Bone River (2 page)

It was a measure of his grief, I knew, that he did not speak the English he knew perfectly well. I did not take my eyes from Junius. “Yes. He’s gone.”

Junius glanced at the bed and then at me. “Gone? Christ, Lea, I’m so sorry—”

Lord Tom made a little sound. When Junius and I looked at him, he said, “
Mahsh kopa illahee.
”
We must bury him.
He was already backing away, repelled, his people’s cultural fear of the dead overcoming even his grief. He could not wait to leave the room, and he would insist Papa’s body be gone before he would enter the house again.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll bury him tomorrow.”

Lord Tom nodded curtly and said, “I’ll bring the canoe.”

I didn’t protest or stop him when he left. Instead, I looked at Junius and said, “He would not want to be buried like an Indian. No canoes. He would want a decent Christian burial. Will you make him a coffin?”

“Yes,” Junius said.

“He said you would marry me,” I said bluntly.

Junius looked startled. “Yes, but—”

“I promised him I would.”

He hesitated. “Leonie, you should know...I...I’m already married. I have a wife. In San Francisco.”

I blinked at him in confusion.
A wife.
Which meant he could not marry me, and I would be alone after all. Alone and lonely, with only the spirits for company. I struggled to contain my panic. “Then why did you tell my father you would marry me? And why haven’t you ever mentioned her?”

“Because she doesn’t matter. I’ll marry you, if it’s what you wish.”

“It doesn’t matter what I wish. You’re already married.”

“She’s not important, Lea. I just wanted you to know. I promised your father I would marry you and keep you safe, and I will. Mary and I...we’ve been apart for...some time. I was young, and...we weren’t good together. I left her. She’s probably already forgotten me.”

“But Junius—”

“We’ll be together, you and I,” Junius went on quietly. “I’ll take care of you as I promised. Mary means nothing to me. But
you
...you do. I’m never going back to her. I’ll stay with you.”

My fear fled in quick relief. I wouldn’t be alone. I could keep the promise I’d made to my dying father. And...I didn’t know much about marriage or laws, but surely Junius did. He was so much older. He knew better than I what was possible.

“You’ll tell her, though?” I asked. “You’ll write her and do whatever...whatever must be done?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll take care of everything.”

I nodded, relieved. The world had changed around me, and it seemed so sudden, though Papa had been dying for a long time. I’d never dared to think of what would happen once he was gone. But Papa had thought of everything for me, just as he always had. He’d given me Junius.

The spirits in the air seemed to fade and quiet.

“You’ll have me then?” Junius asked.

I said, “Well...I said I would.”

He held out his hand, and I stepped forward, taking it. I looked into his chiseled face, into his deep-set eyes, and he pulled me into his arms, holding me tight against his chest. I buried my face in his coarse cotton shirt, breathing in the salt-sweat smell of him, the tang of oysters and the bay and the tidal mud. He was solid and warm; I had not known I was cold until I touched him.

“I’ll take care of you, Lea,” he whispered again into my hair. “I promise.”

I felt my father’s blessing settle over us like a shroud, gentle and soft and benevolent.

I was seventeen.

TWENTY YEARS LATER

AUTUMN 1875

I
HEARD THOSE
spirits again the night the river gave up its bones.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with Lord Tom, transcribing the Indian stories I loved, when the storm began, howling through the hemlocks, alders, and cedars ringing the salt marsh, an eerie wailing made worse by the screeching and clattering of branches and the high-pitched whine through the roof shingles.

I shivered and glanced out the window to the darkness beyond. “Junius should be back by now.”

“Hmmm,” Lord Tom said noncommittally. “No good to be out when the
tomawanos
howl.”

I gave him my best quelling glance. “It’s only a storm,
tot
”—calling him uncle, as I always did—“not spirits.”

