Written in Stone (12 page)

I studied the carving from all sides, drinking in the details, searching out the meaning of the maker. A whaler’s prayer, I decided. His hope. His need to feed his family. His legacy for his sons and grandsons.

Did my father carve this stone? Did he leave it for
his family, to say this is who I am, a whaler? I scanned the stone for some mark of the maker, a symbol, a signature style. I saw nothing familiar, but stone is not as easy to work as cedar. Still, some whaler made this. Spent his hours and months in the company of shorebirds and stone to say this to the sky forever.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?” I said aloud. It was odd. Why should this carving be a secret hidden from all who passed by but didn’t know where to look? Every other carving my family made—totem, mask, canoe—was a public work meant to proclaim the strength and prosperity of our name. Why would this stone carving be kept a secret from all but passing birds? I thought about what had brought me there. Why was my first impulse, when Papa’s masks were in danger, to steal them, hide them, and run away? Away to some white town—not Aberdeen, where people might know my family, but Seattle or Victoria or Vancouver. Someplace where my face would be nothing but another immigrant in the dozens that walked off every train and boat.

I imagined that life. Me, alone in the city, working as a washerwoman or living in one of those orphanages where they taught you to be a white person. How to stand and dress and pray, until the bread-loaf brown faded from my skin and the words of my childhood were erased like chalk marks. What a grub they would make
of me, a pale, blind weevil that thinks of filling its belly and nothing more. I raised a fist against that path. Something worse than the Pitch Woman would be waiting for me at the end of that road.

I paced the edge of the whaler’s rock carving. It was the whale I loved first, with his ocean-green copper skin. The arch of his body stretched over the entire seaward side of the stone. I did not like the canoes as much. Something was wrong with them, a mistake. Their prows faced away from the whale. They did not lie side by side as boats in the ocean did to meet the current and wind straight on. They made a downward-pointing V.

Unless.

I walked around to the whale side of the carving. Unless the canoes were an arrow, an arrow that pointed to—the teller.

I felt a rush of warmth in my hands and a drumbeat in my heart. This was the meaning of the openmouthed man. He was the teller, the one who went from family to family and even to other villages to tell the story. It was the teller who made whaling true. What happened at sea was a mystery. Only the ones who went on the hunt knew, but one whaler came home to tell and made every moment of the hunt real to all Makah who listened.

Papa was that teller. I could be the teller now. I could make his life real. I could raise him out of the water with
words. The thought sang through my whole body. Pearl Carver, daughter of whalers, tell this story.

I scampered down the side of the stone, threw open my basket, and pulled out my diary. I flipped past the first three pages—the names of my family—and smoothed open a fresh page.

Words rushed out of my pencil, the name of this place, the time of year, the position of the carved stones. Then I sketched each carving and wrote the names of Bear and Whale.

On the Bear page, I wrote Mama’s song and the steps of her dance. I wrote the story her dance told, the design of her button blanket.

I paused for a moment at the Whale page. A whaler guarded his knowledge, passing it only to grown sons. There were three men left in Grandpa’s family: Uncle Jeremiah, Henry, and Charlie. What if they went away to lumber camps or mining camps or army camps and never came home. I thought of the storyteller on the rock. I must not shut that open mouth. Who but me would do this?

I scooped a more comfortable sitting spot in the sand and leaned against the warm side of the stone. I wrote small and filled the pages edge to edge, barely keeping up with the words that surged from my throat in whispers, songs, and shouts. I put in accent marks for clarity,
and invented letters for Quinault and Makah sounds that didn’t exist in English. I left blank spaces for things I would need to ask Grandma about, facts and names I should double-check. My fingers tingled as I wrote the way they did high in the mountains. When I got stuck for a word, I drew footprints across the top of the page. My children’s footprints, my grandchildren, they were leading me now.

I wrote for hours, until my pencil was an inch shorter and half the pages of my diary were full. I ate my food cold that night and didn’t bother with a fire. The stars and my words on the page were company enough. I put aside all thoughts of mending the boat and decided to spend at least a week walking the beach and looking for more stone carvings to record.

That night, I dreamed of a boat. I was in a long canoe. It was as finely made as a whaling canoe, but it was no boat I had been in before. A tall cream-colored sail swelled with a steady wind and carried me west, the direction from which all good things come. The sail was covered top to bottom with words in my own handwriting.

The next morning, I checked my reserve of food. There were two meals left in my box, three if I stretched them, but I could gather beach food from the tide pools if I got hungry. Sea urchin was not my favorite, but it was easy to find and fix.

I decided to visit the Chitwin carving after eating. I scrambled to the top of the shorter beach rock. The morning was overcast but not foggy, and the lines of the Bear’s face were not quite as spectacular as they had been in full sun the day before. I loved them anyway.

I searched again for a signature mark. Every artist did something. It might be the shape of the eye in a totem pole or a certain color always placed around the lid of a basket. Mama signed her weaving with a yellow-and-black nine-square checkerboard, very small in the right-hand corner. I saw nothing that resembled a maker’s mark, but maybe after I had found more of these stone pictures I would be able to read them better.

Barking sounds from the ocean caught my ear, and I glanced out to the seal rocks. Two larger seals were fighting over a resting spot, or maybe they were fighting over the smaller female who watched them struggle with avid interest. In the middle of their shoving match, the female lifted her head, looked north, and gave a short bark. In the blink of an eye, all three dove and disappeared. By instinct, I did the same, jumping down from my watching place and hiding behind the beach rock to see what came from the north.

