“I would never have found you,” he said, brushing hair back from my cheeks. The horses stomped contented at their tethers. The Warm Springs River gurgled satisfaction to Shard’s last words before I fell asleep: “It is the best blend of the old and the new. To hold some things in your mind and to write some others down. Both are needed for a strong pot.”
A black dot I had seen from quite a distance in the center of a doorway became a waving woman.
We had passed through the agency with its boarding school and buildings, skirted past skinny-tailed dogs, ridden south along the Deschutes River some distance, then turned west to follow a stream lined with willows and tall grasses that opened to a canyon ever widening, then twisting narrow. The air stirred warm and the canyon welcomed. We rode past clusters of wickiups, a canvas tent or two, before seeing willow corrals and several frame houses, cattle grazing beyond a barn. Barking dogs and wide-eyed children announced our arrival. The black dot, in the center of three homes set in a dimple of bunch grass and sage, became the face of Lukwsh.
“You look no older than a child,” Lukwsh shouted, her arms open to me from her chair with wheels. Her gray hair, parted in the center, still flowed from a knot tied behind her neck. Her smile was a dark cave of broken teeth. I had seen her since we had crested the ridge and ridden along the creek almost hidden in a deep channel lined with tall, coarse grass that gave Seekseequa Creek its name. “No older than a board-baby!” she sang again, clothes flowing loose against her thinner chest, over her knees. Brown stockings rose up from new moccasins that fit flat where feet would be. “No older than a child!”
“I am a child,” I cried, “your child.” I slipped from Amber, letting Shard take the reins. I ran to her, caught a glimpse of a black puppy peering from beneath her chair, felt the wind take my hat, bounce it on my back while I awkwardly tried to hold Lukwsh’s shoulders, kiss her face, her forehead, run my hands over the coarse strings of her hair, capture her, make sure she was real. I felt her reach her arms to mine, hold me, look me over, her fingers clinging to my waist. Her hands kneaded me as though to see if she held flesh, and then I knelt at her feet, buried tears in a lap that smelled of lavender.
“I was a lost child,” I cried, “who is so sorry.”
“Na, na,” she crooned, her wide hands gently stroking my head, her body moving gently back and forward. “You were never lost to us. We never forgot who you were. But it is all right, now. It is all good, now. You are a lost child, found.”
She held my shoulders, ran her cool fingers to move hair behind my ears and let me feel the depth of healing rise up from my heart as it realized where it was, at last.
It did not seem long before I felt Shard’s hands on my shoulders, lifting me as my sobs quieted. His touch startled me, sent streams of feeling through my being—feelings I was less afraid of now, did not hold back. I would have turned to him when I stood, but my legs were full of prickles and would not hold me up.
“Legs have minds of their own,” Lukwsh said as I rubbed my calves back into feeling, one hand balanced in Shard’s. “These two have served me well, but now they get to ride around,” she said, patting her thighs. “Sometimes this one, Arrow, who hides under me, likes to ride. Or the little ones plump themselves like chickens on my legs and even they go numb! I have to sweep them off. Oh, here they come.”
I looked up to see the faces of three children staring like curious does. I watched Arrow finally brave the activity, come to sit beside Lukwsh, wearing a yawn of caution.
“I am their kasa, as they say here at Warm Springs. Their grandma,” Lukwsh said, leaning down to swoop the puppy into her lap. His tongue hung out of the dark face in happy contentment.
“Oh,” I said, and for the first time realized I have had thoughts about a future that may have been in error.
Lukwsh is quick to see the question in my face. “All the children call me kasa. So many did not live from Fort Harney that we old ones who did spread ourselves around. But there is room for more,” she said, her eyes twinkling as she nodded her chin toward Shard.
“Time enough to talk of such things, old woman,” Shard told her. “For now, we are hungry and would eat. Have you done your work?”
Lukwsh’s laugh, full and hearty, washed me with joy. The puppy jumped as she turned her chair to enter the coolness of her home.
