The Robe of Regret

Marie Dorion learned to love a place by being present in it. She noticed the taste of dewy sweat on her upper lip, the brush of an Okanogan breeze against her back, the vista of hills rounded like old women bent to their work. The smell and feel of earth as she dug for camas roots in the finger of grasses and the laughter of her son serenaded by the high sighs of the red-tailed hawks dancing in the distance, all named this northwest river place as home.

“A gif, Mére, a gif.” Paul, her youngest son, shoved his fist under Marie’s nose. He opened his palm. “See? Butterfly.”

Marie turned to look, lifting his hand. She raised her head at the sound of a distant wail. A child? An animal trapped?

“I give gif for—”

“ Not now!” Marie Dorion hissed the English words, repeated them in French so he’d be silent. Paul shoved his palm closer.

“I—”

She put her hand to his mouth and whispered, “This is no time for gift-giving.” His eyelids blinked in fright, and she dropped her hand, then put her finger to her lips. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear it?”

The child shook his head, no.

“Maybe it’s moved on.”

She lifted her nose to the wind, walked toward the Okanogan River, her son following. She didn’t hear the childlike scream again, but as she pushed back the supple leaves of the willows that lined the stream, she nearly stumbled onto the cause. She bent to the animal at her feet, felt the warmth of its body. The cat must have pulled the animal into the shadow of the willows after it brought the lean doe down. The cougar’s claw marks at the deer’s shoulder named the beast that had killed it. That, and the cat’s eerie cry. Like a rattler’s buzz, a mountain cat’s wail once heard could never be mistaken for anything else.

“A dead doe,” she said, “discarded by a startled cat.” She rubbed her stomach. “I’ll look at your butterfly later,” she said. “This gift feeds our bellies.”

Paul’s lower lip rolled out. “Gif gone,” he said, letting the now dead black-and-orange butterfly drop to the ground. He stomped on it with his moccasins, grinding it into the dirt.

Marie frowned at him. “We have work to do, n’est-ce pas?”

She stood up and dragged the doe closer to the water. She scanned the riverbank. The mountain cat could still be there, watching. She and Paul must have startled the animal before it had time to celebrate its kill.

Warmth from the hot morning pressed against Marie. Sweat beaded down her sides, chafed beneath her deerskin dress. She hung her digging stick at her belt.

“We’ll fill our water basket maintenant ,” Marie said. “Come. Now you can make noise.”

Marie dipped the basket into the river. “Are you hungry?” Marie’s sons hadn’t had meat of late. The doe’s belly ballooned from the heat, but the meat would still be good, if she acted quickly.

Marie felt more than saw the rustle of the willows and was instantly alert. Paul sniffed the air.

“Oui,” she agreed. She too could smell the danger. Marie stood to her full height, taller than some of the French-Canadian and Astorian men with whom she’d once traveled. “Make noise, now.” She raised her voice, stomped on the dry grass, and forced a laugh while she patted the root basket tied to her belt. She slipped her knife out of its leather case. If the cat stalked them, it would think twice before taking on a tall, noisy woman and a boy who had seen five summers.

She motioned Paul closer to her, to make him less vulnerable, to make the two together seem larger. He shouted, started to hop around , spilling water from the basket she’d handed him. She told him in French, “Make yourself part of my shadow.” He obeyed. When she no longer felt the eyes of the cat on them, she patted Paul’s thin shoulder. “Good. The cat’s moved on. She didn’t mean to leave it for us, but tonight we’ll have meat. My stomach growls. Yours too?”

Her son didn’t answer, but she pushed him before her, back toward the doe. She released the root basket from her belt and bent to her work . The hide would be useful in trade. And the meat, the meat would feed them. What gift was greater than food for a mother’s sons?

Marie felt the animal’s warmth through the doe’s bristled outer hairs. Dried blood thickened below the chewed remains of the animal’s throat. Marie needed to work quickly in this heat. They weren’t far from the Okanogan post run by the North West Fur Company, and so she would remove the hide there in the shade of her hut. For now, she needed to take out its innards and cut away the torn meat already forming a dark, red crust at the edges.

She pointed with a raise of her strong chin, directing Paul. “Hold the leg,” she said.

The boy walked with his wide gait, still a waddle almost. “Hold tight, maintenant.” Marie spoke mostly in English now instead of French. She hoped her sons would learn both ways of speaking. Such abilities permitted status in this Okanogan world peopled more by natives than the Scots or Frenchmen, though those latter Company men, with ruddy, wind-whipped faces, ruled. She wanted her sons to enter this world so they might rule well too. The words they chose would either help that entry or keep their mixed blood from moving freely in the waxed walls of the bourgeois.

