Enuk Tried to Come Home

Enuk Tried to Come Home

By Naomi Klouda

Enuk stood tall as a book-learned Yupik in our village by the sea. He came back from a school in Oregon in 1969 and set about returning to the boy he’d been when he left. But we all knew he’d grown new thumbs where fingers should be. Nothing came right, from fishing salmon to hunting for isuik, seal meat.

“Enuk lost his mojo,” Uncle Tuuk told us kids the night my cousin set off.

Mojo was a new word we’d learned from Enuk. It said luck or fortune or grandfather’s guiding spirit. Enuk lost all those things.

August rains followed July’s new suns, the heat of the month following late summer’s foggy downpours. A purple sky overlooked Enuk as he set off in a dory. He’d named the wooden boat Sintak, another word we didn’t know that Enuk brought back with him.

I didn’t know what became of Enuk. He paddled away in the dory on that bruised horizon, destined for his failure – or his future.

“Camai, Melissa,” he’d told me in a personal goodbye, grasping my shoulder in his meaty palm.

And his disappearance haunted me like a warning. Warnings of what, I couldn’t tell you. For in my heart, I harbored dreams for all of us.

Fifty-three summers later, I found myself cleaning out the old fisherman's shack that had belonged to my uncle's cousin's family. No one used it for a long time. The building leaned toward the water like it was tired of standing. Inside, everything smelled of seaweed and dead voles and something that made me think of August rain.

The journal was wrapped in a plastic tablecloth, tucked behind loose boards where the wall met the floor. When I unwrapped it, I recognized Enuk's careful handwriting immediately, though it looked different - smaller, more uncertain than the boy who used to help me with my ABC's.

My hands shook as I took this book in my hands. The first entry was dated August 18, 1969, three days after he'd paddled away in the Sintak:

"Made it to the old fishing grounds near Piqit Point. Caught nothing. The salmon run different than I remembered, or maybe I forgot how to read the water. The river’s mouth is empty of salmon when it should be full.

I came here to do what must be done. I am in exile, with no land left beneath my feet. I must banish myself. What’s a man to do who isn’t a man, and not a man of the village, and not a man of towns or schools?

In the olden days, people banished themselves for less. Do I have the courage to take the walk?

August 22 –

Storms came in from the southwest. Had to beach the Sintak on a gravel bar and wait it out. Spent a day under the overturned hull, listening to the wind tear at the world above me. Thought about the dormitory at school, how quiet it got at night, except for the radiator's hissing. How I used to lie awake, missing the sound of waves, and now here I am missing the sound of that radiator.

Found ptarmigan feathers scattered on the beach after the storm. White ones, though it's still summer. Made me think of grandmother's stories about the bird that changes its coat with the seasons. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do - change my coat back to what it was. But what if the seasons have changed and I'm still wearing the wrong feathers?

***

I had to close the journal and make tea. My hands trembled, though whether from the cold or from recognizing something in Enuk's words that I'd feared as a girl, I couldn't say. Outside, the same waters that had carried him away lapped against the same rocks, indifferent to the more than five decades that passed.

When I returned to the journal, the entries grew shorter, more desperate:

August 28 - Sintak is taking on water faster than I can bail. The old wood is giving up, just like everything else. Funny how a boat can outlast the person who named it, but not by much.

September 1 - Caught a seal today. First time my hands remembered what they were supposed to do. But when I tried to say the prayer grandfather taught me, the words came out in English. Even my gratitude has the wrong language now. Oh, tasted good roasted on the open fire. So long now it’s been since I ate it that way, drippings falling onto the rocks. I can scoop those up later. I long to share this offering, my first. But not with a bear...

September 10 – A bear is trailing me, an old Romeo. I call him that because of a female I first saw him with. The first bear named for a Shakespearian character! I did like some studies in school, even British authors like the Bard. His characters gave long speeches about their troubles. I could make a long speech too, to Romeo. But it is not the way of our people to make long speeches except on special occasions.

