Читать книгу Mabel McKay - Greg Sarris - Страница 10

Sarah Taylor’s Granddaughter

I never knew nothing but the spirit.

The scene was typical. Mabel lecturing, answering questions from an auditorium of students and faculty who wanted to know about her baskets and her life as a medicine woman. As always, she was puzzling, maddening. But that morning I studied her carefully, as if I might see or understand something about her for the first time. She had asked me to write her life story, and after knowing her for over thirty years and with stacks of notes and miles of tape, I still didn’t know how.

“You’re an Indian doctor,” a young woman with bright red hair spoke from the middle of the room. “What do you do for poison oak?”

“Calamine lotion,” Mabel answered. She was matter-of-fact. The student sank into her chair.

A distinguished-looking man in gray tweed raised his hand. Mabel looked down from the podium to the front row where he was sitting.

“Mabel, how old were you when you started weaving baskets?”

Mabel adjusted her modish square glasses. “Bout six, I guess.”

“When did you reach perfection?”

Mabel didn’t understand the professor’s question and looked to where I was sitting, behind a display table showing her baskets.

“When did your baskets start to be good?” I ventured. “When did you start selling them?”

Mabel looked back at the man. “Bout nineteen, eighteen maybe.”

“Was it your grandmother who taught you this art?”

“It’s no such a thing art. It’s spirit. My grandma never taught me nothing about the baskets. Only the spirit trained me.” She waited for another question from the man, then added, “I only follow my Dream. That’s how I learn.”

The young woman from the middle of the room shot up again. Clearly, she was perplexed. “I mean, Mabel, do you use herbs and plants to treat people?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you talk to them? Do they talk to you?”

“Well, if I’m going to use them I have to talk, pray.”

The woman paused, then asked, “Do plants talk to each other?”

“I suppose.”

“What do they say?”

Mabel laughed out loud, then caught her breath and said, “I don’t know. Why would I be listening?”

At that point the professor who had sponsored Mabel’s visit announced that time was up and that people could look at Mabel’s baskets on their way out. He reiterated the fact that Mabel was an Indian with a different world view, reminding the audience of her story earlier about meeting the Kashaya Pomo medicine woman Essie Parrish in Dream twenty years before she met her in person. The professor, an earnest man in his mid-forties, turned to Mabel. “You must have recognized Essie Parrish when you first saw her in person, didn’t you, Mabel?”

Mabel, who was fussing to detach the microphone from her neck, looked and said, “Yes, but she cut her hair a little.”

There it was. Quintessential Mabel. Nothing new. Same stories and questions. Same answers. This small Indian woman, over eighty years old, with coifed black hair and modish glasses, this little Indian woman in a mauve-colored summer dress adorned on the shoulder with a corsage of imitation African violets, had turned a Stanford auditorium upside down. No one cracked her.

On the way back to the Rumsey Reservation that day, I kept wondering how I was going to write about Mabel’s life. She was baffling, even for me. Certainly the facts of her life were interesting and warranted a story. World-renowned Pomo basketmaker with permanent collections in the Smithsonian and countless other museums. The last Dreamer and sucking doctor among the Pomo peoples. The last living member of the Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo tribe. The astute interlocutor famous for her uncanny talk that left people’s minds spinning. The facts were easy. The life was not.

We drove east on Highway 80 toward Sacramento. It was a hot October day; it had not rained and the hills beyond the Bay Area were dust gray. Mabel patted her brow with a clean white handkerchief. Her black patent leather purse sat open on her lap.

“Can I smoke?” she asked.

I knew she’d ask before long. She was polite. She had smoked all the way from Rumsey to Stanford, but remembered that my red Honda Civic was new. In fact, the trip to Rumsey and back was the first major excursion I had made with the vehicle.

“Car’s doing pretty good,” Mabel said from the side of her mouth as she lit a cigarette.

I pulled out the half-full ashtray. First thing to clean when I get back to Stanford, I thought. So much for the new-car smell.

“Drought coming,” Mabel said exhaling a cloud of smoke. “Grandma said one time everything dried up. Peoples had to go clear to Sacramento for water.”

“Yes, she followed Highway 16 from Rumsey to Woodland in a wagon. Was a dirt road then. No water in Woodland, so she went on to the Sacramento River. One of the horses died. Lots of animals died. She stayed along the river until the first rains came. She was hungry. She ate fish mush and drank willow bark tea.” I knew the story. It seemed I knew all the stories. Over the years, ever since I was a kid, I had heard them again and again.

“Yes,” Mabel added, “and lots of them valley people there suspicious of Grandma on account of her grandfather having that white snake poison. Saying problems is on account of her. Thing is that man had that poison sold it off. Some peoples even think I got that poison.” She chuckled at herself and puffed her cigarette. “How can I be doctor and poison you at the same time?”

“See Mabel, that’s the problem. Your stories go all over the place. I can’t write them like that. It’s too hard for people to follow. I don’t know where to start.”

Mabel exhaled another long cloud of smoke and rubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. She folded her hands resolutely over her purse. I saw from the corner of my eye; it seemed the gesture was intended for me. I focused on the road.

“Mabel, people want to know about things in your life in a way they can understand. You know, how you got to be who you are. There has to be a theme.”

“I don’t know about no theme.”

I squirmed in my seat. Her hands didn’t move. “A theme is a point that connects all the dots, ties up all the stories . . .”

“That’s funny. Tying up all the stories. Why somebody want to do that?”

“When you write a book there has to be a story or idea, a theme . . .”

“Well, theme I don’t know nothing about. That’s somebody else’s rule. You just do the best way you know how. What you know from me.”

Back to the facts. I drove on in silence. Mirages rose from the hot pavement. Stories. Old Grandma Sarah Taylor on her wagon. The buckets of dirty clothes rattling on the wagon bed as she steered the horses over the hard, rocky ground to the creek. The sickly little girl next to her who was Dreaming in a world of white people . . .

