He pulled then from beneath his shirt collar a tiny chain that sparkled gold against the darkness of his skin, glittered like moonlight on the river. At the end hung the familiar Christian cross. With its presence in his hand, I knew at last my journey ended. I had found where I belonged.
THE TWENTY-SECOND KNOT
ROSY EVERLASTING
We planned to marry within the week at a service officiated by the circuit Presbyterian minister and held in the church at Seekseequa Shard showed me in the morning.
“Built it ourselves,” he said. “Picked this spot where two ravines crossed. Perfect place. Someday, we’ll have our own Presbyterian minister. For now, we all take turns until the circuit rider comes more than once every three or four months.”
The building gleamed with Ponderosa pine inside and out, from the small porch to the steeple. A dozen rows of wooden benches lined either side of a narrow interior flooded with natural lighting from four windows on either side. On a back wall, beside the coat hooks, people had carved their names with dates of their arrival. At the front stood a huge wooden cross flanked by twin tables, one of which held two fawn-colored beeswax candles on either side of a Bible.
As we walked across the floor, Shard noticed a squeak, walked back and forth on a board to make the sound again, decided the cause, then bent with his nails to tighten the squeaky pine.
“And there is no arguing about the old beliefs?”
“We work at putting all things into place,” he said, as I walked around the cool room, touched the backs of smooth pews. “Ours always was a solitary connection to the Creator when we stayed at the lakes.” He removed a nail from between his lips so I could understand him better. “This Presbyterianism, it tells us how to keep the friendship we have with the Creator but how to include our neighbors as well. There were conversions at Fort Simcoe. Some of those who fell on their faces to claim the Christian God there and in The Dalles wore masks, hid their true feelings. They only danced to win favor. I understood this. But some heard their names called and made him their own.”
Shard spoke with firm words that filled me with wonder at the worlds our Spirit led us through, revealed himself inside of, then let us follow him to here.
“I wonder if those I rode with in the wagon were this Presbyterian,” I said, thinking of a time so long ago.
“Does it matter?” Shard asked as he came to stand beside me. He folded me in his arms. “What matters is their hearts. They wore the cross.”
“You remember that?” I said, pulling back to look at him.
“I found it at the base of Dog Mountain. But I didn’t want to share it. I thought it would make you want to go.” His look dropped with some embarrassment to the floor. “Only when Wuzzie—Lukwsh said you should have it, then, for your journey.”
We stood enfolded in each others arms for a time, listening to the call of ravens in the distance, the warble of songbirds from the rosebush outside the window.
“What they had to give, they gave, my parents did. And Lukwsh, too. A sturdiness to keep going, a wish to have our longings filled, and a Spirit who would do it.”
“It is what I hoped for all along,” Lukwsh said, her eyes glistening as we shared our plans to marry. “I worried when you talked of long houses, afraid that is all you know, that you will not accept our Christian ways, Asiam. We honor old ways and the ways of others. But we reach out to what we feel is true.”
“We could wait longer to marry, to give time for others to join us.” I thought of the Sherars and Ella, of Sunmiet and Ann, even the headman, Wewa, and his family, who lived at Seekseequa but traveled now, away.
“Take advantage of the circuit rider coming,” Lukwsh said, her chin pointed toward the road. “Have a giveaway later, after you come back and can announce your family.”
She grinned, and I heard a cackle not unlike that once given by Grey Doe when she spoke of growing families.
The service would be long with Scripture readings and promises made, followed by much singing and as many kinds of foods as we could gather together in a short time.
“It reminds me of a naming long ago. We had so little time,” Lukwsh said as we bustled about, fixing fry bread, adding water to dried huckleberries for a special pie. “And so it is!” she said as though she just discovered it. “You take on a new name today. Maybe two? Do you say you are Asiam or this Alice M now?”
I had already considered this. “Alice is easier for people to remember and less formal than ‘Mrs. Johnson.’ But I will never stop being Shell Flower, or even Asiam.”
