“What does that mean, Papo?” America Jane asked as we all hovered around the round tin holding the thermometer every morning.
“Dang cold!” her father said.
The animals could not break through the ice to brush away the snow and eat the grass. We had no hay put up—people didn’t do that in the Valley, grass usually growing year-round—so daily Mr. Warren went out in the cold and chopped through ice to water the oxen, the five cows we’d kept, our milk cow, horses, and the sheep. Chickens roosted in the smokehouse. I didn’t say it out loud, but I know he wondered too if the cold and snow was even deeper in the Touchet country where my father and Rachel remained. If it was, the cattle would be dead come spring. I prayed my family wouldn’t be.
We fell exhausted into bed each night, sometimes entertained ourselves after the outside chores were finished by sitting around the cookstove coming up with “as cold as . . .” similes. As cold as a woman scorned. As cold as a tongue frozen to an icicle. America Jane offered that. “As cold as my feet, but at least I can feel them, Mama.” Millie lay on a raised pallet John and Andrew had made for her, recovering. As cold as death did not count for any points. In years to come we would say “As cold as ’62,” as the year set the standard against which we pioneers compared whatever winter we were in. None were ever as cold and snow-drifted and destructive to cattle and sheep as the winter of ’61–’62.
The temperature was hard on Millie, too, her bones shivering. John Brown visited often, bringing treats and treasures from the store. Maple sugar candies. A tin of sweet milk. We discovered the two had been “stepping out” before the accident. She’d gotten some feeling back in her legs for which we praised God. But she needed my arms to sit, use a thunder bucket, and lift her dress off over her head. She was an invalid; something my father had always imagined her to be, fragile and frail. Now she truly was.
He’d be furious when he learned of her condition.
I did not carry the weight that it was my fault. Yes, I could have sent her back to Father when she caught up with us in The Dalles. But he could have come after her and he didn’t. And yes, I could have watched her more closely, but I had small children to look after, and Millie’s slipping out to ride didn’t alarm me as a disaster: it was her pleasure. And she didn’t have to always ride as though a fire burned behind her. She could have loped along beside her John. The weather might have been better; the mole hole could have been bored somewhere besides the middle of our lane. There was blame enough to go around but also none to claim. Tragedies happened. People suffered. I was learning that it was what one did with the suffering that mattered.
We did not get news of my father until he and Rachel arrived in the summer of ’62 a few weeks after I gave birth to Amelia, named for her now invalid aunt. “She’s Minnie,” I said. “We can’t confuse all the Amelias.”
“Millie and Minnie are easy enough to confuse,” Andrew told me, but he liked the nickname “sure enough.”
We listened to Father’s sad story, of how the grass burned to a crisp after we left and how snow started in December and they had six feet by Christmas. The same phenomenon of melting snow turned to ice kept the cattle from the feed. “Snow was chest high and the cattle all died. I . . . It was the saddest thing to hear their moans and not be able to do a thing about it but shoot them out of their misery. Some died before I could get to them, like the air was sucked right out of them, one blizzard came so fast. Sun came out and you’d have thought it a fairy land of sparkle but for the dark blots of carcass, mostly their heads visible above the wintry grave.” Tears formed in his eyes, mine too, with the picture of tragedy he painted.
“He cut up some of the dead and we made a meat soup to feed them but they kept dying.” Rachel wiped her own tears at the memory. “The temperature dropped to thirty-two degrees below zero and stayed there for forty days. I’ve never been in such a cold.” I noticed three of her fingers were whiter than the rest of her hand and she rubbed them near the fire.
“I hadn’t put up any hay. The grass was so abundant.” Father chided himself for not thinking ahead. I could hear it in his voice. But he wasn’t alone. No one had.
His grief so raw, he barely flinched when I showed him Millie, his precious one, lying on a settee we’d purchased for her. “I’m getting better, Papo. Eliza’s taking good care of me. And John is too.”
That perked my father up. “John? John who?”
“John Brown. Your friend’s son.”
“Why, the man’s thirty-some years old.”
“And able to take care of me. As soon as I can walk again. He’s already had canes made for me. And one day, we’ll marry.”
“I forbid you to marry—until you can walk again.”
“That’ll be incentive.”
I thought of how powerless parents really are to define their children’s lives. Thinking of Martha and Bill and even me and my Andrew, it was clear parents often didn’t know what was best for their children in the end. My mother had defied her parents before receiving a modicum of support in the form of a wagon, $100, and her father’s company for the first hundred miles on their missionary journey to the Nez Perce. After that, she never saw him or her mother again.
I knew nothing of my father’s parents, but he certainly challenged the Mission Board, the authority in his life, and still was. He hoped to go back to Lapwai and begin his mission again but wouldn’t without consent. If my mother had lived, I had no doubt she’d want to go back with him. That still bothered me. I couldn’t shake the truth that The People had deserted us even with what Timothy had said. Even Henry Hart suggested the Nez Perce had been kind. One day, long ago, Father had said as much. Truth was, I didn’t want to affirm that I’d wasted time carrying false memories since the time that I was ten. Who would I blame for all the tragedy my family had faced after Waiilatpu if what I remembered was false? Didn’t someone need to be blamed?
