He and I leaped. Together we managed to hoist the boat up onto the beach without wetting Swan’s mantel. Naturally we had hooked no fish; no one had thought to bring a line.
Holding onto Carl like fish bait on a line, we made our way up to the cabin.
Once inside, the dusty air smelled like dried grass and smoke. Our sense of relief was palpable. In the tiny dark room attached to the kitchen, against the headboard, Annie, in a halo borrowed from the setting sun. Her figure, hot and cold, red and black, encircled a pod of energy, a new star called Charley.
Annie Jacob holding her first child, Mary Ann Lambert, Port Townsend, Washington, 1879. Photo courtest of theJamestownS’Klallam Tribe.
5
Pestilent Spirit
(19th Century)
The Nu-sklaim—in English, called the S’Klallam or Clallam—also as “the Strong People” for their skill in war, survived the epidemics better than most of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the governor’s assistant George Gibbs described the band as “the most formidable tribe now remaining . . . Their country stretches along the whole southern shore of the Straits to between Port Discovery and Port Townsend . . .” The territorial government described the S’Klallam as the most resilient tribe on the Olympic Peninsula, and one of the most adaptable in the Pacific Northwest.
Nevertheless, at the time he made his report, their numbers had dwindled. In 1854, Gibbs in his tribal census reduced the tally of Indian villages noted by Vancouver, twenty-five or more, to just eight. Gibbs noted as many as “1500 fighting men.” Just three years later, the drastic decline continued. ES Fowler, an Indian agent, counted 1,000 men, women, and children. Fifteen years later, the Strong People, still the dominant tribe on the west side of Hood Canal, numbered “something over 600,” according to U.S. Indian Agent Edwin Eells. In the 1880 census, Reverend Myron Eells recorded the low tide mark: 485 men, women, and children. Of those, 290 were full-blooded.
Still, despite their perilous decline, the S’Klallam fared slightly better than neighboring tribes. For example, the same 1880 government census puts the Makah of Neah Bay, historic whalers who sold oil to the whites, at a mere 150. They were devastated by smallpox in a single year.
The What Cheer
Two days before Christmas in 1859, the What Cheer, commanded by Captain Thompson, departed from San Francisco for Portland. However, the ship never anchored there. Just outside the harbor, smallpox infected the crew.
Steering clear of the sand bar at the mouth of the Columbia, the ship made for Puget Sound. Instead of setting fire to the poxy debris, the sailors cast off infested tools and wares. As the current oozed in, it distributed the diseased jetsam.
In Ozette, at the tip of the continent, bedding and other debris worked its way up the beach. Within weeks, the whaling settlement was transformed into a grave of 400 corpses. The death ship traveled down the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Dungeness. Soon, packs of diseased dogs looted in the woods and on the beaches. In Washington Harbor, an Indian picked up a coat on the beach. Within days he died. Other villages fell.
The War Department, reporting on an earlier epidemic, described how in 1859 wild dogs spread the germ of illness into the interior: “ . . . the Natives, frightened, left their dead unburied. These were devoured by the coyotes, who shortly became afflicted with a terrible skin disease, in which the hair fell off, and the whole surface of the body became covered by scabs and putrid sores, which, irritated by the sun, wind andsand, were a dreadful annoyance to the miserable brutes . . .”
At last the What Cheer dropped anchor underneath the towering bluffs in-between the sea stacks near Rocky Spit. The remains of Captain Thompson were burned and then buried in a dry knoll just a few yards from the high tide mark. At some point, white settlers erected a cross there.
Today, this desolate piece of shore known as Thompson’s Point, or Dead Man’s Point, has become a place of pilgrimage for both Indians and whites. I predict: one hundred and fifty years from now future generations will search for the grassy trail that leads to the marker of the smallpox captain. Folks from every walk of life will go there, to decorate his grave with sea glass, unusual rocks and shells, and rusty congealed lumps of iron, acknowledging the shared burden of history.
Gravesite of Captain Thompson at Dead Man’s Point.
