Written in Stone

by Rosanne Parry

  “Do you ever get lonely?” I asked. “Working at the post office by yourself?”

  I’d wanted to ask this for a long time. Susi’s man died in France in the war.

  “Sometimes,” Susi said. “If I think about it. If I try to hold on to what’s not there.”

  There wasn’t much in Kalaloch, the beach town where Susi lived, a few cottages for fishermen and their families, a bunkhouse for loggers, a sugar and flour store, and one farmer trying to keep pigs and chickens alive. I’d go crazy in such a little town with no one to talk to.

  We got up and moved on, singing now because we were in bear territory. They would let us pass unharmed if we sang. I sang my father’s whale chant and the ballad my mother sang to herself at the loom. Susi did ragtime tunes from the radio.

  It was already past noon when we reached the alpine meadow. Pale green grass poked out of the rocky soil. Tall foxgloves shaded the gentians that hugged the ground. Gigantic boulders dotted the grass as if a giant had thrown them out like beaver-tooth dice. My hands tingled from the altitude, and I leaned over, resting hands on knees to catch my breath. The meadow was empty of animals, but it took only a few minutes to find a mound of wet black beads—goat scat.

  “Fresh,” Susi said, pointing to flies that buzzed and hovered. We followed the two-pronged track that meandered over the grass and turned behind a boulder. There, out of the wind, was a goat bed, scattered with clumps and strings of dirty white wool. I bent to scoop up handfuls, and Susi picked bits of fleece off a stunted pine tree.

  “Aren’t you afraid to live by yourself?” I asked, rolling smaller bits of fleece together in a ball. Wool oil glistened on my palms. I rubbed it into the hard ridges of skin where my blisters broke the day before.

  Susi shrugged and smiled. She had dimples like me. “What should I be afraid of?” she asked.

  “Dark,” I said. Everyone I knew was afraid of the dark.

  “Yeah,” she said, still smiling. “So I light a lamp. Not keeping anyone awake but me.”

  We moved down the meadow, gathering from shrubs.

  “What about … strangers?” I said, not wanting to mention the Timber Giant or the Pitch Woman by name.

  Susi laughed. “Yeah, I worry about them too. Got myself a big lock very first thing.”

  We stopped at the edge of the meadow and gazed at Lake Quinault a thousand feet below. It shimmered like an abalone shell against the deep green and silver-gray waves of rain forest. The sight of it pressed at my heart. I had to find a way to stay here, to live here. Canneries and factories were far away. Susi set down her basket and watched me watching our grandmothers’ land.

  She said, “There are worse things a woman can be than afraid.”

  I used to love to climb to the top of the headland and look out over the ocean, but after the whale hunt, I couldn’t look at the ocean. I wanted to, but I was afraid if I started to look, I’d never look away. I’d turn to stone, forever looking. It sounded like a thing that would happen in one of Grandma’s stories.

  But in the mountains, the ocean was miles out of sight. The gray, green rain forest set my mind rolling. Why was I still alive? Alone, with no parents and no brothers or sisters of my own? I was the same age as Charlie; why was my luck so different? He was the one obsessed with movies and jazz. Henry was the one who broke the rules of the whale hunt. I had given Ida every dress I’d ever outgrown, and she couldn’t share her stupid crayons with me. But they still had each other and both parents. Ten years from now, their children would have aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins. Not mine.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket and touched the abalone shell from my mother’s regalia. Touching it helped me think of what Mama would say to me, my secret object, the one I stole before Papa burned all my mother’s things. Grandma held me in her lap that day and rocked me, though I was years past rocking.

  “This is hard,” she whispered. “This goes deep. But he is not wrong to let your mother go so completely. He chooses life with you, and that makes him put death far out of his reach.”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to try. But I remembered Grandma’s paper-dry cheek next to mine as we sat together while the funeral fires cooled. The next morning, she laid a red leather diary in my lap and a silver fountain pen.

  “Your teacher up at the schoolhouse tells me you have a fine hand for lettering. You put that talent to use. Write the names of all your relatives in this book.”

