Bo at Iditarod Creek Read online

  Charlie Hootch was one of the miners who never left Iditarod Creek after cleanup. He always stayed through the winter. Charlie was a good carpenter, and Hardy never ran out of work for him—maybe building new storage shelves or putting in a closet. Little jobs like that.

  And he stayed to keep his own business going, selling whiskey and kegs of homemade beer.

  One morning Charlie came early, acting stiff, not like himself. After he’d admired their snake in its glass pickle jar and poured his coffee, Charlie pushed his cup aside, straightened up, and cleared his throat. He looked very serious.

  “Jack, I’m wondering if I could learn to read along with your girl here. I’m some troubled that I never learned to read or write, and I sure would like to fix that.”

  Jack looked at the rolled-up magazine Charlie Hootch had sticking out of his pocket. Charlie shrugged his shoulder. “I just look at the pictures, figure out what I can.”

  Jack nodded. “Used to do the same, before I learned to read.”

  Bo and Graf looked back and forth between the two men, surprised. “Why can’t you read?” Graf asked.

  “Not everyone gets to go to school, you know,” Jack answered for Charlie. “I wouldn’t be able if Tandy didn’t feel bad for me.”

  “How old was you?” asked Charlie Hootch.

  “’Bout sixteen, I think. Not too long before I come north.”

  “I’m thirty-four,” said Charlie Hootch. “You figure that’s too old?”

  “Never too old,” said Jack, smiling. “Learning gets easier when you get older.”

  Charlie Hootch made a doubtful face. “Don’t know about that,” he said. “Used to learn a song the first time I heard it. Now it takes me forever.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jack said slowly. “That’s true about remembering things, I guess. Like these kids learned Eskimo natural as breathing. I never learned more than a few words. Just don’t have a place in my head for Eskimo words.” He nodded, a little wistful. “Get older, things don’t stick like they used to.”

  Jack looked happier all of a sudden. “What is easier when you’re older is stuff that takes figuring. Like if you know how a steam engine works, it’s easy to learn how a gas engine works. Don’t have to remember, have to figure.”

  “Well, is reading a remembering thing or a figuring thing?” Charlie asked.

  Jack thought for a moment. “Some of both, I think,” he said. Then he laughed his deep, rumbling laugh. “Well, slow or fast, you can learn, Charlie, and high time, too. Me and Bo and Graf would be proud to have you here at our school.”

  Charlie Hootch’s troubled face lit up suddenly. “Thanks, Jack,” he said.

  Bo leaned against Jack’s big arm. She was proud that he’d made Charlie Hootch look like that, so joyful.

  “Graf,” Jack said, “while me and Bo are working on this reading, how about you start to teach Charlie the alphabet.”

  Both Charlie and Graf gave Jack a blank astonished stare.

  “I’m only four and a half,” said Graf.

  “Don’t see what that has to do with it,” said Jack.

  * * *

  WHEN STIG and some others came in to drink coffee and found Graf busy at work teaching Charlie Hootch, Bo thought for sure they’d tease Charlie. But they didn’t have anything funny to say at all.

  Glenner Campbell said his teacher wasn’t much older than Graf. “Was my nephew, Homer, learned me to read before I left home.”

  Dave Blakker nodded. “My little sister taught me when she was still in grammar school.” He smiled, remembering. “Strict with me, too. Kids make good teachers.”

  Frenchie told them what a hard time he’d had learning to read. He’d gone to the nuns’ school in Montreal every day. “They used to smack me with the ruler when I made a mistake,” he said.

  But when he knew how to read and write a little, his dad took him out of school to go to work, so he’d never gotten really good at either one.

  Charlie Hootch pointed his pencil at Frenchie. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked. “Got a chance to pick up some more schooling. No nuns to get after you, either.”

  Now that Charlie had started learning, he was pushing everyone else to try it, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MEETING RENZO

  IT TOOK LONGER for Nita to make Arvid’s new mukluks than she’d said it would because she’d stopped to make a pair for the Yup’ik boy.

