A Mere Slip of a Girl

Though accepted for publication and “loved” by Cardinal Sins Journal of Saginaw in December of 2021, through a brainless Cardinal Sin of this excitable boy, the fate of this story shall remain buried shallow, on a beach.

9/25/22 Flash! A Mere Slip of a Girl did actually publish in entirety in Vol. 41, Fall 2021 of Cardinal Sins Journal; this story took up almost 15% of their text space in that issue. Saginaw University’s generosity puts me forever in their debt.

A Mere Slip of a Girl

For some strange reason, even though it has been three years since she was taken by the Consumption, I can see my older sister Gladdie’s beautiful face plainly through our ceiling. Always the shadow of tragedy in her dark eyes, Gladdie was never a threat to any Yaquina girl as a rival for she had left her heart with the young man in Corvallis where we lived during 1872.

They found a body on the beach today. My Father heard it while he was south at Seal Rock because Bennie Collins’s boat was in danger. They think I’m asleep with the Consumption, but I can hear them in the kitchen. They said the dead man was quite tall. The men said it was nothing but an Indian that cut his own throat, but they flushed the turkey vultures and dragged it out of the driftwood and buried it right there. They said burying an Indian was government work and being as there was plenty of room on the new combined Reservation at Siletz and “no Indian should oughtta been on the beach near town without a pass from the Superintendent anyhow”, they just dug shallow. The men being burdened taxpayers besides, they said shallow was good enough, as turkey vultures don’t dig.

Most folks in Newport think the corpse was maybe a renegade some people call Charlie Taylor, but I know it wasn’t. Charlie Taylor’s hiding up at his sister’s right now.

I’m the only girl left in our family. My Mother says “No, dear”, but I know it’s my time to die – just like my three sisters. All of us girls the Consumption, my brothers spared. I can feel myself coming out of my skin - drifting away - just going and starting to fly free on the summer Trades. My chest isn’t hurting right now so I’ve got nothing to do but lay here in my sick bed thinking about a dead Indian. They lived all over here before us, but you pretty much just can’t know it by looking around.

I can hear the afternoon wind – the Northwest Trades - rumbling in our stone chimney. I have slept most of the day.

His day, I folded my dress. He was watching over me. I never told.

Our house is so quiet! The rumble of the Trades is a voice I have heard all my life. I know better than my Mother what it is telling me to-day. I’m never going back to school.

Public School here is just the Summer. Instead, all winter private, my Mother used to school me and at least a dozen other children – charged their parents a “plenty high” twenty-five cents tuition a week – taught us eight months straight.

His year, we got done early. I could easily read and understand even the books the schooners brought us out of California where new books came up around The Horn from Europe. Mother said she couldn’t give me a public award because she was the Teacher so people would talk. She told me I’m not a student, but a “true scholar” and so instead of an award with my name on it, she made me a new flannel dress. She didn’t have buttons, so she designed it a wrap-around with a sewn-on belt that went through a slit at the waist and tied in front. The collar flared and stood up with real style. Down my left leg were three small ties that kept the bottom of my dress from blowing open. Some girls said I “parade” in it. They were right.

Why my Mother and Father have loved me as they do, I don’t know. I am prideful and disobedient. From an early age, I would roam for many hours and return home to find my Mother, her fears driving her to tears. On one of my selfish junkets, I learned that every Spring, there’s a little cliff flower with a yellow button center and lime-colored lettuce leaves that hug the ground. If you’re daring, you can pick them free, way out on Yaquina Head up high above where the sea birds all nest. My sisters – Gladdie, Loie and Iris are all buried in a row up on Palatine Hill above Yaquina Head overlooking the vast Pacific.  I used to risk to pick the little cliff flowers for their graves.

I guess I did fall asleep again a while ago. It’s dark out now. I’m all damp and chilling from the night sweats. My Mother is here beside my bed. She looks very serious and teary all at the same time. I wish I could make her feel better.

I think I was just now dreaming. I saw him again. Even though I know now he’s dead, this time he didn’t look ugly and fierce like before. Folks say some Indians have white souls inside their dark skins. I don’t think so. White isn’t the right color. White’s too homely.

