Sisters of Grass (20 page)

At Spahomin, Margaret and her grandmother were preparing for a sweat bath. They had spread boughs of fir on the floor of the sweat lodge with some sage mixed in, and juniper from a special place known only to Grandmother Jackson. Placing the hot stones in the pit in the middle of the floor, they squatted to put their attention to cleansing their bodies and minds. Margaret felt her lungs sear as the hot dry air entered her chest, and she felt light headed in the intense heat. Her grandmother chanted a prayer in the Thompson language, asking that Margaret go with protection on her journey, that her own guardian spirit watch out for the girl, and her grandfather's, and all her ancestors at rest in the soil of the valley. A prayer had been said by Reverend Murray at Saint Andrew's Church the previous Sunday, asking that the Lord keep Margaret safe during her time away from them, and after the service people she had known all her life came to wish her Godspeed. After their sweat bath, the old woman and the young one washed with cold water and dried themselves with rough towels fashioned from sugar sacks. Riding home, Margaret felt clean and strong and curiously peaceful for the first time since she had made her decision to go to New York. She had been excited about the prospect from the first, but never with this deep knowledge that what she was doing was a necessary part of her progress into the next chapter of her life.

The morning Margaret and her father set out was clear and cold. August came to drive them to Nicola Lake, where they would take the stage to Forksdale and then to Spences Bridge. Jenny Stuart stood on the porch and embraced her daughter, then held her at arm's length to make sure she was ready to go. She stroked Margaret's face, the curve of cheek she had known and loved for seventeen years, and smoothed the wisps of black hair that framed the young face, committing to memory its detail and texture. Blind, she would know this daughter forever, her fingers alive with the instincts of birds. She kissed Margaret on each cheek and adjusted the collar of her travelling jacket. Margaret turned to her sisters.

“Goodbye, Mary, goodbye, Jane. You must help Mother in my place now. And Tom, you may ride Daisy while I'm gone, and take good care of her, please, and help Father. If Mother and Father write to tell me that you've been a help to them both, then I shall buy you something special in New York City and bring it home in my suitcase.”

“A doll, Margaret, a doll, please?” Both sisters echoed the same wish.

“I don't know yet that you've been helpful. But I'm certain there will be dolls aplenty, just waiting to belong to girls who have helped their mother and not argued with each other.”

And it was time to leave. Going along the lane that led out to the Douglas Lake road, Margaret tried to see everything at once — the barn, the chicken house, the cottonwoods with their remnants of magpie nests, the wide fields of Culloden dotted with the slumbering bodies of cattle among the bunch-grass and drowsy flies, horses watching the wagon as it commenced its journey, the family waving goodbye on the familiar porch, one of the ranch dogs running alongside, all of it knitted together by the wild clematis climbing up from the banks of the creek, fluffy seed heads blowing goodbye. If this was part of who she was, then what would she be without it? She had asked her grandmother the same question and was told that she must carry her home inside her. But she didn't know if she did, or could, never having left before in this way. In her suitcase, though, was her buckskin jacket and a little pouch she had made, decorated with quills given her by Alice and filled with dried sage, some strands of bunchgrass with the seeds intact, the drinking tube found at the gravesite, and a twist of paper with a spoonful of soil inside, gathered from the side of the creek. It would have to be enough.

They arrived at Spences Bridge late in the evening and went directly to Mr. Clemes's hotel, where rooms were waiting for them. They were introduced to the relations who would travel as far as Seattle with Margaret and spent some time drinking tea in the parlour, where a warm fire burned and a girl played the piano quietly while the talk went on about beef prices and progress. Mr. Clemes was an enthusiastic man, taking William out in the dark to admire again the red Woolsey he had arranged to have shipped from Paris after seeing it at the World Exposition in ‘98. Every visitor to the hotel was taken out to see the Woolsey, even if the visit was not the first. It was a fine automobile to drive around town, Mr. Clemes declared, as William examined the machine by lamplight and restrained his host from starting up the auto and taking it along the black streets with the same lamps held aloft.

In her bed that night, too excited to sleep, Margaret listened to the river. She had leaned out of the window earlier in the evening when she had been taken to the room with her luggage and had smelled the water, cold and flinty, as it raced towards its marriage with the Fraser at Lytton. Brown bats darted in under the eaves, feeding on the slow autumn flies and moths, almost ready to find a place to wait out the cold months. She thought of the big muscular fish in the Thompson's waters, swimming against the current, and the canoes guided by men darkened with charcoal and grease, going out to meet the fish at night with torches of pitch-pine. And on the talus slopes, even now the rattlesnakes were deep in their winter sleep under stones. How mysterious it was, the life of a place, with its rivers, trees and grasses, and the animals coming down to drink at dawn as they had done since time began. And just as mysterious, the sound of a train moving down the canyon, sounding its whistle as it passed through the town. People on that train, or one very similar to it, had witnessed a landslide, watched as innocent children were washed away by rising water. She wondered if they would see the site of the landslide as the train passed that way in the morning. And would she ever sleep?

She must have, because her father stood at her bedside with a cup of milky coffee, gently calling her to wake up. She drank the coffee gratefully, then dressed in the chilly morning air. Her stomach was a whole flock of butterflies fluttering their wings at once, some of them rising into her throat. Her hands shook as she buttoned her boots, and she forgot where she'd packed her hairbrush.

At the train station, the Clemes family stood to one side and chattered cheerfully amongst themselves, giving the Stuarts a private moment to say their goodbyes.

“You have everything? You're sure?”

“No, I'm not sure of anything, Father. But I think I have what I need. My cases, the camera, the ticket, money, yes, I think it's all here. But somehow I wish we were taking the stage together home to Nicola Lake. I feel nervous about this.”

