“There wasn’t any shooting, though. This is the West, but it’s not that wild.”
When I had been in Wallowa several months, I asked an old-timer, “What’s this about the two brothers who did some poaching just like everybody does, but then they dragged a cop car into their barn with a tractor and locked the door, and the cops had to walk back to town?”
“Where’d you hear that? It’s true, all except the part about the barn. There are these two brothers up on Alder Slope. They’ve got a nice little piece of wheat ground up there against the mountains, you know. Up where the elk will get you if the cold snap don’t. It ain’t hardly poaching. It’s more like taking a cut off your own herd. But say, that reminds me about this hunter one time came out here from Portland—brand new squeaky hunting clothes he got out of some catalogue, some fancy spit and polish boots, and a new gun that didn’t hardly have the sale tag cleaned off it.
“Well, this Portland hunter stops in at the market—you know that little market in Enterprise, on the left just before you head out toward Joseph? He stops in there to buy a little beer, and the clerk boy starts in admiring his outfit:
“‘Mister, you look like you’re about to get yourself an elk.’
“‘I sure hope so,’ says this Portland hunter. But then he lowers his voice and says, ‘Only trouble is, I’ve never seen one.’
“‘Golly, mister!’ The clerk boy looks around, and then leans forward with his hands on the cash register. ‘I’m really glad you mentioned that, mister, because there could be some real problems if you made a mistake.’
“‘Anything you could tell me,’ says this Portland hunter. ‘I’d really appreciate it.’ A line is forming up behind the hunter, and the boy has to lower his voice even more.
“‘Well, here goes. You drive on out of town, you’ll start to see herds of these elk in the pastures beside the road. They have big red and white patches on their sides, little bitty short horns that curve up like this by their ears, and when you stop your rig, they’ll all turn around and look at you. That’s a pretty good time to get off a shot.’
“‘Hey, thanks for the tip,’ says this hunter, wanting to shake the boy’s hand. ‘I really appreciate it.’
“So the hunter goes out, but the next morning he comes back in all excited, says to the boy still standing there at the cash register, ‘I got my elk, thanks to you! Want to see it?’
“‘Sure,’ says the kid, jamming his dusting feathers into his back pocket. He gestures toward some men to leave their shopping carts and follow along.
“‘I got him right out here in the pickup—nice rack on him, too.’ The hunter leads them all out to the parking lot, where the kid looks over the side of the long box on that shiny new truck. Sure enough, there’s a nice big steer lying there shot all to hell. And the kid’s about ready to bust out laughing, when he notices his own daddy’s brand burned into the hide.
“Yeah, the kid never bragged on that story too much, but everybody else sure loves to tell it.”
“The hunter got the steer, but you got the story.”
“Yeah, that’s right. So these two brothers, they had their elk strung up in the barn when the cop car drives up. Those two cops did a little poaching on the side themselves. You have to, with the economy what it is. They’d just come out to razz their friends a little, you know. Well, these two cops start reading them the statute about poaching, while the four of them have some beer, and them all laughing about it, and one of the brothers gets to horsing around on the tractor. Had the forklift rigged on the back, I guess. And he kind of accidentally pokes a hole in the radiator on the cop car. Just a little hole that looked like nothing. Didn’t even hurt the grille.
“But the two cops, by the time they’d finished their beers and got halfway back to town, their radiator was dry. They had to hitchhike the rest of the way.”
I was to visit the school at Joseph, and I would tell a story to the high school class. It was a strange thing to carry Coyote Was Going There, a book of Nez Perce tales, into Wallowa County, the home country of the Nez Perce, but where the latest census shows not one Nez Perce woman, man, or child. From my second-story apartment window, I looked up from the book at the hills: three trees huddled together on the horizon. A hundred years ago, the Nez Perce all were driven out. A twist of pride and guilt hangs in the air. Chief Joseph’s image tops the masthead of the weekly Chieftain, but Nez Perce people only come for the rodeo. And lately, they’ve asked for money to come to that, to wear their costumes and ride in the parade. Then they go back to their exile at Lapwai or Colville.
