Winter Brothers

by Ivan Doig

  I told them my book told nothing but it was my opinion that Jim and his brother who are young and strong would return, but as for Old George and the boy who were in a small canoe I thought they would not get back so soon....

  His commonsense prediction proved right, and the Indians now thin{ that my book tells truth and they have increased confidence in it.

  Some other matters about Swan must have been as puzzling to the Makahs as his ceaseless writing hand. He rejected coldly their attempts to bargain payments out of him for letting their children attend his school, yet he would pay rewards to have mere seashells brought to him from the beach. He scolded about the drinking of whiskey, indeed questioned the Makahs steadily about its purveyors so that he could report them to Webster, yet at Port Townsend it was said that Swan had a weakness for putting the potion into himself. Over the years Swan had arrived and departed among the Makahs casually, but now he insisted their children must live steadily with him in the schoolhouse. (The boys will not come as day scholars, and there will have to be an entire change of things before the school will ever amount to anything.)

  All of which is to say, here at this point in his winter diary of unease, that Swan, who even by frontier standards stood out as something of a drifter, was irony’s choice to bring white grooves of routine to the natives of Cape Flattery.

  At last, the twenty-fifth of February of 1865, after a three-month absence Webster arrives with supplies for the reservation. Evidently Swan promptly made a fist at him about the gaping absence of authority at Neah Bay. Before Webster’s next vanishing act a few weeks later, he handed me a document which he had written placing me in full charge of the government property during his absence.

  Swan and diary ease out of their winter ire. Some of the Indians have purchased umbrellas at Victoria and today there was quite a display on the beach. This is quite an innovation on their old style of warding off rain with bear skin blankets and conical hats....Heard frogs singing this evening for the first time this spring....At work trimming shrubbery, training rosebushes and transplanting currants, blackberries and gooseberries....

  Then, the evening of the fourteenth of April, a reverberation set off across the continent at Appomattox five days earlier: we heard several reports of cannon which proved to be the swivel at Baadah but as it was raining none of us cared to go to ascertain the cause although we supposed Mr Maggs had received some news from upsound of some great victory over the rebels.

  And the next week the grimmer echo: Mr Jones brings the sad intelligence of the Assassination of President Lincoln...Dreadful news...The result will be that the north will be more united than ever and will crush out the serpent that has been nourished....

  The reservation’s potato field is planted. A day of fasting is observed in Lincoln’s memory. Swan sets a hen on thirteen eggs in the schoolhouse basement.

  The fifteenth of May, experiment by Swan’s leading scholar. Jimmy took the tips of the Bulls horns which were sawed off yesterday and set them out among the cabbage plants. He had seen me set out slips of currant & Gooseberries and thought if sticks would grow, the horns certainly would.

  Three canoes of Clyoquot Indians, faces painted red and black, arrive from Vancouver Island to visit. At Hosett, a Makah canoe splits on a reef, and a woman and a girl drown. Webster persuades Swan to stand for a seat in the territorial legislature, and Swan is trounced. Swan sets another hen on another thirteen eggs.

  The eleventh of June, a Sunday of frustration and retribution: Yesterday my cat killed all my chickens so this morning I shot the cat.

  Webster sends a number of Makahs to the halibut waters aboard the schooner Brant, hoping to encourage them to learn shipboard fishing. The British gunboat Forward anchors in the bay overnight. On the Fourth of July, Swan hoists the flag at five in the morning and bakes a gooseberry pie.

  The sixth of July, a bit of provisioning. Barker came from Clallam Bay this noon bringing some venison. I bought a hind leg....I strongly suspect it is our tame deer.

  Swan spends a week in Port Townsend, buys two sets of underwear and a pair of pants. A few days after returning to Neah Bay he suffers a bilious attack. He repairs to Victoria for a few days. School resumes. Annuities are distributed to the tribe’s women: china bowls, bread, molasses, a chunk of beef and two blankets each.