It was a summer Monday like so many others. Wash day and one-hundred-degree heat. Only today Old Sarah didn’t leave her granddaughter under the willow tree. After she watered and tied the horses, she lifted the frail seven-year-old to the ground and sat her in the sand near the washboard and pounding rocks. With three sticks and the sheriff’s wife’s calico housedress, she built a tent over the girl. Then she began to unload the wagon. Underclothes, trousers and shirts, dresses, children’s clothes. The buckets that belonged to the woman on the hill, those from the sheriff’s wife and from the storekeeper. She placed them in a row along the water, but all the while she watched the clump of silver willows downstream and the chaparral behind her. She watched the horses, seeing where they turned their heads.

She had sensed something wrong just beyond the Rumsey store, when she was hardly out of town. Someone watching her. The horses lifted their heads. She pulled in the reins and started shouting. “What do you want? I’ve got the white people’s things. I’ve got the ghosts’ clothes. If you touch me, they’ll track you.” She called out in the local Wintun language, then in Sulphur Bank Pomo, and then in Wintun again. She knew half a dozen languages and she called out in every one of them. Every one of them except her own, Lolsel Cache Creek Pomo. On and on she shouted. And then as quickly as she had started, she stopped. Slowly, she let out the reins, and with her one free hand untied the scarves around her head. She needed to see from the corners of her eyes. She needed to take precautions. So before she knelt in the water with the dirty clothes and washboard, she did one more thing. She hung the sheriff’s shirts on the wagon, from the bed and over the seat back.

She pulled a bucket close to her and knelt in a shallow pool. She looked over her shoulder. “Mabel,” she called. The gaunt child looked up with sleep-swollen eyes. She was sitting just as Sarah had left her. “Lie down,” she said. “Put your head on the scarves there.” The girl stared at her, her large, wide face unmoving. Sarah turned back to her work.

The girl would sleep. She had been up half the night, talking out loud in her Dream. Sarah started on the underclothes. The way a person dresses. First things first. She hadn’t let the white people down in ten years. Mondays, wash. Tuesdays, iron. Other days, outside chores, paint, chop wood. Or the orchards. When she walked into town last spring after a five-month stay in Cortina, the white folks asked her back. They let go the Indian help they had hired to replace her. “Old Sarah, the best,” they said, which is what she repeated at the end of each day’s work as they dropped a coin into her apron and handed her a loaf of bread, sometimes a box of crackers, for the sick girl at her side. Old Sarah, the best. It was about the only English she knew. She wasn’t that old really, fifty or so. Her weathered face and old Victorian dress and loose aprons told nothing of the arms and back that hoisted sixty-pound boxes of apples and pounded clothes eight hours straight.

The sun on her bare head would make her delirious in time. She knew working faster wouldn’t help. Neither would crying. For that she only allowed herself the time each morning it took the sun to hit the mountaintops. She had to go on. There was the girl. Mabel. Go on, she told herself as she glanced at the girl and took up a handful of underclothes.

It started about four years ago, shortly after the child began speaking. The long, full stares. Restless nights. The strange things she said. “It’s good to be here, away from that Big Lady by the lake,” she told her mother once. She was referring to her father’s first wife, who had tried to poison her mother up in Nice. But how could she have known anything about that? She was an infant then. How did she know to call the woman Big Lady? Then once when a man from somewhere near Sacramento knocked on Sarah’s door, the girl grabbed a piece of meat off the table and handed it to Sarah. Sarah, who stood in the doorway facing the man, took the meat from the child without thinking. When she looked back at the man, he was stepping backward, away from the door, the reflection of her and the girl vanishing in his frightened eyes. Mabel pushed him backward, down the road, with her gaze. He had come to poison Sarah, and Mabel had known as much, even at the age of three. She knew to show him meat. Offer a stranger meat. If he doesn’t take it, he is carrying poison. A poisoner must fast from meat. The old Indian rule.

Maybe that’s who is after us, Sarah thought as she pushed an undershirt over the washboard. He saw the girl was different, that she had something powerful and old. Others had seen, too. Those people last fall at Mrs. Spencer’s grape-picking camp who had heard the girl cry and hum at night and seen her heavy eyes in the day. It could be any of them. This wasn’t the first time Sarah felt someone following her.

Maybe it was some good person, a good doctor watching, keeping an eye on the girl until she was ready to be helped with the Dream. Sarah didn’t linger on that idea, though. In people’s minds, the girl called up Lolsel, or Wild Tobacco, the ancient village place where Sarah was born, and where now only her sister Belle remained. Lolsel, in the hills above Clear Lake, some twenty-five miles west of the valley, of Rumsey. Lolsel, where Sarah’s brother, Richard, began the Dream religion, where he called people from far and near to hear his Dreams, where people listened and began Dreaming themselves, Dreaming new dances and songs, sacred activities that would keep them alive after the white people had taken everything but their souls to Dream. Bole Maru, they called the Dream religion in the west. Bole Hesi, in the east. But Lolsel was always special. Always a place of powerful people, astonishing events. The small valley tucked in the hills, where strong medicine grew. Where white eagles appeared to the people and traded doctoring songs for live rabbits and small deer, and later, out of gratitude for the good trade, gave one old man there enough white feathers for a full-length cape, a gown so brilliant it exposed every sickness in its path, every darkness in a human body.

That was Old Taylor’s father, or maybe his father’s father. Sarah’s grandfather, or great-grandfather. The same one who discovered the snake one dry summer in Cache Creek just north of the village. A snake a hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, pure white with the head of a deer. It filled the creek bed; it was stuck, unable to slide past the stone-dry creek walls. He sacrificed the snake, killed it with song. He called many people to see it, then ground its dried remains into a powder that he sold to all the neighboring tribes. It was a deadly poison, but he figured if everybody owned it, nobody could use it. You counteracted the poison with the poison. But things got mixed up. The white people came not long after. An awful time. The stories got mixed up. People were always suspicious of strangers, persons from other villages, and now they were forced to live with them, work with them. Sometimes entire villages disappeared. Maybe a few from here survived, a few from there. Smallpox left Lolsel with hardly a dozen people. Once a large village of five hundred, only a handful by 1871 when Richard preached his Dream. But someone remembered about the snake, and told it wrong. When Sarah moved into the small house in Rumsey, someone said, “She has that white snake poison. That old ancestor of hers didn’t sell it all. Why else does she look so good to the white people? She makes us look bad. It’s her poison.”

