Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher) Page 29

He looked up, searching for the cat, then by my face realized I had used the word for more than just to call a friend.

  “It is a way to describe me,” I said, the words difficult to breathe out. “I took a twisted passage, missed the target, as you say. Made choices that caused harm to people who had kept me as their own. And when everyone was injured by what I’d done, they forced me to leave. I made my way here, to Sherar’s Bridge. I did not die along the way. But someone did.” I grew quiet. “A friend offered up his life for mine.”

  “Did they take it?” Thomas Crickett asked. “Your friend’s offer?”

  “I believe that this is so. Only a small attempt was made to bring me back. And I have learned since that the people found a good antelope herd after I left. The people teach that something must be given up to soothe the spirits. I have wondered about this, whether such pain is required. But I believe they took my friend.”

  He sat quiet for a time. “But surely you could find out for sure? I mean, you wouldn’t have to carry such a burden.”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes, in the deepest place of my heart I still hope, still pray that he found another way. Maybe my prayers are answered and he has gone on to live a good life. But I cannot go back. They told me to leave—he did. In this, I will obey.”

  “When did this happen? Years ago, I’ll wager. Why, they’ve probably forgotten the whole thing by now. Where were you? What band was it?”

  “It does not matter now. I have walked a twisted trail, was asked to leave, to not return. I caused much unhappiness. It is something you should know about me.”

  “Is there someone you could contact? Who told you about the herd? Maybe they’d find out for you.” He became aware of my silence. “Oh, here I am, fixing things. It is a habit I have, trying to muddle into other people’s lives. But it seems so sad to not know. And so much has happened since then; you’ve made so many right choices. Surely no one but you thinks of yourself in hamartolos terms.”

  Thomas Crickett grew quiet to match mine. He picked up my pale hand in his and let my fingers pet the cat who had made his way to us. His silence signaled acceptance.

  “I do not believe that I can leave here yet, Thomas Crickett,” I told him. “At least not for always, not every day. There is something here I am supposed to do.”

  “Can I help you with it?” he asked, eager, then pushed both hands to the air in protest. “No fixing things. I understand.”

  “Once I drifted like a seed carried by the wind, waiting to be planted, always trying to belong. Now I am planted. I do feel as though the pot that is my life is full. But I have not borne fruit. It seems that here is where the sun and rain will bring me into harvest, and it will not matter then what has happened in the past.”

  “Your work here, what is it, exactly?”

  “It is not easily described, Thomas Crickett. I find pleasure in making the calves stand firm after a bout with scours or stopping a cat’s cough or relieving a horse’s bellyache.” Hearing it said sounded so small, so insignificant. “I believe I am of service to the Sherars. Sometimes I am asked to heal people, their cuts and wounds. I tend the gardens and direct those who prune the peach trees and the grapes.” I shrugged my shoulders. “It is what I think that I should do.”

  “Of course I’d want you with me, Alice,” he said, leaning back, elbows on the blanket. Fluffy clouds billowed into a sky the color of Malheur Lake. “A person’s work, well, it matters, is a big part of who they are, I’ve found. Lord knows I felt adrift when I lost my thumb. I felt, well, not whole, not complete. It was finding my work at the hospital that brought me from my own slump.”

  He sat up then, took my hands in his, and lifted both thumbs to his mouth, kissed them.

  “Work has a healing quality to it that defies the mind,” he said, “however small the hands doing it may seem. We’ve even proposed to the legislature that there be a farm connected with the hospital, so people can grow their own food, look after land, see the accomplishments of their hands over a season of time. Haven’t been too successful convincing politicians that such will work, but we’re trying. So I know about having a sense of satisfaction. And if that’s here for you, at your river place, now, well …”

  He rubbed his cheeks with my thumbs, and I could feel the roughness of his smooth face, the softness of his lips, smell the sweetness of his breath. Beads of perspiration were on his brow, and he reached for his linen to dab at his forehead, his hairless head.

  “I have come to care for you, Thomas Crickett,” I told him.

