White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  You suffer an accidental gunshot. If you die, you’ll have to restart. Your options: Continue as usual; Rest here awhile; Increase rations; Clean and dress the wound; Treat with an antiseptic; Rub salt in the wound; Get advice.

  Most of these treatment options seem fine; outside the window, most options are bad. Gallbladder failure: Continue as usual or get surgery. Ovarian cysts: Continue as usual; Take Advil (though your inflamed stomach can’t handle it); Take Vicodin; Get a medical marijuana card. You’ve been so busy killing your pain that you never learned how to treat your ailments. Pain won’t kill you. But this gunshot wound might. So you get advice.

  A man with a dead fox hat holds his rifle like a baby and says, “I’ve had me some experience with gunshot wounds back in the Illinois frontier wars. Let me see what I can do to help.” A man with a mustache says, “You sure it was an accident? We don’t want any murdering varmints hanging about!” Yes, you’re sure: the only violent one here is the empire. The men know nothing. You’re good at rubbing salt in your own wounds, good at increasing rations, good at rest, best at continuing as usual, so you know that these actions won’t heal you. You treat with an antiseptic.

  Your injury becomes infected. You clean and dress the wound, and you plan to stop for rest, but you meet a man with the biggest knife you’ve ever seen and also one of the biggest mustaches. He looks like bad company. Your condition is poor, with bleeding, discoloration, pain, and reddening. You wonder whether there’s still a bullet inside you, and where. Removing it was never an option.

  You continue.

  You’re staring at a green rectangle of hunting grounds and thinking about a question your therapist stumped you with—“What do you like about Philip?”—when a deer walks across the sky, levitating above ground. You shoot and miss, and the deer runs. You look for another sky deer but find only geese. This was not a glitch, but an apparition.

  At Ayres Natural Bridge, you meet a woman in buckskins who resembles your grandma, young. She says, “Ah, more wagon people. Are you here to slaughter more buffalo like the group that passed by four days ago?”

  “Tell me more,” you say.

  She says, “I’d never seen such waste. They killed ten times what they needed for food, and left most of the carcasses to rot. Luckily, after the coyotes had finished with them, we gathered the bones to make tools.”

  “Do you have any advice?” you say.

  “If you must kill for food, good. But don’t kill any more than that. The well-being of our people depends on the buffalo.”

  “So long,” you say.

  You’re done looking around.

  You understand the message, but why do people keep telling you not to kill the animals? What is there to do out here but hunt? You’ve always thought of the American West as a place where the land’s story recently got its stakes raised by revolver blasts, esophageal corrosion, torn petticoats, snapped necks, and stripped skulls. Violence has no homeland: you pick it up like a pox and carry it. You got sicker in the West, but maybe that was less about place than about time: the longer you lived, the worse you got, following your mapped trail to death by man or by poison. A trail is both more and less fixed than a narrative. When you’re writing the narrative, choices are infinite; when you’re reading it, your only choice is whether to continue or not. The trail is somewhere in between: when you get to the river, you can cross or not. You assess the river and decide to ford or float. Decision-making becomes rote as you practice. This is what it’s like to live without intoxication: no escape, only facing choices.

  This river may prove a little tricky. You ford the river. This river may prove a little tricky. You ford the river. This river may prove a little tricky. He’s been silent for a week but you don’t know what it means. You ford the river. Text him or don’t. The way up the hill appears fairly steep. You double-team and continue.

  It is night. A long weekend for Thanksgiving. And your birthday, actually. No thank you to every holiday dinner invitation. No messages from Philip, even as your thirty-first comes and goes. Sealed inside a dark room, spine hardening into kyphosis in this rolling chair, eyes fixed on a luminous screen. This portal lets you travel by memory teleportation through jaunty songs, cornflower blouses, and the same text prompts appearing over and over at every hill and river. Your destination is a time when you felt wonder. With every month sober, you strip away another layer of buildup—or maybe armor. The little witch inside surfaces.

