Free Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry Page A

the way they used to. So manypeople work for wages now. You can’t get a month off to paddle to Alaska. Some villages plain don’t have enough manpower to move a seagoing canoe. Messengers are not so easy to send. But the basket maker we met in town, the one at the curio shop, she is from Vancouver Island.”
    I nodded, remembering. She spoke Nootka—similar to Makah, but not close enough for me to understand easily.
    “Her brothers had been up north, and they went to your mother’s village. It was empty. Nothing but house frames and frogs left.”
    “Completely empty?”
    Grandma nodded.
    “Was it the influenza?” I couldn’t bear to think it.
    “No, Pearl, there were no unburied bodies. Nothing to show a battle either. Might be they moved to another village or a town, maybe a city—Ketchikan is not so far, or Sitka.”
    “They’re gone? How could they be gone?” I said, my anger growing. “They can’t just disappear.”
    “We’ll find them,” Grandma said firmly. “But it will take time, Pearl, maybe a very long time. Sometimes the missionaries write down where people move. Maybe they joined a village just a few miles away.”
    “So there really is no one to teach me to weave?”
    Grandma bowed her head and did not answer.
    “Fine,” I snapped. “I don’t need a teacher.” I paced a few times from the dye pot to the loom. “I sat beside Mama and watched all the time when she wove. I’ll remember how to do it. I’ll figure it out by myself.”
    A week passed. Fall rain raised the rivers, and the Silvers started to spawn up the Quinault River. My wool was dyed deep black, blue-green, and yellow. I sat at the tall loom against the wall in a dim corner of the longhouse. The half-finished face of Bear gazed back at me.
    I unwound an arm’s length of black wool and worked it over and under to fill in the line below the eye. I concentrated on holding my hands exactly the way Mama had. I tried to remember what she’d said about tension and forming a curved line. Doubt sat in my stomach like bad fish, but I kept working. I unwove the last row my mother worked to check how it was done, but even with the bends and twists pressed into the yarn I couldn’t reweave it right, not exactly right. My row was bumpy and rose above the smooth skin of my mother’s weaving like a scar. I didn’t know how to fix it. Mama never said a lot about her weaving. When she did say something, it wasn’t very helpful.
    When she was pregnant with my baby sister, she said, “Hold the baby right, and she stops crying. Hold the warp yarns right, and the weaving comes out smooth.”
    Or she would point to a mistake before she fixed it and say, “Never leave uneven work in a blanket. And never leave an argument standing with your husband. Honor his work as much as you honor your own.”
    Why had she never said exactly how to weave? I kicked at the base that held up the loom crossbar to make myself remember. I tugged on each end of the yarn to make the row even, but it didn’t smooth out the bumpy stitches in the middle. I slid my fingers between the vertical warp threads and pressed my row tight to the row above.
    It still didn’t look better. It looked worse. I yanked my yarn out of the warp threads, hopped off the weaving bench, and paced.
    All I could remember was how natural it had looked when my mother did it, how easy. I remembered how her hands moved steadily in pace with the song she sang. Why didn’t I look closer when she was alive? Why didn’t I ask more questions?
    Aunt Loula called me to lunch and called me again, and then she steered me to the table, two hands on my shoulders, and sat me down. I could not smell the soup. It had no taste. It wouldn’t go down. I paddled my spoonaround in the bowl when Grandpa took notice, but my throat was closed.
    What if I couldn’t remember my father’s dances either? What if I could only see how beautiful they were and how easy he’d made it look to dance like Raven?