ATOP THE KITCHEN cabinets, plastic plants sprouted from dusty baskets. Claudia made out woven patterns darkened by a thick film of smoke and oil. Her hands itched to hold them, to stroke their sides and cosset them, the yearning almost physical, the way she presumed most women felt about babies. She would never hold her own baby. The realization sounded a strange keening through her bones. She would not get another chance at that life.
Still, Claudia was proud of herself. It was she—who was not from here, who had no business asking such questions, according to Peter—she who divined the source of the hoard. After he left, tension thickened the air like rain steaming from a sidewalk. As the day wore on, Maggie’s movements grew lighter, her talk brisk and easy like the conversations they once had. Peter still hadn’t come back.
Claudia glanced at the sticky notes covering the cabinets in bright orange and purple. TURN OFF OVEN. TAKE MEDS. Maggie had managed to keep it together for this long, but there was no guarantee. Claudia needed to get to work.
“Peter doesn’t understand. We must have witnesses, or the song won’t belong to him.” Maggie buttered frybread and spread a dollop of jam over its cratered surface with the back of a plastic spoon. “His cousins on his dad’s side have been bringing out the song at parties. In other villages, of course. Couldn’t get away with that in Neah Bay. They think I don’t have people. But I do. I have people. I know what they been doing. Songnappers.”
Claudia giggled in spite of herself. Songnappers. But this Indian business was serious. True, they were called parties, but potlatches propped up Makah society, indeed, tribes all over the Pacific Northwest. Each song was a map of blood claims to big chiefs. Potlatches had kept tribes together for millennia. Makahs who survived the ravages of smallpox resisted federal policies to instill individualism and property accumulation. Refusing to be controlled by prison time, they paddled across the strait, where fearful whites did not venture, to hold potlatches in their summer fishing and whaling camp on Tatoosh Island, drumming and singing and dancing during big giveaways for the ones who mattered.
There was only so much status to go around, especially now, with tribal members multiplying, and with them, competing rights to the same old group of songs. Anything claimed by one was lost by another. Family came first. Before the tribe, before anything.
“Better eat while it’s hot!” Maggie buttered another piece.
The frybread greased Claudia’s hand. Working with these people was going to make her fat. Even their name—Makah—was either a mangled Salish term that meant generous with food, or a Clallam word for never leaving without being full, depending on who was asked. She took a bite. Butter slid down her wrist. By eating Maggie’s food while hearing her story, Claudia vowed fidelity to her version of events. Fair enough. Her right hand squeezed, instinctive. Oil oozed onto her fingers. “What do you plan to do, Maggie?”
Maggie’s eyes flickered over the bite-scalloped frybread in Claudia’s palm. She dumped a spoonful of jelly on what was left. Claudia smiled and shoved more into her mouth.
Maggie waved a strip of frybread in the direction of the bags lining the living room. “Peter wants these things gone. But I didn’t save them for years to give them away in a jumble. It’s bad enough he burned my papers. And oh, my directories. He’ll never learn those names.”
“You know, if you wanted me to hang onto some of these gifts for you, to give Peter some space, I could do that.”
“Would you?” Maggie looked close to tears.
“Of course! It would be no trouble at all!”
Maggie’s mouth puckered.
“There’s a loft in my cabin. I’m not using it. Really.”
They kept chewing.
“Let’s start with a car load.” Claudia patted Maggie’s knee; it twitched beneath her touch. “See how you feel.”
Maggie’s eyes were glassy, pupils dilated, lips widened like those of that lost frog, which was not lost to her, but only to Claudia, who had found her way out, her way through, and would find her way back to the ivory tower.
“Maggie, it’s your show. What would you like to do?”
“I want to have an Indian party.” Maggie pinched off another corner. “I want to do it right. All we have to do is get people together for a few dances and a big meal. Dave can help. He owes me that much. Roberta and the girls, too. Randall and Beans can back Peter up on drums.”
Claudia fancied herself a strategist, but really, it was Maggie scheming a coup all along. Interesting.
At first, Claudia hoped to keep her work on the reservation off the radar and, hence, apolitical, a plan made easier by the fact that she followed the pattern of interlopers and wolves, picking off fringe members of the tribe when they were at their weakest. Maggie’s plan upended that notion.
“How many people do you want to invite?”
“As many Makahs as will fit in the community hall. And certain families from the Nuu-cha-nulth, from the Quileute, from the Hoh. We need folks to go home and tell others what they saw.”
“The hall will be packed.”
“We better get hopping.”
It was only with the third “we” that Claudia realized Maggie was referring to her, Claudia, as an active organizer. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
Whenever she tired of the grind of academia, which was often, Andrew offered the same counsel—“If you can’t get out of it, get into it.”—and for the first time since she walked into their emptied home, which after all wasn’t so long ago, she was grateful to him. She swallowed. “Let’s get started.”
