“Bibi, who told you about the mummy?”
She said again, “My dleam.”
Said as if it were the only answer to give, regardless of how impossible it was. I sighed in frustration.
She said, “She says to tell you he will come soon. Kloshe nanitch.”
Keep watch. Be careful. Again, I felt that shiver. I forced it away. “He? Who’s he? What nonsense is this?”
“Wake hehe, ipsoot klooshman.”
This is serious, sly wife. Her favorite nickname for me.
“It is serious. Which is why I wish you wouldn’t say anything about the mummy, Bibi. Please. I don’t want the word to get out. I want some time to study her, and—” I stopped. She wasn’t listening. Instead, she was digging around in the pocket of her skirt. “Did you hear me, Bibi? Please. Keep it secret. Ipsoot.”
She pulled something from her pocket, holding it out to me. “You take this.”
What was in her palm was a bracelet, and nothing fine. A few strings of twine—and store bought at that—knotted through five charms, all made of abalone shell, their iridescence flashing rainbows, each etched with some figure, a few lines. A worthless, ugly thing.
“She wants you to wear it.” When I made no move to take it, Bibi shoved it at me again. “You must wear it.”
“I’m not much for finery—”
“Take it.”
There was no point in arguing. The sooner I took it, the sooner I could be back to the river. I plucked it from her hand. “Thank you.”
She looked at me for a moment, as if she were trying to read something in my face, and then she turned away with a nod, seemingly satisfied, and trudged down the path toward the canoe without another word.
She didn’t look back, and I dropped the bracelet into my coat pocket, feeling unsettled, not knowing what to think. She was a strange old woman, and I was glad she was going. She stood by the canoe now, waiting, and I knew she wouldn’t budge until Michael returned to take her back to town, so I strode quickly to the house, hurrying up the stairs. Michael and Lord Tom were standing in the kitchen, each with a cup of coffee, and I called out, “She’s waiting to go back, Michael, so you’d best hurry. You know she’ll stand there in the cold all day.”
“What did she want?”
“She had a dream she wanted to tell me about,” I said.
“Siwash mumbo jumbo?”
“Something like.” I grimaced. “I’m sorry you had to come out all this way for it.”
I left quickly then, before he could engage me in a conversation I didn’t want, and I hurried back to the hole, and my digging, and I forgot Bibi’s dream and the bracelet and my uneasiness, burying it in mindless drudgery. I didn’t even see them leave.
When Junius returned late that afternoon, it was with two men in tow—Adam Leach, who owned the whacks next to ours, and Sydney Dawes, another oysterman. He brought them up to the edge of the hole and said, “Hello, sweetheart.”
“Building a dam, Leonie?” Adam Leach asked.
I glanced up. “Do I look like a beaver to you?”
“Well yeah, right now, you kind of do.” He laughed, and Sydney Dawes laughed too.
Junius said, “They came out to see the mummy.”
I pushed up the brim of my hat and leaned on the shovel handle. I was relieved for a moment—Junius was telling people, and that at least explained why Bibi had known—but then I was annoyed. “I didn’t know that you meant to tell the world.”
Sydney said, “Ah, Russell, looks like you made her mad.”
“I’m not mad,” I said, though I was. “You boys go on and take a look at her since you came all the way out, but I wish you wouldn’t go around telling everyone you see. It’s bad enough that Bibi was out here casting her spells, I don’t need any other pretend mystics wasting my time.”
Junius frowned. “Bibi was here?”
Adam said, “Where are you keeping this thing, anyway? Let’s go see it. I want to get back before it’s too dark.”
“In the barn,” Junius said, waving them off, and as the two men made their way there, he said to me, “Why was Bibi here? Did you talk to her about the canoe?”
“She wouldn’t listen. She wanted to tell me about some dream she had.” I glared after the two men. “Really, June, did you have to tell everyone? If Baird finds out—”
“How’s he going to find out?” he asked. “Who’s going to tell him? All these men care about are oysters. They’ll take a look at her and go home and forget about it.”
“Hey, Russell, we ain’t got all day!” Sydney Dawes called out.
