Written in Stone (14 page)

Henry swore under his breath. “That is the last place he should walk unwatched.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me down the porch steps. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time you learned how to stalk prey.” He took his spare brown work shirt and threw it over my shoulders to cover my light blue sweater and navy skirt.

“Follow me. Don’t speak.”

I went along behind him, noticing and copying the way he placed each foot with care, lifting so that there was no sound of a footfall or a rolling rock. In a few minutes, we were in earshot of Mr. Glen. It was like following a hippopotamus. He took no care to move quietly. He hummed a tune. He talked to himself.

There was a trail to the cove—a narrow one not often used, but it was definitely too wide for a game trail. We had to go a lot slower on that trail to keep from making noise when branches rubbed against our bodies.

When I was younger and I passed the trail to Shipwreck Cove, I wanted to sneak down and discover its secrets. Charlie and I made a game of guessing what sort of unnamed monster lived there and the vengeance he would take if we disturbed his home. But now, as I set out on the forbidden trail, even with the solid company of my oldest cousin, I felt dread grow.

We wound uphill around dead falls and outcroppings of rock. When we came to the top of the headland by Shipwreck Cove, the smell hit us. It was like rotting flesh, but more bitter. I drew back a few steps. Henry shook his head and motioned me forward. If the smell bothered him, he didn’t show it. I could think of nothing but the stench. As we inched toward the treeless acres of burned stumps, meadow grass, and shoulder-high columns of mud in the saddle of land above the cove, the smell made my eyes water. Maybe I was smelling the rotting souls of the pirates that had died in that ship on the sand.

At the edge of the burn, Henry and I hid behind a cedar as broad as a barn door. The side of the tree that faced the ocean was blackened from its roots to fifty feet up, but the landward side was green and growing.

Down in the open area, Mr. Glen had put a red bandanna over his face train-robber-style to cut the foul odor. He approached a mud chimney, walked all the way
around, measured it with a marked string, and took a picture. Then he held his hand over the top. Whatever he found in that chimney, it made him very happy.

Next, he moved to the rock wall at the north end of the meadow.

“An earthquake sometimes raises up a wall,” Henry explained in a whisper. “And a mud chimney grows when there is fuel underground.”

I nodded, remembering that Grandpa had showed me the layers of rock on a different wall years ago. He’d said each color stood for something.

Mr. Glen had apparently heard the same thing because he was digging a sample rock from each layer in the wall. He wrapped them in muslin and placed them in his sack, making notes on each one. Then he circled around closer to us, to the part of the meadow where the grass had gone yellow in a long oval patch.

Henry and I drew back behind the tree so he wouldn’t see us, and turned our ears to listen. We heard Mr. Glen grunt and squat down. We heard the clack and thud of rocks being lifted and rolled out of the way.

“Eureka!” The museum man laughed aloud. He took something from his backpack, replaced it, and then walked out the way we came.

I was bursting with questions, but Henry held his
hand up to silence me until long after we could no longer hear Mr. Glen walking away.

“What is this place?” I asked. “What makes that smell?”

“Grandpa would call it a power of the earth,” Henry said. “A power the museum man wants for himself.”

“But he only took rocks,” I said. I walked carefully up to the cone of mud to see what Mr. Glen was looking at. The stench was definitely coming from in there.

“This is the place where the power under the earth breathes,” Henry said. He took a yellow-and-brown speckled maple leaf and held it over the mud chimney. The leaf fluttered up as if a gentle wind had caught it. A chill crawled up my back. I imagined some hideous creature breathing down in a stone chamber underground.

Henry walked slowly around the mud chimney, bent over to search the ground.

“And this is what he was looking for,” Henry said.

He picked up a fist-sized black rock that was smooth and had a bit of luster to it, but it was not the mirror shine of black obsidian. Henry put the rock in his pocket and walked to the patch of yellowed grass.

