Hannah & the Spindle Whorl

by Carol Anne Shaw

  I nod my understanding and smile at them both until Skeepla sort of smiles back at me, but it’s not exactly a real smile. It’s the fake kind that teachers always give your parents on meet-the-creature-night at school. Nutsa glares at me — I am definitely not welcome — while they both check out my clothes. What I’m wearing must look really bizarre to them. I doubt if they’ve ever seen jeans or an orange Quicksilver hoodie before. They seem especially curious about my green and black checkered backpack, which reminds me that not only is my iPod inside it but so is my digital camera. I barely hesitate before I reach inside and fish around for it. I find it hidden inside Max’s baseball hat, although I don’t know how that ended up in my backpack. I remove the camera and hit the power button.

  “It’s for taking pictures,” I tell Yisella, who looks suspiciously at the bright red Coolpix camera I’m holding in front of her. “Never mind. Look. I’ll show you how it works.”

  I feel sort of stupid bringing out my camera but I haven’t got any better ideas, so I back up a little bit and focus it, making sure that I have Yisella, Nutsa, and Skeepla all displayed in the viewfinder. The three of them look at each other before taking a few tentative steps backwards. Maybe they think the camera is some kind of weapon or something. Then I take the shot and the flash goes off. Startled, they look as if they’re about to make a run for it.

  “No, No … it’s all right. Really. Look!” I say.

  No one comes forward, but at least they’re still here. All stare wide-eyed at my camera, not knowing what to think. But, after a bit, and when nothing horrible happens, Yisella approaches to see what I’ve done. A big smile breaks out over her face when she sees the photograph, and she hops up and down waving for her mother and sister to come over and have a look.

  They are all fascinated and pass the camera back and forth between them, pointing at each other and laughing. Maybe I’m not so stupid after all. This was the best idea ever. They’ve forgotten all about my strange clothes and my wild hair. Skeepla’s smile is the real deal now and her eyes are bright with wonder. I show her how to focus the camera, how to find the subject in the viewfinder and how to zoom in.

  She wants me to do it over and over again until, finally, she motions for me to stand in front of her so that she can push the button herself. We look at the picture together and, even though I’m smiling, I look seriously uptight. Nervous. Which isn’t all that weird because I’m pretty sure this is not a dream, which means that I’ve just travelled back in time about a hundred years or so. Who wouldn’t be nervous?

  I take some more photos and then put the camera away even though everyone is still pretty excited about it. They’re all laughing until Yisella and Nutsa lock eyes. Instantly, the smile disappears from my new friend’s face and what could only be a scowl takes its place. Nutsa sees it too and drops her eyes to the ground, but I can see that she’s smirking from behind her hair, as though she’s gotten away with something. Nobody says anything. I don’t even try to figure this one out. Maybe it’s just a sister thing. Like the way my friend Gwyneth used to be with her sister Julie. They used to fight all the time, and sometimes their arguments were so stupid. Over stuff like exfoliating face wash, or who got a bigger piece of cheesecake.

  Yisella then takes me into one of the longhouses. As soon as we push aside the animal hide hanging in the doorway and step through, I’m hit with a million different sights and smells. There’s stuff like skins and fish hanging from the ceiling, and shelves full of tools, baskets and boxes all over the walls. Smoke is the most obvious smell, but there’s another one — a warm sweet delicious smell that I can’t quite identify. I see another rack of dried fish on the other side of the room against the far wall, and I figure that’s got to be it. Is it salmon? As if she knows exactly what I’m thinking, Yisella walks over to one of the racks, breaks off a piece of fish, and brings it back to me.

  “Here. Have some,” she urges. “You’re hungry, right?” She pushes the fish into my hand and it’s only then that my hunger returns. I’m actually starving. I can’t remember when I last ate, except for the blackberries, which don’t count. In all the excitement, I forgot how hungry and how tired I am. The fish tastes delicious. Sweet and moist, but dry enough that small flakes tear away easily. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before and I finish it quickly. I look up and see Yisella smiling at me. I must look like a half-starved lunatic, but I figure that is exactly what I might be — a lunatic.

