Having Everything Right (17 page)

I was just admiring my favorite stick—the four-by-eight haybeam from the gambrel's point, complete with a patch of lichen where it had thrust out into the weather, and a rusted iron ring bolted through that had pulleyed up ton after ton of feed—when a red sports car came creeping along the nail-studded road. I glanced at the clouds reflected in the windshield when it stopped, then lowered the beam to the ground.

The driver waited inside, watching me, or finishing a song on the radio, just long enough to show he was in no hurry, then climbed out slow, slid his hands into his pockets, and looked at the sky.

“Name's Peter. Finding anything good?” He stood by his car. I pointed a crowbar at the haybeam. “Just what you see: lumber with rot on both ends but some good wood in the middle.”

“What about the bees?”

“Right there.” I aimed the crowbar at the hive-box humming quietly in the blackberry shade. “I caught all but a few.”

“A few?”

“Five.”

He nodded slowly, like a bear with ponderous thoughts. “I think I might want those doors,” he said, nodding toward the two big wagon doors slapped face-down where they had fallen. He started gingerly around the heap's perimeter in his rubber running shoes. “My wife likes antique stuff—you found anything like that? It doesn't have to be pretty, so long as it's old. My own idea of old is black-and-white TV, but she sees it different.”

“There's a wheelbarrow with the bottom rotted out and one handle gone—something like that?”

“She'd love it. Could you wheel it out and leave it by the doors? The County's given me a week to scrape this down to bare dirt. Anything left after Friday will cost me a fine. And the man I hired to take it all down should be along soon. He may have stuff he wants too.” He looked at the sky. A quick rain had begun, and he backed away toward the car. “Try to have everything you want out pretty quick. And don't get hurt.”

He paused to say more, looked at the ground, then turned and folded himself carefully into the car. The crowbar was warm in my hand, and slick with sweat. The rain felt good. The lights of the car came on, flickered to high-beam, then died as the windshield wipers started to wag. He backed out the long track across the field, his tires spinning a few times on the wet grass.

A cloud moved and sunlight rippled glistening across the field after him. The lumber around me began to steam. My footing was slick but the air was clean. As I worked with steel-hafted hammer in my right hand and crowbar in my left, swinging each long board through the loving rhythm of lift, pound and tease, roll and balance, flip, shove and drop-slap to the stack of clean lumber, I heard the unique machine of the fallen barn flex in the heat, the rippled ping when tin changes its mind, the shriek of a sixteen-penny nail jerked from the sheath rust wedded it to for seventy years, the see-saw rub and grabble of a rafter waggled from the heap, and in a pause the plop of sweat sliding off my elbow to a stone. Before me loomed the raw, steaming tangle of chaos with a history of order, a flavor of tradition, the stiff, wise fiber of old growth; behind me, stacks of lumber rose with a new barn intrinsic in each board, in the rivet of right work I had yet to do to knit it all together again. My hands were twin apprentices to the wreck, to the knowing fragments of joinery still buried there.

As I curled my spine over the tangle to grasp a clear length of one-by-twelve fir, two causes made my task hard: the persistence of the
builder, circa 1910, and the haste of the wrecker, 1980. The builder had known how to make things hold, clinching nails that bound the battens down, and pinning the whole fabric of the walls with extra braces scarfed to the frame wherever it might be vulnerable to the wind's pivot or gravity's drag. The wrecker, on the other hand, was in a hurry.

Maybe he heard the bees when he first drove up, and decided not to go inside at all. Maybe the doors were so woven with thumb-thick ropes of blackberry he didn't take the time to pry them apart and find the mahogany skiff locked together with bronze screws, or the wagon bed, the kerosene lamp, its wick last trimmed before he was born, now crushed flat under a three-hundred pound stick of fir. He never saw the stack of two-by-six spare joists, ten foot long and clear. Those the farmer had set aside for years of so much hay even this cathedral wasn't ample enough. With them he would lay an extra hay-floor over the stanchion alley. Instead, the wrecker threw a grappling hook high over the roof and pulled it all down. That must have brought out the bees to kiss him in the eyes. I found the hook abandoned—it had stabbed into a punky rafter with twenty feet of rope dangling where the wrecker had cut it away and fled. I coiled the rope and hung the hook from a volunteer cherry at the field's edge.

Somewhere way down Boone's Ferry Road I heard the low hum of a big bike coming. I heard it slow for the turn, and accelerate with a roar the last two hundred yards up the side-road toward me. Then it came popping and growling over the field. A nail came out for the crowbar and flipped past my face. I was listening too hard and not watching what I did. I turned.

My face was small and double in the dark glasses on the upturned face of the Gypsy Joker idling his big Harley ten feet away. On the shoulder of his black jacket were stitched the red names of his friends or victims:
Rick, Joe, Rollo
. When the engine rumbled and faded and coughed dead, the black leather of his gloves creaked as he flexed his right hand free.

