Blood Will Tell (2 page)

The sound of Michelle Shocked made her turn. Ekaterina was standing in front of the tape player, restored from the tree stump in the yard to its rightful place on the shelf. She had one hand on the volume knob, eyes intent as she listened to the lyrics. Ekaterina had always had a penchant for well written lyrics. She'd been a Don Henley fan from way back; in fact, one of the first civil conversations Kate could remember having with her grandmother after their long estrangement had been a discussion of "The End of the Innocence." Words were important to Ekaterina, words and the way they were put together. It was probably why she was always so economical with them, even with her granddaughter.

Perhaps especially with her granddaughter. She still hadn't told Kate why she'd come out to the homestead. Well, two could play that game.

Kate turned back to the dishes.

The table cleared, the top of the oil stove scrubbed with the pumice brick, the dishes dried and put away, she sat down on the other leg of the L-shaped, built-in couch and propped her feet next to Ekaterina's on the Blazo box lying on its side. The couch was little more than a plywood platform with foam cushions covered in blue canvas and might have been a little too firm for some people's tastes. The years had worn a Kate-shaped groove into this particular spot and she leaned back and lapsed into an agreeable coma, too lazy even to read. From a corner came an intermittent, unladylike snore, where Mutt lay on her side because her stomach was too full of scraps and bone to lie directly upon it.

When "Woody's Rag" ended, Kate stirred herself enough to get up and exchange Michelle Shocked for Saffire and surprised a belly laugh out of Ekaterina with

"Middle Aged Blues Boogie."

When the song ended Kate turned down the volume and sat down again. "You haven't lost your touch, emaa," she said. "That's about the quickest I've ever dressed out a moose, with help or without it." She smiled at her grandmother, a smile singularly lacking in apprehension or hostility, a measure of how far their relationship had come over the last year. At this rate, by Christmas Ekaterina would forgive Kate for moving to Anchorage when she graduated from college, and by Easter Kate would forgive Ekaterina for her continuous attempts to draft Kate into working for the Niniltna Native Association. They might even become friends one day. Anything looked possible on a belly full of moose. Kate said, "Maybe by the time I'm eighty, I'll be that good with a skinning knife and a meat saw."

Ekaterina gave a gracious nod and was pleased to be complimentary in her turn. "I have not seen better trimming and packing, Katya. When it comes time to cook a roast, there will be nothing to do but unwrap it and put it in the oven."

They sat there, full of meat and potatoes harvested by their own hands, pleased with themselves and the world and perilously close to a group doze. In fact, Kate did doze, and woke up only as Saffire was explaining why "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues." The tape ran down and stopped. In the wood stove a log cracked and spit resin. The resin hit the side of the stove and it sputtered and hissed, echoing the sound of the gas lamps fixed in wall brackets around the room, the pale golden light reaching into all four corners of the twenty-five-foot square room and as high as the loft bedroom. Kate linked her hands behind her head and blinked drowsily at her domain.

To the right of the door, the kitchen was a counter interrupted by a porcelain sink as deep as it was wide. With the pump handle at rest, the spout dripped water. Cupboards above and below were crammed with cans of stewed tomatoes and refried beans and bags of white flour and jars of yeast and jugs of olive oil, as well as generous supplies of those three staples of Alaskan bush life, Velveeta, Spam and Bisquick. The only thing missing was pilot bread. Kate had never liked the round, flat, dry crackers, not even as a child, not even spread with peanut butter and grape jelly, not even when they were the only things in the house to eat. As far as Kate was concerned, one of the purest joys of reaching the age of consent was not having to eat pilot bread. She refused to keep it in her cabin, even for guests, a defiant rejection of a touchstone of bush hospitality.

The root cellar beneath the garage contained a bumper crop of potatoes, onions and carrots, and at close of business today the cache was full literally to the rafters with moose meat, three dozen quart bags of blueberries Kate had picked two weeks before on a foothill leading up Angqaq Peak, a dozen quart bags of cranberries she had picked next to a swamp a mile up the creek and a dozen quarts of raspberries she had poached from her neighbor's raspberry patch (the remembrance of which made her add another roast to the moose shipment she would be delivering to Mandy later that week).

