Written in Stone (5 page)

I was about to apologize when Aunt Loula said, “A woman with baskets can stay home with her family, not go off to some cannery job miles away.”

I knew it was true, but I fought it. I wanted to be a weaver, as my mother had been. She had a commission from a chief up north. He was going to pay her a hundred trade blankets and seventy-five dollars in gold coin. It would take her a year to follow the pattern on the board this chief sent, but when she was finished, her Chilkat blanket would hold a place of honor in that chief’s house for generations. That was what I wanted, something that
would last. And Aunt Loula was right. I was a pathetic basket maker. Mine always came out flat as a plate and wobbly around the edges.

“Keep working,” Grandma had said when I was younger. “It takes practice.”

But I think she was relieved when I gave it up and learned to spin from my mother instead. It was the first step to becoming a weaver. It took forever to get the feel of stretching the wool out and rolling it up my thigh into an even twist of yarn. But Mama never minded my mistakes and never rushed me to be perfect. She laughed at my lumpy tangles and said, “Put some more meat on that leg and the spinning will go easier. Get outside and run. I won’t have that Charlie running faster than my girl.”

And then I would forget the weaving altogether and attack Charlie with a broken fish club. Pirates and Indians was our favorite game. If I had known that I’d lose Mama that same year, I would never have played outside, not ever. I would have sat beside her and watched her hands. Weaving was a rare gift—a legacy. It should have been mine, and I wanted it.

I fumed over Aunt Loula’s words all the way up the river. I didn’t rest. Not when the blisters rose, as we reached the mouth of the lake and paddled along the southern shore past the gravel bar at Willaby Creek. Not when they broke and oozed, as we paddled by the green
sloping lawn and powder-blue rowboats at the Lake Quinault Lodge. There was something satisfying in the sharpness of the pain.

I watched the tourists lounging in chairs and playing croquet at the lodge. They never seemed to worry. They spent the whole day not working, unless you count rowing a lady with a parasol around in circles work. And then they went in that fancy dining hall for dinner without a care for how they would pay.

“What do you suppose they do, to eat without working?” I asked.

“Rob banks,” Henry said. “Or maybe hold up trains. I am especially suspicious of those two.” He pointed to a magnificently overweight gray-haired woman and her companion with a cane and thick spectacles.

Even Aunt Loula laughed.

“Look,” I said, pointing to three boys in sailor suits digging in the sand. “Prospectors. No doubt they’ve struck oil or made their fortunes in gold already.”

As we passed by, the boys stood up and pointed at our canoes. They pantomimed shooting us with arrows and made war whoops. In the canoe in front of us, Charlie pretended to shoot back, and Ida waved as if she were the belle of the Independence Day parade.

Last year, when we came to the camp on the meadow at the east end of the lake, Grandma’s nephews teased
Papa and Uncle Jeremiah about the foolishness of chasing after whales in the ocean.

“If you wait long enough, one will wash up on your beach,” they said. “No mess, no danger, just a free gift.”

But when Papa told the story of how it was to touch a living whale out on the open sea, nobody laughed, and he held a place of honor at the summer feasting.

This summer was quiet. When our canoes pulled in, the Quinault relatives glanced up from their work and said
“Oo-nu-gwee-tu”
and nothing more. Everyone knew we had lost our whale. Everyone knew we were not alone in our troubles. None of the whaling families of Vancouver Island had seen a single whale on any of the usual ocean paths. There had been no feast messenger and no gathering of families to sing the praises of the whalers and share in the meat and oil. I missed visiting with my friends from Nitinat and Alert Bay, and I wondered if they felt the same spooky feeling of looking over the ocean and not seeing the spouts of whales.

Were the whales punishing us for not keeping the old ways? Would we suffer because other nations chose to hunt with disrespect? If it was true, there was no way for an Indian to live at all—put in prison by white men for keeping the old ways, and abandoned by whales for losing them.

