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
