Simon, 1971

Only days after graduating high school, another tragedy hit our village, this time the death of my best friend, Justus. There was family all around me, though many days I woke overwhelmed with loneliness. Grief was a perpetual storm.

The day after Justus’s fall from the dike, everyone came out to help. Tommy, Jimbo, Gerard, even some of the elders. All the kids, and the women. Everyone dropped what they were doing, and we took turns searching and sleeping. Night and day, we searched, walking up- and downriver and running skiffs in both directions.

Horsepower was plentiful. I had my dad’s twenty-horse kicker. The river was muddy brown with silt. Several of the men made drag hooks and pulled up stuff that had been lost for ages: tangled nets, old cables, boots, and beat-up coolers. We found nothing that belonged to him. The junk and clunk of our storied lives were dredged up, but we couldn’t find the one precious thing we were looking for. We were determined to find him before winter turned the river into an ice highway.

I couldn’t sleep. When I wasn’t out searching, I took turns staying with Justus’s sister, Pearlena, and her family twenty-four hours a day. The women rotated cooking meals: big pots of fish stew, pies, and fry bread. Some of us camped out on the floor at their house so they were never left alone. Other nights we dragged our sleeping bags down to the beach and watched clouds sway across the sky like wind-blown tents. This went on the whole summer. Watching, searching, holding our breaths.

One gray afternoon, sitting on the beach, I thought I saw Justus walking toward me. He stopped and cocked his head to one side as if he were listening really hard, trying to locate an animal in the brush, like he did when we were hunting. My body stiffened, waiting for what would happen next. Then the motion, the energy that was him disappeared, and the vision left me shaking, my nerves damp and cold as a musty cellar.

It was near 9 pm on a cool night in August when we found him. We saw what looked like a water snag sticking up, like a reed that vibrates in the current. It was moving and a piece of blue fabric was attached, from a shirt, maybe, or a jacket. I rammed my boat into the bank. Gerard and Tommy were right behind me, and from downriver a couple other guys fought the current and motored up. Tommy lowered a dragline inches from the snag, and the rest of us took hold of the rope and tugged. It only took a couple tries. “Jesus,” Gerard uttered as we pulled the heavy corpse up from the sucking water. He turned it over in the sand.

“We got him.” I could hardly stand to look at him. The flesh on his face was missing in strips, and bones burst through his shale-colored skin. The body was unrecognizable, the skin blistered and greenish-black. His ears and nose were packed with mud. Both boots were gone. His hands were swollen and wrinkled, his arms and legs cocked at odd angles.

Was it him? I didn’t want to believe it. Not like this. Were there scars on his arms from childhood bumps and scrapes? Patches of skin? Moles? Was there a chip on his front tooth where he banged himself on a beer bottle one night? Of course it was him. No one else had gone missing. I scanned the horrid body and turned away for a moment, throwing up bile. With the heel of my hand, I wiped the mud from his belt buckle. My skin prickled and instantly I became totally focused.

He was wearing the silver belt buckle I gave him for Christmas when we were just twelve years old. I had cut and stamped it in our metals shop class. The buckle had curlicues around the edges, and in the middle were his initials, JP, for Justus Paul, in big capital letters. With that, a sickening thought crossed my mind. At least his body had sunk. At least his body wasn’t eaten by wolves and gulls.

I shivered as the rush of our lives moved through me, and in that moment felt fragile as a newborn. We were like twins of different mothers, together all the time, and now he was gone. Just gone. We’d been best friends since kindergarten, maybe even sooner when you factor in the gathering of our families at fish camp.

Summer would never come soon enough for us in those days. We practically lived in the woods, dragging sticks for campfires. We built elaborate forts out of spruce limbs and chased rabbits into the underbrush. With care we followed the tracks of roaming bears. We called our fish camp Red River, as there would be so many sockeyes fighting their way upriver, you could practically walk atop them, like walking across a bridge. Their silver bodies glistened in the bright summer light, and their meat was red as rubies. At the end of each day we listened to the elders tell stories about the fish. How the fish had a compass inside, and by smelling the water they would swim to the exact place where they were first born to lay their eggs.

The adults and bigger kids pulled fish in by the hour. Fish-cutting tables lined the beach, and long strings of guts were tossed into the river, making the ravens and gulls fight like crazy over the scraps. My sisters cut the fish into long, narrow strips, dipped them into salt-water brine, and hung them on drying racks under a tented tarp. A few days later, us boys helped move them into the smokehouse to fully dry them out. My dad taught us how to start an alder fire when we were pretty young. It was our job to keep an eye on the fire so it stayed constantly burning. “You let the fire burn out, boys?” He could tell by the taste and texture of the fish if we’d been slacking on the job. Later, when Justus and I were older, we built smoky fires around the perimeter of camp to keep the mosquitoes at bay. We got pretty darn good at fire-making.

There was always work to be done, but these jobs were meted out slowly over the years so it never felt like so much work. It was our family’s way of being a part of everything. My best memories are those times when all the human sounds quieted and coyote sounds took their place. Summertime the northern sky never turned dark, and since what you’d think of as nighttime never really came, we weren’t told when to go to bed. Instead we slept whenever we were tired, no matter what the clocks had to say.

***

The funeral was held a few days after we found him. A couple of the men built a plain pine coffin, and the women lined it with a colorful fabric. Perfumed candles flamed in the window as people arrived, bringing food and prayers to the Paul family.

