Free All the Winters After by Seré Prince Halverson

a tenderness toward him she hadn’t felt for a long time.
    â€¢ • •
    So many times over the next year, anyone else might have shaken a fist at her, damned her for getting them there in the first place. But A. R. never did. Not even one I told you so .
    There was the treacherous boat trip once they ventured outside the Inside Passage, where she clung to both the fear that they might die and the fear that they might not die, that death might not come and save them from the slamming, slamming, slamming of the sea.
    But they survived somehow, and they arrived somewhere. It was called Herring Town. They trudged through icy water, carrying their bags over their heads while waves leaped at them like children begging for a present. There were people on the shore too. A man, a woman, and—she counted them—ten children. Ten! The Newberrys. All of them round-faced and round-eyed, but their bodies were lean and muscled. All except for the baby, who was delightfully fat, and the toddler, who, later when the sun broke through and slapped color all over the place, ran along the beach wearing nothing but a dirty orange life preserver and a cowbell, his legs chubby and creased, his feet padding on the wet sand.
    Frank Newberry had gotten word from the Rosses in Wilbur, who’d gotten word from Uncle Fred’s next-door neighbor’s cousin, Beck Patten, that Lettie and A. R. were due to come in to Herring Town on the Salty Sally . For three days, the Newberrys watched down the inlet for the promise of Lettie and A. R.
    Margaret Newberry clung to Lettie as if she were a long-lost sister. She stroked Lettie’s hair, most of it fallen loose from the bun she’d pinned it up in days before. A lifetime before. Lettie held her breath while Margaret stared into her face, inches away. Lettie knew she reeked of vomit and worse, but Margaret didn’t seem to mind.
    Margaret reassured her, reassured her again. There would someday be a train connecting them to Anchorage, and a school. More talk of a store. A post office. And soon, a church.
    What Margaret didn’t seem to know was that Lettie didn’t need reassuring. A church? A mere glimpse of the water, which went from blue to green to red to pink, depending on what the sun and moon were up to—not as it had been earlier with the torment of waves, but now white with the sun’s reflections, a thousand spots of light leaping and dancing—seemed a declaration to her, Let there be light! Why would anyone want to worship God in a dark log hovel?
    If she could, Lettie would have stripped off her vomit-crusted clothes, pitched them into the fire, and worn nothing but a cowbell while she splashed in the icy waves.
    Later, while the young women of Herring Town plotted their civilities, crowded around the Sears catalog, and tended to their children, the men helped Lettie and A. R. stake out their land. She giggled at the kissing puffins with their strange, hooked orange beaks and matching feet, cried when she first heard the lonely cry of a loon. Her heart jumped with the salmon in the river; when she saw their silver streaks through the clear water, she saw for the first time the invisible currents of her own life.
    One night, she pulled A. R. close to her, unlatched his trousers, snugged them down before he’d even stopped snoring. She was not that type of woman, really. She had always been a lady, though a rather plain one. But Alaska was no place for a lady; the men in Kansas said that to A. R. Even the men on the boat said it. She kissed A. R. on the mouth, and he stopped snoring with a snort. And then he said her name, as he’d been saying it for the past few months—with a question mark. “Lettie? Lettie?” but then “ Lettie …”
    She wanted to give him some of this… What was it? Abundance. It spilled up and out and over her. Let him see it, experience it.
    â€œNow…now…now,” she said, arching