6
Shake Up
(1881)
“Breathe,” I said.
Less than a minute before, I had been startled into wakefulness by screaming victims with bleeding eyes and bursted skulls. I was five. For more than a year the recurring nightmare of a massacre—what and where? And why me? The lightless hours of whispering rain: a deadly lullaby.
But tonight something other than the dream had waked me. It wasn’t a sound, but the silence. On trembling knee, I made my way down the hemp ladder.
The hearthside, dim and breezy. Inside the cradle, creaking on a beam, Charley’s bright eyes called for help. Seya, resting on a cedar mat by the fire, stirred. Alarmed, she pulled herself up, reached into the cradle and lifted him up.
The baby rattled.
She tossed a blanket over him andprepared to set out. Not for the white doctor: she had little faith in his methods, and no cash to pay him—but for the Sunday morning service at the Indian Shaker Church in Jamestown. A new religion founded by a modern-day prophet from Squaxin Island.
A new magic.
Reluctantly, Annie agreed.
I inserted, “Me, too.”
Seya replied, “Fine. As long as we go now.”
From the alcove bed Carl groaned.
The bleak path unfurled. The floating tips of the evergreen bough beckoned. Through the mossy mist, my grandmother advanced. With my heart scampering, I hurried to keep up with her.“Let me.” She handed me the bundle, a tight package except for the hanging fist that bounced. By the time we reached the first full twist in the path, through a sweeping dome of Douglas fir, I drooped.
Annie rescued me. I held onto the tips of Seya’s dry fingertips. Annie followed, singing lightly to the infant pressed against her chest. Every so often I tilted my head back to watch the fir canopy exhale.
Like the curtain between dream and waking, the tangled rhododendrons and the mist parted. The Jamestown Church, also the schoolhouse, erected in 1878, gleamed in spilt sunshine like the froth on top of milk. With its pretty picket fence, mission-style portico, and steep cedar shingled roof, the Jamestown church was the first on the Olympic Peninsula to sound its bell.
Just north of Sequim, Jamestown was not a “preserve for Natives,” but instead an independent, privately owned township purchased for five hundred dollars by the S’Klallam residents who refused to be removed to the Skykomish Reservation, one hundred miles south, overcrowded with near and far neighbors who were not always friends. Under the leadership of Tuls-Met-Tum, known to whites as Lord Jim Balch, S’Klallam families pooled their resources to purchase the two-hundred-and-ten-acreparcel from the white farmer Richard Delanta.
Reverend Myron Eells, a missionary from the Skokomish Reservation, serving as a local minister for thirty-three years, named the new township after Balch. The total acreage of Jamestown was a hundred acres less than the three-hundred-and-sixty acres allotted by the Donation Land Claim Act, one third of the land awarded to a married white couple. Nevertheless, Jamestown afforded the Indian villagers a chance to determine their own destiny.
First light crowned Mount Baker. The air sang: horses stamping; women gossiping; unbridled children shrieking; the yap of a little dog; the bleat of an insistent lamb. To me, a little girl who mostly stayed at home, it felt like Election Day or the Fourth of July. I wanted to shout and to clap, to stamp my feet. Then, I thought of Charley.
Without a word, Seyatook the hot bundle from Annie and headed for the door underneath a portico. For more than a minute Annie remained, staring at nothing.
Absentmindedly she hauled me from the churchyard, pa
st the whitewashed cottages, to a twisted tree on the edge of the shore. The day turned clear. She kicked off her shoes and sat down on top of her full skirt. Annie leaned back onto the prickly grass and closed her eyes, the same shape as the brittle Madrone leaves. I leaned against the tree and curled off the bark to the polished ceramic of the unexposed wood.
“It’s odd,” she said. “The Indian Shakers took my baby. Right now they’re bathing him in holy water, palpitating him with their dirty hands, disturbing him with their bells. Maybe they’ll cure him. Maybe they’ll kill him.”
I sucked on my muddy thumbnail.
