Sisters of Grass (3 page)

Wanting to take a break from the textiles, I suggest a brief camping trip to the Nicola Valley. I have a report to read, preparatory to my exhibition, and will take some time to clarify the details of Mylar, adhesives, insurance against humidity and insect damage. Away from the objects, I can make a plan for their display. And I am hoping to figure out the geography of Margaret's box, the placement of trails and the locations of photographs.

When I wake the second morning after a deep sleep, I take a minute to remember where I am. Tent, blur of mosquito netting, Clark's nutcracker scolding in a tree just at the back of us. I have dreamed of a girl, waiting on horseback. It might have been myself half a lifetime ago, the same dark hair and straight back. Someone is humming outside, and the sun is already up; I feel heat through the nylon wall. I go down to the outhouse to pee and find moths all over the inside of the cubicle — noctuids, geometers, pyralids and tiger moths, wings spread for balance and camouflage, stippled with colour. I am accustomed to thinking of moths as the enemy, and I have seen the damage caused to fine woollens and silks by the larvae of brown house moths and common clothes moths. But the wings of these are like samite or the couched gold grounds on pieces I have seen in ecclesiastic collections. I forget where I am, lingering in an unseemly fashion among the toilets as I examine each moth, their eyespots, their antennae fringed with sense organs. A few in a heap into a corner of the cubicle look for all the world like dead leaves or the crumpled, foxed pages of an old book. Not wanting to disturb them, I resist the urge to poke at the little pile with a twist of toilet paper to see if they're alive.

Nicola Lake is lovely in the clear morning, ruffled a little by a light breeze, faint voices calling from the shore. I take back a kettle of water to make coffee and find our blue enamel pot covered with a fine yellow dust. Anywhere else, our stuff would be damp, condensation glazing the walls of the tent, the sides of the cooler, even our sleeping bags, but here we wake to pollen, falling from the pines like golden rain. I pick a small bouquet for the table, fleabane, asters, a sprig of southernwood. When the children come back from walking the dog, we eat pancakes with maple syrup, watched by a chipmunk on the nearest tree.

On a horse, dark hair, her back straight, her eyes shy.

Once, in this very campsite, I looked idly to the rocks behind us to see my image reflected in the eyes of a coyote. How long it had been there I had no way of knowing, but my children had been playing among the rocks earlier, and I wondered if it was attracted to their scent. It didn't stay after I looked into its eyes but slunk away up the slope, its tail low, looking back from a respectable distance to make sure I was watching.

Hum of bees in the tall grass, quarrel of crows, ache of the distant hills dappled with sunlight. Each morning could begin this way, each evening end with the loons. To have grown up in this air, taking in the dust of this earth with each breath, dust of dried grass, animal skin, the bodies of collapsing stars. I have dreamed of a girl. Pollen falls into my coffee as I walk among the trees, wildflowers brushing my legs. A startled ground squirrel skitters away.

IN A HANDKERCHIEF edged with fraying lace, the smell of lavender. A few brittle seeds caught in the threads. I rub them between my fingers and am taken back to my own grandmother's house in Halifax, where hedges of the grey-leaved plants lined paths and where bundles of their dry flowers kept the rigid piles of ironed sheets fresh. Gifts sent from that coast arrived with sachets tucked into pyjama pockets or wrapped in an apron constructed of scraps of polished cotton and lengths of crocheted lace, the bittersweet odour rising from the box as it was opened. And this box, too, has its incense, a prelude to the rituals of discovery and accompaniment.

The air of the valley's history is rich with the smoke of artemesias burned to clean and protect, clouds of tobacco smoke bringing the souls back from the dead. And the smell of evergreens laid about to protect against witchcraft, illness, the tips rubbed on the bodies of girls to keep away evil. The rising of dust as graves are swept with the branches of wild roses. When we make our campfire, I burn a branch of sage for my own safe passage through this world of ghosts, my hands rich with the oil of lavender, Margaret's little bag of earth.

Margaret, Nicola Valley, 1904

She was riding in the direction of her favourite place, Minnie Lake, though she knew she wouldn't get that far today. There were tasks Mother wanted help with, and the younger children were still weak from the bout of influenza that had laid them low one by one; Margaret was the only one strong enough to beat carpets and begin to mend the winter quilts before they were put away until fall.

But today there was a fresh wind, and Mother told her to saddle up Daisy and go for a ride.

“I can manage for a few hours,” she said. “Tom is sleeping and the girls are playing. You go. A ride will make you fresh. Bring back some sunflowers if you can find them in bloom.”

