The Edge of Nowhere

By Julie Harris

Some promises are easy to break and easier to forget.

Billy Shaw comes from the edge of nowhere. Half Aleut, half American, he escapes his old life in Alaska for a taste of the real world, the world his father came from, promising his sister and the remaining elders he will return to lead them into a new beginning.

Just like his American father, flying is in his blood. But unlike his father, he wants more from life. He wants somewhere to belong.

He joins the army, becomes a pilot. He also meets a nice girl, a rich girl and his new life is good, until the orders come.

Before he leaves for Vietnam, Billy needs to go ‘home’, but the old ways are alien to him now. He also needs to meet his father’s sister but Billy finds his cousin instead, another spoiled rich girl, unbalanced and aimless…

It’s not until Vietnam that he finally learns the importance of family. Of promises made and broken. Of finding a place to belong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie Harris
• Release date: Feb 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507034279

Book preview

Chapter 1

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I wasn’t one for many visitors at the best of times so who on earth would be calling so early in the morning? When I first opened the door, I didn’t recognise the man standing there even though something about him was familiar. Then my poor old heart lurched. ‘Is that you, Billy?’

‘Ma’am.’

‘What on earth? Let me look at you, now.’

He spread his arms and turned about on the porch so I could take a good look. He’d fought hard for the chance to wear this uniform and pride shone in his eyes, wasn’t that the truth. And that smile. It was just like his daddy’s.

‘Heavens above. Come on in, Billy. Where’s my manners?’ I stood aside and let him in. ‘Tea? Coffee?’ I asked, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Shock, I guess.

‘Coffee thanks, Ma’am,’ he said as I led John’s son into the kitchen. I set him down on the chair his father always favored on the occasions he’d visit, but that was a very long time ago now. In fact, it seemed like forever. At first, I thought of John Robert every day, and played games in my mind about what might have been, but as time passed—days to weeks to months and then years—those kinds of thoughts came fewer. Seeing his son brought it all back. Tears were stinging behind my eyes, tears I didn’t want Billy to see. ‘Army pilot?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘Your father would burst from pride if he could see you now. So tell me what you fly.’

‘Anything they put me in, Ma’am. Choppers, for now at least.’

‘Don’t call me Ma’am, Billy. Makes me feel old. Now I might look it, but I don’t feel it, so I want you to call me Betty Sue.’ Just like your daddy did, I thought. But Billy didn’t call me by my name, he smiled instead. That made it worse. Oh, that smile. I made coffee and wondered why he’d come calling so early in the day. Billy never came by unless there was a reason.

I hadn’t seen him and vice versa for, how many years exactly I don’t recall, and before that, I hadn’t seen him at all, just knew him mostly from his father’s stories. We first set eyes on each other the day he came to tell me his daddy had died. We were strangers to each other back then. We weren’t strangers any more. ‘I haven’t heard from you in a long while,’ I said.

‘I’m just back from Germany, Betty Sue. That’s why you haven’t heard from me.’

I thought, there’s paper and envelopes and stamps, even in Germany. He promised me he’d write but he never did. He was like his father that way, too. Damn men, always breaking hearts and promises.

‘I’m being sent away again soon.’

I looked up quickly. I didn’t have to read his mind. Vietnam, I thought. The US Army is sending him to Vietnam.

‘I came back to say goodbye to my family. You’re part of my family, too, Betty Sue.’

‘I’m pleased you think of me that way.’ Always, what I felt I just couldn’t say. Heaven knows what my face was telling him. My heart was screaming at him not to go.

‘A lot’s changed for me, you know. Seems funny now but I didn’t even know Germany existed until I went to school. I didn’t know much of anything until I left the island. At times I get angry with myself that I never listened to my father when he tried to tell us about the world he came from...’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘I guess we all have regrets.’

He looked at his hands, studied his fingernails. I noticed his hands were like his father’s too. So was that thoughtful gleam in his eye. He looked up as if reading my mind and my heart skipped a beat. I could have sworn on the biggest Bible there was that it wasn’t Billy Ignash Shaw looking back at me but John Robert himself. ‘One of my regrets is not taking the time to know my father. Will you tell me about him, Betty Sue?’

So much had changed for this young half-breed. His daddy was a white man who fell from the sky on to a small Aleutian island in 1926. His son—the light of his life—this handsome half-Aleut, half-White hadn’t ever wanted to know. But the war to end all wars came, and life as the Aleuts once knew it would never be the same again. Billy hadn’t listened to his father’s stories of the other, strange world not so very far away, or perhaps he had and didn’t realize it at the time. Now he was here, sitting across from me, a US army pilot trying to fit into the world his father once came from.

