Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Their susceptibility to other kinds of pain was a subject on which the agent was less sure. They were seldom insane; Dr Carr had told B.J. that. There were exceptions, of course: a Clallam Indian who was struck in his youth by a falling tree so that some of his brains spilled out; a Twana who had a long series of troubles with different wives and developed a quiet, self-deprecating insanity, eventually running away and hiding in the forest.

  There were occasional suicides, always women. The Indians described sorrow as the sensation of being stuck with a needle in the heart. The white men named villages and rivers after men, because it did not hurt white men to hear the names of the dead. The Indian heart was made of mud, the Indians had told the agent. The white man’s heart was made of stone.

  B.J. noted two iron spearheads leaning against the doorway and decided that Sam Clams was probably a seal hunter and might be a wealthy man if he didn’t hold to the old potlatch way of thinking that giving things away made men important, if he understood that money was now wealth. ‘Pay me chickerman,’ Sam had said, so he probably did understand, and, anyway, the days when Indians could be paid with a cotton handkerchief for a day’s work were over. Seal hunting was becoming a profitable business and the white men kept as much of it to themselves as they could.

  Look at me, the blanket in the doorway told B.J. insistently. I am trying to tell you something.

  Before things changed, the blanket said, twisting about in Sam’s fist, animals were much more like people than they are now. In this time, Coyote had a daughter who was known for her speed. She wished to marry Raven, a man from another village, and he wished to marry her, but Coyote opposed the union, saying that Raven was not her equal. He was not as fast as Coyote. He was not as skilled with syuid, the language of power. Why should she marry someone less than her father?

  I’ve heard this story, B.J. told the blanket in his mind. Only instead of Coyote, it was a king, and instead of being known for her speed, she was known for her goodness, and instead of wishing to marry a Raven, she wished to marry a woodcutter. Except for that, it was the same story.

  B.J. wondered for a moment if the blanket itself was talking or if Sam was secretly directing the blanket in coded patterns for B.J. The Indians on the plains communicated with blankets and smoke. Why not blankets and wind? B.J. looked more closely at Sam’s hand. A tattoo of three semicircles decorated his wrist. His hand did not appear to move.

  Suddenly the blanket escaped from Sam’s fingers and flew at B.J.’s face, making him gasp. Pay attention now, it said sharply. Stop thinking and listen to me. Just listen.

  Coyote wished to marry his daughter himself, the blanket said. He would tell his daughter she must marry a certain man from the Yakima tribe and then he would disguise himself as this man, B.J. could scarcely imagine such perfidy, but he had the impression that the blanket rather admired it.

  Sam caught the blanket again. The story became quieter. Coyote’s daughter ignored his wishes and married Raven. And then Coyote took some pine and made a box big enough for two people. He put his daughter and his son-in-law in the box and he nailed it shut. He towed the box out into the ocean behind his canoe and cut it loose.

  He thought the box would sink. But it did not. Coyote tried to push the box under the water. It rose again to the top. Coyote stepped out of the canoe and danced on the box. When he danced on one end, that end dipped under the water. When he danced on the other end, that end dipped. But the box would not sink. Coyote jumped up and down on the box. He jumped high into the air and a great wave moved the box from beneath him. Coyote fell into the water. His canoe had already floated away.

  The Changer came by in another canoe. ‘Where is your daughter, Coyote?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Syuid,’ Coyote answered. ‘I am making fog.’ And he made a great fog to hide himself from the Changer and he made this fog by correctly naming the part of his body through which he urinated.

  His male member? B.J. asked in silent surprise.

  That is not the correct name, said the blanket. The blanket was laughing at him.

  ‘I know,’ said B.J.

  ‘You can’t hide from me, Coyote,’ said the Changer, and he woke the Thunderbird, who flapped his wings and spit lightning and blew Coyote’s great fog away. Then, without the fog, the Changer saw Coyote and the Thunderbird saw the box. The Thunderbird thought the box was a whale. The Thunderbird ate whales and so he sent a lightning bolt from his mouth to kill the whale, but the lightning went wide into the water. The Thunderbird circled lower to try again, but there was no whale, only a box, and the Thunderbird was now close enough to see this. The Thunderbird took the box in his talons and carried it into the sky. The sky was much closer to the earth than it is now. It was not so high. The Thunderbird left the box on the ground of the skyworld.

