Sarah Black's Blog: Book Report - Posts Tagged "basque-boise"

One of my Changeling stories is now out of print, so I can share it with you here. So happy to be back in Boise I can't even begin...Ate some Basque sausage this weekend and nearly burst into tears.

Pelota! A Basque-Inuit Love Story
Sarah Black

Oliver is obsessed with all things Basque, and Jack is Inuit in his heart. But even the ancient Basque and Inuit managed to fall in love. In the abandoned Basque whaling
camp at Red Bay, off the coast of Labrador, the two young researchers find their common ground in a game of pelota.

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Chapter One

Oliver had dreamed of becoming Basque since his chubby baby hands had first
reached for a black beret. He grew up in Boise, Idaho, home of one of the larger Basque communities in the United States. He ate so much chorizo, even in kindergarten his breath smelled like garlic. Every five years, when Jaialdi came to Boise, he was first in
line to get tickets for the stone-lifting and wood-cutting competitions. A person could ask Oliver anything about Basque traditions, culture, symbols, and he would explain it all, sometimes in much greater detail than anyone was really interested in hearing. He
insisted on calling the home country Euskal Herria, and the Basque language Euskara.

When he was eight, he asked his mother to enroll him in Basque school in Spain
so he could learn to speak and write Euskara. When she refused, beginning to worry his interest was teetering on the brink of obsession, he went underground, collecting books written in Euskara, hoping to let the language seep into his mind. He drew the sacred lamburu on his schoolbooks, a tiny four-leafed clover, which charmed his many Basque
teachers, and when he was eighteen, he had the Ikurrina, the beautiful red and green striped Basque flag, tattooed on his biceps. And naturally, he learned to play pelota, the Basque game of handball.

Oliver’s mother remained worried, especially as she occasionally peeked into his bedroom to see the teenaged Oliver dressed in a black beret, traditional red neckerchief,
and nothing else, his wilted dick in his fist and a smudge on the sheets. However, there did not seem to be any way she could bring up these issues without offending his
strong Basque pride. In fact, he had started muttering some choice words in Euskara around the house, and she suspected these were curse words.

When he went off to Boise State for college, he majored in history, with a minor in Basque Studies. He picked up the language so quickly that his professors remained convinced there was Basque blood somewhere in his lineage.

Oliver was not politically
active, for which his professors were very grateful; the Basques already had plenty of homegrown obsessive hotheads to deal with, and they didn’t need any more. What Oliver was passionate about was the language, about books and printing and writing --
Euskara.

“Mom, don’t you see? I can’t sit around and watch another language become
extinct. It’s a blow to the collective human heart.” He patted her gently on the knee. “This is my life’s work, Mom. Did you get over to the store for some chorizos?”

Thursday was Basque food night at their house, and Oliver insisted on the authentic chorizos from the Basque Market downtown.

But while Oliver’s mother sat with her head bowed over the dinner table,
listening to Oliver recite their mealtime prayer in Basque, and saying her own little prayers for her son, his teachers were a bit more active. “We need to send Oliver into the field,” they agreed. Get him out of Boise. Basque country was out of the question.
Good Lord. They shuddered to think what would happen if Oliver found his feet in the sacred black dirt of Gernika. And that is when one of his professors remembered Labrador.

“Red Bay? You mean the whaling camp?”

“They’ve found a Basque whaling ship sunk in the bay, Oliver. There were logs, journals. We are co-sponsors of the excavation, and we want you on site. Our Euskara point man.”

His professors would never guess the joy that filled Oliver’s heart at these words, Euskara point man. He was packed, with a suitcase full of chorizo and beans, his beret snug on his head, and his mother barely had time to kiss him goodbye before he was out the door and flying north.

Labrador was more than a little shocking to a boy from Boise. Oliver stood on the
deck, looking out over the gray, cold water, turned around and stared out at the gray-green landscape. No trees, a few weathered bare rocks. This, Oliver said to himself, is arctic tundra. What the heck did the Basques come here for?

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They came for whales, of course. He knew that from his reading, but it didn’t
quite sink in until he stood in this place what a hellish trip that must have been. And then, when they got here? Killing fields. They killed as many right whales and bowheads as they could, processed them into oil and baleen and got the heck out of there before the whole place froze up for the winter. Oliver hiked his backpack up on
his shoulder, and walked back up to the dormitory, where he had a bunk waiting with a shared bathroom and kitchenette.

