Bo at Iditarod Creek Read online

  The wheelbarrow race was next, and Jack and Arvid were itching to have a try. The men pushing the wheelbarrow would be blindfolded, and the men sitting in the wheelbarrow would tell them which way to go.

  “Go sit in front of the hotel,” Arvid told Bo and Graf. “You might get trampled.”

  Then Jack loaded Eero in his wheelbarrow and Arvid took Stig, and they waited at the starting line with dozens of other men.

  The path to the finish line was twisted, with curves and sharp turns. The wheelbarrows careened all over the streets, tipping and spilling the passengers, getting stuck and bashing into one another.

  It was a terrible brawl, and the crowd was hoarse from screaming.

  When it was over, Jack and Arvid tore off their blindfolds and said it wasn’t their fault that they were going crooked—it was Eero’s and Stig’s fault because they couldn’t give good instructions.

  And Eero and Stig said Jack and Arvid were hopeless at following simple directions and didn’t know their left from their right.

  It looked like the most fun thing in the world, and Bo wanted to try it. Tomorrow they’d borrow Hardy’s wheelbarrow.

  Maybe they’d try the spitting, too.

  There were more games—footraces and three-legged races and burlap bag races. Some were so crazy Bo couldn’t imagine how they’d thought them all up—mumblety-peg with jackknives and who could stand the longest on a greased log. And even crazier, a contest where they had to climb up a greased pole.

  After all those were finished, Bo tugged Graf’s arm. “Look,” she said and pointed to the washtubs that had held the doughnuts. They were empty.

  At last it was time for the arm wrestling. It was easy to tell this was the thing everyone had been waiting for, because the whole huge pack of men roared with excitement when Hardy called for all the contestants.

  In the middle of the street, there was a big upright log about waist high, with a bench on either side for each wrestler to sit on. Each man planted his right elbow in the middle of the log, and they clasped hands while the crowd chanted, “Down, down, down.”

  Haruto held up his hand for silence, and when the crowd was quiet, he gave a blast on the whistle—and they were off. The two men grunted and strained, each trying to pull the other’s arm down on the log. The winner would go another round with someone else and on and on, until finally there were only two left.

  Bo and Graf were very pleased that their Maggie beat two men before she went down.

  The last two left undefeated, as everyone had expected, were Jack and the guy from the Kilbourne dredge.

  Bo was interested to see that the Kilbourne man’s hair was slicked down some way and neatly parted right down the middle. She’d seen men like that in magazines.

  “That’s why his nickname is Dapper Dan,” Eero said. “Dapper means fancy.”

  When the fancy guy took off his shirt, Bo and Graf stared at the ripples and bulges all over his body. It looked as if there were snakes under his skin.

  Dapper Dan looked very pleased with himself.

  All those hundreds of men stood in a circle around Jack and Dapper Dan, carrying on something awful.

  It was so loud Bo glanced anxiously at Graf because he hated noise so much. But Graf wasn’t hiding behind Arvid’s legs—he looked fascinated. Maybe he was getting used to all the hoorah.

  But when the men who wanted Jack to win began chanting, “Black Jack! Black Jack!” over and over, Arvid had to pick Graf up. The noise was deafening.

  Bo got so excited she started yelling “Black Jack!” too.

  The men from Kilbourne started yelling, “Dan! Dan! He’s our man!” to drown out the Black Jack men.

  Bo felt very cross with them.

  Back and forth, slowly, Jack’s arm strained, Dan’s arm strained, almost but never quite touching the log. Dapper Dan was sweating, and veins were popping out on his head. His hair was not stuck down to his head anymore, or parted in the middle, but falling in his eyes.

  Then for what seemed like a long, long time, their arms stayed upright, trembling, neither able to move the other.

  Then Jack suddenly took Dapper Dan’s arm down with a whack, and the crowd went mad.

  Jack beamed, his teeth flashing white. He pounded enthusiastically on Dan’s back and shook his hand ferociously. Bo thought it looked as if Jack had forgotten who was the winner.

  But Arvid said Jack was pleased that the Kilbourne man had been so hard to beat. It was more fun that way, Arvid said.