I glanced toward them, thinking of how they’d be looking at her as if she were some curiosity in Barnum’s museum, how they would stare and prod and touch and laugh, their crude jokes. The thought troubled me and brought back the uneasiness I’d felt at Bibi’s visit. “Junius, don’t...don’t let them touch her. Please.”
“We won’t harm a hair,” he promised, and went off after them.
I watched him walk off to join them and I turned back to the hole. But I couldn’t lose myself in the work. I wanted to be with the mummy, not in this wet and muddy hole. It seemed pointless, such a waste of time. So far, my instincts had proved right. I’d found nothing, and there looked to be nothing to find. Why continue?
I took up the shovel and pick and went back to the house, leaving them on the porch as I went inside. Lord Tom was sitting in his customary chair by the organ.
He said, “What did that pelton woman tell you today?”
“She’d had a dream. The mummy’s tomawanos wants me. Junius has told everyone about her, it seems.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. “Now he’s out there like some lyceum showman. Too bad there’s nothing to unwrap or he could charge admission.”
Lord Tom grunted. “Bibi said more than this.”
“Yes,” I said. “More nonsense.”
Lord Tom said, “The memelose are tricky, okustee.”
“And this one’s been dead a long time. Her spirit’s long since passed over, even according to your Chinook legends. It’s not coming back. How can it hurt me?”
Lord Tom looked unconvinced. “Kloshe nanitch, okustee. That is all I’m saying.”
Kloshe nanitch. Be careful, listen, watch. He’d said such words to me a hundred times. There was nothing unusual in them, and the fact that Bibi had said them to me just this morning meant nothing either. “So you think Bibi’s right?”
He shook his head. “That one? No.”
“Then there’s nothing to fear, is there?” I went to the stairs. “I’m going to wash up. I’m filthy.”
When I came downstairs again, it was to find only Junius sitting at the table, sipping a cup of coffee.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“They headed on back,” Junius said. “You want to tell me why the hell Bibi felt the need to come all the way out here to tell you about a dream?”
I shrugged. “She wanted to give me a bracelet to wear.”
“A bracelet?”
“A charm, I think. Against the skookum tomawanos or something. It’s just a bit of twine from Garrett’s, with some abalone shell.”
Junius laughed. “Yeah. That’ll be some powerful magic. What tomawanos is she talking about?”
“The mummy’s, of course,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t told her about it, but—”
“I didn’t tell her.”
I frowned. “You didn’t?”
“I wasn’t anywhere near Bruceport. I saw Dawes and Leach out on the whacks.”
“Then how did she know?”
“No idea. I’m sure she heard it from somewhere. How else?”
How else indeed? In my dleam, she’d said. But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?
“Johnson said we should start our own museum and charge a fee to see her,” Junius said.
“Absolutely not,” I snapped.
“I was joking, Lea. But people will want to see her. You might as well ge
t used to it. She’ll be a curiosity for at least a while.”
“As long as they don’t touch her,” I said. I saw Junius’s quick frown, but I was relieved when he said nothing.
As the night wore on, it grew harder to banish Bibi’s dream or her warnings. I felt strangely haunted. I tried not to give in to the terrible urge to go to the barn, to check on the mummy, to look at her, to touch her. Time was my enemy, but surely not so much as I felt, that if I did not go out there right now I would somehow be letting the answers slip away. It was foolish, and I knew it. Speed was not my friend when it came to research. I must be slow and steady and complete. I was good at detail, and I was good at it because I didn’t hurry, because my father’s teaching had been thorough and strict, drawings sometimes done ten times or more before they satisfied him, measurements refigured, words rejected and recrafted. So this need for hurry was strange and new. I fought it—I could not afford to make mistakes, not with her. I sat and wrote down everything I meant to do, step by step. To measure her and draw her, to explore and list every mark upon her skin. Slowly, as a true scientist would, as my father had taught me to be.
But I couldn’t focus. What I wanted tonight was a story, to hear Lord Tom tell me something new, but Junius was here to criticize and I didn’t want that either. So I went to bed. The warmth from the stove and our bodies had risen, but it hadn’t completely banished the cold, and I shivered as I undressed and put on my nightgown and went to the bureau to brush and braid my hair.