He said nothing to that, and I looked back down at my notebook, trying to banish the sense of...suspense, I supposed...that hadn’t left me all day, as if something was lurking, waiting. It was the reason I’d asked Lord Tom to tell me the stories tonight,
something to distract me. But it wasn’t working, and the storm wasn’t helping. The air felt shivery and odd, and Lord Tom’s talk of spirits only made it worse. I was already too sensitive to this kind of thing. Usually I was better at fighting it. This was only a storm like many others, I told myself. Still, when a gust of wind blew a spattering of rain hard against the window, I jumped.

Lord Tom gave me a knowing glance. “You hear them too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m only worried for June.”

“That one fears nothing,” Lord Tom said. “He’s fine,
okustee
. Should I continue the story?”

I nodded and took a deep breath, feeling warm and reassured when he used the nickname he kept only for me.
Daughter
. I drew strength from his calm and resolved to focus. “Go ahead.”

“
Chako elip sun wawa Italapas
.” Lord Tom’s voice rose and fell, the harsh syllables and consonants of the Chinook jargon set to the time of the flickering lamplight and the scratching of my pen upon the paper as I transcribed the old tale.
Come very early, said Coyote.

I loved these stories, the tales of the trickster Coyote and the great Thunderbird Hahness and the adventures of the time when the mountains were people. I loved the way they sounded in the old Chinook too, the way Lord Tom told them, that singsong voice that brought me back to when I was fourteen and had just come to this place, not yet used to settling, uneasy at the presence I felt here and my father’s impatience with my fears. I remembered one day, when Papa was buried in his cataloging, and Lord Tom had seen my loneliness and taken me salmon fishing. There, he’d begun to teach me the trading jargon and told me the first of many tales, as if he’d somehow understood the joy I would take from them. They helped me understand this strange new place, to make it mine, much to Papa’s dismay.

I’d thought once the Indian legends would be the tales I told my children, but, well...some things didn’t work out as planned. Now I told myself I transcribed them for the scientific world,
preserving a dying culture, but the truth...the truth I never admitted was that they were for me. I was fascinated by them, though they were lewd and primitive and my father had hated them and had forbidden me to listen to them. Junius agreed with my father—he disliked my interest and said the stories were too obscene for a woman to hear. But the nights I spent listening to Lord Tom were some of my favorite times.

Except for tonight. Tonight, the harsh sounds of the jargon played on my nerves, and Coyote’s obscene tricks couldn’t make me laugh or distract me from the sound of the wind and the voices I heard in it.

Voices? There are no voices, Leonie. It’s only your imagination. Do you understand? It’s not real. What kind of scientist gives in to such fancies?
I heard my father’s words and his affectionate sighs of exasperation as if he stood beside me, though he’d been gone now more than twenty years.

Lord Tom said, “What is it,
okustee
?” and I realized he’d been talking and I was just sitting there with my pen dripping ink onto the paper.

“I’m sorry,
tot
, but—”

There was a noise on the porch, and the door opened, bringing a blast of chill wind, the smell of the river and salt mud and Junius with it.

I jumped up in relief. “There you are! I was worried.”

“Nothing to fear.” He smiled at me, taking off his coat and boots and hat, hanging them beside the door. “It looks to be a bad storm, though. I hope the barn doesn’t flood. It’s going to be a wretched winter, I think.”

I closed the notebook, but not before Junius noticed.

His smile died, but he only said, “You should be drawing those relics Baird’s waiting for. I wanted to send them off tomorrow.”

I looked guiltily at the bowl on the table, part of our latest collection of Indian relics that I was cataloging and drawing
before we sent it off to Spencer Baird, the assistant secretary at the Smithsonian National Museum, who had charge of procuring Indian relics for the Centennial Exposition’s ethnological exhibit planned for next year. He’d commissioned us, along with many other ethnologists, to get him the collection he needed, and he’d been anxious and persistent. He was nervous about the exhibit’s prospects—if it succeeded, it meant money and fame for the museum, which had not much of either. He’d already sent us several letters urging us to collect more, and to hurry. “I
was
doing that. But then the night got so dark, and—”

“And Yutilma began howling,” Lord Tom put in.