  Some of the men picked Jack up, arms and legs, and tried to carry him around, but he was so big they began to laugh and had to put him down. So they thumped him on the back some more and shook his hand up and down like a pump, beaming like crazies.

  LATER THERE WAS a wonderful show.

  Some boys from the Willard dredge put on a play, dressed up like ladies. Everyone screamed with laughter as they walked around in a silly way with their painted cheeks and red lips. And talked in high voices.

  There was lots more: a magic show, a lot of little bands, a trumpet solo that Graf really liked, and Little Jill on the harmonica. Sadie and Carmen dressed up like men with round black hats and mustaches and canes and did a funny dance, and one man played a washboard—a washboard!

  And finally, two accordions played together so people could dance.

  The men had to dance with one another, mostly, because there were hardly any women—just the good-time girls and Emma and Paulie and Nita, and Louise who cooked at their dredge, and Maggie.

  None of the Mizzes came to the Fourth of July.

  Will and Buddy said every year their ma told them they couldn’t go because there were too many rough men and unsuitable people.

  “She says that every year until our pa roars at her and says he’s tired of her stuck-up ways,” Will said.

  “And then he gets drunk,” Buddy said with satisfaction.

  Bo danced every dance, but Will and Buddy wouldn’t dance at all, just folded their arms across their chests and gave her a disgusted look when she asked.

  “Look, Arvid,” Bo said. “Paulie can dance like anything!”

  Arvid was not surprised. “Don’t have to see to dance,” he said.

  * * *

  WHEN THEY WERE finally tucked into their beds that night, Bo sighed with satisfaction.

  “We finally got to see all the Charlies. Scotch Charlie and Charlie One-Eye. But I thought that meant he had one eye in the middle of his head, not just a patch over one eye. And—” She looked blank for a moment.

  “Skookum Charlie was wrestling,” said Graf.

  “Oh, yes,” said Bo. “And the Charlie like an Indian, with the band around his head and the feather.”

  “Cherokee Charlie,” said Graf.

  “And Little Charlie. He wasn’t very little, was he? And we already knew Charlie the Tram and Dago Charlie and Charlie Hootch.”

  “Good-Time Charlie, too,” said Graf. “He came to the house once, remember.”

  Bo said them under her breath and counted on her fingers. “Nine!” She turned over and closed her eyes. “And Jack won the wrestling.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AUGUST

  ONE DAY WHEN Bo and Graf went to visit Nita and Paulie, Nita stuck her head out from the little shed by her house. She was holding a tin lard can by the handle, and she waved it at them. “We’re going berry picking, me and Paulie,” Nita said joyfully. “You better come, too.”

  Bo looked at the tailing piles all around them. “Where are the berries, Nita?”

  Nita laughed. “Not here, for sure. We go out on the tundra near Bonanza City. Charlie the Tram takes us when he is going out there, lets us off to pick, and gets us on his way back. Right now, he says, the berries are perfect!”

  “Go home, see if Jack will let you come,” Nita ordered. “Meet us at the tram!”

  * * *

  BO HADN’T KNOWN how much she missed the tundra at Ballard until she smelled the Labrador tea and the dirty-s
ocks stench of the high-bush cranberries.

  And she was nearly astounded at the brightness all around her; she had grown so used to the drab tailing piles in Iditarod Creek. Scarlet blueberry leaves, fuchsia and burnt orange Labrador tea, yellow spongy moss, red lichens and gray lichens with ruffled edges clinging to the rocks, and pink grass, peony pink, bending and swaying in the tiniest breeze.

  Paulie’s delicate fingers could find the berries so easily, it was hard to believe she couldn’t see them. Bo knelt by Paulie and bent her head low to look closely at the tundra by her knees.

  “It’s like a little world down here, Paulie. A tiny woods full of tiny strange trees and flowers. What would it be like to be that spider taking a walk through the tall lichen trees, stopping to look at the red flowers? Their stems are thin, like a stiff thread, and the flowers are the size of beads. Shiny red beads. And here by your boot, there’s a tiny yellow spider—even his legs are yellow. He’s yellow all over, and he’s zigzagging through the lichen and moss.”

