CLAUDIA FIXATED ON the chip in the windshield, forgetting her purpose until her tires grazed a rumble strip. Once she made it to her cabin, she stashed the pregnancy tests below the kitchen sink along with two boxes of condoms. She would get ahold of herself. Whatever that meant. It was bad enough asking the clerk to unlock the clear plastic case shielding the pregnancy tests. She made herself drive to Port Angeles for that pleasure, rather than risking it in Makah territory, but she couldn’t go through with the ritual just yet, though it was familiar to sit, frozen on the toilet, stick in hand, staring.
She kept going back to their hike at the cape, the wind and waves droning an incantation that soothed her, quieting her mind to a single purpose, guiding her forward to what she must do, whispers converging into a wrathful symphony that turned discordant, the sweet lure of the cliff a lone oboe pulling her through. Just when she gathered her courage to step into her fate—to plummet—there was Peter, dragging her back.
She had wanted to taste the ocean and would have too, had it not been for Peter. Being with him was distracting. It was hard to hear the cedars rustle their warnings while he watched, making untimely disclosures, staring at her with carbon eyes whose color deepened the longer he looked at her, as if that were possible. She could see it in him, the attraction to her vulnerability, the need to cosset, to protect, when what she wanted was to be free, and fierce. It was all she could do to inhabit this body. His hand was slippery in hers, too hot. She had wanted to take off her clothes and roll in the moss.
Claudia couldn’t eat, gripped by nausea that appeared upon waking. It was just what she deserved. She was disgusted by her own weakness, and yet she knew she should be asking for help, should be returning to Seattle for evaluation and treatment. Her sight had crystallized. Fractals spread across her field of vision like frost on glass, patterns repeating in trees, waves, blades of grass. There was no one she could tell who wouldn’t create an echo chamber of rumors she could not afford.
Work would save her. It always had. She opened her laptop and, shying away from the Internet and its cruel tidings, began to type.
My arrival to Neah Bay coincided with the holiday season. Christmas is celebrated by many Makahs, even some who profess to hate Christians, and with strong reasons. The contradictions here are too numerous to be named, but they speak to selective adaptation of cultural practices as a way of exercising personal agency over assimilation. I began work right away, reconnecting with a prior research participant named Maggie, an elder with strong ties in the community. Joining us for the first time was her son, Peter, recently returned after a long and unexplained absence. Maggie had become a hoarder in the interim decades since her husband’s death and her son’s departure.
With the support of her son, I agreed to assist Maggie in sifting through what she had saved. It was my hope to salvage, repair, and catalogue any cultural materials we found while creating a safer and more pleasant environment for her to live in. Unfortunately, before I arrived, Peter burned all of her papers—directories, news clipping, photos, and who knows what else—which he claimed, perhaps accurately, were destroyed by mold and urine (Maggie has a fondness for cats). My rapport with Peter and Maggie was greatly aided by support of this large effort, which put us in close contact and allowed for intimate conversations about cultural preservation, tribal traditions, and familial loyalties.
Someone knocked. She tensed and checked her porch steps through the window. Peter. She was more thankful for his presence than she would have liked, but she kept her smile frosty. She owed him her life.
“I wanted to come earlier, but Mom’s been on a rampage.”
“I was just getting to work.”
“So you’re glad to see me.”
“It’s surprising how well you know me, considering.”
“You’re not as hard to figure out as you think.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “How’s it going?”
“I’m alright.”
“Been thinking about you. Can I come in?”
“I don’t know. Any more choice comments to share?”
“You’re doing better than I hoped.” He tapped the riser with the steel toe of his boot.
“Thanks?”
“Come on, don’t be embarrassed. Let me in!”
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“Sure you are.” He stepped up the last stair and hugged her. “But you shouldn’t be.”
She pulled him inside the door to protect herself from peeping eyes, but it wasn’t paranoia that made her bury her face in his neck, tug off his smoky jacket, and guide him onto the couch, where she lay on top of him, glad for the long shifting warmth of his body, for his hands on the back of her head, on her waist, beneath her thighs, for his fingers finding the crease of her knees and drawing them close to his ribs so that, without meaning to, she was straddling a man who was moving and grinning like, how about now? What relief to be outside herself, if only for a moment, in his company.