“Too bad you are not marrying in spring,” she said. “We could have a flower festival like the one you missed and bury your arms in them. That would make your eyes shine!”
I laughed. “I’ll have no trouble finding shining eyes!”
To marry the one who held me in his mind, I wore my traveling clothes. A purple dress with purple jacket, a hundred tiny pleats, my knots of smoked leather tucked beneath my lavender blouse. Mother Sherar’s Stetson hat, chin strings dangling to my hands, covered my widow’s peak in the front, let wisps of hair fuzz from the back.
Shard handed me a bouquet of pussytoe stems, the silver-gray shiny against my purple skirt. “I like Mrs. Sherar’s name for the pussytoes,” he said. “It is how our love is: rosy everlasting.”
He stood almost sideways to me after handing me the stems, and I settled them in front of me, clasped and unclasped my wet fingers around them, adjusted my hat. I checked my moccasins, too, a special beaded pair made by Vanilla Leaf and handed me with a welcome smile that morning. We waited for the signal to come inside.
My future husband chewed on the side of his finger, his other arm crossed over his stomach, and for a moment my mind flew back, twenty years or more, to the morning I first saw him, first woke inside Lukwsh’s lodge and wondered if this boy judged me kindly.
“Do butterflies live in your stomach, too?” I whispered.
He dropped his hand, looked sheepish, stood to face me, both hands on his hips, now, elbows out.
“They only make me wonder if what I hoped for will be better than the wish,” he said. Then he smiled, his eyes sparkling in the way that I remembered when we rode together to Steen’s Mountain. “Seeing you beside me already makes that so.”
Singing rose up behind us. He motioned me to take his arm, and we walked up the steps into Seekseequa Church.
God himself had joined us now together, and we vowed to him and to each other. And who would question that? We stood before him, travelers who had walked the trail he set before us. As if we needed living proof that we did not walk alone, the minister read from a Puritan’s prayer as though the author had been eavesdropping on our lives:
O Supreme Moving Cause,
May I always love thee,
Submit myself to thee,
Trust thee for all things.
Permit me to rejoice
forever in thy love,
And love, to water my soul.
“You are husband and wife together,” announced the minister, Elijah Miller. “And what God has brought together let no man put asunder.” His words were followed by much rejoicing and slaps on the back for Shard, hugs and gentle presses of hands to the face for me.
Before we could walk out, we had a final joining meant to keep us close together, safe inside the love of friends and family. It was what I felt, warm and gathered up within the Hudson Bay blanket they wrapped around us; people blended from my past with new ones, laughter bubbling out like friendly springs at Home Creek.
I looked around the gathering at the smiling faces of Lukwsh and others and for a moment thought I saw Wren and Grey Doe standing there, even Stink Bug. I blinked my eyes. The circle felt almost complete.
My first night as Alice Johnson stays a misty dream. Several times I pinched myself at the way the circle came to close, how the charm was broken. We lay together held in a comforter of down, needed that first week of October. The Hudson Bay wedding blanket wa
s folded at the foot of the bed. In the distance I heard geese call to each other, expected a light fog to lift from the creek in the morning. In a few days, we would leave for the agency to make arrangements for Shard to be gone. A few days after that, a trip to Salem, and then on to Shard’s promise of the ocean.
For now, the knot of tangled vines described me, as though I had not held a husband in my arms before.
“There is no reason to be fearful, Asiam. Alice,” he corrected himself.
A giggle rose up. “You do not know the woman you choose to sleep with, Mr. Johnson?”
“I know,” he said and pulled me tighter to him. “I have waited a lifetime for the privilege. Your name has changed, but you are still the one whose hair is like the sunset. The one I do not wish to live without.”
His fingers combed through the kinks of my hair, lifted and fanned the thickness from around my neck. He touched the leather necklace of knots. “You will tell me of the memories sometime?”
“If you want to hear them.”
“All that has crossed your walk. I want to know all about those years.”
“What about your scars?” I asked. “The real ones on your face—this one here?” My fingers outlined a wound the size of a bullet hole near his shoulder, the ripple of a burn scar on his ribs.
