THE FIRST SUMMER I came with my family to Nicola Lake, I had the feeling I was passing through a curtain into the past, that the present was only a moment imposed upon a history of such compelling presence that it shimmered and shone, oblivious to current events. By what way is the light parted? The houses in the townsite of Nicola, the ancient lilacs in the graveyard with seedpods withered and dry, the rain fences of cracked grey logs — all were rich with what had passed into memory. Standing on the roadside where we stopped to take photographs of the lake in sunlight against a backdrop of suede hills, I’d feel the ground rumble with the movement of cattle and horses and wait, vainly, for them to appear. There were never cattle in the valley in summer. They were high on the plateau, out of sight, and the fields around the lake were planted with hay crops — alfalfa with its sweet blue blossoms, timothy — and golden oats. On the road to Kamloops, trucks made their steady way north, windows open to the air.
We were a family gathered together by ghosts. Not our own, but dry sounds heard among those lilacs, in the hasp on the gate to the graveyard. Some of the enclosures around the graves consisted of pickets and square-cut nails, dark orange with rust, rough on the thumb as one or another of us touched the surface. There was pain in the shape, the rough touch, pain in the rustling of leaves, yet it was necessary as breathing. To walk quietly under the lyrical pines and take in the details of their needles against a blue sky, to imprint the particulars of a time and place into the fabric of our own lives and histories, was as urgent as anything we had known. I saw my children staring across the water, their thin shoulders rising and falling as they took in deep breaths of that pollen-laden air, saw them choose perfect cones to tuck into their knapsacks. A fallen nail held in the fist like an amulet, branding their skin with the iron of place. Seedpods found their way into empty jars, pockets, a few feathers of a magpie stuck into the brim of a hat.
And now, years after those first visits, I am here to find a version of a girl. A date, some photographs that show a way of seeing the world, a path leading to a some rocks on a slope of pasture. The report on conservation has not given me a vocabulary to use in this search. How to allow for access without over-handling, or remember the watchwords “no interference” in order not to lessen the value of objects as historic documents.
Margaret: Nicola Valley, April, 1905
Margaret was riding up beyond Culloden, one of the ranch dogs trotting along beside her. Her father had asked her to watch for coyote signs. The neighbouring rancher was setting out poison baits, and the wise coyotes were keeping clear of that range. That meant more on the Cottonwood and Lauder ranches to the west and Douglas Lake to the east. It was a windy day with a few thunderheads to the north; Margaret had her oilskin tied to the back of her saddle and one of her father’s old hats on her head.
On a west-facing ridge she stopped, dismounting to stretch her legs and take advantage of the view. She could see Nicola Lake, grey and choppy, to the west. Lauder’s Creek, swollen with spring runoff, raced towards the Nicola River immediately south of where she stood, and beyond the Douglas Lake road, hill after hill of new bunchgrass rolled endlessly, effortlessly towards the horizon. The dog flopped down on its belly and fell asleep so suddenly and deeply that its feet continued where they’d left off, trotting in air and twitching, little yips coming from its throat. If there was a coyote in the vicinity, Margaret couldn’t see it, though a pair of falcons tossed in the wind, and she could make out a small herd of mule deer grazing over near Lauder’s Creek. She decided to let the dog sleep for a bit, so she sat down near a group of boulders.
Margaret leaned her shoulders against the largest boulder and felt something poking into the small of her back. Something hard and sharp. Turning, she could see the thing protruding from the ground about three inches, not a stick or rock, but something white and calcified. She dug around it with her finger, loosened it, pulled it carefully out of the earth. It was a thin bone, about seven or eight inches long, and once she’d brushed off light surface dirt, she could see a design incised into the bone’s surface, dirt in the incisions making the pattern obvious. A series of parallel lines along a third of the bone’s length, a number of star-like shapes in the middle third, and at the other end, crosshatching. Taking a long rigid stalk of rye-grass from a clump growing nearby, Margaret prodded it into one end of the bone. Dirt trickled from the other end, and she worked all of it out easily. By now the dog, wide awake, was watching something that looked suspiciously like a coyote creeping towards the mule deer in the distance. One coyote couldn’t bring down an adult deer, she knew that, but this one might be part of a family pack, and the deer probably had young in their midst. Back to work, she thought, putting the bone, carefully wrapped in a bandana, into her saddlebag, mounting Daisy and riding off to investigate the area where the coyote was coming from to see if she could find its lair.
