Sisters of Grass

by Theresa Kishkan

  While Margaret sat in the grass, she remembered how she had once felt the presence of the young girl here among the rocks and dry earth, and she wondered if the girl had longed for a particular young man, made excuses to be around him, watched him under shy lashes at communal events. Margaret hoped she hadn’t died without feeling the sharp catch of her breath in her throat when the boy caught her eye or brushed against her. She took solace in the fact that she was alive to feel these things, not buried with a necklace of elk teeth and a drinking tube she would never use. She’d kept the drinking tube after cleaning it carefully, she’d even used it to drink from the Nicola River; how odd it had felt to taste the living water coming up through the ancient length of bone, flakes of calcium coming away against her palate. She kept it on the windowsill in her bedroom, a charm to be held and wondered at on nights when, sleepless, she stood looking at the stars. Had the girl’s mouth ever touched the surface, had her tongue probed the opening, wearing the rough edges smooth over time?

  The whole family helped with haying, moving up to the hay camp for its duration, while Jenny’s sister Josie stayed at the ranch house to feed the chickens and pigs, milk the cow, and keep an eye on Thistle and the Bonny Prince. The hay camp was fun for the younger children, they were allowed to sleep in tents and ride with William on the mower or bull rake, depending on what he was doing. The hay, once cut, dried and raked, was stacked with the help of swinging boom stackers, moved from stack to stack as needed. Once a stack was finished, those on top who had helped to place and level the hay coming up would ride to the ground again on a sling. When William was working on the stackers, he’d allow the children up to the top of the stack to help, and then they’d ride down on the sling, shrieking with excitement as the sling dangled and swung. At night, the men would wash in the creek and sleep early, after a game or two of poker or horseshoes on the shorn field, because the mornings began at four thirty; they could be heard talking quietly in their tents or else snoring. The Chinese cook smoked in the evenings outside his cabin, the fumes of opium and the joss he burned inside hanging over the clean scent of hay like an exotic curtain. Margaret rose early to help catch and harness the horses. She loved the sight of them in the dawn field, standing in groups near a cottonwood, and their movement toward her as she rattled oats in a bucket to catch their attention, looming out of the mist, huge and sombre. She had her favourites among the working teams — a pair of Clydesdales named Bill and Florrie, who had massive feet and densely feathered fetlocks. She liked to fit their harnesses on while they held their big heads low for her, and they always stood stock still while she fastened the straps under their bellies and tails. In the mornings their cool faces smelled of grass, an occasional seed caught in the fine hairs on their lips. The way they wrinkled their lips around their teeth reminded her of the toothless old men she saw in church, working their gums while the minister preached of God and angels.

  Hay camp was a pleasant diversion from Margaret’s preoccupation with Nicholas. Up on the hay meadows, she stopped half-expecting to see him riding up to the house, she wasn’t reminded of his mouth as he kissed her under the trees on the road to Douglas Lake, and she had no privacy in the tent she shared with her sisters to fill with the memory of dancing with him in the Nicola Hall, the pressure of his hand on the small of her back. When she did remember, it was the weight of his body against hers during a waltz, his face against her hair. It was kissing him while around them lightning crackled and snapped, the taste of his mouth. She remembered the shock and excitement in his eyes as the two of them steadied Thistle while the stallion grunted and thrust into her, his teeth bared as he released his seed into her damp mysterious body. And Margaret remembered washing herself by lamplight that evening, and how she had felt she was drowning in pleasure.

  The days at the hay camp were sunny and warm, an occasional afternoon storm coming in from the northeast to cloud the skies, produce thunderheads and summer lightning, then pass as quickly as it arrived. When the hay was all stacked and the family had packed up their belongings, the wagon returned them to the home ranch, where the garden was flourishing and the redtailed hawk chicks in the big cottonwood were beginning to fly, their parents teaching them tricks of aviation and pursuit. The songbirds were fledging, too, just in time for the parent hawks to teach their young to hunt inexperienced larks, as well as ground squirrels and the marmots whistling on the rough shoulders of the erratics.

