The Memory Weaver

  “‘And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient . . .’ Second Timothy 2:24,” my mother had quoted. “This means one must not be quarrelsome, Eliza. But always kind, to everyone, be open to learning new things, and allow God to whisk away resentment as I hear in your voice.” I shamed myself with her calm reminder that my tongue could get me into trouble.

  Because of my selfishness that day, my desire to resist the higher order that my mother wanted for me, I’d ended up in tragedy, unable to stop it, fearing for my life, my parents’ lives, wondering if I’d ever see them or my brother and sisters again. I’d erred. Made many, many mistakes that I carried in my basket of shame. But only briefly did I wonder if sitting there kissing Mr. Warren was one of them.

  I clung to him, felt the safety of his arms around me, having missed the touch or warmth of caring. The smell of his sweaty collarless shirt comforted, and his words held the hope that I could choose wisely. My heart pounded and I felt tingles in my bodice pressed against him. “One of the smartest people” he’d ever known, he’d said. And what fourteen-year-old ever considers that a boy twenty probably hasn’t met many people at all, let alone so many that one young girl stood out in his field of intelligent people who had crossed his path. For all I know, I was likely the only fourteen-year-old girl he’d ever spent a moment with, let alone kissed.

  The crochet hooks poked against me. “We’d better go.” I pushed him back with gentle force.

  “You didn’t answer.” He traced my cheekbones with his thumb.

  “When you make a proper proposal, Mr. Warren, I will consider it. For now, I will cherish your dream with you. And pray that God will guide you to that place where all good things come from him, not only from your sound efforts.”

  He pulled back. “You preachin’ like your pa?”

  “I’m telling you what I believe, what moves me. Not just your warm kisses, Mr. Warren, but your heart must woo me. And I must know your heart seeks Jesus.” I didn’t know why I threw that condition in. Maybe to placate my father when that time came, or in memory of my mother who was so faithful. “My mother knew her path was set by the Lord Almighty and that was how she endured the trials she did, and she and my father were faithful to each other and their work. She changed a hundred lives with her commitment, her kindnesses, her—”

  “I get it. Your mama was a saint. Oh, I ain’t mocking, I’m not.” He held his hands up to ward off my scowl. “She was. Everyone says so. Even my pa, and his kind words are stingy as mosquitoes in December.” He rose, pulled me up to him, our bodies pressed together as close as iron to apron. “I have to think on how I feel about what you’re talkin’ on.” He thumbed my cheek, sending shivers. “Jesus and what-not. That’s needed before you’d consider hitching up to my yoke?”

  “It will never be a yoke, Mr. Warren, if the Lord chooses it. We’ll team up together, yes, but I’ll not wear a heavy collar saying I must always go just your way whenever you choose.”

  “I’ll be ponderin’ then, Miss Spalding.”

  I’d given Mr. Warren words to consider. My mother would be proud. I knew what was important in a marriage. I knew what was the center. But I harbored a terrible fear that perhaps Mr. Warren might not come to choose the faith, and what then for us? He rode off. I touched my fingers to my lips so recently caressed and wondered if I would be strong enough to resist the warmth his kisses promised, whether he met my conditions or not.

  The Diary of Eliza Spalding

  1850

  I have often wondered what is important in a marriage, besides a shared faith, how two separate people somehow come together for a purpose beyond themselves; and then see it fractured and believe they’ve contributed to the problems but not how, nor how to stop it. I’ve no answers. So I’ve taken to poring over old notes, translations, lessons, and letters while Mr. S and Eliza are gone to the trial. I write then in this journal hoping I can find some understanding as to what happened, why it happened.

  This morning, I watched my twelve-year-old daughter’s slender body walk away from me, again. She wore my old cape instead of her own. We hadn’t been allowed to take much with us when we escaped, and funds to replace things have come as slow as high country spring. Her bonnet hid her face, but I knew, as a mother does, that she stared with eyes focused on the past. She turned. A painful, pleading look; me, powerless to stop it.

  Earlier, my husband and I quivered inside the space of silence as when a walker comes upon a mountain lion, wondering if in that moment destruction would slice the gap or if each would honor peace and allow the other to go along its path. I asked him not to take her, that she was so young and still shaking from that dreadful November day. What I did not realize then was that we all still shook from it, from the powerlessness and wondering why our work had failed in such a way that God had turned his back on so many. These would not be words I could say to my husband, but then I often struggled to find the words to express myself to him. Even before the great tragedy at Waiilatpu.

  “I have need of her here.” That’s what I’d told him, of my need. But truly, I believed it was God’s need to protect her yet again. God as the center. That’s what I so wanted Eliza to understand, to experience. Instead, it was her father’s passion for justice or perhaps revenge that drove him to take her with him to Oregon City.

  We’d adjusted to yet another landscape, our little family. This one in the Willamette Valley of the Oregon Territory far from the land I’d come to love, which we called Lapwai and the natives described as “the place of the butterflies.” From the mighty rivers of the Snake and Clearwater and the stark, round hills rising like the humped backs of sleeping bulls we moved—escaped—to the Tualatin Plain where tall timber closed in the sky and where I hadn’t heard a word of Sahaptin, the Nez Perce language, now for nearly three years. I miss the Nimíipuu people, the language, the work, my life 350 miles away.

