Winter Brothers (8 page)

Swan, I hardly need say, was not a man to record himself as whole D or any other degree of it. But that he was tussling with the temptation of the bottle is plain enough in his own diary even so.

Joined the Dashaway Club of Port Townsend
—a group who took a pledge of abstinence and whom one unsympathetic editor dubbed a claque of “high-toned drunkards.”

Cut my lip with a brush hook this evening in Gerrishes store in a scuffle with Maj. Van Bokkelin
—Van Bokkelin was one o£ Swan's closest friends and a pillar of community respect, and a scuffle hardly thinkable of a sober Swan.

Days later,
Made a pledge...not to drink any more liquor for two years from this date
, the ninth of December 1860.

That pact may have been as much with Webster, gatekeeper to future employment at the Makah Reservation, as with himself. Whether or not, most of the next twenty-one months until Webster finally was able to pluck the appointment as Indian agent found Swan odd-jobbing in sobriety at Neah Bay. (And quartering at the Baadah Point trading post with Webster and whoever else happened to be on hand, in what seems to have been a peppery household:
During the evening a'skunk came into the kitchen to eat swill. Mr Webster fired at him with his pistol, cutting some of his hair off with the boil. The skunk made his escape but filled the house with his stench.)
Some months more had to pass before Webster could enroll Swan on the Makah Reservation payroll as teacher, but then, the first of July of 1862, at last Swan having secured position and salary, immediate dig-nification sets in. Three and a half years of jotted doings in pocket notebooks leave off and the first of Swan's ledger diaries, the pages long and officious and the handwriting scrupulously clear and margined, ensues.

What is recorded for the first year and more has nothing to do with education, except that over this course of time Swan's classroom ever so slowly gets carpentered to completion. Instead Swan spent the time lending a hand in the sundry chores of the little Neah Bay work force, especially the labors of the Reservation's farmer, Maggs, earnest bearer of agriculture to damp Cape Flattery.

“Making the earth say beans instead of grass,” Thoreau teased himself about his garden at Walden. At Neah Bay, the official notion was that the brush-tufted coastal soil ought to orate potatoes.

We plow the land twice
, Swan recorded,
harrow it twice, then plow in the potatoes and harrow the whole over again....If what we plant grows as thrifty as the wild raspberry, currant, gooseberry and elder and nettles, cow parsnip and other rubbish grew we shall have a famous crop.
A kind of Hibernian woefulness moans through this idea of remaking such a people of the sea as the Makahs into potato farmers. I think of the “potato Protestants” of Connaught in the Irish famine, forced to barter their religion for the meals of survival. (Credit Swan with grave doubts about persuading the Makahs to trade canoe for plow:
Indians cannot live on potatoes alone, any more than the white man; they require animal food, and prefer the products of the ocean to the farina of the land. It will take many years, and cost the Government large sums of money to induce these savages to abandon their old habits of life and acquire new ones....I think they should be encouraged in their fisheries...
.) The Makahs, however, with an oceanful of seafood at their front doors, were not at the edge of desperation and so managed to make the best of the potato policy. As democratic eaters they blithely demanded their spud allotments whenever a harvest was produced. But as uninspired agriculturalists they conspicuously left most of the plowing and other field labor to Maggs and Swan.

Through 1862 and most of 1863, Swan dabbles as extra muscle in the potato field. Gleans lore from the Makahs. (Captain John is an ever-ready, if problematical, fund of it:
]ohn as a general thing is a great liar, but he is well informed on all historical matters.
...) Does sketchwork. Keeps the diary constant. And otherwise disposes of days until the carpenter hired by Webster at last whams the final nail into his schoolhouse.

Webster himself is absent from Neah Bay much of the time now that he has Swan and the others in place there, so Swan fairly often discovers himself standing in as arbiter among the Indians.
Peter came in this evening and had a long talk with me relative to his conduct since he came back from California. He promised to do better and said he hoped I would be friendly to him. I told him I always had been his best friend and was now,
but his actions had displeased me and in particular the fact that he had not paid a debt he owed in Port Townsend to Sheehan the tinsmith.
...And sometimes the tumbleweed white population as well.
Capt Melvin arrived in the schooner
Elisabeth.
He had been down on a trading voyage and had been trading whiskey among the Nittinat Indians in the vicinity of Barclay Sound...he assured me positively that he had not nor would he sell any liquor near the reserve. He however inadvertently showed me his account book and I saw that he had with his potatoes one barrel 33 gallons whiskey...I advised him to keep away from where I was for so soon as I had proof of his selling whiskey so sure would I complain of him.

