Henry stood to speak.
“I broke our tradition of silence on the hunt. Maybe I was wrong to do it. Maybe my uncle’s death is my fault. But I believe the old whale came to warn us, to show by his scars that the whales are leaving. Soon they will be gone forever, hunted out like the sea otters. What child younger than ten has seen a sea otter? They are all dead, and my children will never know their whiskered faces hiding in the kelp beds.”
Henry’s words broke over me like waves. I felt like a sinking stone. I wanted to feel heavy. I wanted to walk along the ocean floor. I wanted to look for my father in the houses of whales and seals. My father—the last whaler.
Grandma got up to speak. She went to the front by the fire. People stopped talking. They shushed the children. Grandma was a famous storyteller.
“I believe,” she called out, as steady and strong as a revival tent preacher. “I believe the whales have seen the greed of the big whaling ships. They have gone deep, and they have taken my son, our finest whaler, with them. They will wait in the deep for men to change their ways. And we will wait with them.
“You, fathers, teach your sons the meditations of a whaler and the arts of ocean navigation. Mothers, teach your daughters the prayers of a whaler’s wife and the ways to prepare whale meat.”
People sat up taller as Grandma spoke. They lifted their heads, and I felt the power of her voice like that invisible force that made a flock of birds or a school of fish turn together as if they were one animal. I wondered for a moment, if there was no voice like hers, would we be a tribe at all?
“We will honor our whales,” Grandma went on. “Even when they are gone from us we will honor them with our songs and dances, our carving and our stories. For I believe, I do believe our whales will come back to us one day.”
After the feast, the men left, using the full moon to navigate. They slipped out in groups of four or six. They moved over the ocean as quiet as shadows in the light of the moon. I had to wait with the women for the fire to burn low and the chatting aunties to put their children to bed.
When everyone was busy, I sneaked outside and tiptoed down the porch, skipping the loud step. I went to the side of the house and pulled the fish canoe down the sand, the small one that I could paddle alone. I took an old spruce root hat and a wool blanket out of the canoe, where I had hidden them. With them on in the dark, I would look like one of the grandmothers. No one told the grandmothers what to do.
“Where will you go in the dark?” Grandma’s sharp voice came from the shadows at the far end of the front porch.
I gasped, dropped the canoe on my foot, and cursed silently.
“Out,” I said back just as sharp, and tugged the boat farther. I didn’t have to look for her frown. I felt it. I didn’t care; she couldn’t stop me. I was stronger than she was. Anyone strong enough to stop me was already at the giveaway.
“Will I tell the Pitch Woman story again?” she said.
The name hit me like a slap, and the most horrifying details of the Pitch Woman story flooded my memory. I couldn’t make myself look over my shoulder at the dark spaces between the trees. I leapt all five of the porch steps in one bound and stood in the stripe of lamplight that leaked out the door. Once I was in light, I could take a breath and close my mind to that story. I turned and studied the black water between me and my father’s potlatch. My hands shook. I gave Grandma the same hard look she gave me. I had an urge to dash inside and bar the door. Leave her alone in the dark to face the Pitch Woman.
“It is not wrong to be angry,” Grandma said.
I turned all the way around and faced her full on.
“It is not wrong that you want to be there,” Grandma went on. “I want to be there too—he is my son.” She gave me a quick peek at her own sorrow and then covered the wound carefully. I kept my sorrows bound up tight, but they bled anyway.
“If you are determined, Pearl, I will go with you,” Grandma said. “I will carry the light, and you will paddle, and we will find the giveaway together or a jail in Vancouver together. But there is another way to go, a safer way.”
I shrugged. Safer did not hold much appeal. Grandma waited me out.
I remembered how long it would take to paddle alone. “Safer?” I asked.
Grandma ducked inside and brought out a lamp. It cast a warm pool of light on the porch. We settled, backs against the wall.
“Who came to the feast today?” she asked.
I closed my eyes. “Shall I tell them by tribe or by order around the table?”
