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AMERICAN
CHILDHOOD
Pat Murphy
Nadya Rybak was five years old when she realized that her family was
not like other families. She was in the crossroads store, staring at the jars
of candy on the high shelf behind the counter and wondering if her father
might buy her a peppermint stick to suck during the wagon ride home. It
was late spring in Missouri, and the wooden floorboards were warm
against her bare feet.
She liked the store. The clutter of boxes and barrels intrigued her.
Interesting smells clung to them: jerked beef, clarified butter, pickles, and
spices. Her father leaned against the wooden counter in the back, talking
with Mr. Evans, the storekeeper, about Indian trouble up north. Two fur
traders had been killed the month before. Mr. Evans blamed all the
trouble on whiskey and whiskey peddlers, and Nadya's father agreed.
Nadya's mother and Mrs. Evans sat on a bench near shelves that held
bolts of fabric and sewing notions. A three-month-old issue of
Godey's
Ladies Book,
worn from handling, lay open on Mrs. Evans's lap. Lottie
Evans, a wide-eyed three-year-old, sat at her mother's feet, staring at
Nadya. One chubby hand clutched her mother's skirt. She was fascinated
by the older girl, but had not yet gathered her courage to approach.
A bearded man came in the door and threw a bundle of furs onto the
counter. Nadya stared up at him with interest. He was a very shaggy man:
his beard was long and unkempt; his hair needed cutting. He was wearing
a buckskin coat, homespun pants, and a shirt that hadn't been changed
any too recently. There hung about him—mingling with the usual
man-smells of chewing tobacco, whiskey, and sweat—a strong smell of
many animals. She smelled bear and deer and buffalo and beaver, but
what caught her attention was the faint smell of wolf.
The man leaned against the counter, evidently content to wait for the
storekeeper's attention. He glanced down at Nadya. "Hello there,
young'un."
"Hello."
The wolf smell came from the bundle of furs on the counter.
"You know, I've got a little sister back in New York that's not much
older than you."
Nadya considered this gravely, but didn't say anything.
"What are you doing here?"
"Waiting for my papa."
"Looked like you were watching those jars of candy back there." She
nodded, and the man grinned. "Thought so. Well, maybe when I trade
these furs, I'll buy you a piece of candy. Would you like that?"
Nadya nodded solemnly. She watched the man untie the rope that
bound the furs together and spread the furs on the counter. She could
smell wolf more strongly now. Emboldened by the man's grin, she reached
up and touched one of the furs, a soft pelt the color of butter.
"That's a painter," the man said. "A mountain cat." He let her stroke the
soft tawny fur, then lifted it aside. "Now here's a beaver pelt. Some fine
gentleman in New York City will be wearing a hat made from that soon
enough."
The man lifted the beaver pelt aside, revealing a fur that gave off a
warm, reassuring scent, the scent of Nadya's mother on certain nights.
Nadya reached up hesitantly to stroke the soft pelt. A layer of stiff gray
guard hairs lay atop an undercoat of soft fur. She stroked the fur
backwards to reveal the soft undercoat, and the long gray guard hairs
tickled her hand.
"This 'un, I'll sell for the bounty," the man said. He lifted the fur off the
counter and held it down where she could see it better. Where the animal's
head should have been, there was a mask with vacant holes in place of
eyes. The ears were shriveled; they had been pressed flat by the weight of
the other furs.
Nadya stared at the empty eye-holes and took a step back, dropping her
hand to her side. "Where did you get it?" she asked, suddenly wary. Until
she saw that eyeless mask, she had not thought about where the fur had
come from.
"From a wolf bigger than you are." He shook the pelt and the fur
rippled. "Saw her prowling around the edge of my camp and got her with
a single shot. Right through the head."
Nadya took another step back, glaring at the man.
"What's the matter, young'un? She's dead. Can't hurt you now."
"You shouldn't have done that," she cried shrilly. "You shouldn't have
shot her."
She fled across the store to hide behind her mother's long skirt. Her
mother put her hand on Nadya's head. "What is it, child? What's the
matter?"
"He killed her. That man." Nadya pointed across the store at the
bewildered trapper, who still held the wolf skin.
"I didn't mean to scare her, missus," he said apologetically. "I was just
showing her some furs."
"It's all right," her mother said. She stooped and put her arm around
Nadya's shoulders. She spoke softly. "Come, Nadya. We'll go out to the
wagon to wait for Papa."
"Why did he kill the wolf, mama?"
"Hush," her mother said. "Hush now."
Nadya's mother took her hand and led her out the door. Nadya walked
by her mother's side, carefully placing herself between her mother and the
man who killed wolves. She would protect her mother.
"I didn't mean to scare her," he was saying.
