Kodiak wasn't all fun and games.

I had to deal with a fisherman's wife's worst nightmare more than once. This one comes to mind.

The boat had gone down. That was already established. I walked into my bar-room office and found out that one of the bodies had been recovered which wasn't all that common. 

Fisherman more often than not went down with their boats.

Bill was dead and she had been notified and was sitting face on the bar passed out. She was a mess and I can't say as I can hold it against her.

Her husband had been good to me and so had she. I'd done a couple of odd jobs for them and they had paid me well and had given me a few odds and ends and now it was time to repay the favor.

I just walked over to Louise and threw her over my shoulder and put her face down in the bed of her pickup, went through her bag for the keys, fired the rig up and took her home to her kids.

Then I hauled her in, parked her in her bed face down and gathered the kids. I told them that their father's body had been recovered and would be brought back to town in a couple of days for burial. Then I put the oldest one in charge of his mother to insure she didn't vomit and choke on it. He was maybe 12 years old.

I looked at the other two and decided to make sure they were fed and headed over to the refrigerator and opened it. Pretty slim pickin's but I knew I could make do.

As I was figuring out what to make those kids there was a knock on the door and I recognized a woman I knew named Jinka. We were friends of a sort. A couple of years earlier her ex husband had tried to publicly humiliate her. I stepped in and left him the humiliated one.

Jinka was carrying a casserole and most likely saved those kids from the hideous fate of my slap-up cooking.

While Jinka and I were feeding the kids I handed her some cash and asked her to run down to Kraft's and get some bacon, eggs, spuds and pick me up a couple of packs of Camels. She was back in a half hour with the goods and a bottle of brandy. "The brandy is for you," she said. "You ought to spend the night here. Camp on the couch."

"Jeez, Jinka, This town can be vicious. I can't handle somme jerk like Joanne starting dirty rumors," I said.

Jinka thought for a second. "Joanne would do something like that. She hates you after she humiliated herself at the raft race. She blames you but everyone knows better."

Small town problems.

"Look, Pic. I'll overnight here, too. There's one couch and you take first watch." She got up made a couple of phone calls and that was that. 

I wandered over to the window and opened it and lit a Camel.  Bill had been a smoker so this was not an issue. 

"Jinka, I gotta have a talk with Louise tomorrow morning and let her know her first responsibility is to those kids," I said.

"I was thinking the same thing," she said. "We'll both take care of it tomorrow morning. It was pretty decent of you to scrape her up and make sure she got home OK. Your friend Blaine let me know you had her taken care of."

Over the next couple of hours a few other people showed bringing the obligatory gifts of food. One person brought over a bottle which I immediately put in a cabinet. Louise didn't need any more booze that night.

We left the bedroom door where Louise was open and told her son to get the other kids together and clean up the place. It really didn't need it but we figured we ought to give them something to do. The youngest one climbed up on me and held me.

Jinka poured me a brandy and I sat there with a kid falling asleep on my lap as I had a drink and smoked a Camel. It was one hell of a way for a kid to doze off but when she was asleep I put her in her bed.

For a few hours Jinka and I took turns checking on Louise and around midnight I started to hit the hay. As soon as I laid down the youngest came out of nowhere and climbed onto the couch with me. There really wasn't enough room so I threw a pillow at my feet and the child slept head to feet with me until I woke up to pee. Then I returned the child to her bed.

I woke to a start at about 0300 for no reason and saw Jinka crashed out on a Lazy Boy. I started to get up and Jinka heard me. "She's OK," she said. "Go back to sleep."

About 0630 the kids slowly began to stir, one by one. I started breakfast and made coffee.  When the coffee was brewing Jinka entered and poured herself a cup and commented that it was pretty strong. We agreed to let Louise sleep in, of course.

Then we fed the kids and made the command decision that they would go to school that day based on the reasoning that they should stay busy. The littlest one wasn't of school age yet so we parked her in front of the TV as best we could and waited for Louise to stir.

She woke up foggy but ravenous and wolfed down the breakfast we put in front of her. I was never able to figure that one out.

After breakfast we both had a serious talk with her about what was going to happen over the next few days and we both knew the drunkeness displayed the day earlier had passed. It wasn't likely to be repeated. She knew the kids came first.

I left, Jinka hung out a while longer and the next time I saw Louise was at the funeral. She was very grateful to Jinka, myself and all the neighbors that had helped her along.

This was not the first funeral or memorial service I attended in Kodiak nor was it to be the last. During my decade in Kodiak I went to about fifty of these and only went to three or four weddings. It was one hell of a way to live.

There is a fisherman's memorial in front of the harbormaster's office. To get your name on it you pretty much have to have been born in Kodiak. Every year a couple more names get added to it.

It doesn't cover the majority of fishermen that are lost fishing out of Kodiak. It omits the summer kids, the resident non-locals, the part-time residents and others.



Aftermath.

Jinka instantly put word on the street that I had been good to Louise and had taken care of the kids when she had been notified of her husband's death. A lot of people looked at me in a different light after that and I found myself being brought into a circle of friends that were not just barflies.

Joanne tried to make a dirty comment about me a couple of weeks later and was instantly rat-packed by a large number of fisherman's wives and fishermen coming to my defense. She faced a lot of well deserved vile language. She steered well clear of me the rest of my time there.

The children always were grateful to me for the rest of the time I lived on the Rock. A couple of years later my kindness was repaid by the oldest when he told his neighbor how I had helped his mother. The neighbor was selling a Dodge pickup and knocked $300 off the price. I got it for $100. He also found me some teak and mahogany when I was setting my boat up for open ocean crossing.

The littlest one always gave me a hug when she saw me.

Almost twenty years later I got a phone call from someone out of the past. We chatted and in the course of conversation I found that the oldest son had followed his father's footsteps and became a fisherman. He was lost at sea and left a widow and three small kids. He was 29.


To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY