There was a pattern to Christmas. Even a pathology.
For the 14 children of Pete and Mae Wallis of Fort Yukon, the holiday always would begin with such promise.
"My father would order new clothes for us and give us haircuts, while my mother made us brand-new canvas boots," Velma Wallis recalls in her new memoir, "Raising Ourselves -- A Gwich'in Coming-of-Age Story From the Yukon River."
The tree was decorated in their two-room cabin in the downtown section of Fort Yukon, and adults began to whisper about presents. But all the while in those checkered days of the 1960s, she says, there was always the ominous smell of home-brewed beer fermenting in the back-room barrel.
"The scent filled our noses, vaguely warning us. . . ."
On a typical Christmas Eve, Wallis writes, her mother would put the children to bed. Then the friends would arrive, and her father would "generously pop open the first bottle of home-brew."
Everyone would toast the season. The children in the back room would peek at the grown-ups as their voices got louder. Usually, just before midnight, "with a half dozen empty green bottles littering the table," the happy adults all would begin to cry.
"Then their tears would dry up into angry words, and before anyone could redirect the party, it would erupt into anger. My father would end up tossing people out of his house left and right. About this time, my parents would start fighting. Jimmy, Martha, the younger siblings and I all witnessed my father beat my mother with his fists.
"It was unfathomable to us why my mother would not back down. One moment she was lying in a heap on the floor, but as soon as she recovered she was like Muhammad Ali, bouncing back up and challenging my father all over again.
" 'Hit me again, Pete!' she taunted him over and over.
"Then we children would try to intervene. We begged our father to stop hitting our mother, and we pleaded with our mother to stop telling him to hit her again. But they were in their own world and did not even notice us."
In a bold redirection of her writing career, Wallis -- the popular 42-year-old author of the best-selling "Two Old Women" legend -- has chosen to examine that world anew, exploring a childhood that was both good and bad.
But it's her sober recognition of the bad that emboldens her.
"Many times the stories about me and my loved ones are not flattering," Wallis writes in the preface to "Raising Ourselves," which became available in local bookstores this week.
"But in order to begin healing through storytelling, I must speak truthfully, without intentionally dishonoring anyone. . . . Our culture and people have been decimated by these self-destructive behaviors, which will only continue until we take steps to acknowledge our past honestly and to educate our young ones."
"Raising Ourselves" begins on a pristine summer morning inside the Wallis home in Fort Yukon -- at the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers in northeastern Alaska -- in 1966. She is 6 years old. Her father has just asked her to join him in the boat as he heads downriver to tend the fish wheel -- and Velma is thrilled.
"With 13 siblings, it was not every day that I had a few precious moments alone with my father," she writes. "This time was to be savored. I had to mind my outlandish tongue."
In the chapters that follow, she traces the main branches of her family tree, beginning with her paternal Grandmother Itchoo, who had "roamed the land in survival," and maternal Grandmother Hannah, who "yearned for another man" but reconciled herself to an arranged marriage with Velma's grandfather, Moses.
Her father and mother endured the great epidemics that swept across village Alaska in the early 20th century, leaving families broken and grieving, but each suffered the loss of three siblings. Her parents grieved, too, when their own children died. Which gave rise to the drinking. Which in turn brought more death.
Her father succumbed in the early 1970s to diabetes aggravated by his alcoholism. Her mother's alcoholism grew worse. So Velma dropped out of grade school at 13 to help raise her five younger siblings. That she not only survived that descent, but eventually emerged -- with the help of her brother Barry -- to write and publish "Two Old Women" is an extraordinary story.
Before she tried to tell it in "Raising Ourselves," however, she first asked her mother's permission -- and received it. In the book's dedication, she thanks her mom -- now 20 years sober and living in Fairbanks -- for "giving me your blessing to write honestly."
"You talk to a lot of elders today, and they pretty much don't tell you about their drinking days," Wallis said in a telephone interview from her home in Fairbanks. "But my mother always came right out and was very forthright in saying: 'Number one, I was a drinker. I'm not going to lie to you."
The daughter doesn't want to lie to you, either.
Reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.