“Where did you find this?” Jenny Stuart asked her daughter.
“On a ridge just above where Lauder’s Creek joins the Nicola River. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes, I do. Among my mother’s people, these were given to young girls who were learning to be women. I didn’t have that training because we’d begun to go to church and then I went to live with the priest, but my mother did. Was this on the ground or under something?”
Margaret told her how she’d found the piece of bone. Jenny asked if there’d been many boulders around, and Margaret told her about the ones she’d been sitting among.
“Well, Margaret, you might have been in a burial ground. They were never around the houses in the old days, not like now, when there’s always a field for graves beside the church or by a home. I don’t know too much about it myself, but if you want to know more, why don’t you go to see your grandmother for a few days? She likes it when you visit. See if your father can spare you.”
William had no objections, so Margaret packed her saddlebags with a few personal items as well as gifts for her grandmother — a jar of crabapple jelly, a loaf of Jenny’s bread, drawings from the younger children, a rooted cutting of honeysuckle she wanted to plant by her front door — and left mid-morning the next day. It was about six miles to Grandmother Jackson’s small house on Spahomin Reserve, and the day was perfect for riding, with high cloud, a breeze, everywhere the smell of green leaves and budding sage.
By the time Margaret rode into sight of Douglas Lake, she was hungry and hoped that Grandmother would have one of her stews on the back of her woodstove. Jenny’s brothers, now with families of their own, kept their mother well supplied with rabbits, grouse, fresh or smoke-cured fish from their gill nets. She often had visitors, for she was the elder with the deepest knowledge of plants; people came for advice on sickness or wounds and would leave with a poultice or a handful of dried roots or a salve. Payment was made in food or firewood, but she never turned anyone away who couldn’t give her something. And no one left without a meal of venison stew or a piece of wild duck tucked into a bannock. Teas and decoctions brewed in a large kettle, the cabin always fragrant with rose hips or wild ginger.
Grandmother Jackson was standing in the doorway when Margaret rode up. She held Daisy’s head as the girl dismounted. “I was not expecting you, but I’m so glad to see you here. Hobble Daisy and come in. The day is fine, and we can go up later to pick some sunflowers.”
Margaret’s grandmother was tiny and quick-eyed, her face a map of lines. She spoke English slowly and carefully, measuring each word, saying exactly what she needed to say and little else. Margaret found her comforting to be with. She accepted the gifts with serious approval, propping up the children’s drawings on a shelf above her table, putting the loaf of bread into a big covered basket, and then pouring a tin mug of tea for Margaret.
Margaret showed her the bone, placing it on her grandmother’s table. To her surprise, the old lady went to a basket against the wall and took out a similar bone. The incisions were different, this one had a bit of crosshatching at one end and a little hole in the other, but they were about the same size.
“This was my drinking tube. We used them when we were girls learning to be women. Our mouths couldn’t touch the water, you see, so we had these to drink with, either from a creek or from little bark cups we were given. Mine was a whistle, too,” and putting the bone to her lips, she blew a thin, shrill note. A dog outside, maybe Margaret’s, began to bark.
“What kind of bone is it, Grandmother?”
“Ah well, we used the crane at Shulus, its leg, I mean. Or sometimes a swan leg, sometimes a goose.”
“How old were you?” Margaret wanted to imagine her grandmother, young and smooth-skinned, drinking water through a crane’s leg bone.
