Written in Stone (4 page)

“Look at all those girls flirting with my Henry. Maybe he’ll make a match today. Charlie will sing later. He’s so talented. And look how tall my Ida’s grown. She was only a baby the last time we had a feast here.”

I hated her and her living family. She had never lost anything in her life. She couldn’t possibly understand me.

“Blue mussel?” she said to Anita. “Your favorite, right?” She scooped a bit of my food to Anita’s plate.

“This is the finest sausage we’ve made in years,” she said, helping herself to mine. She went on in praise of her own cooking and passed around my food until salmon was uncovered. She leaned in and whispered, “Salmon is familiar. It goes down.” She gave me a final pat and flapped off to crow at someone else.

Ida slid in beside me next. She bounced on the bench, making my already queasy stomach worse.

“Sisters,” she hissed through missing front teeth. “We’ll be real sisters now. Mom said you can move into my room. Girls aren’t supposed to live alone. Besides, Henry’s old enough to take a bride. Dad and Grandpa said he can live in your room, and you can share mine.
You can have the top bunk if you want, and I’ll let you use my crayons.”

I didn’t hate Ida yet, but I could see it coming.

After the feast came the story. Uncle Jeremiah told it standing tall in his black-and-red robe of power in front of the carved panels of Whale and Raven. He sprinkled oil on the fire to make it burn brighter. The guests settled in silence.

“Our whale hunt began beautifully,” he said. “We saw spouts to the northwest, but as we drew near, the whales dove and disappeared. Before, when we met our brothers on the open sea, they raised up their heads to greet us. In time, one would swim alongside our canoe and offer his life for us. But this time, the whales ran from us without even a raised head in greeting.

“Had we offended them? Had we come to hunt with greed in our hearts? Disrespect in our minds? We prayed and searched, traveling farther from home.

“The morning of the second day, we found a whale alone, a singer, a humpback. He had many notches along his tail from battles with killer whales. This old one greeted us in the traditional way. His body rose beside the canoe, and we saw scars. Deep gashes ran from the blowhole down to the tail. Some scars were old, but one was so fresh it bled. They were as deep and jagged as the scars a bear leaves on the bark of a tree.

“My brother stood with his harpoon ready. As he lunged to strike, my son, Henry, shouted for him to stop, a direct challenge, a break in our silence.”

There was a stir among the listeners. The old whalers from Neah Bay and Vancouver Island leaned their heads together and spoke with sharp urgency. They had the power to cast Henry out from the society of whalers.

But the younger men and those from families that did not rank high enough to hunt whales looked at my cousin with admiration. I saw whispers pass among them and nods of satisfaction. If Uncle Jeremiah noticed the divided response, he gave no sign. He went on with the story.

“The old whale lifted his head one last time and dove. My brother saw the dive coming. He leapt from the boat to the whale, ready to drive the harpoon deep and end our whale’s suffering. I did not see him strike.

“The whale pushed our canoe over with his tail and disappeared. We struggled to right our boat, to collect our paddles. Henry dove for his uncle in the dark water. My brother and the whale vanished, with no sound, bubble, or spout.

“We were alone on an empty sea. As we turned our canoe for home, my brother’s harpoon floated up from the depths, snapped in two pieces.

“We paddled with heavy hearts, not guessing the sorrows ahead. That evening, we saw a ship. In the distance, we thought it was a steam-powered trader. Nearer, we took it for an ironclad navy vessel with a bow-mounted cannon.

“Then the truth became clear. It was a battleship making war on the whales. The cannon held a harpoon. Dead whales were pumped full of air, chained up, and dragged along behind, only to be eaten away by sharks. Twenty whales were pouring out their blood, and still they steamed after more. The waste! The dishonor! We wanted to curse their white greed, but these sailors had faces like ours. They flew the red sun of Japan. Hours later, we passed more battleship whalers, one from America, one from Russia. We saw more dead whales in one day than this village has seen in three generations.”

Uncle Jeremiah stepped back, his tale finished. Anger rose in the room like the tide.

“Thieves!” a man shouted from one side. “The whales are ours to take.”

Grandpa’s deep voice rolled out every curse in every language he knew. “Liars! Treaty breakers! We gave them land for the sea!” he shouted. Grandpa holds the long pages of our treaty in his memory. “We gave them the trees, three hundred thousand acres of trees, theirs
forever. All we asked for was the whales, and the right to hunt and fish as we always have. Now they scorn our treaty and steal the life out of the sea.”

Under the high tide of anger I heard women’s voices, quieter and more urgent, talking about hunger, disease, poverty, and shame.

Henry stood to speak.

“I broke our tradition of silence on the hunt. Maybe I was wrong to do it. Maybe my uncle’s death is my fault. But I believe the old whale came to warn us, to show by his scars that the whales are leaving. Soon they will be gone forever, hunted out like the sea otters. What child younger than ten has seen a sea otter? They are all dead, and my children will never know their whiskered faces hiding in the kelp beds.”

Henry’s words broke over me like waves. I felt like a sinking stone. I wanted to feel heavy. I wanted to walk along the ocean floor. I wanted to look for my father in the houses of whales and seals. My father—the last whaler.

Grandma got up to speak. She went to the front by the fire. People stopped talking. They shushed the children. Grandma was a famous storyteller.

“I believe,” she called out, as steady and strong as a revival tent preacher. “I believe the whales have seen the greed of the big whaling ships. They have gone deep, and
they have taken my son, our finest whaler, with them. They will wait in the deep for men to change their ways. And we will wait with them.

“You, fathers, teach your sons the meditations of a whaler and the arts of ocean navigation. Mothers, teach your daughters the prayers of a whaler’s wife and the ways to prepare whale meat.”