Grandma smiled, proud of my memory. “We’ll start from Alaska and go south,” she said.
I worked my way down the names and clan connections, and Grandma told me the gifts they would receive tonight, who made them, and why they went to that family.
I had only thought to keep something of my father’s for my own comfort, not about this naming of gifts. Maybe twenty years from now, I would travel to a village I’d never visited before, but someone there would remember that I was the daughter of the whaler Victor Carver.
“I remember him,” they would say, and they would think of the honor their family received tonight and treat me with respect. It was not the same as a thing I could hold, but it had a weight of its own.
Still, I wanted something, one small thing of my father’s to keep for my own.
4
Summer at Lake Quinault
The season for berries came, and the carved cedar boxes that held the whale meat and oil stood empty. We turned our backs to the ocean and traveled to the summer hunting places to meet Grandma’s people, the Quinaults. They did not hunt whales. Their wealth and power and fame were in the Quinault River and the Blueback salmon, the richest meat fish of them all. To hear them talk about their salmon, you’d think they were whales.
Last year, we came to the lake after our whale hunt, fresh from selling the oil in town. We wore new clothes and carried new rifles and toys. We gave presents to all our relatives. This year, we came in lighter canoes. My dress showed a dark stripe at the hem and sides where Aunt Loula had let out the seams.
Aunt Loula took the occasion of our long trip, down the coast to Taholah and then up the river to Lake Quinault, to plan my future. When I was the only daughter of a great whaler, no one minded that I couldn’t draw or weave or twine a basket, that I sang more like a bear than a bird. But I would have to learn something of value now that the power had gone out of my name.
Aunt Loula wanted me to learn baskets. Aunt Loula knew baskets. She had a reputation for turning out the small, close-woven ones with a colored pattern that sold at the curio shops in Seattle, Juneau, and San Francisco.
“You can get money for a good basket,” Aunt Loula said. “Especially when you work out a deal with a regular buyer.”
“Never very much money,” I said. “You would have to turn out dozens a month to make it worth the trip to town.”
“If you were good at it, you would be able to turn out a dozen baskets a month.”
“Yes,” I snapped. “And you know what an outstanding basket maker I am. Completely without form or balance, that’s what you said about the last basket I made.”
Aunt Loula opened her mouth to snap back at me, but then she sighed and arranged a calmer expression. “I didn’t mean it.”
“People say what they mean.” I was not going to let up on her.
“You could learn,” she said quietly. “You’re plenty smart enough, but you don’t pay attention to your work, Pearl. Your mind is miles away when you are making a basket. What are you thinking about all the time?”
I could feel her leaning forward and to one side in the canoe to look at my face. There was no way I was going to tell her what I was thinking. She wasn’t my mother. I let an unpleasant silence grow between us. I heard Henry paddling more loudly behind his mother and felt a touch of guilt. He always took my side when Ida cheated at dice or Charlie copied my schoolwork. Even if I would never love Aunt Loula, I ought to respect her for
his sake.
I was about to apologize when Aunt Loula said, “A woman with baskets can stay home with her family, not go off to some cannery job miles away.”
I knew it was true, but I fought it. I wanted to be a weaver, as my mother had been. She had a commission from a chief up north. He was going to pay her a hundred trade blankets and seventy-five dollars in gold coin. It would take her a year to follow the pattern on the board this chief sent, but when she was finished, her Chilkat blanket would hold a place of honor in that chief’s house for generations. That was what I wanted, something that would last. And Aunt Loula was right. I was a pathetic basket maker. Mine always came out flat as a plate and wobbly around the edges.
“Keep working,” Grandma had said when I was younger. “It takes practice.”
But I think she was relieved when I gave it up and learned to spin from my mother instead. It was the first step to becoming a weaver. It took forever to get the feel of stretching the wool out and rolling it up my thigh into an even twist of yarn. But Mama never minded my mistakes and never rushed me to be perfect. She laughed at my lumpy tangles and said, “Put some more meat on that leg and the spinning will go easier. Get outside and run. I won’t have that Charlie running faster than my girl.”
