IN A HANDKERCHIEF edged with fraying lace, the smell of lavender. A few brittle seeds caught in the threads. I rub them between my fingers and am taken back to my own grandmother’s house in Halifax, where hedges of the grey-leaved plants lined paths and where bundles of their dry flowers kept the rigid piles of ironed sheets fresh. Gifts sent from that coast arrived with sachets tucked into pyjama pockets or wrapped in an apron constructed of scraps of polished cotton and lengths of crocheted lace, the bittersweet odour rising from the box as it was opened. And this box, too, has its incense, a prelude to the rituals of discovery and accompaniment.
The air of the valley’s history is rich with the smoke of artemesias burned to clean and protect, clouds of tobacco smoke bringing the souls back from the dead. And the smell of evergreens laid about to protect against witchcraft, illness, the tips rubbed on the bodies of girls to keep away evil. The rising of dust as graves are swept with the branches of wild roses. When we make our campfire, I burn a branch of sage for my own safe passage through this world of ghosts, my hands rich with the oil of lavender, Margaret’s little bag of earth.
Margaret, Nicola Valley, 1904
She was riding in the direction of her favourite place, Minnie Lake, though she knew she wouldn’t get that far today. There were tasks Mother wanted help with, and the younger children were still weak from the bout of influenza that had laid them low one by one; Margaret was the only one strong enough to beat carpets and begin to mend the winter quilts before they were put away until fall.
But today there was a fresh wind, and Mother told her to saddle up Daisy and go for a ride.
“I can manage for a few hours,” she said. “Tom is sleeping and the girls are playing. You go. A ride will make you fresh. Bring back some sunflowers if you can find them in bloom.”
Daisy had been easy to catch, though a few of the other saddle horses rolled their eyes and trotted away as Margaret approached with a handful of oats and a bridle. She tied her horse to the fence while she changed into trousers in the barn. This was the compromise she’d reached with her father: she could ride in trousers but had to change in the room where they kept the harnesses. How he could have imagined it possible to ride in a skirt, even a divided one, was beyond her, and why her riding clothes had to change just when she’d turned fifteen puzzled her, too. That was when he’d decided that she must cultivate a more ladylike appearance, helped by his visiting mother and sister from Oregon. They showed her how to roll up her hair, after brushing it a hundred times, showed her how to starch her petticoats with sugar until they were stiff as boards. Her mother only watched, saying nothing. Her own soft dresses moved as she moved and did not rustle.
When Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth had arrived in Forksdale for that visit a year ago, Margaret’s mother had not wanted to ride down in the buggy to pick them up. She would prepare food, she’d suggested, make sure everything was ready, the beds well aired. The ladies would disembark from the train at Spences Bridge, spend a night there at Mr. Clemes’s hotel, then come by stage to Forksdale, stopping along the way for tea at Coutlee. But Margaret’s father had insisted she come. At the livery stable, her mother had kept in the background as embraces and kisses were exchanged between her father and these two handsome women in their fine hats. Introductions were made, her father leading her mother forward by the hand. Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth had known Father had married a native woman, of course; he’d told them in letters. And in 1890, in exchange for beef, he’d had Dr. Sutton photograph Jenny, holding the infant Margaret, at the settlement at Nicola Lake, the portrait carefully framed and packed up to send to Astoria for Christmas. Grandmother Stuart and Aunt Elizabeth wrote long letters to the family several times a year and sent parcels for the children. But this was the first meeting, and the first time William had seen his kin since 1883.
Watching Jenny Stuart greet her mother-in-law, Margaret thought how beautiful she was. She wore her glossy hair in a braid, and when she brushed it out before bed it looked like dark water in starlight. She’d grown up first on the wild grasslands near Douglas Lake and then, after 1878, in a cabin on the Spahomin Reserve. She had been educated by Father LeJeune, one of the missionary priests, after showing a quick intelligence and curiosity, working as his housekeeper until Margaret’s father had married her and taken her home to Cottonwood Ranch, near the north end of Nicola Lake. In those days, the ranch house had been the two-room log cabin which the cowhands now slept in, there was no garden, barely a barn. Jenny had worked hard with William, helping to string fence, digging over a large area to grow potatoes and turnips to store for winter, planting slips of roses and crabapple seedlings given to her by other ranch wives. In turn, she helped them with cooking during the haying season until the Cottonwood operation grew large enough to demand her every minute. She had become an excellent ranch wife, a gentle mother, fond of music. When William played his violin, she closed her eyes and leaned into the melody, sometimes humming, never singing. And beautiful, yes, but not like the women in Margaret’s father’s family, with their elaborate dresses and high voices. Jenny was quiet by nature, not shy, exactly, but a woman who chose her words carefully and never learned the art of small talk. Grandmother Stuart took Jenny’s hands in her own and told her she was looking forward to seeing the ranch and getting to know her daughter-in-law over the next two months. Jenny smiled and looked to Aunt Elizabeth, who, after exclaiming over the mountains they had seen from the train, the pitch-dark tunnels drilled through the rock, the beauty of the river below them, wondered about tea.
