Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway

Butterflies

After they bring everything from the boat into the house, Panruk and Maklak and Minuk go with the other children to see the new log house. It’s at the end of the village, tall and square and strong-looking. It’s built right onto the ground, not partly buried, like their houses. It’s also not rounded like a beaver’s house. The roof comes to a point as if they’re putting the fingertips of their hands together. The house is made of bare wood with its spruce logs laid sideways. It has sod only on the roof, not covering the logs, like their houses. There’s no little passageway to get into the house, just a tall wooden door right in front.

They stand far off and stare at the house for a while, then warily skit around it to see what the back looks like. A very thin, tall little house with a door stands behind the big house. The strangest thing of all is a line that stretches from the house to a spruce tree. The line is a rope made of something white, not walrus thongs or seal-hide cords, and on the rope is hanging a pair of blue cloth pants and a sort of pink butterfly. The butterfly has lacings in the middle of it instead of a body, and strings hang down on the outside of the wing parts. None of the children know what it is.

Minuk frowns and tries to think of what it could be. But before she can imagine anything, a woman’s face appears in the back window. She smiles and waves. The other children squeal and scamper away as fast as hairs. Panruk wants to run too, but Minuk holds fast to her parka.

Minuk has been schooled many times for being too bold for a girl, and many times for asking too many questions. She’s glad none of the grown-ups are there to see her now. In a second, the white woman disappears from the window and comes around the corner of the house. She asks them in Yup’ik to come inside.

She introduces herself as Mrs. Hoff. Minuk explains that Panruk is her aunt’s daughter. Minuk was born about twelve summers ago, just when Panruk was starting to walk.

Mrs. Hoff leads them into the house. Panruk, taking Minuk’s hand, looks inside the door with her. It’s much bigger inside this house than the house they live in. But it’s filled with so many things that it seems crowded. There are chairs and tables and a big metal box, which Minuk knows is a stove for cooking. Cloth hangs around the windows, and shelves are filled with tin cans and boxes with pictures on them. The floor is made of wooden planks, just like the floor in the men’s house. There’s a big thick cloth on the floor.

Minuk can tell that Mrs. Hoff isn’t very old, because her hair isn’t yet white. Her teeth are good and long, not worn down. She has braids, just like them, but they are brown and shiny and fastened around on the top of her head. She’s not wearing a parka, but that seems to be okay because the house is so hot that little beads of sweat have formed on Panruk’s upper lip. Instead, Mrs. Hoff is wearing a pretty cloth dress with pink flowers on it, and on her feet are little black boots with lots of buttons on them. She doesn’t have any tattoo lines on her chin or any nose beads, but there are beads hanging from her ears. Her eyes are blue, the same color as blueberries before they become ripe. They had seen blue eyes before on Russian traders, but still, eyes that color make Minuk feel funny.

Mrs. Hoff instructs the girls to sit on the chairs around the long table. Panruk looks uncertain, so Minuk sits down to show her that she shouldn’t be afraid. But, Minuk sits so close to the front edge of the chair that it tips forward and she falls down. Panruk starts to laugh and covers her mouth quickly with her hand. Minuk can see it’s necessary to sit far back on the chair to keep it balanced. When Panruk sits down as well, they’re sitting properly.

Mrs. Hoff puts two tin mugs on the table and pours some tea into them. She puts a bowl of sugar on the table with two metal spoons. They had never seen spoons that weren’t carved from wood. The girls are happy to put sugar in their tea. They don’t get sugar often, but they know it tastes good.

Mrs. Hoff speaks Yup’ik a little strangely, and some words are hard to understand, but they can always tell what she means. She explains she’ll be there for the whole summer and winter, too. Probably for many, many years. When Minuk asks Mrs. Hoff what the thing trying to fly away from the rope is outside, she chuckles. This is her corset. She makes a wrapping motion with her hands around her middle to show them where it would go, but they still don’t understand.

