“Pshaw! What does he know of land? Or hard work. Or beginning a life in a harsh landscape. No, I ought to insist you leave your daughters with us here along with Millie and Martha.”
“I’m not staying, Papa. I’m going with Eliza.”
Father turned to Millie who had come back inside. I wondered where Martha was. Probably off with Bill Wigle!
“No. I decide. You stay here.”
“She needs help, Father. Two small children, driving an ox team by herself? You would sentence her to that?” A voice of support: my sister Martha Jane who had just entered. “You’re aware of the trials. You’ve talked of them.” She appealed to the compassionate side of him. I nodded to her, hoping she could see my gratitude.
“Your choices are mine to make. Let her hire a driver if her Warren is so flush he can leave without selling his property here. Let her hire another wagon to take everything with them. Everything except my girls. And may the Lord forgive me for not retaining custody of my granddaughters, as their parents lack common sense, are loony, and put them in harm’s way.”
The furies found me. “You speak of harm’s way? What of the times you left my mother alone with these two?” I nodded to my sisters. “What about the times you took Henry and me miles from home, risking our lives? We nearly froze to death when we crossed the flooded Snake and you wouldn’t let us build a fire. Or the time you took us to the Pacific. If we hadn’t been taken in by that mixed-blood Indian when we crossed the Cascades, we might have been lost forever in the mountains, never seen the ocean. What of the time you ran the Indians into acting out death and dying before our eyes? Do you remember that?”
I recalled in great detail the foreshadowing of death at Waiilatpu. How terrified I was when the hair came off at the end of a knife held by men I recognized and, yes, loved. I thought Timothy was dead, that Raymond had killed him. The screams and shouts and horses as fired up as the portrayers, prancing, twisting, dust rising with a hundred hooves while those along the sidelines cheered them on. Thank God that my mother took us inside.
“I remember strong children who weren’t all that cold in the last miles. You never complained. And God provided that Indian in the Cascades. I remember a fine display of horsemanship, which is what I hoped Reverend Lee would see.” Father’s gaze took him to the past. “And the contrast between their devotion to God and what they’d once been.”
“Some still are ‘what they’d once been.’” I’d heard rumors of converts returning to old ways.
“Not the Nimíipuu, no. Cayuse, yes. Some Umatilla, too, which is why I will not allow your sisters to travel with you to their country. Millie will return with you and get her things. I’ll come fetch her in the morning. It’s decided.”
“What’s decided?” Rachel stepped through the door, her round face dripping with laundry room sweat. Maybe she had learned how to heat the water and blue the whites.
“Millie is coming home.”
“Lovely,” Rachel said and plopped onto the hickory rocker, fanning her face with her apron. I marveled at the ease with which she accepted whatever surprises life offered.
We two were silent on the way back. At the cabin, we put the little ones down to sleep, fixed a light supper. We were finishing when Millie said, “I’ll defy him.”
“No. He’s right. There is a danger in that country.” The memory of the spectacle just reinforced what I already knew. We weren’t that far out from the finish of the Yakima uprising and we headed where disgruntled Cayuse roamed. Land of the Umatilla, of Chief Five Crows, the one who had tortured Lorinda. And maybe, in a season, there’d be Nez Perce, and who was to say if they still kept Christian ways or in the twelve years since we’d left Lapwai if they too were now “what they’d once been.” At any rate, I didn’t want to find out.
“But you’ll need help, Sister.”
I nodded, then reached for her hand as we sat at the table. “I’ll find someone. I’ll see if I can get another couple to join us, bring their wagon and possibly have room for some of our things too. Maybe a woman to assist with the children. I can walk beside the ox team, but I’ll need muscle for the yokes. I don’t know who to hire, but I will pray for the right person and trust that if this is my call then God knows what I need.”