‘I can’t tell you much about your daddy.’

‘You loved him, didn’t you.’

‘We were friends.’

‘Nah, you loved him. I can tell.’

‘In my own way and he in his, I guess. But it’s not like it is today, Billy. That’s all we could have been back in 1943. Just friends. We both knew it.’

‘It was more than that. When he was dying, he said to me, visit Betty Sue. Tell her thanks for everything. She’ll know what I mean. He also said he’d left something with you. Something I might like to see one day. Said it might help if ever I needed to know who my father was. Do you know what he was talking about?’

‘I’ll go get it.’

I came back with a package wrapped in cracked seal hide and tied up with string. I’d hoped the day would never come that I’d have to pass it on but I couldn’t lie, not to Billy. Not now that he wanted to know about his father. I put it on the table and he looked up at me. ‘I remember this. When the army came to evacuate the island it was all my father took.’

‘It’s all he had, Billy. He was in a real state when he got to the hospital. No one knew exactly what to do with him. He seemed half-wild to us. For some reason he took a shine to me and he trusted me and it didn’t take us long to become friends. I knew soon enough that he wasn’t a wild man. He was kind and gentle and in a state because the military took his family away and he didn’t know where you were. Oh yes, he was in a real state. There was confusion everywhere back then. It took a long time for your daddy to find out which island you’d all been shipped out to. Don’t you go blaming him for things he couldn’t do anything about, now. I won’t hear of it.’

Billy was quiet for a while. ‘I remember the evacuation. Being on the boat. A hundred soldiers herded us into trucks and shipped us out to a reservation, dumped us there and expected us to fend for ourselves. We had to start over with nothing. They treated us like we weren’t human. My mother cried every day until my father found us again. I hated him for leaving us. I hated him for fifty damned reasons, but he never hated me back.’

‘I doubt your father had it in him to hate anybody.’

‘I know that now but at the time I always thought he was... weak.’

‘No. Just special.’

For a moment there was a thoughtful silence between us.

‘When your father gave me this, he said he didn’t need it any more. I was going to make a book out of it someday, but you’re welcome to it, Billy. This will tell you more about your father than I ever could. Like I said, we were just friends.’

William Shaw unwrapped the package, sipped his coffee and started leafing through the illegible scrawl of a pilot’s log book—water-damaged, falling apart, yellowed notepaper. He picked up a small journal, again water-damaged, and he leafed through it carefully. Quietly he read out, almost in a whisper:

‘I am hurt but I am not slain. I will lay here and rest awhile before I rise and fight again.’

‘Your Aunt Meg wrote that for him.’

‘What’s she like? All I know about her is that she got polio when she was a teenager.’

He let me turn the pages to the back of the journal where a photograph was pasted. It was chipped, damaged, faded, but the image there showed two women, one young and in a wheelchair, one older, standing protectively behind her daughter. ‘That’s your grandma with her. She’s dead now of course. Died about the time your sister was born. Her name was Lily, too. Lily Margaret. Like I said, Billy, I can’t tell you much except that your father loved you, and he named you after his hero.’

‘Billy Taylor. Taught him to fly.’

‘You know?’

‘Some things.’

‘Maybe some things are enough. He wrote down the important things. Like what happened the day you were born. He loved you so much.’

‘And I didn’t want to know.’ Again those startling eyes cored into my very soul. John Robert looked at me like that, too, sometimes. I had to keep reminding myself that this man wasn’t John Robert.

‘He knew that, Billy. He never blamed you. Maybe in his own way he thought you might come along one day wanting to find out more. In this, he talks about being a little boy and wanting to fly. His dreams. Ambitions. He talks about his friend who died in his arms. How they flew together. Bobby was a daredevil, a thrill-seeker back in the old barnstorming days. They’d planned on flying around the states, setting a record. Then Bobby died in a crash and your father went on to do it alone. But he crashed too, near your island and your people saved his life. He had to begin over, this suntanned young man from Florida who hated the cold.’ I laughed quietly to myself and wished I could remember John’s philosophy on life but it had faded away, lingering somewhere in the depths of my memory. ‘He never dreamed that anything like that could ever happen to him. Those seventeen years must have been the longest of his life.’

‘Is my Aunt Meg still alive?’

‘How can I say this? Billy, she ...’

‘Won’t want to know because I’m a half-breed? I’m used to it by now, Betty Sue. I’ve learned how to handle it.’

