Bone River (33 page)

M
Y DREAMS WERE
restless. Drowning and dry grass and withering, and I woke feeling as if I’d spent all night in struggle. When I went downstairs, Daniel was already there, the stove fired, coffee brewed. He had a cup in front of him, and he looked as tired as I felt, shadows beneath his blue eyes, his hair tousled as if he either hadn’t brushed it or had run his hands through it. The collar of his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing his underwear. His gaze came to me and then away.

“I’ve already been to the springhouse,” he said. “The water’s down. I’ll clean it out.”

“You don’t need to—”

“I need to be outside today,” he said shortly.

The reason was clear, though he didn’t say it. He had no wish to be in close proximity with me, and though I should have been relieved—wasn’t that what I wanted as well?—I felt oddly hurt.

“Thank you.” I sat down.

He stood up so quickly his chair rocked, which reminded me strangely of the sound of his chair scraping back last night, and then the bath, the things I’d felt and imagined.

I bent my head before he could see me coloring.

He said, “I’ll get started then.”

Once he was gone, I ate a quick breakfast of bread and jam and picked up my father’s journal, but I couldn’t concentrate on the entries. I was still angry with Papa over his precious “experiment” and the fact that he’d shared it with Junius and not with me, and that mixed with the things Daniel had said yesterday, the things that would not quite leave my head though I wanted them to desperately.
Do you still believe it was best?

And along with those things, there was the dream, drowning and withering and
What a waste, what a waste...
and the things I wanted burning like salt in a wound, the feel of him against my palm and his fingers trailing over my collarbone...

No, I could not concentrate.

Instead, I drew the mummy. It was easier to focus on her, to focus on drawing and shading, to lose myself in the story of her that I told with paper and pencil, rubbing here to smear the lead, a highlight there. And again, as if she loved the attention, she drew me in, and I forgot everything but the accuracy of the line, everything but depicting each peg-like tooth with as much detail as I could, each strand of hair, the shell-like husk of her ear and the thin, nearly indiscernible scar of an unhealed wound, the mottling of bruising beneath skin coloring to umber.

When the door opened again, bringing with it a rush of cold air, I jumped, startled.

Daniel came inside, his boots coated with mud nearly to their tops. He drew off Junius’s old and cracked leather gloves. “It’s done,” he announced. “All set to rights.”

“Thank you,” I said again, gripping my pencil hard. “I shouldn’t have let you—”

“Oh, I know you feel you should have been the one to do it,” he said. He was tense already, his full mouth tight. “My father has you trained as well as one of the Bela Coola’s slaves.”

“Daniel, must we really have this argument again?”

He hesitated, and then he shook his head. “No. Forgive me. I had a difficult night.” He took off his coat and hung it, and his hat, then bent to pull off his boots.

“We both did, then,” I said.

“You had nightmares again?”

“No, but...sometimes it’s worse than nightmares. At least with nightmares one’s sleeping.”

He set his boots aside and dragged his hand through his hair. “I suppose that’s true enough.” He glanced at the notebook in my hand. “Anything new?”

“I decided to draw instead.”

“Are you going to leave her there on the settee forever? Not that I mind it, particularly, except that your Indian won’t like it when he gets back, and the barn floor’s dried out. You could put her back.”

“She doesn’t want to be in the barn,” I told him without thinking, and then, in puzzlement when I realized what I’d said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

“I wouldn’t like it in there either. It’s cold and dark.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “If you were Junius, you’d scold me for my imaginings.”

“I don’t want to think about the things I’d do if I were my father,” he said shortly. He seemed ill at ease, aimless. He went to Junius’s organ, pulling out the bench, seating himself there, jerking up the keyboard cover, plunking one finger down on a key. The tone reverberated through the room. He hit it again, and then another, a dirge-like “Hot Cross Buns,” slow and menacing, before he pulled away from the keys and stared at the organ as if he’d never seen one before.

“You play?” I asked in surprise. “So does Junius.”

