The Seal Wife Read Free Page B

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    It may be that his pay is insufficient, but Bigelow has discovered something. In Alaska he is his own boss. For the first time in his life, he can order his days as he sees fit. He can build what he’s seen in those minutes before he falls asleep, drawn on the red insides of his eyelids. Equations that he knows by heart, sketches he’s copied onto scraps and into margins, analyses of friction impacted by velocity and altitude: a kite, a two-celled box kite that will soar above his station on the creek, whole miles higher than any kite has ever flown before. A way to understand not just the air, but the heavens.
    Bigelow digs out his friend’s letter, smoothes it to read the date. August 8, 1915. More than a month has passed. Already he’s hired and fired the Indians. He’s traded his father’s watch chain and fobs for a parka with wolverine trim. He’s eaten strawberries that have grown to the size of fists in the long summer light.
    And he’s seen the Aleut woman. He’s followed her along the town’s new main street.
    AT FIRST HE THINKS she might be a deaf-mute, but she isn’t deaf, because she startles at the diagnostic noises he makes, dropping an armload of wood, clattering a pan on the stove. And she isn’t mute, either. She cries out in the bed, mews and moans and even, sometimes, giggles.
    It is snowing on the day he follows her home. Small, dry flakes blow like dust behind the lenses of his glasses. Eleven degrees at noon, with a shifting wind, first from the west, then from the north, then west again. On his way from the cable office he breaks a bootlace, and when he bends to fix it, knotting the two ends together, it breaks in a new place. So he stops at Getz’s General Merchandise.
    She has three tusks of walrus ivory and a bundle of pelts, red fox mostly, pups and summer skins not worth more than a dime apiece. She leans forward over the wide counter to point at what she wants in exchange—tea, tobacco, toffee, a bottle of paregoric. Her arm up, her ungloved fingers outstretched, she waits until Getz takes each item from the shelf, slaps it down on the counter in a manner intended to convey impatience and condescension.
    At Getz’s, payment is accepted in a number of forms: gold, flake or nugget; coins, American, Russian, and Canadian; skins— sable, marten, mink, otter, seal, rabbit, lynx, wolverine, caribou, bear, wolf, moose, fox, lemming, beaver—anything bigger than a rat that has a hide to tan; and miscellany, blankets, boots, eggs, nails, needles, knives. Two walls of the store are devoted to complications of equivalence, and while certain values are not negotiable—gold is gold, and it is twelve dollars an ounce, this is painted on the wall in black—the worth of an egg, for example, goes up and down according to the number of chickens that make it through the winter. And that population depends on how many have worn themselves out laying without cease when days are twenty hours long. So Getz inscribes the cost of eggs in chalk.
    “Not un—uh, ornamental,” he says, noting how Bigelow stares at the woman. With one proprietary elbow pinning down the pelts, he ties her purchases together with twine. “If the war paint don’t bother you.”
    As if she understands, the woman turns and stares back at Bigelow, her jaw thrust forward, unapologetic, even defiant. In what way does she see him? How does he look to her? He thinks of himself as handsome—handsome enough, anyway—with a broad face, pale blue eyes almost too widely set, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that balances the eyes. There’s nothing sharp in his face, nothing mean. His big forehead appears even bigger because of his fair eyebrows, his slightly elevated hairline. As for her: black braid, black eyes, black buttons on her bodice, and little black lines drawn on her chin. She watches Bigelow watching her, and her pale tongue comes into the corner of her mouth.
    Bigelow forgets his broken bootlace and follows her out