Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher)

  I willed the tears away. Shard and Thomas would have taken action, not sat and wept. Perhaps this was the way each stayed with me, became a memory of comfort, not of loss.

  Thinking of what they would advise gave me direction in the morning. It came to me in my small room while I poured hot water into herbal tea and smelled familiar scents.

  “Benny,” I told the cocker spaniel resting at my feet, “we will spend some time in the past, but I promise we will not stay there. Just use it to make a trail into the future.”

  The dog lifted one eyebrow at the sound of his name, watched as I fingered the scent of smoked leather knots of memories still worn around my neck.

  “As Mr. Sherar would say, ‘We’ll whip our weight in wildcats, defeat this enemy, sure.’ ”

  The dog wiggled his short tail, raised his head at the hope he must have heard in my voice.

  “Arlita,” I said at the asylum, “something happened yesterday. With a patient.” I nodded my chin toward Wuzzie, seated quietly as always facing the window, her palms up in a posture that would permit a winnowing basket to rest easily upon her fingers.

  Arlita waited for me to tell her, hands folded tightly over that apron I wondered when she found time to starch. I took a deep breath and said: “She spoke to me. In the language of my childhood.”

  Arlita’s eyes widened. “Wuzzie spoke?” Her voice moved from astonishment to doubt. “You should have told someone as soon as it happened. Never mind. What did she say?”

  “That she needs help, for a bad dream.”

  “Law sakes alive!” Arlita said in an unsettling whisper.

  “And.” I wondered how much to tell this person things that would open up my past.

  “And what? Spit it out!”

  “I believe it is possible that I know this person from a time before. I may even know some of her bad dream.”

  Her neck arched away from me; her hands squeezed themselves against each other. “And you just now realized it? How could that be? It’s so unlikely that anyone here would actually know a patient.”

  “It cannot be, if what my husband said was true about where she came from or how long she stayed before arriving here. She could not have been in the hospital before the last Indian war if she is the one I remember. She would have been in the war itself, taken from her homeland near the lakes and marched to Yakima and then imprisoned.”

  “But to have sat beside her all this time … are you certain you have some experience with her?” Her look turned cautious.

  I took a deep breath. “She spoke my name. A name given me in a special ceremony that not even Dr. Thomas knew.”

  Arlita looked over my shoulder at Wuzzie, back into my eyes, searching.

  “We’ll check her records,” she said. “Perhaps contact people from her previous hospitalization. Meanwhile, you stay with her, just as you always have.” She turned to leave then stopped, her wide skirts rustling at the quick change in direction. “What were you doing differently yesterday?”

  “Weaving. With reeds. I wove a treasure basket and she made a dog. Like ones the children play with. She gave it to me and said ‘gift’ in the language of the people.”

  “Good. Get the reeds out again. And talk with her. In your language, if you think that’ll help. Law or no law. Let them prosecute us for speaking a native tongue.” She clucked her tongue in disgust. “I’ll talk with Dr. Adams. His is the kindest way. Not taken to quick judgments.” And she left to find him.

  Beside Wuzzie I sat close, as family, held my memory knots in my hand. My fingers wore the scent of leather as I told the stories from the knots, shared a part of me so personal yet in words I hoped would give her images of snow geese thick in flight against the spring sky, the smell of tule tubers lifted from the soft mud of the marshes near the Malheur, the rustle of wind in the willows. I spoke of children playing, laughing, of Wren squatting beside a winnowing basket, of Lukwsh’s warm fire roasting sagebrush gum outside her wickiup. I talked of Flake, the way he sneezed and flushed the ducks to the nets, chewed on my fingers and mentioned a hawk that followed a grandmother.

  Like a careful elder, I related the library of my memory, attempted to capture details of the way life moved before I went away, before I walked as one.

  Wuzzie did not speak. But she sat taller as though aware of what I told her. When I stopped, she turned to me, and the line of eyebrow that met above her nose pinched less, marked pleasure on her face.