Sarah got a ride into the valley with the rancher. She stood outside the barn where he hitched the horses and she pointed to the road. He knew she was leaving the place. It wasn’t just the gunnysack of clothes at her feet, which she took with her whenever he gave her a ride anywhere. And it wasn’t just that she was pointing east toward the Sacramento Valley on the coldest day in winter, when snow was on the hilltops and there wasn’t an almond to crack or an apricot to pick anywhere in Rumsey. It was that a week before, her oldest children had come for her youngest. The older boys, young men really, Nelson, Anderson, and Dewey, who built the rancher’s stone fences and cleared the land for his cattle, came on a wagon of their own, a wagon with fine wheels and a long bed, and loaded up the younger brother, McKinley, and the girl, Daisy. How could he protest? There wasn’t really enough work for them, and now he couldn’t afford to feed them well. Game was scarce and his own family needed what supplies he could get in Rumsey. And now didn’t it make sense that the old woman would follow her children?

Sarah let the man with long red sideburns help her onto the wagon. His worn leather gloves felt cold, smooth. They started off then, past the barn and the rancher’s house, past where Sarah could see the Indian shacks by the creek. The half dozen or so places looked small, abandoned, except for where smoke rose from a single stovepipe. The wagon bumped and made the corner away from the ranch. Sarah turned in her seat, kept looking back after the barn and Indian places disappeared. She could still see the elderberry tree in the open, flat field. It was bare now, of course, but its drooping branches held full white flowers each spring and dark blue berries every summer.

It was the last miraculous thing to happen at Lolsel.

Richard Taylor, Sarah’s brother, died one late fall afternoon. The night before, he instructed his people to bury him in the Roundhouse, where he preached his Dream. After, they were to lock the Roundhouse, since no other Dreamer would live at Lolsel. He was the last. That was hard enough. But then the rancher, who bought the land from a white man, announced that he was going to move his family there. He wanted the land cleared, and he looked at the wide round rooftop rising out of the ground in the middle of the field. He said he would come back in the spring. That winter the creek flooded, the worst rains ever. People moved into the hills. When they returned, they found their places, all their possessions, in order. Everything except the largest structure on the land, the Roundhouse. It was gone, centerpole and all. Only the indentation in the earth where it once stood told anything of its ever having existed. And after the rains and flood, the large crater in the earth was dry. That next spring, where the entrance had been above ground, a lone elderberry grew. People said Richard Taylor ascended to the world above.

The rancher couldn’t have known what Sarah was seeing any more than he could’ve known all that was in her mind when he found her outside the barn. He knew Belle, Sarah’s sister, was left, that Belle would stay on to help his wife. He’d seen to that after the older boys moved to the valley. Belle and, now with Sarah and her younger kids gone, nobody on a regular basis. Maybe that old man from the lake someplace who had been around the last five years, that old man whom he couldn’t see Sarah thinking about that morning, talking to Sarah. “You got children to look after,” he told Sarah. “This is white man world. And the Indians down there aren’t always friendly. You go . . . stay together. There’s nothing for you here.” He was sitting up, his rattling chest heaving with each breath. “Go on,” he said, and looked to Belle. “She’ll come later. Then no Indians left of this place. But I’ll be here.” Sarah knew what he was saying. It was enough for him to die there. He didn’t need or want more from her. Except to leave him, to join her children. “You got a place down there,” he said. “Now go.” She figured, at her age, he would be her last husband. She just never figured it would end like this, at a time when the life ahead of her seemed so long.

She thought of things on the way to the valley. She thought of her mother, Mollie, who had come to Lolsel from a village far south, in the Napa Valley. She was a stranger; no one understood her language. She was alone, frightened, and her hair was singed close to the scalp, a sign she was in mourning. But she worked hard, and she made beautiful baskets. Once she wove a basket the size of a grown woman, another time she made a string of baskets tiny as beads, so tiny that people could hardly see them to know what they were. She gave each Lolsel person one of the little baskets. She was close to middle age, and still Old Taylor took her for his wife. After she learned to speak the Wild Tobacco language, she told how she fled north after the Mexicans kidnapped her children and burned her village on the Napa River. Sarah thought how she had never seen Mollie cry.

The ride down was slow. The ground was hard, slippery. In the valley, where the road was flat, the horses had an easier time. Rumsey wasn’t too far then, and Sarah tapped the rancher when she saw the house and barn on the other side of the general store. She got herself off the wagon, took up her gunnysack, and nodded to the rancher. Then she started up the narrow road past the large white ranch house with a picket fence to the smaller house behind the barn. Anderson was chopping wood, and he saw her right away. He called his sister and brothers out of the house to greet their mother.

Her children had done well for themselves. The place was small, two rooms, but it was clean and dry. It had a good stove, and there was enough food—flour, and even some canned goods from the store. The boys chopped wood for the local ranchers, sewed feed sacks at the granary, loaded and unloaded boxcars at the train stop. The girl cooked, washed clothes. But Sarah was still suspicious. Why did their distant cousin, who had Lolsel lineage, leave such a nice place? It was winter now, and even though they were only a few miles from the Wintun rancheria across the creek, they did not see other Indians too often. In the summer, the Indians would be everywhere.

Sarah thought through the situation. She knew most of the Wintun people, she had worked with them in the orchards for many years, and, as far as she knew, she had good relations with them. She would strengthen the ties, make sure none of them turned on her or her family now that she was settled in their territory. Marriage was the key. That summer in the orchards she nodded to every available Wintun woman she found. The boys knew to follow her chin. She instructed Daisy to comb her hair and keep her clothes clean at all times. She taught her how to make a good black pinole that she could share with people, not just men lest the women suspect her motives and become jealous. By fall, Nelson and Dewey had taken up with women, but it was not exactly as Sarah had wanted, no exchange of gifts, no formal marriages. Later, Anderson moved to Cortina with a woman. When the heavy rains came, Sarah found herself in the house with only McKinley and the girl.

By then the storekeeper’s talk of her excellent work around his large white house had led to jobs with the woman on the hill and the sheriff’s wife. Daisy helped and so did McKinley, when there wasn’t work at the granary or at the train stop. Then McKinley began to wander. He socialized with the local Indians and danced with them at the big dances in Cortina, which, for Sarah, was as good as if he married one of them. In time, she got used to the quiet house. She enjoyed time with her daughter, who, after so many years, still didn’t have a marriage proposal.

