in Birdie’s chest. She willed herself to relax with each breath. Sascha was nowhere to be seen. Jolene was okay, for now.
The door prizes were good enough this time they’d had to set up two rows of plastic chairs in front of the bleachers to hold everybody. The village council offered three chances to win: ten gallons of gasoline, fifteen gallons of fuel oil, or a fifty-dollar credit at the village store. Many in the audience attempted to cool themselves with cardboard fans, made from the navy-blue boxes of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread. They put up with the stuffy auditorium air and uncomfortable seating in hopes of winning the gas for their ATVs or snow machines. At over seven dollars a gallon, it was by far the best of the three prizes. The fuel oil was second, and the store credit was nothing to sneeze at. Fifty bucks didn’t go far in bush Alaska. Ajar of peanut butter was twenty-two dollars. But free food was free food, even if you could carry fifty bucks’ worth home under one arm.
Her panic gradually subsiding, Birdie glanced at the others sitting with her before she closed her eyes again. She’d known them all since she was a child and called them auntie or uncle.
Martin Jimmy was on his feet behind a microphone at the end of the table, engaged in one of his notoriously long prayers in the Yup’ik language. Even the people with their eyes open pretended they were pious enough to enjoy it, but Birdie could hear the shuffling in the bleachers as people began to wish he would wind it down. The twelve teachers at Stone Cross school sat in chairs to the side of the gym under the basketball hoop. They were part of the community, so Birdie wanted them at the meeting. None of them spoke Yup’ik, so this was five minutes of phlegmy, wet-mouthed gibberish to their ears. Too bad, Birdie thought. It was actually a pretty good prayer.
Martin Jimmy’s voice finally reached the crescendo that was his customary sign-off to the Holy Trinity.
The city secretary, Ethyl Kipnuk, scooted back her plastic chair and stood to brief the attendees about the upcoming visit of a federal judge. He was to help them decide a dispute over who owned a spit of land out by the airport—the residents of the city, which included everyone under the age of fifty, or the Native nonprofit shareholders who were alive in 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed. The land’s location made it worth a great deal of money and the disagreement over who owned it was no small cause for concern, even among individual families.
Several people wanted to make their cases in this forum. Kipnuk listened respectfully, for that was the Yup’ik way, but when the opportunity arose, she reminded everyone that the judge was coming for that purpose. Some groused about him coming to the village at all. Birdie couldn’t help but agree.
Representatives of the federal government didn’t have a great reputation for looking after the best interests of bush Alaska. Mistrust of gussaks—white people—in general ran deep in the Native community. Most of the teachers were gussaks. Newbies were not trusted. The priest, Father Nicolai, was white. He was married to a Yup’ik woman and they’d been in Stone Cross since Birdie was a child. Though not exactly revered, he was more than tolerated. The ones like Aften and Bobby Brooks, who’d returned to teach for three years running, even after experiencing firsthand the difficulties of life in a bush village, they fell somewhere in between.
The city secretary reminded everyone that they were just a week away from the forty-day memorial service for Lyle Skinner, a sweet seventeen-year-old boy, as bright as Birdie had ever seen, who had shot himself over a girl from downriver. Like most in Stone Cross, the Skinners were Eastern Orthodox. Forty days from his death, his spirit could finally quit wandering. His family could lock their house if they wanted to—though few did out here—and turn off the light in Lyle Skinner’s room. They would take down the spruce branches they’d placed over the door so the departed could more easily find his way home if he wanted to stop by. They could now decorate his grave. They could stop mourning; though, from the look of his poor mother, Birdie doubted if that would be the case after four hundred days, let alone forty. The gym fell silent. Nervous coughs