“You men can think of only two things for women to do, and both things fill you up!” she said over her shoulder, waving one hand in the air.
We finished the meal of wind-dried salmon and corn meal, a pine-nut stew, canned peaches, a huckleberry pie, and fried bread. “I do not make it so good as those from here,” Lukwsh told me, “but it is my own way and leaves less oil on your fingers when you eat it. Here,” she said to the two little ones still hovering at the open door. “Take what is left to Auntie Pauline.”
Chubby fingers snatched at the crisp, fawn-colored bread like hungry birds as the children scampered out the door.
“Tell them my family is home!” she shouted after them. “And for them to come later to see.” Then to us she laughed. “As if they need an invitation to find out what happens here.”
She let the puppy lick at her fingers before he found his bed of cornhusks, turned three times to plop beside the stove.
The house felt pleasantly warm from the fry bread. We had eaten at a round table made of a single log held by a carved leg at the center. Beyond squatted a wood stove surrounded by a ramp that appeared to make the stove sit inside a wooden box, making it easier for Lukwsh to cook from her chair, to reach the warming oven at the top. Beside the woodstove stood a deep sink lined with a reddish metal and bearing a water handle. It too had been built so Lukwsh’s chair could slide under it and she could wash dishes or her hands at a height of ease. Even the tables holding her unfinished baskets or the shelves of herbs and spices that supplied the room with pungency were lower. The windows, too. Shard had cared well for her.
Colored rugs were scattered where her wheels would not catch them. A feeling of lavishness spilled across the tidy room.
“He has made it so I can do for myself, Asiam,” Lukwsh said, watching me watch. “Until a few weeks ago, I had a good dog to help, too. Yampah could get my shawl for me and bring in sticks for kindling. But we all get old and die, and Yampah did, too.” She sighed. “In that room,” she nodded with her head to a closed door across from the main one, “is a bed and thunder bucket so I do not have to find my way out in the night. He is a good son, knows how to walk on another’s trail even if the person has no feet.” She smiled at her own joke. “It is not easy to find a son so willing to see the world in this way.”
Shard’s face darkened with the praise. He pulled an obsidian knife from a sheath near the stove and sat down on a high-back chair he had probably made, scraped his fingernails with the knife.
“None were of my own flesh, but it has not mattered.”
She wheeled her way to sit where she could look out the window at the tall grasses that gave the creek its name.
“It is so pretty here, quiet, as at the Silvies,” I said, coming to stand beside her. I am not sure I’ve really heard her words. “Wren was your child,” I said.
“I said she was the sister of Shard and Stink Bug, who came to me in a different way.”
Shard held the knife in midair. “You and my father—she was the only child you two had.”
Lukwsh shook her head, turned on her wheels, and returned to the table. She scanned it, found crumbs she scraped with the cup of her hand onto her lap. She rolled to the doorway and lifted her skirts to the breeze. The dog raised his eyebrows but did not leave his bed.
“For the meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds,” she said and chirped for them, watched them hop, hop at the dirt and crumbs in front of the door. “I cannot get a hawk to come to me like Grey Doe did. Have to keep working on that one.” She kept her back to us as she spoke again. “Wren came as you, Asiam. She was much smaller. Tiny. Barely born.”
“We kept her in a winnowing basket at first, she was so small,” Lukwsh said.
“Grey Doe told us we would have to stay with her when your time came to deliver. Is that not so? We even went with her and auntie. For what, two, three days?”
“My time came. Yes. You went to Grey Doe. But my baby did not live. Then, as if the Creator could answer my prayers of anger with something sweet, Wren came.”
She looked far back into her memories. Softness filled the space between the wrinkles of her face. Quiet settled on the room as each remembered Wren in his or her own way.
Lukwsh turned to me. “Wuzzie brought the child. I do not know where or how Wuzzie found this gift or why I was chosen to receive it, but I took it. As with all gifts. And when years later you were brought, I took you too. But when Wuzzie sent you away, I could not find the strength inside to argue. So much had already been given. I hoped only that you lived and did not hold me angry in your thoughts. And so my prayers are answered. You are here.” Tears pooled at her eyes. “You do not seem to hold harsh feelings, so my faith finds fruit. You have been led where you need to be.”