When Paul lifted the doe’s back leg, she saw the animal’s full bag. The doe had a fawn. Marie winced with the image of a bleating fawn somewhere, screaming for its mother. Marie lifted her eyes, scanning. It would be in the area, possibly not far if the cat had killed the doe there, though mothers often distracted danger, leading attackers far from their offspring in an attempt to keep them safe.

The fawn would die now too.

Marie returned to her work. Some things could not be helped.

A powder pouch made of the fawn’s hide, one marked by small spots like sun dappled on calm backwater, would bring much in trade. The doe would be twice the gift then, if they could find the fawn before the cat did.

While Paul held the back leg, Marie used the knife to split the doe’s belly. Once again the gift of Sacagawea served her. Sh e’d met the famous interpreter of Captain Clark two, no, nearly three summers previous . Sacagawea had been going home to the Mandan while Marie and her family had been headed west. There beside the Missouri the two women formed a friendship. Both pregnant. Both married to men with French-Canadian blood. Both affiliated with white, fur-trapping expeditions. Both mothers. Both Indian women in a white man’s world, guides across relationships if not landscapes.

They were tenderly tied, these two women, despite their language difference, a tie that sustained Marie in dark times. Sacagawea had given her this knife that had been carried on the journey of Meriwether Lewis and Captain Clark. It had served Marie well, even in one of her darkest times when she and her sons had endured the winter in the Blue Mountains after her husband had died. But no time now to think of such things. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t change what had happened. She’d learn to live with old memories, make them nourish anew, the way a carcass soon feeds new grasses around it, the dead and decaying giving life to the soil. In this new Okanogan place, she’d not be held hostage by allowing those hard times to call her back to a place she’d survived.

She located the center of the doe’s belly. It was a rare gift to have meat without the use of a gun or bow. She touched the point of the knife into the soft white crevice below the still swollen milk bag and slowly sliced open the animal’s belly from the base of the bag to the arc of the rib cage. She followed a line where the hairs came together in the center. “It is as though the deer we re made of two halves and sew n together,” Marie said to Paul. “See. We cut at this line.” She pointed with the bloody knife.

“Retrouve le faon,” Paul said.

“ In English,” she told him though she’d understood.

“I find the fawn,” he told her now, letting the doe’s leg drop. The leg bone cracked against the back of Marie’s hand and she dropped the knife into the entrails of the deer. “Non!” she scolded. “Stay here. We finish the deer; take it back to the hut. Then we look for the fawn. It will not move. It listens to its mother. You should too.”

Paul dropped his eyes. “I listen, Mére.” He lifted the leg again.

“Only when it suits you,” she said.

Her hands reached into the wet warmth of the mother doe, felt for the knife, all slippery now with blood. She found it, laid it aside, and reached in again. Then as though she held the head of an infant, she rolled her hands under the rib cage and over the deer’s stomach, bladder, and intestines, seeking the tender strips of sinew that bound them to the spine. If she cut carefully, the entire ball of vitals could be pulled out as one mass. She’d try to save the bladder and the stomach. They could be made into bags that could be bartered for seed beads, molasses, or even a copper pot. A hawk called, and Marie raised her eyes, her hands still gripping the blood-slick knife.

Paul bumped her with his elbow. He poked at the doe’s stomach, the bone-digging stick tearing a hole that allowed gas to escape, along with bile and half-chewed grass. It dribbled over the entrails, down into the cavity, staining the meat.

“Non,” Marie said, exasperation escaping like a sigh.

“Deer isn’t hungry,” Paul said in English. “She tosses her food up. ” He laughed.

How have I raised such a disrespectful child?

Marie stood and reached for the stick, her hands wet with blood. Paul jerked back and the stick slipped from her grasp while her son laughed.

“This deer is a gift to feed your stomach. Not to play with,” she scolded.

He waved the stick around at her then, jabbing at her as though he would poke her, too, his wide mouth and sharp little features pulled up into a grimace as he continued to hold the deer’s leg while sparring with his mother. “I do what you say,” he told her. “I listen to you. See, I still hold the leg.”

Marie swallowed, made a choice. She bent back down to her work . Sometimes if she ignored him, his resistance stopped. She could never be sure. Both her boys proved as unpredictable as skunks.