Then they were out in the sunshine, away from the comforting and
horrifying scent of the wolf fur. Nadya sat on the wagon seat and her
mother explained, very softly, that the wolf the man had killed was not a
person—not like Mama or Papa. That wolf was an animal, and it was not
murder to kill it.
But her mother's voice trembled when she talked and she held Nadya's
hand a little too tightly. Nadya knew that her mother was afraid of the
man too. When her father came out of the store, he brought a new ax
head, a box of supplies, and a few hard candies to comfort Nadya.
"He's a bad man," Nadya told her father.
"He just doesn't understand," her father said.
Nadya shook her head stubbornly. The world, which had always seemed
so safe and secure, was suddenly a frightening place. She sucked on a hard
candy and clung to her mother's hand, convinced that her father was
wrong.
Dmitri Rybak, Nadya's father, had emigrated to America from a small
Polish village. Marietta, her mother, had come from France. They had met
in St. Louis, fallen in love, and moved West, looking for land where they
could live their lives undisturbed.
At that time, Missouri had been a state for only a few years. According
to the unreliable census figures of the time, the state had a population of
66,000 (not counting Indians or Negroes) scattered over its 69,000 or so
square miles. Most of the folks were clustered along the Mississippi River.
Only a few had ventured westward—trappers and traders and soldiers, for
the most part.
Nadya's parents had settled on the Osage River in the southwest portion
of the state, a hilly region of creeks and springs and few settlers. When
they settled, there had been a trading post located where the river was
shallow enough to ford. The Evans's store stood there now.
When Nadya was three, the mountain man who had run the trading
post had moved on, selling his ramshackle building to Mr. Evans, who had
improved and expanded the store to serve the needs of the farmers who
were moving into the area. By the time Nadya was five, a tiny settlement
had grown up around the store, including a blacksmith shop, a tavern,
and a few houses.
After meeting the trapper in the store, Nadya became more careful of
people outside her family, less willing to talk with strangers. On the whole
her new shyness affected her life relatively little—few strangers happened
by their farm. And for the most part, Nadya's childhood was happy.
On long winter nights, when the farmyard was dusted with snow and
hickory logs burning in the fireplace warmed the cabin, Dmitri taught her
to read the
Farmer's Almanack.
They leaned over the book, huddling close
to the pool of light cast by a wick burning in a cup of bear oil. Her father
stumbled over the difficult words, but he persisted, determined that
Nadya learn. While they labored over the book (learning that turnips
should be planted in the dark of the moon and that a silver coin, placed in
a butter churn, will help the butter come), Marietta watched from the
fireside, mending or knitting.
With a pen made from a wild turkey quill, Dmitri taught Nadya to
write. By the wavering light, Nadya painstakingly made marks on bark
that her father had peeled from the shagbark hickory tree. She learned to
write her name in English. Her father could write in another alphabet as
well—the alphabet he had learned when he was a boy. But he only taught
her the English writing, saying that she was an American and she should
write as the Americans did.
When Nadya's lessons were done, she would ask for a story.
"A story?" her father would say. "It's too late for a story." But he always
smiled when he said it was too late.
"It's not too late," she would say. "There's time. Please, Papa. Just one
story."
"Maybe there's time for one, Dmitri," Marietta would say. Then Dmitri
would put aside the pen and the Almanack and he would lift his hands so
that the light from the burning wick made wavering shadows on the
deerskin that her mother had stretched across the window to keep the
drafts out. The shadows that Nadya's father made with his hands were
magical.
"Once upon a time, there was a man," her father said, and the shadows
of his hands became the silhouette of a man's head—a man with a jutting
chin and a big nose. "He lived in a cabin on the edge of the forest. And
there was a rabbit who came to eat the vegetables in his garden." The
shadows shifted and changed, becoming a rabbit that wiggled its nose and
made Nadya giggle. "Every night the rabbit came and ate from the man's
garden."
Dmitri told of how the man built a scarecrow to fool the rabbit. The
rabbit ignored the scarecrow—it kept on hopping into the garden and
eating all the vegetables. The man tried to keep the rabbit away by sitting
in the garden all night long, but he always fell asleep. The shadow man
snored noisily, and that made Nadya laugh.
"But," Nadya's father said, "on the night when the moon was full, the
man changed."
Nadya watched with fascination as the shadow man shifted and became
a wolf, a fierce shadow head that snapped at the air and lifted its snout to
howl. The wolf chased the rabbit through the forest, growling and
snapping.
"All night long, the wolf chased the rabbit and the rabbit ran from the
wolf. When the moon set and the sun came up, the rabbit hid in its
burrow, afraid to go near the man's garden. And the wolf became a man
again."
Nadya watched the shadow wolf give way to the shadow man.
Sometimes the shadow man sang a song and sometimes he howled like a
wolf. Then Nadya and her mother howled too. If they howled long and
hard, the wild wolves that lived in the forest heard them and joined in.
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