his mom and dad added onto again, then transformed into a real house in the Seventies. The house Kache grew up in and loved and the only place he ever called home. Reduced to a pile of moldy logs.
He guessed that when he got out to the homestead it would be dark. The days were already starting to get longer and in less than a month would go on until midnight, though that didn’t help him now. He had no idea if the moon would show up full or a sliver, waxing or waning. Yes, he knew the DIY network lineup by heart but he’d lost track of the night sky long ago. He reached under the seat for the flashlight he figured Snag would have stowed there and set it next to him. Plenty of gas—he’d filled it that afternoon, so he’d make it out and back with some to spare.
Keeping an eye out for moose, he drove the first part of the road, the paved part, fast. Here the houses stood close enough to see each other, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across six miles of Kachemak Bay.
Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school, when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he’d insisted on—pronounced simply catch—the kids adding Bay onto the end of it. Then in high school, the girls blushing and calling him What a Kache, asking him if he would write a song for them. Or the boys throwing balls of any type his way and saying Here, Kache, followed by You can’t! Kache!, which was absolutely correct.
At first his mom told him they named him for the bay because it was the most beautiful bay she’d ever seen and he was the most beautiful baby she’d ever laid eyes on. Whenever Denny protested, she’d laugh and say, “Den, I won’t lie to you. You had the sweetest little squished-up turnip face. Fortunately, you grew into your dashingly handsome self.”
Later, when Kache was sixteen and his father decided he was old enough to be let in on a secret, he told Kache that was all true, but there was more. Kache was conceived, his father said, grinning, in the fishing boat on the bay. The sun had been warm and the fishing slow—both rarities for Alaska. “Proved to be a fruitful combination, heh?” He slapped Kache on the back so hard it about knocked him over. “Denny, of course, was conceived on a camping trip to Denali.” Kache had told his dad that he didn’t need quite that much information, thank you very much.
He hit a pothole and mud splattered on the hood and windshield. Kache knew the house was probably too far out of the way and too well hidden for anyone to stumble upon. Old Believers wouldn’t want anything to do with a house outside their village, and the deepest cut of canyon on the whole peninsula added an uncrossable deterrent. Nobody with a brain would descend that canyon. The one other access besides their five-mile private road was by the beach, and only during the lowest tides. Most likely, the house stood its ground against the snow and rain and wind until the chinking filled like sponges, the roof turned to cheesecloth, the furniture rotted with moss, all his mother’s books … All those books. His mom’s paintings and her quilts and the photographs. The photographs he had never wanted, now he wanted them, even the blurry black-and-white ones he’d taken when he was five, when he’d snapped a whole roll of film with Denny’s new camera, and Denny had threatened to strangle him.
Damn it, Aunt Snag.
Where you been? Where you been?
Damn it yourself, Winkel. He hit the steering wheel, pulled on the lights, leaned forward as if that would make him get there faster.
The road turned to dirt—mud this time of year. A plastic bottle of Advil lodged between the seats rattled on and on. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.
No turning around now; the pull grew stronger, magnetic.
He wasn’t the first one to leave and get pulled back. In the mid-Sixties, even his dad couldn’t wait to get away, had gone off to Vietnam in a huff of rebellion mixed with a desperation to see someone other than the all-too-familiar faces in Caboose, Alaska. But he returned with a deep disdain for the World Out There. In a few short, horrific years, he said, he’d learned a lifetime of lessons about human nature and wasn’t interested in learning more.
“I’ll take plain old nature with a minimum of the human element, thank you,” he was fond of saying.
But then he’d met Bets, and she restored his faith in humankind, or at least in womankind, and instead of the life he’d planned as a hermit bachelor, he became a family man. Still, he answered to no one (except, it was a known fact, Bets) and lived off the sea and the land for the most part, earning a decent living as a fisherman. They’d been able to transform the cabin into a real house, with huge windows facing the bay and Kenai Mountains. Bets had eased him into one compromise after the other over the years, first with a generator, and then, once Caboose Electric Association extended their service, real electricity, although they never did have central heating. She’d confided to Kache that it was next on her list, right before the Cessna crashed.
It made sense for homesteaders, like all farmers, to have large families to help with the work. But Lettie and A.R., and later Bets and Glenn, had only had two children. Fortunately, Denny, like his father Glenn before him, was able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had a hard time hiding just how much Kache let him down on a daily basis.
A bull moose plunged through the spruce trees, and Kache slowed to a stop and let it cross in front of him. Its long legs navigated the mud with each step before it disappeared into the alder bushes. Kache drove on and turned down their private road to the homestead. But he quickly pulled over. “Road” was an optimistic term. A churned up pathway of sludge obstructed by downed spruce and birch trunks and overgrown alders was more like it. He grabbed the flashlight, which was also optimistic, the light dim, the battery exhausted. Aunt Snag knew to keep the battery fresh, but Kache should have checked it before he left. He didn’t want to walk in the dark through moose and bear country at the onset of spring when the animals experienced the boldest of hunger pangs.
His cellphone was useless; no service. He should turn back. Get in the car and head into town and return tomorrow. But his dad, his mom, Denny—they seemed so close: a slap on his back, an arm around his shoulders, as certain as the cold on his feet, and he shivered from both. He smelled the fire from their woodstove, as if they kept it burning all these years. All around him they said his name in all its variations and tones, so achingly clear: “Kache, honey?” “Oh, Kaa-achemak, there’s my Widdle Brodder …” “Did you hear me, Son? Pay attention.” He heard their snow machines, though there wasn’t any snow, though there wasn’t any them. He didn’t believe in heaven, exactly, but this place was thick with recollections and maybe something more. If their spirits watched him, somehow, from somewhere, didn’t he want to prove he had become capable of more than any of them thought possible? But had he? No. A city boy number-cruncher-turned-couch-potato who wore pretty boots and forgot a decent flashlight would hardly invoke awe. Still. If they were waiting, they’d been waiting twenty years and he didn’t want to make them wait another day.
He made his way through the mud, tripping, sinking, until the full moon rose from behind the mountains. Like a helpful neighbor in the nick of time, it shined its generous gold light through the cobalt sky. A wolf howled, holding a single lonely note in the distance. The scent of spruce and mud and sea kept dredging up the imagined hint of smoke. All those scents had always come together here. Even in the summers, a fire burned in the woodstove.
Now Kache spotted the downed trees clearly without the flashlight, and he walked as quickly as his mud-soaked city boy boots would allow—until the last bend, where he stopped and readied himself for what lay ahead.
It
