Written in Stone Read Online Free Page B

light, I could takea breath and close my mind to that story. I turned and studied the black water between me and my father’s potlatch. My hands shook. I gave Grandma the same hard look she gave me. I had an urge to dash inside and bar the door. Leave her alone in the dark to face the Pitch Woman.
    “It is not wrong to be angry,” Grandma said.
    I turned all the way around and faced her full on.
    “It is not wrong that you want to be there,” Grandma went on. “I want to be there too—he is my son.” She gave me a quick peek at her own sorrow and then covered the wound carefully. I kept my sorrows bound up tight, but they bled anyway.
    “If you are determined, Pearl, I will go with you,” Grandma said. “I will carry the light, and you will paddle, and we will find the giveaway together or a jail in Vancouver together. But there is another way to go, a safer way.”
    I shrugged. Safer did not hold much appeal. Grandma waited me out.
    I remembered how long it would take to paddle alone. “Safer?” I asked.
    Grandma ducked inside and brought out a lamp. It cast a warm pool of light on the porch. We settled, backs against the wall.
    “Who came to the feast today?” she asked.
    I closed my eyes. “Shall I tell them by tribe or by order around the table?”
    Grandma smiled, proud of my memory. “We’ll start from Alaska and go south,” she said.
    I worked my way down the names and clan connections, and Grandma told me the gifts they would receive tonight, who made them, and why they went to that family.
    I had only thought to keep something of my father’s for my own comfort, not about this naming of gifts. Maybe twenty years from now, I would travel to a village I’d never visited before, but someone there would remember that I was the daughter of the whaler Victor Carver.
    “I remember him,” they would say, and they would think of the honor their family received tonight and treat me with respect. It was not the same as a thing I could hold, but it had a weight of its own.
    Still, I wanted something, one small thing of my father’s to keep for my own.

4
Summer at Lake Quinault
    The season for berries came, and the carved cedar boxes that held the whale meat and oil stood empty. We turned our backs to the ocean and traveled to the summer hunting places to meet Grandma’s people, the Quinaults. They did not hunt whales. Their wealth and power and fame were in the Quinault River and the Blueback salmon, the richest meat fish of them all. To hear them talk about their salmon, you’d think they were whales.
    Last year, we came to the lake after our whale hunt, fresh from selling the oil in town. We wore new clothes and carried new rifles and toys. We gave presents to all our relatives. This year, we came in lighter canoes. My dress showed a dark stripe at the hem and sides where Aunt Loula had let out the seams.
    Aunt Loula took the occasion of our long trip, down the coast to Taholah and then up the river to Lake Quinault, to plan my future. When I was the only daughter of a great whaler, no one minded that I couldn’t draw or weave or twine a basket, that I sang more like a bear than a bird. But I would have to learn something of value now that the power had gone out of my name.
    Aunt Loula wanted me to learn baskets. Aunt Loula knew baskets. She had a reputation for turning out the small, close-woven ones with a colored pattern that sold at the curio shops in Seattle, Juneau, and San Francisco.
    “You can get money for a good basket,” Aunt Loula said. “Especially when you work out a deal with a regular buyer.”
    “Never very much money,” I said. “You would have to turn out dozens a month to make it worth the trip to town.”
    “If you were good at it, you would be able to turn out a dozen baskets a month.”
    “Yes,” I snapped. “And you know what an outstanding basket maker I am. Completely without form or balance, that’s what you said about the last basket I made.”
    Aunt Loula