  “I know how he is now,” she said. “He don’t like to take nothing. Always I tell him here’s some soup, he says, ‘I’m not hungry.’ And you can see he’s just bones. So I made him some good mukluks, nothing fancy, and I rubbed them with some dirt to make them look like they were used. So that way he would take them.

  “But he said he got to work for them. Cut wood for me. He won’t take nothing without working for it. I said sure, I can use lots of wood cut up. Then he asked me if I’d keep the boots here for him till it snows. Didn’t want to take them home. Said he didn’t have anyplace to keep them. I just got a bad feeling about that.”

  Bo told Jack and Arvid at the supper table what Nita had said. Both of them put down their forks and looked searchingly at Bo.

  “I heard about him,” Arvid said to Jack. “Didn’t know his dad stayed to do winter work on the dredge.”

  Arvid looked at Bo and Graf. “How old’s this kid?”

  Graf and Bo shook their heads. Didn’t know.

  Arvid and Jack asked around, but no one seemed to know much. Even Hardy, who usually knew everything, said he didn’t know anything, really. Just didn’t think much of the father.

  * * *

  WHEN NITA sent word that Arvid’s mukluks were ready, Bo and Graf scampered down the tailing piles to Nita’s house to pick them up.

  That’s when they finally saw the Yup’ik boy.

  He was standing inside the fence, in the sawdust, splitting Nita’s wood. He chopped like a grown man—fast and strong. But Bo was surprised to see how little he was. Thin, like Paulie said.

  His hair was curly like Little Jill’s, thick black curls over his ears, falling in his face. At first he acted like he didn’t see them, but after a few minutes, he dropped the ax and came up to the fence. He smiled down shyly at them.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Bo shook the boy’s hand, and then Graf did, too.

  “I’m Bo, and this is Grafton. But everyone calls him Graf.”

  “I’m Lorenzo,” the boy said. “Lorenzo Donatelli. But everyone calls me Renzo.”

  He had a Yup’ik accent like Nita. Brown eyes, almost black.

  “Nita told me about you,” he said. “About your papas. You got adopted.”

  Bo nodded, surprised, because everyone said that he didn’t talk.

  His clothes were very dirty, and his leather boots were in terrible shape, but they had good strong bootlaces made of braided grass.

  “Nita braids grass like that,” Bo said. “Did she braid those laces for you?”

  “No, my mom taught me how. She could make anything out of grass. You got a mom?”

  Bo and Graf both shook their heads.

  “Mine’s dead, too,” said Renzo.

  “Your mom was Yup’ik, like Nita,” said Bo.

  “What was your mom?” asked Renzo.

  “Me and Graf had different moms. His mom was Hazel from Kaltag. And my mom was Mean Millie. I don’t know what she was. Nobody ever said.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “No, neither of us do. You remember your mom?”

  Renzo’s face went still. “Yeah,” he said.

  Bo and Graf had promised Jack they’d come right back, so they said good-bye to the boy and got the mukluks from Nita.

  As they ran back home, they thought of a dozen questions they might have asked him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  FOUR MORE

  THE CALVERT COURSE sent books for Bo that were about a boy and a girl and their dog. Dick and Jane and Spot. And there were Sal
ly and Puff, a baby and a cat.

  There was also a mother who wore dresses and funny shoes with high, skinny heels. And a father who wore an outfit with buttons. A suit, Jack said.

  Not only were the people in the book strangely dressed and strange looking, their talk was embarrassing.

  “This is not a good book,” Bo said. “‘Oh oh oh! See Spot. See Spot run.’ What kind of talk is that?” She gave Jack a beseeching look.

  Jack pursed his lips and thought a minute.

  “I see your point,” he said.

  “Here, then, we’ll just practice with these,” and he showed her the pack of cards that came with the Dick and Jane books. One word on each card.

  Bo and Graf learned those words in no time, and then Jack was hard-pressed to know what to do about reading.

