Sisters of Grass (9 page)

“You look like wild flowers on the slope of Hamilton Mountain, fresh and sweet,” he assured them.

Tom wore a suit given him by a Nicola Lake family whose son had outgrown it, and he fidgeted and pulled at the tie which William had helped him to knot. Since returning with his father from the river, where he'd seen the SS
Peerless
beached on the bank, he'd been dreaming of the sternwheelers. William had explained to him that the boats were long past their heyday, the railways had taken over the work of carrying cargo and passengers from one community to another from Shuswap to Savona, and now the sternwheelers were mostly used to move logs. But Tom loved the look of the boats and imagined himself as captain of the
Peerless
, venturing down the Thompson River, as Captain Irving had, taking flour to the Canadian Pacific Railway crew at Spences Bridge. He was allowed to climb on the
Peerless
in Riverside Park, and his father had paid a man to take Tom's photograph, posed on the portside deck like a sailor.

It wasn't far from the Grand Pacific to the Opera House, just one block south on Fourth Avenue and then west on Victoria Street for slightly more than two blocks. But William had arranged for them to go by carriage so they could arrive in style. Margaret was speechless with excitement as the carriage proceeded along the wide road, past the Fire Hall, the Federal Building, the Bank of Commerce with its ornate stone window headers and rosy brickwork, until they arrived at the Opera House. The driver had to wait his turn to pull up in front of the building, there were so many conveyances delivering concert-goers.

Entering the building and ascending the stairs, Margaret could hardly breathe at the sight of the electric lights, the luxurious wall coverings, and the beautifully dressed people waiting to be shown to their seats. Such gowns and jewels! Margaret had not supposed the women of Kamloops she had seen on her explorations that morning would possess such finery. She felt humbled in her simple muslin dress, but then she remembered how excited she'd been when Father had told the family of the concert and resolved to enjoy every moment of the evening.

William helped them to their seats with the assistance of an usher and then excused himself to return to the lobby to speak to several acquaintances he'd nodded to as they'd entered. Returning just before curtain time, he held a brief whispered conference with his wife and then leaned across Mary and Jane to Margaret.

“Would you like to be presented to Madame Albani later this evening? An old acquaintance, William Slavin, invited me to a reception after the concert. Your mother feels the children should return to the hotel, and she doesn't want to come herself, but she suggested that you might like to accompany me. We wouldn't stay late, and God knows you have so little of this sort of thing that you might like the opportunity.”

“Father, how wonderful!”

So it was with doubled excitement that Margaret waited for the curtain to rise upon Madame Albani. The concert was everything she had dreamed it would be. The adored soprano sang a variety of songs from Tosti's “Goodbye” to the poignant “Crossing the Bar.” The haunting lines
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark!
sent a delicious shiver through Margaret, reminding her of late April evenings when blackbirds fell silent as the darkness settled down on the little valley of the home ranch. This was like poetry or the language of the Bible, this kind of singing.
And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark
. Madame Albani's voice was high and true, and she sang with complete poise. She was stunning to look at in her formal gown, her eyes dark and heavy-lidded, her pale throat covered with necklaces. A young singer, the contralto Eva Gauthier, was only able to sing two songs because of the effects of a bad cold, but Margaret marvelled that someone so young could be so accomplished. She sang one duet with the baritone, the closing number, “A Lover and His Lass,” and it was wonderful to see them address one another so artfully. And then the baritone sang a rousing encore, “Land of Hope and Glory,” which thrilled Margaret to the bone.

After the applause had died down, William leaned to his daughter to ask if she'd enjoyed the concert, but one look at her enraptured face told him all he needed to know. He led his family out to the waiting carriage and returned to the Grand Pacific. “Wait here for me. I'll help your mother up to our rooms,” he told Margaret and left her in the carriage to muse and remember. She wondered when the performers, both the experienced and professional Madame Albani and the younger contralto, knew that they would be singers. Had they always loved to sing and pursued it as an avocation, or had someone overheard them and realized that they had the gift, persuading them then to devote their lives to the art of music? If you had a gift, would you know? Margaret wondered about her own life. Apart from horses and the ranch, there was nothing she knew or did well, as far as she knew. She could train young colts, track coyotes, spot the nests of cranes. But was there something she could do for the rest of her life? Oh, why hadn't she thought of it before? Here she was, seventeen, and with no real idea of how her life would proceed. When her father returned to the carriage, she was deep in thought with her face pressed to the window.