I stepped onto the grass at the meadow, my arms
shaking from the paddling and my legs stiff from hours in the canoe. Aunt Loula took one look at my blistered hands and growled.

“Foolish girl,” she hissed at me. “You ruin your hands when we have all this work to be done.”

“I’ll work,” I said, holding my voice steady so I sounded more grown up than her. “I’ll go up to the mountains and gather goat wool for my weaving.”

I could see she was dying to tell me weaving was not real work, not useful work. “Fine,” she said. “If Susi will take you.”

I walked off with my head low so she would think she had won, but inside I was dancing. Aunt Susi, my favorite person!

That night, there was dancing under the summer constellations. The meadow grasses were tamped flat in a circle around the fire. The drummers and singers gathered. Robes of power were unpacked from cedar chests and suitcases. Uncle Jeremiah took his rifle for signaling and went out in the dark to watch the road. Ida and her little friends taught the grandmothers to sing the happy birthday song and giggled at their mistakes. It was Grandpa’s turn to pretend to have a birthday. Charlie put a tall candle in a loaf of store bread.

“Listen, Grandpa,” he said. “After everyone sings, you close your eyes and make a wish.”

Grandpa listened carefully. “And do I sing? Tell a story?”

“No, all you have to do is blow out the candle.”

“No dance? No magic? These people do not know how to make a proper feast.”

“I’ve noticed,” Charlie said. “They seem to prefer their celebrations very plain. But if we pretend it’s a birthday party, we can even give gifts. The sheriff in these parts leaves Indians alone, so long as we are having a white person’s party.”

Other summers Aunt Loula brought carved and painted canoe paddles for me and Ida. We always did the paddle dance together to represent the Makah side of the family. But not this year. We would wait a whole year after my father died before we danced again.

But my Quinault kin brought out their best regalia and lined up to dance. Papa had promised me a new robe of power this year. He would have bought me wool and pearl buttons on our trip to town before we came to the lake. I would have worked on it all summer, with my aunts and girl cousins pitching in. It would have been a thing to gossip over and admire. When many women worked on a robe, each one put some of her strength in it. That strength would have been mine to wrap myself in,
and mine to show at winter ceremonies. I had last year’s coat from the store. It kept my skin dry, but it left my heart cold.

Aunt Susi came up behind me and gave my arm a squeeze. “I want you to wear this tonight for me,” she said.

She unfolded her own button blanket. It was thick and heavy and reached to my feet. When Susi draped it over my shoulders, the firelight made the pearl buttons sparkle. It felt like putting on the stars.

The songs began and the younger girls had the first dance. My littlest Quinault cousin, Esther, was going to dance for the first time. Every eye was on her, but she was looking at me. As usual, I counted down the last six beats, signaling with my hand so Esther would start on the right beat. She was a good little dancer as soon as she forgot the watching eyes and remembered her feet. She swirled into the circle of firelight, and all her sisters and cousins followed her around the fire, each one three beats behind the dancer in front of her. I had known this dance by heart since I was five years old.

If my baby sister had lived, she would have danced it too. We would have practiced it over and over until every turn of the paddle and every swoosh of our robes matched perfectly. I remembered my father dancing the Raven stories in his carved cedar mask and feather-covered cape.
He would soar and dive and bank. People sat perfectly still to watch him, almost believing he could fly. No one else danced the entire cycle of Raven stories, from Raven Releases the Sun to Raven Scatters the Salmon Eggs. I imagined my sons learning those dances. Henry would have to teach them, or Charlie. They were not a woman’s dances, but they would come to me to be sure every step was perfect. I was the one who would remember.

Next morning, Aunt Susi led the way to the mountain meadows where trees grew waist-tall and mountain goats grazed. We walked together up an old hunting trail with two empty baskets and a long cotton sack. Susi was the oldest unmarried person I knew. The grandmothers shook their heads and clucked about how old she was. Twenty-five, at least, they said, as if she would turn gray any moment. But the young men watched her every step and swore she was in the bloom of nineteen years.