Claudia needed to be gone when Peter got back. With Maggie’s things in her cabin, she would have a reason to return—proof they forged an agreement. Some decisions were made safe by the passage of time. She was here to do her work, and that meant helping his mother preserve and pass on what she knew. Or at least part of the story, the sanitized version, for ceremony’s sake.
Commitment made Claudia panicky. She would not be able to stay in the margins. Not for long. Anything public was political in Indian Country. You can always leave, she told herself, quieting her rattling thoughts. Like right now, get up and go.
Claudia stood, knocking back her chair. She felt feverish.
“You okay?” Maggie frowned.
“Um. Yes.” She righted the chair. “I—I should leave.”
“We’re just getting going!”
Claudia sat, drumming her fingers, and sprang back up. “I’ll load my car.” She was out of the kitchen before Maggie could protest, the air outside welcoming her with evergreen and a hint of brine as she scurried down the path, garbage bags in each hand.
When Maggie hauled the mask from beneath her bed, Claudia felt as she hoped she would when she decided upon anthropology in college. Thrilled. She was awed by relics of true belief. That certainty had always eluded her, yet she was triumphant. After years of work, she had been granted access to what Maggie had been withholding in the hopes that Peter would care before it was too late.
It was no surprise that these people shrouded their tribal knowledge. They had learned as much during centuries of persecution that left them little enough that those who survived fought over what remained. She believed Maggie knew less than those who came before, and they less than their grandparents, and so on, the entire generational line leaky as a sieve with giant holes left by the twin epidemics of smallpox and federal policy. Less, but also more. The elders now were not the old-timers who remembered life in the longhouse, as they attested whenever they stumbled over a story. The eldest of the elders now were the once-resentful children of those shipped off to boarding schools to be stripped of their native language and family bonds. Of their old ways, but not their homing instinct. Maggie came back for good after carousing spells in satellite cities up and down the coast, into the Midwest and clear across the Atlantic and the Pacific, following her enlisted husband’s deployments.
She had convinced Maggie to bring out her regalia by offering to make invitations for the potlatch on her laptop, using photos of Maggie at the beach with the gifts she planned to pass on to Peter. Maggie warmed to the idea of proving her family wealth and lineage to everyone invited, rather than just those who came or heard about it later.
On their way out to Hobuck, they watched a bevy of swans glide into Wa atch River. “It’s so beautiful.” Claudia sighed. “You live in paradise.”
“It is beautiful.”
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to look at this for as long as you have.”
“The thing is, you and I can be looking at the same thing, but we see two different things. You come out here, and it’s like a picture. What you see is right in front of you. But I look at it, and I see a lot of places in time, all wrapped up in one, you know? I see the stories my parents told me, and their parents, like how the sea covered this prairie for four days, back when the waters rose and sent our canoes every which way. And the whole time I am remembering, you’re thinking about birds.”
True.
“Like Dave.” Maggie snorted. “You look at Dave, and you see an old man. Dirty, maybe, but safe. But I seen what he used to be. I know what he used to be, and he knows it, too.”
“What was he like, when you were younger?” They came up on the quarry. Claudia kept her eyes on the road. The lines blurred and doubled.
“Dave? He was dangerous. Didn’t know how to control himself. Got people in trouble.”
Claudia slowed. It was a short trip from one end of this reservation to the other. She wanted this conversation to roam. “Let’s drive out to the hatchery.”
Crossing the low concrete bridge, she kept left at the fork to stay on the paved road through a patch of replanted forest.
“Did he ever get you in trouble, Maggie?” Claudia braked at the first speed bump, creeping along. A basketball hoop and a faded goalie net wobbled at the edge of the road. Behind them, a house hugged the edge of a clearing. Tall grasses were reclaiming its shed and woodpile.
“Well, he used to drink pretty hard. And he chased women. They outran him most of the time, but he tried. He and Sam were drinking buddies. They would run over to Forks or P.A. Sometimes clear to Bremerton or Tacoma or Seattle. Just to have a good time, you know. Acted like they had business. What business. They always came home broke. Brought bum people back.
“Probably seemed like a good idea at the bar. By the time they got here, at least one of them would have gone sour, usually the person they brought. They wouldn’t notice, you know? Because that person was probably like that before. Probably had them figured from the start.”
Maggie’s watery reflection was pasted on the glass, superimposed over the dark trunks flashing past. The trees opened onto a weathered gray barn and a house. Between them, a thick carved pole crested with abalone eyes that glittered green. A long curve of whale bone crushed the grass at its base.
“I don’t understand.” Wind swept through the lush prairie on either side of Tsoo-Yess River. She kept driving, listening to the slick hiss of road.
“I could tell you everything, and you still wouldn’t get it.”
