Written in Stone (7 page)

Grandpa examined my writing. He took heavy paper from the box. He folded an envelope and sealed the letter inside with flour paste. Henry frowned, and Charlie looked worried, but they would not cross Grandpa’s
word. They drifted back to their own work and I was alone with him.

“What does that museum man really want, Grandpa?” I asked. “Washington is a long way to come.”

“This Arthur Glen is looking to take from us,” Grandpa said. “He’ll call it buying or collecting or research. He will have heard from other museum men the reputation of the mask makers in our family, the Bear mask with the full skin, the Whale that turns into a man. He will want those.”

“But what for?” I pressed, thinking of my father’s chest of masks.

“For power, Pearl. Why else would a nation keep a treasure house? Think how it is when a man holds a potlatch. All his wealth arrayed, and he gives it away. His friends think, this powerful man is my ally. I will do anything for him. His enemies think, this is only what he shows, what he can afford to give away. What powers does he have that I don’t see? Do you understand how it is, Pearl?” Grandpa leaned toward me now with his hands on my shoulders.

“Your friends are stronger, your rivals weaker, and not a drop of blood is shed. It’s a weak nation that chooses killing.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, why should we give him or even sell him what gives us power? But
I noticed Grandpa’s arm was thinner than it used to be under his green-and-blue calico work shirt, and there were streaks of gray in his short black hair that were not there a summer ago.

I slipped my hand into Grandpa’s and gave it a quick squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ll make your guest welcome, the way my mama would have.”

As I walked up to the summer lodge, I stroked Mama’s abalone shell in my pocket. Would she have made a collector welcome? I wondered.

Susi was there unrolling a blanket on the table. There was a green cotton dress inside. Susi gave it a shake.

“I haven’t worn this in years,” she said. “Your mother picked out the fabric for me. She would want you to have it.”

I took the dress, relieved that Susi had found a way to make it look as if I was obeying my mother and not as if I was taking charity.

“What did Uncle Jeremiah want with a newspaper?” I asked once the dress was folded and set aside. Susi glanced around the room for listeners. Ida had taken the maddening habit of following me everywhere that summer. I heard her screaming and splashing in the lake with Charlie. Susi turned to me looking grim.

“He hasn’t said, but I know that the Friday paper has advertisements for lumberjacks and mill hands, some
local work and lots of ads for Alaska and Montana. Loula will be looking at the canneries.”

“Do girls work in canneries?” I interrupted. “I mean, girls my age.”

Susi put a hand on my shoulder. “Look at you, you’re as tall as a grown woman. Taller than some. They would never ask your age.”

“What about Charlie?” I asked. “Charlie’s too little for lumberjacking.”

“I’ve heard the mining companies are looking for boys his age.”

We could hear Charlie laughing and splashing Ida. Susi was about to cry.

“It’s not settled, is it?” I asked, to comfort me as much as her. “We’ve worked hard all summer and there is leather, buttons, baskets.” I paused. All that work, there must be more than that to sell, but most of our efforts had gone into smoking and drying food for the winter.

“What we need,” Susi said, dabbing her eyes at the corner, “is something white people need, like whale oil for their machines. Or something they think they need, like jazz or rouge.”

She walked to where the newspaper sat on the table. The front page showed a fancy man and lady aboard a steamship. Susi flipped a few pages in, where another
picture showed a couple eating at a San Francisco restaurant. Susi tapped the page.

“Oysters,” she said firmly. “Oysters Rockefeller and Manhattan clam chowder. It’s all the rage in San Francisco. The showy types buy it at five dollars a plate.”

I calculated prices in my head. Aunt Loula and Grandma and I always took a couple dozen pounds of shellfish in the fall, but if the men worked too, we’d have a hundred pounds—easy.

“Fresh is the thing,” I pointed out. “Unless we’re going to smoke them, we want to sell the day after we catch.”

Susi turned to the shipping schedule on the back page. “A steamer leaves from Aberdeen next week. If we could get the clams there alive, they’d put them on ice.”

I thought over the times I’d dug clams. Usually, we only took as many as we could smoke the next day, but once we gathered extra and kept them fresh in a box full of seawater. I looked out the door at the lake. The uncles were putting the finishing touches on their canoe. It was a beauty, a ten-seater with plenty of room for cargo.

“Susi, do you think we could put my little fish canoe inside that one and still have room to paddle? We could keep two hundred pounds of oysters and clams fresh in a canoe full of water.”

“Do you think the men will agree to dig clams?” Susi asked. “What would your dad say?”

I tapped over the outside of my dress pocket looking for something—my father’s sharpening stone, a gold button from his Russian Navy coat, the baby spoon he carved for me. Nothing was there. I couldn’t think of what he would say to me. I knew what Uncle Jeremiah would say, though. He was Grandpa’s twin in keeping the old ways. This was not going to be easy.

I paced a few laps around the floor and swallowed back the lump in my throat. “If my father was alive,” I said, “we would have our whale and not be in this trouble. It’s my choice now, and I choose not to be poor. I choose to stay here, to live on my land.”

It wasn’t easy to tell them my plan for gathering shellfish, not even with Susi beside me holding the facts: $3 a pound, Steamship
Liberty
, Slip 29, Aberdeen. Ida stared at me openmouthed, as if I had claimed whales could fly. Charlie matched his frown to Grandpa’s, shaking his head and puffing out his belly.

But Henry walked to my side, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “I’ll help.”

His father laid into him first. “Never been done! You’re old enough to take a wife, son. What will she think if you do her work?”