“Don’t cry. Have some breakfast.” From the pocket of her skirt she retrieved a charred lump of potato, one that turned my lips and the inside of my mouth black.
She did her best to smile. “Want to hear a story?”
7
Annie’s Tale: The Silver Earrings
(c. 1875)
I grew up on the south side of the Dungeness sandbar on the crooked hook known as Graveyard Spit. In the longhouse, on my mat, I would watch the maze spiraling through the hole in the rafters, like the white thread on a spindle whorl.
My cousins were my sisters and brothers. We spent most of our time on the beach. We raced hermit crabs. We speared little fish on sticks and waved them in the air, like a whirligig. Like children everywhere, we competed in everything: running, leaping, wrestling, tying knots, and aiming rocks at the birds.
In those days about the only vessels on the Strait were Indian canoes. Never refer to a canoe as a boat—as if Europeans invented sea travel. If you do, you’ll be tossed into the water. Most canoes, one or two persons could handle. Others, fifty or sixty feet long, could transport an entire family to the Cape Scott Light Station, Vancouver Island, or through the inside passage to Bella Coola and Alaska.
One day a military steamship anchored inside the crook of the spit. The Hudson’s Bay official delivered the news: The U.S. Army had requisitioned the harbor for military and commercial vessels, small to mid-sized, to load and unload their wares.
In contrast to the others—whispering and wailing. My mother Eliza became a stone column. The truth is, an officer in the U.S. Army named Smyth, a too-friendly acquaintance, had warned her in advance. “Do you understand what I just did? To help you, I compromised military protocol and risked my job. You owe me.”
The officer handed her a paper, though he must have been aware that neither one of us could read. “Meet me in my office. If you don’t come, I’ll find you.” He kept bobbing his head up and down and stretching out his neck, like a heron ingurgitating a fish. “Don’t forget to bring your daughter.”
As if to make the point, the ship’s cannon fired a warning. Then, the gun on the ship’s deck boomed. The longhouse smoked and flamed.
I opened up my hand and showed her soiled sugar lump inside my palm. “The army man gave me this. And kissed me, here.”
“What are we going to do?”
Eliza II thought. Well, it wasn’t the first time she had fled a village in flames. At last, she said, “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Where they won’t look.”
With a bundle and a basket, we crossed to the mainland and followed the shore. When the sand ran out, we stopped. Without speaking, Eliza stacked up drift logs and washed-up planks. Three days later, it was finished. Essentially, it’s the same house on stilts that Seya lives in today.
Eliza had no real plan. Yes, we had enough to eat, but the two of us were alone. After several days, I forgot my fear. I became restless, even bored. Each day, I awoke a bit earlier, to wander down the beach. Each day, Seya noticed but said nothing.
One day, just before noon, I was standing up to my knees in the water, peeling sea urchins off a rock, cracking them open with my teeth, and sucking them out of their shells. From in between the sea stacks, a cedar canoe with a sharp beak appeared. The paddle, with its pointed tip, moved in circles to keep the craft steady. The canoe lingered, whoever was in it watching me. Without turning my head, I turned back to the shore and headed toward our secret place. Like an otter, or a seal pup, the canoe followed.
Every day I would find a new place to dangle my feet. The paddler, though not bad-looking, was not good with words. One thing: he could handle a canoe. Each day he would aim the stern in between the rocky palisades in order to get closer to me. It became a game. On top of the flat paddle, he balanced a single strip of smoked halibut or dried elk, or one time, chocolate wrapped in paper and gold foil. Within easy arm’s reach, like bait.
This Indian was a Makah carver from Neah Bay. In his timid, determined way, he tried to impress me. One day, about a week after that first day when he caught me pulling urchins off the sea stack, he told me he had an extra-special gift for me. An offering. “What?” He refused to say. He told me to meet him that night, next to the twisted pine on the tip of the point.
Because it was summer, I had to wait long hours for the last embers of the sun to fade. There were so many stars in the sky that at first the moon kept its head hidden, like a loon. When it rose, it beamed. In the water about five yards from the shore, rested a soiyutl, a larger seafaring canoe, decorated with the emblem of the sacred thunderbird.
