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I felt my heart beat, but it was not a second heartbeat of the past. It was of the present. Waiilatpu was a place of death and loss and memory. My life belonged among the living.

29
A Gold Ring

After Waiilatpu, Timothy and his band left me. But not before he hugged me like a father hugs a daughter.

“You do forgive me,” I said.

“Forgiveness is a summer blanket meant to ward off a chill but carrying little weight. It frees you. This your mother said long years ago. Forgiveness is granted, Eliza. Forgive yourself.”

I watched them go. I had done my work at that sad site. What had to be settled from that time forward involved people as they were in this time and my need to see them through forgiven eyes.

Each stop along my journey home unraveled old memories and replaced them with new ones. The Dalles was a place where my sister married and found happiness rather than the river town where I fell so ill I nearly died following my father’s foolish ocean trip. It was the reunion site where I met up with my husband after he successfully brought cattle across the Cascades; where he gave me the gold band I wore. And it’s where my
sister Millie found us, where she rode fast and firm, before her injury. The journey on the steamship heading back to Brownsville would be a reminder not of hostages huddled beneath the canvas with our British rescuers but of a voyage returning me to my family. The Willamette Falls in Oregon City not with memories of a trial but of a marriage. I inhaled the mist and the thundering sounds of water.

I had kept the old memories too close and they had fed a shame in me, but their sustenance came from murky places, not from a well that quenched a thirst. With practice, I could pull happier memories from that deep well.

My girls made scarves of their arms around my neck when I brought them home from Rachel and Millie’s care.

“Don’t leave us ever again, Mama. You abandoned us.”

“Abandoned? Such a big word for you, America Jane. No, I left you safe. It’s good for Mama to be alone sometimes. Good for you too, to know I’m gone but I come back. I didn’t desert you.”

“What if you don’t come back though?”
Such a big
question.
She pooched out her lower lip as she ran her hands across the smooth ribbon at my throat. She smelled of the lavender Millie must have put into the soap, lavender my mother loved.

“Then as with my own mama, I will see you again in that heavenly place.”

It was enough to satisfy her as she began telling me stories of what she’d done while I was gone, and how she’d looked after Lizzie, her little sister.

“See, you grew strong with me away, just as I did. I’m proud of you.”

“You are always strong, Mama.” She pressed her head against my chest, patted my arm, then told Lizzie to “get your book. We’ll read to Mama and Minnie. She hasn’t seen a book for a
loooong time.” The oldest child, giving orders to the youngest, just as I had always done.

My husband welcomed me home and I saw him through the filter of forgiveness. Yes, friends could sway him, but he also resisted temptation. He had disappointed himself and me when he drank more than to “wet his whistle,” as he called it. But he sought new paths, and I found sincerity like well water rising up to squash old stories and replace them with the hope of new. These moments when I did not try to “make” my husband do this or that, didn’t interfere with my children learning in their ways different from my own, were kindling for the warming fires I built each day. I remembered a Scripture about “a bruised reed he will not break.” The reed of my body had been bruised but I had not broken. Even as a child it grew strong enough to endure.

Millie married John Brown in November and they began their life on the property Father had given her when Mama died, across from the schoolhouse, a level, productive piece of ground. I wished he’d left that plot to me, but he hadn’t. It was the way of things. One didn’t always get what one hoped for in this life. As time wore on I saw that while Millie got good land, her husband wasn’t nearly as attentive as Mr. Warren was. She had children but she needed help to raise them, and John Brown was busy soliciting investments for rebuilding the woolen mill after it burned down. Each child Millie bore took her closer to the invalid she became.

I conceived again in the fall of ’65, before the great War was over, and found I loved my husband better than I had when we first met, when I’d dragged him to the altar before I let him find his own way. My life was woven in with his, but we each also had singular threads. With God’s help, we had the power to wrap present moments with memory in order to make new cloth.

Mr. Warren’s herd had once again grown too large to keep constrained. We had another branding that spring and this time the whoops of the buckaroos as they lassoed calves or hooted and shouted did not remind me of a sham display. The calves moved down narrow lanes into corrals where a fire waited with branding irons to sear
AJW
into their sides, and the smell of burning flesh did not remind me of another time of scent and evil sounds. And when my husband said he and several other men planned to take the herds to Montana where a new territory thrived and settlers were hungry to start their own herds, I did not object to being left alone.

“You won’t be here when our baby is born.”

“No. But I’ll come back with cash.”

“And renewed vigor, I suspect.” He tipped his Stetson hat at me. I saw him as a man who needed space, challenge, and adventure, needed to be extraordinary, to have stories to tell. As did I, I decided. My story of making my way with my girls and Little Shoot and the Ruckers, my tale of riding back alone from Lapwai with a baby in my arms always marveled folks, as much as stories others told of crossing the Oregon Trail, a journey I’d been deprived of. Maybe each of us needs to feel a little extraordinary, to believe we’ve used well the talents we were given to live meaningful lives. I am the mother raising children to be resilient, trustworthy, able to keep going when they want to quit, kind and generous. What greater meaning can one life have?

