Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  “This was our most important plant because we used so many parts of it, and each part had a different name in the old language, the stalk, the root, a different name for a collection of roots, the seeds, a name for when the leaves were just beginning to show. You’d know when other plants would be ready by this one. When the sunflower bloomed, it wouldn’t be long for the bitterroot, the spring buds, all the others we used.”

  “What does it taste like?” Margaret was thinking of the yellow petals and what it would be like to eat flowers.

  “We’ll bring some back, eh, and you’ll know. The roots have to be cooked and then added to the pot of meat or fish. Some grease with it is good.” Grandmother Jackson took a knife from one of the baskets and carefully pried up several long tap roots, shaking the dirt from them gently. She then cut the entire crown of a little plant that had not yet flowered for a spring treat. Offering Margaret a part of it, she put the remainder into her mouth and chewed it with pleasure. Margaret chewed cautiously, finding the flavour mild and a little bitter.

  “The girls, they made moccasins of the leaves, putting sweetgrass inside, after their first bleeding. Put one of these against your cheek and think what it would feel like to wear the moccasins.”

  Margaret closed her eyes and felt the fine hairs of the leaves, inhaling the smell, dry and warm, like the hills. She thought hard about the young girls coming away from their people, wanting to feel them around her in the unchanged hills as they learned their place in the landscape, which was her home. Sometimes, when she rode alone beyond the ranch, she had a sense that she was entering a timeless world where everything was of value: the erratics with their cryptic patterns of lichen, long grasses with insects riding their seedheads in the wind, a pile of bear scat alive with seeds containing the knowledge of what they would become — thistle, berry bush, little thorny rose. She would pass through this world quietly, only the soft sound of her horse’s hooves on dust, as much a part of it as sky. If she had time, she’d dismount and find a warm patch of grasses to lie among, her horse content to graze, the bit jingling against her teeth. Margaret would will each limb and muscle to relax into grass and go into a kind of sleep, motionless, while the horned larks sang in a tongue she could almost understand. She was weightless, unburdened, her hair perfumed. Rising, she took the memory of grass with her on the rest of her travels, tiny seeds thrust into the warmth of her hair.

  Opening her eyes, Margaret returned to her grandmother. “But why was the bone sticking out of the ground? Mother thought it was part of a burial ground when I told her about the rocks all around, but why would a drinking tube be in a burial ground?”

  Her grandmother came close and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Margaret, when a girl died young, maybe still in the middle of her learning, or even before she began to bleed, she took her things into the grave with her, things she would have needed if she had lived. I think our people were careful to make sure the dead ones went prepared, not knowing what to expect. That drinking tube was buried with a girl, probably there’s a digging stick, too, somewhere, still underground — the graves weren’t deep then — and her shoes, some beads, a little food. Sometimes even a dog would be buried with its owner. And there are so many reasons why she might have died young.”

  Margaret was quiet, thinking of the girl beneath the ground on the ridge above Lauder’s Creek. Not lying on her back, as though sleeping, but with her knees drawn up to her chin, bound there with bark twine. Had the girl seen the coyote pups leaping and rolling in the dry grass when they first left the den, did she watch the eagles on Hamilton Mountain before it was called that and wonder how it must feel to hang in the air so high and still, did she bury her face in blossoming sage, sneezing as she inhaled the tiny flies that sucked at the nectar? Most of all, was she related to Margaret, through blood down all the generations? And was she afraid to die and leave the world? The Indians at Douglas Lake had believed that the souls lived in a western world, underground. Now that most of them were Christians, it was heaven where the soul went, taken upward on wings, as though by eagles. But Grandmother Jackson still read the stars like an old storybook, saying, “We think of those stars as the children of Black Bear, and we call that the grey trail, the tracks of the dead.” When Margaret visited, they’d stand outside the cabin after dark to listen for loons, and Grandmother pointed out the stories of the tribe written across the sky. The moon and his sister, shadows and smoke, the dog following the cluster of stars that William called the Pleiades. When the two women, young and old, stood in the darkness, Margaret thought that she never wanted to leave. She wanted to learn to make baskets and medicines and stay in her grandmother’s house forever. Yet it was not quite home.