  Stig said nothing to worry about, you could learn reading any old place. He’d learned to read from the grain bags at his farm in Finland, and Zeke said he’d learned from the Bible, and one of the men had learned from cans, just like Graf.

  “Now that I think on it,” Jack said, “I learned to read from an old almanac, so beat up I could hardly make out the letters.”

  So Jack went through a National Geographic and copied down all the words that seemed like they happened a lot and made cards out of them. And that was what Bo used for reading, along with the old magazines Hardy had saved, the Sears catalog, and anything else they could find.

  * * *

  STIG AND EERO came every day to help Graf and Charlie Hootch, and in a few more days, Glenner Campbell from Eller’s mine and Frenchie asked to come to school too. And a few days after that, Dago Charlie came. He could read, but he couldn’t write at all.

  So Jack and Arvid had five more students than they’d thought they would when they first ordered the Calvert course.

  Stig was teaching them about the night sky. There were no trees to block their view, so the sky looked way bigger than it had in Ballard. When it was too cold to be cloudy, when it was forty or fifty below, Bo and Graf liked to lie outdoors all bundled in their winter clothes and look up at the northern lights and the stars. Stig had given them a book of the constellations, and they’d find them every night, just where the book said.

  The sky had a map—just like the world.

  Stig and Eero weren’t the only ones who helped teach. Yoshihiro and Haruto came, too. They were both good at teaching arithmetic, which was the same in Japan as Alaska. And now that Bo and Graf had a snake, Yoshihiro was teaching everyone about reptiles, which was something he knew a lot about.

  Even Carmen came sometimes.

  Carmen was really strict about writing: “You have to start at the top! Pull the pencil down, not up!” They were all a little scared of her.

  Everything Bo and Graf studied set off a dozen arguments and discussions around the table.

  Like spelling. Stig told them there was a man in England who left a million dollars for anyone who would make spelling sensible.

  “Take the word enough,” Stig said indignantly. “How can anyone make sense of a word like that? Should be e-n-u-f. Made me tear my hair out when I was learning English.”

  Bo was learning to read easily, which Jack said was a relief, considering that she wouldn’t read the books Calvert sent. And Graf seemed to have been born reading.

  All in all, she and Graf liked school a lot after they’d seen to it that they didn’t have to do all the things Calvert told them to.

  And so did everyone else at their school, Charlie Hootch and Frenchie, Glenner and Dago Charlie.

  Arvid said it was amazing how fast grown-ups learned when they got a chance. Dago Charlie, for instance, learned all the math that he’d have learned in five years of school in just two months.

  They learned so fast Arvid said maybe it would be a good idea just to teach everybody when they were grown up instead of wasting eight years or so at it when they were kids and could be having a good time instead of being stuck in school.

  Bo said she liked to do school now, while she was little. But Arvid looked grim.

  “That’s because you don’t know nothing about how they do real school. Can’t talk, can’t move, get your hand smacked or worse if you can’t recite your lessons. Big board for paddling. Prison. I hated every minute of it.”

  So Bo knew she and Graf were very lucky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EIGHT CHARLIES

  ONE DAY IN EARLY WINTER, they were almost finished with school. Bo had put away her workbooks, and Graf was putting all the crayons in the can. Glenner Campbell had finished all the writing exercises that Stig and Carmen had set for him and was feeling pleased with himself. The rest were leaning back in their chairs, ready for another cup of coffee, when a terrible noise shook the ground.

  Everybody around the table looked at one another, suddenly tense.

  “Dynamite,” they all said.

  “Sounded like Donal Sather’s direction,” Dago Charlie said.

  “Probably getting rid of a big stump or some such,” Stig said calmly.

  “Yeah, most likely,” Frenchie agreed uncertainly.

  Still they sat tense, listening. Glenner got up and pulled on his parka. “I’ll see if anyone knows something,” he said.

  It wasn’t long before Glenner came running back to tell them it was at Donal’s mine, and it was terrible.

  Cherokee Charlie had been carrying dynamite. He’d tripped, and the dynamite had blown him up.