Four years went by. Sarah knew some of the Indians were unfriendly to her, and she heard from those who were her friends what was said about her and the white snake poison. She figured she could live with the talk. No one had tried to harm her. Besides, in this world of more and more white people, weren’t more and more Indians forgetting those old-time things? She worked hard, was polite, watched her step. She worried about Daisy, who was now eighteen and still unmarried. Daisy was a flirt, too casual with the men, Sarah thought. Too many different men came to visit her—so many that Sarah could hardly keep track, so many that when a couple parked their wagon in front of her house and pointed to the loaded wagon bed, she did not have any idea who their son was. There were chickens, pigs, even a young heifer. Barrels of flour and corn, a case of crackers, yards of fine material for dressmaking, piles of new blankets. The only problem was they weren’t Wintun. They were Pomo, Potter Valley Pomo from west of Clear Lake.

Sarah went inside the house. Daisy was nowhere around. Sarah waited all day. So did the couple on the wagon. When Daisy came home that evening, Sarah pleaded with her to wait for an offer from someone in the valley. But she didn’t push too hard, since she didn’t want to offend the dark handsome man who stood next to Daisy and called himself Yanta Boone. He might be able to understand some of her Lolsel language, after all. When he did address Sarah, he spoke Sulphur Bank Pomo, a language they both understood. “My parents are paying the highest price for your daughter,” he said. “A woman from Lolsel is the most valuable anywhere.” “We’re nothing special,” Sarah said, wanting to believe her own words. “Take the gifts,” Daisy said in Sulphur Bank, putting Sarah on the spot. So Sarah agreed, and Yanta and his father unloaded the wagon, and Daisy left with a gun-nysack.

That was in the spring. April sometime. Sarah wasn’t alone. Dewey was back without his woman, and McKinley was there. The other boys visited regularly. Sarah told them what happened to Daisy. She told how Yanta Boone had a regular job on a ranch in Nice, just north of the lake. “That’s closer to our home,” Sarah said, as if to make things all right. “She’ll be happy there.” The boys weren’t convinced. How did Sarah or anyone know anything about this Yanta or his family? they wondered. Sarah pointed out that Yanta’s sister, Nanny, had married Charlie Williams, the lone survivor of the Bloody Island Massacre, who was a fine man. Still, the boys were not appeased. Someone would have to check on Daisy.

Sarah would be the one.

Just after the last crops and before the first heavy rains, Sarah made the trip. The boys lent her their wagon. They hoisted enough straw on the bed to feed the horses for a week, then followed her on horseback to the foot of the hills. Now she was alone. It was early morning, and if she didn’t stop, she could be in Nice by nightfall. But at noon, when she was well into the hills, halfway to Clear Lake, she turned off the road. She didn’t hesitate. There were no second thoughts. She drove on, around that turn in the narrow road where she spotted the elderberry tree in the open field, onward past the house and barn, along the shacks, until at last there was a woman on the ground holding the horses and calling her name.

The two sisters had a lot to talk about. There was talk about life in the valley, the boys and Daisy. There was talk about the ranch and how cattle were everywhere now. By the time Sarah thought to get up from her place by Belle’s wood stove and have a look around outside, it was already dark. By then Sarah had seen that the pallet bed in the corner was gone, as was the wooden apple crate next to it that held her husband’s few belongings. The place was neat and tidy, dry-smelling like an orderly and lonely old woman.

Belle served acorn mush with a dinner of fried beef and cabbage sent over from the rancher’s wife. Sarah and Belle talked into the night. Mostly about the valley and how, with so many white people, the world was changing even faster than before. “Richard’s Dream was true,” Sarah said. “There will be roads going everywhere, even to the moon.” They sat on the floor, in the old style, their long dresses spread out around them, even though Belle had a new table with four perfectly comfortable wooden chairs. And when they got sleepy, they camped right there, folding up their shawls for a pillow.

Sarah had not taken a good look at things on her way in. She had not seen how the grass was grazed to the bare earth, not just in the open field, in the little valley that was Lolsel, but over the hills in every direction as far as the eye could see. “Cattle,” Belle explained, when Sarah took in the damage the next morning. They walked about, past the large oak tree along the creek. It looked dry, hungry. And along the water, where sweet clover grew year round, there was nothing but rocks, dusty earth, and cow dung.

On the way back, Sarah turned off the trail, just beyond the oak tree. Belle followed. They stopped at the graves above the creek. Sarah glanced around, then caught Belle nodding toward the grave she was looking for. Belle left and waited by the barn. Sarah looked awake but very distant. Something about her eyes. How they were last night, how they were all morning, how they looked when she reached the grave. Full of the unspeakable. That which breaks the insides to pieces. Which she and Belle cautiously avoided talking about. Not just what-happened-to-my-husband. Sarah knew that. But the countless remember-whens that made up her life at Lolsel.

Later that day, back on her way to Nice, Sarah began to think of things. Memories floated up. But she pushed them back where they came from, in that space that made up everything she knew except for what was immediately in front of her. “Go on,” she said and shook the reins.

The ranch was easy to find. She found the endless stone fences her son-in-law had made and the barn and the cottages behind. Daisy came out to greet her, and she saw immediately that Daisy was in a family way. Not just that Daisy, who was rather stout anyway, was bigger, but that her face had changed, settled in a way Sarah had seen in many pregnant women. And it was in Daisy’s face that Sarah detected in the days ahead that something was wrong. Nothing about the place; it was clean and warm. Nothing about Yanta; he was polite, good to Daisy, even if, as Sarah discovered, he was absentminded, wishy-washy at times. It was what Yanta’s parents hadn’t said that day on the wagon outside Sarah’s house, what Daisy finally told Sarah at the end of their visit, after days picking herbs in the hills, cracking acorns for mush in the evenings. It was that Yanta was already married. He had a first wife. She was from the lake someplace. Yanta’s parents didn’t like her; apparently he had married her without their approval. They paid such an extraordinary price for Daisy because they figured a woman from Lolsel would keep this lake woman away.

