Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  But William decided to forbid the trousers in order to placate his sister, and it wasn’t until some time after the two Stuart women had returned to Astoria that Margaret was able to persuade him that she could ride in comfort as long as she changed in the barn and took care not to be seen by anyone other than the cowhands. He had always allowed her a good measure of freedom and relied on her as a steady helper and companion around the ranch, trusting her judgement on important matters. But the trouser incident made him uncomfortable, as though he now realized that his daughter’s mixed blood might one day put her at a disadvantage.

  On the one hand, he’d come to this country partly to escape his own family. The Stuarts were among the elite of Astoria, with their elegant mansion and Chinese servants. A code of behaviour accompanied their position in the high house with its view of the river and the Pacific, unwritten but perfectly clear nonetheless. William’s attempts to find his own way had met with bewilderment, then anger. His family hadn’t understood his love for fishing, but at least he’d joined the Astoria gill-netting fleet, near enough to home that they could see him with the telescope as he came in from the sea. But fishing hadn’t been enough, and when Tom Alexander had told him of the cattle drives north into British Columbia, William’s nerves had stabbed him with excitement. He’d left early one morning for the Willamette Valley, not trying to explain in the note he’d left for his family, only asking them to keep him in their hearts.

  On the other hand, he’d married Jenny, herself of mixed Thompson and Okanagan blood. Her father was from the Douglas Lake Reserve of Spahomin and her mother from the village of Shulus on the other side of Forksdale, towards Spences Bridge. Although Jenny had been living at the priest’s house when William met her, she was closely bound to her family, and she still saw them as often as her busy life allowed. Her younger sister came to help out at the ranch during haying, and one of her brothers regularly brought venison and smoked fish, sometimes a string of ruffled grouse hanging by their feet, or a pheasant. They were fine people, William thought, and he hired many of their friends for ranch work. They knew the country, each grove of aspen with its story, every season with its texture and spirit. Once they’d invited him to participate in a sweat bath when he’d gone over to the Reserve to see who was available for a few days of branding. Jenny’s brother explained that they generally went through a sweat bath before a hunting trip, but they were doing it now simply because they felt like it. William remembered heat, the smell of juniper and sage, the stones being brought in, huddled and hot in special blankets, the hissing of water as it met hot stones. There had been cycles of prayers for healing, for strength, offerings of tobacco strewn on the stones. He’d felt as if he was dying, the way the hot air seared his lungs, and he’d closed his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing, hearing his heart pound in his ears. Or was it the heart of the man who squatted next to him, the man who’d reached out and clasped one of William’s hands in his own, saying something in the Thompson language that soothed William and gave him strength. His skin had tingled from the scrubbing with rough fir branches and the cold water, taken from the creek nearby, that one of the men had ladled over his naked body. Riding home, he’d watched the stars come closer and closer until he knew he could touch them if he’d only reach up. Everything shimmered, and he saw himself ride out beyond the road, enter the night, disappear into the velvet darkness like a red fox gone to earth. He heard an owl and the music of loons.

  And today there was wind with the green smell of cottonwoods on it as Margaret galloped Daisy up to the place where she’d seen a pair of coyotes playing in the golden grass, where the whole valley spread out below her, and hawks hung on the warm thermals looking for field mice. She found spring sunflowers, the first yellow blooms of the year. Her grandmother had told her they always said a prayer before digging the roots to cook in the steaming pit or else snipping the new flower buds to enjoy as a spring tonic, and Margaret wondered if she should say something before cutting the stems with her bowie knife. She closed her eyes and hoped a prayer would come to her. When such beauty opened itself to the world, springing from earth only recently frozen and bleak, there ought to be words to match the radiance. Not able to think of anything, she cut a brilliant bouquet and tied it to the horn of her saddle with a long strand of grass.

  Wrapped in a piece of faded tissue, a worn jacket of deerskin, thin and soft, plant fibres woven into the fringing. Holding it to my face, I smell the earthy aroma of animal hide, of smoke and sweat, the skin like the inside of my arm. I am caught for a moment in a fragile web of emotions which keep me still and quiet.

  A girl, riding the long slope of pasture, shimmering in the sunlight. By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? And with what message does she come across the decades, yellow balsamroot, which some call sunflowers, hanging from her saddle?

  Each item in the box of her life can be noted and commented on, and yet what distance between a jacket and its wearer, a little bag of earth and its connection to the human landscape, what distinction between photographs and memory, the way a place is remembered in all its colours and scents, the feel of its dust settling into the lungs. What a basket has known of camas roots and wild onions and the weight of longing in the fibres of the handles.

