The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

  “Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”

  “I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”

  Chickadee shook her head once, silent.

  “It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas . . . You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”

  The child nodded.

  “They’ve been looking for you.”

  “They have?”

  “Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”

  “Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

  “Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain . . .”

  “I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”

  The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.

  “Will I ever see Coyote?”

  “I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.

  The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”

  “Yes. You can keep your eye.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope toward the next day. Ahead of her in the air of the dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.

  HERNES

  To Elizabeth Johnston Buck

  Fanny, 1899

  I SAID WE HAD THE same name. She said she had had another name, before. I asked her to say it. She wouldn’t say it. She said, “Now just Indun Fanny.” She said this place was called Klatsand. There was a village here, on the creek above the beach. Another up near the spring on Kelly’s place on Breton Head. Two down past Wreck Point, and one at Altar Rock. All her people. “All of my people,” she said. They died of smallpox and consumption and the venereal disease. They all died in the villages. All her children died of smallpox. She said there were five women left from the villages. The other four became whores so as to live, but she was too old. The other four died. “I don’t get no sickness.” Her eyes are like a turtle’s eyes. I bought a little basket from her for two bits. It’s a pretty little thing. Her children were all born before the whites settled here and all died in one year. All of them died.

  Virginia, 1979

  I WANTED TO WALK DOWN to Wreck Point, late this afternoon, I wanted a walk after writing all day. I put on my yellow slicker and went out in the winter wind. All the vacationers are gone at last, and there was not another soul on the beach. The storms have brought in an endless scurf of trash, a long, thick line lying from the foot of Breton Head to the rocks at Wreck Point. Seaweeds and litter of waterlogged twigs and branches, feathers of seabirds, scraps of white and pink and blue and orange plastic that from a distance I take for broken seashells, grains and lumps of dirty Styrofoam, worn-down bits of plastic floats and buoys, clots of black, tarry oil from one of the spills they don’t talk about or a tanker release, all thrown up together on the sand in the yellowish foam the storm waves leave.

  It began to rain, beating down out of the dark ceiling of clouds. I put up the oilskin hood, and the hard rain on the south wind deafened my ears, hitting the hood over them. I couldn’t look up into the rain, only down at the water floating and sheeting on the brown sand, wind gusts sending cat’s-paws wrinkling across it towards me, and the myriad rain hitting it, becoming it. I opened my mouth and drank rain. It increased, increased, increased, it was hard and thick, thick as hair, as wheat, no air between the lines of driving rain. If I turned left, east, I could look up a little, and I could see how the rain came, not only in waves as I often see it from the windows of the house, but spaced and crowded together to form columns, like tall white women, immense wraiths hurrying one after another endlessly northward up the beach, as fast as the wind and yet solemn, processional, great grave beings hurrying by.

  There was a gust of wind so hard I had to stand still to stand against it, and another even harder. And then it began to end. It quieted. A spatter of raindrops, then none. No sound but the breakers. A faint jade blue gleamed out over the sea. I looked inland and saw the clouds still dark above the land, and the tall figures, the rain women, hurrying up the dark clefts of the northern hills. They faded into wisps, shreds of white mist in the black trees. They were gone.

  As I came back towards Breton Head the light of the sky shone placid pale blue and pink on the low-tide lagoons at the mouth of the creek. The tideline of scurf and filth and litter had been scattered and blurred away by the rain. In the quiet colors on the pools and shoals of the shallow water hundreds of gulls were standing, silent, waiting to rise up on their wings and fly out to sea, to sleep on the waves when darkness came.

