My name is Patti Hyslop. I was born in Northway, Alaska. My father was Floyd Hyslop from Grand Rapids, Mich., and my mother, Polly Hyslop , is an Athabaskan Indian from Northway. I am an alcoholic in recovery and also am recovering from cocaine addiction. I celebrated five years of sobriety on Aug. 1, and Aug. 1 celebrated three years of being drug-free.
-- from a speech in 1993 to a group of fellow village alcohol counselors.
TANANA -- Allen Starr stumbled out of a house around midnight, sat down on his snowmachine and roared off into the cold November night. He wore only socks, sweat pants and a gray cotton T-shirt.
By sunrise, the temperature had fallen to 15 degrees below zero. Searchers found his frozen body three miles out of town on the Yukon River ice next to his snowmachine. He was 61 years old. Friends said he was drunk on whiskey.
Carol Marie Elia was next. On Christmas night after an evening of drinking, she decided to visit her sister on a homestead 18 miles down river. Elia, 47, hitched a ride on the snowmachine of a village man who had been drinking, too. Along the way they lost the trail and got stuck in soft snow. As the man walked 10 miles back to Tanana for help, Elia lay down in the snow and froze. Searchers found her body the next day, next to an empty whiskey bottle.
Two months, two funerals, two more alcohol-related tragedies in a place that has seen many.
Soon there would be three.
But no one in Tanana expected the next grave to be Patti Hyslop 's.
Not Patti, who had kicked booze and cocaine and, for the past three years, was the village's lone drug and alcohol counselor. Not Patti, a fixture at the weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, for a while the only person who showed up, who helped village women get court orders against their abusive husbands, who helped start a support group for sexual abuse victims.
Not funny, upbeat Patti -- member of the city council, organizer of the annual booze-free New Years Eve party, one of those people with a knack for remembering everyone's birthday. Of all of Tanana 's people in peril, she didn't seem high on the list.
So when Patti Hyslop died a violent, horrible death on a Friday night in mid-January, and alcohol was again at the center of the tragedy, the village of 350 people was jarred in a way it hadn't been before. She wasn't even drinking. It was as if everything she'd been working against rose up and struck her down.
In the weeks that followed, the community first mourned and then plowed into an emotional, angry debate over alcohol and freedom, death and the future. Similar arguments have divided other villages, but Hyslop 's death -- one in a string along the Yukon this winter -- has torn Tanana worse than most.
"It feels like spiritual warfare is going on here right now," said Faith Peters, a member of the village's tribal council and one of Patti's friends. "It's like the bad spirits are just waiting out there at night for someone to get drunk and do something stupid."
***
Friday, Jan. 13. Hyslop, 35, was due home from Fairbanks on the last flight of the afternoon. Two of her friends, Jo Ann Summer and Marie Grant, stood in the office of the village school getting ready to go home for the night and joked how they'd made it through the unlucky day.
Patti had gone to the city a week earlier to see the doctor. Her health over the past few months had been a mess -- headaches, stomach cramps, anxiety attacks that sometimes left her gasping for breath. She'd put on 20 or 30 pounds. She smoked too many cigarettes.
Her friends were concerned. Since high school, Patti had been a cutup, capable of bringing her friends to giggles with a raise of her eyebrow, and people found it easy to talk with her about their problems when she went to work at the tribal council as social worker and then alcohol counselor. She wore big turquoise rings and long beaded earrings, and surrounded herself with flowers -- on her curtains, the tablecloth, her luggage. Whatever her own personal problems, she usually hid them beneath a mask of composure.
But Patti's life was unraveling. Her friends knew her work was wearing her down. The recent deaths made her wonder if she was doing any good. They knew about the trouble at home between Patti and her longtime boyfriend, Melvin Edwin, 39. While she'd given up booze and cocaine, Melvin still consumed both, and their fights were frequent. Some of Patti's friends knew a secret: that Tanana 's alcohol counselor, who often worked with abused women, herself had a boyfriend who sometimes got drunk and hit her.