  I wrote the names and nothing else. It was not beautiful. The pen was shaky in my hand, and the ink dribbled. I wondered if Grandma meant for me to write something more. I wondered why I remembered that diary today, looking down on Lake Quinault from the mountains.

  Susi called me over to a patch of wild strawberries. We feasted like bear cubs, and afterward I was ready to sleep like one, but we had baskets of wool to gather and miles to walk before the sun went down. We returned to the wool picking. The large boulders were a favorite scratching post. Cobweb strands of matted wool caught in the crevices. As I wound fibers into a soft ball, I saw, shoulder-high on the rock, a row of circles. They were too regular, too perfectly round to be natural.

  “Look at this, Susi,” I said.

  The circles were as big as a half-dollar and shallow. I ran a finger across the row.

  “No one carves in stone,” Susi said. “Plenty of men work in bone, antlers, and walrus ivory, but I’ve never heard of a stone carver.”

  “It has to be art,” I said. “Animals or weather couldn’t make this pattern.”

  I leaned closer to look for a blade or mallet mark. I pressed my palms to the stone. Warmth and life pressed back. I stepped away and checked my hands for some sign of that life pulse. Nothing. I must have been losing my mind.

  That night, I had the dream again, the one where my father was calling me, calling me to save him. I ran in pitch darkness looking for him. Only this time, I came close, so close I reached out to take his hand, to pull him up out of death. But I touched stone instead and woke up.

  6

  The Museum Man

  The next day, I was full of plans for my wool. I needed to clean and spin it in the summer. Come fall, when we moved back to the longhouse where my mother’s loom was waiting, I would learn how to weave. I would teach myself or die trying.

  I followed the riverbank upstream, walking on boulders and wading in the shallows. The wool basket rested between my shoulder blades with the tumpline over my forehead. I turned up a steep bank to a clearing that was marked by the skeleton of a lightning-struck tree. It marked the patch of white dirt I needed to sprinkle over my wool to soak up the oil as I pounded it.

  Uncle Jeremiah and Uncle Royal were at the far side of the clearing, pacing off the length of a fallen cedar. Uncle Royal set his palm over the log for a blessing. Uncle Jeremiah did the same. They sang the blessing song over the cedar. I almost cried to hear it. My father used to sing it with Uncle Jeremiah before they made a mask or canoe or totem pole.

  Uncle Jeremiah was a better carver than my papa. He could see the canoe inside the tree, the way my father could see a whale under the water. I turned my head to hear the thud-grunt of the adze, the snap-crack and chips of cedar flying. I made my work fit their rhythm. I didn’t mean to overhear, but the word “starve” opened my ears wide.

  “Don’t worry,” Uncle Royal said quietly. “We won’t let your family starve. Plenty of salmon in the river for everyone this year.”

  Uncle Jeremiah nodded his thanks but didn’t look up.

  “You would do the same for us,” Uncle Royal said.

  I knew it was true, but we had always been the family that gives, not the family that gets. Whatever Uncle Jeremiah said to this, I didn’t want to hear it. I tossed clean wool back in with the dirty and hopped from stone to stone across the river. I turned up the north bank to my favorite spot under a willow by the water.

  Charlie was already there, fletching arrows. He had a pocketknife in his hand and a pile of duck
feathers beside him to split and slide into the notch on the back end of the arrow. He glanced up and swore when he saw me, but it wasn’t a very bad swear.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Grandpa thinks it’s time we go back to bow hunting,” he said.

  “You couldn’t hit the broad side of a dairy cow at twenty paces.”

  “You should talk,” he snapped back, whacking me with the end of an arrow. “You going to feed us with that wool you got? Wool soup? Fleece flapjacks?”

  I thought about smacking him back, but I remembered my quelans. “There aren’t any more bullets for Grandpa’s hunting rifles, are there?” I said. I dropped my basket of fleece and sat beside him. “Not much sugar or flour either.”

  Charlie picked up a feather and concentrated on slicing it in half. “Gonna be dark come winter,” he said, “with no whale oil to put in our lamps.”