The dorm was grim, faded, gray-white clapboard. He could already imagine the
sounds of the wind off the Labrador coast, whistling through the boards. He
remembered reading Jack London as a boy -- something about padding his clothes with newspaper for insulation? Good Lord.

He closed the door carefully behind him, then walked into the dorm and found
an empty bunk. There were four sets of bunk beds, but only one seemed to be in use.

Oliver took the bottom bunk and threw his backpack on the bedspread, unpacked his precious supply of chorizos and hung them in the kitchen. He was unpacking his clothes when the door blew open.

The guy that walked in must have been about his age, with a native cast to his
eyes and black hair that was standing up every which a way from the wind. He nodded to Oliver. “You the Basquo?”

Oliver nodded, and he walked over and introduced himself. “Jack Brown. I’m
here with the Inuit team from University of BC. You’re from Boise State?”

“Are you Inuit?”

Jack shook his head. “I had a Japanese grandmother. But I am the top graduate
Inuit researcher in the entire department! When this placement came open for a researcher, my professors didn’t even consider anyone else!”

“Hey, me too! I think I got this job because I read and write Euskara. That’s the Basque language. What’s your specialty?”

“Inuit art.”

“Cool.”

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“The Inuit artifacts are below the Basque artifacts. You know what that means, right?”

Oliver frowned at him. “It’s not any great news that the Inuit were here first.”

“Here first and last, brother. You won’t find many Basques in Red Bay today.”

Oliver had been about to share a precious chorizo with this asshole! Well, he could go chew on some whale blubber. Oliver turned away, stretched out on his bed.

“You’re not coming to the site?”

“I’m taking a nap,” Oliver said. “Jet lag.”

When Jack left, stomping harder than he needed to across the bare plank floor,
Oliver sat up and studied the dorm. It looked to him like he and Jack were the sole cowboys. Jack had his bed on the bottom, and was using the top bunk to store his gear.

Oliver took a quick look. It seemed Jack was an artist, carving whales out of pieces of wood. They looked like the animals you would see on totem poles. He had a couple hanging up on the walls around his bed.

Oliver looked closer. Each carving was a circle, and the whale was swimming
inside the circle. The wood was carved and stained to show water, sun, air, and the details of the whales were so exact Oliver could name them: killer whales, right whales, bowheads and humpbacks, blues and fins and sperm whales. He knew the Basque whalers had driven the rights and the bowheads nearly to the brink of extinction in the waters off Labrador. He felt somehow these carvings of whales were a reproach. “They just came looking for cod,” he said, and turned away from the beautiful carvings.

Oliver got out his Ikurrina, hung it from the top bunk so it fell down over his bed like a curtain. The room immediately looked brighter. He unpacked his gauntlets and his pelota ball, unpacked his Euskara grammar text, taped up a map of the beautiful homeland, Euskal Herria. Oliver sighed, lay back down. The place felt warmer, homelike.
He could stand it, he thought, as long as Inuit-boy kept to his side of the dorm.

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Chapter Two

Jack’s mother blamed her mother-in-law for many things, but mostly she blamed
her for Jack’s strange obsession with the Inuit people. When Jack was six, his
grandmother had begun to tell him stories about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. She had been interred in Idaho for six months when she was an infant. It was her dearest hope to have a grandson who would become a powerful attorney, one who would squeeze an appropriate punishment from the United States of
America on behalf of everyone of Japanese-American ancestry. She and Jack were on a tour of the internment camps up in Alaska when Jack first met an Inuit, and first held a hand-carved piece of walrus tusk, and first felt the enormous power of the animal
spirits in a Totem Pole.

He flung himself into the study of the native peoples of the arctic, quickly
consigned the Athabaskans to Arizona, and settled his considerable powers of
concentration on the Inuit people.

