Sisters of Grass (18 page)

MRS. SUSANNAH JACKSON AT HOME, SPAHOMIN
. September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

An elderly woman, seated on a chair on a weathered wooden porch, looking straight at the viewer. The chair has thrown a shadow of fine fretwork onto the wall behind it, where animal skins are stretched as though to dry. The woman is wearing a calico dress, bare legs, a pair of moccasins. Her own shadow appears behind her, almost exactly fitting the outline of her form on the chair. She is holding a nosegay of flowers, and on her left wrist can be seen what appears to be a tattoo.

Nicholas was packaging Margaret's photographs into a special portfolio to send to Dr. Boas. He thought they were extremely fine, and he wanted his mentor to see them.

“He's very interested in photography itself, and not just as a way of recording anthropology research. He often recommends exhibits for us to see. I remember one in particular, the work of a man named Adam Vroman, who spent a number of years making photographs of the Indians of the pueblos. His portraits are magnificent. Another man, O'Sullivan, he'd photographed some of the terrible battles of the Civil War, Gettysburg, Bull Run, the Slaughter Pen at Round Top, and others as well. Later he went west with geographical survey teams. His pictures of the ruined village sites near the Grand Canyon are extraordinary. And there's a beauty I remember, one of a cliff house at Canyon de Chelly. You can see the striations of the rock, his focus is so clear.”

The places sounded a haunted poetry to Margaret as she watched her photographs disappear into tissue and card. Canyon de Chelly, Bull Run . . . for a moment, she saw a grey field with some trees to the side and bodies lying side by side, like felled logs. Some were draped with striped blankets, looking sodden. She could smell stale gunpowder and the cloying odour of blood. When Grandmother Stuart had visited two years earlier, she and William sat one evening by a blazing fire of pine logs discussing the terrible war that had occurred in their country. William had been a boy in Astoria during the battles of the Civil War, but news of them had come across the land by newspaper and telegraph. His own father had been a supporter, in word at least, of the Union Army, and had been angry as the lists of the dead, published in the newspapers, grew longer and longer. William and his mother talked quietly of those days, and Margaret heard the names of the foreign cities softly punctuating their conversation: Petersburg, Richmond, and loveliest of all, Arlington, Virginia, a name like falling water. Now, remembering Arlington, she shuddered, associating it for reasons beyond her knowledge with loss, with the terrible ceremonies of the dead. Shaking her head to clear her sight, she began to make a list of the photographs she was sending. Although she had the plates still, she wanted to keep track of the prints.

I have dreamed of a girl.

In all weathers I've travelled up to stand on the high plateau, to look around me half in excitement, half in fear. Although I know enough of my family background to know that the Nicola Valley does not figure in my past, no relation farmed here, no great-ancestor walked across these wide grasslands trapping small animals and skinning them carefully, no one fished the lakes, no one drew a needle of porcupine quill under the surface of a child's skin, pulling a thread blackened with charcoal to mark her for life. Yet I am no less branded than the horses that come to the truck, the arrows and crosses of their belonging delicate scars that tie them forever to a patch of grass. Each time I come, I wonder what I will discover — a small wildflower unnoticed until now; the remains of a blackbird's nest; a shadow in a corner of the photographs taken of trees, buildings, views of the far-off hills. And the shadow might have been a girl, tracing the narrative of her own belonging, unaware of me waiting in the years to come to find her in the pollen, the seeds I bring unnoticed in my clothing, the clump of southernwood I dig up with a spoon to take home for a dry garden. Waiting on the side of the road below Hamilton Mountain, I almost see her on her bay mare, obscured by dust and the shadow of a cloud. When I sleep, she enters my dreams quietly, leaving a fine mesh of memory threaded with the tiniest of keepsakes, the hollow at my ankle pierced with the sharp seeds of rye.