And then I would forget the weaving altogether and attack Charlie with a broken fish club. Pirates and Indians was our favorite game. If I had known that I’d lose Mama that same year, I would never have played outside, not ever. I would have sat beside her and watched her hands. Weaving was a rare gift—a legacy. It should have been mine, and I wanted it.
I fumed over Aunt Loula’s words all the way up the river. I didn’t rest. Not when the blisters rose, as we reached the mouth of the lake and paddled along the southern shore past the gravel bar at Willaby Creek. Not when they broke and oozed, as we paddled by the green sloping lawn and powder-blue rowboats at the Lake Quinault Lodge. There was something satisfying in the sharpness of the pain.
I watched the tourists lounging in chairs and playing croquet at the lodge. They never seemed to worry. They spent the whole day not working, unless you count rowing a lady with a parasol around in circles work. And then they went in that fancy dining hall for dinner without a care for how they would pay.
“What do you suppose they do, to eat without working?” I asked.
“Rob banks,” Henry said. “Or maybe hold up trains. I am especially suspicious of those two.” He pointed to a magnificently overweight gray-haired woman and her companion with a cane and thick spectacles.
Even Aunt Loula laughed.
“Look,” I said, pointing to three boys in sailor suits digging in the sand. “Prospectors. No doubt they’ve struck oil or made their fortunes in gold already.”
As we passed by, the boys stood up and pointed at our canoes. They pantomimed shooting us with arrows and made war whoops. In the canoe in front of us, Charlie pretended to shoot back, and Ida waved as if she were the belle of the Independence Day parade.
Last year, when we came to the camp on the meadow at the east end of the lake, Grandma’s nephews teased Papa and Uncle Jeremiah about the foolishness of chasing after whales in the ocean.
“If you wait long enough, one will wash up on your beach,” they said. “No mess, no danger, just a free gift.”
But when Papa told the story of how it was to touch a living whale out on the open sea, nobody laughed, and he held a place of honor at the summer feasting.
This summer was quiet. When our canoes pulled in, the Quinault relatives glanced up from their work and said “Oo-nu-gwee-tu” and nothing more. Everyone knew we had lost our whale. Everyone knew we were not alone in our troubles. None of the whaling families of Vancouver Island had seen a single whale on any of the usual ocean paths. There had been no feast messenger and no gathering of families to sing the praises of the whalers and share in the meat and oil. I missed visiting with my friends from Nitinat and Alert Bay, and I wondered if they felt the same spooky feeling of looking over the ocean and not seeing the spouts of whales.
Were the whales punishing us for not keeping the old ways? Would we suffer because other nations chose to hunt with disrespect? If it was true, there was no way for an Indian to live at all—put in prison by white men for keeping the old ways, and abandoned by whales for losing them.
I stepped onto the grass at the meadow, my arms shaking from the paddling and my legs stiff from hours in the canoe. Aunt Loula took one look at my blistered hands and growled.
“Foolish girl,” she hissed at me. “You ruin your hands when we have all this work to be done.”
“I’ll work,” I said, holding my voice steady so I sounded more grown up than her. “I’ll go up to the mountains and gather goat wool for my weaving.”
I could see she was dying to tell me weaving was not real work, not useful work. “Fine,” she said. “If Susi will take you.”
I walked off with my head low so she would think she had won, but inside I was dancing. Aunt Susi, my favorite person!
That night, there was dancing under the summer constellations. The meadow grasses were tamped flat in a circle around the fire. The drummers and singers gathered. Robes of power were unpacked from cedar chests and suitcases. Uncle Jeremiah took his rifle for signaling and went out in the dark to watch the road. Ida and her little friends taught the grandmothers to sing the happy birthday song and giggled at their mistakes. It was Grandpa’s turn to pretend to have a birthday. Charlie put a tall candle in a loaf of store bread.
“Listen, Grandpa,” he said. “After everyone sings, you close your eyes and make a wish.”
