Martha Jane comes to sit with me. She brings her doll, the one I made for her. The baby, oh, the baby “Millie” my last, who talks a streak at four and who thinks horses are big dogs meant for her to grab a tail and even walk beneath them. She has her ways. I think she is her father’s favorite as she is our last. My last. Before I am taken home. How I wish I could have been buried in Lapwai! But this Brownsville will do. Where our earthly bodies are planted is of no matter. We go where we are led by God and men whom God has placed in our lives. It’s where our souls soar to, a path of grace broken for me a long time ago. I am so grateful to have heeded the call. Grateful for my children. Grateful for Matilda too. When S was gone, it was Matilda who reminded me I was not alone.
15
Stretching through the Darkness
A year after the night when Andrew was returned by his friends, he did something lacking common sense. He’d been so faithful! But he left our cabin, left me alone, went out and “found himself at a game,” as though his body simply took control of his mind and his limbs. “Man has to have a little entertainment after being cooped up in a cabin with four women all year.”
Four women. Me, my sisters, and our America Jane holding her head up for just seconds while lying on her tummy. The kelpie stands beside her, vigilant, watching over the child. The dog takes on cattle at their noses, pushing them back, but with children, she is a guard dog, soft yet making sure that all is well. I seek a Kelpie for my marriage.
That Andrew would choose on his first outing on a late February day to be with his “friends” astounded me. What was the draw that led him to make a decision of such un-common sense? Doing what he wished. Making his way regardless of the impact on others.
He came home without liquor on his breath, so my ire was not as fueled as it might have been. Maybe he did need a small diversion. He had no money with him though, so I hoped the game was but a friendly one, the exchange of jokes and stories more than coins. We still had cattle and the horses when he returned, and he’d arranged for drovers to round them up for branding in the spring. Perhaps as my mother often said, all will be well.
In time, Andrew worked back into his former tasks while I took on baking goods Martha Jane and I whipped up for the “Rachels” of the region. The new enterprise brought in revenue, and I found satisfaction in contributing income to the family. I discovered there were a number of women lacking yeast bread skills. They welcomed the chance to purchase or trade for baked goods already prepared. Each year more people crossed the continent and came farther south from Oregon City, seeking land not already spoken for. October and November were the most difficult times for new arrivals, and I found I could put some coins or other trade goods aside by bringing baked goods into town to sell at Brown and Blakely’s. Andrew watched me put money in the tin bucket I kept in the back of the cupboard. I had another stash, too, one Andrew didn’t know about—for a crisis if one happened. Planning for how to respond to a disaster was not the same as “imagining” one in hopes of keeping it from happening. Was it? As a young mother I had moved on from that bad habit, one Rachel had said invited trouble. Not imagining a dreadful future gave me room to see happier possibilities: America Jane growing strong, walking and jabbering sometimes recognizable words.
Once while delivering the doughnuts alone, Martha and Millie at home chasing after America Jane, I came upon a camp of Kalapuya Indians filleting fish taken from the river. Their features did not startle me, but the fish blood did. For a moment I looked at the fish and people, smelling the fire, the wind in my face. And then I wasn’t.
What I remembered next was the touch of someone stroking my hair saying, “Yok-sa. Klose.”
“Good hair.” The words were Chinookan jargon, the hand touching the hair at my forehead cool and smelling of water and earth and smoked salmon. Brown eyes looked down at me, concern on their faces. They were not the tall-stature people like the Nez Perce or Cayuse but they loomed large over me. I tried to sit up, swooned again, but stayed with them, listening to my breathing. Maka tugged at grass off to the side. One sat behind me and I leaned against her. They were a quiet group in their movements, a beaten people, no longer staked by their land, clinging to a present history.
“You go away?” One spoke in English.
“Yes. I . . .” I looked around. I was in the middle of a group of women, maybe five. I smelled fish and saw the blood on their hands. My straw hat lay beside me. I swallowed, but I didn’t go away. “Thank you,” I said, seeking the Chinookan word but not finding it. I’d lost the language of the people who had left me behind at Waiilatpu.
“You fall. You hurt?”
I didn’t think I was. Apparently I’d slumped off Maka and landed in the tall grasses beside the river. Maka stood waiting, pulling at weeds. “I’m fine. Klose.”
They helped me up. One brought Maka around, then formed a stirrup of her palms, and I stepped inside, mounted sidesaddle, the way I rode in public.
“Fish?” one woman said. She squinted, looking up at me, holding the salmon. In that moment I remembered how the Nez Perce brought salmon to my family. Fish, sustenance; fish, a gift, salmon given up in season.
“I’d love some. Here.” I dug in my purse for coins, but she shook her head, nodding with her chin toward the baked goods we could all smell.
“Of course.” I opened the white towel covering three loaves of bread and handed them to her. The Brownsville Rachels would be short. She took but one loaf, returning the rest to me.
“Is enough.”