  Fanny, 1919

  THIS IS THE INFLUENZA. I know where I took it. In Portland, at the theater. People were coughing, coughing and coughing, and it was cold, and smelled of hair oil and dust. Jane wanted Lily to see the moving pictures. Always wants to get the child into the city. But the child kept fidgeting and coughing. She was cold. She didn’t care for the moving pictures. She never hears a story. She doesn’t put one thing to the next to make the story. She will not amount to anything. My people were no great shakes, any of them, and all of them dead now, I suppose. There might be cousins yet in Ohio, Minnie’s family. Jane asked me about my people. What do I know, what do I care for them? I left them, I came west. With Jack Shawe. With Mr. Shawe. I came west, in ’83, to the Owyhee. The sagebrush in the snow. I left them all there where I grew up. The cow, the white cow down in the pool like silver in the evening. No, that was later, on the dairy farm, on the Calapuya. It was mother’s red cow that bawled and bawled, and I said, Why is the cow crying, Mother? And she said, For her calf, child. For Pearlie. We sold the calf, she said. And I cried for my pet. But I came out with Mr. Shawe and left all that. We had our honeymoon in the sleeping car on the train. A bedroom. The Honeymoon Suite, ma’am! that porter said, laughing, and Mr. Shawe tipped him five dollars. Five dollars! We got on the train in Chicago, in Union Station, how often I have thought of it, the high marble walls, the trains east and the trains west, the smoke of the trains, the voices of men calling. The cold wind blew in Union Station. And cold, cold when we got off the train in the sagebrush in the snow. Evening, and no town. No railway platform. Five houses on the sagebrush plain. I never will be warm again, I think. Mr. Shawe came back from the livery stable with the buckboard to me where I waited with our trunks, and we drove out to the ranch across the blue snow plain. How cold it was! How Jack Shawe did laugh when he beat me at cribbage, nights! He always beat. How his eyes shine! And he coughs, coughing and coughing. And my son, and my son is dead. Coughing. There were five villages. Owyhee was five houses and the livery stable. We were thirty miles from town on the buckboard through the sagebrush, through the snow. What a fool Jack was to take on that ranch. It killed him in five years. His bright eyes. He could have been a great man. My people never amounted to anything. Little sister Vinnie died of the whooping cough. Coughing, and the red cow bawling. The white cow stands in the evening pool, water like quicksilver, and I call her, Come, Pearlie, come! The pet, the one I hand-reared when the mother died. And Servine and I were fools to take on that dairy farm, I guess. Though he did know something about dairying. I wonder what that land on the Calapuya would sell for now. I wonder had Servine lived would I have lived there all these years and never come here to the coast, to the end of things. Would I be there now in the valley with the hills all round? Pretty country, like Ohio. It’s the promise land, Fanny, it’s the promise land! Poor
Servine. Him and Jack Shawe both, both those men worked so hard. Worked so hard to die so young. They had hope. I never had much, just enough to get by, to go on with. Don’t you hope in Jesus, Fanny? Servine asked me that when he was dying. What could I say? Little sister Vinnie is with Jesus now, Mother said, and I said, I hate Jesus. Why did you sell her to him? You shouldn’t have sold her! Mother stared at me, she stared. Not a word.

  Oh, I am ill. I smell dust.

  The markings on the basket are like a bird’s feather. Light brown and dark brown, light brown and dark brown, I can see it clear. I’d like to see it, to hold it. It’s a pretty thing. It’s on the chiffonier in Lily’s room. The child keeps shells in it. I’d like to hold a shell, cool and smooth. Light brown and dark brown in rows, neat and firm, the marks on shells, on the wings of birds. Orderly, like writing. That was the only pretty thing I had then. Charlotte said she’d send me Grandmother’s opal brooch when I got settled in Oregon, but she never did. She wrote that the jeweller in Oxford said it was just glass, not real opal, and she would be ashamed to send it, not being real. I wrote her to send it, but she never did. Fool woman. I’d have liked to have it. I think of it, after all these years. Fool woman. Oh, I ache, I am aching ill. She’d come by, Indian Fanny, when it was all trees down to the dunes. Before the loggers before the houses before the roads. When the dark hills came down to the dunes and the spruce trees dropped cones and needles on the sand, when the elk walked and the heron flew, when I brought the children here because baby Johnny was choking on that valley dust, that farm dust, breathing dried cow dung, and I didn’t want any more farms any more ranches any more cattle any more coughing, and I sold the place and the stock to Hinman and took the children here west to the dark. Under the trees. Looking out to the bright water. I saw my daughter running on the sand. Away and away down the beach, running on the sand. And she’d come by, not often, the old woman, Indian Fanny. And I went that time to her shack down behind the Point, and we talked. I bought the basket for two bits. Not for the children. I kept it for myself, kept my hairpins in it, on the shelf in the little shack. What are you going over there for? Ada Hinman said. Henrietta Koop said, Whatever are you going to do over there on the coast? Why, it’s the end of the world! Not a road! Johnny’s lungs, I said. Why, there isn’t a church nearer than Astoria! I said not a word. The dark trees and the bright water and the sand nobody can plow, nobody can graze. I have lived at the end of the world. I have the same name as you, I said.

