The white truck stopped at the edge of the spruce, and the man who stepped out of it was wearing a badge on his parka, as I had feared and hoped. Reverend Sam Tikluk stood beside me in the snow with his hands in his pockets and his breath rising in the forty below air. I was seventy eight years old, bundled in the old wolf parka of Lars, and I had a sheet of paper in my mittened hand. The man came across the crust toward us with a slow, steady stride, and he took off his glove to shake hands. “Mrs. Lindqvist,” he said. “Sergeant Mike Dahl, Alaska State Troopers.”
The paper in my hand was a list. It named twenty six rifles, every one of them from the glass cases of my trading post in Fairbanks, with makes, calibers and serial numbers, a list I had copied myself from the old inventory book of Lars. My daughter in law Darla had sold them all for a hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars to a buyer in Anchorage, and she had told my son Erik that I had signed the papers. I had not. I read the list aloud to the sergeant, one line at a time, and he wrote each number in his notebook.
Then I pointed with my mitten at the cabin, a hundred yards up the hill, where a thin gray line of smoke rose that was not woodsmoke. It smelled of chemicals. Erik, my only son, forty seven years old, had been cooking methamphetamine in the old cabin of his father for a year. Sergeant Dahl nodded slowly, and spoke into the radio on his shoulder. Two more trucks came out of the trees, and a snowmachine, and I watched the uniforms spread across the white hillside like dark seeds. “Madam,” said the sergeant, “thank you for the call.”
A list of missing rifles read aloud in the snow gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the cabin in Fairbanks.
I gave my terms in the snow, with the cold in my teeth and my hand in the arm of the Reverend. “Sergeant, do what you must. Erik, you will come down from that cabin with your hands in plain sight, and you will go to the treatment center in Fairbanks that Reverend Tikluk has arranged. I will pay. Darla, you will go with the troopers and tell them who bought the rifles. The trading post stays in my name, and the cabin comes down. Lars built it to keep a family warm. It will not stand as a place for poison.”
Erik came down the hill with his arms in the air, a big man with hollow cheeks and a beard that smelled of smoke. He stopped three feet from me and began to cry, and the tears froze on his face. “Mama,” he said, “I started with a little, only to stay awake for the night shift. Then I needed more, and I could make it myself. I let Darla sell the guns because I thought no one would miss them. Papa would have thrown me out of the house. I wanted to be thrown out. I wanted somebody to make me stop.”
It was Darla who bolted. When the sergeant said her name, she shoved the troopers aside, ran to the snowmachine parked at the edge of the clearing, and kicked it into life. She revved the engine and swung it toward the frozen river road, with a satchel of papers across her back. She did not reach the road. Reverend Tikluk lifted two fingers to his lips and whistled, and from the spruce came eleven men of the village of Nenana, each with a team of sled dogs on a short line. The teams fanned out across her path, barking and lunging, and Darla stopped.
The snowmachine sputtered, and she sat there amid a wall of howling husky faces, the satchel falling off her shoulder into the snow. Sergeant Dahl strode over, turned off the key, and held out a hand. Darla took it. In a few minutes she was in the back of the white truck with a blanket over her shoulders. The dogs settled down one team at a time, and the men of Nenana grinned under their fur hoods. I looked up at the sky, which was green with northern lights, and I felt the cold go all the way through me.
The money consequences were direct. Darla was charged with theft and the sale of firearms without papers, and the buyer in Anchorage was arrested as he tried to ship the rifles south. All twenty six were recovered, and every one went back into the glass cases. Erik pleaded guilty to manufacturing and received treatment and probation, because he cooperated against his supplier. The six million, four hundred thousand dollars offered for the trading post was refused, and I signed instead a lease with the village at one dollar a year.
In the name of Lars, who passed in 2020, I started the Lars Lindqvist Fund. It pays for heating fuel, winter gear and treatment beds for families in Fairbanks, Nenana and Delta Junction. In the first year we filled the oil tanks of ninety four homes. One was a one room cabin near Healy, where an old woman had been burning furniture to keep warm. When the truck came and the furnace roared, she stood in the middle of the room in her wool coat, and she laughed out loud.
Erik came home in the spring, in time for the breakup. He walked through the door of the trading post on a Tuesday morning in April, shaved, with his hair cut short. I was behind the counter with the ledger of Lars open in front of me. He went to the glass case and ran a finger along the rifles, one by one, and then he came to the counter and asked what he could do. I handed him a broom. He swept the floor from one end to the other, slowly, while the sun came through the window.
