Sisters of Grass (12 page)

(Whatever happens, I am waiting. The cup of her throat, her small breasts . . .)

Margaret's parents were agreeable to her escorting Nicholas part of the way back to Spahomin, and so, after making arrangements for the young man to return to spend a day or two in the high country in the next week, they said their goodbyes. Nicholas and Margaret, who had changed into her riding pants, went out to saddle the horses. Margaret decided to take Daisy, who had not been ridden since Thistle had been brought home to the ranch; she brought out her saddle, struggling with the cinch as Daisy moved about as far as her rope would allow her. Nicholas's borrowed horse, a dun gelding, waited patiently while Margaret settled Daisy, who pranced and sidestepped excitedly. Then they rode out to the road and headed toward Douglas Lake.

“Look at that thunderhead! We often get storms after a hot day. They don't last long, an hour or two at the most, but the sky is spectacular, even so.”

Nicholas looked to where Margaret pointed. A huge cloud formation filled the southwestern sky, lit from behind by the falling sun. They rode on, letting the horses lope a bit and reining them in by a low-growing clump of pink flowers.

“There! That's the plant I meant. It looks almost like a cactus or succulent with its fat leaves.”

Margaret got off her horse and Nicholas followed. She bent to the clump of flowers and dug around with her fingers underneath. Pulling up a few white stringy bits of root, she said, “This is bitterroot, it's one of the most important food plants of my grandmother's people. They would dig big sacks of this in spring, earlier than now actually, this clump is a bit late. They'd peel the roots and dry them, and they'd use them all winter. Grandmother Jackson told me that bitterroot would be traded for dried salmon with the people over on the Fraser River and the lower Thompson. It was very good for you, although I thought the pudding my grandmother made so I could taste it was awfully bitter. No one had much sugar, so they'd use dried berries, I guess.”

“The flowers are lovely. I thought of you when I saw them.”

Margaret blushed, looking at the soft pink blooms. She got back on her horse and rode a little further, followed by Nicholas. By now, the thunderclouds were almost directly overhead and big drops of rain began to fall.

“We should get out of the open right away, because this storm is too close. See that stand of cottonwoods over there? We'll head for that. It's safer to wait it out under a group of trees than to stay in the open or near just one tree.”

As they reached the trees, a clap of thunder startled the horses. Margaret dismounted and pulled a rope out of her saddlebag, hobbling Daisy deftly. Nicholas watched as she did the same with his horse. Each time thunder rumbled around them, the horses would snort and lay back their ears, the whites of their eyes showing. But both showed the good sense to stay in the sheltered area, and anyway, hobbled, they couldn't have run.

“Did I embarrass you with my comment about the flower? I'm sorry, but I got carried away. Your skin is so lovely, particularly when you blush.”

“No one speaks to me like that, I'm not used to it.” Margaret didn't know how to have this kind of conversation, and she could only be honest. “Well, actually, one person did, but I thought she was just being kind.”

“I assure you it's not kindness but the truth.”

Just then a brilliant flash of lightning articulated the sky to the west. Margaret counted to eight before the thunder sounded. “My father says you count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder and then divide by five. That tells you in miles how close the lightning is. Less than two miles away, right over that hill,” she said, pointing to a low rise on the other side of the road. “Exciting to have it so close, isn't it?”

“I'm not really thinking about the lightning.” Nicholas looked at her blushing face, leaned over and kissed her mouth quickly. To his surprise, she returned the kiss with an ardour he hadn't expected. He put his arms around her and kissed her again under the dripping cottonwoods while the horses huddled nervously together nearby.

When the storm had passed and they rode their horses onto the Douglas Lake road, Margaret felt as though she carried it all inside her — the pungent smell of damp rocks and sage, the flowering buckwheat, the blackbird's shrill whistle, the warmth of the sun emerging from the back end of the thunderhead. Her mouth was remembering his mouth upon it, not like anything she'd ever known, yet she seemed to have waited her entire life to feel the texture of his lips, the pressure of his teeth. Nicholas was smiling at her, the blue of his eyes exactly like the bells of clematis that grew on the mountains.

