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