I bent to her, held her as tightly as I could. “Yes,” I whispered. “I am where I’m supposed to be.”
Later in the evening, more joined us. Summer Rain and Thunder Caller; Willow Basket and her child; Leah, soon to marry; names of others I did not know touched their hands to mine gently in the Indian way. They ate then walked back carrying their lamps, their lights twinkling, then disappearing like stars at dawn. Their voices and eyes had welcomed me, not sent angry arrows to my heart.
I fought not to scold myself for waiting, for not finding them before.
It was again the three of us.
“There is enough water to dam the creek and make a mill here,” Shard said. “It is worth some effort. Beyond the ridge there, people stay in tents. We could harvest timber and build more houses. If we stayed well, there might be more families here.”
“Enough people to need a long house,” I said.
Shard cast a quick glance to his mother, and some message passed between them.
“Our people had no long house at the lakes,” he reminded me. “Our religion was a private one. We have gone to the long house ceremonies here, and some even know the songs if not the words. It is a good religion, this one with drums, and not so hard to share.” I thought he would say something more, but he did not. He stood and walked beneath an arc covered with wild rose vines. “Some elders say many years ago, long before the war, we came here to Seekseequa to find roots, but no one here remembers. Still, it has a feel to it, this place, that is like home.”
“Maybe the smell of the water and the grasses,” I offered.
“Hmm,” Lukwsh agreed, inhaling deeply. “It gets chilly.”
We heard crickets, some tiny screeches, and coyotes howled. The latter brought barks from Arrow, dark as the bats that swooped toward the creek. They can be heard, the air moved by their wings felt, but their presence not seen.
“I am a tired old woman,” Lukwsh said and began to wheel herself back inside. I rose to help her, but she waved me away. “I am fine. This will be my best night of sleep for a long time. You will not wake me when you slip into my bed later. Just push Arrow out of that place.” She smiled, her lips rolling up onto ash-stained gums. “In the morning, we’ll speak of Wuzzie. And of the plans I have for who would marry my children.”
“And your home?” I asked Shard after she had gone to bed. “You have not shown me, or do you stay here, too?”
He moved back into the lamplight cast through Lukwsh’s windows. “There.” He pointed to thick foliage in the scoop of a ravine. “I make her an iron to hit, so I can hear her if she calls. I wanted one big house for both of us, but she does not permit this. Says I will have my own family one day. So there is a house back there. The barns here, they belong to me. And the cattle. I work out some, for ranchers, use what Sam Johnson taught me at Malheur. That wagon there”—he pointed in the moonlight to a wagon with a stall built on its back—“for hauling a bull,” he said, pride in his voice. “There is a winch to pull him forward if he resists. It is the only one like it, and I can take my bull wherever I want without herding him. He leads a good life, that one.”
We were both quiet, let the night winds rise and settle like a sigh.
“I waited so long,” I said, “imagined how it would be when … if I saw Lukwsh again someday. Then I’d wipe away the thought, not want to dwell on something impossible. And you—sometimes I would think of you and ache with the wanting to feel your arms around me one more time, to know how you and I might be as we grew older. Now here I am.”
“You have a hesitation.” He gave me time to continue, but I did not. “Because you married once?”
“Not because I married. Thomas Crickett was a good man, and I became who I am in his presence. Because of him, I am here now, I think.” I struggled with how to explain, what words to use. “It is because … of how I walked my path, will choose to walk it in the future. Because I do not know if you will understand this, Shard.”
“I listen well.”
I praised the dark for hiding his face.