My father moped that year, had difficulty finding his way. He continued to travel and preach, to write his letters to the newspaper or the Mission Board, any who would listen. Rachel’s teaching salary made it possible for them to live frugally in their cabin. But like my husband, I could see my father grow restive. I didn’t know how to fix it. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
27
New Sight
“I’m going back.” My father spoke as I stopped by to bring fresh bread for him, Rachel, and my sister, Millie, whom Father insisted move back in with them. It was summer. Millie had improved, walked often without her canes, still favored her sore back. My father still cooked but Rachel managed the laundry and the garden. Dried beans hung from the rafters. Millie even rode her horse again, saying that being astride was the best medicine she could have to renew her strength. I admired her spunk and told her so. She and John planned a wedding in November. She lay on the settee we’d sent with her with my youngest, Minnie, playing patty-cake on her lap.
“Where are you going back to? Ohio? New York? Touchet?”
“Lapwai.”
“Timothy and another convert, Raymond, invited me to visit last year but I don’t want to go just to visit. I want to stay there, to do my work again. Mission Board be d—” He stopped himself from swearing.
“Rachel, what do you think of that?”
“If that will make him happy, then of course, I’ll go with him. But I’m teaching here this year again. He’ll have to make the trip alone.”
“Maybe I’d go with you, Father.” It was an impulsive act, the kind my father would make.
“To stay? To do your mother’s work there?”
“No. To make the journey with you. To keep you company. To ride back here later on my own.” And make new memories.
We took pack animals as we had when my father took me and Henry Hart on our journeys leaving Mother behind. No wagon. I didn’t worry about the two older girls; they were staying with “Granma Rachel” and Millie. Minnie I had with me, the child nursing and never far from the fill. I did sew up
the sack where she could ride on the side of the horse, juggled by a rope on the saddle horn. She slept to the rhythm of old Maka’s gait.
Along the way the land was littered with cattle carcasses. So many had not survived.
“I should have listened to you and Warren.” My father shook his head.
“You weren’t alone. Judging by all the sun-bleached bones. We were fortunate. You thought differently.”
He wiped his nose. “I wasn’t meant to be a cattleman. Preaching, that’s my calling. Maybe teaching, though that was your mother’s gift, among many. And farming.”
“Why didn’t you go back earlier, as you’re doing now?” We’d swum the horses and pack mules across the Deschutes River and the John Day and continued to ride beside the Columbia on a well-worn trail, the horses’ hooves dusting up puffs despite the rocky path. The hills and lava rock cliffs to our right brought thin but blessed shade.
“I didn’t think I could go back without your mother. Oh, she wanted to go, but I had it in my head for the Mission Board to bless this work, to know I was doing it . . . not only for myself.” I let the silence sit. “I wasn’t certain I was strong enough to return without the Board’s blessing. Trying to sort out what’s God’s will and what’s the Reverend Henry Spalding’s.” He punctuated that last with an awkward chuckle.
“You never doubted that you were called to be there, did you?”
“No. Never. But the politics, the arguments.” He sighed, pulled up on the reins to let his horse tear at grass. “And there was a meeting at Whitmans’. Your mother didn’t go. I didn’t want her to come. I told myself it was so she could continue to do the good work at Lapwai, but I had another reason. The other missionaries, they grumbled about our winning souls in Sahaptin rather than in English. None of the others worked to learn the native languages.”
“I remember Mother saying that. I’ve lost the language, too, mostly.”
“Without use it disappears. She was such a great teacher. A better student in Greek and Hebrew than I ever was. I didn’t want her to have to hear the hostility toward us from the others. I didn’t want her to wonder about what God was having us do there. So I went alone. Oh, I know they talked about me, the missionaries, as this ‘distempered man,’ but I had to be abrasive to get things done when the authority was so far away. We were all on our own, really. Our gatherings were the only checks we had on each other. And when the recruits arrived, especially the Smiths, there were letters sent back condemning our efforts. Mostly because we taught in Sahaptin and not in English. If only they could have seen the converts, their faithful hearts.”
He tugged on the reins and we rode on. After a while he started talking again. This was the most my father had ever shared with me about his work, speaking to me as though I was an adult, not someone he had to teach or preach to, but just be with, to share his failings.
“Whitman was never trained as a preacher. He was to be our doctor and then, there we were, so far away from him, at his insistence choosing Waiilatpu. Or maybe Narcissa’s. She could be strong-willed, that one.
“Anyway, I asked myself, what was the point of our coming to start a mission ‘together’ if our partners were far away? I don’t think the Mission Board could imagine the vastness, or the number of distinctive tribes.” My father continued. “The Nimíipuu invited us, not the Cayuse.” He shook his head again. “Things got so bad we were dismissed by the Board. I never wanted your mother to know that. And part of the complaint was that she spent too much time teaching in their language and I spent too much time showing them how to make a living in a changing world. It . . . it was a strange time.”
“And then Waiilatpu happened.”
