Written in Stone (10 page)

I paced the floor, numb, not seeing or hearing, only obeying the urge to keep moving the way an animal keeps moving even in a cage. It was long enough to scare Aunt Loula. Long enough to make Ida cry. Long enough for Henry and Charlie to move the loom out of sight. That night Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncle Jeremiah made hours of quiet talk by the fire. They decided I needed a change.

Everything was set the next day. Grandpa packed a good knife and wool blankets. Aunt Loula and Uncle Jeremiah saw to the food. Grandma wrapped herbs in bundles for sore throat, cough, pain, and rest. Henry gave me a long wool army coat and fur mitts. Ida slipped
my diary and a pencil in the basket with my change of clothes.

“You can have any crayon of mine that you want to borrow,” she said proudly. “If it is green or blue or purple.”

I didn’t care about those stupid crayons, but Aunt Loula smiled, proud of Ida’s generosity, so I had to take one of each and say thank you. When the good-byes were done, I set off in the fish canoe that Grandma passed down to me. It was just me and the waves for the whole day it would take me to paddle to Susi’s post office in Kalaloch. I dug the paddle into the water and named each sea stack and headland I passed in Quinault and Makah and English. The weather, current, and tide were a book I could read, just as my father had. I stopped twice to rest on beaches with drinking water. The burning weight I felt at home was already behind me.

Late that afternoon, I came to the door with the bright brass plaque:
MISS SUSANNA JAMES
,
POSTMISTRESS
. Susi was not expecting me, but when she opened her door, I smelled fresh mussels and fry bread, and there was enough for two. Aunt Susi lived in one long, low-ceilinged room over the post office. There was a glass window at each end and a squat black cookstove in the middle. I loved the pin-neatness of the room: a broom in
one corner, clothes pegs on the wall, and one open cupboard that held four books and three dishes.

Susi carried a shipping crate upstairs for my chair. She heaped a generous plate for me and opened a pot of huckleberry jam on the table. We began the meal with the required questions about family health, the weather, and the strength of the fall salmon runs. Susi didn’t ask why I came, and I wasn’t sure what to tell her about those feet following mine and wanting to do right by folks who haven’t been born yet. It sounded crazy even to me. Susi left plenty of space in our conversation in case I wanted to speak my mind, but I asked questions about jazz and silk stockings instead.

She cranked up a Victrola while we washed the pots. Piano ragtime filled her room. It sounded like rain falling on tin cans. Susi took my hand and showed me a few steps of the Charleston. It felt completely foreign to dance face to face and touching another person. I stepped on Susi’s toes twice and our foreheads collided before I retreated to the cot along the wall. Susi laughed at me, but I didn’t mind watching her dance by herself.

We passed three days together. In the mornings, I helped her sort letters in the post office downstairs. In the afternoons, we walked the beach or the forest along the edge of town to get blue mussels, Indian tea, or
firewood. I loved the quiet of only two people in a house, and Susi wasn’t worried about money or what people think. I could have drifted there like an otter in kelp and never thought about yesterday or tomorrow or anyone following after me.

On our fourth evening together, a storm came through. Susi stoked the fire and stuffed the cracks around the windowpanes with rags. Rain whooshed against the dark windows, and we could hear the creak of trunks bending in the wind and the snap of broken branches. We ate smoked halibut and canned pears, and afterward, Susi pulled a drum out from under her cot. It was not a little hand drum either. It was a floor drum almost as big as Grandpa’s.

“Whose is that?” I asked.

“Mine,” she said.

She pulled my crate up to one side and sat on her cot across from me.

“Women don’t drum,” I said, and then I hated the sound of Grandpa in my voice.

Susi smiled just enough to show dimples. “Women don’t
say
they drum.”

She took drumsticks out from under her pillow,
leaving one where I could reach it. She gave a few solid thumps to the middle of the drum. Then she picked up speed and beat steadily on the worn place along the rim.

She began to hum with her eyes shut. When she opened her mouth to let the song out, no words came, only the rise and fall of her voice. The power of her singing made my hair stand up. I could feel in it the freedom of living on her own and the wail of grief from losing her man far away in the war.

I leaned forward in my seat, closed my eyes, and rested my palms around the sides of the drum. I could feel Susi’s loneliness, but it wasn’t sad or even angry. There was strength in her voice and her drumming.

I swayed my head forward and back and tapped with my fingers. The music stacked up inside me. I opened my mouth, but it wouldn’t come up. Just as sometimes the food wouldn’t go down.

I picked up the drumstick and followed Susi’s rhythm, beating close to the rim on my side of the drum. I felt Grandpa’s stern gaze in my mind, and it stopped me. But I felt something else too. When I breathed in, my lungs felt larger.

Susi caught my eye and smiled with more joy than I had ever seen in her. She didn’t have to say it. This is what Indians do—all of us. It doesn’t matter if we are cowboys or farmers or ironworkers or fishermen. We all drum. I
picked up my drumstick again and followed Susi. The drumbeats grew harder, softer, faster, and then finally slower and deeper, moving to the middle of the drum. When we finished, we were sweating as if we’d run in the mountains.

The next morning, I swept the lobby and dusted the counter of the post office, and Susi worked on the ledger while we waited for the mail to come up the beach at low tide. A stranger rode along on the mail truck.

“Is it the tenth of October?” I asked Susi.

She nodded. “So this must be the museum man who wrote to Grandpa back in August.”

“Mr. Glen,” he announced, hopping off the truck. “From the Art Institute.” He stretched out a bony hand, connected to an even scrawnier arm, connected to a coat hanger holding up his jacket. I looked at Susi, and Susi looked at me, but she was older, so she had to shake the skeleton.

