The Memory Weaver

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  We chatted about the early feel of summer. I wiped sweat where my bonnet met my forehead, finished our digging.

  “I can lend a hand planting these.”

  “They’re for my mother’s grave.”

  “I’ve been watching you since that sad time.” His volunteering this made my skin tingle.

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of a man watching a mere girl.” I kept my eyes forward, caught Nancy’s look, her eyebrows raised in question.

  “You aren’t no girl. You’re an old soul. I saw that from the beginning. You weren’t no whimpering mess like some girls hit with harsh living.”

  “You seem certain of your insights, Mr. Warren.”

  “Ain’t sure of much, but I see courage when it walks beside me.”

  That day his claiming he saw courage in me proved a comfort and comfort was what I needed more than truth.

  It became a habit, his meeting me weekly, closer to the schoolhouse than might have been wise. I knew my father would object. My father objected to everything after my mother’s death. Yet there was a thrill to wondering what my father would do if he caught us. How strange to think I wanted the tingling of danger but I remember that I did—until a day when my father met me at the door, my brother standing behind him. I could tell by his set jaw and narrowed eyes that he was angry.

  “You will not cavort with that man!”

  “Who—”

  “Don’t play naïve with me. That Warren.”

  “I merely walk to town and he walks beside me, Father. We’re rarely alone. Nancy joins us. And Henry watches too, as you know by his . . . tattling.”

  “Don’t blame others for your transgressions.” He raised his hand but did not strike me. He never did strike his own children, though he had been severe in punishment of the Nez Perce children. He used harsh measures with my brother too, more so since my mother’s death. He once put a wooden laundry pin on Henry’s nose, forcing him to wear it all day at school in humiliation for some perceived lack in my brother’s character that day. Had my mother been alive she would have stopped him. She did not believe in shame. And speaking of shame, I did not act to protect my brother either.

  My father continued his diatribe, ending with, “The man is too old, too loose in his direction, Eliza. Your mother had high hopes for you, as do I. You’ll continue your education. And we have work to do together, you and me. Work interrupted by, well . . . you know.” His voice had softened. “You must stay away from Mr. Warren. Or any young man. You are too young and I can’t afford to lose you too.”

  He stomped outside, leaving me and my brother staring at each other. I’d gotten off with a switch of my father’s tongue instead of a willow stick. Yet his words haunted. Or any young man? What future had my father planned for me?

  We’d left the mission at Lapwai in a hurry. Forest Grove, where most of the missionaries landed in the Willamette Valley, was a settled place. My father helped start a school there and my mother taught in it. It was a good place for recovering from all that had happened. Then the trial happened and Mother became ill and not long after we moved to Brownsville. I had traveled with my father, making sure he ate before his hours of preaching as he started new churches in Albany and beyond. I saddled the horses we rode, listening to the stories of hardships told by new immigrants and older settlers alike. If my mother was up to a journey, then we all went and I tended my siblings and took on the task of making certain my mother ate as well. After her death, I became my father’s sole preaching companion. I wondered if that’s how he saw my future.

  I glared at Henry Hart for tattling about Mr. Warren, surprised at the intensity of my upset. I slammed my purchased lye on the table with a bit more force than necessary. Soap had to be made. My father earned little money being the postmaster, teaching, and preaching, so I made soap, did the laundry, stitched patches on my father’s and Henry’s pants, let out the hems on Martha’s and Amelia’s little dresses.

  “Thanks, brother.”

  “I only want to protect you. Father says Mr. Warren is not a nice man.”

  “I can take care of myself. I’ve done it often enough.”

  His mouth turned downward in a frown. “I only said you had man company going to town. I didn’t think Father would mind, not really.”

  “Anything that isn’t his idea he objects to.” Henry nodded, stared at the floor. “It doesn’t matter, Henry. Mr. Warren merely likes to give his horse a rest and so he walks. Father will get used to it, if it continues.”

  “I could walk with you.” He rubbed at a cut on his finger.

  “You could.” I lifted his chin. “But if Papa thinks Mr. Warren is a poor influence, then he’d punish you as well for associating with him. I need to look out for you too. You and Martha and Amelia.”