The ground was steeply folded there. At the bottom of the crease was a black puddle. Henry dipped his finger in the puddle, and when he lifted his hand, the black liquid coated his finger. It was thicker than paint but not
so stiff as glue. It smelled sharp and sour, but it didn’t make my eyes water the way the mud chimney did.

“What could he possibly want this stuff for? It’s ugly and smelly and—”

“And it burns,” Henry said. “It’s like whale oil but not so clean. I’ll show you.”

He scooped up a bit of the black oil with a shell and took me away from the burned area. Back in the trees, we found a moss-covered log. He set down the shell and the black stone and took a matchbox out of his pocket. When he touched a lit match to the oil in the shell, it burned with a blue flame, yellow at the edges, and gave off a thin black wisp of smoke. Then he took a knife and shaved a few crumbs off the black stone. He had to coax that one along, but after the third match it burned.

“Listen to me, Pearl,” Henry said. “This coal and the oil and the natural gas that comes out of the chimney are all the same thing, and the gas catches fire most easily. You must never, never come here with fire.”

“Is that why the ground is burned back in the clearing?”

Henry nodded. “When Grandpa’s father was a boy, lightning struck one of those mud chimneys. There was an explosion they heard miles away and a pillar of fire taller than any tree.”

“So it’s not a monster?”

Henry smiled but not to mock me. “I don’t believe in the old monsters, Pearl. Sometimes I wish I did. Is it worse to be swallowed by a demon or a fire?”

I thought it over and poked at the smoldering ashes with a twig.

“Monster,” I decided. “With a monster, you always get a chance to trick your way back to life. At least you do in the good stories.”

“We had better hang on to those good stories then.” Henry took a wet piece of moss and dabbed out the last sparks. “When Grandma’s gone there will only be you and me and Ida and Charlie to keep the old stories.”

“Yes, and what if …” My mind jumped from sickness to war to logging accidents. “I’m going to write them down,” I said firmly. “All of them.”

“That’s your father in you talking. He wasn’t afraid to try new things.” Henry laughed a little. “It drove my dad crazy, Grandpa too. But I admired that about him, and so did many other young men. When there was trouble in town or a dispute with a neighbor, Victor was the man people turned to.”

“People always told me how brave he was,” I said. “But I thought they were talking about whaling.”

“Oh, he had the courage from the strength of his body,” Henry said. “And so does many a fool who can’t imagine his own death. But your father had courage from
the strength of his ideas too, and that is what made him a leader of men.”

The strength of his ideas, I thought. Now that’s something of my father’s I want to keep in my pocket.

“I wish he was here,” Henry said. “I’d give a hundred coppers to know what he would have done about our museum man.”

“What is Mr. Glen going to do?”

Henry shrugged. “He’ll need investors in order to buy drilling equipment.”

“They can’t just drill. It’s our land. We have a treaty to say so.”

“Seems like a treaty doesn’t count for much when you’ve got oil or gold or some other thing white people want on your reservation.”

I nodded, looking at the ground. My friend Anita from Nitinat had cousins in Montana. They used to live in the Black Hills, but gold miners came and now they live in a rail-yard shack in Helena with strangers all around them and no clean water or view of the mountains. The schoolmaster called it assimilation. He called it admirable. I knew piracy when I saw it.

That night at dinner, Mr. Glen was more cheerful and talkative than he had been all week. He complimented Grandma and Aunt Loula extravagantly on their cooking and tried to make jokes with Uncle Jeremiah.

At the end of the meal he gestured for silence and announced, “Simon, Jeremiah, I have decided to buy the totem pole you are working on. It will be a fine addition to the Art Institute.”

Aunt Loula gasped with pleasure, and Ida actually jumped up and clapped. I looked down at my hands and wished with all my heart for the Pitch Woman to swoop in the door and devour that man. There were smiles and handshakes all around. I noticed Henry making a
charade of pleasant congratulations, so I did my best to disguise my feelings.