“It was when we first began the bleeding. We moved away from the others into, well, a hut made with fir boughs. I was fourteen or near enough, and my father made me my hut on a mountainside above the river at Shulus. It was mostly just branches leaning into one another and wrapped at the top with twine made from Indian hemp. My mother and aunties came to help me for part of the time. There were things I couldn’t eat and special ways to do things that I had to learn. It was hard work, lots of carrying, digging, running, making my body strong. There was a special headdress to wear, balsam fir, and it hung over my face. I loved the smell, and sometimes I’d take a piece into my mouth and chew it a little. We brushed our bodies with fir, too.”
“How long did it take?”
“Oh, quite a time, five moons at least, more for some girls, less for others, but I learned what I needed to know.”
Margaret touched her grandmother’s arm. “Like what, Grandmother?”
Her grandmother laughed and patted her hand. “Oh, you would think it foolish. When your mother reached her age, the priest wouldn’t let her come to us for her lessons. But we learned to make our bodies pure, and how to make baskets and rope, how to prepare ourselves for having children. How to be kind to our friends, how to give, how to keep ourselves from sickness. The name I received was Hidden Root because I learned about plants and could find the potatoes and bitterroot so easily.”
“I don’t know any of that. I know how to sew, of course, and bake bread, and I know about birds and animals from Father. And the work from school — sums, reading, compositions . . . could you teach me some of what you learned?”
“Margaret, the priests have told us that this is not what God wants us to do. But I never thought He would care about it one way or the other. If I hadn’t learned about the plants, how many sick people would have left my door without something to help them? The priests come when someone is dying, yes, but they know nothing about our land and our own medicines. None of the young girls go through the lessons anymore, and I wonder who will remember any of it when the elders are gone. I am too old to take you through the different stages, and I don’t think your father and mother would want you to go back to that. But I will tell you some of what I remember. And we will keep making baskets together. That will teach you how to use plants and make something useful.”
After tea and a bowl of stew, Margaret and her grandmother gathered some baskets together and followed one of the creeks north of Douglas Lake up into a group of hills bright with spring sunflowers. The old woman told the girl that they’d come to this place every year with their faces painted — “some of us painted our whole face red, some just put a dot on each cheek” — and that they had a prayer:
I inform you that I intend to eat you,
may you help me to grow,
may you help me to be graceful,
not to be lazy.
You are the most mysterious of all plants.
“This was our most important plant because we used so many parts of it, and each part had a different name in the old language, the stalk, the root, a different name for a collection of roots, the seeds, a name for when the leaves were just beginning to show. You’d know when other plants would be ready by this one. When the sunflower bloomed, it wouldn’t be long for the bitterroot, the spring buds, all the others we used.”
“What does it taste like?” Margaret was thinking of the yellow petals and what it would be like to eat flowers.
“We’ll bring some back, eh, and you’ll know. The roots have to be cooked and then added to the pot of meat or fish. Some grease with it is good.” Grandmother Jackson took a knife from one of the baskets and carefully pried up several long tap roots, shaking the dirt from them gently. She then cut the entire crown of a little plant that had not yet flowered for a spring treat. Offering Margaret a part of it, she put the remainder into her mouth and chewed it with pleasure. Margaret chewed cautiously, finding the flavour mild and a little bitter.
“The girls, they made moccasins of the leaves, putting sweetgrass inside, after their first bleeding. Put one of these against your cheek and think what it would feel like to wear the moccasins.”
Margaret closed her eyes and felt the fine hairs of the leaves, inhaling the smell, dry and warm, like the hills. She thought hard about the young girls coming away from their people, wanting to feel them around her in the unchanged hills as they learned their place in the landscape, which was her home. Sometimes, when she rode alone beyond the ranch, she had a sense that she was entering a timeless world where everything was of value: the erratics with their cryptic patterns of lichen, long grasses with insects riding their seedheads in the wind, a pile of bear scat alive with seeds containing the knowledge of what they would become — thistle, berry bush, little thorny rose. She would pass through this world quietly, only the soft sound of her horse’s hooves on dust, as much a part of it as sky. If she had time, she’d dismount and find a warm patch of grasses to lie among, her horse content to graze, the bit jingling against her teeth. Margaret would will each limb and muscle to relax into grass and go into a kind of sleep, motionless, while the horned larks sang in a tongue she could almost understand. She was weightless, unburdened, her hair perfumed. Rising, she took the memory of grass with her on the rest of her travels, tiny seeds thrust into the warmth of her hair.
