The Memory Weaver

  “He did. And he found you.”

  “We’ve really no need of him anymore.”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I . . . I guess you’re right, though he’s been good with the children. And the sheep.”

  “You and I will trade off driving the oxen.”

  “I have the children—”

  “I’ll send a drover when I’m on horseback.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, he has a wife waiting for a baby, so I imagine he’ll be happy to return. I’ll just express my thanks and pay him.”

  “I already did. He’s gone.”

  “No! I didn’t get to thank him. I thought he’d stay on until we got to Touchet.” A niggle of fear wormed its way into my throat. Going back to Cayuse country, I had counted on Little Shoot acting as intercessor if we needed.

  “He said he was happy to serve you.”

  “Papo! Papo!”

  America Jane hopped up and down, and Mr. Warren handed me Lizzie as he lifted his oldest daughter and rubbed his whiskered face against hers. America Jane giggled as she tugged on his beard.

  “He did well with the children. They’ll miss him.” I sighed. “I keep having to explain where people go.”

  “Good practice. Living is all about the different ways we say good-bye.”

  “I can’t believe he left without saying anything to me.”

  “He didn’t abandon you, ’Liza. People leave because they’ve finished their business. It isn’t about your business.”

  “Well, I prefer hellos.”

  “Me too. Hello, Mrs. Warren. Are you free for supper tonight?”

  Oh, how I was!

  Before Little Shoot found my husband, bringing him to me, I had written and posted a letter to my father telling him that we’d arrived, that all was well, and that he ought to consider bringing cattle and coming too. It was not too late in the season. It was an impulsive act taken within my waiting. I hadn’t known when I wrote it whether Mr. Warren had gone on ahead, if something had happened to him, or what Touchet would offer, but I felt a confidence that we could make it through if we needed to. And having my sisters near would be a pleasure as well as a help.

  The cattle caught up with us, bellowing and shaking their bovine heads of flies. We followed them, continuing our journey east. For most of the trip, we trudged beside the oxen away from the river to ridges high above the Columbia. The views were majestic. Copses of timber dotted the horizon, fading to rounded hills, the grasses turning brown from the hot sun but still majestic, like waves of amber. Then down steep, rocky trails, back toward water, crossing the Deschutes and then the John Day flowing into the Columbia. “John Day’s River.” Mr. Warren chewed on a long grass as he nodded toward the slow-moving stream. “Named by the Astor party. I guess the Virginian had gone mad on the passage west. They had a hard time. Got here in January and he was nearly skinned alive by In—” He stopped himself. “Never mind. It’s a pretty river, isn’t it?”

  “Is the Touchet as large?”

  He shook his head. “But it’ll be good for transport. Feeds into the Walla Walla River and that into the Columbia. And the grasses, see how tall they are on either side of the John Day? We’ll have that kind of grass at Touchet.”

  A wheel broke on the wagon while the faithful oxen pulled us up rolling ridges high above the Columbia. Timber, green, didn’t make a good repair, but we managed, getting ourselves moving again. Often, I carried the goading stick, Lizzie in a quilt on my back, America Jane on a long rope to keep her from wandering away. I walked beside the wagon, and Mr. Warren rode ahead to be with the drovers, keeping us far enough back to be out of the cattle dust but close enough to be of help if they should get spooked and stampede.

  None of that happened and grateful I was.

  When we rolled down and crossed the Walla Walla to arrive at the fort, I was ready for a night on a bed of feathers instead of on the ground. I had not been to the fort since we’d been taken there first after the hostage negotiations were completed. I heard the iron hinges grate as the gate opened.

  Clunk! Gates close behind us. We are safe. A woman, not a hostage, an Indian, comes to me and I shrink until her soft words are spoken in Sahaptin. I stare at her, tell her my name.

  “Spalding,” she says and claps her hands together, the movement and sound a startle. “Your father, here.”

  “Papo?”

