As I eased in beside small Anne and laid my cheek on one of Mrs. Kettle’s best pillow slips, I knew that I would awaken with a basket of flowers imprinted on my right cheek. “The French knots hurt the worst,” I thought drowsily as I snuggled deeper and wondered if Paw had taken off his hip boots.
16
With Bow and Arrow
THE Pacific Coast Indians whom I saw were as unlike the pictures on the Great Northern Railroad calendars as slugs are unlike dragonflies. True, most of the Indians I knew were breeds, but the few full-bloods I saw certainly did not lift me to any pinnacle of artistic ecstasy. The coast Indian is squat, bowlegged, swarthy, flat-faced, broad-nosed, dirty, diseased, ignorant and tricky. There were few exceptions among the many we knew.
Among the exceptions were the Swensen brothers, Clamface, Crowbar and Geoduck. They were Bob’s good friends. I couldn’t count them as mine, for they had no use for women and were unable to understand Bob’s attitude toward me. Bob was such a fine hunter, such a crack shot, so lean and strong and manly; yet when I, merely his wife, asked him for some wood, instead of sneering, “Aw, shut up, old lady,” or letting me have a well-deserved left to the chin, he docilely obliged. They were openly disgusted with Bob much of the time. They knocked their wives down for exercise and would no more have considered performing such unmanly tasks as chopping wood or carrying water than they would have entertained the idea of helping with the washing. They brought Bob venison, hundreds of pounds of it, clams, crabs, oysters, pheasant, quail, salmon and whiskey. They sometimes brought Bob unexplained hindquarters of lamb or veal and that second summer they appeared one evening at dinner with an apple box full of smoked salmon bellies. They stamped into the kitchen and plunked the box down in the middle of the floor; then Geoduck with filthy hands lifted out one of the smoked salmon and carefully cut off a strip for Bob to try.
There were times when I had been irritated by their treating me with less consideration than they did Bob, but this was not one of them. I had read of Indians preferring rotten salmon and, although I was reasonably sure that Clamface, Geoduck and Crowbar were more civilized than that, still the dirt on the hand that was fondling the salmon was of at least a week’s vintage and God alone knew who had handled the fish during the catching, cleaning and smoking. I grinned hatefully at Bob, as with distended nostrils and curled lips he put the salmon in his mouth. With the first chew, however, the distaste left his face. Of his own volition he went over and cut himself another strip and then cut one for me and insisted that I eat it right then. If that salmon had originally been rotten, then all I can say is that all of us Indians prefer rotten salmon. It was delicious, but I realized with sinking heart that smoking salmon bellies would be added to my canning duties, and in order to learn I would probably have to spend at least a couple of days in Clamface’s or his brothers’ wigwams, or wherever they lived.
We met the Swensen brothers about a week or so after we moved to the ranch, and as I watched Bob’s friendship with them and with other Indians grow, I realized why it is so much easier for a man to adjust himself to new surroundings and people than for a woman. Men are so much less demanding in friendship. A woman wants her friends to be perfect. She sets a pattern, usually a reasonable facsimile of herself, lays a friend out on this pattern and worries and prods at any little qualities which do not coincide with her own image. She simply won’t be bothered with anything less than ninety per cent congruity, and will accept the ninety per cent only if the other ten per cent is shaping up nicely and promises accurate conformity within a short time. Friends with glaring lumps or unsmoothable rough places are cast off like ill-fitting garments, and even if this means that the woman has no friends at all, she seems happier than with some imperfect being for whom she would have to make allowances.
A man has a friend, period. He acquires this particular friend because they both like to hunt ducks. The fact that the friend discourses entirely in four letter words, very seldom washes, chews tobacco and spits at random, is drunk a good deal of the time and hates women, in no way affects the friendship. If the man notices these flaws in the perfection of his friend, he notices them casually as he does his friend’s height, the color of his eyes, the width of his shoulders; and the friendship continues at an even temperature for years and years and years.
One summer evening when Bob was at a grange meeting and I felt safe and unafraid because it was still daylight at eight o’clock, Geoduck and a friend of his drove into the yard and shouted rudely for Bob. I was packing eggs and had the egg scale and the boxes stacked around me in convenient but confining order, so I shouted back just as rudely, “Bob’s not here. He’s gone to the grange meeting.” Whereupon to my great surprise Geoduck and his friend opened the back door and came staggering into the kitchen—they were both very drunk. The friend was an unpleasant little character with a flat nose, small, very crossed eyes, greasy overalls clinging uncertainly to his pelvic bones and a low forehead across which ran a jagged scar welted high with proud flesh.