Patti and Melvin lived with their 10-year-old son, Darren, in a boxy, five-room log house that sits in a stand of tall spruce on a hillside over the Yukon. It's one of a dozen houses built by the government three miles east of the main village. The neighborhood is called Mission Hill for the big wooden church built by Episcopal missionaries nearby.
Patti used to tell friends how she liked the quiet. She kept a little garden out front, and the only sounds were the yaps of Melvin's sled dogs, anoccasional buzz of a snowmobile or four-wheeler and the wind whispering off the river and through the trees.
The medical tests in Fairbanks turned up nothing. Patti's doctor suggested the problem was stress, gave her some pills for her stomach and nerves and sent her to a counselor. Now Patti was on her way home.
The flight to Tanana from Fairbanks took 45 minutes, with mountains giving way to the broad, forested river country of the western Interior. By the time Patti's plane landed at 5:30, the January sky was dark and the village was just a string of lights on the north bank of the Yukon. In every direction was darkness.
She hitched a ride in the little white delivery van of Tanana 's airline agent. Driving through the village, they ran into Patti's son walking down a snow-packed street with a friend. Darren was happy to see his mom. He and his friend piled into the van for the drive home.
When Patti walked in the front door, there was Melvin, passed out on the sofa. She phoned her sister, Annie Vanderpool. Over the phone, Patti said that when she had awakened Melvin and asked him to help carry in groceries, he blew up.
"She said Melvin was drunk and that she hadn't even been home five minutes before he'd threatened to kill her," her sister recalled. "She said, 'I really want him to leave the house, but I don't know how to make him.'"
Annie told her sister to call the village police officer.
Ken McKinney had just moved to Tanana from California a couple weeks earlier. He happened to be in the neighborhood when the radio phone in his Suburban rang.
Patti told McKinney her boyfriend was drunk, that she was afraid and she wanted him out of the house.
She was explaining where the house was when her voice turned frantic. Melvin, she told the officer, had gone to the front porch and now was bringing back a rifle.
As McKinney stepped on the gas, he heard Patti scream. Then he heard the thump of the receiver hitting the kitchen floor.
***
Patti's father met her mother when the Federal Aviation Administration transferred him to the village of Northway on the highway near the Canadian border. The family moved around the Interior and finally settled in Tanana , 150 miles west of Fairbanks, when Patti was a toddler.
Like a lot of other village children, Patti started drinking young. Her older sister, Polly, remembers once dragging her home in a sled, passed-out drunk from a village party. Patti would have been 13 or so. She and her friends bought booze from older teen-agers and sneaked bottles from their folks.
She went off to college in Oregon, but within a year was back home, working as city clerk and then school secretary.
Patti started hanging out with Melvin Edwin after she moved back. They were together so long that people in the village have trouble remembering what attracted them to each other. Patti once joked to a friend about his "bedroom eyes." He had shaggy black hair down over his ears and wore his beard in a goatee. Women in the village say he liked to flirt.
Melvin and Patti shared two interests -- drinking booze and snorting cocaine, a drug that by the early 1980s was becoming readily available inTanana and other Interior villages. Residents say whenever there was money -- after fire-fighting season, the arrival of permanent fund checks in the fall, a big village construction job -- the coke appeared as predictably as the salmon runs.
Melvin was born into a big Athabaskan family, and he grew up at fish camp, hunting and working a trap line through the snowy spruce forests that stretch out from the village toward the jagged Ray Mountains on the northern horizon.
Melvin grew up around dogs. As a young man, he ran a team in village sprint races. An older white woman in the village remembers taking her daughter to Melvin's folks' fish camp when he was about 5. Melvin was fascinated by the girl's blue eyes. He'd never seen anyone with eyes like a husky.
As a young man, he found work on village construction projects and on crews fighting summer wildfires. But he was part of a generation of village men who saw the world change around them. They were raised by Indian parents, but the village world now included satellite TV and basketball, high-horsepower snowmachines and outboard motors. Most of the year-round cash jobs in the village were held by women, and men's roles as providers had shrunk with the arrival of air-freight groceries, food stamps, oil stoves and microwave ovens.
