Hannah & the Spindle Whorl

by Carol Anne Shaw

  The village men lift the box that now holds Skeepla’s body and carry it out of the longhouse. They walk with it carefully down to the beach and along the shoreline, chanting as they go. The rest of the villagers follow in a line, climbing over the rocks, over the logs, and around the point, as the sun disappears behind Swuqus, the Quw’utsun’ name for what I know as Mount Prevost. I remember lying in my bed, watching a satellite travel over the mountain not long after I found the spindle whorl, wondering if it was taking pictures of me and Chuck. That seems like years ago, and not just a couple of weeks. As I gaze at the sky, I know for sure that there won’t be any satellites passing over my head tonight.

  By the time we finally stop near a stand of trees, the first few stars are visible in the sky and the air is noticeably cooler. Skeepla’s box is raised on leather straps, up into the branches of the tallest tree. When it rests between two of the sturdier branches, several men shimmy effortlessly up the tree and lash the box to the limbs, so that it will remain there in all kinds of weather. And, just like that, Skeepla is put to rest once and for all. There’s more chanting, and when we’re back in the village I hear the beginnings of a steady drum-beat coming from the stand of trees. The drumming continues through the night, long after everyone else has gone to bed. I’m not sure who the drummer is, but the beat doesn’t stop, even for a moment.

  I am numb and sad, and I can’t sleep. I am also really homesick, but I try not to think about that because I know that Yisella feels as though she’s walking around in a bad dream. At least, that’s how I felt knowing I’d never see my mother again. I can’t help thinking how different everything was today. Different from my mom’s funeral, where everyone sat so still and listened to people tell happy and bittersweet stories about her.

  Afterwards, at Grandma’s house in Parksville, I had to comfort my Aunt Laura by giving her neck rubs and some Tylenol. I put up with a lot of hugging from a bunch of sobbing relatives who I’d never even met — telling me to be strong and saying how much I looked like Mom. Eventually Dad came to my rescue and we went off for a walk, just the two of us, along the beach. We didn’t come back until it was dark and all the cars were gone from the driveway. Grandma was really mad, but Dad didn’t care.

  When we got back home the next night, Dad asked me if I wanted to watch old home movies with him but I said no. I couldn’t. So we ended up watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon marathon until we both fell asleep in the living room. In the days that followed, some of the houseboaters dropped off casseroles and cookies and stuff, but some people avoided us too. Dad said it was because they just didn’t know the right things to say. I guess people just don’t get it until they lose someone they love.

  I grab my backpack from under the platform and pull out my journal, pen and my key-chain flashlight. My pen is one of those hokey ones you get at cheesy souvenir shops; a killer whale “swims” back and forth when you tip the pen up, then down. I’ve had it forever but I watch the tiny orca float in different directions for a long time before I start to write.

  August something-or-other, 2010, or maybe 1862?

  Dear Diary:

  Yisella’s mother died today. She died of smallpox. That awful disease that Mrs. Elford told us about that killed so many Native people in North America in the 1800s. It’s so horrible. Like chickenpox only a zillion trillion times worse. People have been getting sick here for a while, and I wished so badly I could go back home so I could get some medicine for Skeepla! I’m sure Dr. Hall would know what to do. But I couldn’t do anything. And I know that some people here think that it’s my fault that they are getting sick. Okay, it’s not like Skeepla and the others caught it from me, but, well – I am white.

  The history books say it’s a disease that the Europeans brought over here on the boats, and that Native people had no resistance to it. Yisella knows this white man named Harris who has a store and a hotel around in the bay. She says he’s pretty nice. I told her that we should go and find him. Not only would he speak English, but he might have medicine that would work for this awful disease, but Yisella said he left a while back – gone to get some white man’s medicine himself. She doesn’t know when or if he’ll be back and, anyway, Skeepla couldn’t wait. In the longhouse back near the trees, two little kids and two older people have gotten worse. Tonight these men took them somewhere else because the sick can’t stay here. Soon there won’t be anyone to look after them because we’re getting ready to go across to the mainland.