“You alone here, eh?” he asked, leering formidably and rocking on his heels. I looked fiercely at Geoduck, who heretofore had treated me very indifferently but never with hostility. “Geoduck,” I said sternly, “Bob has gone to the grange meeting and won’t be home until after ten.” I waited, but neither Geoduck nor his friend made a move to go. Geoduck looked insolently around the kitchen. “You got this joint fixed up pretty good,” he said. I said, “You had better leave, Geoduck, now!”
The friend said, “Mebbe we ain’t ready to go, eh, Geoduck?” He looked at me with one eye and at Geoduck with the other. I too looked at Geoduck with what I hoped was a pleading expression, but his braggadocio had collapsed and he was smiling foolishly, his eyes glassy.
“How about fixin’ us a little somethin’ to eat?” said Friend, lurching toward me and knocking against the egg crate so that the delicate scale fell to the floor. My hands were shaking so that I could barely set it up again. Through my mind ran glaring headlines, “Lonely farm scene of tragedy—farmer’s young wife raped and beaten!”
“Geoduck,” I said, my voice trembling. “Take this man and get out of here.” Geoduck laughed a silly giggle.
The drunken friend lurched toward the door of the bedroom where the baby was asleep. That galvanized me to action. I jumped to my feet, knocking over a stack of empty egg crates and a bowl of eggs, ran over to the closet where Bob kept his guns, opened the door, grabbed the first gun I saw, rammed the barrel in Friend’s stomach and croaked, “Leave now or shi’ll oot!”
Either “shi’ll oot” means something in Indian or Geoduck was afraid of the gun, for he seemed to awaken and said, “Aw, come on, Pearl, let’s get outta here.” They left then, driving through my perennial bed and the unopened rustic gate, and I returned to my egg packing, which eventually soothed my nerves, but cracked a good many eggs. When Bob returned, at a little after ten, I indignantly recounted the experience. Bob didn’t act at all alarmed; in fact, he shouted with glee when I dramatically described Geoduck’s evil friend and then told him his name was Pearl.
“Pearl!” he said, wiping his eyes. “What a wonderful name for a desperado.”
I said fiercely, “Bob, you tell Geoduck that he has to apologize to me or he can never come up here again.”
Bob said, “Oh, Betty, he didn’t mean any harm. Probably just drunk enough so that he was willing to forget you’re a woman and be friendly.” Geoduck was Bob’s friend, period.
Just a week later Geoduck and Clamface and Crowbar drove up one morning to invite Bob and me to an Indian picnic. I supposed it was in the nature of a peace offering and such a rare gesture from an Indian to a woman that I had to accept. After they had left, Bob said, “I think the Swensens feel that if you go to an Indian gathering and they all get to know you, they won’t bother you any more.”
I said tartly, “Do you mean that to know her is to love her? And when those drunken savages find out how refined I am they’ll come up here t
o discuss the arts instead of lurching around with rape in their eyes?”
Bob said, “Nonsense, Indians don’t go around raping people!”
“Not while I have my trigger finger, they don’t,” I answered bravely.
The next Sunday morning was the last day of August. It was still and hot and hazy. A wonderful day for a beach picnic—even with Indians. At about eleven o’clock Geoduck and Clamface came to get us. They were both genially drunk and refused to let me provide any food at all, except milk and vegetables for the baby. With more than a few misgivings on my part, we were hastily stowed in the back of their car and taken hurtling down the mountains to Docktown Bay. Here were gathered about twenty families of Indians and part-Indians. The women were on the beach setting tables made of planks stretched between driftwood logs, boiling crabs of which there were five gunny sacks, steaming clams in a wash boiler and carrying platters of fried chicken, bowls of potato salad, and loaves of new bread from the backs of their cars to the beach.
Indian girls ten years old and younger were playing on the beach and minding the babies; little Indian boys were out in boats fishing and catching crabs; and the rest of the gathering, including all girls over ten, were sprawled around the cars drinking moonshine out of gallon jugs (which they held with one finger and crooked in their arms) or home brew.