  There was a letter from Nicholas to say he was coming to Spahomin for four days in early August. Before he arrived, Margaret rode to her grandmother’s cabin to help her gather rose hips for drying. She tried to time her visits with a plant trip so that she could learn how and where to gather the roots, stems, and berries that her grandmother used for food and medicine. It was one thing to sit in the kitchen and hear Grandmother Jackson describe how to dig up a tuber or remove a certain portion of a tree’s bark and another to walk the dry hills or creek banks with the gathering baskets and watch exactly how much bark to take or whether the berries were at the right point of ripeness. The rose hips were perfect, plump and full. They filled one basket, and then Grandmother carefully cut some stems of the rose bushes to take back to use for basket handles. They found some tall mint growing on the banks of a creek and cut many stems of it to dry for keeping bugs away from the beds.

  “I’ll put some of this inside the pillows,” said Grandmother Jackson. “The feathers get musty, and the mint will make them fresh.”

  “Nicholas has written me to say he’s coming in a few days. Do you mind him staying with you?” Margaret wanted to hear her grandmother’s opinion of the man whose name filled her with such pleasure.

  “He is a nice young man, and I enjoy his company. So many of our young men are anxious to be accepted by the white people, and they haven’t the time to listen to the old stories. Some don’t even want the language any longer. In my heart, this is part of my fear, the old fear that we will disappear. If we don’t speak our language, tell our stories, feed and heal our bodies with what the Creator has put on our doorsteps, then who will we be? Who? It is very good to have someone come who thinks the stories are important. Your mother says he came to look for you the last time he was in the valley and was disappointed not to find you. This time he will be luckier, I think.”

  They laid out the rose hips in single layers in shallow baskets when they returned to the cabin, and peeled the stems of rose wood and laid them out along the rafters to dry. Then the two women prepared a meal of bacon and bannock and took it out onto the porch to eat with mugs of strong tea. Margaret had promised to milk her family’s cow that evening, so she left and rode towards home on a trail that the Reserve cattle used, leading along the river where it left the road. She was about halfway home when Daisy snorted and balked, reluctant to go further. And Margaret could see why: just ahead, standing ankle deep in the river, was a big black bear, her two cubs just behind her. Although Daisy had squealed before Margaret could pat her neck and direct her, the bear was busy at the river’s edge and hadn’t yet got wind of them.

  Keeping a tight rein, Margaret backed Daisy along the trail to where a cluster of young willows sheltered the water. She could see that the bear had a fish, a salmon, and was tearing open its belly; the eggs shone in the body cavity and the cubs were being encouraged to take a mouthful. The sharp stink of bear stung Margaret’s nostrils and Daisy’s, as well. She was beginning to fret on the short rein, skittering and blowing. The sow turned and saw them there among the willows and dropped the fish. Clacking her teeth, she started toward them, then retreated, growling and snapping. The river was too fast for Margaret to attempt to cross it with Daisy in such an agitated state, and the rise on the other side of the trail was too steep to take at a run. She did not want to turn and retreat and risk having the bear catch up with them. Although bears looked clumsy and slow, Margaret knew how fast they could run, especially when provoked.

  The sow bear turned to her cubs and grunted a comma
nd. Before Margaret could think, the little family was swiftly climbing the steep grassy slope across the trail and vanishing over the hill. Margaret was so relieved to see them go that she collapsed over Daisy’s neck, exhaling the breath she had not been aware she was holding.

  Returning to the ranch was anticlimactic. Frightened as she had been, recognizing the danger of the situation, Margaret was thrilled to see the bear and her young at the river, eating the rosy salmon flesh and then disappearing into the landscape so quickly. There was such beauty in their glossy coats, their long claws, the glistening eggs in the belly of the fish. Her father was up with the cattle, and she told her mother instead, expecting it would worry her but needing to share the story.

  Instead, Jenny told her, “The black bear was my father’s guardian spirit, you know. I always liked bears and was never afraid of them when we picked berries or put our weirs across the river. My father said they could hear what you said about them. You should never say hurtful things because then they wouldn’t come when you needed them. And we did need them sometimes, for their fat and their meat, and for winter robes.”

