“Lukwsh and Wren worked there. I learned machinery and iron work from Sam Johnson. We all broke the land and planted with Mr. Parrish’s help. Two thousand acres in wheat, he told us. Mr. Parrish was a good man. We harvested one crop with only Lukwsh’s knives. The Washington fathers refused to send us tools. Women sewed. Wren helped the White Lily, Mrs. Parrish, in the school. We did what we could. Sarah came some to speak the words between us until we learned English.”
He stood up, paced a distance from me toward his tethered horse stomping impatience. He rubbed the animal’s nose, seemed to gather courage, and returned.
“Then the government sent Mr. Parrish away, gave us this Christian.” He spit in the dirt and I shivered. “Rhinehart made slaves of us, put our crops into locked sheds. Only those who worked as he said could eat from it. If we wished to give some to those who still gathered seeds beside the lakes, give gifts to those who needed it, he locked the doors twice. It was not what I remember from Sarah’s words about the Christians. It was a bad time. And then the war.” He took a deep breath. “But that is over. Today, you are a gift.” He lifted my hands. “One I do not deserve. And I want to hear of you, which people you allowed to love you, help you along.”
Stillness overcame me. Where to begin in the circle of my memory knots?
“Night comes,” he said then into the quiet, to save me. “We should go now.” A breeze moved the feather from behind his ear. He bent to retrieve his hat, my fishing rod.
I moved as if to stand, but he had stopped. His arm surrounded my shoulder, and he pulled me up to him.
“I thank God for you, Asiam.” His voice was thick, deep like a drumbeat in my ear. “Thank him that you are real, beside me, and not some lost dream I will wake up from.”
He lifted my chin with his fingers then so that I could look at him, gently rubbed the dark line along my jaw, the markings of a lost child, now found. Just before he bent to brush his lips against my own, he spoke the words I never thought my ears would hear from him, longed to, to know that I was loved, was worthy and belonged.
“And now, if you will have it,” he said, “I will take you home.”
THE TWENTY-FIRST KNOT
HOME
We understand that a few Piute Indians intend wintering in this city and supporting themselves by doing odd jobs of any kind. Some of the Piutes are very industrious and well-to-do.—Grant County News, Canyon City, Oregon, 1891
What of the others?” I asked, still not wanting to speak much of my ways, a feeling of hesitation separating us like a woven willow wall. He had pulled me up behind him on his bay. The evening breeze chilled against my wet legs, but my face burned hot resting into the rough wool of his coat. He carried the Tonkin rod in his right hand, the silk line moving like a fine web in the breeze. Yellow rabbit brush sent up puffs of color and strong scent as Shard maneuvered the horse through the shrubs.
“Wren is gone,” he said, his voice tight, bound in sadness. “She did not survive the journey from Fort Harney.” His words came from far away, and I was glad I did not have to see the anguish in his face. “My sister had no fat stored on her to resist the bitter cold. We had few blankets. Wuzzie tried, gave everything to her, but it did nothing. Even the army’s coats they gave the men were not enough draped over her in the snow. One morning, she did not wake up. Her face was as spring ice, so thin and cold. They would not wait for us to have a ceremony, so her bones are there, still. Scattered by the dogs and high water of John Day’s River in spring now.”
“So Wuzzie’s water babies took her anyway,” I said.
He twisted to look at me. “No … no water babies took her.” He turned back. “Lukwsh still lives.”
“She does! Where?”
“I hunt for her, keep her in venison and choke cherries.” I felt his grin as he sat straighter, took a deeper breath against my arms. He seemed pleased to speak of happy things. “And she keeps my house.”
“She is at Warm Springs?” I asked, pleasure coming from knowing that she lived—and that his mother, not someone else, kept his house.
He laughed. “She’d have long arms to tend me from anywhere else. Yes. She’s there and would come to see her Asiam, but she doesn’t travel much now. One foot she lost to frostbite on the journey north. Some toes later—to an injury that did not heal and rotted her other foot. I made her a chair with wheels, and she moves around pretty good. She waits to see you.”
