The Memory Weaver

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  But she had died, her last days as vivid in my mind as the sounds of the sheep bleating in the distance. Her hands so cold, her eyes growing glassy, breathing rattling like wind against a broken gate. I’d prayed that she’d be well, prayed aloud. Then to myself, prayed that she’d die, be at peace. She clasped my hand, lifted a finger to answer my childish pleas, tapped it gently. “It will be well,” she said. “All will be well.” I claimed it as a promise yet unfulfilled. Perhaps my father’s permission for me to have my sisters near was the beginning of all being well.

  The girls were with me when I discovered a few months later that I was pregnant. It was February 1856. I’d gone into Brownsville to see the new doctor there. I knew already from the stoppage of my monthlies I must be with child. I wasn’t frightened, though learning that my mother had a stillborn baby while they lived in Ohio and then lost another on the journey overland to Lapwai did cause me pause.

  “You’re going to have a niece or nephew,” I told my sisters. They were close enough in age and stature they reminded me of twins. Miraculously, Andrew had acquired Maka back again, so the girls had a horse to ride and so did I. He’d purchased a buggy too, and we discovered Maka was trained to the harness. I’d driven with the two girls as we traveled along the frozen, snowless road into town. Upon leaving the doctor’s, Millie begged to go on to Father’s, to see if he was there. They saw him each Sunday, Rachel as well, but I could tell they missed them. When Father was at home and feeling tender, he often read them stories, Rachel having convinced him of a novel’s merits, and was his old self, the way he’d been sometimes with me and Henry before everything changed.

  “Can we name it?” Their enthusiasm took away the doctor’s somber comments about the importance of taking care of myself, of not straining over heavy things, especially with my mother’s history.

  “I think the baby’s father and mother might like the honor of naming this child, but I’ll take suggestions.”

  “I say we call it Nubia.” This from Millie. She dragged out the word so it sounded like “neeeew-bee-aaah.”

  “Nubia? Where did you hear that word?”

  “Rachel says there’s a country in Africa with that name,” Millie answered. “I like how it sounds. It’s like a new bay-bee-ya.”

  “Well, sort of,” I said. “It does have a pretty ring to it. Nubia. But we don’t live in Africa.”

  “Name it America.”

  I actually liked that name. “America Jane,” Martha Jane said. “After me.”

  “I want her named after me.”

  “Amelia?”

  Millie crossed her arms, holding but one hand in the rabbit fur muff I’d made for each girl and given to them at Christmas.

  “You’ll freeze your fingers off being petulant.”

  “I don’t care. You should name it after me too.”

  Sorry I’d even honored their wishes by discussing it, I said, “Andrew and I will decide. But if we do choose America, Millie, it will be because you came up with the idea of naming a child for a country, our country. And if we choose Jane, it’ll be for Martha, so really, America will stand out even more than Jane’s name. Are we settled?”

  They both pouted, but at least Millie put her hands back in her muff and the rest of the ride home was silent, offering me time to consider that I was going to be a mother. I figured in my head. My mother had been thirty years old when she had me. A hard pregnancy from the few comments she’d made. I wished for her to have had a friend that she could have shared her journey with, someone whom now I could ask about my mother’s life. But she’d been isolated of women friends except for Nez Perce women. Maybe they were enough for her. I wondered about Matilda and if she still lived. How I would mine her memory for stories of my mother—if I ever saw her again. But even she had betrayed us . . . sending us away.

  I’d be nineteen if this baby came when expected and wondered if being younger than my mother’s motherhood would be better in the end. I couldn’t know. I was powerless to control the outcome, but there were some things I could do, the doctor said. And getting good rest and pacing myself in the garden or at spinning and not chasing after cattle or chopping wood would be at the top of the list. I could still ride a horse but no galloping.

  When I told Andrew later that same day that he would become a father in November, he swung me around the room and held me close as my crinolines continued to sway. “I’m as happy as a man holding a full house in my hands,” he crowed.

