Bo at Ballard Creek Read online

  “‘I can’t take her to the bunkhouse,’ says Arvid. ‘The boys will have my hide.’ ‘We’ll put a cot out for you right here, no trouble,’ I tell him.” Jack winked at Hank. “I knew he’d have plenty trouble, sleeping in that little short cot, but I didn’t want to discourage him.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head, smiling. Bo could see he liked this story as much as she did.

  “Next day Arvid was going to make her some clothes,” Jack said, “some little long shift things on his sewing machine, but the only material he had was that striped twill he used for work shirts, too rough for a baby. So he made some little shifts out of our undershirts, nice and soft. We figured she’d need a lot more clothes than that, so he told the boys he’d give a dollar to anyone would give him their undershirts to make her some other things.

  “But the boys wouldn’t take any money for the undershirts because they were all tickled about her, glad to see her being cared for. Didn’t call us seven kinds of fool, like we figured they would. They even started a collection at the saloon, brought us a bag of nuggets for her—wrote ‘Bo’ on the bag in fancy letters. ‘That’s her stake,’ Kovich said.”

  “And tell him about how you kept me,” Bo said. That was her favorite part.

  “We went past the Ruby camp—used to be a big camp, but it was winding down by the time Bo was born. Past the Galena lead mines—all closed down, little town there, that’s all—past the wood camps. Then a few hours before we got to Nulato, she looked up at us and she smiled, first time ever. This little crooked smile, just one-sided, funny as all hell, and we laughed so hard. ‘Just like a real person,’ Arvid said, like he’d never seen a baby smile before.

  “Then we got off at Nulato, and we walked the little way to the Catholic church, where the orphanage was. We saw one of them nuns outside of the church—no one else, just her in this long black robe they wears, with a white cap thing, and by god, she looked mean. Mean as Mean Millie. We looked at her, and we just kept on walking to where we was going to catch the scow.

  “We didn’t say nothing, and then Arvid says, ‘I think I’d like to call her Marta after my mother.’ I says, ‘That’s a fine name.’ And that was it. We never talked about it, never discussed nothing. We just made up our minds that we wasn’t giving her to no one.”

  “Well,” said Hank. He looked at Bo and shook his head in a wondering sort of way. “If that don’t beat all.”

  Bo nodded with satisfaction. “Now tell him what everyone did when we got here,” she said. That was her favorite part, too.

  “Well,” said Jack, “you never saw nothing like it. You’d a thought we’d brought a princess up the Koyukuk. Everybody, the whole town, was crazy about babies, which were few and far between. Eskimos are just foolish over babies. Then half the town is old bachelor miners, never had any babies of their own. They spoiled the Eskimo babies something awful. And here we come with a brand-new baby.

  “Everyone in Ballard Creek hustled on down to the riverbank when the bargemen yelled ‘hoo hoo!’ like they always do. We were on the first scow of the season, so the whole town was excited. Stopped work at the diggings even, to see who’s coming, see what they brought. The kids mostly looking for candy. Always some candy on the first scow.

  “So here are all these people—the whole town, the whole camp, down at the scow landing—and were they ever surprised to see Bo hanging over Arvid’s shoulder, trying to lift her head up to see what all the noise was about.

  “We stepped off the scow into this crowd, clapping their hands, the women holding their arms out for her. What a hoorah. And was she scared of all them people, hollering and carrying on, laughing fit to die? Reaching to touch her? Not a bit. She smiled one of those sideways smiles again, and everyone went even crazier. Right there, she figured out that if she wanted everyone to go all goofy, all she had to do was take out that smile and there’d be all kinds of commotion. She was a big smiler from that time on.”

  Bo smiled at Hank to show him that was true.

  “‘That’s your baby?’ They asked Arvid, because they knew right away couldn’t be mine, black as I am,” Jack said. ‘It’s our baby,’ Arvid told them.