The water was placidly retreating under a curtain of mist; the tide flats steamed in the hot sun; the little island was partly obscured by the mist, but from its steep banks echoed the happy cries of small explorers; and over all floated the delicious smells of seaweed, clams and driftwood smoke. There were no buckskin dresses or feather headdresses, and from a distance it could have been anyone’s picnic. The women were dressed in housedresses and sweaters (mostly maroon), reddish cotton stockings, run-over shoes and eyeshades. All of them wore eyeshades and whether this denoted a racial eye weakness or a weekend special at the crossroads store, I did not learn. The children wore bathing suits and their small brown bodies could have been those of any sun-baked children. It was in the area around the parked cars where the scene was pure unadulterated Indian, and I was anxious to get away from there and down to the beach. I gathered up my baby, the robe and the didy bag, but before I could escape I had to be introduced by Geoduck to some of his friends.
The first was a young couple—the girl small and thin, about nineteen years old, the boy lank haired and doltish. The girl said, as we shook hands, “I-had-Siamese-twins-joined-at-the-breast-bone-and-they-are-pickled-in-a jar-and-on-exhibition-in-New-York!” I said, “How nice!” She said, “And see YEWgene here,” she yanked her husband forward. “Lookee,” she snapped his head back and pulled open his mouth. “Lookee, no teeth. Want to see where they went?” Of course I did, so she threw open the door of their car and pointed proudly to deep teeth marks in the dashboard. “YEWgene got stewed and run into a tree.” She and Eugene stood back proudly, so we could all look. Reluctantly, but at last, Eugene’s wife left the teeth marks and YEWgene, and shepherded small Anne and me to the beach. She introduced me to all of the women at once with “Meet Clamface, Geoduck, and Crowbar’s friend, Betty.” Then she said, “Christ, honey, put the baby down on the beach with the rest of the kids. Lookee they’re all O.K.” I looked and saw several babies crawling around in the sand and seaweed while older children raced around and over them, knocking them down and kicking sand in their faces. One of the babies was gnawing on a large dead starfish. I pointed this out to YEWgene’s wife, but she merely laughed and said, “Christ, I bet that little bugger’ll be sick tonight.” I walked down and took the starfish away from the baby and threw it out into the water whereupon the baby gave a disappointed howl and bit me on the ankle. A little girl came running and said, “You damn fool, why’n’t you git your own starfish.”
With my robe and the baby I retired by a large silvery log. The sand was fine and white and there were lovely little fluted pink shells behind the log where they had been tossed by some high winter tide. I picked them up and Anne threw them away, and we were having a pleasant game until a little old Indian woman with a face like a dried fig came and settled herself beside us. She was fascinated by the baby’s red curls and kept touching them with her little mummy’s claw and saying something quite unintelligible to me. It sounded like “Yawk, yawk, gugh”—but on the other hand it could have been “Gugh, gugh, yawk.” Whatever it was, I replied with “Yes, isn’t it?” for I was very proud of my baby’s bright hair.
Then the little old Indian woman began talking to me in English. She was very deaf and quite senile, but she explained (about seventy-five times) that she was the last of her tribe of Indians: that these Indians had been very warlike and fought all of the time until, in 1855, after a great war with several other tribes, there were only ninety left. “Now only me,” she concluded. “All rest marry white and mix blood.” She was a friendly little woman and anxious to talk to me, but she had trouble with English and she was so frail and so very old it was difficult. She seemed troubled by the degeneration of her people. She said, “I was a good girl. Just one man for me. No whiskey. Others”—she included the entire picnic—“all bad. Sores come out. Bad arms,” and she pointed to a little girl drooping by her mother on a near-by log. The child had one short arm with a two-fingered stub on the end of it. On this cheery note, lunch was announced.
I was careful to eat only the clams and crabs which I had watched a clean woman with sound limbs lift from boiling water. Bob sat beside me and ate heartily of everything—these were his friends.
The Indian men came down from the cars and sprawled around on logs and their wives brought them food. They were all quite drunk but still jovial. They jeered at Bob’s cleaning and cracking a crab for me.
After lunch everyone stretched out in the sun and slept, and no attempt was made to clean up the ankle-deep mess of crab shells, clam shells, chicken bones, paper plates, paper cups and other debris.
