The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [16]
6
He awoke in the morning to the crackling of twigs in the woodstove. The old woman stirred the remnants of the duck soup, and when she realized he was awake she quickly pulled up her long grey hair and refastened the blue and purple beaded hairnet she had been wearing the day before, a silent gesture to show her commitment to her dead husband.
After pulling his boots on he stood and stretched. His back ached from the hard plywood floor. He probably could have found a sleeping pad or mattress in one of the other houses, but to find one that wasn’t soiled with death, one that the girl could sleep on, wouldn’t have been worth the effort. A stack of her grass sat in a pile beside her. He wondered when she’d removed the grass from the sled, and how he hadn’t heard her. The yellow strands were woven together tightly in a long, flat braid, but he couldn’t tell what she was trying to make.
The stove creaked as the fire started to heat the metal sides. The old woman stirred. He held his hands out and warmed himself in front of the stove’s open door.
The woman took out a small white enamel saucepan with a broken black plastic handle and set it on the stovetop. She poured water from an empty coffee can into the pan and set the coffee can aside. From a tan plastic grocery sack she took a handful of thin green sprigs like pine needles and dropped them into the water.
He reached for the coffee can beside her and ran his fingers across the label: Rich. Dark. Satisfying.
“A cup of joe would be the bee’s knees about now,” he said.
She stirred the mixture in the small pan, using the same wooden spoon she’d used to mix the duck soup.
“We’ll have tundra tea when this done cooking. Too bad, I got no coffee.”
She caught him looking at the spoon.
“This soup is not what make you sick,” she said. “People didn’t die from birds. The earth didn’t make this disease, you know. Yup’ik people been eating birds forever. Yup’ik people been seeing bad sicknesses since when kass’aqs come here. Not the ducks. Not the birds that did this to the people. I’ve seen these kind of diseases before. When I was little piipiq. Smallpox, measles, influenza—so bad mostly everyone all on the river and the tundra villages die. My sisters tell me that when my mom died from smallpox, at night in our sod house, they let me sleep by her so I stop crying. Even they try to have me aamaq on her breasts to make me stop crying during the darkness.”
The water in the saucepan began to boil, a light green mixture, with the little needles floating and churning. She poked her spoon at it, filled the carved wooden depression, and brought the steaming liquid to her lips. She blew gently, and then sipped it.
“Mmm. Almost ready,” she said. “You ever tried our Eskimo tea? Labrador tea to you, maybe.”
“No.”
“You first-year teacher, ah?”
“Yeah.”
She pointed the wooden spoon at his wedding band.
“She teacher, too?”
He nodded.
“It will get easier. Not better. Just easier,” she said. “My first husband die young. He go through the ice, and I never remarry for a long time, until maybe I was twenty.”
“How old were you when you first got married?” he asked.
“Maybe twelve. They marry early back then. I hardly knew that man at first, but he was a good man. They never found his body, and I said I would wait for him to come back. He never did, and then someone else try marry me.”
She took the saucepan and poured the contents into three green plastic coffee mugs. She handed one to him and called to the girl.
He sniffed at the tea. The steaming liquid had the light scent of gin, or of a juniper berry, but when he sipped it, the warm fluid puckered his lips and numbed his tongue. He ran his tongue against his top teeth to scrape the taste off. He took another sip, this time prepared for the bitterness. It warmed his throat and slithered down into his hungry stomach.
“Girl, have tea,” the old woman said. She pointed the spoon at his ring again, and said, “She not want you to walk heavy without her.”
The girl sat