  “I’d hoped you’d be that happy . . . but also I hope a full house is a rare occasion, something you seldom see?”

  “I don’t see it much, that’s sure.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. It’s an occasional thing, Eliza. A man needs his distractions.” He twisted my wedding ring, then held my hand.

  I was torn by having the privileges his gambling offered—the return of the horse, clothes he purchased store-bought for me and sometimes for the girls too. Compared to some, I lived a treasured life, one others might even envy. He was happy about the baby and so was I. What more could I ask for on an otherwise crisp February day?

  Andrew went out that evening. He rode his horse. The night was colder than usual for our mild-climate Willamette Valley. I heard him slip out and didn’t ask where he was going. I suppose I should have. I might have prevented what happened. At the very least I could have revised my imaginings of thinking troubled thoughts in the hopes of preventing them. But Nancy says I couldn’t have stopped it. Some things just happen.

  The Diary of Eliza Spalding

  1850

  I never recovered my full resources after Amelia’s birth. My little Millie. Tiny though she was, her arrival in this world caused much distress, and even now, when she has just turned four, I still strain to sit for any length of time. I pray she never becomes an invalid like this. Perhaps because I was already thirty-nine when she was born, perhaps it is my own fault to be with child at such an advanced age. But these things are ordained by God, this birth and death, and I defy his sovereignty when I question the why of it. But question I do, ever since we were forced by the Mission Board to leave Lapwai.

  When Mr. Canfield came to warn us, I sent Timothy off to see if he could find S and Eliza, a last act before those gracious Nez Perce people—for our protection—packed us out our door and far into the valley, away from the mission in case the Cayuse came. We stayed in Matilda’s family tipis, warm as toast. Martha Jane made the trip well. But Amelia, our little Millie, not yet one year old, fussed, receiving my own grieving through my milk. Matilda wrapped her in a baby board, the swaddling comforted and I could rest. I was at the mercy of the Nez Perce and I wondered through my fevered prayers what I would do if something happened to my husband. Where would I go? What place was safe? If they would have me, I decided I would stay with these people who were more family to me than my own sisters. I even wondered what might happen if the Cayuse came demanding me or any of the few white persons we employed. Would they turn us over? I looked at Joseph and at Peter, two Nez Perce who not only claimed Jesus but learned English well enough to teach the gospel to those as yet unformed in the faith. They were good young men. They had always been kind to us. They were different from the Cayuse. I had to remember that. I had to trust that God knew where we were and what our future held.

  It is 9:00 a.m. This was the hour when I, Narcissa, Mary Walker, and Sarah and the other missionary wives all ceased our work and prayed for our children. Our Maternal Society, we called it. Narcissa wrote of it and the Mission Board published our extended giving of support through prayer in their newsletter. A part of me was a bit envious that her words were published, but she captured our hopes for the society well, and after her dear Alice drowned, I was grateful she had experienced some small joy in the publication. She lost so much. The death made me more vigilant and I had S build a fence around our house-garden and small yard so that Eliza didn’t waddle off to the Clearwater River. And she never did,
but I remember with such sorrow that the Littlejohns’ boy did. They were people called by God too, who came west to support us. Their little boy met death on our river. Eliza came inside and asked where he had gone and we ran outside, his mother and me—we had no Matilda then—called out to him, and then we saw the hole in the rope webbing S had woven to serve as a fence. The boy had crawled through. Had Eliza seen him go? I hoped she had no memory of his disappearance and the Lord offered me solace in that regard by the purity of her question when she came in, wondering where he’d gone. At three, she was too young to be responsible for watching him. Somehow they’d both gone outside without us mothers noting. S was gone. Mrs. Littlejohn bereft. Hugging my Eliza I still felt so alone.

