Sarah Canary (24 page)

Four of Night’s daughters were waiting for him at Night’s house. They were very beautiful, and on their foreheads each had painted one aspect of the moon. The youngest girl wore the full moon, the next youngest wore the waxing moon, the next the waning moon, and the oldest wore only a tiny crescent. The girls bathed Raven and rubbed his body with the oil of the dead so that he became as black as Night. They offered him food, but it was the food of the dead, and Raven did not eat it. He ate roots instead. He went to bed with the four daughters of the Night. In the morning, the girls got dressed to go hunting. ‘Why are there only four of you?’ Raven asked them. ‘Night told me he had five daughters.’

The girls pointed to a box at one end of the room. ‘There is our eldest sister,’ they said. ‘She is the dark moon that no man can see. She is your wife, too, and she slept with us last night, but she never comes out of her box in the daytime. She is very beautiful in the dark, but the brightness of day would kill her. You must believe us and not try to see her for yourself.’ The four daughters of the Night left Raven alone with the box. Raven opened it at once.

‘I know this story,’ said B.J. Only instead of Raven, it was Pandora, and instead of the daughter of the Night, it was all the troubles of the world. Plus hope. Except for that, it was the same story.

Stop thinking, said the blanket. Just listen. When Night had found Raven, he had seen Coyote’s box. Inside, he thought, there must be a woman as beautiful as my eldest daughter. And he had gone back later to fetch it. This was the box that Raven opened, so the woman inside was not Night’s daughter, but Coyote’s.

‘You stink of death,’ she told Raven. ‘You have eaten the food of the dead.’

Raven denied it. ‘I ate only roots,’ he said. But she would not listen. She left the house of the Night and went on the dark paths and Raven followed her, knowing as long as he stayed in the dark, Night could not see him. ‘Roots!’ he called to the daughter of Coyote. ‘Roots!’

The daughter of Coyote walked many miles in the skyworld looking for Spider. She wanted to talk him into lowering her back to earth. She could not find him, but she found his cord. She threw it out of the skyworld and began to descend it. Raven flew behind her. ‘Roots!’ he called. ‘Roots!’ The cord did not reach to earth. The sky was much higher than the daughter of Coyote expected. She fell the rest of the way and it was a long fall.

On earth, everything had been changed. Everything was the way things are now. The Changer had changed everyone except for Coyote’s daughter, because she had been hidden in her box in the house of the Night and the Changer had not seen her. And so Coyote’s daughter is more like a coyote than most women and more like a woman than most coyotes.

‘What do you think?’ Purdy asked.

‘I think it’s semaphore,’ B.J. said. ‘I’m getting most of it.’ He expected Chin to be pleased with this, but Chin wore his usual unhappy, eyes-closed-to-slits expression and didn’t respond to B.J. Chin spoke to Purdy instead, which was rude of Chin, but B.J. understood. In Chin’s defense, B.J. had noticed that Chin suffered from some sort of phobia about boats and another about Indians, and right now Chin was trying to rent the one from the other. Of course, he was unhappy.

Boats had maimed and killed many more people in the Puget Sound area than Indians had, even counting the war in 1855-56, and yet a certain uncomfortableness around Indians was considered only natural and this same uncomfortableness around boats was a sign of insanity. B.J. didn’t understand. One of the men in the Steilacoom asylum had been bruised and scalded on the
Fairy
when her boiler exploded just out of the Steilacoom dock. He had been thrown into the air like a Fourth of July rocket and he’d lost the hearing in his left ear. He still had a red mark on his chest, shaped like the pad of a bear’s paw and just about the size of a watch, B.J. thought, but he couldn’t be sure about the size and it might have been smaller.

Dr Carr specialized in boat phobias and would have found Chin an interesting study. He had told B.J. once that a sudden irrational fear of boats was common in women about to give birth. And then B.J. knew, the whole nation knew, about Abraham Lincoln’s recurring black boat dreams. Although Chin might not know. B.J. made a mental note to tell Chin about this sometime when he had nothing else to say.