Daisy had been easy to catch, though a few of the other saddle horses rolled their eyes and trotted away as Margaret approached with a handful of oats and a bridle. She tied her horse to the fence while she changed into trousers in the barn. This was the compromise she'd reached with her father: she could ride in trousers but had to change in the room where they kept the harnesses. How he could have imagined it possible to ride in a skirt, even a divided one, was beyond her, and why her riding clothes had to change just when she'd turned fifteen puzzled her, too. That was when he'd decided that she must cultivate a more ladylike appearance, helped by his visiting mother and sister from Oregon. They showed her how to roll up her hair, after brushing it a hundred times, showed her how to starch her petticoats with sugar until they were stiff as boards. Her mother only watched, saying nothing. Her own soft dresses moved as she moved and did not rustle.

When Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth had arrived in Forksdale for that visit a year ago, Margaret's mother had not wanted to ride down in the buggy to pick them up. She would prepare food, she'd suggested, make sure everything was ready, the beds well aired. The ladies would disembark from the train at Spences Bridge, spend a night there at Mr. Clemes's hotel, then come by stage to Forksdale, stopping along the way for tea at Coutlee. But Margaret's father had insisted she come. At the livery stable, her mother had kept in the background as embraces and kisses were exchanged between her father and these two handsome women in their fine hats. Introductions were made, her father leading her mother forward by the hand. Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth had known Father had married a native woman, of course; he'd told them in letters. And in 1890, in exchange for beef, he'd had Dr. Sutton photograph Jenny, holding the infant Margaret, at the settlement at Nicola Lake, the portrait carefully framed and packed up to send to Astoria for Christmas. Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth wrote long letters to the family several times a year and sent parcels for the children. But this was the first meeting, and the first time William had seen his kin since 1883.

Watching Jenny Stuart greet her mother-in-law, Margaret thought how beautiful she was. She wore her glossy hair in a braid, and when she brushed it out before bed it looked like dark water in starlight. She'd grown up first on the wild grasslands near Douglas Lake and then, after 1878, in a cabin on the Spahomin Reserve. She had been educated by Father LeJeune, one of the missionary priests, after showing a quick intelligence and curiosity, working as his housekeeper until Margaret's father had married her and taken her home to Cottonwood Ranch, near the north end of Nicola Lake. In those days, the ranch house had been the two-room log cabin which the cowhands now slept in, there was no garden, barely a barn. Jenny had worked hard with William, helping to string fence, digging over a large area to grow potatoes and turnips to store for winter, planting slips of roses and crabapple seedlings given to her by other ranch wives. In turn, she helped them with cooking during the haying season until the Cottonwood operation grew large enough to demand her every minute. She had become an excellent ranch wife, a gentle mother, fond of music. When William played his violin, she closed her eyes and leaned into the melody, sometimes humming, never singing. And beautiful, yes, but not like the women in Margaret's father's family, with their elaborate dresses and high voices. Jenny was quiet by nature, not shy, exactly, but a woman who chose her words carefully and never learned the art of small talk. Grandmother Stuart took Jenny's hands in her own and told her she was looking forward to seeing the ranch and getting to know her daughter-in-law over the next two months. Jenny smiled and looked to Aunt Elizabeth, who, after exclaiming over the mountains they had seen from the train, the pitch-dark tunnels drilled through the rock, the beauty of the river below them, wondered about tea.

“The cup of tea at Coutlee was very pleasant,” she said, “but its effects have not lasted long!”

“You must be so thirsty,” said Jenny. “I've brought some refreshment, it's in the buggy. Shall we put your baggage in, and then I can get you some lemonade?”

William and Tom carried the smaller cases to the buggy, and then Mr. Armstrong, of the livery stable, sent out a boy to help lift the bigger trunks. The horses moved restlessly, their harnesses jingling a little. Jenny reached under the seat for a basket and offered everyone a drink. The children all took a tin cup of lemonade, but the ladies chose to wait. Margaret heard Aunt Elizabeth comment to Grandmother Stuart about the unseemliness of eating and drinking right there on the street. “Ah well, my dear, we are hardly in Astoria now,” was Grandmother's tart reply.

Remembering that first meeting, Margaret felt a pang for her mother. The two women from Astoria never really got to know her, preferring to spend time with William and the children, reminiscing, telling the children funny stories about their father's boyhood, or else working on a sampler they left with the family: vines and flowers around a collection of birds in a potted tree above the adage,
He doeth much who doeth a thing well
. The younger three children loved their presents of books, a model ship in a wavy glass bottle for Tom, and lengths of pretty calico, smelling of dried lavender, to make up into dresses for Jane and Mary. Margaret's gift was a dresser set, a silver-backed brush, comb and hand mirror, and a bottle of French cologne. She was a little afraid of using such beautiful things, but Aunt Elizabeth soon had her hair unbraided and was brushing it out in long strokes.