  Another alone time, me with baby Eliza, and over a thousand Nez Perce came in to the mission for lessons I taught, to hear S preach the gospel, to work the land and plant wheat. A day when trepidation came upon me like an angry mountain storm, quick and fierce for my husband’s abandonment of us. He insisted he must go to Waiilatpu to work out some permission with the Whitmans. I understood then what it meant that we at Lapwai were but a branch of the larger mission that included both our sites. And then later with the arrival of others, that the “site” encompassed land beyond mountains among different tribes of Indians.

  These thoughts discomfort. My back aches more.

  Maybe S wanted the distance from the woman he’d once asked to marry. Maybe he liked doing what he wished without Marcus looking over his shoulder. But Marcus was the doctor for all our “missions’ sites” and he was 120 miles away! Meetings always seemed to happen at M’s site, forcing S to go there and leave me at Lapwai. And that day, he left, and while Eliza slept I took out my paints and drew the story in Luke of the woman and the lost coin, though I show it as her having many strings of mollusk shells used for adornment and in trade. Dentalia, the Nez Perce called it, and then I paint her having lost one precious strand and how she scours her tipi to find it. I make her face with the high cheekbones of the Nez Perce, give her long black hair I color with blackberry ink, put a touch of strawberry juice on her cheek. She carries a lamp with expensive oil she burns in her search, an investment in seeking that lost treasure. And in the last panel she is rejoicing and I show her dancing on soft moccasins, hands to the sky, offering up the shells. I put knitting needles and yarn in the corner behind her and told the Nez Perce students that her joy is because she has found what was lost, but more, that her dance is that of God’s when we allow ourselves to be found and we knit him into our hearts. I wish I could have taken those panels with me. We left in such a hurry.

  On that day as I painted I heard the thunder of hooves, enough to wake Eliza. I stood at the door and watched as dust came up the valley, hoof-powder of a hundred horses. I saw myself in the valley of the shadow of death. My heart pounded as I held my child to me and waited what fate the Lord had set before us. I did not even pray, a fact that astounds me still. But perhaps I knew at that moment my small words would come in human time. God already knew and had us in his hands. I felt my heartbeat slow, thought of S and how after all we’d been through this was now the climax of a life’s work. We were ended. He would go on alone and I asked then for prayers for him as I knew he would blame himself for leaving us, his guilt compounding his grief. And I felt a lifting of my spirit, that death had no fear for me in this valley. My child would be taken with me and never know fear nor sorrow in her life. How wrong I was about that.

  When the dust settled, a man I called Joseph came forward, his son beside him, on magnificent horses, both of them. The boy had a presence about him exuding confidence even in his youth. Old Joseph, as I came to know him, in a mix of Sahaptin, English, and Chinookan, all which I could understand, said he hoped they had not frightened us. I think I laughed in my relief. They came to welcome. They would summer near us, and work as S had asked them. When I told them he had gone for a time but would be back, Old Joseph smiled. They had met him on the trail. “He says to look after his family,” the younger Joseph said. “It is The People’s way to also look after strangers until they are as family.” I thought of a Scripture, about living honorably among strangers.

  They set about making their camp as I wondered at how my great fear had dissipated before I even knew of their friendly intent. I showed young Joseph the panels and he said, “The woman, she is strong. Like our women.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “And in this story she is God seeking what is valuable, our hearts and souls. See how she rejoices when she lets God in?” He held the last panel of the celebrating woman with such a light upon his face I asked if he would like to take it with him. He declined, said he already had it in his heart and it belonged with the other panels to be shared with everyone.

  That night more than one hundred fires flickered, their lights like bright knots among the knitted fabric of this wide country and our place within it. I imagined God weaving all threads of us living for him. Old Joseph was our first convert, his son not long after. Young Joseph I felt would follow his father’s authority granted by The People as their chief. Such promise we saw in our foreign efforts among strangers, turned to such disaster, and all must have passed through our Lord’s hands. I will one day soon ask of him, why.