It didn’t work out exactly that way. Yanta was not interested in her. But she did not want to let him go. With friends, she made trips up to the ranch. She would stand out on the road for the longest time. Daisy was afraid to leave the ranch by herself, thinking she might run into this woman who gave long, hard stares. It wasn’t good. Daisy felt like a prisoner, stuck on the place. And just the week before, one of the Mexicans found a sun basket, perfectly made with the red feathers from a woodpecker’s head, hanging behind the cottage. Yes, someone was trying to poison her. Who else but this woman?

Sarah was packing her gunnysack and thinking to herself that she did not want to hear what she was being told. She asked who the woman was. “They just call her Big Lady. I guess that is her name,” Daisy answered. “She is a big woman.” Sarah then inquired about the woman’s family, where they were from. Daisy didn’t know too much, other than that they came from the lake someplace. “Well,” Sarah said, picking up her gunnysack, “remember all I taught you about yourself and having children . . . And if . . . you can always come back to the valley.”

Which is what Daisy did one gray February day. With Yanta. And with an infant girl she called Mabel.

At first, things seemed all right. The little house behind the storekeeper’s barn was crowded, but it was good to have Daisy home where she was safe. Big Lady had finally got her hooks in Daisy. Not long after the baby was born, Daisy became deathly sick. An old man from somewhere nearby doctored her. He said Big Lady and her family had hired a poisoner, and while the old man said he could heal Daisy, he warned her that the poisoner would strike again. Sarah informed Daisy that the old man doctor was a distant cousin, a descendant of a Lolsel woman. “I always called him Uncle,” Sarah said, “even though he grew up along the lake, lower lake, I think, among his father’s people.” She hoped Yanta paid him well. Sarah never found out what Yanta paid, since Yanta didn’t say. Yanta didn’t say much of anything, which was just one of his problems as far as Sarah’s family was concerned.

The boys found him unmotivated. He would sit by the stove or, if the weather was good, on the back porch, gazing at the western hills all day if someone didn’t tap his shoulder to let him know that a train had come in or that a rancher’s fence needed mending. And he didn’t raise an eyebrow, he wasn’t the least concerned, when Daisy took off by herself for a dance in Colusa. What kind of man is that? the boys asked. What kind of husband? Yanta seemed more interested in the small spotted dog that was always at his side than he was in his own child. The boys gave him the worst jobs, cleaning the outhouse and the storekeeper’s chimney, just to see if they could get a rise out of him, some protest. But nothing. He did the terrible jobs. Until one day he disappeared. He took nothing, none of his clothes, only his hunting rifle and the spotted dog. Four months later, Daisy moved to Colusa to live with a Wintun named Andy Mitchell. She left the baby with Sarah.

The first thing Sarah noticed, even before Daisy left, was that the child was unusually quiet. The little girl was observant enough, her eyes darted about all the time, but otherwise she was still, solemn. The boys thought she would be lazy like her father. Sarah didn’t know what to think. In time, Sarah had her hands full keeping the girl out of mischief, as she would any child. Once little Mabel swallowed kerosene. The white doctor came all the way from Woodland and pumped her stomach. For the longest time, she could only take pureed fruits and vegetables. “Maybe that’s why she’s turning out so strange,” one of the boys suggested. But by then Sarah knew it was something else. She had heard the girl mumble in her sleep, she had seen the long stares, and watched her chase away a poisoner with a piece of meat. She had noticed the girl was thin, far too thin, even before the kerosene accident. No, it was something else, and it wouldn’t stop.

Sarah tried to downplay the situation. “She’s cranky and damaged because of the accident,” she started saying. She told her family that, just as she told it to the Indians in front of the store or in the orchards when they stopped and stared. She told it to the white people who said the little Indian girl looked like she was starving to death. Mabel didn’t grow. She shrunk in, close to the bone, so that her cheekbones and the indentations on the side of her face showed, the way they do on very old or very sick people. Because her body was so thin and undeveloped, her head, even as bony as it was, looked disproportionately large. Something’s wrong with Sarah Taylor’s granddaughter, people began to say.

Wrong. Sarah knew the kinds of things people meant. The boys told her what people were saying. Stories about Lolsel came up. Stories about the white snake poison. Some said Sarah was being punished because she used her poison to charm the white people. Others claimed it was a curse from way back, from the time Sarah’s grandfather sacrificed the snake. Still others thought the girl had a strange disease that might be catching. They did not want their children to go near her. There was an old lady from Cortina, where Anderson was living, who felt the girl was special in a good way. Whatever people said, though, Sarah showed little reaction.

But it was hard. The girl caused quite a stir. Still, Sarah found that going about her public life—washing clothes, harvesting apricots, then peaches, then apples, then pears, then prunes, then almonds—amid people’s curious stares and fast stories was not as difficult finally as the frustration and helplessness she felt at home alone when the girl wouldn’t eat or screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night. She knew what was happening, the girl was Dreaming, and she didn’t know where to turn for help.

At night, Sarah prayed, sang what songs she thought might help Mabel. Each day seemed to bring another challenge. Now federal government officials were rounding up all the Indian children and hauling them away to boarding schools. They checked regularly to see if Mabel was well. Sarah took off Mabel’s dress each time and scared them away. More than once she felt people following her as she went about her work. Still, the nights alone were the worst, and sometimes, exhausted, she found herself saying over and over again, as if the words would make a difference, “If my father was alive, you wouldn’t be this way . . . If my father was alive, you wouldn’t be this way . . .”

Mabel heard Sarah say this, but she didn’t know what Sarah meant. She didn’t know Sarah was thinking of Old Taylor’s powerful medicine, the ways he might help and guide Mabel. Mabel didn’t know too much. She didn’t ask. “You listen to me,” the voice was saying. “I’ll teach you. You don’t tell nobody what I’m telling you. You don’t ask them questions about it. You’re being fixed to be doctor.” “What’s doctor?” Mabel asked. “You’ll know when the time comes.” But what the spirit was showing her did not seem good. She saw blood, poison. Ugliness. People carrying bones from the dead, grinding the remains of the orange-bellied newt, weaving the woodpecker’s red feathers into sun baskets. Bodies swollen and distorted, discolored. Bodies with black growths like roots. Crying. Misery. Hatefulness. She couldn’t trust anything around her. Once while she was sitting by the willows waiting for Sarah to finish her wash, a small colorful bird appeared before her. “Close your eyes and follow me,” it said. And Mabel did as she was told, only to find herself in a dark cave where poison was being ground by an old woman on a red rock. She screamed, as she always did, and waited for Sarah’s arms.