  The twentieth of August, the imaginative Jimmy once more. Jimmy had his ears bored yesterday and since then has refused to eat anything but hard bread & molasses and dried halibut. The superstition of the Indians being that if other food is eaten the ears will swell to an enormous size.

  Then autumn, and unease among the Makahs. Capt John tells me that the Indians predict a very cold winter. There will be according to his statement, very high tides, violent gales, great rains, much cold and snow. The Arhosets predict rain from an unusual number of frogs in a particular stream at their place. The Oquiets predict cold from the fact that great numbers of mice were seen leaving an island in Barclay Sound and swimming to the mainland.

  The natives and the mice and the frogs are promptly right. Nineteenth of November: The wind this morning blew open my chamber door which opens out from the south side of the tower, and slammed it against the flagstaff breaking out the entire panel work.

  Next day: Gales of wind...accompanied by a tremendous surf and the highest tide that I ever saw in the bay. The water was nearly up to the Indian houses. The Indians were out with their torches saving their canoes & other property.

  And the day after that: Gale...lasted till sundown doing considerable damage to fences, and unroofing Indian houses. Frequent lightning with distant thunder during day and evening....The Indians were badly frightened and brought their children to the schoolhouse for safety.

  The eighteenth of December. Commenced snowing at 1 PM—6 inches by six that evening.

  The nineteenth. Crust of ice on the snow....The Indians have inquired of me frequently during the month when the sun would begin to return north. They say the fish are all hid under the stones and when the sun commences to come back, the stones will turn over and they will be able to catch fish.

  This queer, jittery year of 1865 bites through its last days. The diary entry for the twenty-ninth of December: Katy was taken sick on the PM of the 27th and I gave her medicine and told her to keep in the house. But she went to the tomanawas & took cold. Katy was a slave girl belonging to John’s squaw and early in the year had begun to do household chores for Swan. He found her intelligent and competent. During the summer and autumn she cooked at the house of the Reservation carpenter, then in early winter became cook for Swan at the schoolhouse. To all appearances a stout and remarkably healthy woman, her abrupt inclusion in Swan’s running list of ill Makahs is disquieting. Then on the 31st, the final several hours of 1865:

  Katy died towards morning and was buried north of the schoolhouse near the beach....The attack was sudden and her death unexpected....

  Day Twenty-Nine

  Seventy-nine pages later in the diary, this:

  I found that the dogs or skunks have been disturbing Katys grave and that the body is partly exposed and flesh gnawed from the bones. I spoke to John to have it covered up but as Indians are very averse to such work, I shall probably have to do it myself.

  He then sawed up a plank, went out and protectively boxed in the grave.

  I did this for the reason first that I wished to cover the body from sight, then, as she was a slave I wished to show the Indians that we considered slaves as good as the free persons, and lastly I wished to give the natives an idea how we made graves among civilized people.

  Possibly. Possibly something more than that nervous rattle of reasons. The next day after noticing the grave had been disturbed, Swan planted daisies on Katy’s mound of earth.

  Day Thirty

  Year and year Swan’s right hand shuttled on paper, pushing the quick daily threads into the pocket notebooks, the longer yarn across the broad ledger pages. In all his total of lines, forty steady year
s of them and tag-ends at either end of that, there exists not as much typewritten material as I produce in a week. But more handwriting than I would beget in four hundred lifetimes. Staring down into the diaries these weeks—a third of winter already flown; this man Swan is hour-eating company—I begin to learn this constant route of Swan’s pen hand. Rather, his pen hands, for the weave of words on these pages proves to be not a constant tapestry: more like the output from some Hebridean isle of tweedmakers, steadily of a style but also of different and distinct wefts.

  Pocket diaries: they generally are in pencil and the smallest several of them (1863 the size of a deck of cards) offer crimped little language indeed. One handwriting in these Swan simply tosses together of teensy stalactites and stalagmites. A word such as Webster jags along as if scratched onto the page with an icepick. This is Swan’s casual-but-get-it-down hand, jab the day’s doings into place and sit down to supper.

