Bo at Iditarod Creek Read online

  “Don’t you know about Calvert courses?” Will looked at her with eyebrows raised. “See, how it works is Calvert sends the lessons from way back East and then you do the lessons, and your ma sends them back East to get a grade, and you keep doing that until you’re finished for the year. I’m in the fifth grade, and Buddy’s in the fourth. What grade are you in?”

  “I’m supposed to be in first this year,” said Bo. “I didn’t know there wouldn’t be a school.” She looked sadly down at her feet dangling over the edge of the boardwalk. “School was nice in Ballard Creek. There was Miss Sylvia and all the big kids, and even some of the grown-ups went, even a grandma, and there was singing, and they did a play for Christmas. And there was a paper all around the wall with the ABCs in printing and in that curly kind of writing.”

  “That’s cursive,” said Will. “I’m learning it this year, Ma said. I never did even get good at printing yet, though. Ma says I don’t write no better than a hottentot.”

  “What’s a hottentot?”

  “I don’t know. Someone who’s no good at printing.”

  Buddy had been thinking about what Bo said.

  “How come a grandma was going to school?”

  “Not just a grandma, there was a father too. There wasn’t any school when they were little, so they were going now.”

  “Whoa,” said Buddy. “That’s crazy.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to go to school when I’m a grandma if there’s no school here,” Bo said gloomily.

  Will pointed to a house on the edge of town that looked fancier than the other houses. “That’s the Eller house.”

  “It’s very tall,” Bo said. “Taller than the roadhouse in Ballard Creek. The roadhouse had an upstairs, but it wasn’t that tall.”

  “Got three stories, that house,” said Will. “Eller’s got to have the biggest and fanciest of everything. To keep his wife happy. He’s the boss of the dredge across the hills over there. It’s the biggest outfit around here. He has a hundred men working there.”

  “It’s not the dredge your papas will be working on,” Buddy said. “My pa said they’re working for Petrovich. Different outfit. But our pa works for Eller.”

  “House’s got three stories so Miz Eller can watch us,” Will said.

  “She watches you?” said Bo.

  “Not just us, she watches everyone. She’s got big binoculars. See that window up on the top? That’s where she likes to spy on us. She’ll be watching us right now, to see who come to town. Guess she’ll get an eyeful this time—never seen nothing like you bunch.”

  Buddy and Will smiled at each other, thinking about that. “She mostly watches the boys who work for Eller. And if they do something she doesn’t like, she tells her husband.”

  Bo was bewildered. “Tells him what?”

  “Well, like if one of Eller’s men was drinking and got the blind staggers or something, she’ll tell Eller to fire him. And the boys don’t want to get fired, especially in the middle of the mining season, because all the jobs would be taken. So they try to keep on her good side. Ma’s always scared Pa will get fired because he argues with Eller sometimes.”

  Buddy was trying to get a word in. “And see, if anyone visits across the creek, she tells him.”

  “She doesn’t like people visiting?”

  “Well, she doesn’t like them visiting the good-time girls. And see, there’s no trees or bushes or nothing, so no one can’t go anywhere without Miz Eller seeing them.”

  “And, boy,” Will said, “she sees everything. Like Ma is scared if she keeps her washing on the line too long, Miz Eller will say she’s being lazy or something. And she tells Ma if she sees us doing something she don’t like.

  “Once she told Ma when we was making this little net across the creek, and she said it wasn’t healthy for children to play in the cold creek water and that Ma should keep better control of her children. We couldn’t go to the creek for the longest time until Ma kind of forgot about it.”

  “Oh,” said Bo. “That’s a right old battle-ax!”

  Will and Buddy laughed so delightedly that Bo felt uncomfortable. “Well, that’s what Zeke, at Bonanza City, said. A right old battle-ax. Eller’s wife.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Will, still grinning madly. “Zeke’s got that right!”

  Buddy jumped up. “Let’s go see how far Edna got in her house!”

  Bo really wanted to watch the house moving. But Graf shook his head at her and then she remembered what Arvid had said.

  “Oh, we can’t. Papa said to stay right here because we got to find a place to live and all.” She looked wistfully down the street. “Are they going to be moving more houses?”

