Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  William liked to take his father’s mare up to Coxcomb Hill, where he’d let her graze on the young grass while he followed the routes of the rivers with his eyes — the Lewis and Clark coming in from the southwest, Youngs River immediately south, the mist-covered Columbia surging from the east. His tutor once showed him reproductions of quattrocento paintings, and the rivers looked here and there to be painted by the same hands. They made him restless and homesick at the same time, the clear green of the surrounding trees, the contour of the rivers disappearing into fog. He wanted to venture up each to its end, and yet he was afraid of what he might discover hidden beyond that soft curtain. There were stories told in Astoria of men going into the wilderness and never coming out, their footprints vanishing into thin air. The woods teemed with stories of huge hairy creatures, half-human, watching from a ridge, valleys of trees too large to get the mind around. Jim MacKay had worked in the woods, and he told William about cutting down cedars near Mist, then inviting others to join him for a dance on the stumps. “I’ve seen four couples,” he said, “aye, four couples waltzing on the dance floor created by a stump, while two fellas sawed away at fiddles and another lad played a mandolin alongside, balancing on the springboards.” Below, in the town, William could hear saws whining at the mills, the commotion at the docks as crates of canned salmon were loaded onto waiting vessels. From this hill he’d once seen whales, a stately procession passing the estuary. The natives hunted them, he knew, using the bladders of seals as floats for their harpoons, and whaling ships came into port for provisions, their decks bloody, the piles of whale flesh stacked carefully to balance the load. But the day he saw the whales, they moved north, their progress unimpeded by anything more than curious seals.

  Two summers of working with Jim MacKay convinced William that he ought to buy his own boat. He didn’t tell his father but chose one himself, a twenty-six-and-a-half-foot Columbia River salmon boat. It was white with blue gunwales and beamy enough that he felt safe handling it himself. He bought it in February, 1883, and spent a few months down at the docks, scraping the bottom, tarring the inside planks, repairing the nets, patching a hole in the jib using stitches taught to him by his sister Elizabeth. He enjoyed being around the other fishermen, listening to them tell stories of good years and bad. Most of them fished for the cannery and used the cannery boats; they worked on these during the off-season for an hourly wage, labouring over them as carefully as if the boats were their own. William tried not to ask too many questions but watched and learned with his eyes and hands. Sometimes another fisherman would take William’s hands in his own and draw the scraper over the curving wood of the hull, helping the young man to feel the pressure needed to pare off paint and barnacles, though barnacles were few here where the boats were moored in fresh water or lifted to the quays for the off-season. He’d smell the bitter edge of the pipe tobacco the Norwegians smoked, the unwashed sweaters of homespun wool, the thin, vinegary whiff of pickled salmon, pungent with mustard seeds.

  That was a good season for him. The runs were enormous, the nets teemed with fish, and the canneries worked around the clock to keep up with the supply. Sometimes when he delivered the fish, he would look inside the cannery; he saw the native women expertly cleaning and slicing the salmon, the Chinese men making cans from tin plate, soldering them together, the steam swirling from the processing baths, the smell of fish and blood entering his nostrils in nauseating gusts. Everywhere the gulls wheeled and cried in the wind. A good season, yes, but when the sockeye finished that year, he decided to sell his boat and try something else.

  Some enterprising men recognized the need for beef in the gold fields of Williams Creek and Antler, and a few decades earlier, they’d begun driving herds of cattle there from Oregon and Washington, taking them over to the Boundary country, across brigade trails, and up the wagon road running north from Yale. The uncles of William’s friend Tom Alexander had participated in the drives, and their stories fuelled Tom’s adventurous spirit. After a summer with his uncles, he had come back to Astoria with shining eyes, telling of huge ranges of grass, there for the asking. Some of the drovers had settled to raise cattle on the rich bunchgrass, and although there were no longer the big drives of the fifties and sixties, it was possible to find work on a smaller, more specialized trip north, one bringing solid breeding stock, mostly bulls, to established ranchers trying to improve the quality of their beef. A herd of Clydesdales was making the journey, too, for the ranchers wanted good teams to pull the haying equipment. William slipped away from his sleeping house one morning, leaving a note.