In 1982, Tanana got another modern convenience -- its own liquor store. It opened under a state law that allows local governments to operate package stores if a majority of citizens vote for them. Tanana 's leaders reasoned that since there was already drinking in the village -- and no effective way to keep it out -- that the community might as well get some financial benefit from it and use some of the profits to deal with problems caused by alcohol.
Violent death haunted the Edwin family. Melvin's father shot and killed another village man in self-defense during the 1950s, and two of Melvin's brothers later killed themselves -- one putting a rifle to his head and the other shooting himself during a drunken game of Russian roulette. Some people in the village whispered about a curse placed on the family by a shaman.
Patti got pregnant in 1984, but it did nothing to stop her and Melvin's drinking. Darren was born with some of the problems associated with pregnant mothers who drink, though they weren't debilitating.
By 1988, Patti had landed a job as a social worker with the village tribal council and her drinking had become such a problem that her boss finally gave her a choice: go into treatment or find a new job. She was afraid of losing Darren because of her neglect. Patti went to a detox center in Fairbanks for 30 days.
Back home, Patti stayed sober, although, according to friends, she binged on cocaine like never before. Finally, she and Melvin, along with others from Tanana , went to Alkali Lake, the Indian village in British Columbia where, through years of determination, villagers gave up booze and drugs, and now held esteem-building seminars for other Native Americans. She was trained in counseling and read about addictions.
Patti's resolve grew, friends say, and within a couple years she'd given up cocaine, too. Melvin didn't change. The tension led to frequent fights. But it wasn't always that way.
"There were times when Patti was totally happy," said her friend Marie Grant. "She'd say, 'I woke up this morning and Melvin cooked me breakfast in bed.' Or she'd wake up to a fresh pot of coffee. You don't really see many men like that, especially around here. I used to tease her, I'd say, 'I need a man like that.'"
Grant and other friends knew about Melvin's dark side. The booze and drugs made him sullen and mean. He yelled at Patti in front of their son. He talked about going clean, about spending more time out at fish camp or hunting in the woods, but it never happened. Little by little, year after year, he deteriorated, friends said. He kept fewer dogs. He didn't do as well in the races. He spent more time partying.
Sober friends learned to stay clear when Melvin was drinking.
"Sometimes when he'd be sober he'd come over, and we'd sit and have coffee," said Stan Zuray, a neighbor and the former village policeman. "It was always the same conversation. He wants to bring his boy up good. He'd say things like, 'I know I'm a mess, and I'll never straighten up. I just want to bring my kid up good.'"
Melvin took Darren hunting. He stopped running dogs a few years ago, and the family only had a house dog, a reddish mutt named Windy. But over the past year or two, Melvin picked up four or five huskies and was trying to teach Darren mushing.
Melvin worked most of last summer as a laborer on a village housing project, made $20 an hour over a couple of months but had little to show for it. He bought a new snowmachine last year and promptly wrecked it and had to rely on Patti's snowmobile. She bought the food and paid most of the bills. Both had affairs. The fights escalated.
***
Patti started keeping journals as part of her recovery, just thoughts jotted down in spiral school notebooks. Some of the entries described a home on the edge of collapse:
Last night Mel came home drunk and he's on a binge. I can feel my anxiety level rising.
Another entry, from 1992:
Melvin shot Windy when he was drunk. I think it was meant for me. Darren and I saw him shoot her for no reason then he dragged her away while she was still alive and throw her in the river. I will never forget how horrible it was to see her get shot. I really miss her. She was part of our family.
She called the magistrate in Nenana a couple of times asking about getting a restraining order to keep Melvin out of the house. But she always took him back.
In a thin red notebook, Patti listed "50 pet peeves." Among items such as, "Hair in my food" and "Someone talking with food in their mouths," were, "People not accepting the new me," and "Not being able to let go."
At the bottom of the list:
49. Not having a meaningful relationship.
50. Hanging onto Mel even though I know I have to let go.
A growing list of people in the village, mostly women, now depended on Patti for help staying sober after completing treatment programs outside the village. The Nenana magistrate, Paul Verhagen, taught her how to help battered women fill out criminal complaints against their husbands and boyfriends, which she would fax off to courts in Nenana and Fairbanks.
