The Morning

The faucet coughed twice before the water came. She held her palm under it, counting. Three seconds of air, then a thin stream, rust-colored, clearing to something close to gray. She filled the kettle and set it on the burner. The propane caught with its small blue sound.

Her mother was already at the table, both hands around a mug of yesterday's tea, reheated. She'd pulled her kuspuk on over thermals and sat with her back to the window where the tape had started peeling again along the frame.

"Wind came around in the night," her mother said. To the room, to no one.

She checked the bucket in the back entry. Half full. She'd empty it on the way. The lid fit if you pressed the left side down first, a motion her hands knew without directing them.

In the girls' room, Nora was already sitting up, pulling her socks on. Eight years old and she dressed herself with a competence worn smooth by practice. The sleeping bag was pushed to the foot of the bed. She slept under it and the quilt both, though the new generator held the house warmer than last winter. Its hum reached every room, low and constant. You stopped hearing it. Then the power cut and you heard your own breathing.

"Is the water on?" Nora asked.

"It's on."

"Can I wash my hair?"

"Tomorrow. There's enough for faces and the kettle."

Nora came out in her school clothes and sat next to her grandmother, who touched the girl's hair once, lightly, then said something in Yugtun that made Nora laugh. She wouldn't translate it when asked.

Pilot bread with peanut butter, the last jar from the barge shipment. The next one wouldn't come until spring. She'd frozen salmon strips in August, and there were still two bags of berries from the hill behind the school, but mornings were fast and Nora ate what was easy. Her mother broke the cracker into pieces, dipping each one in her tea.

"Your father's mother used to set net in the dark," her mother said. "Before Niugtaq. Out on the ice before anyone woke up."

She was wiping the counter. "Mm."

"Different river, though."

Last summer she'd gone to the fish camps twice with her cousin's boat. The second time, the motor had trouble and they drifted for an hour before it caught. What stayed from that day was the weight of the cooler up the bank, her shoulders burning, Nora running ahead on the gravel.

She pulled the front door. It stuck at the top where the frame had shifted, a slow warping she could track by the scrape mark on the floor, deeper each month. She lifted and pulled. October air came in all at once, raw and salt-edged, carrying the generator sound louder now, and under it the quiet where the river should have been audible but wasn't, the water too far below the bluff this year.

The sky was the gray that meant it wouldn't get lighter than this. Eight-thirty and this was the day's full brightness. Nora zipped her coat to her chin and took the bucket handle before she could reach for it.

"I'll carry it."

"It's heavy."

"I know."

She let her. They walked the gravel road toward the school, Nora holding the bucket out to one side with both hands, her boots crunching frost that would melt by noon and refreeze by three. Other kids appeared from other houses, some carrying buckets, some without. No one looked at the buckets. The school sat on the rise, the newest building in the village, three years old and already the most solid thing here. Its windows held what light there was.

Behind them, her mother stood in the doorway, holding it open with her hip. Looking past the houses, past the road, toward the river and the tundra beyond it where the old village had been. Where the village before that had been.

Nora set the bucket down outside the entrance and wiped her palms on her coat.

"Bye, Mom."

She watched her daughter walk inside. The door closed behind her. It was new, and it fit.