Written in Stone Page 6

  I couldn’t believe it, a blanket worth as much as a man’s mask! And it wasn’t even a Chilkat blanket, with the perfect circles and patterns that show the faces of Bear or Raven. It was a plain Salish blanket with broad stripes in three colors. It was finely woven, probably one of the older dog wool blankets, but still, if I could learn to weave, I’d have blankets worth twice as much. It wouldn’t matter if no chief or famous house could give me a commission. I’d sell to white collectors and museums. The baskets were pathetic by comparison—two dollars, five at the very most for the big ones. The shopkeeper didn’t set a higher price for Dora’s or Annabelle’s work, even though it was better than anything else in the store.

  That’s it, I promised myself. I’ll weave, and then I’ll have enough money to buy my own wool and pearl buttons for a button blanket, enough money to stay on my own land. As we moved on down the street, I remembered the design my father had drawn for me. I figured yards of wool in red and black and imagined how I would decorate the borders. Maybe I would make an outline of waves to represent the dreams of my father, to show that I was a daughter of whalers.

  The department store was a block farther on. The men headed downstairs for tools and hardware. The women skipped the ready-made clothes and church hats on the main floor and went up the broad wooden staircase for dry goods. Aunt Loula picked out bolts of flannel and broadcloth for shirts, hard canvas for men’s work pants, and plain muslin for underthings. My fingers ached at the thought of all that sewing.

  Ida and I matched threads at the ribbon counter. There were two shopgirls there; one was winding new ribbon onto spools, and the other stood at the cutting table, folding and marking remnants. They carried on an easy conversation about the latest Valentino movie and the cut of fall blouses. They were as relaxed with each other as sisters, and I watched them out of the corner of my eye. When I spoke with Anita or Dorothy, we sometimes talked about movies or a book we had read at school, but we never got around to ribbon color or the fashion of ready-made clothes.

  The ribbon winder had sea-green eyes and hair as yellow as a fall leaf. She wore it in one thick braid that fell over her shoulder. She took one color of ribbon after another and laid it on her shoulder so her friend could admire the effect.

  “Baby blue, oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  “Blue goes with blond,” the other insisted. “It says so right in the Ladies Home Journal.”

  “But every Sonja from Little Sweden will be wearing blue,” the ribbon girl said. “How about red, scarlet red!”

  The friend burst out laughing. “As if Mrs. Hardy would let you out her door in red. ‘I have a reputation to keep up, young lady, even if you don’t!’ I bet she was a prison matron before she ran our boardinghouse.”

  I liked the remnant folder better. She had jet-black hair done up in a twist, brown eyes, and shoulders as broad as mine. She never wasted a motion in folding and labeling her yard goods.

  “Lavender, that’s what you want,” the black-haired girl went on. “Soft like blue, but distinctive. Not that you’ve got a penny to spare for ribbon, what with stopping at the chocolate shop every other day.”

  “Oh, you can afford to be virtuous.” The ribbon girl pouted. “You already have a beau to buy you chocolates.”

  I could be that brown-eyed shopgirl. Any fool could stand at a counter, dust goods, and make change. I could move to town. The schoolmaster always said we should. I could get a proper job and live with other girls my age and spend my days indoors in a clean skirt and blouse thinking of nothing more difficult than what movie to watch and who to dance with at the Woodchoppers’ Ball.

  I tried to catch the shopgirl’s eye to see if she would smile at me, but she didn’t give Ida and me a glance. When Aunt Loula finally came to the cutting table with a dozen bolts of cloth, an older woman appeared from a back room to do the cutting and tallying up.

  Our next stop was the grocer. Grandma shooed me and Ida off to the city park, while they ordered their cases and barrels. Ida and I picked up a game of kickball with some town girls. The grown-ups met us an hour later, and we ate our lunch under the red-gold maple trees. Afterward, we walked to the Victory Movie Parlor. Grandpa was all smiles.

  “Gifts for hardworking grandchildren,” he said. “Littlest first.”