About two-thirty there was a more or less general awakening and more eating and drinking. Then the men went back to the cars, and the women put away the uneaten food in hampers and baskets. As the afternoon progressed into evening the men became drunker and more noisy and quarrelsome. There were two or three fights, and a few wives were clouted soundly for attempting to interfere. About six o’clock the beach fires were built up high and the children who had been in the water the entire day were rounded up and brought to the fire to dry out. About seven, a feeling of apprehension seemed to permeate the women’s group on the beach and moves were made to round up recalcitrant husbands, sons and daughters.
One woman tried to take a jug from her fifteen-year-old son. “Come on, gimme that dirty stuff,” she whined. “You get bad like your old man.” She clawed for the jug, but the boy held it just out of her reach. Finally in exasperation he said, “Aw, go on, old lady. Git back to the dishes,” and placing his open hand in her face he pushed. She sat down hard in the middle of the road and her husband, who was sitting on the running board of a car, just behind the boy, laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.
One woman pulled her daughter, about twelve years old, from under a car and out of the arms of quite an old man. She pulled the girl to her feet by the hair and still holding the hank of hair turned her face from side to side and slapped her cheeks hard. The girl was so drunk she merely giggled and swayed back and forth, and finally in exasperation the mother tossed her in the back of a car where the girl cuddled down and went to sleep. The old Indian from whom she had been separated, lay under the car, eyes closed, his jug clutched to his chest.
I tried to locate Bob, Clamface, Crowbar or Geoduck, but I was told that they had gone down the beach to do some target shooting. It was growing dark when they finally returned and we left, our party now including the little old lady who was last of her tribe, the mother of the little starfish eater, someone’s husband who had passed out on the floor and two wives whose husbands had driven drunkenly off without them.
Geoduck drove home with
one wheel part way up the bank on the wrong side of the road. I complained, but he explained profanely and thickly that it helped him guide the car. Knowing that on the road up to our ranch this bank was replaced by a sheer drop of from ten to five hundred feet, I begged Bob to let me walk. Bob said, “Don’t worry, honey, Geoduck’s a fine driver, aren’t you, boy?”
When we arrived home, at long last, Maxwell Jefferson, the moonshiner who had volunteered to do the chores for us, had fed the chickens and animals, had gathered the eggs, had a fire in the stove and coffee in the pot. He carried the baby into the house for me, then somehow he removed Bob from the car and sent the others home. While I put the baby to bed, I could hear him giving Bob a talk on the unreasonableness of a law which “puts a sober God fearin’ man in jail foh makin’ whiskey, but neveh does nothin’ to the goddamn fools who drink it.”
The next day I washed all our clothes in Lysol and resolved never again to enter into any form of Indian social life.
Sharkey, the old Indian who lived at Docktown Bay and who gave me my first geoduck, drove up one day to get Bob to help load a ship—they were shy of longshoremen, the stuff they were loading was perishable, and the company was combing the mountains for help. Bob left me the chores and went off with Sharkey, and when he returned he had another bosom Indian friend. Sharkey was over six feet tall and was built on the same general plan as a bulldozer. He had an enormous head, the largest head I’ve ever seen, and it was our impression when first we knew him that he was a victim of some insidious gland trouble and that his tremendous torso, like his head, was unhealthily large. That was not the case, Bob learned on that longshoring venture. The first cargo to be loaded was sides of beef. A stout plank had been laid from the wharf to the freighter’s deck, and Bob and an equally husky longshoreman shouldered a side of beef between them and, with much grunting and maneuvering, walked over the plank to the ship down to wherever they stored the beef. Coming back for the next load, they were amazed to see Sharkey with a side of beef on each shoulder start across the plank. Just as he reached the middle the plank broke, and he and the beef dropped to the water some twelve feet below. Bob fished him out, but Sharkey was so incensed at the company’s stupidity in providing such a weak gangplank that he quit then and there and spent the remainder of the day fishing for flounder from the end of the wharf. The boss pleaded with him to come back since he did the work of two strong men, but Sharkey wouldn’t even look up. From that day on he and Bob spent many happy hours trolling for salmon, but Sharkey never again would load a ship for anyone.
The Egg and I Page 19