Jack liked the way Canada called their native people the First Nations. He felt
that was respectful, and he led a campaign to change the popular usage of the language from “Native American” to “First Nations.” The tribal politics quickly got ugly. The Navajo suggested they could be the First Nation, but the Apache were of a certainty only Second Nations, and everyone disputed the claims of the Athabaskan. The
Cheyenne and Arapahoe renewed their fight over the borders of their shared
reservation, and the Southern Utes wanted to use the title, but with Inc. behind the name. Many of the Eastern tribes complained that they were being ignored in the discussion, and in fact their complaints went unnoticed. But when it became known that Jack was not, in fact, Inuit, but of Japanese-American ancestry, the doors to the hogans and tipis, the pow-wows and tribal council meetings were slammed shut against him.

The Inuit always welcomed him, though. Jack suspected it was because he had
learned their language, but actually the small villages were so isolated, and the people so hungry for visitors, they welcomed everyone. But Jack was their darling. He loved to listen to the stories told by the elders, stories of animal spirits and great hunts, stories of the ferocious magic in the strange arctic landscape. He admired their native handicrafts with such enthusiasm the villagers always felt hopeful that they might at last find a market for goods so fervently admired.

When he went off to the University of British Columbia, he went with a pair of
hand crafted, beaver lined mukluks and a beaver hat, made by hand and sewn with
bone needles and sinew. His muffler was knitted from hand-spun qiviut, and his head was full of stories. His grandmother and mother could only watch helplessly as he hoisted a backpack full of walrus tusk and whalebone, bid them farewell in Inuit, and headed off to school.

Jack fell in love during a class on Inuit culture. The boy was called Amuk, and he told Jack his name meant Father Wolf. His hair was as black as a raven’s wing, and tumbled down his back. Jack sat behind him and breathed his scent, looked at the lines of his neck, like the smooth brown of old, polished ivory.

The instructors were amazed at how quickly Jack picked up Inuit, and he was
encouraged to continue graduate study. One of his instructors gave Jack a gentle suggestion about Amuk. “Jack, just because a boy is Inuit doesn’t mean he embodies all that is fine about the culture. In every community, you will find different sorts of people. I do not want you to be hurt.”

Jack sort of understood what he was saying. Amuk was a lazy student, and
seemed to be looking for an easy ride. Jack’s Inuit was far better than his, even though he was raised a native speaker. Also, Jack noticed that Amuk never kissed him. Their lovemaking mostly involved Amuk shoving Jack’s head down between his legs. Then Jack overheard Amuk talking to another Inuit boy, saying, “Hey, the Jap gives good
head. That’s all it is.” He understood clearly then that assholes could come from every culture, and knew that the elders who held him so dear would have something to say about the lazy boy who had treated him so disrespectfully. He tore up all the poetry he had written about Amuk’s black hair and told his professors he wanted some fieldwork.

The small excavation at Red Bay, Labrador, was a hardship post. There was quite a bit of competition between the Basque Studies and the Inuit Studies departments at the respective universities, but it was the landscape that was most troublesome. The
desolate air, harsh arctic tundra, and the incessant wind withered the academic zeal in many a soul. But his instructors knew Jack was made for arctic tundra. It was imprinted on his soul. So he packed his beaver skin mukluks and his qiviut muffler and his beaver hat, and set off across Canada.

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Chapter Three

After a short nap, Oliver set out to explore. The Basque whaling vessel that had been found in the waters off Red Bay, and brought up in pieces, was called the San Juan.

The majority of work by the anthropologists and archeologists had been done, and several sites on shore had been carefully excavated. This excavation had produced more
fragments and pieces of tools and small scraps of books and pieces of paper and ivory than any ten people could properly inspect and catalogue if they worked nonstop for years. This inspecting and preserving and cataloging was the work Oliver and Jack were being called upon to do.

There was a trailer set upon the shore, and Oliver stuck his head inside. One wall contained shelves with boxes of artifacts, and there were a couple of desks. Jack was at one, looking at pieces of bone under a magnifying glass. He gestured to the other desk.
“That’s yours,” he said. “I put some books on your desk. I think they’re written in the Basque language but I’m not sure. They came from the San Juan.

That metal shed behind us? Full of artifact boxes. I think at last count there were six hundred and twelve
boxes of artifacts still to go.”

“Cool!” The books were in bad shape, with covers warped and twisted with
water, and the pages stained. The ink seemed to be some sort of dark brown, the paper parchment. Oliver pulled out his memo book and started taking notes.