In fact, and less in Chin’s defense, Chin often didn’t respond to B.J., not just when they were around boats and Indians. B.J. minded this, because it made him wonder sometimes if he had spoken at all, which made him wonder if he was really there. He could always ask Chin, though, and when he did, Chin always told him he was, so it was better than before he had met Chin.

Chin often didn’t respond to other people either, making B.J. answer for him. B.J. minded this, too, because he was afraid to be wrong, but he was becoming less afraid. Chin was smart and often he told B.J. how to respond to people so that B.J. looked like the smart one. It wasn’t as hard to look smart as B.J. had always thought. He could do it himself sometimes, even without Chin. He said something to Purdy now about Belle Starr, something Chin probably wouldn’t have known any more than he’d know about Abraham Lincoln, although Chin could surprise you sometimes and he knew about Patrick Henry and he could recite the first two lines of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ just like everyone else could.

B.J. looked back at the blanket. It was trembling in anticipation. But the Changer knows that he missed her, the blanket said with a sharp flap and two small flutters. He looks for the daughter of Coyote. He looks for a woman who is followed by a black bird. When he finds her, when he changes her, the Change will be complete. Then time will stop. Then everything will stay, always, the way it is now. Then there will be no more changes.

‘Is this a good thing?’ B.J. asked the blanket. ‘Would Indians want this?’

‘Is that man with you?’ Sam was looking away from them, down toward the beach. B.J. turned to see Harold pushing the smallest of the canoes into the water. The smallest canoe was a fishing canoe, made of a single piece of fir, meant for rivers and lakes. It was too little for the canal, unless Harold stayed close to the shoreline.

‘Why is that man stealing my canoe?’ Sam asked.

Harold gripped the dugout by the gunwale and tilted it. Water poured off the legs of his pants as he climbed inside. B.J. watched Harold and let Chin answer Sam. Chin’s answer was a shout in a code B.J. couldn’t translate, but this didn’t mean Sam might not understand. Except that Sam repeated his question. ‘That man has stolen my canoe. Why?’

Purdy cleared his throat. ‘That man is the manager of the Alaskan Wild Woman. She left Seabeck this morning on the
Biddy
with someone else. Probably he wants to get her back. We were hoping to catch up to her ourselves.’

‘Is there some way we could get to her first?’ Chin asked in a funny voice, as if he might have hurt his throat with his shouting, as if his throat was full of fog. He looked at B.J. Help, his expression said. It was an expression B.J. had become familiar with. Chin was telling B.J. to say something, but he was not telling B.J. what to say.

‘Harold wants her to stop,’ B.J. told Purdy. ‘He’s not fooled by her innocent Wild Woman act any longer.’ He looked at Chin for guidance, for approval or disapproval.

Chin offered neither. He was staring instead out over the water, where Harold and the little canoe grew even littler. ‘He does not have her interests in his heart,’ Chin added in his low unhappy voice as if he wished he were not speaking at all.

‘No,’ said B.J. ‘Nor her chopstick. Not anymore.’

‘Three dollars to rent the
hyas canim
,’ said Sam.

‘Fine,’ said Purdy.

‘I will take you to the
Biddy.
On the way you will help me recover my stolen canoe.’ Sam looked out over the canal, where Harold could no longer be seen. ‘Three dollars and my wife will come and paddle, too,’ Sam said.

The sky behind the shanty darkened, the wind died, and somewhere in the distance, somewhere in the mountains, there was thunder. Everyone stopped for a moment and looked toward it. Even the seagulls were silent.

‘The dwarves are playing tenpins,’ said Purdy lightheartedly.

‘The Thunderbird is flapping his wings,’ said Sam Clams, and his tone was one of ominous import.

‘The Thunder God is punishing lazy dragons,’ said Chin, whose boat phobia was showing again in the trembling of his voice.

The blanket was still.

~ * ~

The canoe had a flat stern for rough waters and a bow carved with the face of a frog. It tilted wildly until Sam slapped the blade of his paddle against the surface of the water, holding it there a moment to keep them from capsizing. Sam was steering from the backmost position. B.J. heard the sound of the paddle striking the water. He turned from his place just behind Purdy in the bow in time to see Chin dropping his paddle onto the floor of the canoe and grabbing with both hands at the gunwale. B.J. thought that Chin was probably as white as he was ever going to get.