  Day came by and found the box. He opened it and saw the man and the woman. He took the man out. He didn’t want the woman, so he left her inside and nailed the box shut again. Day had five beautiful daughters, and he told Raven they would all be his wives if Raven came home with him. Day left to chase an elk and told Raven to wait for him to come back. Raven sat on the box and waited until it grew dark. Then Night came to Raven. ‘I have five beautiful daughters,’ Night told him. ‘Come with me and they will all be your wives.’ So Raven followed Night home on the bright paths that Night used. Being so dark himself, he couldn’t see to find his way on dark paths.

  Four of Night’s daughters were waiting for him at Night’s house. They were very beautiful, and on their foreheads each had painted one aspect of the moon. The youngest girl wore the full moon, the next youngest wore the waxing moon, the next the waning moon, and the oldest wore only a tiny crescent. The girls bathed Raven and rubbed his body with the oil of the dead so that he became as black as Night. They offered him food, but it was the food of the dead, and Raven did not eat it. He ate roots instead. He went to bed with the four daughters of the Night. In the morning, the girls got dressed to go hunting. ‘Why are there only four of you?’ Raven asked them. ‘Night told me he had five daughters.’

  The girls pointed to a box at one end of the room. ‘There is our eldest sister,’ they said. ‘She is the dark moon that no man can see. She is your wife, too, and she slept with us last night, but she never comes out of her box in the daytime. She is very beautiful in the dark, but the brightness of day would kill her. You must believe us and not try to see her for yourself.’ The four daughters of the Night left Raven alone with the box. Raven opened it at once.

  ‘I know this story,’ said B.J. Only instead of Raven, it was Pandora, and instead of the daughter of the Night, it was all the troubles of the world. Plus hope. Except for that, it was the same story.

  Stop thinking, said the blanket. Just listen. When Night had found Raven, he had seen Coyote’s box. Inside, he thought, there must be a woman as beautiful as my eldest daughter. And he had gone back later to fetch it. This was the box that Raven opened, so the woman inside was not Night’s daughter, but Coyote’s.

  ‘You stink of death,’ she told Raven. ‘You have eaten the food of the dead.’

  Raven denied it. ‘I ate only roots,’ he said. But she would not listen. She left the house of the Night and went on the dark paths and Raven followed her, knowing as long as he stayed in the dark, Night could not see him. ‘Roots!’ he called to the daughter of Coyote. ‘Roots!’

  The daughter of Coyote walked many miles in the skyworld looking for Spider. She wanted to talk him into lowering her back to earth. She could not find him, but she found his cord. She threw it out of the skyworld and began to descend it. Raven flew behind her. ‘Roots!’ he called. ‘Roots!’ The cord did not reach to earth. The sky was much higher than the daughter of Coyote expected. She fell the rest of the way and it was a long fall.

  On earth, everything had been changed. Everything was the way things are now. The Changer had changed everyone except for Coyote’s daughter, because she had been hidden in h
er box in the house of the Night and the Changer had not seen her. And so Coyote’s daughter is more like a coyote than most women and more like a woman than most coyotes.

  ‘What do you think?’ Purdy asked.

  ‘I think it’s semaphore,’ B.J. said. ‘I’m getting most of it.’ He expected Chin to be pleased with this, but Chin wore his usual unhappy, eyes-closed-to-slits expression and didn’t respond to B.J. Chin spoke to Purdy instead, which was rude of Chin, but B.J. understood. In Chin’s defense, B.J. had noticed that Chin suffered from some sort of phobia about boats and another about Indians, and right now Chin was trying to rent the one from the other. Of course, he was unhappy.

  Boats had maimed and killed many more people in the Puget Sound area than Indians had, even counting the war in 1855–56, and yet a certain uncomfortableness around Indians was considered only natural and this same uncomfortableness around boats was a sign of insanity. B.J. didn’t understand. One of the men in the Steilacoom asylum had been bruised and scalded on the Fairy when her boiler exploded just out of the Steilacoom dock. He had been thrown into the air like a Fourth of July rocket and he’d lost the hearing in his left ear. He still had a red mark on his chest, shaped like the pad of a bear’s paw and just about the size of a watch, B.J. thought, but he couldn’t be sure about the size and it might have been smaller.