  Margaret’s young sisters, Jane and Mary, favoured their father in appearance, having reddish lights in their brown hair and fair skin. Jane’s eyes were blue, Mary’s a clear grey. When William Stuart’s mother and sister from Astoria came to visit, the younger girls hung about them constantly, asking for stories, watching Elizabeth patiently cut and sew the bright calico she had brought into pretty dresses for them, and letting her style their hair into ringlets with rags and an iron rod she heated on the woodstove. Margaret felt shy with the ladies, felt the contrast between their creamy skin and her own darker colouring; she was also wary of their expectations of woman-hood. “A lady never rides astride.” “A lady never allows the sun to ruddy her complexion.” “Keep your voice soft and low, and always wait to be spoken to.” But no matter what Aunt Elizabeth said, you could not ride sidesaddle when you were rounding up cattle. It was important to be able to crouch low when your horse cut out sharply, to grip with your knees, to balance yourself with your stirrups at a lope. And how could you do it in a skirt?

  She knew this but felt uncomfortable contradicting her aunt. After all, she knew about the flowers of Grasse and had brushed Margaret’s hair so lovingly that the girl had leaned into her and felt the warm glow of family love wash over her along with the scent of lavender. Sometimes she thought of herself as two people, moving between two homes, two families, often under the same roof. She had dreamed of the Astoria ladies for many weeks after they’d left, seeing herself ride with Aunt Elizabeth in a strange saddle that must have been a gift from her aunt, wearing a long divided skirt and pretty black boots. Her hair had been braided and wrapped around her head in a coronet, satin ribbons woven among the dark strands. Waking, she felt a loss so deep she cried into her pillow. She wondered about the girl in the dream, not quite herself but someone she might almost have been.

  The girl on the ridge, under the ground: Margaret wondered if she’d ridden, had a special pony she’d recognize in a herd from a distance, the familiar sheen of sunlight on the flank, the whiskery feel of her lips against her hand as she fitted on a bridle. But she supposed there hadn’t always been horses here in the valley. And certainly the girl wore buckskin, unless she was very poor; then she’d have worn a robe of willow or sage bark. Maybe she had died of influenza. This past winter, when the younger children had been so sick, Mother and Father had told her that they must be prepared for the possibility of losing one of them. There had been high fevers and delirium, and Mother had worked so hard to keep the children comfortable, making broth and plain puddings, cooling their heads with cloths soaked in spring water. Margaret had tried to think of what life on the ranch would be like without their voices, their presence at the long table, the girls giggling in bed at night in their shared room.

  A gravestone in the graveyard at St. Andrews Church had always haunted Margaret. It was white stone with a carving at the top, a woman lying down with her left arm cradling a baby. Underneath was written: In affectionate remembrance of Mary Ann Whitford, beloved wife of Samuel Moore. Born 31 Oct’r 1855, Died 13 Oct’r 1881 also infant dau. Mary Agnes Moore, Died 31 Oct’r 1881, aged 19 days. That meant the mother died one day after her baby had been born, and the child died on her mother’s birthday. Margaret wondered if anything sadder had
ever happened to anyone and how the father went on living. When she realized that the father was the Samuel Moore who lived at Beaver Ranch — he’d died of old age when Margaret was about ten — she felt sadder still. That house must have been haunted with the ghost of the exhausted mother, having carried her baby for so long only to die before she had a chance to know the wee thing, and the ghost of the babe, taken to be with its mother in heaven, leaving the father with his hope and love departed. In 1881, her own father was still in Astoria, not even knowing this valley existed. Two years later, he was working on the Thompson Plateau, six years later he’d met and married her mother, seven and a half years later, Margaret herself had been born in the tiny cabin that the cowhands now slept in. That little girl born in 1881 would have been a woman now, someone Margaret would certainly have known; she’d have seen her at the entertainments, at church, community picnics, perhaps even accompanied her to Kamloops for dress materials as she had Mrs. Lauder. Some days it was too much to fathom, how a year could pass and leave so much change and sorrow in its wake and such tremendous happiness, too. And to imagine her life any different, a father who hadn’t come north through Washington territory, a different mother, a grandmother who didn’t live in a log house near the shore of Douglas Lake with an osprey nest in her tallest tree.

