Chief Moon looked down upon the wizened brown face of his heir, neatly and securely laced into a coffin-shaped basket cradle. There was grim determination in the small Indian features shut up tight like an aggravated sea anemone. The brows were well defined, the hair long and very black.
Without pause in her basket-weaving, the mother gently shoved the cradle with her naked foot until the shadow of the great carved eagle rested full upon it. The movement did not escape her brother, Chief Moon.
“It is good, Susan Dan, that you put him in the shadow of the big Eagle. That make him come big and stlong.”
“He come better now,” the mother answered. “Fat come soon.”
Moon nodded and lifted his eyes to the noble emblem of his tribe. “Big Eagle take care of your baby, Susan Dan. He got stlong heart—fierce but wise. He not like clooked talk. You teach your boy be very ploud of Eagle.”
The woman’s soft, thoughtful gaze rested on the great carved bird, standing proud and magnificent above the squatting bear, on the totem pole before Moon’s ancient, square-fronted house in this old-time British Columbia village. She loved it as Chief Moon loved it, and as the carver who, loving it, had put himself into every stroke of the tool, seeking to express himself in it. The Eagle was the very essence of his being. The sweep of the wide-spread wings, the tilt of the noble head, cruel curve of beak, powerful talons, keen piercing eye—all were himself. He had given of his life to it, created it.
“I make my boy so Eagle never have shame for him, Moon,” said Susan.
The boardwalk creaked as a massive form waddled towards them. Swiftly Susan took her cradle to her lap, drew her old plaid shawl across it, like the protecting wing of a hen when a hawk is near. But Martha’s heavy hand lifted the corner of the shawl. She bent over the child. “Velly small and weak,” she said. “Too bad! All your lil babies die, Susan. Too bad! Too bad!”
Martha telescoped onto a log, her chin sinking into her chest, her chest sinking into her stomach, her stomach absorbing her legs, a great groan enveloping all. She removed the handkerchief from her head to wipe her sweat-washed cheeks and brow, and called in a voice half strangled in her fat throat, “Jacob!”
Her oldest, heavy and black, produced her youngest from a dustpile where she had been wallowing. The baby roared at the interruption.
“Hush up! Don’t make that noise! Ole Eagle up there get mad. Slap you with his big wing. Pick you eye out. Maybe eat you up.”
“Martha, it is not good to tell you childlen clooked talk about the Eagle,” said Susan. “Eagle good for his people.”
“Ha, ha! Susan, you make me laugh. You ole, ole fashion. I see you bling you poor lil baby, put him down in Eagle shadow, make him come stlong. White woman put her baby in sun make him come stlong. My Steven, my man, got white blood, he tell me. Look, my Paul, he got white man eye, blue-colour.”
“You Paul got clooked eye what white man call squint,” retorted Susan. “I think blue eye so surplise he not black Injun eye, he never stop looking. No matter for Chief s’pose he not fat if he got stlong heart and talk stlaight.”
“Ya! Nobody want skinny chief. Look . . . poor!”
Chief Moon listened with troubled eyes. If Susan’s baby died, Martha’s coarse child would become chief. It was the tradition of his people, against which he was powerless. But any dread of such an event was veiled by his gentle, kindly voice as he said, “Eagles do not quarrel, do not make squawk like spallow. Eagle see what he want, fly stlaight, take it. Spallow fight and flutter, forget what he want and fly away empty.”
Susan’s head drooped low over her baby, but Martha waddled off in a huff.
And all that spring, despite Martha’s jeers, Susan continued to place her child in the shadow of the Eagle. He grew, but not fast enough to silence Martha, who persisted in her venomous comparison of Susan’s frail babies with her strong ones, and her own larger house with Susan’s shanty.
For Susan’s home, like most in the village, was furnished with the minimum requirements of life. It bore the full brunt of the prevailing wind, and would have collapsed but for long poles of driftwood wedged under the eaves, which braced it at a tipsy angle. Crevices and knotholes were stuffed with rags and newspaper. Within, the rusty stovepipe twisted hideously on its journey from the cook stove to the roof. There was an iron bedstead, a broken-backed chair, used exclusively for the coal-oil lamp to sit on, a battered sewing machine, a dresser holding a few dishes, a figure of the Virgin, and some paper roses in a jug. Rough, unlovely boxes containing Susan’s “things” hobnobbed with beautiful Indian baskets. From a single nail in the wall dangled companionably a cracked mirror, a rosary, and Susan’s church dress. These were the worldly goods of Susan Dan.