It was Uncle Jeremiah’s canoe, the big one with the Raven carving on the prow. It was close enough to shore that I could hear Henry and Uncle Jeremiah’s muffled
voices. Were they looking for me, or were they going to bring Mr. Glen to Grandpa’s house? I could have gone down to the water and called to them. They would have given me a ride. But I hated the idea of being rescued. The thought of explaining my reckless voyage and towing my broken boat home was too much to take. I weighed my pride. There was still time to fix the canoe and make it home before them, time to decide what to do about my father’s regalia. The notion of stealing it and running away seemed a hollow and foolish choice now. Something Ida would do, not me.

I set my diary aside, promising myself it would only be for a day. A half hour of scrounging firewood and another hour of collecting pine pitch had me ready to work. It was a dull and messy business to warm the pitch on the end of a stick and then work it into the crack in the bow of my canoe. I filled the split and reinforced it with pine needles, working both from the inside and outside of the boat. Once the sap cooled and hardened, I tested the bond by pouring water over it, and then by dragging the canoe to the surf and holding the bow down in the water. It wasn’t a tidy-looking repair, but it held.

I decided to skip lunch to get home before dark. Even so, the sun was only one fist up from the horizon and a soft rain was falling when I pulled onto the beach in front of the village. The sand was empty and doors were
closed, but yellow lamplight spilled out of windows, and the smell of wood smoke, biscuits, and elk stew was welcome enough.

I opened the door of Grandpa’s house to find the floor freshly swept and a table set for nine. Grandma was rolling biscuits for a second batch. Ida was hustling food to the table, and Charlie was filling the wood box. Aunt Loula flapped up to me with an apron in one hand and a soup ladle in the other.

“Back already?” she said. “Where are the men?”

“We came in two boats and mine is much lighter. I’m sure they’re only a little ways behind me.” I smiled, followed her to the kitchen, and started ladling soup into a long wooden dish. She believed me. What a relief. I would eventually have to answer for running off, but with a little luck it wouldn’t be tonight.

Ida scampered back and forth between the table and the front door, and about a half hour later, she let out a squeak and began to jump and spin, shouting, “They’re home! They’re home!”

Aunt Loula snatched off her apron and Ida’s, washed her hands, and smoothed her hair. Grandpa wrapped a button blanket around his shoulders, and Grandma looked pointedly at my sweaty blouse and stained skirt.

I ducked into my room and snatched the only clean dress off the pegs on the wall. I could hear Uncle Jeremiah
and Henry and Mr. Glen come in the door. Grandpa met them with formal style and made the introductions, quoting ancestors back five generations. I skidded into place behind Charlie just as Grandpa came to my lineage. He said the names of my mother’s parents and grandparents and the name of their village with as much pride as his own family line.

I looked Mr. Glen in the face and shook his hand the way the schoolmaster taught us to do. I gave him a hard look and was surprised to see how small he seemed in my own house standing next to my uncle and grandfather. His thin body was as curved as a question mark, and I heard nothing of the pompous tone he had taken in a house of just women.

He made a brief thank-you speech after Grandpa finished his welcome, and I heard nothing of the greed that had spooked me back at the post office. Still, I did not trust him. He spoke kindly, even generously, but I looked for a lie in his words.

All through dinner, Mr. Glen plied Grandpa with questions about our reservation. Grandpa kept telling about the ocean and the strength of the fish runs, and Mr. Glen kept asking about the land.

Charlie thought it was hilarious, although he knew enough to hide it while he was at the table. He kept score with peas on his plate of how many land questions Mr.
Glen asked and how many ocean answers Grandpa gave. I didn’t hear the lie I was listening for. Did I hate Mr. Glen for being a white man, the way the lady in town hated me for being an Indian?

When dinner was finished and Grandpa led the guest to his room, Henry leaned toward me and whispered, “How did you manage to paddle past La Push without being seen by a soul? Susi said you would be there, but they didn’t know anything about it.”

I checked to see if he was angry, but he smiled as though he had caught me doing something secretly clever.

“Magic,” I said.

Henry laughed, and Grandma looked at me from across the table as if to say, just because I’m not asking doesn’t mean I don’t know you’ve been up to something.

That night, as I listened to the welcome sigh of Ida sleeping in the bunk above me, I thought about how I would fill the rest of my diary. There must be more of the stone carvings. I would find an excuse to walk the beaches near the village to look for them. There were caves and beaches north of us that no one used. But the cold rains were coming, and I would be shut up at home for days at a time over the winter. I decided to spend that time getting Grandma to tell me things I wanted to learn about the Bear stories and the regalia my mother wore.

In the morning, after breakfast, Mr. Glen dressed in a jacket and cap and waited by the door as if he was expecting the grand tour of local curiosities. Grandpa had other plans. His carving bench was set out with the mask he
was working on that week. Henry sat at the other end of the bench stirring fish oil into his paints to freshen them.

“That man,” tutted Grandma over the dishes. “Where did he learn his manners?”

Grandpa took up his work, plainly annoyed that Mr. Glen was ignoring him. Uncle Jeremiah and Aunt Loula talked quietly at the far end of the room. I figured they were making plans about how to best part Mr. Glen from some of his money. Charlie surfaced from devouring his third helping of oatmeal and grabbed his coat.

“Really, Mr. Glen,” he said. “You don’t have to help me get the firewood. I can manage alone. Come sit by the workbench. It’s warm, and I’m sure Grandpa has valuable stories to tell you.”

It worked. Mr. Glen headed reluctantly to the middle of the room. No wonder Charlie was Grandpa’s favorite.

“May I make you some tea?” I said.

“Tea would be very nice,” Mr. Glen answered. He sat and took a small notebook out of his pocket. It gave me an idea.