Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher) Page 31

  “You are not feeling well, Thomas Crickett,” I told him.

  “I’ll be fine. Just that indigestion bothering me again. Should take off a few pounds too, I suspect.” He patted his soft abdomen.

  “More rest would help you, Thomas Crickett. You work too hard.”

  He continued eating, and I thought then that his dedication to his work was one reason I had grown to love him. I have watched my husband give his care to patients and staff, write and send the papers that were needed to keep this asylum that is a small town moving forward like a lumbering animal, watched him pace before a legislative meeting, seen his eyes water in tenderness as he scanned a room of patients he had come to care for as his family, helped them unearth their enemies, then find the strength to leave. I admired my husband greatly.

  “You are seldom missing hope,” I told him.

  “Hopeless? Never. Some things are just worth doing,” he said. He crumpled his napkin in a ball. “Whether they turn out well or not.”

  “My friend said that once, that looking for a lost chain was worth it even if we didn’t find it.”

  “Hmm. Working here is like that.”

  “As is sitting beside Wuzzie.”

  He reached for my hand across the table and held it. We sat quietly together, sharing silent burdens before I added, “But the healer must care for himself so he has enough to give away.”

  Thomas Crickett squeezed my fingers, and his look told me he appreciated my concern but would change little in his life to reduce it. So what he said next came as some surprise.

  “I’d court you at a steelhead stream,” he offered, eyes twinkling, “if you’re willing. Have Kaiser pack us a picnic lunch?”

  “It is a good plan, Thomas Crickett,” I said, standing to kiss the top of his shiny head. “I will get my rod before you change your mind.”

  Thomas Crickett took me fishing that very next day along the Santiam River. It was the first outing we had had since seeing Carrie just before her wedding.

  We rode out in a sporty buggy, Benny sleeping at our feet. “Old age slows you down,” Thomas Crickett said, nodding to the dog. “That’s what I feel like doing, really.”

  “Let’s stop then,” I suggested. “I’ve no need to fish. Just wanted to see you out and quiet for a day. Give Benny a chance to play. Let’s lay the blanket and let you rest.”

  “The steelhead are running,” he said. “Still want to get you to one of the coast streams, too. That Coquille River. You’d have a fight there with one on.”

  “I have always wished to see the ocean. To see where Home Creek and the Malheur and the Deschutes and the Columbia all pour together.”

  “We’ve never done that, have we? Next summer,” he announced, committed. “Won’t be able to drag you away before then, I’ll wager. You’re more wrapped up in this work than I ever was.”

  “It is good work to do, Thomas Crickett. And I am grateful.”

  “You’re inexpensive help,” he said and laughed. “Making good progress with your Wuzzie. Who would have thought that some lonely Indian woman would have made my life so rich and full. Guess we never know what form some gifts will come in. Wuzzie. She’s the one who truly gave me you.” He bent to kiss me, and I felt my heart full.

  My husband, Thomas Crickett, M.D., did not land a steelhead trout that day. He snagged one with his streamer and shouted for me to watch the split Tonkin cane rod bend like a rainbow from his hands to the crystal water where the fish resisted the catch. My husband whooped and hollered as he made his way along the shore.

  “Hope the gut leader holds!” he shouted, letting out silk fly line, reeling it in, waiting and releasing, making his way, lifting his rod over his head to push his broad chest through brambles.

  Benny barked and barked. Thomas Crickett shouted back for me to watch when the big fish jumped out of its watery world into the foreignness of the air.

  “Bring the net!” he yelled.

  I watched his fishing hat bob from the other side of the brambles. I laid my pole down and grabbed the net.

  Thomas Crickett remained out of sight, but I could hear him enjoying this sport of skill and capture, knowing he would let the steelhead go if he should finally land it on the sandy shore, perhaps a pause for picture-taking with the Eastman.

  I made my way through brambles. On the other side, a quietness met me, broken only by the chatter of robins flitting between willows, a dog barking in the distance. White clouds fluffed their way above the water, promising a later thunderstorm. I smelled mud and Russian olives.

