But Thomas’s anger vanished as quickly as it had come. He looked downriver toward the dam site; he closed his eyes; he began to chant. And at the blend of deep voice and booming falls I moved closer to Ma for comfort. But she was fidgeting.
“Sorry Thomas,” she said, “but if ya want me to understand ya gotta give it to me in English.”
Thomas turned to her: his face made me want to hide. He said, “I sing the story of the young men of the Nass River People. It cannot be sung in English. English will not sing. Do you scold the geese flying over in autumn because they sing in their own language!”
Ma blushed and turned away: it was the first time, the only time, I have seen her utterly abashed. Again she said, “Sorry.” But this time she meant it.
Thomas extended his tree-branch arm out over the falls and bellowed, “Celilo! Stop your roaring! Roaring is not English!” Then he chuckled like a kid who’d farted in a car and chucked Ma in the ribs. She giggled and hugged the huge brown arm. Thomas said, “I will tell you this tale in your language, little sister and brother. Stiff and ugly as it is.”
I thought he winked as he said this, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know Indians winked. I thought winking was in English.
Thomas’s eyes grew vacant and he hummed for a little. All the while he told the tale he stared, but seemed not to see, across the river.…
There was a place in a canyon, near a great mountain, where the Wolf Clan of the Nass River People lived. There was a pool there, below a falls, where many salmon came in spring and autumn. Much game was there, too, and berries. In this place it was easy to live, as it once was here.…
Thomas extended his hand in a circle around us.
But in this place the young men of the Wolf Clan grew foolish. They began to leave carcasses unburied. Later, they began to kill the small forest animals only to test their skill, letting them lie, after. And they began to kill more deer and elk than they needed, keeping the choicest meat, wasting skin, bone, entrails. And they bragged of their hunting prowess, killed for the sake of mere betting. No longer did they recite the sacred prayers over those they killed. No longer did they purify themselves before the hunt. No longer did they give their kill to the elders, to share with those who couldn’t hunt. So the elders began to warn them. They warned of the Spirit Father’s anger. And the young men laughed.
One autumn they went to the fishing grounds and stayed after night came. Then, to amuse themselves, they caught salmon, slit their backs, placed burning torches in the slits, let the salmon go in closed-off shallows. They laughed as the salmon swam madly about. When the torches burned out they left them to die and returned to their lodges.
An old tamanawis man found the salmon in the morning. Some had beached themselves in their pain and confusion, spraying red eggs and milky sperm upon the dry stones. Some swam till they died of exhaustion. Others bled to death. All but one were dead. This elder knew, then, that great trouble was to come. He returned and warned the people. He told them they must pack and leave that place. But the young men scoffed him. They ordered him to be silent before they slit his back and put a torch in it. To the people they said, “Winter is coming. The salmon are drying on the racks. It is time to make ready for the winter ceremonies, not to listen to crazy old fools.”
But the tamanawis man said, “A fire is coming.” And he packed and left that place. Only his wife and one daughter went with him.
Before many days passed, the Spirit Father began to voice his anger. For a little time each day the ground would shake and rumble. The other elders were worried now. They asked the young men to try to appease the spirits of the salmon people they had tortured and badly killed. They said the young men should fast, pray, offer gifts to the angry spirits. But again the young men laughed. They said the rumbling came from the ghosts, waking to join in the winter ceremonies. They said that ghosts like feasting and celebration, not fasting and prayer.
Then, for a time, the noises in the ground stopped. The words of the tamanawis man were forgotten. Even the elders thought the trouble might pass. But one day a sound like a thousand Celilos was heard, and from the mountain poured rivers of fire, and they streamed down every canyon, and fiery rocks flew through the sky like leaves in the first fall winds. The village and its people were devoured.
But those young men of the Wolf Clan saw the fire-river coming. They ran swiftly in their terror. They left their children and parents and they ran like wolves.… but the forest watched as they escaped to high ground. The forest had not forgotten who they were. Forest told the hazel to lean into the fire river, and the hazel leaned, setting itself aflame. Then Forest called on Wind. Wind came, driving the fire madly from tree to tree. The fire chased those bad men down.
All were destroyed but one. That one was badly burned. And he knew why his people were destroyed. He thought then that it would be better to die, and he sat himself under a smoking tree to wait. But the old tamanawis man came to that place and found him. He was a doctor, that old man. He brought him back to life.