“Once, I hiked in the mountains with Thomas Crickett and some friends of his.” I moved to sit on a bench on the south side of Lukwsh’s house, felt the day’s heat at my back, captured in the wood. Shard retrieved a shawl for me and wrapped me in it, our heads together as we talked. “Each walked at his own pace on that hike, some faster than others. There were beautiful things to see along the trail up to Mount Hood. But I seldom looked. I was busy watching my feet, thinking as I walked. I thought about what would happen when I reached the top, if I would be too tired to come back down. I remembered things I should have done before I left. Always a busy mind.
“Suddenly I looked up and found myself alone, no one else on the trail, no sounds except the wind. I thought I missed a fork in the trail and was ashamed I didn’t pay attention, thinking of past things or future but never of where I am. I stopped to see if those behind me would catch up. ‘Then I will know I am on the right path,’ I decided. But they might be following me and have taken the wrong fork as well! So I picked up my pace to catch those in front, and when I spied Thomas Crickett’s familiar coat in the distance, I was overwhelmed with relief. Until later, when one of that group told me they had taken a wrong turn, wandered about before finding the main road again.
“And so I think of this. Why do I spend time on my trail wondering about those I follow or those behind me, letting my mind wander into what lies ahead or what has passed? I lose sight of the way, pay no attention to what is happening now, end up doing foolish things. It is what got me into trouble those years before—being angry with Vanilla Leaf and you, walking as one with Summer Rain. Later, I let Stink Bug and Wuzzie, or what I thought they would think, keep me looking for something, searching always but never sure when it was found.”
It pleased me that Shard let me speak, did not jump in to tell me what I should have done, made no effort to repair things.
“Something kept me from the present. And then I knew.” My mouth was dry. “It was because the only one there with me on the trail when I walk alone is me. Someone so unworthy I did not wish to share her time.”
Shard kept his face forward, as though his eyes would violate his soul if he looked at me.
“So I went away to the future or the past.”
“It is not how I see you,” he said, looking at me now. He thumbed the fullness of my cheeks, wiped at my tears.
“It is not how I am, now.”
“Then why be sad?”
“Because I do not know if you will understand what made the difference.”
He smiled. “Now I see. This is how you wander into the future yet.”
His gentleness enco
uraged, and so I told him in a whisper still laced with awe and wonder. “I did. Until I listened to my Spirit, the One they call the Lord, the One who called my name.”
Shard had taken his hand from behind my back. He leaned forward, elbows resting on knees, waiting.
“This Spirit said I do not need to be afraid. He will give me people, things I need, tasks to do, direction. And I will never walk the trail alone as long as I will listen.”
“He gives you a future. And a hope.”
His choice of words surprised me, words I had heard myself sometime before. “You know this Spirit?”
He smiled again. “Is this why you keep the wall between us? You think I will not understand the Spirit who is above all others?”
“It is why I think I am here with you after all these years.”
“Come with me, Asiam.”
His voice carried impatience to it but anticipation as well, like a boy sharing his first kill. He pulled me to my feet, lifted the lantern, and we walked the short distance down a rocky walkway toward his house. He pushed open the door hung on iron hinges, set the lamp on the table, and went to light the wall lamps. The room eased into a warm glow to match my cheeks. He had selected fine and familiar things to surround himself with—willow baskets, wainscoted walls, china on plate shelves, a divan draped with a Hudson Bay blanket, doors leading to two other rooms. But it was with pleasure unanticipated and without limit when I saw where he led me first.
“I have made it with my own hands,” he said, “from the leg irons taken off us at the big river when we were freed. I made it to remember how we got through, where our strength came from, and who controls all things.”
On the wall before me hung twists of iron that formed a cross so delicate and yet so strong that it needed securing to the wall by heavy leather straps.
“And I have learned to read the English words of the book that says which Spirit is the strongest, the One who gives us hope. There is no reason to be afraid, Asiam.” His voice was thick with pride and something else. “Mr. Parrish and his wife and even Mr. Johnson, they all lived with kindness and a rare strength, like iron, that could be fired and made stronger. And they gave it away to me and Lukwsh and Wren and others, did not force it on us, but let us see such love. And so we wished it for ourselves. We trust the same Spirit, Asiam.”
Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher) Page 36