  His second handscript comes slightly smaller—the comb from my pocket covers five lines at a time when I hold it across the page as a measure—but immensely more legible; the clerkly Swan, this one. These diary days procession along as if stitched by a sewing machine.

  Lastly, Swan has a scrawling hand, evidently for use in a canoe or other deskless locales, and it asks a bit of cryptoanaly-sis. After a half minute or so of blank staring, something like Prow & rum wood 8 will seep through to me as Snow & rain wind S. Fortunately there is comparatively little of this written mumble.

  The notebook hands have rich cousins: the two handwritings of the Neah Bay ledgers Swan began in 1862. (That tiniest of pocket diaries, 1863, he elaborated into ledger entries as well.) The more prominent of these is done in lines about as high as the thickness of a pencil, and slanted on the page as rain is with a brisk breeze behind it. These are pretty pages, each headed with the year and month—Swan showed real flourish here; the M of March, for instance, will begin off in space with a loop that seems to be going nowhere but then swoops in to make the central pillars of the letter and next curlicues off into a smaller farewell barrel roll—and the day’s weather entries. Hard to believe that weather such as Cape Flattery’s could be made decorative, but Swan has done it. Each day’s temperature readings at seven in the morning, two in the afternoon, and nine at night are stacked within an elegant bracket which Swan draws beautifully, featherlike lines meeting in a precise pucker.

  Rarely in these big pages is anything crossed out, and never blotched. Quirks do show themselves. Swan’s alphabet tends to flip open at the top, an a or o only slightly more closed than his u; a d at the end of a word may have a quick concluding stroke away from its top, so that it looks as if a musical note has tinkled in from somewhere; commas, when they exist, are the briefest specks a pen can make. But overall this is a steady hand for which, again, the only word is clerkly.

  His language is remarkably not out of date. He surprises me, for instance, by using pretty as loosely as any of us would: worked pretty constantly all day. The one off-word I trip over consistently is eat for ate, as when the schoolboys stay for supper with him: I boiled a shin of beef with potatoes...and they eat heartily and washed it down with cold water.

  Swan’s other handwriting in the ledgers, the fifth of the bunch, is simply more crouched than his standard ledger hand: about two-thirds in size. The reason could be in the deep springs of his psyche, Swan in these occasional scrimped pages showing some tightened mood. But my guess is lamplight. That when Swan wrote at night, he hovered to the page more carefully to be within the narrow yellow puddle of light.

  All in all, Swan the so-constant diarist puts me in mind of a story he once records, of meeting a seaman named John Johnson who had sailed aboard an American ship with three other Scandinavians of the same name in the crew and who told Swan I was called Johnson Number Four. All of these days of pages are the shared craft of Swan One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.

  Day Thirty-One

  Point No Point is the tiny peg of map line from which Puget Sound measures itself southward. Southward and ultimately southwestward, for the Sound at its farthest thrust begins to fringe toward the Pacific as if swept in a steady breeze. Those streamers of water extend the measuring considerably; when the Sound has delineated its every last remote bay and channel, thirteen hundred and fifty miles of shoreline—the equal of the enure Pacific Coast from San Diego to Cape Flattery—edge the sprawling inlet’s outline.

  Evidently in derision, Point No Point was named by the Wilkes Expedition of 1841, when that American naval survey team sailed up to what seemed from a distance to be a promontory prowing into the Sound, one more bold shoulder of the northwest coastline, and isn’t. The forested ridgeline lies a few hundred yards back from the shore, and the fiat acres intervening between the dark bluff and the water, plus the nubbin of beach which provides a perch for the lighthouse, proved to be the maritime sum of the site. But eminent or not, Point No Point marks the main entrance to the great Sound, and nobody now remembers who Wilkes was.

