Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  The men were already fishing above the camp where the creek collected for a moment in a deep pool before tumbling off the edge of the hill in a sudden white fall. For some reason, the trout from these high creeks tasted better than those caught in lakes. The latter had softer flesh and something dank in their flavour, like waterweed. But these mountain trout, well, rainbows actually, had a flinty edge to their flesh, almost like granite. When William came back to the camp with two of them carried by the gills on a stick, Margaret could already taste them, wrapped in thin slices of bacon to baste them and turned with an iron fork in the blue smoke of pine. She put a skillet underneath to catch their juices for flavouring the bannocks.

  “Does this creek have a name?” asked Nicholas, watching the water race down the slope.

  “Not really. There are a number of creeks this high, some of them only running when the snow melts. But this one is permanent, draining out of a lake without a name, farther up. Eventually it joins with another arm, and that creek runs into the Nicola River down towards our place. You know, I’ve fished all of the creeks, and there are some I’d swear have never seen a trout, but this one has always given me fish.” As William spoke, he used his hatchet to slice a chunk of pine into pitchy sticks, wanting a quick hot flame to boil up a kettle of creek water for coffee.

  When the fish were ready, Margaret divided them into equal portions on the tin plates and put a bannock on the plates, too. The fish was delicious, clean and sweet, and when they had finished every little morsel with their fingers, the stew was hot enough to ladle onto their plates. William made the coffee, adding the grounds to the kettle, letting it boil until it frothed over, removing the enamel pot briefly to a rock until the froth subsided, then repeating the procedure three more times. Margaret carefully placed the long backbone of each trout into the creek. Watching her, Nicholas imagined the pleasure of kissing her here on this golden hill, her mouth tasting of the trout and her hair smelling of the fire.

  By now it was dusk. The fire settled into a comfortable burn, snapping now and again as hidden pitch ignited and flared. Margaret rinsed the plates and handed cups of coffee to the men. The stars were appearing in the clear sky, and William told Nicholas the names the Thompsons gave various constellations.

  “Teit has material on this, I believe, so you’ll come to it in your work. But it’s useful to see the stars for yourself, in the country of the Thompsons, to get a sense of how they fit into the place. It might be easier to come up with French equivalents if you’ve seen what the Indians were referring to, physically if not spiritually.”

  The sky stretched out in every direction. “Follow that one bright star there directly in front of the big pine, yes, there. It’s the Big Dipper, of course — my father called it the Plough — in Ursa Major. Well, here it’s the Grizzly Bear. There’s a story to go with it, you’ll have to ask Margaret’s grandmother for the details. And that one, just follow my hand exactly, yes, that’s the one we call Cygnus, they call it the Swan, same thing, and they’re very familiar with swans in this country. Colonies winter here on the plateau. The group right behind the Swan they think of as a canoe full of hunters pursuing the swan. It makes as much sense to me as anything else, maybe more than those old Greek stories. They trace their family trees back to the animals, you know. Some are descended from the coyote, some the antelope, others from badgers. And Coyote is the important animal here, really. He’s a sort of an emblem, you could call him that, moving through this valley, changing people and other animals, birds, too, into bluffs and rock formations. He brought salmon to the Columbia River, brought them up the Fraser River into all the different feeder creeks and rivers.”

  They lay on their backs in dry grass by the fire. The stars were so many and so bright that Margaret covered her eyes with her right hand and peered up through the spaces between her three middle fingers. One constellation at a time, swans and hunters, tracks of the dead on the grey trail, a dog following the friends of the moon, one story that linked her to the vast sky which had been there when the earth was young and Coyote ranged across the valley in the company of grasses.

