Something to Hold (19 page)

I don't want to think about it anymore.

The last glow of sunset lights up the sky, and the breeze that follows us away from the ball field brings a tinge of fall. School starts in about a month. As we begin to climb the hill, I'm glad I have that to look forward to.

Then Dad stops walking. "Honey, I need to tell you something." He looks down at me. "I got a call from Washington yesterday."

My heart drops. I want to stop the rest of the words from coming.

"Washington, D.C.," I say, turning away.

"Yes. They want me to come work for the commissioner of Indian Affairs."

The nod and the smile when he came home from work.

I focus my eyes on the dark shapes of the rimrock hills beyond the canyon of the Deschutes River, where the highway winds up to the flat plains full of mint. To the east, the direction we'll be going.

"We haven't even been here a whole year." My voice feels tight, and I have to push the words out of my mouth.

"I know, honey," he says. "I'm sorry. But it's an opportunity I can't pass up."

"When?"

Dad sighs. This can't be easy for him, but I don't care.

"I have to start on the first of August. So we leave for Virginia on Tuesday."

Five days.

The light from this baseball sun fades across the sky. Out on the highway, a log truck rumbles as the driver downshifts to ease his load through the long grade from the woods. Then the truck and two cars pass the turnoff to Warm Springs.

I watch them speed by and wonder what lies ahead for me.

***

The last days in Warm Springs go in a blur of sorting and packing. Mom pulls out the moving boxes we emptied last August, their labels still clear in her neat printing: K
'S ROOM, SEWING, KITCHEN
. Bill and Joe throw their stuff together, then pack up Dad's workbench as he wraps up the last details at work. They all seem happy and excited.

I move through each day thinking about everything I'm losing. Like my birthday and a party with my friends. Pinky and Jewel would be there, and we'd be making plans for next year. Instead I'll be opening gifts in some motel in Ohio. And when we get to Virginia, I'll have to start all over.

I know that Tuesday will come, and we will lock the back door for the last time, walk down the sidewalk past the zinnias, and get into the station wagon with the tarp roped tight over the bulging cargo rack. We'll pull out of the driveway and leave all this behind forever. The way we always do.

Pinky comes by to say goodbye. She brings me a beaded bracelet and some dried salmon from her mom. And her steelie, the shooter that won her fame in the marbles ring at school. I give her the blond Barbie and the packet of shoes she loves. Pinky starts to tell me about the muffins she'll enter in the Jefferson County fair next week, but she stops when she sees my face. I'll be back in Virginia by then.

Pinky hugs me hard, though she only comes up to my chin. "I'll see you," she says. Then she heads back down the alley toward home. I nod and wave, even though I don't think she ever will.

***

Tuesday morning, the house is nearly empty. All the dishes are packed, and Mom sends me over to McKenzie's for paper plates so she can fix breakfast. "Just the small pack," she says, handing me money.

The store is crowded with shoppers. As I make my way through the aisles, people stop me to say goodbye. First our neighbor, Mrs. Litton. Then Mrs. Wyatt from the school office. Finally, Mr. McKenzie himself.

When I push through the glass doors, Jewel and
Káthla
are standing beside their truck. "We went by your house," Jewel says. "Your mom said you were over here."

I nod, holding up the paper sack. "All our plates are packed."

Jewel suddenly looks shy. "We're going up to see my cousin. Do you want to come?"

It takes me a moment to understand what she means. The cemetery.

"Your mother said to tell you she can wait,"
Káthla
says, nodding toward the sack.

"OK, then—sure."

Káthla
opens the pickup door, and I follow Jewel around to the passenger side. Then I stop.

"I need something," I say, tilting my head toward the store. "I'll be right back."

***

The cemetery spreads across the top of a bald knob way out on the reservation.
Káthla
turns in at a gate and then drives slowly over the bare track lined with wildflowers and cheatgrass. She parks, and we step out onto the soft dirt.

