Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Jean shook her head and said softly, “I can’t understand you. Do you speak English?”

  The child giggled again, and she jabbered in Wasco, or Warm Springs, or Paiute, or a tongue she made up on the spot.

  Jean shook her head and said clearly, “I don’t speak your language.”

  The child laughed as if she had told a joke, and continued to speak rapidly.

  Jean shook her head again, pointed to herself and said, “Jean.” She pointed to the child then.

  “Olahuene,” the girl said, laughing, pointing at Jean. “Olahuene.” Then she pointed to herself and said, “Mary.”

  She became very still then, listening although Jean could hear nothing that had not been there before, and suddenly, as abruptly as she had come, she left.

  In the room was the bed, a small table and a wooden chair with her clothes folded on it, and a chest of drawers. Jean clutched the blanket around her and sat on the side of the bed, dreading her first step. Her feet were pulsing with pain now. Finally she stood up and had to blink away tears. Vaguely she remembered walking barefoot among the sharp rocks and she shuddered.

  There was a knock on the door. Jean hesitated, then said, “Come in.” She pulled the blanket more tightly around herself and sat down on the side of the bed.

  A woman entered this time and firmly pushed the door closed on the sound of giggling behind her. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Serena, Robert’s wife. I’ve come to dress your feet, see if you are ready for breakfast, make you welcome.” She said it in a rush, as if she had been practicing the lines.

  Serena, it turned out, had memorized the phrases. She had said them over and over until she had them down exactly right. It had been five years since there had been an Englishspeaking person around, and here in the village they all used Wasco.

  Weeks later Jean asked Robert, “Why are you still here, your people?”

  They were in his house, Serena, Robert, and his son Wesley. Mary was playing outside. Wesley was twenty-two and did not accept Jean with the ease that his parents did. She often felt his wariness when she approached; he watched her closely, ready to react to any unreasonable action of hers. It was Wesley who answered her question.

  “For the same reason you are. You could be safe and cared for in Newtown, yet you’re here.” There was an aggressive edge to his voice.

  Jean shook her head. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, what are you preparing for? What are you planning? Today I went up the hill with the children and watched Serena and Annie teaching them how to grind out rocks to make mortars. What are you doing?”

  Robert regarded her steadily for a long time before he spoke. “We are neither Indian nor white,” he said then. “We’ve forgotten how to survive in our own world, and now we’re trying to relearn the old ways.”

  “You don’t intend to go to Newtown ever?”

  “Would you recommend them to us?”

  Jean bit her lip and turned away from his steady gaze. “But the water is vanishing faster and faster. The Metolius has been dry for years, and the Deschutes has an intermittent trickle. Your wells are gone, nearly all your springs are dry. You can’t survive without water. No one can.”

  “There’s enough water, if you know where to look, how to look, and how to use it and preserve it. No more wheat, no more irrigation. So we’ll have acorn flour instead. The mortars are heavy, so we make them where we’ll use them to grind the acorns. The oak senses the dropping water table and sends its roots down deeper and deeper. It will survive many years of drought. No more sweet potatoes, no more turnips; we’ll gather the camas root and the sunflower root, the wild carrots and parsnips instead. We’ve changed, the plants haven’t. They’re waiting the eternal wait; one year of no water, they shrink a little, but they’re out there, and below them, deep in the ground, the water runs as always. Our grandfathers would have scorned the fear this drought has brought. For them it was always drought and cold and wind and heat. That’s how life was. Our grandfathers call them the good days, the days of plenty and of no pain. But we have to learn it all over; we’ve forgotten so much.”

  It was the longest speech Jean had ever heard him make. Slowly she nodded, and her skepticism went unvoiced. Futile, she wanted to cry. Even the camas and the sunflower need some water, and it wasn’t there. Where the usual rainfall had been ten inches annually, it was now three or four; where the snow melt had fed the brooks and underground streams that emerged on the distant slopes as sparkling springs, there was no snowfall, no meltwater.

  “It will be easier for us than for our grandfathers,” Robert said gently then, as if aware of her fears. “We have many things to make it easier for us. Guns and bullets to hunt with. Stout boots. Steel fishing hooks and nylon seines. When we have cattle to sell, we can make a call from Bend, load them on trucks, buy what we’ll need with the cash. Many things are better.”

  She nodded, unconvinced. “You said you wanted me to help with something. I’m able to work now. What can I do?”

  “For five years there’s been no teacher here. Some of the children can’t speak English at all, some of them only incorrectly. Many can’t read. And the books are all in English. We need you to teach us English, and in turn to learn Wasco and give us a dictionary that we can keep to help those who forget again. The instructions for how to drill wells, how to build solar heaters, how to order from your catalogues, they’re all in English and it must not be a forgotten language among our children.”

  Later Jean walked away from the houses of the village and sat on a massive ledge of obsidian overlooking the deep gorge of the Metolius River. On both sides of the gorge thick strata of lava were visible and here and there sheer obsidian flows gleamed.

