Sisters of Grass (17 page)

After he had the composition he wanted, Nicholas asked the Jackson family to remain where they stood so that he could show Margaret how to use the camera. She stepped up to the tripod and put her eye to the viewfinder while Nicholas arranged the hood of dark cloth over her head. She could smell the varnished wood casing of the camera and the acrid chemical as Nicholas slid a plate into place.

“You should see them here as you would like the photograph to look. Think of balance and frame. The light is good, and we've got the magnesium to improve it. When you're ready, we'll take the shot.”

Margaret looked through the arrangement of glass and mirrors, expecting to see her family members in their unfamiliar clothing against the shelter of dried tule-grass. That was what she looked for. But instead she felt light-headed, goosebumps on her arms and shoulders made her shiver, and she could feel the little hairs on the back of her neck rise, one by one. What she could see through the viewfinder was a group of people moving through the grass, one of them putting an armload of sticks by the fire, a few children, so airy she could almost see through them, and some thin horses in the distance. Although the day was still, she could hear something, a wind, voices, almost whispers. She reached one hand toward them but it was as though she didn't exist: the figures spoke quietly to one another, thrust sticks into the fire, turned a mat that was lying over a wild rose bush. One of the children coughed, one of the adult figures looked worried at the harsh phlegmy sound. Another child played in the grass with a few small stones, humming. The sound was like bees in flowers. When Nicholas asked quietly if she was ready, Margaret nodded under the cloth and the ribbon of magnesium snapped and burned. What she had seen was gone, and it was Aunt Alice and Uncle August smiling at her, a little self-conscious in their buckskin.

Nicholas inserted another plate and replaced the hood over Margaret's head. She closed her eyes hard before opening them again to look through the viewfinder. With a hand, she gestured to Tessie to turn her face to profile, she gestured to August to straighten the hammerstone. They moved together a little as she indicated and then held the pose until she had taken the shot she wanted.

She blinked in the sunlight and shuddered. Nicholas took the glass plates to the smokehouse to begin the process of developing, and she followed him, told him what she'd seen, hesitating at what she might call the diaphanous figures she'd seen through the viewfinder.

“It wasn't them at all, it was something else entirely. Yet someone still of this place. Like a dream, as though I was dreaming. I could almost see through the shapes of the children. Do you remember I told you about seeing the men being taken to Kamloops in the rain for the train robbery trial? It was that kind of seeing.”

Nicholas looked at her, puzzled. “I don't know what to say. Perhaps the lens or plates are fogging, but wouldn't I have noticed that? When I looked through the viewfinder, I saw them perfectly clearly, August and Alice, I mean. But we'll develop these and see what turns up. Do you feel ill or feverish? It's very hot today, and maybe you've had too much sun.”

“No, nothing like that. You forget I'm used to this heat, I've never known any other kind of summer. But I hope I haven't ruined the shot. Maybe I'll feel better in a shady place.” But saying that, she knew it wasn't the sun that had caused her to hear the humming of that child, to see the sticks thrust into the fire.

When the plates were developed, Nicholas began to see how good the photographs would be. When he had time, he'd make contact prints from the plates. August's family looked magnificent in the dry air, and the light had been perfect, helped only a little by magnesium. Nicholas could see on the negative plate that each element was recorded with a clarity he hadn't yet achieved with his photographs.

By the next evening, Nicholas had a group of photographs drying on a wire he'd strung from the ceiling of the temporary darkroom. The pungency of his chemicals was almost overwhelming, and he caught whiffs of smoked fish from the oils that had penetrated the wooden walls over the years. The shots that Margaret took were the best. He couldn't say why, but the people in front of the tule lodge were so alive and potent in the clothing of their forefathers and mothers. They shimmered in the clear summer air, strangely lit as though by fire. Margaret, who had been working alongside him, was quiet as she watched the images come forward on the paper, watched as he toned with gold chloride, washed, fixed, and puzzled over each photograph.

