Dungeness

by Polinsky, Karen;

  He squirmed. His chubby fist reached out and grasped a flickering fish. He pulled on it, hard. “Charley!”

  “Charley?”

  I looked at Annie, who looked at my grandmother.

  He would survive, but not without cost. The fever had made him deaf.

  Seya pronounced, “It’s the earrings.” Bitterly, she went on. “I’ve said it before. They’re tainted. What’s more, they don’t belong to you, and never did.” She pointed. “Or her.”

  She shook her finger at Charley. “Get rid of the earrings. Sell them, or bury them. If not, pay the price. Let go of the past. Your children need you now.”

  At the same time Eliza accused her, she forgave her. Seya threw open her shawl. Annie laid down her forehead on her soft shoulder and wept. I lost myself in the thick folds of Annie’s skirt.

  As I bent my head down, the fish slithered out of Charley’s snotty fingers. He wailed. I suppose it was better this way. If one of us had to suffer, it was right that we should suffer together.

  Charley recovered from the fever. When he could only toddle, Seya carried him to Jamestown on Sundays. When he was old enough to decide for himself, he became a life-long member of the Indian Shaker Church. Though he could never hear their bells, he felt their healing vibrations.

  9

  Shaker Bells

  (c. 1880)

  John Slocum, stubborn and taciturn, was not widely known for his geniality. Yet, after his spiritual transformation, whenever he met a stranger, Indian or white, in church or out, he held out his hand. Later, he would require his disciples to do the same.

  This is the story of how John Slocum of the Indian Shaker Church at age forty died—and came back to tell about it—establishing a new religion.

  In the 1880s, in Oyster Bay, Slocum lived on an isolated homestead, earning most of his pay at a nearby logging operation. He was of medium height, with a jutting eave of black hair on top of his swooping forehead, deep bright eyes, and a speckled beard. He married a wife who gave him thirteen children, only two of whom survived. Despite the hard times, Slocum refused to move his family to either the Skokomish or Squaxin Island reservations. He didn’t believe in a handout. He favored whiskey and betting. His profligate habits broke his health, which made it even harder for him to support his ailing family.

  One day at work he fell ill. On a cedar plank he was carried to his farm in Skookum Chuck where he died at about four in the morning.

  His mother placed coins on his eyes. She wrapped a bandage under his chin to keep his jaw from dropping, so his soul wouldn’t spill out. That night and throughout the following day, family, friends, and neighbors sat around waiting for the coffin to arrive.

  John Slocum sat up.

  Astonished kin and neighbors gathered round. Slocum announced, “If the people would convert to a new form of Christianity, renounce sin, and build a new church, God would repay them with a new medicine.”

  Slocum recalled his disembodied spirit, glancing down at his dead body. Reluctantly, he had come back, Slocum said, to teach the people to love one another and to be good. He then shook hands with everyone and said, “We should always be glad to see each other because, who knows? This time might be the last.”

  Slocum ordered the people to build him a church. Inside: an altar, with wax tapers and hand bells. Slocum also taught the people how to pray.

  As news of the miracle spread, people began to refer to Slocum as a prophet.

  A year later, Slocum again fell ill. Again, he died. His wife Mary, terrified to lose him a second time, began to shake all over. Again, Slocum revived. Slocum realized that he had returned from death a second time, only after his wife Mary began trembling. He thought, this must be the medicine that God up in heaven had pledged to send the people.

  Prayer within the Indian Shaker Church looked a lot like a traditional healing ceremony. Slocum, never a big talker, allowed others to lead the church he had created. His bleak outlook had not improved. In his second passage to the other side, he had seen things that made him even more depressed than when he lived. When he passed away the third time, it was for good.

  Though John Slocum’s mystic revelation had been witnessed by a mere handful, word traveled overland and up the Hood Canal to Dungeness. The Jamestown Shaker Church, the first church in the county with a bell tower, was built in 1878. Inside, the only decoration was a cross on the far wall and a candelabra hanging down from the ceiling. On the altar, a collection of bells.