  THE FIRST SUMMER I came with my family to Nicola Lake, I had the feeling I was passing through a curtain into the past, that the present was only a moment imposed upon a history of such compelling presence that it shimmered and shone, oblivious to current events. By what way is the light parted? The houses in the townsite of Nicola, the ancient lilacs in the graveyard with seedpods withered and dry, the rain fences of cracked grey logs — all were rich with what had passed into memory. Standing on the roadside where we stopped to take photographs of the lake in sunlight against a backdrop of suede hills, I’d feel the ground rumble with the movement of cattle and horses and wait, vainly, for them to appear. There were never cattle in the valley in summer. They were high on the plateau, out of sight, and the fields around the lake were planted with hay crops — alfalfa with its sweet blue blossoms, timothy — and golden oats. On the road to Kamloops, trucks made their steady way north, windows open to the air.

  We were a family gathered together by ghosts. Not our own, but dry sounds heard among those lilacs, in the hasp on the gate to the graveyard. Some of the enclosures around the graves consisted of pickets and square-cut nails, dark orange with rust, rough on the thumb as one or another of us touched the surface. There was pain in the shape, the rough touch, pain in the rustling of leaves, yet it was necessary as breathing. To walk quietly under the lyrical pines and take in the details of their needles against a blue sky, to imprint the particulars of a time and place into the fabric of our own lives and histories, was as urgent as anything we had known. I saw my children staring across the water, their thin shoulders rising and falling as they took in deep breaths of that pollen-laden air, saw them choose perfect cones to tuck into their knapsacks. A fallen nail held in the fist like an amulet, branding their skin with the iron of place. Seedpods found their way into empty jars, pockets, a few feathers of a magpie stuck into the brim of a hat.

  And now, years after those first visits, I am here to find a version of a girl. A date, some photographs that show a way of seeing the world, a path leading to a some rocks on a slope of pasture. The report on conservation has not given me a vocabulary to use in this search. How to allow for access without over-handling, or remember the watchwords “no interference” in order not to lessen the value of objects as historic documents.

  Margaret: Nicola Valley, April, 1905

  Margaret was riding up beyond Culloden, one of the ranch dogs trotting along beside her. Her father had asked her to watch for coyote signs. The neighbouring rancher was setting out poison baits, and the wise coyotes were keeping clear of that range. That meant more on the Cottonwood and Lauder ranches to the west and Douglas Lake to the east. It was a windy day with a few
thunderheads to the north; Margaret had her oilskin tied to the back of her saddle and one of her father’s old hats on her head.

  On a west-facing ridge she stopped, dismounting to stretch her legs and take advantage of the view. She could see Nicola Lake, grey and choppy, to the west. Lauder’s Creek, swollen with spring runoff, raced towards the Nicola River immediately south of where she stood, and beyond the Douglas Lake road, hill after hill of new bunchgrass rolled endlessly, effortlessly towards the horizon. The dog flopped down on its belly and fell asleep so suddenly and deeply that its feet continued where they’d left off, trotting in air and twitching, little yips coming from its throat. If there was a coyote in the vicinity, Margaret couldn’t see it, though a pair of falcons tossed in the wind, and she could make out a small herd of mule deer grazing over near Lauder’s Creek. She decided to let the dog sleep for a bit, so she sat down near a group of boulders.

  Margaret leaned her shoulders against the largest boulder and felt something poking into the small of her back. Something hard and sharp. Turning, she could see the thing protruding from the ground about three inches, not a stick or rock, but something white and calcified. She dug around it with her finger, loosened it, pulled it carefully out of the earth. It was a thin bone, about seven or eight inches long, and once she’d brushed off light surface dirt, she could see a design incised into the bone’s surface, dirt in the incisions making the pattern obvious. A series of parallel lines along a third of the bone’s length, a number of star-like shapes in the middle third, and at the other end, crosshatching. Taking a long rigid stalk of rye-grass from a clump growing nearby, Margaret prodded it into one end of the bone. Dirt trickled from the other end, and she worked all of it out easily. By now the dog, wide awake, was watching something that looked suspiciously like a coyote creeping towards the mule deer in the distance. One coyote couldn’t bring down an adult deer, she knew that, but this one might be part of a family pack, and the deer probably had young in their midst. Back to work, she thought, putting the bone, carefully wrapped in a bandana, into her saddlebag, mounting Daisy and riding off to investigate the area where the coyote was coming from to see if she could find its lair.

  “Where did you find this?” Jenny Stuart asked her daughter.

  “On a ridge just above where Lauder’s Creek joins the Nicola River. Do you know what it is?”

  “Yes, I do. Among my mother’s people, these were given to young girls who were learning to be women. I didn’t have that training because we’d begun to go to church and then I went to live with the priest, but my mother did. Was this on the ground or under something?”

  Margaret told her how she’d found the piece of bone. Jenny asked if there’d been many boulders around, and Margaret told her about the ones she’d been sitting among.

  “Well, Margaret, you might have been in a burial ground. They were never around the houses in the old days, not like now, when there’s always a field for graves beside the church or by a home. I don’t know too much about it myself, but if you want to know more, why don’t you go to see your grandmother for a few days? She likes it when you visit. See if your father can spare you.”