Nicholas turned to Margaret. “You see how different your shots are from mine? I swear we looked at the same scene, but you've made something of it that I wasn't able to. Do you see what I mean? Yours are, well, they're alive somehow. You've made a connection, like eye contact or something, I don't know what to call it.”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I can see the difference. I had a feeling they'd be good when we made the exposure. I can't tell you how, I just did. But it isn't quite what I saw, you know, or at least the first shot isn't. You thought the plates might be fogging, but it's clear they weren't. When I looked through the viewfinder that first time, I saw people moving, doing things with a fire. I heard a child cough, heard another child humming as he played on the ground. It was my uncle's family and yet it wasn't, quite. I've had this feeling before about other things — once when I was gathering plants with my grandmother, for instance, and then the train robbers. It's a little frightening, but I would like to try some more, if you're willing.”

Margaret and Nicholas rode home to the ranch side by side that evening, holding hands and talking of an expedition to the kikuli site by the lake in the next few days. It was so clear that they could see the mountains beyond Nicola Lake turning crimson as the sun went down. A sparrow hawk was hunting for grasshoppers and field mice over the pasture before the ranch, and they stopped to watch it hover and plunge, sounding its shrill killy-killy cry in the falling light. Ahead they could see the ranch in its grove of cottonwoods, two horses in the corral watching their progress, and then, one by one, the windows glowed as the lamps were lit by someone within. A ranch dog had spotted them coming and was barking on the edge of the road leading to the house.

“Will you come in for a meal?” Margaret asked.

“No, I'd better head back now while there's still some light.” Pulling on her hand, Nicholas drew Margaret toward him until he could touch her face and kiss her. Her mouth was dusty and her hair smelled of the darkroom. They kissed until the dog trotted up to see what was taking the horses so long to arrive.

“Here's my escort to see me home,” laughed Margaret, and then leaned to kiss Nicholas once more, releasing her reins in her attempt to get as close to him as she could. She wanted his smell on her hands and shoulders, the warmth of his breath on her neck. Her horse, impatient, started toward the barn, and she hastily reached down its neck for the reins, calling goodbye as she left.

Lying in her bed that night, Margaret recalled how she had felt after the Albani concert in May. She remembered sitting in the carriage with her face against the cool glass of the windows, wondering about her future. She had been amazed by Madame Albani, her singing and her gracious manner at the Slavin house. But she had been particularly taken by the younger singer, Eva Gautier, that evening, impressed that someone so young could have been so sure of herself to have made a career of singing. That evening, Margaret had tried to assess her own accomplishments, and they had been such modest ones — training horses, tracking coyotes across the grass, helping her grandmother dig up roots of blue camas. But now she felt she had discovered the thing she could direct her abilities toward: making photographs and recording the life of her valley. She had experienced the camera, its wood, the texture of the brass fittings and the gauges, the rack and pinion arrangement that adjusted the focus. Although she had been unnerved by the sight of the moving figures through the viewfinder, she had also known in a way beyond words that her images would be good ones. The process of developing and printing she was confident she could learn. All spring she'd had the feeling she was on a threshold. A darkened doorway led to her future, and she had not yet had the courage to even consider peering into its shadows. But now she knew she was ready to take the step across, to what and where, she was still uncertain, but she was filled with the sense of possibility. She had the map and now needed to learn to read its legend. And she had hope, hope that her family would permit her to do what she needed to do to learn more about photography, and hope that whatever she did, Nicholas would somehow be a part of it.

A receipt for a camera, purchased September, 1906, from Mary Spencer in Kamloops, accompanied by a letter.

Dear Miss Stuart,

Your father asked me to recommend a camera for you. There are as many cameras as there are photographers, but from his descriptions of your interests, I am hopeful that you will enjoy this fine Sanderson field camera as much as I did. I bought it new, on a trip to London, in 1895. I must say I fell in love with its appearance as much as anything. The mahogany is such a pretty wood and the brass fittings lovely, I think. The lens is a Beck Symmetrical, iris to f64. If you ever have questions about it, please do write to me. The reason I am willing to sell it is that it simply hasn't been used for its true purpose, which is field work, vast landscapes, skies. Increasingly my work has been portraiture, weddings and civic events, and I seldom work outdoors as I once did.