  And now the knowledge of this young girl, at the threshold of womanhood, lost to her family, bound in the earth with her digging stick of antler, her medicine bag, a necklace of elk teeth. Margaret could see her, almost, an outline fading in and out of view, a shadow in the tall grass which parted and rustled as she passed. Who would she have become? Grandmother had told Margaret that mothers used to take their babies in their buckskin sacks laced to the cradleboard to the digging ground with them, and, after the mother had painted her own face, she danced before the infant all night, praying to the mountains and other spirits that evil and sickness might never come to her child. When the child had outgrown the cradleboard, it was hung in a tree a distance from the village site and not used again for any other child. Margaret wondered about this girl’s cradleboard: perhaps birds had taken away the buckskin, the hairs of the blanket made of fawn skin, perhaps mice had nested in the remains. So much could go wrong in a life, even if all the measures were taken in time.

  Margaret had not had much formal schooling. The school was down in the community of Nicola Lake, too far to ride to every day. She’d gone for a week at a time some spring and autumn months, staying with a family, the Pooleys occasionally, the Howses, doing her sums by lamplight at night at the round table in the Pooley’s parlour. She loved reading, everything from the new Nicola Herald to the family Bible; the words made such a clear picture sometimes, staying in her memory like photographs. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, when He asked, Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or has thou seen the treasures of the hail?, Margaret could see the opening into the blizzard that God certainly meant, and surely He himself had seen the summer ground covered with hailstones all glittering and cold, looking like Culloden after a storm. And once Reverend Murray had read the sixty-fifth psalm in church, and she thought she would swoon with the loveliness of the picture: Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. . . . The pastures are clothed with flocks, the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing. It was as though God was speaking of her own ranch, the beauty of the hayfields ripe with grass, and the music of the yellow-headed blackbirds in the marsh.

  When she was staying with the Howses one spring, in their big house across from the church, there had been an entertainment in the hotel and a number of people sang or played the piano or recited poetry. One man, a visitor at Quilchena, recited a sonnet by Mr. William Shakespeare, and Margaret never forgot it, especially the way the man had said each word slowly and dramatically, even sighing after the first line, From you have I been absent in the spring, so that you could feel the longing of the poet for his love.

  Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,

  Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

  They were but sweet, but figures of delight,

  Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

  The room was quiet after the conclusion of the poem, as though everyone there was putting a face to the object of the poet’s longing. Margaret copied out that poem later from the volume of Shakespeare at school and kept it in her Bible at home so that she could feel again the shiver of delight the words created in her, the sweet sadness of the feeling, although she had no face to praise or long for.

  When we sat by our campfire at night, I could almost hear voices, but listen as I might, hard as I could, I could never make out what they were saying. It was enough to almost hear them, I thought, feeling the deep heartbeat of the ponderosa pines in the ground below our tent. When the moon was right, there was a path of moonlight from our camp to Quilchena. And all around, the grass turned obscure in the darkness, no longer gilded with endless skies of sunlight or shadowed by high tumbling cloud.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads

  of old mothers.