I tried to memorize their faces filled with smiles. They did not look like the Cayuse and I was grateful. In the distance, at the river’s edge, I heard a man shout, come up from the bank with another fish and a spear. They weren’t paying him attention. I knew the women were to be close to the water to take the catch and fillet them, set them at the fire to smoke while men speared or tended nets or traps. Torches lay beside the place where the women worked and I suspected they’d light them in the dark and continue both fishing and working through the night. Another woman wrapped my fish fillet with big leaves and I opened my pack for her to place it inside the leather. It must have weighed three times my loaf of bread and one end stuck out it was so long. “Dried by hatia.” The word popped into my head. I touched the part of the fish that stuck out. “Wind.” She looked confused, then must have made the translation from the Nez Perce.
“Aaaaah,” she said with a smile and I was reminded of Millie and her “I looooove that” as she dragged the word of happiness out.
“Aaaaah,” I said back.
Later that day when I returned from Blakely’s, they were still busy at it and I waved. They lifted their chins in recognition. Neighbors. Not strangers. I saw the fish blood but stayed in Brownsville on a spring day. Maybe in the future when I saw fish blood I would remember their kindnesses instead of the massacre when I was ten. This Brownsville was a klose place, even though it was where I lost my mother.
My father ignored me after church, but he did permit the girls to remain with us even after America Jane was born. I saw then how much my mother must have needed Matilda. She had four children and worked hard to paint Bible stories, teach, manage my father, learn Sahaptin—for all the good any of it did her. I taught the girls and I took it as a compliment that my father permitted me to be their teacher, given that I was “dead” to him. He liked seeing them twice a month at the Sabbath service. Especially Millie. She was his favorite, allowing her to interrupt when he spoke, giving in to requests for treats at the store. She was a fine young horsewoman, staying astride even riding bareback at a fast run. “I’m an eagle, flying,” she told me once. Her frame was slender as a pullet’s wishbone. She was a charmer too. I think all youngest children are, while oldest children are meant to always strive to be their parents, protecting even when young ones name it an intrusion. I could see how my father adored her. Still, I vowed I wouldn’t let that happen, let one child worm her way deeper into my heart than another.
Andrew was happy with his brood, or so I thought. He limped a bit but had resumed all duties, rode with his cattle for days at a time. When he returned, we nestled down with a good meal, a reading from the Word, something I’d begun after Andrew’s last trip to town. I taught the girls to spin and weave. We had a good life.
Yet in our cabin, Andrew chafed. He barked at the girls if their chattering got too loud for him. Didn’t look at me when I spoke.
“Would you like a berry pie tonight? It’s your favorite.”
“No.”
“We washed sheets yesterday. They smell so good. Did you notice? You always do.”
“No.” His hands worked a set of leather reins, softening them. He resisted my attempts to soften him.
“America Jane learned a little poem I taught her. Would you like to hear her recite?”
A deep sigh. “I need to check the barn latch. I’m not sure I closed it.”
Maybe having to be away from us for a few days at a time gave him something that being around all the women in his house didn’t. He said his more frequent separation was because he had to take the herd higher into the hills and away, what with the valley being “fenced up” as he put it and the longhorns gotten from California needed wider range than our beef cows. “Same species, different needs,” he said. Not unlike us humans, I thought then.
At one point that fall of 1858 he said he’d be gone a month. “I need to find more land. Don’t worry. I’ve got drovers checking the cattle.”
“Where are you headed? Could we go with you? Make an adventure of it?”
He looked at my burgeoning belly. “No.” He held me then. “I’ll be back.” He kissed my ringless knuckles.
“I never thought you wouldn’t.”
Andrew returned in the fall, not sharing much about his journey.
“Did you find the land you were looking for?”
He scratched at his neck and started that lip chewing he hadn’t done for years.
“I looked. Still looking. All this talk about Oregon becoming a state, free or slave, raises the stakes about staying here.”
I swallowed, treaded like a mother not wanting to wake a sleeping child. “Move?”
“What did you think it would mean if I found land somewhere else?”
“I . . . I guess I thought the cattle would move but not us. And statehood, that makes a difference?”
“Rules and regulations come with statehood. My pa came from Missouri to avoid all that.”
“Well, hmm, I hadn’t thought someone wouldn’t want to be part of America.” Our citizenry confused me, and it was true, the Spectator newspaper was full of letters and columns about slavery, free blacks, taxing authority, and the like.
Our talking of such things grew more intense until he pounded his fist on the table, shouting “Silence! Can’t a man have a moment of peace?” He’d shoved the chair back, then stomped away, leaving my sisters with startled looks and America Jane in tears. Something was amiss but I didn’t know what.
Our second child, Martha Elizabeth, arrived in January 1859. We called her Lizzie from the start. On February 14, Oregon became a free state and entered the Union. But we also included in the constitution an exclusion clause keeping free blacks out. Our new state harbored ambivalent-voting men. I wondered how Andrew voted. My sisters burst into lovely young ladies at the new state’s festivities on Valentine’s Day, and I took some credit for Millie’s knitting and sewing skills, and Martha’s imaginative baking. My sisters were twelve and fourteen already and of great aid to me with two children. Our baked goods continued to allow purchases for cloth and needles, ribbons for the girls’ hair and bonnets, catalog orders for crinolines and clocks made in France. I found myself chatting with Rachel about what Eastern women wore and spoke to her more as a friend than an intruder to my mother’s memory. I sang as I worked and rarely visited Waiilatpu in my nightmares or my thoughts. Except for Andrew’s reticence about his discovery of new land or not, I thought we’d settled into a rhythm as predictable as a rocking chair.