Yaquina Head is all solid rock. It sticks at least a mile into the ocean and they put a light house out on the end. All along the Head, high cliffs drop to the foaming ocean far below where groups of rocks are scattered so no boat can come in safe closer than most of a mile. It is a desolate, forlorn place. The ghosts of lost fishermen and ship-wrecked sailors wander those rocks where they were drowned. Missing miserably my dead sisters, that is the very reason I walked out there quite alone the first time. That’s when, in our simple life in Newport, I first saw the little button-centered flowers and I finally had something to give my sisters. That’s when lonely Yaquina Head first became my own place.

*          *          *

Will Keady is here at our house again to visit me. He smells so fresh and alive like the salt air off the bay. I’m quite embarrassed at my pale, sickly appearance. The new girl, Clad Bensell, had marked him for her own. She is older and has quite a glamorous air and sings the old songs like “Gypsy’s Warning” beautifully, but Will would be mine for-ever surely if I were to live. Now, he daren’t even touch my feverish hand, but I saw it in his eyes.

*          *          *

Everyone has gone outside in the Sun. The house is again so still. Today, in our chimney, the Trades are a full gale. It screams a cold, Summer melody.

But Will Keady has been killed! My Mother just told me this morning. She said I have slept or been delirious for over a week. She said a strange storm forced a Danish lumber schooner, its deck load torn away, into our little bay for repairs. She said the crew was three weeks starved, hardly even water. A day or so before the time set for the schooner’s departure from our little bay, the Northwest Trades brought us some very squally weather. One afternoon, Will sailed up to Oysterville with Captain Nissen(of the schooner), in the schooner’s small boat, to finish some business. The Oysterville reach was a ragged chop that afternoon and the wind was crossing the tide. The Captain’s body has been found very battered, but not Will’s.

Mother has gone back out into the kitchen and she is singing quietly. I know she doesn’t want to sing, but I beg her so she does, though sadly.

My eyes are closed, but I know evening is coming on. When people’s voices inside our house stop, I hear the wind. It is hushed down now to a moan.

Just now, I felt a dark shadow pass over my bed. My eyes are closed, but I could feel him.

I know tomorrow, the Trades will take us both.

I can never, never tell. His shadow just now has made me suddenly remember details I haven’t thought of for a long long time. It was a morning to make the blood quicken in one’s veins and in my “parade” dress I pilgrimaged alone to Yaquina Head. That time, I brought along a basket Old Mary, wife No. 2 to California Jack who was brought up the Coast when they condensed the Indian Agencies, had given me. In it, I carried a small lunch of bread and dried apples. I wanted not to be distracted by hunger. I wanted Gladdie, Loie, Iris and myself to have occasion to talk while I placed my little cliff flowers on their graves, but we never did.

Out onto Yaquina Head, I walked in the lonely sunshine feeling, just as in the story, grand and melancholy so to speak as “The Lady of the Lake”. Even though great huge waves were rolling in off the deep, blue ocean far below me, the dark water rose and fell slowly over the sharp black rocks like the breast of giant, sleeping Gulliver quietly breathing. The barks of basking brown sea lions echoed up to me through the stillness of the morning.

But when I arrived at my usual flower beds, I felt a sudden, stinging pang. I discovered that I had been invaded. A stranger had picked all my flowers and so I began to think of a route around the salal walls that commanded Yaquina Head.

The wagon road to the Yaquina Head light house runs to the north, protected from the fierce winter gales that sweep from the southern ocean.  The opposite, southern edge, where I sought my little flowers in those days is smothered by an endless thicket of wind-stunted pines and fluffy myrtle floating on a sea of dark green salal that stands tall as a man, and dense as the hair on a head. But Captain Wynant, who can command his ship without using profanity, has a spy-glass about two feet long which pulls out in three sections, the small end to your eye. With it, I had studied the Head from a distance of over two miles. I had seen, scattered on the salal sea along the southern cliff brink, grassy islands of safety where it appeared Spring flowers might grow.

