Cissy
Dad was a looker. Tall guy, big shoulders, eyes as green as grass. Mom never stood a chance. They met when she was fifteen, pulling starfish from the sea or some nonsense. He was eighteen, engaged to marry a girl on the rez, and nine months later, upstairs in this same house, in the room my sister Pam now sleeps in, my sister Helen was born. All five of us were born in that room, up in Mom’s bed. And now all five of us, who got married and moved out, have come back, widows or divorcées, or just hopeless, to live here again. The only difference now is Mom’s been long dead. Buried in the Moclips cemetery next to her parents and nowhere near Dad, who was buried on the rez. I guess even at fifteen Mom knew what she wanted. She wanted Dad, and even though she couldn’t have him, she did. The story goes that when Dad went to his parents to tell them he’d knocked up a white girl from town, they didn’t bat an eyelash or raise their voices or hands to him. They moved fast and got him married within the month to that poor girl on the rez he was already engaged to. And that, as Mom used to say, was that. He had a son with that wife, and five daughters with Mom. Mom stayed with Gramma and Granpa and the three of them raised us. Dad came by for lunches a few times a week. Never at night, always in the day. We’d line up like little girl soldiers awaiting inspection when he walked in. He’d give us kisses and butterscotch candies and ask us about school and boys and wink before sitting down for a sandwich and coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen with Mom.
Mom graduated from Moclips High School and went to Grays Harbor College and got an associate degree. She was pregnant on and off through most of that schooling time, and she always said she never minded the gossip. She had Dad and Gramma and Granpa and us, she said, and besides, it kept the boys away. She would have kept going in school but Grays only gives out a two-year degree and nothing else was close enough for her to go to classes and come home in the same day. She worked as an assistant librarian at the public library in Ocean Shores until she died in 2000. Dad died that same year. His wife is still alive and lives on the rez. She must be in her eighties, maybe older. She survived her husband and her son, who died not so long ago, and she lives, like me, with what’s left of her family. My sisters and I never had a problem with any of them, but we were always careful to steer clear. We knew no one there wanted anything to do with us and we stayed away. For the most part, we still do.
I’ve been on the reservation five times in my life, and three of those times were because of Will Landis. This last time was to let folks there know that he’d died. He was not one of them, but he got under everyone’s skin over there, and I knew they’d want to know. That boy got under a lot of our skins whether we wanted him to or not. He was the kid of a couple of hippies from Portland who moved here in the early nineties to teach elementary school. They moved into the house Ben built us after we got married, same house he died in. I had no reason to stay on in the place, so my sister Pam sold it and I walked a few doors down to live with my sisters. I was the last one to come home, which made sense being that I’m the youngest. Will was the youngest, too, but that wasn’t what got to me about him. What got to me was that he worked. Tell him to paint a barn and he’d find the paint and brush and he’d do it until it was done. Tell him to clean the sea of seaweed and he’d run and get a rake. That kid didn’t blink, and the only other person I ever knew like that was Ben. So I let Will tag along. He came knocking on my door ready for work, and work I gave him. From ten to four and for a buck a day. The Hillworths didn’t like it at first. I think they thought they’d get fined by the state for exploiting a minor, but the kid made himself useful and got under their skins, too. He’d wash their old Ford wagon, bundle their newspapers and magazines and haul them out for recycling, run up to the hardware store or Laird’s for anything and everything. I’m telling you he was Ben, but a boy and a tenth as tall. Nothing to say about Ben but that he woke early, came home late, worked hard, slept deep, and was true-blue. He was the one for me, and the only thing he ever did wrong was smoke and it killed him. I never thought I’d want anyone around like I did Ben, so the whole thing was a fluke to begin with. His leaving was less a surprise than his showing up in the first place, so after he died I just kept going and went back to plan A, which was the house I grew up in, with my sisters. And that’s when that Landis kid showed up. Ten years old and living with those hippies who didn’t know the first thing about keeping a house going. He’d come knocking each morning to go to work and keep going until I said so.
After I heard Will had died, I walked down Pacific Avenue to the rez. Thing was, that Landis kid also got under the skin of Joe Chenois. He was a leader, someone who fought to get back stolen land for the Quinault. The one time I ever asked him a favor was to give the Landis kid a shot. He was done cleaning gutters and stripping sheets and hauling trash at the Moonstone and was ready for something else. He never shut up about the rez and was itching to find out as much as he could. So I went down to Joe’s office and asked him to put him to work, and before long the whole place was calling him Little Cedar. He loved it there and he worshipped Joe. All of them over there did. Tall, like Dad. Had his green eyes, too. Will still came by a few times a week to help out at the Moonstone, or he’d come by the house and barge up the front stairs full of stories from the rez: how Joe had scored some victory against the state, what the carvers who made the old canoes charged tourists for a paddle up the beach. Those old boys loved to tell him the legends and myths of the tribe, and he sucked it all up like a sponge. He’d get extra excited about the stories involving the spit of sand between here and the rez that used to be a camp for the young Quinault girls who’d come of age but were not yet married. The old-timers still say mermaids protected them from men or whatever else might harm them. Anyone who’s grown up around here has heard these stories a thousand times. But the way Will told them opened my ears. He loved every inch of this place. He couldn’t get enough of the people here and their history, and though I’d spent most of my life avoiding the rez and the shaming eyes of the tribe, I liked to hear his version of it.
