From the ceiling of the cottage dangled a squadron of cardboard-and-tissue-paper airplanes. After the Brayfogles left, she had read whatever she could find about pilots and flying in Missoula’s handsome brick Carnegie library. Since Lindbergh, the whole country had caught aviation fever, and besides the columns of coverage in the papers every day, new periodicals kept springing up. In the back of one magazine promising “Daring Tales of Flight and Flying,” she had found instructions and stencils for making a model of a Standard biplane. That first one hadn’t turned out well—its wings were crooked and dotted with gluey fingerprints; the struts were buckled—but she made another and another, lavishing them with the attention she longed to expend on real aircraft, and eventually they were perfect.
At some point in the first weeks post-Brayfogles, as she lay earthbound and pining in the cottage, lost in heady memories of the valley spinning below, of the high harmonic of the plane’s rigging, the obvious fact had dawned on her that she could not become a pilot right away. She needed to be older. Not much older, she didn’t think, just not thirteen. Maybe fourteen or fifteen—she believed then she would be old enough that her intentions would not seem comical. She would also need a flying teacher and an airplane, but she did not doubt those would materialize.
Another undeniable truth had occurred to her: If she hadn’t been able to pay Trixie for a ride, she certainly wouldn’t be able to pay for proper lessons, and so she had begun to look for income more dependable than petty thievery. Sixteen was the age for real work; fourteen if you had a school-leaving certificate, which she didn’t. The librarians would pay her a dime for every cart of books she shelved, but there were not enough carts. Farmers would not hire a girl to pick apples or milk cows when there were boys after the same jobs. Opportunities were limited, but she would find a way because she must be a pilot. She couldn’t fathom that others did not see her for what she would become, that she did not wear the fact of her future like some eye-catching garment. Her belief that she would fly saturated her world, presented an appearance of absolute truth.
It was Caleb who came to the cottage, not Jamie. She had fallen asleep in the armchair and woke to him standing over her, purloined Audubon under his arm. His hair was bound back in a braid thicker than the one she’d cut off. He laughed—high and wheezy, almost a neigh—while peering at the back of her head. “What’ve you done?”
“I wanted it short.”
She dreaded him asking why. To explain would be impossible. Because tender lumps had recently begun deforming her chest? Because she had read something in one of her father’s books about nuns shaving their heads as they entered their novitiate and wanted to mark herself with the seriousness of her intention to fly? Because she wanted to strip everything extra away, be streamlined and clean and swift?
Caleb didn’t ask why. He set the book down and said, “Were you crying because your hair’s gone or because you did such a bad job of it?”
“I’m not crying.”
He smiled, patronizing.
She ran her hand over her naked neck, said, “Because I did a bad job.” She was relieved to recognize this as the truth. “Can you help, maybe?”
“I don’t see how I could make it any worse. Jamie was too scared to come try.”
They spread newspaper on the floor, and she sat in the middle. Carefully, slowly, using a comb and just the points of the scissors, he snipped. “I cut Gilda’s hair sometimes,” he said.
“You do?”
“I just trim the ends. She’s never given me such a mess to start with. How short do you want it?”
“Like a boy’s.”
“I’m a boy, and mine’s longer than yours ever was.”
“You know what I mean. Real short.”
“All right.” Snipping. “You know since you already dress like a boy people will take you for one after this.”
“That’s fine.”
“Don’t you want to be a girl?”
“Would you want to be a girl?”
“Of course not.”
“Well then.”
“But sometimes I wish I were fully white.”
She felt cold metal against her neck, the scratch of the comb, the unhurried touch of his fingertips. “Why don’t you cut off your braid, then?”
“Short hair won’t make me white.”
“No, but having long hair makes you seem more different than you are.”
“I ain’t never—I’m not ever going to be fully white, so there’s no point. I don’t care what people think, and they should know that.”
“So you do care what people think.”
“No.”
“You care that they know you don’t care what they think.”
“All right, maybe a little.”
After a minute, she said, “Maybe I cut my hair for the same reason you don’t cut yours.”
“Maybe.”
Silence except for the blades.
He said, “I heard a story once about a woman who really turned into a man.”
“What do you mean really turned into a man?”
“She was Kootenai. An old guy in Shacktown told me. He said a hundred years ago there’d been a woman who married a white man in one of the traders’ parties but acted too wild and got sent away. She went back to her people and told them the white men had turned her into a man. After that she was a man.”
“You can’t just be a man.”
“She even took a wife. She gave herself different names, too. The only one I remember is Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly.”
“Then what?”
“She told people she was a prophet. She rubbed everyone the wrong way, and eventually someone killed her and cut out her heart.” He set down the scissors, said, “You’re not going to win no beauty pageant, but it’s better than it was.”
She ran a hand over the back of her head. It felt smoother than before. “There’s no mirror in here.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I’d trust a mirror more.” She stood and tried to look at her reflection in the window. All she could make out was a small head, round and pale. “But anything would be better than it was.”
Suddenly agitated, he scooped up the newspaper and crunched it into a ball that he tossed into the stove. “Don’t you want to know what I charge for haircuts?”