  Shaker Healing

  The following details come from an eyewitness account of a Shaker healing ceremony in the Jamestown Church:

  A youth of eight or so had become feverish ill, sick enough to die.

  In the center of the room, the sick boy stood as still as a post. With hypnotic energy, the congregants circulated around him, stamping their feet and ringing bells next to his head. Every person sought a new and inspired way to make the boy “shake.” They passed their hands over him, blew on him, stroked his body, and whirled him round and round. He never moved an eyelash.

  Hours passed.

  Still, the boy never moved.

  When one devotee fell out, exhausted, another stepped in.

  Finally, the youth’s feet folded and his head hit the floor.

  As he came to, he began to tremble and shake. The others watched, but did not intervene. Finally, he stilled. When it was over, he scampered to his feet. In the words of one participant, the boy was “free as a cricket,” completely healed.

  PART II

  School Days

  Female side of the 9 foot salmon carved by Master Carver of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe Joe Ives. The Salmon People play an important role im S’Klallam culture and lore.

  “Many years ago we (S’Klallam) used to turn our Tamanowas, or Spirit Guardians,” says Joe. The flip side of the salmon reveals a young man in his Tamanowas form.

  10

  Spirit Canoe Paddle

  (c. 1884)

  Little girls and boys are naturalists. At seven, they become philosophers. By the time they are ten, they have derived half a dozen theories to account for the multitude of questions they generate daily. Those with exceptional courage spend the rest of their lives exploring ideas that, years before, their childish minds intuited. One summer’s day, when I was seven, nothing happened.

  Nothing changed my life.

  I awoke at daybreak. By mid-morning I was leaping over the scattered sticks, combing the beach.

  The oily rocks glinted in the beaming air. Salty suds polished my naked feet. The frothy advance overtook my father’s skiff stranded upside-down on the rocks. For a moment the whole world appeared to hold its breath. Then, the sky whispered, “Hush-sh-sh.” and the black current fell back. It was then that I perceived the rowboat sliding up the beach. One moment later I realized my mistake. The rowboat, hunkered down in the wet sand, had not moved an inch. The sand slide created an optical illusion. I realized: What we perceive looks different depending on where we stand. Nothing is true or untrue: Everything depends on one’s point of view. Reality, implacably rooted in time one minute before, all at once became as slippery as eelgrass.

  Every so often, my father’s taciturn hired man, Jake Cook, would bring his half-brother George to play with me. Jake could do it all: fisherman, logger, handyman, guide, and carver. He worked for little or no pay. We relied on him to survive. This was a fact that no one ever mentioned. Jake lived alone in a trapper’s cabin in the woods. His father and mother were Makah. His mother died when he was small. His father remarried a S’Klallam. His stepmother Jennie allowed George to tag along if he had no schoolwork or odd jobs to do.

  George dressed in overalls, with no shirt, whether or not it rained. He had boots but not shoes. At the Jamestown school, inside the Shaker Church, he excelled in every subject. He adored science, old and new. When he was nine he notched a pine beam to use the run-off from the roof to irrigate his European vegetable garden with native herbs. At twelve, he
was curious and clever as a Steller’s jay, and just as irritating.

  One morning, George appeared, toting on one shoulder a mysterious object; flat, and about a meter long. He held it up for me to see. The object was a hand-carved cedar plank crudely hewn. Powdery white. In the center, a bold and inky sketch of a dancing skeleton, his right hand lifted up. Encircling the figure, inky black dots spiraled upward. According to George, these black spots and dashes represented the shaman’s spirit power. In the center of the wide end of the paddle, near the top: A big round eye, with lashes springing out in every direction. Just above the eye, which looked like a black-and-white sun, a carved feather, bent over.

  Cautiously, I turned it over in my open hands. “What is it?”

  “A paddle.”

  “I can see that. What is it, really?”

  “A portal, for the energy of the dead. It’s used in a ritual unknown to whites, that few S’Klallam have witnessed. It’s a spirit board for the spirit canoe ceremony.”

  “Did you make it?”

