Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher), Page 2

  The Modocs sought abandoned treasures, too, like cattle, oxen, pieces of leather, a discarded pot or pan, vacant wagons. On good days, they might find a valued horse or iron wheels they made into bullets; a lost soul on other forages, someone they could take revenge on for their losses, make a slave of or trade with tribes spending time in The Dalles or south in the wild city of Yreka. These things I learned of later.

  That day, the Modocs found only me: a small white girl with no people and no bonnet, an abandoned white child with braided hair streaked like the color of wet sand stuck to the tears on her face.

  I have a faint memory of them, those large men with grease on their bellies. They rode horses. One reached and pulled me up then dropped me like a rock behind him.

  Did I scream and kick and hit at him? Did I pound his back, tell him to leave me be? Did I cry?

  When I try to bring the memories back, I feel the ache of wanting so to stay, and I wonder if that longing is a part of who I am, that I cling to what is past even when no hope lives there, even when the sunset carried cooling with it and scorpions and snakes. I just wanted what had been, like wishing for the love of someone who has left.

  Why they paid attention to me is a mystery. I was nothing more than a fluff of cattail resting in the dirt, so light a wind could have blown me far away. But something made them ride my way. Something made them stop to pick me up instead of killing me or leaving me behind. And something made the Modocs let me keep a thin gold chain tucked beneath my dress when they took me to my new beginning.

  This white child is not raised but does grow up.

  Each year becomes a good year when there is enough to eat and I find myself still able to breathe cool desert air, watch large white birds lift over lava beds and marshy lakes, have room in a covered place to sleep. Each year is a good year when I hear news of tibo, a white person, and wonder if they wear a locket that bears my likeness or have a gold chain not unlike the one I hide inside my treasure basket, a gold chain that once had a crossed bar and must have been my mother’s.

  For three, maybe four summers, I lived with the Modocs as I did when they first dropped me dirty and tired before a wickiup of willow covered with tule mats. I did not know that someday I would reach in reedy water for the strips of bulrushes and split the tule leaves myself for a wickiup I shared.

  Someone with a wide face must have tossed me a piece of roasted meat that first night and pointed to a mat where dogs lay sleeping in the corner. I see myself grab the deer meat before the dogs could reach it, huddle to the ground and chew, my eyes staring into dogs’, challenging. The skinny-tailed dogs sniffed around me, gave up low growls, and when I left the bone, they must have fought for it but without effort. The dogs’ ribs did not show. They were valued beings I could learn from as I worked for those who fed me and moved like a stray dog from lodge to lodge to make my way.

  The Modoc village carries with it memories of mats warmed by dogs’ bodies and of making the best of fitful sleep.

  I dreamed of wagons and warm faces. I must have. Often someone shouted in the night in words I did not understand. Their anger woke the dogs and startled me awake, made me aware of the emptiness of my stomach that precious food had failed to fill. I turned my face into a dog’s fur to muffle gasping breaths and shaking shoulders that marked my nights and many waking moments.

  The mirror reflects the image of a grown woman years later. A widow’s peak looks back at me. Fitting for the kooma yagapu, one who “weeps for a husband,” that I am. I wear face powder and rouge. But years and the inventions of men have not faded the nabawici that marks my face.

  I do not remember when the Modocs held me down to make it, but I recall others who had it done. Old women with needles and hot ash made the marks along the jawline or on a child’s chin. Drawn with the black of an old fire and a sharp bone, it told all that a child was lost and did not belong.

  When I first saw my markings in the reflection of a still lake beneath a snow-capped mountain, I felt my eyes pool with hot tears, bringing to the surface a hunger and depth of disappointment that covered me like a skin. I determined then that the black lines were meant to mark my journey, and they made me choose again to do what must be done: stay alive but not forget that I would leave.

  Many Modocs died in raids, some at the hands of men in uniforms with long guns led by other Indians dressed in buckskins and feathers. Children were kept out of the way, but I did my best to let myself be seen, hoping they had come to rescue me.