The Wolf Clansman married that elder’s daughter. He became known as Nothing-But-Scars. And he lived for many years, singing his story each winter as a warning to the other clans. That is all.
I shivered and watched the river, fearing it would leap and snatch the drunks from their perch, and maybe Ma and me, too. Thomas said, “Then it was the river of fire. Now it is the white man’s dam. These are the Spirit Father’s weapons. Always it is the same: it is the greedy, the cruel, the ungrateful that bring down suffering upon the people.”
I never asked Thomas what spirits were. I felt they must be even greater than he, and just his greatness made me afraid, there, beside the falls. A month later Celilo was silenced and the dam began to roar—in English. The ancient fishing and burial grounds were submerged.
Not long after, Thomas Bigeater died while fishing at Sherar’s Rapids. He was the first unconverted tribesman to be buried in the new Christian Indian cemetery high above the reservoir. A few zealots grumbled, but there was nothing to be done: the ancient burial ground, like the converts, had to undergo baptism. Until its immersion ended there was nowhere else to put an old fisherman.
On Tamanawis Mountain the sun had grown hot, but Thomas’s tale chilled me—for comparing my fishing to Thomas’s, resemblances were all too few. I hadn’t descended to calling trout “fuckers,” but I fished for and fed only myself. My angling was a contest—Gus Versus Coastal Streams—and throughout the contest my opponents flowed, undefiled, undefeated: I was a flea screaming challenges at a hibernating bear; I’d die of old age before my “enemy” yawned or stirred. The only consolation was that my Fishing Log had gone the way of the Wolf Clansmen—ashes now.
That greed, cruelty, and ingratitude brought down suffering on the people, this I understood. But that I personally might be bringing suffering to something or someone besides my catch or myself—this possibility appalled me. Who would I be hurting? Who were “my people”? And if I found them, what could I do to help them? I guessed I wouldn’t mind attempting a little friendliness if I had some friends, but who did I know? Nobody.…
But by choice. Was this my mistake? Avoiding all anglers and neighbors, fishing for and by myself—was this my crime against the people? I wasn’t sure, but the thought left me uneasy.
The Spirit Father business was getting to me, too. I’d reckoned once that if He was so blasted important, He would make Himself less scarce. But how scarce was He? It was beginning to seem like everybody I respected—Bill Bob, Knickerbocker, Thomas—had some kind of secret Deity they worshipped, but who mostly just confused me. Yet everybody without a Deity looked a tad pedestrian beside those three.
Well, gods or no gods, I knew I wanted to annihilate all similarity between the Wolf Clansmen and me. The question now was How? And as I pondered it, who should come puttering into my mind but those long-winded god-fearing plunkers, Piscator and Venator, acting out a scene on the TV screen in my mind: Compleat Angler; Third
Day; fourth chapter; Piscator and Venator out on the riverbank, plunking, munching, gassing away the day.…
“Look you scholar!” cries Piscator. “We have a bite!” (He means he has a bite: Venator can’t catch a cold at this stage of his career.) “O’ my word I have hold of him. Oh! it is a great loggerheaded chub.…” Piscator keeps his distance from the repugnant creature, but he orders Venator—who likes chubs—to land it and thread it on a willow branch. Then, already loaded down with trout (none of them Venator’s), the jolly pair elects to head for their lodgings, Piscator spouting verbosities about harmless lambs and the swollen udders of bleating dams, Venator listening patiently, as if this Freudian flubdub will somehow make a fisherman of him.
They don’t get far before they encounter a handsome milkmaid, Maudlin by name (and by behavior, as Walton depicts her), and her mother, who is not handsome and therefore remains anonymous. Piscator bellows at old Anonymous, “God speed you, good woman!”
But God doesn’t speed her. Instead she stops in her tracks. Maudlin stops in her tracks as well. In fact, Maudlin and her mother do everything alike throughout the scene, like moms and daughters in Post Grapenuts and Ivory Liquid commercials—except that nobody would mistake Anonymous for Maudlin. (Then again, Venator might.) The picture of politeness, Piscator eyes Maudlin but addresses Anonymous: “I have been a-fishing, and having caught more fish than will sup myself and my friend, I will bestow this upon you and your daughter, for I use to sell none.…” With that, he opens his creel. Maudlin and Anonymous crowd close and gaze longingly at the trout. Piscator and Venator crowd close and gaze longingly at Maudlin. Then, lo and behold! Piscator hands over the great loggerheaded chub!
