Written in Stone (8 page)

My heart raced, and I knew what I had to do. I took the piece of shell, my mother’s abalone from her button blanket, and I cradled it in my hand. I glanced around at my family. All of them were looking at the water, lost in thought. Even Uncle Jeremiah seemed not to steer.

I held the smooth, flat shell to my cheek. It curved
just enough to perfectly cup my face. Then, when no one was looking, I let it go. For a minute, I could see it shine like the moon underwater, and then it was lost in darkness. As my mother’s last thing dropped away, I felt my body grow lighter, so much that I gripped the edge of the boat to keep from floating up over the mast. My head spun, and I squeezed my eyes shut. From far off, I heard Charlie sing. It was a child’s paddle song, and Charlie sang it pure and clear. There was no weight of age in his voice. I closed my eyes tighter and clung to that song.

We camped that night right outside of town. The next morning we were on the water at sunup. We turned into Grays Harbor and sailed up the bay to Aberdeen. We passed fishing trawlers and dories stacked with crab pots. There was a clatter of metalwork from the shipyards and the deep voices of longshoremen. A cloud of smoke poured from the railroad yard. We could smell tar and raw logs. A pilot recognized the design of our canoe with the head of Raven carved on the prow. He rang his bell and hailed us from the pilothouse. We lifted our paddles to our old trading partner.

When we pulled alongside the steamship
Liberty
, a redheaded man with tan spots on his face climbed down
a pilot’s ladder and stepped into our canoe. He shook hands with the men and made a bow to the women that set our boat rocking.

Grandpa smiled at Uncle Jeremiah and said,
“Cheechako.”
Newcomer.

“
Skookum Cheechako
to you, Simon Carver,” the redheaded man answered. “You may not know O’Neil, but O’Neil knows of you. Newcomer indeed; I bought oil off your nephew Frank in Neah Bay three years ago and halibut from your cousin Solomon Jackson last month.”

“And you’ll buy clams from me today, Red O’Neil,” Grandpa answered back faster than I had ever heard him talk. “You won’t find better—not this year.”

“Is that a fact.” Red smiled. He plunged a hand into our catch uninvited, stirring through the shellfish all the way to the bottom.

“Alive-o. Well done, ma’am.” He bowed to Grandma and Aunt Loula again, who laughed openly at his extravagant manners. Red fished out a pair of clams and flipped them open with a knife. He poked and sniffed and swallowed.

“Dollar fifty a pound and not a copper more,” Red announced.

“Six dollars or I’ll heave you overboard,” Grandpa answered.

“Ooh, you’re a filthy pirate, you are. I’ll clap you in irons, but not before I offer a dollar eighty-five.”

“You’re a man with an empty hold,” Grandpa said. He pointed to the load waterline. “I’ll take six dollars firm.”

Insults and prices volleyed back and forth. It was better to watch than baseball. On cue, Grandma chanted a Quinault lullaby that Grandpa claimed was an ancient Indian curse. O’Neil responded by assigning us all to the deepest circle of hell. When it was over, we settled on $4.10 a pound. Red wrote it out in showy penmanship on the bill of sale. He passed out peppermints to Ida and me and called Grandpa a few more profanities, and we went to the scales to weigh and collect pay.

We walked up from the harbor and into town. Each time we came, Aberdeen was larger. Houses sprang up along the edges of the business district like rings of mushrooms. A new three-level dormitory stood between the lumberyard and the railroad terminal. Charlie lingered by the door of every diner and pool hall with ragtime piano playing.

We stopped at the cobbler shops first. Uncle Jeremiah did the bargaining, but luck was against us. A new dairyman up in the hills had a contract with every boot maker in town. We finally found a glover to buy our deerskins, but he paid half of what we got the year before.

Still, we had made a good profit on our shellfish. There would be enough money for clothes and winter groceries. Maybe we wouldn’t need to sell ceremonial things
when the museum man came to visit. I held my head up and perused the shop windows as if I had the power to buy anything they might have for show. A block before the department store, we passed the curio shop, and by unspoken agreement the entire family stopped. Grandma and Aunt Loula looked over the baskets for sale.