  As I’m licking my fingertips, thinking about how I could easily eat another twelve pieces of the smoked salmon, Nutsa walks through the door. The little grey cat follows right behind her. Yisella’s eyes narrow and grow cold again. She watches as her sister walks, unhurriedly, over to a raised platform covered with a woven cedar bark blanket and furry animal pelt, and flops herself down on top. Obviously, it is where she sleeps. The cat jumps up and nestles in next to her. It has a little diamond-shaped patch of white fur between its eyes. Seeing it curled up next to Nutsa makes me miss Chuck. Yisella sighs, drumming her fingertips against her leg, and stares up at the smoke hole in the ceiling.

  “Nutsa!” she says loudly, both hands now straight and rigid at her sides. Nutsa turns her head slowly in the direction of her sister’s voice. Yisella then begins to speak, quickly and angrily, foreign words that I don’t understand. But I can tell from her tone that she’s pretty angry and that Nutsa is sure getting into trouble for something!

  Nutsa doesn’t answer. She just looks bored and impatient, the way most of the kids look when Mrs. Elford starts talking about fractions in math class. She waits for her sister to finish talking, and then slowly gets up off her mat and wanders outside, as though she doesn’t have a care in the world. The cat stays behind to sleep where it is safe.

  I must look puzzled, because Yisella turns to me and says angrily, “Nutsa is such a lazy girl! She’s the older daughter! There are things she has to do but she never does! She just waits for everyone else to do her work for her. I’m so sick of her lazy ways. She should know better! She’ll never have a blanketing ceremony if she doesn’t change. She disgraces our whole family. And she’s over fourteen summers old. She’ll never have a husband. Who would want such a lazy wife!”

  Yisella sits down on the floor of the longhouse and drags a stick mindlessly across the hard-packed earth. I don’t say anything, mainly because I’m just not sure what to say. There’s no way I’m going to get involved in some kind of family dispute. That would be a dumb idea and I can’t afford to make any enemies here. Besides, I never say anything bad about people I don’t even know. That’s just low.

  We sit there for a moment, each of us silent and a little bit shy, more aware now that we don’t really know the first thing about each other.

  She looks up at me and then over to the corner of the longhouse. “Nutsa was supposed to help my mother with the wool. She was supposed to get the fleece ready to spin. But, no, she goes to the beach and dreams of foolish things! Then she tells Mother silly stories that don’t have any meaning. She just sits there while Mother brushes her hair!”

  “Is your mother mad at her too,” I finally ask, “because she doesn’t help?”

  “I think it bothers her,” Yisella sighs, “but Nutsa won’t change.”

  “Well, you can’t make a person do something they don’t want to do.” I’m thinking about my own mother’s failed attempts to get me to take flute lessons even though she knew that the sound of that instrument made me want to chew my leg off.

  Yisella looks at me as though I slapped her. Her mouth opens a bit and her eyes widen with disbelief, but a moment later, she softens and says, “You don’t understand, Hannah. My mother is the finest weaver in all Quw’utsun’. Everyone knows her and everyone respects her. Her blankets are better than all the rest. Even over the water, they know of her. Mother’s blankets are highly prized gifts and everybody wants one. Nutsa, as the number one daughter, is supposed to help. She disgraces our village because she doesn’t care
about our mother’s gift.”

  “Why don’t you help your mother then?” I ask. It seems like a pretty simple solution.

  “Me? I can’t. I just don’t have the spinning gift.”

  “Really? How do you know?” I say. “How many times have you tried?”

  “Not very many.”

  “Then how can you know?” I protest. “Honestly, you can’t say you’re bad at something if you’ve never really given it a good try. I used to say that about drawing … but I never really practised all that much. And now that I do, well, I don’t think I’m as good as my friend, Max, but I’m getting way better.”