  13

  Lost and Found

  Strangers brought Andrew in the next morning. With frost on his whiskers, he would have died if not for the alcohol in his system, or so one of his comrades said. And he’d have complained of more pain with his broken leg, the bone piercing against but not through the skin if not for their ministrations. “Like an icicle thrust upward,” this stranger in my home described. It was bandaged tightly around a board to “push it back in its channel, Missus.” And to hold his leg steady. I could smell alcohol on their breaths, though they said their drinking had ceased long before dawn. They’d taken all that time to get Andrew treated at the doctor and then home.

  “That’s what friends are for,” Andrew said, his eyes glassy with laudanum—or more. The rescuers were in much better shape, laughing as they hauled him into our cabin and laid him onto the bed.

  “Fix them vittles, woman.” Andrew waved his hand like a hat circled overhead.

  The girls awoke and I sent Martha to the henhouse for eggs while I stepped behind the divider quilt to change from my nightdress into a wrapper and fresh apron. I jabbed at the fire and added water to the coffee kettle, then nestled it in among the now glowing coals.

  His friends, with Irish accents, began waxing on about their evening, about how Andrew arrived at the saloon with words of “happiness about your impending kin.” I frowned. “Your wee one coming. Sure and he’s a happy lad.”

  “Happy, yes indeedy.”

  “Uncle burped,” Millie said. “And he didn’t say sorry.”

  “That’s the least of his social lapses. Get the syrup from the larder and put it on the table, would you, Millie? Thank you, child.” I loved it when she did as she was asked without a protest.

  Eggs arrived. I grabbed striped meat (as Andrew called bacon), mixed up johnnycakes, spread them on the round griddle as soon as the woodstove heated. With my other ear I heard the story of the night, how they played cards and Andrew had lost. (Which explained his friends’ great “kindness” to him, taking him to the doctor, bringing him home. If he’d won they likely would have left him to the cold and wolves, a just recompense for having taken all their funds that night.)

  “He usually holds his liquor well, Missus, but he was harborin’ visions of grandeur with a son beside him on that cattle ranch he’s always talking ’bout.” These men were no strangers to Andrew; only to me.

  “Needs riding lessons. Man’s got to both hold his liquor and his seat.” This from the skinny one, slender as a bacon strip, his comment causing all three men to howl with laughter. Both of my husband’s comrades sported broken blood vessels across their noses, and for the first time I noticed my husband’s face in a new way. At that moment, his cheeks were scraped but ther
e was that telltale sign of liquor consumption. Over time. I’d never acknowledged it before.

  “How did his face get so scraped up?”

  “He fell into a pile of rocks, slipped right off the horse and then whooped so that the gelding pulled back and his leg was still in the stirrup. He got dragged a ways.”

  “Right into a boulder where his horse deposited him and left him with an arrow-looking thing pushing against his leg. Took us a bit through his wailing to see that it was bone trying to break free.” This so-called friend had reached into the cupboard and handed cups around, poured hot coffee from the kettle he’d grabbed. I must have frowned at his intruding in my kitchen. “Just being helpful, Missus. You got your hands full there.”

  “Almost lost my supper.” The skinny one continued. “Never seen bone like that come up.”

  “So we took him to the doctor. What are friends for?”

  “Doc weren’t none too happy to be woke up at that hour. He patched it, pushed it back, and wrapped it good, but he says infection’s likely. Said he’d be by later today to take another peek. Gave us laudanum to give you to numb his pain when he starts to really come out of it.” The helpful coffee-serving friend pulled a bottle from his pocket. “Laudanum.”

  “Thank you.” I grabbed it from him with more vigor than intended, plopped it on the table. “Don’t mistake it for syrup,” I said. “Breakfast’s ready.”

  The men pulled up chairs and ate, quiet for a moment. Andrew moaned once or twice but no longer participated in any part of the discussion. I eavesdropped, learned of how regularly these men saw my husband, how much they knew about us, and how only when they let others join their games had the friendliness waned into real distress. A favorite horse lost. A promissory note written, giving up future profits when a beef was sold. How grateful the men were when Andrew played, as “he always brings the best whiskey.”