Grandpa listened carefully. “And do I sing? Tell a story?”
“No, all you have to do is blow out the candle.”
“No dance? No magic? These people do not know how to make a proper feast.”
“I’ve noticed,” Charlie said. “They seem to prefer their celebrations very plain. But if we pretend it’s a birthday party, we can even give gifts. The sheriff in these parts leaves Indians alone, so long as we are having a white person’s party.”
Other summers Aunt Loula brought carved and painted canoe paddles for me and Ida. We always did the paddle dance together to represent the Makah side of the family. But not this year. We would wait a whole year after my father died before we danced again.
But my Quinault kin brought out their best regalia and lined up to dance. Papa had promised me a new robe of power this year. He would have bought me wool and pearl buttons on our trip to town before we came to the lake. I would have worked on it all summer, with my aunts and girl cousins pitching in. It would have been a thing to gossip over and admire. When many women worked on a robe, each one put some of her strength in it. That strength would have been mine to wrap myself in, and mine to show at winter ceremonies. I had last year’s coat from the store. It kept my skin dry, but it left my heart cold.
Aunt Susi came up behind me and gave my arm a squeeze. “I want you to wear this tonight for me,” she said.
She unfolded her own button blanket. It was thick and heavy and reached to my feet. When Susi draped it over my shoulders, the firelight made the pearl buttons sparkle. It felt like putting on the stars.
The songs began and the younger girls had the first dance. My littlest Quinault cousin, Esther, was going to dance for the first time. Every eye was on her, but she was looking at me. As usual, I counted down the last six beats, signaling with my hand so Esther would start on the right beat. She was a good little dancer as soon as she forgot the watching eyes and remembered her feet. She swirled into the circle of firelight, and all her sisters and cousins followed her around the fire, each one three beats behind the dancer in front of her. I had known this dance by heart since I was five years old.
If my baby sister had lived, she would have danced it too. We would have practiced it over and over until every turn of the paddle and every swoosh of our robes matched perfectly. I remembered my father dancing the Raven stories in his carved cedar mask an
d feather-covered cape. He would soar and dive and bank. People sat perfectly still to watch him, almost believing he could fly. No one else danced the entire cycle of Raven stories, from Raven Releases the Sun to Raven Scatters the Salmon Eggs. I imagined my sons learning those dances. Henry would have to teach them, or Charlie. They were not a woman’s dances, but they would come to me to be sure every step was perfect. I was the one who would remember.
5
Gathering Wool
Next morning, Aunt Susi led the way to the mountain meadows where trees grew waist-tall and mountain goats grazed. We walked together up an old hunting trail with two empty baskets and a long cotton sack. Susi was the oldest unmarried person I knew. The grandmothers shook their heads and clucked about how old she was. Twenty-five, at least, they said, as if she would turn gray any moment. But the young men watched her every step and swore she was in the bloom of nineteen years.
I knew for a fact Susi would be twenty-three on the fifth of the next month. I knew every birth and marriage in the family. I could recite all of Grandma’s stories. I knew every dance and song my family owned, even the ones girls were not allowed to do. People counted on my memory.
Susi was the only auntie who could outrun me. I had to step lively to keep up with her, but she rested every time we crossed water so we could drink and I could bathe my blistered hands. She sat cross-legged on a rock in the kind of denim dungarees loggers wore. I just looked at her and laughed, a woman in pants. The uproar at the camp when she drove in that morning was worth a nickel to see.
“What’s gotten into that Susi!” the aunts whispered to each other.
“Is that girl looking for a wife or a husband?” Uncle Royal boomed out.
Susi laughed. If she had a husband, they’d tease him for keeping an uppity woman. If she lived with family like a normal girl, her parents would get an earful on the subject of proper decorum. But Susi lived alone in the one-room apartment over the post office. She did all her own earning. It made the grown-ups crazy. I pictured myself wearing work pants to the schoolhouse up in Neah Bay. My teacher’s skinny head would pop right off his body from the shock of it.
Written in Stone Page 3