to do everything I can to help your sister marry that boy.'

But when she saw the truly tormented faces of all the Flatches but Flossie, she had to try to help them understand the situation: 'All right! I agree with you. According to LeRoy, he's an illiterate oaf with hair in his eyes and a grunt for hello. But he's lived in the woods with people who know no better. Marriage in Alaska is often a woman with good sense and an overdose of humanity marryin' a clod like this Nate and civilizin' him. So if your Flossie can tame a moose, she can sure civilize young Mr. Coop.'

When Missy finally stomped out of the house, she left expecting that the Flatches would make some kind of conciliatory gesture to their daughter, but what Hilda said was: 'If you marry that damned half-breed, your father will throw you out of this house . . . and I'll help.' But when Nate flew down to Matanuska in the plane of another bush pilot to present himself to the Flatch family, they had to admit that he seemed like a manly young fellow, with good, though awkward, manners, but he was frighteningly dark-skinned and his features were hopelessly Indian. If Flossie were going to live in the wilderness, he might be acceptable as a son-in-law, but in ordinary town life with other people he was painfully inferior to Paulus Vickaryous. And he had made the grave error of bringing with him his dog Killer, who showed his growling dislike for all the Flatches, including Floss
ie.
So when Nate in mumbling fashion asked for Flossie's hand, with Killer snarling in the background, all of the Flatches replied with a clear-cut 'No!'

UNWILLING TO ACCEPT THIS AS A FINAL ANSWER, NATE remained in the vicinity for some days, then vanished. However, he did write to Flossie, but Mrs. Flatch appropriated 842

the letters, and when this was discovered by Flossie's asking at the post office if any mail had come in for her, she so informed Missy Peckham, who stormed out to the cabin with some harsh news: 'Hilda Flatch, if you prevent United States mail from reachin' its intended owner, you can go to jail. You hand over those letters, right now, to me as an agent of the government. And don't be a damned fool.'

When the letters were delivered to Flossie, she carried them home unopened and told her mother: 'I'm not mad. You did what you thought was right. But I want to read them here in my own home with you watching,' and with a long kitchen knife she opened the letters, one by one, and read them in silence. As she finished each one she handed it over to her mother, sitting on the opposite side of the kitchen table, and that night she wrote to Nate.

As a consequence of this exchange of letters, Nate Coop flew down to Matanuska at the time of year when the three George Lakes could be expected to break through the great glacier wall; Flossie had told him that she wanted to see it actually happen this year and he had come to take her up the Knik River to witness it. He lodged at Missy Peckham's place and came to the Flatch cabin only twice, for when he appeared the second time the older Flatches made it clear that he was not welcome, and he left.

They were shocked, some days later, when Flossie disappeared, and no one could guess where she might have gone; Missy said her lodger had left too, and she supposed they might have flown to Seattle to get married, but when Hilda, who was especially opposed to Coop, ransacked her daughter's mail she found in one of Nate's letters a reference to the dramatic breakup of the lakes, with the comment: 'That would be a neat thing to see.' Shuddering, she called her son, but he was absent on a trip to Venn's Lode, and by the time he returned it was too dark for him to do anything about finding his sister.

But in the morning he acceded to his mother's wild laments, revved up his Cub, now on wheels, and set out to scout the surrounding countryside, and as he flew up the Knik River toward the glacier he saw, near the promontory from which the shattering collapse of the glacier would best be viewed, a white canvas tent. Dropping low, he buzzed the place, and was relieved but also distressed to see two young people emerge obviously from sleeping bags, for their hair was disheveled and they wore what could be taken for pajamas or some kind of slapdash substitute. Although he could not identify the pair, he was pretty sure they must be Flossie 843

and Nate, and his uncertainty was removed in a way which infuriated him: the dog Killer burst out of the tent and began yapping at the plane.

Signaling to them by dipping his wings, he made another circuit, now flying so low that he could see their faces, but at this moment his attention was distracted by a gigantic pillar of spume soaring high in the air. The ice plugs which had held the three lakes captive during the past ten months had exploded, and the long-imprisoned waters were now roaring free. LeRoy in his plane, his sister and Nate from in front of their tent, watched in awe as this titanic force broke loose, for as the waters struck the face of the glacier they carved away massive icebergs, which began their tortuous way down the tempestuous river, gouging out smaller icebergs as they ground and jostled and carved their way along. It was the most violent manifestation of nature any of the three had ever seen, and LeRoy circled over the cascading waters and the crumbling icebergs for half an hour, after which he buzzed the tent once more, dipping his wings to the lovers and their excited dog.