  Except for the four of us, Carol, me, Ann, and Phil, good friends newly moved to the height above our valley, today’s visitors to the Point all cluster out on the water with salmon as their purpose: twenty-five small boats in a bright shoal around the lighthouse. Many are red rowboats from the resort nearby, with dashing white script on their sides proclaiming Point No Point. The fanciness reminds me of another prank of language, that when his Mississippi townsmen used to scorn Faulkner as an overelegant scribbler they would dub him Count No ’Count. Here is a site in scansion I can see that sly squire enjoying, out in one of the red rowboats with an antique bamboo rod and a flask of sipping whiskey, affirming to fellow anglers that yes, none other, he is Count No ’Count of Point No Point.

  When the tide is down, as now, the beach can be walked for a few miles southward from the Point into long views of the forested rim of Puget Sound. In fact an angled look across the water to a particular patch of the quilled horizon on the Sound’s eastern shore exactly reverses my usual line of sight along the gray plain of water: the view from the top of the valley which holds our house, across into this Point No Point corner of the Sound. Now, here on the western shoreline, bluffs align in sequence along the Sound’s edge like sterns of a moored fleet.

  We begin to do the leisurely beach miles and the friends’ gab that comes with them.

  Ann performs a squinched-up impression which she assures us is an abalone.

  I retaliate with my imitation of a tenpenny nail being driven: rigid stance, hands at side, shuddering winces as my knees buckle downward.

  Phil gently informs us that neither has much career ahead as sealife or spike.

  Carol is first to see an inbound ship. Freighters entering the Sound pass close by the Point—indeed, emerging from Admiralty Inlet to round the bluff they give the illusion that they are going to carve away the lighthouse as they come—and this beach offers one of the few sites where I can share in Swan’s fixation on passing ships. Windships sail day on day in his pages, rocking into view with the hidden push of air against their groves of canvas, whitely slicing the Strait’s breadth of blue, the very print of their names vivid enough to ferry the imagination horizonward. Willamantic and Alert and Flying Mist and Naramissic. The Toando Keller, the Lizzie Roberts, the Jenny Ford. Orion, Iconium, Visurgis. Torrent. Saucy Lass. Wild Pigeon. Forest Queen. Maunaloa. Growler. Quickstep. Up from San Francisco, Nahumkeag. Aguilar de Los Andes, eagle of the Andes and homebound to Santiago. Lalla Rookh and Wavelet and Jeannie Berteux.

  Nothing in our world is so richly, gaily named any more, unless it would be racehorses, and the sails that come and go on these waters now fill for pleasure rather than commerce. Saturday spinnakers instead of daily broadsails. Swan would like it, though, that the region still is water-mad, in its way. To walk down to the shoreline of any Puget Sound community is to find mast-filled marinas, natural as coves of cattails. But schooners, barks, any of the working-canvas fleet that kited past him, sometimes several a day: no.

>   Our version of a Quickstep sheers past the Point No Point light like strap-iron passing porcelain, then steadies massively into the shipping lane of the Sound. We try, and fail, to pick the name off the freighter’s bow with field glasses.

  Ann tells of a handy powerful monocular her father carries with him on hikes. A spyglass, it would have been in Swan’s time.

  As if the first freighter was the outrider, others now show themselves from behind the bluff regularly each half-hour or so. The third black ship cuts past just at low tide, three P.M. As we have walked I have been watching a known place on the horizon for any glimpse of Mount Rainier, where I will be at this time tomorrow, but a squall in the center of the Sound’s prairie of water is intervening. Soon the squall line moves north, off Whidbey Island, and try as we do to convince ourselves it can’t boomerang toward us, it comes.

  The Sound and sky go to deeper grays, the lighthouse begins sending out dashes of light, and we start back to the Point as the day’s fourth ship, edges erased in the rain, passes indistinct as a phantom.

  Day Thirty-Two

  As I carry groceries from the car to the cabin, the forest challenges me. Rawf, it barks, rowf rowf roof. Rawf. While showing me routines of the cabin, doorkeys and woodpile and pots and pans, Trudy and Howard had mentioned that a neighbor’s small brown dog is fond of visiting. Solo and I would be instant friends, Trudy assured me. Dog friend is advancing on me now from the woods with his five-note salvo like a sentry triggering off warning bursts.