He nodded. “I know. It was one of the things I remembered about him.” And then, before I could absorb his bitterness over the reason he had learned to play, he twisted away from the
keyboard, opening the glass-fronted cabinet that held my argillite collection. The black stone statuettes were worth next to nothing, monetarily or scientifically, because the Indians made them for the tourist trade. But I loved them, and couldn’t resist buying them when I found a good artist. Restlessly, Daniel touched one and then another, and then grabbed the salmon. He rolled the smooth, polished stone in his hands, turning it this way and that, and then he said, “Tell me a story about this fellow.”

His mood was strange; it matched my own and made me wary.

He held it up so I could see it, the hook of its nose, the stripe along the back. “A fish of some kind, isn’t it?”

“A salmon,” I said.

“Tell me. Just a story this time, Lea. Not a scolding.”

I smiled, remembering the tale I’d told him in the cave, and I tucked the pencil into the spine of the notebook and closed it, laying it on the settee beside her. “Long ago, the South Wind, who was called Toolux, was making his annual journey to the north, which he did every spring. He came upon the giant ogress, Quoots-hooi. Now, Toolux was very hungry, and he asked Quoots-hooi for food, and she gave him a net instead and told him he must catch his own fish. But he was impatient, and he did not like waiting to eat when he was so hungry, so when he caught a small whale in his net and Quoots-hooi told him that he must only cut the whale lengthwise, and must use a shell knife to do it, he ignored her. He cut himself a large steak. It was a terrible mistake, because the whale transformed instantly into an enormous bird—Hahness. She flapped her great wings, blotting out the sun, and the world shook with thunder. She was the Thunderbird, and she flew north, while Toolux and Quoots-hooi chased after. The attempt was futile; they could not catch her.

“It was some time later when Quoots-hooi was looking for berries on Swallalochast, which is known to us as Saddle Mountain, and she found a great nest filled with eggs. This nest belonged to Hahness. Quoots-hooi was hungry, and so she sat
down to eat the eggs, tossing the shells down the mountain as she did so. These shells turned into people, the Chinook people, and it was how they were formed.

“Hahness was furious when she found what Quoots-hooi had done to her nest. She sought out Toolux to help her find the ogress, and each spring, the Thunderbird and the South Wind come north to find her.

“And this is why one must only ever split the salmon lengthwise when it is cut, because otherwise they won’t run, and the Chinook people will go hungry.
Kani, kani
.”

“‘
Kani
,’” he repeated. “What does that mean?”

“It is. It lives. Loosely translated,” I said.

Daniel nodded. He was staring at the salmon in his hands, stroking its smooth surfaces, and I thought of last night, of the feel of his fingers on my skin, and my mouth went dry. I said, “Those masks on the wall. One of them is Hahness.”

He glanced at them. “Which one?”

I stood, going over to it, reaching up to take it from the nail it hung upon. It was quite large, nearly the length of my arms outspread. A bird face, carved of cedar, with a huge sloping beak, spread wings on either side. “This is a fine one, but I’ve seen better. My father sold one where the beak opened to show a human face, and the wings were longer even than these.” I ran my hand over its curved beak, painted red. The cedar bark fringe decorating the top of its head and the wings shivered. The inside of the mask was smooth, stained with smoke and human sweat; the mask had been well used. I fit it to my face, breathing deep the scent of smoke and cedar.

“You look fierce wearing it,” he said.

I lowered it and made a face at him. “It seems it should be heavy, but it’s not. They had to dance wearing it.”

“Do you know the dance?”

I shook my head, fingering the finely shredded fringe. “Only men dance it. My father knew it. He’d seen it once when he was
up north and was invited to a winter ceremony. He described it to me. I can imagine it quite well.”

“I’d guess you can. Dance it for me.”

I looked at him and shook my head. “I hardly know it.”

“I’ll bet you could imagine it if you tried.”

