The Memory Weaver Page 7

  “Eliza! Get smelling salts.” My father shook me. “Help now. Poor Rachel.” His voice pulled me back into this present moment. He didn’t notice where I’d gone or that I shivered. “This is too much for Rachel’s sensitive nature. But she so wanted to help with butchering. Go on. Get the salts, Daughter. You’re all right.”

  I stumbled to our cabin, slowly back into this place of autumn leaves, the sound of geese calling to each other high above. For a moment their calls were cranes above Waiilatpu, but the dog’s nose against my hand as I walked kept me here. “Yaka. Good boy.” I let him come inside while I pulled the smelling salts from the box, my hands shaking. I checked on the stove, made sure the damper was closed so we didn’t have to tend to it for now. My ritual of safety completed, I headed back out, the molding leaves of autumn musking the air. I put my arms beneath Rachel, and she sat up as I swept the salts beneath her nose. With my father, we half carried her to the cabin where she rested all day, and my father and I—with the help of Henry Hart and the little ones— finished the slaughter of the hog. My mother would have helped without fainting. And she would have seen me disappear and brought me back to warming arms to stop my shaking. My father defiled our mother’s memory with his marriage, even if Rachel did her best. She would never be as good as my mother’s worst.

  The Diary of Eliza Spalding

  1850

  I fail my husband, not being able to care for my household. Horace my dear brother has agreed to remain with me during the trial. I am so grateful, as I have three children to care for and my own health has deteriorated. Do I repeat myself? I should look back in this diary and see if I speak overly much of my trials. Long hours I spend in bed, praying through a persistent cough that tires me more than when I taught school, sewed, dried foods, picked berries, and yes, rode horses, the latter for pure joy and the feel of the wind in my hair, the sun on my face.

  Gracious God in heaven, be with my family, me. Help me to set aside these thoughts of anger and betrayal directed at the Mission Board, my husband’s insistence to expose Eliza to yet more pain. Help me see that you are in all places, light and darkness, that we can better see the light because we have wandered in the shadows. With gratitude for the lives you spared I remain your humble servant. Amen.

  I was strong on our journey west, though more than once I asked Mr. S to leave me behind. It was a genuine request to hasten a death I thought could not be avoided. I did not wish to be responsible for the deterioration of the work we’d been set to do. I didn’t complain. It was a practical matter. I was with child and, merciful God, may I one day understand—I lost the infant. And if this was God’s provision for me, an early death to bring me to his Presence, I was prepared for it. But my dear husband would set our tent at night, cook over our fire, settle me in, bring me tea. And by morning, I would be better. Praise God.

  I suppose a part of me did not wish to let my husband go on without me, traveling with Narcissa Whitman, a woman Mr. Spalding had once proposed to, though she had declined. We were near the fort at Laramie when Mr. Spalding once confided to me that he wondered if we ought to have come with the Whitmans. “I question her judgment,” he whispered. “She wasn’t wise enough to accept my offer of marriage so I’m not sure I have confidence in her ability to truly teach the Gospel.”

  I confess I’d been surprised to hear him speak that way. I found her cheery and lovely to behold, as the fur trapping party we traveled with demonstrated daily, tipping their beaver hats to her, leaning in when she lifted her tinkling voice, chasing after her bonnet when the wind caught it and it sailed away. A simple neck string would have solved that problem.

  I hope he will remarry, my dear Mr. S. I would pray that he would find a helpmate for him, someone to carry on the work away from Lapwai, though I pray he might one day return there. I never will. My days are numbered.

  Mr. S waited on me on that journey. Tended me after we escaped to the Forest Grove, and I improved enough to teach at the little academy. Today my dear brother waits on me, brings me tea. Like Mr. S, he can cook. And we speak easily together (through my coughing) about New York and Ohio where I attended classes beside my husband, how I ran a boardinghouse for students to pay for Mr. S’s schooling. “You could do that here,” Horace offers. “You love to teach.”

  “I do. But I have a feeling that I won’t be long in this world.”

  “Oh, don’t even say such a thing. You’re what, forty?”

  “Forty-two. I’ll be forty-three in August. If I live that long.”

  “You’ve a babe to raise.”

  Dear Millie. She is an active child.

  “Matilda helped raise my others. And dear Eliza.” There Eliza sits with her father at the trial of those Cayuse, caught, confessed. They will be hung, no doubt. The trial feeds the people who hunger for actions that take them from their powerlessness. They seek revenge more than truth or justice. Eliza should not have to be there, but my words to Mr. Spalding fall on deaf ears. A deaf mind as well. He has been so different since those days following the tragedy. And now, two years later, there is this trial and Eliza attends because her father insists she will be the best reporter, calmly telling of what happened, how she was the only one who could understand the hostage-holders’ language and thus communicated with them, expressed their desires to the hostages and then to British messengers negotiating their release. We’ll never know the terrors she experienced while under siege. She will never know ours, believing she was dead, fearing for our lives.

