Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

"Oh yeah, that's right."

"What do we say if they find out we skipped school?"

"Don't lie," he said. "Will Kate ground you?"

He grinned and patted the steering wheel, chock-full of sixteen years' worth of bravado. "She can try."

What?" Kate said. Auntie Joy beamed at her. "You chairman of board, Katya." She applauded, and was joined in that action immediately and with attitude by Old Sam Dementieff, more moderately by Demetri Totemoff, and belatedly and without enthusiasm by Harvey Meganack. Harvey was sitting on Kate's right and she could almost warm her hands on his resentment. He was dressed in gray slacks and a white button-down shirt. He hadn't actually put on a tie but there was the sense that he would have if he knew the effort wouldn't have been wasted on the rest of them, not to mention ridiculed by every Park rat who saw him that day.

Demetri sat on Harvey 's other side in jeans, blue flannel shirt, and dark blue fleece vest. Next to him and across from Kate was Auntie Joy, a plump little brown bird with bright eyes and long graying hair tucked into a neat bun skewered with lacquered red chopsticks. The red matched her blouse, long-sleeved and loose over the elastic waistband of black polyester slacks. Auntie Joy always matched and was always comfortable.

Old Sam, dressed in Carhartt bib overalls and a faded black and red plaid shirt worn bare at the elbows, sat exactly midway between Auntie Joy and Kate, smelling aggressively of the summer's fishing season and not about to apologize for it.

"Wait a minute," Kate said. At Auntie Joy's words, any outward calmness of demeanor she had assumed before arriving at the Niniltna Native Association building that morning had deserted her. Now something close to panic was crawling over her skin with delicate spider feet. "I said I'd be on the board. I didn't say I'd be chairman."

"You're the only one who could be, girl." Old Sam looked at Harvey, who scowled at the top of the round table occupying center stage in the Association board room. "The only other candidate failed to gather a majority."

In spite of herself Kate's voice rose. "We didn't even vote yet."

"The board had an ad hoc meeting last night."

"Nobody told me."

Old Sam gave Harvey a sardonic look from beneath bristly brows. "Can't understand that."

"Anyway," Kate said, feeling desperate and not working real hard to conceal it, "I thought the shareholders vote on who's chairman. The same way we vote on board members."

Demetri, a short, stocky man with dark hair, steady eyes, and a stubborn jaw, said, "In the event of the death of a current member of the board, the bylaws allow the board to name a replacement. The candidate must be a shareholder and must be of legal age. The bylaws also allow the board to name a new chair. Both are interim appointments until the next annual shareholder meeting, when the entire membership votes to accept or reject the slate of officers."

"In January," Auntie Joy said helpfully, still beaming.

January, Kate thought numbly. January 15th. Three very long months from now. "I wasn't here," she said. "I didn't get to vote."

"Wouldna mattered," Old Sam said, "you weren't on the board yet, so you didn't have a vote anyway. And even if you were, the vote was three to one," and he smiled, not at all amiably, at Harvey, whose grinding of teeth was audible.

"But-" Kate was beginning to feel like she was lost in the middle of a Joseph Heller novel.

"It's done, girl," Old Sam said, and slid a piece of paper down the table. "Let's get on with it. I've got other things to do today."

The piece of paper proved to be the agenda for the meeting, embossed with the Niniltna Native Association logo.

The Association logo had been the subject of a great deal of controversy when the Association was first formed over thirty years before. One group of shareholders had held out for art, another for commerce, a third for culture, a fourth for history, and a fifth for the artist of their choice, usually a near relation. The divergent opinion resulted in a verbal fight at the first shareholders meeting that very nearly ended in a riot which, legend had it, Emaa quelled by sheer force of personality. The resulting logo, designed by committee, was a jumbled ball of black silhouette images, a leaping salmon, a browsing moose, a Sitka spruce, a jagged mountain with what might have been a tiny mine entrance halfway up it, a dogsled with the musher snapping his whip over the dogs' heads, a dancer with a drum, a seiner with its nets out, a gold pan. That many images were, of necessity if there were to be anything written on the rest of the page, minuscule, and as such difficult to identify. At first glance the whole thing looked like a Rorschach inkblot. This had of course pleased no one, but Ekaterina Shugak, Kate's grandmother and the first board chair, had been impatient to move on to more important topics and had pushed it through.

Kate said the first thing that came into her head. "God, that's ugly"

Old Sam gave out with a stentorian guffaw. Auntie Joy's radiance dimmed a trifle. Harvey and Demetri said nothing. Belatedly, Kate realized that all four of them would have had their own opinions on the NNA logo long before Kate was old enough to vote as a shareholder. She looked around, casting about desperately for a less incendiary topic.

The Niniltna Native Association headquarters was a modest, rectangular building two stories high. It had asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, vinyl windows, and an arctic entryway, and was painted brown with white trim. It sat on the side of a hill in back of the village, next to the state trooper's post on the road to the airstrip.

The board met in a corner room upstairs, with windows in two walls, large sliders equipped with screens. Through them could be seen the washed-out blue sky and the thin sunlight of an arctic fall day, with the gathering edge of an ominous bank of dark cloud. Snow was late this year, and the temperature was dropping fast, putting pipes at risk of freezing all over the Park.

The room held a table, and like almost every project involving shareholder funds, it was made from spruce bark beetle kill harvested from Association lands. The blight had swept through spruce forests across southeastern and southcentral Alaska over the last ten years the way the bubonic plague had swept over the world in 1350. Sensibly, the board had reasoned that if the spruce trees were going to fall over dead anyway, they might as well put them to good use. There were spruce bark beetle kill countertops, cupboards, floors, paneling, sleigh beds, rocking chairs, and farmhouse tables in every public and private building in the Park.

This table had been made by Demetri to Ekaterina's specific instructions, round in shape, because Ekaterina didn't think there ought to be a head to a table where sat equals, and modest in size, because Ekaterina disapproved of large governing boards. Privately, Kate thought it was because Emaa knew that smaller groups were more easily manipulated.

The table was sanded and polished to a satin gloss, although the individual boards did have a tendency to bow occasionally. Annie Mike had been in the room once when one of the boards, imperfectly dried, had split open with a crack like a.30-06 going off. Demetri had mended it with epoxy but it could still be seen, a narrow lightning bolt of rich dark brown running almost all the way from Auntie Joy to Kate.

Annie, Association secretary-treasurer and its only full-time employee, was there today, too, sitting at a small desk in the corner, taking notes on a laptop. Annie's husband, Billy Mike, previous chair of the Niniltna Native Association, had died last year of a massive coronary. They'd lost their son Dandy the year before and after a double whammy like that everyone would have understood if Annie had retreated into a life centered around her last two children left at home. Both were orphans, both adopted. The baby boy, half Korean, half African-American, was named Alexei for Annie's grandfather. Vanessa Cox, who had lost first her parents to an automobile accident Outside and then her last surviving relatives here in the Park, one to murder and the other to jail, had been acquired the following year.