  Margaret was surprised to hear her mother talk of such things. Because she had not undertaken a puberty ceremony and because she seldom spoke of her childhood, her daughter supposed that she wasn’t interested in the old ways. She asked her mother about her grandmother’s guardian spirit.

  “It’s the mountain goat,” Jenny said. “We don’t see them here, but she was from Shulus, you know, and there were some over there. It suits her, she was always scrambling about on the mountainsides looking for plants. But if I’d had a guardian, I’d have wanted it to be the bear because it was special to my father. Now, do you want your supper before you milk the cow or after?”

  Margaret took her time with the milking as she thought about her mother. Because she didn’t talk much about her life before William, it was easy to forget she’d had one. She was the daughter who had been lost to the priests; that was the way Grandmother Jackson seemed to think of her. Yet they were not estranged, nothing so dramatic. Jenny still visited her mother at Spahomin from time to time, though she was closer to her brother and sister; and she always sent little gifts to her mother when Margaret went over alone. But from what she’d just said, she had felt a bond with her father. He’d been dead for years, having been taken by consumption when Margaret was a tiny child. She had one memory of him: sitting in the cabin Grandmother lived in, hearing him tell a story about Old-one creating the Nicola Valley and making the mountains and the original people. At home she had been hearing about God and the garden of Eden from her mother and father; she thought Eden must look like Culloden, all golden grass, ringed with ponderosas, and God like her grandfather, whom she thought of as the Old-one. She had not doubted that he could do anything he put his mind to, his voice was that deep and strong as he told the story, and she didn’t notice how thin he was, how wasted his arms, and how he kept coughing into a bloody handkerchief.

  Margaret dreamed of the bears that night, the surprise of the mother as she heard Daisy’s snorting and caught the scent of them in the air, and she heard again the snapping of her teeth. In the dream she dismounted and went down to the river to greet them, then ran with them up the steep hill, her loose black coat hanging from her bones. In her mouth, the taste of fish eggs and raw flesh, and the husks of rose hips flecking the dung she left in the excitement of their departure. How will I tell my parents I’ve left them, she wondered, will I still have speech? But when she tried to talk, only muffled grunts came from her mouth, her tongue a thick obstacle, immovable. When she woke, she found three black hairs on her pillow, too coarse to have come from her own head.

  Nicholas came with a little gift, a photograph he’d taken of Margaret’s favourite from among her grandmother’s baskets — the split cedar with the pattern of deer hoof and entrails. It was sitting on the sinew chair on the porch, weathered railings to one side.

  “I didn’t know you had a camera!” she said. “Did you take many photographs?”

  “I’m still learning how to use it,” he confessed, “and quite a lot of them didn’t turn out. I tried taking the glass plates away to develop, and some of them fogged or the emulsion cracked. I want to make a record of things, though, and your grandmother’s baskets are exquisite. I thought that from the beginning, but I can verify it now that I’ve spent time looking at others and consulting with Dr. Newcombe. He has given me instructions to photograph everything. Perhaps you could help me with the equipment if you’re interested.”

  When Margaret had been younger, a Dr. Sutton had practised medicine in Nicola. He’d come to the ranch to attend to a cowhand who’d broken an arm, and he was often seen at the socials. He was a big man and hard of hearing, the result of a childhood bout of scarlet fever. But he claimed the bracing air of the valley was bringing his hearing back. His interests had included photography, and he was the one whom William had traded the quarter side of beef for a family portrait to send to Astoria. Dr. Sutton had photographed his servant as well as other people in the valley; it was a point of pride to have been taken by the doctor.

  “Your grandmother is letting me use the old smokehouse as a darkroom. That’ll be perfect for the images of her baskets and everything nearby. I’ve got a tent, too, to take up for shots of more remote areas like that old campsite your father showed me. And I’d like to take some shots of the kikuli houses down by the lake, maybe with some other things to make them look as though they’re still in use. I know people haven’t lived in them for twenty years or so, but they’re still part of active memory, your grandmother’s memory.”