Be calm, I want to tell her. Something will come to you, will take you by your shoulders and shake you with its rightness. It will hone your eyes and give you a shape for your stories. But in her seat by the window, Margaret mourned the ordinariness to which she believed she was doomed.

The Slavins' turreted house on Hill Street was brilliant with light, the sound of music floating down to the street. A tennis court to the east of the house was strung with lights, and many people gathered there in the mild evening air, laughing and talking. William introduced his daughter to Mr. and Mrs. Slavin, and Mrs. Slavin led her to the receiving line and waited with her until it was her turn to be presented to Madame Albani.

The great lady was kind and held her hand as she asked her if she lived in Kamloops. She had a way of smiling deep into your eyes and making you feel as though you were the only person in the room, thought Margaret.

“No, we've come from our ranch in the Nicola Valley just to hear you sing,” Margaret told her.

“The Nicola Valley! What a lovely name. And you must be the wild rose of the valley. That colour suits you admirably, my dear.”

Margaret felt her cheeks go warm. “I loved the Tosti piece that you sang,” she told Madame Albani. And ‘Crossing the Bar.' It was all so beautiful.”

“I'm delighted you enjoyed it. This is my farewell tour of Canada, you know, and when we've completed it, I shall sail to England again where I always feel so much at home. But it is very moving to have been able to sing in such diverse places as your Kamloops and Vienna, one of my favourite cities.”

“A farewell tour? Is that why all the songs, or the ones in English anyway, were all about leaving?
And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark
. And ending with ‘Land of Hope and Glory,' as though to point to your new home?”

“Indeed! And what a clever young lady you are to notice. Your Nicola Valley has taught you to be perceptive. Incidentally, Tosti, who wrote ‘Goodbye,' a song I love to sing, is the singing teacher for the Royal Family, and I shall no doubt encounter him in my new life in London. I shall tell him you liked his song, shall I?”

After a few more words, Margaret took her leave, and Mrs. Slavin returned her to her father. He smiled at her.

“Did she speak as beautifully as she sang?”

“Father, to think that such people exist! To be able to sing as she does and to think of something kind to say to girls like me. This is her farewell tour of Canada, she told me, and we won't hear her sing here again.”

William took a glass of champagne from a tray offered by a maidservant and put it carefully into Margaret's hand. “Only one, mind you, but the evening seems to warrant it. I wonder if the ranch will be able to hold you now that you've met the Great Canadian Songstress.”

Dawn saw the Stuart family settling themselves into the Nicola-Forksdale stage and Margaret mounting the new mare to ride alongside. The mare was well trained but skittish, dancing around as Margaret tried to adjust her stirrups. To get accustomed to the horse and settle her down, the girl decided to ride around the block. South on Fourth, west on Victoria, not a soul to be seen, only a few birds in the small trees newly planted at the edges of the streets. Looking west towards the Opera House, she wondered if last night had been a dream. There was no sign that anything unusual had happened on the quiet thoroughfare. The buildings cast shadows that divided the breadth of street into bars of light and dark, some of the carriage tracks across the smooth dirt in darkness, some in early morning light. Which track had been made by the carriage that had taken her family to such an enchanted evening? And could it really have happened here, in this western town, the golden hills visible even now in the distance?

And no memory in her heart of yearnings for a life different from this one, on a spring street in a western town, the little trees pulsing with their green expectations. Shuttered windows were silent in the morning light. Returning to the waiting stage, Margaret told her father she felt confident enough to set out, the mare having settled. The long road home to the ranch was waiting.