It was gratifying work but lonely and depressing, too. Many of her friends were still partying, and some fell off the wagon. Patti found herself constantly torn, having to choose between them and staying sober.
In 1993, she wrote this in her journal:
How someone hurt my feelings
2 nights ago two people drove Melvin home and when they come into the house they were both drinking. The girl went into my room when I was lying down and asked me if I wanted to smoke dope and I said no but I went outside to the living room w/her and we were talking and she was doing all the talking and then she got up and she said she was moving over to the guys because I was too boring. That really hurt my feelings because we used to be good friends.
Her training as a counselor told Patti she was in a bad situation at home herself, and she repeatedly threatened to leave, according to friends. But she never did. She said she didn't want Darren to be raised in a broken home. He adored his father.
Patti clung to the idea of a happy family. Her friendship grew with Melvin's elderly mother, and Patti visited almost every day.
Last fall, Patti wrote up a "one-year personal plan," over several pages in one of her notebooks. Part of it said:
I want my family to be able to deal with our personal problems together -- have healthy minds free from alcohol and drugs ... I want my son to be able to express himself, not with aggression but with kindness and love, and I want him to have learned these qualities from his mom and dad.
Patti grew more militant about the village liquor store and cocaine, friends said. She started thinking about what makes people seek comfort in booze and drugs. She and her friends talked about their vision of Tanana -- a place with jobs and traditional culture and strong, healthy families, a place where no one could complain there was nothing to do.
The week after Christmas, after Carol Elia's death, a man in the village injected cocaine with a hypodermic needle and overdosed. Patti sat with him at his house waiting for a plane from Fairbanks. She was angry. The man told her the name of the villager who sold him the dope. It was someone Patti grew up with. She called him on the phone and chewed him out. The next day, they crossed paths in the store. Don't mess with me, the man told Patti. No, Patti shot back, don't mess with me.
Patti later told friends the confrontation rattled her. She had been trained in counseling and had helped the users for years. But the tribal council's alcohol program was guided by the principle, "Don't blame, don't shame." Confronting a dope dealer was new and scary.
Before she left Fairbanks that Friday night in January, Patti told a friend, Charlene Marth, that she had decided to take some time off work and wanted to finish college. She wanted to take her sister Annie and their kids to Disneyland. The week she was in the city, she pored over the job ads in the Fairbanks newspaper.
Patti told her friend she'd decided once and for all to leave Melvin, take her son and get on with her life.
***
McKinney, the village officer, heard the phone receiver drop and stepped on the gas.
He'd been on the job 11 days. He had almost 20 years experience as a small-town policeman in northern California and was working as a campus officer when he answered an ad in the newspaper. He'd visited a buddy in Alaska last summer and was ready for some adventure. He bought a snowmobile and imagined an outdoorsman's life on the edge of the wilderness. Compared to California, he expected quiet.
Patti was one of the first people he met. She and Zuray, the former officer, explained to him how there wouldn't be a lot of calls, but that virtually every one would be alcohol related -- drunk men beating up wives or girlfriends, children neglected, occasionally something worse, although there hadn't been a murder in more than a decade.
Now Patti's voice was screaming over the speaker in the police car. Then McKinney heard a bang. The screaming stopped. McKinney approached the house. Then again: Bang.
Darren later described what happened inside the house to relatives and police:
While Patti talked with McKinney, Melvin stormed into the kitchen carrying a .243-caliber hunting rifle. Patti dropped the phone and ran with Darren and one of his friends down the hall and into the bathroom. She locked the door.
Melvin kicked open the door and held the rifle with one hand. Patti cowered against a wall, between the sink and the toilet, curled up with her head pressed into her knees and her hands clutching the top of her head. Her son and his friend stood in front of her.
With their son watching, Melvin pointed the rifle at Patti's head and pulled the trigger.
The explosion hurt the boys' ears. Darren's friend dove into the bathtub.
Melvin said goodbye to Darren and walked out of the room, shutting the bathroom door behind him. The boys heard another shot in the hallway, some footsteps, then the thump of Melvin's body hitting the floor.
