The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [13]
He stirred the broth with a plastic spoon and looked once again at the blackened pot sitting on the woodstove. The head of a duck peered out at him from the brown bubbling liquid.
“I don’t think we should eat it,” he said.
“Why? We need to eat something other than that canned fruit,” the girl said.
He poured the contents of his bowl back into the pot. The soup and a few chunks of dark brown meat fell in with a plump. His stomach grumbled.
“I’m not eating it, and neither should you,” he replied.
She lifted her bowl to her nose and inhaled a single long, deep breath. She held it, as if she was savouring the smell and drawing strength from it.
“But it smells so good,” she said. “It smells okay. She caught it this summer. Cooked it up just for us. We eat when someone offers food.
It’s rude not to eat her soup.”
The old woman responded to her concern. “Assirtuq.”
“She says it’s good.”
“Of course she does,” he said.
“You think it might make us sick?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s duck. Duck.”
The old woman reached over and squeezed the girl’s arm. She spoke for a second in Yup’ik, and the girl raised her white eyes toward him.
The girl said quietly, “She says you can’t let fear eat you like it did all the others.”
“What do you mean?”
The old woman sat up from her place beside the woodstove and moved toward a stack of blankets in the far corner of the one-room house. He noticed the wooden panelling had all been stripped off. Probably burned for firewood. All that was left were the wooden supports, a thin stuffing of pink insulation, and the outside plywood covering. The inside of the house became the inside of whale’s stomach, the flimsy wooden house frame becoming giant rib bones with the walls closing on him. He took a deep breath and tried to relax.
“Have you seen the hunter?” he asked.
The old woman turned back and looked at him. She pulled the bundle of blankets to her chin. “You should listen to your hungry stomach,” she said.
“I’ve got to eat it,” the girl said, moving her spoon in small slow circles. “I miss real foods, our Native foods. I’m starving for them. I don’t care if this is duck.”
“Go ahead, then. Eat it.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine. Who is he, the hunter? The man on skis. Was he here?”
The girl took a small spoonful and held it in her mouth. He swallowed hard, and turned away from her. The old woman threw a wool blanket toward them.
“Here,” the old woman said to him, and then turned to the girl and asked something in Yup’ik.
The girl shook her head and said, “Qang’a.”
“What did she ask you?”
“She wants to know if I sleep with you.”
“With me, or near me?”
“To her there is no difference,” the girl said.
“What did you tell her?”
The girl didn’t answer. She set her spoon on the floor where she sat and lifted the bowl to her lips.
“She knows English, why doesn’t she just ask me these things?” he asked, and then turned to the old woman. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”
The old woman pulled the blankets over herself and turned her back on them, her words floating across the room, quiet, barely audible, and to him, completely foreign.
The girl finished licking the rim of her bowl clean and then ran two fingers around the inside and caught the last of the duck soup. She gave a long satisfied sigh, followed by a soft burp, and said, “She says, because you won’t listen anyway.”
HE SAT IN THE BACK of the conference to avoid the crowd and pored over a heavy three-ring binder containing the school district’s new high school curriculum. Anna sat toward the front of the large room, chatting with other new teachers. She did the socializing for them, and he had no problems with that set-up.
The next session was the one he looked forward to, a break from all the school district’s goals and priorities and all the new educational buzzwords. The schedule simply called the next in-service topic Camai! He knew this word worked as a simple greeting, pronounced juh-my, from the morning welcome from the district’s superintendent.