"She's over here," Jewel says, gesturing to headstones clustered up against the fence. I see someone bending over one of the graves, pulling weeds from the dirt mound. Jewel and I follow
Káthla
over the rough ground.

As we walk up, Raymond stands, wiping dust off his hands. His face is closed like always, but I'm still glad to see him. "I'm so sorry," I say. "I never told you that before."

Raymond nods slowly, and for the first time he looks right at me and almost smiles.

Small gifts blanket Tela's grave: seashells, a worn Teddy bear, a scattering of beads. "I brought her something." I pull the pomegranate out of the paper sack and set it gently among them.

Standing between Raymond and Jewel,
Káthla
reaches into the pocket of her jacket. She puts a small buckskin bag in my hand. "This is for you."

The top is tied closed by two leather strings with gold, blue, and green beads at the ends. It smells like the campfire out on Sidwalter Butte.

My fingers feel something hard beneath the smooth, soft leather. I slowly work the bag open and pull out a small rock. It's deep red and rough, just like the earth under the junipers all across the reservation. And it feels as warm in the flat of my hand.

The sadness rises in my throat. "Tomorrow I have to go."

"You remember that day I came to your house,"
Káthla
says.

It feels like a long time ago.
The animals who were people and the people who were always here.
"Yes."

Káthla
looks into my eyes. "Your roots are inside you, too." She touches the bag in my hand. "Carry this to remember that they go with you always."

I look at
Káthla,
at Jewel and Raymond. In their familiar faces, I now see what I couldn't for so long. I want to fold their strength and pain and kindness into my heart, the way
Káthla
tucked this little rock into the bag. Where they will be whenever I need them.

"I won't forget you," I say, blinking back tears.

The cemetery is peaceful and quiet in the morning sun. From here, I can see far over the rolling hills of sagebrush and juniper, even farther off into the dark mountains beyond.

Something to hold in my hand. Maybe this will be enough for now. The rest I can figure out as it comes.

Thanks, first, to my parents, the real Bud and Mary Schlick, for starting this long journey. They left Iowa in 1950, a young married couple setting their sights on the West. They didn't know then that they would spend the rest of their lives living among and working with Indian people. I've always been grateful for the life that I was born into. Thanks, too, to my brothers for lending so much of the best parts of themselves to the characters of Bill and Joe.

The kids I knew at Warm Springs from 1960 to 1964 inspired the characters that became Kitty's classmates and friends. I'm grateful to each person I know still and to those who live in my memory. In particular, I wish to honor one courageous classmate, now gone, who lives on in the spirit of Jewel.

In 1997, I wrote the first piece that would evolve into this book as an exercise at Fishtrap, a writing workshop in the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon. I thank my instructor, Sandra Osawa, and Fishtrap faculty in later workshops where more of Kitty's story found the page: Richard Garcia, Craig Lesley, John Rember, Peter Sears, and Kim Stafford.

Throughout this process, I've been blessed by the supportive critique of fellow writers: Katie Benmar, Mallory Clarke, Riley Fleet, Stephanie Guerra, Coy Heaton, Damion Heintschel, Bonnie Campbell Hill, Nancy J. Johnson, Bridget Turner Kelly, Erin Keogh, Frances McCue, Margit McGuire, Claudia Mason, Maureen Massey, Steve Milam, Megan Morrison, Di Murphy, Mark Roddy, Regie Routman, Megan Sloan, and countless others who read and encouraged. I also appreciate the cheerful research support of Bob Novak of the Lemieux Library at Seattle University.

I owe more than I can say to Dinah Stevenson at Clarion and to Marjorie Naughton, who introduced us. Feedback from Marcia Leonard came at just the right time and made all the difference.

Finally, it comes back to my family, who walked every step with me: Mary Dodds Schlick, Joseph and Patty Schlick, Margarete Noe, Joseph and Jessica Noe, Jack Noe, and Russ Noe (who read every word out loud and laughed and cried in all the right places), and in their lifetimes, William T. (Bud) Schlick, Bill Schlick, and Jerre Noe.