  Darker than the colourless beards of old men,

  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  Sometimes I looked at the crescent of houses on the road in to the campsite and thought about buying one. I wanted a way to locate ourselves in the dry soil of the Nicola Valley, a place to dream about when elsewhere, a site to venture from on exploratory drives up over that hill or along the road following the river west to Spences Bridge. But it wasn’t this time that I felt drawn to, not the trim Lindal houses with their gardens of saucer-sized dahlias and their squares of watered lawn. It was more to an interval, maybe only a decade or two, when the community of Nicola Lake thrived, complete with grist mill and sawmill, bakery, laundry, harness shops and livery, banks and the courthouse, newspaper office and hotels. Sometimes I try to dream my way back to those busy streets, perhaps a girl on a compact bay mare, on her way to watch her father play polo against the Kamloops team.

  It was as though we had known each other all our lives and had just been reunited after a long absence . . .

  And sometimes the thought of never having lived here, never having come to womanhood in these dry hills, stabs at my heart like a thin knife, piercing me with such longing that I am breathless. I have dreamed of a girl and, waking, inhale particles of dust that might have contained her, the seeds of tender grass, the feathery hairs of her horse’s fetlock. A girl who might almost have existed, a life that might almost have occurred, everywhere and always.

  A photograph of a girl with smaller children, her sisters and brother, dressed as though for church. They are standing in a yard of some sort, fence rails in evidence, a barn in the distance. The girls are all in sprigged dresses, ankle length for the oldest and below the knee for the two younger, pleated bodices edged in narrow lace, cuffs buttoned to the elbow. The boy is wearing a Norfolk jacket and short pants. They are smiling for the camera while behind them a grove of cottonwoods casts textured shadow on the sunlit yard, a rope swing dangles from one tall branch, and off to one side a line of sheets pauses, too, for the photographer’s eye, as if to tell the viewer that this family, posed for eternity in their Sunday best, also climbed trees, slept in beds with wind-dried linens wrapping them in an intimate embrace.

  This reminds me of my growing collection of textiles for the exhibition, how bed linens are so rarely saved and cherished. Yet one pillowcase has come to me, its edge beautifully hem-stitched and with an intricate monogram in French whitework embroidery, two initials entwined like vines, D and R, around a central M, with exquisitely worked satin stitch flowers and leaves. The fabric is very thin and fine and will need careful treatment for display. But what impresses me most is not its handwork but the knowledge that it was almost certainly intended for a marriage, that lovers might have slept with t
heir heads close upon it. If only there was a way to decode the memories contained in cottons and woollens, buckskin and beadwork, the shape of bodies impressed in fibres.

  THE ITEMS ACCUMULATE as I hoped they would. The little jacket’s mystery is becoming clear; two Japanese families lived in my community until the War. One of the men was a boatbuilder, and their home was confiscated by authorities and resold to a local family. When I ask about them, I am told about his skill, shown boats that were his design. “And did she sew?” I ask the oldest women, and someone almost remembers that she did. So the jacket might have been a gift or a hand-me-down. I spend some time looking at examples of Japanese quilting, admiring the practicality — padded jackets were made for firemen and farmers in handsome dark blue cotton, the tiny white stitches making them strong enough to withstand many washings. And even earlier, the padding was used to make a kind of armour, channels filled with pieces of horn or metal. The shibori dye patterns are fascinating, too — ne maki, thread-resist rings, and mokume, woodgrain. The impulse to look at the natural world, all its cycles and phenomena, and to mirror these patterns in textiles is a thread of history that pulls me to follow it to the heart of a maze.

  And, as well, I am taking the unravelled threads from a life and trying to reweave a companion piece, not the life itself but its image.

  May 13, 1906: The Douglas Plateau

  From her eastern window under the gable, muslin curtain drawn back by the breeze, Margaret could see morning opening upon the home fields, mauve, pale pink, a faint orange like the opened belly of a trout, gold and dove grey. A few tendrils of honeysuckle ventured in the open window, and a blackbird’s piercing whistle. It was too lovely to stay in bed and too early for anyone else to be up and about. She left her bed, pulling up the warm sheets and her quilt with its border of wild geese, and quickly put on her clothing.