  The trip north had been glorious, riding through the coulees and grasslands of eastern Washington territory, swimming the animals across rivers, up through the Boundary and over to the Thompson Valley. William remembered campfires under stars, the unearthly howling of coyotes, and an unsettling moment when one of the drovers found a rattlesnake curled up under his bedroll. He’d cut off the head without a moment’s delay, and then expertly removed the skin for his hat band. Waking at night, William heard the Clydesdales snorting and shifting in the darkness, and he remembered the powerful shoulders of the horses pulling in the seine nets, water bedraggling their fetlocks.

  When the group arrived at their destination, a ranch in the Hat Creek Valley, they’d all been paid, and then William travelled to Kamloops to gather his thoughts. He paid for a room in the Cosmopolitan Hotel and got to know the owner, a man called Edwards, who told him it was a country ripe for young men. Ranches, paddlewheelers, contractors blasting away mountains for railways — there was work any place you cared to look. Edwards lent him a horse, one of the muscular wide-chested mounts favoured in this area, and William rode in every direction, trying to get a sense of place.

  He’d never seen anything like it, this country of golden grass. He couldn’t remember when he decided for certain that this was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life: he stayed one winter, then two, working for Bill Roper at Cherry Creek after a tip from Edwards, who knew all the ranchers. He lived in bunk-house, learning from the other men, acquiring a saddle which he couldn’t then remember living without, though it was certainly different from the saddles he’d learned to ride with in Astoria in what seemed like the life of another young man. He discovered that the winters were bitterly cold and the summers hot, nothing like the moderate seasons of his boyhood, tempered by the Pacific. People spoke of chinooks, warm winds that could come during the coldest months, they spoke of the spring flowers; even the spiny cactus would produce enormous deep yellow blooms, some tinged with apricot, some fading to soft red. In the fall of 1886, on a selling trip to Joseph Greaves at Douglas Lake, William had looked at the vista from the Douglas Plateau, the sky that billowed and rolled forever, dark with thunderheads, the oceans of rippling bunchgrass, and he asked a few questions about ranches.

  It turned out the Cottonwood place was available. As a ranch it wasn’t much yet, but the title included six thousand acres of grass, both deeded and commonage, and he wasn’t afraid to work hard to build it up. He bought eighty head of two-year-old Shorthorn steers and moved them to his ranch, fencing one big meadow with the help of a young Indian man from nearby Spahomin to keep them in that winter. There was a cabin, nothing fancy, two windows with glass intact, a roof of split cedar shakes, only a few missing, and, once he’d cleaned out the stovepipe of mice straw, a useable stove which almost warmed the room he lived in. At night he’d hear mice in the other room, and he knew a packrat was nesting underneath the floor boards because of the sharp stink. As soon as he could, he would get a dog to deal with the packrat. He re-chinked the biggest gaps between the logs with clay and moss and built a log frame for his bedroll, but he did little else to the house. It was more important to get the cattle through the winter. At night he’d sit as close to the fire as he dared, the smell of his wet woollen stockings draped over the fender filling the small room, and he’d remember the old song, humming it to himself or singing a phrase here and there,
never able to summon up the entire thing: Onward, the sailors cry or though the waves leap, soft shall he sleep or dead on Culloden’s field. He could see the Highlanders fighting bravely but then slain in their thousands on the bleak moors of Culloden and Glencoe, which he imagined looked a lot like his own home meadow in winter. Some nights he didn’t make it to his bedroll at all but slumped in the wooden chair, dozing while his stockings steamed. The ghost of his bonny ancestor stole from the field, dressed as a maidservant, secreted away to Skye, and returning finally to France, then Italy, no longer the gallant youth who had captured the hearts of the Scottish chieftains. The part his father had not cared to tell him, the tutor had revealed: Charlie ended his days a drunk and a cuckold and couldn’t have done much for Scotland even if the Highlanders wanted him.