Kitty's story is inspired by my own. Like Kitty, I moved to the Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon in the early 1960s. Like her dad, mine worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the forest manager. My family attended church in Madras. We swam in Shitike Creek. My brothers played baseball on the VFW Little League team, just like Bill and Joe.

We lived at Warm Springs from 1960 to 1964. My brothers and I were among seventeen non-Indian students in the school of three hundred on the reservation. Unlike Kitty, I felt welcomed and accepted by my classmates from the beginning. I experienced what Kitty's mother urges her to consider about being the new kid: "People are kind and generous here. If you give that girl a chance to know you, you'll see."

***

Many of Kitty's experiences at school are based on events in my real life. One of my teachers read the Bible to us every day. A boy fell through the ceiling of my fifth grade class when he was working in the attic. We cut out cardboard masks with razorblades, and, like Kitty, I cut my desk and lived in fear that I would be caught.

We also sang the Oregon state song, celebrated Columbus Day, and learned of the courage of the pioneers who followed the Oregon Trail. And I was aware, even as a ten-year-old, that my Indian classmates sometimes were treated like outsiders on their own land.

The school, now called Warm Springs Elementary, has changed a lot since Kitty, Pinky, Jewel, and Raymond would have been students. The principal is a member of the Klamath tribe. Students now learn things in school that relate to their lives on the reservation. For example, the school teaches lessons in the languages of the three tribes who live there: Ichishkiin, the language of the Warm Springs people; Kiksht, the Wasco language; and Numu, the Paiute language.

Although the characters in Kitty's life are fictional, they remind me of people I knew at Warm Springs. Today those classmates and friends are parents and grandparents, members of the tribal council, business leaders, and police officers. Pinky, the inspiration for her namesake character, remains a valued friend.

All my life, other non-Indians have asked me, "What was it like living on an Indian reservation?" I found part of an answer in Kitty's story. It applies to people no matter who we are, or where or when we live. Through her journey as a lonely girl who just wants to fit in, Kitty learns to reach out to others. With the help of caring friends, she comes to understand that belonging is something she holds always, inside her heart.

 

To learn more about the people, history, culture, and government of the reservation, visit the websites of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs (
www.warmsprings.com
) and The Museum at Warm Springs (
www.museumatwarmsprings.org
). My mother, Mary Dodds Schlick, told the true story of my family's life on the Colville, Warm Springs, and Yakama Reservations in her memoir,
Coming to Stay: A Columbia River Journey
(University of Washington Press, 2007).

Three tribal languages are spoken on the Warm Springs Reservation: Ichishkiin (Warm Springs tribe), Kiksht (Wasco tribe), and Numu (Paiute tribe). Words that come from a specific language are identified below.

 

Báshtan (buhsh
-tin).
Ichishkiin
. A term for non-Indians, sometimes used derogatorily; from "Boston man" to describe non-Indian explorers and traders from the east.

Celilo Falls
(suh-lie-low). The largest and best known of the many traditional fishing areas on the Columbia River. Called
Wy-am
("echo of falling water"), Celilo Falls was a major gathering and trading place for native people from throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The falls were destroyed when the last gates on The Dalles Dam were closed on March 10, 1957. Within hours, the waters of the Columbia River backed up behind the dam and drowned this ancient cultural treasure.

HeHe
(hee-hee). A forested butte near the highway between Warm Springs and Portland, Oregon. HeHe is the site of one of the important first-foods ceremonies, the Huckleberry Feast, held in late summer.

Káthla (kaht
-la).
Ichishkiin
. "Grandmother"; specifically, "mother's mother."

Nch'i-wána
(inch-ee-wanna). The Columbia River, which forms much of the border between Oregon and Washington. Also called The Big River, the Columbia has had many names through the centuries; this is the name most commonly used among the native peoples of the region.

Paiute
(pie-
yute
). One of the three tribal groups living on the Warm Springs Reservation. In the 1870s, the U.S. Army forced the Numu-