People sat up taller as Grandma spoke. They lifted their heads, and I felt the power of her voice like that invisible force that made a flock of birds or a school of fish turn together as if they were one animal. I wondered for a moment, if there was no voice like hers, would we be a tribe at all?

“We will honor our whales,” Grandma went on. “Even when they are gone from us we will honor them with our songs and dances, our carving and our stories. For I believe, I do believe our whales will come back to us one day.”

After the feast, the men left, using the full moon to navigate. They slipped out in groups of four or six. They moved over the ocean as quiet as shadows in the light of the moon. I had to wait with the women for the fire to burn low and the chatting aunties to put their children to bed.

When everyone was busy, I sneaked outside and tiptoed down the porch, skipping the loud step. I went to the side of the house and pulled the fish canoe down the sand, the small one that I could paddle alone. I took an old spruce root hat and a wool blanket out of the canoe, where I had hidden them. With them on in the dark, I would look like one of the grandmothers. No one told the grandmothers what to do.

“Where will you go in the dark?” Grandma’s sharp voice came from the shadows at the far end of the front porch.

I gasped, dropped the canoe on my foot, and cursed silently.

“Out,” I said back just as sharp, and tugged the boat farther. I didn’t have to look for her frown. I felt it. I didn’t care; she couldn’t stop me. I was stronger than she was. Anyone strong enough to stop me was already at the giveaway.

“Will I tell the Pitch Woman story again?” she said.

The name hit me like a slap, and the most horrifying details of the Pitch Woman story flooded my memory. I couldn’t make myself look over my shoulder at the dark spaces between the trees. I leapt all five of the porch steps in one bound and stood in the stripe of lamplight that leaked out the door. Once I was in light, I could take
a breath and close my mind to that story. I turned and studied the black water between me and my father’s potlatch. My hands shook. I gave Grandma the same hard look she gave me. I had an urge to dash inside and bar the door. Leave her alone in the dark to face the Pitch Woman.

“It is not wrong to be angry,” Grandma said.

I turned all the way around and faced her full on.

“It is not wrong that you want to be there,” Grandma went on. “I want to be there too—he is my son.” She gave me a quick peek at her own sorrow and then covered the wound carefully. I kept my sorrows bound up tight, but they bled anyway.

“If you are determined, Pearl, I will go with you,” Grandma said. “I will carry the light, and you will paddle, and we will find the giveaway together or a jail in Vancouver together. But there is another way to go, a safer way.”

I shrugged. Safer did not hold much appeal. Grandma waited me out.

I remembered how long it would take to paddle alone. “Safer?” I asked.

Grandma ducked inside and brought out a lamp. It cast a warm pool of light on the porch. We settled, backs against the wall.

“Who came to the feast today?” she asked.

I closed my eyes. “Shall I tell them by tribe or by order around the table?”

Grandma smiled, proud of my memory. “We’ll start from Alaska and go south,” she said.

I worked my way down the names and clan connections, and Grandma told me the gifts they would receive tonight, who made them, and why they went to that family.

I had only thought to keep something of my father’s for my own comfort, not about this naming of gifts. Maybe twenty years from now, I would travel to a village I’d never visited before, but someone there would remember that I was the daughter of the whaler Victor Carver.

“I remember him,” they would say, and they would think of the honor their family received tonight and treat me with respect. It was not the same as a thing I could hold, but it had a weight of its own.

Still, I wanted something, one small thing of my father’s to keep for my own.

The season for berries came, and the carved cedar boxes that held the whale meat and oil stood empty. We turned our backs to the ocean and traveled to the summer hunting places to meet Grandma’s people, the Quinaults. They did not hunt whales. Their wealth and power and fame were in the Quinault River and the Blueback salmon, the richest meat fish of them all. To hear them talk about their salmon, you’d think they were whales.

Last year, we came to the lake after our whale hunt, fresh from selling the oil in town. We wore new clothes and carried new rifles and toys. We gave presents to all our relatives. This year, we came in lighter canoes. My dress showed a dark stripe at the hem and sides where Aunt Loula had let out the seams.

Aunt Loula took the occasion of our long trip, down the coast to Taholah and then up the river to Lake Quinault, to plan my future. When I was the only daughter of a great whaler, no one minded that I couldn’t draw or weave or twine a basket, that I sang more like a bear than a bird. But I would have to learn something of value now that the power had gone out of my name.

Aunt Loula wanted me to learn baskets. Aunt Loula knew baskets. She had a reputation for turning out the small, close-woven ones with a colored pattern that sold at the curio shops in Seattle, Juneau, and San Francisco.

“You can get money for a good basket,” Aunt Loula said. “Especially when you work out a deal with a regular buyer.”

“Never very much money,” I said. “You would have to turn out dozens a month to make it worth the trip to town.”

“If you were good at it, you would be able to turn out a dozen baskets a month.”

“Yes,” I snapped. “And you know what an outstanding basket maker I am. Completely without form or balance, that’s what you said about the last basket I made.”

Aunt Loula opened her mouth to snap back at me, but then she sighed and arranged a calmer expression. “I didn’t mean it.”

“People say what they mean.” I was not going to let up on her.

“You could learn,” she said quietly. “You’re plenty smart enough, but you don’t pay attention to your work, Pearl. Your mind is miles away when you are making a basket. What are you thinking about all the time?”

I could feel her leaning forward and to one side in the canoe to look at my face. There was no way I was going to tell her what I was thinking. She wasn’t my mother. I let an unpleasant silence grow between us. I heard Henry paddling more loudly behind his mother and felt a touch of guilt. He always took my side when Ida cheated at dice or Charlie copied my schoolwork. Even if I would never love Aunt Loula, I ought to respect her for his sake.