There were three cords of wood stacked outside the cabin. The dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel oil racked in back had been topped off by the tanker from Ahtna the week before. There was fuel and to spare for the gas lamps and, in a heroic action at which she herself still marveled, she had filled in the old outhouse hole, dug a new one and moved the outhouse onto the new site. She had even gone so far as to sculpt a new wooden seat out of a slice of redwood her father, a well-known whittler, had never gotten around to carving into something else thirty years before. She was sure he would have approved of the use she put it to.

So much for the outer woman. Over the Labor Day weekend Jack had brought the inner woman a box of books from Twice-Told Tales on Arctic Boulevard in Anchorage, seriously depleting Kate's credit with Rachel but nicely filling in the gaps on her bookshelves. There were two histories by Barbara Tuchman, one on Stilwell in China and one on the American Revolution, three paperbacks by a mystery writer named Lindsay Davis starring an imperial informer named Marcus Didius Falco who peeked through Roman keyholes circa a.d. 70--"You will love the story about Titus and the turbot," Jack promised with a grin--and a starter set of John Mcphee, beginning with Coming into the Country, which Jack swore would not piss her off in spite of its purporting to be written about Alaska by an Outsider. There was a selection of the latest in science fiction, the autobiography of Harpo Marx and a slim volume of poetry by a professor at the University of Alaska, one Tom Sexton, which fell open to a poem entitled "Compass Rose" that held her enthralled from the first line. The care package had been rounded off with a forty-eight-ounce bag of chocolate chips, a two-pound bag of walnuts and four albums by the Chenille Sisters, a girl group previously unknown to Kate but who from the opening verse of

"Regretting What I Said" she knew she was going to love.

All in all, Kate was rather pleased with Jack. She might even give him some of the back strap that small strip of most tender and most flavorful meat along the moose's backbone which she usually hoarded for herself. She dwelled on her own generosity for a pleasurable moment.

In fact, the only fault Kate could find with her current physical and mental well-being was the fact that the scar on her throat itched. To relieve the itch she would have to move. She considered the matter, and came to the inescapable conclusion that she had to move sometime in the next five minutes anyway or she'd be settled in on the couch for the night. She hoisted herself into a more or less vertical position and went first to the tape player. Saffire was succeeded by "The Unforgettable Glenn Miller," an album she knew her grandmother would like and one she didn't find hard to take herself. The wood stove cracked and spit again, moving her all the way across the floor to the wood box. The heat from the coals struck her face like a blow and she jammed wood in as quickly as she could and adjusted the damper down. She opened the door to check the thermometer mounted on the cabin wall next to the cooler. The needle pointed to nineteen, and the sky was clear. It was only going to get colder. She stood a moment, savoring the crisp, cold, clean air on her face, the warmth of the room at her back and the pale glitter of stars far overhead.

The couch creaked and she came back inside, the door thumping solidly and snugly into its frame behind her. "Want some tea, emaa?"

Ekaterina nodded, yawning, and Kate moved the kettle from the back of the wood stove, which heated the cabin, to the oil stove, what she cooked on. She adjusted the fuel knob to high, removed the stove lid and pushed the kettle over the open flame. Waiting for it to boil, she rummaged in the cupboard over the counter for a jar of Vitamin E cream and rubbed it on the white, roped scar that interrupted the smooth brown skin of her throat almost literally from ear to ear. With fall came drier air, and her scar was better than a barometer at calling the change of the seasons.

The kettle whistled and she spooned samovar tea from the Kobuk Coffee Company into the teapot. The spicy orange odor brought back memories of the neat cabin on the bank of the Kanuyaq, habitation of the hippie ex-cop with the ponytail and the philandering grin. Her smile was involuntary and Ekaterina, who had come to the same conclusion Kate had and moved to the table while she still could, said, "What's with that smile?"

Kate poured water over the tea leaves. The teapot and two thick white mugs went on the table along with a plate of Dare short-bread cookies.

Still smiling, she slid into the seat across from Ekaterina. "I was remembering the last time I smelled this tea, emaa."

"When?" For politeness, Ekaterina took one of the cookies and nibbled around the edges.

Kate stirred the leaves in the teapot and replaced the lid. "Last summer. A man with a cabin on the Kanuyaq." She poured tea into the mugs through a strainer.