“When you go through boxes, if you find anything that looks like Inuit art, you
pass it to me. If I find anything made of paper, or that looks like a book, or has writing on it, I’ll pass it to you. Will that work?”

Oliver nodded. “That will work.”

* * *

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Jack touched him on the shoulder, and Oliver looked up to see it was dark
outside. “You haven’t moved for hours. I’m heading back to the dorm. I didn’t want you to get lost in the dark.”

“Oh, thanks.” Oliver blinked a few times, rubbed the tiredness from his eyes.

“So is that Basque?”

“Euskara, yes. Looks like a log of supplies. I need to look up the names, compare them with the names on the contracts back in Euskal Herria. When do they have the Internet up?”

“They put the tower up for four hours in the middle of the day.”

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“I’ve got a pile of baleen to go through. Some of it looks to have been carved into tools, needles, mostly, and I think some buttons. The Inuit made most of their art into something useful, like tools or household goods.”

“What is baleen exactly?”

“Whales have it in place of teeth. Made of keratin, like horn or fingernails. They have plates of it in the mouth, in parallel lines, and use it to filter small fish out of seawater. The Basques hunted whales for oil and baleen.”

“What was it used for?”

“Corset stays.”

“Hmm.”

“The Inuit carved it, made hair combs and small flexible tools. It doesn’t fossilize, but we think it developed in whales about 30 million years ago. So we’re mostly guessing about when…”

Jack took a deep breath, and it looked to Oliver like he was ready to talk about baleen for some time to come. “Hey, how do you want to share the kitchen?”

Jack shrugged. “We can each do our own thing, or we can share cooking and
eating. I’m not a great cook but I can make grilled cheese.”

“Probably a good idea if we share, then. How do we get groceries?”

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“We can order stuff from Newfoundland and they deliver once a week. If you
don’t have anything, don’t sweat it. I can cover us for this week.”

Oliver felt himself softening toward Jack just a bit. “I did bring some Basque sausages and beans. I’m happy to share them.”

“Cool!”

Over the next week, Oliver and Jack fell into a good working routine. They
traded breakfast and supper cooking duties, and packed lunches so they wouldn’t have to stop in the middle of the day. Jack went on a bit about Inuit art, but Oliver was willing to listen, especially since Jack seemed interested in what he had to say about the
development of Euskara and the history of writing, printing, and book binding in the Basque world. Jack seemed especially impressed to hear about the long history of Basque seamanship, and the presence of a Basque crew with Columbus when he discovered America. Things might have gone well except for pelota.

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Chapter Four

Oliver mentioned casually that pelota, the Basque handball game, was probably
the original handball game. Jack courteously disagreed, suggesting that Inuit handball had been around for hundreds of years before pelota. He suggested that there was
archeological evidence to support the contention that the Greenland Inuit had handball before the Basques were ever seen in Red Bay. Oliver showed him several artifacts from
the boxes on the walls that could easily have been, when whole, the cupped baskets that some petola players used. Jack blew a raspberry at that.

Oliver challenged Jack to a game of pelota, sure he could end the argument with a sound Basque ass-whipping. To his surprise, Jack agreed, and pulled out a pair of well-worn leather gauntlets from beneath his bunk. “I know where there’s a rock wall we can use,” Jack said. “It’s not quite a fronton, but it should do.”

Jack knew the name of the Basque handball court? Oliver refused to ask him about it, followed him out to the rock wall, afraid he was looking at the backside of a ringer.

And so it proved. Oliver was a decent pelota player, a goer, with a lot of heart. Jack was world class, with an armspan like a chimpanzee and hands that must have been as hard as baleen. He whipped Oliver back and forth across the court, nearly took his head off a couple of times, and when Oliver swayed on his feet, Jack reached a foot out, hooked it around his ankles, and brought him down.

“Admit it,” he said. He sat down on Oliver’s stomach, kept him pinned to the
ground. “The Inuit had handball first.”

Oliver shook his head grimly. “Pelota,” he said. “Not handball. And the Basques
brought it to the New World.”

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“New World? That Eurocentric bullshit interpretation is so last century, my
friend. The Inuit had it first. Not the Basques. Admit it. Say it: ‘Inuit had handball first’.”

