D’s Bones

My mother’s new husband, Dick,
decided it would be embarrassing
for me to have a different last name
when we moved to this small Alaskan town.
But now Lincoln Trigg and Larcie Mathieson
older native kids whose folks were in the nearby
TB sanitarium, pulp my shoulders with their fists,
outraged by my Tennessee accent
and mercilessly taunt me
about my new
name.

Seward, 1952

I was a soft, protected southern boy when my father died in 1950. My mother and her new husband pulled a trailer (and me) over the Alcan Highway in 1952. By the time we got to Seward, south of Anchorage, I’d been chased by gangs of Canadian trailer park kids calling me “Yankee,” an ironic epithet for a southerner of that time. Beginning school in that small Alaskan town involved walking a gauntlet of endless physical threats and challenges. I quickly learned to effectively use words instead of my fists.