Dan, Susan’s man, occupied a place in the home equivalent to the other things, perhaps not quite as important as the dresser. Sweet-tempered, unambitious, talking little, smoking much, loving Susan and his babies not ardently but comfortably, he was scarcely missed when he went fishing.
This spring, less than ever, Susan dreaded his going. For she had her little Tommy, whose health was too precious to risk life at a cannery. The men would go on the fishing boats, the women pack salmon in tins. But Susan had determined to stay and make baskets for the tourist trade and add to the little store of savings in the box under the loose planks beneath her bed.
So, with little Tommy who had outgrown his cradle and now lay on the plaid shawl beside her, Susan sat before the cabin weaving baskets and watching that activity which approach of the cannery season always brought to the village. Men tinkered with boats, women baked and did up bundles of clothing and bedding which children lugged down to the beach. Dogs watched eager-eyed, anxious.
The breeze played pranks with Susan’s cedar roots and dried grasses and fluttered the handkerchief on her neck. Her small brown hands moved swiftly. She ran moistened fingers down the long strands to keep them pliable. A quick, expert twist, followed by a firm rhythmic movement, and strand after strand was finished, pared off with a knife, another started. Sometimes her bare toes wiggled as she sang to her baby.
Martha stopped beside her. “Too bad you can’t go to cannely, Susan. Poor lil baby, too weak. Too bad! Too bad!”
“Look,” replied Susan, “my baby get big now, Martha.”
It did not please Martha to see the child had grown. “I buy buggy at cannely store first thing. My Christine too heavy for Jacob to cally. Mosquito could cally your baby, too small for buggy.”
A wave of fury swamped Susan. “I glad you go away, Martha, you scare my baby so he can’t glow quick. I don’t want buggy. I want him close, close on my bleast under my shawl. I solly for you, Martha. You too fat to cally baby.”
“You stupid, Susan! Ole, ole fashion,” and Martha waddled off to superintend her family’s departure.
Before the boats returned at the end of the season, Tommy had a little sister. Both children thrived. While she made baskets Susan sang Eagle songs to her babies. Time passed swiftly. When the village people drifted back, a boat or two each day, they came to see Susan’s new baby and to tell her of Martha, who was working to the last that she might make more purchases.
“She going to buy white-woman clothes,” one of the women told Susan. “She no want Injun han’kelchief for head, or Injun shawl. And shoes she want for always, not just go-town shoes. She heap mad that store man just got corset for skinny lady.”
Martha had indeed arranged a triumphant return. She stood in the cannery store on the last day of the season searching the shelves with covetous eyes. The storekeeper was weary of her bartering. Her purchases, a silk dress, a purple umbrella, skirts, blouses, sweaters, perfume, powder, a few pots and pans, a stand lamp surmounted by a floral hat, were heaped on the despised shawl. The tip-top moment of her dream was when, dressed in her finery, she would wheel the rest of her new things home in the buggy, tossing Susan a careless nod in passing.
Gathering up the shawl by its corners, she waddled outside to get the buggy and found a little group of people surrounding the howling Jacob. A woman held Christine, quiet and limp. The baby’s heavy head hung over the woman’s arm. Others were righting two upturned buggies. Christine was dead. Jacob and another urchin had been racing buggies; Christine had pitched over the bank, striking her head on a rusty anchor.
Martha went to her cabin uttering long, blood-curdling, doglike howls. All the village came, even the manager’s wife and her widowed mother. “Poor soul!” said the little white woman. “Is there nothing I can do?”
The widow’s veil brushed Martha’s cheek. Martha’s howls ceased abruptly. “You give me that sollow hat for my funeral?”
“Would it help? Of course you shall have it.”
“Mother!” gasped the daughter.
“But think what she’s lost, Edith. A baby!”
Martha cried no more. The salt spray took all the crisp daintiness out of the sorrow hat, but not the exultation out of Martha’s soul. Susan had had three funerals, but never a sorrow hat.
But Susan’s eyes were fixed on Christine’s little coffin in the wheelbarrow. Never once did she raise them to the sorrow hat which perched precariously on top of Martha’s thick hair and rocked in the breeze. Martha caught the flying streamers, tying them under her chin with an exaggerated jerk. But even then Susan did not see. She was crying for Martha.