Peter hovered behind her open laptop, sipping his coffee. “What are you doing?”
“Drawing up my fieldnotes. And some participant observations.”
“What?”
“Fieldnotes are my account of my time here. A personal narrative. And the other stuff is more formal—observations about your family.”
“Here.” She heard him set his mug down behind her. “This should refresh your memory.”
She faced the screen, resolute. He was not trained to leave her alone when she was writing, as Andrew had been. Something soft and damp pressed her cheek. She smelled ballsweat.
“That’s it! Out!”
Laughing, he left with a kiss to the part of her hair. “See you at the house.”
As it happens, I was able to identify Maggie’s intent in saving these items. While she disclosed to me during a prior interview that she had gathered materials for her son’s review, that was not the whole story. In fact, Maggie had been buying and saving items for a potlatch that she wants to host for Peter, who she believes is in line to receive a song that proves chiefly lineage and an accompanying dance, together known as his tupat, along with a mask and a rattle. Complicating matters is a competing claim on the song from Sam’s brother’s sons, who Maggie says have been performing the song without permission on neighboring reservations. In contrast to his mother, Peter does not seem to be bothered by the actions of his cousins.
While it remains unclear to me what brought Peter back after an absence of more than twenty years, it seems likely, from casual statements that he has made, that he will not stay for long, perhaps waiting for his mother’s death before he departs, perhaps not. I believe the prior abundance of materials obscured the hoard’s purpose from his view, and that his mother’s hope for him was too closely guarded to be revealed before its time. During the fraught process of revelation, I agreed to assist Maggie in putting on the potlatch, which requires the accumulation of many gifts and foods, the invitation of hundreds of Native Americans, including what seems to be the larger part of the Makah tribe along with representatives of the Nuu-chah-nulth, the Quileute, and others. Peter is going along with the effort but seems ambivalent about his mother’s plans for his future here.
I acknowledge that my participation politicizes my presence here. Perhaps fortunately, I have decided to refocus the terms of my inquiry to a qualitative study of this one nuclear family unit. There will be longstanding social, cultural, economic, and political repercussions—alliances both forged and riven—depending on which families decide to support Peter’s claim. If Makah oral history is any indication, these consequences will play out for centuries. But that is outside the terms of my research.
There. She left out their affair, but it was a start. What did John Whiting say during a lecture, when he was too old to care what anyone thought? Oh, yes. “An observer is under the bed. A participant observer is in it.” She doubted he foresaw her situation. Then again, she would not be the first,
not at all. Besides, she told herself, everyone edits their own narratives. It didn’t matter.
That was a lie. The stories we tell each other matter, but the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter the most. We lie so we don’t have to change. She could look no further than her own life, but her shame was too great, so Claudia preferred to study Maggie, who trusted that her failings as a parent could be rectified if she pulled off this potlatch, and Peter, who thought running from his past would free him to be a better man. Neither story was true, but they were believed, clung to, a faith that carried mother and son through lives that were never what they wanted. Of all the practices Claudia had come to study, this basic element of survival was the most essential, a triumph of endurance beyond the scope of whatever remained of her research objectives.
She had bought the pregnancy tests as assurance. Not from true doubt or fear. And so it was with shocked awe that, having peed on the stick and her hand with it, she watched one line appear and soon enough, another alongside, saturating with blue as she rubbed her eyes with her dry hand. She hadn’t been so unlucky. Strange that she felt more than fortunate, fingered for some higher purpose by a wise and mirthless judgment, made to pay and redeemed all at once. She was wild with joy and terror. There was no going back. She would keep this child.
Lights blinked along riggings throughout the marina. In the early fade of evening, they glowed into their satiny reflections. Claudia parked in front of Washburn’s and girded herself to buy groceries and mingle with her new kin.
