Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Jean waited for her to continue, but Serena seemed to be finished. Finally Jean asked, “You mean you can get more if you ask for it?”

  “Sometimes. You should always be suspicious of easy answers to hard questions.”

  “You mean it wasn’t just my shadow?”

  “I don’t know.” Serena shrugged. “No one understands someone else’s dreams.”

  Jean shook her head. “It wasn’t just my shadow. Something else. Like a riddle: What is always behind you and more frightening than shadows?”

  “What is it you refuse to talk about or think about or use when you need it?” Serena began to arrange the meat strips on a shallow pan made of dried woven tule, keeping her attention on what she was doing.

  “I don’t know,” Jean said, but she knew Serena would tell her nothing more. “It’s the past, isn’t it? That’s what my dream was about.” Serena now looked at her, waiting. “The past is like a shadow, always with you, ready to stretch out as far as you want, able to vanish altogether. . . . You can’t step into it, but you can look at all of it. You can examine it closely without becoming part of it. . . .”

  She was roused from her thoughts when Serena started to chop meat again, the knife blade falling rhythmically on the wide plank cutting board. Jean had been thinking of her father, her mother, their lives together, how his death had shattered the universe for her. She had thought of Walter, how little he had meant after all, how like her father she had thought him at first. And those men in Newtown . . . She felt drained and limp, and yet no more than a minute or two had passed surely.

  “Drink your tea, my child,” Serena said, her voice soft and comforting. “You’ve been far away, thought about many things that you have turned away from for a long time.”

  Outside it was dark, and the wind was screaming against the wooden house, causing it to shudder. Jean saw the cup of tea on the table before her and lifted it, sipped the steaming brew. She was weeping! She felt her cheek in wonder, then looked at Serena, who was regarding her calmly. “How long have I been sitting here?”

  “An hour, a little more. You had many things to think about, and you went to your thinking place, where no one could disturb you.” She smiled. “Now you can chop for a while and I’ll make supper. I can hear Mary’s stomach growling like a bear.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  THERE were fewer than five hundred Indians remaining on the reservation now. A third group was preparing to depart, this time for the high prairies in the Ochoco Mountains, to drive the herd of cattle before them to the grazing grounds, where permanent alfalfa and bunch grass were thin and brittle but abundant enough for the long summer.

  Jean watched the clouds of dust raised by the horses and cattle, hiding the Indians completely, and thought now the final dispersal time had come. They would separate into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own purpose, its own mission, and given enough time they would become separate tribes again, meeting to trade, meeting to celebrate marriages and mourn losses.

  Robert’s family and others would leave to follow the dry watercourses in search of berries and nuts, to hunt in the higher elevations where the stream beds finally led them. And when winter came again, they would return to the village, where they had warm houses. And so it would go; the pattern laid down by their ancestors would reassert itself and they would wander, follow the food, follow the water.

  “Can I go with you?” she asked suddenly, speaking to Robert and Serena, who were also watching the clouds of dust. She asked with no hope, and they all seemed to know that. No one answered.

  Wesley rode up on a brown and white short-legged horse, a quarter horse bred for endurance and intelligence, not for the graceful beauty of the thoroughbred race horses. He used no saddle; few of them burdened their horses with the extra weight of saddles.

  He was happy, Jean thought, standing apart from the family, watching them all. The sullen look had vanished from his lean face, and now he was excited and happy, doing what he wanted to do, not what civilization had demanded of him. He would make a leader as wise and strong as his father one day. The good-byes were over with quickly; a clasping of hands, a quick wave, and he was gone.

  A few people would remain on the reservation, elderly people, a few women and children, a handful of men. And the long timeless future would begin for the whole tribe, a future concerned with food and warmth and survival.

  “I’m strong, and I can hunt or gather food as well as anyone else,” Jean said later, inside the house. “What else do I have to do? Go back to a Newtown?”

  Robert shook his head. “Don’t be silly. You won’t go back there. Our destiny was decided long ago, little sister, and for a while we were detoured on a path that wasn’t meant for us. Now we’re following our own future again. But our future isn’t yours. You’ve dreamed of your own future, and you know it isn’t out there on the desert, not for many years anyway. One day you’ll come home, and the desert will embrace you and comfort you. But not for many, many years.” He paused, then said somberly, “Unless the war starts. If that happens, come home to us as fast as you can. Promise.” She nodded. They had spoken of it before. He believed it was inevitable. “Why did you want me to stay here? You don’t Want a dictionary, or anything translated.”

  “We knew a lot of our people would have to go to the Newtown, and they were afraid. They knew they’d be treated as foreigners, outsiders, made to suffer because they had forgotten the right words. Some of the children had never even spoken English. You taught them well. You gave them the confidence they need. And you’re wrong. We do want the dictionary. Not a white man’s dictionary, but our own. Doris will help you with it.”

  “You could have taught them English. You speak it better than most people I know.”