“Oh, Martha, I so solly. I have pain in my heart for you. I lost lil babies. I know how bad it feel.”
Hate burned in Martha’s eyes. It was envy she wanted from Susan Dan, not pity.
The little procession straggled its way to the point where lay the cemetery, with its consecrated part for the baptized, presided over by the big white cross, and the heathen portion where Moon had erected a great carved Eagle. In solemn dignity the emblems faced each other. Not even the sorrow hat could sweeten Martha’s bitterness when Christine, unbaptized, was placed among the heathen while Susan’s three shaggy little graves lay across the line which the tangle of sweet briar and brambles tried to hide.
No more babies came to Martha. But they came and went in Susan’s home with amazing rapidity, fluttering in and out, short-lived as butterflies. If it had not been for Tommy and Rosie, Susan could not have borne it. And as the number of little graves grew, Susan realized that only through Tommy could she mother a chief who might uphold the honour of the Eagle.
Martha was always among the first to witness these recurring humiliations of births and deaths. One fine spring morning she waddled as fast as her white-woman’s shoes and tight skirts would permit to Susan’s home. Susan, lying in her bed upon the floor behind the stove, where she loved to have it, felt the floorboards quiver.
Martha’s greedy eyes, blinded by the sunlight, searched anxiously until she saw the two tiny papoose cradles tipped up before the stove.
“Girls!” she gasped.
“Yes.”
Martha gave a relieved sigh, and pushed among the other women. Susan winced as Martha fingered the black hair of her babies. “Too bad! Too bad! You always get girls now, Susan. S’pose Tommy die. You got no boy left.”
Susan closed her tired eyes. What was it that Moon had said about sparrows and eagles?
Susan’s strength came back slowly. Even good-natured Dan grumbled. Twins were not lucky. They belonged to the supernatural world. He felt no great sorrow at their passing.
Martha saw them buried. But some of her bitterness at the number of Susan’s consecrated graves was assuaged by the news she rushed to tell Susan. “Steven got a job in his father’s sawmill. We go today. We got a house with thlee looms, and a sink and kitchen tap. Jacob and Paul go to school with white children. Too bad you not got white man for husband, Susan. Maybe good house with kitchen sink make you babies come stlonger.”
“I like this Eagle place,” Susan answered. “Sawmill make too much noise. White boy tease your Jacob and Paul because they stupid.”
Martha bounced off the box like a kicked football. “Some day I make sollow for you, Susan Dan,” she spluttered, as she bustled ponderously down to Steven’s boat.
Susan watched her go. She was glad that Martha would not be present at the arrival of her eighteenth baby. That, too, was her first quick thought when only Johnny Paul came home from the fishing boat on which her Dan and five others had gone to the west coast. The bodies were not recovered. The next day Susan’s dead baby was born.
In the years that followed, while Tommy grew into a keen-eyed lad, and Rosie into a sunbeam, a singing soft-eyed thrush, Susan’s savings piled high in the secret box. As well as her cannery earnings and basket-making, there were her cherries. The children gathered them from the gnarled old tree before the cabin. In June her customers expected the gentle knock and smile, the “chelly come lipe now” as she held out the glistening fruit.
On Tommy’s seventeenth birthday, after just such a trip, Susan and Rosie turned homeward laden with special parcels. “Tommy’s eyes stick out like codfish’s when he see the white-topped cake,” and Rosie rubbed her pink cotton front in anticipation.
“Tommy plitty soon man now. When he come Chief, I make big feast for him.”
“Mask dance, tom-toms, and—potlatch?” asked Rosie eagerly.
“Government say no, I say yes, for my Tommy. Long time now I work and save lots money for my Tommy’s potlatch. I got it safe in box under my bed. Lots, lots money.”
They turned the last corner and looked for the smoke of Tommy’s fire, which was to be ready to cook the birthday feast. Smoke there was but no house. Tommy rushed out from the little group.
“Mother, fire come from nowhere. I not got stove light. Nobody know where he come from.”
Susan stumbled to the corner where her savings had been hoarded. She groped and found only ashes.
Chief Moon’s kindly voice broke into the wails of women. “Cly no good, Susan. Eagle no cly. You Bludder Moon got big house. Got money for Tommy’s potlatch too.”
“You good man, Moon. But I like cly just little. Long time I work for make money for my own chief potlatch.”
