Written in Stone (9 page)

The theater filled for the matinee, all but the seats nearest us. People laughed and chatted with their neighbors. Men argued the board-foot price of lumber. Ladies admired each other’s hats and gossiped over the skirt length of certain unchaperoned girls at the theater. I had always loved the busy variety of people at the movies. I loved feeling as if I were a part of the story told on the screen and sharing it with people who seemed so different but laughed at all the same things I did. I could see Ida drinking it all in, but for the first time I saw what she didn’t. No one spoke to us. No one even looked in our direction. We were dressed as well as all but the fanciest moviegoers. We had paid the same cash price for a ticket, but their silent indifference said you don’t belong here, as clear as shouting. Charlie Chaplin was as funny as ever, but this time I didn’t laugh.

I bet no one scorned those shopgirls. I bet they could sit wherever they chose in theaters, churches, and cafés. I was no darker than the black-haired girl. I did not look so foreign as a Chinaman, and I spoke better English than any off-the-boat immigrant working man. I was so angry I wanted to spit on that high-and-mighty woman. But what if she was the boardinghouse matron? What if she did the hiring at the department store? I would have to hide my Indian life if I wanted to live in town. I would have to make up a story about my circumstances. I would fashion myself a character like the young women in the penny dreadful novels the older girls passed around at school, a virtuous girl who hit hard times and had to make a living on nothing but her own determination.

I could do it if I wanted to. I could put on a white woman’s clothes and high voice and little steps. But then I would never be able to sing or dance in my own language, never be able to bring a visitor or a token from home to my boardinghouse in town. I weighed it against my life on the reservation with all its work and worry, and both seemed too heavy to bear.

Uncle Jeremiah and I paddled the small canoe home that evening since it was empty of clams. Daylight held until we reached the mouth of Grays Harbor, and after a break for a meal, the rising moon gave us light to travel by.

The little canoe held the lighter goods—cloth, needles,
thread, soap, two pairs of spike-soled logger boots, and two pairs of long rubber cannery-worker gloves. I looked at them, and Uncle Jeremiah saw me look. We said nothing for more than a mile.

“We cannot always count on four dollars a pound for clams,” he said. “Next year, something else will be fashionable. Next year, the Hood Canal beaches will be clean and more shellfish will be on the market. We won’t have to go away to find work this winter, but next year …” Uncle Jeremiah went quiet, and we both watched the fall constellations rise from the horizon to point our way.

“Next year, we must be ready for anything,” he said.

“But it’s so far away,” I said. “We would only see each other every other month. Maybe less. What about Grandma and Grandpa? They couldn’t possibly go work in a factory. Ida’s too little. Would we leave her behind with nobody but Grandma and Grandpa to take care of her?”

I was glad Uncle Jeremiah sat behind me in the canoe where he couldn’t see my face. I hated sharing a room with Ida, but the idea of her sleeping all alone made my heart sink. It wasn’t natural for a child to sleep in a room alone.

“Maybe this museum man who comes next week will have carving work for us,” Uncle Jeremiah said. “We don’t have to go away yet, but we can’t stay on land that won’t support us either.”

Maybe he’ll be a bone hunter and dig up graves, I thought, but I didn’t say it because Uncle Jeremiah sounded so sad. He was right. I knew he was right, but I wanted to know what my mother would say. I reached for my pocket and the abalone shell I had always kept there. But I had nothing of my mother’s now, and I’d never felt more empty.

When we arrived home, I was ready to put all my energy into weaving, but Aunt Loula was making winter shirts and wanted me to do buttons and hems, and there were always people to feed. More frustrating than all the chores put together was Ida following me everywhere, demanding another round of the bone game or hounding me to read her a chapter in her tattered copy of
The Wizard of Oz
. Whenever I had a moment to spare, I was out the door gathering what I needed to make dye for my wool. I collected iron nails from the driftwood and fresh hemlock bark from the forest for the black dye. I set an old copper pot full of pee out to age for the second dye bath.

Grandma did not care to see me working the wool. I
could tell by the way she followed me on my gathering, pretending she needed bark for medicine or maidenhair ferns for her baskets. One day, when I was inside dipping skeins of wool into the first bath of black dye, she sat on the bench nearby. I noticed that her hands were more wrinkled than last year. She took a white skein of yarn in her calloused hands, held it up to the lamplight to examine the twist, and gave it a nod of approval.

“When your mother first passed from us,” Grandma said slowly, “I thought of the loom as a thing belonging to her mother and to her sisters up north. We sent word that they were welcome to take your mother’s loom and the blanket she had begun.”

I was ready to protest for my right to my mother’s loom, but something in my grandmother’s defeated look made me hold my thought and keep peace with her.

“Your mother’s people sent us word that they would come and bring the loom back to their village, and they would bring you with it, so that you could learn the language and stories of your mother’s people.”

“What?”

I had heard plenty of stories about my mother’s people when I was little but not this one. I stopped stirring the wool in the dye pot and out of habit reached for the abalone shell that was no longer in my pocket.

“Yes, your mother came from powerful people, the
Tlingit, up north. She was the pride of her family, and they were shocked to see her choose a southern husband. But your father”—and here Grandma lifted her chin and put pride in her voice—“your father made a fortune in whale oil as a young man, and he had the Raven stories. There was none but him with the right to dance and sing the entire cycle of Raven stories. It took a whole week of evening ceremonies to dance them through from the first to the last. And it didn’t hurt that he was as handsome as the devil and knew how to make a girl laugh.”