*          *          *

I have coughed up quite a lot of blood today. There is more pain. Our single physician in Newport, Doctor Hoag, a pleasant man and kind, can really do nothing for me but sometimes bring my fever under control. Doctor Hoag is here now. I can hear him and my Mother murmuring somewhere distant. They can’t know of the shadow which I felt pass over me just moments ago. I sense him near me. I see him.

Now, I see there is no longer a scar across his throat.

*          *          *

I remember, though very dismayed at first on discovering my flowers all picked by my invader, I had resolved to find the islands of safety I had seen through Captain Wynant’s spyglass. Salal has a beautifully smooth, red bark and it rises to the occasion exactly like myself then – skinny and spindle-legged. I remember, to save it, I took off my parade dress and folded it with the bodice on top so that my stylish collar could stand. In only my under-things and carrying my folded dress and the basket Old Mary had given me, I stepped behind the salal curtain.

Reaching for the Sun’s life, ever dense salal formed a canopy over my head that barely parted above me as I stepped and stooped through the silent gloom. At only eleven, I was such a mere slip of a girl that I barely needed ever to push the tall stems aside. A winding dark passage yielded to me endlessly. I stopped at the white bones of a small animal that had died quite a long time ago. I crouched. I studied the skeleton intently. Since its bones were close together, I could tell it had died a lonely death. When I stood back up though, thinking to check behind me, I found the salal curtain had closed back as if I had never passed there at all. I had an awful moment of confusion and panic. I had lost my way home. But then I heard my father’s voice reminding as he always used to do, “One thing at a time, Lucy.”

*         *         *

Even though I can hear the muffled and distant mutterings of my Mother and Doctor Hoag, I am exactly alone in my sick bed at this my final hour. I can feel again the heat of the Sun on my Island of Safety –  just as when I first burst out upon it from the salal that day – just when the warmth of its rays first touched my skin. Suddenly back in that warm sunshine, I sensed a deliciousness. I saw far to the south, slowly crossing the bar that windless morning, the black hull of a lumber schooner entering our little bay in ballast, probably bound to lade at Puget Sound, thence back south to San Francisco.  Since Stonewall Shoal wasn’t breaking, I knew the schooner was lifting on a flood tide. At the entrance to our snug harbor, up on the bluff amongst the pines, the white-painted Ocean House was plainly visible in the clear air. Below it, I could see the tip of the plank boardwalk my Father and Mr. Venables had built. On top of my entire world, I was profoundly alone. Almost directly below me, a whale nursing its little calf drew my vision down. Just as if I were Alice, I realized I was standing at the beginning of what appeared to me as a natural stone staircase descending, and not far, before it disappeared from my sight.

I became so powerfully curious, I felt alive beyond measure. Following the white rabbit, Alice did not hesitate. I took her example. My earlier feeling of deliciousness was replaced by a very strange sense. As I thought carefully where to place my feet and balance, I realized that long, long ago native minds had thought and chosen and stepped exactly on my same stones, descending and descending that high wall of fatal rock.

Suddenly frightened, I stood stopped, unsure of anything. I thought I should just go back. I thought helplessly of home and my Mother and how she would feel if I... but then, a cool breeze puffed up off the ocean and into my face. A wild sound rode it – the shrill chatter of thousands of seabirds. I had never seen so many dark, diving Murres blanket the sleeping ocean.

At sea level, the rock spread and flattened nearly evenly, just as if it once were the flowing batter of fresh, morning flannel cakes poured out onto a giant griddle. For once, my poor, clumsy shoes which my Father had made me were perfect. I stood quite still again. I had been near the ocean on many occasions, but now profoundly alone in that strange, watery cathedral the salt air fairly stung my nose. I had the creepy, lonely sense that I and my dead sisters were nothing more significant than barnacles – in whose nameless faces I was stepping right then. Thinking of my lost sisters, suddenly I became so sad that I couldn’t stand up.  I set my folded dress and Wife No.2’s spruce-root basket on a log. For a time, sitting beside them, I couldn’t move at all and the warmth went out of the sun. I felt feeble and that I was in a dangerous place and that I had been a foolish, foolish child and that my body would never ever be found.