  “And I, you, my Muffin.” He placed his arm around my shoulder, let it lie gently, waited for me to lean into the crook of his arm, to rest my head on his chest. “And I am so grateful you find some small pleasure in my company. Just sitting beside you seems to fill me up.”

  “I would visit,” I said. “But we could wait, until I know for—”

  “Perhaps you could remain here until the children come,” he said moving me away from him to look into my eyes. “You would want children, wouldn’t you, Alice? I know I am somewhat older than you, but I’m not yet fifty, and I can care for you and any little ones we’d be blessed with, truly.”

  I found myself strangely silent at the thought of children, then warmed by the idea, remembering Sunmiet’s babies, Willow Basket’s little one.

  “I would like children,” I said, “sometime.”

  “Then we’re agreed. If those would be your terms, I’d accept them, knowing I’d have at least some moments with you. And when the children come, or perhaps if you completed your … finished your work first, well, then you could join me. And before then, for visits, a week or two at a time?”

  “If it wouldn’t seem too unusual to you, Thomas Crickett.”

  “Oh my, I have no worry about the unusual, Alice,” he said, smiling, holding my hands, thoroughly delighted. “I know people who are married whose wives live in Boston, and they haven’t seen them in years. And some whose husbands have been in the gold fields in California or South America who send home script and Valentines so full of love and encouragement that their wives speak as though they’d just met.”

  “Perhaps the distance helps,” I offered.

  “Might allow fanciful thinking to fill in empty spaces,” he said. “But I don’t think one’s presence is the critical thing to keeping a marriage quickened. It’s what’s up here that does it,” he said, tapping his head, “what one thinks about. And here,” he patted his heart. His eyes sparkled with eagerness. “Certainly I’ve seen the ravages of alliances that have not worked, though people have seen each other every day. That’s what I work with, actually.”

  “People who see each other every day who lose their minds?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Poorly stated. No, damaged relationships, regardless. The pain of disappointment, failed dreams, seeing ourselves reflected poorly in another’s eyes. Many people can’t let go of poor treatment by another or forget about past wrongs so they can move on. They choose to live with sadness.”

  “Perhaps they do not believe their happiness matters,” I said.

  “They’re forgotten souls, most of them. People who believe no one loves them and so they fail to love themselves.”

  “So you will not object to my staying here for a time? Not think me selfish?”

  “I’m the selfish one, to want you with me. But if that’s what it will take to have you accept this old man, allow me to change your name to mine, so be it,” he said.

  “And I would like to share yours. It is always nice to have a naming.”

  For six years I traveled at least five times a year to share my husband’s work and time. And he traveled once a month to visit mine.

  Sometimes, in the summer, we took trips east to walk beside the lakes I once called home, slip beneath the fences of the ranchers, hoping no one will see us, shout us away. Hawks who have never been tamed fly high above us. I escort Thomas Crickett, show him how I once walked with Shard and Lukwsh and Wren and Will
ow Basket, the whole band, perhaps one hundred or more, even Stink Bug, holding nets of tules while we walked to move the rabbits to their deaths.

  “Only in the winter,” I told my husband. “And then we killed the rabbits immediately so their meat would not be tired. And stripped their hides with our knives in our mouths so the rabbits could give us warmth for winter. Fifty rabbits for one coat, and many hours of work to sew them. But they were as beautiful as the pictures of a king’s cape you once showed me. And warmer.”

  Once when Thomas Crickett and I walked south of the lakes, we came upon a stack of carcasses many feet high. “Are these from one of your rabbit drives?” my husband asked. “There must be a thousand of them!”

  “We always took the meat, dried it, and made something of what the rabbits gave us with their deaths. These piles belong to others. Ranchers rescuing their crops. Their hides went for nothing. Most meat, for vultures.”

  None of the people were there in places where I once belonged. Only a tiny reserve existed closer to the fort, and I did not recognize the people there. I read the Canyon City paper, looked for evidence of those I might know, but those who were imprisoned lived a scattered life—those allowed to leave.