  My father steps out of the guardhouse, his eyes searching until he finds mine. “Spalding!” the Nimíipuu woman says then and she reaches for my hand to lead me toward him, but I run, run into his arms. “Papo, Papo, you are safe. You are safe.”

  His tears mingle with mine as he bends to hold me. “Eliza, oh, my child. We are all safe. We are all well. Your mother, she will be better when she sees your face. Thank God, thank God.”

  “She is alive?” My mother lives! I search the adult faces looking at us, their eyes glassy with tears at the sight of our arrival.

  “She’s at Fort Vancouver. Your brother and sisters. We’ll join them.”

  “We won’t go back to Lapwai?” My dolls, my books, all left behind.

  “We can’t.” His words falter. “We’ll be together. Just not in Lapwai. We are here. Safe. At this fort.” The happy sounds of other reunions, the cries of joy begin the disheveling of terror.

  “’Liza, are you all right?” Mr. Warren sounds concerned, his voice pulls me back.

  “What? Yes. I . . . I think so.” Twelve years later, I’m facing old, cold memories as hard as the iron on the fort’s gate.

  “Everything is so strange. It’s as though it’s a different fort.”

  “I suspect it is.” Mr. Warren removed his hat and rubbed his forearm to his sweaty brow. A red rim marked the hat’s residence. “This fort was built in ’56, for soldiers in the Indian Wars. The one you remember, it was abandoned. We’re downriver from where that one stood. Don’t you remember?”

  “I—how could I forget?” My limbs shook and I reached for the oxen, steadying myself against the warm body. I’d been anticipating how I’d feel about that fort, all its memories. But the physical space of it was no more. We’d traveled right past it. My memory kept secrets from me.

  “We’ll let the soldiers know we’re in the territory but move on. Not far from Touchet now.”

  I nodded, gathering my thoughts. I had returned to a time, a reunion, that didn’t happen where I’d thought. I was discovering that the past I remembered wasn’t always the past that was.

  The Diary of Eliza Spalding

  1850

  Between the stories I remember of Lapwai and the facts of how it really was lies memory. How to separate one from the other? In my fading I remember the good times. Matilda speaking in English about Jesus. Eliza laughing as Mustups, a Nimíipuu boy, pulls her in a cart made of a fir round. Henry Hart catching frogs along the Clearwater. My little girls born healthy. A day before my daughter went off to school when we rode alone. She found an iris. Or was it some other bloom? Oh how I wish to return.

  Before we were invited to Kirk’s Ferry, known as Brownsville now, and S became obsessed with the trial, I thought we could have just gone back to Lapwai. Things had settled down there and I missed The People so. Matilda could have nursed me back to health, taken care of the children. That place of the butterflies was where we’d been called to by God. But Henry insisted we could not return without the sanction of the Mission Board. “Why not?” I asked. “The Board don’t understand that the Indians are different in different places. Our Nimíipuu want us back. We could return and do our work without the Mission’s support, show them what we can still accomplish there. Take the remnants of what was left and build something new with them. Be as homesteaders are, building up a claim with our neighbor’s help.”

  “We accepted a call from the Board,” S insisted. “Your logic does not enter in.”

  “We accepted a call from God. And circumstances have changed. Aren’t we compelled to change with them?”

&
nbsp; “You do not remember the difficulties we had there. And without the Board’s support, there would be grave tensions. Not all want us back. Some have lost the faith.”

  I remembered our lives as good there, full of challenges but rich in present moments, small gifts of living. “Are we not meant to forget past difficulties except to learn from them, to take more informed stands to better serve? Do you not remember Philippians 4:8?” I quoted for him, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

  He shook his head. “I will write another letter.”

  I remembered then just how stubborn S could be. Henry ranted about the Catholics, then, about their part in the uprising, which to my way of thinking was nothing, they’d only just arrived. He raved about justice that seemed of vengeance to me. And I wondered then if this man had broken his mind, if all the trauma of the years had taken him from me, this man who was so far from the man I had married. I hope I live long enough to learn from our trials, to gain from past lessons.