Opening her eyes, Margaret returned to her grandmother. “But why was the bone sticking out of the ground? Mother thought it was part of a burial ground when I told her about the rocks all around, but why would a drinking tube be in a burial ground?”
Her grandmother came close and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Margaret, when a girl died young, maybe still in the middle of her learning, or even before she began to bleed, she took her things into the grave with her, things she would have needed if she had lived. I think our people were careful to make sure the dead ones went prepared, not knowing what to expect. That drinking tube was buried with a girl, probably there’s a digging stick, too, somewhere, still underground — the graves weren’t deep then — and her shoes, some beads, a little food. Sometimes even a dog would be buried with its owner. And there are so many reasons why she might have died young.”
Margaret was quiet, thinking of the girl beneath the ground on the ridge above Lauder’s Creek. Not lying on her back, as though sleeping, but with her knees drawn up to her chin, bound there with bark twine. Had the girl seen the coyote pups leaping and rolling in the dry grass when they first left the den, did she watch the eagles on Hamilton Mountain before it was called that and wonder how it must feel to hang in the air so high and still, did she bury her face in blossoming sage, sneezing as she inhaled the tiny flies that sucked at the nectar? Most of all, was she related to Margaret, through blood down all the generations? And was she afraid to die and leave the world? The Indians at Douglas Lake had believed that the souls lived in a western world, underground. Now that most of them were Christians, it was heaven where the soul went, taken upward on wings, as though by eagles. But Grandmother Jackson still read the stars like an old storybook, saying, “We think of those stars as the children of Black Bear, and we call that the grey trail, the tracks of the dead.” When Margaret visited, they’d stand outside the cabin after dark to listen for loons, and Grandmother pointed out the stories of the tribe written across the sky. The moon and his sister, shadows and smoke, the dog following the cluster of stars that William called the Pleiades. When the two women, young and old, stood in the darkness, Margaret thought that she never wanted to leave. She wanted to learn to make baskets and medicines and stay in her grandmother’s house forever. Yet it was not quite home.
Margaret’s young sisters, Jane and Mary, favoured their father in appearance, having reddish lights in their brown hair and fair skin. Jane’s eyes were blue, Mary’s a clear grey. When William Stuart’s mother and sister from Astoria came to visit, the younger girls hung about them constantly, asking for stories, watching Elizabeth patiently cut and sew the bright calico she had brought into pretty dresses for them, and letting her style their hair into ringlets with rags and an iron rod she heated on the woodstove. Margaret felt shy with the ladies, felt the contrast between their creamy skin and her own darker colouring; she was also wary of their expectations of woman-hood. “A lady never rides astride.” “A lady never allows the sun to ruddy her complexion.” “Keep your voice soft and low, and always wait to be spoken to.” But no matter what Aunt Elizabeth said, you could not ride sidesaddle when you were rounding up cattle. It was important to be able to crouch low when your horse cut out sharply, to grip with your knees, to balance yourself with your stirrups at a lope. And how could you do it in a skirt?
She knew this but felt uncomfortable contradicting her aunt. After all, she knew about the flowers of Grasse and had brushed Margaret’s hair so lovingly that the girl had leaned into her and felt the warm glow of family love wash over her along with the scent of lavender. Sometimes she thought of herself as two people, moving between two homes, two families, often under the same roof. She had dreamed of the Astoria ladies for many weeks after they’d left, seeing herself ride with Aunt Elizabeth in a strange saddle that must have been a gift from her aunt, wearing a long divided skirt and pretty black boots. Her hair had been braided and wrapped around her head in a coronet, satin ribbons woven among the dark strands. Waking, she felt a loss so deep she cried into her pillow. She wondered about the girl in the dream, not quite herself but someone she might almost have been.