“Finding some good stuff, buddy?” My double body was still in his glasses. His beard pointed to the field behind me. “I had a nice stack of boards all pulled out over there, but some bastard went and hauled them away.”

“Oh, that was me,” I said.

“Was, huh?”

“Peter said I get the bees out, I could take any lumber I wanted.”

“You talked to Peter about it? I guess that's okay. But what about those bees? Christ, I blow up my truck trying to pull this wreck down, then these bees come busting out with my number in their tails. I don't mess with them little guys. No way.” He looked around, raised his hand to his shades, but left them on. “They gone?”

“They're gone,” I said.

“Well, hey, soon as I get my truck fixed I'm gonna start hauling this pile to the super dump, so take everything you can.” His head turned toward my Chevy low in the grass, then slowly back to me. “I'm on fixed rate. The less I have to haul, the better. Jesus, take it all for firewood. You ain't never going to get another chance like this.” He kicked his smoking bike to life with a roar, and had to shout. “I tell you what: I wreck buildings for my living, and I never see pickings easy as these.” With a tight nod he turned the bike and bounced across the field, a shrug and hunch restoring his solitude as he waggled away through the grass.

Wind riffled over the mounds and valleys of the blackberry patch, lifting off a harvest of white petals that skimmed across the swell. The two swallows twittered as they spiraled overhead, and a cricket, undisturbed by catastrophe, began to chant from somewhere near the fallen barn doors.

Along toward dusk, as I began sliding the longest boards onto the roof of my car named The Duchess, I saw a little boy come furtively down from the farmhouse, through the lilac hedge, through the wild hawthorn grove and out to the edge of the barn's debris. From the slow bob and swivel of his head, I could read how his gaze followed the
outlines of the building that had stood there—first around the footing-wall perimeter, then down the stanchion bay, out into the central floor where the wagon had been, up some invisible ladder to the loft, then south to the back wall. He looked at me. I was part of the treachery. He was polite and said nothing. I began to wrestle a twenty-foot six-by-six, authentic with manure, onto the car.

“It wasn't dangerous,” he said quietly, and I knew it was. I got the beam to the balancing joint and stopped to rest.

“Did you go in there a lot?”

“Just sometimes.”

“What was it like?”

“It was always dark, and you had to know where you were going. There was broken glass, too, a whole floor of it. But I put a board across it so I could walk.”

“What about the ladder?” I said, once I had the beam all the way up at rest on the car roof.

“I knew the good steps to step on. You just go slow, and hold onto other things at the same time. And there were bees in there. They never hurt you. I came up that close.” He held his hand in front of his eyes. His face was a blur against the pale swathe of the hawthorn. “They kept working. They never bothered you. Once I even tasted some of their honey that dropped down on the straw.” He looked back at me. “What are you going to build here, mister?”

“I'm not going to build anything here,” I said, reaching for another board so he wouldn't go away. “Someone just wanted the barn taken down.”

“What happened to the bees?”

“They're right there. Can you hear them?” I pointed to the hive-box that glowed a dull white and hummed. We both stood still.

By dark I unloaded the mossy timbers and curve-cured boards at my home, carried them one at a time around the house through the
memorized tunnel of plum arch, apple tree, grape arbor. I stacked them in different ways, season by season, putting them to bed under tin, listening to the rattle of rain and fitting them in mind on my pillow to an old shape that would happen simply by happening slow. Whenever I hefted a timber so heavy I feared for my collarbone, or teased a splinter from my palm, I remembered how these boards stood face-to-face in a forest harvesting nineteenth-century light, how they slid through the saws side by side, how the green-chain grader's crayon marked them with a C for clear or an S for standard.

Clinched together in the first barn-shape, wood had a memory, and the boards in my yard now curved again for sun and water with a tree's wish, with the honest warp of their character, with history visible in every stress-ripple, every seam of bark or pitch, every conk-wither or knot. The tight grain of slow growth held steady long. But the oldest memory was of earth. Where any board had touched down to the damp floor below architecture, rot took root, branching upward into heartwood.

I sawed the rot-softened wood away, planed each curve straight, measured the length of firm timber, and began to build the barn again. My industry was slow. The building inspector told me to hurry.

“One hundred and eighty days without visible progress cancels your original permit,” he said. “Better get going.” But he forgave me. I kept working, resting, remembering the design in the air where the swallows flew. I started remodeling before it was done. The building inspector forgave me even that. Then he retired. His replacement warned me, and then forgave me.