“So much,” I said without thinking. “My Spirit has led me to so much.”
Shard stayed quiet, and I did not know if the mention of my Spirit troubled him or if his mind had moved to other thoughts.
“Grey Doe died. Near Seneca,” he said. “She found herself beneath a heavy wagon. She could not move fast enough in snow. Her shoulder slowed her. The food rotted in the storehouses and still the agent Rinehart would not let the people eat. So Grey Doe was weak as well as slow. Mr. Parrish tried to help, but Rhinehart told the army not to listen to him.”
“Mr. Parrish did write a letter.”
“You know of this?” he asked, turned in surprise.
“Before Wren died. He asked that she and Grey Doe and Lukwsh and Wuzzie go as family. That you asked for this. All but Wuzzie made sense.”
“You have seen these words?”
I shook my head. “It belongs to Wuzzie’s story. Wuzzie set me on this search for Lukwsh and Wren. Helped me find you.”
“Wuzzie?”
“Wuzzie is in Salem. In the Oregon Asylum. Until last year, my husband was the doctor who looked after that one.”
Shard rode quietly, shook his head. “We are a small family walking around a circle.”
“Wuzzie does not speak, is caught in a web. Still is. You knew about …?”
His eyes remained forward helping the horse pick its way in the growing twilight. The roar of the river as we approached it drowned out conversation as we followed the road toward the inn. Pale lamplight flickered in the window, warm and welcoming.
“Did you know about Wuzzie?” I asked again when the night sounds allowed it.
He nodded yes. “How is what I do not wish to think of. Lukwsh knows more.”
The horse stumbled in the growing dark, caught itself, and I grabbed him more tightly at his center.
“As for the others,” he continued, “except for Stink Bug, who died in the war, they are scattered. There was no need for fighting. If they had given out the food, none of it would have happened.” He paused. “Some went to Walker River with Sarah and her school.” The word “Sarah” is bitten like an angry man. “In the end, she could do nothing for us. Others made themselves lost in the eastern towns and alleys. Thirty-eight came to Warm Springs first, then another seventy or so. I came with the last, but it has been almost ten years now.” He shook his head as if surprised at how the time had passed.
“A few are back at Malheur, took the land allotments and have farms of their own. Some work at white men’s ranches on fields they are familiar with. It is where they gathered seeds and hunted ducks. I would be wary there. Too strange to be taken away from all you know for no reason and then brought back to the same place but told by someone else how you must be. Too hard to make sense of all the time you were away.”
“It is a strangeness,” I agreed.
We reached the hitching rail at the stone wall of the inn. I slid off the horse, took the rod, and Shard stepped down beside me, led the horse to the trough. He stood, reins loose in his hands. I could feel the heat from his shoulder burning like a branding iron into mine. The horse’s soft slurp like a whistle played against the cicadas, the distant falls, the smell of river and dust. Shard leaned back, put his arm around my shoulder, pulled me to him.
“We will make sense of it, together, Asiam.”
“Can’t you stay another day or two?” This from Mother Sherar. “Seems like we just got you and you’re gone. Not even a minute to see Ella or Carrie or meet our newest grandbaby, Mabel!”
“Let the girl be,
Mother. Can’t you see she’s on a mission? Time enough for visitin’ when she’s made her peace.”
“Well, what’s left to find?” she said to Joseph. “There he is”—she lifted her palm to Shard, as though directing a choir to sing—“standing right before your eyes, the dead resurrected!”
“For both of us,” Shard said, smiling.
“Lukwsh,” I told her, “who is like a mother to me, too. I would see her again. And what she may tell me about Wuzzie, the one who sent me on this journey. My first journey, too. I would end it with a healing if I can.”
“Well, I know you’re doing the right thing. I’m just green with wanting more time of yours, myself. This occasional visit to check on your sweet grapes doesn’t seem enough. Hope you can make the reservation in one day. Night comes earlier now, you know. That hat looks good on you, even if I did pick it out.”
