Free Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry

driftwood and fresh hemlock bark from the forest for the black dye. I set an old copper pot full of pee out to age for the second dye bath.
    Grandma did not care to see me working the wool. Icould tell by the way she followed me on my gathering, pretending she needed bark for medicine or maidenhair ferns for her baskets. One day, when I was inside dipping skeins of wool into the first bath of black dye, she sat on the bench nearby. I noticed that her hands were more wrinkled than last year. She took a white skein of yarn in her calloused hands, held it up to the lamplight to examine the twist, and gave it a nod of approval.
    “When your mother first passed from us,” Grandma said slowly, “I thought of the loom as a thing belonging to her mother and to her sisters up north. We sent word that they were welcome to take your mother’s loom and the blanket she had begun.”
    I was ready to protest for my right to my mother’s loom, but something in my grandmother’s defeated look made me hold my thought and keep peace with her.
    “Your mother’s people sent us word that they would come and bring the loom back to their village, and they would bring you with it, so that you could learn the language and stories of your mother’s people.”
    “What?”
    I had heard plenty of stories about my mother’s people when I was little but not this one. I stopped stirring the wool in the dye pot and out of habit reached for the abalone shell that was no longer in my pocket.
    “Yes, your mother came from powerful people, theTlingit, up north. She was the pride of her family, and they were shocked to see her choose a southern husband. But your father”—and here Grandma lifted her chin and put pride in her voice—“your father made a fortune in whale oil as a young man, and he had the Raven stories. There was none but him with the right to dance and sing the entire cycle of Raven stories. It took a whole week of evening ceremonies to dance them through from the first to the last. And it didn’t hurt that he was as handsome as the devil and knew how to make a girl laugh.”
    I left my wool in the dye pot and sat beside Grandma on the bench. This was a story I hadn’t heard before.
    “You mean it wasn’t an arrangement between fathers?” Grandpa took pains, whenever the subject came up, to tell me he would be picking my husband from among men of a certain station.
    Grandma laughed and squeezed my arm. “The fathers set the marriage terms, you can be sure of that, but your parents loved each other.” She paused and turned away from me. “The last five years would have been easier for your father if they had not.”
    That was true enough. After my mother died, Papa was not a handsome man, and he spent little effort making me laugh. I went back to my dye pot to stir and lift the wool to check the depth of color.
    “Why didn’t I go to my mother’s people?”
    “Your father wouldn’t hear of it,” Grandma said. “He just couldn’t let you go. There were some who said he should take a new wife, one who would give him sons.” She glanced rather sternly in the direction of Grandpa’s workbench. “But he would have no part of that. So here you are.”
    Grandma stood up and moved beside me. She held the lamp close so I could check the color of my wool against the black that was already woven into the blanket. It was hard to tell if I had it right, matching wet yarn to dry.
    “I’m not sorry he kept you here,” she said. “I would have missed my Pearl. But you have lost something none of us can replace.”
    I busied myself stirring another batch of wool into the pot.
    “Maybe you wish we had chosen differently,” she added.
    My mother’s people—they would know how to weave. Maybe I had another grandmother or a whole new set of aunts. I could visit them, and they would help me learn. I smiled and turned to her.
    “Do they still want me?”
    “We have been looking for them,” Grandma said. “People don’t travel