  Horace cut into my memory. “Don’t be absurd. Matilda is a lovely Indian woman but she certainly did not instill in your children the love of God you tout so strongly. You’re needed.”

  “I wish you knew the Lord, Horace.” I patted his hand, strong, with liver spots.

  “I know of him well.” He grinned at me, then removed the rag from my forehead and prepared another mustard paste to grab the fever that came and went like bad dreams.

  “You would find in him a kindred spirit of kindness and gentleness.”

  “Maybe I know him through you.”

  “It’s not the same,” I told him. “Think what joy it would bring to me to have one more soul to anticipate seeing in heaven.”

  “Enjoy the soul you have before you,” he said. “And appreciate my cooking.”

  Have I told him how much his presence meant to me when we learned of the assault? Or how grateful I was that he did not panic but cautioned us to wait to see what the word truly was, whether Mr. S and our Eliza were actually gone from this world? I doubt I’ve told him. I will do so before I die. Let him know that his arrival was God-sent, to be there when I grieved my daughter and husband’s death; to be there when Mr. S arrived emaciated and in shock as we learned there were hostages as well as deaths and prayed that Eliza was alive. Then the Nez Perce came and whisked us farther up the canyon, for our safety, they said. For all we knew, we were being held hostage too, awaiting our own demise.

  7

  Held Hostage

  My memories weave a complex web. They hold me hostage one day so I can’t act; other days they send me toward plans that might not be the best for me. No words would ever make my father consent to our marriage, even if I approached contrite, even if Mr. Warren was baptized a believer. So long as my siblings needed tending and Rachel gained few house husbandry skills, and I was stuck at home, I’d remain his true assistant in his work. Rachel had begun teaching school. Henry Hart cooked when I traveled with my father. But a year from now, I had decided, Andrew and I would marry. Wouldn’t my mother want that for me? Happiness with a good man?

  Christmas was a lovely time that year, 1853. The school became a vision of the party and feast in A Christmas Carol, a book by Mr. Dickens that Rachel had shipped from Boston and read to the little girls. I eavesdropped as I mashed potatoes. It was the only time I ever saw my father lose his temper with Rachel, yelling at her for bringing fiction into the house, for tainting our minds with untruths. But the story spoke of me
mories, of experiences gone that could still touch us. The ghost of the future was a crooked finger beckoning us to make the future different, to somehow learn from what had happened in the past and make the present a more comforting, kind, and, yes, safe place.

  “God can use anything,” Rachel told him. “Don’t you remember the biblical Nathan who told a story to David that changed David’s heart?”

  My father relented then and let her read it to us more than once. I loved the rendering of the feast on Christmas morning when Scrooge has blended past with future into present, willing to change while he still had the chance, to let the past transform him rather than define him. I thought how lovely it would be to decorate the school with greens and berries and mistletoe for the Christmas program, hoping to capture the joys of the season that we’d all known when my mother was alive.

  I garnered my sisters and Nancy Osborne and a few others to string popped corn and berries on the tree my father chopped to put inside the schoolhouse that winter. Small candles we made ourselves decorated the tree, and Mr. Warren offered to be one of the guards to douse any branch that might catch fire. My father could hardly refuse him. We arched greens over the few windows, hung them with mistletoe given up by the oaks. My father said Meriwether Lewis called it the Great Grape of the Columbia during the Corps of Discovery that opened up the West. Small apples with more red than brown highlighted the greens upon the mantel as they surrounded the large candle I’d made and placed in the center.

  For additional decoration we hung our quilts created by the women of Brownsville. Carpenter’s Wheel. Crown of Thorns. Barn Raising with Prairie Points. We encouraged scrap quilts with reds and greens and whites and hung one or two by wealthier women whose work was made of only those three colors. They could afford the material while the rest of us used bits and pieces. The evening flickered with candles and the voices of neighbors grateful to have survived another year, feeling blessed to have a teacher and a pastor in my father and his new wife.

  He didn’t preach that evening. Instead a bit of the former man appeared, smiling, patting children on their heads, laughing out loud at Mr. Blakely’s joke. Rachel beamed. I think she took credit for his transformation—and he did look upon her with affectionate eyes. My stomach gnawed as I watched them, wanted to say something. I chose to eat a pastry Nancy had made instead. We sang carols, the room warmed by the fire and friends. When the children opened their meager presents that Mr. Warren and the other guard handed out from beneath the tree, I caught Mr. Warren’s gaze. He wiggled his eyebrows, grinned, then tended back to his task.

  Yes, Christmas would be a lovely time to marry.