I should have laughed and put the mask aside. But the way he looked at me urged me to it, and...more than that, I wanted to.
Do what you want
, her voice said, and I put the mask to my face and closed my eyes and fell into my imaginings. Men gathered around the fire in the center of a longhouse, smoke rising to the hole in the top but not well. Filling the room with a gray haze. The clicking, nasally talk and laughter, and the scents of tobacco and the smoked fish hanging in the rafters, strings of dried clams, sweat. The sound of a drum, music made by voices, grunting and rhythmic, and the dancer, coming into the circle now, half-bent, the ball of one foot tapping and then the other, outstretched arms to mimic the wings on either side of his face, his eyes shining through the slits in the mask on either side of the great beak. Dodging and soaring, tipping wings at those sitting in the circle, arching back to let out a whoop, and then the other foot down, one and two and one, and the drums beating loud in my ears, the
nah-nah-nah
of the voices joining and harmonizing, and the story of Hahness and Toolux and Quoots-hooi and the creation of the tribes played out before them. My heart beating fast, hard to breathe against the mask, sweating. One and two and soar, and from somewhere an organ beating out the tune, raw and a little desperate, and I twirled round and round and round until I was dizzy, until the vision fled and I was myself again, there again in the great room of my own house, turning in a circle, laughing at the joy of it, and there was Daniel, matching the organ to my steps as if he saw the whole thing with me, and that seemed right as well, as it should be.

I collapsed onto the organ bench beside him, the cedar fringe pulling strands of my hair with it as I lowered the mask. I pushed
them back, breathing hard, still laughing, and he twisted, smiling, to look at me.

“You belong in a cave somewhere, brandishing a spear,” he teased.

I laughed. “Yes, well, don’t tell anyone. I’m quite certain it would be frowned upon.”

“No wonder. A dance like that...we’re not so civilized as we like to think, are we? We’re only apes wearing clothing. Steps away from savagery.”

I said, “I’m not certain I like the sound of that.”

“You can thank Herbert Spencer and his theories for it. He’s made us afraid of ourselves and each other. He can’t banish the emotions that rule us, but he can make us hate ourselves for having them.” Daniel met my gaze.

I drew back, disturbed by what I saw in his eyes, by the conversation beneath the surface, the words he was saying without saying them. “If we don’t rule ourselves, we become no better than the Indians.”

“But you don’t believe that,” he whispered. “I know you don’t believe they’re savages.”

“No,” I managed. “I don’t believe it.”

“To be civilized means we must hide who we are,” he said. “But then we don’t really live, do we?”

I did not know what to say. I could only stare at him, and he kept my gaze for a moment before he looked down. He took my hand, uncurling my fingers, laying them out flat in his while he pressed the tip of his finger to the hollow of my wrist. I shivered, and then he touched one of the bracelet charms, tracing the symbol upon it, a feather-like touch.

He didn’t look at me, but only twisted the twine about his finger, tightening it so I felt its bite, then letting it unwind again, and then he touched the vein in my wrist, slowly moving upward, up my arm to the cuff of my sleeve.

I pulled my hand gently from his grasp, curling my fingers into my palm. I could not find my voice.

He raised his gaze to mine. “Last night, I”—he swallowed convulsively—“when you were in the bath...” He reached out. Two fingers touched the leather thong at my neck, slid to the pulsebeat in my throat, and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he traced the leather until it disappeared into my bodice, the same path I’d made. His fingers stopped there, burning against my skin, and the vision washed over me again. The way my own fingers had traced down to the tooth, slipping lower, fingers I’d imagined were his, and my palm itched. I remembered the rest of it, upstairs in my room, the way I’d felt him in my hand, the way I’d stroked him—

And he saw it. There was no possible way he could have known or understood, and yet he did, I knew it with a kind of knowing that was impossible as well. Yes, impossible, but the connection between us pulsed and flared, and that was impossible too. That I should feel him so intently. That I should know him. I reached up to take his hand from my collarbone, but instead of pushing him away I found myself clutching his fingers, afraid to let go.

He closed his eyes. He whispered, “Leonie—”

I dropped his hand, leaping to my feet, putting out my arms as if I meant to stop him when he didn’t move, when he only opened his eyes and watched me.

Live.

The voice echoed, so loud in my head I was surprised he didn’t start at it. “I can’t,” I found myself saying desperately. “I don’t know how.”

And then I ran.

I stayed in my room for hours. I locked myself in, locked myself away, hearing Daniel’s words:
if we hide who we are we don’t really live.
I sat in the cane rocker at the window and watched the sky darken, and still I stared. I heard him come upstairs. I heard the close of his door, and I pulled my dressing gown more tightly about me and told myself to go to bed. But I didn’t. I saw
the moon come up, white light on the bay beyond, and the wind blowing the clouds across it.