Sam had given Chin a woman’s paddle, which was an insult if Chin had only understood it as one. Instead Chin had simply accepted the paddle he was offered. Now he retrieved it, dipping into the water with the shallow, splashing stroke of a woman, only more awkward. B.J. had seen mother ducks feign injury and flap above the water as if they had only one good wing in order to draw a hunter away from the nest. This charade was what Chin’s paddling reminded him of.

Behind Chin sat Sam’s wife, a short woman with long hair. No one had actually told B.J. her name, but Purdy had called her Old Patsy when they first took their seats in the dugout. Really she wasn’t that old. She had waited behind while the men climbed aboard, pushing the men and the canoe into the water over a track of sticks and then wading after it to scramble in. ‘Come on, Old Patsy,’ Purdy had said from his seat in the bow. Old Patsy spoke only to Sam and not in a language B.J. could decipher or in one Purdy seemed to know. She had a paddle like Chin’s and a quick, graceful stroke. Sam steered. His paddle was made of yew, five feet long, a fine expensive
Makah
paddle that he drove deep into the canal. They all sat to one side and leaned against the wind, which came from behind and across them. The paddling was almost unnecessary to their forward motion; the wind moved them northward, but without their own efforts and without Sam’s steering, it would have also blown them back to shore.

Sam and Purdy had begun the trip with an argument about the advisability of using a sail. Sam had two sails stowed in the bottom of the canoe. They had been pieced together out of old flour sacks, but Sam said the wind was too strong to risk them. ‘One sail only,’ Purdy suggested, but Sam still refused, hinting that the crew was unreliable.

A wave splashed up and over the gunwale. B.J. was already tired. His hands were wet and cold where the water ran down the paddle every time he lifted it for another stroke. He was beginning to feel the strain in one spot beneath his shoulder blade, the same spot that had always hurt him at the asylum when he had wood-chopping duties. He rested a moment, rubbing his back, and watching the shoreline. The dugout moved quickly. The scenery was continually changing as if a long painting were being rolled by them: sometimes beaches, sometimes forest, once a group of Indian shanties thrown up together along the stony coast and all tipped in the same direction as the wind. Small, muddy children came out as they passed, singing and whistling and pounding on a drum to give them good weather. B.J. waved, turning when they were behind him, until the shore curved out and he couldn’t see them anymore. Sometimes B.J. saw logs that had been lost on their way to the lumber mills and were now beached or wedged against rockier parts of the coast. An occasional seagull flew overhead. Once, they passed a tree that bent double in the wind right before their eyes and cracked across its trunk. It fell over into the canal several yards behind them with an enormous splash, sending them skidding forward. The incident made B.J. remember Dr Carr’s suspicions concerning the magnetized trees left behind for the French Revolution. It was a dangerous world, no doubt about it, and there was really no way to anticipate its many dangers. Not when trees were willing to sacrifice themselves for malice.

They rounded a small point, struggling with all their weight and muscle against the wind, the big canoe blown almost sideways. Then their direction changed and the wind was entirely favorable now, throwing them forward at great speed. They all pulled their paddles in, setting them on the thwarts to rest. They flew past the entrance to a small bay with a stony beach. A large rock jutted out into the water, the waves battering themselves white against it.

Behind the big rock was another stand of trees, whose tops were bent and tossed in the wind. Halfway past, B.J. saw a canoe lodged between two of the trees, the bow and the stem set within the two forks of four branches. The branches beneath it bent. Those above blew about. The canoe seemed to shake precariously in midair. B.J. turned, pointing to make sure that Chin saw it as well. ‘Rock-a-bye baby in the treetop,’ B.J. said.

‘How did a canoe get into a tree?’ Chin asked. B.J. wondered if Chin thought the canoe might have simply blown there on an earlier occasion when someone had been foolish enough to try to take it out onto the canal in bad weather. He looked that frightened.

‘The Indians bury their dead in canoes,’ B.J. told him, ‘since they don’t bury them. They put the canoes in trees or sometimes they build scaffolds if there are no good trees.’ When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.