  William had no objections, so Margaret packed her saddlebags with a few personal items as well as gifts for her grandmother — a jar of crabapple jelly, a loaf of Jenny’s bread, drawings from the younger children, a rooted cutting of honeysuckle she wanted to plant by her front door — and left mid-morning the next day. It was about six miles to Grandmother Jackson’s small house on Spahomin Reserve, and the day was perfect for riding, with high cloud, a breeze, everywhere the smell of green leaves and budding sage.

  By the time Margaret rode into sight of Douglas Lake, she was hungry and hoped that Grandmother would have one of her stews on the back of her woodstove. Jenny’s brothers, now with families of their own, kept their mother well supplied with rabbits, grouse, fresh or smoke-cured fish from their gill nets. She often had visitors, for she was the elder with the deepest knowledge of plants; people came for advice on sickness or wounds and would leave with a poultice or a handful of dried roots or a salve. Payment was made in food or firewood, but she never turned anyone away who couldn’t give her something. And no one left without a meal of venison stew or a piece of wild duck tucked into a bannock. Teas and decoctions brewed in a large kettle, the cabin always fragrant with rose hips or wild ginger.

  Grandmother Jackson was standing in the doorway when Margaret rode up. She held Daisy’s head as the girl dismounted. “I was not expecting you, but I’m so glad to see you here. Hobble Daisy and come in. The day is fine, and we can go up later to pick some sunflowers.”

  Margaret’s grandmother was tiny and quick-eyed, her face a map of lines. She spoke English slowly and carefully, measuring each word, saying exactly what she needed to say and little else. Margaret found her comforting to be with. She accepted the gifts with serious approval, propping up the children’s drawings on a shelf above her table, putting the loaf of bread into a big covered basket, and then pouring a tin mug of tea for Margaret.

  Margaret showed her the bone, placing it on her grandmother’s table. To her surprise, the old lady went to a basket against the wall and took out a similar bone. The incisions were different, this one had a bit of crosshatching at one end and a little hole in the other, but they were about the same size.

  “This was my drinking tube. We used them when we were girls learning to be women. Our mouths couldn’t touch the water, you see, so we had these to drink with, either from a creek or from little bark cups we were given. Mine was a whistle, too,” and putting the bone to her lips, she blew a thin, shrill note. A dog outside, maybe Margaret’s, began to bark.

  “What kind of bone is it, Grandmother?”

  “Ah well, we used the crane at Shulus, its leg, I mean. Or sometimes a swan leg, sometimes a goose.”

  “How old were you?” Margaret wanted to imagine her grandmother, young and smooth-skinned, drinking water through a crane’s leg bone.

  “It was when we first began the bleeding. We moved away from the others into, well, a hut made with fir boughs. I was fourteen or near enough, and my father made me my hut on a mountainside above the river at Shulus. It was mostly just branches leaning into one another and wrapped at the top with twine made from Indian hemp. My mother and aunties came to help me for part of the time. There were things I couldn’t eat and special ways to do things that I had to learn. It was hard work, lots of carrying, digging, running, making my body strong. There was a special headdress to wear, balsam fir, and it hung over my face. I loved the smell, and sometimes I’d take a piece into my mouth and chew it a little. We brushed our bodies with fir, too.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Oh, quite a time, five moons at least, more for some girls, less for others, but I learned what I needed to know.”

  Margaret touched her grandmother’s arm. “Like what, Grandmother?”

  Her grandmother laughed and patted her hand. “Oh, you would think it foolish. When your mother reached her age, the priest wouldn’t let her come to us for her lessons. But we learned to make our bodies pure, and how to make baskets and rope, how to prepare ourselves for having children. How to be kind to our friends, how to give, how to keep ourselves from sickness. The name I received was Hidden Root because I learned about plants and could find the potatoes and bitterroot so easily.”

  “I don’t know any of that. I know how to sew, of course, and bake bread, and I know about birds and animals from Father. And the work from school — sums, reading, compositions . . . could you teach me some of what you learned?”

  “Margaret, the priests have told us that this is not what God wants us to do. But I never thought He would care about it one way or the other. If I hadn’t learned about the plants, how many sick people would have left my door without something to help them? The priests come when someone is dying, yes, but they know nothing about our land and our own medicines. None of the young girls go through the le
ssons anymore, and I wonder who will remember any of it when the elders are gone. I am too old to take you through the different stages, and I don’t think your father and mother would want you to go back to that. But I will tell you some of what I remember. And we will keep making baskets together. That will teach you how to use plants and make something useful.”

  After tea and a bowl of stew, Margaret and her grandmother gathered some baskets together and followed one of the creeks north of Douglas Lake up into a group of hills bright with spring sunflowers. The old woman told the girl that they’d come to this place every year with their faces painted — “some of us painted our whole face red, some just put a dot on each cheek” — and that they had a prayer:

  I inform you that I intend to eat you,

  may you help me to grow,

  may you help me to be graceful,

  not to be lazy.

  You are the most mysterious of all plants.