She rode with him as far as the fork in the road where you could keep going to Douglas Lake or take a rougher trail up Hamilton Mountain. “You'll be fine now,” she told him. “Just stay on the main road, and you'll be there before dark.”

“Margaret!” He pulled his horse up beside hers and took one of her hands in his. “When will I see you next? Will you be able to ride with your father and me when he takes me to see the cattle?”

“I don't know. I'll see you when you come to meet with him, though.” She was wondering how she could ride with them and not touch Nicholas, not hold his hand as she was now, their fingers laced together, unwilling to become two hands again, rest on the horns of their saddles as they moved away in separate directions, each hand at a loss unknown to it before.

The tea towels arrive, and with them a carefully written account of their making and a brief description of the manufacture of linen. I keep them wrapped in their tissue and enter their arrival in my ledger. I think of the woman's surprise at my welcoming such items for my exhibition and how little attention we pay to the archaeology of our own lives. Those reassembling our history will have such random scraps of our fabric. Photographs of isolated events, letters, a journal if we've been careful, a memory or two carried in the minds of our children.

When I travel to the Nicola Valley, it seems all of piece but protective of its stories. There are clues, of course — the community of graves in the Murray churchyard and the silent buildings in what's left of the townsite. The museum in Merritt has exhibits that offer a glimpse into the mining history, the ranching history, and enough objects to make me spend hours looking into glass cases where beaded gloves and newspapers repose alongside fossils and old harnesses. And there are buildings in Merritt that were there a hundred years ago, still bearing their dry siding and windows of wavy glass, one with a copper cupola. If I stand on the sidewalk and unfocus my eyes until I can just see their shapes, it's as if. As if.

A QUILT HAS COME, moving me to tears, an uncontained crazy quilt with a contained border. The pattern moves freely over the body of the quilt, the border follows a geometric pattern of control. A typewritten text accompanies the quilt, explaining that it had been pieced together with scraps of clothing from all the members of the maker's family who had died. Black velvet, faded brown corduroy, the heavy coarse worsted that fishermen's trousers are made of, tweed, gay flowered prints, the satin of fine gowns, tiny fragments of lace and the soft flannel of baby clothing, shards of fabric carefully fitted together, all framed with a three-inch-wide border composed of narrow strips of alternating colours of corduroy and worsted, looking for all the world like a stack of cordwood. The backing is pieced of sugar sacks, some of them plain and some faded prints. It is tied rather than quilted, tufts of grey wool threaded through at regular intervals. Staring at it, running my fingers over the lines of yellow feather-stitching outlining each scrap, feeling the soft nap of the velvet, the worn wales of the corduroy, I know that I am reading the map of a human heart. A cartography of grief and loss, a small remnant of pink flannel to indicate a baby daughter gone to an early grave, the constant black of the mourning clothes, the trousers of a husband lost at sea. The text is matter-of-fact but carefully records the date of each death and the provenance of each scrap:
Alice Jane Morris, died March 2, 1923, pieces of fabric from her summer dress; Rachel Mary Morris, died in childbirth, September 14, 1932, scrap of her wedding dress; Albert Thomas Morris, lost at sea and given up as drowned, herring, March 11, 1943, cloth taken from the cuff of his fishing pants
. And then the text concludes with a fragment of hymn:

Riches I need not, nor man's empty praise,

Thou mine inheritance, now and always,

Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,

High king of heaven, my treasure thou art.

In Margaret's box, the postmarks on the letters form a map of another kind, cancellations of stamps in the tiny Spences Bridge post office, letters sent from the train station in Seattle, notes given to porters to mail as a train paused on a cold morning in Fargo, North Dakota, the early winter snow already falling. Letters from Astoria, telling of hair styles and books, new species of birds to be added to a life list kept in immaculate copperplate. In my mind, I flag each place in order to remember it as important when the map makes sense, is practical enough for my own journey.

And as for my own explorations of the valley, I have walked the road that she might have walked behind the Nicola River where the old grist mill would have been, I have driven to the Douglas Lake ranch, watched a golden eagle in contemplative flight over towards Hamilton Mountain. At a distance, someone on a horse, a dog at foot. In my pocket, a sprig of southernwood, its keen aroma keeping me alert to the country.