Well-kept homes commanded open views of the valley and, farther west, the Pacific. At the gleaming mouth of the Tsoo-Yess, crosscurrents formed small scuds of waves where the river emptied itself against the sea.
“When he was a teenager, just a kid, Peter came home one night to his dad lying dead in the kitchen.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t tell him what led up to it. I just couldn’t. I didn’t want that man.”
“What man?”
“They’re the ones brought him.”
“Who’s they?”
“I never should have went out that night. Dave talked me into it. And then he took matters into his own hands.”
“Maggie, what are you saying?”
“Dave was arguing with Sam about this law in Canada—it’s off the books now—that kicked women out of their tribes if they married a white man. He said we should do something about it. Sam said it served those women right. I don’t know how they got into it. They were supposed to be playing cards. That’s why they invited that guy. To stake the game, you know? They were going to play all night. After they got into it, Sam went to get more cigarettes. Least that’s what he told me later. He was gone an awful long time. I never got to ask him. Not that I wanted to know.”
“What happened?”
“I’m getting to that. Pull over a minute.”
Gravel shimmied and popped beneath Claudia’s tires. Maggie looked out at the flat grays of the horizon, the sea changing with the sky.
“So anyway, Dave was drinking—it’s what we did—and he says to Sam, ‘You looked in the mirror lately? You’re kinda pale.’ Sam jumped up. He and Dave were swaying over the rest of us like trees left by a clearcut.
“I was keeping my head down. Don’t know why I went out that night. Dave was bothering me about being a shut in, but I didn’t like to party if Sam was drunk when I got there.
“So I look up, and there’s this white guy. He’d been staring at me all night, and he gave me a sideways V with his fingers, you know? Pointed to the door. A smoke, I thought. A way out.
“He and I pushed our chairs back at the same time. Sam was all over it. He says to me, ‘Stepping out with our new friend?’
“And I looked around, waiting for someone to jump in and defend me. From my own damned husband, but still. Some laughed and shrugged like, ‘Hey, these guys’ll say whatever. Don’t mean nothing.’ The others held still, waiting for the party to start again. Dave kept quiet. So I left.
“The white guy followed me. It was a nice night. The stars were out. It wasn’t raining, for once. I was feeling sick, I was so mad.
“He offered me the pack. I was going to say no. I wanted to go home. I could hear them inside, and it got me, you know, them inside, and me out there. He asked me to take a walk. I said yes. We didn’t walk very long. Far enough, I guess.
“A car passed. The taillights were shiny, like rubies. I remember that.
“He pulled out a flask. Offered me a swig. I said no.
“I wasn’t even looking at him when he hit me the first time.”
Claudia’s silence met the rise and fall of Maggie’s voice, old truths dropping like stones in a river, the windshield fogged with breath. She started the car and shifted into drive. Movement was the only possible response, a self-protective measure she couldn’t help but use. She had no idea what to say.
“What I remember is his breath. Spoiled.”
They passed through the long metal gates of the hatchery. Low blank buildings rose behind a paved series of pools encircled with chain link.
“Did you tell your husband?”
“I didn’t have to. He knew just by looking at me.”
“What happened to him?”
“I was faithful. Even after all Sam did to me. Things I never told Peter. He loved his dad. I never wanted to say something that hurt him just to make myself feel better, you know?”
Maggie never told her son about the sour smoke in that man’s mouth, the scrape of stubble and cold mud, a star exploding on her cheekbone, his one hand at her throat and the other on his buckle, her kicking and bucking until he slammed forehead into teeth and she lay still, gasping through pain while he finished what he came for.
But she told me, thought Claudia, who circled the parking lot while Maggie relayed the story piece by piece. She could not stop seeing Maggie as she must have been, eye sockets swelling, jeans dirtied by her long crawl to get home.
“Drink made Sam sick. Brought out the worst in him.”
He was like a baby, helpless against his own urges. Maggie absorbed it all, her calm a pillow he beat to pieces, searching for the center. That night, shaken, fearful, she did what she could manage, mixing up a batch of frybread to blot the alcohol, an offering, a distraction. There wasn’t enough concealer in the world to hide her bruises. When Sam came home, he went after the only one in sight.
“He wasn’t himself. Said I must have wanted it. I got to hollering, he was after me so bad, and where was he when I needed him? Dave must have heard it going down, because he came in and got between us.”
And then Maggie was alone, as she would remain.
“Dave always said he didn’t mean for it to happen. I swore to God I’d call the police if he didn’t get out right that second. I wasn’t thinking about what I had coming. Just crazed, you know? My kid’s dad was dead. I live with that. Every day. That’s how I come to peace with it. For a long time, I looked your god square in the face and dared him to judge. He couldn’t look at me. I got old, waiting. Wised up just in time.”
