The Ice Harvest

38 the minnesota review Anton Ugolnik The Ice Harvest The first mention of Alaska in our house came on a weekday morning in autumn of 1958. I remember because weekday mornings were silent. Spoons scraping oatmeal from the blackened saucepan, eggs spitting on the grill, and newspapers folding and refolding—these were the sounds of dawn. We lived in a Detroit Depression Duplex— twin flats, upstairs and down. We lived upstairs, my grandparents and an aunt downstairs, with the doors to the back landing always open and the borders between households blurred. From my back bedroom, I could usually hear the Roshinskis next door. They were "pure Poles," like most people on our block. And they raised hell every morning when the old lady picked a few of her seven kids to scream at— at the boys in Polish, the girls in English. But this morning I heard Russian drift up the landing from the downstairs kitchen where we ate breakfast on weekdays, when my Ma was a cashier on the A.M. Breakfast shift at the Pilgrim House cafeteria, downtown. And the Russian wasn't in the sustained high tones of an argument, either. It was conversations, questions and answers. The questions were low and grumpy, clearly my old man's. The answers were long and melodic, in my grandmother's high-pitched monologue. And this on a Monday morning. I couldn't make out what was being said, but it was interesting enough to bring me downstairs a bit early. I usually waited until the old man left the table. In the grey light of dawn, he was more sullen than my grandfather , and my Grand-dad could be sullen enough. My grandmother had a post at the stove. First she faced what she was cooking; next she faced those who ate it. I never saw her eat breakfast herself. My Dad chewed oatmeal at one end of the table and read the Detroit Free Press, looking hard for Republicans to resent. My Grand-dad sopped a loafend of rye in a bowl of half-cooked egg and picked over one of his weekly socialist Russian rags. My Aunt Vera slept heavily after her afternoon shift and in my mind at least there dwelt the image of my mother downtown, near the door of the Pilgrim House, accepting dollar bills with a "Thank you" and smiling emptily beneath that idiotic slogan: "AS YOU RAMBLE ON THROUGH LIFE BROTHER, WHATEVER BE YOUR GOAL, KEEP YOUR EYE UPON THE DOUGHNUT AND NOT UPON THE HOLE." Breakfast was a time surrounded by other people's labor. It was a time for guilt. I came down cautiously. If I came down too early, it could cause com- 39 ugolnik plications. I bore the burden ofcheer, for one thing. IfI smiled, my smile was a hollow echo in that crabbed abyss. IfI said nothing, somebody was apt to ask, "So what's the matter with youl" I was sixteen, I went to the Jesuit high school on Seven Mile Road, far away from any factory, and I wore a clean white shirt. Nothing was supposed to be wrong with me. So ordinarily I waited until each of the patriarchs retired to the porcelain thrones in both bathrooms, upstairs and down, where they gleaned the final scraps of bitter news. And I ate cornflakes alone and read the back of the cereal box. By the time I finished, my Dad and Grand-dad were leaving the house together with their black lunchboxes clattering. Their jackets smelled of the factory. Some scents evoke the past, but that smell to this day insists upon the future. Another week. Another year. Another life. I came into the kitchen as my old man's Free Press was refolding back to the front page and as he was explaining a feature story to my Granddad , the skeptic. There was one of those italicized headlines in the corner of the front page: Detroiters Plan for Trek to Alaska. On top of the boxed story was the subtitle: "Fifty-Niners." That was what my Dad was trying to explain, in one of those dilemmas known only to duallanguage homes. "Fifty Niners...