  I’d pleaded with my husband this morning, using the same words as when he sent Eliza to the school when she was nine. That my husband would insist my child leave (and be a part of that Narcissa Whitman’s life! Forgive my sin of jealousy, Lord, especially when I live and Narcissa does not) and then not even take her to school himself because he was too busy doing the Lord’s work? Is not tending our children also the Lord’s work? I must not dwell there. I will think of better things.

  Matilda, our Nimíipuu helper, took my child, the two riding on separate horses the 120 miles to Waiilatpu where Eliza was to remain until the spring. My daughter left a happy child. She celebrated her 10th birthday at Waiilatpu, away from us, among the Cayuse and with the Whitmans. I’d failed in my efforts to keep her home with me then, though some would say I was obedient to my husband, which is of greater import. I’m not certain of that. Standing for a child is of the highest order to my thinking. Now, after all our chaos and moving and moving again, he wishes to attend the trial, insisting that Eliza is the greatest witness, that his Eliza spoke the language, interpreted for the hostages, so of course she would testify, as she must to secure justice. I wonder if having her repeat the trauma expresses the mercy our Lord commanded. The Cayuse responsible are captured; there were other hostages freed, older, to testify. A twelve-year-old child has seen enough and I believe repeats the events in her nightmares. She does not need to see the accused nor hear again the agonies of those terrible days.

  I wanted Mr. S to let her stay with me, help with her younger brother and sisters, be a child again, to walk beside me in the forests that we might discover together this new landscape. When I would be well enough to walk again. But in the silence, that pause of walker meeting mountain lion, I knew that I had lost. I watched his face turn red, his fists tighten. He would take her, and my resistance to him would falter as it always did. Well, not always. I did once insist she learn the Nez Perce language as I did, and in the end, that may have saved her. Saved us all. No, the Lord saved us. Even in this diary I must acknowledge that. But I did te
ach her the language, didn’t I? I played some small part in my child’s survival, didn’t I? I am shamed for not standing up and insisting she remain at home, with me. I didn’t stand that day; I let her go to Waiilatpu. One often never knows if what one stands for will in the end be for naught or be the bridge that gives a child a way to go forward.

  She mounts her horse, takes the reins. She looks back once and I see a small hand raised, waving.

  Forgive me, Lord, my own rambling. It will never be the same for any of us. Especially not for Eliza. Pray help me accept. Help me accept what I do not understand.

  3

  The River’s Edge

  Many things about my behavior I do not understand. My meetings with Mr. Warren, for example. By the spring of 1853 I’d been breathless with him, often, seated beside the Calapooia, at some risk. We’d catch each other on the way to Brown and Blakely’s or while riding to the Osborne farm. He’d come upon me as planned in the moist heat of blackberries ripening in July. He’d put his arm around me at the graveyard, comforting, my mother having been joined by another settler that year. The iris bloomed. I missed her so! Nothing would be the same with her gone, I knew that, but I kept imagining her with me, wondering what she’d say about Mr. Warren.

  I had been too young for my mother to talk to me of love between men and women. Only on that journey to school the fall before the killings did I gain some small insight into marital love. That wouldn’t have happened if my father hadn’t insisted I go to school, overruling my mother. Then at the last minute he gave Matilda, a Nez Perce woman, a list of supplies to bring back and directed her to take me to the Whitmans at Waiilatpu. I adored the five-day journey with Matilda. I was nine years old, almost ten. At first I felt abandoned by my father for not riding with me. I also felt incomplete without my brother along; but after what happened, I was grateful he had not been sent to school with me and wasn’t there to spoil my time alone with Matilda either.

  Matilda had friends among the Cayuse, who often intermarried with the Nez Perce. She looked forward to a few days with them before returning, possibly bringing relatives back with her, a friend or two. We had five days together and they were precious. I’ve often thought since then that God gives us great joys that fill us so we can draw upon them like a well when times turn tough. I think that’s why after the massacre my mother often spoke of the arrival of the printing press, a remembered joy for when she suffered sorrow beyond words.

  Matilda didn’t treat me as a child who shouldn’t be going off to school, who needed me at home. That was how I saw my mother’s wish to keep me close then. Matilda treated me as her friend. She told stories of others who lived close to our Lapwai mission, of the trapper Mr. Craig and his sometimes sneaky ways, or of the arguments over men her aunties had. My mother would have called this gossip and forbidden it, but Matilda spoke of life, of how people got along—or didn’t; how they fell in love—or out; something my parents never spoke of.

  “Do you have a husband?” I asked Matilda. Birds hopped their way along the deer trail we followed beside the river. I watched the world between Tashe’s alert ears.

  “I did. He died. I might find another.”

  “Where do you look for husbands? Are they hiding?”

  She laughed. “Some do. Celebrations are good places. Singing and dancing and eating and game playing. One can find a good husband if one looks with clear eyes and is willing to haul them out of their activity.” She used the word hol, meaning to drag or pull. I imagined a husband stuck in a mud pile and laughed with her. Then she turned serious. “Aiat hayaksa.”