It was a strange thing to leave my book of tales, and carry one of its stories in my head to the town called Joseph, to walk into an all-white class and unfold a narrative rooted to the place we stole. I decided to try a Nez Perce tale that had made me laugh when I read it silently to myself. Coyote is such a fool. He postures and hopes, makes all the predictable mistakes, then sits alone on a hill waiting for the world to change, waiting to see his foolish wish come true and the world forgive him. In my apartment I had laughed, and put the book down. Now I stood in front of the class. I could not remember the story just as it was, word for word, but it would have been too strange to read it, so I told this:
Coyote had a wife, and his wife died, and he mourned her for a time. But then a shadow came to speak with him.
“Coyote, if you do just as I tell you, your life will be as it was. Your wife will live with you as before.”
“Tell me, and I will do as you say.”
“Follow me five days,” said the shadow, “and do as I do. Then you will see your wife. You may bring her back among the living, if you do right.”
They had been traveling most of one day, when the shadow said, “Look what fine horses are running there.”
Coyote saw nothing, but he held his hand up over his eyes, nodding as the shadow did.
“Look what fine horses are running there,” Coyote said. And they traveled.
One day, the shadow said, “Let us bend down these branches and gather serviceberries for our meal.” The shadow pulled at the air where nothing grew, and chewed.
“Let us bend down these branches and gather serviceberries for our meal,” said Coyote, and he scooped the air with his hands and chewed.
The fifth day, they came to a low hill.
“Soon it will be dark,” the shadow said. “Then we can enter the lodge of the dead. You will see your wife.” Coyote and the shadow sat down to wait. The sun moved not at all, then slowly, then it went down. The shadow stood up.
“It is time to go inside.” The shadow’s hands seemed to be lifting a door-flap. The shadow bent down and went through.
“It is time to go inside,” said Coyote. He raised his hands, bent down, stepped forward. People were singing. They were gathered about a fire. Farther along was another fire, then another. Coyote walked from one fire to another, searching the faces of the dead. There was his wife.
The shadow said, “As you walk with her toward your home, you must not touch her. Remember that one thing.”
The sun came up. The fires were gone, and the people, the lodge, and the shadow. Beside Coyote was something in the air. She followed him all day. That night, beside their fire, Coyote looked at her. He could begin to see her more. And they walked another day. He could see her more. The fifth night he could see her across the fire.
He said, “Tomorrow we shall be home.” She looked at him. It was his joy to reach out. She was gone.
The shadow said, “Coyote, could you not wait one more night? Now she will never be with you.”
“I will go back,” said Coyote. “Now I know the way.” The shadow was gone. The fire died down. Coyote slept.
Coyote started out, and soon he said, “Look what fine horses are running there.” He held his hand up over his eyes.
Another day, he began to paw the air: “Let us bend down these branches and gather serviceberries for our meal.” He chewed.
The f
ifth afternoon of his travel alone, he stood on the low hill where the dead had danced, where he had stood among them. He sat down to wait. The sun stood still, then it moved slowly, then it went down. Coyote tried to lift a flap of darkness away, to step forward. Then he waited again. Soon he would hear the dead sing. He would see their fires, he would walk from one to another. He would see the face of his wife.
He waited on the hill. It was dark. Nothing happened.
The students before me were very still. In my voice among them, Coyote was not a fool. The teacher looked at me hopefully. There was tremendous sorrow in the air. We did not know how to end the class.
I left the car at the rim of Joseph Canyon, and started down. A snow squall ended in sunlight, where elk bedded across a meadow ignoring me, and I followed their trails where my people had made none, down through pines that flavored the wind I sipped, rollicking through damp needle-duff with a swinging step all afternoon. Up on the rim, huge helicopters lifted whole trees from where the loggers had felled them—distant as dragonflies carrying twigs of grass. And I plunged down the slope.