At times on the ride to Trapp Lake, Margaret gave the mare her head and let her gallop along the soft dirt road. The horse was sound-winded, and they made good time. Margaret stopped a few times, once to let the mare drink at a roadside slough and once to stretch her legs while the horse nibbled on a clump of sainfoin in bloom on the edge of a pasture. Sometimes they were ahead of the stage, sometimes behind it, but the day was fine, and when they finally reached the stopping house at Trapp Lake, Margaret felt she could go on until home. Her father wanted to stay with the original plan, however, and rest the mare overnight. After a meal and some conversation about the Miner trial — the police bringing the prisoners to Kamloops had broken the journey at Trapp Lake, and the family who ran the stopping house had stories to tell of the three men sitting on the backboard with blankets around their shoulders in the pouring rain — the stage proceeded towards Forksdale and August Jackson, who awaited the family's return at the Douglas Lake road.

In such ways is the world remembered. A box of slatted wood containing photographs, letters, the program from a concert in an unlikely place, as unlikely as David Daniels singing “
Ombra mai fu
” in a hall on a remote bus line. Driving through Kamloops nine decades later, I try to see the streets as she would have seen them, at dawn, riding the new bay mare. Although some of the houses remain, the vistas — the river, the golden hills rising from the town's western reach — are flattened somehow, and the sound is traffic, shrill machinery, not the soft burr of voices as people walk to work in the shadow of sleeping buildings or harness horses in the stableyards. No young woman in plaid taffeta glides through the quiet streets to her job at John T. Beatton, Clothier, where she would spend the morning folding petticoats of fine lawn and dream of the young assistant at the Bank of British Columbia; instead, a girl in tattered jeans with a golden ring through her lip, sipping from a paper cup, head-phones clinging to her ears. I listen for the sound of the printing presses issuing news of the bank robbers and reviews of a concert in the Opera House and hear only a motorcycle accelerating as a light turns green. And dust, yes, descendent certainly from the dust that settled as Margaret rode, as the stars shed their outer skins and windowsills flaked in the weather.

SOMEONE HAS BROUGHT IN a sampler, asking if I thought it was artistic enough for my exhibition. The lender, a small woman in her eighties, told me it had been stitched by her sister on a visit from her home in Ireland. It was surrounded with a gilt frame and arrived wrapped in several layers of tea towels, themselves worthy of display for their fabric — fine linen which the woman told me had come from Belfast in the year of her marriage to a local fisherman. She'd received a bolt of it, and it had lasted her until now; she simply cut a length of it as she needed new towels and then hemmed and ornamented them in some way, perfect edgings of cross-stitches or nosegays of flowers and a homily,
Thou crownest the year with thy goodness
, framed with a wreath of silvery willow leaves. The sampler itself was pleasant, a little harbour of fishing boats of the sort common in the thirties and forties, blue sea, trees on the shore, and a verse from John Masefield:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea

   and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

I assured her that the sampler was indeed artistic enough, but that I would also love to use her tea towels. She was quite skeptical about any museum that might want to display tea towels, but I explained my idea that history is contained in the small details, the homely objects, and by putting together a lot of them, we might be able to understand something about a community in a particular time and place.

“If you only saw armour or cannons, then those are the only activities you would think mattered. But what about the way people, maybe ordinary people, spent their days? Did they farm or cook or sew? Of course they did. I want to concentrate on textiles and fabrics because for so long they were the way that women explored their creativity, often unconsciously. These tea towels are such a wonderful example! If you were just thinking of them as purely practical, as cloths to wipe the dishes with, you probably wouldn't have taken such care to make them pretty.”

“Aye,” she replied in her soft voice, a faint Irish brogue still discernable. “I used to look through my Bible for a verse that suited how I was feeling and then try to match it with flowers or some such. Well, if you're serious about the tea towels, Anna, I can bring you lots of them.”

I told her I was very serious. We had a cup of tea together, and she told me that her father had worked in the linen mills as a weaver. He was very proud of the linen he wove and used to say that its softness came from the water of the creek harnessed for the washing and bleaching process. Soft northern Irish water and then line-drying in the soft air. The bolt of linen had come from her parents as a wedding gift after she'd left Ireland to come to Canada and this community as a young school teacher, met a local fisherman and decided to make her home with him. I told her I'd like to include a little of her story on a card which would be displayed with her tea towels and sampler, and she seemed very pleased. She left, assuring me that she would return with more of her fancy-work.