  Ida got knitting needles and a skein of thick pink yarn. I could hear her crow already. With ten minutes’ practice, she would be better at knitting than I was.

  Charlie got a Hohner harmonica and immediately picked out a jazzy tune he had heard that afternoon.

  “I chose these for you,” Grandma said, with an arm around my shoulder. She opened her hand to show five pencils and a Swiss folding knife. I hid my disappointment behind a smile.

  “Pencils, thanks,” I said. “I guess you noticed, I haven’t been keeping my diary.”

  Grandma shrugged. “Ink is tricky,” she said.

  I opened the knife and worked on a pencil point. The shavings released a faint cedar smell.

  Grandma lifted my chin. “When you write a word down, you own that word forever,” she said.

  The Victory was the fanciest place in town. It was a glittering palace on the outside, with electric lights and mirrors. Inside, it had green carpeting with gold swirls and a velvet curtain with thick gold fringe. The seats had cushions, and the lamps had sparkling diamonds. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the Queen of Sheba sitting right up in the front row.

  I felt like royalty walking down the center aisle. We took seats in the middle row, and Ida pestered me to death with questions about the movie stars on painted posters along the side walls. It was Charlie Chaplin that afternoon, with a musical interlude from the piano player before the show and at intermission. We had only been seated a moment when a well-dressed woman stood up with a sniff of disdain. She clutched her two children close and pushed past our chairs. She made a big show of sitting as far from us as possible.

  There was a moment’s pause while the rest of the theatergoers got over the need to stare at us. Charlie leaned toward Henry, batted his eyelashes, and pretended to point and gossip about some scandalous thing. Aunt Loula smiled, and Grandma smacked Charlie on the arm but not very hard. Then Charlie stood up and walked in front of our chairs, doing the white-woman wag you see sometimes in the well-dressed ladies in town. Ida and Henry laughed out loud. Grandma hid her smile behind a handkerchief, and Grandpa resorted to a fit of coughing.

  The theater filled for the matinee, all but the seats nearest us. People laughed and chatted with their neighbors. Men argued the board-foot price of lumber. Ladies admired each other’s hats and gossiped over the skirt length of certain unchaperoned girls at the theater. I had always loved the busy variety of people at the movies. I loved feeling as if I were a part of the story told on the screen and sharing it with people who seemed so different but laughed at all the same things I did. I could see Ida drinking it all in, but for the first time I saw what she didn’t. No one spoke to us. No one even looked in our direction. We were dressed as well as all but the fanciest moviegoers. We had paid the same cash price for a ticket, but their silent indifference said you don’t belong here, as clear as shouting. Charlie Chaplin was as funny as ever, but this time I didn’t laugh.

  I bet no one scorned those shopgirls. I bet they could sit wherever they chose in theaters, churches, and cafés. I was no darker than the black-haired girl. I did not look so foreign as a Chinaman, and I spoke better English than any off-the-boat immigrant working man. I was so angry I wanted to spit on that high-and-mighty woman. But what if she was the boardinghouse matron? What if she did the hiring at the department store? I would have to hide my Indian life if I wanted to live in town. I would have to make up a story about my circumstances. I would fashion myself a character like the young women in the penny dreadful novels the older girls passed around at school, a virtuous girl who hit hard times and had to make a living on nothing but her own determination.

  I could do it if I wanted t
o. I could put on a white woman’s clothes and high voice and little steps. But then I would never be able to sing or dance in my own language, never be able to bring a visitor or a token from home to my boardinghouse in town. I weighed it against my life on the reservation with all its work and worry, and both seemed too heavy to bear.

  Uncle Jeremiah and I paddled the small canoe home that evening since it was empty of clams. Daylight held until we reached the mouth of Grays Harbor, and after a break for a meal, the rising moon gave us light to travel by.

  The little canoe held the lighter goods—cloth, needles, thread, soap, two pairs of spike-soled logger boots, and two pairs of long rubber cannery-worker gloves. I looked at them, and Uncle Jeremiah saw me look. We said nothing for more than a mile.