When he landed at Palmer he hurried out to the cabin, rushed in, looked at his apprehensive parents, and said: 'Well, now they got to get married.'

THE FOUR FLATCHES HAD BEEN so PREOCCUPIED WITH their own affairs, they had remained oblivious to the irresistible manner in which world history had been creeping up on them. In June 1941 the prediction that Air Corps Captain Shafter had made at the Palmer Airstrip in the winter of 1940 came true; Nazi Germany declared total war against Communist Russia, and what Shafter had seen to be an illogical alliance came to an end. This meant, the 'other pilots at the airstrip pointed out, that 'Russia will probably be our ally, if we ever get into this thing.' And the more knowing, with whom LeRoy did not associate, began to look more closely at that very narrow stretch of the Bering Sea separating the Soviet Union from Alaska.

At about this time even LeRoy became aware that someone, Canadian or American, he could never tell which, was expressing interest in a chain of would-be airports skimpy strips in the wilderness, really linking Edmonton in Canada to Fairbanks in Alaska, and he wondered what was afoot. Once more Leonidas Shafter, a major now, appeared in Palmer with a request, or perhaps it was an order, that all bush pilots in the region meet with him:

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'American participation in the war's inevitable. How we'll enter is anybody's guess.

I think Hitler will do something stupid in Europe. The Lusitania all over again. But something. Or maybe Russia will begin to fall. When that happens, right here where you are in Alaska becomes of utmost importance.

'So what we're about to do in anticipation, is rush into being this line of airports, call them emergency landing strips, from Great Falls down here in Montana to Edmonton up here in Canada and over to Fairbanks in Alaska. Then we'll use the little Yukon River strips already existing from Ladd Field in Fairbanks to Nome. To accomplish this we must have the cooperation of you flyboys familiar with the territory.'

This time he had with him a map marked Secret, and after asking anyone not a pilot to leave the room, he tacked it onto the wall behind him. It was almost identical to one of those he had displayed on his previous visit, except that this time it had a linked chain of some dozen red stars glued to little known villages or river crossings in northern Montana, western Canada and eastern Alaska: 'If you tried to walk the last part of that route, Edmonton to Fairbanks, it'd take about two years, supposing you had a good Indian guide and an airplane to drop supplies.

To drive it, maybe fifteen years, granted that the two countries ever woke up to build a road through that wilderness ... or could do it if they did decide. What we're going to do is build us eleven emergency fields, right now, and since there are no roads along most of this route, you men are going to fly the equipment in, right now.

'Of course, from the opposite end here in Edmonton, another group of guys just like you will be flying in their share of the cargo. So as of tonight, now, you are all enlisted in one of the damnedest projects Alaska has ever seen. Building airfields where there have never been any. We want you, and we want your planes. An office will be established in Anchorage and I've asked two officers to work out of here, starting right now. Captain Marshal, Army Air Forces. Major Catlett, Army Corps of Engineers. Start signing them up, Officers.'

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The two officers were delighted to learn that LeRoy Flatch owned, more or less, two airplanes, the two-seater Cub and the fourseater Waco, but they were taken aback when he allowed as how he would lease out the fourseater and keep the two-seater for himself: 'It carries more. It can do more things. And when it crashes you walk away from it more often.'

So he dropped all other obligations, except for borrowing back his fourseater occasionally for a hurried flight to ferry the Venns into their camp at the base of Denali, and flew one tedious flight after another with huge loads of cargo for the incipient airstrips in the wilderness. The system of linked airfields, primitive and provisional though it was, bore the exalted title the Northwest Staging Route, and since its various components came into service at the most uneven times, with an extremely difficult base operational five months before a much easier one, flights along it were spasmodic, but workhorse pilots like Flatch became accustomed to stops like Watson Lake, Chicken and Tok, with occasional flights to unheard-of places between Fairbanks and Nome. 'When we get this damned thing finished,' Lieutenant Colonel Shatter told his crews at the various construction bases, 'we'll have a first-class route from Detroit to Moscow, because I can tell you the Russians are doing the same on their side of the Bering Sea.'