I gave him Meg Meschers last known address. Her brother, reappearing on her doorstep after being ‘dead’ for 17 years was embarrassing to her. She was ashamed of him. I knew that much because I was there when they met up again. No wonder he was nervous about seeing her. I should have trusted his instincts, but, in the end, it turned out for the best. John got some money and with it, went back north to his family and made life a little easier for his adopted people. He found himself a pilot, bought a plane and a mail run, just like the old days, and he also managed to send his son to the best school he could afford. But would Meg want to know her brother’s half-breed son even if he was now a pilot in the US Army? Knowing Meg like I did, probably not. We swapped Christmas cards for a few years and Meg sent me a photograph, but that was the limit of our contact.

‘He was from Abbeville, South Carolina.’

‘Yes.’

‘He went back there.’

‘But he didn’t belong. His real place was with his family—you, Kioki, Lily and Asul... sorry, I can never get that name out.’

‘Asuluk. My grandfather.’

‘Yes. Exactly. Billy, your father always followed his heart. Sometimes good old common sense didn’t get a look in.’

Again that John Robert smile appeared and I had to look away and swallow my heart back down again. ‘I’ll be getting married when my tour of duty’s over. Will you come? The wedding will be in California. Los Angeles. I’ll write you with the details if you want.’

‘I’d love to come. I’ve never been to California.’

‘Thanks for the coffee and for this,’ he said as he wrapped up his father’s old notes. ‘The mail plane’s leaving soon. I gotta go.’ He rose, kissed my cheek, and held me tight for a little while.

‘Will you write me from Vietnam?’

‘Absolutely.’ He kissed my cheek again and said he’d write, just like his daddy had promised, and after another long, tight hug, he was gone, down the street. And like his daddy, he never looked back. I wish he had because he would have seen me waving.

I knew I’d never see him again. Sadness overwhelmed me and for a moment I thought I’d cry. But what good would tears do? Crying wouldn’t change anything.

I closed my door and sat on the corner of my sofa and stared at the photograph on the mantle piece: John Robert Shaw and Bobby Sullivan, together. Meg had a copy made just for me. I took it down. Two young, handsome, pioneer aviators, full of ambition and wild dreams, their lives only beginning.

They were both dead now.

What if, in that summer of 1943, I’d said, ‘John, please don’t go back to the island. Stay with me. Please, stay with me?’ Maybe if I’d told him how much I loved him, would it have been enough to make him stay? And if he’d stayed with me, and loved me as much as I loved him, well, chances were that he might still be alive... I would have done anything for him. Anything at all.

Next thing I knew I was crying. I was crying for John, I was crying for Billy. But most of all, I was crying for me. I shouldn’t have been so selfish. I should have given this old photograph to Billy. But if I did that I’d be left with a bigger nothing than I already had, so I wiped some dust from the glass and put the photograph back in its place.

I got ready for work. That’s what I do. I’m a nurse at Anchorage Hospital and I always will be.

Chapter 2

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The plane touched down on the water, and someone, Billy didn’t recognize who, moored the plane at the jetty. Kit bag over shoulder, Billy walked on down to the village. At first sight, he knew exactly why he’d left this godforsaken place: now the smell of rotting meat and garbage made him nauseous. It was definitely white man’s land for him now, even if he had to come home to realize it.

School was still in session and a few young faces were peering out from the small, dirty windows of the long, tin shack. Kids figuring out who this stranger was. Kids had short memories, didn’t he know it.

Sinbad, his uncle, was in another meeting of the elders. As Billy walked on by, it was hard to ignore the raised voices. It hadn’t really worked—this idea of throwing several different groups of Aleut and Inuit together, telling them to get on with life. Pretend nothing had changed when everything had. Take away the dignity, the self-sufficiency and we the people have nothing left. Even our faith is gone.

Here barely five minutes and Billy wished he’d never come back.

His uncle had cried when, years ago, Billy decided to leave for good. It was true that his father had sent him away to college, but from college he was expected to return. Return and stay. But he learnt too much too soon and leaving the island wasn’t a move he regretted. Billy, just like his father, had watched the sky long enough to know that up there was where he truly wanted to be. And now that he had a good, secure job in the army, he had some money, a rich girlfriend who wanted desperately to marry him, and soon he was going off to serve his country the only way he knew how. He wasn’t frightened of going to war—he needed the escape. Over there in Vietnam he wouldn’t get time to think of home, providing he knew exactly what home was.