  Margaret examined the equipment Nicholas pulled out of his bags. Glass plates wrapped in canvas, jars of solutions, pans, a bundle that proved to be the windowless tent to use as a portable darkroom. Nicholas explained that he didn’t really need the darkroom now that he’d been given plates coated with gelatin emulsion — before coming to the valley, he’d used collodion plates, which needed to be developed immediately — but he wanted to develop the plates anyway to make sure he’d got the images he wanted.

  “How stupid I’d feel if I took them back to Spences Bridge or shipped them to Victoria and then discovered I had nothing at all to show for my work. So I’ll develop them here and make contact prints. I’ll teach you everything I know if you like, but I’m really still learning, too.”

  I’ve seen the photographs taken in the early years of the century and have looked deeply into their images to find a clue about the lives there. They hover and circle, sometimes surfacing in sleep with a clarity never experienced in dreams, as if they are memories of my own. The mule-drawn wagons on the Cariboo road. The astonishing prospect of Hell’s Gate on the Fraser River, racks of salmon drying on the rocks beside the chasm. Views of the stopping houses with plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys, women in long dresses drying their hands on aprons as they greeted the travellers. The crowded courtroom in Kamloops, Bill Miner with a bemused look on his face as he rested his chin in his hand in the prisoners box. In the early pictures of men at work, the loggers pose on their springboards, one at each end of a gut fiddle, ready to topple the immense trees of our beginnings. Doukhobor women draw the ploughs over plains of unbroken grass in pairs, straining to the task. And there are the photographs of the valley itself, a kikuli house, c.1898, with the ladder showing at the opening but otherwise abandoned, Dr. Sutton’s picture of a woman net-fishing the Nicola River in 1900, the Roi.pellst family in 1914, posed in front of a tule shelter, their buckskin clothing so finely worked and regal, so palpable that I want to straighten the fringe with my fingers. I know that they wouldn’t have worn those clothes regularly in 1914 because I’ve seen the other photographs, too — Frederick Dally’s shot of people praying at Lytton, Dr. Sutton’s photo of a mealtime in 1898, tents of canvas, most people with their backs to the camera, one fellow standing with his hands behind his back, his suspenders holding up his worsted trousers. I want to enter the p
hotograph, walk into the camp from the aspens to the left, be given a tin plate of bannock and a piece of fish. The grass is dry and heavy with seeds. I could take these seeds forward with me, hidden in my clothing, my hair, an amulet to summon the past into my life, extant, viable as lupin seeds removed from the stomach of a mastodon, to germinate and flourish in the soil of the present.

  Nicholas had persuaded members of the Jackson family to allow him to photograph them in traditional clothing in front of a tule house that he and August’s boys had reconstructed. Grandmother Jackson had tule mats stored in her cabin and drew sketches for them to show the way the poles were placed, the mats layered and fastened. Inside the house was airy and smelled of dry grass. Nicholas was so fond of its interior that he decided to sleep in it for the remainder of his visit. He’d lie in the silver latticed screen the moonlight made on the ground as it filtered through the spots in the mats where the stalks of dried bulrush held together with Indian hemp had separated slightly. He’d look up towards the smoke-hole and imagine summer villages of these shelters, the smell of curing fish and bear fat in the air, baskets of drying berries, and fish nets spread out for mending on the bushes. He wanted to dream his way back into that life, become a part of it, however temporarily, and carry away the smoke in his clothing, the foxtail barley seeds in his hair. He couldn’t explain why he found it so fascinating, even haunting, why he wanted to enter it in the enigmatic realm of dream, knowing any other way was impossible. But when he slept and dreamed, it was of his father in the Ausable River, casting a line with a mayfly fashioned of coloured thread and feather on its end, bracing himself against the strong current, his old creel over his shoulder. Or else he dreamed of his grandmother in Chantilly, brushing crumbs from her dining table with a little silver brush and pan, singing as she worked a fragment of Purcell’s Dido.