“She’ll think I’m not a whaler anymore. These are new times; I’ll take any work that helps my family.”

His words bit like frost. It was plain they had argued
this matter before. Had I kicked the pebble that started a landslide?

Henry and Uncle Jeremiah stepped closer with their heads up and fists tight, the way men do before boxing. Grandpa stepped between them with a hand on each chest. I saw him gathering up words to pass judgment.

Grandma beat him to it. “I’ll need your help with the bargaining, Simon,” she said. “You know how a white man hates to talk money with a woman, especially an Indian woman. We’ll get a better price if you make the deal.”

Grandpa paused to collect a new set of arguments.

Aunt Loula took the hint and added a helping of sugar to her voice. “It’s a long way to paddle, Aberdeen.”

Uncle Jeremiah turned his scowl from his son to his wife. “You’ll not go without a proven navigator along.” He announced it as though the trip had been his idea from the start. “Our canoe is finished. It should have a first voyage.”

“We’ll wait two days for a better tide,” Grandpa added with a note of finality. “And I hear from old McCreedy who hears from the Tulalip who trade with the Skokomish in Puget Sound that someone sank a boat over the Hood Canal oyster beds. Oil and dead fish everywhere. Nobody’s shipping oysters out of the sound this year. We’ll get better than three dollars a pound.”

He gave a satisfied huff and surveyed his family.
“Show me a man with a boatload of ice, and I’ll show you a man in a hurry to make a sale.”

Ida’s mouth was open so wide a squirrel could have crawled in and made a nest.

Charlie gave a short laugh of relief and said, “I’ll dig clams and stay in school this winter. Anything’s better than going down in a mine.”

So the clam digging was settled. Susi gave my hand a squeeze. Grandma kissed my cheek, and then gave me a long look as if she were seeing me for the first time.

When the tide was right, we took our canoes down the Quinault River and out to the ocean. We followed the coast south to the beach just past Taholah and made camp.

At dawn, the clam beach was cold, flat, and yards wider than usual with the minus tide. There were star prints in the sand from gulls and pelicans and the little hands of a raccoon along the edge of a shallow creek that emptied into the ocean. I walked slowly. The wet sand reflected the sky, and clouds rushed dizzy under my feet. I searched for bubbles that stood up enough to break the reflection. When I saw one, I dug as fast as I could with the stick to get the clam before it burrowed out of reach. It was tricky to get one. Whenever I was able to flip one out of its hole, I was tempted to shout with satisfaction like Ida did.

My family was spread out over two or three acres, walking, digging, and carrying clams to boxes full of seawater. Three boxes were filled by midmorning. My hands were rough from sand and stiff from cold, but it was worth it. I loved all of us working together. In the rain. Here. On our own land. I thought of all the generations before me who had come to this place and collected this food. Before Spanish pirates and Russian traders and French trappers and American settlers, there was only my family, my people, and all the treasures of the ocean were ours to take.

For the flash of a moment, I saw a trail of children following Charlie, and five more clustered around Ida—their children, I was sure of it. I spun to look behind me. There was a crowd of footprints, long and little. One wave later, and there was nothing but smooth sand. My heart beat faster. It was the flicker of certainty I had secretly been praying for. I would not be alone forever. Someday I would have a family of my own.

The next morning, we made ready for our trip to town. Aunt Loula and Ida wanted to take the truck, but we could empty it completely and there still wouldn’t be enough room for the clams and oysters. And the road was so bumpy, we’d have to pack them up dry. They’d
die on the way into town. The canoe would carry the clams in water and all of us together. The men packed rope around the fish canoe and its load of clams to keep it from tipping. I smoothed the pleats of my town skirt and turned up the sleeves of my blouse for the paddling. Ida hopped about waiting to put the bundle of deerskins in the canoe. Aunt Loula put lunches in a basket.

We took our places, and Uncle Jeremiah launched us. Grandpa sat across from Charlie and taught him navigation. They read the weather first, then the currents. Charlie named each sea stack, headland, and freshwater creek in Makah, in Quinault, and in English if they bothered to name it. Grandpa explained how to keep track of time on the water and how to judge a storm. I took in all that information and set it firmly in my memory, but I was careful not to show my interest. It was enough that Grandpa agreed to men digging clams. Even I knew better than to propose women navigators.

When the fog lifted, it was a perfect fall day, cool wind and not a cloud for miles. Uncle Jeremiah put up the mast and set the sail. We moved with good speed south to Aberdeen.

Now that I could relax, I couldn’t help thinking how deep the water was beneath me and how dark and cold. I couldn’t help thinking, is he down there? The memory of that nightmare of looking for my father and trying
to follow his voice made me shiver. To distract myself, I took a handful of pebbles from my pocket. I had been saving this trick to show Ida—how to call porpoises up from the deep.

“Look!” I said, and tossed the pebbles over the water. I waited a few minutes and tossed again. Ida looked, but she didn’t have the patience to wait.

“Look there,” Uncle Jeremiah said, pointing to a slight change in the ripples.

A porpoise burst out of the water, leaping in a rainbow arch. Three more and then another lifted their heads above the water. Ida gasped and clapped.

Grandma called,
“Nah-gwee-nau,”
and tossed bits of pilot bread. The porpoises snapped up the food. It was impossible not to laugh at their chubby, frowning faces.

All at once they dove, and my mind went down with them. What if he’s alive down there, I thought, hidden away or kept prisoner in the deep houses of the whales? What if he’s waiting for some sign or gift or sacrifice?