horses and started off. She rode along, past the place where the horses had lifted their heads. Now they did nothing but push along, snorting out the dust from the dry empty road.
As Sarah came into Rumsey, up to the general store, she laughed, thinking of the wagon draped with the sheriffs belongings. What if she had left it that way? Wouldn’t the white people think she was crazy? Old Sarah. Crazy Sarah. But it was the wagon draped with the sheriffs clothes that Sarah herself would first think of on the day six years later when she was returning from Mrs. Spencer’s place without the girl. Saved by white people again, Sarah thought, this time without a hint of anything but sorrow.
It had all started late one night when Daisy appeared from Colusa. She was alone. She had lost her daughter from Andy Mitchell. A girl named Lena. And now she had left Andy. But there wasn’t any sadness about her that night. She had come to get Mabel. Not because she wanted the girl, but because she had taken a large sum of money from a sixty-year-old Colusa man for her. “But she is only twelve years old,” Sarah protested. “That’s old enough,” Daisy said adamantly. “But she knows nothing about marriage,” Sarah argued, “and she is weak, sickly. What good would she be to anyone? She can’t cook, clean house. She knows nothing. She’s useless.”
On and on they argued. Mabel watched from behind the bedroom door. What is this thing marriage? she wondered. Why does my mother want to take me now, after all this time? My mother, who is a stranger. Then Mabel heard the voice that was always with her. “Don’t worry,” it said. “Wait to see how it turns out. You’ll not go anywhere in marriage. But you’ll go where it’s safe for you. A strange place, but you’re going to be all right. Now you’ll start to see everything I say is true. Watch how it turns out.”
Daisy yelled at Sarah. “She’s my daughter, I’ll take her,” she said. “No,” Sarah said. “The white lady, Mrs. Spencer. You have to ask her.” The thought came to Sarah like a bolt of lightning. Mrs. Spencer, who hired the Indians to cut grapes each fall. Mrs. Spencer, who opened her abundant vegetable garden to the Indians. Mrs. Spencer, friend of the Indians. No one would do anything to upset her. No one would take away a starving Indian girl she was keeping and feeding. No one. Not even fast-talking Daisy. Mrs. Spencer had wanted to keep Mabel. Now she would have her chance. “You have to ask her,” Sarah repeated. “I have to take her back in the morning.”
So while Daisy slept in the dark hours of the morning, Sarah was on her way with Mabel to the white two-story house with gables. And by the time the sun was on the hilltop, she was on her way back, the seat next to her empty for the first time in twelve years. Saved by the white people, but who would’ve thought like this?
Daisy left. She went back to Colusa, but only for a while. She came home to Rumsey and married Harry Mateo Lorenzo, a man ten years younger than she was, whose father, Mateo Lorenzo, was chief of the Rumsey Wintun. Mabel stayed with the old woman who wore fancy clothes and kept horehound candy in big glass jars. Sometimes Sarah visited Mabel. Sometimes Sarah took her to dig sedge for baskets or to pick herbs. But not very often. Sarah thought to leave well enough alone. She kept busy. She had her work. But the nights alone in the little white house behind the storekeeper’s barn were hard. Sarah missed the girl’s murmurs in the dark, the bits and pieces of her songs that made the house their place.
We drove on Highway 80 until 505, where we went north toward Woodland. If Highway 80 is long, Interstate 505 to Woodland is forever. Flat, open landscape. Cow fields. Some orchards. An occasional barn and farmhouse. Rice fields that the farmers burn each fall, filling the open sky with hot, dirty clouds of smoke. On and on. In Woodland, we stopped at Happy Steak for an early dinner. It was about four-thirty.
I noticed at the service counter that Mabel was having a hard time holding her plate. Her wrists were swollen from a recent bout with arthritis. She mentioned her problem when we sat down.
“It’s catching up with me,” she said. “All my doctoring things. Some of the things that went wrong. These wrists. My knee, too.”
I had heard the stories. About the girl who started menstruating while Mabel was doctoring her. About the young man who had some illness with his knee that Mabel inherited and could not expel. I did not want to see her wrists. I avoided looking at them in the car. I didn’t want to know she was having a hard time weaving her baskets. I didn’t want to hear that the spirit said she would be retiring from her doctoring. This news created panic in me. Then frustration. I didn’t know what to do for her. Just a couple of months before, I had driven all over the valley in the over one-hundred-degree heat to find a doctor who might help her. Finally, we found a doctor who ordered large white pills for the pain in her swollen joints. I was relieved. Then, on the way home, Mabel informed me with her inimitable light chuckle that the white man’s medicine couldn’t help her. “It’s that moonsick girl who done me in like this,” she said, suddenly serious. Why in the world had I been driving all over the valley then, when she knew all along that my efforts wouldn’t do her any good? What was the point?
So, again, why the mention of her ailments? Was it to get me going on her book? What was this whole adventure to record and write her stories about? What was Mabel up to now? A joke? A trick to get a university person face-to-face with the impossible and ridiculous? Another white-pill story? Why pick on me? Someone who had known and cared about her all his life. Someone who is Indian.
“Mabel,” I said, “maybe we should start with your Dream.”
“Well,” she said, setting down a fried chicken leg and wiping her fingers on a napkin, “that’s what I mean. Dream says I’m getting to that point. No more doctoring. I can’t do much good anymore.”
“No, Mabel, I mean for your book. When did the Dream start?”
She laughed and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “It didn’t have no start. It goes on.”
“But I mean the Dream. Not the spirit.”
“Same thing. Well, it said to me when I was little, ‘I put these things to you, and you have to sort them out.’ It wasn’t always a good thing. It’s many. Then it’s saying, ‘You have to learn many bad things so you know what to do when the time comes . . .’ That’s why people say I’m poison. I don’t know. How can I be poison?”
“Maybe we should start with the baskets. That’s what people know you best for.”
“Well, same thing. Spirit show me everything. Each basket has Dream . . . I have rules for that. . .”
I got up and filled my plate again at the all-you-can-eat counter. Later, when she was sipping hot coffee, she said, “You’re kinda funny person. You try to do things white way. On account you’re mixed up. You don’t know who you are yet. But you’re part of my Dream. One day you’ll find out.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
She laughed and pulled out a cigarette from her purse. “That’s cute. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Nothing. How can anything be wrong with you? You’re young and healthy.”
So what was the point? I paid the bill and we left.
We drove west and then north on 16. She pointed out the prickly pear trees along the road that she remembered as a girl when she rode into Woodland with Sarah on the wagon. She mentioned a spot along the road where someone had been murdered, where the horses always shied. The same stories. Where clover once grew. Where Sarah picked almonds. A goat farm. Sheep. Buzzards feeding on a cow carcass. Oak trees. Ripe tomatoes. Long shadows crossed the road now, things felt cooler.
To my surprise, Mabel didn’t want to go straight home. When we came to the