“And then Waiilatpu happened.”
We rode in silence for a time, the breeze warm beside the river. We made a camp and Father shot a deer. After a supper by a fire, he said, “I brought along your mother’s diaries.” A coyote howled and the horses stomped at their hobbles. “I read them now and then, to remember her. She still tells me what to do.” He looked sheepish. He walked to his saddlebags and pulled them out. “It’s time you read them.”
I held them as though they were gold. No, manna, food to nourish.
We stayed two days to dry the meat beside our fire. And I read. Read of my mother’s thoughts those first years, her words as she faded away. And of how she loved The People who became her family more than the missionaries or other whites who visited or stayed. I inhaled her longing to have my father return and even saw that she wanted him to remarry. She spoke of Matilda like family, not someone who only worked for her.
“Mother loved Lapwai, the way I once did.”
“It was her life. Leaving it killed her.”
“She didn’t feel they’d deserted you.”
“Deserted us? The Nimíipuu? No, no, no. They kept us safe. Good heavens, if they hadn’t whisked your mother and the children upriver to a site they could defend, well, I hate to think what might have happened.”
“But they knew some of the Cayuse. Couldn’t they have stopped it? Don’t you blame them just a little for that?”
“People tried to warn Marcus. Even John McLaughlin. You remember. He testified to that. So there were signs but none the Nez Perce could have interrupted.”
“Until I spoke with Timothy, I thought they tried to take us back, when we were in the bateau.”
“They rode to act as guard so no Cayuse followed.”
“That’s what he said.”
“You carried around these false beliefs all this time? Why didn’t you speak to me about them? I’d have set you straight.”
I snorted. “Speaking to you had its own challenges. We never could carry on a conversation without leaving tufts of turf dug up. Not like we are today.”
He pursed his lips but he didn’t disagree.
“I was so alone after Waiilatpu.” Minnie fussed and I let her suck my finger.
“I know. Timothy would have brought you back, but he couldn’t. He grieved that.”
“I thought that you were dead. All of you.” I swallowed back memory tears.
“It must have been a terrible time for you. I’m sorry that happened to you, Eliza.”
I blinked. He understands. He does.
“She . . . she wanted you to go back to Lapwai?”
“She did. Even without the Board’s blessing, but I just couldn’t. I regret that. But I’ve decided: I’m going no matter what the Board says.”
“There’ve been so many things I didn’t understand. In her diaries . . . she wanted you to find a Rachel?”
“Of course she did. I wouldn’t do anything to mar your mother’s memory. Rachel’s a teacher. Not like your mother was, but a teacher nonetheless who shares my passion for our work. She’s a good partner, Eliza. Always was.”
“Yes. Yes, I see that now.” Those diaries were a gift, though one that contradicted so much of what I’d believed I knew. The past is but a puzzle with pieces missing and misplaced.
When we moved on in the morning, we met a wagon train heading west. We bypassed the “Place of Rye Grass,” Waiilatpu, the main trail to Lapwai a few miles south. I wondered if I ought to ask my father to go by there, with his help to face one last shame, but I didn’t. And then we left the route and followed the road up into the hills, crossing the Snake, riding beside the Clearwater River to Lapwai Creek where I’d discover what it was that I’d been missing—what my mother had missed too.
Sensing the presence of other horses, our mounts quickened their pace. We rounded a bend and there it stood—the log home and church my parents had lived and worked in, built by the Nez Perce, for them. A few tipis dotted the river’s edge. Horses whinnied back to ours. Minnie made noises and I took her from the carrying sack and fed her, sitting beneath an old apple tree in the orchard my father had planted. Quiet like wet earth settled around me and I felt a sacredness in the silence. I didn’t know what brought the peace but it was there.
My father hobbled our h
orses and walked toward me, bent a bit with his aging.
“What will you do here, alone?”
“Oh, if I am meant to be here, I won’t be alone,” my father said. “All right if I walk to the tipis? They’ll have seen us and be sending people our way. I’ll be close enough to hear your call if you need me.”
“We’ll be fine.”
I watched him leave us and had a momentary imagining of something terrible happening: a rattler waiting to strike; one of the dissonant tribal members who resented my parents’ intrusion coming out to argue with him. I remembered my mother’s diary story of him being choked and the first and only time she said she’d become flummoxed. I should call out to him, remind him to be careful. But I remembered Timothy’s words and Paul the Apostle’s words too: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely . . .” I’d think on those things. My mother had quoted the entire verse in a diary section I’d read the night before.
After Minnie ate, she dozed on my shoulder and I stepped inside the house, that place that had nurtured me those ten years, expecting it to be empty. But someone was kneeling at the far end, kindling the fire. I walked, my feet echoing, but the person did not turn. Then I was in front of him and he looked up. His face registered confusion and then a smile that started at his mouth and spread across his face onto his eyes.
“Do you remember me?”
He shook his head, tapped his ears and mouth. A flash of memory warmed my face. This man had lived with us for a time, helping Mother, pulling me in that little wagon with fir rounds for wheels. His name was Mustups.
The Memory Weaver Page 24