  That winter was one of the coldest on record. William had been able to purchase a little hay, a few tons, and he’d scythed as much grass as he could, drying it quickly, then dragging it with a rope behind his horse to a central location, but his eighty head mostly had to feed themselves on what they could find. Unlike horses, who could paw away snow from a covered field and get at the wintering grass underneath, cattle were at the mercy of the elements. William had counted on them surviving on their stored fat and what fodder he could get to them. Another winter they might have been fine, but from mid-January on, blizzards brought snow to cover the grass and other forage, and in the spring of 1887, Cottonwood’s winter pasture was dotted with carcasses; less than half his herd had made it through. William called the field Culloden after that and thanked heaven he hadn’t been counting on cows to drop healthy calves after such a fierce winter.

  When a letter came from Astoria, the first since he left though he’d written home many times — to tell them he had arrived, where he picked up his mail, about the ranch, how he hoped they were well and weren’t bitter about his leaving — he knew what it would say before he opened it. He’d dreamed of his father’s death a week earlier and had woken to find his bedroll soaked with tears. So the envelope edged with a thin black line came as no surprise. What he didn’t expect to find out was that a large amount of money had been included in his father’s estate for him. The money could be wired to him as soon he provided the name of a bank. Such a loss and unexpected gain filled William with turmoil. He supposed this was his father’s way to demonstrate forgiveness and approval: to have remembered the defector in his will. Yet how welcome a letter would have been in William’s first lonely months. He went to Kamloops and arranged to have the money sent to the Bank of British Columbia there. It would be useful, no denying. He’d pay off what he owed on the ranch and buy some more cattle, maybe even invest in one of the Hereford bulls just coming into the country, thanks to Greaves of Douglas Lake, and a good string of horses. He’d need haymaking equipment, too, if he was going to increase his herd and keep more horses. And he ought to make some improvements to his cabin, which looked more like a home now that he had received a parcel from Astoria containing a mariner’s compass quilt made for him by his mother and sister and a sampler cross-stitched by Elizabeth, soft flowers and a verse from the Old Testament: Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwelling. The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing.

  The day William first saw Jenny was in the autumn of 1887. He’d gone to Father Lemieux’s house by the church just a mile or two from the Cottonwood Ranch to pick up some books. Not a Catholic, he had been gifted with a classical education nonetheless (for this was how the Jesuit put it to him) and had taken to dropping in to drink port on occasion and take home volumes selected for his edification by the good Father. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the confessions of St. Augustine, and even texts by earlier intelligent pagans, Pliny and Cicero — these had been taken to the windy cabin and read with great interest and a fair amount of skepticism on long evenings. And sometimes there was delight of recognition, as when Pliny described the mares of the Portuguese. William pondered over the Latin, Constat in Lusitania circa Olisiponem oppidum et Tagum amnem equas favonio flante obversas animalem concipere spiritum, idque partum fieri et gigni pernicissimum ita, wondering if the mares would gather themselves into a circle and hold their tails up to facilitate copulation with the wind. It was not difficult to picture them lifting their tails, he’d seen it so many times. But to the wind? Well, perhaps. After all, he had seen the gusts of ripe grass seed moving in currents of warm air, seen the golden pollen of cottonwoods falling from the sky. And maybe Pliny offered as complete an explanation as any for the occurrence of certain swift horses when the bloodlines did not lead you to expect such speed. And he laughed aloud in his cabin as he read the section of the Natural History concerning superstitions. Rumpi eqos, qui vestigia luporum sub equite sequantur — horses would burst if they were ridden in the footsteps of wolves, as near as he could tell. He hadn’t yet heard of wolves in this territory, although there were coyotes, cousins no doubt, and this theory might explain the way horses spooked when they heard coyotes nearby at night.

