20
Scritch-Scratch
c. 1889
While Blake blasted us with his tale, the heave of the little kitchen door rattled the china. A large sack entered, followed by a crate. Next, a pot-bellied basket, topped off with a waxy cheese wheel, bumped over the threshold.
George entered with my satchel. “Where do I set it?” He nodded with his chin in the direction of the little hallway that led to Richard’s chamber. Obviously he had something to say to me. Not wanting to miss a word, unwillingy I followed.
Through the pantry behind the central staircase that spiraled up the tower, a small unlit passageway. At the end of the hall, the tiny bedroom—Richard’s room. I half-expected to see him: a pale shivering boy, bloodless fingertips gripping a wooly blanket up for dear life. Rather, a feather mattress topped by a merry quilt. I sat down. From underneath stretched a lithe cat. Striped black and white like the lighthouse tower, Blake’s cat Maldita. When I reached out for it, it slipped beneath the bedstead, but not before leaving me with a scratch on the back of my hand.
George threw himself down beside me on the bed. Here was his grievance: earlier, Blake had announced, “Indians sleep in the shed.” I was there, too, but it didn’t bother me. Honestly, I was surprised at George. Though wrong, the arrangement was standard. White settlers extended hospitality to other whites but treated Natives like servants, or worse. It wasn’t merely the injustice of it, George said. The shed featured large gaps between the planks. On a night such as this, it barely slowed down the wind. He added, “I noticed a scratching sound. In the rafters or walls, tunneling beneath it?”
“A family of raccoons?” After a moment, “Anyhow, you can’t sleep in my bed.”
George grinned broadly. “I’m going to build myself a shelter out of driftwood. Warm and dry. And safe, Millie. Tonight, meet me on the south side of the spit. Look for my campfire. I need to talk to you. This could be our last chance.”
“To do what?”
“You’ll find out,” he stammered. “Later on, tonight.”
We went back into the kitchen. Right away George pitched in, arranging jars large and small on the shelf. All of a sudden, I recalled the odd figure I had noticed slipping around the back of the shed. I asked Blake, “How is your mother?”
“In the glory of her declining years. As you know, she lives in town with my brother Richard. Why do you ask?”
“Does anyone else live on the spit?”
“Nadie, nobody. Why?”
Jake looked at me. My father openly stared. George tried not to look at me.
I slurped scalding coffee. What was it that I had seen? A raccoon? An optical illusion in the driving rain? Too vexed to pursue the matter, I asked, “Mr. Blake, what ever happened to that Indian girl, sole survivor of the massacre?”
“Not so. That girl was pregnant, which is perhaps what made her so determined to live. As soon as she was well enough, my father saddled his mule and brought her back to the mainland. Later, the territorial government put her on a steamer and sent her home with trade goods worth twice the value of what had been lost.”
“What about the others?” I knew how the tragic tale ended. Frightened, I was desperate for Blake to drop the final curtain.
“Eighteen Indians—men, women and children—ambushed inside their tents by the S’Klallam. Those who fled were crushed into the sand.”
Blake handed Jake a plate of heaped-up pastry. Sticky juice leaked over the edge. The blackberries, fatly purple, pulpy, and glistening.
Jake set it aside. “No thanks,” he said.
Carl, in spite of himself, had been drawn in. “That Indian, in the plaid shirt, with the little white dog, what happened to him?”
“Yes, yes. I almost forgot.”
Blake loaded up his own dish with steamy juicy pie. “Just as he was about to shove off, that Indian said to me, ‘A long time ago, my mother came here. Something bad happened to her. The white family who lived inside the lighthouse station helped her.’
“I asked, ‘You ain’t Tsimshian, are you?’
“He nodded.
“Eureka! I shouted, ‘Go directly to the house of my brother Richard. Believe me, it would change his life. Believe me, he would be a new man.’ I guess he had other plans. After he shoved off, he headed due north to Esquimalt.