  I thought he must have walked some distance, let the fish take him where it would. I smiled, thinking of him doing what he loved. I followed his tracks along the shoreline, making my way sideways through more brambles. I expected to see the sun sparkle on the taut, wet line, hear him shout to me, signal me with his hands.

  Instead, I heard the dog’s quick, quick bark of something wrong, noted the Tonkin cane beside the water, saw my husband sitting in the sand, his hand clutched to his chest.

  “Thomas?” I dropped beside him, kneeling, his face as gray as the shoreline, his eyes deep sunk with pain. I loosened his tight collar, unbuttoned his vest, pressed his head to my chest.

  “Stupid thumb,” he sighed. “Couldn’t get a good hold on him. Lost him, Alice.” His breaths came in short gasps. “No need to worry. Just need a minute.”

  “Oh, Thomas.” I felt the tears stinging in hot streaks down my cheeks, could see he lied to keep me from worry.

  “First time you ever called me Thomas,” he said in wonder, gazing up at me. “Today. Without the Crickett. Sounds nice. Like we’re friends that way.”

  “You are my friend, my most wonderful friend. Did you ever wonder?”

  “Not really,” he said, breathing harder now, his voice coming in gulps, his face pinched in pain. “Just thought … when you started calling me by my first name … it would mean you were ready to really stay … really love me.”

  They are the last words my husband of nine years said to me before I felt his body stiffen, sensed his spirit rise above me as I held him, powerless to save him, in the sand.

  I had taken to speaking in Paiute words to talk about the weather, the birds that bounced the fir branches when they flitted away. It did not bring her voice nor much change in the rhythm of her days, but the words seemed to give comfort to her. Her shoulders relaxed.

  The Wadaduka words brought comfort to another: to me, a healer being healed.

  I sat with other patients, helped the nurses who had been like family in my husband’s death. My presence was a familiar sight to families visiting. They watched me take out chamber pots, bring in fir boughs to capture something of the outdoors, fresh. Sets of towels and china, books and stereopticons once in my husband’s living room now filled these spaces on the wards, made the lives of patients easier, added interest. I had given them, I thought, so Thomas could still touch these lives he cared about, but found I kept him near to me as well when I walked the halls he’d cherished, let my eyes fall on familiar things that once carried his scent.

  Most of Thomas’s things I gave away when I moved out to make room for the new physician.

  “Not much of your things to pack, Missus,” Kaiser said as he emptied out the wardrobe from our bedroom. “Know about that. Makes it easier to move on.”

  And so I wondered if I never gave my all to Thomas Crickett, somehow kept myself from loving him as fully as I could, always kept myself packed lightly, unencumbered by possessions, prepared to leave.

  I stroked Spirit, moving back and forth with me, living full-time in the asylum, there to catch the sun, offering purrs to soothe a troubled soul, then off to Sherar’s Bridge to soak up sagebrush air.

  No, I gave all that I could find inside myself to give, gave it all to Thomas, loved him not as Shard, but loved him still, the most connected I could be to another living being. But I could have told him more, that much shame I carried. I had not known he wished to hear
the words.

  I found comfort in continuing in the shadow of his work. My thoughts fell often onto Wuzzie, even when I was not with her. I thought that reaching her would be the final gift I gave my husband, that good man who gave so much to me.

  I prayed for Wuzzie. Told no one.

  I rented a small room not far from the asylum, thought of it as temporary until the time my Spirit told me to move on. But Wuzzie pulled me, stretched my willingness to stay beside another until her heart was ready. I watched her make no alliance with me or any others.

  Until one day.

  Wuzzie had touched her forehead as though her head contained some pain. It was some months after Thomas’s death, a cool morning. The sun did not feel warm and clouds threatened, making my own head pound. Wuzzie’s action reminded me that dizziness and headaches meant spirit trouble to the Wadaduka, ghosts whose presence called for the Wuzzie I remembered from my past.