The naive ladies act delighted. Piscator probably told them the thing was a baby pig, or a new species of trout. Or maybe he had Venator recite his famous Ode to Chub: “’Tis as good meat as ever I tasted!”—cutting him off before he can explain that he was raised on fried rats and boiled dog.
Anonymous and Maudlin give the two anglers some “fresh red cow’s milk” (red? perhaps it was blood!). Then lovely Maudlin sings them a song that tells how milkmaids don’t die of consumption and gout at the least provocation like upper-class ladies do. When she finishes, it’s Venator’s turn to get generous. Piscator has taught him well. He grins at his master, at old Anonymous, at the lovely young girl, and enthusiastically blurts, “I’ll bestow Sir Thomas Overbury’s milkmaid’s wish upon her, ‘That she may die in the spring, and being dead, may have good store of flowers stuck about her winding sheet.’”
Maudlin is so moved by the thought of dying the next spring (for wasn’t it a backhanded way of saying she was upper class?) that she and Anonymous sing another pretty song together, moving Piscator to say,
“I’ll give you another fish one of these days.”
“Full of maggots, I’ll warrant,” thinks Anonymous.
“Come scholar, let Maudlin alone,” says Piscator. (Walton doesn’t tell us what the lout was doing to her.)
And so they go their separate ways, the anglers to gorge on trout, the ladies to gag on great loggerheaded chub.…
The memory was an inspiration: I couldn’t do worse than that! I looked down the Tamanawis Valley. Pillars of blue smoke rose up here and there; beneath each pillar lived folks I’d never met, never sought out, never even greeted unless I had to. Whoever they were, they’d better watch out! A latter-day Piscator was about to attempt a little friendliness.
2
Neighbors
Most of the good men who lived along that shore
Wanted to be in love and give good love
To beautiful women, who weren’t pretty,
And to small children like me who wondered,
What the hell is this?
—James Wright
When I reached my cabin I rifled it for potlatch gifts: smoked trout, salmon, and steelhead; flies and fishing tips; tall tales; and a Timex to give away the time of day. Wasn’t much, but it beat chub and death poems. I tossed it in the pickup and struck out for the first column of smoke. It rose from Coke and Doughnut Dairy.
I was greeted in the dairy driveway by six kids and three dogs, the former chattering with the comprehensibility of starlings in a fir at dusk, the latter arfing and snapping so enthusiastically I had to stay in the truck. I introduced myself, gave the kids some smoked fish (a little of which wasn’t inhaled on the spot by the dogs), offered them free fishing lessons, told them where to find me, and started to depart. But they yelled “WAIT!” and vanished in six directions, returning from various hideous-hued buildings with fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, a dozen fertile eggs, a couple of steaks, a jug of raw milk, and their parents—Ernie and Emma—who took turns reaching through the window to shake my hand till it hurt as they discoursed about the weather, the kids, the impossibility of my refusing any of the gifts they’d just buried me with, the wonderfulness of my reputation as “the fella ’at saved the life o’ that poor corpse outta the river,” the crops and cows, which discourse was conducted at a full shout interspersed with an assortment of slaps, kicks, curses, and threats directed at various heads among the encircling war party of dogs and kids.
The next smoke column rose from a forbidding, weatherbeaten, gray-boarded farmhouse half a mile down the road. At the head of the rutted dirt drive was a multicolored hand-painted sign which announced “CANDLES FOR SAIL,” nailed to what had once been a fence post. What had once been front yard and garden was now a kind of insect-and-weed sanctuary, and what had once been a barn and chicken coop was now a kind of huge lean-to leaning on what had once been an International Harvester tractor. But what had once been a house was still a house, and a network of well-worn paths wove through the thistles, tansy, wild rose, and daisies, betokening signs of vigorous life within. And sure enough, as I hopped out of the truck four seemingly angelic beings emanated out into the insects-and-weeds. The leader was what had once been a surfer and was now a candle-maker—a beaming, ephemeral, undernourished-looking person featuring a brown beard and yellow braid that shared the remarkable distinction of reaching to his woven jute belt. He was followed by a consort named Satyavati—a quiet, dark-skinned, very pretty, very skinny woman with a braid just like the candle-maker’s, only black. Bursting past them were two yellow-braided sons, aged three and five, named Rama and Arjuna. (The candle-maker’s name was Steve.) Rama was the smaller son with the ax. Arjuna had a hatchet. These two greeted me with identical dour nods, then set upon a formidable clay embankment with their weapons, apparently intending to hollow out a cavern (into which, perhaps, the family would move when the house too became a lean-to). Their excavations weren’t faring well. Rama’s yellow braid unraveled after one swing and his ax, though missing his head, was driving the ends of his hair into the bank at each stroke; to lift the thing required a violent backward snap of his entire being, but often as not it was only ax-pinned hair, not ax, that he pulled out of the bank. “Thwack. Youch! Thwack. Youch! Thwack,” said Rama and his ax. Arjuna’s braid was faring better but his hatchet wasn’t: he’d selected a several-ton boulder to extirpate from the clay, chip by chip by chip.