  Why do people have to die like this, anyway? Mom was just driving to the nursery to buy tomato plants. She just wanted fresh tomatoes for her famous salsa. Even though I didn’t really know Skeepla, she seemed kind and gentle, and she loved her daughters so much. And now, like me, Yisella and Nutsa don’t have a mother anymore. It totally sucks. Hey, I haven’t written about Nutsa lately and her hate-on for me but things are different, she’s different. Since that day by the river. But I don’t know what to expect now that Skeepla is gone.

  I guess I fell asleep because I wake up the next morning with my journal on my chest. I put it away and sit up, not knowing what to expect today. I see that some people are just now getting up, moving around; others are coming and going in and out of the longhouse, carrying baskets, boxes and bundles lashed together with cedar cords. The sombre mood of the previous day is gone, replaced now with busyness. Only Yisella is sitting quietly in the corner by her mother’s weaving loom. She’s carefully combing fibres out with her fingers and rolling them on her leg. She offers me a weak smile when I sit down beside her.

  “Sometimes I prepare wool for Mother,” she says. She reaches into a different basket and pulls out what looks like cottony fireweed fibres. She adds the plant bits to the goat wool, mixes them together, and then rolls the mass out onto her leg again.

  “Yisella, who’s going to finish your mother’s blanket?” I’m thinking about the potlatch her village is supposed to have when they get back.

  “I don’t know. Nutsa isn’t ready. Maybe it’ll never be finished. There isn’t any other person in the village with the same gift as Mother’s.”

  “Do you think I could try?” The words are out before I even have time to think. I reach out and run my fingers over the smooth burnished surface of Skeepla’s spindle whorl. It’s cool to the touch and I feel an electric jolt in my fingertips as I trace the carved salmon around the hole in the centre. “Will you show me how to use this?”

  Yisella gives me an odd questioning look, but nods anyway. “I’m not very good but I’ll show you what I know,” she says, and gestures for me to hand her the whorl. She then grabs the spindle, a smooth three-foot cedar pole with a notch in it, and pushes it through the hole in the centre of the whorl. The whorl stops about a third of the way down the spindle. It will act like a flywheel, to steady the rotation of the spindle, and spool the yarn on top.

  Yisella ties the rolled fleece to the tip of the spindle and when she is satisfied that it is secure, she spins the pole against her thigh. The whorl spins and the salmon swim in a circle, jumping before my eyes. As my head begins to buzz and prickle, I tear my eyes away from the whorl and watch Yisella work. She continues to work the spindle and I’m fascinated by how quickly the yarn spools on top of the whorl.

  I watch until she stops and says, “Now I’ll try and show you how to weave. The part at the edges is hard and the pattern makes my head hurt. If I don’t watch what I’m doing, I’ll lose my place. But I’ll show you what I know.”

  She sits in front of the two-bar loom, focusing on the tight off-white weave of the blanket: where it ends and where the thin vertical warp strands begin. Yisella attaches the new yarn and, using a kind of paddle, she weaves it over and under the warp strands: over two, then under two, then over, then under. She reaches the edge, where the deep red and dark brown pattern borders the blanket, and hesitates. Now she works with three different strands, carefully twisting and counting the warp and the weaving threads before and after each pass she makes.

/>   I can see that it takes a lot of concentration. Just one strand too many or one less would totally change the perfect geometric design. When Yisella reaches the end, she rests the paddle against the side of the loom. She returns to the spindle and whorl to make more yarn for the main portion of the blanket. But just as she begins to turn the spindle, the salmon barely merging together, Yisella breaks her concentration and says, “Okay, Hannah. You try it now.”

  My fingers are literally itching to try as she moves aside so I can take her spot, and it’s all I can do to sit still. When she passes me the spindle and whorl, I get that funny electric feeling in my fingertips again. I grab a handful of fleece from the basket and my hand feels all warm and tingly. That’s bizarre. I adjust the whorl the way I saw Yisella do it, and the craziest thing happens! It’s like my fingers belong to somebody else.