You will notice that the plate on the camera says “G. Houghton, Son.” This is the manufacturer. I was so impatient to take possession of this camera that I went directly to Mr. Houghton in High Holborn in order to see the final stages of the camera's construction rather than wait for it at the dealer.

I had the outfit case modified by a local harness maker so that I could carry it on my back; that is what the straps are for. I had them made to be adjustable, and therefore the case is comfortable to wear over summer clothing or heavier winter wear.

This camera should be used, it should do what it does best, and I know you will employ it. I am gratified to hear of a young woman taking up this excellent calling. Please let me know how you progress, and best of luck to you.

I remain,

Sincerely yours,

Mary Spencer

The receipt acknowledges gratefully the sum of thirteen dollars and notes the inclusion of some eight-by-ten plates with the camera and its case.

Of course I wish the camera were available to look at, and I wonder where it might be found, if anywhere. If the hands of women are present in the textiles they have worked, the smoothing of their fingers imprinted in the furrows of quilted cotton and the tiny mice-feet of feather-stitching, in the sayings they have chosen to replicate on linen, then what remains of a woman in the camera she has used to frame her world? The apparitions of all the images she has sought and made visible on paper, would they linger in the workings of the camera, its polished mahogany body? I think of it as a repository for her soul, or part of her soul, everything her eager heart made a connection with by focusing and developing.

A TABLE COVER HAS ARRIVED, a cloth of yellowed damask, chewed in one corner by rats. The owner knew it was rats and not mice because she'd caught them at it in her storage room. The cloth had been a wedding gift to her mother in Bukovina in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had been brought to the prairies to a sod house on a windswept plain, dried buffalo bones and dung piled by the door. She wept when she learned she must use that as fuel. Hers was the experience of the young country, immigration, hardship, sorrow as one baby after another succumbed to whooping cough or scarlet fever. But the land was broken, as her husband had promised it would be, and lilacs were planted, wheat grown, children borne who lived and thrived, and those children went out into the world to do and become things undreamed of by their parents. This daughter had nursed in the old Mission Hospital in our community, married a fisherman and raised seven children of her own. She remembered the long winter nights on the prairie, tallow candles and then oil lamps illuminating the dark rooms, meals of turnips and salt pork, but every Sunday the table laid with the damask cloth, salt rubbed into any grease marks that dared to appear on it, and on Monday, which was wash day, the sight of it draped over a wolf willow to dry. It had been her own habit to use it on Sundays, too, until her children had all left home. She had put it in her storage room for mending one winter, kept being sidetracked by one thing after another, and then discovered it had been chewed by the rats that were a part of coastal life, living as she did in a house built right over the bay, its front part on footings that rocked slightly in storms when the tides buffeted them. I wrote her story down on a card and then gave her some information on the treatment of heirloom textiles. So much of the research discourages the use of these textiles as the practical objects most of them were intended to be. Light can fade, ultraviolet light can damage fibres, moist air and warmth encourage molds that stain fibres and cause deterioration. Folding and creasing cause streaking and fading and can cut threads. Yet many families love to use the things their grandmothers stitched or wove or quilted to keep a daily connection with their history. And most households don't rise to acid-free boxes and tissue. I suggest to this woman that we wash the cloth together after we vacuum it with low suction and then carefully dry it. And washing the damask cloth, our hands touching in the cool water, we are sharing the ceremony of Sunday meals in the sod house, passing bread across its white expanse in the illlit room, we are folding it, one at each end, after it has dried in the wind, and pressing it with sadirons and steam flicked from an expert finger, and carefully putting it in a drawer to wait until the next Sunday meal. I tell her my own grandmother, for whom I am named Anna, brought such a table cloth from her birthplace in Poland, and that it was used by my family for years until it finally wore away to a shred. After the exhibition, she has agreed to wrap her cloth in unbleached muslin and store it in a cedar-lined trunk. I'll give her a small sachet of dried lavender when the time comes.