This Neah Bay Swan, if you look steadily at him for a moment, is a greatly more interesting and instructive fellow than the Shoalwater oysterer/loiterer first met on this frontier coast. He has shown himself to be a chap who likes to hear a story and to take a drink, not absolutely in that order; reveals a remarkable fast knack for friendships, among whites and Indians both; is as exact a diarist as ever filled a page and as steadily curious as a question mark; contrives not to stay in the slog of any job very long (although we shall have to see about this forthcoming profession in the Cape Flattery schoolhouse); can drily characterize—
I thought that their friendship was of the kind that might induce them, should I give offence, to stick my head on top of a pole for a memento
—or get a bit preachy—
I told Peter I always had been his best friend and was now, but
—long since has unwifed and defamilied himself yet maintains week by week steady correspondence with Matilda, Ellen, and Charles; hardly ever meets a meal he doesn't like or a coastal scene he doesn't hanker to sketch; muses occasionally, observes always.

And is about to offer more instruction yet. Mid-November of 1863, the potato harvest in, the schoolhouse at last roofed and windowed,
I painted the alphabet on the blocks Mr. Phillips made for me and tomorrow I intend to commence teaching.

Neah Bay pedagogy gets off to a stuttery start. The first morning, the seventeenth of November of 1863, a single student showed up; Captain John's ten-year-old nephew, Jimmy Claplanhoo. Swan chose a bit of guile.
This evening I got out the magic lantern and gave Jimmy an exhibition of it as a reward....
Within a few days four more Makah children edged into the schoolroom and were treated to Swan's picture show. By the end of the first week,
Twenty children present today exercised them on the alphabet and then gave them a pan full of boiled potatoes.

Success in the schoolroom, discord in the world. Something here sets Swan unusually to brooding about the Civil War and its politics:
I do not believe in the principles of the Republican party as enunciated by Greely, Sumner, Phillips, Beecher...but I do believe that the country is in real danger and I believe at such times it is the duty of every true man to stand by his Government (no matter what the party) in saving this country and ourselves from ruin.

That out of his system, Swan goes on to record that the Indians' dogs killed two skunks in the lumber pile.

He next has to take three days out to supervise the digging of the schoolhouse cellar, introducing the Makah laborers to the wheelbarrow, which they think a hilarious machine. Then a drain to carry the runoff from the schoolhouse roof needs to be finished. Jimmy Claplanhoo comes down with a cough so severe that Swan worries the ailment may be consumption. The Makahs put on a raucous tamanoas ceremony to boost Jimmy's health, just as a gale rips across Neah Bay. Crows tip over Swan's rain gauge. He sets to work on them with shotgun and strychnine. Makahs from the village of Waatch arrive for Swan to dispense potatoes to. One of the Makah men brings his two-year-old son to school to learn the alphabet and creates uproar by spanking the tot for not mastering it. A number of the Indians embark on a drinking spree which gets rougher as it progresses day by day. There are knife wounds and one combatant smashes three canoes with a stone before other partyers knock him out with a brick.

At risk here was more than a few cedar hulls.
This drunken frolic shows how easily these people can be excited to deeds of violence,
Swan's pen scolds.
We are powerless under the present circumstances either to prevent these drunken scraps or protect ourselves in case of an attack. But I have not the least apprehension of any difficulty if liquor is kept from them.

Now Swan catches cold;
I have not felt so sick for a year certainly.
Jimmy Claplanhoo's health mends and he arrives back at school. The agency's winter larder begins to be questionable:
Sometimes we are very short of provisions and have to depend on our beef barrel, then again the Indians will bring in such quantities of fish and game that there is a surfeit.
The agency cattle start dying. Cold, damp weather holds and holds. On December 16
the most remarkable fall of rain I have ever known
, gurgling to the top of his rain gauges twice,' a total of nearly seven inches. A number of the Indians begin another knockabout drinking party. One participant this time is blasted in the arm with a dragoon pistol and another asks to borrow a shovel from Swan.
He went to where old Flattery Jack, Sixey's father had been buried and dug up one of his arm bones which was taken and bound on as splints to the arm of Sixey. The Indians believing that the bone from the father's arm would cure.