  My right hand turns the spindle, naturally and quickly, spinning the whorl faster and faster. I control the fleece with my other hand, separating it and feeding it along in perfect time with the turning of the spindle. The salmon start to swim again and blur together.

  I can’t shift my eyes, and even when my fingers feel tired, I don’t break the rhythm. My pulse quickens and I can’t stop even if I wanted to. Yep. It’s the same feeling that came over me when I first saw the spindle whorl. I focus, mesmerized, thinking of nothing else. I am acting like a well-oiled machine. That’s what Dad says when he watches the hockey play-offs. “That team plays like a well-oiled machine!” Which is funny because he’s not a huge sports fan, so how would he even know?

  Just when my fingers are beginning to cramp up, everything slows down, coming to a full stop. I blink for a minute, look over at Yisella, and see her staring at me with her mouth hanging open. And she’s not the only one. A group of villagers are standing near the door watching in disbelief. Jack is calmly perched on the edge of the main fire pit, observing everything. He’s the only one who doesn’t look surprised, not that I even know what a surprised raven might look like.

  I look down at the basket on the ground beside me. What was full is now empty. I look at the whorl sitting on the spindle. What was empty is now full, and the new yarn is even and strong.

  21

  Across the Water

  NUTSA BREAKS THE awkward silence first. She says something to Yisella, her arms dancing wildly at her sides, but Yisella makes a shhhsh-ing sound. Nutsa ignores her and talks excitedly to a woman behind her, pointing at me furiously. Soon everyone is chattering back and forth, but Yisella remains quiet, her eyes going from the spindle whorl, then to me, and then back again. Finally she says, “Hannah. Did you feel that? Did you feel the power take you?”

  “Power? Well, I felt something. Kinda like I wasn’t in control of what I was doing. It was super eerie, but really cool at the same time.” I look at my hands as though they’re not attached to my body anymore. No one is more surprised at what just happened than I am.

  “Hannah, you have the same gift as my mother. Spinning is not easy and it usually takes a really long time to learn how to do it. But you don’t need any lessons. You have the spinning gift!”

  Yisella may be right. How else can you explain what just happened? Why else would I feel so mesmerized every time I look at the spindle whorl? Wasn’t I here because of the whorl in the first place?

  I’m excited by the whole thing until I notice the villagers murmuring amongst themselves. They stop talking, look at me suspiciously, and then three move forward to whisper something in Yisella’s ear. She looks at me and says, “Some of the people here don’t understand this. They wonder why a hwunitum child would be given this Quw’utsun’ gift?”

  She looks at me as though I should have the answer but I don’t. I’m just as confused as she is about everything that’s happened. So again, I don’t say anything. I’m hoping that the villagers are used to me enough by now to believe that I’m just a kid with no idea how she got here or why. Standing by the loom, I smooth out the cedar skirt that Yisella gave me to wear after I ripped my jeans and wait for this moment to pass.

  More whispering and then Yisella says, “They think you might have fallen from the sky.”

  “What?” Fallen from the sky?

  “You didn’t come across the water like the other hwunitum or walk a long way to get here. You just appeared. Just like Syalutsa and Stutsun, the first humans. Our first ancestors. They fell from the sky a long, long time ago, and then many others came afterwards.”

  “But I’m hwunitum,” I protest, “and there have been other white people here before me. What about the men with the big beards and the “moon faces” that you told me about? What about the people up on the flats who give you goods for furs? Or that man — Mr. Harris — with the hotel and the store? I’m pretty sure that there are tons more down the island too. How could I have fallen from the sky?”

  “We know other hwunitum have sometimes come on the water. But you aren’t like the others. You have the spinning gift. You’re different somehow.”