At the bottom of the box of memorabilia, something has slid between the flaps of cardboard. An envelope, powdery as moth wings, foxed like dried and fading blood, and inside, a piece of paper folded into squares. I know what I will find before I open it: the certificate telling of her death, influenza, 1908, before she has even turned twenty. The language of mortality is so formal. Schedule B — Deaths. Name and surname of deceased. Certified cause of death, and duration of illness. Religious Denomination. The careful lettering of her name, the duration, three weeks, her physician, Dr. Tuthill. And was there a moment when the hand paused before filling in Presbyterian, from her father's Scottish upbringing, did a heart remember a girl crouched in a sweat lodge, sweet juniper steaming on hot rocks?
How angels move
. Is it too much to imagine her still among the hills or seen in the cheekbones of a girl selling ice cream in Merritt, wiping tables at the Quilchena Hotel, leading a group of green riders across the rangeland at Douglas Lake?

After the photographs had gone to New York, Margaret was too busy to think about camera work. The ranch was gearing up for the fall cattle drive, and as usual she would accompany her father on the round-up and then to Kamloops to the buyers. They would take two full days and part of a third to make the trip, spending the first night near Stump Lake, where the cowhands and the Stuarts would sleep in an abandoned cabin and barn while the cattle rested and foraged on bunchgrass. The second night would be spent between Brigade Lake and Knutsford, depending on time and weather. They'd rise very early on the third morning and try to drive the cattle to the corrals by the railway station by mid-morning. Some years they would have trouble — a minor stampede when a grizzly met them on the trail, tearing the chest out of a steer before the cowboss shot him dead; some losses when a couple of young steers got into a patch of larkspur and ended up bloated on the ground, unable to continue; and once there was a sudden hard freeze-up at the higher elevation that upset the cattle and horses, coming as it did without warning.

Nicholas was working hard at his information-gathering, and there wasn't much time for long rides together on his irregular trips to the valley from his base at Spences Bridge. He wrote letters to Margaret, which she would take out to the creek, reading them under the cottonwoods which were beginning to lose their leaves.

I've been out to a series of deep pools near Spences Bridge where a few men were using bag nets of bark and twine. These were hung from hoops of fir with rings made of animal horn. They are very beautiful and work well, too. The feasts of salmon are wonderful, and everywhere you can smell the fish drying on racks in the sun. At first I found it almost nauseating, but now it is simply a note in the complex melody of the air. I was lucky enough to be asked to go night-fishing with a group of young men Charles Walkem introduced me to. They used torches of pitch-pine, and it was eerie to watch them spearing the fish from rock shelves along the river, like looking at old photographs. We went out in a canoe, too, and they speared from the sides of the boat. Some of the fish were enormous.

Margaret was familiar with these methods from her mother's family, although on the smaller creeks they usually used weirs. She had helped take fish that had been lured into traps within the weir systems, some of them speared and some of them raked in with gaffs. Her mother's brothers always brought a supply of fresh and dried fish to the Stuarts in exchange for beef or pork or young stock. She knew what Nicholas meant by the odour of drying fish. It was everywhere this time of year, hanging in the air near the drying racks and shifted about by wind. She thought of it as one of the smells of autumn, tied to the season like new hay to summer and fresh scallions to spring. Sometimes in winter she would pull an item of clothing, unworn since the fall, out of her wardrobe and be surprised at the faint smell of smoke and fish contained in its fibres.

The prospect of Nicholas leaving entirely caught Margaret unaware on a visit he made to the valley in early October. Walking in the field behind the home ranch, he told her he had nearly completed the work he had set out for himself upon arriving.

“I've made notes, made drawings, photographed everything and everyone, conducted many interviews, and I can't really put off going back to the university any longer. I still have course work to complete, and then I'll treat the translation as a thesis, perhaps writing a monograph of my own as a kind of appendix to Mr. Teit's work.”

Margaret was quiet. She had not forgotten his other life, exactly, but in her pleasure at his company, the attraction she felt not just to him but to his ideas and work, she had put aside her knowledge that his time in the valley would end. She looked at him and touched his arm, not quite trusting her voice to say what she felt. He took her hand and they walked a little further.