“Such lovely hair, Margaret. I'll show you the way all the young ladies in Astoria are dressing theirs now. And here, a little dab of this scent behind your ears and in the hollow of your neck. There! What do you think?”

“I've never smelled anything like it. What is it made of?”

Aunt Elizabeth told her about the fields of flowers — jasmine, rose, lavender, orange blossom — cultivated in the south of France; she'd seen them on a tour of Europe taken with Grandmother Stuart two years ago. “We stayed in Grasse, my dear, and in the evening you could smell the flowers as the night air released their oils. This cologne comes from there. Sublime!”

Margaret had smelled roses, of course, the ramblers growing around the veranda of their house and the wild pink ones close to Nicola Lake, but the other flowers were unknown to her. France she knew from the atlas at school. Privately she thought she preferred the sage of the hills all around her, particularly the way it smelled in the morning after a rain, tangy and warm. And the scent of hay as it was raked up behind the team. Timothy, clover, lucerne and rye so sweet and pure it made her feel faint.

Astoria, 1906.
My dear, I must confess to you that I had never seen hair as pretty as yours. I remember brushing it out with the silver brush and how it flowed down your back. I look at the photograph your father sent after that visit. How young you were! And I try to imagine you older but see only your braids, your narrow wrists. I still hope to take you to France to see those fields of flowers. We could stay for a time at Cap Antibes, a little fishing village where painters sometimes spend the winters and paint the Mediterranean. At least you must visit us here in Astoria. It is a very rainy town but such flowers as a result! Someone could take you out on the river in a canoe, where you would be travelling the same currents as the man for whom your own great river is named. Such things are endlessly possible.

One day, her father offered to take the ladies riding. Grandmother Stuart declined, but Aunt Elizabeth was pleased until she realized they had no sidesaddle, just the usual stock saddles with long stirrups and high horns to hold ropes. She'd learned to ride at her boarding school as a girl and had definite ideas about proper style. She finally allowed herself to be coaxed, in her long skirt and fine buttoned boots, up onto one of the gentle geldings.

“That's the sister I remember,” William announced, as she arranged her skirts around her with some difficulty. He showed her how to hold the reins in one hand and press them to the horse's neck to direct him. She laughed and waved her straw hat in the air.

“Do I look like a Wild West Show poster girl? It's a pity you haven't given me six-shooters as well. This saddle feels remarkably like a bath chair. I do believe I could ride all day in this kind of comfort.”

“Oh, we often ride that long, and longer,” replied William. “After six or eight hours, it doesn't feel like a bath chair, I can tell you.”

Margaret came out of the house in her riding trousers, an old pair of her father's that Jenny had helped her to shorten and alter. She wore the soft buckskin jacket that her mother's mother had made for her, a design of stylized birds woven into the fringe with sage bark. Putting her face to her sleeve, she could just catch the faint aroma of burning sage used to smoke-tan the skin. Aunt Elizabeth was shocked.

“William, you can't let her go about in that ridiculous outfit. Mother would be horrified.”

Obviously Elizabeth was accustomed to speaking her mind, and she expected her listeners to pay attention. Margaret, embarrassed, saddled Daisy as quickly as she could. She waited for her father to explain that she often rode with him for long hours, looking for stock or checking for kills, even riding as an equal hand on the cattle drives to Kamloops. After all, didn't he tell her often that she was his best cowhand, as good on a horse as any of the men? She could not work in a skirt. And how could Aunt Elizabeth call her clothing ridiculous? Grandmother Jackson's jacket was her pride and joy. She loved how the buckskin smelled, loved the design and the way the jacket felt like part of her own skin. But her father only mumbled a little about their isolation and the convenience of trousers and the fact that she was still a child. Margaret waited for him to defend Grandmother's sewing skills, her honour, in fact, as the most skilled woman in Spahomin with tanned skins and design. He began to speak of Grandmother Jackson's method for curing skins, but Aunt Elizabeth would have none of it.

“Really, William, you
must
insist on standards, even at this distance from civilization. The girl is very nearly a young woman, do you notice nothing? She will never be marriageable if you allow her to run loose like a ruffian, you must realize that. It's not as though decorum is unheard of in this country. The Smith girls at Spences Bridge, for example, we met them riding sidesaddle, in skirts. I'm certain their mother would never allow them to race about the countryside in old skins, astride a horse in such a provocative way. They are lovely girls and will marry well, I should think.”

William Stuart was silent, looking first at his sister, then at his daughter. His face hardened as it did when he was angry, and his eyes were like ice. Then: “Margaret, we'll discuss this later. Now, please, if you will, open the gate so we can be off.”