Oliver glared up at him, shook his head grimly, and Jack reached down and
snatched the beret off Oliver’s head and threw it across the court. Then he kissed him, right on his furious, snarling mouth.

“Inuit had handball first.”

Oliver tried to buck him off, but Jack had surprisingly strong thighs, and they
kept Oliver pinned in place. Jack kissed him again. “Say it. I’ll keep you pinned here until you admit it.”

What followed was a surprise to both Oliver and Jack, especially when they
found their anger quickly turning to the sort of passion usually reserved for pelota and Euskara and, in Jack’s case, Inuit art. Jack was lean and soft, his skin as pale as parchment, and Oliver decided that kissing his mouth could not really be seen as a betrayal of his beliefs, not if they both agreed not to mention pelota. Jack wore strange
clothes, hide boots with fur inside, some sort of scarf that was the softest thing Oliver had ever touched. Jack pulled Oliver’s shirt out of his jeans and unbuttoned it, then unsnapped and unzipped him so quickly Oliver wasn’t really sure how it had
happened.

Jack traced down Oliver’s belly with the scarf, wrapped it gently around his
cock. “This is qiviut,” he said, mouth moving over Oliver’s neck. “The down of the musk ox. Seven times softer than cashmere. You can come in it. It’s totally hand-washable.”

Oliver felt his cock give a throb and a jerk, wrapped up in the silky wool. He
imagined Jack jerking off inside his qiviut muffler when he was alone in the dorm. He imagined the muffler was long enough they could use both ends at the same time. “Oh, God, Jack. Kiss me again.”

Oliver was not ready to give up, but he also did not want to miss one moment of
Jack’s hands, wandering down his stomach, or the feel of his warm mouth and spiky hair, following the trail of the qiviut. His cock was dancing against his belly, and Oliver wasn’t sure if he should moan or yelp or even just scream out loud. Jack seemed pleased with the vigor of Oliver’s thighs, toned by years of pelota, the way they locked themselves around him.

Jack took his time nuzzling Oliver’s cock, and then he said a strange thing. “I know how to do this.”

“You do? Well, I don’t. You can show me, though, right? Am I supposed to do it
to you, too?”

“Well, I would say that’s the polite way to go about things,” and he looked so
hopeful that Oliver determined right then and there to develop at least some of Jack’s considerable expertise. There seemed to be nuzzling involved, kissing and licking, then he sucking down and lips moving up and down and careful placement of the teeth and
the whole thing was so extraordinary that Oliver found his voice, raised in Basque song, a beautiful contralto, and he clutched Jack’s hair in both fists until Jack reached up and
gently disentangled his fingers.

Oliver held Jack wrapped up in his arms and legs, and they were both sweaty,
from pelota and from lovemaking, and he liked it. He liked this feeling, another boy in his arms, his smooth, strong back, a crinkle of silky hair against his groin, and the feel of
Jack’s mouth moving across his neck. “This is good,” he said, thinking, I can’t believe I’m kissing a boy who isn’t a Basque, and Jack raised himself to his elbows and smiled down at
him.

“Yeah, it’s good. You want to go in? I think you’re lying in a pile of rocks.”

Oliver would have guessed a pile of baleen, but he didn’t want to mention that and risk Jack getting distracted. Jack climbed off him, reached a hand down to pull him up, and brushed off his back. “So you aren’t going to give, huh?”

Oliver shook his head. “About pelota? Sorry, my friend. No can do.”

“Well,” Jack said, “we must just agree to disagree.”

Back in the dorm Oliver slid into the shower, and Jack was waiting for his turn when he was done. Oliver dried his hair and tied a towel around his waist. When Jack came out of the shower, Oliver took the towel and rubbed his back dry. “Tell me about those carvings by your bed.”

Jack gave him a grateful smile. “I want to capture the spirit of the whales.
They’re nearly extinct now. It’s like a tribute.” He saw Oliver’s face. “I don’t blame the Basques, Oliver. They were just trying to make a living. We didn’t know any better back then. But I want to honor the spirit of the whales anyway.”

This sentiment was so tender and beautiful that Oliver couldn’t help but take Jack into his arms and kiss him sweetly. Towels hit the floor, and hands roamed over warm skin. Jack fell back on his bunk, and Oliver climbed on top of him, nudged his warm cock into his mouth. He had a handful of black pubic hair clutched in his fist, and
when Jack’s cock slid between his lips, against his tongue and slowly along the edge of his teeth, Oliver was so overcome he was ready to renounce his stubborn belief in pelota. But he couldn’t, at the moment, speak.