  On the following day, I braved the knots that talked of leaving, of losing Shard, of Salmon Eyes and Stink Bug and their chase, of all the shame I felt at having hurt the ones I loved. I recounted the quaking earth, my anger and my sadness, my time of waiting beside the rushing Deschutes River.

  She still chose silence, but as I spoke of finding strength with the most powerful Spirit who had words that promised he would never leave, did not demand a sacrifice for making errors, who wanted only love and trust, I saw her face soften, noticed she chose not to clamp her jaw.

  “This Spirit chooses to walk with us,” I said, “stays behind when people we know are gone.”

  “The record is a little vague,” Dr. Adams said as we stood in the foyer of the activity room. I recognized him as the doctor who came to rescue Red Mop the first day I sat beside Wuzzie. He held a ledger-looking book that recorded events of interest to his patients.

  “It does say she came from Washington Territory but not a hospital. From Fort Vancouver. They probably had an infirmary there. But it says she’s a Bannock Snake, out of Idaho. Nothing about being—what was it you said—a Wadaduka or a Paiute person.”

  “Could Thomas have read it wrong?”

  Dr. Adams paused, read, shook his head. “Nothing more than that.” He pawed through the sheaves of paper brittle now with age, moving them left to right as he read.

  “Look there,” Arlita said, stopping him. “On the back of that page. Something’s stuck to it.”

  She pulled at the fragile page delicately, as if separating cooked artichoke leaves, until she held a thin page from the past in her hand.

  “Ink’s faded into the back of the other page some,” Dr. Adams noted. He paused to see what he could gather up. “Some reference here to relatives.” He read again while I wondered if I could be mistaken. But the name, my name, so few would know it.

  “A Mr. Parrish,” Dr. Adams read, “says he used to be the agent at Malheur, sent a letter on her behalf, it looks like.” His eyes squinted at the script written on paper so thin I could see ink letters like veins beneath pale skin. “Apparently when they herded everyone into Fort Harney, before they marched them to Fort Simcoe. Doesn’t say exactly why he’s asking. Mixed-up, too, because Parrish calls Wuzzie ‘him.’ Somehow, what got transferred with her makes it sound like she’s Bannock. And it looks like she never went to Fort Simcoe. No mention of it. Just the infirmary in Washington Territory at the Vancouver Barracks.”

  I held my tongue, did not explain, still too uncertain. I listened to the sounds of patients walking past us, the crackle of cool linoleum beneath their feet.

  “That’s what this letter is about?” Arlita asked. “Nothing about others who were with her, someone we might still find or contact?”

  Dr. Adams sucked on his lower lip, his teeth reminding me of Grey Doe’s as he squinted over the record. “Not really. Wait. Someone asked Parrish to intervene, have her sent to Fort Vancouver with a few others instead of Fort Simcoe, though it doesn’t say why. Let me see if I can make out that name a little better.”

  He held the letter away from his eyes. “This ink fades and smudges so easily.”

  “Let me,” Arlita said, reaching for it. “I’m familiar with hen scratchings of doctors so this should be no challenge.”

  Dr. Adams grunted good naturedly and turned the letter around for Arlita.

  “Here, in this paragraph,” he pointed as she studied the page.

  I watched them pore over the words, but my mind returned to the year of the lan
d quaking, the year I made my way from Stink Bug, Shard, the Wuzzie that was a man. Only a few seasons separated those events from people leaving the rhythm of land they were familiar with, the cadence of moving and traveling, seed harvests and hunts and living on the Malheur Reservation, a place that no longer existed.

  Sarah Winnemucca had written of it, too, published a book about the people and their plight that Mother Sherar had sent to me from one of their trips back east.