Moon’s house was large, dim, peopled by the past. The big roof-beams were supported by massive carved house poles representing squatting bears, surmounted by eagles with outspread wings. The floor was of earth, smoothed and hardened by generations of naked dancing feet. Upon it burned the fire of driftwood, its smoke circling lazily to the hole in the roof. Low sleeping-platforms were built around the walls. A huge painted canoe occupied one corner, and Moon’s carved cedar seat, without legs, was before the fire.
It was a happy house. In the autumn, when the people returned from the canneries, there was feasting and dancing. Susan, working again upon her baskets, was content. Even Martha’s return to the village could not spoil the peace of that household. Feasting continued long that year, for the weather was mild. Indians travelled from other villages and Moon’s house was always filled with guests and mirth.
Then, suddenly, a blast of bitter weather struck the village. Stoves were filled till they roared, clothing stuffed into broken windows. People walked blanket-shrouded and shivering. The cruel wind swept under shacks, darting up between floorboards like sharp knives. It shrieked around frail dwellings, tearing at them, wrenching shakes off the roofs, drifting fine snow under windows and doors. The one tap in the village froze so that the women, looking scarcely human in their wrappings, were forced to carry buckets to the creek and break the ice.
And then influenza, that most dreaded enemy of the Indian, seized its opportunity. Old and young were smitten. Haughty death stalked through the village pointing his finger now here, now there. Wind shrieked like hellish laughter. Snow and sleet churned to mud beneath the feet of the coffin-bearers. The people cowered low—broken, terrified.
Chief Moon was tireless in his efforts to help his people. With a blanket about his shoulders and his head swathed in mufflers, he went from house to house and back and forth to the Indian Agent, getting what help he could. Many he sheltered in his home. Tommy accompanied him everywhere.
Moon saw the anxiety in Susan’s eyes. “Be blave. Our young chief must know the way of the Eagle.”
Not for anything would Susan have restrained Tommy.
Martha, wearing the sorrow hat, saw her husband, Steven, laid among the heathen, and her greedy eyes sought the cross of the white man. Susan, bare-headed, stood by Rosie’s grave, her eyes upon the big eagle, pitiful and imploring. To Moon’s house came a dreadful silence. The flickering firelight cast fitful shadows across the bears and eagles and lighted up the little group of silent watchers gathered about the fire. By Moon’s bed was Martha—by Tommy’s, Susan crouched.
It was Martha who came to tell Susan that Moon was dead. She peered closer. Tommy’s head was cradled upon Susan’s breast. Her arms encircled him. Her shawl was drawn across the face of her dead chief.
Martha went out quickly to find Jacob.
Spring with its insistent life brought no joy to Susan. Everywhere was warmth and sunshine and pulsing life. The swollen stream, freed from its frozen sleep upon the mountain, roared its way to the sea. Flocks of crows quarrelled on the tide flat. Swallows darted over the water. Buttercups and daisies rushed up to greet the sun. There seemed scarcely room for another blade of grass upon the bank. The village cattle were glutted. Leggy calves followed their mothers. Village dogs produced pups, no two resembling each other, or their mother. New babies cuddled their way into places that had been empty and aching since the influenza.
Spring and winter were all the same to the benumbed Susan, crouching in the low doorway, huddled inside her shawl. She stared out over the sea, scarcely aware of the village happenings. When Tommy died, she had said to the Eagle, “All my young life I tly to make chief for you. What for you not help me?” Her faith in his power was shaken. Her face turned away from him.
Martha made a grand feast for Jacob when he assumed his chieftainship, but angered the people by ignoring many of the old traditions. She selected a showy half-breed for Jacob’s wife. But Jacob, wishing to regain his people’s favour, married a full-blood Indian from another village. The bride refused to have Martha live with them. So she lived in her old house above the cemetery, with Paul, whose squint eyes had grown so tired of looking at each other that they had gone blind.
With spring, Martha cast aside her sorrow hat with its dilapidated veil. The detour by which she escaped risking her bulk on the two-plank bridge brought her frequently past Susan’s door.
“Hallo, Susan. I got big hully-up. I go get a fine tombstone for my Steven and Christine. My white fliend work on government load,” Martha simpered coyly. “Tell me lots toulist come now new load finish. He like see ole time village and cemetely. I want my glaves look smart.”