  22

  Segments of the Past

  How, when I was so grateful to have seen my father after the rescue, could such dissension live between us? Had my father always been so stubborn? How did my mother handle that? I had made overtures to him. Yet I had willingly gone away while our disagreement broiled. He’d say I am the cause of our separation, having left my home to marry Mr. Warren those years before. But aren’t children allowed to make their own way without their parents always hovering? How would I learn from my mistakes if I made none? I didn’t think my marrying was a mistake, though there had been moments. Maybe my mother had those moments too. I wondered how she wove them into the gracious, loving woman I so missed.

  Another thirty miles beyond the fort and we entered the Touchet River valley. And oh, the grass! It was just as Mr. Warren had described. We watched as the cattle meandered down the ridge to the river, then disappeared in the meadow, their beige backs like raw potato slices among a sea of mustard greens. Their big heads and long horns pushed the grasses aside, the sun spattering across the horns like flickering firelight. They spread out, the nearly three hundred he’d begun with. “No small feat,” he told me. “If I ever need a job, I can drive cattle across the mountains.”

  “You have employment,” I said. “Taking care of your family.”

  “And my cows.”

  I was happy to see him happy.

  Near the river, the land flattened out more, and in the shade of cottonwood trees and with a view of willow bushes, we set our tent. Our life began anew.

  “In years to come,” Mr. Warren dreamed aloud for me, “the cattle will graze on the upper hills that rise one thousand feet above us, I’d guess. We’ll plant wheat there. Here, the grass will sustain those beeves and us as well.”

  We had the river for water and the bounty of the land on which to build his dream.

  And we had each other.

  We stayed in the tent for several weeks while the drovers constructed the log house we would eventually move into. A lean-to off the main cabin would one day be a bunk room for the three drovers, from California, they said. They had worked cattle before the Catholic missions closed there. They spoke another language among the three of them, Spanish. I thought I’d learn it too.

  The building came slowly, as the men rode out every few days to keep the cattle from wandering into the next territory. I was alone with my daughters then. I found time to write, hoping for a wagon to take my letter west to family. I hadn’t heard back from my father after telling him the cattle had made it over the pass nor of my invitation for them to join us. I knew that not far away, about eleven miles, were the remains of Waiilatpu, and I knew that one day I would go there. Perhaps at last to say good-bye to the teacher, Mr. Rogers, whom we all loved; to the Whitmans, whom I adored as well, especially Mrs. Whitman. Mrs. Whitman had treated us white children with such care.

  I’d gotten the drovers—Jose, Romano, and a man we called “Pet” to build a willow fence around the yard that the sheep kept clipped but also to keep the children away from the river. Mrs. Whitman’s grief began when her little Alice drowned living close to a rushing stream. I didn’t want to lose a child to the Touchet. I remembered at Lapwai looking for the Littlejohns’ boy and hearing horrified screams as his mother and mine searched for him along the Clearwater; crying as the Nez Perce divers pulled his body out in the late afternoon. We’d had a fence at Lapwai. I made sure this one would keep my girls in.

  It didn’t keep the rattlesnakes out, however. And each morning before I let America Jane run outdoors chasing the Kelpie when the dog wasn’t otherwise “employed” with cows, I’d beat the grasses, shout to them to head on away, to look for mice another day. I didn’t want them killed. They had their work to do. I wanted them to do that work away from those I loved. Lizzie crawled and pulled herself up on me when I sat in the rocker under the tree and knitted winter socks.

  On a day in early August with the cabin half finished, Mr. Warren and the drovers left to go into the hills to check the cows’ pasture again. In the evening dusk, I took out my leather tools and worked a strip of hide that might one day become a belt. It wasn’t like baking, where my efforts were quickly eaten; tooling leather was a lasting art. One that soothed.