1.

Margaret didn't sleep all night but kept going over in her mind the steps she needed to follow, rereading the owner's manual that had come with her new camera. At dawn she had been in the field for an hour, working out positions for the best light, preparing the plates, climbing into the lower limbs of the cottonwood tree to secure the buckskin laces of the cradleboard in such a way that they could be seen through the viewfinder. The handle of the cradle was a length of wild rose cane, stripped and polished by years of handling. Margaret had borrowed the cradleboard from a family at Spahomin who had used it for each of their six children, the old custom of abandoning the device after a child had outgrown it no longer prevalent. When she was ready to take the shot, she noticed that the roan gelding had wandered into her field of vision, attracted by the first rays of sun. Her first instinct was to include him in the shot, and then, after exposing the first plate, she chased him away to try another shot without him.

CRADLEBOARD IN A TREE
, August, 1906.

(gelatin-silver print)

Taken at sunrise at the western edge of Culloden pasture. A cradleboard with the buckskin laces dangling is hanging from a young cottonwood tree. A grey horse is just to the right of the tree, head down as though sleeping. The soft light filtering through the cottonwood branches gives the photograph an atmosphere reminiscent of the platinotypes made by Clarence H. White in the late 1800s.

2.

She hadn't planned the next shot but had been returning on Daisy from another shoot with all her equipment and had come upon the place where she'd found the drinking tube the previous year. It was late afternoon, with clusters of high cloud in the sky. The sun was just passing through one such cluster, creating an ethereal light. Margaret hurriedly got out her camera and took three shots. The third included some things she was taking home to use as props — an old pair of her grandfather's moccasins, a necklace, a few of Uncle August's old tools. As she looked through the viewfinder, she felt the sensation again of seeing presences. This time, a girl came from nowhere to place a small figure of an animal fashioned out of wisps of grass and a little clump of brown-eyed Susans among the rocks. Her face was painted with a wide yellow band across the forehead. Margaret remembered her grandmother saying that this represented the grey trail or the Milky Way. Was this girl the dead girl? And was this like a dream, seeing her through the viewfinder? There were stories about those who dreamed of the dead, their heads touching the pillows of the dead, stories of the dead returning to wear the clothing of the living. Painting your face or purifying your body with a sweatbath could take away the events promised by the dreams. Taking her eye from the camera to look, Margaret saw only the boulders, irradiated by the aureole of the sun behind clouds. She quickly took the props from her saddlebag and placed them by the boulder she'd seen the girl approach with her offerings.

GRAVE-SITE ABOVE LAUDER CREEK
, August 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

In the foreground, boulders heaped in an informal cairn with assorted boulders strewn around the central grouping. Tall stalks of grass cast a netting of shadows over the ground. Beyond, a grove of trees, their shadows clean shapes that echo the dark lines of grass. A shaft of intense light coming from behind high cloud bisects the photograph, illuminating the central cairn. A few artifacts — a necklace of animal teeth, a stone hammer with an image carved into its head, a pair of moccasins — lie to one side of the largest boulder, as if abandoned.

3.

“Will you go with me to the kikuli site? I thought I'd ask Tessie and Jack to come along in case I want to use people in some of the shots. If we go early, we can take a picnic and even swim. Nicola Lake never gets very warm, but if the day is hot, we'll be glad to have it for cooling off.”

KIKULI HOUSES BY NICOLA LAKE
, August, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

Three winter houses near the lakeshore, the notched poles that served as ladders protruding from the west side of the entrance holes on two of them, the third pole in the foreground of the photograph. Clumps of bunchgrass growing on the earth covering the framework indicate that these are not recent structures. Two children stand to the far left of the photograph, each dressed in leggings and a buckskin shirt, some ornamentation woven into the fringe of the shirts. The children are carrying lidded baskets of the sort used as kettles.

4.