  I’m different. Yeah, I can’t begin to count the number of times that I’ve heard that before. Especially at school. My hair is different. I don’t really dress like the other kids. My shoes are wrong. Hah. If Sabrina Webber could see me right now, dressed in my cedar skirt and cloak, I bet she’d have plenty to say. But I also know that Sabrina Webber wouldn’t last a second here in the village of Tl’ulpalus on the shores of Cowichan Bay. She would hate the clothes girls wear here, and the raccoon fat in the hair — no matter how shiny it makes your hair — would gross her out.

  I know that I didn’t just drop out of the sky, but how I did get here remains a mystery. It’s all so vague and foggy. I don’t have the answers for Yisella but I’m sick of saying I don’t know. I think about making something up. Maybe I should say that I’m an alien from the planet Krypton and that my spaceship crash-landed in the middle of the forest. But no, that’s just mean. And anyway, no matter what the story, if I were a villager here, I’d be pretty curious about any stranger who showed up right out of the blue. In the end, I ask Yisella to tell everyone that I’m just as surprised by my arrival and at my ability to spin as they are.

  I guess they believe her because they go back to getting the canoes ready for the voyage. Nutsa goes back to filling baskets with items for the trip. She keeps shooting me looks, only now she looks more scared than angry. Like maybe she thinks I really did fall from the sky, and I do have special powers, and just maybe she better be nice to me. I’m still not sure what happened out there by the river; I doubt that I’ll ever know. But I don’t think she’s going to bother me anymore. I smile at her. She doesn’t exactly smile back, but she doesn’t look at me like I’m the enemy either.

  The preparation for the last trip across the water goes on and on. All of the villagers seem to move with increased energy, lashing down baskets and storing cedar boxes within the deepest sections of the canoes. Dried salmon, baskets, more planks for making temporary shelters, and all sorts of items for trade go into the canoes. Yisella tells me that they’re late, that most of the other island tribes departed much earlier. The people of Tl’ulpalus stayed behind to watch the bay for a while, to listen and to be aware. For what, I don’t know, but I don’t ask as many questions as I used to. The summer is almost over; there’s time for one last trip before the leaves fall. Time to get ready for the cold wet months ahead. They must be certain that everyone has enough stored for the winter, because they work less then and stay inside their long-houses more. Winter is the time when they listen to stories, learn special dances and celebrate the abundance of food. Today, even Nutsa pulls her weight, helping to look after the smallest children so that the grown-ups can get their work done.

  By the time evening falls on the bay, Yisella and the villagers look like they’re ready. Everyone is going to make the journey this time; even Yisella’s great-grandmother wants to go. The more help the better when they reach the big river on the mainland.

  I know that Yisella really
doesn’t want to leave her mother’s unfinished blanket. She’s worried that it will not be finished in time for the potlatch. Although she can be stubborn, even Yisella must accept that she needs to be with her village. And while I don’t really know what to expect, I feel excited and nervous all at the same time. I’m pretty excited about riding in one of those huge canoes — all the way across the strait, but I sure hope I don’t get seasick. And I sure hope that nothing bad happens on the way over? How long will we be away anyway? What if I’m stuck here forever and I never get back home to my houseboat?

  Much later, long after we’ve all gone to bed, I wake up with a start. Something’s wrong. Something is missing. I feel around for Poos but he’s not there. That’s not like him. These days he follows me everywhere, and he sleeps with me at night. He never moves once he goes to sleep. What if he went outside? What if he went outside and met that great big dark shadow in the woods?

  “Puss, puss, puss,” I hiss, peering into the darkness. “Come on, kitty. Come on.”

  “Why are you still awake?” Yisella’s voice floats over from her sleeping platform.

  “I can’t sleep.” I don’t want to say why. She’s just lost her mother, so getting all twisted about a missing kitten doesn’t seem like a legitimate reason for not being able to sleep.

  But Yisella notices things, so right away she says, “Where’s Poos?”

  “What — how did you know?”

  “If you’re calling for him, I’m thinking that maybe he’s not here?”