  “We look out for each other.”

  “We do.”

  I smiled then, and later when Henry Hart came to me with apology wildflowers in his eleven-year-old hand, I accepted them and hugged him. It’s what my mother would have done.

  He lingered for a time, but as he saw I held no grudge against him, he left to chop the wood we’d fire and turn to ash for making soap.

  As I worked preparing supper for the five of us, my mind did wander onto Mr. Warren. His hair was the color of good earth, eyes the same as otter fur. Charming is the word that came to mind, beguiling, with just the slightest hint that what he presented might not be all there was to see. Was I drawn to the mystery of him? Or was testing destiny with Andrew Warren the distraction I longed for, pushing out the losses that had moved into my thirteen-year-old heart and threatened to stay?

  2

  Finding the Center

  “You let the taters burn.” This from Millie, in her five-year-old-missing-front-teeth voice.

  “Potatoes,” I corrected. Mama would want me to continue to keep our grammar and pronunciation pure. It was my job to correct when I saw it was wrong.

  “Well, you lets them burn.”

  “I did let them burn.” I scraped the spider pan of the mess, tossed the remnants in the chicken bowl, and started slicing potatoes again.

  “I’m telling Father. Waste not, want not.”

  “Do what you must. And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell him about the broken crockery pieces I cleaned up. He might wonder how they ended up so wasted.”

  She pooched her lower lip out. “I’m sorry, ’Liza. I won’t say nothing.”

  “Anything. Off with you, then. Let me concentrate on our supper. Eggs and potatoes.”

  “I loooove potatoes.”

  She wiggled her nose and began to set the table with our tin plates. We only used my mother’s ironstone on special occasions. It would bring her with us as she always tried to have a little beauty and “back East” civilization on the table. A flower might grace the center. A candle scented with lavender. But since her death, Father didn’t want any of her things used and he didn’t want us having joys. It was as though we were to suffer more because we lived and she didn’t. We mourned and we’d do it properly, according to my father.

  Had he always been so hard or did it happen with Mother’s death? Or the massacre? Or his growing hatred toward the Catholics, whom he blamed for the troubles at the missions. “All went well until the bishops arrived,” he pronounced on Sundays from the pulpit at the Congregational Church. Blaming was a second language with him, one I hoped I wasn’t learning. Finding fault with everything is tiring and breathes no hope of change.

  The time between the massacre and my mother’s death was often a fog misting up from the river. All I’d known before November of 1847 was the happiness, joy, and laughter among the Nez Perce and my family. The massacre changed my father, made him angrier. I wondered if I’d ever get my intense but loving father back. Had my mother wondered too and died of a broken heart?

  Despite my father’s warning, Mr. Warren became a regular part of my week, appearing on the Thursdays when I went to town. That fall, when school began,
for a few months after harvest but before the heavy rains made travel treacherous, Mr. Warren enrolled in my father’s school. He wasn’t so old he couldn’t. Many young men spent summer months working, and then in winter when Father held school, boys as old as twenty would settle their lanky legs out in the aisles leaning against the bench backrest, slates in hand.

  Mr. Warren didn’t take his schoolwork seriously, but he paid attention enough that Father found it hard to send him on his way. He was a paying student, after all. His parents had a farm on the north side of Brownsville. They’d named a creek there after themselves. But Mr. Warren dreamed of running cattle on a spread—it’s what he called larger acreage on unclaimed land in the eastern part of the territory. Mr. Warren painted pictures with his words of lowing cows and riding the “range,” of shooting coyotes and wolves that threatened, of branding his own mark in springtime—or fall—to show that he owned all. He had big dreams of how he’d tame a wild country, beat back Indians who warred. “They best get used to us being here and them having memories of once livin’ here but making no more memories in this place.”

  I cringed at those words, though truth was in them. I could see that. Despite the massacre and uprising that followed, I held no animosity toward Indians as a whole. But I did resent the betrayal of the Nez Perce—to my parents, but also, to me. They’d invited us, and then after the tragedy they sent us packing. I never understood it. The Nez Perce had had no part in what happened except to invite my parents and the Whitmans to come west and bring the Book of Heaven with them. One even saved my father’s life when all was chaos.

