The Memory Weaver

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “He doesn’t speak. And cannot hear you.” I turned to a Nez Perce man and my father who’d entered behind me.

  “Ask if he knows me?”

  The two made signs and then I was told that Mustups rocked my cradle when I was a baby and kept me safely from the river. “He says all these things are yours. All the trees. Seeds your mother planted.”

  “Which plants?”

  He took me outside to a small bed, still maintained, of asters.

  “I thought she only planted garden seeds and the lilac bush.”

  “Your mother loved flowers.” My father had his hand on my shoulder. “She had little time for them, but this little plot was special. Didn’t you remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Mustups has kept it, it seems. Perhaps he’ll keep my grave one day. Bury me here, Daughter.” His friend signed, asking if Mustup tended the plot and he nodded. The blooms were gone but I could tell they’d come back in the spring.

  I walked around the house then, over to the fence that kept me from the river. I saw where Henry Hart and I had raced each other on our Indian ponies along the water, our hair flying like our horses’ manes. The hills were a blanket of brown around me. The quiet of this place vanquished the clashing memories of Waiilatpu. This was a place of peace.

  Then near a clearing I drifted in my mind, but felt a tightening in my stomach, and must have clenched Minnie as she stirred on my hip. “Did I press you, little one?” Holding her kept me in Lapwai, though I saw a memory unfold before me. The sham battle, but this time, older now, I watched a child watching men performing as though dancing to the drums. Nothing frightening. Nothing bad happened with that battle except the lingering fear it sent the small child. I heard birds singing, not the screams and howls of men in paint. Beyond, I watched the horses graze by the camp, black tails flicking against white rumps. One raised its head. Maka whinnied back. I was restful. Peaceful. Calm. That child found comfort.

  I turned around slowly to take in what my mother would have seen each day: the comfort of the hills, the chattering water, a lone raven overhead, the faces of the people she had come to love. A breeze brushing tendrils of her hair. I could see my mother here, and with a sigh of understanding I knew then what had been missing. Her rest. Her peace. Her calm. One day, I would bring her here to be buried in Lapwai, “the valley of the butterflies,” where her life truly began. And where it ended.

  “Timothy is expected later,” Father said. “And there are others who still worship and hold the faith. Not Old Joseph, I hear. He has separated into another band that resisted the treaty signing. He was my first convert, the first I sprinkled in baptism.” He sighed, then brightened. “We’ll have worship this Sabbath.”

  And so we did. It was a marvel to see both familiar faces and many new. Eyes bright with recognition of “our Spalding” and looks of sadness when told of my mother’s death. Timothy knew, of course. I’d told him. They sang hymns my mother had taught them, haltingly. “We have not sung them for many years,” Timothy told us. I thought my father would be upset, but he patted Timothy’s shoulder in understanding, his eyes filled with a kind of joy I hadn’t seen for a long time.

  “They’ve forgotten.” I held Minnie on my lap while my father picked up the hymnals he’d brought with him. I didn’t think they’d done much good. People sang with their eyes closed, from memory, if they sang at all.

  “Of course they’ve forgotten. Unless one nurtures the faith, it disappears.”

  Blunt as he said it, his words carried no heat to them nor did the message that followed. “It’s how I know I belong here. Ours is a God close by as well as far away. Jeremiah 23:23. I bring the message to them of a God who is in all places and who gives them tools to take him with them when they go.” His face brightened. “I’m to ensure the watering hole is here and keep the water clear and quenching.” He held the stack of hymnals against his vest. “That’s how your mother thought of her work—as a mother. To keep the lives of her children clear and quenching.”

  He whistled then, tapping my daughter’s chin as he walked out into the sunshine. She rocked in happiness upon my knees.

  Before Minnie and I left, Timothy took me to his stick house. It was up the valley a little way, the smallish structure with a black stove, not a cookstove, but a little heating device. He patted it like a good dog when he walked by and beamed as he pointed to a picture on his wall framed in wood, wobbling glass covering it. It was a painting of blind Bartimaeus, a man healed by Jesus. Beneath it were the words “Presented to Timothy by Mrs. Spalding.”

