“And I blamed everyone.”
“You are forgiven for being young and frightened and not able to do what you might have done at another time or place.”
I saw then that my father’s vehemence when he spoke about those days, when he included in his letters and preaching the story of Lorinda’s terrifying testimony of being sent to Five Crows each night, when he railed against the priests and all Indians except the Nez Perce, when he admonished me for nearly every choice I’d made. These were acts to fill his hollow places, not to blame me for them. He had thought himself a failure, where he was powerless to change what had happened, and so he tried to change each of us. None of us could change the past. We could only transform how we reacted to what life presented, and even then, any guarantee of certain results was as elusive as morning river mist.
I never dismounted that day, liking the safety of the place atop Maka, viewing at that height what had happened, seeing from a distance instead of in the center of the sounds and smells as when I was ten. I held Minnie, and my mare followed Timothy, who walked on foot toward the orchard as he nearly swam through the tall grasses, pushing with his arms, his long hair swinging against his back. His horse was well trained and tore at grasses that looked to be spring-fed as they still wore green.
Then we were at the stream bank where Alice Whitman had drowned. I never knew her but I remember my mother praying for Mrs. Whitman and the other missionaries and “Dear Alice,” every morning between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., their maternal hour. I was doing that with my sisters, but I could expand to Nancy Osborne. Matilda Sager. Even Rachel, give to my girls the same prayer mornings my mother had once shared with me. Maybe I could even take a different route home, to see how Matilda Sager lived her life now, tell her I was sorry. At a future Independence Day picnic or an Old Pioneer celebration we’d stand in front of bunting and tell our stories. We wouldn’t need to retell these Waiilatpu tragedies except to straighten them out. But no, the stories and my own life would always be tangled not only with my mother’s diaries, but with my memories of her and how much I missed her in my life, and with my father’s stories and a child’s memory wrapped in wounds. No matter how much I tried to control my world, no matter how much Nancy attempted to line hers up, we could not command the future nor undo the past. But we could let God set us free to weave new fabrics. I suspected each of us who survived had found a way to hold ourselves together, and those ways had worked but also taken their toll. Mine nearly cost me my husband’s devotion and my sister’s love and my father’s affection. We could find new ways.
“It’s a place of quiet rest,” I said.
“It is so.”
“Thank you for bringing me. And for granting me forgiveness. We can go now.” I’d already begun picking up lost stitches of memories that might knit over my hollow places rather than make them wider.
I felt my heart beat, but it was not a second heartbeat of the past. It was of the present. Waiilatpu was a place of death and loss and memory. My life belonged among the living.
29
A Gold Ring
After Waiilatpu, Timothy and his band left me. But not before he hugged me like a father hugs a daughter.
“You do forgive me,” I said.
“Forgiveness is a summer blanket meant to ward off a chill but carrying little weight. It frees you. This your mother said long years ago. Forgiveness is granted, Eliza. Forgive yourself.”
I watched them go. I had done my work at that sad site. What had to be settled from that time forward involved people as they were in this time and my need to see them through forgiven eyes.
Each stop along my journey home unraveled old memories and replaced them with new ones. The Dalles was a place where my sister married and found happiness rather than the river town where I fell so ill I nearly died following my father’s foolish ocean trip. It was the reunion site where I met up with my husband after he successfully brought cattle across the Cascades; where he gave me the gold band I wore. And it’s where my sister Millie found us, where she rode fast and firm, before her injury. The journey on the steamship heading back to Brownsville would be a reminder not of hostages huddled beneath the canvas with our British rescuers but of a voyage returning me to my family. The Willamette Falls in Oregon City not with memories of a trial but of a marriage. I inhaled the mist and the thundering sounds of water.
I had kept the old memories too close and they had fed a shame in me, but their sustenance came from murky places, not from a well that quenched a thirst. With practice, I could pull happier memories from that deep well.
My girls made scarves of their arms around my neck when I brought them home from Rachel and Millie’s care.
“Don’t leave us ever again, Mama. You abandoned us.”
“Abandoned? Such a big word for you, America Jane. No, I left you safe. It’s good for Mama to be alone sometimes. Good for you too, to know I’m gone but I come back. I didn’t desert you.”
“What if you don’t come back though?” Such a big question. She pooched out her lower lip as she ran her hands across the smooth ribbon at my throat. She smelled of the lavender Millie must have put into the soap, lavender my mother loved.
“Then as with my own mama, I will see you again in that heavenly place.”
It was enough to satisfy her as she began telling me stories of what she’d done while I was gone, and how she’d looked after Lizzie, her little sister.
“See, you grew strong with me away, just as I did. I’m proud of you.”
“You are always strong, Mama.” She pressed her head against my chest, patted my arm, then told Lizzie to “get your book. We’ll read to Mama and Minnie. She hasn’t seen a book for a loooong time.” The oldest child, giving orders to the youngest, just as I had always done.