Sarah began to feel desperate. She thought of things. Like the fact Mabel was never blessed, dedicated in the traditional way. She was not given a name in the Roundhouse. But what Roundhouse? The one at Lolsel was closed a long time ago. What Dreamer? What spiritual person? What Lolsel? What people? A lonely old woman in a one-room shack who takes care of white people’s children? The other one who washes clothes in the valley and carries around a sickly grandchild? Lolsel was a dream now, a memory that seemed useless. Richard Taylor had said there would be a new world. So this was it. A world of white people and strangers. New world that was no world. Why, then, this child in a place that was not home? A mean trick played on a woman burdened by enough mean tricks already.

McKinley, who was the only son around on a regular basis, suggested that Sarah move to Cortina. He thought she would feel better up there. He said the Indians were friendly, that they took in strangers, and that they still performed the Hesi and Big Head dances. McKinley danced with the Rumsey Wintun there. He thought the ceremonies would do her good. Maybe someone there might even be able to help Mabel.

In the fall, after the last crops were in, Sarah gave notice and left Rumsey. She wasn’t going to a place where she didn’t know anyone. Her son, Anderson, lived in Cortina, after all, and when Sarah showed up at his door on the small reservation, Anderson’s wife took Sarah and the girl right in. The woman’s name was Rosie. She was a stout, attractive woman who kept a neat house and food on the stove. She was happy her three children had a grandmother and a cousin.

By now Sarah knew enough Wintun so she could converse easily. While Anderson worked, finishing the pruning in the fruit orchards, Sarah and Rosie cooked and visited. Rosie knew everybody, and everything about them. Sarah saw that she was respected and well liked among her people. At times, Sarah felt that she wasn’t contributing enough. The crop harvesting had ended, and there wasn’t a white person around who needed clothes washed. She knew no white people in Cortina. She had to depend on what Anderson brought in. But she didn’t have a lot of time to worry about herself and what she could or couldn’t do just then.

Excitement was everywhere. The old-time dances were on, and people from all over came to dance. People from Sulphur Bank in Lake County. Grindstone people. Colusa. Rumsey Wintun. Pomo. People Sarah hadn’t seen in years. People she had never seen. They came on horseback, piled on wagons, alone on foot, and camped in view of the Round-house, whose roof rose up to a peak in the middle of the open field. The women cooked up black and green pinole and acorn mush. They prepared baskets of fresh clover and pepperwood balls. Old-timers from the valley toasted grasshoppers. Meat was baked in large underground ovens. Everybody had some specialty to offer.

The men who danced wore elaborate and colorful Big Heads, great feathers on top, and streamers of yellowhammer feathers down their backs. The women sometimes wore headdresses, but not nearly as large and lively as the men’s. Some wore shell pendants, abalone and clam, over their faces and on their dresses. In their hands they held long scarves, which they moved and waved as they danced in a wide circle around the men in the center. Frank Wright and Charlie Wright were Sectu, Roundhouse bosses. Frank stood on top of the Roundhouse, just in front of the smoke hole, and called in the different groups. Sarah went in with the Rumsey Wintun, because her son danced with them, and because she had been living in their territory and wanted to show them her respect. Only she did something she wasn’t supposed to do: she brought a small child into the dance house.

Mabel cried. She did not want to be left alone. She hid under Sarah’s dress. Tiny feet that danced when Sarah danced, sat when she sat. People saw and laughed. How cute, Sarah Taylor’s granddaughter, the little sick one. Only the Moki did not think it was funny. That was the clown, Moki. A man covered head to toe in a striped black-and-white eagle feather cape. Nothing showing but his eyes and nose, so that no one knew who he was. The crucial element of the Hesi dance. He said nothing and was still only when Frank Wright came into the Roundhouse after everyone was gathered and named each plant and animal that had been harvested for the people. Each thing that was to be danced for. Once in the fall and again in the spring. If anything was forgotten, it would not grow anymore. The people would have to do without. And the Moki checked to see that all the rules were followed. He passed each person. Some he shook a stick at, or a cocoon rattle—that meant they were supposed to sing or leave a larger offering by the centerpole. He squealed, made high-pitched noises that were unearthly. Sometimes, he imitated people, their voices and gestures. The first three nights he took no notice of Mabel. On the fourth night, the last night, he went mad.

He started scooping up hot coals in his hands and throwing them around the Roundhouse. The rafters caught fire and people’s clothing. The place filled with smoke so no one could see a thing. People panicked and made for the front and back doors. Sarah was closest to the back door, so she started out there. “Grandma, Grandma,” Mabel screamed, clinging to Sarah’s long dress. “Grandma, Grandma,” Mabel heard someone saying in her own voice, and when she turned, she saw that it was the Moki coming up behind her with a burning ember in his hand. He forced the hot coal into her shoulder, as if it were a cattle brand, and she screamed with all her might.

It was odd. The next day there wasn’t a mark on the girl. Nothing. But Sarah stayed hidden in Rosie’s house. She heard the talk about how the Moki was enraged. It had been announced that the Moki would not appear again. People were saying that they had to put away their eagle feathers. The dances would be different from now on. Their feathers would be from turkeys, tame birds. A lot of the old foods would be gone. Sarah felt it was her fault.

An old Cortina woman convinced Sarah otherwise. She was Mary Wright, the mother of Frank and Charlie Wright. One night, not too long after the fall Hesi, she visited Sarah. She had two men with her, who were even older than she was. She told Sarah that the trouble was not her fault, that the dances and the people were changing. She talked about the white man’s rule forbidding them to kill eagles. So much has changed, she said. Then the old men spoke. They were Stiffarm Jim Coper and his cousin Johnny Cline. They had grown up far in the south, below Mount Diablo, where their ancestors had prayed since the beginning of time. They escaped the Spanish who leveled their village, and fled north to Cortina. They talked about how no one was left to pray and give thanks for that sacred mountain. Sarah nodded. She understood. “Mary took us in, adopted us here,” they said, “and that’s why she is here tonight. She’s going to adopt in your granddaughter. Give her a name and a place.”