  “Asiam! Down!”

  Long Braids grabbed me, a child with six or seven summers. The Modoc woman scowled as she dragged me like a squirmy marmot resisting a bear. A dry desert wind blew my hair back from my hot face.

  “Stay!” she hissed and pushed me. My knees scraped on sharp lava rocks. Her breath came short from the effort of dragging me while watching over her shoulder, bending low. She forced me beyond the soldier’s Springfield musket’s range.

  For a moment my heart felt light with her orders. Someone worried about me, wanted me saved, and pressed me inside the caves to keep me from harm.

  “Ayah! You with no ears! This way!”

  She insulted my listening, but I did not mind. She planned to save me.

  She pulled at my hair as we disappeared into the lava caves, our moccasins leaving no tracks on the rocky ground. She brushed at spiders, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the caves. Long Braids would fight for space with snakes who slithered into small rock holes, but for now she worried about keeping me out of sight. A warmth filled me.

  But like a prairie hen enjoying bugs, I didn’t recognize the hawk’s shadow overhead.

  “Watch her!” Long Braids told the others huddled in the cave. “Keep her from sight. She makes the soldiers fight harder. Down!”

  She pushed me to my knees then left to help her man reload. So. The soldiers fought stronger when they risked their lives for white women or a lost child.

  My eyes adjusted to reveal a Modoc woman too old to fight, waiting out this war. The pops and blasts of guns sounded like hard rain on water, the smell of powder drifted heavy, back into the caves. I could remain sheltered or make another way.

  While Modoc men such as Lives in Pain or Jack shot their traded guns and arrows across the desert toward the muskets, I made my choice. I crept along the cave wall, scooted like an otter on my side before the old woman could barely set her eyes to see. I slipped around the nubby lava edge and found another channel, smaller but with light promised at the end. The presence of the walls close to my shoulder and the darkness made my breathing hard. I fought the heavy feeling pushing up against my throat. I imagined high places of sky over me instead of the close curve of lava over my head.

  As fast as fear and hope would let me, I eased closer to the sunshine, and when the late afternoon sun brushed my face, I felt relief. My eyes searched the colors of the uniforms the Modocs aimed at.

  I tried to think of how to signal the soldiers. But they were nothing more than dark seeds against a blue sky. Not one face had features; not one man stood close enough to hear a child’s voice.

  I imagined one face wearing kind eyes, like my father’s eyes, or teasing eyes like those of my brother, perhaps a soldier now, sent to rescue me or offer ransom, as though they trusted I still lived.

  Hands over my ears blocked the sounds, but I refused to bury my face. My head scraped against the sharp nubby rocks, but still I stared while people who had fed me shouted orders, grunted, and moaned in pain. Without warning, Long Braids grabbed my hair and pulled me down. “Do you wish to kill us?” she hissed.

  My mind wore a mixture of wishes: that the soldiers would know my father and could take me to him—without harming those who marked me but still fed me as they could.

  She held me down with the weight of her body. Silence followed. She released me and moved away as though I held no value.

  Acrid smoke drifted across the still battlefield, and dead lay scattered on the dirt beyond t
he lava caves. No soldier’s dead; their bodies had already been taken away.

  Slowly, like marmots after a hawk has passed, people’s heads eased out from the lava openings to see what remained. Several caves away, I watched Long Braids scold at someone I could not see but knew it was her man. She wrapped his wounds and paid no attention to me, a child staring after the distant dust of departing soldiers.

  I remained where I was, a still-lost child left behind.

  Who could guess what caused that fight, why the soldiers came when they did? In later years, I knew of many skirmishes with soldiers and other bands, some brought on by the Modocs’ raids. They did not always act in self-defense. I heard them talk of rushing at wagons that sliced across their lands or how they planned to resist the raids of Paiute people, roaming bands with fewer hides to trade who the Modocs said stole wagons and horses then sold them as though they were their own. “We lost good people to those Paiutes,” I heard Keintpoos say. “We trade food sometimes for the ammunition they have. The soldiers think we burned their wagons for it, not just traded. Those Paiutes,” he’d say in disgust and shake his head.

