Sisters of Grass (16 page)

“He is a nice young man, and I enjoy his company. So many of our young men are anxious to be accepted by the white people, and they haven't the time to listen to the old stories. Some don't even want the language any longer. In my heart, this is part of my fear, the old fear that we will disappear. If we don't speak our language, tell our stories, feed and heal our bodies with what the Creator has put on our doorsteps, then who will we be? Who? It is very good to have someone come who thinks the stories are important. Your mother says he came to look for you the last time he was in the valley and was disappointed not to find you. This time he will be luckier, I think.”

They laid out the rose hips in single layers in shallow baskets when they returned to the cabin, and peeled the stems of rose wood and laid them out along the rafters to dry. Then the two women prepared a meal of bacon and bannock and took it out onto the porch to eat with mugs of strong tea. Margaret had promised to milk her family's cow that evening, so she left and rode towards home on a trail that the Reserve cattle used, leading along the river where it left the road. She was about halfway home when Daisy snorted and balked, reluctant to go further. And Margaret could see why: just ahead, standing ankle deep in the river, was a big black bear, her two cubs just behind her. Although Daisy had squealed before Margaret could pat her neck and direct her, the bear was busy at the river's edge and hadn't yet got wind of them.

Keeping a tight rein, Margaret backed Daisy along the trail to where a cluster of young willows sheltered the water. She could see that the bear had a fish, a salmon, and was tearing open its belly; the eggs shone in the body cavity and the cubs were being encouraged to take a mouthful. The sharp stink of bear stung Margaret's nostrils and Daisy's, as well. She was beginning to fret on the short rein, skittering and blowing. The sow turned and saw them there among the willows and dropped the fish. Clacking her teeth, she started toward them, then retreated, growling and snapping. The river was too fast for Margaret to attempt to cross it with Daisy in such an agitated state, and the rise on the other side of the trail was too steep to take at a run. She did not want to turn and retreat and risk having the bear catch up with them. Although bears looked clumsy and slow, Margaret knew how fast they could run, especially when provoked.

The sow bear turned to her cubs and grunted a command. Before Margaret could think, the little family was swiftly climbing the steep grassy slope across the trail and vanishing over the hill. Margaret was so relieved to see them go that she collapsed over Daisy's neck, exhaling the breath she had not been aware she was holding.

Returning to the ranch was anticlimactic. Frightened as she had been, recognizing the danger of the situation, Margaret was thrilled to see the bear and her young at the river, eating the rosy salmon flesh and then disappearing into the landscape so quickly. There was such beauty in their glossy coats, their long claws, the glistening eggs in the belly of the fish. Her father was up with the cattle, and she told her mother instead, expecting it would worry her but needing to share the story.

Instead, Jenny told her, “The black bear was my father's guardian spirit, you know. I always liked bears and was never afraid of them when we picked berries or put our weirs across the river. My father said they could hear what you said about them. You should never say hurtful things because then they wouldn't come when you needed them. And we did need them sometimes, for their fat and their meat, and for winter robes.”

Margaret was surprised to hear her mother talk of such things. Because she had not undertaken a puberty ceremony and because she seldom spoke of her childhood, her daughter supposed that she wasn't interested in the old ways. She asked her mother about her grandmother's guardian spirit.

“It's the mountain goat,” Jenny said. “We don't see them here, but she was from Shulus, you know, and there were some over there. It suits her, she was always scrambling about on the mountainsides looking for plants. But if I'd had a guardian, I'd have wanted it to be the bear because it was special to my father. Now, do you want your supper before you milk the cow or after?”

Margaret took her time with the milking as she thought about her mother. Because she didn't talk much about her life before William, it was easy to forget she'd had one. She was the daughter who had been lost to the priests; that was the way Grandmother Jackson seemed to think of her. Yet they were not estranged, nothing so dramatic. Jenny still visited her mother at Spahomin from time to time, though she was closer to her brother and sister; and she always sent little gifts to her mother when Margaret went over alone. But from what she'd just said, she
had
felt a bond with her father. He'd been dead for years, having been taken by consumption when Margaret was a tiny child. She had one memory of him: sitting in the cabin Grandmother lived in, hearing him tell a story about Old-one creating the Nicola Valley and making the mountains and the original people. At home she had been hearing about God and the garden of Eden from her mother and father; she thought Eden must look like Culloden, all golden grass, ringed with ponderosas, and God like her grandfather, whom she thought of as the Old-one. She had not doubted that he could do anything he put his mind to, his voice was that deep and strong as he told the story, and she didn't notice how thin he was, how wasted his arms, and how he kept coughing into a bloody handkerchief.