“Did he find what he was looking for? Who knows? At least, now we have the epilogue. The unborn son of that sixteen-year-old Tsimshian girl survived to become a man. On the night of the massacre, my mother Maria saved not one life but two.”
But why then eighteen bodies on the sand?
Between Life and Death
S’Klallam Folklore
For the S’Klallam, and other Northwest tribes, the boundary between life and death is not final, but a permeable border that can be crossed and re-crossed. To put it another way, in this philosophy, death is not the final departure from the railroad terminal, but instead a door that swings both ways.
This is why, according to a popular legend, the Suquamish leader Chief Sealth, was not insulted but relieved when whites misappropriated his name for the gold-rush city of Seattle. After losing their loved one, friends and relatives refrained from saying his name, since the pronouncement could induce his spirit to return. Sealth preferred to remain at peace in the Land of the Dead.
This is also why Christ’s mythic transformation from life to death and back again is not all that surprising. It may be the reason that so many Pacific Coast Natives are ready to convert. Like Jesus, a mystic, or shaman, increases his strength by traversing the boundary between the living and the dead. When the shaman’s spirit power is enhanced, the village grows stronger. I have heard it said that one can visit one’s dead relatives—by traveling up the Dungeness River.
A S’Klallam Funeral
The girl, not more than six, contracted smallpox, rapidly declined, and died. Her coffin was a canoe, which her father and her uncle carried to the beach. Her cousin placed the dead girl’s body inside the vessel. Her mother covered her up with a coverlet of calico. Her father and his brothers set the canoe on legs made of crooked sticks.
They worked together to construct a makeshift hut around her.
Next to her burial hut, the women built a fire and tossed into the flames all of the things the little girl loved best: a doll, two or three oranges, a ball woven out of grass that made music as it rolled across the floor. Each object as it burned made its own kind of smoke: a column of white, a gray or black cloud, an amber fountain.
The father leaned into the flames and captured the smoke inside his clasped hands. The wet grey smoke writhed against his palms. He cracked open the palms and breathed in deeply. After that he poured sugar on the fire, which created a pillar of thick smoke.
The mother of the little girl, agitated one moment before, suddenly became tranquil. “We can go now,” she said.
For that family, the little girl was not dead. They often visited her at the burial hut, to tell her a joke, or a story, or to deliver some little thing they had saved for her: an orange, a button, or an unusual rock or shell.
Life comes from death. As the rotting stump of the cedar provides a nursery for the spring sapling, and as the crumbing body of the adult salmon is the first food for the fingerling. Death is not final; death is not even death.
21
Beneath the Shed
c. 1889
I dashed from the sheltered entryway above the tiny green door of the lighthouse, through the garden, and out the front gate. The polished soles of my new boots surfed the slimy grass. The next instant I found myself sitting in a puddle just outside the shed. Muddy, chagrined, I managed to find my feet. Pressed up against the woodshed, I pondered my next move. At least for the moment, I was protected from the wind and rain by the miserable little outbuilding.
Panting, I hovered there.
In the gaps between the planks of wood, a homey scene materialized. Jake’s kerosene lamp browned the interior like a se
pia photograph. On top of a pile of discarded sacks he sat cross-legged, stripped down to his long lean waist. It was freezing but he showed no sign of it. Intently, he stared at a small piece of cedar inside the palm of his hand. He bent his wrist, twisting the blade of his carving knife. He seemed relaxed, at peace.
No doubt George had overreacted. If he wanted to pretend he was an original pioneer and build a house out of scrap in the wintry rain, that was his choice. I preferred to get out of the weather and into my goose-down bed. I was just about to give it all up and make a dash back to the lighthouse when a scritch-scratching vibration in the plank pressed up against my palm stopped me.
A bandit raccoon?
Could it be the old woman with the headscarf, the one I had seen slip away behind the shed?