“The cup of tea at Coutlee was very pleasant,” she said, “but its effects have not lasted long!”
“You must be so thirsty,” said Jenny. “I’ve brought some refreshment, it’s in the buggy. Shall we put your baggage in, and then I can get you some lemonade?”
William and Tom carried the smaller cases to the buggy, and then Mr. Armstrong, of the livery stable, sent out a boy to help lift the bigger trunks. The horses moved restlessly, their harnesses jingling a little. Jenny reached under the seat for a basket and offered everyone a drink. The children all took a tin cup of lemonade, but the ladies chose to wait. Margaret heard Aunt Elizabeth comment to Grandmother Stuart about the unseemliness of eating and drinking right there on the street. “Ah well, my dear, we are hardly in Astoria now,” was Grandmother’s tart reply.
Remembering that first meeting, Margaret felt a pang for her mother. The two women from Astoria never really got to know her, preferring to spend time with William and the children, reminiscing, telling the children funny stories about their father’s boyhood, or else working on a sampler they left with the family: vines and flowers around a collection of birds in a potted tree above the adage, He doeth much who doeth a thing well. The younger three children loved their presents of books, a model ship in a wavy glass bottle for Tom, and lengths of pretty calico, smelling of dried lavender, to make up into dresses for Jane and Mary. Margaret’s gift was a dresser set, a silver-backed brush, comb and hand mirror, and a bottle of French cologne. She was a little afraid of using such beautiful things, but Aunt Elizabeth soon had her hair unbraided and was brushing it out in long strokes.
“Such lovely hair, Margaret. I’ll show you the way all the young ladies in Astoria are dressing theirs now. And here, a little dab of this scent behind your ears and in the hollow of your neck. There! What do you think?”
“I’ve never smelled anything like it. What is it made of?”
Aunt Elizabeth told her about the fields of flowers — jasmine, rose, lavender, orange blossom — cultivated in the south of France; she’d seen them on a tour of Europe taken with Grandmother Stuart two years ago. “We stayed in Grasse, my dear, and in the evening you could smell the flowers as the night air released their oils. This cologne comes from there. Sublime!”
Margaret had smelled roses, of course, the ramblers growing around the veranda of their house and the wild pink ones close to Nicola Lake, but the other flowers were unknown to her. France she knew from the atlas at school. Privately she thought she preferred the sage of the hills all around her, particularly the way it smelled in the morning after a rain, tangy and warm. And the scent of hay as it was raked up behind the team. Timothy, clover, lucerne and rye so sweet and pure it made her feel faint.
Astoria, 1906. My dear, I must confess to you that I had never seen hair as pretty as yours. I remember brushing it out with the silver brush and how it flowed down your back. I look at the photograph your father sent after that visit. How young you were! And I try to imagine you older but see only your braids, your narrow wrists. I still hope to take you to France to see those fields of flowers. We could stay for a time at Cap Antibes, a little fishing village where painters sometimes spend the winters and paint the Mediterranean. At least you must visit us here in Astoria. It is a very rainy town but such flowers as a result! Someone could take you out on the river in a canoe, where you would be travelling the same currents as the man for whom your own great river is named. Such things are endlessly possible.
One day, her father offered to take the ladies riding. Grandmother Stuart declined, but Aunt Elizabeth was pleased until she realized they had no sidesaddle, just the usual stock saddles with long stirrups and high horns to hold ropes. She’d learned to ride at her boarding school as a girl and had definite ideas about proper style. She finally allowed herself to be coaxed, in her long skirt and fine buttoned boots, up onto one of the gentle geldings.
“That’s the sister I remember,” William announced, as she arranged her skirts around her with some difficulty. He showed her how to hold the reins in one hand and press them to the horse’s neck to direct him. She laughed and waved her straw hat in the air.
“Do I look like a Wild West Show poster girl? It’s a pity you haven’t given me six-shooters as well. This saddle feels remarkably like a bath chair. I do believe I could ride all day in this kind of comfort.”
“Oh, we often ride that long, and longer,” replied William. “After six or eight hours, it doesn’t feel like a bath chair, I can tell you.”
Margaret came out of the house in her riding trousers, an old pair of her father’s that Jenny had helped her to shorten and alter. She wore the soft buckskin jacket that her mother’s mother had made for her, a design of stylized birds woven into the fringe with sage bark. Putting her face to her sleeve, she could just catch the faint aroma of burning sage used to smoke-tan the skin. Aunt Elizabeth was shocked.