  “Perhaps you need a puhagammi,” I suggested, “to take away your bad spirits.” I said it gently, almost without thought.

  Wuzzie’s head jerked to me, her brown eye glared.

  I looked away out of respect, but my heart pounded encouragement. She knew the Wadaduka language, had understood the word. She still stared, her fingers twitching, but she said nothing, made no new moves.

  “Yes, perhaps a puhagammi could bring some comfort,” I suggested again, pushing myself closer, the distance of one seed this time, looked closer to her unpatched eye. She did not seem to look straight through me. I saw the change as progress.

  On a day long into fall, I noticed several patients making baskets with slender reeds, and I gathered some, spread them on the table next to Wuzzie’s chair. In doing so, I bent my face to hers. I was thinner than any previous time, had no interest in food, no one to share it with. I wore no waxy makeup, spent my evenings reading, taking walks to grassy places, to lectures, concerts, or struggling with the words of Puritan prayers.

  But something flashed in her eye as she looked at me with a kind of recognition, and I felt pleased she acknowledged my presence, sitting with her as the hours went by. I smiled, sat back down, and began the makings of a treasure basket, surprised my fingers still remembered the way to twine two cords together to create the center that must be perfect to make the basket balanced and then whole. I felt delight as I made the working surface grow with each twist to the right.

  My own basket so engaged me that at first I did not notice that Wuzzie’s hands had picked up the slender reeds, were weaving too.

  What she created stunned me. My stomach tightened both because of what it brought to mind and because she had made it.

  Complete, she handed it to me. She did not watch my face. Into my open palm she placed her creation and then said the first word I had ever heard from her: “Namaka.”

  “Yes,” I breathed, my body tingling. “Namaka. Gift. Look!”

  I raised my voice to the patients at the table next to ours, showed the nurses. “See what Wuzzie makes.”

  They murmured notice before returning to their tasks, unimpressed with the magnitude of her gift.

  I turned the weaving over in my fingers, just beginning to put words to something deep inside that hearing the peculiar sound of Wuzzie’s voice had tapped. I turned the gift slowly, making sense. She had woven a small dog, not unlike the one Wren hid for me inside the treasure basket buried now with Flake.

  “It’s lovely,” I whispered, afraid to look at Wuzzie. The reeds spoke through my fingers, touched a memory, pushed to an understanding of why fear clutched at my throat. Her gift had signaled one fence might be taken down. Why did my heart beat, then, with sudden fright?

  “Namaka,” she repeated, her tone more insistent, her fingers pressed to mine.

  And then she spoke in a voice so familiar, a voice so powerful from my past that I could hardly grasp the meaning above the throbbing in my chest.

  “E tumatza’yoo!” she whispered, leaning to me, her bony fingers on my wrist, now working up my arm.

  “Help you? How? I …” I swallowed hard; I could not breathe.

  Then in words spoken like a prayer she told me, her eyes directly staring into mine. “Ka suda nosena wunayoo.”

  Her claw-like fingers no longer twitched, no longer wove the reeds. Instead, they moved to cover trembling in my hand. Then she added one more word to make the tears push to my eyes, my palms and arms so wet with sweat that I could smell myself. I heard my heart pound in my ears so that I was not sure she truly said it.

  “Thocmetone,” the voice sang out, fluttering above my pounding heart. “Shell Flower.”

  It was my name this Wuzzie spoke, my name she said, her hands on mine. Thocmetone, the name once given me in love.

  THE NINETEENTH KNOT

  COMMUNION

  Praying Piutes. The Piute Indians were in the habit of paying annual visits to the California coast towns and some of their women married Spaniards, which made them acquainted with the Christian religion.… Several of their leading men and women were baptized each year. Their own religion is not a bad one, and from it to any orthodox Christian religion is but a short step. Strange as it may appear, they are a praying people. The Princess, Sarah Winnemucca’s book, is full of instances where her people were assembled in prayer, and she herself was wont to pray to the Great Spirit whenever she got into trouble—prayed aloud as she fled before her enemies on a wild cayuse across the deserts.—Grant County News, Canyon City, Oregon, 1890

  Who are you?” I whispered.