  It might have been a torture for us to travel there, but I had listened to Thomas Crickett talk of healing. I remembered Sunmiet’s direction to look for tools to break the fences of the past. I looked for glimpses of Grey Doe’s or Lukwsh’s life, hoped once to encounter Sarah’s band in passing, maybe even Sarah as she moved from the Nevada reservations to Yakima where most Wadadukas still remained.

  But I felt relief when I did not see Sarah or her friends, faced no questions about why I now lived a life of ease while nothing of their familiar lives remained.

  My husband became a fan of fossil beds and unusual rock formations, and so we traveled to the marshes through the rocky areas and I thought, once, that I had found the rock pile where I buried Flake. Though uncertain, Thomas Crickett stood with me over the grave and let me lean into him, helping me hold the memory.

  He did not press me, this husband of mine, did not question my devotion to him or my care. We had not been blessed with children, and so when I was with him, looking out on fir groves and rolling green lawns of the asylum, I could give him all I had to give, respond to his requests with no interference as I did that day when he asked me to share his visit to the hospital wards.

  “Something different about today?” I asked.

  “Hmm,” he mumbled between bites of pork. “A new patient, just arrived from Fort Simcoe. Where they marched the Paiutes after the Last Northwest Indian War. You remember.”

  “I will always remember.”

  “So you will.” He reached for my hand, patted it. “But for the grace of God, you would have been there too. Hungry, defeated, marched those hundreds of miles. In January! Just the thought makes my blood boil.”

  “All Sarah Winnemucca’s words had no meaning.”

  “They meant something, all right. General Howard got his Paiutes, the raids stopped, and Sarah kept her grandfather and brother from dying in the Steens. Something to be said for that. Think that’s why her grandfather called her the Chief.”

  “But the ones who lived still lost everything, trusted her to help them out.”

  “They couldn’t even carry on their songs if they hadn’t lived, Alice. They have some choice at least, in life’s deliveries, as we all do if we choose to live, to manage what we’re given. Now, I didn’t want to tell you this just yet, but the government has begun letting them go.”

  I turned to him, surprised by this news, and wondered why I did not know. I read the papers, kept my ears open for any mention of the people or their lives.

  “Just this spring. They’re being allowed to return to their old reserve. Or other reservations that’ll have them. There’s very little left at Malheur. An unfriendly agent, Rhinehart, I think it was, there some years? No one wanted to go back to that man’s orders. Been paid but had no Indians to agent, if you can believe that government scam. So the land’s going back to the government. Anyway, I doubt many will return there even though they can get some small acreage back. I’ve heard Warm Springs has been approached.”

  My mind flew to the rainbow of plumed birds, the drifts of swans that settled on the lakes, the snow geese, mud hens, herons, the grasses weaving in the wind. All lost to the people. My stillness told my husband that this painful subject was now closed. He persisted just a moment more.

  “They won’t be in prison any longer,” he said softly. “It’ll be better for them. They’ll find someplace to belong.”

  He had walked to the sideboard, filled his cup with coffee, returned to sit beside me.

  “How I wish you would have gone there and spoken with some of them. I can’t believe they hold you accountable for any of their misfortune, just a child you were! O Alice, I just wish.” He watched my eyes get large with meaning. “I know. You were asked not to return. Well, you didn’t, though it seems to me your past has marked your trails for long enough you may as well have.

  “Let me change direction,” he said, fisting his napkin into a clump. He pushed his chair back and put both hands on his ample thighs to stand, pulled me up, looked at me straight across, eyes above the spectacles, twinkling. “I need you today, Mrs. Thomas Crickett. Will you come with me to meet this patient? She’s a quiet one. Rather frail. Indian. Afterwards, we’ll have lunch later in the children’s unit. You always like that.”

  “Yes, I always like the children. How is the one you call Michael?”

  “Such a charmer, that one,” he said, laughing. “Can’t see the value in having those Mongoloids live here, if truth be known. They’re quite smart, you know. Easily trained. But the gardens and housekeeping would suffer if they stopped coming here. They really make the place run! Michael especially, so active, bounces like water on a hot spider, but I like his energy.”

