Sisters of Grass (7 page)

At the ranch, there were several men in the yard, talking to her father while the sheets snapped and blew in the wind. One man was saying, “They know where the scoundrels are, more or less, they've found tracks, and I'd say they'll get them any time now.”

William Stuart called Margaret to him. “I should never have sent you over to the camp this morning. Bill Miner and his gang are on the loose, I didn't hear until now that they robbed a train over at Ducks last week and have been spotted up by Campbell's Meadow. The tracks show them heading over towards Minnie Lake. Go now and take the saddle off that horse, and then I want you to stay close to home until they're caught. A search party is out now with Indian trackers, so it shouldn't be long.”

Margaret said nothing. Walking the gelding over to the corral, she began to tremble again. She knew that she couldn't tell her father what she'd seen, thank goodness she hadn't remembered to tell him at dinner last night about seeing George Edwards and his companions. But he liked Mr. Edwards, so why was she relieved not to have told him? It was all so confusing. Was the man Mr. Edwards called Shorty or the one introduced as Louis really the train robber Bill Miner? Why were those men shooting, and who had screamed? One thing she knew for certain: if her father knew she had been where men were shooting, he'd never let her ride alone again.

William saddled up his own horse and headed out with the other men, asking Margaret to milk the cow in his absence. They were headed over to Douglas Lake to see if they could help with the search. Each carried a rifle slung over his shoulder, and Margaret saw her father tuck his Colt into his jacket pocket. She shivered to think of her father in danger and then shivered again to remember how close she'd been to danger herself.

In the house, her mother was clearing up after what had obviously been an interrupted dinner. Her father's plate still held a portion of roast beef and a mound of mashed potatoes.

“Let me get you something to eat, Margaret. You must be hungry.”

“No, Mother, I'm fine. I ate a big breakfast and took some bread along on the ride. I'll help you with this.”

The routine of clearing plates, stacking them, putting food away helped to settle her heart and mind. She worked hard at the chores for what remained of the afternoon, taking out dinner leavings for the pigs and making sure the horses all had water. She ate supper with her sisters and brother and washed their dishes when they'd finished. At dusk her father was still not back, and so she took out a scalded bucket and milked the Jersey cow who provided milk for the household. Leaning her cheek against the cow's warm flank soothed her as she squeezed each teat, felt the warm fluid as it left the cow's body, listened to the ping against the side of the bucket. Margaret strained the milk, cleaned the bucket and put the jug in the cellar to cool. Already the cream was collecting on the surface; by morning her mother would skim off a full third of the jugful for butter.

Back in the kitchen, Jenny Stuart was sewing by lamplight. Margaret took up a shirt of her father's from the mending basket and began to turn the collar so the frayed part would be underneath. By the time they heard hoofbeats in the yard and the chorus of barking, it was almost completely dark outside.

William called to the ranch dogs to quiet down. He came in, bringing with him a gust of cool air, and he carefully put his rifle away.

“Well, they got the men all right, but you'll never guess who Bill Miner turns out to be. George Edwards! You know him, Margaret, from Douglas Lake? And Jenny, you remember his fiddle playing? Imagine that. I thought for certain they'd made a mistake, but Corporal Wilson from Kamloops is positive this is Miner because of some tattoos. They've gone over to Quilchena for the night to get Doctor Tuthill to look at the one who was shot.”

“One was shot?” Margaret asked, wondering which man had screamed so horribly and if he was still alive.

“A fellow called Dunn. Not seriously, though, just a flesh wound to the leg. I can't get over old Edwards, for the life of me. A decent man. We all said that over at Douglas Lake when the Royal North West Mounted Police brought them in. Greaves was the most surprised, didn't believe it at first. I think maybe I don't still. Is there a chance of some supper, Jenny?”

Jenny quickly got her husband a plate of cold beef and pickle, a couple of biscuits, and a wedge of cheese. She poured him a glass of milk from the pitcher she kept cool on the window sill. With his feet on the fender of the big range, he told them about seeing the trio brought in to the home ranch at Douglas Lake, exclaiming every few minutes that he found it hard to believe that Edwards was a train robber. He was too polite for that, surely. And the one other fellow, the one that hadn't been shot, he was so well-spoken, more like a banker than a criminal.

Under her wild geese quilt that night, Margaret dreamed of the three men being herded to Quilchena by a posse of gun-slingers and woke in a panic about her own role in the event. Should she have told her father about seeing the shoot-out by the lake? She decided in the moonlight that her father would only worry, and she was safe, wasn't she, so why trouble him with the information? No, this would be a secret between her and the blue roan gelding, and he wouldn't talk, of that she was certain.