  Mr. Warren reminded me of my father in odd ways. Grandiose ideas, full of visionary hopes. My father wanted to save the Indians from a hell they did not know of, to give them the light and love of Jesus. It was what the Nez Perce had asked my parents to do, bring them that light, and they had done so with a purpose, building lives in that remote place, on their own, and printing books. Books! Aside from our Lord, what greater gift than to give a way to hold one’s story inside a book.

  Mr. Warren’s hopes weren’t wrapped up in faith. He believed, I think, but such views were secondary to his wishes to make his mark on a new land. His mark. He’d come west from Missouri, a lush, green place not unlike this Brownsville country. But he sought the wide vistas of the prairies and plateaus he’d traveled through while heading west. I hadn’t had the privilege of overland travel, having been born in the territory. My father would say, “The first white child born here who survived.” It was how he introduced me at his preaching events. I had a unique status, associated with the Whitmans’ child who had been older than me but drowned while very young. What I lacked were the happy stories of the overland journeys so many spoke of—stories like Mr. Warren’s.

  “I want to settle one day in those fields of thigh-high grasses, near . . . where the Indians did their dastardly acts.” Andrew looked away. We had sat beside the Calapooia River that summer day, the year after my mother’s death. It was the first time he’d brought up the terrible events of November of 1847.

  “I’m familiar with the place.” He tossed pebbles into the stream while I crocheted tiny stitches around a linen square, my fingers suddenly cold. Later I’d embroider a flower onto it and give it to my sister Amelia—Millie, we called her—as a birthday gift. I had no problem with his mention of where the “dastardly acts” had taken place. It wasn’t the directness of a mention that took me away but more a certain smell or sound. Of blood, for example, when I had to kill a chicken for our supper. Or the scream of a mountain lion in an early morning, so like the cry of anguish of Mrs. Whitman, seeing her husband’s mangled body just before the hatchet struck her down. The sound of horses running on frozen ground, raising puffs of snow. Once when I ironed my white apron, then held it up to hang and caught the whiff of it, I nearly fainted with the memory of a day I covered my face with a bloody apron so as not to see more killings. Those are the things that take me to another place where my heart beats hard, my breath gasps as though I’ll choke, and images flit across my eyes as real as my sisters bending to their dolls, and I disappear. Perhaps it is the surprise that takes me away.

  When Mr. Warren mentioned that place, I knew of what he spoke, and odd as it is to me, I could see what he saw, the wind-driven grasses rising to a horse’s chest, meadowlarks chirping their song that sounded like they were saying Why-e-la-pu is a pretty little place. I could see what he imagined and I longed again for those wide vistas, the hills hot and brown in summer, cool and verdant in spring and fall, snowfall blanketing us in winter, my family happy and intact in a landscape as nurturing as a mother’s arms. Every season seeking singular recognition, bringing change and wonder and a memory of when I loved the Nez Perce people like my family.

  “Yup.” Andrew picked up a stone. “That’s where I’d like to settle one day. Near the Touchet River. You remember that one?” He tossed the pebble, the plop like a baby’s cough. “Not so much a big stream but the grasses are lush. And there’s flat ground enough to build on, and timber in surrounding hills for corrals. We can drive beef to the fort at Walla Walla—well, a man can. It’s a good market. And travelers on the trails heading west, they could stop at our place to resupply dried beef. Then there’s the hide market. All sorts of opportunities.”

  “And where will you start your herd and what will you do until you have enough cattle to run and slaughter and sell?” My bone crochet needle felt smooth in my fingers, cold as they’d become. I blew warm breath on them.

  “There are cows coming on the trails across. And I hear that a group of fellows gathered up longhorns from the Mexican missions in California, brought ’em into Oregon. A bunch not far from here. They were wild as a troubled hornet’s nest but likely tamed, some. Fort Vancouver has stock to sell. You’ll see.” He sounded petulant, as though my asking questioned his dream.

  “You’ve done some thinking on this then.”