I gave him an admonishing look.

Junius sighed. “You shouldn’t encourage her, Tom.”

Lord Tom turned an innocent expression. “Encourage what,
sikhs
?”

“The two of you conspire against me,” Junius said.

“I needed a distraction,” I said. “As you were so late.”

“You could at least distract yourself with something elevating. There’s a Bible right over there. I’ll bet you can’t even remember who Job is. Your father would have my head.”

“My father didn’t give a damn about Job. All he cared about was ethnology.”

“And raising a daughter who wasn’t a savage,” Junius said. “A task he left in my hands, as I recall. And look at you, bent over a lamp and listening to Siwash superstitions. Yutilma howling indeed.”

“Call it my birthday present,” I said.

“That’s not until tomorrow.”

“An early one, then.”

Junius sighed. “You’re wearing me out, sweetheart. It was a long day and I’m tired. Now I’m for bed. You coming?”

Lord Tom rose and put aside his coffee—his signal that he was done for the night—and I rose as well and followed my husband up the stairs. The wind sounded louder up here, clattering
against the roof, and the dark cold seemed forbidding and dangerous, barely kept at bay by the walls and the roof, as if Yutilma and the wind were only giving us quarter.
I’ll leave you safe and warm now, but one day perhaps I won’t be so kind.

Voices in the wind, in the rain. Spirits in the water. I felt spooked and uneasy. That wretched eerie howling...I couldn’t remember hearing its like before. I went to the window that overlooked the Querquelin River—translated to Mouse by the settlers, though I preferred to call it by its Indian name. It was too dark to see it, but I heard its rushing and churning, which seemed violent tonight, and as full of talk as the wind.

Junius lit a candle. “You shouldn’t listen to those stories.”

He sounded as he had in the beginning years of our marriage, when he’d taken over my father’s role as teacher, and I chafed a little at it now, until I looked over my shoulder and saw the concern in his eyes. “They’re only children’s tales. Haven’t you said that yourself?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “It wasn’t so long ago that hearing them made you sad.”

Sad. Yes, I had been that. But I wasn’t anymore. I’d come to terms with things I could not have, what wasn’t meant to be. “I’m all right.”

“You’ve been better lately.” I heard the reluctance in his voice as he said it—he hated to speak of those times as much as I did. “I don’t want you to—”

“You needn’t worry,” I said firmly, forcing myself to smile. “Truly. It’s only this wind. It’s so strong and...and it doesn’t sound right. It makes me uneasy.”

“It’s no different than any other storm,” he said, though I heard his relief. “But I’ve been thinking...we could leave this place, Leonie. Before the winter sets in. Go someplace else. Someplace new, where there’s actually sun. This rain would make anyone melancholy. God knows I’d be happy to leave. I’ve been saying it for years.”

“Please, not that again. I love it here. You know that.”

“I don’t think it’s good for you to stay.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Junius hesitated. “All right. But...no stories for the next few days, I think.”

I nodded, too unsettled to argue, though I did say, “I still think Baird will find a use for them, if I ever get them translated.”

“Baird doesn’t care about the stories, Leonie. No one does. There’s no point in it. No one would notice if you put them aside.”

This argument, too, was an old one, better ignored, so I went up to him, putting my arms around him and whispering, “Let’s go to bed.”

He let the argument go, distracted as I’d wanted him to be. He reached up, taking out the pins in my hair until it fell down around my shoulders, a mass of wispy blonde corkscrews, more than any one man could hold, though, as always, he took it in his hands, squeezing it and letting it bounce back, laughing a little before he buried his face in it, his mouth finding my ear. He pulled me to the bed, and soon we were tangled beneath the blankets, and his hands roamed my body with familiarity and ease, making quick work of it, holding me as tightly as he always did, as if he were afraid I would move and thrust beneath him, and the truth was that sometimes I wanted to, but the first and only time I’d done so he’d been horrified, and I’d learned to do nothing but hold him.