  Nested inside a lonesome pause, you can take stock of what still hurts, if you’re ready. You’ve been told to think about how you want a man to treat you, but that kind of reflection feels like indulgence in fantasy. Reality is hard enough without imagining the impossible: a tender man who loves you. Real men are snakes. Some the poison kind, some constrictors; some are harmless but slither away when you get close.

  Alkali water. Morale is high.

  No grass. Deep sand.

  Mia Zapata has a sprained ankle. You immobilize the affected joint.

  You’ve traveled so many miles but you still haven’t seen the sun or the moon.

  Injured livestock: 1 mule. Get advice: “An injured draft animal is no good to nobody. Shoot it!”

  In your gut, you know that your relationship is bad, as in expired, like milk. Philip’s white man face is not a mask, and he can’t see it. He doesn’t love you. He is not wicked, never abusive, never mean, so you know you must hold on to this for as long as you can, because if you lose him, the next man might kill you.

  Fallen rocks. Try to clear the path—You were unable to clear the path. Try to find another path—You were unable to find another path. Wait for conditions to improve—

  You decide to enact a plan you hatched when you found one of his pubic hairs on the bathroom floor. You folded it up into a little scrap of paper. Just in case. And now, he hasn’t even emailed, so you take the logical next step in your occult development: you put the hair into a glass pillar candle, reach into your vagina, pull out fingers wet with cervical fluid, and scrape the ooze into the glass. You light the wick. You don’t really believe it’ll work, but you burn it to the end.

  At the Grande Ronde River, you meet a cavalryman with a gun and gold buttons. He says, “Used to be you could count on Indians being here to help you cross, but not no more. Too much tension now between them an’ the settlers.” You hope he’ll tell you more about these particular Indians, who would have been trading partners with your ancestors, but he does not.

  In the space of five miles, near Deadman Pass, a wild animal bites you, Layne Staley gets a bad cold, you become snowbound, Kurt Cobain gets the grippe, you get stuck in the Blue Mountains, the trail floods, a mule is injured, and your party goes through most of its food. You don’t celebrate the new year of 1856. You never see death here and yet its promise is everywhere.

  You’re nearing the Columbia River when: No fruit. No vegetables. Low food. Hunting turns up nothing but rabbits and rocks.

  Before colonization, your Columbia River Indian ancestors brought in food according to the seasonal round, moving from fishing to picking to gathering to hunting and back through again. They preserved food to carry villages through the winter. People celebrated the arrival of first foods with ceremonies that would ensure future abundance. They did this for thousands of years; it took only a few for whites to upend the system.

  Your freezer is full of salmon you won’t let yourself eat because you don’t deserve it. Your pantry, canned pineapple for the apocalypse you don’t fear. Your belly, a birthday cake you bought yourself and served with no song, no fire, no wish.

  You stop at the McDonald Ford of the John Day River. This is your traditional territory. Your ancestors should be here. You find only a white man with suspenders who says, “What are we waiting for? Let’s cross!”

  You cross on the ice.

  You hunt.

  You stop in Biggs Junction. Your guidebook doesn’t tell you this is the first place on the Oregon Trail where settlers woul
d see the Columbia River. Your guidebook doesn’t say anything. You see who’s around, but find only more white men in vests.

  You stop at Celilo but can’t see the river. You can see only white snow and white people.

  Celilo. Intact, here in this window, the kind of miracle that feels like a backhand.

  You stop.

  The Columbia River originates in the Canadian Rockies and curves through volcanic ridges, basalt scablands, and flat basins, flowing so forcefully the white people knew they had to take its power from it. So they dammed the river to capture water for farming, stop the flooding of riverfront towns, control the water’s course, and generate electricity.

  Your mother was five years old when the Dalles Dam was completed. The Army Corps of Engineers flooded Celilo Falls, an important salmon fishery since the beginning of time, drowning the village with a reservoir. Your ancestors and other people once gathered at Celilo to trade, fish, play stickgame, talk, and snag.