18
That Which Sustains
Father came the following day and took my sister away. I wept after they left. “We’ll see each other again,” I told Millie, who looked every bit her almost thirteen years. I thanked her for what she’d given me and thought then I needed to thank Martha too. They’d been my companions when Mr. Warren wandered away. It made me wonder how my mother ever said good-bye to Matilda or if she’d had the chance to do so once we were all sent from Lapwai.
“Are you busy?”
Nancy Osborne put her head in the door. I wiped my eyes with my apron.
“Is a mother of two ever not busy?” I said it with a light voice. Nancy had that fragile look on her face she got sometimes. I never wanted to say anything that might push her into silence.
“I suppose not.” She came through the door and stood beside me, closer than I would normally prefer, but she did that, too, on her “bad days.” She found safety in being close to taller bodies. I wanted a wide berth, didn’t even like people standing behind me at the mercantile. I’d step aside and allow others to go first rather than imagine them hovering there behind me, no telling what they might do to harm me.
I handed her Lizzie and pumped water from the spring into the teapot and set it to brew on the woodstove. Mr. Warren had said he’d purchase a stove for me once we were in Touchet. I wasn’t to bring this one.
I had the use of this old woodstove I’d come to love until we left and the farm sold. At least we had a farm to sell. I feared when he told me we were moving that he’d lost it in a card game. When I questioned him about the area being closed to non-Indians, something provided for in last year’s treaty, he waved his hand at me, dismissive.
Having a stove go with our farmstead would be a selling point, he’d said. I just hoped he didn’t forget his promise.
Nancy sat with my daughter on her lap. She wiped the edge of Lizzie’s mouth with her apron. “I’m feeling sad about your going, I guess. Brings back memories, dark ones.”
Nancy dropped her chin close to the baby’s head. America Jane toddled over and lifted the baby’s fingers, up and down, like a metronome. “Any kind of change bothers me, Eliza. Having the table just an inch or so from where it’s supposed to be flutters me. I’ve tried to ignore it, like you said to do, but I’ll get up in the night and move the table because I can’t sleep. Then I’ll lie back down and I’m still wide awake and get back up and move it again. It’s been more than ten years, Eliza. The strangeness, it’s related to what happened then.”
I put the tea leaves in the caddy, poured the hot water through them. “It takes time.”
“But you’re having no problems, not a bit.”
“Oh, I have my problems. I just figure they’re from Mr. Warren, not from the Cayuse.” I laughed and she smiled with me. I didn’t tell about the row with my father or of my interference with Martha’s future.
“You don’t ever wonder if you might have done something differently?”
All the time. “Of course I do. But we don’t get to do it over. We only get to learn from it.”
“I think God was punishing me because I didn’t pay good attention.”
“Attention to what? Nonsense. You were younger than me. And you endured worse. God doesn’t punish in that way. You were a powerless child lying there under that floor at the Mission. And you escaped. Your father hid you well among the rushes. You didn’t cry out when you heard the Cayuse searching. Your father found you. And even when at first they wouldn’t let you in at the fort for fear of Indian reprisals, God was with you. And here you are. It’s a happy-ending story.”
“You don’t really think that, do you? I’m almost twenty. I’ll never have a life with another if
I can’t sleep, can’t let things be. Who besides brothers and sisters and parents would put up with a woman prowling through the nights, rearranging tables?”
“It will serve you well at the mill.” I kept my voice light, straining not to return to Waiilatpu.
She snorted. “I guess carding and working a loom require precision.”
“Would you like this dish towel I embroidered? I have too many to take.” She nodded. “Have you told your Andrew Kees? You spoke of his kindness.”
“I have. But I’m not sure even he can put up with my lining up tin cups while people are still drinking from them.” She pulled her hands back, started straightening my dishes, one hand on Lizzie, the other fussing like a mother hen. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I just—”
“I don’t mind if you organize my world.” I took Lizzie from her and began to nurse.
“But that’s just it. With you moving, who will be safe?”
I began singing a lullaby. My daughter nursed greedily and then soothed to the music. America Jane leaned her head against my side as I sang while Nancy wiped her hands on her skirts, stood to fold sheets and clothing, placing them in the trunk. She refilled her tea cup and drank.