The girl on the ridge, under the ground: Margaret wondered if she’d ridden, had a special pony she’d recognize in a herd from a distance, the familiar sheen of sunlight on the flank, the whiskery feel of her lips against her hand as she fitted on a bridle. But she supposed there hadn’t always been horses here in the valley. And certainly the girl wore buckskin, unless she was very poor; then she’d have worn a robe of willow or sage bark. Maybe she had died of influenza. This past winter, when the younger children had been so sick, Mother and Father had told her that they must be prepared for the possibility of losing one of them. There had been high fevers and delirium, and Mother had worked so hard to keep the children comfortable, making broth and plain puddings, cooling their heads with cloths soaked in spring water. Margaret had tried to think of what life on the ranch would be like without their voices, their presence at the long table, the girls giggling in bed at night in their shared room.
A gravestone in the graveyard at St. Andrews Church had always haunted Margaret. It was white stone with a carving at the top, a woman lying down with her left arm cradling a baby. Underneath was written: In affectionate remembrance of Mary Ann Whitford, beloved wife of Samuel Moore. Born 31 Oct’r 1855, Died 13 Oct’r 1881 also infant dau. Mary Agnes Moore, Died 31 Oct’r 1881, aged 19 days. That meant the mother died one day after her baby had been born, and the child died on her mother’s birthday. Margaret wondered if anything sadder had ever happened to anyone and how the father went on living. When she realized that the father was the Samuel Moore who lived at Beaver Ranch — he’d died of old age when Margaret was about ten — she felt sadder still. That house must have been haunted with the ghost of the exhausted mother, having carried her baby for so long only to die before she had a chance to know the wee thing, and the ghost of the babe, taken to be with its mother in heaven, leaving the father with his hope and love departed. In 1881, her own father was still in Astoria, not even knowing this valley existed. Two years later, he was working on the Thompson Plateau, six years later he’d met and married her mother, seven and a half years later, Margaret herself had been born in the tiny cabin that the cowhands now slept in. That little girl born in 1881 would have been a woman now, someone Margaret would certainly have known; she’d have seen her at the entertainments, at church, community picnics, perhaps even accompanied her to Kamloops for dress materials as she had Mrs. Lauder. Some days it was too much to fathom, how a year could pass and leave so much change and sorrow in its wake and such tremendous happiness, too. And to imagine her life any different, a father who hadn’t come north through Washington territory, a different mother, a grandmother who didn’t live in a log house near the shore of Douglas Lake with an osprey nest in her tallest tree.
And now the knowledge of this young girl, at the threshold of womanhood, lost to her family, bound in the earth with her digging stick of antler, her medicine bag, a necklace of elk teeth. Margaret could see her, almost, an outline fading in and out of view, a shadow in the tall grass which parted and rustled as she passed. Who would she have become? Grandmother had told Margaret that mothers used to take their babies in their buckskin sacks laced to the cradleboard to the digging ground with them, and, after the mother had painted her own face, she danced before the infant all night, praying to the mountains and other spirits that evil and sickness might never come to her child. When the child had outgrown the cradleboard, it was hung in a tree a distance from the village site and not used again for any other child. Margaret wondered about this girl’s cradleboard: perhaps birds had taken away the buckskin, the hairs of the blanket made of fawn skin, perhaps mice had nested in the remains. So much could go wrong in a life, even if all the measures were taken in time.
Margaret had not had much formal schooling. The school was down in the community of Nicola Lake, too far to ride to every day. She’d gone for a week at a time some spring and autumn months, staying with a family, the Pooleys occasionally, the Howses, doing her sums by lamplight at night at the round table in the Pooley’s parlour. She loved reading, everything from the new Nicola Herald to the family Bible; the words made such a clear picture sometimes, staying in her memory like photographs. When God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, when He asked, Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or has thou seen the treasures of the hail?, Margaret could see the opening into the blizzard that God certainly meant, and surely He himself had seen the summer ground covered with hailstones all glittering and cold, looking like Culloden after a storm. And once Reverend Murray had read the sixty-fifth psalm in church, and she thought she would swoon with the loveliness of the picture: Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. . . . The pastures are clothed with flocks, the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing. It was as though God was speaking of her own ranch, the beauty of the hayfields ripe with grass, and the music of the yellow-headed blackbirds in the marsh.