  “It is my greatest earthly possession. I love the story. Jesus asked the blind man what he wanted, he did not assume to read his heart. This is your mother. She came and listened. She did not assume to know. She asked in our language what we wanted and I said I wanted to see Jesus. She said it would be so, by merely asking.”

  I could ask for new things too. And so I did.

  28

  Filling Hollow Places

  My father remained in Lapwai while I began my journey home with my daughter. I felt a little skip of anxiety going such a distance yet found my father’s reference to Jeremiah comforting. God is a God both near and far away. My mother would say I wasn’t without guidance. I had the experience of so many journeys, memories I knew were not always trustworthy but that, when they appeared in my days as I rode home, I could transform them, wrap them into the wife, mother, daughter, woman I’d become and hoped to be.

  I rode old Maka and had one pack animal I led, and for quite a distance, beyond Lapwai, my escort, Timothy, rode beside us. Because the Nez Perce always traveled with many families together, others followed us, but they stayed back beyond our dust so as not to intrude. Minnie with her dimpled cheeks got handed all around at our campfire that night, and I was grateful that at least one of my children would have a memory perhaps of being loved by Indians as I had been.

  As we approached Waiilatpu, I knew what I would do.

  “You said you would take me.”

  Timothy nodded. “I wondered if you would want to make the journey now that your father has found his peace again.”

  “Maybe there I can find mine.”

  In the morning, we rode toward that place, Minnie with me, riding the ten or so miles through hills beginning to turn brown from the hot sun. Near the river it was cool and the horses drank at the stream, their bits jangling as they slurped. I held Minnie in front of me, wishing for one of the baby boards the Nez Perce used. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t brought the sack. Maybe to keep the heartbeat of my child close that I might use it to steady my own. She liked riding and patted the saddle horn, sitting now outside of my body where months earlier she’d been inside. At least I wasn’t riding sidesaddle as my mother always had. How she managed a child while on that precarious seat always remained a mystery, and grateful I was, once again, that we girls were allowed to ride astride. I sewed split skirts for all of us.

  With the sway of the horse’s gait, my mind wandered to other journeys made through this landscape in which so much had changed and yet remained the same. Memories of that last ride with my mother. Memories of Matilda taking me to this place that fall of ’47, taking me to Waiilatpu, that meadow we now came upon. My mouth turned dry and I tried to say something but couldn’t get the words out as we entered the perimeter of what had once been the Whitman Mission. “Place of the Rye Grass.” I spoke it out loud. The grass grew tall against my horse’s withers and it swished against her flesh. It was the only sound I heard as we rode slowly into my past.

  There, the adobe mission house stood, transformed by heat and time. Beyond crumbled another such house that emigrants often stayed at, deciding whether to winter with the Whitmans or continue on to The Dalles or race the snow, crossing the mountains into the Willamette Valley. Some had chosen to stay that fateful November and never left this place. I saw charred remains of the grist mill with grass growing through the blackened beams lying like sticks on t
he ground. Nothing left of the chicken house, smokehouse, or barn. My heart beat in my ears. My father said there were seventy-four people there that November day. Eleven died then; two more of the children later when held as captives. I could hear their cries. My fingers felt cold, sluggish on my reins, slowed by old visions. I could see the chaos, the shallow grave. The sounds were deafening, and I put my hands to my ears, buried my face in the sweet-smelling hair of my child.

  Timothy touched my hand still holding a rein. “You are here. It is not then.”

  I gasped for breath. Looked up at him. “Yes. I know.”

  “Birds sing, there, near the pond. You can hear them?” He moved his horse closer to the water’s edge and Maka followed, taking us with him without my effort, past a lifetime.

  “The mill pond,” I whispered.

  “It remains.”

  “But the mill is gone, burned. How . . . ? I remembered it still standing that day.”

  “No. It was taken before you came here that last time. The burning, it was an early sign of trouble. You do not remember it correctly.”