I am between two worlds. At my desk in the museum, collating pages or making detailed notes on the items that are brought in to me, my mind wanders along the road winding up behind Quilchena, a road I have driven on to find myself among horses. Outside my window, the dense coastal vegetation obliterates the sky. A quilt, neatly folded in a box, waits for me to examine it. Early in the month I woke from a dream of three men, bent under the weight of provisions, walking across the high grasslands. There was such silence in the grass and overhead a sky like a book of hours, blue and open. In the dream I was a girl again, alone under the sky, waiting for my life to begin, waiting for the pages to turn. And now, well underway, I am left to wonder about the men, the girl, their landscape of sage, pine, soft grasses and wild clematis. Back and forth I move, between home and the valley, my work and this deep exploration of place, the years of my girlhood and the present, between the life of the body and what remains, a few objects, a tube of bone on a rocky hill. Across the hills the men made their way, a girl watching them in secrecy, while on the marshy shores of a lake, cranes nested with their young, oblivious.

And what of the woman I leave when I take the road high above Quilchena? Does she continue on, unchanged, sorting through a box of leavings, wondering about the propriety of reading letters addressed to another? Of preparing marriage linens to be viewed by a generation that never embroidered the initials of lovers into fine cotton? Did anyone know that by such things lives are remembered?

Thinking makes me heavy with loss. I think of Sappho, surrounded by young women, and I understand the wistfulness of her lyrics.

The night is now

half-gone; youth

goes; I am

in bed alone

THE OLD ROAD FROM Nicola to Kamloops winds through grassy hills which take your breath away in their stillness. Past Stump Lake, Napier Lake, Trapp Lake, Ussher Lake, unseen in the west but remembered for the murder of John Tannatt Ussher by the sad McLean gang in 1879, past sway-backed cabins collapsing gently into fields, fields alive with savannah sparrows, horned larks, coyotes, through Rose Hill and Knutsford, until it finally leads you into Kamloops itself. Each rise and fall of grass slope is like a basket, a coiled burden basket of split root, hooked through with the bark of bitter cherry, the bleached stems of canary grass. The road a handle, a scaffolding, holding the baskets together with their contents of berries, freckled meadowlark eggs, the occasional horse pausing in its grazing. Driving, we are quiet, thinking of the cattle who passed over this ground, the home-steads forged by those paying the ten-dollar fee under the Dominion Homestead Regulations and then building a house, breaking the land, fencing their quarter section. The maps are quilted with the neat stitches of fencelines, threaded with creeks where stock might wander to drink — Campbell, Peterson, Anderson — and jewelled with lakes, blackbirds whistling from the reeds. In old dooryards are lilacs and roses gone wild; lines of Lombardy poplars remember their planting. A girl born in this landscape would know the wind's quiet voice in the cottonwood leaves and would stop to listen to skeins of geese coming from the south to land on the sloughs. In such ways the world is remembered.

Nicola to Kamloops, May 15-18, 1906

Two days later, the family was waiting for the stage at the Forksdale- Kamloops road. After breakfast, Jenny's brother August had brought them down from the ranch in the buggy, and he would take care of the home ranch while they were away. Jenny and Margaret waited in the buggy while the younger children watched for the stage and William and August talked about the Miner capture. It was all anyone talked about these days. Many felt that a mistake had been made, that a genial man like George Edwards couldn't possibly be the notorious train robber the police insisted he was. They were awaiting positive identification by a Pinkerton detective, but his tattoos gave him away, or so the Corporal had told the men at Douglas Lake. A ballet dancer around his right arm, two stars on his left arm, and a heart pierced with two daggers. There was also a bluebird on his hand. These marks had not been noteworthy among the native people in the Nicola area because the Thompsons often tattooed themselves in connection with important dreams or to inspire courage and strength.