  Dr Carr specialized in boat phobias and would have found Chin an interesting study. He had told B.J. once that a sudden irrational fear of boats was common in women about to give birth. And then B.J. knew, the whole nation knew, about Abraham Lincoln’s recurring black boat dreams. Although Chin might not know. B.J. made a mental note to tell Chin about this sometime when he had nothing else to say.

  In fact, and less in Chin’s defense, Chin often didn’t respond to B.J., not just when they were around boats and Indians. B.J. minded this, because it made him wonder sometimes if he had spoken at all, which made him wonder if he was really there. He could always ask Chin, though, and when he did, Chin always told him he was, so it was better than before he had met Chin.

  Chin often didn’t respond to other people either, making B.J. answer for him. B.J. minded this, too, because he was afraid to be wrong, but he was becoming less afraid. Chin was smart and often he told B.J. how to respond to people so that B.J. looked like the smart one. It wasn’t as hard to look smart as B.J. had always thought. He could do it himself sometimes, even without Chin. He said something to Purdy now about Belle Starr, something Chin probably wouldn’t have known any more than he’d know about Abraham Lincoln, although Chin could surprise you sometimes and he knew about Patrick Henry and he could recite the first two lines of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ just like everyone else could.

  B.J. looked back at the blanket. It was trembling in anticipation. But the Changer knows that he missed her, the blanket said with a sharp flap and two small flutters. He looks for the daughter of Coyote. He looks for a woman who is followed by a black bird. When he finds her, when he changes her, the Change will be complete. Then time will stop. Then everything will stay, always, the way it is now. Then there will be no more changes.

  ‘Is this a good thing?’ B.J. asked the blanket. ‘Would Indians want this?’

  ‘Is that man with you?’ Sam was looking away from them, down toward the beach. B.J. turned to see Harold pushing the smallest of the canoes into the water. The smallest canoe was a fishing canoe, made of a single piece of fir, meant for rivers and lakes. It was too little for the canal, unless Harold stayed close to the shoreline.

  ‘Why is that man stealing my canoe?’ Sam asked.

  Harold gripped the dugout by the gunwale and tilted it. Water poured off the legs of his pants as he climbed inside. B.J. watched Harold and let Chin answer Sam. Chin’s answer was a shout in a code B.J. couldn’t translate, but this didn’t mean Sam might not understand. Except that Sam repeated his question. ‘That man has stolen my canoe. Why?’

  Purdy cleared his throat. ‘That man is the manager of the Alaskan Wild Woman. She left Seabeck this morning on the Biddy with someone else. Probably he wants to get her back. We were hoping to catch up to her ourselves.’

  ‘Is there some way we could get to her first?’ Chin asked in a funny voice, as if he might have hurt his throat with his shouting, as if his throat was full of fog. He looked at B.J. Help, his expression said. It was an expression B.J. had become familiar with. Chin was telling B.J. to say something, but he was not telling B.J. what to say.

  ‘Harold wants her to stop,’ B.J. told Purdy. ‘He’s not fooled by her innocent Wild Woman act any longer.’ He looked at Chin for guidance, for approval or disapproval.

  Chin offered neither. He was staring instead out over the water, where Harold and the little canoe grew even littler. ‘He does not have her interests in his heart,’ Chin added in his low unhappy voice as if he wished he were not speaking at all.

  ‘No,’ said B.J. ‘Nor her chopstick. Not anymore.’

  ‘Three dollars to rent the hyas canim,’ said Sam.

  ‘Fine,’ said Purdy.

  ‘I will take you to the Biddy. On the way you will help me recover my stolen canoe.’ Sam looked out over the canal, where Harold could no longer be seen. ‘Three dollars and my wife will come and paddle, too,’ Sam said.

  The sky behind the shanty darkened, the wind died, and somewhere in the distance, somewhere in the mountains, there was thunder. Everyone stopped for a moment and looked toward it. Even the seagulls were silent.

