Sisters of Grass (13 page)

They looked to where William was pointing and saw the bright meadowlark, his yellow breast and throat bibbed in black.

“It's like flute music,” said Nicholas in delight. “One of my sisters plays the flute, and she often practises a particular Bach sonata, I think it's in A minor, a beautiful clear piece. But no lovelier than that bird's song, I'd say.”

And in her tent that night, Margaret remembered the thrill of hearing that visitor to Quilchena recite a Shakespeare sonnet. She had felt the same longing that day, the almost bitter joy the words left her with.

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odour and in hue . . .

Now she had something, someone, to attach the longing to. She fell to sleep in its spell.

She had no idea at first why she woke but lay in her bedroll listening for clues. Random drops of rain fell on the canvas of her tent. Had they put the saddles under cover? She couldn't remember. She knew her father had rigged the food bags high in a tree; this was bear country, and they never forgot to remove food from temptation. Putting her jacket on over her underclothes, she untied her tent opening and went out to check the site. Chances were this would only be a light rain as a cloud passed over the valley, high and transitory.

“Margaret?” Her father's voice came quietly from the other tent.

“I'm just checking to make sure the saddles are covered and there's nothing to be spoiled if the rain keeps up,” she said softly. “There's no need for you to get up.”

The horses were gathered under the biggest pine. By now it was raining harder, but it was fairly sheltered where the horses stood. Margaret could smell their bodies, warm and relaxed, and the odour of rain on pine needles, on pollen, on southern-wood and wormwood, on the smouldering logs in the fire, sizzling as each drop fell. She leaned against Daisy for a moment, her cheek on the horse's withers, her hair against the dark mane. That's what her father saw as he looked out of his tent opening to see why she was taking so long to return to her bed.

The next two days were fine and warm. William took Nicholas far and near, sometimes accompanied by Margaret (which tracks on the wide expanse might be hers?) and sometimes just the two men riding from the camp, each with a bannock wrapped in a clean handkerchief in his saddlebag. When they returned for supper the second evening, William had a pair of snared grouse hanging from his saddle by the feet. Margaret loved to eat grouse, willingly cooked them, but hated to clean them, so William took them aside and opened them up with a swift knife stroke down the centre of the abdomen. He quickly skinned them, removed all the entrails and buried them, after first carefully extracting the livers. He rinsed the body cavities in the creek, shaking out the excess water and blood. Taking his sharp knife, he split each bird down the backbone and flattened it so it would grill evenly over the fire.

“There you go, my dear. Mind you don't overcook the livers.”

Margaret sharpened some cottonwood sticks and soaked them for a few minutes in water. Then she threaded them through the grouse, taking care to direct the sticks into meaty areas, four sticks per bird, reaching into the flesh to pull the sticks out the other end so that the bird was positioned in the middle. This made a kind of support rack so that Margaret could lay the ends of the sticks over one of the rocks ringing the fire and let the flattened grouse grill slowly over its heat. She turned them several times during the cooking, and when they were nearly done, she put sliced onions over the breast meat and covered them with the last few slices of bacon, once again catching the melting fat in the skillet to fry the bannocks. The livers were seared at the ends of two of the sticks, basted with a little bacon fat.

“I don't think I've ever tasted anything so delicious,” Nicholas said, throwing the last clean bone into the fire. “You both are so accomplished! I
can
fish, my father took on the task of teaching me in his favourite river, the Ausable, near our summer place, so I don't suppose I'd go entirely hungry if I lived up here, but I can't say that I'd ever think of cooking the grouse the way you did. I'd probably end up with a charred lump that was still raw inside.”

William laughed. “Well, I wasn't brought up to cook over fires like this, believe me, but I learned quickly enough the first summer I spent as a cowboy up on Roper's ranch on the Thompson. There were always camp cooks, but often we'd be out checking on cattle far from the camp, and we'd be given some beans to take along and maybe some flour. That was it, and you got pretty tired of beans and hard biscuits. There was one fellow I remember, he knew plants, and he'd cook grouse with wild onions and some peppery grass — I've never forgotten the taste of it, but I can't seem to find it here. Maybe it's the air that seasons the meat, too. I wonder how tasty this would be cooked in a skillet on a stove. Tough, maybe, and stringy.”

“I'd say it would still taste wonderful,” Nicholas replied. “But you say you weren't brought up to cook like this. Where do you come from?”

William told him about Astoria, his boyhood home on the shore of the Pacific. Margaret listened intently. When her father described that life, it was as though he was talking about someone else, a stranger, a boy from another world. Not the man she'd grown up with who knew horses, who loved the Nicola Valley with every fibre of his being. Yet she also remembered how tight and proper he'd become when his mother and sister had visited. Even his speech had changed, his vowels sounding more and more like theirs; his table manners, usually casual, had become, during that visit, an impossible model for his children. The way he held out the chair until his mother was seated, the way he held his fork, neatly wiped his mouth with his napkin — a stranger seemed to be eating at the ranch table. And there was a language between William and his mother, mostly unspoken, that Margaret had witnessed, as you might witness two people speaking Chinese; she had found it intriguing but impenetrable.

“It's ironic that I came up from Astoria to work on the Thompson Plateau because of all the stories I heard when I was young. The tales of David Thompson's explorations of the Columbia River were the ones that made me restless and eager to strike out on my own. The Indians called him the Star Man because of his interest in astronomy and mapping. I guess I thought that working my gillnetter would satisfy those feelings, but it wasn't what I needed.”

Nicholas was engrossed. “Was the Thompson River named for him?”