  The men got up and left, all gone to see what they could do.

  * * *

  ALL THE JOKES everyone had made about the nine Charlies seemed sad now. Only eight Charlies left.

  They buried him at the graveyard with his headband and his feather that he wore for the Fourth of July. Donal Sather made a speech over the grave about what a good guy Charlie had been. They didn’t know who his family was or where they lived. Didn’t know who to tell that he was gone.

  That night when Graf was already asleep and Jack was tucking Bo in, she asked, “How come they didn’t know anything about Cherokee Charlie?”

  Jack sat on the chair by her bed and looked down at his hands.

  Then he said, “Lot of men come here from other places. Don’t tell about nothing, just like they want to forget it,” he said.

  He was quiet for a minute. “I’m betting Charlie was happy here. He could have gone somewhere else anytime, but he stayed here. Been here a long time. So I figure this was his home, and the boys were his family.”

  “Like it was at Ballard,” Bo said.

  “Like it was at Ballard,” said Jack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE PIANO BOX

  BO AND GRAF wished they’d see the Yup’ik boy again, but they never did, not for the rest of that winter. Nita was disappointed, too. He hadn’t come to see her for quite a while, but probably he didn’t have the right clothes for such a long walk in the winter—ten miles. But at least he had his new warm mukluks. She was glad about that.

  Hardy said the men from the Willard dredge were uneasy about him.

  They said he didn’t ever seem to be with his father, just cut wood for the stove in the cookshack and the bunkhouse. He usually slept in the cookshack, but sometimes last summer, he had slept in a corner of the dredge. (Bo and Graf made faces when Hardy said that. Imagine sleeping in the dredge.) Nice kid, they said, but he wouldn’t talk to them. They figured he was afraid of his father, who was a surly guy. Didn’t talk much himself.

  There were lots of days when the men at the dredge didn’t see Renzo at all.

  One bright sunny day in the middle of April, Graf was off by himself, across the tailings, almost up to the hills. The snow had mostly gone, just a little left in the spaces between big rocks.

  School was over for the day. Bo had gone to see the horses, Arvid was working at the dredge, and Jack was asleep because he’d been up half the night doing some welding for Hardy.

  Even now that Graf was five, he still wasn’t supposed
to go that far away without Bo or Buddy or Will. But he had been following a gray vole. They never saw animals around Iditarod Creek—nothing for animals to eat—but there the vole was. It was almost as if the vole wanted him to follow, the way he’d scamper off and then sit down and watch Graf stumbling across the tailings.

  Graf had just decided to turn back when way behind Eller’s house, at the edge of the tailing piles, down in a shallow pit, he saw the piano box. The big box they’d shipped Miz Eller’s piano in last summer.

  Graf knelt at the edge of the tailings and looked down at the box for a long time. It was tipped on its side. The top of the box had been crowbarred off to get the piano out, and that top was propped up to cover the front opening. Like a door.

  In front of the box, there was a ring of rocks, and inside the ring were sticks blackened from a fire. There was a little pile of dead spruce branches and twigs nearby, ready for another fire.

  A big rock from the tailings was set near the ring of rocks. A place to sit when the fire was burning.

  Graf suddenly knew that the Yup’ik boy was living in the piano box. He got to his feet and made his way down the side of the tailings.

  He walked quietly around to the front of the box. Graf bent to peek through the opening.

  Renzo was inside. He was lying curled up in a pile of dried grass and was half covered with grass as well. He was wearing a parka, the hood mostly covering his face, and there was a shabby blanket over the parka.

  Winter was over, but it was still cold at night, freezing sometimes, and this box couldn’t keep anyone warm. Graf had a dread of being cold.

  Renzo’s eyes suddenly flew open. They looked at each other, both of them horrified.

  “Come with me,” said Graf. “It’s too cold here.”

  Renzo shook his head wearily and closed his eyes again. He snuffled, and his breathing sounded ragged. Graf was sure he was sick.