  Lily, 1918

  DEAD IS A HOLE. DEAD is a square black hole. Mother got up from the table and said, Oh, Bruv, oh, Bruv. Grandmother didn’t say anything. When I listened to Mother crying, lights went up and down behind my eyes. Grandmother said I could go and play, but she didn’t say it nicely. Lots of people came over. I played with Sammy and Baby Wanita, and Dicky and Sammy were playing cowboys and Indians and kept running through where we were making a house under the rhododendrons. Then I could go to Dorothy’s house for dinner, but I couldn’t stay over. I had to come home and go to bed. First the room was dark, but then it got whitey and turned solid and pressed down and squashed down all over me so that I got all narrow inside, and everything was white, so I couldn’t breathe. Mother came, and I told her it was the Gas. She said, No, no dear, but I know it was the Gas. Dicky Hambleton says the men with the Gas in the War make yellow froth like Mr. Kelly’s horse did when it was dying, and Dicky held his neck and coughed, groke, groke, but he doesn’t know anything about it. His uncle didn’t die. It was in the Astorian about it. Pvt. John Charles Ozer A.E.F. Oregon Hero Falls. A black square hole with green grass all round it. I’m afraid of the Gas in my room now. In bed it begins to get white and narrow every night, and I call to Mother, and she comes. It’s all right when she comes. I want Mouser to sleep with me, and Mother would let him, but Grandmother says he can’t because of my breathing. Maybe she’ll die now. I have a dead uncle. I know a dead man. He Died for his Country. I hate Dicky Hambleton.

  Jane, 1902

  I WRITE MY NAME IN the burning sand. The wind will blow it away, the sea will wash it away, and I like that. I like to write my name. I like to sign my schoolwork: Jane S. Ozer, Jane Shawe Ozer. Servine Ozer wasn’t my father, only Bruv’s. My father was Jack Shawe, and I remember him: the stove was going red-hot, and he stood tall and thin, with snow in his hair when he bent down to me, and he smelled like cows and boots and smoke. His breath smelled like snow. I like that, and I like my name. I like to sign my name: JANE. Plain Jane, plain Jane, loved a Swede and married a Dane, plain Jane, plain Jane, swallowed a window and died of the pane. Ha! I like signing things. I signed the beach. My beach. Private Property—Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. This is Jane’s Beach. Recoil, profane mortals! Tread not here! Do I wish Mary was here with me? No, I don’t. It is entirely my beach alone this day. My ocean. Jane alone, Jane alone, run on sand, run on stone. Bare feet. I never will marry. Mary can marry, Mary be merry. I’ll marry a Dane. I’ll marry a man from far, far, far away. I never will marry, I’ll live up in the shack on the Kelly place, the property Mother bought, the Property on Breton Head. I’ll live alone and be old and scream at night like gulls, like owls. My Property. My beach. My hills. My sky. My love, my love! Whatever is to come I love. I love it here, I love my name, I love to love. My footprints on the burning sand, on the cool wet sand, write a line behind me down the beach, running in love, writing my name, Jane running alone, ten toes and two bare soles from Breton Head to Wreck Point and straight out into the sea and back with dripping skirt. You can’t catch me!