  She heard someone approach, but did not look up, although she felt herself tense and felt her heart pound. At least she was learning to control the visible signs of her apprehension, she thought derisively. At first she had started at every sound, had whirled, ready to flee whenever anyone had come upon her suddenly. Now she merely tensed enough to make ulcers thrive.

  “You think it’s suicide, don’t you?”

  She turned to see Wesley standing over her, scowling. He was dressed in jeans and a white, stained T-shirt, moccasins on his feet. How ridiculous, she found herself thinking, for them to pretend they could go back to the old ways. She didn’t answer his question.

  “I’m supposed to tell you to come to our defense classes. Every morning at nine.”

  “What are they?”

  “Self-defense. Actually I wasn’t supposed to tell you to come, only to tell you it’s available. Robert started them because of you, what happened to you.” Abruptly he sat down beside her. “This would have been the last generation to show even a vestige of the old stone-age memories,” he said. “Not mine. I’m still a bastard mix. But the little kids, my children. And so it would have been completed, the adaptation of the savage into civilized modern homo sap.”

  He raised his eyes to survey the hills to the west, the rising slopes that led higher and higher to the barren summit of Mount Jefferson, where historically there had been mammoth glaciers. “We don’t even know for sure if we’re supposed to be forest Indians, or fishing Indians, or desert Indians. Or some crazy combination of the three. Every day we’re inventing a new tribe, new customs, new racial memories to follow.” He jumped to his feet again, the sullenness returned to his face, his mouth tight. “Pretty goddamn romantic, isn’t it? Classes at nine.” He stalked away and she watched until he was lost to view behind a basalt outcropping.

  Jean shook her head and wished she had answered his question. Suicide, she had decided. Robert was taking them to a certain death rather than face the uncertainties of Newtown.

  To the west the high Cascades loomed over the reservation lands; the lower Mutton Mountains to the north were even less hospitable than the dying slopes of Mount Jefferson. The Mutton Mountains looked grim from where she sat, an irregular skyline, not high enough to catch the few clouds th
at passed, or to avoid the sudden changes of temperature that could make any night midwinter, any afternoon Saharan. To the east stretched hundreds of miles of high desert plateau, tortured land scarred by volcanoes and earthquakes, mocked by the ghostly dry riverbeds, and expanses of lake bottoms that were now alkali plains, where blowing dust stung and burned the skin and eyes viciously. Dry waterfalls, smoothed rocks, flow lines still visible, fossils of marine vegetation and animals still to be found, everywhere reminders of the lush periods of the past when the desert had been wet, and high forests had crowded shorelines. The fertile past derided the traveler who could easily die of thirst while searching for water that once had been there and now was far below the surface of the earth.

  Jean pulled her thoughts back from the high desert country and began to consider the more immediate problem of how to teach the children a language they might never be called upon to use again. She had no doubt that they would vanish out on the desert.

  Slowly she walked back to the village. A highway cut through the center of it; on one side of the road were the agency buildings, on the other a small general store that was closed now, and a gas station that had pumped no gasoline for years. The houses were small frame buildings, with privies behind them, most of the outbuildings newer than the houses. They had been built when the water system failed. There was no longer any electricity, of course. The houses were silver gray, many of them over fifty years old, too small for the families they contained. Farther from the road were several ancient army buildings, discards from a war that no one could remember. Dirt roads led from the village, wound around huge boulders or upthrusts of basalt, disappeared in the sparse junipers and sagebrush, the bitter-grass stands. Some automobiles were parked here and there, but most of them had been put inside sheds or garages, out of the weather to wait for the day of returned civilization. Many yards had hitching posts again, and wooden troughs.

  The Indians were dressed in clothes that could have come from any Sears catalogue for the most part, but here and there she saw handmade moccasins, an occasional pair of buckskins. Dozens of people were tending truck gardens, fields of beans. Buckets of water were being passed hand to hand down the rows. A woman carefully scraped away an inch of soil from the base of each plant, measured out water and poured it slowly on the exposed dirt, then replaced the protective covering. None of it would be lost to evaporation, but the beans looked spindly, as if they longed for a downpour.

  No wheat had been planted for two years. The irrigation system had failed three years before, and hand watering of wheat had been insufficient.

  She turned her back on the pitiful efforts to save the vegetables, and entered the agency building where she would hold classes. The building was the largest on the reservation, but it was small in comparison to any municipal building in any town she had ever seen. There were several offices, stripped of everything—desks, file cabinets, chairs, all the government-issue symbols of bureaucracy; there was a reception room, empty; a library, with books still shelved; and there was a large meeting room where the tribal council meetings took place. Several hundred people could squeeze in here. Sand was piled up along one wall, it crunched under her feet, and several flies droned, hit the windows, droned. . . .

  Every morning she attended the defense classes along with twenty-six Indians, most of them younger than she. There was no class structure as such, and she remembered the books she had read from the agency library, studies done by whites on Indian psychology: they had decided Indian children were very shy because they refused to respond to the usual white programs. But she found that they were not shy at all; they joked and laughed and played freely; they simply did not structure classes or respond to authority the way she had been taught to do from infancy on. For days she stayed in the background, watching, trying to catch phrases of the rapid Wasco language. No one told her to join or participate; no one told anyone what to do. Wesley demonstrated, someone else tried it, then another; someone approached Wesley and together they went through the routine—this one was a simple fending off a blow with the forearm—and presently they were all pairing off and going through the slow motions of attack and defense.