  ‘The dwarves are playing tenpins,’ said Purdy lightheartedly.

  ‘The Thunderbird is flapping his wings,’ said Sam Clams, and his tone was one of ominous import.

  ‘The Thunder God is punishing lazy dragons,’ said Chin, whose boat phobia was showing again in the trembling of his voice.

  The blanket was still.

  The canoe had a flat stern for rough waters and a bow carved with the face of a frog. It tilted wildly until Sam slapped the blade of his paddle against the surface of the water, holding it there a moment to keep them from capsizing. Sam was steering from the backmost position. B.J. heard the sound of the paddle striking the water. He turned from his place just behind Purdy in the bow in time to see Chin dropping his paddle onto the floor of the canoe and grabbing with both hands at the gunwale. B.J. thought that Chin was probably as white as he was ever going to get.

  Sam had given Chin a woman’s paddle, which was an insult if Chin had only understood it as one. Instead Chin had simply accepted the paddle he was offered. Now he retrieved it, dipping into the water with the shallow, splashing stroke of a woman, only more awkward. B.J. had seen mother ducks feign injury and flap above the water as if they had only one good wing in order to draw a hunter away from the nest. This charade was what Chin’s paddling reminded him of.

  Behind Chin sat Sam’s wife, a short woman with long hair. No one had actually told B.J. her name, but Purdy had called her Old Patsy when they first took their seats in the dugout. Really she wasn’t that old. She had waited behind while the men climbed aboard, pushing the men and the canoe into the water over a track of sticks and then wading after it to scramble in. ‘Come on, Old Patsy,’ Purdy had said from his seat in the bow. Old Patsy spoke only to Sam and not in a language B.J. could decipher or in one Purdy seemed to know. She had a paddle like Chin’s and a quick, graceful stroke. Sam steered. His paddle was made of yew, five feet long, a fine expensive Makah paddle that he drove deep into the canal. They all sat to one side and leaned against the wind, which came from behind and across them. The paddling was almost unnecessary to their forward motion; the wind moved them northward, but without their own efforts and without Sam’s steering, it would have also blown them back to shore.

  Sam and Purdy had begun the trip with an argument about the advisability of using a sail. Sam had two sails stowed in the bottom of the canoe. They had been pieced together out of old flour sacks, but Sam said the wind was too strong to risk them. ‘One sail only,’ Purdy suggested, but Sam still refused,
hinting that the crew was unreliable.

  A wave splashed up and over the gunwale. B.J. was already tired. His hands were wet and cold where the water ran down the paddle every time he lifted it for another stroke. He was beginning to feel the strain in one spot beneath his shoulder blade, the same spot that had always hurt him at the asylum when he had wood-chopping duties. He rested a moment, rubbing his back, and watching the shoreline. The dugout moved quickly. The scenery was continually changing as if a long painting were being rolled by them: sometimes beaches, sometimes forest, once a group of Indian shanties thrown up together along the stony coast and all tipped in the same direction as the wind. Small, muddy children came out as they passed, singing and whistling and pounding on a drum to give them good weather. B.J. waved, turning when they were behind him, until the shore curved out and he couldn’t see them anymore. Sometimes B.J. saw logs that had been lost on their way to the lumber mills and were now beached or wedged against rockier parts of the coast. An occasional seagull flew overhead. Once, they passed a tree that bent double in the wind right before their eyes and cracked across its trunk. It fell over into the canal several yards behind them with an enormous splash, sending them skidding forward. The incident made B.J. remember Dr Carr’s suspicions concerning the magnetized trees left behind for the French Revolution. It was a dangerous world, no doubt about it, and there was really no way to anticipate its many dangers. Not when trees were willing to sacrifice themselves for malice.

  They rounded a small point, struggling with all their weight and muscle against the wind, the big canoe blown almost sideways. Then their direction changed and the wind was entirely favorable now, throwing them forward at great speed. They all pulled their paddles in, setting them on the thwarts to rest. They flew past the entrance to a small bay with a stony beach. A large rock jutted out into the water, the waves battering themselves white against it.