The stage announced itself in a cloud of dust, four bay horses at a brisk trot. It drew up, and the horses stood still while the Stuart family said their goodbyes to August. William's friend Angus Nelson was driving, so after tying the luggage securely onto the roof, the two men sat on the driver's bench with Tom in the middle; Tom held the reins proudly on the straight stretches of road. Jenny, Margaret and the two girls were tucked inside, Mary and Jane holding on to the edges of their seats for dear life. Jenny looked nervous. Margaret was beginning to understand that her mother was happiest at home with her own children around for company or with other ranch families whom she knew well. She would go with the family to concerts and outings, but she seemed uncomfortable in large groups or in unfamiliar settings. Once Margaret had observed a woman speaking quietly to another as the Stuart family arrived at a Victoria Day fete in Nicola Lake, and she overheard one woman say “klootchie” and nod significantly at Jenny Stuart. Later Margaret asked her father privately what the term meant. Furious, he told her never to use such a word in the presence of her mother, that it was meant to demean Indian women, like squaw, and he would not hear it used in reference to his wife or any other woman.

“But Father, I only asked you because I didn't know, I'd never heard it until the women at the picnic —”

William pulled her to him. “Margaret, I'm sorry, I know you weren't being disrespectful. There's an attitude, though, you will come upon it in your life, possibly you already have, that distinguishes between Indians and whites. It's hypocritical, you know, especially in this valley where a lot of the families have intermarried — look at the Coutlees and Voghts. I love your mother, and I won't have her hurt. And, my dear, that goes for you as well. You are as good as anyone alive, you have the blood of the Stuart kings in your veins as well as noble Thompson blood. Keep your head high, and don't let the small souls of the world hurt your feelings.”

In the box of her life, a length of bone, some photographs, a program. How do I balance the composition of what might be expected of a young woman of her time and place with what might be remarkable? What have I learned from dreaming her shape into my life, and how can I know what is memory and what is desire? One person struck by a stone, said Pliny,
forgot solely how to read and write. Another who fell from a very high roof forgot his mother. And as sleep gradually steals over one, it restricts the memory and causes the inactive mind to wonder where it is
. But what if the mind has not forgotten, exactly, but has remembered a girl who might never have been? Not a mother, not a sister, but a younger earlier self? What if the mind carries her as imagery of nostalgia, which is only a longing for home? And what is home but the cradle of the self? Carried in the wild rye, the bunch-grass, the yellow feathers of rabbitbrush, in soft wind, the subtle seeds pause and attach.

Thinking on what her father had said, Margaret remembered a certain coolness on the part of some of the girls at school, but she'd put that down to the fact that she didn't attend regularly and hadn't made friends as easily as the others. And there had been lots of children who were either fully Indian or who had one Indian parent. Oddly, Margaret had never really thought about this before in any meaningful way. She was who she was, they were who they were. Sometimes you liked a person, found her congenial, sometimes you had nothing in common. Many were eager for male attention and talked endlessly of who was sweet on whom and whether their affection was returned. Little tokens were exchanged carefully, so the teacher wouldn't catch on. Margaret had never received a token from a boy or a girl, nor had she given one. Because she came to school infrequently, she was intent on learning as much as she could while she was there. She couldn't remember taunts specific to her Indian blood, though. Or would she have recognized a taunt if she heard one?

None of it mattered this fine May morning on the road to Kamloops, but it did make Margaret feel a protective tenderness toward her mother, and she linked her arm through Jenny's and put her head on her mother's shoulder. Her mother patted her hair with one gloved hand. Jenny Stuart wore a dark blue gabardine skirt she'd made that winter and a jacket of soft grey wool. At home she never wore a hat, but for the trip she'd trimmed her navy straw boater with a piece of grey velvet ribbon. It was soothing to sit by her and smell both the unaccustomed fragrance of clothing stored in a cedar-lined trunk and the familiar scent of her hair and skin.

The ride to Kamloops took twelve hours. The usual stage from Forksdale was spread over two days, but Angus Nelson told William he was trying a one-day run, and this fit nicely with William's plans. Stops were made along the way, one to change horses at Rockford on Stump Lake, where tea and hot biscuits were provided. Later, Angus stopped to water the team as needed at lakes near the road; he untied a bucket from under his seat and dipped it into the cold water, letting each horse drink its fill. Everyone stretched their legs and disappeared behind bushes to relieve themselves on the warm ground. It was a beautiful drive, the road rising high and passing hill after hill of blowing grass. Marshes alive with blackbirds could be seen as the horses clipped along, and once Tom called out for them to see coyotes at play in the sunshine.