The story is not what you do, but what fits. The story is not a sequence of actions, but a whole quilt unrolled in the story-maker’s mind. My walk down Joseph Canyon was filled with sensation, with danger, meditation, discovery—pitch and smoke, rain down my back, a bed of rock at the top of Starvation Ridge. An owl called as I crossed the net of moonlight filtered through trees. By the charcoal of a fire, I found a book of camp songs the mice had chewed. I fed on nettle and fern root, and wood ticks fed on me. And I was lost three hours in the snow, getting slowly chilled, afraid to sit down, tipsy with confusion, until I stepped abruptly out from the trees by the highway, and hitchhiked home.
None of that was the story. No incident had enough of the tight terror and swirl, the exhilaration of change. Pitch and dragonfly, owl and moonlight, a cabin where no one lived for years—those are fine in their way, but when I told the children at Wallowa School, they all got righteously bored. I could tell by how they got polite. They folded their hands. One glanced at the clock. Another got interested in the boots I wore. So I asked them to tell me about what it was like when they were old. In the third grade, this is an easy task. They told me without fear. One paper I carried away told this:
I Was Old
God woke up and he herd a Dinusor but
he was old and he sed to myself how
come he am in The old day how come
he don’t no why and then I died and
he died for a little while and then he
came out of my graveyard and he
went back to sleep and he died
again and he woke up and Then
he was young and he Loved to dy
young and The End.
Vicki was the quiet one. She could be Coyote’s wife. And, the end. But there were seven minutes before the class was done. I remembered one more little thing from Joseph Canyon—the time I bent down to drink. It was the smallest moment, but Vicki’s story about being old made me know something, and I started to tell it anyway. This time, the children forgot about me and listened to the story itself:
It was a hot day, and I was clear at the bottom of Joseph Canyon—hadn’t taken enough water. But Joseph Creek, you know it’s a big muddy torrent this time of year with a couple of cow pies floating by every so often. I wasn’t going to take a drink of that.
Well, pretty soon I came to a little stream flowing in from the side—clear little stream about a foot wide—and I bent down to fill my hat. Water was real cool on my hands as I dipped the hat in, but as I stood up, a whole story went through my head. You know how fast a story can flash past your mind? It’s a story my parents told me, sitting on the couch at home, when I was just a little guy:
Once upon a time there was a king, and this king liked to hunt, liked to take his hawk on his arm and ride out looking for game. He would send that hawk up to circle around until it saw a little rabbit, or maybe a quail, and then the hawk would swoop down and grab that little critter and bring it back.
Well, this one day it was pretty hot, and they weren’t doing too well. Hadn’t caught a thing. So they were riding home, with the hawk on the king’s arm, and the king on the horse’s back, just trotting along through the dust and hot wind. And this king gets real thirsty. Comes to a cliff where the water is dripping down, sends the hawk up to circle around while he holds his silver cup—kings always carry a silver cup, even to the hunt—holds his silver cup up to the water that drips and drips and drips. And just when he brings the cup that’s full of this cool water up to his lips, the hawk swoops down and knocks it out of his hand and spills the water.
Hawks get kind of wild sometimes, and the king, being a king, isn’t the kind of guy who just gets mad over any little thing, so he waves off the hawk, picks up the silver cup, and holds it up to the dripping water again. Well, the hawk circles above, the man holds his cup—even though his arm’s about to fall off, he’s so tired—and the water drips, and drips, and drips, and drips. And he sort of looks up at the hawk and tries to bring the cup up to his lips real fast—but the hawk is faster, swooping down and knocking the cup out of his hand again and spilling that water.
This time the king gets real mad, and he whips out his sword. Holds his cup up to the water again, and it drips, and drips—and this time when it’s only half full he thinks he can fool that hawk, and he brings the cup up to his lips. But the hawk’s too fast—swoops down, knocks the cup out of his hand, spills the water, and he swings his sword and kills that hawk with one blow.