  Later, in her tent, she listened for the breathing of the men in their own tent, their quiet voices murmuring in the darkness. Riding up here, she had felt that she might burst with joy, Nicholas very close on one of August’s horses, her father leading them up the rough cow trails through blossoming buckwheat and beargrass, their fragrant flowering tops swaying in the wind. She wondered if she’d be able to speak naturally or if her tongue would feel too thick for her mouth, the way it had in the kitchen on the day Nicholas had come for dinner. He, on the other hand, had been pleasant to her and her father, asking questions, doing his share of the work once they’d found the campsite, filling the kettle again and again so they always had water when they needed it. When they’d stopped for lunch, he’d caught her eye and smiled, saying quietly, “I’m glad you’re here,” and she felt that fire again, a charge of lightning running her spine, and in spite of the warmth of the day, she’d shivered.

  They’d stopped for lunch by a slough, and on the reeds by the shore, a pair of red-winged blackbirds swayed on the tops of bulrushes. William tried to locate the nest but couldn’t, the reeds grew too thickly and gave way to wild roses on the shore. Margaret leaned into the thicket of blossoming roses to inhale their sweet breath and saw the blackbirds’ nest like a grassy cup on the stem of a bulrush, a single hatchling crouched baldly on the floor of the cup with three eggs still unhatched, like pale blue beans, mottled with green and darker blue. She backed away quietly and beckoned to the men, who came to peer in at them, the parents anxiously fluttering in the tangle of plants. Margaret pinched off a rosebud to tie into Daisy’s forelock, and they resumed their meal of bread and cold beef.

  “Everything is a little later up here,” William commented. “The blackbirds around the ranch house have been feeding their young for a week or two now. And the roses down at Nicola Lake are nearly finished. Listen — a meadowlark! That’ll be the male. Let’s see if we can see him, the female will be on the nest, probably in those tussocks up on that ridge. Ah, yes, there he is!”

  They looked to where William was pointing and saw the bright meadowlark, his yellow breast and throat bibbed in black.

  “It’s like flute music,” said Nicholas in delight. “One of my sisters plays the flute, and she often practises a particular Bach sonata, I think it’s in A minor, a beautiful clear piece. But no lovelier than that bird’s song, I’d say.”

  And in her tent that night, Margaret remembered the thrill of hearing that visitor to Quilchena recite a Shakespeare sonnet. She had felt the same longing that day, the almost bitter joy the words left her with.

  When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

  Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

  That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,

  Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

  Of different flowers in odour and in hue . . .

  Now she had something, someone, to attach the longing to. She fell to sleep in its spell.

  She had no idea at first why she woke but lay in her bedroll listening for clues. Random drops of rain fell on the canvas of her tent. Had they put the saddles under cover? She couldn’t remember. She knew her father had rigged the food bags high in a tree; this was bear country, and they never forgot to remove food from temptation. Putting her jacket on over her underclothes, she untied her tent opening and went out to check the site. Chances were this would only be a light rain as a cloud passed over the valley, high and transitory.

  “Margaret?” Her father’s voice came quietly from the other tent.

  “I’m just checking to make sure the saddles are covered and there’s nothing to be spoiled if the rain keeps up,” she said softly. “There’s no need for you to get up.”

  The horses were gathered under the biggest pine. By now it was raining harder, but it was fairly sheltered where the horses stood. Mar
garet could smell their bodies, warm and relaxed, and the odour of rain on pine needles, on pollen, on southern-wood and wormwood, on the smouldering logs in the fire, sizzling as each drop fell. She leaned against Daisy for a moment, her cheek on the horse’s withers, her hair against the dark mane. That’s what her father saw as he looked out of his tent opening to see why she was taking so long to return to her bed.

  The next two days were fine and warm. William took Nicholas far and near, sometimes accompanied by Margaret (which tracks on the wide expanse might be hers?) and sometimes just the two men riding from the camp, each with a bannock wrapped in a clean handkerchief in his saddlebag. When they returned for supper the second evening, William had a pair of snared grouse hanging from his saddle by the feet. Margaret loved to eat grouse, willingly cooked them, but hated to clean them, so William took them aside and opened them up with a swift knife stroke down the centre of the abdomen. He quickly skinned them, removed all the entrails and buried them, after first carefully extracting the livers. He rinsed the body cavities in the creek, shaking out the excess water and blood. Taking his sharp knife, he split each bird down the backbone and flattened it so it would grill evenly over the fire.

