Bone River (26 page)

“A creed my father embraced wholeheartedly, I see.”

“Actually, Junius finds it abhorrent.”

“He’s a hypocrite then.”

“Yes. But I have to admit that it always made a queer kind of sense to me. There were political gains to be made, and women were good traders and gatherers. When one has to constantly fight both the elements and the slaving raids of the northern tribes, well...” I shrugged. “Papa hated that I understood them. But I always thought that was our task. He said I took it too far.”

“A daughter who understands savages,” Daniel mused. “Yes, I can see why a father might have found it frightening.”

“He was an educated man. He should have realized it was only intellectual curiosity.”

Daniel laughed.

“He was as well-read as you are. Would you have found it frightening?” I insisted.

Daniel’s laughter died. “It doesn’t frighten me. Just the opposite, in fact. But I’m not your father, and no doubt he found it disturbing to see your interest in savagery when he knew what other men are thinking when they look at you. He could not have been blind to it.”

I felt the heat rise in my face and I looked away.

Daniel went on, gently now. “All fathers want to keep their daughters innocent, don’t they? I’m not surprised that he kept the more...indelicate...aspects of his study from you.”

“I knew about such things anyway,” I said, keeping my gaze focused upon the pages, my father’s handwriting. “Some of the relics are very...obscene. He thought I didn’t understand, but I did.”

“Obscene how?” Daniel asked.

“The usual thing. Huge breasts and bellies. Erect...phalluses.”

“How very descriptive.”

I glanced up, but his expression was impassive, his eyes hooded. I said, “They weren’t really. At least, they weren’t very detailed. Papa must have believed I would think they were giant sticks or something. I can’t imagine he would have had me draw them if he’d thought I knew what they were. Some of them were jokes—Indians have a perverse sense of humor sometimes—but most of them were fertility icons. We had some around the house until Junius sent them away. Not that they helped.”

Daniel glanced away. He flipped the pages of the journal almost idly. “You wanted children?”

I tried not to feel pain at his question, to answer lightly. “Doesn’t every woman?”

“Not in my experience,” he said.

“Oh?”

He gave me a wry glance. “But then again, I haven’t spent much time with respectable women, so I’m hardly an expert.”

“But your Eleanor—”

“I’m not asking her. I’m asking you. Did you want children?”

“Very much. Once.” I smiled weakly, pushing away sadness. “But some things aren’t meant to be. I suppose it’s for the best. It’s given me more time to dedicate to ethnology. My father would be relieved.”

“Relieved not to have grandchildren?”

“My mother died in childbed. He was afraid for me. That was part of it. But mostly he wanted me to pursue science, and he feared children would interfere with that. The fact that I was a woman was already a flaw hard enough to overcome. He worried I would abandon my studies and whatever capacity for rationality I had if there were children.”

Daniel frowned. “I see,” he said slowly.

“I
wanted
to study.”

“I didn’t say otherwise.”

“But that’s what you believe, isn’t it?”

“What I believe,” he said, looking at me, “is that you’ve spent your life doing what others want. Have you ever asked yourself what the world could be if you did what
you
wanted?”

Who are you? What do you want from the world?
His words brought the dream hard into my head, an echo that made me curl my fingers into my palm. “You don’t know anything.”

“So you keep saying,” he said lightly, but his gaze called me out; his gaze said something I didn’t want to hear.

For a moment, I stared at him, caught. I
felt
him. For a moment, I felt a possibility that alarmed me, so insistent it was, and I put aside the book and rose, slamming from the room without grace, nothing but panic, downstairs and out again, without thought or volition, racing for peace and calm and
reassurance, outside and across the yard and in the barn, and then I was standing over her closed trunk, and there was no reassurance there, either, but the melancholy from my dream returned, that terrible sense of loss, those haunting words,
who are you?
And still I stood, staring down until it became too dark to see.

That night I tossed and turned, and finally I gave up any expectation of sleep. I lit the lamp and felt myself to be a little child braving nightmares, and that little child craved the comfort and reassurance of her father’s words—the things that had always comforted me in the past. He was not here, but his journals were, waiting for me.