  Even with their choice to blend, it had not been enough for the Paiutes, who had chosen to live as owls. They’d been herded like cattle—the agency Indians who had not raised a fist in fight—made to stand and sleep and starve in snow up to their bellies beside Rattlesnake Creek. The food houses at Fort Harney stood empty feeding five hundred people, and the new agent, Rhinehart, the Methodist minister agent, did not respond to requests for stores of food and clothing. Women and children had only threadbare blankets. And then they were ordered north, Wadaduka people, to prison. A blizzard near Canyon City stalled them. Women, children, and the elders, moving slowly north, broke bark from trees to eat the soft layers beneath. They died anyway, tossed stiff beside the road while the agent Rhinehart wrote angry letters to the government about “his Indians being taken away” and what should he do “with 65,000 pounds of beef that now would spoil.”

  I am lost to my remembering, recalling without effort the anger I had felt on reading Sarah’s English book. So I did not hear at first what Arlita offered when she looked at me after deciphering the agent’s letter.

  “Please say again,” I said.

  “I think it says Shard,” she said. “See here. Shard Johnson. He’s the one the agent writes for. Says he’s asked for special treatment of this Wuzzie.”

  My head began to spin.

  “Does the name Shard Johnson mean something to you, Alice?”

  “Not possible,” I said. “The Shard I know is dead.”

  “What year would that have been?” asked Dr. Adams, unaware that my world had gone awry. “Maybe this was written earlier.”

  “The year of the quaking earth.”

  “He died in ’72? Well, can’t be him then because this letter was written in 1879. Unusual name, though.”

  “There were many Johnsons in the Malheur country. One was a blacksmith. Shard worked for him,” I said, my voice sounding far away even to myself.

  “Know lots of Johnsons myself,” Dr. Adams said. “Portland’s full of them.”

  “Indian people have taken last names of those they admired. Perhaps this Shard did that,” I told him.

  “It’s the ‘Shard’ word I thought unusual,” Dr. Adams said. “Never heard of it as a name. Doesn’t it mean a piece of something shattered?”

  “Something once useful that has been broken, yes,” I said. “And when blended with fresh clay creates new strength.” A world once kept tied up in my memory knots began unraveling.

  “There are some others here too, Dr. Adams,” Arlita said, bringing her inquisitive eyes back to the thin pages of the letter. “Look.”

  “Asks that he—keeps mixing that man and woman business up—that he, Wuzzie, be kept with Lukwsh and Wren when he’s sent to Fort Vancouver. Guess he wanted those two women together. But this Shard wasn’t asking to stay with them. Humph. This Lukwsh woman was his mother.”

  His eyes lifted to me, this Dr. Adams, then he suggested I take a seat.

  “You’re pale as a fresh-washed bed sheet, woman! What’s the matter?”

  I moved briskly to the Methodist Church, my feet splashing without notice through water pooling on the boardwalks. Only later did I realize my wet shoes would remain so throughout the concert as I had neglected to bring my change of slippers; my cloth purse swung empty on my wrist.

  The DeMoss Lyric Bards were playing banjos, coronets and singing that night, and I had need of great distraction, a wish for music to take away the startled thinking that had seized that day. I slipped in beside an older woman who nodded her head at me politely, added a smile of encouragement as she patted the seat beside her while I removed my poke.

  “They haven’t started yet, dearie. Haven’t missed a thing. They say they’ve played for the Russian Czar and even sung in Switzerland, and they’re right here. Imagine! I like the message they always give, myself,” she added, leaning toward me.

  I nodded my head absently, acknowledged her presence, then buried my face in the paper program, though I did not take time to read the words. My world still spun from my afternoon.

  Dr. Adams helped me to a chair, and Arlita brought me water. Both stood like night owls caught in daylight, staring at me in wonder.

  “Survives hearing a woman talk who hasn’t said a word for years and then about passes out from a letter more’n ten years old she says is written for a dead person!” Dr. Adams said. “You know these people?”

  I drank the water, sipping slowly both to be sure I did not drift away and to ration time to think.

  “I did know them,” I whispered. “But something happened. Years past. They helped me leave. And Shard … well, Shard died. Is dead.” I said it with finality. “He died the year of the quake. In my place. Because Wuzzie ordered it.”

  Arlita gasped. Dr. Adams scratched at his face, seeking sense.