  So I believed there would be more contact with the soldiers if I just waited, more chances I could leave. At least this was what a small white child came to believe by watching, listening, planning how to find her way.

  When I was old enough to help make tule lodges, I noticed children and women who were not Modocs or Shastas or Klamaths joined the Modocs. They looked cloud-skinned like me. One became a “together with wife” of a Modoc warrior, and I spoke almost forgotten English with her, discovered she had no wish to leave, chose to stay, had found what she was seeking.

  “It’s best to make the most of where you are, dearie,” she told me as she twisted willow into a basket, her knuckles large and looking in pain. “Can’t complain when you have a place to lay your head and a good man bringing in game fer ya. More’n I had before with my own people,” she says. “Kentuckians, they were, and they never once touched me with the hand of kindness I’ve known here.” She smiled, the space between her teeth making her look younger than her many wrinkles.

  Sometimes the fairer-skinned Indians were traded, marched before warrior horses to The Dalles on Nch’i Wana, the big river called the Columbia. The braves returned with blanket wealth draped across the backs of better horses.

  Other captives died of hoping to go home, refusing food, waiting to be rescued. Some were burned while tied to leafless trees, though this was only whispered of, given as a threat to me by children. I had never seen it.

  “Leave us!” a round-faced girl said once, then grabbed at small stones spread in the circle before her. They were playing the stone game called jacks. Her words were said to a puny girl, Rose, the daughter of a sickly woman who fought with whiskey when she had it. Rose had done nothing I could see to interfere, wanted only to belong, like me.

  “What stinks of wet dog?” said another girl.

  She sniffed her nose to the air while three other dark-eyed girls giggled at Rose’s unwashed smell. Rose lowered her eyes but stayed. I guessed what she was feeling, for I had felt it too.

  The first girl wrinkled her nose again, told Rose to move, and pushed her until she fell. The sniffing girl continued with her game as though she’d just stepped on an ant. She threw a larger pebble upward and tried to pick up four or five smaller ones kept inside a circle of hemp rope. She hoped to get them all before the larger rock hit the ground.

  But my small white hand reached beneath hers and caught the rock instead.

  “Ooh. Spring Water is mad, now,” said one of the girls kneeling at the circle.

  “Put it down,” she snapped, her attention now on me. She looked uncertain of my intentions. No wise tibo ever interfered.

  “This is not for you to play. Give it to me!”

  I resisted and fueled her rage.

  “You will be strung by your fingers! Burned from that tree!” She nodded her head to a charred juniper standing alone. “I will see to it!” She stomped her foot. “Give it,” she demanded, her eyes narrow like a snake’s.

  The river stone felt smooth with a faint slick of oil from a child’s fingers that often held fish. Rose picked herself up, but her eyes showed more alarm now than when she’d been shoved, and I wondered if my interference had really been for her.

  “You’ll burn!” Spring Water screamed.

  I pretended I did not hear her threat, though my heart pounded and my thoughts told me to find another way to make a friend.

  Spring Water began stomping around the girls kneeling at the circle. She kicked at Rose. Anger clenched her jaws.

  “You better run, tibo,” the girl closest to me whispered. “Rose is not worth it.”

  I might have gone off. I had no hope of turning this to something good. But her words fired me. So instead of dropping the stone at Spring Water’s feet or scooting away to avoid her arm raised to strike me, I surprised her and myself by moving toward the danger, rather than away. In one quick step, I stood to meet the surprise in her eyes, then dove past and flipped the stone into Rose’s surprised hands.

  “Your turn,” I said and walked away, imagining the surprise I left behind, pleased that they would see me as one who would not back down.

  My feet walked wide past the charred juniper. I heard Spring Water shouting at me that I would still likely burn, but when I looked, I saw my efforts had been worth it: Rose had been allowed to keep the stone and make one try at the jacks. I would have liked to take a turn myself, but my heart told me it would never be.