In spite of her “hully-up”, she lowered herself onto a box, which proved unequal to the strain and collapsed, throwing Martha back into a dish of fish belonging to Susan’s cat. “Oh! Oh!” she wailed. “Fish all in my hair! What for you not got chair for sit, Susan? Not ole lotten box. Too bad! Too bad!”
Susan rolled her over to free her from the box and helped her to her feet. Red and panting, Martha flipped herself with her “white-lady han’kelchief”, a scrap of muslin, lace, scent, and dirt. With a fancy comb that held her hair, she combed out the fish, searching for a parting dart to hurl at Susan before she left. “Now I go get my stones,” she bragged. “Too bad you got so many glaves, Susan. Nobody could buy stones for all you got. Toulist not see just glass glaves. Too bad! Too bad!”
Like the stinging swish of a whip, Martha’s words brought life back into Susan. The limp hands clenched themselves into hard little fighting fists which she shook at the shapeless back of Martha.
“I show Martha who can buy tombstones for glaves. I show that jellyfish Martha. Maybe I show the Eagle too.”
From the moment of her awakening Susan’s life was one steady push towards a definite goal, with a double objective—the honouring of her children, the humiliating of Martha.
“Oo!” she chuckled as she pierced the tough cedar roots with her deer-bone stiletto. “Martha’s house just above my glaves. Martha’s eye got to see my eighteen tombstone.” Without pause, without hurry, Susan worked steadily on.
A winter’s basket-making, a summer at the cannery, a second winter, happy because her triumph was so close. Before Susan left for her second cannery season, she bargained for her stones.
Amos Hearne had moved from the city where rents were high and tombstones a luxury to the vicinity of the Indian reserve, where rents were low and tombstones a necessity. For an Indian will deny himself much in life to make a good showing after death. Since the flu epidemic, business had been excellent. Whistling and chipping, Amos did not hear Susan approach. She touched his arm.
“Hallo, Missus! What can I do for you?”
“How much this kind?” She smoothed the little white cross as if it were flesh and blood.
“Twenty dollars.”
“How much for eighteen?”
Amos laid down his chisel and stared. “Say! You ain’t a-goin’ to start a tombshop, are you?”
“I got lots children in glaveyard: sixteen little one, two big one.”
“Whew! Some family! Sixteen at twenty ’ud be three hundred and twenty dollars. I’ll make it three hundred. One corpse goes deadhead, see?” Amos roared.
Susan supposed he meant dead-in-the-head, or lunatic. “He dead all over,” she replied, so gently that Amos was ashamed, and wholeheartedly threw himself into her service.
“When d’you want ’em, Missus?”
“When cannely stop.”
Susan struggled with the knots in her handkerchief, and Amos counted her savings—nearly enough to include the tall beauties she had selected for Tommy and Rosie.
Susan went to the cannery with the rest of the people. But she came home a week earlier and went straight to Amos. High above struggle, sorrow, loss, she stood gazing in ecstasy at the little group of dazzling whiteness that was to commemorate her motherhood.
Amos was to put two words in black letters on each stone free. Licking his pencil, he prepared to make the list. “Can you remember all the names?” he queried.
They slipped from her tongue faster than he could write. Last of all, “Tommy Dan—Rosie Dan. I want gold words for these.”
“Cost more.”
“No matter.”
After they were set in the hummocky grass, Susan lingered, straying from grave to grave, smoothing, patting, whispering the names of the children who had drifted away from her one by one. Now she saw them assembled. She leant against Tommy’s stone, her finger tracing his gold words. Lovingly her arms stole about Rosie’s stone. She kissed it. The cemetery was bathed in moonlight before she left, and as she opened her cabin door moonbeams glided in, flooding the little room. She left the door open, and the soft breezes whispering across from the cemetery point were to her as the voices of her children. With daylight her dreams vanished, replaced by exultation at the chagrin she was about to cause Martha.
The boats came late. Martha squawked and flapped over the ooze like a winged duck, leaving deep footprints in the wet sand.
The people streamed up the bank, all talking at once. Susan could hear Martha’s insistent voice, arguing with Jacob. They pointed first to Jacob’s pole and then to the cemetery. “Jacob is telling her it is good to have so many fine stones for Eagle. Oh, he-he!” laughed Susan. “Martha heap mad! See her arms go flap-flap like seagull. She so mad an’ so fat maybe she bust! Oh, he-he! Maybe I just a little solly for Martha. I wonder who tell it before people come.” It was a bigger stir than even she had expected.