Darren looked at his mother, lifeless and bloody, still wearing her coat. The boys opened the bathroom door and saw Melvin on the floor. His face was a horrific, bloody mess. He was still alive, groaning and crawling toward the kitchen. Darren dashed into the hall, grabbed the rifle and hid it under his parents' bed.
The boys jumped out a bedroom window and were scrambling around to the front of the house when McKinney pulled up.
Darren told the policeman his father had just killed his mother.
McKinney ran up the steps, revolver drawn, and opened the front door. He found Melvin, the bottom half of his face gone, reeking of liquor, moaning in agony on the kitchen floor. The officer hurried back to the bathroom and found Patti slumped over dead on the floor.
Ever since that night, McKinney has had bad dreams about what he found in the house on the hill.
***
Some of Patti's friends decided to burn down the liquor store that night. The deaths of Allen Starr and Carol Elia did nothing to stop the drinking inTanana . Now Patti was dead.
Patti had grown to hate the little wooden shed and its blue and white sign, " Tanana Liquor Store!" The exclamation point seemed like a boast.
She drove past it every time she went to the Laundromat or the airport. She'd never campaigned for its closure; she always said the real victory would come if there were no more customers. But after Elia's death in December, she and others in Tanana talked of starting a petition to shut down the place and outlaw alcohol altogether.
The night of her death, word spread quickly. Within an hour or two, everybody knew. Patti's friends, most of them people she was helping through recovery, were frantic and enraged.
"We kept saying, 'Not Patti! Not Patti!'" said Jo Ann Sommer. Several of her friends, worried about her, had planned on making that night's AA meeting a welcome-home party.
They spent the night sitting around the kitchen table of Patti's sister, Annie, and talked about torching the store. First it was just crazy, angry talk. Then they got down to details. Someone had matches. They debated what would work better, diesel fuel or gasoline. They talked about enlisting some of the elders and linking arms and standing around the burning building to keep anyone from putting out the fire.
In the end, the women lost their nerve. They worried about jail and losing their children or someone getting hurt. They weren't sure whether the store was insured and feared burning it would plunge the city into debt.
People in the village comforted themselves with memorial services for Patti the next week, both in Fairbanks in Tanana 's little log Episcopal Church, where Patti had been baptized last summer. Her obituary in the Fairbanks newspaper ran across three columns.
She was buried a week after her death on a hill in the woods. The grave has a sweeping view of the meeting place of the two great Interior rivers, the Yukon and Tanana . The village men built a bonfire to soften the frozen ground, and dragged her casket on a sled through the forest. Her friends blanketed Patti's grave with flowers.
Among the relatives who returned for the funeral was Patti's older sister, Polly Jardine. She grew up in Tanana , went off to college in Fairbanks and wound up living in New York City, where she'd just started a new job with a children's publishing company. Recently sober herself, she became enraged as she heard about the drinking and the deaths.
It isn't like the whole village was drunk. Many people, maybe most, didn't drink at all. On any given day, there were men out cutting wood and working on snowmachines, people working at jobs in the two stores, the clinic, at the school and government offices. School children here are some of the best cross-country skiers in the Interior, thanks to a teacher who introduced it a few years ago.
But no one has to dig deeply to learn that virtually every family in town has been touched by alcohol-related tragedy. There have been at least 10 deaths associated with liquor in the past three years and many more before that -- drownings, freezings, suicides.
Jardine typed up an open letter to the community, posting copies outside the two stores and Laundromat.
"This community is consumed in denial," the letter began. "The denial of the problem has made it impossible to start a better life for your children. It is time for a change." There was a big community meeting at the elders' residence, and Jardine talked of using the tragedy to clean up Tanana .
Their first step: shutting down the liquor store. A few days later, on Jan. 23, the city council -- with Patti's seat empty -- met and voted to close it onan emergency basis. The anti-liquor group started a petition to shut down the store permanently and outlaw alcohol.
It was a big victory for Patti's friends. But as it turned out, it was just the beginning.
***
Some of the village women went up the hill to clean Patti's house and box up her things after the murder, just as they had a cleaning party before she and Melvin moved in.
Tucked away throughout the house they found Patti's notebooks -- diaries, lists, speeches and presentations she gave at drug and alcohol seminars.