Jack could, though. He removed Oliver’s fingers from his pubic hair, and when
Oliver clutched his hips with both hands, sucked him down so deep and so soft, made these sweet little noises of pleasure, Jack was moved to ululations, and for a moment the joyous, triumphant sounds of an Inuit hunting party felling a musk ox filled the abandoned village of Red Bay.

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Chapter Five

After this bout of lovemaking, which seemed to last just a moment or two, but in actuality lasted over two hours, Jack and Oliver went back to work. Jack had his baleen tools to catalogue, and Oliver had a new journal to try and preserve.

Oliver did spend a few moments wondering about the exact definition of
virginity -- was oral sex given and received significant enough sexual activity that it would be defined as loss of virginity? He and Jack had a lively discussion on this point,
and decided that virginity was primarily a heterosexual definition, and thus they could craft a new definition specific to homosexuality. Oliver proposed that a degree of reciprocity was important, and Jack recommended a new terminology, since traditional definitions of virginity involved a loss of something precious, and the new definition
could incorporate the idea of gain. He theorized that true loss of innocence, if that could be a metaphor for loss of virginity, came with betrayal. Oliver disagreed, and suggested
that he would like to choose their earlier lovemaking as his official loss of virginity. Jack was so touched he leaned across the aisle and kissed Oliver for nearly five minutes.

The pages of the journal Oliver was working on were stuck together, and he
wasn’t sure how to get them apart without tearing them. He’d removed the leather covers and boards already, and was thinking he could document how the pages were sewn together, then take the pages apart from the bound edge.

He photographed every step, to preserve the record, and once he had good
documentation about how the paper was sewn, he eased the thread out of the holes with a tiny blade. The thread looked like linen, and it had been waxed. Probably how it had been preserved. He pulled the papers apart, and just as he hoped, the bound edge
separated easily. Even without tearing or cutting the stuck-together edge, he would be able to read and translate the pages. This looked to be a personal journal, too, and those
were always the most valuable for the historical record.

He heard a little gasp from behind him, and Jack reached across and put a small
tool on his desk. “Would you look at that!” It was a piece of walrus tusk carved like a handle, a knife or a fork handle. There was a scene scratched on the surface, an Inuit boy holding a tiny fish on a string. And on the end, a small carving of the lauburu, the
ancient Basque symbol.

Oliver smiled at Jack’s back. He was already bent over his desk again. “Hey,
thanks.”

“Cool, huh?”

“You think it was a Basque knife handle, and someone carved a scene they saw?”

“Could be. Or maybe the Basquo married an Inuit women, and the boy is his son.
We don’t have very much evidence of cross-cultural behavior, marriages or burials. It would be really great to find some. There must have been people falling in love, despite their huge cultural differences.”

“I agree. It would be bound to happen.”

Oliver turned back to his journal. He noticed a flash of color, and opened a
couple of pages to an illustration. The pictures had a paper covering between the facing pages, probably to keep the paint from sticking, but this paper had helped preserve the
picture. He saw the word at the bottom of the page, pilota, and his breath caught in his throat. Oh, my God! He had a picture of early pelota! Jack was going to eat his tongue!

Oh, my God. The picture wasn’t of Basque whalers playing pelota. It was a
drawing of Inuit playing pelota. He double checked his translation several times. The caption said, “An ancient form of pilota played by the native Indians of the Arctic.”

An ancient form of pilota played by the native Indians of the Arctic. Jack had
been right after all! The Inuit did have handball first!

He looked over at Jack, bent over his worktable. Jack had a good light, and a
magnifying glass, and was looking at a small carving on an ivory button. Oliver studied the curve of his neck, the fine bones in his spine. He had a sudden picture of the two of them, sitting in little work trailers all over the world, back to back, Basque artifacts and
Inuit artifacts, and he would be staring at the beautiful bones of Jack’s neck until the black hair on his head turned white as the arctic snow.

“Hey,” he said. Jack looked up, blinked a couple of times to focus his eyes. “Look what I found.”

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