In his heart, he knew he had to say goodbye to his sister, who taught school now or at least helped the government-appointed teacher. Lily kept as much of the Aleut tradition alive as she could, if only within the kids’ minds. To her, the past was more important than the present. She’d never leave this place, this life. This was all she knew, and worse, it was all she wanted to know. The Aleut in her blood was stronger than the American. She had three kids now, or was it four? Still, it’d be good to see her again. There was also the one-eyed uncle to contend with. Sinbad was old and going senile, but Billy loved him regardless. Maybe this time he wouldn’t cry? Maybe by now, he’d accepted the inevitable? Billy never wanted to be an elder. He’d leave that to his brother in law, Eennali, providing the booze hadn’t got too much of a hold on him by now.

Billy walked to Eennali’s house. The boards leading to it had sunk in the mud due to the summer thaw. There was nobody home. Everyone must have been in the meeting house. Billy put his kit bag down on the porch, amid the empty bottles of whiskey, and turned back towards the meeting place.

Sinbad was mid chant when the door opened. Virtually every adult in the village was there and everyone turned to stare at the person who stood in the doorway, cap in hand. Billy’s uncle, who now looked as if he’d shrunk a good twelve inches, sniffed, grunted, spat and carried on. Billy, not for the first time in his life, felt like an outsider.

‘Don’t just stand there!’ the old man barked in Aleut. ‘You’re letting the warmth out!’

Billy stepped in and closed the door. With a relieved sigh, he took his place within his gathered people, and joined in the chant as if he’d never been away.

But he had been away. He’d learnt more of the modern white man’s ways than these dispossessed Aleuts would ever want, or need, to know. But after all, he was half-white, wasn’t he.

Billy Ignash Shaw was indeed like his father, trying to find his rightful place in the world.

As he chanted, and memories of the old life seeped to the forefront of his brain, he saw Ki. Ki for short because her name was too long to pronounce. She sat across the room, on her own. They’d been friends for many years. That was all Billy would allow her to be. Her hair was long and plaited thickly. Her face was ruddy. Her eyes were always alight with a smile. She’d be twenty-five by now. Probably married. At least, he hoped so. He smiled back. It was all the invitation Ki needed.

‘Germany,’ Sinbad repeated once everybody had departed and only he and his much-loved nephew remained.

‘That’s right. I’ve been to Germany.’

Nothing ever changed. Sinbad took his time in considering this. ‘Japan. Germany. Heet-lar.’

‘That was a long time ago, uncle,’ Billy said in Aleut. ‘That war is over.’

The old man could speak English well enough, but chose not to. How old was he now, anyway? Seventy? Eighty? Whatever, he looked a hundred. A hundred years of experience and wisdom, sitting there, shaking his head, telling Billy that what he intended again was wrong. But everything Billy intended was wrong just because it wasn’t relevant to the old ways. ‘You’ll never change and because you won’t, nothing ever will.’

The body may have been old, but the hearing was still 100% perfect and the spirit inside was as young and gruff as ever. ‘Stay. We need you. No Germany, no Vee-at-num.’

‘It’s Vietnam, Uncle. Vee-et-nam.’

‘No! Here is where you belong!’ The old hand slammed down on Billy’s knee, as it had a hundred times before.

‘No. I can’t stay. This isn’t my home any more. I have a woman now. I want a family. I’ve come to say goodbye.’ With that Billy rose to his feet.

‘You never say hello to us. Only goodbye.’ The old man stared hard at the airborne insignia above the pocket, the WO4 bars. Then the gaze rose to the young man’s face. What was he seeing? Would Billy ever know? Billy touched the old man’s hand, gave it a cursory squeeze and got out of that empty meeting hall as quickly as he could.

Once outside, the summer cold hit him in the face like a brick. He was once accustomed to this. Once upon a time seemed a lifetime ago. He looked about. There was still no sign of Eennali anywhere. Maybe he’d taken some boys out fishing? Billy looked at the time. School would be out at any moment. He thought seeing his sister wouldn’t be as traumatic as trying to talk to the old man, so Billy walked off towards the school. The further he walked, the dimmer the sounds of the old man’s wailing chant became.

That old heart was broken again but it wasn’t Billy’s problem. At least that’s what he told himself.

He took the seven stairs up to the school hut and at the third top, the door opened and a barrage of screaming children ran out. He heard his sister yell in Aleut, ‘No running!’ but she may as well have been screaming at the sun not to rise. Billy waited until all the kids had dispersed before he walked in.

‘Hey, Lily.’

Lily turned from where she was cleaning off the blackboard. She wasn’t pregnant that he could see anyway. She had one too young to walk yet in a carrier on her back. Billy couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. They all looked the same to him.

