Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  “Nicholas, it’s hard to talk about this, to find the right words, although I’ve thought it out in my own mind. Before you arrived, I really had not considered the future, my future, that is. The days passed happily enough, there were things to do, to look forward to, but no future, if you know what I mean. Then my father took us to Kamloops to hear Madame Albani sing, and I began to wonder about my life. There are girls who stay with their families all their lives, my Aunt Elizabeth did that, but I don’t think it would be a good thing. We are isolated, as you know, and I wouldn’t want to become one of those elderly spinsters, fearful of the world.”

  “You have a year or two to go before we can think of you as a spinster, and then some before you are elderly.”

  Margaret continued, “I have also begun to see a little how I am placed in the world and how it might affect my future. There is Spahomin and my relations, there is the ranch, and there is also Astoria. Aunt Elizabeth, who is certainly not fearful of the world, wrote earlier in the year to suggest that I might want to come to them for an extended stay, perhaps even travel to Europe with them. I kept thinking that I had to choose which family I belong to more.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes, I can see your difficulty. You have a foot in two worlds, it seems, but I wonder if you must choose one or the other. Can you have both?”

  Margaret felt grateful. “I’m beginning to understand that a choice would be impossible. My grandmother Jackson once told me that her people mourned the loss of their territory when the reserves were established, and it was more than the fact that they had lost land, because they didn’t exactly think of the land as their possession. It was more that they knew who they were in relation to rocks and other places in the landscape, places that had meaning or where important things had happened. And not just in their own time but in memory. Well, I never knew the Nicola Valley before the reserves, of course, but I have never known any other place, either. Everything that ever happened to me has happened here. Each place on our ranch speaks to me, it has its own meaning or memory attached to it. The corral where I learned to ride, the cranes’ marsh where I saw the train robbers. I have become acquainted with ancestors in the hills and pastures in a strange way. And this is the country where I met you, too. Yet I feel I must try to do something with my life that is mine. I was so happy when you taught me to use your camera and then when Father bought me my own because I thought it might be the thing I’ve been hoping for, without knowing what to expect. I would like to learn about photography, and I mean to now, so that I can make a record of the lives here, past and present.”

  Nicholas was watching her while she spoke, listening as she tried to explain something that was obviously still forming in her mind. “Shall we sit down here in the grass? I have a suggestion to make, and I’d rather not be panting while I talk. This ridge is steeper than I thought, but what a wonderful view!”

  Looking down, they could see the ranch buildings and hear the voices of Margaret’s sisters and brother at play. A line of immaculate laundry was strung between two cottonwoods, and the sheets billowed and danced in the wind like ghosts.

  “I wonder if you would consider coming to New York for an extended visit. Dr. Boas telegraphed me to say that he thinks your photographs are splendid and that you would benefit from a course in data-collecting if you’re serious about continuing with photography. The ethnology field he wants to develop is still brand new, and he needs people who have something to offer. From what you’ve said about making photographs, I think there would be a place for you. I know my family would welcome you to stay in our home, my mother in particular, because she’s so grateful for everything your family has done for me. And I would love to show you the sights of New York and take you to concerts, though nothing will compare to the vitality of Jack Thynne’s banjo or that Irish fellow’s fiddle. What do you say? Please say you’ll come, and then I’ll begin to make arrangements. I must leave soon, sooner than you’d be able to, perhaps, but I’ll find out about trains and anything else you’ll need to know.”

  Margaret did not reply immediately but looked intently at the ranch below them, as if an answer might be found in the voices of the children or in the little herd of horses trotting across the corral to the summons of a bucket of oats. Magpies were hanging around the corral, loud in their observations, and the milk cow was making her way to the barn. The life of the ranch was steady and calm, the hours turning like pages in a book one has known and loved. And which one could return to, in need, all the days of a life.

  “I will have to speak to my parents, of course. It is so sudden, and yet it’s so exciting,” Margaret answered finally, filled with elation and panic. One minute, expecting to wait out the winter on Cottonwood Ranch, riding the frost-rimed hills with her hands in her armpits for warmth, working on a needlework sampler or piecing a quilt from the bag of remnants and outgrown clothing; the next, anticipating a train ride across the breadth of America to meet new people and to learn a craft to take with her into the world.

  Lying back on the ridge, Margaret looked into the sky. It had the look of a fall sky, the blue more subdued than summer’s cerulean. High flights of geese skeined over daily now, and the hills rang with the sound of hunters’ guns. Nicholas was watching her, leaning on one elbow, his hand sifting soil between his fingers. He was learning her face like his small vocabulary of her grandmother’s words, one syllable at a time, by heart. Margaret stroked his face with her fingers, feeling the smooth slope of his jaw, the rough texture of his beard. He kissed her eyes, her cheek, and pulled a wisp of vetch from her hair. The ground still held the day’s heat, though soon a hard frost would come in the night while the sunbrowned children slept and freeze the earth until spring. No more music of horned lark and meadowlark, no grace notes of blackbirds. The lovers held each other in the last hours of sunlight while the smell of crushed grass rose up around them, sweet and wild.