Nearer to the water, I noticed the cheering flames of a fire in front of a squat heap of driftwood. With my head down, I ran at it pell-mell. When I reckoned I was near enough, I hurled myself at it.
“D’Zunakwa,” said George. He was sitting inside under a two-toned blanket, his knees up. He stretched out his arms. “You’re shivering.” He lifted up the blanket. “Quick, get in.”
I tumbled in.
“D’Zunakwa,” he whispered again fondly. He dabbed at my wet face with the tail ends of his shirt. Inside, his shelter with its front porch roof to shelter and ventilate his fire, didn’t look so chaotic.
I was freezing, and drenched. I removed his broad arm and placed it behind my shoulder so that I could feel his rib cage move against me. I pressed up against him until the heat from his body seeped in. When was the last time I had cuddled with George? As a little girl, I sat on his lap.
Looking back, I can see that I was flirting.
A little.
George seemed to warm to my act.
Putting his head outside the shelter and pointing, he said in his knowledgeable-older-boy voice, “Do you see those poles standing up in the sand in a V? Those are traps. In winter at night you paddle your canoe into a flock of ducks. The ducks startle up and get tangled in the nets. For some reason the trick works only on ducks. The geese know better.”
“That’s mean,” I said.
“Are you a duck?” he teased.
“Be serious,” I said. “Annie mentioned something just as I was leaving. How do kids get an Indian name?”
“It usually happens at the winter ceremony. Boys, and sometimes girls too, receive their spirit power.”
“Then, why not me?”
George shook his head. “The territorial government banned it. On the beach in Vancouver and Port Townsend Indians perform the ceremony for tourists, but that’s not real. They do it for money. To me, that’s embarrassing.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed.
George, looking thoughtful, stared into the fire. “Well, there is another way.”
I waited.
“You allow it to find you.”
“How?” No answer. I tried again. “Tell me about your spirit power.”
“You’re not supposed to ask.” He hesitated. “It’s personal. Not something folks talk about. It’s definitely not something I like to talk about. A few years ago, I was tested.” He looked down at his bent knees. “I failed.”
“What happened?”
George took my hand, and told me the story of his spirit quest.
22
George’s Tale: A Rotten Fish
c. 1889
I had reached the age when a boy discovers his spirit power and becomes a man. That same year, the white government prohibited the winter ceremony.
Uncle Lyle felt bad about it. Around the time of the summer solstice, he took me to a remote beach; I won’t say where.
Together we built a tall and narrow shack made of cedar planks. Then, Lyle disappeared. For three days I prayed. Each day at sunrise, I would walk into the water. And then meditate inside that sweat lodge. I listened to the wind and the murmur of the tide, waiting for my spirit power to find me.
At first, it was boring. What’s more, I wasn’t completely sure I even wanted to be there. I had nothing to eat but mussels and a few handfuls of berries.
I spent a lot of time pacing over the dry drift logs. At the edge of the water lay a fallen tree, wrapped in eelgrass, hollowed out by the tide. Mid-morning of that third day, out of curiosity, I bent my head down to look inside. Inside the black heart of that tree, something slimy moved. I reached way in with my fist, withdrew it, and opened my palm. Something moved. It wriggled, wetly. I dropped it.
A moldering half-decayed herring.
The herring spoke to me. “Do you want to become a man? Hold me in your hands. Lift me up, speak to me. Tell me the one thing you want most. Whatever you want most is within your power to achieve.”
I felt something . . . rising up out of the earth, swimming into the core of my being.
It frightened me.
A lot.
I dropped the moldering cold lump. And ran.
I reached the line of trees and kept on. The drooping curved boughs of the Douglas firs scooped up the sunlight and thrust it underground. What happened next, I can’t say. I blacked out. In my eagerness to escape whatever it was, I must have torn through at least one spider web; when I woke up my entire face—lids, nostrils, and mouth—was covered in a ghastly residue.