  “We cannot always count on four dollars a pound for clams,” he said. “Next year, something else will be fashionable. Next year, the Hood Canal beaches will be clean and more shellfish will be on the market. We won’t have to go away to find work this winter, but next year …” Uncle Jeremiah went quiet, and we both watched the fall constellations rise from the horizon to point our way.

  “Next year, we must be ready for anything,” he said.

  “But it’s so far away,” I said. “We would only see each other every other month. Maybe less. What about Grandma and Grandpa? They couldn’t possibly go work in a factory. Ida’s too little. Would we leave her behind with nobody but Grandma and Grandpa to take care of her?”

  I was glad Uncle Jeremiah sat behind me in the canoe where he couldn’t see my face. I hated sharing a room with Ida, but the idea of her sleeping all alone made my heart sink. It wasn’t natural for a child to sleep in a room alone.

  “Maybe this museum man who comes next week will have carving work for us,” Uncle Jeremiah said. “We don’t have to go away yet, but we can’t stay on land that won’t support us either.”

  Maybe he’ll be a bone hunter and dig up graves, I thought, but I didn’t say it because Uncle Jeremiah sounded so sad. He was right. I knew he was right, but I wanted to know what my mother would say. I reached for my pocket and the abalone shell I had always kept there. But I had nothing of my mother’s now, and I’d never felt more empty.

  9

  At the Loom

  When we arrived home, I was ready to put all my energy into weaving, but Aunt Loula was making winter shirts and wanted me to do buttons and hems, and there were always people to feed. More frustrating than all the chores put together was Ida following me everywhere, demanding another round of the bone game or hounding me to read her a chapter in her tattered copy of The Wizard of Oz. Whenever I had a moment to spare, I was out the door gathering what I needed to make dye for my wool. I collected iron nails from the driftwood and fresh hemlock bark from the forest for the black dye. I set an old copper pot full of pee out to age for the second dye bath.

  Grandma did not care to see me working the wool. I could tell by the way she followed me on my gathering, pretending she needed bark for medicine or maidenhair ferns for her baskets. One day, when I was inside dipping skeins of wool into the first bath of black dye, she sat on the bench nearby. I noticed that her hands were more wrinkled than last year. She took a white skein of yarn in her calloused hands, held it up to the lamplight to examine the twist, and gave it a nod of approval.

  “When your mother first passed from us,” Grandma said slowly, “I thought of the loom as a thing belonging to her mother and to her sisters up north. We sent word that they were welcome to take your mother’s loom and the blanket she had begun.”

  I was ready to protest for my right to my mother’s loom, but something in my grandmother’s defeated look made me hold my thought and keep peace with her.

  “Your mother’s people sent us word that they would come and bring the loom back to their village, and they would bring you with it, so that you could learn the language and stories of your mother’s people.”

  “What?”

  I had heard plenty of stories about my mother’s people when I was little but not this one. I stopped stirring the wool in the dye pot and out of habit reached for the abalone shell that was no longer in my pocket.

  “Yes, your mother came from powerful people, the Tlingit, up north. She was the pride of her family, and they were shocked to see her choose a southern husband. But your father”—and here Grandma lifted her chin and put pride in her voice—“your father made a fortune in whale oil as a young man, and he had the Raven stories. There was none but him with the right to dance and sing the entire cycle of Raven stories. It took a whole week of evening ceremonies to dance them through from the first to the last. And it didn’t hurt that he was as handsome as the devil and knew how to make a girl laugh.”

  I left my wool in the dye pot and sat beside Grandma on the bench. This was a story I hadn’t heard before.

  “You mean it wasn’t an arrangement between fathers?” Grandpa took pains, whenever the subject came up, to tell me he would be picking my husband from among men of a certain station.