“Behold, dear brother!” I told the bear aloud, knowing how he slinks along after me. “You can have the seal drippings, even the rump and parts I cannot enjoy. Whoever heard of an Eskimo man who liked Shakespeare? I will not taste good to you … I’ll probably stink.”

September 15 - Romeo and I have an understanding now. He follows at a distance, cleans up what I leave behind. Sometimes I read to him from the one book I brought - Hamlet. My voice carries across the water and he listens from his rock perch, ears forward. 'Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…’' - funny how that question makes more sense out here than it ever did in a classroom.

The Sintak is holding together with prayers and stubbornness. I named her for a word that sounds Eskimo - sintak in singular of Syntax means sounds. Grandma used to say it about the ocean, how it waits for everything to return to it eventually, a sintak. Now I think she was waiting for me to understand something I'm still too thick to see. Sintak, a grandmother word. Married to English words and sounds, syntax.

September 20 - Found an old fish camp today, maybe from my grandfather's time. The drying racks still stand, weathered gray as driftwood. I sat there all afternoon trying to remember the songs that used to rise from camps like this. All I could remember was 'Amazing Grace' from the church services at school. So, I sang that instead, and Romeo snorted in loud irritation.”

***

All those years ago, when Enuk disappeared, it hurt our hearts, especially Uncle Tuuk, his dad.

I often thought: did he remember me? The work we did in spelling words prepared me for Oregon. The work we did on the woodpile, getting alder ready for the smokehouse. If only he’d caught one salmon, I thought, his courage would grow and multiply. But it was not to be. No salmon from Enuk heated our smokehouse.

Things beached on the shore die. A seal too old to go onward. Young sea otters come loose from their mother’s tied seaweed around their bellies. Spawned out salmon. Even humans lost. Was Enuk too young to be unleashed from his mother? Too old in spirit to be out there alone?

Enuk’s body did not wash ashore, nor his dory.

I’d like to go announce to the village that Enuk is talking to us again! I would call it out loudly, but no one here remembers him. My grandchildren come to the house. I could tell Sadie, now twelve. I will read aloud Enuk’s last entry:

October 30: Snow falls. I’ve got a chill and some kind of sickness. But I’m determined to go on.

How foolish to banish myself. I will patch the Sintak. I will return to the village before winter settles in. Right now, I’m teeth-chattering cold. How wimpy of me to be sick. Not a tough man of my people, not the strong boy I left as. A self-banished 18-year-old. Have I been too rash?

Daddy Tuuk, I miss your jokes. They float!

Mom... (Here he gives a long list of names and messages that I skip over as I read the entry for Sadie.)

Melissa, can you forgive me? I shouldn’t have left you alone to go to my old school. I should have warned you. By now you have sailed there … I’ll see you soon! God willing.”

“Grandma Melissa – he’s talking to you!” young Sadie crowed. “And you went to a school in Oregon, too!”

“I did,” I told her, hiding my tears.

I folded Enuk's journal back into the tablecloth. Its vole-eaten corners made a doily of pages. He was one of the first to leave for school, and I followed two years later. We wrote letters that first winter, his full of longing for home, mine full of questions about surviving in that strange place where nobody knew our names or our stories.

But I came back. I married, raised children, grew old in the village that shaped me. Enuk tried to come back too, but did the current carry him somewhere else entirely?

He did not do the unspeakable. I know that now.

That evening, I walked down to the water's edge where the Sintak had been launched so many years ago. The purple sky looked the same as it had that August day, battered and beautiful and full of weather coming in from the west. I thought about Enuk out there somewhere, his spirit maybe still talking to his bear, maybe still trying to remember the old songs while "Amazing Grace" played in his head.

"You found your way back after all," I sang to the waves. "Through me, through your words, through Sadie now knowing your name."

The tide was coming in, and I let it wash over my boots as I stood there, the last keeper of his exile, the only one left to sing: Enuk was here.

Enuk tried to come home.

He has at last.