  Before white people found the river, their diseases found its people: first smallpox, then malaria, influenza, and whooping cough. Deaths gutted kinship systems and decimated whole villages. Lewis and Clark cataloged lands to claim, peoples to overtake, and riches to split: furs, logs, waterways.

  For a while, some of the people tried to get along with the whites and strategically traded with them at forts to get the horses and guns they made necessary. Intervillage marriage had always been important in maintaining kinship systems; now, some of the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company became marriage partners for the women. Some of the new men were just fucking the women. Sometimes by force.

  By the 1850s, the Oregon Trail brought the arrival of thousands of settlers per year. Fort Dalles served as a US Army outpost along the river, and in 1857, a few miles west of Celilo Falls, settlers established The Dalles as a town at the site of a mission popular with trail-goers. Then white people found gold. Then white people wanted land. Then they took it and farmed it. Through treaties largely unclear or wholly unintelligible to the headmen signing them, the US government formalized the land theft its citizens had initiated. The people would no longer live along the river as they had since time began. They were clustered into “tribes” whites could understand, and these tribes were pushed onto small pieces of land far from the territory they moved throughout to live, fish, hunt, and gather. White people didn’t like these Indians: they weren’t as exciting as the peoples of the plains, and they ate fish, even when they didn’t have to.

  The white people never understood the river. They still don’t understand the river.

  Elissa. Do you?

  You’ve spent more time at wimahl, the great water, inside this window than you have outside it. As a child, you made trips to the Columbia River every other summer. You watched salmon move through the fish ladder at the Dalles Dam, looked at fishing platforms from the bridge, and traveled by sightseeing boat. As a teenager, you tried to walk from your grandparents’ house to the river, but walking from memory with no guidebook, unable to tell the scorched flats around you from the scorched flats in your recollections of drives from The Dalles, you walked deeper into Washington.

  Now, a few hours’ drive away, you can’t ever seem to get there. You’re perpetually rushing to finish some task for money or going to the doctor to see why you feel like you’re dying (it was the drinking, and then it was the lack, but now, you don’t know). But the real drain on your time is the men. One after another. In the last year alone: your man of four years who drank even more than you did; a man who demanded your affection until a court ordered him to stop; a man who choked without asking; a man with his ex-wife’s name tattooed on his chest who yelled at you for making everything about race when you told him you were pissed that an event host introduced you and a Black writer to the audience after saying, “We have diversity”; and now, this white man Philip, whom you’re trying to understand. Who listens in silence when your darker-skinned Native friends talk about being followed around stores by security guards, and who later tells you he didn’t like that conversation. Whose sense of self seems dependent upon formative experiences with substances Native people discovered to be hallucinogenic. Who was raised by wealthy white genius people fifty miles from the graveyard where the bones of all your ancestors, back to Tumulth, lie, and where you will be buried when you die, maybe at the hands of a white man.

  Elissa. What do you think you’re going to find on this trail?

  At Camp Dalles, a white man with a gun and buckskins tells you this last stretch is the roughest. You can raft down the Columbia or take Barlow Toll Road; he recommends hiring an Indian guide for the river. You consider paying $80 for someone to raft you, just so you’ll see another person like you. But you decide to do it without help because your Indian senses are strong—right?—and your people have lived with these rocks forever. For a while, you do move your cursor with precision, and your wagon dodges every rock, rapid, and whirlpool. But then you capsize once. You capsize again. You capsize four times before you’re yanked from the ultramarine river, the adventure tune changes to a dirge, and you see five settlers wringing their hands at an unmarked grave.

  Elissa died.

  Elissa drowned.

  Save diary. End game.

  No. You’re not going to do either of those things. Your ancestors didn’t do the things ancestors do for you to fall off your wagon and drown.

  You load a saved game. Back at Camp Dalles, you try the river again, and every time you capsize, you wonder how white people made it as far as they did. The river feels almost as long as it did when you were a kid in the back seat of your aunt’s car, waiting to reach Grandma and Grandpa’s house, or at least to get to the place where your aunt would point to a stone outcropping on a hill and tell a story you’ve never seen written.