“Like Shard’s.”
“So it is, Stetsons both. Quality. Functional, too. You can water your horse from it, the weave’s so tight.”
“Like the baskets my mother makes,” Shard said. “Or Sunmiet.”
“Why, I suppose that’s so,” Mother Sherar said, fussed at a thread on my jacket.
“Amber’s sound,” Joseph said. “Not the prettiest buckskin I’ve seen. Like the real pale ones myself, or a mule. But he’s big and surefooted and will get ye where ye need to be.”
Joseph Sherar patted the horse I traded him for. He patted the gelding’s rump affectionately, checked the cloth bag and bedroll tied behind my saddle. Stepped back, cane beside him. “And I will enjoy that rod,” he said, smiling, “though the offer stands: yours to use anytime you come to visit.”
“It will not sadden you, I hope, to know I have another bamboo rod.”
“Expected as much,” he said. “Tonkin?” He lifted one brow.
“No Tonkin cane.” I noticed his relief. “It was Thomas Crickett’s only Tonkin rod and his favorite. I believe it would please him to have it in the hands of someone who will appreciate its balance and its rare value.”
Shard had already mounted up as I am once again squeezed by Mother Sherar, surprised as always by the strength of her wiry body, the intensity of her care. Spirit arched himself against my skirt, stepped his soft paws on my moccasins, and purred. I scooped him up.
Father Sherar wiped his nose, sniffed as though struggling with a cold. Cat back on the ground, the big man grabbed me in a bear hug, my face buried in his red vest that smelled of leather and of cabbage.
“Let the Spirit bless ye, darlin’,” he whispered to me. He walked me around the horse and gave me a lift up with his hand before I answered.
“He does,” I said. “He already does.”
We rode out the Tygh Valley road, up the twisting ravine. Sagebrush and rocks and dirt hauled by the hands of many marked the road wide enough for the two of us to ride abreast, broad enough for stagecoaches, which I hoped we would not meet.
Most of the morning we spent in quiet comfort, adjusting to the presence of one held so long in my mind. I hoped Shard would not press too hard about the future—beyond my seeing Lukwsh—for I was in a surprising fog about it.
Amber tossed his head up and down, a spirited horse, the clank of his bit and the sound of hooves on the rocks the only breaks in the calm. Once or twice Shard’s eyes reached across the space between us, and I could see he shared the wonder that my eyes were looking back at his.
At Muller’s store in Tygh Valley we selected fresh apples brought by freight from Washington. Two small children with eyes like waiting owls peered out from behind the counter. I thought they stared at the feather braided into Shard’s hair. The clerk hesitated a moment when Shard handed him coins, watched Shard, who did not drop his eyes. But then Shard reached in his pocket to show his papers.
“Not necessary,” the clerk said, shook his head, his dark mustache bobbing as he talked. “Not necessary.” He nodded toward the two pairs of eyes below him. “Kids act like they’ve never seen anyone from the reservation before, but they have. Scoot now,” he told them, “quit your staring. Ain’t polite.” They scampered out. “Course, it ain’t often they see a prosperous one with a pretty white woman standing at his side. Sometimes see squaws following their white men, but not the other way around.”
Shard stiffened at the words, but I was glad this first of many times had come so I could see what I had learned, how keen my edges had been honed.
“A good mind inspects what is different,” I told the clerk, adjusting my leather gloves. “Children notice. It is wisdom winning over foolishness that reveals if what is regarded is treasured or said to not belong.”
The clerk was thoughtful then, not sure if I had offered him an insult or some acceptance of his words. “You think their starin’ is a compliment, ma’am?”
“It is my choice how I take it, and I take it as one,” I said and pulled my hat back on my head, adjusted the chin string. “I have waited a long time to stand beside this man,” I told him, taking Shard’s arm. “I am pleased that someone noticed.”