I knew for a fact Susi would be twenty-three on the fifth of the next month. I knew every birth and marriage in the family. I could recite all of Grandma’s stories. I knew every dance and song my family owned, even the
ones girls were not allowed to do. People counted on my memory.

Susi was the only auntie who could outrun me. I had to step lively to keep up with her, but she rested every time we crossed water so we could drink and I could bathe my blistered hands. She sat cross-legged on a rock in the kind of denim dungarees loggers wore. I just looked at her and laughed, a woman in pants. The uproar at the camp when she drove in that morning was worth a nickel to see.

“What’s gotten into that Susi!” the aunts whispered to each other.

“Is that girl looking for a wife or a husband?” Uncle Royal boomed out.

Susi laughed. If she had a husband, they’d tease him for keeping an uppity woman. If she lived with family like a normal girl, her parents would get an earful on the subject of proper decorum. But Susi lived alone in the one-room apartment over the post office. She did all her own earning. It made the grown-ups crazy. I pictured myself wearing work pants to the schoolhouse up in Neah Bay. My teacher’s skinny head would pop right off his body from the shock of it.

“Do you ever get lonely?” I asked. “Working at the post office by yourself?”

I’d wanted to ask this for a long time. Susi’s man died in France in the war.

“Sometimes,” Susi said. “If I think about it. If I try to hold on to what’s not there.”

There wasn’t much in Kalaloch, the beach town where Susi lived, a few cottages for fishermen and their families, a bunkhouse for loggers, a sugar and flour store, and one farmer trying to keep pigs and chickens alive. I’d go crazy in such a little town with no one to talk to.

We got up and moved on, singing now because we were in bear territory. They would let us pass unharmed if we sang. I sang my father’s whale chant and the ballad my mother sang to herself at the loom. Susi did ragtime tunes from the radio.

It was already past noon when we reached the alpine meadow. Pale green grass poked out of the rocky soil. Tall foxgloves shaded the gentians that hugged the ground. Gigantic boulders dotted the grass as if a giant had thrown them out like beaver-tooth dice. My hands tingled from the altitude, and I leaned over, resting hands on knees to catch my breath. The meadow was empty of animals, but it took only a few minutes to find a mound of wet black beads—goat scat.

“Fresh,” Susi said, pointing to flies that buzzed and hovered. We followed the two-pronged track that meandered
over the grass and turned behind a boulder. There, out of the wind, was a goat bed, scattered with clumps and strings of dirty white wool. I bent to scoop up handfuls, and Susi picked bits of fleece off a stunted pine tree.

“Aren’t you afraid to live by yourself?” I asked, rolling smaller bits of fleece together in a ball. Wool oil glistened on my palms. I rubbed it into the hard ridges of skin where my blisters broke the day before.

Susi shrugged and smiled. She had dimples like me. “What should I be afraid of?” she asked.

“Dark,” I said. Everyone I knew was afraid of the dark.

“Yeah,” she said, still smiling. “So I light a lamp. Not keeping anyone awake but me.”

We moved down the meadow, gathering from shrubs.

“What about … strangers?” I said, not wanting to mention the Timber Giant or the Pitch Woman by name.

Susi laughed. “Yeah, I worry about them too. Got myself a big lock very first thing.”

We stopped at the edge of the meadow and gazed at Lake Quinault a thousand feet below. It shimmered like an abalone shell against the deep green and silver-gray waves of rain forest. The sight of it pressed at my heart. I had to find a way to stay here, to live here. Canneries and factories were far away. Susi set down her basket and watched me watching our grandmothers’ land.

She said, “There are worse things a woman can be than afraid.”

I used to love to climb to the top of the headland and look out over the ocean, but after the whale hunt, I couldn’t look at the ocean. I wanted to, but I was afraid if I started to look, I’d never look away. I’d turn to stone, forever looking. It sounded like a thing that would happen in one of Grandma’s stories.