  Fanny, 1906

  I PUT IN TO CHANGE the name as soon as they said we were going to get a post office at the store. Will Hambleton wanted it to be Breton Head, for the fancy sound of it, to bring the summer people over from Portland. Old Frank and Sandy would have gone on with Fish Creek. I said, That’s no name, every creek in Oregon’s a fish creek. This place has a name of its own. Don’t your own dad call it Klatsand Creek, Sandy? And he’s lived here since the year one. So Sandy starts nodding that’s right, that’s right. He says old Alec has it written down on a map he has as “Latsand.” But she told me the name. It was the name of her village. I said, Well, Fish Creek is no name for this town, with its own P.O., and that big hotel going up. So Will started right in again saying we need a dignified name that would attract desirable residents. I said, I guess I just assumed the new P.O. was to be Klatsand, since all the real old-timers call it that. So Frank starts nodding like a china doll. They all fancy themselves mountain men, here since Lewis and Clark. Will Hambleton’s the newcomer and they like him to remember it. I just thought that was its proper name, I said, and Will laughed. He knows I get my way.

  When I came here from Calapuya, Janey was ten, and Johnny was two. We lived in that shack off the Searoad that first winter. I have saved. I have worked at the store eight years and saved. When the Hinmans finally paid off the farm, I bought that land up on the bluff, old Kelly’s place on Breton Head. That property. Fifty acres for fifty dollars. The old man liked me. Said anyhow he wanted fifty dollars more than he wanted a piece of rock. It’s all been logged, but they left the little stuff, it’s coming back. There’s two good springs, one developed. I want to take the old shack down, it’s rubbish. I own that land and I own a half interest in the store and I don’t owe anybody anything. If Servine had lived I guess I’d have been slaving debts out till I died. I’d like to put up a house, up there on the property. It’s going to get crowded here in town, with that Exposition Hotel going up, bringing people in. Two houses going up on Lewis Street. I might could put up a house in town myself to rent or sell. Will Hambleton’s taking out all those old trees down along the Searoad, and he’s buying land. There’ll be houses everywhere soon.

  That shack, that winter, I couldn’t stop the leaks. Tarpaulins on the roof blew off, pans and buckets every time it rained. And it rained, land! I never knew rain till I came here. When the sun came out baby Johnny would try to pick up the sunshine from t
he ground, didn’t know what it was. But you walked under the trees, dark old spruce trees that kept it dark underneath them, and then one step more, and it was all the light. Even in the rain the beach is light. The light comes back from the sea. I have seen the rain fall between the cloud and the sea in lines like the pillars of a house, and the sun strike through them. I would call that the house of glory.

  The elk would come out on the beach, that first year. They don’t do that any more. I see the herd inland, going through the marshes by the creek, but those days they’d walk down the dunes like a line of cattle, only tall, and looking with those bright eyes.

  Well, old Frank says, siding with Will because Will’s the rich man, well, what does it mean, anyhow? It don’t mean nothing. I said, It means this place. It’s its name. There isn’t any other place called Klatsand, is there? That made them all laugh. So I got my way. The petition to change the name was already in, anyhow. I had sent it on Tuesday.

  Lily, 1924

  WHEN I GET MARRIED I’LL have four attendants in pink and white organdie. My dress will be white lace with silver lace insets and veil, and my bouquet will be pink rosebuds and white rosebuds and baby’s breath. My shoes will be silver kid. I’ll throw the bouquet so Dorothy can catch it. The car will be a white roadster, and we’ll drive to Portland after the ceremony and have the honeymoon at the Multnomah Hotel, in the Honeymoon Suite.

  Maybe it will be a blue and white wedding and my attendants will wear blue organdie with puffed sleeves and white sashes and white shoes. Marjorie and Edith and Joan and Wanita will be my attendants and Dorothy will be the Maid of Honor with a silver sash and silver kid shoes. The wedding dress will be white lace and silver lace with a tiny stand-up collar like Mary Anne Beckberg’s new dress, and silver kid shoes with those cunning little undercut heels, and the bouquet will be white rosebuds and some blue flowers and baby’s breath, with a silver bow and a long silver ribbon.