So it happened. Just a few people in the Cortina Roundhouse. Old people from here and there. They witnessed the old woman pray for the sickly girl who stood staring beside her grandmother. They heard the name Catanum given to the centerpole, the name that was not new, but that her mother had given her shortly after she was born, a name that had a place now. Good old Grandma Mary Wright, who offered her own beautiful baskets to the centerpole and prepared a dinner of the finest old foods Sarah would ever see again. “For my new girl,” Grandma Mary said. Grandma Mary, who said in the Rumsey orchards that the girl was special. Mary Wright, whose voice Sarah listened for even after she left Cortina so she wouldn’t have to take from her son and his family, after she found herself back in Rumsey, at the same place along the creek, with the girl who was just the same as before . . .

Sarah tried to think of good things, even as her eyes caught the sheriffs clothes draped over her wagon. Again, she thought of someone who had been watching Mabel, not to harm her but to help her. Someone like Mary Wright. But why didn’t they show themselves? What did they have to hide? Where were McKinley and the others when she needed them, when she needed eyes in the back of her head?

Somehow she made it through the afternoon. Hadn’t she always? Good thoughts, memories, fear for the girl went around and around in her head until it was late afternoon. The birds were singing and darting in the long shadows across the water when she had packed the washed and pounded clothes on the wagon. She arranged the buckets of clothes on the wagon bed so anyone looking could see she had the sheriffs clothes. Then, with the girl seated next to her, she turned the horses and started off. She rode along, past the place where the horses had lifted their heads. Now they did nothing but push along, snorting out the dust from the dry empty road.

As Sarah came into Rumsey, up to the general store, she laughed, thinking of the wagon draped with the sheriffs belongings. What if she had left it that way? Wouldn’t the white people think she was crazy? Old Sarah. Crazy Sarah. But it was the wagon draped with the sheriffs clothes that Sarah herself would first think of on the day six years later when she was returning from Mrs. Spencer’s place without the girl. Saved by white people again, Sarah thought, this time without a hint of anything but sorrow.

It had all started late one night when Daisy appeared from Colusa. She was alone. She had lost her daughter from Andy Mitchell. A girl named Lena. And now she had left Andy. But there wasn’t any sadness about her that night. She had come to get Mabel. Not because she wanted the girl, but because she had taken a large sum of money from a sixty-year-old Colusa man for her. “But she is only twelve years old,” Sarah protested. “That’s old enough,” Daisy said adamantly. “But she knows nothing about marriage,” Sarah argued, “and she is weak, sickly. What good would she be to anyone? She can’t cook, clean house. She knows nothing. She’s useless.”

On and on they argued. Mabel watched from behind the bedroom door. What is this thing marriage? she wondered. Why does my mother want to take me now, after all this time? My mother, who is a stranger. Then Mabel heard the voice that was always with her. “Don’t worry,” it said. “Wait to see how it turns out. You’ll not go anywhere in marriage. But you’ll go where it’s safe for you. A strange place, but you’re going to be all right. Now you’ll start to see everything I say is true. Watch how it turns out.”

Daisy yelled at Sarah. “She’s my daughter, I’ll take her,” she said. “No,” Sarah said. “The white lady, Mrs. Spencer. You have to ask her.” The thought came to Sarah like a bolt of lightning. Mrs. Spencer, who hired the Indians to cut grapes each fall. Mrs. Spencer, who opened her abundant vegetable garden to the Indians. Mrs. Spencer, friend of the Indians. No one would do anything to upset her. No one would take away a starving Indian girl she was keeping and feeding. No one. Not even fast-talking Daisy. Mrs. Spencer had wanted to keep Mabel. Now she would have her chance. “You have to ask her,” Sarah repeated. “I have to take her back in the morning.”

So while Daisy slept in the dark hours of the morning, Sarah was on her way with Mabel to the white two-story house with gables. And by the time the sun was on the hilltop, she was on her way back, the seat next to her empty for the first time in twelve years. Saved by the white people, but who would’ve thought like this?

Daisy left. She went back to Colusa, but only for a while. She came home to Rumsey and married Harry Mateo Lorenzo, a man ten years younger than she was, whose father, Mateo Lorenzo, was chief of the Rumsey Wintun. Mabel stayed with the old woman who wore fancy clothes and kept horehound candy in big glass jars. Sometimes Sarah visited Mabel. Sometimes Sarah took her to dig sedge for baskets or to pick herbs. But not very often. Sarah thought to leave well enough alone. She kept busy. She had her work. But the nights alone in the little white house behind the storekeeper’s barn were hard. Sarah missed the girl’s murmurs in the dark, the bits and pieces of her songs that made the house their place.

We drove on Highway 80 until 505, where we went north toward Woodland. If Highway 80 is long, Interstate 505 to Woodland is forever. Flat, open landscape. Cow fields. Some orchards. An occasional barn and farmhouse. Rice fields that the farmers burn each fall, filling the open sky with hot, dirty clouds of smoke. On and on. In Woodland, we stopped at Happy Steak for an early dinner. It was about four-thirty.

I noticed at the service counter that Mabel was having a hard time holding her plate. Her wrists were swollen from a recent bout with arthritis. She mentioned her problem when we sat down.

“It’s catching up with me,” she said. “All my doctoring things. Some of the things that went wrong. These wrists. My knee, too.”

I had heard the stories. About the girl who started menstruating while Mabel was doctoring her. About the young man who had some illness with his knee that Mabel inherited and could not expel. I did not want to see her wrists. I avoided looking at them in the car. I didn’t want to know she was having a hard time weaving her baskets. I didn’t want to hear that the spirit said she would be retiring from her doctoring. This news created panic in me. Then frustration. I didn’t know what to do for her. Just a couple of months before, I had driven all over the valley in the over one-hundred-degree heat to find a doctor who might help her. Finally, we found a doctor who ordered large white pills for the pain in her swollen joints. I was relieved. Then, on the way home, Mabel informed me with her inimitable light chuckle that the white man’s medicine couldn’t help her. “It’s that moonsick girl who done me in like this,” she said, suddenly serious. Why in the world had I been driving all over the valley then, when she knew all along that my efforts wouldn’t do her any good? What was the point?

