The Great Alone

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Large Marge said, her dark face crumpled with grief.

Natalie Watkins nodded solemnly. “I’ve crossed that river a dozen times this month. Jesus. How could she fall through this time of year?”

Leni was listening and not listening. All she could think about was Matthew and what he must be going through now. He’d seen his mother fall through the ice and die.

How could you get over a thing like that? Every time Matthew closed his eyes, wouldn’t he see it again? Wouldn’t he wake screaming from nightmares for the rest of his life? How could she help him?

Back at home, shivering with cold and a new fear (you could lose your parents or your life on a normal Sunday, just out walking in the snow … gone), she wrote him a series of letters, each one of which she tore up because it wasn’t right.

She was still trying to compose the perfect letter two days later, when the town came together for Geneva’s funeral.

On this freezing cold afternoon, dozens of vehicles were in town, parked wherever they could, on roadsides, in vacant lots. One was practically in the middle of the street. Leni had never seen so many trucks and snow machines in town at one time. All of the businesses were closed, even the Kicking Moose Saloon. Kaneq was hunkered down for winter, glazed in snow and ice, illuminated by the ambient glow of daylight.

The world could tumble, change radically in two days, with just one less person living in it.

They parked on Alpine Street and got out of the bus. She heard the whining drone of a generator’s motor, grumbling loudly, powering the lights in the church on the hill.

Single file, they trudged up the hill. Light filled the dusty windows of the old church; smoke puffed up from the chimney.

At the closed door, Leni paused just long enough to peel the fur-trimmed hood back from her face. She’d seen this church on every trip to town, but she’d never been inside.

The interior was smaller than it looked from the outside, with chipped white plank walls and a pine floor. There were no pews; people filled the space from side to side. A man dressed in camouflage snow pants and a fur coat stood up front, his face practically hidden by a mustache, beard, and muttonchops.

Everyone Leni had ever met in Kaneq was here. She saw Large Marge, standing between Mr. Rhodes and Natalie; the whole Harlan family was here, squished in close to one another. Even Crazy Pete was here, with his goose settled on his hip.

But it was the front row that held her attention. Mr. Walker stood beside a beautiful blond girl who must be Alyeska, home from college, and alongside Walker relatives Leni hadn’t met. Off to their right, standing together with them and yet somehow alone, was Matthew. Calhoun Malvey, Geneva’s boyfriend, kept shifting his weight, moving from foot to foot, as if he didn’t know what to do. His eyes were red-rimmed.

Leni tried to get Matthew’s attention, but even the opening and closing of the church’s double doors and the subsequent sweep of cold and snow didn’t faze him. He stood there, shoulders slumped, chin dropped, his profile veiled by hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week.

Leni followed her parents to an empty space behind Mad Earl’s family and stood there. Mad Earl immediately handed Dad a flask.

Leni stared at Matthew, willing him to look at her. She didn’t know what she’d say when they finally got to talk, maybe she wouldn’t say anything, would just take his hand.

The priest—or was he a reverend, a minister, a father, what? Leni had no idea about things like this—started to talk. “We here all knew Geneva Walker. She wasn’t a member of this church, but she was one of us, from the moment Tom brought her here from Fairbanks. She was game for anything and never gave up. Remember when Aly talked her into singing the national anthem at Salmon Days and she was so bad that the dogs started howling and even Matilda waddled away? And after it was all over, Gen said, ‘Well, I can’t sing a lick but who cares? It’s what my Aly wanted.’ Or when Genny hooked Tom in the cheek at the fishing derby and tried to claim the prize for biggest catch? She had a heart as big as Alaska.” He paused, sighed. “Our Gen. She was a woman who knew how to love. We don’t quite know whose wife she was at the end, but that doesn’t matter. We all loved her.”

Laughter, quiet and sad.

Leni lost track of the words. She wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. It made her think of her own mother, and how it would feel to lose her. Then she heard people start to turn for the door, boots stomping, floorboards creaking.

It was over.

Leni tried to make her way to Matthew, but it was impossible; everyone was pushing toward the door.

As far as Leni could tell, no one had said anything about going down to the Kicking Moose Saloon afterward, but they all ended up there just the same. Maybe it was adult instinctive behavior.

She followed her parents down the hill and across the street and into the charred, tumbledown interior. The minute she crossed the threshold, she smelled the acrid, sooty smell of burnt wood. Apparently that smell never went away. The interior was cavelike, with propane-fueled lanterns swinging creakily from the rafters, throwing light like streams of water on the patrons below, set in motion by the tap of the wind every time the door opened.

Old Jim was behind the bar, serving drinks as fast as he could. A wet gray bar rag hung over one shoulder, dripped dark splotches down the front of his flannel shirt. Leni had heard someone say that he’d bartended here for decades. He’d started back when the few men who lived in this wilderness were either hiding out from or coming home from World War II. Dad ordered four drinks at once, downed them in rapid succession.

The sawdust floor gave off a dusty, barnlike scent and muffled the footsteps of so many people.

They were talking all at once, in the low voices of grief. Leni heard snippets, adjectives.

“… beautiful … give you the shirt off her back … best damn nettle bread … tragedy…”

She saw how death impacted people, saw the glazed look in their eyes, the way they shook their heads, the way their sentences broke in half as if they couldn’t decide if silence or words would release them from sorrow.

Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books (Johnny’s death in The Outsiders had turned her inside out), but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.