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I held them as though they were gold. No, manna, food to nourish.

We stayed two days to dry the meat beside our fire. And I read. Read of my mother’s thoughts those first years, her words as she faded away. And of how she loved The People who became her family more than the missionaries or other whites who visited or stayed. I inhaled her longing to have my father return and even saw that she
wanted
him to remarry. She spoke of Matilda like family, not someone who only worked for her.

“Mother loved Lapwai, the way I once did.”

“It was her life. Leaving it killed her.”

“She didn’t feel they’d deserted you.”

“Deserted us? The Nimíipuu? No, no, no. They kept us safe. Good heavens, if they hadn’t whisked your mother and the children upriver to a site they could defend, well, I hate to think what might have happened.”

“But they knew some of the Cayuse. Couldn’t they have stopped it? Don’t you blame them just a little for that?”

“People tried to warn Marcus. Even John McLaughlin. You remember. He testified to that. So there were signs but none the Nez Perce could have interrupted.”

“Until I spoke with Timothy, I thought they tried to take us back, when we were in the bateau.”

“They rode to act as guard so no Cayuse followed.”

“That’s what he said.”

“You carried around these false beliefs all this time? Why didn’t you speak to me about them? I’d have set you straight.”

I snorted. “Speaking to you had its own challenges. We never could carry on a conversation without leaving tufts of turf dug up. Not like we are today.”

He pursed his lips but he didn’t disagree.

“I was so alone after Waiilatpu.” Minnie fussed and I let her suck my finger.

“I know. Timothy would have brought you back, but he couldn’t. He grieved that.”

“I thought that you were dead. All of you.” I swallowed back memory tears.

“It must have been a terrible time for you. I’m sorry that happened to you, Eliza.”

I blinked.
He understands. He does.

“She . . . she wanted you to go back to Lapwai?”

“She did. Even without the Board’s blessing, but I just couldn’t. I regret that. But I’ve decided: I’m going no matter what the Board says.”

“There’ve been so many things I didn’t understand. In her diaries . . . she wanted you to find a Rachel?”

“Of course she did. I wouldn’t do anything to mar your mother’s memory. Rachel’s a teacher. Not like your mother was, but a teacher nonetheless who shares my passion for our work. She’s a good partner, Eliza. Always was.”

“Yes. Yes, I see that now.” Those diaries were a gift, though one that contradicted so much of what I’d believed I knew. The past is but a puzzle with pieces missing and misplaced.

When we moved on in the morning, we met a wagon train heading west. We bypassed the “Place of Rye Grass,” Waiilatpu, the main trail to Lapwai a few miles south. I wondered if I ought to ask my father to go by there, with his help to face one last shame, but I didn’t. And then we left the route and followed the road up into the hills, crossing the Snake, riding beside the Clearwater River to Lapwai Creek where I’d discover what it was that I’d been missing—what my mother had missed too.

Sensing the presence of other horses, our mounts quickened their pace. We rounded a bend and there it stood—the log home and church my parents had lived and worked in, built by the Nez Perce, for them. A few tipis dotted the river’s edge. Horses whinnied back to ours. Minnie made noises and I took her from the carrying sack and fed her, sitting beneath an old apple tree in the orchard my father had planted. Quiet like wet earth settled around me and I felt a sacredness in the silence. I didn’t know what brought the peace but it was there.

My father hobbled our horses and walked toward me, bent a bit with his aging.

“What will you do here, alone?”

“Oh, if I am meant to be here, I won’t be alone,” my father said. “All right if I walk to the tipis? They’ll have seen us and be sending people our way. I’ll be close enough to hear your call if you need me.”

“We’ll be fine.”

I watched him leave us and had a momentary imagining of something terrible happening: a rattler waiting to strike; one of the dissonant tribal members who resented my parents’ intrusion coming out to argue with him. I remembered my mother’s diary story of him being choked and the first and only time she said she’d become flummoxed. I should call out to him, remind him to be careful. But I remembered Timothy’s words and Paul the Apostle’s words too: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely . . .” I’d think on those things. My mother had quoted the entire verse in a diary section I’d read the night before.

After Minnie ate, she dozed on my shoulder and I stepped inside the house, that place that had nurtured me those ten years, expecting it to be empty. But someone was kneeling
at the far end, kindling the fire. I walked, my feet echoing, but the person did not turn. Then I was in front of him and he looked up. His face registered confusion and then a smile that started at his mouth and spread across his face onto his eyes.

“Do you remember me?”

He shook his head, tapped his ears and mouth. A flash of memory warmed my face. This man had lived with us for a time, helping Mother, pulling me in that little wagon with fir rounds for wheels. His name was Mustups.

“He doesn’t speak. And cannot hear you.” I turned to a Nez Perce man and my father who’d entered behind me.

“Ask if he knows me?”

The two made signs and then I was told that Mustups rocked my cradle when I was a baby and kept me safely from the river. “He says all these things are yours. All the trees. Seeds your mother planted.”

“Which plants?”

He took me outside to a small bed, still maintained, of asters.

“I thought she only planted garden seeds and the lilac bush.”

“Your mother loved flowers.” My father had his hand on my shoulder. “She had little time for them, but this little plot was special. Didn’t you remember?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Mustups has kept it, it seems. Perhaps he’ll keep my grave one day. Bury me here, Daughter.” His friend signed, asking if Mustup tended the plot and he nodded. The blooms were gone but I could tell they’d come back in the spring.