  Your rafting ends without death. You’ve lost the following supplies: 2 blankets; 1 pair of boots; 1 16-oz. bottle of brandy; 1 butcher knife; 1 fishing spear; 4 25-lb. kegs of gunpowder; and various other items. At Cascades Portage, you find yourself down to no fruit, no vegetables, no beans, no bread, and 11 pounds of meat. You meet a man in a bowler and a checkered jacket who says, “Let’s head for the rapids! Sure, it’s dangerous, but it’ll be fun!”

  No. You portage.

  At McCord Creek, you have to raft again. Your Indian senses are strong; you don’t capsize. You reach Fort Vancouver. It appears to be an ordinary fort, but you think your spirit heard about it from your mother’s spirit, who heard about it from her mother’s, who heard about it from her mother’s, who heard about it from her mother’s, because she was forced to linger in that place, and maybe her spirit is still there a little, and maybe you can even see it through the window.

  Visit the fort.

  You look for your great-great-grandmother and her sisters, but they’re not there. Eventually, outside the window, their father will be executed, the Klamath will take the girls as slaves, and the US Army will attack the Klamath and take the girls to Fort Vancouver. You know nothing of their life at the fort, only that soldiers collected gold for them because it was known that Tumulth had been wrongly accused of treason. In the window, you don’t find any known hangmen or any Indian girls. A white man with a buckskin vest says, “It always pleases me to see more people moving out west. This will be a great and grand country some day, you know!”

  “Tell me more,” you say.

  He says, “Why, expanding the horizons of civilization out here in the wilderness. Just thrills me to the bone to think on it!”

  “Do you have any advice?” you say.

  “Don’t be led astray by anyone or anything promising shortcuts or quick fixes. There ain’t any! Stay on the main trail and work hard. That’s the only sure path!”

  “So long,” you say.

  A man in a bow tie will sell you supplies. He has 118 5-lb. tins of biscuits. He has 91 10-lb. sacks of cornmeal. He has horses for cheap. He has pemmican, salt pork, rice, and sugar. You have 61 pounds of meat and no idea
how much longer this trail is. But you won’t leave a single dollar at this fort. You’ll take all these settlers’ money. You sell your mules, your extra clothing, and half your oxen. You sell your rifle, bullets, and gunpowder. Someone on the internet said if you heal yourself you heal your ancestors, your whole family line. How would that work? You want to think time is not linear and all of you are alive at once. But even games have been training you to see your life as a quest, trail, or narrative, time flowing like a river pushed through narrows. Stay on the main trail and work hard. That’s the only sure path! You’re staring into this window so hard because outside it, you’re stalled in a dark room lit by a weak flame you fed with your own cells because they put you on this path and compelled you to follow it: your mother has a husband, and her mother had a husband, and her mother had two husbands, and her mother had three, and her mother was one of a chief’s wives. The ancestors are in the beautiful wagon of your body, your eyes like a rifle, your lean hips like a horse. A long time ago, your ancestor women married white men because no Cascade men were available, you’ve heard. Your mother and grandmother didn’t model that: they built marriages from love and healthy interdependence. But your body, somehow, seems to remember the fort. The scarcity. The huckleberry crop dwindling as the white men stopped the people from tending the fields. Your body carries something you need in the thin pillow of fat around your waist, right where the huckleberry basket would be tied. Your body holds. When you pair with a man, even if he is not good to you, your body holds. Philip will return and you won’t ask him why he didn’t write, not even on your birthday. Months from now, at his birthday party, you’ll surprise him with a unicorn-shaped piñata filled with candies you took care in selecting from WinCo bulk bins; he’ll save it to break later, at a karaoke party to which you are not invited, and afterward, he’ll tell you nobody liked the candy, so they left it on the floor. In late winter, he’ll break up with you, saying the problem is that you won’t trash-talk when you two play Dance Dance Revolution.