  “That’s the last one. They already moved five houses last month. See that one over there with the black door? That’s ours. Moved it last week. When they get all the houses moved, they’ll start thawing the tailings. And then when that’s done, they’ll move the dredge over here and start eating up the tailing piles.”

  “At Ballard Creek, no one ever bothered the tailing piles,” said Bo.

  “Lots of gold under those tailings—that’s what they said when they drilled. They said the last dredge didn’t dig deep enough.”

  “Did you feel bad to have your house moved?”

  “Nah, we had it moved before when we lived way down there.” Will pointed down the river where they could hear the dragline clanking away.

  “See, they tell people they got ten days to move to someplace else on the tailing piles. And then, like us, we got the house jacked up and on the go-devil, and Jason pulled it with the Cat to the new place. And then our dad put down a well and stuck our old pump on it and ran the electric lines to the house, and it’s all finished.”

  It was ordinary to Will and Buddy, Bo thought. They sat back down on the boardwalk and dangled some more.

  “So how come you got two fathers?” asked Will. Bo felt impatient having to explain, but then she thought that having two fathers was ordinary to her, but not to Will and Buddy. The way it was ordinary for them to move houses.

  “Well, me and Graf didn’t have any relatives. Graf’s dad died, and my mama took off like a turtle.”

  “Like a turtle?” said Will, with an astonished stare.

  “Jack says where he comes from, the mama turtles just lay their eggs and take off.”

  “Oh,” said Will. “We saw that before. Suzie’s mama just up and left. Left her with her dad, and then he took Suzie Outside to live with her grandma.”

  “Well, see,” said Bo, “my mama was going to take off, so she gave me to Arvid when he was just minding his own business, smoking a cigarette. And then Jack had to help Arvid, because Arvid didn’t know spit about babies. And that made two papas, Arvid and Jack.”

  “Didn’t you have no grandma?”

  “No,” said Bo. “Didn’t have anything. That’s why Jack and Arvid took me. And because they didn’t want to leave me with the nuns.”

  “What’s nuns?” asked Buddy.

  Bo pulled her shoulders up to show that she didn’t really know. “Some kind of church people. And Graf didn’t have anyone to take him, so his auntie said send him to the nuns, but Jack and Arvid didn’t want to do that either. So we got to keep him. And so now I have a brother, and he has a sister, and we have two papas.”

  Will and Buddy looked respectfully at Bo and Graf.

  “Jeez, that’s pretty good. Lucky for you.” The boys were silent for a minute, thinking.

  “Look to be easy-going, your papas,” said Will.

  Bo wasn’t sure what easygoing meant.

  “Well, good-natured. Like maybe they don’t yell a lot.”

  Bo and Graf smiled at each other.

  “No, they don’t yell at us, not mad yell. Jack always rolls his eyes and says ‘what next?’ if we do something we shouldn’t.” She could see the boys weren’t impressed with that, so she bragged, “But Arvid, he swears in Swedish when he gets riled.”

  “Wow,” said Wi
ll. “Wow.”

  “Swear some Swedish,” said Buddy.

  Bo was proud to do it. She wished she knew a lot of swearing in Swedish, but Arvid just used the same few words over and over.

  “Vad i helvete,” she said. She put her chin down and tried to swear with a deep, growly voice, kind of loud, like Arvid.

  Will and Buddy looked at her, awestruck.

  “Dra åt helvete!” she shouted.

  The boys pressed closer to her.

  “Jävlar! Jävlar!” she snarled. “That’s what you say when you hurt yourself,” she explained. “Jävlar!” She thought a moment. “Skit! Skit, skit, skit!”

  She wiped her hands on the front of her overalls.

  “That’s about it,” she said.

  “Swearing sounds really, really good in Swedish,” Buddy said fervently.

  “Could you teach us?” Will asked.

  “Sure,” said Bo. “But your ma might not like it.”

  “Shoot, we’re not going to swear around Ma. Not in any kind of language. She’d take the hide off us.”

  “And besides,” Buddy said, “she don’t know any Swedish.”

  “Graf and I can swear in Eskimo, too,” said Bo. Buddy and Will stared at her.