The women also found a note folded beneath the sofa, in Patti's handwriting. They later learned that she had passed it to a neighbor who was visiting in December while Melvin was in the house drunk.
The note said: "We have to get the guns out of the house tonight somehow without him knowing."
Patti Hyslop 's death drew people in Tanana together in their grief. But as the weeks passed, it drove a wedge between them, too. The arguing turned personal and ugly in the way it can in a small town. Like Patti's and Melvin's turbulent relationship, the whole village seemed torn by the conflict between non-drinkers and drinkers. It was like a battle for the village's soul.
Tanana 's city government has grown to depend on the store's profits, more so as state aid has been cut. The village nets between $65,000 and $75,000 a year from the store, about a fifth of the total budget, according to Pat Moore, a former mayor who still sits on the city council. Tanana has traditionally used store profits to pay its police officer and cover budget shortfalls.
The village officer, McKinney, learned his salary was coming from the store after Hyslop 's death and told city officials in early February he was leaving if the place stayed open.
When he arrived in the village back in January, McKinney could hardly believe his eyes when he stepped into the jail, the most secure place in town, and saw it was the liquor store's warehouse. A thousand cases of Olympia beer were stacked from ceiling to floor.
"It's bizarre," he said. "Selling the booze pays for me to fight the people who get into trouble because of the booze. It just doesn't seem right to me. Morally, I can't justify it. As far as I'm concerned, when that store's open I'm a legal bootlegger. I'd rather find someplace else to work than have that place stay open."
A lot of people in Tanana believe closing the store puts more people at risk. The three nearest villages -- Manley Hot Springs, Rampart and Ruby -- all have their own liquor stores, and many people in Tanana fear that if there's no booze for sale here, people will head out on the river to get it, in boats and on snowmachines, and that some will die.
After Patti's death and the store's emergency closure, the village grew quiet for a while. Coincidentally, the statewide satellite television channel was off the air for three weeks, and people talked about the pleasant change. It was like going back into the 1970s. The village woke up earlier. Children spent more time at home. Some of the men went trapping. An old village man, long an alcoholic, dried out and walked on snowshoes across the river for the first time in years.
But soon some of the men were making the three-hour run up the Tanana River to the liquor store at Manley to drink and bring home liquor to resell at triple the price. Dog mushers in a race along the Tanana in January reported the trail littered with debris -- broken-down snowmachines, an ax, tools, empty liquor bottles and beer cans, several full bottles of whiskey accidentally dropped.
"They leave here drunk, and they come back drunk," said Faith Peters. "People sit here in the village praying all night."
And problems in Tanana hardly begin and end with alcohol. Cocaine is still here -- some say worse than ever. There's money around after a big fire-fighting season last summer and high-paying jobs rebuilding flooded villages on the Koyukuk River to the north last fall. Not only are people snorting coke, they're smoking crack, and increasingly, are shooting cocaine intravenously, many residents say.
Several villagers recite from memory the Alaska State Troopers drug-tip telephone number. They say they've called to report village dealers and nothing happens. Troopers say it's tough to work undercover because village dealers know all their customers, and it's almost impossible to catch people in the act. Villagers are often reluctant to testify against neighbors dealing drugs or bootlegging.
Will shutting down the store really make a difference? Can a group of sober and drug-free villagers force their neighbors to follow them? That's what the debate in Tanana really comes down to. If the experience of most other Alaska villages is any gauge, prohibition probably won't stop booze from coming in. Will Tanana be healthier without the store? People who want it closed say it's a start.
"You have to step in at some point and say enough is enough," said Patti's sister, Polly Jardine. "Three deaths in three months, to me that's plenty. It frustrates me to no end. Alcoholism is killing us, it's killing this village. Sometimes it seems like no one can see it. There's a lot of ambivalence. People say, 'If you shut it down, they'll just go to Manley.' Well, other villages have gone dry."
As the weeks passed, Polly grew more strident -- attacking the tribal council for taking a neutral stand on the store and berating city councilmen when they began reconsidering the store closure.
Many of Patti's now-sober friends, many struggling with recovery themselves, found it tough to step forward and take a such strong public stand against their friends, neighbors and relatives.