Ekaterina clicked her tongue reprovingly. "How am I supposed to read the leaves if you won't let any get into the mugs?"

"Oh. Sorry, emaa, I forgot," Kate said, who hadn't but who disliked straining tea leaves through her teeth while she drank. "Next time."

"This summer," Ekaterina said, stirring in three teaspoons of sugar. "At Chistona?"

Kate nodded, smile fading. The dark events that had followed easily overshadowed the lighthearted encounter with Brad Burns.

The spoon stilled. Ekaterina fixed stern brown eyes on Kate's face. Her voice was equally stern. "You did what you could."

"It wasn't enough."

"You were a year too late." Kate said nothing, and Ekaterina's brows drew together. "You worry me," she said.

This was unexpected. "I worry you?" Kate said.

Unsmiling, Ekaterina nodded.

Knowing she shouldn't, Kate said, "Why?"

Ekaterina put the spoon to one side and contemplated her tea. "You care too much."

When Kate found her tongue again she said, "I care too much." When Ekaterina nodded a second time, she said wryly, "Emaa, you've got that backwards, haven't you? You're the one who cares too much."

"No." Ekaterina shook her head. "No?" Kate said, half smiling.

"No," Ekaterina said firmly. "I care enough." The old woman blew across the top of the steaming mug and took a delicate sip. She set the mug down on the table again and looked at her granddaughter, her face set in lines that were firm, yet dispassionate. Ekaterina was delivering a verdict, not passing judgment. "You care too much. You always have. You cared too much about your mother and father, so much so that now you can barely speak of either. You cared too much for the old--" Ekaterina paused almost imperceptibly and continued "--for Abel, so much so that it blinded you to what you should have seen from the beginning. You cared too much for the children you worked with in Anchorage, whose lives you only made better, so much that you allowed it to cloud your judgment, and got you that." One bony, slightly cramped forefinger pointed at Kate's scar. "You care so much for your family and your people that you have to hide out here on the homestead where you don't have to look at them, at what their life is like, at what life is doing to them."

Kate stiffened, the rosy glow of self-sufficient satisfaction that had permeated the last three days vanishing with her grandmother's words.

"Emaa." She took a deep breath and swallowed an angry rejoinder with a sip of tea. When she could calmly, she said, voice tight, "Please don't start that again, emaa. I can't and I won't live in the village."

"No," Ekaterina agreed, "I see that."

Kate's head jerked up and she examined her grandmother with suspicious eyes, searching for the catch.

"I see that, Katya," Ekaterina repeated. "I see you happy with the land.

Agudar blesses you with food. You walk with the anua. The land makes you strong, I am not blind. I see."

Kate stared hard at her grandmother, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Ekaterina met the blatant skepticism placidly, what might have been a twinkle lurking deep at the back of the steady brown eyes. For a moment Kate wondered if perhaps Ekaterina's body had been snatched by aliens who had replaced her with a pod. It was as likely a theory as Ekaterina deciding to stop harassing her granddaughter into taking what Ekaterina considered to be Kate's rightful place in the tribe.

Glenn Miller gave out his phone number to whoever happened to be listening and Ekaterina freshened their mugs from the teapot, without the strainer this time. Kate watched her, wary, waiting, still suspicious. Ekaterina caught sight of her expression and laughed out loud. It was the same belly laugh she'd given earlier, a solid, hearty sound, a laugh that sounded like she looked, a laugh Kate remembered hearing often during her childhood, one she had heard less often since.

"You look at me like Fox looks at Raven," Ekaterina said, still laughing.

Her laughter was infectious and Kate had to grin. "I remember what happened to Fox," she retorted.

Ekaterina choked over her tea and this time they laughed together. It felt good, good enough to put her back into charity with Ekaterina, so good that when she realized it Kate felt suspicious all over again. Old habits die hard.

"Ay." Ekaterina sighed and drank tea. Her brown eyes were old and wise and never failed to make Kate feel much younger than her thirty-three years. The room was silent except for a saxophone and a clarinet an octave apart, the crackle of the fire in the wood stove and the hissing of the lamps on the walls. Kate studied her grandmother's face over the rim of her mug. By some trick of the light the lines in it had deepened.