  “Go on,” Will said, as if he didn’t believe her. Bo could swear a lot more words in Eskimo than she could in Swedish, so she started in.

  Then she nodded encouragingly at Graf. “He can, too,” she said. “Go on, Graf.”

  So Graf and Bo swore all the Eskimo swear words they knew. Graf had this funny voice, all growly and rough, and his swear words were the toughest sounding.

  “Do it again,” the boys begged. Will and Buddy cheered each new word, pounded their knees when there was an especially good one, grinned with delight over the really long ones. When Bo and Graf had said all the Eskimo swear words they knew in as many different ways as they could think of, Will leaned weakly back against the hotel wall. He sighed happily.

  “That’s the best swearing yet,” he said. “Sounds really, really worser in Eskimo. Teach us that long one.”

  Bo tried, but the boys couldn’t make the wet scraggly sounds in their throats at all. So Bo said they should learn the Swedish swearing first because it was easier; you just had to kind of sing it.

  Will and Buddy carefully copied Bo, watching her lips.

  “Skit, skit, skit!” they said, quite well.

  It was just then that Arvid came out to get them and when he heard the word they were practicing, he stopped short.

  “Vad i helvete?” he roared, which made Will and Buddy smile happily.

  “Bo! What the … Where’d you learn those words?”

  Bo blinked. “You’re the only one I know speaks Swede, Papa.”

  “Christ almighty, you’re the—” Arvid’s face turned very red. “You can’t say those words around here.” He looked to see if anyone had been listening. “Might be some Swedes—you don’t know.”

  “Well, Papa, they wanted to learn. I was just teaching them.”

  Arvid looked helpless.

  “Don’t worry, mister,” said Will. “We won’t tell no one. Heck, we never tell no one nothing. Guess we know better than that.”

  Arvid groaned, snatched Graf up off the boardwalk and grabbed Bo’s hand.

  “Come on, Bo, Graf. We’re going to send a wire to Ballard Creek. Let ’em know we got here safe. Gotta find the Signal Corps building.”

  Will and Buddy jumped to their feet. “We’ll take you!” Arvid made a face like he didn’t want the boys to show him anything, but they were already scampering ahead.

  Bo didn’t think Arvid liked their new friends much.

  Bo and Graf and Arvid and the boys walked past the houses scattered every which way on the old tailing piles.

  “There’s the Signal Corps building,” said Buddy, pointing. Then he nodded to a pile of charred lumber. “And that’s where they had a big fire before we were born, killed somebody. Guy got drunk and set the house on fire.” Then he showed them a little house set crookedly on the tailing piles. “That’s the bootleg shack,” he said.

  Arvid raised one eyebrow at Buddy. “Not much you kids don’t know, is there?”

  “No, mister,” said Buddy.

  Arvid made his frowning-thinking face and then he stopped short, grinned his biggest grin, and chuckled.

  “Guess I was just the same,” he said.

  He bent down and put his hand out to Buddy. “Name’s Arvid,” he said. He shook Will’s hand next. “Pleasure to meet you boys,” said Arvid.

  As he started to walk off toward the Signal Corps building, Arvid called to the boys over his shoulder, “My grandfather could swear for two minutes straight without ever repeating himself.”

  So that was all right, thought Bo.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NEW HOUSE

  THE NEXT MORNING, when Hardy brought their breakfast, Bo could tell right away that it wasn’t like one of Jack’s breakfasts. The sausages were burnt and cold, sitting in a little puddle of grease, and the hotcakes were dried out and pale.

  She could see by the looks on Jack’s and Arvid’s faces that they agreed.

  Of course, none of them would say anything rude about someone else’s cooking. But when Hardy went back to the kitchen to get some more coffee, Arvid mumbled, “Be glad to be eating your cooking again, Jack.”

  “That’s how it is,” said Jack. “Don’t miss the water till the well runs dry.”

  Petrovich would rent them one of the houses he kept for his men who didn’t live in the camp bunkhouse. Any of his workers who didn’t live at the camp got three extra dollars a day. Jack said that was a good deal because they for sure didn’t want to live that near the dredge, which clanked and roared day and night.