Nervousness down low in her. It had been a couple of years since they played any of his games, but he’d taken on that needling jumpiness he used to get before he proposed one. Games of captivity, games where the rules involved taking off clothes, touching. “Don’t you ever just do a friend a favor?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sometimes. I’ve done you lots of favors.”
An acrid smell emanated from the stove.
“Caleb!” she said. “Why did you throw that in there with all the hair in it? It stinks.”
“Listen, the price is a kiss.”
Kissing was never a part of any of their games. She laughed, more shocked than if he’d suggested she strip naked.
“It’s not that I’m sweet on you,” he said. “I want to practice for when I have a real girl.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome. Pay up.” When she made no move, he gave an exaggerated sigh and came to her, looking into her face, sardonic and unafraid. It seemed impossible they would press their mouths together, but then they did. Or he pressed his to hers, hard. She sealed her lips tight together, pulled away. He smirked. “Next time you want a haircut, you’ll have to kiss better than that.”
“Next time I want a haircut, I’ll go to a barber.”
“Someone’s got to teach you how to kiss.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Don’t be chicken.”
“I’m not.”
“Sure you are. You’re sha
king. I can see it.”
She willed herself to stop. “Maybe I just don’t want to kiss you.”
The smirk came back. “That’s not it.”
After he’d gone, she sat stroking her head. A pressure built between her legs. She put her fist there. Sparks like dandelion fluff. Was she chicken? She wasn’t sure if she’d felt fear or only embarrassment. If she had returned Caleb’s kiss, let his tongue into her mouth, she would have been admitting she wanted to be kissed, that she wanted in general. Did she want? Pressure again. Some intuition: She was more afraid of the admitting than of the doing.
She ran her hand over her shorn head again, felt a stirring of pride mixed up with the pressure that was tightening in her like a bolt being turned into place. Her hair was a declaration, not an admission. All things should be declarations, not admissions. She pressed forward onto her fist as though riding a horse uphill, swayed on it. Soon she couldn’t get enough leverage and moved to sit astride the arm of the chair, thought of the beastly man with his face between Gilda’s legs, devouring, of Felix Brayfogle holding her shins, of Caleb’s mouth, urged herself on until she was emptied of all thoughts.
An Incomplete History of Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly
c. 1790–1837
She is born at the end of the eighteenth century, in what will be Idaho, just outside a Kootenai winter camp. She falls from her mother, who has walked and squatted, walked and squatted all night, and the frosty dawn air slaps her into a scream. An ordinary girl from the look of her.
The story is patchy, contradictory, a mixture of gossip from both white men and native people, fermented almost into myth.
When the time comes to marry, she is thirteen and big-boned, quick-tempered. She knows how to collect and prepare food, how to weave rush mats, how to do a hundred other things. But no man wants her for a wife. Spurned, she bores holes in the sturgeon-nosed canoe of the man she likes best.
A group of white men pass nearby, the retinue of the trader and mapmaker David Thompson, and in the night she leaves camp, makes her way through the forest.
In the morning, Thompson’s servant, called Boisverd, emerges from his tent and finds a native girl staring at him. At first, he’s afraid she might be a ghost, but she drops to her knees, crawls to him across the rocks and dirt. Boisverd has been waiting his whole life for a woman to do exactly this.
Boisverd’s new wife, the girl who came out of the woods, is no trouble in the beginning. She is eager to help in the camp, eager in Boisverd’s bed, never tires. When the men can barely keep trudging forward, she races high-spiritedly through the trees. She learns English quickly and some French. She laughs when the men shoot at animals and miss. When they have to cross a river, she strips off her clothing without shame and wades in, brazenly meeting the men’s eyes.
* * *
—
Plenty of Thompson’s men lack wives, and Madame Boisverd proves to be generous and obliging, strong and tireless. Her raucous laugh comes from a different tent every night, even though Boisverd beats her for it, or tries to. She fights back, gives him black eyes and swollen lips to match her own.
She has to go, David Thompson says. He fears Boisverd might kill her and doesn’t want the hassle. She must return to her own people.
Again she walks through the forest. She doesn’t know where her people are, exactly. They take a bit of finding. With a gun she took from the white men, she hunts for food. Prowling among the trees, she imagines herself a warrior, and an idea presents itself. More than an idea—a truth, unnoticed before.
It turns out, she announces when she has rejoined the Kootenai, that white men have supernatural powers, and they have used those powers to change her into a man.
She starts dressing as a man. This man gives himself a new name: Gone-to-the-Spirits. He hunts and fishes, refuses to do women’s work. He gets a horse to go with his gun, invites himself along on a raid. The warriors tell him to go away, but he follows, camps in the darkness just outside their circle. In battle, he takes three horses and two scalps. Not bad at all.
A man wants a wife. Gone-to-the-Spirits starts approaching girls who know how to collect and prepare food, how to weave, but they don’t want him. He rants and rages. He claims that the white men’s supernatural powers have rubbed off on him, that everyone should think carefully before crossing him because who knows what punishments he might call down.