  After the church service while men and women chatted in the cool rain before stepping into their buggies and wagons, Mr. Warren pulled me behind the log building. A steady rain misted and we ducked under an umbrella Rachel had brought with her that I raised.

  “You can push it onto a belt,” he suggested, “and wear it when we’re riding, to put precious things into.” He’d gifted me with a small leather pocket purse with my initials worked into it.

  “I don’t wear belts. You just began wearing one yourself.”

  “I’ll make you one.”

  “I didn’t make you anything.” I should have thought of something for him. I wondered at my lack of generosity, but Mr. Warren interrupted my shame.

  “You’ll still marry me next year. That’s your present to me.”

  “If you have my father baptize you, yes.”

  He kissed me then and would have done so again, but my father shouted my name and I slipped away into the night, shaking the rain from the umbrella. I couldn’t show his leather gift to anyone except Nancy, but I treasured it. That night, I put my mother’s golden wedding ring inside.

  The winter had its way with us, sending rain in shapes: drizzle, downpour, fog, and once or twice a freeze. We even woke one morning to snow, a rarity. Rivers rose, and yet that spring of 1854 I traveled with Father south to start a church at Spencer Butte not far from Eugene City where he’d also worked to begin a Presbyterian church. We rode through spring drizzle to Grand Prairie where Father preached and then on to Albany where he began a Congregational church. Both were closer villages, but still it meant much riding and no time to mix with Mr. Warren. It wasn’t like the old times, when my father and I had ridden and he taught Scripture along the way, spoke of the high hills that placed their arms around us all at Lapwai, breathed in the hot, dry air. Here, moisture was our companion, low fogs in the morning, high streams we crossed with trepidation. And a man obsessed. He talked incessantly of Lapwai, of getting the Mission Board to approve his and Rachel’s return. Ours, too, I imagined, if I still lived with him.

  “Why go back there?” I gave my horse her rein, so she stopped and tore at grass.

  “Lapwai? Why, it’s my life. Your mother’s life. We did such good work there, Eliza. Such good work. The People need me.”

  “They betrayed us.”

  “What? What a thing to say! They saved our lives, your mother’s and mine and your sisters and brother. It wasn’t Timothy’s fault he couldn’t rescue you and the others. Don’t even think such a thing.”

  But I did.

  I changed the subject. “You often left Mama behind in Lapwai.” I kept judgment from my voice.

  “She did fine. She had Matilda. We did the Lord’s work there, Eliza. Just as we do here, bringing the Lord to people to light up their darkness. Someone always has to remain behind.”

  I trusted we were doing the Lord’s work when I traveled with him as a child. I wasn’t sure we still were. I believe he took me with him because I could sing all the hymns and he knew that our hearts are turned through music. But it concerned me that my mother had remained behind so often with no one but Nez Perce to look after her, her husband far away in case of trouble. She must have felt abandoned. I knew I would.

  The hills in this Willamette Valley were all referred to as buttes and grew out of the lush, flat landscape like those blemishes that appeared on my chin or forehead during my monthlies. We dismounted to give our legs a stretch and relieve the horses too. “So you think one day I’ll marry?” I posed the question to my father as we watered our horses at a small stream not far from Spencer Butte. “I’ll have a husband to look after as Mama looked after you.”

  “Marry? Well. One day. But you’re just sixteen, Eliza. A girl. You have much promise before you, and thankfully, there are no young men panting at my door for your hand. That’s all I’d need.” He grumbled that last under his breath, but I heard it. “One day you’ll go to the Tualatin Academy, and when you do, you might meet a young man worthy of you. I see none in Brownsville. There were no mates for me here either. A friend found Rachel for me.”

  Something you ought not to have done. I picked at the horse’s rein. “There are some young men of interest.” The horses tugged at new grass. We’d have to be careful or they’d collick with the tender shoots. My Nellie twisted her head to nip at a fly, jangling the bit.

  “We’d best be riding.” He helped me mount Nellie sidesaddle, then eased himself onto his bigger gelding.

  “There is Mr. Warren, of Missouri. He came to classes for a time.”

  “Warren?” My father jerked his head around to look at me, his hand resting on the rump of his horse. He scowled. “He’s a drunk. I thought you’d followed my orders about not seeing him. You have, haven’t you?”

  “Why do you say he’s a drunk?”

  “Everyone says it.” He turned back, shouted over his shoulder. “God will find the man for you in due time. Don’t you worry.”

  His certainty of Mr. Warren’s fallen nature caused my face to burn hot. But I’d already imagined the worst, so I knew it couldn’t happen. I just had to find a way to make my father accept what God had already ordained.

  “Andrew! You frightened me.” He’d entered the cold smokehouse and stood behind me so when I turned I stared into his face and gasped. I struck his chest. “Don’t
ever do that, don’t surprise me like that.” Wiping an errant hair from the bun at my neck, I stepped back.