Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

there anything you’d like to say?” Coach Nicks asked.
    It’s damn hot in here. That’s what first came to Keb’s mind. He wasn’t a sports philosopher like Coach Nicks. He didn’t have a leadership award from the governor. He didn’t study games on TV. He thought March Madness was cabin fever until Truman told him it was a college basketball tournament. During games in the school gym, with the bright lights and everybody shouting and pounding their feet, Keb would get a headache. He attended on Gracie’s insistence, and sat next to Truman, who had a way of making one thing into another: basketball players into mammoth hunters, cheerleaders into princesses, referees into cops, the court into a battlefield.
    “It’s a real cliff dweller,” Keb would say during a tight game.
    “Cliffhanger,” Truman would correct him.
    So what to say now to these broken-hearted young men?

everything closed over him
    TELL A STORY,” Uncle Austin used to say. “We are a story people.”
    Old Keb said into the huddle, “My sister Dot, she died of cancer in a hospital in Juneau. She was the youngest of us all, and the happiest, and she was the first to die.”
    The boys listened hard. Keb could feel it. They listened hard because the old man’s tongue didn’t work like it used to. Half his teeth were gone. He spoke in a soft and syncopated manner. Hearing him required effort, but he had wisdom, a great heart. The oldest man in Jinkaat, he was a respected Tla x aneis’ elder, part Norwegian Viking berserker and part Tlingit Raven trickster, as the Raven rattle had the tail of the Kingfisher. Austin Skredsvig, a clan leader, had raised him in the ways of the long ago time. One of Austin’s cousins had been the last shaman in Sitka, a great man who knew the language from a thousand years ago. Most everybody in Jinkaat knew stories of Old Keb and his Uncle Austin walking over mountains. How they traded blankets up north with the Ice People, carved canoes down south with the Haida, and hunted seals in Crystal Bay.
    Gracie and Little Mac joined the circle while Ruby stayed at the window, facing away and talking on her little phone.
    “She had an operation, my sister Dot,” Keb said. “She liked to draw with pencil and paper. She got good at it. So one day in the hospital she made a picture of a black vase, and she put a crack in it. One crack, right down the middle. That was Dot; she did things like that. A woman visiting her dying daughter in the next bed asked Dot why. Dot said it was her scar, the one she got from the operation. You know what that other woman did? She took that drawing in the middle of the night and colored a yellow line over the scar. Just like that. She told Dot it was the light coming in. ‘That’s what cracks do,’ she said. ‘They let in the light.’”
    AFTER THREE DAYS, Old Keb found time alone with his grandson. Visiting hours had ended and Gracie was down the hall, asleep. Robert and Lorraine were back in their hotel room with little Christopher. Many people had come to visit. Near as Old Keb could tell, James saw none of them. Anger and self-pity blinded him. How dark and brooding he looked in the starched white bed, his head bandaged, the TV channel-changer captive in his hand. Little Mac sat nearby with her knees pulled to her chest, reading a book. She wore a black beret and a sad face. Old Keb could see that she too had failed to console James.
    Ruby came in with her little phone, gave it to Old Keb and said, “It’s your friends in Jinkaat. They want to talk with you.” Keb pulled it to his mouth. “Put it by your ear, Pops, like this,” Ruby showed him. “Talk. They’ll hear you.”
    “Hullo.”
    “Hey, Keb, you still alive?” It was Oddmund, or maybe his brother, Dag.
    “I think so.”
    “How’s Seattle?”
    “Busy.”
    “How’s the coffee? Everybody down there drinks coffee.”
    “Good, I guess.”
    “How’s James?”
    “Not so good.”
    “Keb?” It was Helen