Steve and Satyavati’s matching pants and shirts were of baggy white Indian cotton. Rama’s and Arjuna’s were of the same cut and material, no longer white. They were a pleasing sight in the morning sun, the four of them there in the weed sanctuary in their cotton and braids and skinny bodies and Oriental names (except Steve). The ax and hatchet worried me for a while, but the longer I stood there with them the more I began to feel like growing a braid that hung to my butt and not worrying about anything forever. Like, it was what it was. Like, the hatchet hits Arjuna and it hurts for a while. Or it doesn’t hit him and doesn’t hurt for a while. Like Rama hacks off a toe; sew it back on. Like Arjuna puts out an eye; use the other one. Like they lop off their hair—plenty more where that came from. Like yin or like yang, what happens is what is. Like we stood around looking at each other and at the weeds and bugs and t
rees and ax and hatchet and clay bank and kids, and it was what it was… until I offered them smoked fish. Then it wasn’t what it was. Then it was thanks man but creatures are to love not eat. Like meat in our temple goes nowhere, man, closes the gates, grossness and decay, man, Constipation City. So I gave them the fresh vegetables Ernie and Emma gave me, and it was what it was again. We left Rama and Arjuna yanging away at the boulder and clay and went yin to the candle shop at the back of the house.
There were hundreds of candles in there. Steve gave me a huge sand candle shaped like a flounder, a calendar candle guaranteed to burn a notch a day for a fortnight, and a half-dozen squat tapers in tintinnabulatious colors. That’s what the sign said: “Tintinnabulatious.” I asked what it meant. It meant what it was. Talking to Steve was a bit like talking to the Tamanawis.
But I could see the guy worked hard at what he did, and he did it with great skill. I told him so. He smiled and said, “How it is.” There was a table covered with big cloud-shaped multiwicked monstrosities in grays and whites and sunset colors, called “Cumulonimbustibles”; there were a couple of shelves of green and brown treeish-looking little chaps called “Leprechaunatious.” And there were “art candles”—complicated, beautifully sculpted things, some of them selling for three or four hundred bucks and, if you were interested in that sort of thing, actually looking worth the price. Some had a dozen or more wicks coming out of various parts of them, and when I asked why, Steve left off leaving things “how it is” long enough to explain that some giant candles are rip-offs because after burning and melting for a while they just turn into piles of waxy garbage. His masterpieces didn’t just fall to ruin: they “did things to your mind.” He showed me a series of snapshots of one art candle that had changed from an office building into a mosque as the wicks were lit, extinguished, and relit according to the detailed instructions. Then he showed me a massive conglomerate that looked like a dull row of suburban split-levels, but which melted away into a Tillamook Indian village: the cars turned into canoes, the telephone poles into totem poles, the split-levels into lodges, and the wickless wax dogs stayed where they were. This was his masterpiece to date. We wandered among the fabulous candles, me exclaiming, Steve disclaiming, till I was struck dumb by one of a naked woman lying on her back, and her breasts were in her hands, and each breast had a bulbous, goggle-eyed face peering out from deep under the watery flesh, with wicks coming out their noses, which were also her nipples, which were surrounded by her fingers, which were each shaped like thighs, under which were these, these uh, well, you’d have to see them. I didn’t make the mistake of asking what it was. I did invite them all to come see me whenever they liked. Steve said they’d like to soon, but that it would be when it would be. He wanted to see my hand-built rods and seemed to know a surprising amount—considering he was a Sutra-thumping vegetarian—about flies as well. He explained, “I’m into hands.” I gave him a #6 Bermuda Shorts, a #12 Coachman (I do tie an old classic now and then), and a #24 I invented, the Flea. He looked the Flea over, nodded, laughed, and said “Flash.” I realized that this was, coming from Steve, strong praise.
The River Why Page 18