So, again, why the mention of her ailments? Was it to get me going on her book? What was this whole adventure to record and write her stories about? What was Mabel up to now? A joke? A trick to get a university person face-to-face with the impossible and ridiculous? Another white-pill story? Why pick on me? Someone who had known and cared about her all his life. Someone who is Indian.

“Mabel,” I said, “maybe we should start with your Dream.”

“Well,” she said, setting down a fried chicken leg and wiping her fingers on a napkin, “that’s what I mean. Dream says I’m getting to that point. No more doctoring. I can’t do much good anymore.”

“No, Mabel, I mean for your book. When did the Dream start?”

She laughed and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “It didn’t have no start. It goes on.”

“But I mean the Dream. Not the spirit.”

“Same thing. Well, it said to me when I was little, ‘I put these things to you, and you have to sort them out.’ It wasn’t always a good thing. It’s many. Then it’s saying, ‘You have to learn many bad things so you know what to do when the time comes . . .’ That’s why people say I’m poison. I don’t know. How can I be poison?”

“Maybe we should start with the baskets. That’s what people know you best for.”

“Well, same thing. Spirit show me everything. Each basket has Dream . . . I have rules for that. . .”

I got up and filled my plate again at the all-you-can-eat counter. Later, when she was sipping hot coffee, she said, “You’re kinda funny person. You try to do things white way. On account you’re mixed up. You don’t know who you are yet. But you’re part of my Dream. One day you’ll find out.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

She laughed and pulled out a cigarette from her purse. “That’s cute. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Nothing. How can anything be wrong with you? You’re young and healthy.”

So what was the point? I paid the bill and we left.

We drove west and then north on 16. She pointed out the prickly pear trees along the road that she remembered as a girl when she rode into Woodland with Sarah on the wagon. She mentioned a spot along the road where someone had been murdered, where the horses always shied. The same stories. Where clover once grew. Where Sarah picked almonds. A goat farm. Sheep. Buzzards feeding on a cow carcass. Oak trees. Ripe tomatoes. Long shadows crossed the road now, things felt cooler.

To my surprise, Mabel didn’t want to go straight home. When we came to the turnoff just beyond the Rumsey Wintun Bingo Hall, she motioned with her hand for me to drive on. I thought maybe with all my questions about how things started, Mabel got the idea to go to Lolsel again. Once before, after I had asked her about Lolsel, she directed me without any warning to the little valley in the hills above Clear Lake. She didn’t say where we were headed. In the middle of nowhere, we came to a stop sign and a 7-Eleven and a laundromat. Beyond the sign and rows of new prefab houses, we took a dirt road that opened on an empty field. Then I knew. I saw the ancient oak tree above the creek, and I saw the large craterlike indentation in the field. Nothing else was there. No barn or house. No shacks. It was drizzling, I remember, and Mabel stayed in the car and watched as I crawled through the barbed-wire fence, past the No Trespassing sign. I found junk—old mattress springs, clothes, a rusted refrigerator—people had dumped in the crater. There was no elderberry tree. Along the creek, I found one marked grave, a concrete block with the name Belle embossed on it.

But Mabel had no plans for going to Lolsel again. Not too far beyond the reservation, a good ways before the hills, she directed me off the highway. In a minute, we were on a dirt road, or rather a horse trail. Then, in my new car, we plunged down the rocky creek bank, crossed the water, and bounced up the other side. Dust swirled up, rocks thudded underneath. On a dry plateau beyond the creek, she said, “Stop, right here.”

She was gazing straight ahead to a wide smooth roll of packed dry earth. Something like the end of a rusted irrigation pipe stuck out of the ground. Piles of dried cow manure here and there marked the otherwise barren earth. “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“There,” she said, nodding with her chin. “It’s where Grandma Sarah is buried. McKinley, too. Dewey, I think, too. The old graveyard.”

“But this is Wintun country,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mabel answered. “The old Wintun places was just down the creek there. . . After the white people pushed them up this far in the valley.”

I looked at the expanse of packed ground. “Well, where is Sarah’s grave? There’s no marker anywhere.”

“Hmm. I don’t remember. Somewhere in there, though.”

I jumped out and looked around. There wasn’t anything to see really. A warm breeze blew, and I could hear the low-running creek below. A lone cow bellowed in the distance.

“I can’t see anything,” I said, getting into the car.

“Oh,” Mabel said, as if I had just mentioned what I had eaten for breakfast.

I looked out at the empty ground. “So this is where it ended for Grandma Sarah Taylor,” I said.

Then all at once, Mabel burst into laughter. Not her light chuckle, but loud raucous laughing. She was looking at me sideways. I wondered what I had said or done that was so funny. How was she going to make fun of me this time? Then I heard it.

“No,” she said, barely able to contain her laughter. “Grandma didn’t end here. She didn’t die here. She’s just buried here. Who ever heard of a person dying in a cemetery? Well, I guess they could. It’s a good idea, anyway. Is that what you learn in the school?”

“No,” I answered. I felt angry. She knew what I meant. Then I looked down the creek, and over my shoulder to the highway. The old Wintun village. The dirt road where the highway is now. Grandma Sarah on the wagon with the sickly little girl. Grandma Sarah packing and washing clothes. The creek. The water that was still running clear from the hills above Lolsel to the big valley down below. Mabel. For the first time all day I thought I understood something she was trying to say. Of course, people didn’t die in cemeteries. They died when people forgot them.

I started the car and turned around. We thudded and bumped our way back to the highway. We drove on in silence. It was almost dark now.

After I pulled into the driveway of her new HUD home on the Rumsey Wintun Reservation, I jumped out of the car and turned on her porch light. I wanted to see what was left of my new car. Then I heard her passing on my side of the car. “Car done real good,” she said with a slight chuckle. I looked up from the dusty red fender, then took her arm and helped her up the porch step.