I stopped short. There, next to my hairbrush, was the bracelet Bibi had given me, the abalone glimmering in the faint light. I frowned. How had it got there? I had left it in my coat pocket. I hadn’t taken it out.
I heard Junius’s footsteps on the stairs, and then the bedroom opened and he came inside. Before he could say anything, I said, “That bracelet, June, the one I told you Bibi gave me? Did you take it out of my pocket?”
“Bracelet? No. Why would I?”
I stared at the bracelet, confused and disturbed. I picked it up and let it fall into the carved horn bowl—my father’s—alongside loose buttons and a brooch, the only other piece of jewelry I owned. And then I turned determinedly away. It was late, and I was tired, and I reassured myself: it was easy to forget something so small, an action so thoughtlessly taken. It was nothing more than that.
CHAPTER 3
THE SERE GRASS was stiff and prickly beneath my bare feet where I sat on the hill overlooking the valley, a basket of berries at my side, my saffron skirts shifting about my legs with the hot dry summer breeze. I was waiting. Waiting and impatient, and that waiting grew and grew until I was so tense and anxious I did not think I could wait another moment.
Then I felt him. I turned to look.
Everything changed.
I rose to run, my foot catching the basket, upturning it, and the berries spilled onto the ground, a pool of them like blood, the basket rolling and rolling down the hill, the design woven into it—light reeds against dark—flashing as it rolled, and I could only stare at it, frozen. I could not move. He was here, and I knew what was coming, and I was afraid. I was afraid and I could not run and could not scream—
I woke with a start, sitting bolt upright, sweating, choking, my chest so tight I could not catch a breath. I gasped, panicking, clutching my throat.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Junius’s voice, sleepy and alarmed. He grabbed me, and I fought him, unthinking, still caught in the dream, trying to get away. “Lea, stop. It was a dream. It was only a dream.” He pulled me hard into his chest, murmuring, “It’s all right, sweetheart. It’s all right.”
My fear faded in the reality of Junius’s warmth, the darkness of the room, the moonlight casting a subtle light beyond. I was here, in my bed, in my room.
I took a deep breath, and another, until my heart fell into a regular beat.
“A bad nightmare?” Junius asked.
“Yes,” I managed. “Yes. It was...terrible. I was waiting and...and the basket overturned, and it was so...so horrible...” It sounded ridiculous when I said it. Not the least bit frightening.
Junius whispered, “Ssshhh. Ssshhh. It’s all right. Nothing to worry about. Just a dream.”
I lay back with him, snuggling into his arms. I listened to the rise and fall of his breathing, the beat of his heart, until the dream faded and was gone.
The next morning, Junius said, “That was a bad nightmare you had last night,” and I nodded and told him I couldn’t remember it, which wasn’t true. I tried to forget it as I went about my chores, though I couldn’t. There was something about the dream that carried, that made me even more anxious, and it all settled around her. I wanted to see her, to touch her, to be reassured—about what? I found myself pausing in the middle of carrying milk to the springhouse, staring at the barn, murmuring, “What trick have you played on me?”
I refused to surrender to such absurdity. Dreams, instincts...I’d fought them all my life. As a child, I’d always been susceptible to bad dreams—I’d awakened to blind fear in the night more times than I cared to remember, running to Papa’s room to fling myself into his arms, begging for his comfort. He’d soothed me with whispers, Ssshhh, ssshhh, my dear, dear girl. It’s only a dream. There’s nothing real in it, though in the morning it had always occasioned a lecture—I should not have read those old legends or listened so closely to the songs, or whatever it was I’d done to bring the bad dreams. Superstition is the enemy of objectivity, he’d told me often. Science needed facts.
I remembered those words and told myself I would take my time today, do my chores, go out to her when I was good and ready. I was no green girl to run at every change in the wind.
But still, when Junius stopped me as I finally made my way to the barn, saying, “I need those drawings for Baird first, sweetheart. The collection’s been waiting long enough,” I felt a sinking desperation.
“But I—”
“The mummy can wait. And you haven’t got that canoe yet for me, have you? I might have to send it off after all.”