  “’Course I have. I’m working for my pa, hoping he might stake me. Maybe find others to invest. They’d have a good return. I’d make it worth their while.”

  I thought of “investors.” My parents’ investors were those who supported the foreign missions, the Mission Board, and all the faithful people in the East who offered sustenance of various kinds to us as we labored among the Nez Perce. And how that support could shift with changing circumstances both back East and with the news received from the West. My father wrote diligently to the Mission Board asking they reinstate the Lapwai Mission. That he and my mother had done good work there and “our” Nez Perce Indians had not been involved in the trouble. I was embarrassed for his pleadings. It was over. Lapwai was over. My parents and all the missionaries were at the mercy of the Board, who ultimately owned everything we had at Lapwai—house, barn, mill, printing shed, printing press, hoes. Maybe even my mother’s dishes, I wasn’t sure. Maybe that was why my father didn’t use the good dishes. He’d have to replace them if one broke. His begging letters shamed me. The Nez Perce didn’t want us back anyway.

  So Mr. Warren sought investors. I wondered if he knew that doing so would limit his control, shade his dreams a bit with different colors than what he had in mind. I didn’t say that as we sat beside the river. Instead, I tried to erase what he had taken as a slight on my part, questioning how he’d accomplish what he set out to do. Facts do little but annoy big dreamers, or make them more determined to show the naysayers wrong. And I found I didn’t want to distress him. I wanted to please him, to make him happy. “How many cows do you think you’d need to have?”

  “Not milk cows, now. I’m talking beeves.”

  I nodded, picked up a stitch I’d dropped.

  “’Course I’d let you have some milkers, for the little ones and all.”

  I blinked. “Was that a marriage proposal, Mr. Warren?”

  “Kind of.” He had a charming grin, the ease of it bringing a shiver to my belly. He plopped another stone into a quiet eddy of the stream. I watched it ripple outw
ard. He reached for my hands. “They’re cold.”

  “I’m fourteen, won’t be fifteen until November,” I reminded him. “My father would never approve. I’ve schooling to attend to. My father intends for me to return to the Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove.”

  “You’re smart. You should do that, I suppose, but you can learn from places other than books.” He kissed my knuckles. “I wonder if he’ll let you. You do a lot for him.”

  “As long as I have books to read, I’m always learning.” I pulled my hands from his. I dropped another stitch I had to go back for. Would my father let me marry, ever? “I can take care of my siblings. No, marriage to you is quite out of the question. I’m responsible for my brother and sisters. I’m the oldest. It’s what my mother would want.”

  “Bring the little ones with you. I like that toothless Martha.”

  “Her front teeth are in.”

  “And Amelia is a minx. She’s game for anything. Got me to give her a ride on my horse last week and hand over the reins to her. What is she, five?”

  “She’s six. She’ll say ‘six and a half.’ And yes, she does sometimes take a risk or two and is pretty certain of herself.”

  “Runs in the family, does it?”

  I’m not a risk taker. “With horses. She’s very good with horses.”

  “Not unlike her big sister.” He leaned toward me then and I thought he might kiss me.

  He did.

  The crochet hook dropped into my lap. “I’m fourteen.” I swallowed what I was going to say next.

  “I know,” he whispered. “And tall. And beautiful.” His voice was gravely low. “And kind.” He kissed me again, hands warm against the back of my head. I hoped my twisted braid would stay atop it. “And the smartest girl I’ve ever known.”

  I might not have allowed the final kiss of that afternoon if he hadn’t added that last. I don’t know why, but it mattered to me that he saw competence. Perhaps because I struggled so with seeing it in myself. I’d made mistakes. Like at Waiilatpu. I hadn’t listened to my mother’s pleas to keep me home that year. I knew my father wanted me to go to the Whitmans’ school at Waiilatpu and I wanted to be with other children, away from my brother and sisters for a time. I wanted the new adventure too, of being in a new place, to hear new stories. So I’d sassed my mother, who only longed to keep me home with her to continue teaching me herself. She could have schooled a toad to give up its hopping if she’d set her mind to it. Brilliant, people said of her teaching. I told her we should do what Father wanted. He was head of the house, after all.