When I finished, Nancy said, “Thank you. Tea and singing does make me feel better.”
“You’ll keep yourself safe. You’ll reach out a hand to God and accept the comfort he sends.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Not as much as I could.” I’d considered asking Nancy to join me, to look after my girls. But I suspected she wouldn’t come, and being honest or maybe selfish, I wondered if looking after her might take as much time as caring for my children.
“That’s what you’ll do after we’ve moved. You’ll fix yourself tea. You’ll garden. You’ll work at the mill. You’ll spend time with Mr. Kees and be warmed by his patience and kindness. And maybe,” I continued, “day by day, you’ll see a table out of place or a cup with the handle turned the wrong way and you’ll let God arrange it as he would.”
“It’s nice of you to imagine that.”
“You’ll come visit us. We’ll have a fine time. You can play with the children.” America Jane hummed as she put her doll to bed.
“You’d let me?”
“Of course.” What horrors did Nancy harbor about her ability to give and love?
“I don’t understand it. I wasn’t even a hostage. After three days we were safe. But you had—”
“A different experience. But each of us was powerless for a time.” I wiped Lizzie’s chin of my milk, put her on my shoulder to burp, then placed her in her cradle. “It was unique for each of us. I’m finding a way to live with it. I can talk about it even. Sometimes. I still try to make the world conform to my pattern. Maybe I’ll always have that. We survived, and that’s what we must hang onto. Survival shows our strength.”
“And I rise in the night with nightmares and horrors, believing my father is already dead.”
“We did share that experience,” I said. And just as suddenly I was back . . .
“Spalding dead. Tell them.” The Cayuse pushed me forward, spoke in their language. I must tell the others my father is dead? To scare us. No one will rescue us. That’s my horse the Cayuse is riding. Or is it Tashe? I fall onto my knees. He must be dead. A child sobs.
Lizzie’s cries woke me. I wiped at my face, reached for my child. America Jane lay on a quilt on the cabin floor sound asleep while dear Lizzie mewed her discontent in Nancy’s arms, reaching for me.
“I don’t wonder you can doze at the drop of a spoon.” She gazed about the room. “You’ve done an awful lot of work getting ready.”
“And more to come.”
Nancy rose to leave then and I held her, one arm around her shoulder and my past; the other holding Lizzie and my future. I drank in the history we shared but stayed with this place we found ourselves in now. “You’ll visit.”
“It’s a long way away.”
“Maybe we’ll come back to see Father and my sisters. And we’ll write.”
“I’ll just imagine you talking to me when I get to fretting.” She wiped tears from her cheeks.
“And I’ll do likewise.”
I gulped then, grief like claws closed my throat. We shared so much and we were separating. My mother’s death came back to me.
Nancy’s tears wet my cheeks and then I stepped away from her. “You’re a strong woman, Nancy. You’re a good woman. Mr. Kees sees that. Don’t be afraid to let him love you and just love him right back.”
She smiled. “I will do my best to straighten him out as though he were a cup and saucer.”
We both laughed then and we walked arm in arm out to the porch, leaving Lizzie cooing beside her sister. “I don’t know what to say.” She nodded. “I love you, Nancy, like a sister.”
“And I you.”
She untied the reins from the hitching post and I waved as she mounted her horse and rode away. I wondered when our paths would cross again.