A weakened bull from the staggering agency herd has to be put in the basement of the schoolhouse for shelter. He takes out a window on his way in. Another party of Makahs from Waatch troops in to purchase a bride:
They came in the house and rigged themselves up with masks and feathers and all went to Whattie's house to make their trade.

Five weeks since Jimmy Claplanhoo inaugurated the schoolhouse, Webster at last sails into the bay with some supplies, and an audible sigh lifts from the ledger pages as Swan turns his pen toward the coming of Christmas and the making of a plum pudding.

The strop of this weather on the days, each one brought identically keen, tingling. Rainless hours after rainless hours glimmering past, it has dawned on me how extraordinary is this dry cold time, as if I were living in the Montana Rockies again but without the clouting mountain-hurled wind. There is a bright becalmed feel, a kind of disbelief the winter has about itself. Other years, by now I might have shrugged almost without noticing into our regional cloak of rain and cloud, the season's garment of interesting texture and of patterned pleasant sound as well. “Rain again,” a friend growls. “Right,” I say and smile absently, listening for the
boommm
and
whoommm
of foghorns out in the murk of Puget Sound. But through yesterday morning the temperature hung below freezing for four days and nights in a row, the longest skein of its kind I can remember here at the rim of the Sound. I bury our kitchen vegetable scraps directly into my garden patch each evening as immediate compost and the shovel brings up six-inch clods of frozen soil, like lowest-grade coal.

But what speaks the weather even clearer is today's renewed presence of birds. This morning kindled into warmer sun than we have had and already, Carol minutes gone up the hill to teach her first class of the day, just to be out in the fresh mildness I have walked to the top of the valley. Clouds were lined low across the southern reach of the Olympics while clear weather held the northern end, the Strait country. The view west from me was bannered in five blues: the water of Puget Sound in two shades, azure nearest me, a more delicately inked hue farther out; the foreshore of the Olympic Peninsula in its heavy forested tint; the mountains behind their blue dust of distance; the clear cornflower sky. Such mornings shrug away time. Vessels on the Sound—freighter, tug harnessed to barge, second freighter, the ivory arrow that is the Edmonds-to-Kingston ferry—seemed pinned in place, and I had to watch intently before my eyes could begin to catch the simultaneous motion of them all, inching on the water. Then as I turned home, the flurry. Robins in fluster at the mouth of the valley, abruptly dotting suburban fir trees and frost-stiff lawns. Motion doublequick, headlong. Airful of flying bodies, a vigor in orbit around fixed beauty of Sound and mountains.

Soon after, a jay cry, like rods of some terrible substance being briskly rasped against each other. Then framed in the desk-end window, popping from place to place along the bank beneath the valley slope's evergreens, a tiny brown flying mouse which proved to be a wren.

These past iced days I have tried to picture this valley's birds, up somewhere in innermost branches, fluffed with dismay and wondering why the hell they didn't wing south with their saner cousins. I live in this suburb for its privacy, the way it empties itself during the workday—people evaporated off to office, school, supermarket—and delivers the valley to me and the birds and any backyard cats. I suppose I could get by without the cats, or trade them for other interesting wanderers, maybe coyotes or foxes, but a birdless world, the air permanently fallow, is unthinkable. To be without birds would be to suffer a kind of color blindness, a glaucoma gauzing over one of the planet's special brightnesses. Bushtits must bounce again out there on the thin ends of birch branches like monks riding bell ropes. A fretful nest-building robin—we always have one or two nattering in the trees at either end of the house—must gather and gather dry spears of grass until the beakful bristles out like tomcat whiskers. Towhees, chickadees, flickers, juncoes. (All the creatures of this planet that do not know they have splendid names.) Occasional flashing hummingbirds; seasonal grosbeaks who arrive in the driveway and, masked like society burglars, munch on seeds amid the gravel. Besides Carol and the pulse of words across paper there exist few everyday necessaries in my life, but birds are among them.