LITMIR.BIZ

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did McKinley, when there wasn’t work at the granary or at the train stop. Then McKinley began to wander. He socialized with the local Indians and danced with them at the big dances in Cortina, which, for Sarah, was as good as if he married one of them. In time, she got used to the quiet house. She enjoyed time with her daughter, who, after so many years, still didn’t have a marriage proposal.

      Four years went by. Sarah knew some of the Indians were unfriendly to her, and she heard from those who were her friends what was said about her and the white snake poison. She figured she could live with the talk. No one had tried to harm her. Besides, in this world of more and more white people, weren’t more and more Indians forgetting those old-time things? She worked hard, was polite, watched her step. She worried about Daisy, who was now eighteen and still unmarried. Daisy was a flirt, too casual with the men, Sarah thought. Too many different men came to visit her—so many that Sarah could hardly keep track, so many that when a couple parked their wagon in front of her house and pointed to the loaded wagon bed, she did not have any idea who their son was. There were chickens, pigs, even a young heifer. Barrels of flour and corn, a case of crackers, yards of fine material for dressmaking, piles of new blankets. The only problem was they weren’t Wintun. They were Pomo, Potter Valley Pomo from west of Clear Lake.

      Sarah went inside the house. Daisy was nowhere around. Sarah waited all day. So did the couple on the wagon. When Daisy came home that evening, Sarah pleaded with her to wait for an offer from someone in the valley. But she didn’t push too hard, since she didn’t want to offend the dark handsome man who stood next to Daisy and called himself Yanta Boone. He might be able to understand some of her Lolsel language, after all. When he did address Sarah, he spoke Sulphur Bank Pomo, a language they both understood. “My parents are paying the highest price for your daughter,” he said. “A woman from Lolsel is the most valuable anywhere.” “We’re nothing special,” Sarah said, wanting to believe her own words. “Take the gifts,” Daisy said in Sulphur Bank, putting Sarah on the spot. So Sarah agreed, and Yanta and his father unloaded the wagon, and Daisy left with a gun-nysack.

      That was in the spring. April sometime. Sarah wasn’t alone. Dewey was back without his woman, and McKinley was there. The other boys visited regularly. Sarah told them what happened to Daisy. She told how Yanta Boone had a regular job on a ranch in Nice, just north of the lake. “That’s closer to our home,” Sarah said, as if to make things all right. “She’ll be happy there.” The boys weren’t convinced. How did Sarah or anyone know anything about this Yanta or his family? they wondered. Sarah pointed out that Yanta’s sister, Nanny, had married Charlie Williams, the lone survivor of the Bloody Island Massacre, who was a fine man. Still, the boys were not appeased. Someone would have to check on Daisy.

      Sarah would be the one.

      Just after the last crops and before the first heavy rains, Sarah made the trip. The boys lent her their wagon. They hoisted enough straw on the bed to feed the horses for a week, then followed her on horseback to the foot of the hills. Now she was alone. It was early morning, and if she didn’t stop, she could be in Nice by nightfall. But at noon, when she was well into the hills, halfway to Clear Lake, she turned off the road. She didn’t hesitate. There were no second thoughts. She drove on, around that turn in the narrow road where she spotted the elderberry tree in the open field, onward past the house and barn, along the shacks, until at last there was a woman on the ground holding the horses and calling her name.

      The two sisters had a lot to talk about. There was talk about life in the valley, the boys and Daisy. There was talk about the ranch and how cattle were everywhere now. By the time Sarah thought to get up from her place by Belle’s wood stove and have a look around outside, it was already dark. By then Sarah had seen that the pallet bed in the corner was gone, as was the wooden apple crate next to it that held her husband’s few belongings. The place was neat and tidy, dry-smelling like an orderly and lonely old woman.

      Belle served acorn mush with a dinner of fried beef and cabbage sent over from the rancher’s wife. Sarah and Belle talked into the night. Mostly about the valley and how, with so many white people, the world was changing even faster than before. “Richard’s Dream was true,” Sarah said. “There will be roads going everywhere, even to the moon.” They sat on the floor, in the old style, their long dresses spread out around them, even though Belle had a new table with four perfectly comfortable wooden chairs. And when they got sleepy, they camped right there, folding up their shawls for a pillow.

      Sarah had not taken a good look at things on her way in. She had not seen how the grass was grazed to the bare earth, not just in the open field, in the little valley that was Lolsel, but over the hills in every direction as far as the eye could see. “Cattle,” Belle explained, when Sarah took in the damage the next morning. They walked about, past the large oak tree along the creek. It looked dry, hungry. And along the water, where sweet clover grew year round, there was nothing but rocks, dusty earth, and cow dung.

      On the way back, Sarah turned off the trail, just beyond the oak tree. Belle followed. They stopped at the graves above the creek. Sarah glanced around, then caught Belle nodding toward the grave she was looking for. Belle left and waited by the barn. Sarah looked awake but very distant. Something about her eyes. How they were last night, how they were all morning, how they looked when she reached the grave. Full of the unspeakable. That which breaks the insides to pieces. Which she and Belle cautiously avoided talking about. Not just what-happened-to-my-husband. Sarah knew that. But the countless remember-whens that made up her life at Lolsel.

      Later that day, back on her way to Nice, Sarah began to think of things. Memories floated up. But 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

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