It was growing dark when they arrived in Kamloops, but the city was vibrant with life. The stage took them directly to the Grand Pacific Hotel, its entrance on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Lansdowne Street lit by a street lamp. The manager was expecting them and directed a boy to take their bags up to the suite of rooms Father had reserved. The children were thrilled to see that the window of their room opened onto a balcony overlooking the street. They kept calling one another to see the lively scene below — two men laughing loudly as they left the hotel's saloon; a Chinese family hurrying in another direction, the mother dressed in bright clothing and walking in small steps behind the father; a group of men seated under the trees outside the hotel talking of the Miner gang. Phrases of their conversation rose up to the family leaning out the window, screened by darkness and the new leaves. Father explained that the train robbers were being held in the Kamloops prison awaiting their trial on May 28. The manager, who had come up to make sure all was in order, told him that he was lucky he'd booked the rooms early. Now, what with Madame Albani's concert and the Miner trial, most hotels were full to the brim. People were coming from as far away as Vancouver to attend the trial and to get a glimpse of the notorious Bill Miner.

“He may be the fella, all right, but I hear over and over again that George Edwards wouldn't hurt a fly, everyone likes him, and there seem to be irregularities about his arrest. They say the Pinkerton detective, a weasely sort called Seavey, led him to believe he was an attorney. False pretences, I say, and so say many others, too. Ah, Stuart, you'll find this town fairly buzzing.”

It was difficult to get to sleep that first night in Kamloops. The beds were unfamiliar, the pillows deep and soft. Margaret woke in darkness and couldn't get her bearings. Where she was accustomed to seeing the moon through a lattice of ponderosa directly in front of her bed, there was a wall. Then she remembered where she was; she could hear her parents talking quietly in the other room, which reassured her, and she sank back into the pillows to make the morning come sooner.

I have slept in old hotels, not the Grand Pacific (famous for its bathrooms, among the first in Kamloops), which burned in the thirties, but others, in Paris, in Dublin, in the Nicola Valley itself. I know she listened to the creak of timbers beyond the dark ceilings as the building adjusted its weight, the sound of pulleys, the quiet voices of the kitchen help at first light, taking a moment to enjoy a smoke before beginning their day. And the peach-skin softness of the sheets in their folds, the smell of soap and the wind of Kamloops, a different wind from the one she was accustomed to, bringing with it train fumes and commerce and the faint odour of the North Thompson tumbling from its headwaters down through Avola, Clearwater, McLure. All over Kamloops while she slept, the city waited for morning. In the jail, the three accused robbers slept fitfully; in the Fulton household, the family of the Attorney General dreamed of his successful prosecution of Bill Miner, still to come; in the newspaper offices, the typesetters wiped inky hands on their aprons and held up chases of type to place in the presses, pulling a proof of the headlines, excited at playing a small part in history. And on the road from the Cherry Creek ranch, a hopeful wrangler rode a pretty bay mare at a quick trot, not wanting to miss an appointment with William Stuart.

Rising before the others, Margaret went to the window in her nightdress to look out at the street. Sounds of the morning filled the air — a rooster, even in the city, crowed the hour; buckets clanging in the livery stable told her that horses were being fed; a boy carried newspapers down the street and dropped them at many of the doorsteps, including the hotel's. Two men in suits were striding down the road, and one looked up to see her in the window, her shoulders bare and her hair still unbrushed. He raised his hat and called out to her — she was a lovely sight to behold this fine May morning. Margaret's hands flew to her face and she left the window in a hurry, her cheeks burning. By now the children were stirring, and she could hear her father cough. She put her clothes on and went down the hall to use the bathroom. A maid just coming out the door told her that the towels were fresh, and there was lots of hot water should she care to bathe. What luxury, thought Margaret, as she ran a tub of water and stretched out in comfort. At home, they heated water for baths on the stove and then emptied the tub, bucket by bucket, after. But this was lovely, hot water up to her chin, and then big towels to dry off with as the water ran down the drain, whirling like an eddy on the Nicola River. She returned to the suite of rooms to find her family waiting for her so they could go down for breakfast.

A table had been set for them, and a newspaper was folded beside the plate William Stuart sat to. He unfolded it, shook out the wrinkles and read the headline aloud: THE CHASE, THE CAPTURE AND THE COMMITTAL. A waitress served coffee to William and Jenny and looked inquiringly at Margaret, who started to demur but then impulsively held out her cup. The newspapers made the capture of George Edwards seem heroic, she thought, as though a dangerous criminal had been caught at great risk to the team of men and dogs who had tracked them down. She saw again the three men around a campfire preparing a meal, the approach of the posse, the questions, Mr. Edwards's calm replies, and then she heard the sound of gunfire and screams as she galloped away over the spring grass, the meadowlarks silent in the pauses between gunshots. The coffee tasted good, and she breathed in its aroma as she raised the cup to her mouth.