I got out of bed, pulling on my dressing gown, taking up the lamp. The night was dark as pitch, the sky so clouded there was no moon. I heard the soft patter of rain on the rooftop. The floor was cold on my bare feet as I padded from my bedroom and into the hallway. I glanced nervously at Daniel’s door—still closed, no light peeking from beneath it, and I hurried as quickly and silently as I could downstairs, clutched by an irrational fear that I would wake him, that he would come out to find me thus—something I most assuredly did not want.

The journals were on the table. I picked up one and raced back to my room, closing the door gently behind me, a bit too relieved that I managed it unscathed.
Unscathed
—what a strange word to use. To think him capable of scathing me—I laughed, and to my surprise it caught hard in my throat. I was a fool, and I knew it. Scientists did not let emotion rule their thinking. I was, after all, the most evolved kind of being—not a
man
, of course, but still, as Agassiz said, one of the highest and last series among living beings. I did not have to give in to primitive feelings. I was happy in my life. I was
happy
, and here was my father’s journal to reassure me of it, to tell me again who I was. Leonie Monroe Russell. My father’s daughter. Junius’s wife.

The thought restored me, and I went back to my bed and settled the lamp on the bedside table. Then I crawled between the blankets and opened the journal.

February 15, 1852: Argument today with Old Toke. I was looking for a wooden salmon hook, which he said his people did not use anymore, much preferring bought ones made of metal, and he offered one of those, which I refused. When I said my only interests were in those that were
authentic
and made the old way, he was very offended and said white men cared only for the past, and not for the truth, and I said only the past was the truth. His people will all be dead soon enough, and it is irrelevant and irresponsible to imply otherwise. There is no hope to offer to his people at all. I had hoped to be able to give some solace that environment could change their future, but the experiment has not solved this question for me.

The experiment again. I frowned and continued to read.

The Indians here are lazy—all tribes, even the northern ones. They respect pleasure above all else. But the northern tribes are raiders as well, almost single-minded in their pursuit of slaves. This is a conundrum: their laziness requires they find others to do their work for them, and yet the aggression required to
steal
such slaves is also necessary. What then sets the aggressively lazy North apart from the pleasure-loving South? The weather is the same. The vegetation and animal life the same. The ocean is the same. Is it biological? At some point, did a member of an advanced culture mate with a primitive and through the pollution of miscegenation instill aggression in later stock? Or vice versa: was there a mixing of blood in the southern tribes that negated that aggressive tendency?

The experiment has come no closer to showing me the truth except that I have seen that tendencies
do
pass through the blood, and environment
can
squelch them in some fashion. But what would happen if one were not vigilant? If I were not here to fashion it, how might it go astray?

Whatever this experiment had been, Papa had been obsessed with it, and I didn’t even understand what it was. It wasn’t what I was looking for, of course—I wanted some indication of who the mummy was and where she’d come from—but I was puzzled and troubled by the fact that this experiment had held Papa tight in its grip and I’d known nothing of it. I had been his favorite companion—how often had he said it? I was his only assistant before Junius came, my hand had been in everything Papa did, and yet he had never mentioned to me the very thing that was the focus of his study, and I didn’t know why.

Because he didn’t trust you to be able to continue it.

I tried to push the thought away, but it wouldn’t go. There were too many others that reinforced it. Papa’s fear that the fact of my sex kept me from having a true faculty for study. His constant deriding of my theories about the Indians and their stories, the way he’d forbidden me to listen to them when I was a child. He had told me I had a quick mind and was proud that I’d inherited that from him. But he’d also called me too sensitive and imaginative.

The curse of your sex, I fear, Lea
, he’d told me when I was just fourteen and as devoted to him as any acolyte, and when I’d asked him what he meant, he told me,
Women were created for having children. Science goes against your natural abilities—such study may indeed be impossible for your sex, but I have hopes that you might overcome it.

I will overcome it,
I had said confidently.
Tell me how.