  He laughed. “My tongue rolls easily over our own words—la xwaixt wanai tat, citai lat, siksi kwi. They sound like water falling over warm stones, singing in the moonlight, laughing in the breeze. Your words are hard and have no music, bring no pictures—scrip, regulations, cafeteria. They are noises, not sounds of what they are. They’re like the nonsense words of small children playing their games, making up words to use and be discarded when the game ends.”

  Authority, she thought. He was speaking of her authority with the language. She was the cutting edge of a whole different reality that some of them had to enter to survive.

  “May I stay until you have to go?”

  “You may stay until you have to go,” Robert said.

  “And I’ll write a book about you, about your decision; how you prepared for it. The world should know.”

  Robert and Serena smiled their pleasure and the matter dropped there, but Jean knew that now she had to decide. Now she had to step back into her own world, and there was no place for her to get a foot in again. Very early Serena had said that one day, when Jean was well, she would go back to her world, meet someone, start a new life. Jean had not been able to stop the long shudder that passed through her. Not that, she thought very clearly, but something. There had to be something for her.

  She wandered through the village later, feeling its emptiness, aware of the vacant houses, aware of the silence pressing in from the mountains, from the desert. The sagebrush rustled in a slight wind, and the junipers moaned; a stone clattered as a small creature dislodged it, scurrying from one safe hiding place to another in the perpetual search for food.

  She had dreamed of being in a strange place where the wind cut into her face harshly, and although she turned again and again trying to avoid it, it was always in her face. She had found a small cave and crept inside to hide from the sharp wind. Inside was only silence and darkness, nothingness. She had become ashamed of herself, frightened by the nothingness, and finally had left it again, only to find the same wind, the same pressure, the same unyielding resistance to every movement she might make. Finally she had started to walk, keeping her head bowed, her eyes squinting, and as she moved into the wind, advancing had bec
ome easier. Slowly she had raised her head, and she was able to see around her. She walked faster, and discovered that the faster she walked, the less the wind cut and stung, the less frightened she was. And curiously, the faster she walked, the more time she had to look around and examine the strange, alien landscape, until paradoxically, running into the wind, there was no resistance at all, and she had all the time she needed to see and experience everything about her. She had wakened with no memory of the strange landscape and what it contained, but it no longer frightened her, and, in fact, she felt an eagerness to return to it.

  Serena had talked with her about the dream, and, as usual, had made no suggestions about its meaning, but had forced Jean to decipher it to her own satisfaction. It was the future, she had decided. She had dreamed of her own refusal to face the future, her fear of it, and in the dream she had overcome that fear.

  But the dream was not the reality, she thought now, leaving the quiet village to stand over the Metolius River gorge, a chasm hundreds of feet deep carved through the volcanic rocks. Obsidian, basalt, pumice, tuff—she knew all the names; in her mind the land moved and shifted, the river cut deeply, the volcanoes flared and erupted masses of glowing magma. It was on a scale that made her remaining years seem pitifully inadequate; the insignificance of her own life and the tremendous importance she attached to it suddenly seemed a joke, the sort of joke that coyote would tell. She laughed aloud.

  Jean and Doris stood on the bluff overlooking the Deschutes River bed and watched until the band of thirty-two Indians moved out of sight around a curve. Doris stood very close to Jean, and when the last of the ponies vanished, she reached out for Jean’s hand and clasped it tightly. Jean remembered her first days in the village and returned the pressure.

  “Okay,” she said then, more cheerfully than she felt. “Let’s see what shape the house is in.”

  She led the way into her grandfather’s house, which was exactly as she had left it. Doris remained close to her, looking, saying nothing. For the rest of the summer, until late in fall, the two women would be alone in the house, working on the dictionary together. Robert and his group would pass by again before winter, he had said, and Jean had decided that would be time enough for the rough draft of the dictionary. She had debated staying in the village to do the work, and it would have been better for Doris that way, but here there was plenty of paper, typewriters, pencils, a place to work uninterrupted. The village had too many ghosts now, too few people; it was disturbing. And she had to make that first step back into her own world, she had added silently.

  “We’ll use the dining room table for a desk,” she said, trying to keep her voice cheerful, although Doris’s gloom was chilling. “We’ll organize everything tomorrow and see how it goes here.”

  They went into the kitchen, the basement, upstairs, Jean talking, Doris silent, watchful. They were upstairs in Jean’s room when they heard the sound of a motor. They hurried down to the kitchen door. A jeep had pulled up to the house.

  Doris hung back out of sight while Jean watched two national guardsmen approach.

  “Hey, you’re back!” the younger one said.

  Jean was surprised by the sudden leap of her heart when she saw them. These two were not the ones she had met before, a year ago, but they were white; they would know what was happening in that other world she had thought of so seldom this year. The younger man was hardly more than a boy, red-haired, freckled, sunburned. The other one was older and stouter, his face scored by smile lines; he was grinning broadly at her.

  “Come in,” Jean said. “Tell me everything.” They all laughed at that, but behind her Doris clutched her shoulder. Jean said, in Wasco, “It’s, all right. Don’t be afraid of them. If they try anything, remember, we can break their arms.” Doris smiled nervously and moved away from the door as the two men entered.