  I have enough items now to begin planning their display. Some have been carefully washed, some backed with clean muslin, some placed in envelopes of Mylar, and others tentatively arranged on padded hangers. I have borrowed a sleigh bed and will make it up with the bed linens, draping a fragile nightdress, pleated and tucked, over the quilt which I’ve chosen to dress it. I have in the works a small catalogue with photographs, and our printer is working on display cards. The stories that arrived with some of the pieces will be printed as well so that both narratives, the written and the stitched, will interweave to create their own parable.

  I’ve steadily made my way through Margaret’s box and organized the material as much as I could. Sometimes I sit with my hands full of letters and cry for the girl whose shadow I see in every grove of ponderosa pines, whose hands I feel on my own hands as I smooth fabric and study photographs, a soft voice which I almost hear telling me of her difficulties in reading the light or how she wept herself when her first plate cracked. When I rode the high pastures, her arms circled my waist, helped me to find my old seat, to read the pressure needed to guide a horse on a flinty path. Was it her hair or my own that blew across my cheek as I let my horse gallop?

  A LETTER FROM THE ETHNOLOGY division of the Canadian Geological Survey, dated summer, 1907, asking if Miss Stuart would like to participate in field work among the Thompson, Okanagan and Shuswap tribes. Her photographic work has been recommended by Dr. Franz Boas in New York, and Dr. Edward Sapir has spoken highly of her data-collecting ability and mentions that her growing knowledge of the Thompson language will be of considerable value. The letter assures her that her fiancé will also be doing some work in the Spences Bridge area and can provide assistance if necessary.

  The arrangements had been made. Margaret would travel to Spences Bridge with her father during the last week of November. From there she would take the train to Vancouver, then to Seattle, accompanied by relatives of Mr. Clemes in Spences Bridge who were returning home to San Francisco. Before leaving her, the relations would help her to board a trans
continental train that would take her to Chicago, then New York. Her concerns about the cost of such a trip had been dismissed by her father.

  “When I inherited my father’s money, there was some left over after I’d paid off the ranch and purchased more cattle and horses. I invested it on the advice of my banker in Kamloops, and it has done reasonably well. Money must not be a factor in your decision. And it must be your decision, finally, to make. There are not many opportunities in this valley for a young woman. Nursing, perhaps, if you were interested in that. The Royal Inland Hospital has recently begun to train nurses.”

  “No, Father, not nursing. I did think of teaching for a while, but I am really hopeful that I can do something useful with photography. Nicholas has said there will be a need for well-trained people to take accurate photographs for anthropology research. And perhaps I will even do commercial work, if I can find jobs. Miss Spencer has certainly made a name for herself in Kamloops and earns a good living doing something she loves.”

  William took his daughter’s hand in his own and gave it an encouraging squeeze. “My dear, I think you will do exactly what you intend to. I am only sorry to see you leave us. Parents do not anticipate the going away of their children, and when the time comes, we feel bewildered. The house will not be the same, and I’ll miss your company around the ranch.”

  “It won’t be forever, Father. I’ll be home in time to help take the cattle to the spring range, I’m sure.”

  What was unspoken between them was the possibility that she might not come back, or at least not as she had left — an unmarried girl, an older sister living among her family. Or that she would return altered by her experience of New York and its institutions of higher learning, its concert halls, museums and art galleries, into someone unknown to them, remote.

  Nicholas returned to his home by train in mid-October, in time to travel through changing landscapes of shorn fields, trees losing their red and golden leaves to the air, expanses of tallgrass prairie white with frost near Fargo, North Dakota. He had written almost daily, long letters filled with news of his courses, lectures he’d attended, an exhibit he’d seen of the work of a group of photographers calling themselves the Photo-Secession Society, and he sent some copies of the magazine Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz and featuring the work of individual photographers — Stieglitz himself, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence H. White — so Margaret could share his pleasure. Margaret pored over the magazines, wondering how the effects in particular photographs had been achieved. She loved the orchard photographs of White and the portraits of Kasebier with their simple, evocative arrangements of children and women. One issue of Camera Work from earlier that year had sixteen photographs by a man called Steichen, portraits perfectly composed, each detail brilliant and singular. She loved the look of the magazine itself, its green cover with artistic lettering, and sometimes a reproduction on fine Japanese paper that you could remove and frame if you wished.

  One letter spoke of an opera Nicholas had attended, Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell. “My French grandmother loves this opera, and I was so pleased to be able to write to tell her I’d finally seen it. It was wonderful. There’s a very moving final aria after Dido has said goodbye to Aeneas. She is about to die and sings,

  When I am laid in earth,

  May my wrongs create

  No trouble in thy breast;

  Remember me, but ah!

  Forget my fate.

  I think everyone in the concert hall was weeping at that point, including me. Everything I see and hear speaks to me of you. I have written to your grandmother asking if she would make a basket for my father, one of the flat-backed ones that I always thought would make a good fishing creel. Will you bring it with you if she finishes it in time?”