There is a word: berdache. Not a perfect word, not even close: French for catamite, meaning a young boy kept by an older man, derived through muddled Spanish and Italian from an old Persian word for slave. White trappers and traders and explorers, from the time of their earliest forays among the natives, had encountered people who weren’t quite men and weren’t quite women. What to call them? Some forgotten soul shrugged and offered a half-remembered insult his mother back in Montreal had spat at his older brother. The word spread, took hold.
Gone-to-the-Spirits flits in and out of the diaries of traders and explorers. He bestows prophecies on the native people. It starts as simple boasting. He tells them that not only did he change himself from a woman into a man, he has other supernatural powers, too. Like prophecy.
Then give us a prophecy.
Well, for example, some giants are coming. Soon. They will overturn the earth and bury all the tribes. Smallpox is coming, too. Again. White men are bringing it. Again. But, fortunately for you, Gone-to-the-Spirits can perform rites of protection. For the right price.
Warily, people give him gifts in exchange for his rites, but since they don’t like his prophecies, they don’t like him, either.
He becomes more popular when he starts foretelling a great white chief who is angry at the other, lesser white men, the ones they’ve met, because he’d told the white men to give away his treasures, not trade for them. He will soon be sending riches and gifts as an apology and will punish the others for their greed. Soon.
When he meets her, his wife is sitting beside a lake. She isn’t doing work of any kind, and the strange sight of a woman who is not busy makes him think she doesn’t have a man. He skips stones into the water as they talk. Her husband has abandoned her. She is deciding what to do.
He asks, Do you want a new husband?
He has already made a buffalo-leather phallus he thinks might fool a wife, but his wife is no fool. She is, like him, a loud laugher, a brawler. Their first night, she grabs the counterfeit cock from his grasp, laughs at its wishful size. Before he can stop her, she’s pulled up his shirt to laugh at his breasts. He holds her down and finds a way to press and rub against her that gives them both pleasure.
She joins him, traveling and prophesying. She tells someone about the buffalo-hide phallus and soon everyone knows. Gone-to-the-Spirits suspects her of sleeping with other men and beats her, though she denies straying. She doesn’t want anything to do with a cock, she insists. Hasn’t she made that clear?
They wind up at Astoria, on the Oregon coast.
In their journals, the Astorian traders note the arrival of a husband and wife, dressed like Plains Indians in leather robes and moccasins and leggings. The husband speaks English and French, a little Cree and a little Algonquin, other native languages too, but none of the coastal dialects. He dazzles the Astorians by drawing an accurate map of the rivers and mountains to the east. If any man comes near his wife, he grows menacing, will even draw his knife. He gambles. He can’t hold his drink. He learns the coastal dialects.
David Thompson shows up at some point. Bless my boots, he says. If it isn’t Madame Boisverd.
The Astorians scratch their heads, wonder how they hadn’t seen it. Gone-to-the-Spirits twitches his hand toward his knife, but really he is pleased to have met this white man again, to have the chance to show him he is no longer in his power.
July 1811. They all decide to go up the Columbia River. Thompson is making his way back to Canada; the Astorians
plan to erect a trading post in the interior; Gone-to-the-Spirits offers his services as a guide.
One day, as the party travels up the river, they find four men waiting for them with seven huge salmon to trade. The lower jaws of the fish have been run through with poles that rest on the men’s shoulders; their tails brush the ground. Is it true, these men ask David Thompson, casting dark looks at Gone-to-the-Spirits, that you are bringing smallpox? And also giants to bury our camps and villages?
No, says Thompson. No, no, no. Certainly not.
In his journal, Thompson writes: I told them not to be alarmed, for the white Men who had arrived had not brought the Small Pox, and the Natives were strong to live, and…such as it was in the day of your grandfathers it is now, and will continue the same for your grandsons.
But nothing will be the same for their grandsons.
At some point, the party splits. Thompson heads north, telling the story of the berdache as he goes—a surefire anecdote, always a hit. The Astorians continue east, Gone-to-the-Spirits and Mrs. Gone-to-the-Spirits accompanying them. Thanks to optimistic prophecies, the Gone-to-the-Spirits household has grown to include twenty-six horses heaped with goods. One evening the Gone-to-the-Spiritses ride off without a word of farewell and, for a time, go unremarked upon by white men.
* * *
—
When he reemerges, Gone-to-the-Spirits has acquired a new wife but lost the twenty-six horses, starts showing up around the Flathead trading post near Missoula. He appears in the journals of the white men there as Bundosh. Or Bowdash. He comes with groups of Kootenai to trade furs and get liquor, which makes him noisy. For pay, he’ll translate the Flathead and Blackfoot languages.
There’s a story: Gone-to-the-Spirits was traveling with a band of warriors. At river crossings, he always dallied behind, and another man grew suspicious and hid in the trees to watch him undress, saw Gone-to-the-Spirits had breasts and no cock, though he claimed to have been fully transformed into a man. Gone-to-the-Spirits, naked in the water, caught sight of the spy and crouched down, concealing himself. Later, when they came to Lake Pend Oreille, the chief said the warriors could pick new names if they wanted, since their raids had been unsuccessful and they needed something to shake off the malaise.
Great Circle Page 11