The store bulletin board was thick with advertisements for electric lawn mowers, lost dogs, afterschool tutoring and computer repair. The overhang kept the rain off the welcome back signs for war heroes and the handmade posters for Baby Makah Days Queen and Makah Days Queen, the lucky names outlined in puff paint and covered in glitter, photos curling in humidity that persisted until August, when Makah Days came around again and the title passed to the next well-connected family. As with Claudia, eyed by other Latina panelists for her pallor, the girls in the photos didn’t always look the part, blue eyes peering beneath woven cedar headbands, olive shells shiny in hair the color of wheat. Claudia’s favorites were the babies with brown eyes and big cheeks.
In the three years she had been coming here, Claudia once saw sisters take the twin crowns of baby queen and queen. During the parade, veterans leaned out of trucks. A short prayer was said to bless the American flag since Makahs earned the right to vote in 1926. Claudia watched the sisters and their mother pass by in regalia that didn’t match but echoed, the mother’s fringed shawl trimmed with mother of pearl buttons that also traced the outline of her daughter’s red cape and dotted the cedar barrette on the baby’s downy crown.
Claudia’s mother had dressed her and Maria alike for church until Claudia grew old enough to complain. After that, it was complementary, the navy blue of Claudia’s striped shirt finding its way into her sister’s shorts and their mother’s headband. Her mother kept a hand on both daughters and smiled, munificent, at each person who passed them in the aisle. Later, examining the only photo she packed for boarding school, Claudia moved the flashlight over the faces of her dead mother and distant sister, their eyes seeming to squint against her examination. It had been a bright day. The sun was behind the camera. Only then did she realize that this small vanity, a monogramming of sorts, signaled to strangers that their trio was related.
No longer. Maria would not know she was an aunt, if Claudia could help it. She would protect herself this time.
People filed into Washburn’s, hurrying to buy whatever they forgot to pick up on their last trip. Chips and salsa, soda, an extra steak, maybe some ice cream. A laughing couple ducked inside, hand in hand, trailing wet boot prints, the woman’s belly ballooning well into the third trimester. In front of the soda machine, Claudia pretended to fumble in her purse for change. She could practice living here, though becoming part of this place, subject to its laws and customs, was daunting. She would have to take care of herself, no matter where she ended up. Thomas had no time for failures.
Maggie was halfway to the kitchen by the time the door swung open to the smell of melted chocolate and butter. “I have to pull these out or they’ll burn!”
“Hi!”
“He’s next door.” Maggie’s words were muffled by the interior of the oven, where she was stooped.
“I’m here to visit you.” Well, not entirely. A fresh test prodded her thigh through her pocket. She wanted to be ready to tell Peter if the right moment appeared, and to furnish proof, if he doubted her. Though she hadn’t decided whether to tell him, she was curious to see what he would say. Likely he would recall a clinic somewhere and offer to split the cost of a procedure he would assure her was simple and painless, so she could write him off forever, like she wanted. Beneath that whispered the hope for a witness to her unfurling. “I brought some tea.”
Maggie slipped her spatula beneath rows of cookies, one after another, transferring them to wire racks that lined the counters.
“I’ve been writing up my notes.” Claudia leaned close to a cookie and inhaled. Heaven. “I hope you’ll be proud of the work we’ve done.”
With a swollen knuckle, Maggie pressed the center of the nearest cookie. “I’m too short on time to sit with you today. One more batch to bake. Go see if the guys are finished? Take a few of these with you!”
“I’ll just leave this tea on the coffee table.”
The living room felt empty. Well, there was furniture, but nothing wedged between or around or beneath or behind it, each piece a goodly distance from its neighbor. A normal place to live, if you were poor. What joy her news might bring to this home. What sorrow, too. Claudia knew she wasn’t what Maggie had in mind for her son.
Drumming shook Dave’s house. Claudia neared his porch, her blood pounding. His door was closed. Whistling began, high and wild. She stopped. The Wolf Ritual? She had read about it thanks to Alice Henson Ernst. She’d never seen it. She regretted not cultivating Dave, though it was hard to look at him with fresh eyes, knowing what she knew.
Back in the day, Makah ceremonial leaders claimed the right to kidnap or kill anyone who intruded on a ritual or even the warm ups. She wavered. She needed to talk to Peter. Fear of being rebuffed—albeit by a gruff “Get out!”—kept her from drawing closer to the door.