“Not tonight.”
“I have new memories to add to my string of knots,” I said. I sat up to slip the leather over my head and show him where I tied the last one. “This time at Seekseequa, finding you. They are like notes in a song, these knots.”
I touched each one, felt the rhythm of their memory. “My husband—former husband—Thomas Crickett liked words and their past. One comes to me now looking at these knots: charm. From an old language no longer spoken, but it meant ‘song’ and sometimes ‘a gathering of finches.’ Perhaps that is where the song part came from, the birds in their joy giving us a charm. Now it means more, something that attracts but in a strange way, like the antelope hunt. I liked the old meaning, a song and a gathering. It still smells of smoke.” I held the necklace to my nose, inhaled the fascinating song of my past.
“Smoked hides carry the scent a long time. Keep it off,” he said, his hands moving over my fingers and the knots as I started to put it back on. “Remember it, those songs and charms, but do not keep the past between us. There is hope in your life now and a strong Spirit. That is all you need.”
And so I took it off, tiptoed across the cool floor to hang it on the side of the mirror. My skin formed bumps. In the lamplight, I saw his reflection in the mirror. Wide shoulders, bare, leaned against twists of iron that formed the headboard made by his hands.
“Come here now,” he said, his arms open wide to me as I turned, wide in invitation to where I belonged. “Let there be no old songs between us, now or ever.”
“So we will be able to leave directly from Salem?” I asked about arrangements Shard had worked out with the agent and the managers at the mill.
He nodded. “At Empire City there is a mill built by A. J. Simpson. It is a long trip south by ship after we reach the ocean, but there are things to learn from how they manage the logs there.” We rode north again to The Dalles, this time on a stage we had picked up at Wapinitia, perched on a juniper flat at the edge of the reservation.
Another couple’s knees touched ours as they lodged themselves in the small space across from us. The woman scowled at me from beneath the shade of her bonnet, and her lip curled as she looked at my husband. Her tongue clucked in disgust. Her man slept, his mouth open, lower lip bouncing like a flap of old fat, jarred by the stage wheels attacking the rutted road. She had enough trouble, I decided, ignoring that skirmish.
At the Columbia, we boarded the train west to East Portland then south to Salem, and though it was my husband’s first time in these large cities, they neither charmed nor cowered him.
“Some time will pass before we come back,” Shard said. “We need to make plans before we leave about Wuzzie and what things you want to take with you from your time in Salem.”
I felt a seed of irritation that someone else now started to organize my days. The thought reminded me that I walked a different path now, not just two people on the same road but like a span of horses, two working together on a course neither had walked before.
Some thoughts formed that had not yet been said out loud. They had been swirling in my thinking since Shard and Lukwsh spoke of what they remembered about leaving Fort Harney and Wuzzie’s difficult time, things that may have molded into her bad dream. As we jostled along on the bumpy road, I thought of what they told me not long before we left.
“Tell me what you remember about Wuzzie, what happened there,” I asked Lukwsh and Shard the day after our marriage. We pushed Lukwsh’s chair along the path used to gather willows for baskets.
“It is not yet the best time to choose willow,” Lukwsh said, “but I like to see which ones to pick when all the leaves are gone.” The trail ran bumpy and narrow. Arrow sniffed in the grasses, beneath bare willow branches, pushed against me, and I remembered how much gladness those balls of fur could give. I decided then not to hold back as I had with Thomas’s Benny, but risk the pain of losing for a powerful present joy.
“You must go farther back,” Lukwsh said with no joy in her voice, “before the war. None of us wanted to go to the reservation at first. Who wants to give themselves away? And Wuzzie objected. And the army came, treated our headmen like deciders. We just wanted their wisdom when we needed, not to have them speak for us.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Who can say what might have happened if we had stayed away?”
“Nothing worse,” Shard said.