When she was staying with the Howses one spring, in their big house across from the church, there had been an entertainment in the hotel and a number of people sang or played the piano or recited poetry. One man, a visitor at Quilchena, recited a sonnet by Mr. William Shakespeare, and Margaret never forgot it, especially the way the man had said each word slowly and dramatically, even sighing after the first line, From you have I been absent in the spring, so that you could feel the longing of the poet for his love.
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
The room was quiet after the conclusion of the poem, as though everyone there was putting a face to the object of the poet’s longing. Margaret copied out that poem later from the volume of Shakespeare at school and kept it in her Bible at home so that she could feel again the shiver of delight the words created in her, the sweet sadness of the feeling, although she had no face to praise or long for.
When we sat by our campfire at night, I could almost hear voices, but listen as I might, hard as I could, I could never make out what they were saying. It was enough to almost hear them, I thought, feeling the deep heartbeat of the ponderosa pines in the ground below our tent. When the moon was right, there was a path of moonlight from our camp to Quilchena. And all around, the grass turned obscure in the darkness, no longer gilded with endless skies of sunlight or shadowed by high tumbling cloud.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads
of old mothers.
Darker than the colourless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Sometimes I looked at the crescent of houses on the road in to the campsite and thought about buying one. I wanted a way to locate ourselves in the dry soil of the Nicola Valley, a place to dream about when elsewhere, a site to venture from on exploratory drives up over that hill or along the road following the river west to Spences Bridge. But it wasn’t this time that I felt drawn to, not the trim Lindal houses with their gardens of saucer-sized dahlias and their squares of watered lawn. It was more to an interval, maybe only a decade or two, when the community of Nicola Lake thrived, complete with grist mill and sawmill, bakery, laundry, harness shops and livery, banks and the courthouse, newspaper office and hotels. Sometimes I try to dream my way back to those busy streets, perhaps a girl on a compact bay mare, on her way to watch her father play polo against the Kamloops team.
It was as though we had known each other all our lives and had just been reunited after a long absence . . .
And sometimes the thought of never having lived here, never having come to womanhood in these dry hills, stabs at my heart like a thin knife, piercing me with such longing that I am breathless. I have dreamed of a girl and, waking, inhale particles of dust that might have contained her, the seeds of tender grass, the feathery hairs of her horse’s fetlock. A girl who might almost have existed, a life that might almost have occurred, everywhere and always.
A photograph of a girl with smaller children, her sisters and brother, dressed as though for church. They are standing in a yard of some sort, fence rails in evidence, a barn in the distance. The girls are all in sprigged dresses, ankle length for the oldest and below the knee for the two younger, pleated bodices edged in narrow lace, cuffs buttoned to the elbow. The boy is wearing a Norfolk jacket and short pants. They are smiling for the camera while behind them a grove of cottonwoods casts textured shadow on the sunlit yard, a rope swing dangles from one tall branch, and off to one side a line of sheets pauses, too, for the photographer’s eye, as if to tell the viewer that this family, posed for eternity in their Sunday best, also climbed trees, slept in beds with wind-dried linens wrapping them in an intimate embrace.
This reminds me of my growing collection of textiles for the exhibition, how bed linens are so rarely saved and cherished. Yet one pillowcase has come to me, its edge beautifully hem-stitched and with an intricate monogram in French whitework embroidery, two initials entwined like vines, D and R, around a central M, with exquisitely worked satin stitch flowers and leaves. The fabric is very thin and fine and will need careful treatment for display. But what impresses me most is not its handwork but the knowledge that it was almost certainly intended for a marriage, that lovers might have slept with their heads close upon it. If only there was a way to decode the memories contained in cottons and woollens, buckskin and beadwork, the shape of bodies impressed in fibres.