Margaret dreamed of the bears that night, the surprise of the mother as she heard Daisy's snorting and caught the scent of them in the air, and she heard again the snapping of her teeth. In the dream she dismounted and went down to the river to greet them, then ran with them up the steep hill, her loose black coat hanging from her bones. In her mouth, the taste of fish eggs and raw flesh, and the husks of rose hips flecking the dung she left in the excitement of their departure. How will I tell my parents I've left them, she wondered, will I still have speech? But when she tried to talk, only muffled grunts came from her mouth, her tongue a thick obstacle, immovable. When she woke, she found three black hairs on her pillow, too coarse to have come from her own head.

Nicholas came with a little gift, a photograph he'd taken of Margaret's favourite from among her grandmother's baskets — the split cedar with the pattern of deer hoof and entrails. It was sitting on the sinew chair on the porch, weathered railings to one side.

“I didn't know you had a camera!” she said. “Did you take many photographs?”

“I'm still learning how to use it,” he confessed, “and quite a lot of them didn't turn out. I tried taking the glass plates away to develop, and some of them fogged or the emulsion cracked. I want to make a record of things, though, and your grandmother's baskets are exquisite. I thought that from the beginning, but I can verify it now that I've spent time looking at others and consulting with Dr. Newcombe. He has given me instructions to photograph everything. Perhaps you could help me with the equipment if you're interested.”

When Margaret had been younger, a Dr. Sutton had practised medicine in Nicola. He'd come to the ranch to attend to a cowhand who'd broken an arm, and he was often seen at the socials. He was a big man and hard of hearing, the result of a childhood bout of scarlet fever. But he claimed the bracing air of the valley was bringing his hearing back. His interests had included photography, and he was the one whom William had traded the quarter side of beef for a family portrait to send to Astoria. Dr. Sutton had photographed his servant as well as other people in the valley; it was a point of pride to have been taken by the doctor.

“Your grandmother is letting me use the old smokehouse as a darkroom. That'll be perfect for the images of her baskets and everything nearby. I've got a tent, too, to take up for shots of more remote areas like that old campsite your father showed me. And I'd like to take some shots of the kikuli houses down by the lake, maybe with some other things to make them look as though they're still in use. I know people haven't lived in them for twenty years or so, but they're still part of active memory, your grandmother's memory.”

Margaret examined the equipment Nicholas pulled out of his bags. Glass plates wrapped in canvas, jars of solutions, pans, a bundle that proved to be the windowless tent to use as a portable darkroom. Nicholas explained that he didn't really need the darkroom now that he'd been given plates coated with gelatin emulsion — before coming to the valley, he'd used collodion plates, which needed to be developed immediately — but he wanted to develop the plates anyway to make sure he'd got the images he wanted.

“How stupid I'd feel if I took them back to Spences Bridge or shipped them to Victoria and then discovered I had nothing at all to show for my work. So I'll develop them here and make contact prints. I'll teach you everything I know if you like, but I'm really still learning, too.”

I've seen the photographs taken in the early years of the century and have looked deeply into their images to find a clue about the lives there. They hover and circle, sometimes surfacing in sleep with a clarity never experienced in dreams, as if they are memories of my own. The mule-drawn wagons on the Cariboo road. The astonishing prospect of Hell's Gate on the Fraser River, racks of salmon drying on the rocks beside the chasm. Views of the stopping houses with plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys, women in long dresses drying their hands on aprons as they greeted the travellers. The crowded courtroom in Kamloops, Bill Miner with a bemused look on his face as he rested his chin in his hand in the prisoners box. In the early pictures of men at work, the loggers pose on their springboards, one at each end of a gut fiddle, ready to topple the immense trees of our beginnings. Doukhobor women draw the ploughs over plains of unbroken grass in pairs, straining to the task. And there are the photographs of the valley itself, a kikuli house, c.1898, with the ladder showing at the opening but otherwise abandoned, Dr. Sutton's picture of a woman net-fishing the Nicola River in 1900, the Roi.pellst family in 1914, posed in front of a tule shelter, their buckskin clothing so finely worked and regal, so palpable that I want to straighten the fringe with my fingers. I know that they wouldn't have worn those clothes regularly in 1914 because I've seen the other photographs, too — Frederick Dally's shot of people praying at Lytton, Dr. Sutton's photo of a mealtime in 1898, tents of canvas, most people with their backs to the camera, one fellow standing with his hands behind his back, his suspenders holding up his worsted trousers. I want to enter the photograph, walk into the camp from the aspens to the left, be given a tin plate of bannock and a piece of fish. The grass is dry and heavy with seeds. I could take these seeds forward with me, hidden in my clothing, my hair, an amulet to summon the past into my life, extant, viable as lupin seeds removed from the stomach of a mastodon, to germinate and flourish in the soil of the present.