  “And now here’s the boss, meeting the scow, looking for me and the Swede. He walked right up to me and Arvid, shook our hands, and never blinked. Perfectly calm. Acted like he’d seen lots of drooling babies hanging over the shoulder of his new blacksmith. ‘Lots of women here to help you with that,’ was all he said.”

  “And there were, by god,” said Arvid. “Women making her little Eskimo swing beds, and little parkas and boots, dance-hall girls knitting her blankets, couldn’t do enough for her. And they’re still doing for her.” Arvid looked at Bo fondly. “When she got off that scow, it was just like she had a big family waiting for her.”

  Bo was happy. They’d told her story really well this time. Hank smiled back, shaking his head.

  “Beats all,” he said.

  Jack jerked his chin at Bo. “Time you was in bed,” he said.

  Bo gathered her things together. She was supposed to do something right away, the first time they asked her, so she didn’t argue, even though she had been wanting to ask Jack to cut the people out.

  “Say good night to Hank,” Arvid reminded her. Bo said good night and walked away from the table.

  Then she stopped and looked back at Hank. “What would you have called me?” she asked.

  Hank didn’t even take time to think. “Would have called you Simone,” he said. “I always liked that name.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN THE COOKSHACK

  BO STOOD in a slash of cool sunlight on a low stool by the pastry table. The pastry table was pushed up against the side wall of the cookshack, the wall full of windows. She could see the whole little sleeping town there over the creek, the dirty snow half thawed, mud thick in the paths.

  The miners got up long before anyone else was awake in the town.

  She was cutting out the biscuits. Her tongue was sticking out, because you had to concentrate on biscuits.

  There were seventeen men to cook for, so that meant sixty biscuits to cut. That was her job every morning. When she was younger, Jack would mix the dough and roll them out for her, but now she was five and old enough to roll them out by herself.

  Jack said biscuits were the most important thing a cook made and that you could tell right away what kind of cook you were dealing with when you saw his biscuits.

  They had to be flaky, ready to fall apart almost, golden brown on top. You must never twist the cutter, or else they wouldn’t rise up tall.

  There were lots of other rules for making perfect biscuits, and Bo followed them all. She had taken on Jack’s fussy ways, not Arvid’s slapdash ways.

  She cut the last biscuit and put it carefully on the baking sheet. You had to put them just so, far enough apart that they wouldn’t bump into each other when they got bigger in the oven. If they touched, the sides wouldn’t be crispy the way good biscuits had to be.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and climbed off the stool. Jack was singing under his breath, a rumble from his broad chest, frying the potatoes in an enormous cast-iron skillet. Frying potatoes made a good brown smell.

  She pulled at his apron. “Papa,” she said, “they’re ready.”

  He smiled down at her. “Just in time.” He opened the huge oven door, and a wave of heat poured into the room. The oven had to be very hot to make biscuits. He put the pan on exactly the right rack, not too high and not too low, and closed the door.

  Bo waited anxiously until it was time to take the biscuits out of the oven, because you could never be sure what kind of job you’d done until you saw them all baked.

  Soon the kitchen was full of the good smell of biscuits. Jack took out the pan and set it on the side of the stove. Bo smiled. They were all standing tall, those biscuits, their flaky layers almost ready to tip over. Bo got a clean napkin from the drawe
r to line the tin washbasin they used for biscuits and then Jack slid all the biscuits off the pan into the basin. She looked a question at him and he nodded. She ran to the porch outside the cookhouse door and stood on her tiptoes to reach the iron triangle that hung from the porch roof. It was her job to call the miners to breakfast and lunch and dinner.

  You had to take the little rod that hung with the triangle and bang it back and forth on the sides of the triangle. And you couldn’t do it just once. You had to clang away for a long enough time that all the men in the bunkhouse would hear it, even if they were still asleep. She liked the noise the triangle made, bossy and loud.

  And now in the spring, with the snow melting, it made an even bossier, louder sound. All the sounds seemed to be louder in the spring. You could hear things far away, even people chopping wood in the little town across the bridge.