I spend some time photographing the items I'll be using for the exhibit in order to archive them properly. Each object will be accompanied by a full description. But what it won't say, could never say, is how the fabrics came to their softness, decades of carefully drying teacups and plates, the weight of sleeping lovers, the endless washing and hanging out in sunlight and fog, smoothing and folding, pressing with hot irons until they gave up their wrinkles and entered dark cupboards to wait, scented with lavender and the faint memory of wind.

And then I look at some of the photographs in Margaret's box, trying to name each person from the references in the letters. Her grandmother, younger sisters and brother, only one of a couple that might be her parents, a young man hanging photographs on a line with clothes pegs as though they were the clothing of infants. And what photographs are they, hanging in the air like the shadows of shadows, souls on their way to the country in the west?

“What will we name her?” William asked, watching the new mare roll in the dust in the home corral. She had closed her eyes and was luxuriating in the dry dust, lingering for a moment to rub one shoulder, then the other. It had been her first night at Cottonwood, and Margaret had awoken several times to look out to make sure she was still there, not spirited away by the darkness. In the moonlight, the mare had been alert, listening to the other horses, nickering to them in return. After she grew accustomed to her new surroundings, she would be pastured with the saddle horses the family kept at the home ranch.

Margaret had already decided on a name. Riding the mare on the road south of Kamloops, she'd noticed again how the black forelock resembled a thistle. And when she'd stopped to let the mare crop at a rich patch of pink-blossoming sainfoin, she'd seen the horse nip off the tip of a blossoming thistle, a few mauve petals falling away as she chewed.

“I've already named her Thistle, Father. Do you think it suits her?”

“Well, now, I suppose I'd hoped for something more stately, to suit her role as our top brood mare. But Thistle, yes, it does suit her with that forelock. Thistle she is, then.”

According to records given them by the mare's previous owner, they could expect a heat in the next few weeks. The plan was to breed Thistle to the ranch's stud and begin to develop a quarter horse ideally suited to the Cottonwood's range. Thistle's broad chest and sound wind, the strong legs of the Bonny Prince — a legacy of his Clydesdale ancestors — and the cutting ability and endurance that came with both horses: William imagined generations of foals with this combination bringing in the cattle each fall and driving them high up the plateau each spring. Generation upon generation, the bay mare, the dark stallion, the dry air alive with their descendants in the fields of the valley and mountain.

“May I ride her to Spahomin tomorrow, Father? I'd like to spend a day or two with Grandmother Jackson and tell her about the concert. I've already made sure Mother doesn't need me.”

“Certainly you may, but don't forget we've planned to go to the Victoria Day celebrations down at Nicola Lake. So you'll only be able to stay the one night. Ask your grandmother if she'd like to come with us on Thursday. August could bring her as far as the ranch on his way, or else we could meet there if August is taking his family.”

“I'll ask, but she usually doesn't like to go to things like that. There's always drinking, and she doesn't approve of Indians taking a drink. She never minds when you drink whiskey, Father, but she hates to see August drink, or anyone else from the Reserve. Why is that?”

“Oh, it's a long story, Margaret. She's seen a lot in her years, both good and bad, and she knows what life was like before the valley was settled by ranchers, although there would have been trappers in her childhood. She's right to mistrust alcohol, it's caused a lot of sorrow to her people.”

The next day saw Margaret riding towards Douglas Lake along the Nicola River. The sunflowers were in their prime, full and brilliant yellow, there were clusters of long-leaved phlox, and threaded through the willows on the riverbank, the buds of white clematis were just opening. Margaret loved clematis. For the next month, there'd be heavenly white clouds of it all along the river and the creek running through the home ranch, and then, until winter, fluffy seedheads would cling to the vines, some of them floating away on the wind to plant themselves in any cranny. Higher up, on the summer range, she'd found blue clematis and had tried bringing a root of it home to try by the veranda, but it had withered and died, longing for the high air of the mountains, or that was what she liked to imagine.