Father Gene stood prayerfully next to the closed coffin, dousing it with holy water as mourners gathered around card tables to eat. People spoke in whispers. Laughter sputtered out now and then from the little kids. They banged around, spilling into the kitchen or out the front door. People sniffled and cried and looked at each other with sad, empty faces.

“Simon.” Randy called me from across the room. He was standing next to Po, who was holding a bouquet of droopy fireweed blooms.

“Um. I heard.” He shifted his weight and straightened. “How you guys, um, found him.” Randy looked me in the eye, then shifted his gaze outside. A tense wind rose up, thin branches scraping at the windows. He asked lots of questions that I wasn’t in the mood to answer or was in too much shock to remember. Po stood there, silent.

Had Randy and Po stayed later that night, maybe things would have turned out different. Maybe me and Justus wouldn’t have fought so hard, our argument swelling into hostile waves of spitting and swearing. Maybe all three of us could have been faulted for not stopping Justus from going in. All three of us. Not just me.

“Yeah. Well, it’s done.” I didn’t know what else to say.

The room smelled of cheap candles and sweat. People kept coming and going, and the walls seemed to breathe in and out with everyone’s sorrow. I couldn’t eat or approach a discussion with anyone, least of all with Randy and Po.

But Randy locked eyes with me again and wouldn’t let go.

“Did you hear? About last night? A couple girls were out on the dike, messing around, throwing stones in the river. They found a backpack that belonged to Justus, tossed in the alder bushes.”

A massive headache began to brew behind my eyes.

“Inside the pack were rocks heavy enough to weigh a person down.” I turned away from Randy and searched for Pearlena. She was standing on one leg with her shoulders pressed against the wall and her other foot set deeply against her opposite knee. The sharp sun, the way it angled through the window, made her silhouette look like a heron standing on one leg in a bog. We caught each other’s eye, and as I headed for the front door, she slipped on her mud boots and followed me. We had time to kill before the church service and walked along an old game trail in the woods.

“You were his rock, you know,” I said. The wind was still howling, whirling brittle leaves at our feet. “Sticking up for him when he got picked on.”

Pearlena was strong. Braver than most. She took care of the younger kids, getting them up for school, washing their faces, making sure they had breakfast. She helped her dad patch the family back together again, stitch by stitch, after her mother flew off to Fairbanks one day and never came back. Cancer treatments worked until they didn’t. We’d all had enough tragedy to last a lifetime, but Pearlena weathered it better than most.

I think what helped pull her through back then was school. In the classroom there was a sense of order and purpose. There was precision in the way one thing followed another. I’m sure that was part of it, though it’s hard to say exactly what saves people from themselves. The tundra saved me, I know that for sure, but God saved Pearl. She never missed church and loved all the hymns. One glad morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away. To a land where joy shall never end, I’ll fly away. Church and singing and school and God saved her. Deeper than that, it’s a fact that certain people are born to walk through this life with more fierceness and valor than others. Pearlena was one of those people.

“Yeah. You took care of him too, Simon.” Pearlena shook her head. “He was such a gentle kid. His heart so tender. His eyes would water up if you looked at him funny.” We shared a knee-jerk laugh, then didn’t speak much the rest of the afternoon. Our grief was so deep, there was nothing much left to say.

***

Walking the long boardwalk to the church, I felt as if I were pulling a weighted sled behind me. Pearlena and I stopped several times to let four-wheelers with entire families piled on pass us by. Overgrown alders cocooned the boardwalk, and mosquitoes swarmed up in the thick warm air.

We stepped inside. The coffin took center stage on the altar. Most of the young men stood; the elders sat in chairs in the back, while mothers and kids crowded the pews up front.

“May the Holy Spirit gift us with understanding that Justus’s troubles are now over,” Father Gene said, his eyes locked on the congregation. “May Jesus care for his soul and grant his earthly sins be wiped clean.”

Because I knew Justus better than anyone—at least I thought I did—I knew he was good to the core. I was happy Father Gene forgave Justus’s sins and launched his spirit to Heaven. I was happy his troubled soul would now gain entry to paradise, even though his particular paradise was not in the arms of a phantom god but in the singing wind, the soft tundra, the rushing waters of a cold, fast river.

“When we die,” Father Gene said, “we enter a terrifying place. An unknown realm that only Jesus Christ can rescue us from. Justus will enter the kingdom of paradise, where a better world awaits him beyond the flesh.” I was uplifted by Father Gene’s words even though I didn’t fully understand them. A golden gate that swings open to paradise did him equal justice, though, and I decided not to give it any more thought than that.

When the prayers were done, all of us, led by Father Gene, filed past the coffin one by one, kissing the pinewood or laying a hand on it with whispered prayers and bowed heads. I stopped and the line bunched up behind me. For a couple long minutes, I couldn’t pull my hand away, couldn’t let him go. Pearl clutched my arm and gently pulled it toward her, folding my hand in hers.

It was 4 pm by the time we got the coffin to the gravesite. Crosses on old graves listed in the spongy tundra. We picked up shovelfuls of dirt and threw handfuls onto the grave. More prayers. Then chicken wire with plastic flowers was stretched over the mound, and a cross was set on top, moored by large rocks.

Justus’s dad put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

“Here.” He opened his hand. “You should have this.”

“Thank you, Moses.” I put the belt buckle in my pocket. We turned away from the cross that stood tall with the words Our Beloved Boy, Justus Paul and walked the dirt road home.