“Someone has to take him to Grandpa’s house,” Susi said while he was out at the mail wagon bringing in his suitcase. “You’ve got the canoe.”

I nodded, but something about that man made my skin crawl. Still, I’d promised Grandpa I would help.

“May I offer you a ride, sir?”

“Excellent,” Mr. Glen said. “My luggage will arrive presently.”

It turned out “presently” meant right before dark. We spent the day waiting for the museum man’s luggage and hearing whole books full of what Mr. Glen called anthropology and we called neighbors. He had been with the Klamath and the Tillamook and half a dozen other tribes up the coast in Oregon and Washington. He had an opinion on each of them and their art. He went on at great length about how discriminating the Art Institute was and how they would pay handsomely for the right piece of carving.

When the truck finally came with Mr. Glen’s luggage, Susi had to move all the postal files and her chair upstairs to make room in her little office for Mr. Glen’s boxes and shipping crates. He insisted on putting them in a room with a lock.

After dinner, he said, “I am accustomed to the rough life. Set up a cot for me anywhere.” As if we were the sort of people to have extra cots lying around not in use. Susi rolled out her blankets on the floor and hauled the cot downstairs.

“He’s used to the rough life,” I whispered to Susi. “Let’s make him sleep out on the front porch.”

Susi laughed it off. “Mr. Sharp-Sides would scratch
a hole in my good floors if I let him sleep on them,” she said.

I could sleep on anything if I made up my mind to, but something old Sharp-Sides said during dinner stung my brain awake.

“Carver?” he said after we were fully introduced. “Are you the Carver family who keeps the whole cycle of Raven dances?”

“Yes,” I said, and I might have said more, but I saw greed jump up like a flame in his eyes. Suddenly, he seemed to have eight tentacles on each hand, long and grasping like the devilfish.

I remembered what Grandpa said: “This man is looking to take from us.”

No matter how hard I tried to sleep, I could see his greedy eyes looking at the chest of my father’s dance masks. In my dreams, I saw coins dripping out of slippery, wet fingers that closed around the chest and dragged it to the bottom of the ocean.

The more I saw those long hands, the more I burned inside. I made a plan. I didn’t wait for daylight.

I woke early the next morning, before the sun rose. I tiptoed around Susi’s room by candlelight and gathered up my things. I left a note.

It was not exactly a lie, I told myself. Henry knew Mr. Glen was arriving, and he would come to get him eventually. I made a quick drawing for Susi: the forest, the mountains, the lake, and the colors, green, purple,
and blue. I packed my things in the fish canoe and paddled away silently, as soon as it was light enough to see.

The air was dead calm, and thick fog hovered a few feet above the ocean. I should not have been out on the water that day. I should have faced the museum man and told him my father’s things were not for sale, not at any price.

I paddled as quickly as I dared. Headlands and sea stacks were invisible to me. I navigated by counting freshwater inlets. The rain the night before last washed mud into all the rivers and creeks. Each stream spread a slim brown fan over the salt water. The lighthouse at Destruction Island was nothing but a color change in the clouds, and the Hoh River, swollen with rain, pushed at my paddle as I crossed its outflow.

After an hour on the water, the fog rose just enough to see the beach. La Push came next. I headed farther out to sea. The people of the village might recognize me from the shore. They might busybody themselves up the coast to Grandpa’s house in Ozette and tell him I was coming before I had a chance to steal what was mine. I dipped my paddle quietly and pulled hard until I was past the Quileute Reservation.

Once I crossed the outlet of the Calawah River, I knew I was safe. Only empty beaches between there
and Ozette. The relief of it made me giddy. I imagined men chasing me down the beach dressed like the Keystone Kops who were always chasing Charlie Chaplin. I snorted out a suppressed laugh. The honk of it made me giggle, and the giggling almost made me pee. The monstrous disrespect of peeing in my grandmother’s fish canoe while planning cold-blooded theft of ceremonial objects and leaving my family forever made me laugh so hard, I had to set down my paddle. I held my sides in and clamped my knees together. Tears collected on the point of my chin and dripped into the collar of my coat. The echo of my laugh barked back at me.

A jolt of panic hit. There shouldn’t be an echo over open water.

I swung my head around, peering through the shifting mist. There was barely time to see the shadow of an offshore rock before I lurched forward and struck my head on the gunwale. For a second, there was only the ring of the strike and the burst of white fireworks under my eyelids. When I sat up, black barnacle-speckled rocks towered over me. A split opened a little bit back from the bow. Cold seawater seeped into my canoe, and warm blood flowed down my face.

I seized my paddle and pushed against the rock. My canoe dragged a few inches lower, breaking off barnacles as it went. The split lengthened, and water gurgled in.
I scooted back in the boat to lift the bow. On the next wave, I shoved with my paddle again. A notch broke off the tip of it, but I was afloat.

I back-paddled with all my strength, looking over my shoulder, winking blood out of my eye. Another roll and the side of my canoe struck a smaller rock. I saw that one coming and braced myself, and the canoe held. The water was ankle-deep and rising. I fought my boat backward out of the cluster of offshore rocks. By the time I made open water, my arms were shaking with fatigue, and the boat was almost half full. I grabbed the bailer and flung water out. The beach seemed a million miles away. My hands were cramped with cold, and the darkness of the deep water all around froze my heart. I’d never make it. Even if I could swim, I’d freeze before I made the shore. My shoulders slumped, and I gave in to shivering.

A torpedo shape passed under my canoe. A sleek, dark head broke the surface one body length away. The seal stared at me with sorrowful brown eyes. A blink and he was gone, but he rose again on my other side and stared. The memory of my father’s voice came to me.

“The whale will rise and rise again to offer his life.”

Life.

He was offering me life.