That was true. I hadn’t kept my end of the bargain. I needed to go into Bruceport and speak with Bibi again, but after our conversation yesterday, I was reluctant. I didn’t want to hear her words—I was already uneasy enough. Without cause, I reminded myself. Still, Bibi would wait. I’d talk to her tomorrow.
I forced myself to attend to the chore of drawing, resisting the call of the mummy. I picked up the bowl waiting on the table, turning it in my hands, running my thumb along the broad form lines of the salmon carved upon it. Junius, who was going to the stove for a cup of coffee, glanced over his shoulder and said, “A camas bowl, I think.”
But I saw skilled hands carving, smoothing, polishing. I saw, in my mind’s eye, the bowl sitting at the edge of the fire, the oil it held glistening and pungent. I shook my head. “Oil,” I said softly, without thinking.
Junius frowned. “Why do you say that?”
I saw the way he was looking at me, that frown between his eyebrows, the same one I’d seen on Papa’s face a dozen times. “The salmon carved on it. And it still smells of oil,” though neither was true. Salmon was a common motif. And the bowl smelled like nothing but dust and old wood.
“Ah.” Junius nodded and poured the coffee. “Well, write that down too. It’s always good to give Baird a story.”
I thought he was mocking me, but when I looked at him more closely I realized he wasn’t really paying attention, and I felt a quick relief. I’d always had too strong an imagination when it came to the relics. It was easy for me to envision the life they’d lived—dancers wearing those masks that now hung on the wall while the fringe shivered with their movement; sinkers plunging deep into a cold river, holding nets taut; salmon hooks taking shape beneath the blade of a stone knife. Sometimes those stories felt so real...but I thought I’d learned long ago to keep such ideas to myself.
It was the mummy. She was too distracting. And my dream...I tried to shake it away and settled my
self to the drawing, hurrying through it, keeping my fancies well at bay, not allowing myself to think of the stories these things could tell, but even so, it was growing dark by the time I finished for the day.
I managed to make it out to the barn, but only for a few moments before I had to start supper. The whole day had escaped me. I didn’t even bother to take her from the trunk. I only stood there, holding the lantern over her, watching the light turn her oak-colored skin to honey and glisten on the molasses-taffy color of her hair, and I was struck by a reverence that made me catch my breath. For a moment, as I stared at her, I felt as if I’d somehow brought her alive. I saw the faint rise and fall of her chest, the flutter of her eyelashes upon her cheeks, and I found myself whispering, “Who are you?”
I’d no sooner said the words than I felt how foolish they were—not just because I’d spoken them aloud but because I’d expected an answer. She was no more alive than the straw or that harness hanging on the wall. But when I closed the trunk lid, again I felt that sense of suffocation; it was all I could do to turn the key in the lock and walk away.
I could not stop thinking of her, and it wasn’t just questions about her people or how old she was or whether she was Indian—the kinds of questions I should have been asking. Instead, I wondered what had brought her here from hills with long brown grass and wind full of the scent of sun and dust. I wondered if those berries had been her favorites and why she was waiting and why that waiting had turned so afraid. A dream, Leonie. Not real. But as the days went on and the dream returned, it seemed so. Sometimes I could feel that grass against my feet, and when I took down my stockings and saw the milk white of my own ankles, I was startled that they weren’t brown. I thought of those berries spilling into a pool like blood as I spooned red currant jam from a jar. I washed dishes and thought of the black and white on that basket flashing as it tumbled down the hill.
My chores kept me from her aside from a few minutes here and there. I tried to visit her every day—as if she was an old aunt you feel beholden to—and it was rather like that. I felt I had to reassure her I was here and would remain so. Soon, I kept promising. Soon. Because there was no time for real study. Drawing the relics took days. Then butter had to be made before the cream soured, and soap, and the garden had to be cleaned out before the weather turned completely. And there was always someone else here too. Every day brought men out to look at her. Sydney Dawes and Adam Leach had done their work well, and Junius had been right when he predicted the barn would turn into a curiosity museum. Much of the time, Junius was so busy showing her off that I had to be the one to go out to the whacks to harvest the oysters with Lord Tom. When I complained of it, Junius said, “You show her then, sweetheart. God knows I’d be happy for you to.”
Bone River Page 4