From inside the bow this odd and compelling boy sprang up. He wore a cedar band across his forehead. His black hair, unbraided, flowed down.
He stood tall.
He danced.
And sang.
I know it sounds strange but in fact it was beautiful.
I got in and he turned the notched bow to the lighthouse.
The eve was still, peaceful. Astride a plank in the stern, I watched him paddle the craft. The truth is: I knew nothing about him, not even his name. I asked how he acquired his fine canoe. A craft like this one was worth a hundred dollars, or more.
He said simply, “I made it for you.”
“It would take a skilled carver at least two months. With help. Two weeks ago, you’d never even seen me.”
“Not true.”
“Then, how is it I don’t remember?”
“For centuries; in my dreams.”
I admit it, I laughed.
It sounds silly but the words did something to me. His words, though somewhat hard to take seriously, empowered me. As you know, standing up in a dugout canoe is not the smartest idea, especially if the sole paddler is maneuvering around a point with the tide rushing in at night. For the first time in my life, I felt vital and strong. Beautiful. For the first time I perceived the song of my spirit power in the freezing current underneath the water.
He took me to Graveyard Spit, the site of my home village. It was deserted now, except for a muskrat crown threading through the water and a screaming killdeer that whirled to draw us from its nest.
The night breeze unlaced my hair.
One dry hand reached for the buttons on my collar. He clenched my neck with his scarred left palm and gathered the loose locks into the empty cup on the top of my spine.
I thought to myself, What’s happening here?
I said not a word. For no real reason, I trusted him.
Thumb to index finger, with a fishhook, he punctured my earlobe. He inserted a wire. Next, the left lobe. Afterwards, he dabbed at the blood with a rag.
Before this, I had no idea if I even liked him.
After what he did to me that night, I felt as if we were married.
For the rest of the night we sat on the beach, knee to knee, but otherwise not touching. The air hissed with the mixed-up noise of water lapping, birds screeching, harbor seals hacking.
At sunrise, he kissed me.
8
Revenge of The Silver Earrings
(c. 1875)
“Ten months later—you.”
Annie fingered one lobe. “Your grandmother says the earrings are cursed. She told me to sell them to a collector, singe them in the fire, or bury them in a hole . . .”
She unhooked one, and then the other. On her knees she
leaned into the tide, which jumped and thrashed. She opened up her hand. The eager fish thrashed, but before they could escape, she plucked them from the black current. Inside her palm, the silver earrings whirled.
“Millie, shut your eyes.”
Like Isaac to Abraham, I laid my head down. She smoothed the damp in the hollow at the back of my neck with her cool sure fingers. All told, the pain was not much. After, I think I must have slept, because when I opened my eyes the tide had receded. Smiling, she braided my hair and set me on my feet. My small fist inside of hers, she led me away over the dry sand, through whole villages of sand fleas, where crabs poked fun at the mottled surface.
By now, it was midday, the white church so bright that it hurt. Underneath the triangular portico, the door, painted fire engine red, opened. The crowd spilled out: The men in black coats, followed by women in puffy dresses and smocks, and little children in their burly sweaters with over-sized wooden buttons, tumbling out onto the musty grass in the churchyard.
Throughout it all, the ceaseless tinkling of bells. There was my grandmother, the black crocheted shawl on top of her grey woolen jumper, with Charley in her arms. I ran up to greet them. She fingered the collar of my blouse, studded with sapphires drops. Her eyes winced at the swinging fish.
Charley leaned way, way down. His eyes, shiny and black. He reached out a dimpled fist. Was it the Indian Shaker ceremony that cured his fever? I didn’t know or care, as long as he was well.
Annie’s hand rested on my shoulder. Dazzled, she eyed Charley. She studied him like an artifact, or a vision without substance conjured by a magic lantern. Little by little she began to believe. Annie lifted him with both hands. While Charley squirmed, she kissed his forehead, nose, and chin.
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