“William, you can’t let her go about in that ridiculous outfit. Mother would be horrified.”
Obviously Elizabeth was accustomed to speaking her mind, and she expected her listeners to pay attention. Margaret, embarrassed, saddled Daisy as quickly as she could. She waited for her father to explain that she often rode with him for long hours, looking for stock or checking for kills, even riding as an equal hand on the cattle drives to Kamloops. After all, didn’t he tell her often that she was his best cowhand, as good on a horse as any of the men? She could not work in a skirt. And how could Aunt Elizabeth call her clothing ridiculous? Grandmother Jackson’s jacket was her pride and joy. She loved how the buckskin smelled, loved the design and the way the jacket felt like part of her own skin. But her father only mumbled a little about their isolation and the convenience of trousers and the fact that she was still a child. Margaret waited for him to defend Grandmother’s sewing skills, her honour, in fact, as the most skilled woman in Spahomin with tanned skins and design. He began to speak of Grandmother Jackson’s method for curing skins, but Aunt Elizabeth would have none of it.
“Really, William, you must insist on standards, even at this distance from civilization. The girl is very nearly a young woman, do you notice nothing? She will never be marriageable if you allow her to run loose like a ruffian, you must realize that. It’s not as though decorum is unheard of in this country. The Smith girls at Spences Bridge, for example, we met them riding sidesaddle, in skirts. I’m certain their mother would never allow them to race about the countryside in old skins, astride a horse in such a provocative way. They are lovely girls and will marry well, I should think.”
William Stuart was silent, looking first at his sister, then at his daughter. His face hardened as it did when he was angry, and his eyes were like ice. Then: “Margaret, we’ll discuss this later. Now, please, if you will, open the gate so we can be off.”
Margaret soon forgot her aunt’s outburst. Who could stay angry or embarrassed for long under an arching blue sky in the cleansing wind? Up through the bunchgrass hills behind the ranch buildings to a small marsh, along the highest ridge so Aunt Elizabeth could get a sense of space, stopping in a grove of ponderosa pines to eat their bread and cheese and drink from a flask of cold spring water. Margaret pointed out a nuthatch creeping down one of the pines, and they could hear the tinkling song of a horned lark above them. Aunt Elizabeth rode well, catching on to the western style of neck-reining and holding her seat at the gallop. Her cheeks were flushed with sun or excitement, Margaret couldn’t tell which.
At a high point in the calving pasture, William Stuart pointed out a golden eagle drifting down from its eyrie on Hamilton Mountain. He told his sister how unpopular they were in this country because ranchers blamed them for taking young stock, particularly lambs.
“But I’ve watched those birds all the time I’ve lived here, Lizzie, twenty-four years now, and I’ve never seen them trouble live calves or sheep. And I’ve seen plenty of eagles hunting rabbits and marmots, and fishing of course, which I really think they prefer. But some of the men shoot the eagles whenever they can, and it’s a shame.”
“William, remember Father telling us about golden eagles in Scotland? There was a bounty on them when he was a boy, and he earned pocket money shooting them for the laird. Now, would that have been because of the sheep?”
“Oh, likely. I’ve seen eagles feeding off dead lambs, yes, but there are lots of ways for a lamb to die besides under their talons.”
They returned by a different route, the spring pastures, and William described something of his system for the cattle — how long they spent on each area of the range, how they were rounded up and moved, what range was best in which season. He loved the ranch, and it made him happy, Margaret could tell, to show it to his sister. She paid attention to what he told her and asked a few questions, teasing him about his accent, which she said was pure cowboy. Her own patrician voice betrayed her years at boarding school in Portland and at finishing school in Boston.
There was no more talk of the trousers, but later Margaret heard Aunt Elizabeth speaking to Jenny about the unseemliness of a young woman wearing trousers in a country full of rough men, only a few of whom were suitable for marriage. Jenny kept her eyes down and said nothing. This was not something she would decide; her husband knew about such things and would no doubt speak to Margaret later. Jenny had a difficult time keeping straight the social strictures to which she was required to adhere, however subtle or illogical. Clothing, for instance. The priests had worn the same black trousers, jackets, stiff white dog collars for everything but Mass. On the Reserve, the older people still wore moccasins of soft cured deerskin, decorated with porcupine quills and tiny glass beads when they could get them. They were perfect footwear for this country — setting traps, gathering berries and roots, even fishing, for they’d dry fast in the wind. But comments would be made when the elders went to town, behind hands to be sure but meant to be heard, and thus the younger people wanted the heavy boots that they imagined would carry them to acceptance. Jenny thought how regal her own mother had been in her tanned deerskin leggings and quilled shirt, and how small she seemed, in recent years, in her ill-fitting high-necked dress and cotton bandana. Such clothing seemed inappropriate as she sat coiling cedar roots for the baskets she made in the old way, piles of bark and fibre alongside for imbrication. And now this fuss over Margaret’s trousers, as though the girl needed to think about marriage at her age. William would know what to do, she was certain.