  Bo picked something from the tundra for Paulie to admire. “Hold out your hand,” she said. “Here are tiny, tiny white mushrooms only as big as a pinhead.”

  It didn’t matter that Paulie couldn’t see with her eyes. She saw with something else, and Bo was sure from Paulie’s lovely smile that she was seeing that tiny world in her head.

  * * *

  AFTER LUNCH, NITA SAID, “We find mouse food now.”

  She showed them how to find the little mounds where the voles had hidden their cache of roots.

  “Yup’ik people love these roots boiled. I’ll make some for you.”

  When she found a little bulge, she cut it open carefully with her knife, took the roots stashed there, and put them in her basket.

  Bo looked at Nita unhappily. To be taking what the little vole had so patiently gathered!

  But Nita smiled when she saw Bo’s face.

  “In the Yup’ik way, we share with the animals. Look what we do.” Nita took pieces of dried fish and meat from her basket and put them into the empty hole. Then she covered it over the way the vole had done. “That way the vole won’t starve in the winter. I think maybe he’ll be happy to find fish and meat. That’s better than roots.”

  The Yup’ik, Nita said, would never take something without paying for it.

  * * *

  WHEN IT WAS RAINING, which it did a lot in August, they usually went to Eero and Stig’s or to the hotel, where Bo and Graf and Will read magazines and Buddy played pinochle with old Henry.

  This rainy day, they’d visited Eero and Stig first. The boys worked on their knots with Eero, and Bo told Stig one of her long letters to Ballard Creek. It took a long time for the mail to come to Iditarod Creek, so they’d only had one letter from Ballard. But Jack said that soon the mail would catch up with them and they’d get a lot of letters all at once. Bo could hardly wait for that to happen.

  When she finally finished her letter, Bo said good-bye and left the boys there. She was eager to get to the hotel, because she knew Hardy had two new records which she’d only heard a few times.

  She liked “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” the best. Hardy had to tell her what tulips were, because she’d thought it was “two lips,” which didn’t make sense.

  After she’d played that record two times, she looked for another, one of her favorite opera records that Tomas had played for her in Ballard Creek. Caruso.

  But as soon as she put it on the gramophone, everybody started to make a fuss and groan. “No opera!”

  Hardy told them to let her be, but she felt bad playing something nobody liked. So she took the record off the turntable.

  Hardy glared at all the old-timers who’d complained to Bo, and then he pulled all the Caruso records off the shelf and piled them in her arms.

  When she got home, Jack raised his eyebrows when he saw all the records she was holding.

  “Hardy said I could have all the Caruso records I wanted because nobody else liked them. Just like Ballard. Nobody there liked Caruso either. Except Tomas.”

  She put the records on the shelf with the others and then counted them. “Now we have seventeen altogether. You want to hear my best Caruso one, ‘La Donna È Mobile’?”

  Jack smiled bravely. “You bet,” he said.

  * * *

  ONE GRAY DAY, Charlie the Tram came from Bonanza City with a huge box in one of his tram wagons.

  As soon as Buddy and Will caught sight of the big box, they left Bo and Graf sitting on the boardwalk and tore off to the freight barn.

  It wasn’t long before they were back, breathless. Buddy leaned forward, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

  “It’s a piano in there,” Will said. “For Eller! Came all the way from Seattle.”

  Buddy could talk now. “On the ocean, on the train to Fairbanks, from Fairbanks to Nenana, from Nenana on the sternwheeler and up the Innoko and Iditarod. And still in one piece, Charlie said.”

  “What’s a piano?” asked Bo.

  “Used to be one in the old dance hall,” said Will. “Got busted up in a fight. I really liked to listen to it.”

  In a while, one of Eller’s men brought the Cat from Eller’s mine, and together with Charlie, they loaded the box on the go-devil.

  Buddy and Will and Bo and Graf watched the piano box as the Cat hauled it away slowly, slowly, over the tailing piles to Eller’s house.

  “That’s the biggest box I ever saw,” said Buddy.

  After that, they could often hear scraps of piano music from all the way across town if the wind was blowing the right way. Then Buddy and Will and Graf and Bo would sneak around the Eller house to listen up close. Mostly because Will was crazy about pianos.