At five a.m., I am in the loft. Dust-colored rafters join in marriage above me. The haybeam behind my head aims toward sunrise. Soon the blackberry pasture out this window will blossom. Soon the bees, daughters of the daughters of the bees I took care of, will winnow out from their white box beyond the pear tree into sunlight.

R
OOT
F
EAST

Then it was dawn, my daughter hunched asleep on the seat beside me, and we were driving toward the sun, up and over the slope of Mt. Hood into the desert. I had been invited to the Root Feast, and I brought Rosemary to learn there among the Warm Springs people, the Wasco, and the Paiute. Somewhere in the forest, as we drifted east, she rubbed her eyes and looked around.

“Dad,” she said, coming out of a dream, “I always think boys are stronger, but girls remember better. Boys are tough, but girls remember. That's fair. We each have one thing to do.” Cedar and hemlock shadows flickered across her face as we traveled.

At Warm Springs, inside the longhouse, things started slowly by not really starting at all. It seems we awaited the seventh drummer. The long
dancing floor at the center was open, and people sat in knots of two and three around the perimeter. Somewhere, just out of sight, there was a bustle of people very busy preparing the feast. The old women had been at work for days, digging, and even the inmates at the jail had pitched in to help peel the roots for us. But in the big room, we looked at each other and smiled. On my lap, Rosemary pulled down my head to whisper.

“Dad, why did the men with guns come and take this world from the Indians? I guess they wanted to have the whole world to theirselves!” She thought for a time. “But there has to be a place for everyone to live—with peace, and harmony, and care, and love. Those four things for everyone.”

Then the drums started and five dancers, a men's line of two and a women's line of three, facing each other, began to spring-step around the hall, twirling their bodies into the line like ouzels entering a sacred river, and passing before us, their eyes inward, cast down. The heartbeat drums shaped the hall inward. We slid together into that older rhythm than history.

The drumming stopped. An old man stood at the microphone, held it two-handed like a staff for support, then raised his right hand and spoke.

“Our children, where are our children? They have gone from us into the wilderness.” His hand swept away toward the west. “Into the wilderness, and we don't know where they are. We don't know how to help them there. If they would come back here”—his arm curled inward to embrace the circle we made—“we could feed them, and take care of them. Back to us here.”

My mind followed his hand outward, and back. When he said “the wilderness,” I knew he meant the city of Portland, my city, the hard streets where the tribe's children wandered and faltered. When he said “back here,” I knew he meant the desert, the dry, open land my country allowed to his people. Within this circle, the children could be raised.

Then hours of dancing, and prayers, speeches in English and in Sahaptian. I wondered what all this would mean to my daughter. What
would she understand, or remember? After four hours of drumming, dancing, and prayers, Rosemary looked up at me.

“Dad,” she said, “I've gotta have a Pepsi.” So we got her a Pepsi. And then she sat still for another hour and watched the dance.

The drums stopped in unison. The dance floor cleared. There was a great bustle as the long mats were unrolled across the floor, and a clatter as plates were put down, cups, napkins along the length of the mat. It was another kind of dance, as women came in a file to set our places, serving the places. It was time, and the women came dancing in a row, all in beads and otter fur, each who had helped, from young to old, each with their platters of camas roots, bitterroot, wapato, huckleberries, chokecherries, and other wild foods I did not know. Behind them, the men came dancing with their platters of salmon and venison. All the bounty of the wilderness—the generous wilderness of the reservation land—was spread on long mats across the floor. My daughter knelt beside me, and everyone settled in double rows, facing each other across the feast. Then an old man was saying a blessing, and a mother beside me began quietly translating for me: “Blessing fish, blessing berries, and roots. . .God in the roots we walk on, as we dig them up. . .children will know. . .blessing. . .dancing. . . .” Then a woman at the microphone was giving a prayer in words I could not understand, and everyone was busy. The mother saw my trouble.

“This is the ritual tasting,” she said. “Taste the bitterroot, and give your daughter some. Taste the huckleberry, and give your daughter some. Now taste the salmon, and give her some. Now taste the venison, and give her some. Now. . .now pig out!”

I looked around. Everyone was feasting. I learned by watching how to join salmon and camas in a single bite with my fingers, to dip bread in fat. I had never seen such feasting, and as we ate, women behind us kept advancing, placing more food over our shoulders to the mat, spilling candy, bread, and oranges to fill any empty space. And finally, there
was a distribution of gallon-size ziplock bags. Everyone was gathering what was left.

“We had a death,” the woman said to me, “coming back from California. We got a funeral now, upriver. Grandpa's left. Our old man everyone knows. We are all going.”

Everyone rose, and we filed out in a circle around the longhouse for a final prayer. The sun beat down. Wind riffled through the ribbons on the shirts of young boys, and jingled the bells on the dresses of the girls. And then it was done. Together, we cleared the floor. As I turned to go, a boy caught my eye and threw me a chocolate kiss wrapped in silver foil.

