Bo at Iditarod Creek Read online

They were very clean themselves, the Japanese men, as particular as Jack. They took a bath in the steaming water of the laundry every day.

  Their names were Haruto Hiroshi and Yoshihiro Ishikawa.

  “I can’t remember your names,” said Bo despairingly one day. “They won’t stick in my head!”

  “Oh, that all right,” said Haruto. “You call me Harry, you call him Yosh. That more easy.”

  Bo considered that. “I want to call you your real names,” she said. “They’re so pretty. But I keep losing hold of them. I get the first sound, and the rest just slides away.”

  “Here, I write them down for you. You practice,” Yoshihiro said. Bo didn’t tell him she didn’t know how to read.

  Yoshihiro wrote and then showed her. “These our name in English, and these our name in Japanese. Can’t really write Japanese good with a pencil, but that’s about right.”

  “You can write two kinds of ways,” Bo said sadly. She was beginning to feel that she was behind in learning things.

  Haruto got a little book off the shelf that he said was Japanese poetry, the words made the right way. Not with a pencil but with a brush.

  Japanese writing was nothing like American writing. It was curvier and had thick places and thin ones, and each figure was like a picture or a design.

  “Our kind of writing is not pretty,” said Bo. “Not like yours.” Yoshihiro and Haruto made a little bow with their heads and looked pleased.

  “Take us long time to learn when we are little,” Yoshihiro said. “Yours, just some straight lines and some round ones. Faster to learn.”

  Bo kept the piece of paper Yoshihiro had given her, and she and Graf tried to draw the Japanese names. It was very hard.

  She practiced saying the names every night with Arvid. Graf didn’t have to practice, because it turned out he’d learned them the first time he heard them.

  But at last she had them just right.

  “Can learn anything, you just set your mind to it,” said Arvid. But Bo noticed he still hadn’t learned them.

  In the morning, when she showed Jack that she’d memorized Yoshihiro and Haruto’s names, she asked, “Where is Japan, anyway?”

  “Not so far,” Jack said, and he showed her on the map that was pinned under the kitchen shelves. “Look, we’re practically neighbors.”

  “I wonder if Yoshihiro and Haruto get homesick like we do for Ballard.”

  “Must be even worse,” said Jack. “You moved away from Ballard, but you moved to a country almost the same. Same trees and birds, and everyone talks your language. Think how it would be to move to a place with all different trees and birds and animals, and everyone wears different clothes and talks different. And writes different. Be strange if they didn’t get homesick.”

  Bo could see that some people had more to miss than she did.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE STRAIGHT LADY

  SOMETIMES JACK SENT BO and Graf to the store for matches or a can of milk or Ivory soap flakes for the dishes—whatever he’d run out of.

  That was one of their favorite things to do, because the store man, Sidney Cohen, liked children very much and because he always had a treat for them. And besides, the store was full of wonderful things: a dozen kinds of knives and leather gloves that smelled interesting, snuff and snares and cigars.

  Milo had a store in the roadhouse at Ballard, but he only got a new order twice a year on the scow. So everything in his store got tired and dusty, and there was never anything different. But at Sidney’s, new things came on the plane every week in the summer.

  One day when they went into the store, Sidney, wrapped in his big apron, his curly hair in a gray cloud around his head, was on the ladder getting something from the shelf.

  He turned to give them his cheery greeting—“Kinderle!”—and when he climbed down, he said, “Have I got news for you! There’s a new boy come into the country with his father. That makes five of you, or is it six?” He rolled his eyes up dramatically. “Before long, there will be children everywhere we look. No room on the sidewalks for grown-ups!”

  Sidney always exaggerated.

  “Will and Buddy told us,” said Bo.

  “Did they see him?” asked Sidney. Bo and Graf shook their heads. “I never saw him either,” said Sidney. “Just the father. Italian, judging by his name.”

  Sidney was back on the ladder sort of talking to himself. “Not a pleasant person, the father. He’s meshugene, I think. Crazy.”

  “That’s four boys,” said Bo. “But now Edna’s gone, there’s just me for girls.”