As Martha approached, Susan seized an unfinished basket and fell to work to steady herself. But instead of making the detour past Susan’s door, Martha strode straight across the flimsy two planks to her own house.
The basket and Susan’s jaw dropped. “Oh, what a mad Martha got!” she gasped. Then—“Maybe Martha sick.” Snatching her shawl, Susan followed, and, as she climbed the bank, Martha’s voice reached her.
“And, Paul, it is five hundred dollars they are giving Jacob for that ole eagle pole. Five hundred dollars for a ole good-for-nothing thing like that! Ha, ha!”
Susan’s world went blank. She forgot her stones and her triumph and Martha. Moon’s great Eagle, emblem of all that was finest in herself and her people, was to be sold.
“Martha! Martha! What you say? What you say about Moon’s big Eagle?”
“He going for culiosity,” Martha replied exultingly. “I make my Jacob sell for big money. Silly ole bird make toulist laugh at Injun.”
“Cemetely eagle go too?” faltered Susan.
“Na! He too lotten. Nobody want ole bloke thing like that.” She glanced scornfully out of the window in his direction. There was a sizzling noise like hot fat. Her black eyes bulged and grew hard. “Where you get money for all those stone, Susan?”
But Susan was stumbling blindly down the bank to her cabin. She flung herself upon the floor as strangling sobs tore. “When my Tommy die I get big mad for Eagle,” she moaned. “Now I shamed, I solly.”
After the village lights were out she crept to the pole, laid her forehead on the Eagle’s great foot, and, sobbing bitterly, declared anew her faith in his supernatural powers, and her love and allegiance to the noble crest of her forefathers.
Martha’s life became unbearable. She heard the village women say, “Susan Dan a good woman and her poles are velly fine.” Greed and envy ate into her soul. Every time she threw the water from her dishpan or hung out her washing, she saw Susan’s stones, and saw the fingers of the tourists move as they counted them. She cut a new door in the back of her house among the trees and covered the window with sacking. It was no use. The eighteen tombstones haunted her night and day. Martha took blind Paul and went to live in another village.
As predicted, many tourists came. The Indians, resentful at first, found their basket trade good and ceased complaining to the Indian Agent about the intrusion. The Agent endured rather than gloried in his job; as long as the Indians did not bother him he did not bother them. When Susan Dan came into his office, opened a handkerchief bundle, displayed the broken remnants of a china grave-wreath, and said, “White boys make bloke in cemetely.” He replied not unkindly, “That’s too bad. What shall we do about it?”
“Get padlock and key for cemetely gate,” she replied promptly.
“But tourists like to see the cemetery,” he objected.
“Me keep key—me show,” said Susan.
“Um . . .” Susan’s aboriginal quaintness might be an attraction. “Where’d you stay so they could find you quick?”
“Shovel house.”
“Go ahead. I’ll get the lock and see that you are paid ten dollars a month for showing people round.”
Next day Susan moved into the gravedigger’s hut. A couple of feet of chain attached the iron gate to the cedar post. The padlock was enormous. The key was Susan’s glory.
And so it fell out that Horace Wragge, wealthy and somewhat eccentric tourist, faced Susan Dan, West Coast Indian, and asked permission to view the cemetery.
“Me Susan Dan—me show it.”
“I have heard of you from others who have been here,” he replied. Susan unlocked ceremoniously, opened and shut quickly, and led the way, clutching the big key.
The old part had its tattered wreckage of valued possessions. Clothing, baby buggies, gramophone, sewing-machines, and a few modern stones to the unbaptized. Horace was much impressed by Moon’s big Eagle. “Belong my bludder, Chief Moon.” A note of pride rang in Susan’s voice and remained there as, indicating the dividing line, she said, “This new fashion. Baptized people.”
Horace read the queer mis-spelled wording on the stones and home-painted boards with interest.
Susan saved her corner to the last. With a free, sweeping gesture of the arm and shawl that had circled her babies in life, she indicated their graves. “Mine, all my children.”
Horace counted. Eighteen—what a family! “Who put up all the stones?”
“Me.”
For some moments Horace remained silent. Susan and this quiet spot and the eagle had cast a spell over him. Then he said, “Susan, I write stories for a big paper. I’d like to tell people about you and your children and the stones and the big eagle. Will you tell me about them? Were any of your sons Chief?”