Everything at home had a dreamlike quality when Margaret returned. The grey pine fence-rails, the windows shining with late sun, the enamelled bucket by the barn pump, all of them luminous. She unsaddled Daisy and, before she turned her loose in the corral, kissed her neck again and again.

“He seems a nice fellow,” her father commented as she entered the barn to put the saddle and bridle away. He'd seen her kissing her horse and hoped she hadn't noticed him smiling.

“Oh, yes,” she replied.

William wondered what to say to her. She looked as though she was miles away, and he remembered the feeling well. The point about intense attraction was that it changed you forever, took you out of yourself to make possible all the years of work that made a marriage — building barns and raising children, living through difficulties, physical pain and occasional deep loneliness — that follow it logically as apples follow blossoms on a tree. The reasons that kept you connected to the object of that attraction remained true in their essence but altered, too, as bodies altered, as land changed over the years. But wasn't she too young for this? Jenny had been, what, eighteen when they'd met? He somehow imagined she'd been more ready for what happened than Margaret was, but he supposed that was what a father must think. And surely it was his responsibility to protect her from pain and grief as much as he could.

“Will you want to go up to the meadows with us when we go?”

“I'll have to talk to Mother first and make sure she won't be short-handed, but I'd love to go.”

They fed the horses, and William handed Margaret the bucket of milk to take to the house. He remained in the barn, lighting a kerosene lantern when it got too dark to see what he was doing. Which was turning a broken rein over and over in his hands.

Those horses that came to our truck on the Pennask Lake road, heads low and eyes curious — it seemed they had something to say as they crowded around me while I stood in the autumn field with my paper bag full of apples. The one, the bay mare that I dream of, had eyes fringed with black lashes, eyes of deep beauty.

If there had been a way to speak to her, I wonder what I would have asked. Did a girl come this way, which tracks on this vast expanse of grass are hers?

They made a camp in a narrow cut between two ridges, some distance from the cow-camp. William wanted to use it as a base so that they could lighten the horses' loads and venture off to explore the higher country where the cattle spent their summers. There was a creek nearby for water and a pine that had been split open by lightning several years earlier; its fallen branches would make excellent firewood, dry and fragrant with pitch. Margaret had camped out with her father on many occasions and knew the way he liked to set up — big stones brought for a fire ring, tents in a sheltered area, horses tethered to sharp pegs but with plenty of room to graze. She shook out the saddle blankets and put hers in her tent to give her some protection against the hard ground. Jenny Stuart had packed stew in a sealer for their evening meal and some flour premixed with baking powder, to which they would add water and a lump of lard from their tin for bannocks. A half-dozen eggs, wrapped in pages of Eaton's catalogue, a slab of bacon, some cornmeal, two onions, dried beef, a bag of cut oats to make into porridge and to reward the horses. Most of the camping gear had been carried on the blue roan gelding, the best packhorse they owned.

The men were already fishing above the camp where the creek collected for a moment in a deep pool before tumbling off the edge of the hill in a sudden white fall. For some reason, the trout from these high creeks tasted better than those caught in lakes. The latter had softer flesh and something dank in their flavour, like waterweed. But these mountain trout, well, rainbows actually, had a flinty edge to their flesh, almost like granite. When William came back to the camp with two of them carried by the gills on a stick, Margaret could already taste them, wrapped in thin slices of bacon to baste them and turned with an iron fork in the blue smoke of pine. She put a skillet underneath to catch their juices for flavouring the bannocks.

“Does this creek have a name?” asked Nicholas, watching the water race down the slope.

“Not really. There are a number of creeks this high, some of them only running when the snow melts. But this one is permanent, draining out of a lake without a name, farther up. Eventually it joins with another arm, and that creek runs into the Nicola River down towards our place. You know, I've fished all of the creeks, and there are some I'd swear have never seen a trout, but this one has always given me fish.” As William spoke, he used his hatchet to slice a chunk of pine into pitchy sticks, wanting a quick hot flame to boil up a kettle of creek water for coffee.