  The men had been gone a day when a family heading east stopped at our site. I wasn’t wary. From a long distance I could see the rider make his way with a pack animal. A second rider followed him. The sheep bleated at his arrival and I recognized him then as the mixed-blood man we’d followed with his family the year my father and brother and I went to the ocean. He carried a letter from my father. I waited until I’d fed them and they’d moved on before reading it.

  The letter told of news, that Nancy and her Andrew had set a wedding date for the following year.

  On yet a more important note, Rachel and I have taken your advice. We are buying cattle. We will drive them over Wiley’s pass and run them with yours. Expect me and the girls in August. Rachel will come when the school term ends in October. Your sisters are looking forward to being with you again.

  I hadn’t told Mr. Warren I’d invited him! That might have been a mistake, but I saw it as the road to reconciliation for them and for me when I’d sent my letter. I never expected my father to actually do it. Make a visit, that’s what I’d suggested. Or had I offered more? Mr. Warren had planned for this journey for years and my father impulsively listens to me after one missive? I’d invited him to visit, but he buys cattle and joins us? What would Mr. Warren think? I spent that evening tossing in my bed. America Jane kicked off the light cover over us as the heat of August stayed the night. I saw the sun come up. “Grateful I am,” I told my girls.

  I’d finished my daily Bible reading in the morning and written a congratulatory letter to Nancy when I stepped outside the tent and saw the road filled with dust. Maybe thirty Indian horses with riders came over the ridge and down the trail, their hooves like the thunder of the waterfalls; like the sham spectacle my father had asked the Nez Perce to display. Were they Yakima? Cayuse? Umatilla? Nez Perce? Enemy or friend?

  “Quick, girls, stay inside.” America Jane stood rooted, staring at the dust. “We’ll play a game. America Jane, you hide under the tick, pretend you’re playing in snow.” Had she ever seen deep snow? “Pretend you are a mouse hiding under the quilt. Take Lizzie with you. Try to keep her quiet.” My heart pounded. “Don’t come out no matter what you see or hear.”

  I grabbed the varmint rifle next to the door while their eyes bore into me like dark stones inside the whites. Lizzie began to whimper.

  “No.” I hissed. “No sounds. America Jane, hold her close. You are mice hiding from the hawk. Not a sound. Go. Now.”

  My throat felt parched as the chicken house floor. My hands shook and I felt swe
at dripping down my ribs. There were too many riders, but I could hit a few perhaps, let them know I was in control. Keep bullets enough to shoot my children and myself, if necessary.

  I stood beside my rocker, heart hammering as a butter churn, my fingers feeling fat and sluggish near the trigger as I held the rifle at my side. When the dust settled around them, the lead man said, “The Nimíipuu bring greetings. There is no need for weapons.”

  The voice was soothing and in some odd way familiar.

  “What do you want?”

  “We camp here.” He wore a head band around straight black hair that rested on his shoulders. He spread his arms out wide to take in our tent and beginning cabin, the river and the land. We’d taken their place just as the Whitmans had done, settled; uninvited.

  “Each year,” he continued, “but not all year.”

  He spoke in English, but I responded in Sahaptin, the language slipping from my tongue as though I were ten. “My husband and I were unaware.”

  He frowned. “Eliza Spalding?”

  “Yes. But how do you know that?”

  He sang out my name again, dismounted. “It is Timothy. We hear that you have come to this country.”

  I put the rifle stock to the ground, held the barrel with my hand.

  “You are frightened? Do you not remember your old friend?”

  From far away his voice carried across the years. “The one who left me behind at Waiilatpu.”

  His eyes softened. “Yes. That Timothy.”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  He opened his arms to me then and I found myself dropping the rifle and, like a grateful ten-year-old child, running into them.

  I cannot describe the joy, the reunion. A few of the others I also knew. I asked after Matilda, learned she had died, but Timothy said Old Joseph, my father’s first convert, spent winters near Lapwai as before and worshiped in the old building. “We keep the old ways but your father’s Jesus ways too. Sometimes. Some do not understand why he left us, you and your father and mother.”