 I felt very certain then that I would not die of the Consumption like my sisters, but of heartbreak, and that ever since Iris’ death – the first of my sisters to waste and die in front of my eyes – I had been pretending. In that teeming, lonely place, nearly naked, beside what wife No.2’s dark hands had patiently made me, my mask fell away and I mourned my sisters as my childhood -  that would end that very day.

Finally, through my salty veil of tears, I saw what struck me as – while I was descending earlier – a most precious gem. Very near the brink, where the flannel cake rock ended and the ocean seemed to sleep, was a deep pool somewhat larger than our small kitchen at home. The water was of the greenest emerald, its sides lined with every color of life and deep purple, spiny urchins. When I slipped my bare hand through its surface, its warmth startled me. I was suddenly flooded again by the same sense of strange deliciousness as before. Immediately, smiling, I decided I would swim! I left my under things and my shoes on Wife No.2’s log and I slid and disappeared into the cool calmness of the emerald pool.

I was a foolish, foolish child. One ought never to risk oneself, because others will suffer for it. Even just my bare feet in the cold of the ocean itself, or in the icy Yaquina River flowing from the east into our little bay, my breath was always taken away. But I had never in my entire life, over my entire skin felt such a caress as my emerald pool just then. I filled my mouth with it and rolled on my back and spouted. Above me was only the Sun and blue. A pair of seagulls chased madly across my sky. I thought stupidly of school chums Ed and Mort Abbey, who just couldn’t wash behind the ears. I felt clean and perfect. I had a very exciting thought I have never told anyone – that when my time came, I would bring my husband to that pool. I floated on my back. I closed my eyes.

But suddenly, icy cold water stopped my breath. There was a great, gushing roar. My thought was only panic. By coldest water, I felt myself carried up and up. I had foolishly forgotten the rogue waves that always accompany a flooding tide. My arms and legs had no force. I was lifted higher, faster. Then I dropped. I spilled and tumbled. I couldn’t see. The cold salt water seethed around me madly and stuffed up my nose and into my throat.

In a single moment, I glimpsed a band of blue sky with speeding dark stone walls right and left. Seeming to hang silently as a hunting Eagle against the blue, the silhouette of a man with streaming long hair soared.

Then, I was laying alone beside a fire that had burnt down to embers. Its smoke filled his cave. Outside, exactly as before, the ocean seemed to sleep. Further inside, the dirt-floor cavern reached away into blackness.

Newport’s native inhabitants we knew then came sixteen miles over from the Siletz Agency. They came for a change of scene and to sell fish to the campers from the Willamette Valley. I had seen the natives’ fishing spears with their fire-hardened points many times. Beside a bed of spruce root, some drift firewood, and a large, spilling pile of the black shells of the mussels that grew everywhere beside the ocean, there were only three things in his home. One was just such a fishing spear as I knew. The others were two baskets, crude compared to the fineness which Old Mary, Wife No.2 to California Jack had given me.

When the man saw me awake, his dark face turned instantly fierce and ugly. The sight of him terrified me absolutely. I felt myself begin to shiver and shake. Vague stories of what Indians had done in olden times flooded my mind. Across his throat was a great, scarred-over gash. I saw he carried the largest knife I had ever seen. He was much taller even than Charlie Taylor and his arms and chest were bundled cords. I could see he was a hard, hard man, that he was a most dangerous, defiant renegade.

When I began to cry and wail for my Mother, anger is his face became more hideous than anyone I had ever seen. He threw up his hands just as my own Mother had done in her tears of frustration with me and my ramblings. He drew his knife and, several times with it, he made a violent slashing motion across his own throat. I was so terrified I thought, in that moment, that Gladdie, Loie and Iris had been lucky compared to what I knew he was going to do to me.

Heavenly Father, I want to tell you now and at this, the hour of my death, that I gave not one thought to what I had done to him.