  She ran back inside the cookshack, banging the door, and carefully gathered up the pastry cloth she’d used to cut the biscuits on. She took it outdoors and shook the extra flour off of it, trying to be careful that none of the flour flew back on her. Then she folded the cloth carefully again and put it in its place in the pantry drawer. She wiped off the rolling pin and put it with the pastry cloth, and that job was done.

  By that time, the porch was full of miners, some of them bending over the basins of water on the long bench by the door, throwing water on their faces to wake up, insulting each other.

  “Shove over,” Karl complained to Siwash George, and Peter growled at Dan, “You’re getting more water on me than on yourself.”

  Bo loved to listen to them carry on. They were a good-natured bunch, Jack always said, but rowdy.

  Then the cookshack was filled with the loudness of the men in their striped shirts and suspenders, their miners’ boots noisy on the bare wood floor, and the clattering of the thick pottery.

  Guillaume took Bo’s hands and pretended to dance her down the room, singing “Casey Could Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde,” because he always said that was the color of her hair. Well, strawberries were red, and her hair wasn’t, so she didn’t know why he said that. When Guillaume let her loose, Paddy pulled her braid and said, “Good morning, my darling.”

  Bo always got a little roughed up in the morning.

  They took their bowls and plates from the table against the wall and sat at the long, long table, which was covered with oilcloth. Benches lined the sides of the table, and there was a chair for the boss at the head. Everyone had his own special place, though Bo didn’t know how they’d decided it.

  “In England,” said Lester to no one in particular, helping himself to sausage, “the sausages are much fatter.”

  “Yeah, but we put meat in ours,” Johnny said, which made everyone laugh.

  What everyone called them, and what they called themselves, was “boys.” “You boys move over,” Dan said when Fritz and Andy were taking up too much room on the bench. The boys at the Ballard Creek mine, people would say, even if they were all pretty old. And Peter was very, very old.

  They all had different ways of talking, because they came from different places. Bo was really good at imitating them. The boys would say, “Do Jack,” and Bo would make her voice go all soft and slurry and slow like Jack’s. “Do Sandor” they’d say, and she’d talk like Sandor, who was from a country called Hungary. The boys would laugh and slap their knees.

  “Could be on the stage,” Johnny always said.

  Lester was the youngest, and Bo liked him very much. He had bright red hair, and his words bounced up and down. He said that was how they talked in London.

  There was a place in London where people put on shows and sang songs and told jokes. The music hall. Lester taught her songs he’d learned there.

  Bo’s favorite music-hall song was “Don’t Go in the Lion’s Cage Tonight, Mother Darling, ’Cause the Lion Looks Ferocious and May Bite.” It was about a circus lady who did tricks with lions. Bo knew it all the way through, and she and Lester would sing it at the roadhouse if someone asked them to.

  Peter was the oldest miner. His eyes were pale blue and milky looking, and his hands had knotted veins all over them. But even if he was old, he was as strong as the other men.

  Peter liked rocks. “Rocks are the oldest things on the earth,” he’d told her. “They’ve been here since the beginning. Before any plants or animals. Before the oceans. They’re billions of years old.

  Bo had looked hard at Peter’s kind face to see how old that was. Billions must be terribly old, but she couldn’t even imagine being twelve or fifteen, so how could she think of billions? She couldn’t feel what big numbers meant.

  Peter taught Bo how to look for mica—the shiny stuff in rocks—and he would bring her any interesting rocks he found. Bo kept the rocks under the long table by the door in a Hills Bros. coffee can.

  Bo’s favorite rock was called schist. The mica in schist was streaked in long, shining lines straight across the rock, scraped there when the rock was under the earth and was being squeezed and stretched.

  Peter complained about the rocks around the diggings. “Not of much interest,” he said. “Other places in the world they have rocks full of crystals and sometimes bits of bugs or ferns from long ago. And some rocks that are made of nothing but ground-up shells. Those are really interesting, those kinds of rocks.”

  Bo wished she could see those shell rocks.

  The boys teased him about his rocks. “Only rock I want to see is one with gold in it,” they’d say.

