Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

"There," Auntie Vi said, pointing at Kate. "That! What they do!"

Kate, skewered by the finger, perceived that she was at fault, and found herself at something of a loss. "It only makes sense, Auntie," she said placatingly. "They have to ship the ore to market once they pull it out of the ground. That is the object of the exercise." She stripped the gloves from her hands and started toward the house. "Come inside. It's about time for lunch anyway."

"Grilled cheese!"

Kate grinned without turning around. "In your dreams, kid. Moose liver pate if you're lucky."

Johnny made gagging noises beneath the hood. Mutt departed in search of her own lunch. Auntie Vi followed Kate up the stairs to the deck and into the house. It was still hard for Kate to accept that she had a deck, never mind a house. Both had been a gift of the Park, a product of a Park rat house raising, what, almost two years ago now. She and Johnny each had their own bathroom and bedroom, and what was most amazing of all, she had a refrigerator. And electricity. And a whole bunch of other stuff that even if she thought about it for too long didn't weigh her down as much as she thought it ought to.

Comfort could be corrupting, she thought darkly. What she didn't have was the log cabin her father had built on that same site, the one he had brought her mother home to nearly forty years before, the one she'd been conceived in, had been born in, had grown up in. That cabin had been burned to the ground by someone who had thought to solve all his problems by burning Kate alive. That Johnny had also been living there by then appeared not to have concerned him. He was now a guest of the state in a maximum security prison in Arizona, where Kate cordially hoped he was rotting slowly away, one putrefying limb at a time.

She made coffee and seated Auntie Vi at the table with a mug and cream and sugar, and busied herself with the makings for lunch. "Why are you so upset about this dock, Auntie?"

"Not dock." Auntie Vi looked up from her coffee and said with bitter emphasis, "Mine."

"The Suulutaq Mine?" One grilled cheese for her, half of one for Auntie Vi, and three for Johnny. "That's past praying for, Auntie. Global Harvest bought the leases fair and square from the state, and that's state land."

"We hunt there," Auntie Vi said fiercely. "We fish there." She surged to her feet and thumped her breast with one fist. "We live there!"

"They gave us most of Iqaluk in the settlement, Auntie. Just not that part."

"And you think they don't know that gold there when they did!"

"Well," Kate said. "This is the state of Alaska we're talking about here."

Auntie Vi took in a visible gulp of air, became aware that she was on her feet, and sat down again. "You see plans for this mine?"

Every Park rat with a post office box had gotten the flyer, and just in case they hadn't Global Harvest had blanketed every public place in every town and village in the Park as well, from the Club Bar in Cordova to the Niniltna School gym to the Costco in Ahtna. It was a glossy production, color pictures of salmon spawning in streams, moose browsing in lakes, and caribou calves frolicking in the foothills. There was a map of the proposed mine, fifteen miles square, a tiny gold-colored splotch crowded between grids and graphs of different colors denoting the borders of three federal parks, one state park, two national forests, three marine wildlife refuges, and four separate Native land allotments belonging to four different Native tribes. Towns and villages were dots on the landscape and the map's scale was too small to distinguish the minimal amounts of private property. It was an excellent way to illustrate just how small the acreage in question was.

On the flip side of the flyer, an attractive man displaying a perfect set of teeth in a friendly smile was identified as Global Harvest CEO Bruce O'Malley. Next to his head a conversational balloon quoted O'Malley as saying, "Global Harvest is fully committed to ensuring the healthy stocks of fish and wildlife and all the natural resources of the Iqaluk region so essential to the lives of the people who live there. The Suulutaq Mine can only succeed if Global Harvest Resources becomes a working partner with the people who live next door. We will apply the best available science and technology to ensure an environmentally friendly operation that will coexist with and within the community. Our employees will be drawn as much as possible from that community, and since most estimates have the Suulutaq Mine in operation for a minimum of twenty years, at minimum an entire generation, we expect the relationship to be long and profitable for everyone concerned."

"Yeah, I saw the flyer, Auntie," Kate said. She poured a dollop of olive oil into a hot frying pan and tossed in a chunk of butter after it, and assembled sandwiches made of homemade white bread buttered on both sides, slices of Tillamook Extra Sharp, and green chilies. When the butter melted, the first two hit the pan with a loud and aromatic sizzle. She went to the door, opened it, and yelled, "Lunch!"

"I don't like mine," Auntie Vi said.

She sat there, a round dumpling of rage and, Kate thought, some bewilderment. Auntie Vi had seen a lot of change in her eighty-plus years, and now more of it was bearing down on her like a freight train.

Other Alaskan villages had tribal councils. Some even had mayors and city assemblies. The Park had the four aunties. They were its backbone, its moral center, its royalty. They were all widows, Auntie Vi serially, four or, if Kate's suspicions were correct, possibly five times. They had all been born in the Park, and Auntie Vi was the only one who had ever been farther away from it than Anchorage. This was due to her third husband, an enthusiastic gambler who had introduced her to the illicit joys of one-armed bandits in Vegas before he keeled over of a heart attack after a successful run at the craps table.

The aunties knew the Park and they knew everyone in it chapter and verse, birth to death, white, black, Aleut, Athabascan, or Tlingit, male or female, old or young, married or single, gay or straight, atheist, agnostic, or born -again Christian. They could be found most nights at the Roadhouse, working on the most recent quilt and knocking back Bernie's Irish coffee in quantities that would have had anyone else facedown on the floor. They called it a quilting bee, but everyone else called it holding court. If a kid was a serial misbehaver, he or she was hauled before the aunties when the parents and the schoolteachers threw up their hands. If a husband was beating on his wife, as a last resort before calling in the trooper the wife could complain to the aunties, who would deputize the four Grosdidier brothers to haul him up in front of them. Since the four Grosdidier brothers were also Niniltna village's first responder EMT team, this solved the punishment and the 911 call afterward with neatness and dispatch. If someone let his dog team run wild, to the detriment of another neighbor's ptarmigan patch, and upon protest refused to restrain said team, the neighbor could complain to the aunties, one of whom was always related to the offender's mother and all four of whom had probably babysat him at one time or another.

A summons before the aunties was something no Park rat could ignore. As each individual case demanded, Auntie Joy would look sorrowful, Auntie Balasha would cry, Auntie Edna would glare, and Auntie Vi would fix the offender with a basilisk stare that, combined with the other three aunties' disapproval, generally reduced the Park rat with even the stiffest spine to a gibbering, knee-knocking wreck, sobbing their contrition and swearing on his or her negligible honor never, ever to do it again.

Most of the time it was enough for the offender to slink off beneath the stern admonition to go and sin no more. The aunties were remarkably evenhanded in their dispensation of Park justice, dealing fairly and with very little favoritism with all who came-or were forcibly hauled-before them. Jim Chopin, while taking no official notice of this ad hoc court of civil justice, had been heard to say that the four aunties halved his caseload.