  Nicholas’ mother had written a long friendly letter to the Stuarts. “We are so looking forward to having your daughter with us as long as it suits her heart. Please do not worry about her in our home. We already love her and will cherish her as her maman and papa do. We have been preparing a room, les petites sisters of Nicholas and I, making it pretty for the young lady to dream in. Our Nicholas is not the same young man who left us in the spring. He talks of horses and dried fish, telling us we would love both. Ah, la vie est belle when you are young, do you agree?”

  The cattle drive went smoothly that year. After sorting, cutting out, and bringing the bred cows and yearling heifers down to overwinter at Culloden, the steers were taken to Kamloops over the Brigade Lake trail. Margaret rode the roan gelding and worked as hard as any of the hands. No stock wandered off to be given up as lost, none drowned, none ate the last blossoms of larkspur or milk vetch, and so they rode into Kamloops on the third morning with six hundred head of grass-fed steer to sell to the buyer, Pat Burns, who met them at the railyard corrals. Mr. Burns always sought out the Cottonwood beef for its consistent high quality and paid well — three and a half cents a pound that year for steers.

  After the cowboys had loaded the cattle into the boxcars to be taken to Vancouver, they went to the nearest drinking establishment with the bonus William Stuart had paid them when he received his money. They would leave the next morning for the ranch, so they wanted to take advantage of their night on the town. Margaret and William had rooms at the Grand Pacific Hotel and planned to stay two nights in Kamloops, going back by stage with Angus Nelson after purchasing provisions for the ranch as well as the clothing Margaret needed to take with her to New York. She had made a list after talking to Mrs. Drake, a Nicola Lake resident who often spent her winters in Vancouver and who kindly gave her advice on what one wore in such surroundings and to the events Nicholas had mentioned they would attend — concerts, lectures, classes at the university. The first afternoon at the Grand Pacific, Margaret did nothing but bathe in the big tub, soaking off the dust of the trail, and then napped in the bed in the same room she had slept in the night of the Albani concert. (I know she listened to the creak of timbers beyond the dark ceilings as the building adjusted its weight, the peach-skin softness of the sheets on her shoulders . . .) So much had happened since then, too much to fathom as events remembered in clean singularity. Was she the same girl who had dressed in such excitement for the Opera House, who had spoken with the great singer, feeling shy as a meadowlark, and who had wondered what her future held as she rode the new mare along the sleeping streets of Kamloops at first light? The tree outside the window of her room, so shady and green in May, had shed its leaves but for a few which hung, withered and dry, in the autumn air.

  While her father bought flour and supplies for mending harnesses, foot trimmers for the horses, and other items from a list he had prepared with Jenny, Margaret found the shop where she had bought trousers the previous May — John T. Beatton, Clothier — and bought dresses to supplement her rose muslin gown, one of dark blue and a simple green one of soft wool. The saleslady showed her some collars, one of lace, one of beaded silk, that could be worn with the green dress to make it versatile. Margaret also chose a grey wool skirt and jacket with black frogging and bought several yards of fine lawn to make into underclothes. The saleslady directed her to a cobbler, who fitted her with a pair of pretty black boots.

  Her shopping completed, Margaret was free to spend an afternoon exploring the streets of Kamloops, which still held their allure. She wandered from street to street, looking at all the window displays, particularly the photographs in the window of Mary Spencer’s photographic studio. She would have entered, asked questions, examined each piece of equipment she could see on the shelves inside, but the shop was closed, a sign requesting those interested in make appointments to telephone the proprietress at the given number. Margaret had never used a telephone and didn’t feel courageous enough to ask at the hotel or post office how such a call might be made, so she contented herself with studying the photographs in the window as though they might tell her something of their origins. Wedding groups, portraits, a ceremony involving police officers, a shot of last year’s Ma
y Queen and her handmaidens in their fancy white dresses: she looked at each shot, hoping to decode the image’s individual elements, its composition and texture, the quality of light.

  Meeting her father at dinner at the Grand Pacific, Margaret felt a pang of love for him, of gratitude that he was allowing her to try something new, undreamed of, unexperienced, of anticipated loneliness for his company during the next months. As if he knew what she was thinking, he patted her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “I remember the morning I left Astoria. It was raining, of course. It always rained in Astoria. My parents were still sleeping, and I crept past their bedroom and downstairs, leaving a letter for them on the dining table which was already laid for breakfast. I propped the letter against my father’s coffee cup. It was white porcelain, I won’t forget it, ever — the look of the letter against the cup, like something out of a novel, not a life. So I understand completely the desire you have to make something of yourself that is yours alone, not ours. Selfishly, however, I know how much I will miss you. You have been the best daughter a man could have, and never once did I regret that my first-born was not a son. You mean everything to us, and that is why we want you to go the way that you must.”

  “Did you regret the way you’d left, Father?”

  William answered without hesitation. “I have no regrets about what I have done with my life, and I don’t like to think of the man I’d have become had I not left my father’s house. But the blessing of my family would have made my leaving less lonely, and that is why we give you ours.”

  Tears filled Margaret’s eyes, and she hastily wiped at them with her table napkin. “Remember the day we bought Thistle? We sat at this very table for breakfast, and you asked if I’d go with you to look at her. I wonder what her foal will be. I hope she throws a filly. You must write to me immediately and tell me, and promise you’ll allow me to name it.”