Under Nushagak Bluff - Mia Heavener

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brought cheese and offered to work with the elders. They did this so they could teach the way to heaven through the elders. Most were happy to learn, happy to sit down and eat new foods with bleached flour and sugar. But because she had lived with missionaries as a child, Marulia saw through Frederik and Nora and waited for them to scold the villagers as if they were children. Waited for them to demand an end to potlatches and ivory carvings.

      “He’s supposed to go fishing soon,” Anne Girl said. She rinsed mud from the gills and fins, before plopping the salmon onto the table. He was supposed to leave at the next high tide, but part of Anne Girl hoped he would change his mind.

      He was a storyteller. Anne Girl wanted to share that with her mom, because if anyone understood a good story it was Marulia. Yet his stories were written in a different color than the silty green of the bay, and Anne Girl found herself thinking about them long after they parted ways on the beach. Steamships, Norway, trapping, Canada—they were words, yet he made them real and separate from the endless bluff that were her days. Anne Girl couldn’t explain it, especially to her mother when she was holding a knife.

      The older woman huffed. Sweat had gathered around her neck and trickled down her back as she cut the meat. She wanted to warn Anne Girl that she never mixed with the fishermen and hunters who used the village as a pit stop. Most of the time they took what they wanted, but never stayed long enough to see who gave it to them. Kass’aqs only meant trouble when the fish came. They always smelled like booze and dirtied the village, especially after a good fishing season. Too much money in the bay made smelly, hungry men and babies. She didn’t have time for that, and she didn’t want Anne Girl to mix with them. But Marulia was silent for another reason. She felt this was her last summer. The pain in her gut had grown stronger, and it took all her strength to put up these strips with her daughter. Soon Anne Girl would be alone.

      “I loved a kass’aq once. But he flew away.” Marulia grunted as she scraped the darkest blood of the salmon from its spine.

      Anne Girl raised her eyebrows. She had only seen a plane a few times in her life, and she doubted her mother had seen as many planes, much less known someone who flew. Flying in Bristol Bay was new, and the whole village stopped and ran to the beach when a plane was circling the bluff. Whatever man her mom was talking about could not be a pilot. “Nah, you joke. There’s not even a place for planes to land here.”

      “Kita.” Marulia handed Anne Girl the bloodless fish. “You going to change my story? Now, I loved a kass’aq once. He was pink like this meat and licked his lips to keep the cold from biting them. He fished better than your John too. We fished together, and when the bay dried up and all we caught was flounders and jellyfish, he stretched his arms up”—Marulia motioned with her hands, raising her bloodied fingers in the air—“and left.”

      That’s what Anne Girl loved about her mother—how she held her hands above everything and said what she thought people needed to know. But despite her mother’s warnings, Anne Girl liked the fact that this blue-eyed man, who claimed to be a fisherman, didn’t know the difference between a king and a silver. Or that he didn’t know which flounders were good to eat and which ones were tough on the teeth. But she loved that he tried. He didn’t know it yet, but she would make him fish good.

      “It’s time you find a man though,” Marulia said. She sucked in air to catch her breath. “What are you—twenty already? Going to dry out soon, you know. What are you waiting for?”

      “For a tall Norwegian, maybe like your pilot,” Anne Girl answered. She flung two slabs onto the table. She felt the tension rise in her throat and debated whether to admit her feelings about John. His name was forming on her lips until she looked at her mother. Marulia’s head was bent down in concentration, taking large gulps of air as she tried to split the fish. Anne Girl couldn’t. Now wasn’t the time.

      At the end of the summer, when the last of the fishermen pulled up their nets and returned to civilization in the States, John’s boat was still sideways with its bow pointing toward the peaks across the bay. Anne Girl had shrugged and said, “Hell, you might as well stay. But I better not have to ask Amos or Gil to push it off.” John smiled and promised that the sailboat wouldn’t be a problem ever again, that he wished he never saw the damn thing. “You going to the chapel this week? I’ll be there.”

      The question caught Anne Girl off guard. He hadn’t seemed like the type to advertise the missionaries. She was disappointed and wondered if he was going to say something about being saved. Even some villagers on the bluff tried to corner Anne Girl and her mom. They would say that the women needed to get ready for salvation and Marulia would retort that she needed to put up fish for winter, and that they better steer clear of her. And yet they always returned. It burned Marulia, who would mutter in a nasally voice, “This is right—that’s wrong. Always something!” Out of respect for her mother, Anne Girl kept to herself. But it even bothered her when Nora first came around, urging her to go to chapel. She was tired of being tracked down and cornered—first the villagers, then Nora, and now John. Anne Girl swallowed and told herself that if she had to, she would suffer splinters on those hard, wooden benches if it meant she could sit next to John for an hour. No one said she had to listen. Two hours would be pushing it, though.

      Four

      Although her mother gave her long, tired glances, Anne Girl secretly met with John. They walked up and down the beach, creating a space for themselves between the cannery and the bluff side of the village as they searched for new paths when the tide was high. John told different types of stories, ones that filled Anne Girl’s head with black and white images, like those she saw printed in the Life magazines at the cannery store. Her favorites were the summer covers that usually showed a girl in a fitted swimsuit with bare shoulders looking out to the ocean. It made her laugh to think of herself in such a getup, trying to pick fish. Yet, the images always fascinated her, and she pictured them when she talked to John. She saw them in his words when he described his home and family in Seattle. And the more John talked, the easier it became to fit herself into his stories as if she came from the same roots. He was Norwegian, with a grandfather as old as the canneries and straight from Norway. John didn’t have to tell that story twice. Even with his soft hands, she knew that Norwegians were workers. That’s what every village woman on the bluff said. The cannery was built by Norwegian and Swedish hands. You can’t let a worker go, even if he doesn’t know what he is doing. Even Marulia couldn’t disagree with that. Yet, Anne Girl wondered why someone who traveled so far would decide to remain in her village, where the winter quiet becomes hungry and you have to yell just so you know that your voice still works.

      They walked toward the cannery and onto the boardwalk where the buildings loomed from on top of wooden decking. The cannery had shut down weeks ago, and there was a new stillness in this part of the town. Although all of the windows were boarded up and the doors locked, she could feel the echoes of the cans of salmon being steamed shut. She could hear the seagulls fighting for the last bits of gills.

      “You’re quiet today.”

      Anne Girl nodded and took John’s hand. Before she had left the house, she had helped her mom into bed and pulled the covers up to her chest. Marulia told her to bury her on high ground and to make sure all of her clothes were burned. She had made Anne Girl promise to marry a fisherman, someone who knew how to mend nets with one hand. Until that moment, they hadn’t mentioned death before, and Anne Girl had found herself without a response. She nodded and moved to put more wood in the stove, because her mother continued to repeat that it was too cold.

      “The temperature dropped in the last few days. It’s going to be a cold winter,” Anne Girl told John. “Did you see how fast the berries came this summer? I couldn’t pick them quick enough. They were falling into my bucket. Just so you know, my kass’aq, when the berries ripen early, then everything shifts.” Anne Girl motioned with her hands, moving them side to side.

      “Yeah, that’s what Frederik says. He says you haven’t had a really deep freeze in a long while.”

      Clearing her throat, Anne Girl pulled John toward the boat house. “He always says that. He hasn’t been here long

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