What Auntie Helen Said About the Plague

May 29

by Robert Kinerk

My mother’s cousin Clara married a guy named Danny. When she got mad at him, she’d call him a dumb Indian. She said she could say that because she was Indian, too. They had come to Boon from their village, Timkwan, so they could stay with us while Clara got radiation for her head. My mom made me give them my bedroom.

Teenagers – I was a teenager then – are not happy to be made to move to the living-room couch for people they hardly know. When I complained my mother said, “Speak softer,” and then, speaking softly herself, she said, “It’s only for a little while, Janice.” That didn’t shut me up. It was my father who finally told me he had heard enough. No one could say ‘dumb Indian’ in front of my father because he was not Indian. He was Norwegian, and it pained him more to hear that insult than it pained us Natives in the family.

I was in trouble already that year, my senior year, because I had copied answers on the final test in my American Government class off the paper of my friend Arlene. Mr. Olson, the teacher, said I deserved an F, and if he gave me an F I wouldn’t graduate. Pacific Lutheran University had already accepted me but my dad said he wouldn’t send money until I had my diploma in my hand.

Mr. Olson also told Arlene she should get an F. Both of us cried so much he said we could do a special summer project and he would work that grade into the final grades he gave us.

“What summer project?” Arlene asked.

“A book report or an oral-history project,” Mr. Olson told us.

“How long does the book have to be?” Arlene asked.

I wish she hadn’t asked that because it made Mr. Olson mad. Right away, without even thinking, he told us, “The book has to be at least five-hundred pages.”

When he saw how sad we looked he said ordinarily he wouldn’t make an exception for students who cheated but because this was the year the territory would vote on statehood it would be appropriate for us to study our history and remind ourselves of our traditions.

“You don’t really have to read the book,” Arlene told me later. “You can make stuff up.”

“What’s an oral-history project?” I asked.

“You talk to old people and write down what they say,” she told me.

As soon as she said that I decided that’s what I’d do because I didn’t want to read five-hundred pages, and I couldn’t make things up the way Arlene could.

All this was before Clara and Danny moved in. Once they’d come it was hard to concentrate because everytime I tried to think of someone I could interview Clara would holler about the tumor in her head.

“Ask Reverend Gibbons,” my mother told me. “He knows everybody. He’ll know who to interview.”

Rev. Campbell Gibbons came every Thursday to pray with Clara and to eat my mother’s lemon chiffon pie. He came in sniffing with his pink nose to catch the pie smell before he bustled into what used to be my bedroom. His greeting to Clara was always the same: “How’s my favorite girl doing?”

My father called Rev. Gibbons ‘Chuckles’ until my mother made him stop. She said he was teaching me irreverence.

The next time I heard the cheerful minister praying in the room that used to be mine I told my mom, “I’m not asking him anything.”

My mother had put on the coffee – another feature in the post-prayer treat for Rev. Gibbons. She said if I wanted to get an F in American Government that would be my business.

I said I didn’t want an F.

“Well, then,” she said, and she started setting out pie plates and napkins while Rev. Gibbons, who must have smelled the coffee, hurried through his prayer.

She put an extra setting on the table for Danny, who didn’t take part in the cheerful prayers but who was more or less around because in our house there weren’t many places he could go to get away. He listened while I explained to Rev. Gibbons about my history project, and when our visitor pressed his napkin to his lips Danny did the same, a kind of sympathetic echo of what he’d seen the Reverend do.

Reverend Gibbons gulped down the last of his pie. “You must talk to Jens Vick,” he said. “Jens came around Cape Horn in a sailing ship. A cabin boy. Just barely fourteen. Imagine. All the waves and storms. Could be quite a story.”

He smiled at Danny as if he hoped Danny would say how interesting it would be to hear about a cabin boy on a sailing ship. Danny obliged only with a smile. He didn’t have any idea who this Jens Vick might be.

I knew who he was because the old man – the neighborhood called him Captain Vick – lived with his daughter at the bottom of our hill. His daughter still had a basketball that belonged to me. It had rolled into her yard when a dumb guy named Bailey tapped it out of bounds. I told my mom I wasn’t going to knock on her door and ask to interview her father because I knew she’d be crabby.