  “There you go, my dear. Mind you don’t overcook the livers.”

  Margaret sharpened some cottonwood sticks and soaked them for a few minutes in water. Then she threaded them through the grouse, taking care to direct the sticks into meaty areas, four sticks per bird, reaching into the flesh to pull the sticks out the other end so that the bird was positioned in the middle. This made a kind of support rack so that Margaret could lay the ends of the sticks over one of the rocks ringing the fire and let the flattened grouse grill slowly over its heat. She turned them several times during the cooking, and when they were nearly done, she put sliced onions over the breast meat and covered them with the last few slices of bacon, once again catching the melting fat in the skillet to fry the bannocks. The livers were seared at the ends of two of the sticks, basted with a little bacon fat.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so delicious,” Nicholas said, throwing the last clean bone into the fire. “You both are so accomplished! I can fish, my father took on the task of teaching me in his favourite river, the Ausable, near our summer place, so I don’t suppose I’d go entirely hungry if I lived up here, but I can’t say that I’d ever think of cooking the grouse the way you did. I’d probably end up with a charred lump that was still raw inside.”

  William laughed. “Well, I wasn’t brought up to cook over fires like this, believe me, but I learned quickly enough the first summer I spent as a cowboy up on Roper’s ranch on the Thompson. There were always camp cooks, but often we’d be out checking on cattle far from the camp, and we’d be given some beans to take along and maybe some flour. That was it, and you got pretty tired of beans and hard biscuits. There was one fellow I remember, he knew plants, and he’d cook grouse with wild onions and some peppery grass — I’ve never forgotten the taste of it, but I can’t seem to find it here. Maybe it’s the air that seasons the meat, too. I wonder how tasty this would be cooked in a skillet on a stove. Tough, maybe, and stringy.”

  “I’d say it would still taste wonderful,” Nicholas replied. “But you say you weren’t brought up to cook like this. Where do you come from?”

  William told him about Astoria, his boyhood home on the shore of the Pacific. Margaret listened intently. When her father described that life, it was as though he was talking about someone else, a stranger, a boy from another world. Not the man she’d grown up with who knew horses, who loved the Nicola Valley with every fibre of his being. Yet she also remembered how tight and proper he’d become when his mother and sister had visited. Even his speech had changed, his vowels sounding more and more like theirs; his table manners, usually casual, had become, during that visit, an impossible model for his children. The way he held out the chair until his mother was seated, the way he held his fork, neatly wiped his mouth with his napkin — a stranger seemed to be eating at the ranch table. And there was a language between William and his mother, mostly unspoken, that Margaret had witnessed, as you might witness two people speaking Chinese; she had found it intriguing but impenetrable.

  “It’s ironic that I came up from Astoria to work on the Thompson Plateau because of all the stories I heard when I was young. The tales of David Thompson’s explorations of the Columbia River were the ones that made me restless and eager to strike out on my own. The Indians called him the Star Man because of his interest in astronomy and mapping. I guess I thought that working my gillnetter would satisfy those feelings, but it wasn’t what I needed.”

  Nicholas was engrossed. “Was the Thompson River named for him?”

  “Yes, although he was never on it that I’m aware of. It was named by Simon Fraser, another explorer and a friend of David Thompson, and Thompson named the other great river after Fraser, who had made a journey down it, thinking it was the Columbia, until he reached the Pacific. I think I’ve got that right. A kind of exchange of honour, I suppose. My mother’s father worked for John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company at the original outpost back in the early part of the last century. I grew up hearing about these explorers, often from men who had known them or been on their expeditions. An old fellow who came to prune our trees each spring remembered seeing Thompson come into Astoria that day in 1811, he remembered the cedar canoe flying a British flag. He was only a boy, really, but it stayed with him, clear as anything.”