I left my wool in the dye pot and sat beside Grandma on the bench. This was a story I hadn’t heard before.

“You mean it wasn’t an arrangement between fathers?” Grandpa took pains, whenever the subject came up, to tell me he would be picking my husband from among men of a certain station.

Grandma laughed and squeezed my arm. “The fathers set the marriage terms, you can be sure of that, but your parents loved each other.” She paused and turned away from me. “The last five years would have been easier for your father if they had not.”

That was true enough. After my mother died, Papa was not a handsome man, and he spent little effort making me laugh. I went back to my dye pot to stir and lift the wool to check the depth of color.

“Why didn’t I go to my mother’s people?”

“Your father wouldn’t hear of it,” Grandma said. “He just couldn’t let you go. There were some who said he should take a new wife, one who would give him sons.” She glanced rather sternly in the direction of Grandpa’s workbench. “But he would have no part of that. So here you are.”

Grandma stood up and moved beside me. She held the lamp close so I could check the color of my wool against the black that was already woven into the blanket. It was hard to tell if I had it right, matching wet yarn to dry.

“I’m not sorry he kept you here,” she said. “I would have missed my Pearl. But you have lost something none of us can replace.”

I busied myself stirring another batch of wool into the pot.

“Maybe you wish we had chosen differently,” she added.

My mother’s people—they would know how to weave. Maybe I had another grandmother or a whole new set of aunts. I could visit them, and they would help me learn. I smiled and turned to her.

“Do they still want me?”

“We have been looking for them,” Grandma said. “People don’t travel the way they used to. So many
people work for wages now. You can’t get a month off to paddle to Alaska. Some villages plain don’t have enough manpower to move a seagoing canoe. Messengers are not so easy to send. But the basket maker we met in town, the one at the curio shop, she is from Vancouver Island.”

I nodded, remembering. She spoke Nootka—similar to Makah, but not close enough for me to understand easily.

“Her brothers had been up north, and they went to your mother’s village. It was empty. Nothing but house frames and frogs left.”

“Completely empty?”

Grandma nodded.

“Was it the influenza?” I couldn’t bear to think it.

“No, Pearl, there were no unburied bodies. Nothing to show a battle either. Might be they moved to another village or a town, maybe a city—Ketchikan is not so far, or Sitka.”

“They’re gone? How could they be gone?” I said, my anger growing. “They can’t just disappear.”

“We’ll find them,” Grandma said firmly. “But it will take time, Pearl, maybe a very long time. Sometimes the missionaries write down where people move. Maybe they joined a village just a few miles away.”

“So there really is no one to teach me to weave?”

Grandma bowed her head and did not answer.

“Fine,” I snapped. “I don’t need a teacher.” I paced a few times from the dye pot to the loom. “I sat beside Mama and watched all the time when she wove. I’ll remember how to do it. I’ll figure it out by myself.”

A week passed. Fall rain raised the rivers, and the Silvers started to spawn up the Quinault River. My wool was dyed deep black, blue-green, and yellow. I sat at the tall loom against the wall in a dim corner of the longhouse. The half-finished face of Bear gazed back at me.

I unwound an arm’s length of black wool and worked it over and under to fill in the line below the eye. I concentrated on holding my hands exactly the way Mama had. I tried to remember what she’d said about tension and forming a curved line. Doubt sat in my stomach like bad fish, but I kept working. I unwove the last row my mother worked to check how it was done, but even with the bends and twists pressed into the yarn I couldn’t reweave it right, not exactly right. My row was bumpy and rose above the smooth skin of my mother’s weaving like a scar. I didn’t know how to fix it. Mama never said a lot about her weaving. When she did say something, it wasn’t very helpful.

When she was pregnant with my baby sister, she said, “Hold the baby right, and she stops crying. Hold the warp yarns right, and the weaving comes out smooth.”

Or she would point to a mistake before she fixed it and say, “Never leave uneven work in a blanket. And never leave an argument standing with your husband. Honor his work as much as you honor your own.”

Why had she never said exactly how to weave? I kicked at the base that held up the loom crossbar to make myself remember. I tugged on each end of the yarn to make the row even, but it didn’t smooth out the bumpy stitches in the middle. I slid my fingers between the vertical warp threads and pressed my row tight to the row above.

It still didn’t look better. It looked worse. I yanked my yarn out of the warp threads, hopped off the weaving bench, and paced.

All I could remember was how natural it had looked when my mother did it, how easy. I remembered how her hands moved steadily in pace with the song she sang. Why didn’t I look closer when she was alive? Why didn’t I ask more questions?

Aunt Loula called me to lunch and called me again, and then she steered me to the table, two hands on my shoulders, and sat me down. I could not smell the soup. It had no taste. It wouldn’t go down. I paddled my spoon
around in the bowl when Grandpa took notice, but my throat was closed.

What if I couldn’t remember my father’s dances either? What if I could only see how beautiful they were and how easy he’d made it look to dance like Raven? What if my sons received the masks and never learned to dance?

I thought of the footprints of my descendants on the beach. Would those feet ever dance, or would they trudge after me to factories and lumber camps and cities far from home? The weight of them following me burned. I hopped up and paced the room to outrun them, heart racing and the touch of flame on my skin.