“Dora’s work,” Grandma said, pointing to an especially fine basket with a geometric pattern in brown and green, “from Neah Bay.”

“This is Annabelle’s favorite weave,” Aunt Loula said of another.

A cowbell jangled as the shop door opened. An Indian woman, older than Aunt Loula and younger than Grandma, stepped out onto the street. She had an empty cloth sack under her arm and a small slip of paper in her hand. I didn’t recognize her, but Grandma seemed to know her well. Grandma greeted the woman in Makah, and she answered back in a language that was similar to ours but enough different that I couldn’t translate. It was probably basket chat anyway.

Grandpa and Uncle Jeremiah frowned over a Hamatsa mask displayed prominently in the window. It belonged to such a scary story, I didn’t want to look at it, but Grandpa was upset because it was a secret society mask. A man was supposed to guard it with all his honor and take it out only for the winter ceremonies.

“I think it belongs to the Raymond Sook outfit,” Henry said quietly.

I took a step closer to hear but pretended to be looking at the baskets on the bottom shelf of the store window.

“Did you hear about him?” Uncle Jeremiah said, still frowning. “Terrible fall.”

“He was a topper for that logging company out of Hoquiam,” Henry said. “Came down off the crown of a fir he was topping. Maybe a hundred feet. He hasn’t walked in a year.”

Grandpa turned to Uncle Jeremiah when he heard this, as though he had something to say, maybe something to whisper to him. But Uncle Jeremiah turned away, fixing his eyes to some empty spot down the street. He wouldn’t even look at his father. It was such a little thing. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been standing right beside them, but I could tell they had been fighting, the way Henry was fighting with Uncle Jeremiah over helping with the clams. Henry paused a moment longer, cleared his throat, and went on. “There’s only a brother and a sister left to look after Raymond and all those children and the grandparents too. They’ll suffer this winter if he doesn’t sell it.”

“He’d get a better price in Seattle,” Uncle Jeremiah said.

Two hundred dollars seemed an amazing price to me,
but shopkeepers were a strange bunch. They didn’t care how long it took you to make a thing or how famous your family was for carving or weaving. They wanted a thing because some other shopkeeper had one or maybe because there was a nearly identical mask at the World’s Fair. I took a closer look and saw, behind the mask, a woven blanket and a price card that said
AUTHENTIC INDIAN BLANKET
,
HAND-WOVEN
, $200.

I couldn’t believe it, a blanket worth as much as a man’s mask! And it wasn’t even a Chilkat blanket, with the perfect circles and patterns that show the faces of Bear or Raven. It was a plain Salish blanket with broad stripes in three colors. It was finely woven, probably one of the older dog wool blankets, but still, if I could learn to weave, I’d have blankets worth twice as much. It wouldn’t matter if no chief or famous house could give me a commission. I’d sell to white collectors and museums. The baskets were pathetic by comparison—two dollars, five at the very most for the big ones. The shopkeeper didn’t set a higher price for Dora’s or Annabelle’s work, even though it was better than anything else in the store.

That’s it, I promised myself. I’ll weave, and then I’ll have enough money to buy my own wool and pearl buttons for a button blanket, enough money to stay on my own land. As we moved on down the street, I remembered the design my father had drawn for me. I figured
yards of wool in red and black and imagined how I would decorate the borders. Maybe I would make an outline of waves to represent the dreams of my father, to show that I was a daughter of whalers.

The department store was a block farther on. The men headed downstairs for tools and hardware. The women skipped the ready-made clothes and church hats on the main floor and went up the broad wooden staircase for dry goods. Aunt Loula picked out bolts of flannel and broadcloth for shirts, hard canvas for men’s work pants, and plain muslin for underthings. My fingers ached at the thought of all that sewing.

Ida and I matched threads at the ribbon counter. There were two shopgirls there; one was winding new ribbon onto spools, and the other stood at the cutting table, folding and marking remnants. They carried on an easy conversation about the latest Valentino movie and the cut of fall blouses. They were as relaxed with each other as sisters, and I watched them out of the corner of my eye. When I spoke with Anita or Dorothy, we sometimes talked about movies or a book we had read at school, but we never got around to ribbon color or the fashion of ready-made clothes.