  “What did your own father do?” Nicholas asked, enjoying the conversation more than he could say. How right it seemed to be sitting by this fire with a girl he had kissed and her father, wanting to be nowhere else on earth.

  “He had been a bar pilot on the Columbia River. There were two channels at the mouth, separated by a sand bar called Middle Sands, which kept changing as the sand shoaled in the storms and currents. He’d guide boats into the Columbia and out again, he knew the river like his own hands, knew about all the sandbars, which were navigable during particular tides, what conditions were likely to be through particular weathers. He never lost a boat and became something of a legend. Someone even composed a song in his honour, a sea-shanty that glorified one of his adventures in a Pacific squall.”

  Margaret exclaimed, “You’ve never told me that, Father! Can you remember the song?”

  “Oh, not really. There was a refrain, let me see if I can get it right:

  Captain Stuart brought her in, the limping broken beauty.

  No man died, though she’d a list to her side,

  And her sails hung all a-streaming.

  Perhaps not so much of a song after all.”

  “Could a man make a good living doing what your father did?”

  “Well, he did very well financially, and my mother was left a considerable sum when her father died. My parents had a big house built on the slope overlooking the river, among the merchants and cannery owners. My sister and I were somewhat isolated in Astoria, though. She went to school in Portland after she turned twelve, and I had a tutor because I made such a fuss about going away to school. There wasn’t much society in Astoria, and our parents had made our lives conspicuously different from those around us. I could escape occasionally, going up the river by canoe, alone or with another boy, as far as I could reach by water, then walking the riverbanks to see the fishing platforms at Celilo and to look at the Indian villages where the Klickitat River flowed into the Columbia, and the Wind, farther west. I guess I wanted to see where the fish I’d missed catching ended up, some of them hanging on grey latticed racks to dry in the sun, some being roasted on fires as I passed the camps. Some people said that runs of them travelled as far as the Snake River and even farther, into the Salmon River. Fishing gave me people to work with, the men who helped me figure out settings and how to care for my boat gave me companionship, but I think my sister was disadvantaged by too much of one thing and not enough of others.”

  “Did she stay in Astoria,
or did she do something as interesting as you?”

  William laughed. “Interesting is not the half of it, Nicholas. She was sent to Boston for finishing but never married. She lives with my mother, still in the big house, still with servants and proper standards, as they would have it. They came here for two months a couple of years ago, their first and only trip to Canada, although they go to Europe regularly and to the east coast fairly often. Father left them very well off and left me a substantial amount of money, too, although he wouldn’t write to me once I’d settled here, wouldn’t acknowledge me.”

  Then William was quiet, remembering the loneliness of that break with his family. It was a wonder to him that he’d come so far from his original home and found such happiness, undreamed of in the earliest years. He had loved the vast country he’d travelled through to get to the Thompson Plateau, the openness of the sky, even the cryptic messages rattlesnakes left in the sand. He felt he could breathe deeply after years in the fog, his lungs filling with dry air and the pollen of the grey herbs settling on his body as he rode the benchlands and side valleys. In his socks, the hooked seeds of barley and wild grass.

  At Margaret’s bidding, Nicholas told them something of his life in New York City, where his father practised law and his mother tried to grow apples and roses in their garden.

  “When my mother was a child, she was taken to Versailles, and she was captivated by the Orangerie and then, at Malmaison, by the roses of the Empress Josephine. I think she missed her calling, she should have been one of those grand ladies of horticulture. Instead she fell in love with my father when he came to France on a holiday and married him. Father was ready to leave Dublin at that time anyway because there were so few opportunities for Catholics, the country was run by Anglo-Irish, although Father said many of them hadn’t seen England in generations. So they came to New York, and Mother resigned herself to raising what she could, children and flowers, in the sooty air of our back garden.