  What else did I not remember correctly?

  “Yet it’s part of my memory still intact. How can that be? And the orchard. I thought it was on the other end.” I remembered then a kindness, a Cayuse splitting wood and carrying it for me to the fireplace, building a fire to warm us. Were there other small gifts of compassion? “Mr. Osborne escaped through there.” I pointed to a falling-down rail fence. “John Sager went for water for us after three days. He was so ill. Shot there.” He’d sacrificed himself for us.

  I spoke a silent prayer for him and all the others. The site confused me. It was all so much smaller than I remembered. “The pictures are sharp in my mind but they’re fuzzy here.”

  “What we remember is not always a true arrow. Memories fall short or range too far.”

  “My mother told me once that the Hebrew word for sin could be translated as ‘missed the mark.’ As with an arrow.”

  “Your mother taught that grace covers such thoughts, Eliza Spalding Warren. There is no sin in remembering in error.”

  But in that moment I felt there was. “Timothy, I’m so sorry. I remembered wrong and blamed you.” How brave he’d been to step into the danger to let us know we were not forgotten. It must have hurt him as much as me to leave. When we cannot offer sustenance to those we care about, especially to a child, the weight of our reliance on faith bears heavy. “Can you forgive me for believing your people had abandoned us, that the Nimíipuu had betrayed me?” At last I used their preferred name, Nimíipuu, as my mother would have.

  “It is not mine to forgive.”

  “But you didn’t mean to leave me. I . . . I thought you could have taken me away, but I understand that all the choices were horrible ones. You made the ones that kept people alive. The People didn’t send us away; you let us go to the safety of Forest Grove. And I blamed you for that. I’m sorry. So sorry.” I touched his forearm in respect; felt a shifting in my chest.

  He put his hand over mine. “Your mother showed us about forgiveness. You must forgive yourself now. It is so.”

  “Forgive myself?”

  The past swirled back. I saw the priest baptizing the murderers. No, I couldn’t have seen that. It wasn’t done in front of me. We had huddled inside, pushed together into a room awaiting our fate, strangled by the smell of sweat and fear, of moans from those injured whom we could not save. My father told me the priests had done that, baptized the Cayuse who held us. He can’t know that. I breathed faster and Minnie whimpered. I patted her small hand, inhaled the lavender scent of her hair.

  Our captors forced us outside then, demanded we carry on, feed chickens, milk cows, make bags for the dead. With Matilda Sager—who was younger than me—we two tugged at the weight on sheets we’d stitched, ignoring blood stains, dragging bodies to a shallow place in the ground. She cried throughout. I moved stiff as a hatchet. Stack after stack of white bags held those we’d loved. My arms and legs ached and still they goaded us to continue. Here in Waiilatpu, years later, my palms sweat. My fingers twitched in memory. “Matilda Sager lived with us for a time but I could not talk to her. To anyone. When I saw her I saw the sheets of bodies and the needles we used to sew them up. She cried so when they came to take her from my parents’ home in Forest Grove.” I felt a sob well up. “I sent her from my family. I abandoned her.”

  “Your mother was ill, Eliza. It was better for that child to be where you did not remind her of this place and she did not remind you.”

  Maybe that was so, but it was also cruel of me to want her gone, unforgiveable.

  A raven circled overhead and in his call I heard the cries of Lorinda Bewley, begging me to tell the hostage takers—pleading—to let her be. “She was a beautiful girl,” I said out loud. “Lorinda. I failed her too.”

  Timothy shook his head. “You could not keep her here when Five Crows sent for her. Just as I could not take you with me when I came. You did what you could. She did what she could. We must forgive ourselves the rest.”

  Had I done all I could?