I went around asking, “Is there a place I can pay? Can I make donation?” No one would look at me. Everyone was busy, with a clang of pans, and a dance of brooms.

Finally, an old woman stopped beside me, turned her head to hear me.

“Is there a place I can contribute?” I asked her. She looked at me.

“You will find a way,” she said. And she turned away and went into the kitchen.

My child wandered among the people on her own, and I found myself walking down behind the longhouse, to the fire-pit where the salmon had been prepared. I looked over the blanket that had been set up between poles as a wind-break, and saw Verbena, old friend, sitting in a folding aluminum chair with her eyes closed as the wind blew ashes sifting down on her face, her gray braids. She opened her eyes, and squinted through the smoke in my direction.

“Oh, Kim,” she said slowly, “I wrote you a letter, but never sent it. But you're here, so I guess I didn't need to.” She looked around for another chair, but I crouched down by the fire. We were quiet for a time.

“Yeah,” she said, “twenty five pounds of roots is a lot of work, you know. Each one is so little. I'm glad our prisoners could help us peel them. We never would have been ready without everyone helping. It's always like that.” And soon she is telling me of recent sorrows, and their blessings.

“When diabetes took my husband's sight, and then both his legs, it brought the children home—now he has everything in reach.”

I tell her I had asked how to contribute in some way, and what the woman had told me. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Kim, you will find a way. You will find a way. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week. But you will.” She had bent to lift a fish from the grill over the coals, a whole salmon, wrapping it in foil. She handed it to me, hot.

“This was left over,” she said. “Take it. The head is a delicacy.” I stared down at the bundle in my hands. “Go,” she said, “and tell me sometime about the way you find.” She was laughing as she turned to stir the coals. Then she looked over her shoulder at me with a grin. She waved me away. I turned back, stumbling, to the longhouse.

There was my daughter, tugging on my sleeve. “Dad, do you have some paper? I want to give my phone number to those Indian boys.” She gestured toward a cluster of boys five years older, standing together. I gave her papers. She barely knew how to write, but leaned on her knee and scrawled something on each piece, and gravely handed them around. The boys looked at her, and at each other, then at the papers. Then they looked at me. I shrugged back at them.

We got in the car and started west, up the long slope out of the canyon toward the wilderness of Portland. I was hoping Rosemary would fall asleep again. The evening was warm, and the sun shone down through the windshield.

“Dad,” she said, “stop the car.”

I said what any parent would say: “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No, dad. Stop the car. We gotta climb that mountain.” She was pointing toward the bluff. I looked up the slope. I was tired. I said what any tired parent might say, a guess and a lie: “I think that land is private property.”

“Dad, stop the car.” She had her hand on my sleeve. For a moment, I kept my foot on the gas pedal. The car had just settled into its
long-distance lope, climbing the grade. But then I took my foot away, and eased off the road onto the shoulder. We climbed out. Deflected from her first choice of climbing, she pointed to the ditch beside the road, the little ravine filled with styrofoam and tumbleweeds.

“Let's follow that road,” she said, “and maybe we'll find gold, or pretty rocks, or Jesus!” She held up her hands to the sky, the way she had seen the elders of the tribe stand tall to pray. “There was one big rock,” she said, “that filled all the world, and out of that rock, Jesus was born! And here God rained all of Jesus' bones, one for every land.” Her hands sifted slowly down. “This is where they had his wedding feast. And look!” She bent to take up a handful of dust. “Here are his brains.” She held out the dust to me, then bent to take up a rock. “And a piece of his heart!” She took up gravel. “And all his bones!”

She looked at me. “Dad! We gotta take this stuff home!”

“What shall we put it in?” I said.

“Take off one of your shoes, dad.”

I took off one of my shoes. She filled it with the bones of Jesus. We got in the car and drove. She was still. I began the long river of thought that is such a road home. How did my daughter learn to see the sacred in a gully of debris? Where would this seeing lead her? How would I find a way?

But in a few miles, she said again, “Dad, stop the car.” This time I didn't hesitate. We climbed over a barbwire fence, just east of the Mill Creek gorge, and she led me to a pile of rocks. She wanted to play house among them, showed me which hollow was my room, which was hers, and which was the kitchen. Then for a long time, we sat there, as the wind twitched a little pine tree nearby, and the sun began to slant low toward the west. I could hear the rush of Mill Creek, in the canyon. I remembered how my brother and I had once written to the Tribal Council, asking permission to hike up that creek, across Reservation land, toward the mountain.

“We believe that is a wilderness,” they wrote back. “No one should go there.”

“Dad,” my daughter said, “when you get really old, I won't move away. I'll stay with you.”

And we drove west toward the city.