Nicholas had persuaded members of the Jackson family to allow him to photograph them in traditional clothing in front of a tule house that he and August's boys had reconstructed. Grandmother Jackson had tule mats stored in her cabin and drew sketches for them to show the way the poles were placed, the mats layered and fastened. Inside the house was airy and smelled of dry grass. Nicholas was so fond of its interior that he decided to sleep in it for the remainder of his visit. He'd lie in the silver latticed screen the moonlight made on the ground as it filtered through the spots in the mats where the stalks of dried bulrush held together with Indian hemp had separated slightly. He'd look up towards the smoke-hole and imagine summer villages of these shelters, the smell of curing fish and bear fat in the air, baskets of drying berries, and fish nets spread out for mending on the bushes. He wanted to dream his way back into that life, become a part of it, however temporarily, and carry away the smoke in his clothing, the foxtail barley seeds in his hair. He couldn't explain why he found it so fascinating, even haunting, why he wanted to enter it in the enigmatic realm of dream, knowing any other way was impossible. But when he slept and dreamed, it was of his father in the Ausable River, casting a line with a mayfly fashioned of coloured thread and feather on its end, bracing himself against the strong current, his old creel over his shoulder. Or else he dreamed of his grandmother in Chantilly, brushing crumbs from her dining table with a little silver brush and pan, singing as she worked a fragment of Purcell's
Dido
.

Margaret helped with the shoot of the family standing by the tule lodge. They were wearing clothing of light buckskin and sage bark, elaborately ornamented with quillwork, painted designs, beadwork and dentalia. Some of the old clothing, saved and wrapped in the burlap bags that potatoes were stored in, was still used for ceremonial purposes, but other pieces had been begged, borrowed and stolen for museum collections, some even purchased, a fair price arrived at and agreed upon. August and Alice stood side by side, looking solemn, and three of their children gathered around them. August wore his father's headband of coyote tails and carried his hammerstone carved with the head and claws of a bear. The smallest child, Tessie, wore a headband decorated with buttons. Margaret thought they looked wonderful, so stately and serious, transformed almost into the shadowy figures of the ancestors who were spoken of so often and who had worn these clothes as naturally as their own skins. She had the sense again of being in two worlds at once, wanting one so intensely that she felt her heart might break but knowing, too, that it was not her complete home, the one which involved meals at the long table in her father's house, sewing by lamplight as Aunt Elizabeth and Grandmother Stuart had shown her, cross-stitching and delicate French knots articulating a verse on fine linen with borders of bluebells and purple English violets while her father played sweet airs on his violin. She travelled out from this home to hear the glorious voice of Canada's Queen of Song, knew every inch of the fields and creeks of the ranch, played chess on the long winter evenings with her father under the low window looking out to stars and the occasional owl alighting in the bare cottonwoods. But a part of her, too, walked on the dry grass of Spahomin, knew where to find lilies, where to find wild potatoes to bring back to her grandmother's cabin. Walking that land, with her favourite basket over her shoulder, she could hear the voices of the dead rattling like dry seedpods in the wind. Grandmother Jackson said that sometimes the dead longed for the living so deeply that they followed them through their days, touching a beloved's shoulder as lightly as a moth might so that the person would turn to see who was so close. At night they might stand by the bed of a dreamer and breathe memories into an open sleeping mouth. Or you could feel a hand fit itself into your own, dry as dust and light, oh, very light, never a burden if the dead ones chose to sit behind you on the horse or to share your bed.