Just before he went East to college, he talked me into going down to the rez to see a canoe he’d worked on. After four years and a mess of help from Joe and the carvers, he’d done it. I had no intention of going when he first brought it up in May, but by August he’d worn me down, and I agreed to walk down the beach with him one evening after work. I could hear Joe coughing before we entered the long woodshed. I hadn’t heard coughing like that—the kind that sounds like lungs ripping apart—since Ben. Joe was around my age, but standing in the bright work lights of the woodshed he looked twenty years older, stooped, his skin wrinkled and dry. I could see a pack of Camels bulging from his shirt pocket. You got quite a boy, he said, greeting me as he always had: friendly, cautious. He’s not mine was what I think I said. Joe smiled and shook his head and half whispered, We had no say in the matter.
He coughed, pointing to the only canoe in the shed, propped up on sawhorses and at least thirty feet long. How do you like that? I could see it was a traditional Quinault—long and wide and carved from a single cedar log. It had a high prow and a low, snug stern, with four cedar planks crossing the middle. I remember Dad telling us stories of how it could take as long as two years to make a canoe like this. How the master carvers would chisel the shell, and to seal it, they’d fill it with water and drop in burning rocks to make it boil. They’d then let it sit through the winter and spring to season. I hadn’t thought of him telling us those stories in a long time. I walked around the back to the prow and could see that every inch of the boat’s outside had been painted. I couldn’t make out the design right away, but as I got closer to the prow, I could see the face of a woman on one side and the face of a man on the other. Both had long, silver hair that flowed from the prow to the stern in waves that looked like the sea. In the waves were green fish, black whales, and blue and gold mermaids. Neither face was recognizable, but I knew. Joe came up beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. In all our years we never so much as held hands. Even at our father’s funeral we kept our distance, just as we had our whole lives.
Joe died a year later. Another good man who smoked himself to death. Will came home from college and we went together to the memorial. Some folks on the rez had always looked at me sideways, and I’m sure a few did that day when I showed up with Little Cedar. But it’s none of my business. My sisters didn’t go, just like they didn’t go to our dad’s funeral. Not because they didn’t love him, but the truth was that, for us, Dad existed in our kitchen and no place else. He was like a handsome neighbor who dropped in and lit the place for a few hours and left. The rez was his world, his people, and though he never said so, we weren’t welcome there. Still, I went to Dad’s funeral because Ben insisted, and I’m glad I did. Just like I’m glad I went to Joe’s. He was a hero on the rez and a thorn in the side of anyone who tried to keep from the Quinault what he believed was theirs. Hundreds of people turned up, and Will, among many others, said a few words. I was proud to watch him stand up before the people I avoided my whole life and tell them how Joe always had time for him, and how by example he taught him to want the kind of life he lived, the useful kind.
Ben and I didn’t have kids. We never tried but we never tried not to, either. It just didn’t happen and I don’t think about it much. But that once-in-a-blue-moon wonder about what kind we might have had came up as one by one people stood and spoke their good words. I knew Joe was a leader and someone people looked up to, but I was surprised to see how many lives one man could affect. You could say I felt proud. Of Joe, of Will, of myself for pointing them at each other. But more than that I missed Ben and wished he were next to me, listening to Will speak about Joe. I don’t waste time wanting things to be different than they are. But on that day it hurt how much I wished Ben had stayed around long enough to know the only boy I would have been proud to call mine.
The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned. It can appear as a tall boy who smells like fish who pulls your braid one night in a bar and asks you to marry him. Or it can be a kid who shows up on your doorstep. Will didn’t show up empty-handed, and he didn’t go without leaving something behind. Not only did he give me a little bit of Ben when I was missing him the most, and good company that didn’t ask for anything but chores to do and to be nearby, but when I wasn’t looking, he tricked me into remembering half of who I am.
When the invitations for Will’s wedding came, I checked the box that said regrets and mailed it back the next day. He knew I wasn’t flying on some plane across the country. But I was happy he’d found someone. He brought her here their first summer to show her where he was from. I made them soup and we walked the beach and I listened to the waves as he told his love the old stories of mermaids and magic. Unlike most people, Will didn’t bend a tale or make it more with each telling. He told each one to her as Joe told them to him when he was a boy, just as Dad told them to me.
After Will died, I expected I’d run through all the surprises. That everyone who would play a part or turn up would have done so by then. I settled in and did my bit at work and at home, and that, I thought, was that. And then a woman who called herself Jane checked into Room 6. And she stayed.