Your mind is highly distractible. A proper scientist does what he must to ensure there will be no such distractions. Perhaps you should consider a life of celibate study.

Like a nun?
I had asked, laughing, thinking he was joking.

He only gave me a soberly thoughtful look and said,
No, my dear, I’m not talking of religious isolation, but of a life dedicated to research.

Well, then that’s what I’ll do. I don’t wish ever to marry
, I said.

He smiled gently.
It’s not marriage I object to, but perhaps you’ll be lucky, my dear. Remaining childless might help mitigate your unfortunate biology. I hope it will. I would pray for it if I were you.

I had promised to do so, I remembered now, and for a time I’d obeyed, dutiful prayers to God each night, asking that I might be spared the curse of children so I could dedicate myself to study and collecting.

Such prayers had not lasted the summer, but only because I’d been too busy and forgotten them. My father had been struck by the call of the Pacific Northwest Indians, and it was about that time we’d moved to some dirty little town in northern California, and Papa had been so disgusted by the degeneration of the Indians there that we hadn’t stayed long.

And now I wondered, had such prayers truly had an effect? Here I was, childless as I’d promised him. Had God listened to the prayers of a devoted fourteen-year-old over the ones made by a woman of twenty, who had hoped for children despite their distractions, who, for a time, had wanted them more than science?

And perhaps that was my punishment, I thought, for ignoring what I was, for having the pride to think I could be both a mother and an ethnologist. I thought of my father, and how furious he would have been at my later prayers. No doubt he’d been at God’s side, counseling Him that I didn’t know my own mind, bemoaning the lack of dedication that had allowed my biology to overtake my intellect, telling God that, despite all his work, my mind was as feeble as any woman’s, and he’d been a fool to think it could be otherwise.

He’d known it always, hadn’t he? It was why he’d never shared the experiment with me, because he’d known I hadn’t the capacity to continue it. Because I wasn’t the ethnologist he was, and could never be, and
that
was why I couldn’t see what was wrong with the mummy, why I was blind to the reasons he must have had to rebury her, as I was almost certain he had.

Imagination. Desire and yearning. Sentimentality. Flaws, every one. My objectivity was as substantial as paper melted away in rain, no matter how I tried to gain it. I dreamed about the mummy and drew her instead of cutting her open as anyone else would have done. My father was right. I was no kind of scientist at all. A real ethnologist would have seen right away who she was. A real scientist would already
know
her.

I was drawn more to dreams, to a presence that could not really exist, to imagination instead of fact. I wore an ugly, cheap bracelet because a witch woman had frightened me with talk any thinking man would deride. I was attracted to my stepson—yes, I admitted it—because I sensed an
affinity
with him that I’d never felt for another man. Feelings, all of them. Not facts. Not science.

But there was still time to stop it all. Tomorrow I would finish the drawing and cut into her. Tomorrow I would get rid of this bracelet. I would give Daniel the money to go back to San Francisco. I would even take him to Bruceport myself.

There was still time to return to the Leonie I’d been.

Resolved, I put the journal aside and blew out the lamp. I snuggled into the blankets and closed my eyes and waited for the peace of sleep, the solace of determination.

And the nightmare of her returned, worse than ever. Again the child on the floor, the love and doubt and fear. But this time there were voices added, muffled and changed as if I heard them through water, tones loud and angry but indistinguishable. A man’s, a woman’s. They were fighting, and it was about the child, and my fear was terrible and all-encompassing, and then again the withering away, an old woman’s hand, freckled and spotted,
and then skin turning to leather, muscle adhering to bone, then crumbling to dust, crumbling and crumbling and blowing away in a moist south wind, and
you don’t know who you are. You don’t know...

I woke breathing hard, tears streaming down my cheeks, shaken and uncertain. The feelings didn’t leave me as I rose and washed and dressed, not as I brushed my hair and pinned it up. The echo of that voice stayed with me—
You don’t know who you are
—and I thought of the reassurance of my father’s words, of my determination to do what must be done to regain my will to be who I was, what the years of my father’s training, and Junius’s, had made me.