  “Need to get a rest from that when we’re off shift,” he said. Bo didn’t know how he was going to get a rest, because you could hear the Petrovich dredge all over town. But she thought it must be worse to be living right next to it.

  After breakfast at the hotel, they borrowed a big wagon from Hardy and moved all their things from Charlie the Tram’s barn into their new house.

  There was another house not far away from theirs. It had a green roof—such a beautiful green, such a lovely color in the midst of all those gray, drab, treeless tailings. Bo wished someone would come out the door of that house so she could wave at them. She knew she would like people with a roof like that.

  Their own house didn’t have a pretty roof, but it had electricity and a pump in the kitchen so they didn’t need to haul water from the creek.

  But of course it needed a lot of scrubbing from Jack’s point of view. Jack was a very clean person. What Arvid called crazy-clean.

  Bo and Graf had a wonderful time yanking the chains that turned the lightbulbs on and off. When they were tired of that miracle, they pumped water, leaning on the pump handle and swinging down to bring a gush of water from the mouth of the pump. Before long, they were drenched. They filled so many buckets that Jack hollered at them to stop.

  “Will it run out, Papa?”

  “Guess not, but you’ll for sure wear out the pump at this rate!”

  There were four rooms and a narrow closet in their new house. The doorway to Bo and Graf’s room was covered with a long faded curtain. The other bedroom had the only wooden door that closed, so they all said Arvid had to sleep there because he snored so awful.

  “You’ll wish you had my snoring instead of that clang-clang-god-rotted dredge noise,” said Arvid. Jack looked grim.

  “Never thought I’d hear something worse than your snoring, but I have now,” Jack said. “I do most sincerely hate the sound of that damn dredge.” The look on Jack’s face was so cross, Bo and Graf burst out laughing.

  Jack would sleep in the little closet. He got a cot from Hardy’s hotel, and it was a tight fit. But Jack said he’d slept in lots of worse places, and he’d like it just fine.

  The house had some tired, worn-out furniture: a b
ig chest of drawers in the kitchen, a bed and a wooden chair in Arvid’s room, two beds for Bo and Graf, and in the living room a long couch which bulged in odd places.

  Graf and Bo had never seen a couch before.

  “What’s that called?” Bo asked.

  “A couch,” said Arvid.

  “A divan,” said Jack. The papas looked coolly at each other, and Jack took a quarter out of his pants pocket. “Heads,” he said, and flipped the coin up in the air.

  Arvid caught it, slapped it on his wrist, looked at it, and said, “Ha!”

  They both looked at Bo and Graf and said together, “Couch.”

  Now that that was settled, Bo and Graf immediately wanted to jump on it. But Arvid said stop because that couch had already been abused and didn’t need any more.

  A fat stuffed chair sat next to the couch, and Arvid shook his head at them. “Not the chair, neither,” he said, in case they were thinking of jumping on that.

  The kitchen was the biggest room, but it had a dinky little table instead of that long stretch of table they’d had in the cookshack at Ballard. They all looked at it bleakly.

  Twenty people could sit around the table at Ballard. That table had been where Jack rolled out his piecrusts and where Bo drew with her crayons and made houses out of matchboxes. That table had been the center of their lives at Ballard. This sorry little table with wobbly legs and just four chairs made Bo’s heart squeeze up with homesickness.

  “Don’t worry,” said Jack, patting her shoulder. “We’ll throw together a new table in no time.”

  Bo looked up at them hopefully. “Big as our old one?”

  Jack and Arvid both swept a look down the room, measuring it with their eyes. “Maybe bigger,” Arvid said. Bo and Graf looked at each other and smiled. The papas could fix anything.

  Bo and Graf helped Jack clean while Arvid went out with Charlie the Tram’s wagon to get things they needed at the store. He came back with boards to make a longer table.

  “Look, you two,” he said. “These are planks Zeke pulled off some old house at Bonanza City. Don’t I just wish they could talk.”

  Graf helped Arvid with the new tabletop, and Bo bustled around doing what Jack told her to. He got on his hands and knees and scrubbed the cracked linoleum with a big brush, while Bo did the windows. Jack gave them another swipe with a clean cloth when she’d finished, and then the windows were shining.