  “Cold too,” I added. “There’s only enough flannel left for one winter shirt.”

  “And we can’t put up jam without sugar.”

  I had been wondering what we’d do without whale oil to trade, but saying it out loud made my mouth go dry.

  “What are they going to do about it?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the grown-ups back at camp. Charlie spent all his time with Grandpa. If something was going on, he would know about it.

  Charlie fidgeted. He rolled an arrow between his palms, looking down the shaft to see if it was straight. “We aren’t going to starve,” he said, setting the work down. “Only a fool could starve in a place as good as this. We’ll make up for the whale meat with extra elk or bears.”

  “We just won’t have any money,” I said.

  Charlie shrugged at the ground. “Happened to some of the Tlingit a while back,” he said. “Bunch of sawmills poisoned their river, killed all their salmon. The men and boys went away to work the sawmill and the lumber camps. The women went to some cannery up in Alaska. Only grandparents and babies in that village now. But the workers come home, sometimes.”

  I had heard gossip about that before, about a Tlingit man who came home from the mill. He had run the flying cut-off saw. Only Indians got that job, maybe sometimes a Chinaman, if he was big. That giant saw flew after him. Cut him off above the elbow. The mill boss could have kept him as a clerk or quartermaster, but no, he sent him home with no salary. Now he was a one-armed fisherman. That family went hungry.

  I could tell Charlie was thinking about that story too, by the way he squeezed his elbows in tight to his body.

  In the days that followed, I saw Aunt Loula busy tanning deer and elk hides for the boot and glove maker in town. Grandma twined baskets and little Ida cut sweetgrass for her until her hands were almost as red and chapped as mine. Henry sliced and drilled elk-horn buttons. Uncle Jeremiah carved elk-horn knife handles and letter openers. You could sell all those things in town, but not for very much.

  A potlatch messenger would solve our problems, a feast messenger from the Nootka or Kwakiutl or Tsimshian with news of a marriage or an inheritance. We gave away hundreds of pounds of flour, salt, and sugar, many gallons of fish oil, and all the copper we owned. It would be nice to receive next time. It would be fair. They should have known if they sat at our table and took our gifts, they owed us gifts at their own potlatch later.

  I took my wool and strips of yellow cedar bark to the lakeshore, where I could spin while I watched the mouth of the river for a messenger. I shaped the clean wool into long pieces and twisted them around a strip of cedar bark as slender and strong as a fish bone. My first tries were awkward and lumpy, but once I got the feel for it, spinning was easier than I remembered. I worked in a steady rhythm, stroking the wool down my thigh with a flat hand to twist two strands, and then reversing the stroke to twist the plies of yarn together.

  I watched for the feast messenger every day, but the long, warm months of Panklaswhas and Panmuulak passed, and no one came. Would they hold a feast without us, now that the power had gone out of our name?

  I fingered Mama’s abalone shell. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe Death found Papa because I kept this thing of my mother’s. Maybe it drew Death to him. Maybe it’s what I deserve for disobeying him, disobeying and lying.

  Susi saved me that summer. It was a good year for berries, so every weekend when the post office was closed, she drove up to pick, sort, pound, and dry berries with me by the shore of the lake. And when I wanted to talk, she was full of news from all up and down the coast. She could sing songs straight from the radio. But when I didn’t want to talk, she worked by my side, bumping my arm from time to time to draw me away from my thoughts.

  One day, she stepped out of her car with a newspaper for Uncle Jeremiah and a letter for Grandpa. He didn’t ask, but I knew to read it aloud, translating to Makah as I went. Uncle Jeremiah heard me read and found a reason to bring the paddle he was carving near. Aunt Loula didn’t even pretend to be working. Henry and Charlie stayed put, but they listened without looking.

  The letter was from some man called Arthur Glen, from some place he called the Art Institute.