  “I know,” Yisella explains, twisting the iridescent shell on the cord around her neck with her fingers. “But when you’re born, you’re born with a gift. My gift is plant medicine, not spinning. That is Nutsa’s and my mother’s gift. Nutsa just doesn’t care. She won’t listen. It’s a shameful way for her to act. I’m sorry sometimes to call her my sister.”

  Ouch. Harsh.

  Yisella seems close to tears and I can feel her frustration. I reach out and touch her shoulder. She gives me a weak smile, then stands up and brushes her hands off on the front of her skirt.

  “Anyway,” she says a little more cheerfully, “it isn’t my problem to fix. Mother will spin and make her blankets and they will be beautiful with or without Nutsa’s help. It’s just that she seems so tired the past few days. She just wants to sleep. It’s not like her.” Yisella again glances over to the corner of the longhouse. My eyes follow her gaze to the many cedar baskets full of grey, brown, or white fluffy fleece, and to the big loom sitting next to the baskets. A stump, draped with a cedar mat, also sits nearby. It must be where Yisella’s mother sits when she spins and weaves. I walk over to kind of snoop around and then I notice this dark shape leaning against the biggest basket. I look closer and my breath catches in my throat. I can feel the goosebumps popping up all over my arms, and Yisella raises her eyebrows in a questioning way.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, now following my gaze to the object leaning against the basket. I point to it. It’s a spindle whorl. My spindle whorl! The same one I found hidden in the cave near the marina. It’s not as worn, but I recognize the salmon carved into the wood around the hole in the centre. It has to be the same one!

  “That belongs to my mother,” says Yisella, “her most prized possession. It was carved especially for her three winters ago.” She holds it in her hands, gesturing for me to take it from her. The familiar weight of it is overwhelming: the smoothness of the rich warm-coloured wood; the carved fish with their dancing tail fins, identical to what I remember, only sharper and not yet ravaged by time. I stare into the centre, through the hole, to the fire burning on the other side.

  The acrid smoke stings my eyes, but I can’t blink, I can’t shift my gaze. I try to back away from the smoky pit fire, only my legs are rooted to the ground. Oh, no, it’s happening again, just like in the cave.

  My hands grip the spindle whorl, as if they are glued to it. Then I see it start to spin. Is it an optical illusion? It has to be, because my hands aren’t moving; they feel stuck. I see the images of the fish begin to blur and run together as the disc spins faster and faster before my eyes. I feel light as a feather, even though my heart races a mile a minute and my fingertips are pins and needles. I am powerless, yet at the same time, totally dialled in.

  “HANNAH?” Yisella’s voice breaks the spell. I look up and see her staring at me, her eyes wide as saucers. I reach up with a free hand to wipe the beads of perspiration from my forehead. I’m actually sweating, as if I had been running on the track at school. The whorl is still in my hand and the smooth wood feels warmer to the touch, almost hot.

  “Hannah?” Yisella says again. I look at her, slightly dazed. “Hannah … I think you have it. The gift, I mean. I have to tell my mother. She’ll want to know about this.”

  “Yisella,” I start, my hands clutching the whorl close to me. My mind is racing with a million different thoughts. This is the same whorl! This has to have something to do with why I’m here. “I’ve seen this before! Your mother’s spindle whorl. I found it in a cave, just a couple of days ago. I mean … I’m going to find it in the future, in about one hundred and fifty years. No, I mean …” I realize that I am babbling, but I can’t stop. Yisella’s eyes open wider and wider as I try to explain. “I found it and I showed it to a man who told me that it belonged to the people who lived near my home. People who lived here before the huww … hu … what’s that word again? The word for white people?” My heart is pounding in my chest.

  “Hwunitum,” Yisella says, pronouncing the word clearly for me.

  “Yes! The man was talking about your people, Yisella!” I’m trembling now, because at last some pieces of this crazy puzzle are starting to fit together.

  “Who is this man?”