My husband welcomed me home and I saw him through the filter of forgiveness. Yes, friends could sway him, but he also resisted temptation. He had disappointed himself and me when he drank more than to “wet his whistle,” as he called it. But he sought new paths, and I found sincerity like well water rising up to squash old stories and replace them with the hope of new. These moments when I did not try to “make” my husband do this or that, didn’t interfere with my children learning in their ways different from my own, were kindling for the warming fires I built each day. I remembered a Scripture about “a bruised reed he will not break.” The reed of my body had been bruised but I had not broken. Even as a child it grew strong enough to endure.
Millie married John Brown in November and they began their life on the property Father had given her when Mama died, across from the schoolhouse, a level, productive piece of ground. I wished he’d left that plot to me, but he hadn’t. It was the way of things. One didn’t always get what one hoped for in this life. As time wore on I saw that while Millie got good land, her husband wasn’t nearly as attentive as Mr. Warren was. She had children but she needed help to raise them, and John Brown was busy soliciting investments for rebuilding the woolen mill after it burned down. Each child Millie bore took her closer to the invalid she became.
I conceived again in the fall of ’65, before the great War was over, and found I loved my husband better than I had when we first met, when I’d dragged him to the altar before I let him find his own way. My life was woven in with his, but we each also had singular threads. With God’s help, we had the power to wrap present moments with memory in order to make new cloth.
Mr. Warren’s herd had once again grown too large to keep constrained. We had another branding that spring and this time the whoops of the buckaroos as they lassoed calves or hooted and shouted did not remind me of a sham display. The calves moved down narrow lanes into corrals where a fire waited with branding irons to sear AJW into their sides, and the smell of burning flesh did not remind me of another time of scent and evil sounds. And when my husband said he and several other men planned to take the herds to Montana where a new territory thrived and settlers were hungry to start their own herds
, I did not object to being left alone.
“You won’t be here when our baby is born.”
“No. But I’ll come back with cash.”
“And renewed vigor, I suspect.” He tipped his Stetson hat at me. I saw him as a man who needed space, challenge, and adventure, needed to be extraordinary, to have stories to tell. As did I, I decided. My story of making my way with my girls and Little Shoot and the Ruckers, my tale of riding back alone from Lapwai with a baby in my arms always marveled folks, as much as stories others told of crossing the Oregon Trail, a journey I’d been deprived of. Maybe each of us needs to feel a little extraordinary, to believe we’ve used well the talents we were given to live meaningful lives. I am the mother raising children to be resilient, trustworthy, able to keep going when they want to quit, kind and generous. What greater meaning can one life have?
I think Andrew also needed time away from me, and I didn’t see that desire as irresponsible on his part but rather as a natural state within the weft of our marriage weave. I rather enjoyed my time without him around, at least now and then.
I learned of that cattle drive’s success in August. James Henry Warren entered the world the same month. My husband achieved a feat only once before accomplished, driving a large herd of cattle from Oregon to Montana. It was something to celebrate. We would do so when he returned home.
Rachel joined Father for a time in Lapwai and then because the Board had still not authorized them to be there, and Rachel could not find teaching work to support them, they came back to Brownsville, staying with Millie, helping with her child whose arrival put Millie back on that chaise lounge. How my father’s heart must have ached. He worked in his garden, a man broken despite the lives he’d touched.
And then came the letter he’d been waiting for since my mother’s death. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions authorized him in 1871 to once again be in official service to the Nimíipuu at Lapwai.
“You can go back!” I hugged him. “They want you there and you go with the Board’s blessing.”
He patted my back, separated. “I wish your mother was here to go with me. She felt so betrayed by the Board.” I looked at Rachel, who held the letter now, to see if she took offense, but she kept a warm smile as she gazed upon my father. “But it was the Catholics who hurt us most.”
“Henry—” Rachel touched his arm.
“It’s true.” His fists tightened.
“Yes, but in part we are returning under the auspices of the Mission Board because of the Catholics’ continued success among the natives. The Board could see many were ready for conversion and understood the Presbyterians had already lost too much time. Just as you kept writing to them about.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe so.” He patted her hand. “We’ll celebrate God’s divine guidance after all.”
I saw Rachel then as a warm fire that tempered my father.
Later I asked her if we could talk.
“Of course. I love conversations with you, Eliza. They happen too infrequently, it seems to me.”
Did she enjoy my company? She seemed sincere and in all these years had given me no reason to doubt.
“What can I do for you?”
“When I was young, I did something, took something that had been my mother’s.”
“Yes?” Her eyes had begun to cloud with age but still offered kind encouragement.
“I’d like to give it to you.” I pulled out my leather pouch that held my children’s umbilical cords and placed my mother’s gold ring in the palm of her hand. “It was her wedding ring. My father had intended to give it to you but I . . .”
She patted my arm. “I understand. I was an intruder.”
“I thought my father disloyal to my mother by marrying again. I—I was certain my mother wouldn’t have wanted that, but then I read her diaries, when Father and I rode to visit Lapwai that time. You remember?”
“I do.”
“Well, I was wrong. I misinterpreted and intervened where I should not have. Can you forgive me?”