  “Women hunger?” I clarified. “I’m not hungry.”

  She smiled. “It will find you one day.”

  And so it did four years later. With Andrew Warren.

  Mr. Warren had begun attending my father’s church services in the fall of 1852 shortly after I had turned fifteen. Perhaps to convince me of his faith or to convince Father that he was a worthy mate. Still too young and with the added responsibilities of the younger children, I hadn’t considered Mr. Warren’s earlier proposal much, instead enjoying the pleasantries of his company, not the least of which was a feeling of exuberance for doing so—taking his company—knowing that my father would object if he knew. I wanted a distraction from my father. He stayed up hours at night by candlelight writing long letters. He drank copious amounts of grain coffee and expended rare funds we didn’t have on elixirs he claimed built his concentration. He worked himself into a sweat chopping wood beside my brother, then forgot to bathe before the Sunday service. Several evenings former mission men came for meetings, and I heard them talking late into the night, sometimes my father shouting about Catholics causing all his troubles and shouting of justice “not being served until the Catholic part in this is understood far and wide.”

  “The hangings are enough, Spalding,” I heard one of the men say.

  “Never!”

  “Vengeance is not ours, Reverend.”

  “Don’t talk to me of vengeance. You still have a wife! You still have daughters not warped!”

  I’m warped? How was I twisted or deformed? Didn’t I do everything he asked me to do? Didn’t I fill my mother’s shoes as best I could? Didn’t I care for my baby sister, whom he teased while I prepared his meals? How was I misshapen?

  “Not all Indians are troublesome,” my father said. “The Board must come to understand that. Marcus is the one who created the issues and he paid the ultimate price at the Cayuse hands. But we were asked to come, begged to come by the Nez Perce. Why can’t we return? Why can’t the Mission Board see that?”

  His voice held a wail to it that made my heart ache for him. He and my mother had done so much with the people they served for ten years. I knew he longed to return to that Lapwai valley, to the work that had sustained him. But a part of me knew he could not go home again. My mother wouldn’t be with him. I wished he’d stop talking about it.

  He mourned, he did. He took Henry with him on road trips, leaving me to tend the girls. Then other times without warning he would change his mind, tell Henry he had to stay and take care of the little ones and that I should pack for two days. We’d be starting a new church, he’d tell me, in some far-off valley. “I can still save souls,” he’d say. “Regardless of what the Board says.” Yes, he grieved. And some of how he mourned—his unpredictability and frenzy—frightened me. Andrew Warren was a steadier stream.

  It was about this time that I began to hear rumors about Mr. Warren. Nancy Osborne told me one or two, that he met up with fellow farmers—ranchers, he would call them—and they played cards. He sometimes lost “sums.” And he had a taste for liquor, I learned. I remembered Matilda’s stories, and thought these were just ways men played and kept their spirits up until they settled down to hearth and home. I did once venture a conversation with Mr. Warren about what I’d heard. He and I had made our way up the hill behind his parents’ farm; our horses were hobbled as we looked out over the valley below. There’d been some moments of holding, kissing, deep breathing, our bodies lying face-to-face along a quilt my mother set aside for picnics. I could stop the forward motion with my words and I did that now.

  “I hear you have a taste for liquor, Mr. Warren.” I sat up, brushed my bodice, and breathed in the scent of his cologne still lingering at my throat.

  He pushed his chin down and jerked away from me. “Whose lips are you listening to? Every man likes a little taste. Medicinal, that’s all I take it for. Helps me with the pining you’re putting me through.”

  “You are singled out for such behavior. At the back of Brown and Blakely’s, I’m told. On a Saturday night or two. While others drink only to relieve their thirst, I hear that you drink beyond quenching. You’ve even been loaded on your horse and led home, or so I’m told.”

  “You hear wrong. Haven’t any other good occupation to commit my efforts to. A certain young lady won’t commit herself.”

  “I’ve told you the conditions.” In fact, if h
e had expressed his faith in God, I wasn’t at all sure that would be enough for my father’s blessing on our marriage. I knew I’d have to work on that, but his reluctance to commit suggested I had time. And during that time I looked forward to the kind things Mr. Warren whispered to me, the gentle stroking of my arm, the way my heart beat faster when he came near, how time stood still when I was with him and did not start again until I heard the pounding of his horse’s hooves leaving me, my breathing and heart rate once again becoming as steady as a metronome.

  “Then let it be known that I do accept your conditions. That I intend to speak to your father about your hand in marriage. I’ve secured a position in Oregon City, working at the docks.”

  “You have?” Oregon City was some miles away, across a ferry, though on this side of the Willamette. It’s where the trial was held. I didn’t like to go there.

  “The docks? But I thought you were a cattleman.”

  “I need to earn funds to buy those cattle, and working for my pa isn’t making that happen fast enough. They need strong arms to load and unload cargo. I’ll come back on Sabbath days. That’s when I’d like to see you, proper.”

  “I don’t think my father will—”

  “Does he intend to keep you cloistered in that house until your sisters are married off?”