The ribbon winder had sea-green eyes and hair as yellow as a fall leaf. She wore it in one thick braid that fell over her shoulder. She took one color of ribbon after
another and laid it on her shoulder so her friend could admire the effect.

“Baby blue, oh, I don’t know,” she said.

“Blue goes with blond,” the other insisted. “It says so right in the
Ladies Home Journal
.”

“But every Sonja from Little Sweden will be wearing blue,” the ribbon girl said. “How about red, scarlet red!”

The friend burst out laughing. “As if Mrs. Hardy would let you out her door in red. ‘I have a reputation to keep up, young lady, even if you don’t!’ I bet she was a prison matron before she ran our boardinghouse.”

I liked the remnant folder better. She had jet-black hair done up in a twist, brown eyes, and shoulders as broad as mine. She never wasted a motion in folding and labeling her yard goods.

“Lavender, that’s what you want,” the black-haired girl went on. “Soft like blue, but distinctive. Not that you’ve got a penny to spare for ribbon, what with stopping at the chocolate shop every other day.”

“Oh, you can afford to be virtuous.” The ribbon girl pouted. “You already have a beau to buy you chocolates.”

I could be that brown-eyed shopgirl. Any fool could stand at a counter, dust goods, and make change. I could move to town. The schoolmaster always said we should. I could get a proper job and live with other girls my age and spend my days indoors in a clean skirt and
blouse thinking of nothing more difficult than what movie to watch and who to dance with at the Woodchoppers’ Ball.

I tried to catch the shopgirl’s eye to see if she would smile at me, but she didn’t give Ida and me a glance. When Aunt Loula finally came to the cutting table with a dozen bolts of cloth, an older woman appeared from a back room to do the cutting and tallying up.

Our next stop was the grocer. Grandma shooed me and Ida off to the city park, while they ordered their cases and barrels. Ida and I picked up a game of kickball with some town girls. The grown-ups met us an hour later, and we ate our lunch under the red-gold maple trees. Afterward, we walked to the Victory Movie Parlor. Grandpa was all smiles.

“Gifts for hardworking grandchildren,” he said. “Littlest first.”

Ida got knitting needles and a skein of thick pink yarn. I could hear her crow already. With ten minutes’ practice, she would be better at knitting than I was.

Charlie got a Hohner harmonica and immediately picked out a jazzy tune he had heard that afternoon.

“I chose these for you,” Grandma said, with an arm around my shoulder. She opened her hand to show five pencils and a Swiss folding knife. I hid my disappointment behind a smile.

“Pencils, thanks,” I said. “I guess you noticed, I haven’t been keeping my diary.”

Grandma shrugged. “Ink is tricky,” she said.

I opened the knife and worked on a pencil point. The shavings released a faint cedar smell.

Grandma lifted my chin. “When you write a word down, you own that word forever,” she said.

The Victory was the fanciest place in town. It was a glittering palace on the outside, with electric lights and mirrors. Inside, it had green carpeting with gold swirls and a velvet curtain with thick gold fringe. The seats had cushions, and the lamps had sparkling diamonds. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the Queen of Sheba sitting right up in the front row.

I felt like royalty walking down the center aisle. We took seats in the middle row, and Ida pestered me to death with questions about the movie stars on painted posters along the side walls. It was Charlie Chaplin that afternoon, with a musical interlude from the piano player before the show and at intermission. We had only been seated a moment when a well-dressed woman stood up with a sniff of disdain. She clutched her two children close and pushed past our chairs. She made a big show of sitting as far from us as possible.

There was a moment’s pause while the rest of the theatergoers got over the need to stare at us. Charlie leaned toward Henry, batted his eyelashes, and pretended to point and gossip about some scandalous thing. Aunt Loula smiled, and Grandma smacked Charlie on the arm but not very hard. Then Charlie stood up and walked in front of our chairs, doing the white-woman wag you see sometimes in the well-dressed ladies in town. Ida and Henry laughed out loud. Grandma hid her smile behind a handkerchief, and Grandpa resorted to a fit of coughing.