“Ask him when he comes to vote,” my mother said.

She had volunteered our house as a polling place for statehood. On the morning of voting I had to take all my sheets and blankets off the couch. I carried them to our closed-in back porch. Then Danny vacuumed in the living room while I dusted the windowsills. He and I put up card tables my mom had borrowed so people would have a place to sit with their ballots. Three other ladies came to help pass out ballots and check off names. During the voting I brought them coffee but Danny stayed in the bedroom to read to Clara. He said it would keep her mind off the voting noise.

Captain Vick, first thing after his daughter helped him up our front stairs, sat down on the couch with his trembling hands folded on his walking stick. Mrs. Frame, a voting helper, asked him, “Are you okay?” His daughter had to shout to tell him what to answer, then Clara yelled from the bedroom, “What’s going on?” Danny tried to hush her but she shouted again, this time to say she had a tumor on her brain.

Captain Vick, meanwhile, sat like he was a little boy waiting to be told what to do. His daughter handed him his ballot, then she stood hovering to watch him fill it out while my mom whispered to tell me to ask about Cape Horn.

I shook my head no. I didn’t want to have to shout, ‘What’s this about Cape Horn?’ to an old man too deaf to hear.

“Okay, then get an F.” my mom said.

I watched Captain Vick hand his ballot to his daughter. I heard his daughter shout to ask if he needed to go to the bathroom. He didn’t, and his daughter helped him stand and had just put his stick back in his hand when my mother pushed me in his path. “Ask,” she whispered.

I saw his daughter staring at me with an astonished expression, like I should get out of her father’s way. “Can you tell me how you came first to Alaska?” I asked the Captain.

I should have said, “. . . how you first came to Alaska . . .” but because I was nervous I said it backwards.

A dazed look came to the Captain’s face. His daughter turned and shouted in his ear. “She wants to know about the ship, papa. About the sailing ship. The boat.”

Everybody halted their voting to listen.

“Lars?” the old man said.

His daughter shook her head. “The ship. The sailing ship,” she yelled.

“The boat with Lars?” the old man asked in a frightened voice.

It turned out there had been another boat and something terrible had happened. A guy named Lars had jumped off it right before the eyes of Captain Vick.

“Lars took off his clothes,” the Captain whispered.

“Don’t say ‘. . . took off his clothes’,” Clara shouted from the bedroom. “Not in front of girls.”

What she said, naturally, made everyone turn to the Captain and pay more attention. His eyes filled up with tears.

“Not Lars, papa. The sailing ship,” his daughter shouted.

From the bedroom my aunt complained in a loud voice, “I’ve got a tumor in my head.”

I did not try, after that, to pursue my oral-history project by interviewing Captain Vick. A guy had drowned, which was terrible, but was it historic? It wasn’t like the Civil War or the Great Depression.

When my father came home from work – he was a lineman for the public utilities – I told him the Captain didn’t have anything historic to say.

“I’ve got lots of other places I can spend that Pacific Lutheran money,” my father said.

Then, while my mother finished up her voting duties, he made sandwiches and heated soup for him and me and Danny. Danny helped Clara walk to the bathroom and then helped her take a place at the table. Clara said she wouldn’t eat. All the shouting had given her a nervous stomach. She made Danny break off part of his sandwich, though, and she nibbled at the bread and lettuce part. When she had finished her first nibble and was dabbing her lips with a napkin, she asked who was shouting and why.

My dad explained about my oral-history project. He said it was too bad about Captain Vick because Cape Horn would definitely be historic. “Now we’ve got the Panama Canal,” he said. “No sailing ships.” He waved his sandwich like it rode ocean swells then he said to Danny, “You could tell about Timkwan.”

“Timkwan is not historic,” Clara said. “Nothing happened there.”

“Whatever’s old is history,” my dad said.

Danny sat in his slope-shouldered way, only fingering his sandwich. “The influenza epidemic,” he said.

“You were just a baby,” Clara told him. “Barely born.”

“Auntie Helen told me,” Danny answered.

Auntie Helen, at Timkwan, was someone they had known. She had died before I was born.