  Gradually Jean realized that no one would ever drag her into the lessons; they would wait patiently until she made a motion to join them. Hesitantly she approached a girl about her own size but obviously still a teen-ager. The girl waited for a sign and Jean assumed the defensive posture, legs bent slightly at the knees, feet apart and braced. The girl smiled and moved in and could have landed a blow to Jean’s neck if she had followed through. Jean felt a hot blush on her cheeks and laughed nervously. The girl smiled and resumed her original position, waiting for Jean to prepare to try again. For a long time Jean felt self-conscious and awkward, patronized even, but gradually she began to think of her body, the body of the girl who could have killed her a dozen times over, and the way their movements resembled dance, the way her own movements were too slow. She began to be aware of how the other girl moved before her final lunge, and watching for the signals, she began to anticipate the next motions, be prepared for them, and move in a way that was anticipatory and not only a reaction.

  She was surprised that day when the class was over, it had gone so quickly. Doris, the girl who had become her partner, smiled broadly at her and waited to walk back to Robert’s house with her. Doris spoke correct but stiff English, as if she had learned the pronunciation very early from good teachers, and had acquired grammar from textbooks.

  That day when her class appeared for the English lesson Jean had a book in her lap, was sitting in the middle of the floor, the chairs all haphazardly pushed against the walls. No more lines of chairs, she thought; no more calling on Mickey or Susan or Mary for a recitation. She had learned more than how to parry a blow to the neck, she realized, and could not entirely quell the feeling of victory.

  Autumn was short that year and the harsh winter set in with a howling windstorm that stripped the tops from trees and denuded exposed fields of inches of soil. The temperature plummeted the first night of the storm to minus five, then continued downward for the next four nights in a row until it reached minus twenty-four Fahrenheit. The junipers cracked and groaned, turned brittle and white; the sagebrush looked like ghosts, and from the forest slopes there came intermittent explosions as trees killed by pine beetles and drought broke in the winds.

  During the winter, an expedition had to be sent to Portland to buy provisions. Robert and Wesley and half a dozen others made the trip and there was gloom throughout the village, throughout the other, smaller villages and isolated ranches and farmhouses. They had counted on being self-supporting before this. They were humiliated, Jean realized, to have even this vestige of dependence.

  One night while the group was gone, she was roused from a light sleep by the sound of voices in the living room. Presently she heard the front door open and close, and silence returned. Someone had come for Serena. There was so much she didn’t know, Jean thought, staring at the dark window. Serena was a medicine woman, a healer, a religious leader of some sort, and everyone trusted her and sought her out for ailments both physical and mental. There was practically no mental illness here and never had been. The incidence of psychological breakdown was so small historically that it was too insignificant to consider in Indian studies. She had read everything in the agency library, all the studies, the summaries, the predictions. And they were all about the Indians as they existed in the minds of those making the studies. They were criticized because they did not make good managers, and the solution was to instill in them a sense of competitiveness, which was lacking. They needed strong leaders with authority to make decisions and enforce them. She smiled, thinking about Robert’s leadership and the power behind it. His power lay in his ability to persuade and convince. She wondered if she would understand them ever, if it would take a lifetime of living among them.

  Serena would come back cold, she thought then, and got up to make the fire, to prepare hot
tea. She slipped on moccasins lined with fur, and wrapped a blanket about her shoulders, and then smiled at the image she formed of herself. Blond Indian squaw, still so much a part of the world she had known all her life that even this midnight vigil of Serena’s seemed to her to be filled with mystery, and inexplicable. Serena had no medical training at all, no schooling past the fifth or sixth grade, and she was as superstitious as any medieval peasant. And Serena was a healer. Jean had seen it work; her own feet, cut deeply, bruised, swollen, injured enough to keep her immobilized for a week or longer, had healed within two days, possibly three, and there were no scars now, no traces of the ordeal. If Serena had tended her back, she thought, it might not be scarred now. She froze in the doorway as a tremor seized her. She had not thought of that for many months, had wiped her mind clean of her entire past as much as she had been able to; she was still deliberately working on completing the wipeout.

  She forced herself to move again, stirred up the ashes of the fire, added a log and some small pieces of wood, and then measured out water to make tea. As it heated she looked in on Mary, who had become her favorite in the village. The child was all but buried under a mound of blankets.

  When Serena returned she did not speak of the injury or illness that had taken her out in the middle of the brutally cold night. She smiled gratefully at Jean as she sipped her tea and edged her feet closer and closer to the stove.

  “You should be sleeping. Did I wake you up?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Often you don’t sleep good. I hear you at night, at the window, walking in your room. I hear you being as quiet as a feather, moving like a shadow, trying to stay still and still moving. That’s not good.”

  Jean sat down close to the stove. “Sometimes I think I must dream and that wakes me up, but I never can remember what I was dreaming.”

  Serena nodded. “Do you remember when Robert found you on the desert?”