  15 August 1923

  From:

  Mr. Arthur Glen

  The Art Institute

  New York City

  To:

  Mr. Simon Carver

  Ozette, Washington State

  Dear Sir:

  I am an avid collector of the artifacts of the Pacific Tribes. I have a special interest in carved totem poles and masks. I have heard the reputation of your family, and I am eager to visit and study you.

  I have a stipend from the Art Institute to add to their excellent and world-renowned collection. I will be arriving on the tenth of October.

  Respectfully yours,

  Mr. Arthur Glen

  “Another collector,” Uncle Jeremiah said. “We haven’t seen one in these parts for a dozen years.”

  “More totem poles, bah! How can they want more? There are more poles in New York and Chicago than there are in the whole state of Washington,” Grandpa said.

  “I wonder which kind of collector he will be,” Uncle Jeremiah said.

  “Well, if he’s the grave-robbing kind, we’ll do this with him,” Grandpa said, and he crushed a mussel shell in his bare hand. “But more likely he’s a pole and mask man.”

  “Or maybe he’s the type to want the full story with all the ‘savage’ embellishments,” Henry said.

  Susi took the envelope from my hand and checked the address. She turned to Henry. “Isn’t the Art Institute in Chicago? This letter is from New York.”

  “We’ve sold to Chicago before, but it wasn’t the art museum. Have you ever heard of this collector?” Henry gave Susi a look, and I could tell they were both suspicious.

  “I could ask around,” Susi said.

  Grandpa brushed aside their worries. “White people are always moving things. We’ll ask him his references when he comes.”

  “Some of them want baskets,” Aunt Loula piped up. “And I’ve heard of one who would bring you a plant and pay you to tell its name and its use.”

  “The trouble is, will he be the type to buy old things, the more battered the better, or will he want fresh carvings with new paint?” Grandpa paced a few steps from his carving work and back.

  “It’s easy enough to make old carving.” Uncle Jeremiah laughed. “Rub on some sand, knock off a few corners, soak it for a day, and leave it in the sun.”

  “We have old masks to sell,” Grandpa said abruptly. “We will spend our time on new work.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. They would let a stranger come in and buy things, ceremonial things? Did we really have so little money that we would consider it? I remembered my father’s Raven mask and cape.

  “What if he doesn’t want to buy our things?” I blurted out. “What if he’s a liar or a common thief? We don’t know anything about this man.”

  “He’s one man,” Grandpa said. “If he treats us badly, we’ll send him away. Don’t worry, Pe
arl, a guest in our own house won’t steal from us.”

  I brought out the paper box. Grandpa selected a thin sheet, sharpened a pen, and dipped it in ink for me. I translated his words in my best hand.

  2 September 1923

  From:

  Simon Carver

  Ozette, Washington State

  To:

  Mr. Arthur Glen

  The Art Institute

  New York City

  Dear Sir:

  You are welcome to come to our village in October of this year to study our ways and bargain for our carving. You will find no travelers’ lodging at my village. Please be a guest in my home. Come to the Kalaloch Post Office. We will bring you the rest of the way.

  Respectfully yours,

  Simon Carver

  Grandpa examined my writing. He took heavy paper from the box. He folded an envelope and sealed the letter inside with flour paste. Henry frowned, and Charlie looked worried, but they would not cross Grandpa’s word. They drifted back to their own work and I was alone with him.

  “What does that museum man really want, Grandpa?” I asked. “Washington is a long way to come.”

  “This Arthur Glen is looking to take from us,” Grandpa said. “He’ll call it buying or collecting or research. He will have heard from other museum men the reputation of the mask makers in our family, the Bear mask with the full skin, the Whale that turns into a man. He will want those.”

  “But what for?” I pressed, thinking of my father’s chest of masks.

  “For power, Pearl. Why else would a nation keep a treasure house? Think how it is when a man holds a potlatch. All his wealth arrayed, and he gives it away. His friends think, this powerful man is my ally. I will do anything for him. His enemies think, this is only what he shows, what he can afford to give away. What powers does he have that I don’t see? Do you understand how it is, Pearl?” Grandpa leaned toward me now with his hands on my shoulders.