When the fish were ready, Margaret divided them into equal portions on the tin plates and put a bannock on the plates, too. The fish was delicious, clean and sweet, and when they had finished every little morsel with their fingers, the stew was hot enough to ladle onto their plates. William made the coffee, adding the grounds to the kettle, letting it boil until it frothed over, removing the enamel pot briefly to a rock until the froth subsided, then repeating the procedure three more times. Margaret carefully placed the long backbone of each trout into the creek. Watching her, Nicholas imagined the pleasure of kissing her here on this golden hill, her mouth tasting of the trout and her hair smelling of the fire.

By now it was dusk. The fire settled into a comfortable burn, snapping now and again as hidden pitch ignited and flared. Margaret rinsed the plates and handed cups of coffee to the men. The stars were appearing in the clear sky, and William told Nicholas the names the Thompsons gave various constellations.

“Teit has material on this, I believe, so you'll come to it in your work. But it's useful to see the stars for yourself, in the country of the Thompsons, to get a sense of how they fit into the place. It might be easier to come up with French equivalents if you've seen what the Indians were referring to, physically if not spiritually.”

The sky stretched out in every direction. “Follow that one bright star there directly in front of the big pine, yes,
there
. It's the Big Dipper, of course — my father called it the Plough — in Ursa Major. Well, here it's the Grizzly Bear. There's a story to go with it, you'll have to ask Margaret's grandmother for the details. And that one, just follow my hand exactly, yes, that's the one we call Cygnus, they call it the Swan, same thing, and they're very familiar with swans in this country. Colonies winter here on the plateau. The group right behind the Swan they think of as a canoe full of hunters pursuing the swan. It makes as much sense to me as anything else, maybe more than those old Greek stories. They trace their family trees back to the animals, you know. Some are descended from the coyote, some the antelope, others from badgers. And Coyote is the important animal here, really. He's a sort of an emblem, you could call him that, moving through this valley, changing people and other animals, birds, too, into bluffs and rock formations. He brought salmon to the Columbia River, brought them up the Fraser River into all the different feeder creeks and rivers.”

They lay on their backs in dry grass by the fire. The stars were so many and so bright that Margaret covered her eyes with her right hand and peered up through the spaces between her three middle fingers. One constellation at a time, swans and hunters, tracks of the dead on the grey trail, a dog following the friends of the moon, one story that linked her to the vast sky which had been there when the earth was young and Coyote ranged across the valley in the company of grasses.

Later, in her tent, she listened for the breathing of the men in their own tent, their quiet voices murmuring in the darkness. Riding up here, she had felt that she might burst with joy, Nicholas very close on one of August's horses, her father leading them up the rough cow trails through blossoming buckwheat and beargrass, their fragrant flowering tops swaying in the wind. She wondered if she'd be able to speak naturally or if her tongue would feel too thick for her mouth, the way it had in the kitchen on the day Nicholas had come for dinner. He, on the other hand, had been pleasant to her and her father, asking questions, doing his share of the work once they'd found the campsite, filling the kettle again and again so they always had water when they needed it. When they'd stopped for lunch, he'd caught her eye and smiled, saying quietly, “I'm glad you're here,” and she felt that fire again, a charge of lightning running her spine, and in spite of the warmth of the day, she'd shivered.

They'd stopped for lunch by a slough, and on the reeds by the shore, a pair of red-winged blackbirds swayed on the tops of bulrushes. William tried to locate the nest but couldn't, the reeds grew too thickly and gave way to wild roses on the shore. Margaret leaned into the thicket of blossoming roses to inhale their sweet breath and saw the blackbirds' nest like a grassy cup on the stem of a bulrush, a single hatchling crouched baldly on the floor of the cup with three eggs still unhatched, like pale blue beans, mottled with green and darker blue. She backed away quietly and beckoned to the men, who came to peer in at them, the parents anxiously fluttering in the tangle of plants. Margaret pinched off a rosebud to tie into Daisy's forelock, and they resumed their meal of bread and cold beef.

“Everything is a little later up here,” William commented. “The blackbirds around the ranch house have been feeding their young for a week or two now. And the roses down at Nicola Lake are nearly finished. Listen — a meadowlark! That'll be the male. Let's see if we can see him, the female will be on the nest, probably in those tussocks up on that ridge. Ah, yes, there he is!”