That evening, my uncle returned, with his big grin and an even bigger steelhead trout. We stacked up the firewood and grilled that fish.
At first, I was too hungry to do anything but eat. After I had slaked my hunger and thirst, I told Lyle what happened.
Lyle, slowly, chewed the pink-and-white square of fish on the sharpened charred stick. Slowly, he replied, “It’s too bad you rejected that spirit power. A herring, now that’s protection. Not just for you, but for the whole village. Anyhow, don’t feel bad. You weren’t ready. I misjudged. It’s my fault. On the other hand, the spider web: that’s positive. It means that you will achieve every ambition.”
Mouse Woman, a shape-changer who moves between the spirit and human sorld. She often appears as as wise old woman to guide youth when they need her advice the most. Transformation mask by Craig Jacobrown, demonstrated here with a Haida button blanket worn by S’Klallam Dancer Chenoa Egawa.
23
Be Careful What You Wish For
c. 1889
“I never told anyone. Not my mother, Jennie, or even Jake.”
George concluded, “Two years later Uncle Lyle was crushed by a float of Doug fir. That means: you’re the only living soul except for me who knows. And, maybe, one ugly fish.”
He was still holding my hand.
“Anyhow, I’m glad I told you. It’s something you should know about me.”
My fingers, minutes before stiff with cold, were now beginning to sweat. “Lyle said you would achieve your dreams. What is it you want most?”
He gave me a long look. “That’s easy.”
You, Millie, you. That’s what I hoped he would say.
George answered, simply, “Money.”
Earnestly, he went on. “Well, that’s not it, not exactly. What I want is power. To get it, I need to make others (I mean: whites) respect me. I want to be the one in charge. The boss. I want to be revered for my acumen and skill. I don’t know how I’ll get there. It may take more than passing through a spider’s web.”
He stared at me intently. “What about you, Millie? What do you want?”
“For something like that to happen to me. Really, really, really weird.” Childish, I know. But, if I had a spirit power to protect me, my father might allow me to chart my own course. Annie might learn to love me. “Afternoon tea with a talking fish.”
George winced. “Just recalling it makes me sick.” The hot tip of his finger moved a lock and jangled one earring. “When they catch the light, they writhe. They look wet. When I notice them I feel nauseous. I hate them—”
He shuddered.
His aversion to the earrings bothered me. I took it personally. The
earrings were a souvenir from Annie; the only relic I had left.
I felt betrayed.
Which is better: friendship or romantic love? I was enjoying the intensity of his attentions, but was it for me, or the girl he wanted me to be that attracted him?
“I have to go,” I muttered.
He sighed and studied my eyes searchingly.
Deeper and deeper.
I stayed.
Shuddering, for reasons too complex to analyze, I asked, “Is it true? That eighteen dead people are buried here?”
“That’s what folk say, but I don’t believe it. The culprits were forced to return the stolen items, down to the last cake of soap. Yet, the authorities recovered only one canoe. What if the killers stacked up the bodies inside the canoes, and then drilled a hole or two in each hull? The murdered Tsimshian: fish food.”
A seal coughed. A hard rain beat time to a whimpering wind, which brought to mind familiar dream visions of murdered children with their arms and legs splayed. I shivered and moved closer to George.
What happened next, I suppose, was my fault. I put both of my hands around his neck. He leaned down, I reached up.
He leaned down.
The heat from his mouth felt—like?
Honey-butter on burnt toast.
He looked smug, satisfied.
I was not.
How do I put it? A queasy hunger began to claw at the inside of my belly. I felt hungry—no, starving. At the same time, sick. As if I had eaten the whole loaf and wanted more. I wondered, is this love?
George leaned back on his bent elbows. “Now, Millie, pay attention. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be a servant in a big house. When you’re polishing their silver, or emptying the nightjar, remember, you’re in it for you. Don’t work too hard. Do just enough to keep the job. Also, I want you to wait.”
Dungeness Page 8