By now this king is so thirsty, he can’t wait to let that water drip again. So he drops his sword and his cup by the hawk, and he climbs up that cliff, and there at the top, sure enough, is a little pool where the water comes from. And just as he bends down to drink, his eyes see past the reflection of his face in the pool to where a snake lies dead in the water, sort of turned over on its side—a poison snake his hawk, circling above, had seen. The hawk had saved his life.
Then the story gets very sad. The king climbs down the cliff, takes up his hawk and folds its wings, wraps it in his crimson cape lined with gold, and rides home slow. . . .
But there I was with my hat in my hand just standing up to drink when that whole story goes through my head. And that story makes me hesitate just for a moment. I think about that story, and the water soaking out cool through my black felt hat and running down my elbows. And as I hesitate, the wind—which had been coming down the canyon behind me—shifts around to the side a little, and I smell this terrible smell. Just a little whiff, but awful. Just a little touch in my nose.
Instead of drinking, I dump the water out of my hat, shake it out, and walk up that little stream past a screen of pine saplings—and there, not thirty steps upstream, a dead elk lies across the water, hot and rotten, covered with flies. Been there for days. And now, when I look close at the water flowing in the little stream, I can see the rainbow sheen of some poison riding that water down toward where I dipped my hat.
And then I think to myself, if I had not remembered that story, I would have drunk the water, and never climbed out from Joseph Canyon.
The bell had rung. The buses had pulled up outside to take us home. “Remember your stories,” I said. “They can save your life, a little at a time.”
Grace lives too far from town to worry when the snow falls deep. Can’t drive? Stay home. But today the road is clear. As we step from the car, the colt hangs back, but her three Appaloosa mares crowd the barbwire fence stapled from tree to tree—aspen leaves just coming out. Bending to step between the second and third strands of wire, Grace says, “I guess a man goes over a barbwire fence, a child under, and a woman through. Glad you came out. Tea?” She gestures toward a mobile home hunched low into the ground, with a drift of gray leaves piled around the door.
Inside, bookshelves cover the walls.
“I’ve read them many times.” Her hand sweeps the room. “The kind of snow
we get is good for the mind.” She turns around once and sits down. Her chair used to be red. Now it’s covered with a faded quilt. “I’m kind of the unofficial historian of this place. I’ve got the books and got the time. People trust me with things, and I take care of them. Been to the museum? Sure you have! That’s when I asked you to stop by. Have a seat!” We face each other across a formica table. Through the window, tiny aspen leaves flicker in sunlight.
“You said there is a tribe of people,” I say, “living in Joseph Canyon.”
“Oh yes, the hippies. Wanted to get away, I guess, and that’s away! No one sees them, but everyone knows they’re there. And you know, they found something. Got to digging around, disturbing one of the campsites, you know, and came up with a little stone carved to the shape of a bear. They kept it for a while, then got to feeling guilty I guess. Got to feeling bad about digging it up. So they took it back to where they’d found it. Tied a note to it. Left it there. My friend found that. He brought it to me.
“It was a bear carved out of basalt, a little one curled up asleep. It was a magic thing in your hand. You wanted to hold it forever. You wanted to hold it, and at the same time it didn’t feel right to hold it. It belonged to the ground, to them, you know, to the people we drove away.
“I kept it for a while, then I sent it to the state museum, with a note asking them to give me some information on it and send it back. I thought they might have something similar, or some book that could tell me about it. But you know, they never sent it back. They never even wrote back. I got the idea they didn’t trust me with it. We’re just country people, you know. Left me bitter, I’m afraid. Left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d go bury it in the ground again, if I could.”
The kettle boiled, and she got up to shut off the stove. Wind pushed wide the flimsy door, framed in aluminum, and sunlight burst across the rug covered with dog hair. Grace stood a moment with the kettle steaming in her hand.
“Things get lost, but then things get to be stories, I guess. And stories stick to people like cockleburs.” She left the door open, held up a cup. “You take it black?”
Having Everything Right Page 5