  “She is Paiute? Your new patient.”

  “Oh, no, no. She’s been at a hospital in Washington. Steilacoom. Long before the Bannock War they tell me, but she’s an Oregon Indian they’ve determined, and Dr. Lane said we were forced to take her here for a time. Says we’ll see if we can make some headway. String bean of a thing. Hasn’t said a word. Has a patch over one eye she won’t let anyone touch. Can’t gauge her age.”

  “If you think that I can help,” I said, pleased by the prospect of entering into my husband’s world as someone with resources to share.

  “Good. Good. Just what the doctor ordered. Let me get your cloak. You never know when this Oregon sunshine will be chased by rain.” He placed the dark wool around my narrow shoulders and said, “Oh look! A rainbow!”

  He opened the french doors, and we walked out through groomed lawns, my leather shoes dipping into spongy April earth, to get a better view of the colors. A complete rainbow arched over us, disappearing into the fir grove.

  “Have you ever seen a rainbow at night?” I asked my husband.

  “Not ever. Would be quite a sight, I’ll wager.”

  “That it is.”

  He took my elbow, and followed by Benny, the cocker, we headed down the cobblestone path. I skipped a bit, danced around a puddle, while Thomas Crickett held my hand.

  “Oh yes,” he said, “now that I see you do a jig over that water, it reminds me. She has another unusual specialty, our new patient. She does a charming little dance that seems to seize her day.”

  THE EIGHTEENTH KNOT

  HEALING

  Skeeta Ike, a Piute, became despondent on account of family troubles and ended his existence by eating wild parsnip at Fort McDermitt, last week. The Indians seem to think that his squaw bewitched him and they will probably send her spirit to meet his.—Grant County News, Canyon City, Oregon, 1888.

  You know,” my husband said as we made our way to the nearest three-story building of a hospital that now housed more than five hundred patients, “a saved mind is a sober thing.”

  I walke
d quietly beside him. He had more to say.

  “I find it fascinating that the Greek word meaning to save, sodzo, also means ‘to heal.’ And the word phren, ‘mind,’ when put together with it is translated as ‘soberly’—a saved mind or a healed mind. That’s what we’re about here, I’d say, helping people become sober, having healed minds, don’t you think?”

  “The temperance ladies would approve,” I said.

  “That they would.” He chuckled.

  “You would make a good teacher, Thomas Crickett, the way you put thoughts into new skins.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “I fancy myself one at that.”

  A flash of discomfort crossed his face, and he stopped a moment, pressed his fingers into his stomach.

  “You are not well, Thomas Crickett.”

  “Just a little indigestion,” he said, catching his breath. He adjusted his glasses. “Kaiser puts a little too much seasoning on the pork chops in the morning. Perhaps I should pass that by tomorrow, just eat eggs and hash. I’m fine,” he said again and shook his head, blinked his eyes, smiled at me in reassurance.

  We stepped into the foyer of the largest of the hospital’s wings. Pale pink greeted us from the long walls, the high ceilings, even the floor. Swirls of green in the linoleum broke the pink at our feet as did the black seams that marched like river canals down the center of the just-waxed hallways.

  But the sights of Thomas Crickett’s world stayed with me less than the assault upon my other senses. Sometimes grieving greeted me, mournful songs in words I did not understand, sometimes cries like kittens lost in rainy weather. At times the plinking of a player piano repeating itself to the thumping of the foot pump pounded against my ears like wind chimes buffeted in a gale. Once or twice the music disappeared in the crooning of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” or some other song spinning on the phonograph sung by voices as unmatched as dogs and cats.

  I heard consumptive coughs, the grinding of teeth, and occasionally, screams howled out in rhythms like the clang of the dinner bell at the inn, almost as inhuman, as out of place for healing. And always, the chatter of expressions that reminded me of quarreling magpies or the settling down of irritated snow geese near a rice-laced lake.