she pushed them back where they came from, in that space that made up everything she knew except for what was immediately in front of her. “Go on,” she said and shook the reins.
The ranch was easy to find. She found the endless stone fences her son-in-law had made and the barn and the cottages behind. Daisy came out to greet her, and she saw immediately that Daisy was in a family way. Not just that Daisy, who was rather stout anyway, was bigger, but that her face had changed, settled in a way Sarah had seen in many pregnant women. And it was in Daisy’s face that Sarah detected in the days ahead that something was wrong. Nothing about the place; it was clean and warm. Nothing about Yanta; he was polite, good to Daisy, even if, as Sarah discovered, he was absentminded, wishy-washy at times. It was what Yanta’s parents hadn’t said that day on the wagon outside Sarah’s house, what Daisy finally told Sarah at the end of their visit, after days picking herbs in the hills, cracking acorns for mush in the evenings. It was that Yanta was already married. He had a first wife. She was from the lake someplace. Yanta’s parents didn’t like her; apparently he had married her without their approval. They paid such an extraordinary price for Daisy because they figured a woman from Lolsel would keep this lake woman away.
It didn’t work out exactly that way. Yanta was not interested in her. But she did not want to let him go. With friends, she made trips up to the ranch. She would stand out on the road for the longest time. Daisy was afraid to leave the ranch by herself, thinking she might run into this woman who gave long, hard stares. It wasn’t good. Daisy felt like a prisoner, stuck on the place. And just the week before, one of the Mexicans found a sun basket, perfectly made with the red feathers from a woodpecker’s head, hanging behind the cottage. Yes, someone was trying to poison her. Who else but this woman?
Sarah was packing her gunnysack and thinking to herself that she did not want to hear what she was being told. She asked who the woman was. “They just call her Big Lady. I guess that is her name,” Daisy answered. “She is a big woman.” Sarah then inquired about the woman’s family, where they were from. Daisy didn’t know too much, other than that they came from the lake someplace. “Well,” Sarah said, picking up her gunnysack, “remember all I taught you about yourself and having children . . . And if . . . you can always come back to the valley.”
Which is what Daisy did one gray February day. With Yanta. And with an infant girl she called Mabel.
At first, things seemed all right. The little house behind the storekeeper’s barn was crowded, but it was good to have Daisy home where she was safe. Big Lady had finally got her hooks in Daisy. Not long after the baby was born, Daisy became deathly sick. An old man from somewhere nearby doctored her. He said Big Lady and her family had hired a poisoner, and while the old man said he could heal Daisy, he warned her that the poisoner would strike again. Sarah informed Daisy that the old man doctor was a distant cousin, a descendant of a Lolsel woman. “I always called him Uncle,” Sarah said, “even though he grew up along the lake, lower lake, I think, among his father’s people.” She hoped Yanta paid him well. Sarah never found out what Yanta paid, since Yanta didn’t say. Yanta didn’t say much of anything, which was just one of his problems as far as Sarah’s family was concerned.
The boys found him unmotivated. He would sit by the stove or, if the weather was good, on the back porch, gazing at the western hills all day if someone didn’t tap his shoulder to let him know that a train had come in or that a rancher’s fence needed mending. And he didn’t raise an eyebrow, he wasn’t the least concerned, when Daisy took off by herself for a dance in Colusa. What kind of man is that? the boys asked. What kind of husband? Yanta seemed more interested in the small spotted dog that was always at his side than he was in his own child. The boys gave him the worst jobs, cleaning the outhouse and the storekeeper’s chimney, just to see if they could get a rise out of him, some protest. But nothing. He did the terrible jobs. Until one day he disappeared. He took nothing, none of his clothes, only his hunting rifle and the spotted dog. Four months later, Daisy moved to Colusa to live with a Wintun named Andy Mitchell. She left the baby with Sarah.
The first thing Sarah noticed, even before Daisy left, was that the child was unusually quiet. The little girl was observant enough, her eyes darted about all the time, but otherwise she was still, solemn. The boys thought she would be lazy like her father. Sarah didn’t know what to think. In time, Sarah had her hands full keeping the girl out of mischief, as she would any child. Once little Mabel swallowed kerosene. The white doctor came all the way from Woodland and pumped her stomach. For the longest time, she could only take pureed fruits and vegetables. “Maybe that’s why she’s turning out so strange,” one of the boys suggested. But by then Sarah knew it was something else. She had heard the girl mumble in her sleep, she had seen the long stares, and watched her chase away a poisoner with a piece of meat. She had noticed the girl was thin, far too thin, even before the kerosene accident. No, it was something else, and it wouldn’t stop.
Sarah tried to downplay the situation. “She’s cranky and damaged because of the accident,” she started saying. She told her family that, just as she told it to the Indians in front of the store or in the orchards when they stopped and stared. She told it to the white people who said the little Indian girl looked like she was starving to death. Mabel didn’t grow. She shrunk in, close to the bone, so that her cheekbones and the indentations on the side of her face showed, the way they do on very old or very sick people. Because her body was so thin and undeveloped, her head, even as bony as it was, looked disproportionately large. Something’s wrong with Sarah Taylor’s granddaughter, people began to say.
Wrong. Sarah knew the kinds of things people meant. The boys told her what people were saying. Stories about Lolsel came up. Stories about the white snake poison. Some said Sarah was being punished because she used her poison to charm the white people. Others claimed it was a curse from way back, from the time Sarah’s grandfather sacrificed the snake. Still others thought the girl had a strange disease that might be catching. They did not want their children to go near her. There was an old lady from Cortina, where Anderson was living, who felt the girl was special in a good way. Whatever people said, though, Sarah showed little reaction.
But it was hard. The girl caused quite a stir. Still, Sarah found that going about her public life—washing clothes, harvesting apricots, then peaches, then apples, then pears, then prunes, then almonds—amid people’s curious stares and fast stories was not as difficult finally as the frustration and helplessness she felt at home alone when the girl wouldn’t eat or screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night. She knew what was happening, the girl was Dreaming, and she didn’t know where to turn for help.
At night, Sarah prayed, sang what songs she thought might help Mabel. Each day seemed to bring another challenge. Now federal government officials were rounding up all the Indian children and hauling them away to boarding schools. They checked regularly to see if Mabel was well. Sarah took off Mabel’s dress each time and scared them away. More than once she felt people following her as she went about her work. Still, the nights alone were the worst, and sometimes, exhausted, she found herself saying over and over again, as if the words would make a difference, “If my father was alive, you wouldn’t be this way . . . If my father was alive, you wouldn’t be this way . . .”
Mabel heard Sarah say this, but she didn’t know what Sarah meant. She didn’t know Sarah was thinking of Old Taylor’s powerful medicine, the ways he might help and guide Mabel. Mabel didn’t know too much. She didn’t ask. “You listen to me,” the voice was saying. “I’ll teach you. You don’t tell nobody what I’m telling you. You don’t ask them questions about it. You’re being fixed to be doctor.” “What’s doctor?” Mabel asked. “You’ll know when the time comes.” But what the spirit was showing her did not seem good. She saw blood, poison. Ugliness. People carrying bones from the dead, grinding the remains of the orange-bellied newt, weaving the woodpecker’s red feathers into sun baskets. Bodies swollen and distorted, discolored. Bodies with black growths like roots. Crying. Misery. Hatefulness. She couldn’t trust anything around her. Once while she was sitting by the