Then Andrew came home drunk.
The O’Donnell brothers brought him in again, and he demanded I fix them a meal though the clock chimed three, but I declined this time, incensed at him and annoyed at myself for not anticipating, for having given up my “thoughts of preparation,” imagining the worst. I had failed to notice signs. I’m not sure what they were, but I must have missed them. Or maybe I misinterpreted what I observed. My prayers for his giving up drink had been answered for so long and then . . .
“You. Get out!” I pushed at the O’Donnells, who stumbled against each other and giggled like schoolboys as they headed out the door. They were happy drunks, not mean ones. Lizzie’s breath caught in her sleep as I hissed at my husband, “How dare you come into my home in this state.”
“Your home? Our home.” He didn’t really slur his words, but his eyes were like warbled glass windows at Blakely’s store. And he swayed, leaning toward me. “Oh, ’Liza, come here now. I’ll be good.” He tried to hold me when I straightened him, but I’d have none of that sloppy charm.
“You defile our home and me with your . . . your actions.”
Abby shook in the corner, her ears lowered as though she’d done something wrong, and my sisters, awakened by the ruckus, sat wide-eyed on their pallets. Thank goodness my babies slept through it. My long night braid lay across my breast and I tossed it back over my shoulder. “You diminish us with your betrayal, your disregard for your children, my sisters, for me. Have you no shame?”
His dark eyes widened in surprise. “No shame? Shame is all I have, woman. It’s all I have.”
“You have so much! A home. Family who loves you. You’re an intelligent man. Kind. We have a good life. Why would you throw it away? I don’t want our daughters growing up with their father who’s a d—like this.” I couldn’t call him a drunk, I couldn’t. It had been my father’s word and I refused to say it. But Mr. Warren did.
“I’m a drunk.”
I pressed my hands against my ears. “No. Yes. You drink. Something happens to make you drink. You said once it covered your pain. What pain? Tell me. Please.”
He’d plopped onto the bed—maybe the force of my words pushing him there—and sat up, swaying. “I’m going to be sick.”
Martha Jane came out from her huddle in the corner with a wash basin. He took it from her, lowered his head.
“Pant like a dog.” I gave him the instruction my mother had once given me to stave off nausea.
In a moment he looked up, pale. “I’m not sure you can hear the truth, Eliza, of who your husband really is.”
What shame could he possibly carry that was as great as mine? “Just tell me.”
“Ah, ’Liza.” He leaned back onto the bed and then . . . fell asleep.
I had all I could do not to throw a basin of cold water in his face. Instead, I tried to imagine what he carried like heavy stones or what had happened to make him turn from the path he’d been on, being a good father, looking after the cattle, being kind to me, not drinking or gambling. Had I done something earlier in the evening to upset him? I thought back and couldn’t name a thing.
It was evening when he awoke. I’d fed the girls and they’d gone to bed and slept. I nursed Lizzie. The fire crackled in the fireplace sending heat to our fronts while the woodstove warmed our backs. I heard him start to talk.
“In Missouri. I had a friend, a good friend, though he was a slave. My pa gave him to me when we were boys. Jeremiah. That was his name.”
I turned my head. “Your parents owned slaves?”
“Just a few. We had a hemp farm. Couldn’t have made it without them, my pa always said. They worked hard.” He grew silent.
I kicked myself that I’d interrupted his telling. “Go on.” I drew the rocker closer to hear him better and give him the privacy I could tell he needed.
“When we got ready to leave Missouri for Oregon . . .” He paused, his eyes looking upward. “My pa
told me that since I was seventeen I needed to make ‘big boy’ choices. Jeremiah could come west with us and I’d have to pay his way since he belonged to me. He might be free in Oregon Territory, we couldn’t be sure. Or, I could give him his freedom in Missouri and not take him along. Or I could sell him—he was my property—and keep the money to cover my own expenses coming west.”
“What did you do?”
“None of those.” He leaned his head back against the duck-feather pillow. His handsome face wore weary lines against the pillow slip stained with baby goo that starching hadn’t gotten free. “I lost him in a game of cards.”
“You put Jeremiah up as collateral?”
“You’re right to judge me, Eliza.”
“I didn’t, I was—”
“Your tone of voice did.”
I kept my counsel, letting him continue.
“What kind of man would do such a thing, Eliza? That’s what you’re asking yourself, isn’t it? What kind of man would betray his best friend; treat him as though he was worth only what I could get for him?” His voice caught. “Every time I see a colored man here, I look twice, to see if it might be Jeremiah. I saw a colored man tonight. A free black, I imagine. He drove a freighter. He looked me in the eye and smiled. I couldn’t look back.”