  “But he couldn’t have died then,” he said, “not the year of the quake, or he wouldn’t have been alive to secure Mr. Parrish’s help those, what, seven years later. Must be some mistake, Mrs. Crickett. Either you’ve got the date wrong or this Shard didn’t die when you thought he did. He was still alive, at least in ’79.”

  “Maybe Wuzzie can tell us,” Arlita said, “if you really want to know?”

  I trembled at the thought and the insight of her question.

  Wuzzie would not speak of it, even when Arlita asked. A part of me expected that; it was too soon. When she did, if she did, it would be in the language of the people. And so I sat alone with her again, our hands on green willows I had cut fresh from beside the Santiam River.

  “Pussy willows,” Arlita called the ones with fuzzy buds waiting to unfold.

  Wuzzie’s hands were moving quickly forming a treasure basket, and I wondered when she learned to make such women’s things having spent much of her life living as a man. Who had taught her how to twist the willows? Had a mother placed her fingers over Wuzzie’s as a child, showed her lovingly what to do? Or had she been like me, learning with her eyes, watching others, always seeking recognition by her actions, always longing to be loved for just being who she was?

  Her fingers threaded the long strands, and for a moment I was taken back into the time of moving with our Wadaduka band, dogs loaded, making our way to the mountains for huckleberries or south for piñion nuts. We filled our burden baskets only with essentials, carried the baskets on our backs with a tumpline tight across our heads. Shaped like a funnel, the bottom of the basket left little room for stuffing burdens, while the top opened wide so someone could walk beside and see how another’s burdens pulled against a tumpline, caused an aching head, and they could better reach inside the opening and lift a portion of another’s burden.

  “I made a long journey,” I said. “Like a seed blown by the wind. It took me to you and then Sherar’s Bridge and now here, to be with you. You came another way. But like a seed, there is more to unfold with the right water and wind. I can help you from your bad dream. And you can help me from mine. But you must speak with me. And with the others who are here to help you make your way.”

  Our hands worked in rhythm side by side with no words to break the silence. But she made a treasure basket that day, not a burden basket, though she wove her willows into a basket larger than most. Wuzzie held it tight when Arlita came to take it from her. She shook her head and clutched it.

  “It will be a comfort,” I suggested.

  “No harm in it,” Arlita shrugged as she motioned Wuzzie to her room. As she shuffled out, Wuzzie looked over her right shoulder to see if I still watched. A look of pleasur
e eased into the crinkled crease of her smile.

  So I came to this church where Thomas Crickett often took me to hear quartets of strings or choral groups who filled the air with joy. “Music always soothes the weary soul,” he’d said, and so I had come to hear a concert, to put my thoughts aside, listen to the music and the ministry that followed, hoping I would have direction.

  It was a night of hopefulness despite George DeMoss’s overture, which included a detailed rendition of “General Custer’s Last Battle,” which seemed to me to glorify the army for their errors. But “Sweet Oregon” and “Glockenspiel” and the banjo band and even George De Moss’s playing two coronets at once delighted me, though they were not enough to stop my thoughts of Wuzzie and her secrets, of Shard, and wondering about his.

  Between numbers, the DeMosses, who had a home not far from Ella and Monroe Grimes back near the green river of Finnigan, shared their walk of faith. George spoke of a seed so small it could hardly be seen, and as he described it, I saw a black wada seed, smaller than a dot yet when put together with a thousand more could make a meal.

  “Faith,” he said above the coughs of his audience, the scraping of slippers on oak, “is accepting that God has plowed a new field for you, torn up all the weeds and dug out all the rocks. And you can plant that field the way God wants you to, not the way you remember planting it before. God makes you new to do all things with him.

  “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed … a mustard seed.” He pinched the air. “Imagine how tiny that is. Well, our Lord himself promised if you have even that little bit of faith, almost impossible to see, then no harvest will be impossible for you.”

  They closed the program with a song that sounded like chiming bells. But it was their gospel tune, right before it, that moved my eyes to tears.

  “If you believe and I believe and we together pray, the

  Holy Spirit must come down and set God’s people free.”