  “Don’t be dumb. I whittle, but I’m no carver. Not like Jake. I found it, believe it or not, up in a tree. Inside a dugout river canoe, wedged in between the branches.”

  In the woods, on islands, and other remote places, the S’Kallam, and other local tribes, too, buried their dead in the trees. My grandmother—who believed that objects were magic, blessed or cursed—considered the relics of the dead untouchable, except by a shaman.

  George explained, “The spirit board is used by a medicine man to heal people who are ill. It finds things, like unloosed souls. It can save you, even if you’re dying.”

  “How does it work?”

  He furrowed one eyebrow. “Certain materials—for example, metal and water, conduct electricity. Wood does too, but less efficiently. Maybe the spirit board is a conduit for energy fields in the environment. Who knows? I ought to design an experiment—”

  “Give it back. I’ll show you how to do it—”

  But George refused and held firm.

  The root ball of a nearby drift log tilted upward like a palace stair. George ascended. With both hands he raised the paddle. The sun, which glinted all around it, touched the blind eye. George began to sing. He chanted the same syllables, over and over again, until the line changed until it echoed.

  In the sand I found a lump of charred wood, the debris of a beach fire. With the piece of coal, I added stripes and dots to my belly, arms, and legs. Still not satisfied, I climbed up the root tangle, brandishing my black crayon. “Decorate my face.” I pointed to the shamanistic eye on the spirit canoe paddle. On my forehead George drew a big circle.

  I danced, and laughed, and danced.

  Suddenly the game seemed wrong.

  George climbed down and crouched in the sand as he rewrapped the spirit board. He set it up against the log, and then waded into the water. After grabbing handfuls of sand, he scoured his chest, his arms and legs.

  He yelled, “Millie! A sea cucumber vomited up its guts. Want to see it?”

  “No! The water’s too cold.”

  We scrambled up and down the driftwood logs in our usual way. Hungry, I bolted without a backward glance, heading for the bleached white cabin. Slathering in anticipation, I could taste the saliva—salty and sweet—inside my own mouth. Delicious.

  Inside, next to the slab table in the manufactured chair, Carl smoked his pipe. He scowled. “What the devil? Look at her, Annie. Scrape the black off her. The little heathen needs a bath.”

  “What, now?” She shrugged, lifted up both hands, and opened up her fingers, laced with stringy guts. On the table, a flayed salmon, so large it almost covered the slab. At the moment Annie was prying out entrails with her fingernails. Leaning over the fish, peering up at me, she grinned.

  My father squared his jaw. “Go ahead, laugh. I’ve said it before: I want her brought up proper.”

  She wiped her hands on the apron on top of her big belly. She crossed her arms on top of her painful breasts. “What does that mean?”

  “Look at her. Sure, she can split firewood, peel off cedar shakes with a chisel and mall, and tend the kitchen garden. She’s the only one who can command that goat, her namesake. However, she’s entirely without education. She reads: books for boys, like Treasure Island, the logs of Captain Vancouver, or Swan’s pocket notebooks. To what end? What’s more, she’s stubborn as hell. That reminds me. When was the last time you took her to church?”

  Annie stared at him opaquely. Dead silence: a bad sign. Her anger could be triggered by nothing or anything, most often by me, though usually I had no idea why. When she was angry she stayed that way, until bitter rage became a trenchant sorrow. In these moods, Annie fled.

  She disappeared for a day, or even a week. At times for a month or more.

  Though I looked nothing like my mother, Seya said I acted like her: enthusiastic one minute, intractable the next. Carl, wringing his gnarled fists, almost always gave in. Her black moods frightened him. I think he was afraid she might leave him for good.

  I inherited the strongest tendency in each. Like Annie, I would become petulant over the most trivial detail. Like all wayward children, I often refused to obey without really knowing why. At other times, I traveled far out of my way for to give in. Just like Carl. I ask you, which is worse: To turn from those you love, or sidestep your own needs to please others? Growing up, neither one is viable. Like a netted fish, I flailed.