  “Do you wish you had a girl to play with, Bo?” Sidney asked kindly.

  “Maggie asked me that,” said Bo. “She said boys are more fun, and I think so too.”

  They stood at the counter on their tiptoes watching Sidney wrap the slab of bacon Jack had asked for, admiring the red string they liked so much, when a tall lady in a striped dress came in.

  Bo and Graf looked her over carefully. Her hair was pulled back into a round sort of ball, and she had funny eyeglasses that pinched her nose and didn’t go around her ears like the ones Tomas in Ballard Creek had. One of the tea party ladies Buddy and Will had told them about for sure.

  She carried a big leather sort of bag with the handles over her arm. It was so big Bo thought it could hold a fat baby. She wished she could see what the woman had inside it.

  While Sidney filled a little sack with salt from the big salt barrel, the lady stood very straight at the counter, her chin high. Her behind was straight, and her front was straight as well, Bo noticed with interest. Bo had never seen a woman who wasn’t puffy in front.

  The straight lady waited silently. When Sidney turned to the counter, he nodded at her politely—“Miz Eller”—and continued to tie up the package of salt for Bo.

  Bo and Graf shot each other a startled look. The binoculars lady!

  “I need a pound of raisins and—” the lady started.

  “When I’m finished with these customers,” Sidney interrupted calmly.

  Miz Eller looked down at Bo and Graf as if she’d not seen them there, her eyes cold.

  “These must be the wards of that very odd partnership that’s come to town.”

  “That’s true,” said Sidney, “though I’d probably call them children, and a better behaved pair of children I never did see.”

  “Early days, Mr. Cohen,” Miz Eller said.

  Bo didn’t know what that meant. And what were wards?

  “I am rather in a hurry, Mr. Cohen,” Miz Eller said.

  He smiled at her sweetly as if he hadn’t heard what she said.

  “And what else did your papa need, Bo?”

  “Some maple flavoring,” she said.

  “Making syrup, is he?”

  “He’s making some maple bars for the dredge. Because the boys made us a swing.”

  “A swing! Now, that’s a fine thing,” Sidney said enthusiastically.

  Bo could feel Miz Eller stiffen up next to her, and it was making her nervous. Bo turned to Graf and said in Eskimo, “I think I’m forgetting something.”

  “Qaqqulaaq,” said Graf. Crackers.

  Miz Eller’s eyes narrowed into slits. “I heard about this. These children speak heathen languages.”

  Bo looked up at her. “No, it’s Eskimo,” she said. “Graf and I speak Eskimo.”

  Miz Eller’s face stretched itself tight. “Do not speak until you’re spoken to. Have you never been taught any manners?”

  Bo couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but when Sidney handed Bo the bacon and the other things, he said to Miz Eller, “I know no one with better manners than Bo.”

  Miz Eller gave him a cold look.

  He smiled down at Bo. “And as a matter of interest, it might be said that I speak a heathen language as well,” he told her. Before Bo could ask him what language that was, Sidney asked, “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No,” Bo said, even though Graf was reminding her
again in Eskimo about the crackers. No one had ever looked at her in a mean way in her life, and she wanted to get away from Miz Eller’s squinched-up eyes.

  “Here then,” said Sidney and he put a scoop of gumdrops from the glass jar on his countertop into a twist of paper. “Tell Jack to save me a maple bar,” he said and smiled them out of the store.

  Only when they’d reached the doorway did he turn to the woman, his palms flat on the counter. “Now then, Miz Eller?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DOC LARUE

  WILL AND BUDDY came banging on the door one morning. They had different kinds of knocks, but this kind was what Jack called their gangster knock, so they all knew it was something exciting.

  “Doc Larue’s in town!” they burst out at the same time when Jack opened the door. “You got to see him! He’s real crazy!”

  Bo looked a question at Jack.

  Jack looked delighted. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he chortled. “That’s the dentist, famous for crazy. He was at Ballard one time while you was just a baby.”

  “You never know what he’s going to get up to,” said Buddy.