The trailers Claudia passed on her way back to the beach were lit from within by a flickering blue whose deepest hue found its echo in the dimming sky. They would have to hurry the photo shoot. The light was falling, but maybe she could frame Maggie with the sunset. Tires thrumming over rain-pitted asphalt, she assessed the damage she could do by aligning herself with people marginalized enough to need her.
Felons, if unconvicted. Maggie said no one went to prison. Claudia couldn’t find a way to ask what they’d done with her husband’s body, whether they went to the police. Maggie shook her head when asked what Peter did after he found his dad.
“He took off.” That’s all she would say.
Just after her son left, Maggie started keeping things to call him back. Or to provide a hiding place for her husband’s spirit. Who knows. Maggie said the dead don’t know how they affect those left behind.
Maggie’s boast—“I have people”—ricocheted through Claudia’s gut. Maggie’s husband was in the grave and her son most at home on the road, but she belonged. My own people are gone to me, Claudia thought. They grew past me, pushed me out. Knit together. They’re stronger now, like a scar.
If Maggie really had people, she would not call an outsider into family business, Claudia decided. But this was her way in.
Everyone is related here, she reminded herself. It’s a matter of degree. The blood tributaries of the tribe were charted in the memories of those who attended potlatches held to set the record, the prerogative of the rich in any society. The hosts paid the most important partygoers with Pendleton blankets and carved paddles and twenties, if they could afford it, but a dollar per guest would do, and they’d even give out quarters, like at the potlatch Claudia attended with Maggie the previous summer. Claudia made a makeshift altar with the gifts she received for chauffeuring an elder—a beaded olive shell necklace, a pounded cedar bark rose, a plastic napkin holder—but what she truly cherished from that night was a scathing analysis shared among the smokers outside. Claudia was close by, having left to see the night sky. She couldn’t sit still for ten hours like a Native. She almost nodded off during the namegiving—the name belonged to a great-great-grandfather who was a hereditary chief, according to the emcee. The coffee had worn off. She was heavy with chowder.
A squat woman coughed a laugh into her fist. “Please! People are pulling some bullshit now that the elders have passed on. His great-great-grandfather wasn’t no chief.” The others nodded, plumes of smoke writhing into a ball whitened by the gym’s floodlights.
Maybe she kept that moment close because it meant the whispers of her childhood did not set her apart. Here was no different. No matter where you were, people held each other down. Or, to be more anthropological about it, freewheeling gossip was the most accessible form of self-governance.
Claudia could only imagine the stories that had flown around Maggie since her husband turned up dead. Would the tribe turn out for Peter’s party?
Camera slung around her neck, Claudia held Maggie’s elbow until they were past the dunes. A line of clouds sent gusts to tug Maggie’s button cape toward the forested hills. She insisted on carrying the mask herself.
Snipes scurried beyond reach of the waves, only to dart back in tandem, pecking and pulling. Rocks below the tide-line held in their wakes braided rivers of outflow whose patterns replicated flood-furrowed land east of here, ravages of the last ice age.
Claudia positioned Maggie against the distant outline of a sea stack. Her focus shifted from Maggie’s face to the heavy mask in her hands. “Put it on.” She raised her camera.
“It doesn’t belong to me.” Maggie frowned. “I just take care of it.”
“For the picture.”
“Only Peter can wear it. When we do the giveaway.”
“Can you hold it up? Close to your face. Closer.”
Carved from a solid piece of cedar, the mask was a wild man with open eyes, his mouth a grimace, brows and cheekbones arched to the same height, accentuated with bars of red worn thin at the edges. A large charred circle crowned his forehead; on either side of his hooked nose, phased moons orbited his hollow cheeks, meeting in a pair of singed crescents at his chin. Twisted ropes of pounded cedar feathered from a topknot at the center of his hairline.
Next to the mask’s geometric grandeur, Maggie’s face seemed small and wizened, yes, but more alive, too, her eyes brilliant. She did not smile. Claudia stepped back to frame the bird-shaped rattle in Maggie’s other hand, noticing the trembles—cold? fatigue? emotion?—when she zoomed in.
“Want to go inside?” She lowered her camera. “Warm up in my cabin?”
Claudia had stopped getting cold as of late. A distant part of her brain knew she should feel chilled—it was December—but her body felt at peace with its surroundings, if not her thoughts. This woman did not need more pain. Peter hadn’t yet agreed to play his part, and without him, there could be no potlatch. Claudia may have gotten ahead of herself when she proposed the photo shoot for the invitations. She would have to talk to him. Convince him to make good.
Through the lens, Maggie’s shoulders were narrow beneath her red cape. “I’ll hold these out.” Her blue polyester pants ended above dark socks, exposing a small strip of dry skin. “I can’t keep this up. Take the picture!”
The digital camera sounded out a shutter click.