time she made a string of baskets tiny as beads, so tiny that people could hardly see them to know what they were. She gave each Lolsel person one of the little baskets. She was close to middle age, and still Old Taylor took her for his wife. After she learned to speak the Wild Tobacco language, she told how she fled north after the Mexicans kidnapped her children and burned her village on the Napa River. Sarah thought how she had never seen Mollie cry.
The ride down was slow. The ground was hard, slippery. In the valley, where the road was flat, the horses had an easier time. Rumsey wasn’t too far then, and Sarah tapped the rancher when she saw the house and barn on the other side of the general store. She got herself off the wagon, took up her gunnysack, and nodded to the rancher. Then she started up the narrow road past the large white ranch house with a picket fence to the smaller house behind the barn. Anderson was chopping wood, and he saw her right away. He called his sister and brothers out of the house to greet their mother.
Her children had done well for themselves. The place was small, two rooms, but it was clean and dry. It had a good stove, and there was enough food—flour, and even some canned goods from the store. The boys chopped wood for the local ranchers, sewed feed sacks at the granary, loaded and unloaded boxcars at the train stop. The girl cooked, washed clothes. But Sarah was still suspicious. Why did their distant cousin, who had Lolsel lineage, leave such a nice place? It was winter now, and even though they were only a few miles from the Wintun rancheria across the creek, they did not see other Indians too often. In the summer, the Indians would be everywhere.
Sarah thought through the situation. She knew most of the Wintun people, she had worked with them in the orchards for many years, and, as far as she knew, she had good relations with them. She would strengthen the ties, make sure none of them turned on her or her family now that she was settled in their territory. Marriage was the key. That summer in the orchards she nodded to every available Wintun woman she found. The boys knew to follow her chin. She instructed Daisy to comb her hair and keep her clothes clean at all times. She taught her how to make a good black pinole that she could share with people, not just men lest the women suspect her motives and become jealous. By fall, Nelson and Dewey had taken up with women, but it was not exactly as Sarah had wanted, no exchange of gifts, no formal marriages. Later, Anderson moved to Cortina with a woman. When the heavy rains came, Sarah found herself in the house with only McKinley and the girl.
By then the storekeeper’s talk of her excellent work around his large white house had led to jobs with the woman on the hill and the sheriff’s wife. Daisy helped and so did McKinley, when there wasn’t work at the granary or at the train stop. Then McKinley began to wander. He socialized with the local Indians and danced with them at the big dances in Cortina, which, for Sarah, was as good as if he married one of them. In time, she got used to the quiet house. She enjoyed time with her daughter, who, after so many years, still didn’t have a marriage proposal.
Four years went by. Sarah knew some of the Indians were unfriendly to her, and she heard from those who were her friends what was said about her and the white snake poison. She figured she could live with the talk. No one had tried to harm her. Besides, in this world of more and more white people, weren’t more and more Indians forgetting those old-time things? She worked hard, was polite, watched her step. She worried about Daisy, who was now eighteen and still unmarried. Daisy was a flirt, too casual with the men, Sarah thought. Too many different men came to visit her—so many that Sarah could hardly keep track, so many that when a couple parked their wagon in front of her house and pointed to the loaded wagon bed, she did not have any idea who their son was. There were chickens, pigs, even a young heifer. Barrels of flour and corn, a case of crackers, yards of fine material for dressmaking, piles of new blankets. The only problem was they weren’t Wintun. They were Pomo, Potter Valley Pomo from west of Clear Lake.
Sarah went inside the house. Daisy was nowhere around. Sarah waited all day. So did the couple on the wagon. When Daisy came home that evening, Sarah pleaded with her to wait for an offer from someone in the valley. But she didn’t push too hard, since she didn’t want to offend the dark handsome man who stood next to Daisy and called himself Yanta Boone. He might be able to understand some of her Lolsel language, after all. When he did address Sarah, he spoke Sulphur Bank Pomo, a language they both understood. “My parents are paying the highest price for your daughter,” he said. “A woman from Lolsel is the most valuable anywhere.” “We’re nothing special,” Sarah said, wanting to believe her own words. “Take the gifts,” Daisy said in Sulphur Bank, putting Sarah on the spot. So Sarah agreed, and Yanta and his father unloaded the wagon, and Daisy left with a gun-nysack.
That was in the spring. April sometime. Sarah wasn’t alone. Dewey was back without his woman, and McKinley was there. The other boys visited regularly. Sarah told them what happened to Daisy. She told how Yanta Boone had a regular job on a ranch in Nice, just north of the lake. “That’s closer to our home,” Sarah said, as if to make things all right. “She’ll be happy there.” The boys weren’t convinced. How did Sarah or anyone know anything about this Yanta or his family? they wondered. Sarah pointed out that Yanta’s sister, Nanny, had married Charlie Williams, the lone survivor of the Bloody Island Massacre, who was a fine man. Still, the boys were not appeased. Someone would have to check on Daisy.
Sarah would be the one.
Just after the last crops and before the first heavy rains, Sarah made the trip. The boys lent her their wagon. They hoisted enough straw on the bed to feed the horses for a week, then followed her on horseback to the foot of the hills. Now she was alone. It was early morning, and if she didn’t stop, she could be in Nice by nightfall. But at noon, when she was well into the hills, halfway to Clear Lake, she turned off the road. She didn’t hesitate. There were no second thoughts. She drove on, around that turn in the narrow road where she spotted the elderberry tree in the open field, onward past the house and barn, along the shacks, until at last there was a woman on the ground holding the horses and calling her name.
The two sisters had a lot to talk about. There was talk about life in the valley, the boys and Daisy. There was talk about the ranch and how cattle were everywhere now. By the time Sarah thought to get up from her place by Belle’s wood stove and have a look around outside, it was already dark. By then Sarah had seen that the pallet bed in the corner was gone, as was the wooden apple crate next to it that held her husband’s few belongings. The place was neat and tidy, dry-smelling like an orderly and lonely old woman.
Belle served acorn mush with a dinner of fried beef and cabbage sent over from the rancher’s wife. Sarah and Belle talked into the night. Mostly about the valley and how, with so many white people, the world was changing even faster than before. “Richard’s Dream was true,” Sarah said. “There will be roads going everywhere, even to the moon.” They sat on the floor, in the old style, their long dresses spread out around them, even though Belle had a new table with four perfectly comfortable wooden chairs. And when they got sleepy, they camped right there, folding up their shawls for a pillow.
Sarah had not taken a good look at things on her way in. She had not seen how the grass was grazed to the bare earth, not just in the open field, in the little valley that was Lolsel, but over the hills in every direction as far as the eye could see. “Cattle,” Belle explained, when Sarah took in the damage the next morning. They walked about, past the large oak tree along the creek. It looked dry, hungry. And along the water, where sweet clover grew year round, there was nothing but rocks, dusty earth, and cow dung.
On the way back, Sarah turned off the trail, just beyond the oak tree. Belle followed. They stopped at the graves above the creek. Sarah glanced around, then caught Belle nodding toward the grave she was looking for. Belle left and waited by the barn. Sarah looked awake but very distant. Something about her eyes. How they were last night, how they were all morning, how they looked when she reached the grave. Full of the unspeakable. That which breaks the insides to pieces. Which she and Belle cautiously avoided talking about. Not just what-happened-to-my-husband. Sarah knew that. But the countless remember-whens that made up her life at Lolsel.