The old longing to mother a chief swept over Susan Dan, engulfing her as the undergrowth had engulfed the baby graves. Summoning all the dramatic power of the Indian, she made a big, big story for Horace. Tommy as chief was all that she had imagined he would be. She wove every brave deed she had ever heard of or imagined about the lives of her children. Suddenly her eye fell on Moon’s Eagle. Her voice faltered—softly, tenderly, she told of the “lil weak babies” who did not stop long even though “I cally evely day and put in the shadow of big Eagle to make them come stlong.”
“It’s a grand power that eagle has over you people,” Horace told her. “I want to take another look at him.” But Susan waited by the gate.
Horace wrote far into the night.
And Susan in the shovel house?
When night shut down, Susan’s hell closed about her, gripping, tearing, scorching. Her thwarted ambition, repeated losses, even the giving up of Tommy and Rosie, had not equalled this. Those sorrows had numbed and deadened—this quickened, tortured. She had lied, stolen, made crooked talk against the Eagle, which, now that Horace had gone, she was powerless to recall. She had dishonoured her dead, and given Martha cause to laugh. In an agony of remorse she cried out aloud; the wind shrieked back, taunting her, and furiously shaking the ramshackle hut. Then in the cemetery a heavy, dull, horrible thud. Force of habit made Susan rush to the door. Always in trouble or fear she looked to the big Eagle for help. Save for the cross, the skyline was empty.
Morning broke calm and sunny. Horace wanted a basket for his wife and another gulp of atmosphere for his story. He would not have known this wild-eyed, broken Susan.
Pointing to the fallen Eagle, in a torrent of broken English her confession poured out. Then—beseechingly—“Give me the write? Oh, please!”
Reluctantly he handed her his manuscript, and watched it float in a million scraps from her brown hands, while tears of relief coursed down the deep wrinkles and fell. Running to her hut, she brought her best basket and laid it at his feet. Rather embarrassed, Horace suggested, “Shall we lift up the eagle?” Susan shook her head. “No can. He ole and bloke.”
Then an idea was born in the brain of Horace Wragge which completely changed the life of Susan Dan. “Say, Susan Dan, it was sporting of you to own up. You are a peach of an eagle. Tell you what’s going to happen. Right there in the middle of your stones, I’m going to erect a fine motherish one for you. You won’t need it for a long time, I hope, but it will be there.”
Amazement, joy, and pride rippled in quick succession over the tired old face. Then suddenly—“Will there be words?”
“Sure, what shall they be?”
“Write, ‘Susan Dan was the mother of sixteen lil weak babies, one big girl, and one boy nearly come Chief.’ . . . And put, ‘Susan Dan tol one big lie.’ ” Susan had atoned. The tourists—even Martha—might laugh. What matter—she was right with the Eagle.
Amos Hearne had one bad debt. The Mayor’s wife had ordered a tombstone for her dead husband. Before it was finished, she herself died. Standing there, unclaimed and unpaid for, it had been deeply coveted by his Indian patrons. Horace saw it placed among Susan’s stones. Not for worlds would he have deprived Susan of the comfort of her atonement. Beneath her own words he wrote:
Beloved and honoured by Indian and white people
Erected by her friend Horace Wragge
In a far-off village, Martha shook blind Paul from a sound sleep. “Paul! Paul! Susan got the Mayor’s tombstone! Injun come tell it. I go see for my own eye.”
Susan was not aware of Martha’s coming, did not see her creep in by her back door and pull aside the dust-rotted sacking. “Ah! Too bad!” she groaned. “All that gold write and the Mayor’s tombstone just for ole Susan Dan!” She would not ask Susan to unlock, but cut a hole in the wire fencing among the trees, crawling through after dark. Thorns and brambles tore her, but she reached the stone, and, turning her flashlight, fingered and counted the gold words she could not read. Then stole away.
Creeping stealthily in the shadow of the great Eagle, Martha’s foot caught under the brace, and she sprawled at the foot of the great symbol she had dishonoured. Her torch rolled away. In a panic of pain and terror she screamed.
“Ow! Ow! Too bad! Too bad!”
Susan’s key grated in the lock.
“Oh, Susan! Eagle make black shadow. I fall down. I all bloke. Too bad! Too bad!”
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