“No, no, dear. Just thinking aloud.”
When Harriet turns back to Bernard, he’s gone, disappeared into thin air.
Caroline stoops to pick Bernard’s rolled-up newspaper off of the floor, tossing it absently on the coffee table. “Maybe Ketchikan is too much, Mom. Maybe we should just stay aboard tomorrow, watch some movies, order room service.”
“Heavens, no,” says Harriet. “I wouldn’t hear of it. It’s our last stop, dear.”
July 4, 1938 (HARRIET AT ONE)
My, but how we’ve grown, Harriet! To think, from a scrawny six pounds and change, we’re now officially off the charts at twenty months. Our neck disappeared at three months. Our arms and legs ballooned. When we smile, we have more chins than teeth.
Everybody expected us to start thinning out after our first birthday, once we started walking. But we still look as though we’ve got rubber bands around our wrists and ankles. Our mother calls us “Little Piggy” even as she foists another formula bottle full of powdered milk and Karo syrup on us. She may as well be injecting it into our thighs. We yearn for real food, but for reasons we will never understand, our mother forever pushes the bottle on us.
Our father adores us, every ounce. Not without pride, he characterizes us as his “little bruiser.”
Ample. Substantial. Tubby. All words used to describe our one-and-a-half-year-old personage. Quiet, of course, is another.
No, we’ve still yet to utter a sound, Harriet, beyond the occasional yelp, sniffle, or burp. What are we waiting for? Nobody’s expecting sentences, Little Piggy. A few grunts would suffice, even some crying would be a welcome development. While nobody can fault us for our stoicism, they’d like to know that we’re at least capable of utterance.
Speak, Harriet, it’s in your best interest!
A simple “Help!” might have come in handy on that fateful Fourth of July 1938 as friends and family of Nathan, Montgomery, Ferris, and Fitzsimmons gather to celebrate American independence.
Look at us, Harriet, squatting beneath a picnic table at Volunteer Park, staring at our mother’s swollen ankles, inhaling the blue smoke of the barbecue, and listening to the muffled laughter of other children as a greedy bite of frankfurter, scavenged from beneath the table, lodges itself in our esophagus.
Silently, we panic as our eyes bulge from their sockets.
Quietly we gasp for dear life as the inky black ghosts crowd our vision. This is it, Harriet. Say something! Speak, child!
Okay, the truth is, we couldn’t have made a sound if we wanted to, not with that hot dog wedged in our gullet.
Consider us lucky, Harriet.
Our frantic kicks alert the second-nearest adult, who finding us bug-eyed and blue at his feet, pulls us out, and promptly executes his version of the Heimlich maneuver. In dislodging the offending sausage, he inadvertently breaks two of our ribs, a fact that will not be discovered until late the following afternoon when the bruising becomes impossible to ignore.
Still, he saved our life, Charlie Fitzsimmons. Not that we owe him anything. I mean, it’s only one life.
But let’s not dwell on debts, Harriet. Instead, let’s talk about the moment, that instant when we leave our body, when we feel our mother’s legs, the grass, and the whole world begin to recede, as though down a dark vortex. Let’s talk about that millisecond of instinct, that invisible force that seizes us, body and soul, and pulls us back into the world, just as sure as Uncle Charlie drags us out from under the table by the ankles.
That invisible force, that was you, Harriet, that was us, before we parted ways, wanting to live.
August 25, 2015 (HARRIET AT SEVENTY-EIGHT)
It’s sixty degrees and drizzling when Harriet, Caroline, and Kurt disembark in the bustling port of Ketchikan, the cruise’s final scheduled stop. According to the pamphlets, this rain-battered hamlet of eight thousand is Alaska’s southeasternmost city and also its most densely populated. A working-class town smelling of barnacles and rust, wood rot, and diesel smoke, wet dog hair in heaters, and fish nets hung out to dry. Despite civic-minded efforts to splash some vibrant color about, there’s no disguising the town’s blimp gray underbelly.
Kurt guides Harriet’s wheelchair down along the piers, among the kiosks and buses and herds of grazing tourists. She’s found an unlikely new companion in Kurt Pickens. On the bus ride to the Saxman Native Village, he sits directly across the aisle from her, taking up two seats. Once again, he’s clean-shaven, and wearing a T-shirt (with sleeves, Harriet notes with satisfaction), announcing I’M A VIRGIN (BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT).
“Y’all are sure you don’t mind me tagging along now?”
“Why, dear, we invited you, didn’t we?” says Harriet.
The bus is an ancient charter with blistered paint, squeaky seats, and a clattering diesel engine. The tour guide, whom Harriet can barely hear over the din of the engine, though spirited and delightfully informative, has an unfortunately lazy s: “To the thouth, you’ll thee Printh Rupert Thound.”
Pressing her face to the window, Harriet gazes out as the creaky old charter hugs the fog-tattered narrows along a two-lane highway. She learns all about Ketchikan and Revillagigedo Islands, learns of the 150 inches of rain per year, the world-renown fishing, the defunct brothels and pulp mills, along with its protected forests and misty fiords. She learns about the Tlingit people, a matrilineal culture of clans, the People of the Tides, as they call themselves.
At the Saxman Village, the bus empties into a mist of rain, its cargo spreading out toward the Clan House and the gift shop and the grand totem poles, arranged in lines and half circles throughout the village. Kurt and Caroline take turns pushing Harriet from one pole to the next, where Kurt reads the placards aloud.
“How ’bout that? Says here inanimate objects were forbid den on totems — only living things could be portrayed. Seems to me, I seen one out near Pikeville with a hamburger on it, but I reckon it wasn’t Tlingit.”
The carvings are at turns playful and menacing, mischievous and somber. Harriet is particularly compelled by the stories they tell. The clan histories: Eagle and Raven and on down the line to Bear and Frog and Fox, Wolf and Beaver. The narratives of a people and the histories they cannot outrun. The inheritance of identity, committed to form, displayed for all the world to acknowledge. All the humiliations, tragedies, quarrels, debts, and shames bequeathed them through the unyielding cycle of generations. And other tellings, anecdotal by comparison: a birth, a wedding, a funeral. And on the edge of the village, away from the rest of the totems, a lone pole, faded and weather-beaten, telling the story of a child’s mysterious disappearance. For the second time in two days, Harriet intimates her impending death.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” says Caroline when she sees that Harriet’s eyes are misting over.
“It’s nothing, dear.”
Kurt clears his throat. “Well, think I’ll mosey on over to the gift shop.”
Harriet and Caroline watch him lumber off down the gravel path, Harriet wiping her eyes. Halfway there, Kurt turns and points up at the sky.
“Y’all see that?” he shouts.
A pair of bald eagles, maybe two hundred yards off, bank high and wide in the southern sky. Harriet and Caroline watch them arc to the east, then circle north into the wind until they glide westward, not fifty yards above the Clan House.
“They make it look easy,” says Harriet.
In the gift shop, Caroline parks her directly in front of an end-cap display of miniature totem poles, then drifts toward the racks of postcards. Kurt is in the far corner, thumbing through Native art. When no one is looking, pride insists that Harriet abandon her wheelchair and hobble outside, around the corner to the portable bathroom, which she’s relieved to find well maintained.