I walked around the house then, over to the fence that kept me from the river. I saw where Henry Hart and I had raced each other on our Indian ponies along the water, our hair flying like our horses’ manes. The hills were a blanket of brown around
me. The quiet of this place vanquished the clashing memories of Waiilatpu. This was a place of peace.

Then near a clearing I drifted in my mind, but felt a tightening in my stomach, and must have clenched Minnie as she stirred on my hip. “Did I press you, little one?” Holding her kept me in Lapwai, though I saw a memory unfold before me. The sham battle, but this time, older now, I watched a child watching men performing as though dancing to the drums. Nothing frightening. Nothing bad happened with that battle except the lingering fear it sent the small child. I heard birds singing, not the screams and howls of men in paint. Beyond, I watched the horses graze by the camp, black tails flicking against white rumps. One raised its head. Maka whinnied back. I was restful. Peaceful. Calm. That child found comfort.

I turned around slowly to take in what my mother would have seen each day: the comfort of the hills, the chattering water, a lone raven overhead, the faces of the people she had come to love. A breeze brushing tendrils of her hair. I could see my mother here, and with a sigh of understanding I knew then what had been missing. Her rest. Her peace. Her calm. One day, I would bring her here to be buried in Lapwai, “the valley of the butterflies,” where her life truly began. And where it ended.

“Timothy is expected later,” Father said. “And there are others who still worship and hold the faith. Not Old Joseph, I hear. He has separated into another band that resisted the treaty signing. He was my first convert, the first I sprinkled in baptism.” He sighed, then brightened. “We’ll have worship this Sabbath.”

And so we did. It was a marvel to see both familiar faces and many new. Eyes bright with recognition of “our Spalding” and looks of sadness when told of my mother’s death. Timothy knew, of course. I’d told him. They sang hymns my mother
had taught them, haltingly. “We have not sung them for many years,” Timothy told us. I thought my father would be upset, but he patted Timothy’s shoulder in understanding, his eyes filled with a kind of joy I hadn’t seen for a long time.

“They’ve forgotten.” I held Minnie on my lap while my father picked up the hymnals he’d brought with him. I didn’t think they’d done much good. People sang with their eyes closed, from memory, if they sang at all.

“Of course they’ve forgotten. Unless one nurtures the faith, it disappears.”

Blunt as he said it, his words carried no heat to them nor did the message that followed. “It’s how I know I belong here. Ours is a God close by as well as far away. Jeremiah 23:23. I bring the message to them of a God who is in all places and who gives them tools to take him with them when they go.” His face brightened. “I’m to ensure the watering hole is here and keep the water clear and quenching.” He held the stack of hymnals against his vest. “That’s how your mother thought of her work—as a mother. To keep the lives of her children clear and quenching.”

He whistled then, tapping my daughter’s chin as he walked out into the sunshine. She rocked in happiness upon my knees.

Before Minnie and I left, Timothy took me to his stick house. It was up the valley a little way, the smallish structure with a black stove, not a cookstove, but a little heating device. He patted it like a good dog when he walked by and beamed as he pointed to a picture on his wall framed in wood, wobbling glass covering it. It was a painting of blind Bartimaeus, a man healed by Jesus. Beneath it were the words “Presented to Timothy by Mrs. Spalding.”

“It is my greatest earthly possession. I love the story. Jesus asked the blind man what he wanted, he did not assume to
read his heart. This is your mother. She came and listened. She did not assume to know. She asked in our language what we wanted and I said I wanted to see Jesus. She said it would be so, by merely asking.”

I could ask for new things too. And so I did.

28
Filling Hollow Places

My father remained in Lapwai while I began my journey home with my daughter. I felt a little skip of anxiety going such a distance yet found my father’s reference to Jeremiah comforting. God is a God both near and far away. My mother would say I wasn’t without guidance. I had the experience of so many journeys, memories I knew were not always trustworthy but that, when they appeared in my days as I rode home, I could transform them, wrap them into the wife, mother, daughter, woman I’d become and hoped to be.

I rode old Maka and had one pack animal I led, and for quite a distance, beyond Lapwai, my escort, Timothy, rode beside us. Because the Nez Perce always traveled with many families together, others followed us, but they stayed back beyond our dust so as not to intrude. Minnie with her dimpled cheeks got handed all around at our campfire that night, and I was grateful
that at least one of my children would have a memory perhaps of being loved by Indians as I had been.

As we approached Waiilatpu, I knew what I would do.

“You said you would take me.”

Timothy nodded. “I wondered if you would want to make the journey now that your father has found his peace again.”

“Maybe there I can find mine.”

In the morning, we rode toward that place, Minnie with me, riding the ten or so miles through hills beginning to turn brown from the hot sun. Near the river it was cool and the horses drank at the stream, their bits jangling as they slurped. I held Minnie in front of me, wishing for one of the baby boards the Nez Perce used. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t brought the sack. Maybe to keep the heartbeat of my child close that I might use it to steady my own. She liked riding and patted the saddle horn, sitting now outside of my body where months earlier she’d been inside. At least I wasn’t riding sidesaddle as my mother always had. How she managed a child while on that precarious seat always remained a mystery, and grateful I was, once again, that we girls were allowed to ride astride. I sewed split skirts for all of us.