by Patricia Ann Bowen
Just about every winter day, right at dawn, Rona lugged her tripod stool, her serrated ice saw, a bucket, a homemade fishing pole, and a small cloth bag full of mealworms and food scraps across frozen Fishers Lake. She bred the worms in her compost pile and cared for this precious bait like the meal tickets they were. The saw, the bucket, and the pole were part of the inheritance left to her by James, her departed man. The stool she’d bartered with old Willie Whitebone for a few of her perch and potato pies.
Once at her spot, she sawed a square hole in the foot-thick ice and maneuvered the cut slice under and out of the way. She dropped her line and then sat shivering before the ragged hole while waiting for a telltale tug from whichever creature would give up its life to become her next dinner. This torturous task wasn’t for the fairer sex, but what choice did she have? She was a woman alone and wouldn’t complain. She had her health, most of her teeth, the rickety one-room cabin her man had also left her, and the skills to ward off starvation.
She’d left the East to find teaching work in the western states and met her man when he came into her classroom, all grown up and wanting to learn to read. That wasn’t quite a coon’s age ago, but it felt like she’d been off the grid so long she’d almost forgotten there was a fast-moving world out there, one where white men could raise money to fund their follies, to turn them into reality, and to convince other people how much they should want their tools and toys, too.
The townsfolk called her a squaw, meaning to be derogatory but, little did they know, all the word really means is “woman”. She’d never been the man’s wife and never wanted to be, not in the way he wanted her to be. But they got on okay together and didn’t put up a false front for anyone. She laughed at the way they labeled her without knowing the first thing about her, or him. They thought who she’d been living with defined her and sealed her fate, even though he’d died an honorable death serving the very government that tried to keep him on the reservation.
On that particular day, as metallic clouds rolled in on a north wind from the mountains, she noticed two neighbor boys at the far edge of the lake pointing at a fiery object falling from the sky, its growing roar drowning their shouts. They’d never seen an airplane this close before, but she had. She’d even flown in one once, a bush plane in Canada, but that was a long time ago.
The small plane crashed in a ball of fire, close enough for her to feel a wave of its warmth in the frigid morning. The boys stumbled toward her, their fear overcoming their curiosity. “Did ya see that, Rona Ma’am? Did ya see it go down? Whatta ya think happened?”
She retrieved the limp fishing line, laid her pole on the ice, and faced the bobbing and weaving children. She had to stay calm for them. “Looks like a small plane that got in some trouble and fell out of the sky. You go get some help, a doctor if you can find one, and I’ll see if anyone’s survived. Now hurry off.”
As she walked toward the heat, the smell of machine oil and flesh on fire nauseated her. Through the smoke she saw the bodies of two men thrown from the fuselage and money licked with flames strewn over the ground. One of the men was broken beyond repair, and his hair and clothes were engulfed in fire. The other was trying unsuccessfully to drag himself away from the flames, yelling, “Grab up the cash. Get it for me. It’s all mine. It’s mine.”
She stood there, heart pounding, frozen in place despite the intense temperature, knowing she could do nothing for him or his money. He was dead before he could distance himself from the heat and the flames. She thought of her man, his plane shot down somewhere in France last year, and wondered if children pointed to the sky as he and his comrades spiraled down, if anyone heard his last words, if his dark-honey-brown skin was aflame as he lay on the unfamiliar ground he sought to reclaim for others.
One of the boys, Leo, tapped her on the back; she hadn’t heard him return. Startled, she spun around, saw who it was, and pulled him close under her wing. He was just around ten or so. “Ray went to wake up the doc, and my folks are on their way, too. They just had to find someone to tend the little ones.” His eyes scanned the ground. “Anyone alive?”
“I’m afraid not, son. And maybe that’s for the best. They were burned so bad, what might have been left of their lives would be full of pain and sorrow. Let’s go sit back by the lake and wait for the others to come. There’s nothing you or I can do here. I thank you for trying though. You did your best.”
They walked back to the spot Rona had sawn in the ice and she dropped her line back into the water. She sat down on her tripod stool while Leo got down on all fours and peered into the hole. The sun was full up, and she was hungry.
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