“A down payment of one hundred dollars. No, one hundred twenty,” Mr. Glen went on. “And then another three hundred dollars when you deliver it in six months. How does that sound?”

Uncle Jeremiah smiled, and Grandpa nodded. Aunt Loula tapped her fingers to calculate.

“That’s forty dollars a foot,” she whispered to Grandma.

“And that’s only the beginning,” Mr. Glen said. “When my patron sees your fine work, your exemplary work, I’m sure he will offer you a commission every year.”

It was as if he knew exactly what they wanted to hear. I kept stealing glances at Henry, but he was determined to play along.

“We should celebrate,” Henry said.

“Yes, yes, a toast to our bargain.” Mr. Glen scuttled off to the room where his boxes were kept and came back with a bottle of whiskey. There was a moment of quiet, and everyone turned to look at Grandpa.

He stood up with his fists clenched behind his back, weighing the duties of hospitality with moral obligation.

“Come now,” Mr. Glen said in a meeker tone. “A drink to our partnership. It’s only a custom.”

Grandpa made the briefest of nods, and Mr. Glen poured whiskey for himself, Grandpa, and Uncle Jeremiah.

“To a long and productive partnership,” he said, raising his glass and drinking. Grandpa raised his glass silently and watched Mr. Glen drink; then he threw his whiskey onto the fire in the middle of the room. A thin orange flame leapt up as high as a grown man and then sank down. It left behind a brief smell of burnt sugar.

Ida gasped with delight as if this were part of a potlatch show.

“It is our custom,” Grandpa said, and then retired to his own room at the head of the house.

Uncle Jeremiah gave Mr. Glen a hard look, said “To long prosperity,” and did the same.

I’d heard him say to his boys a hundred times, “Whiskey was invented for the purpose of stealing from Indians.”

“Oh dear,” Mr. Glen said, looking rather forlornly at the fire and then at Uncle Jeremiah walking away from him.

I gave Henry a satisfied nod. Whatever the museum man was looking to steal, he wasn’t going to get it from us with whiskey.

“Come, Mr. Glen,” Henry said cheerfully. “They’re just being traditional. It’s bachelors’ night to wash up.”
He scooped up an armload of dishes, and on the way past he whispered, “Charlie and I are going to distract Mr. Glen. You need to search his boxes while we do.”

I nodded and went to work.

“Ida, do you want a cribbage game or a story before bed?” I matched my cheerful tone to Henry’s. “Good night, everyone.”

Grandma and Aunt Loula had followed their husbands to their rooms, so only the boys were left. Mr. Glen reluctantly set his bottle of whiskey on the table and joined Henry and Charlie at the dish tub.

I knew better than to rush Ida to sleep. If she guessed I was up to something, she’d stay awake for hours and pepper me with questions. I unbraided her hair and gave it the gentlest brushing. I read a chapter of
The Wizard of Oz
in my slowest, most sleepy voice. I kept skipping sentences in the book because I was trying to listen in on the conversation in the kitchen, but their voices were lost in the washing and stacking of plates.

I was nearly to the end of the chapter when Ida asked, “We’re going to be all right now, aren’t we? Now that Daddy and Grandpa can sell their carving.”

For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized Ida had been worried all this time too.

“I’m going to be an artist,” she said. “You’ll see. When I’m bigger I’ll do my fair share.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, stroking her hair. “We’ve got each other.” I blew out the candle and listened. The men were still in the kitchen. There was one lamp on the table, and the fire had burned low. I tiptoed softly around the edge of the common room in the middle of the house, keeping to the shadows. Mr. Glen’s room was a small rectangle separated from the rest of the house with a wooden screen and a curtain for a door.

I was a dozen steps from it when the men came out of the kitchen. I froze and hugged the darkness by the wall.

“Now,” Henry said briskly, “how about a card game?” He set down a deck of cards and two cups.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Mr. Glen said, sitting at the table. “Will you drink with me?”