  The woman, Wuzzie, sat silent.

  I willed myself inside her spell to find the truth, terrified at what I already knew, had determined in an instant, a hundred details making sense at once. Wuzzie lived alone. Wuzzie kept apart. Wuzzie had no eyebrows, no hair, neither woman nor man. Wuzzie had a voice both high and low. Wuzzie had no history with the band, still grew in power for his mystery—her mystery. Wuzzie knew the ways of charming. Wuzzie willed me far away and then was sent, herself.

  The woman, Wuzzie, reached up to brush her fingers across my face. She stroked the marking on my chin. Her touch felt gentle, like the tender touch that lifted me from the rock ledge with a broken leg, helped trade my meager body for a precious obsidian knife. My hand fluttered to her fingers like a scattering spider, brushed against her palm in the Indian way of greeting.

  “Who are you?” I whispered again, violating the taboo of questions, peering into eyes that carried recognition for the first time, something old and strong passing between us. The answer to my question lay in her eyes.

  “Thocmetone,” she said, still making sense of me, then, “E tumatza’yoo. E tumatza’yoo.”

  Her voice shook, but it reached to a place inside my soul, a place once so familiar in its sadness that I almost did not recognize it as the other side of joy.

  My heart pounded. I searched her face still wanting to be sure, wondering how I could have sat beside her for this time and not known. I shook my head with the strangeness of it, the futility of wasted anger, fear, and shame. I had blamed so much on the Wuzzie of my memory, given all that power from the past to a shriveled woman of the present.

  Her hands clutched at mine, and while I recognized now who she was, a part of me wanted certainty. So I told her with my Paiute words that I would lift her eye patch to see if what was beneath it was the color of a summer sky.

  And so it was.

  Her eye did not focus, showed damage, streaked and pinched with scars of a wound not treated properly before it healed itself. She startled, shifted her good eye to me, and we touched across the time of separation, shared a hundred burdens with one momentary stare.

  I could almost hear Thomas tell me in his teaching voice: “Latin word com means ‘burden,’ a sharing of burdens, and union, of course, means ‘a coming together.’ Perfect description of what should happen in this asylum. Two people, one better able for the moment to bear a burden and in doing so, brings the other along. They come together and are the stronger,
able to know each other fully, solve the problem, and then move on.”

  He did so like solving problems.

  Commune with Wuzzie. Is that what I’d been doing these past months, without knowing? Sharing burdens?

  She shriveled smaller as I put the leather patch back. Her mouth pinched as though someone had taken stitches to tie it shut. Her jaws clenched. I was embarrassed by my intrusion to her person, my need to know. I was well beyond my skill.

  “Let me get someone,” I told her, rising, looking for escape.

  Her hand grabbed mine, stopped me.

  “I’ll find a doctor,” I said.

  She clutched tightly, as though clinging to the reins of a green-broke mount she feared would leave her far behind. But she did not speak again, simply stared at me, and then resigned, she sighed, dropped her hand and head, and returned to silence, growing older as I watched.

  I sat back down, frightened now the moment had been lost. I stayed beside her and she settled, sinking into the chair as though no great thing had just transpired. I turned the tule dog over and over in my trembling hands, wondered at this gift, my fears of knowing and yet not.

  My eyes sought out Arlita, but did not find her. The others were not people I felt attached to. I was uncertain whether they would believe me when I told them that Wuzzie had the power of words.

  I never missed my husband more.

  I so wanted him to know of Wuzzie, knew he’d have the answers to what must happen next. The thought of Shard, too, pierced through my agitation and despair, burst inside me like a damaged water basket. How I missed him in that moment, longed for the refreshment his presence would have brought. Tears threatened to pool behind my eyes as I listened to the distant sounds of burdens being borne by other patients, the startling shouts, unnerving laughter, the shuffling of slippers down the hall.