But William decided to forbid the trousers in order to placate his sister, and it wasn’t until some time after the two Stuart women had returned to Astoria that Margaret was able to persuade him that she could ride in comfort as long as she changed in the barn and took care not to be seen by anyone other than the cowhands. He had always allowed her a good measure of freedom and relied on her as a steady helper and companion around the ranch, trusting her judgement on important matters. But the trouser incident made him uncomfortable, as though he now realized that his daughter’s mixed blood might one day put her at a disadvantage.
On the one hand, he’d come to this country partly to escape his own family. The Stuarts were among the elite of Astoria, with their elegant mansion and Chinese servants. A code of behaviour accompanied their position in the high house with its view of the river and the Pacific, unwritten but perfectly clear nonetheless. William’s attempts to find his own way had met with bewilderment, then anger. His family hadn’t understood his love for fishing, but at least he’d joined the Astoria gill-netting fleet, near enough to home that they could see him with the telescope as he came in from the sea. But fishing hadn’t been enough, and when Tom Alexander had told him of the cattle drives north into British Columbia, William’s nerves had stabbed him with excitement. He’d left early one morning for the Willamette Valley, not trying to explain in the note he’d left for his family, only asking them to keep him in their hearts.
On the other hand, he’d married Jenny, herself of mixed Thompson and Okanagan blood. Her father was from the Douglas Lake Reserve of Spahomin and her mother from the village of Shulus on the other side of Forksdale, towards Spences Bridge. Although Jenny had been living at the priest’s house when William met her, she was closely bound to her family, and she still saw them as often as her busy life allowed. Her younger sister came to help out at the ranch during haying, and one of her brothers regularly brought venison and smoked fish, sometimes a string of ruffled grouse hanging by their feet, or a pheasant. They were fine people, William thought, and he hired many of their friends for ranch work. They knew the country, each grove of aspen with its story, every season with its texture and spirit. Once they’d invited him to participate in a sweat bath when he’d gone over to the Reserve to see who was available for a few days of branding. Jenny’s brother explained that they generally went through a sweat bath before a hunting trip, but they were doing it now simply because they felt like it. William remembered heat, the smell of juniper and sage, the stones being brought in, huddled and hot in special blankets, the hissing of water as it met hot stones. There had been cycles of prayers for healing, for strength, offerings of tobacco strewn on the stones. He’d felt as if he was dying, the way the hot air seared his lungs, and he’d closed his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing, hearing his heart pound in his ears. Or was it the heart of the man who squatted next to him, the man who’d reached out and clasped one of William’s hands in his own, saying something in the Thompson language that soothed William and gave him strength. His skin had tingled from the scrubbing with rough fir branches and the cold water, taken from the creek nearby, that one of the men had ladled over his naked body. Riding home, he’d watched the stars come closer and closer until he knew he could touch them if he’d only reach up. Everything shimmered, and he saw himself ride out beyond the road, enter the night, disappear into the velvet darkness like a red fox gone to earth. He heard an owl and the music of loons.
And today there was wind with the green smell of cottonwoods on it as Margaret galloped Daisy up to the place where she’d seen a pair of coyotes playing in the golden grass, where the whole valley spread out below her, and hawks hung on the warm thermals looking for field mice. She found spring sunflowers, the first yellow blooms of the year. Her grandmother had told her they always said a prayer before digging the roots to cook in the steaming pit or else snipping the new flower buds to enjoy as a spring tonic, and Margaret wondered if she should say something before cutting the stems with her bowie knife. She closed her eyes and hoped a prayer would come to her. When such beauty opened itself to the world, springing from earth only recently frozen and bleak, there ought to be words to match the radiance. Not able to think of anything, she cut a brilliant bouquet and tied it to the horn of her saddle with a long strand of grass.
Wrapped in a piece of faded tissue, a worn jacket of deerskin, thin and soft, plant fibres woven into the fringing. Holding it to my face, I smell the earthy aroma of animal hide, of smoke and sweat, the skin like the inside of my arm. I am caught for a moment in a fragile web of emotions which keep me still and quiet.
A girl, riding the long slope of pasture, shimmering in the sunlight. By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? And with what message does she come across the decades, yellow balsamroot, which some call sunflowers, hanging from her saddle?
Each item in the box of her life can be noted and commented on, and yet what distance between a jacket and its wearer, a little bag of earth and its connection to the human landscape, what distinction between photographs and memory, the way a place is remembered in all its colours and scents, the feel of its dust settling into the lungs. What a basket has known of camas roots and wild onions and the weight of longing in the fibres of the handles.