“In the flash of a lamb’s tail.” She hugged me then, something that had rarely passed between us. “But I think you should give it to your father.” She still said “father” with that rolling Boston twang that made it sound as though she said “feather.”
And so I did, when we were alone in Millie’s kitchen. I confessed what I’d done and said how sorry I was.
He harrumphed, turning the ring in his fingers. “You were young. You didn’t know. But if I remember, you let Henry take the blame.” He shook his finger at me. I found my feet of interest. He lifted my chin. “You mourned as we all mourned.” He rubbed the ring on his pants, held it to the dim light from the lantern. “I thank you for this, Daughter. I’ll keep it. Maybe when America Jane marries, she could use it.” He clutched it in his palm.
“I offered it to Rachel.”
“Did you? And she refused it?”
“She said it belonged to you to do with as you saw fit. She’s a good woman and a good wife for you.”
“That she is.” He was thoughtful. His black eyes watered and I couldn’t tell if it was from his memories or his aging. “I think I’ll follow your route and see if she’ll take it from me. Our eighteenth wedding anniversary is coming up. It would make a nice surprise.” He wore a puzzled look then, and said, “Same number of years as your mother and I were married. Imagine. I’ve had as many years to make memories together with each woman. It’s no wonder that I sometimes mix those recollections up.”
30
Like a Second Heart
My father’s past was like his second heart, a constant rhythm. Perhaps all of our memories carry such a beat. He had but three official years to serve before he died and was buried in Lapwai. Over nine hundred Nez Perce and Spokane souls found God close at hand during those last three years of my father’s life. Rachel came back to Brownsville to care for Millie, and when Rachel became ill, she lived with Mr. Warren and me until she died in 1880.
My life has spiraled since that time, orphaned now. My children all married with children of their own. Lizzie died in ’82, such a loss to outlive a child. I cared for her children until her husband remarried. Remarrying is a good thing when one has young children, even if the stepmother lacks certain skills, like cooking. Then Mr. Warren was called home. I think his outliving one of his children took a toll upon him. His death was long and lingering, sadly, and his skin turned the color of sunflower duff. “I want to go where you’re going, Eliza,” he told me at the end.
I assured him that he would.
My mother’s brother Horace, who had moved back East, returned with a wife and family. He carried with him letters my mother had sent to her sisters, last letters written in the weeks before her death.
“I thought you should have them.”
I thanked him, and when he and his family had bedded down in my empty house—all my children grown and gone—I read through them, startled by a few of her comments, comforted by others. While she had never said she loved me in her lifetime, she told her sisters that was so.
Beside my Lord and Mr. S, Eliza is my light. I hope she feels how much I love her. If I have time, I will write a letter to her but then I wonder what to say. She’s an intelligent young girl whose bright wit and kindness has been thwarted by the tragedy at the Whitman mission. I pray for her future, that one day God will restore her, make her blind to the horrors she witnessed and instead bring new sight to her weary eyes. May she cry tears of joy one day instead of sorrow. May she laugh beside the rivers of her life without wondering at her witness, her having survived. I pray for my dear Mr. S. He pushes at the rivers that God controls and doesn’t see that everything that happens can be converted into good. We simply do not know the good of it, our world being so vast and wide and us but a small part in it. Why were we chosen to come to the precious Nimíipuu? Why have we lived and the Whitmans did not? Why were we forced to leave the work of our hearts? Why has my husband taught and preac
hed in this little Calapooia River place some call Brownsville? Is this to be his life? He seems angry here. I cannot bring him peace. These are questions without answers. I can live without the answers, but I’m not certain Mr. S can or my dear Eliza who I pray will not take on his impulsive ways. I pray Mr. S remarries soon, another teacher, someone to share his work and who will allow my dear Eliza to have the chance to be a child again, to laugh and cry in joy.
What does a child really know about their parents’ lives? What do my children think of their parents’ ways?
In 1888 I spoke at the Pioneer Reunion and I met up with Matilda Sager and Nancy Osborne and we told our stories just as I had one day imagined.
I reread my mother’s diaries and letters, liking especially the part about my becoming a child again, someone spontaneous who didn’t always regiment the days and hours and lives of those I loved.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1909, a new century, my son suggested a trip.
“We’re taking a visit, Mama, to Lake Chelan.” This, my son James speaking. He had moved with his family to Washington State some years before and invited me along. I was grateful they wanted an old lady tagging with them. I could still look after two little boys, and Wauna was an easygoing mother who worked hard and enjoyed her “easing time,” as she called putting her feet up on the leather hassock in an evening.
Chelan is a long, clear lake in Eastern Washington, rounded at the edges like a knitted stocking. Something about the place appealed to me and I decided there and then to stay. My son tried only a little to talk me out of it. After all, I was seventy and, as he would say, a tease in his voice, “set in my ways.”
“Not so set I can’t build myself a little house.”
“I would never try to deter you, Mother. Just tell me how I can help.”
“When I’m ready, bring that woodstove out in your shed.”
The Memory Weaver Page 26