Fresh bear scat by the river spooked Thistle a little, and Margaret found it difficult to keep her down to a walk or a quick nervous trot. Yet she was not familiar enough with the mare's habits to let her run. This was unfamiliar country to a horse raised on the banks of the Thompson River, where the hazards were rattlesnakes and small stinging cacti. It was gone noon by the time they reached the Reserve, and Margaret was glad to find her grandmother's house full of the smell of frying trout.

Embracing her grandmother, she was startled to see a strange man sitting in the chair of woven willow and sinew on the other side of the stove. He leapt to his feet, striding across the room and holding out his hand to take hers in a firm handshake. He had very blue eyes and coppery hair, and he was wearing a pair of Grandmother's moccasins, beaded and quilled.

“You must be Margaret. Your grandmother has been telling me about you. I'm Nicholas Byrne, how do you do?”

Grandmother Jackson handed him a plate of trout and bannock as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have a young man at her stove. She handed Margaret a plate, too. As they sat at the table to eat their lunch, the man explained that he was at Spahomin at the suggestion of James Teit of Spences Bridge.

“I'm translating his book on the Thompson people into French as a graduate project for Dr. Boas at Columbia University. Do you know his work?”

Dr. Boas? The only doctor the two women knew was Dr. Tuthill at Nicola Lake, though William spoke of Dr. Sutton, whom Margaret slightly remembered, and a Dr. Chipp, whom she'd never known at all. Dr. Tuthill's work was mending broken bones, sewing up cuts, doctoring people who were down with influenza, and even tending to the man who was shot at Chapperon Lake. Why would a doctor need Mr. Teit's book translated into French? Margaret said as much to Nicholas Byrne.

“Oh, I'm sorry, that's not the kind of doctor I mean. Dr. Boas is a doctor of anthropology, he studies different cultures. I'm a student of his at Columbia, in New York City. Mr. Teit has been doing some work for Dr. Boas, gathering information about the Indian people of this area, and people in Europe are very interested. Dr. Boas has been translating it into German — he comes from Germany — and he suggested that I do the same into French. My mother is French, so I've been brought up to speak both English and French.”

Margaret knew Mr. Teit. He'd come to the valley before, often, and had spent time with her grandmother, asking her about how she made her baskets and even buying a few for a museum. He was a nice man, and Grandmother spoke highly of him, impressed that he was so interested in not just her baskets but in the stories of her people and her language, which he spoke quite well. Once he'd accompanied her on a plant-gathering trip and had written down the names of the plants she pointed out in the Thompson language, taking notes on what they were used for and how they were prepared. He'd come to the ranch, too, and had several meals with the Stuart family. His own first wife had been an Indian woman, Lucy Antko from Cook's Ferry, and he was trusted by almost everyone.

“Are you staying with my grandmother?” asked Margaret, a little uncomfortable at the prospect of a stranger sleeping in the small cabin.

“No, with your uncle August and his family. But your grandmother has invited me to go for plants with her. I didn't know you'd be visiting, and I don't want to get in the way. Do you mind if I come along?”

“Of course not,” Margaret replied, but in fact she was a little shy in the company of this young man. He was unlike the cowhands and ranchers who formed her experience of masculine company. She wondered if she looked as untidy as she felt, her hair windblown. And what was he doing with moccasins on his feet? Her heart was beating a little faster than usual, it seemed, and she wondered if he could tell.

“Have you been at Spahomin long?” she asked.

“I came three days ago, just as all the excitement about capturing of the train robbers had begun to die down. Though I must admit it's thrilling to think of such a dangerous gang at large in one's own back yard, so to speak!”

Margaret was so irritated to hear his version of the story that she forgot she wasn't going to speak about the capture. “You don't know much if you think of them as dangerous. We all knew George Edwards, the man they're saying is really Bill Miner. He lived and worked here for a few years, and he came to all sorts of social events. The dangerous ones, if you ask me, were the police who were shooting at everything that moved when they cornered Mr. Edwards and his friends last week. They were sitting by a campfire, doing nothing more dangerous than making lunch, when the policeman accused them of robbing a mail train.”

“You sound as though you were there. Can that be possible?” Mr. Byrne sounded more surprised than shocked.