“I have been thinking almost constantly of what I need to say to you, Margaret,” Nicholas began, his own voice tentative. “You see, I could not have imagined, when I arrived here, how I would come to feel about you. Everything seemed so clear — I would gather my data, talk to people, make some contacts that might serve me over the years for future work in this area. I suppose I hoped to find the valley congenial, even to make a friend or two. Those things are true beyond my dreams. But I had not counted on falling in love, though that is the most important thing of all. And am I right in thinking your feelings are the same?”

Margaret nodded, and for a few minutes they walked, the ranch buildings receding as they began to climb the eastern ridge above the field. The profession of love surprised her a little; she knew the current of emotion running between them was powerful, but she hadn't yet given it a name. She thought of it like water, sometimes fast moving as a spring freshet, sometimes more placid and quiet, like a pool. And, like water, mysterious and lovely.

“Nicholas, it's hard to talk about this, to find the right words, although I've thought it out in my own mind. Before you arrived, I really had not considered the future, my future, that is. The days passed happily enough, there were things to do, to look forward to, but no future, if you know what I mean. Then my father took us to Kamloops to hear Madame Albani sing, and I began to wonder about my life. There are girls who stay with their families all their lives, my Aunt Elizabeth did that, but I don't think it would be a good thing. We are isolated, as you know, and I wouldn't want to become one of those elderly spinsters, fearful of the world.”

“You have a year or two to go before we can think of you as a spinster, and then some before you are elderly.”

Margaret continued, “I have also begun to see a little how I am placed in the world and how it might affect my future. There is Spahomin and my relations, there is the ranch, and there is also Astoria. Aunt Elizabeth, who is certainly not fearful of the world, wrote earlier in the year to suggest that I might want to come to them for an extended stay, perhaps even travel to Europe with them. I kept thinking that I had to choose which family I belong to more.”

“I hadn't thought of it like that, but yes, I can see your difficulty. You have a foot in two worlds, it seems, but I wonder if you must choose one or the other. Can you have both?”

Margaret felt grateful. “I'm beginning to understand that a choice would be impossible. My grandmother Jackson once told me that her people mourned the loss of their territory when the reserves were established, and it was more than the fact that they had lost land, because they didn't exactly think of the land as their possession. It was more that they knew who they were in relation to rocks and other places in the landscape, places that had meaning or where important things had happened. And not just in their own time but in memory. Well, I never knew the Nicola Valley before the reserves, of course, but I have never known any other place, either. Everything that ever happened to me has happened here. Each place on our ranch speaks to me, it has its own meaning or memory attached to it. The corral where I learned to ride, the cranes' marsh where I saw the train robbers. I have become acquainted with ancestors in the hills and pastures in a strange way. And this is the country where I met you, too. Yet I feel I must try to do something with my life that is mine. I was so happy when you taught me to use your camera and then when Father bought me my own because I thought it might be the thing I've been hoping for, without knowing what to expect. I would like to learn about photography, and I mean to now, so that I can make a record of the lives here, past and present.”

Nicholas was watching her while she spoke, listening as she tried to explain something that was obviously still forming in her mind. “Shall we sit down here in the grass? I have a suggestion to make, and I'd rather not be panting while I talk. This ridge is steeper than I thought, but what a wonderful view!”

Looking down, they could see the ranch buildings and hear the voices of Margaret's sisters and brother at play. A line of immaculate laundry was strung between two cottonwoods, and the sheets billowed and danced in the wind like ghosts.

“I wonder if you would consider coming to New York for an extended visit. Dr. Boas telegraphed me to say that he thinks your photographs are splendid and that you would benefit from a course in data-collecting if you're serious about continuing with photography. The ethnology field he wants to develop is still brand new, and he needs people who have something to offer. From what you've said about making photographs, I think there would be a place for you. I know my family would welcome you to stay in our home, my mother in particular, because she's so grateful for everything your family has done for me. And I would love to show you the sights of New York and take you to concerts, though nothing will compare to the vitality of Jack Thynne's banjo or that Irish fellow's fiddle. What do you say? Please say you'll come, and then I'll begin to make arrangements. I must leave soon, sooner than you'd be able to, perhaps, but I'll find out about trains and anything else you'll need to know.”