  Timothy led us toward a structure, weeds grabbing like old fingers at its side, roots growing through adobe. “In that building or where that building stood we cooked for them,” I said. “And they made me taste all the food first in case we’d poisoned it. There was little food for us.” Is that true? “No, after the first few days there was plenty of food on tables. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t eat.” I gasped, a memory clutched my throat. “The priests told the Cayuse to kill the two wounded men we’d been caring for. I . . . Could they have said that? Did I get it wrong when I interpreted their words? The Cayuse made me tell them what the priests had told me.” Minnie fussed. “Shu-shu.” I calmed her as I tried to calm myself.

  “You cannot know. You saw through a child’s eyes, remembered through a child’s heart.”

  “Lorinda’s brother and Mr. Sails died because of my words.” I heard the panic in my own voice. “Did I misunderstand, did I translate it wrong? Oh Timothy!” I turned to him. “I caused their deaths!”

  “Your words did not carry the clubs that killed them.” He dismounted and lifted Minnie from my arms but stood close; I could still feel their presence. The grass waved chest deep. It tickled Minnie’s feet as he held her and she giggled, a glorious sound. “Are you certain you and the priests shared the room?”

  Hadn’t I been asked to translate their commands? My father said that’s how it happened, but he wasn’t ever there. All I remember was that the Indians came and killed the men we’d been tending, saying in Cayuse that all who suffered from the pox would live if these men died, that the priests had told them this and I had confirmed it. None of the priests spoke the language; only I did. “I watched the men die and they would not let us bury them for three days. That’s what I remember.” It was my father’s telling of the story of the baptisms that mixed like tangled nightmares. Did I even see the baptisms of the murderers? Did I hear that at the trial? My father claimed that the baptisms legitimized the killings in the Cayuse eyes so the slaughter could continue. Is that why he so hated the priests? But he hadn’t been there. Had I told him this? Had someone else?

  Some of what I remembered was not my own story. It was twisted like tobacco strands, tangled with a dozen other memories of people who were here and others who were not even a part of the terror.

  “Tashe, my own horse that Father had been riding, was in the hands of a Umatilla man who said he was sent for Lorinda to be the wife of Five Crows. My own horse! I remember that.”

  Timothy smiled. “You would remember that white mount with dark dribbles across its back. You rode as one together in the wind.”

  “My father claimed he had left that horse and others behind with the priest when Father escaped, and he blamed the priest for sending that particular animal—so that I would recognize it—and believe my father dead. But . . . it was a roan, with frost on its back, I’m sure.” Hadn’t I always remembered
it as Father’s horse? That was how I knew he had died. I was confused, still.

  “It might have been the only animal the priests had, sent not to do you harm or, what you say, kindle a fire.”

  “I thought my father was dead when I saw that Indian pony.”

  “I hear the story that the girl Five Crows took claimed the horse was gentle, she could stay on despite her hands tied and the biting cold. The horse brought comfort to her.”

  “That must have been Tashe, then.” Confusion settled into calm. “Father’s horse was high strung with a nervous step. So Tashe comforted her.” There were good things that happened, sewn through the bad. Tears pooled in my eyes.

  Timothy lifted a fussing baby up to me. “You were strong and saved your life. People called to you to explain the Indian words and you did this, as a comfort for them. You tasted food so all could eat. If there were misunderstandings, there is no fault. No blame. You were a child.”

  In that moment I saw that frightened young child among the rye grasses and wished beyond measure to put my arms around her stiff shoulders, to pull her to me in a comforting embrace. I’d tell her that the future would be fruitful; that she had done good deeds at this place, in surviving in that time. She had cared as she could, spoke words to help others. She had shown mercy. She would grow to be a tender mother, a faithful wife. She could forgive herself.

  With the back of my hand I wiped tears from my cheeks, held my baby close.

  “You became a hollow vessel inside in order to make room for what must be done. It served you, this hollowness. But now, you do not need it. It takes you away.”

  Maka shifted her weight, rested on the other hip as horses do.

  “It is the thought that harms you now, not what happened. Live with what is here. A good baby. Kind children. A husband you follow and who looks after you. A father who could not protect you as I could not but who loves you. We did what we could. This is all we are asked to do. All we are asked to do. Mercy is granted to everyone.”