Mrs. Hoff gets up and goes to another room and grabs one of the butterflies, a yellow one. It has hard sticks sewn inside the cloth. Mrs. Hoff says it’s whalebone. She wraps it around her middle, over her dress, and shows them how it must be laced up the front. She explains it must be pulled very tight. Minuk asks what it is for. Mrs. Hoff looks startled, as if she thought she made it plain what it was by showing them where it went. She explains it’s to make your waist small. Minuk puts her hand out to touch her waist, and instead of soft flesh under her dress she feels a hard shell.

Minuk can hardly believe such a thing. Imagine it rubbing against your skin! Imagine how hard the whalebone sticks dig into your stomach and chest! Panruk suddenly says she doesn’t wear anything under her clothes. Mrs. Hoff pinches her lips together, claiming she knows.

Minuk asks if her husband also wears a corset. Mrs. Hoff looks shocked and exclaims that men never wear corsets. Minuk thinks it’s unfair to make the women wear those tight corsets and let the men go free. But Mrs. Hoff looks as though she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, so Minuk gets up and touches a clear shiny stuff in the windows. It’s covered with a little mist from the tea kettle. The clear stuff is hard and cold and Minuk’s hand leaves a pattern in the mist.

Mrs. Hoff explains it’s window glass. She says it was very hard to get it here in one piece all the way up the Kuskokwim River. It’s very easily broken. She picks up a cloth and wipes the mist and handprint away until they can see through the glass as if it wasn’t there at all. Minuk explains they put windows on the top of their houses, and use seal intestines to make a window. Nodding her head, Mrs. Hoff says she knows. Minuk says that bear intestines are even better because they let in more light but don’t tear so easily. Maybe if this glass gets broken, they can use bear intestines.

Just then, a little kass’aq boy wearing cloth pants and Eskimo boots and a store shirt comes into the room. He’s younger than Minuk, but she can’t tell how much younger. He doesn’t have blue eyes; his are brown, the same color as marten fur. Panruk and Minuk are shocked to see him reach up to one of the shelves and take a cracker for himself from one of the boxes. It embarrasses them so they lower their eyes to the floor so they won’t see Mrs. Hoff’s shame. In the Yup’ik way no one could ever take food without asking the mother, for she is responsible for the food and must see there’s enough for everyone.

But Mrs. Hoff isn’t embarrassed, and doesn’t even seem to notice the bad behavior of her son. She introduces Panruk and her younger cousin Minuk to her son in Yup’ik. Then, she explains to the girls that this is her son, David.

David shakes hands with the girls very seriously and greets them and Yup’ik. He speaks their language perfectly, even better than Mrs. Hoff. He asks them if they have any brothers, and they explain that they have two older brothers, and one not yet in the men’s house. Minuk sees David is just like them. He wants children to play with, just as they do. Minuk wonders if kass’aq boys like to play the same games that Yup’ik boys play.

Mrs. Hoff opens one of the doors in the big stove and puts two sticks of wood inside. They have never seen fire in a box. It looks like a very good idea. Their mothers cook in a passageway of their house, which is very narrow, so it’s easy to fall into the fire and burn themself, or have sparks make smudges on the edge of their parka. The smoke in Mrs. Hoff’s stove goes from the stove up into the pipe, so there’s no smoke in the room. She has pans covered with white cloth sitting on the table by the stove. She takes a cloth off the pans and lightly touches the top of the stuff inside them with her finger. Then, she opens the other door in the stove and puts the pans inside on a little shelf. She says the bread will be ready in half an hour. When Minuk comments that they don’t eat bread, all she says is that she knows.

The girls rush all the way home, afraid they’ve been gone too long and would get a scolding for not doing their chores. When they get home, they see that Mamma covered the floor with dry grass and spread the grass mats over that. They covered the sleeping benches with caribou skins and had aired out the rabbit-skin and muskrat-skin blankets. The girls tell the grown-ups about what they’d seen at the new house. They stop working for a minute to listen to them. Aunt Naya had seen glass once long ago when she went to the Russian store at Kolmakov. She saw chairs there, too. When Grandma had gone to the Russian Mission, the priest had given them some white man’s bread, which is soft, not like the crackers the men sometimes bring back from the trading post. But none of them had heard about corsets. They can’t imagine wearing anything like that. How simply awful.