  Carl with his pipe stem pointed. Again, he said, “Look at her.”

  Nervously, I twisted my sunburnt elbows striped white and black.

  Carl stood up and emptied his pipe on the kitchen table, mixing the spent tobacco with the fish guts. “If we cleaned her up some—sanded off the rough edges, and rubbed her with a polish rag—Millie could blend in.”

  “Huh,” said Annie.

  She didn’t seem upset, or even surprised. As if, she had been expecting these words—for a hundred years or more.

  “What about Charley?” She looked down at her protruding apron, smeared red. “This one?”

  I suppose, at this point even Carl knew that he had wandered into hostile territory. For one thing, in a war of words, even in her adopted language, Annie would win. Words: arrowsheads or buckshot on the battlefield of culture. The high ground: determined by social standing and political power. Carl raised the bowl of his pipe, which matched her belly curve.

  “Charley. Raise him up your way. That one, too. If not Christian, then decent. But this one’s mine.”

  “Christian. Decent. I suppose they’re not the same?”

  “You laugh. Tell me. What happens to you and Millie when I’m dead?”

  On that eve in summer when I was seven, in the kitchen end of our one-room plank house, my mother Annie Jacob Langlie bartered her daughter, a lanky girl with brown eyes, a square forehead, and bad timing, for her adorable son and her unborn child.

  I suppose, families everywhere negotiate treaties. That afternoon Annie appeared to give in. However, like the signers of the 1854-1855 Treaties, she never renounced her claim.

  Beneath the leaves—fire.

  At night, underneath the quilt, she told me stories. Meanwhile, in the room below, ravaged by his own demons, my father muttered, grumbled, and sighed. To prevent Carl from hearing us, Annie spoke in a low voice, which deepened the darkness by shades. I loved and hated her weird tales, terrifying and true.

  In the feathery darkness, Annie whispered, “I was only ten . . .”

  11

  Annie’s Tale: The Winter Ceremony

  (c. 1871)

  I was only ten.

  If I stayed up all night, I could never sample all the aromas inside the busy longhouse: roasted sea anemone, sweet cakes made of corn, barbecued oysters, salmon, pork, and mustard greens. But I could try. I planned to drum, dance, and play games until the sun came up, or I fell down.

  From behind a pole I noticed: a group of half a dozen men, with cedar headbands and fringed armbands: the Bl
ack Tamanowas. Glaring at one and all, these fiendish fellows never mingled but instead stole in between the scattered parties and, now and then, disappeared into the dark trees. Rumor had it that any person who revealed even one word of the rituals of their cult would be murdered in the night.

  A frantic boy, about my age, from behind a post regarded me like something nice to eat. He wore a cedar headband; his brow was slashed with red paint. Looped round his wrist, a braided leash, collaring a skinny dog, which nipped at the back of its own legs, and whimpered. The boy tugged at the leash.

  Seya hissed, “Stick to me.”

  I lay down on my belly on top of a stack of stiffly creased blankets. In the red glow, in between the dancers, the shadows writhed.

  I think I slept, because when I woke up someone was screaming.

  It was the boy I had noticed before, blindfolded. Striped and dotted black and streaked with blood. Bound by a rope and wildly attempting to break free. The dog’s leash, still tied to his wrist, was frayed black with gore. While his limbs flailed, his frantic eyes went this way and that, seeking a way to escape to the dark forest for all time. The spectators remained perfectly still. The wild boy bared his teeth and snapped his jaw at an old woman in red, who shielded the bundled infant in her lap. The other male dancers pulled back on the rope hard. A spirit doctor, in a thick shirt fringed with tiny wood paddles, shook a sheep horn rattle as he whispered in his ear. Little by little, the boy’s gyrations became less frenzied. In the rhythm of his footfalls, a pattern emerged. The rhythm, complex and deliberate, grew stronger. Controlled. Little by little, his handlers slacked the rope. Little by little, they began to follow his lead.

  He had subdued his spirit power and now it belonged to him. This unseen force would strengthen and protect him for the rest of his life. No longer a boy, but a man.