  “You brought a friend. Good. Too damn quiet out here to be alone. Sometimes even if you’ve got someone with you it’s like being alone,” the older man said, indicating the red-haired man. “Steve Miller, and this is Pat MacIlvy.”

  “Jean Brighton and Doris Walk-Away. Would you like tea?”

  “No, thanks, ma’am. Where’s the tribe going anyway? We been seeing them split up heading this way and that all spring and summer.”

  “To the mountains to hunt, out to the desert to graze the herd, I don’t know. Why?”

  “Curious. Our way was to bring the goodies to us, you know—put in pipes to bring in water; put in electricity, haul the water up out of the ground with pumps; fence in the rangeland and plant alfalfa. We stayed put and changed everything around us. Their notion is to move to where the stuff is and change nothing. Two different worlds, you might say. Curious.”

  “What’s been happening in the world?” Jean asked again.

  “Too much to tell in less than a couple of months,” Steve said. “Tell you what. We’ll leave you ladies in peace now, finish our rounds and go back to the station and collect a stack of papers and magazines, bring ’em back later on. Okay?”

  They brought more than just papers and magazines. They brought coffee, and oil for the lamps, sugar, and several cans of peaches and cherries, a ten-pound bag of flour, and a large bag full of ordinary supermarket staples—crackers, pickles, cans of vegetables, peanut butter—food that Jean had not seen in over a year. She felt her eyes burn as she looked at it spread out on the table.

  Steve cleared his throat and glanced at Pat, who blushed furiously and studied the floor. “Coming up,” Steve said then, “the notion came to us that you might get the wrong idea about this stuff. We don’t mean nothing bad. I mean, it’s not an offer to trade, nothing like that. . . .” He glowered at Pat, who refused to acknowledge the look.

  “I know what you mean,” Jean said, and heard the huskiness in her own voice. “Thank you. Perhaps you and Pat will come to dinner tomorrow night?”

  Both men beamed, and even Doris smiled slightly as the awkward moment passed. While she and Jean moved about the kitchen putting the groceries away, Steve finally began to fill them in on what was happening in the world.

  The drought was spreading to places that had never known drought before—Ireland, Scotland, Japan. And at the same time other places were getting more than usual rainfall. It was a global weather change that no one could deny any longer. Parts of China were turning into jungles almost and China and Russia were having more serious border clashes than ever before. Russia was as water-hungry as the United States. Just a matter of time, Steve said often, with some satisfaction. And when war came the United States would be allies with China and rub Russia off the face of the earth. He said it as if it was a matter no longer being debated, but accepted all the way up through the government. Jean shivered at his words, but did not interrupt.

  She made coffee and they sat around the table sipping it, the first coffee she had had in over a year, and the talk continued, but now it was about Portland, about San Francisco, places closer to home.

  “They want to dam the Columbia to irrigate the Willamette valley,” Steve said. “Damn fools. They’ll flood Portland in the middle of the worst drought in history. Serve ’em right if they do.”

  And San Francisco was closing down the last remaining industries. It had held out longer than most Western cities, having been the first to realize the need for desalinization plants and built them early, but now the cost was too high. Agriculture needed the water more than the nation needed hardware and materials that could be produced someplace else.

  After the guardsmen had left, Jean asked Doris, “You’re not still afraid of them, are you?”

  Doris shook her head. “But only because you weren’t afraid.”

  She had not been frightened at all, she thought then, in wonder. She had been afraid of men all her life, or nearly all of it, and the fear was gone now. She felt a great relief at the thought.

  Doris giggled then. “Poor Pat,” she said. “Such moon eyes when he looks at you.”

  “The w
ay Wesley looks at you,” Jean countered, and Doris blushed. They were to be married in the fall.

  The next day they started work on the dictionary. Doris went through an abridged English dictionary and wrote out Wasco translations in longhand; Jean typed them. She kept each word entry well separated from the ones above and below because she intended to cut them into strips and paste them up in alphabetical order later. After the first week they knew this would be too slow, and together they went through the dictionary marking the most important words, leaving the rest for a new edition one day.

  Life settled into a routine very quickly. Work, long walks, sometimes horseback rides into the mountains, or out on the desert, chatting with the guardsmen, having them to dinner, or joining them at the station to eat their food. Jean was working on the short history of the Warm Springs Indians’ preparations to resume the lifestyle of their ancestors, and this was more interesting to her than working on the dictionary.

  They spent hours going through Jean’s possessions, picking out gifts for everyone. A locket for Mary. Doris insisted that Jean put her own picture in it, and she searched her grandmother’s scrapbooks for one, finally found her high school graduation pictures, including a group in which her own face was small enough to fit. For Robert she chose her grandfather’s Oregon collection of books. For Serena . . . she could not choose. Nothing seemed appropriate, nothing good enough. Finally Doris suggested the crystal goblets in the china cabinet. “She would treasure them forever,” she said, and Jean knew she was right. They would never be used, but they would be prized. She looked at Doris then. “You pick what you want from my closet; take it all.”