Wanting to capture something of what she'd seen at the hay camp earlier in the summer, Margaret planned two shoots in a row to take advantage of the fact that the Indians were taking a second cutting of hay off the Reserve's fields. She slept at her grandmother's cabin and was awake at four in order to replicate the image she'd loved of the work horses materializing out of the mist near the creek to be harnessed for the day. She tried a number of shots of the rakes and stackers, the men in their work clothes, a group of children coming across the field with baskets of food and bottles of water, the teams of horses waiting out the worst of the heat under a grove of aspens, and a close-up shot of a large cluster of thistles gone to seed.

HORSES AT DAWN
, September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

Two massive horses, Clydesdales (as evidenced by their blazes, each with four white stockings and heavily feathered fetlocks), are emerging out of a misty field. A fence of grey boards bisects the photograph horizontally to the right of the horses. A grove of trees balances the composition to the left of the horses.

HAYFIELD AT SPAHOMIN RESERVE
, September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

An expanse of shorn grass, articulated by high mounds of hay, one of them with a boom stacker positioned over it. Two teams of horses with flat wagons behind them are visible at the far end of the field. The light is clear, and the shadows cast by the stacker timbers indicate that it is around noon.

5.

The baskets gave her the most trouble because she had in mind that she wanted to photograph them individually, to take their portraits, and it was difficult to arrange the compositions so that the imbrications achieved the clarity she felt they deserved. In the end, after a number of attempts to place the baskets in settings that told something of their making — among piles of dried rushes, lengths of cedar roots, heaps of various barks — she settled on simply shooting each basket from an angle that gave it a clean shadow.

A SERIES OF SIX BASKETS FROM THE NICOLA VALLEY
, September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

Each basket is photographed on a flat rock surrounded by pasture. Two are of coiled cedar-root, two are open-work, of twigs, and two are of laced bark, birch or poplar, and these are decorated with painted designs. A note on the back of the photo of one bark basket says that the pigments were made of iron pyrites, lichens, copper salts and animal grease. One of the cedar-root baskets is decorated with a fine design, geometric in nature, noted on the back as “deer hoof and entrail.” The other cedar-root basket is a fly pattern of different shadings and has a lid hinged with buckskin. The open-work baskets are particularly beautiful. Each photograph is well composed, but two suffer from light leaks around the edges.

6.

“I haven't been here since the day of the capture. This is where I tied my horse after I saw the wisp of smoke coming up from over the little knoll and all the men sneaking up to it. And right there, that's where Mr. Edwards and his friends were sitting. They had a skillet over the flames and a coffee pot on that flat rock there. That man who was shot, Shorty Dunn, he ran over there first, and that's when the shooting began. We could probably find bullets lodged in some of the aspens if we looked. And over here, where the marsh begins, is where the cranes usually nest, the reason I'd come here in the first place. How still it is! All you can hear are the ducks muttering in Chapperon Lake.”

THE ROBBER'S GLEN
, September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

An area of aspen trees on a slope of ground leading to some rushes and reeds on the edge of a body of water. The trees make strong vertical lines across the entire width of the photograph. In the foreground, to the left, is a small ring of stones describing a fireplace, partly covered in leaf litter. Shafts of sunlight filter down through the tree-tops.

7.

Because she knew the photograph of August and his family standing in traditional clothing by the tule shelter told only part of the story of their lives in particular and Reserve life in general, Margaret took shots of their cabin, inside and out, and a variety of scenes about Spahomin.

ALICE'S WASH DAY
, September, 1906.

GELATIN-SILVER PRINT

A woman in a plain dress with a bandana tied around her head is doing her family's laundry in a creek. A pile of clothing is on one side of her as she squats beside the creek, scrubbing a pair of men's trousers against a river rock. A number of items are spread over the bushes to dry — bed-sheets, a child's dress, several shirts, a pair of bloomers. The woman's face is turned toward the camera, the shadow of a smile on her mouth.

8.

Margaret spent several days persuading her grandmother to let her take a portrait shot. When the old lady finally agreed, Margaret brought the sinew chair out onto the porch of the cabin. Asking her grandmother to sit in the chair, she set up the camera and tried various angles before she found the one she wanted.