  Of the seventeen of them, of course Arvid and Jack were the biggest. Nobody was as big as they were. Karl was almost as tall as Jack and Arvid, but he was skinny. It would take two of his arms to make one of Jack’s, Bo thought. Andy and Paddy were the shortest. Andy was square with stumpy legs, and Paddy was just a flimsy little man. “A rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” was what Jack called him when he was teasing him.

  Teasing was their favorite thing. They teased each other for being short, and they teased Jack and Arvid for being tall. They teased each other about their accents, they teased Lester for his red hair, and they teased Bo for being fussy like Jack. They teased Dan for eating fast, and they teased Sandor for snoring. They teased everyone in Ballard Creek for everything. They never stopped.

  Jack had the table covered with a good breakfast. Besides the potatoes and the biscuits, there were bowls of honey and butter, platters of bacon and sausages and scrambled eggs, a big bowl of oatmeal to eat with canned milk and brown sugar, and tall stacks of sourdough hotcakes Jack had been keeping in the warming oven.

  The boss liked to feed his crew well, because every day they all did hard, backbreaking work.

  “Not a slacker among them,” the boss used to say.

  Arvid came banging through the cookshack door and took his place on the bench next to Bo at the end of the table. He was so big that when he sat on the bench, it sagged a little. He looked down at Bo.

  “I beat you this morning,” he said. “You were still snoring when I went to the shop.”

  “I do not snore,” said Bo. “That’s you.”

  The men passed around the plates and bowls of food and never stopped talking while they were eating. Jack said they were the talkingest bunch of men he’d ever worked with.

  Except for the boss, that is. His name was Ed MacKay, but no one ever called him that, they just called him the boss. The boss never said much; he just looked quiet and calm, and when he had to talk, he said things in the shortest way possible.

  Bo ate her stack of hotcakes with lots of syrup and butter, and one biscuit with honey, and lots of potatoes, and two pieces of bacon. She was still hungry, so Arvid gave her one of his greasy sausages, which squeaked when she cut into it. She wasn’t quite full yet, but she didn’t want any oatmeal, so she and Arvid ate the last two biscuits, even though they were cold.

  Jack was proud of the amount Bo could put away. “Just like one of the men,” he said.

  When they were finished and Jack
was pouring out their coffee, little round Gitnoo burst in the door, slamming it against the wall like she always did. She came every morning to help Jack with the dishes and peel potatoes and do the piles of laundry in the washing shack. She was Ekok and Sammy’s grandma, but she almost bounced she was so full of energy. When she laughed, her eyes squinted into half moons.

  Gitnoo had never learned to speak English, so she told Bo what she wanted to say. Bo had learned to speak Eskimo right along with English.

  Sometimes when the boys were teasing her or pulling her apron strings, Gitnoo told Bo to say naughty things to the miners. Bo knew you shouldn’t say things like that in English, so Bo would just smile at Gitnoo and shake her head.

  When Bo was first learning to talk, the Eskimo children taught her all the swear words in Eskimo and then would laugh until the tears ran down their faces to see their parents’ mouths drop at such words coming from a very little girl.

  Oscar was Bo’s best friend. Oscar’s mama, Clara, didn’t think it was funny, and she made the kids stop teaching Bo such stuff. She told Bo not to say those words. Bo understood right away because Jack and Arvid had told her which of the English words she’d learned from the miners that she mustn’t say. So she didn’t say those words anymore when the grown-ups were listening. When the grown-ups weren’t listening, all the children in Ballard Creek used all the swear words they knew, of course.

  Bo could swear in Swedish, too, because that’s what Arvid did. But Bo liked the Eskimo swear words the best because they felt all ragged in her throat.

  After the boys had eaten their breakfast and Jack had poured their coffee, they lit up their pipes and the cookshack was filled with hazy smoke and the good smell of their tobacco. Then it was time for the boys to start work. They scraped back their chairs and benches and stretched. Alex and Sandor patted their round stomachs under their striped shirts.