“Yes, although he was never on it that I'm aware of. It was named by Simon Fraser, another explorer and a friend of David Thompson, and Thompson named the other great river after Fraser, who had made a journey down it, thinking it was the Columbia, until he reached the Pacific. I think I've got that right. A kind of exchange of honour, I suppose. My mother's father worked for John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company at the original outpost back in the early part of the last century. I grew up hearing about these explorers, often from men who had known them or been on their expeditions. An old fellow who came to prune our trees each spring remembered seeing Thompson come into Astoria that day in 1811, he remembered the cedar canoe flying a British flag. He was only a boy, really, but it stayed with him, clear as anything.”

“What did your own father do?” Nicholas asked, enjoying the conversation more than he could say. How right it seemed to be sitting by this fire with a girl he had kissed and her father, wanting to be nowhere else on earth.

“He had been a bar pilot on the Columbia River. There were two channels at the mouth, separated by a sand bar called Middle Sands, which kept changing as the sand shoaled in the storms and currents. He'd guide boats into the Columbia and out again, he knew the river like his own hands, knew about all the sandbars, which were navigable during particular tides, what conditions were likely to be through particular weathers. He never lost a boat and became something of a legend. Someone even composed a song in his honour, a sea-shanty that glorified one of his adventures in a Pacific squall.”

Margaret exclaimed, “You've never told me that, Father! Can you remember the song?”

“Oh, not really. There was a refrain, let me see if I can get it right:

Captain Stuart brought her in, the limping broken beauty.

No man died, though she'd a list to her side,

And her sails hung all a-streaming.

Perhaps not so much of a song after all.”

“Could a man make a good living doing what your father did?”

“Well, he did very well financially, and my mother was left a considerable sum when her father died. My parents had a big house built on the slope overlooking the river, among the merchants and cannery owners. My sister and I were somewhat isolated in Astoria, though. She went to school in Portland after she turned twelve, and I had a tutor because I made such a fuss about going away to school. There wasn't much society in Astoria, and our parents had made our lives conspicuously different from those around us. I could escape occasionally, going up the river by canoe, alone or with another boy, as far as I could reach by water, then walking the riverbanks to see the fishing platforms at Celilo and to look at the Indian villages where the Klickitat River flowed into the Columbia, and the Wind, farther west. I guess I wanted to see where the fish I'd missed catching ended up, some of them hanging on grey latticed racks to dry in the sun, some being roasted on fires as I passed the camps. Some people said that runs of them travelled as far as the Snake River and even farther, into the Salmon River. Fishing gave me people to work with, the men who helped me figure out settings and how to care for my boat gave me companionship, but I think my sister was disadvantaged by too much of one thing and not enough of others.”

“Did she stay in Astoria, or did she do something as interesting as you?”

William laughed. “Interesting is not the half of it, Nicholas. She was sent to Boston for finishing but never married. She lives with my mother, still in the big house, still with servants and proper standards, as they would have it. They came here for two months a couple of years ago, their first and only trip to Canada, although they go to Europe regularly and to the east coast fairly often. Father left them very well off and left me a substantial amount of money, too, although he wouldn't write to me once I'd settled here, wouldn't acknowledge me.”

Then William was quiet, remembering the loneliness of that break with his family. It was a wonder to him that he'd come so far from his original home and found such happiness, undreamed of in the earliest years. He had loved the vast country he'd travelled through to get to the Thompson Plateau, the openness of the sky, even the cryptic messages rattlesnakes left in the sand. He felt he could breathe deeply after years in the fog, his lungs filling with dry air and the pollen of the grey herbs settling on his body as he rode the benchlands and side valleys. In his socks, the hooked seeds of barley and wild grass.

At Margaret's bidding, Nicholas told them something of his life in New York City, where his father practised law and his mother tried to grow apples and roses in their garden.

“When my mother was a child, she was taken to Versailles, and she was captivated by the Orangerie and then, at Malmaison, by the roses of the Empress Josephine. I think she missed her calling, she should have been one of those grand ladies of horticulture. Instead she fell in love with my father when he came to France on a holiday and married him. Father was ready to leave Dublin at that time anyway because there were so few opportunities for Catholics, the country was run by Anglo-Irish, although Father said many of them hadn't seen England in generations. So they came to New York, and Mother resigned herself to raising what she could, children and flowers, in the sooty air of our back garden.

“Why did he choose New York? I thought Boston was the main destination for Irish immigrants.”

“Well, New York had a large Irish population, his cousins had come earlier to study medicine, so it was a natural choice for him, I suppose. My sisters and I were born there, of course, but both sets of grandparents are still alive, my mother's parents in Chantilly and my father's in Dublin, and we've made two trips to Europe to visit them. I loved Ireland and hope to spend more time there when I've finished my university work.”

Margaret, who had never been farther than Spences Bridge and Kamloops, had a sudden yearning for Versailles and even Astoria, where her aunt Elizabeth was that very moment working on a sampler with a verse from Psalms.
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth, For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more
. Around the edges, she was stitching clumps of bunchgrass in soft gold and green.

When the trio rode down off the mountain the next afternoon, in their saddlebags a blackened skillet and bedrolls that needed an afternoon in a good wind to freshen them of woodsmoke and dust, August was waiting to tell William that the new mare was in heat.

“Are you certain, August? Have you teased her?”

Nicholas looked shocked that William would ask his brother-in-law such a thing, so William quickly explained the strategy to find if a mare was really fertile. A stallion would be led near her but on the other side of a partition, and her response and the stallion's would be assessed: did her tail rise, did her opening twitch and contract, did she repeatedly urinate, did she squat, was she uncharacteristically aggressive? Was the stallion interested? The stallion used for this was not the Bonny Prince but a lesser stud, one that was generally turned loose with the range mares during the breeding season, and August reported that Thistle had squealed and showed all the positive signs of estrus, almost sitting in front of the stallion with her hindquarters toward him. August offered to stay with William rather than going home immediately as he'd planned if William wanted to go ahead with the breeding.