“There will be slaps like that one, but more painful,” Shard said as we rode away. “Before, from Grey Doe and Wuzzie and others because your face was not dark enough. Here, it will be because mine is too dark to be with yours. On the reservation, it may be as before. The Sahaptin-speakers and the Wascos are not all happy we are there; they may not be pleased that you are. Time has not changed some things.”
“When I first came to Sherar’s Bridge, I did not belong, even though I lived then among the people of my first parents. I did not find the peace I looked for with Sunmiet’s people nor Peter’s, nor even yours. When I left to live in Salem and walked among the mind-injured there, I did not belong. But I found a way. And now again I will find a way.” For I do not walk alone, I thought but did not say.
“I would like to find the way with you, Asiam.”
I shook my head, but a seed of worry settled in my stomach at how he would react when the time came to tell him of who walks with me on my journey.
At the stage stop at Wapanitia we gathered up some hard biscuits, hot coffee, and more stares, and did not stay long. We rode through hills of scattered juniper and meandering streams, up higher, past waxy leaves of scrub oak, the orange and red of turning stands of aspen, on into low timber.
A mule deer leaped before us, startled. It surged up a rocky outcropping, almost a straight wall of rocks from trail to sky. He clambered up and over, his muscles rolling, his breathing labored into snorts, his big rack cracking against the rocks and tree roots of the impossible place he had chosen to escape to. Smaller rocks of reds and yellows broke behind him, his feet breaking loose flows of dirt that cascaded like water as he crested the top and disappeared.
It had happened so quickly and with such power we both sat a moment, not sure we had witnessed this escape.
“I would not believe fear could push a deer straight up like that,” Shard said.
“Perhaps he sought the view that lies on top,” I told him.
Shard laughed. “I have a place to take you, to show you a great high view, if that’s what you think.”
“At Seekseequa?”
“That is a good place, too. But I think of one far from here. Where there are rocks and cliffs that angle like basket weavings, that overlook another world so far and deep you cannot see the end. The sea. I will take you there if you would have it.”
“The ocean! Yes, I would have it,” I told him, and in my excitement added, “And you.”
Shard exhaled as though he had been holding his breath. “I wondered if you would answer when I asked if I could take you home. Wondered what held you back.”
“After we see Lukwsh,” I said. “And when what becomes of Wuzzie is decided. I didn’t mean to hold back. I am here not just to see Lukwsh or discover more of Wuzzie, but to be with you for as long as you will have me.”
We bypassed Simnasho, the oldest village on the reservation settled into the dimple of red hil
ls, beyond a red lake. “Sunmiet is not here, and I am not always welcomed by others without an elder at my side,” Shard noted. “You do no qualify.” He grinned, looked for the placement of the sun. “We will ride beyond a ways yet, but will need to spend the night. See Lukwsh by midday tomorrow. We will not take time at the agency to show you the mill I work at—just let the agent know that I am back.”
At the Warm Springs river, we made a camp in the shadow of massive gray and red rocks marked by caves and outcroppings that looked like piles of red mud melted down the sides, overhangs with water marks like those left in mud by the receding lakes. A small fire heated the coffee, warmed our faces. Stars peeked out brightly in the sky, sparkled in the crisp air.
“In winter, stories are told about this place,” Shard said as he unrolled the bedrolls, “of Eagle and his brothers and their slave, Skunk—about that cave there. I am reminded of long nights in the wickiups hearing stories. The children snore and expect the same words each time. They know how the story will end and how it will begin again.”
“The elders have good memories, never need to write things down,” I said to him, wiping my hands in sand to clean them, rinsing my face with water from the river, watching my rippling image. “I still have my memory necklace, tied knots of time, if I ever wish to know. Remember?” I pulled it out to show him. “Lukwsh or Wren must have put it on Flake’s neck. It is almost all I keep from my time walking away from you.”
He held one of the knots in his fingers, and we stood close. “I do not know the ending, Asiam,” he said. “But I am pleased words were written, not just remembered.”
“Without Father Parrish’s letter, I doubt this search would have led me here,” I said as he stepped away. I lay down on the bedroll, and he covered me up over my shoulders, lay next to me on his.