  He found pondering these things exhilarating. He had no time to read in spring and summer, and only now that he had his herd down in Culloden for the cold months ahead did he find himself with a few hours to drop in on the priest. They chuckled over Pliny but agreed that he got so much right about weather and the behaviour of bees that one could forgive his lapses. It was Aquinas the priest loved. With winter coming, William would take advantage of his leisure to exercise his rusty powers of logic in debate with that austere mind. He kept a rough journal in which he noted ideas of particular interest or phrases that rang in the wind.

  We next consider how one creature moves another. This consideration will be threefold: (1) How the angels move, who are purely spiritual creatures; (2) how bodies move; (3) how man moves, who is composed of a spiritual and a corporeal nature.

  He would have liked to have asked Saint Thomas about cattle, which he, William, believed had something of the angels in their being. Or the huge fish he caught in the Thompson River once, its body muscular and shimmering with the colour of the sky. Looking into its eyes, he knew God. He wondered what Father Lemieux would have to say about that, or any of the saints, for that matter. Or what they would say about horses carrying the offspring of the west wind in their wombs, air turned to muscle and bone. Surely there was enough superstition in their own theology that they could hardly censure Pliny and his mercurial horses.

  “Ah, William, come in. I’ll have Jenny bring us some refreshment. Go in and sit by the fire.”

  The priest waved William into the cosy room at the front of the house and went off, his boots clattering on the board floor of the hall. Jenny? William wondered who Father Lemieux was talking about. His housekeeper, Mrs. Garcia’s cousin, was called something, he forgot what — “the good woman” or “the woman who does for me” — but not Jenny. The priest returned, rubbed his hands in front of the fire, and then went to the shelves for a book he was hoping William would enjoy. A few minutes later, there was a soft knock at the door and a young woman entered with a tray of glasses and something warm wrapped in a tea towel. She was the loveliest woman William had ever seen. Indian, obviously, with her lustrous black hair pulled back in a knot and a dress of indigo stuff. Her features were fine and regular, and when she looked at him, shyly, she smiled with such radiance, her teeth even and milky, her cheekbones tawny and high. Leaving the men, she closed the door and went quietly back to the kitchen.

  “Jenny is on loan from LeJeune,” said Father Lemieux. “He’s gone off to help with a church at Kamloops and to see to that newspaper he’s become so involved with, and my housekeeper had to return home because of illness in the family. Jenny is a very able girl. LeJeune convinced her to work for him when he was building the church at Douglas Lake last year. One of the Jacksons. A good family, the mother one of the basket makers. Do you know them?”

  William realized that one of her brothers, it must have been, had helped him wi
th some fencing when he’d bought more cattle and needed corrals at the home site. August Jackson. William had found him companionable, easy to sit with around the fire at night, watching for shooting stars and listening to loons. The rest of the visit with Father Lemieux passed in pleasant confusion. William could think only of the woman in the kitchen at the back of the house, her supple brown hands as she arranged the glasses and other things on the low table, her smile. He couldn’t speak of Aquinas or original sin or the merits of the port in his glass. When he left, carrying two books which would remain in his saddlebag for days and would be returned unread, he saw her face at the window, smiling at him in lamplight. How the angels move. He came back twice, once to ask her to attend an afternoon concert at Nicola Lake, and once more to fix a time for him to collect her so that they could be married by the Justice of the Peace, John Clapperton, at the courthouse in Nicola Lake. The priest had not been entirely happy with William “absconding” with his housekeeper, and he had not been pleased at all that Jenny was marrying outside the church. But he had come to visit them in the cabin at Cottonwood and had been reassured by the sampler, which showed evidence of biblical knowledge and suggested that the house would not be entirely godless; he gave them a Bible with gilded pages as a wedding gift. He had also left a bottle of his excellent port and told William he’d be by from time to time to hear Jenny’s prayers and to drink his share.

  Wanting to take a break from the textiles, I suggest a brief camping trip to the Nicola Valley. I have a report to read, preparatory to my exhibition, and will take some time to clarify the details of Mylar, adhesives, insurance against humidity and insect damage. Away from the objects, I can make a plan for their display. And I am hoping to figure out the geography of Margaret’s box, the placement of trails and the locations of photographs.