After a supper of beans and gravy over a loaf of my soda bread, I read to the children from one of my mother’s books she’d drawn and painted. I used to love watching her mix the colors from the wildflowers we picked together. We gathered berries, too, that we later pressed into ink. I wonder how she found time for all that while feeding us and teaching. When we had paper to spare, my friends would draw their horses or their dogs or the feathers handed down from their fathers. What I had loved the most about the books though was that the words were in Sahaptin, words the Nez Perce used. My mother wrote how the Creator made the Hisamtucks, the sun, and the willows, Tahs, the wind and the rain (Hatia and Hiwakasha). With sleepy eyes, my girls listened to the swoosh and rhythm of those Nez Perce words, words I once hoped I’d never forget. Some things stayed in my memory while others drifted away like duck’s feathers out of a poorly stitched mattress tick. My father said she’d had to stop teaching in Sahaptin. How it must have galled my mother to be told by the Whitmans and Smiths and the Mission Board that she must not use the language of The People. I wonder if then, long before our last year in Lapwai, she hadn’t already begun to die.
No terrible memories rose up to grab me in the night. But in the morning I remembered my lapse with Nancy the day before. If she hadn’t been here, would my girls have been all right? I was in danger, my memories pulling me backwards. Would they come more often as I returned to the shadow of Waiilatpu? Or was following my husband less about obedience and more about God’s guidance that I face my demons and put the past to rest.
19
Changing Plans
My anxiety threatened to bubble over and burn as a stew on a too-hot stove. I was at my father’s home.
“We could have time together, all of us. We’ll go together, as a family.”
“I’ll not have you steal them into that country, not with that unpredictable Warren. That ‘pass’ he supposedly knows of, dangerous, if it even exists. He won’t even make it. You’ll arrive in The Dalles and find no one waiting. No. You should just stay here. He’ll be back with his tail between his legs.”
He hadn’t seen Mr. Warren’s resolve. He hadn’t heard the excitement in his voice when he spoke of the impending cattle drive, the thrill of starting anew. Some men, like my father, celebrated the building up of things over time. Mr. Warren was of the other sort, men who longed for new beginnings, for whom a finished thing was less exciting.
“We want to go, Father.” Martha spoke. Had she forgiven me? Gotten over Bill to see the wisdom in what I’d done? What our father had done?
“I don’t.” Millie expressed herself. “I want to stay with Eliza and the babies but not in some faraway place. It’ll be a lot of work too.”
“Good luck finding someone to drive the team. At least he left you oxen to pull the wagon. He did do that much, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I just have to find someone responsible, for a few months.”
“There’s no help here.” My father left the house then, Martha ta
iling after him still talking, pleading? If she came, maybe the two of us could handle things ourselves. Millie held America Jane on her hip.
“Why don’t you hire one of those poor Indians I see fishing?” Rachel spoke. “They could use the money no doubt and perhaps having one with you would ward off other Indians you might encounter. I mean, if you must do this alone—I can’t believe your husband has abandoned you like this, why not—”
“He didn’t abandon me! He’s taking a different route and he had to leave. I’ll join him.”
“Well, yes, of course.” She leaned into me and the baby in my arms. “Are you frightened?”
“Yes.” I was, all the more in my having to make new routines with my sisters no longer there to look after America Jane and Lizzie. “But courage is doing what must be done despite the fear, it’s going on even when you want to quit.”
“My exact thoughts when I boarded the ship to come meet your father. He needed support; I could give it. So my fears were of little matter to the higher duty.” Rachel continued. “Have you considered hiring an Indian to drive, offer protection, what with you going into Cayuse country again?”
“You might have a good idea, Rachel.”
“Do I? ”
“About hiring a native. One of the Kalapuya people maybe. Or Molalla. But where to find one.”
“The Lord will provide.” Rachel patted my arm, bent to kiss the baby’s head.
I said good-bye to my sisters then. I had no idea when or if we’d be together again. More than three hundred miles would separate us. They’d be older, wiser, when I saw them again. Rachel and my father were nowhere around. “Tell them good-bye for me, all right?”
On the way home, I stopped at Brown and Blakely’s and asked Mr. Brown’s son, John, if he knew of a Kalapuya whom I might hire.
“To do what?”
At thirty, John Brown managed his father’s store and he looked strong enough to be a driver, arms like twisted rope, hair the color of wheat. “To drive my wagon to the Touchet River, Washington Territory.”
The Memory Weaver Page 17