Others in the village questioned whether closing the store will do anything except increase bootlegging. As time passed, some of them began to criticize the anti-booze crusaders as self-righteous hypocrites; former alcoholics and drug users, they said, have no right telling others how to live. Others were apathetic or ambivalent.
"If people are looking for a real change, I don't think you're going to do it by just closing down the liquor store or searching people's boats or snow-go sleds," said Pat Moore, the city councilman who helped open the store when he was mayor.
Something has to replace the drinking, he said, something more than AA meetings and counseling. "When people can witness another side of life, then they start to see that other side might be for them. But there's got to be some action and not just talk. They have to see other people around them living it," Moore said.
'We used to talk about what we wanted Tanana to be like," said Marie Grant, another friend of Patti's. "She used to talk about how there needed to be changes. There were always alcohol and drug problems, but underneath that it was from people feeling hopeless about where Tanana was going and what we were doing. Patti was getting interested in that next step. Getting that pride back not only with yourself but with your culture."
Grant is a teacher's aide at the village school and 10 years younger than Patti, but they became close friends. Patti helped her quit drinking, and after school she used to walk down the street to Patti's office at the tribal council. She says she still hears Patti's voice inside her head, and like others, talks of going through "Patti withdrawal."
"Patti always told us that Tanana people, the people who had to abuse alcohol and drugs, they suffered from a broken spirit. We talked a lot about that, how people had low self-esteem and how everything begins with themselves and how you couldn't just tell people to sober up, they had to see it inside themselves. They have to think 'I'm a good person, I'm worth something, I am needed here.'"
But it's difficult to be hopeful in a place that has been battered by so much tragedy. This winter has been especially rough, here and throughout the region.
An elder down river in the village of Nulato, a man known in Tanana , was killed the week after Patti Hyslop when he was run down by drunken snowmachiners; it turned out one of the men on the snowmachine was his son. A teen-age girl from Minto, a village to the east, froze to death in Fairbanks in December after leaving a party drunk. A man in Huslia, coming down from a binge on bootleg booze, shot himself in the head and survived.
"It's like we don't even really start our grieving process for one person and then someone else dies," Grant said.
After the initial bluster, the sobriety movement in the village took a quieter approach. Polly posted a letter around town apologizing for the name-calling. Other people stepped forward, among them her brother, Tom Hyslop , a carpenter who sits on the city council. He's trying to emphasize thatTanana is healthier now than in the past.
"I'm trying to be positive about it," he said. "I'm telling people, 'Let's take a break. Let's try being dry for a couple of years. What's so bad about that? If everybody doesn't like it, we can go back to how it was before.'
"If she dies and we do nothing, if those of us who are straight and sober, if we do nothing about what's going on in our own town, well, to me that means we're nothing. It's a minority that's screwing up everybody. This booze is killing our young people and the heartbreak, I think, it's killing our elders. It's breaking their hearts."
Patti Hyslop 's sisters, Annie and Polly, sat at Annie's kitchen table one night three weeks after her death, leafing through picture albums and the journals. They read one entry written last spring:
Today I have been sober for 5 yrs 10 months! I keep getting stronger and stronger. There have been too many deaths here in the last few years. It is hard to stay positive when so much negative things are going on around us. I want to be able to take a leave of absence from work and do something different -- like just stay home, tend my garden, learn how to cut fish again -- spend quality time with my family.
Another had no date:
Something I wish for that is possible
I wish & feel that our community would be drug and alcohol free & that all organizations work together. I wish that people wouldn't be so negative & stop gossiping and backbiting -- I wish that cocaine would stop & that dealers would be confronted. I wish the liquor store would be closed. We don't need it.
While the sisters read, they heard a knock on the door. It was two men from the village, guys the Hyslop sisters had grown up around. They smelled strongly of booze. Annie invited them in. One of the men left after a few minutes, but the older one, in his 40s with black hair, a ball cap and mustache, joined the sisters at the table.
He'd come to offer his sympathy. His voice was a slur, much of it incoherent. But his drunken words were punctuated with bursts of language that were urgent and clear.