  Even if it was horrible Miz Eller playing, they liked to listen. She didn’t do any of the songs they knew from the gramophone at Hardy’s hotel or the records they had in Ballard. They were serious sort of songs with a lot of thumping parts.

  They all wished they could have a turn at that piano.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WINTER COMING

  NITA SEWED FUR MITTS and mukluks and parkas for a living. She was the only one in Iditarod Creek who did skin sewing, so she was always at it, her worktable spread with cut-out fur pieces and bars of soap stuck full of needles. She said soap made the needles more slippery.

  Jack needed a new pair of mukluks for winter. He’d had Nita measure his big feet, and he told her to make a pair for Arvid too, while she was at it. When Nita sent a note to tell Jack his boots were ready, Jack sent Bo down to Nita’s with the money tied in a handkerchief.

  Nita wrapped up the new boots for Bo. They were beautiful, with a green knitted top, an appliquéd band of black fur diamonds and squares, and bright green ties with big yarn pompoms.

  “Tell him they don’t fit good, bring them right back,” said Nita. She patted the package. “But I know they’ll fit just right. I started next pair for Arvid, got the tops finished already. Tell him he’ll get them soon.”

  She poured Bo some tea and put a box of cookies on the table.

  Bo had never eaten a store cookie. They were golden and folded into little pillows, with a brown sort of jam inside.

  “That’s Fig Newtons. Try one,” said Nita. “Too busy sewing, I’m lazy to bake. Got these from Sidney’s store, but they cost too much.”

  Bo liked the way the Fig Newtons were so perfectly lined up in the box, tight against one another. But she didn’t like the way they tasted.

  Nita dipped hers in her tea. “I got someone to talk Yup’ik with now!” she announced cheerily.

  Bo put her cookie down and looked at Nita.

  “This one boy, never saw him before, he comes to visit. Knocks on the door real quiet. Said he heard I talked his language.”

  “Oh!” said Bo. “That’s the boy everyone keeps telling us about. But we never saw him. Why does he speak Eskimo?”

  “His mother was Yup’ik from on the Kuskokwim. She died, and he came here with his fat
her, little while back. His father’s working at the Willard dredge. His father’s not Yup’ik. Something from far away. I forget what.

  “This boy was so glad to talk with me. Didn’t forget much, and pretty soon he’s just talking fast. Me too. Slow and then faster. Like when you’re pouring ketchup—at first it’s slow, and then all of a sudden, it rushes out. We were both happy to be talking the right way again.”

  “Me and Graf, we talk Eskimo together so we don’t forget. Arvid says keep it up because it’s easy to lose a language. He can’t talk Swede anymore.”

  Paulie came into the kitchen and sat at the table with them. “You should have heard that boy and Mama, just talking away. I don’t know what they’re saying.”

  “Not your fault,” said Nita. “My fault. I don’t talk Eskimo to you.”

  “You thought I’d get confused,” Paulie said comfortingly.

  Nita looked sorry. “Should’ve,” she said.

  “His name is Renzo,” said Paulie. “He’s older than you, maybe ten. Got no brothers or sisters. Not very big, up to my chin only.” She looked at the ceiling. “Skinny,” she said.

  “How can you tell if someone’s skinny?” asked Bo.

  Paulie made a motion with her hands. “The way their clothes sound,” she said. “Heavy people, their clothes don’t slide around so much or something. And he was real polite.”

  “Yup’ik people is always polite,” said Nita.

  * * *

  BO DIDN’T LIKE that gray, in-between, colorless time before the snow came. At Ballard, the geese and ducks and cranes with their long, long legs were flying south. But here at Iditarod Creek, there were no birds to say good-bye to.

  It was almost freeze-up time, and dredge mining was finished for the season. The bosses sent all their gold to Fairbanks and paid the men off.

  “Twenty years ago when all the gold was on the tram going to Fairbanks, two fellas robbed the tram,” Arvid told Bo and Graf.

  “All the gold, Papa?” Bo asked, horrified.

  “Every bit,” said Arvid. “But they caught them and got half of it back. The rest they’d hid someplace on the tundra. Never found it. Every once in a while, someone will take a notion he knows where it is and go looking. No luck so far,” Arvid said cheerfully.