  “Me and Arvid run into him many times before,” said Jack. “The Rampart camp and at Circle City before that. Turns up everywhere. Flies his own plane now.” Jack smiled fondly. “Always had a bottle in his overalls pocket. Took a slug of whiskey from time to time while he was working on your teeth.”

  Jack got quiet all of a sudden and looked thoughtful. He took Bo’s jaw in his big hand. “Open up.”

  Bo had lost her first tooth on the Yukon, coming from Ballard Creek, and just a week ago she’d lost another.

  “Last tooth you lost, it’s already got tiny little nubs of teeth poking up. Jaggedy little white edges here.” Graf stood on tiptoe to see into Bo’s mouth, and Buddy and Will gathered around to look too. Bo rolled her eyes from one to the other, mouth wide open.

  “See,” he said to Graf, “the teeth have little saws on the top to cut their way through the gum. Looks like this one is pushing hard to grow.” Then Jack frowned at the space where Bo had lost the first tooth on the Yukon. “Nothing coming up here yet. Just a naked hole. Seems to be taking an unnatural long time, that new tooth. Think I’ll take you to see what Doc has to say about it.”

  When he let her jaw go, Bo stood up on a chair to look in the little mirror over the washbasin. There was an empty space right in the front of her top teeth, a perfectly square empty space. Bo liked to stick her tongue through so it looked like she had one pink tooth.

  * * *

  THERE WERE A LOT of men at the hotel, waiting for Doc Larue. Some of them were playing cards with the old-timers; some were perched up on the bar stools, talking to one another.

  Dago Charlie was there, and some of the boys from the Eller dredge, and a lot of loud and cheerful men Bo and Graf had never seen.

  “And what’s wrong with your teeth?” Dago Charlie asked her. “You’re too young to have tooth troubles.”

  Bo opened her mouth to show him. “That tooth never came in,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Hmm,” he said. “Maybe Doc will pull mine out and put it in your space!” Bo looked so horrified that Charlie soothed her. “Just joking,” he said.

  The man sitting next to Charlie said, “That’s not a joke, you know. I read they could do that, put a tooth in an empty space. Like you take a plant out of one spot and put it in another.” Charlie made a not-believing face, and the man said defiantly, “Read it in Scientific American.”

  A man from Eller’s mine was telling the boys at the bar about a bad, bad toothache he got one winter while he was out on the trapline by himself.

  “Got so bad I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I got me a pliers. Wouldn’t work. Couldn’t get hold of that tooth. Got a chisel and hammer, and I started to work. First good whack, I passed out, came to, whacked at it again, passed out, did that two or three times. Woke up some time later, cold, the fire gone out, the whole bench covered with blood all gone thick and shiny like jelly, and the tooth lying in the middle of it. Built the fire, cleaned up the mess, washed my mouth with salt water, and had no more trouble.”

  Bo and the boys, their eyes huge and horrified, were each imagining taking a chisel with its sharp blade to one of their teeth. And then hammering the chisel!

  A frowsy-looking man with wild stand-up hair and a striped apron over his overalls—Doc Larue—came out of the pantry where he was going to examine his patients. He beamed at Jack, pounded him on the back, and said, “Black Jack! Blood brother!”

  Bo knew Black Jack was a nickname Jack had, but she didn’t know anything about the blood business. She and the boys looked at Jack for an explanation, but Jack just laughed. “Old story,” he told them.

  “This the baby you and the Big Swede had at Ballard? Mean Millie’s kid?” Doc asked.

  Jack nodded. “Nearly growed up,” he said.

  “She the patient?” Doc asked.

  They all nodded, so Doc put his hand on Bo’s back to hustle her into the pantry.

  “Don’t get riled,” he said over his shoulder to the waiting men. “She can’t take long.” Doc gestured for her to get up on a bar stool that was pushed up against the wall.

  Buddy and Will tagged along behind Jack, and they all crowded into the little room.

  “No tooth coming in yet,” explained Jack. Doc looked in Bo’s mouth.

  “Big hole,” said Doc. “Makes it hard to whistle.”