"Sometimes I wish I could just pick up the kids and ..." he said, snapping his fingers, "and just take 'em out away from everything, away from all the bad influences."
He told the sisters how sorry he was for everything they had been through.
"It's a tough life living in a village," he said. "We all want the best for our kids."
Over by the kitchen window, a boom box was playing a cassette someone had made at one of the memorial services for Patti. Villagers sang the old funeral hymn, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." After a few minutes, the man stood, apologized again, and walked out into the cold night.
***
Tanana's alcohol-fueled violence didn't end the night Patti Hyslop was killed.
On a Saturday night a month after she died, the mayor of Tanana , Connie Greenway, was beat up. She told the police her husband, Darryl, hit her while he was drunk on whiskey and beer that he'd ordered from Fairbanks earlier in the day. She had bruises on her face and head.
Connie left with their three kids, and later that night, alone in the house, Darryl Greenway shot himself in the chest with a hunting rifle. Like Melvin Edwin, he survived. He was flown to the Fairbanks hospital, where he spent three days recuperating. Upon his release, he was arrested and charged with assault. He's since entered an alcohol treatment program in Anchorage while awaiting trial.
Tanana 's mayor spent several days living in a Fairbanks shelter for battered women.
Pressure grew from some residents to re-open the store. On Feb. 23, the council voted it back open with reduced hours and new limits on how much people can buy each day. The store opened the next afternoon. It was 25 degrees below zero outside. Patti's sister, Polly, and three friends stood outside the store with picket signs. Business was steady.
Early the next morning, a village man who'd been drinking fell off his snowmobile, cut open his head and had to be flown out to the hospital.
The village policeman, McKinney, resigned the next week. He's since moved to Fairbanks.
Patti's sister, Polly, left the village in early March. She said she had done what she could, and needed to move on with her life.
The petition to shut down the store got the necessary 40 signatures for an election, but the wording didn't meet legal requirements. It's now being recirculated, and an election is expected sometime this spring.
Melvin Edwin went first to the hospital in Fairbanks, and then later was flown to Anchorage for extensive reconstructive facial surgery at the Alaska Native Medical Center. He blasted away his chin, nose, teeth and part of his tongue, but the blast missed major arteries and his eyes. He was up and walking around within a few days.
Melvin was served with a warrant for first-degree murder at his hospital bed in early February. An armed state trooper sat in the hospital room for several days until Melvin was moved to Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility. Through a public-defender lawyer, he pleaded not guilty. His trial is scheduled for May.
He cannot speak. He faces several more operations and is disfigured for life. He communicates with visitors in jail by jotting notes on a pad of paper.
Prosecutors and state troopers say they're not sure what set him off that night. Maybe Patti told him she was leaving for good. Maybe, as she turned more militant against booze and cocaine, and he remained trapped in his own addictions, his resentment grew into rage. Maybe it was the phone call to the village police officer.
He declined to be interviewed, as did relatives in Tanana . He has told visitors from the village that he doesn't remember what happened that night. They describe him as despondent.
***
The house on the hill is empty now.
One of Melvin's sisters picked up his belongings. A few days later, on a quiet Sunday morning in February, Patti's two sisters packed her things. Some they put aside to give to her friends at a traditional Athabaskan memorial potlatch in a year or two. They weren't sure what to do with other items -- children's books, baby toys, the family possessions of a family that no longer exists. Some items they took outside and burned.
Darren lives with Annie and her husband and children in the village. After the school year, he will move to Fairbanks to live with Patti's friend, Charlene. He goes to school and plays with his friends, but he also flies to Fairbanks every week for counseling. A few days after his mother was killed, the Episcopal bishop flew to Tanana and baptized him.
Back in the house, Annie pointed out Melvin's blood smeared on the door of Darren's room, across a bumper sticker that says: Get Hooked on Fishing Not Drugs.
As the sisters went through Patti's things, they found her answering machine in one of the boxes. They plugged it in: Hi, this is Patti. I can't come to the phone now.
Outside, the only sound on the hillside was the wind whispering through the trees.
The back yard was silent. After that Friday night in January, with no one left to care for the sled dogs that Melvin had got for his son, someone came by and shot each one and then hauled their carcasses away.