Lily looked old and worn out. Too much, too soon. There were no smiles, no hugs. She looked at her brother with an expression he couldn’t read. Was she happy to see him again and covering it like she always did, or didn’t she give a damn? Was he hoping she might have changed because of his absence? When she went back to cleaning the blackboard, Billy decided it was the latter.

‘So, how are you?’ he asked, finally, mainly to break the silence.

‘Good,’ she said in Aleut.

‘Speak English, Lily.’

‘No. Why should I? Why are you here? Why did you come back?’

‘I’m being posted overseas,’ he said in English. ‘I’m going to Vietnam.’

‘Vietnam.’ Another silence, as if she were recalling something. ‘Grandfather told us this would happen. You would turn your back on us when we need you the most.’

God, Billy thought. The witchdoctor strikes again. There were never any secrets where their grandfather, Asuluk was concerned. He didn’t have second sight, he’d had third, fourth and fifth as well and worse, if his sister inherited anything from that old man it was knowing what was going to happen before it did. He’d been dead a long, long time, but to Lily his death always happened yesterday.

‘I’m not turning my back on anybody and you damned well know it.’

She said nothing to that. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t there.

‘How many kids have you got now?’ he asked in English as he touched the baby’s face, still unsure whether it was a boy or girl.

She replied in Aleut: ‘Why are you asking? Why do you care? You’re not one of us any more. You made your choice. You turned your back on everything and walked away. Why are you even here? Do you think I care?’

‘Where’s Eennali? I need to talk to him.’

Any strength she had which held her upright seemed to disappear. The chalk in her fingers snapped and pieces clattered to the wooden floor. Her face contorted. Tears formed, welled and fell. She turned away, quickly.

‘Lily?’

‘Eennali. My husband. He is gone,’ she said. ‘Eennali, my husband, your friend. He is dead and I blame you for killing him! Go away! Just go away!’

For three hours, Billy sat exiled, osctracized, on the porch, alone in the summer cold. He’d come back to farewell people whom he once believed meant a great deal to him: Lily, Eennali, and Sinbad. But Sinbad was senile, his sister wasn’t talking and Eennali was dead. No one would tell him what had happened to his lifelong friend. They’d been babies together. They’d learnt to hunt together. They played at being men together far too soon and although often punished severely for childish daring both had always lived to regret their actions. Now Eennali was dead and Billy hadn’t known. No one bothered telling him. It was as if their bond had never existed. Anger flamed and filled that space inside reserved for betrayal.

Ten years he’d been away. It may as well have been a hundred.For the first time in his life, as he sat there wondering how and why his childhood friend had died, Billy, momentarily at least, wished his father was still alive. Only a small part of him remained and there it was, on the rotting wooden floor beside his thigh. A few papers and a little book encased in an aged, cracked, seal hide wrapper. They’d never had that much to say to each other at the best of times and Billy himself was mostly to blame for that. He knew it, admitted it silently. He’d never wanted to know that strange, useless white man with one arm and one good leg. The man they found on the ice. The white man who, for years, only wanted to die. The inconvenience to the village, who was always left behind. The one who did women’s work. The one who seemed to have no male pride. Billy did a lot of fighting in his early years—fighting for the right not to be known as the useless one’s son. Yet Betty Sue had said how proud he would have been to see him now—how proud he always was.

I never gave him the chance, Billy thought. Tears filled his eyes but he didn’t know whether they were for Eennali or for himself. Or for everything that had ever gone wrong. Surely he hadn’t changed that much in ten years? He got up before the tears fell of course, and thumped on the door again, hoping Lily had changed her mind and would let him in. She must have told the kids not to answer. Inside he could hear her howling.

‘Come on Lily! It’s cold out here! Let me in, dammit!’

Nothing.

Billy picked up his kitbag, his father’s seal hide pack, gave his sister’s door a goodbye kick and walked through the slush to his uncle’s house. He had nowhere else to go.

His impatient knock was answered. A woman he’d never seen before stood there, questioning silently. She was relatively young, at least she still had all her teeth, and she looked him up and down as if he were an unwanted vacuum cleaner salesman. Again, for a moment, Billy was pleased he’d gotten away. He couldn’t imagine having to marry one of these women. Not now. Not ever. He thought of Trish immediately. Trish, with the long legs, perfect body and sky blue eyes.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked in Aleut. ‘My sister won’t talk to me.’

The door was slammed in his face.

‘Shit.’ Now what? The plane wouldn’t be back for another thirteen hours.