  “No, I can whistle good,” Bo said, and she whistled to show him. Doc made a whadda-ya-know-about-that face. His breath smelled like whiskey. With his little mirror thing, Doc tapped the jaggedy ridges coming up after the last lost tooth.

  “How long ago she lose this one?”

  “’Bout a week ago; new one popped up so fast it looked like it’d been pushing the old one out of the way.”

  Doc tilted Bo’s head back so he could look closely at the empty hole on top. “And how long’s this one been out?”

  “Been months,” said Jack.

  “Well, this one ain’t never gonna show up,” said Doc Larue. “Gonna have a space there, right in front, all your life. Someone shortchanged you when they were passing out the grown-up teeth. Good news, it will never give you a toothache.”

  “That’s crazy,” Will said enviously.

  “Yeah,” breathed Buddy.

  Bo could tell they both wished they had a tooth that didn’t have a backup. They liked anything that was different.

  Bo didn’t mind at all if a new tooth didn’t grow in. She liked the way she could make this interesting sound through the space.

  “I can do this,” she said, showing off, and she made a spooky wind-blowing-through-the-willows sound through the space.

  Jack raised his eyebrows at Doc. “What next?” he said.

  “Not a girlie sort of girl,” said Doc.

  * * *

  DOC STAYED ONLY two days before he was off to McGrath. All that week, the boys who came to visit told Doc Larue stories.

  He was a very popular dentist, Doc. Even if he drank on the job and wasn’t noticeably clean.

  “People who make you laugh are much appreciated,” Jack explained when he was going off to work. “And, by god, Doc would make a corpse laugh.” Then he rushed out of the door before Bo could ask him what a corpse was.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A BIRTHDAY AND A NAME

  JACK CAME BACK from the post office one day, beaming.

  “This,” he said, waving a letter in front of their noses, “this is what we been waiting for a long while. Guess!” Bo and Graf stared at the letter, and suddenly Bo was sure she knew. “From Hank!”

  Jack gave her an aren’t-you-smart look. “Right the first time. Good old Hank, he’s been wiring here and writing there, and he finally got the lowdown on you, Graf.” Jack took the letter out of the envelope and held it way out, as far as his arm would reach, so he could see it.

  “Hank wrote to that mission where
your auntie thought you were born, and this is what they told him.” Jack looked down at them to be sure they were paying proper attention. “Your ma’s name was Hazel, and your pa was Paul. You was born when they were up the Koyukuk trapping. February 12, 1926.” Jack sat down and put the letter on the table. “I been figuring it out. Means you’re older than we thought. Almost four and a half.”

  Jack could see Bo and Graf were waiting for more. “I know, I know,” he said. “This letter don’t tell you much, why your mom died, or when. Or anything about them. Don’t say what they was like, what they could do, or all like that. What made them laugh.

  “Someday maybe we’ll run into someone from down there by Kaltag, find out something about your mom and dad,” he said. “Got to talk to people who knew them to find out that kind of stuff. The important stuff.”

  That night when they were in bed, Graf asked, “What’s your birthday?”

  “Mine isn’t a really one like yours,” Bo said. “The papas just knew I was born in April, so Jack put a blindfold on me and Arvid put me in front of the April page in the calendar. And then I walked forward and my finger went on the tenth and that was my birthday.”

  Graf nodded, turned over on his side, and closed his eyes. Then he opened them suddenly. “How long till my birthday?”

  * * *

  NOT LONG AFTER they’d learned when Graf was born, Jack was sitting at the end of the kitchen table, filling out some papers and looking pretty cross about it, pulling faces and grumbling low in his chest.

  Jack jerked his head at the chair next to him to tell Bo to sit down.

  “Got to fill out these papers to get your school stuff,” said Jack. As soon as Jack learned there was no school in Iditarod Creek, he’d asked Will and Buddy’s father for the address of the Calvert School that the boys used. The papers had come on the last mail plane.

  Bo watched for a few minutes as he shuffled papers around and looked more and more grumpy.

  “You’ll do your school right here with me in the morning, and what’s left over you’ll do with Arvid at night after I go to work,” he said.