I think Andrew also needed time away from me, and I didn’t see that desire as irresponsible on his part but rather as a natural state within the weft of our marriage weave. I rather enjoyed my time without him around, at least now and then.

I learned of that cattle drive’s success in August. James Henry Warren entered the world the same month. My husband achieved a feat only once before accomplished, driving a large herd of cattle from Oregon to Montana. It was something to celebrate. We would do so when he returned home.

Rachel joined Father for a time in Lapwai and then because the Board had still not authorized them to be there, and Rachel could not find teaching work to support them, they came back to Brownsville, staying with Millie, helping with her child whose arrival put Millie back on that chaise lounge. How my father’s heart must have ached. He worked in his garden, a man broken despite the lives he’d touched.

And then came the letter he’d been waiting for since my mother’s death. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions authorized him in 1871 to once again be in official service to the Nimíipuu at Lapwai.

“You can go back!” I hugged him. “They want you there and you go with the Board’s blessing.”

He patted my back, separated. “I wish your mother was here to go with me. She felt so betrayed by the Board.” I looked at Rachel, who held the letter now, to see if she took offense, but she kept a warm smile as she gazed upon my father. “But it was the Catholics who hurt us most.”

“Henry—” Rachel touched his arm.

“It’s true.” His fists tightened.

“Yes, but in part we are returning under the auspices of the Mission Board
because
of the Catholics’ continued success among the natives. The Board could see many were ready for conversion and understood the Presbyterians had already lost too much time. Just as you kept writing to them about.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe so.” He patted her hand. “We’ll celebrate God’s divine guidance after all.”

I saw Rachel then as a warm fire that tempered my father.

Later I asked her if we could talk.

“Of course. I love conversations with you, Eliza. They happen too infrequently, it seems to me.”

Did she enjoy my company? She seemed sincere and in all these years had given me no reason to doubt.

“What can I do for you?”

“When I was young, I did something, took something that had been my mother’s.”

“Yes?” Her eyes had begun to cloud with age but still offered kind encouragement.

“I’d like to give it to you.” I pulled out my leather pouch that held my children’s umbilical cords and placed my mother’s gold ring in the palm of her hand. “It was her wedding ring. My father had intended to give it to you but I . . .”

She patted my arm. “I understand. I was an intruder.”

“I thought my father disloyal to my mother by marrying again. I—I was certain my mother wouldn’t have wanted that, but then I read her diaries, when Father and I rode to visit Lapwai that time. You remember?”

“I do.”

“Well, I was wrong. I misinterpreted and intervened where I should not have. Can you forgive me?”

“In the flash of a lamb’s tail.” She hugged me then, something that had rarely passed between us. “But I think you should give it to your father.” She still said “father” with that rolling Boston twang that made it sound as though she said “feather.”

And so I did, when we were alone in Millie’s kitchen. I confessed what I’d done and said how sorry I was.

He harrumphed, turning the ring in his fingers. “You were
young. You didn’t know. But if I remember, you let Henry take the blame.” He shook his finger at me. I found my feet of interest. He lifted my chin. “You mourned as we all mourned.” He rubbed the ring on his pants, held it to the dim light from the lantern. “I thank you for this, Daughter. I’ll keep it. Maybe when America Jane marries, she could use it.” He clutched it in his palm.

“I offered it to Rachel.”

“Did you? And she refused it?”

“She said it belonged to you to do with as you saw fit. She’s a good woman and a good wife for you.”

“That she is.” He was thoughtful. His black eyes watered and I couldn’t tell if it was from his memories or his aging. “I think I’ll follow your route and see if she’ll take it from me. Our eighteenth wedding anniversary is coming up. It would make a nice surprise.” He wore a puzzled look then, and said, “Same number of years as your mother and I were married. Imagine. I’ve had as many years to make memories together with each woman. It’s no wonder that I sometimes mix those recollections up.”

30
Like a Second Heart

My father’s past was like his second heart, a constant rhythm. Perhaps all of our memories carry such a beat. He had but three official years to serve before he died and was buried in Lapwai. Over nine hundred Nez Perce and Spokane souls found God close at hand during those last three years of my father’s life. Rachel came back to Brownsville to care for Millie, and when Rachel became ill, she lived with Mr. Warren and me until she died in 1880.

My life has spiraled since that time, orphaned now. My children all married with children of their own. Lizzie died in ’82, such a loss to outlive a child. I cared for her children until her husband remarried. Remarrying is a good thing when one has young children, even if the stepmother lacks certain skills, like cooking. Then Mr. Warren was called home. I think his outliving one of his children took a toll upon him. His death was long and lingering, sadly, and his skin turned the color of
sunflower duff. “I want to go where you’re going, Eliza,” he told me at the end.

I assured him that he would.