  Grandma laughed and squeezed my arm. “The fathers set the marriage terms, you can be sure of that, but your parents loved each other.” She paused and turned away from me. “The last five years would have been easier for your father if they had not.”

  That was true enough. After my mother died, Papa was not a handsome man, and he spent little effort making me laugh. I went back to my dye pot to stir and lift the wool to check the depth of color.

  “Why didn’t I go to my mother’s people?”

  “Your father wouldn’t hear of it,” Grandma said. “He just couldn’t let you go. There were some who said he should take a new wife, one who would give him sons.” She glanced rather sternly in the direction of Grandpa’s workbench. “But he would have no part of that. So here you are.”

  Grandma stood up and moved beside me. She held the lamp close so I could check the color of my wool against the black that was already woven into the blanket. It was hard to tell if I had it right, matching wet yarn to dry.

  “I’m not sorry he kept you here,” she said. “I would have missed my Pearl. But you have lost something none of us can replace.”

  I busied myself stirring another batch of wool into the pot.

  “Maybe you wish we had chosen differently,” she added.

  My mother’s people—they would know how to weave. Maybe I had another grandmother or a whole new set of aunts. I could visit them, and they would help me learn. I smiled and turned to her.

  “Do they still want me?”

  “We have been looking for them,” Grandma said. “People don’t travel the way they used to. So many people work for wages now. You can’t get a month off to paddle to Alaska. Some villages plain don’t have enough manpower to move a seagoing canoe. Messengers are not so easy to send. But the basket maker we met in town, the one at the curio shop, she is from Vancouver Island.”

  I nodded, remembering. She spoke Nootka—similar to Makah, but not close enough for me to understand easily.

  “Her brothers had been up north, and they went to your mother’s village. It was empty. Nothing but house frames and frogs left.”

  “Completely empty?”

  Grandma nodded.

  “Was it the influenza?” I couldn’t bear to think it.

  “No, Pearl, there were no unburied bodies. Nothing to show a battle either. Might be they moved to another village or a town, maybe a city—Ketchikan is not so far, or Sitka.”

  “They’re gone? How could they be gone?” I said, my anger growing. “They can’t just disappear.”

  “We’ll find them,” Grandma said firmly. “But it will take time, Pearl, maybe a very long time. Sometimes the missionaries write down where people move. Maybe they joined a village just a few miles away.”

  “So there really is no one to teach me to weave?”

  Grandma bowed her head and did not answer.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “I don’t need a teacher.” I paced a few times from the dye
pot to the loom. “I sat beside Mama and watched all the time when she wove. I’ll remember how to do it. I’ll figure it out by myself.”

  A week passed. Fall rain raised the rivers, and the Silvers started to spawn up the Quinault River. My wool was dyed deep black, blue-green, and yellow. I sat at the tall loom against the wall in a dim corner of the longhouse. The half-finished face of Bear gazed back at me.

  I unwound an arm’s length of black wool and worked it over and under to fill in the line below the eye. I concentrated on holding my hands exactly the way Mama had. I tried to remember what she’d said about tension and forming a curved line. Doubt sat in my stomach like bad fish, but I kept working. I unwove the last row my mother worked to check how it was done, but even with the bends and twists pressed into the yarn I couldn’t reweave it right, not exactly right. My row was bumpy and rose above the smooth skin of my mother’s weaving like a scar. I didn’t know how to fix it. Mama never said a lot about her weaving. When she did say something, it wasn’t very helpful.

  When she was pregnant with my baby sister, she said, “Hold the baby right, and she stops crying. Hold the warp yarns right, and the weaving comes out smooth.”

  Or she would point to a mistake before she fixed it and say, “Never leave uneven work in a blanket. And never leave an argument standing with your husband. Honor his work as much as you honor your own.”

  Why had she never said exactly how to weave? I kicked at the base that held up the loom crossbar to make myself remember. I tugged on each end of the yarn to make the row even, but it didn’t smooth out the bumpy stitches in the middle. I slid my fingers between the vertical warp threads and pressed my row tight to the row above.