  The juniper stood black against the desert. It could have been a lightning strike that darkened the thick bark and marked it to the roots rather than a burning.

  Don’t think of it, I told myself.

  I remembered captives who died from longing. They caused my heart to ache in understanding and made me wonder if I chose wrongly to stay here, gathering greasewood, making fires, picking huckleberries in season, watching from a distance the pleasure of stone-playing girls, accepting kicks and pokes and threats, just to stay alive.

  But I chose it: to watch and learn and have the strength to search. You are alive to choose, I told myself. The thought kept me warm on nights when snow dusted the dogs’ backs and my own and drove me toward the future like an arrow.

  Once or twice I spied children with their nabawici who were hugged and called by name, rescued by a moo’a, grandmother from another tribe, or parent—a child recognized at a gathering as one who was lost who had been found. Outside the circle of belonging, I touched my marking with my dirty fingertips, watched the reunions bathed in warmth, and wished for someone who might search for me, know me by my name, and take me home.

  Sometimes I dreamed of tall people in strange-looking skirts and shirts who wrapped me in their arms, the rough of their clothes brushing against me, the sweetness of their breath fresh against my face. But in the mornings, when the sun rose over the high Oregon desert and cast cool rays against mountain snows, I would feel the breath of a dog and the scratchiness of a dried tule mat against my skin and know anew the ache of loneliness.

  Then I chose to have the markings on my face and all I could remember of my past urge me on, remind me of the journey I had chosen: to find my people and my place.

  THE SECOND KNOT

  WADADUKA

  Build the fire up, stupid girl! Your poor fire-tending tells people a lazy man lives here.”

  The voice of Lives in Pain, once a Modoc warrior, came as though pushed through deep mud instead of being carried by a warm wind blowing at the opening of his lodge. In recent weeks, his words were often woven with demand. I tried to leave before he whined, but failed.

  “Oh, little Asiam. You can have some fish with me, after you get it. Get greasewood, too.” His arm reached out to stop me as I slipped by to the outside of his lodge. I wiggled from his grasp. He stepped closer.

  “Maybe I should move you on?” His fingers reached for my shoulder, found it,
pressed hard enough to make me catch my breath. “Maybe to someone who will work you more. Am I so unkind?” he asked, stroking my arm as though I were a pet. Two hairs hung from his pocked chin, and he pulled at them with fingers soft as dough. I jerked, tried to step backward.

  “The fire will die unless I tend it,” I said. He held me a moment then let me go, a marked child making her escape.

  In my four or five seasons with the Modocs, I learned their words for seeds and fish and forgot many of my own. But I spoke little to this man or any other. Lives in Pain had no patience with his helpers. He jabbed with large kicks or prodded with a stick if one moved too slowly.

  I scurried to the basket kept in the cool dark of his tule lodge shaped like a mound of mud. A dog I sometimes made my bed with followed me in, yawned and stretched, his tongue panting while he waited for scraps.

  “Move, Pinenut,” I told the dog, who eased closer to the fish basket, tripping me as he pushed his dark body beside me. His big head hung low, staring like he’d found a prairie chicken among the tules. His chest showed healed scars, evidence of his fights. His tail wagged at the smell of fish, and wetness hung from his mouth like strands of melted honey and dribbled onto the hunk of dried fish I set aside for Lives in Pain.

  “He won’t like that soggy piece,” I whispered but smiled inside at the trick the dog played on a man I could not afford to challenge.

  I lowered my eyes as expected when I handed the food to the man who commanded me, then stepped backward to get fresh greasewood for his fire.

  “So quick!” he cooed at me in his thick voice, as he ripped at the dried fish with his front teeth. He gave the softer piece of fish a look of interest, pressing it between his fingers. He grunted as he felt the wetness, then to my satisfaction, he shrugged and popped it in his mouth.

  “Come back,” he said, his words muffled with food as I moved beyond his reach. “You want a piece of this?”

  “Later,” I said, shaking my head.