“That’s right,” Clara said. “Auntie Helen. Influenza. Epidemic.”

Then she took the rest of Danny’s sandwich, and in three or four big bites she ate it all. At that minute, Arlene called. She had handed in her book report and Mr. Olson was going to read it and tell her later what her grade would be. She said she didn’t care if she passed or not because she had a job in the Five and Ten Cent Store, and what did she have to know about history to sell key rings and tea cups?

“Did you do your oral-history?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I told her.

She said I only had a few more days.

I said everyone was always telling me I only had a few more days.

Arlene asked, “Who’s helping you?”

I said, “My mother’s cousin’s husband,” and because that sounded so stupid both of us laughed, but right then my mother said to get off the phone. It was time for her to call in the results of the voting.

The first thing I learned next morning was that statehood had won. My father, before he left for work, turned on the kitchen radio for the news. That’s what woke me up. Danny came to listen and later my mom did, too. We gathered around the radio and kept the sound low but still Clara yelled to turn it off. My dad left for work. Danny went back in the bedroom, but after a minute he came out and said, “Clara wants to tell you oral history, Janice.”

“Real history?” I asked.

My mother was listening. She said, “Shut up.”

When Danny went back in the bedroom, my mom carried a chair in after him. She came right out again and signaled me in her strictest way to come. Inside, I sat next to Clara’s bed, which was actually my bed, though I didn’t say anything. My mom came back with a spiral tablet and a pen. Clara, looking not at me but at the blank part of the wall, dictated in a flat, tired voice what I wrote down.

***

Auntie Helen’s recollection of the flu:

When Auntie Helen talked, she spoke of people I didn’t know, people named Victor and Dolores and Lina and Paul. She made mistakes in her English, like Victor was he and then he was she. She spoke of people she called ‘his husband’ or ‘her wife.’ I won’t say all that, all those mistakes. But I’ll tell you what she said about that awful flu.

When the influenza came to Timkwan, her mother and father and brother and niece all died. She said she had three children of her own to take care of but that she wanted to try to be the nurse to others in the village because there was no one in charge, only the Indian Agent. She said she had left her children in her house and gone to her brother’s house to help but he had called through the door, “No. Don’t come in. I’ve got the influenza. Go back home and stay there.”

She had gone home and tried to fix soup to send around to the houses of sick people but she saw no one on the street to take it anywhere. The Indian Agent came and told her the sickness would be very bad and that she must stay home and take care of her children. Later her brother came, a different brother, and said, “Well, sis, Anita is dead.” Anita was his daughter. After he left, she looked out her window and saw Daggett flying down the empty street. He stopped in front of Helen’s house. She heard him shout, “Your mother is dead.”

There was no time for people to go to funerals, and besides, there were no funerals. Guys would come and take the bodies away. This was in the springtime but there was still a lot of snow. It was impossible to bury people. The ground was still frozen and people died too fast. Auntie Helen said before the illness came a young man asleep, not in his father’s house but in another person’s house, suddenly waked up. He saw the door to the room where he slept thrown open. A stranger stood in the doorway, a man with his face all scarred as if it had been burned. The stranger’s wild hair reached almost to his waist. He took a knife from its sheath and swept it around toward all the rooms with sleeping people in them. He said to the waked-up man, “Your name is written on this,” and then he disappeared.

The man went home to be with his father. Next day his throat felt sore. He knew he had the influenza and after that, death went from house to house, claiming from each family mostly one, but from some families two or three or four.

* * *

After Clara had said the part about the stranger with his face all scarred, I stopped writing. When she finished her story, she glanced at me. Her glance told me I had hurt her feelings by not writing all her story down.

“There’s part’s not true, Auntie.”

I said that to defend myself. I couldn’t bring an oral history to Mr. Olson with part of it that said a stranger with a burned-looking face had waved a knife around.

Clara didn’t like it when someone contradicted her. I thought she’d yell, so I kept fiddling with the spiral on my notebook, as if it might unwind itself and all my pages would fly loose.

No sound came from what had been my bed for such a long time I finally worked my nerve up to steal a peek at Auntie Clara on her propped-up pillows.

She clearly wasn’t mad at me. She was crying, though.