“There! Go over to that one,” Lukwsh pointed to a section of sweeping red willow that branched out wide from the bottom into the open sky like arms of praise. Wind had whipped the leaves bare. “See there, those without branches, the young ones. Cut those.” Shard pulled his obsidian knife from its sheath at his waist and began to slice. “This place gave us good willow last year. No breaking when we took the bark with our little moons of obsidian. Some pull the branch through a tin can hole now, so who can know if it is a good willow or what?”
“Not traditional enough for you, Mother?” Shard teased as he brought an armful of branches to her.
“Those short ones,” she said, “we save those for the cradle board hood. Weave diamond shapes for the first one. It will be a girl,” she said to me and cackled, handed me one of her knives.
I wedged a rock beneath one wheel to balance her and stepped into the willows, my hands awkward from being so long away from the knife. But the rhythm returned, and I found several branches without scars that would make good sapwood when peeled, become as thread to the basket weavers.
We sat for a time letting the warm sun gather us along the bank, stripping bark from the willows that were strong but soft, like the cords along Shard’s arms that strained as he worked. In the scraping and stacking, the two began to talk about the days before the war. And after.
“The men were asked to do things as white men. We planted and sowed grain and made hay their way. When we got them, we ran mower and hay forks. I learned to fix them, from Mr. Johnson. We built huge barns and put food there and blankets, when they came. At first, it was not so bad. We were paid in rations for work, but Mr. Parrish understood our way to feed the needy, too.”
“To do otherwise would violate the blessing that comes with caring for those less favored,” Lukwsh said.
“Mr. Parrish ordered up the sawmill. When it came, we felled trees and planed lumber and sold it to the ranchers. They ran cattle where we once had our wickiups.”
“We learned how to blend, na?”
“The women worked with Mary Parrish.”
“Yes,” Lukwsh said, smiling at the memory. “We called her the White Lily. So soft, her skin, and good to us. She taught us sewing. Some girls are women now and teach at the boarding school at Warm Springs. They know how to make dresses of calico but a
re not allowed to instruct how to tan hides.” She shook her head. “They hear the rhythm of their feet at those machines instead of the drums or children being sung to sleep.”
“And then the trouble started,” Shard said, his words biting to get this story told. “With Rhinehart and the Bannocks not getting supplies. Everything changed. Some of the Nevada Paiutes were at the agency with us and confused things. A few left with Oytes, who raided near Canyon City and wanted to join up with the Umatillas and fight the war. I thought about it, but it would solve nothing. But after that mix-up, even if you did nothing wrong, you had to stay on the reservation. They kept food from us, though beef was stacked in the warehouses. We grumbled but no one listened. Wuzzie rattled the agent workers, and with the raids and rumors, it turned bad.”
“I know some of this,” I told them, “from the newspaper and Sarah’s book. But not Wuzzie’s part or what might help her now.”
“We were not even a part of the war,” Shard said, telling all in order, not letting me rush them. “But when the army took those who did fight, they did not separate us. They herded all Indians into Fort Harney. It was a cold month, lots of snow. There were five or six hundred. Many from different places. Some had fought, but most had stayed away from the fighting. They drove us like cattle into Fort Harney. Named for an army man who killed Sioux.” He spit to rid himself of the bad taste. “Like cattle, dividing men from women and children into barracks meant for thirty. Almost one hundred squeezed into such little places.”
Shard became silent for a time. My eyes watched my fingers stripping willows.
He stood up, stepped a little apart from us, his wide hands at his hips, eyes across Seekseequa Creek, opening to the past.
“Wuzzie and other leaders, they tried to tell the soldiers once again that we had not fought them, that we did not shoot our rifles at uniforms, had only farmed and learned their ways. Wuzzie’s voice was high and scratchy from the days of talking and the worry over the women and the children whom we had not seen. He pulled at his shoulder like he did in disgust, stomped on the unseen spider he threw to the ground. So cold! And the wind drove snow into our faces like tiny obsidian chips. Our eyes dried up. Our breath froze and so did our lips so when we talked we sounded foolish, like feeble-minded men.