  “His name is Graham Sullivan. He studies the past. He … he told me stuff about your people, about the villages here. He told me some stories. There was one about Quamichan, a woman with a snake basket. About how …”

  “Yes!” Yisella suddenly starts gesturing wildly with her hands. “Quamichan! We tell that story! She will steal children from villages and eat them! She has wings and she can fly from the islands out there in the ocean, over here to Quw’utsun’!”

  “Yeah! That’s the one. So … do you see?”

  I place the whorl gently on the mat in front of me. “I think I was meant to find this in that cave — so it could bring me to you. I’m sure of it now. Even he was there when I found it!” I point to the raven perched on the corner of the loom. His wings are outstretched, as if he’s about to take off.

  “Yes,” Yisella nods. She is watching him, too, with an odd expression on her face.

  “Why do you think this has happened?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know,” she answers. “But I’m happy that it did.”

  15

  Yisella’s Ice Cream

  A FEW HOURS LATER, we are still in the longhouse, now sitting together with Yisella’s extended family. There sure are a lot of them! Yisella tells me that many people share the longhouse and that four generations live together in her house. I can’t imagine that ever working with my family. Having all of our crazy relatives living under one roof? I’m pretty sure we’d all go nuts inside of a week. Especially my dad and my Uncle Barry. There hasn’t been a family dinner yet when those two haven’t argued about something. The last time was Grandma’s birthday dinner, when they fought about some old Clint Eastwood movie.

  But here, in Tl’ulpalus, I guess there isn’t a choice. And nobody even gets their own room. There’s Skeepla and Nutsa and Yisella’s father, Squwam. There are also two uncles and three aunties, eight cousins, Skeepla’s mother, both of Squwam’s parents, and finally Yisella’s great-grandmother. Somehow, the longhouse doesn’t feel so big anymore!

  I think of Dad at home in our puny little houseboat. Is he worried about me? Does he know I’m gone? My watch still says 4:11:26 in the afternoon. It hasn’t moved since I got here. None of this makes any sense at all, and I don’t seem to have any control over what comes next. I’ll just have to wait it out and go with the flow, which isn’t really me at all. I’m not very good at just sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. Life’s boring that way. But here? Right now? It’s not like I really have any other options.

  When Yisella introduces me to the rest of her family, they seem as uncertain of me as her mother and Nutsa were earlier. They don’t say anything, just stare at me for what seems like hours, checking me out from head to toe and then back again. It’s bad enough when Sabrina Webber gives me that look, but try getting that same look from over fifteen people at once.

  Yisella waits while I say my name. I forget that she’s the only one who can understand me here and so I keep talking. I go on to explain how I’m this new friend of Yisella’s and that I came here from another time. Then I see how confused they all look, so I stop. When Yisella
whispers to me that the magic brought by the raven is only for the two of us, I shut up. Duh.

  Yisella’s grandmother steps forward, her eyes bright and alert. When she smiles, I see that she has a tooth missing. She touches my hair and says something to me that, of course, I don’t understand. But I get the feeling that she just made a joke because some of the others cover their mouths to hide their laughter. I know my hair is pretty crazy looking. Why wouldn’t they laugh the first time they saw red corkscrew curls like mine? Gwyneth used to say my hair ended up like this because I stuck my finger in a light socket when I was little. That could be true, but I’m sure my hair would have ended up this way anyway. Mom always said it was ridiculous, that my hair had a mind of its own. So I guess when you add in my freckles and my pale skin, I definitely stand out.

  Yisella’s family all start speaking at once, so I look to Yisella hoping she’ll step in if necessary and rescue me. She says that everyone is a little weirded out by me. They don’t really know any white people, except for the occasional trader who comes to the village from time to time for furs.

  There was one other time when a group of white men came to Tl’ulpalus and spoke in angry voices to her people. No one knew why these men were angry, but it had something to do with Quw’utsun’, the land that they live on. She tells me that those men wanted to grow their own food on this land, even though the hwunitum stay with their own families much farther up near the flats.

  “But you …” she says. “No one in our village has ever seen a hwunitum child. And … well, they think you’re very skinny and pale.” She giggles.