“I'm not surprised. This is a big venture for a girl who's more at home on a horse than anywhere. But everything will go well, I'm certain. You'll cable us from Seattle to say you've arrived? And from New York, of course?”

“Of course.”

The train had arrived and the door of the carriage she would be boarding opened, the porter taking her baggage to stow it away. The Clemes relations stepped up to the carriage, waving to William and calling a final goodbye to Mr. Clemes. William embraced his daughter and helped her onto the platform stool and up the train steps. Margaret could say nothing but clung to her father's familiar arm until the last possible moment, when he pulled away, touched her shoulder, then hopped down to the platform. She waved a gloved hand and smiled through a mist that might have been tears or perhaps the beginning of rain glazing the window of the carriage. As the train pulled out of Spences Bridge, Margaret kept waving until her father was no longer visible. She sat where she could see the cluster of houses, hotels, the bridge itself, receding until the train rounded a corner and they were gone.

Are we remembered by mountains, the sweet fields of hay? Do we leave the syllables of our history in the lambent dawn or on the riffle of water as it moves past our feet in the shallows? A map of our lives might speak of favourite weather, the whistle of blackbirds on April mornings, the way our eyes saw colour, distinguished cloud forms, the texture of linen in a hoop of wood, stitched in and out by wildflowers. Our mark on the map might be rough trails or roads, open pastures, a wild cartography of longing. In Margaret's box, a street map of New York with tiny birds sketched in and a few trees on significant quadrangles as she provided her own icons for the city. Or our history might be followed as a series of threads, silk, wool, fine textiles or rags, which outline the shapes our lives have taken — the samplers of girlhood, the tea towels of domesticity, quilts of practical warmth, and the yoking together of joy and grief in the long recollection of age.
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth
.

Because she had asked him to, the porter pointed out the site of the landslide to Margaret as the train passed — a raw slash of debris on the side of the river. Under that debris, there were houses crushed like brittle cottonwood twigs, even a child flattened like a wildflower between the pages of a book. She pressed her face to the window, seeing the field of the dead passing quickly as the train gathered speed. The river moved in urgent currents, oblivious to all that happened, ungoverned by memory. Margaret could see the yellow blooms of rabbitbrush persisting in the cold days of November and a tangle of the wild clematis she loved, which some called traveller's joy, wrapped around a dead pine tree on the slope above the river.

Light began to enter the canyon as the sun rose high enough to illuminate the dark cliffs and narrow valleys of creeks leading into the Thompson from their sources in the dark mountains. At times, it felt as though the train was moving through a tunnel roofed by sky, so close were the walls of the mountains. The porter reeled off names as they passed creeks and town sites or entered tunnels in the shoulders of the rocks. Skoonka, Drynoch, Nicomen, Thompson Landing. Margaret was thrilled to hear the names, like lyrics to the music of the train. At Lytton she saw the azure waters of the Thompson enter the Fraser and lose themselves in the muddy confluence. At one time, her grandmother told her, so many campfires burned along the sides of these rivers that anyone looking down from a mountain must have thought the sight a fallen constellation, a wash of light along the dark water. She thought of George Edwards riding down to prison, manacled, passing the same rocks, the same trees, with an early summer sky overhead. The newspaper had said that everyone knew which train carried him to New Westminster, and bystanders called from each stopping place, wishing him well; even the dogs remembered him.

The Clemes relations talked animatedly in their seats, and they called to Margaret to come and share their snack. Little cakes and tarts filled a basket, along with thin cucumber sandwiches. Margaret wasn't hungry but accepted an apple, choosing a fine Wolf River with a deep red skin. The train was carrying a shipment of apples from the Clemes orchard, the Martel ranch, and Mrs. Smith's trees to customers in Vancouver. At Lytton, they'd stopped to pick up hundreds of boxes from Earlscourt Farm, and when the porter opened the door of their carriage, the smell of apples filled the air like balm. Hell's Gate, China Bar, Kanaka, Keefer, Slaughter Run, Alexandra Bridge. Biting into her apple, imagining she detected the flavour of sunlight and sage behind the crisp white flesh veined with rose, Margaret watched the passing hills, falling asleep just as the train left the canyon to begin the straight run through the Fraser Valley to Vancouver.

IN A HIGH PASTURE OVERLOOKING the canyon, horses graze, ankle deep in forage, while the fertile wind lifts their tails, enters them as surely as wind entered the fleetfooted mares of Lusitania. A solitary girl might be sitting on a slope above the river as the train passes, a fierce pulse running through her. Was it the pulse of the train or was the earth echoing, loud with the lives contained inside the body? Some were bound, knees to chin, with slender twine made from the fibrous roots of mountain spruce, some buried alive as infants in cradles of bark, soil entering their nostrils and ears, the small socket of their eyes. And girls taken early by influenza in a private enclosure of white pickets, overlooking the river of their birth, their lives contained in a parenthesis of wind: 1889-1908; wild rye shifting in the air;
the beautiful uncut hair of graves
. What secrets do the hills contain in their suede hollows, what mysteries are lifted from the stones in the unbearable stillness of morning?
Which is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?
My daughter has rolled into the grassy hollow of the kikuli pit at Nicola Lake, closing her eyes as she imagines the life of its ghostly household in the time we nearly know as we sit on the shore of the lake. Looking up, she sees a fresh moon in the daylight sky, hears the girls singing wherever they might be — in memory, in photographs, crumbling bones under a cairn of boulders, a little necklace of elk teeth at what was once a youthful throat, in the heart, the imagination.
You remind me of a girl I once watched picking flowers
. On the shoulders of the young girls, golden pollen; in their hair, a halo of seeds, ruffled by the breeze. If we are very quiet, they might sing to us, dry husks in the wind, dust of stars.