Baptiste, her son with eight summers, challenged her more easily too, since the ordeal on the mountain. He often scowled when she sent him on errands. Yet arguing with the boys only seemed to excite them, then made them stubborn as ticks. They had a rhythm, her sons. They performed a devilish dance with her that spun her around until she felt herself ready to strike, her fingernails cutting into her palms to keep herself from bringing harm. Then her sons would stop, quick as the drummers at a feast dance.

She’d taken to ignoring her sons, hoping that reacting differently would throw them off step. It sometimes worked.

Her sons needed a father’s strong hand, but they had none. She’d have to find some other way to teach them to become men or they would never rise in the fur trapping ranks, let alone survive this next winter living here among the Okanogan people and the Scot fur trader, Alexander Ross. That had been her life, always at the mercy of some fur company’s whim.

Marie pulled a piece of gurrah cloth from the bodice of her dress. She used it now to wipe away the green specks of undigested grasses that stuck like pitch to the meat. She rubbed the knife handle down on her leather skirt and then scraped at the organs. She finished cutting free the intestines and pulled them some distance from the carcass, then cut the bladder loose. Paul’s poking ruined the stomach, but she could maybe s a ve some of the urine from the bladder and use it for tanning the hides. Maybe the bladder could be sewn with sinew and used to hold water. Sh e’d have to see.

“Carry these,” she said to Paul, handing him the bag of roots they’d dug earlier that morning. Maybe if she gave him more responsibility he would learn respect. “And lift the bladder. Be careful. It will make a good water bag on hot days.” She watched him until he did as he was told. Then she squatted and lifted the deer over her shoulders, holding the front legs and both back legs across her chest.

It was a light load. The doe must have been last year’s fawn and had her own first fawn this spring. That infant had lost its mother and it would die. Marie felt a connection to it and to the doe she carried across her back.

“Come, Paul,” she said, keeping her voice light. “We see if Baptiste has fish to go with our roots and now this fresh meat.”

“The Up-In-Being gives a gif?” Paul asked.

“For no reason except that we are in need of it. Your other mother, Sarah, would say we do not deserve it and yet we are well provided for.” Saying such things could make them so. Her friend Sarah would say that as well. Words could make the thoughts come true.

Paul grabbed at the bladder then and forced it into the root bag.

“Attention,” Marie said.

“In English,” Paul said just before he gouged the bladder with his stick and took off running.

Urine poured over the roots. Wasted. How could she raise a kind child, an obedient child? How can one so young have so much venom? Did the time in the mountains, staying alive, poison this son’s attitude?

She’d have to come back for the root bag and bladder. Maybe Paul would carry the water basket. She walked toward the post, hoping Paul would follow in her footsteps. She pretended to be certain of herself. She must find a way to teach and raise these boys who had survived bloody places of their own, who had endured the wrath of men both Indian and non. It was not enough to keep them alive. It was also a mother’s job to take out poison, in whatever way she could.

Baptiste Dorion watched his mother from a distance. He’d seen his mother and brother—the last remnants of his family—leaving the shelter of the willows and heading across the grass back toward the fort . Paul trailed behind, dancing close, then dropping back, poking the dirt with a stick. His mother always took Paul with her. Paul didn’t help her much, not the way Baptiste could. Even now while she carried a deer on her shoulders, Baptiste could see she didn’t have her root basket at her belt. Sh e’d left it behind somew h e re. Paul was probably supposed to bring it. He hadn’t. He’d be scolded.

Baptiste brightened. He could go get the basket for her. She’d like that. He stood taller, the wind blowing his straight black hair against the side of his face. Sh e’d be pleased if he helped her.

Maybe.

He stared. The fringe of her buckskins barely shifted at her ankles, so gentle were her movements, as though she were the breeze itself, soft and never stirring in an unwanted place.

He started out, stopped. She might scold. She’d told him to help the men fish at the river. He’d do what he was told, not be like that weasel brother, Paul, who skipped ahead of her now.

Baptiste could hear his little brother laugh in his chatter, but he couldn’t make out the words or what his mother answered. Was she laughing? Paul pretended to talk like a baby, but Baptiste knew he could speak without sounding like his tongue had been stung by a bee. Paul did it to make people laugh, to make the French-Canadians and Scots forget he carried an Indian’s blood.

His mother did laugh now. She always laughed with Paul.

Baptiste belonged there at his mother’s side, helping. He started toward them.

“You, boy, give a hand here.” One of the Okanogan men shouted at him. His mother turned and looked back over her shoulder just in time to hear the man shout again. Even Baptiste could hear the scold in the fisherman’s voice. He was sure his mother could too.

He scampered down the bank to the fisherman. Baptiste’s family was out of sight now. He wondered what they were doing.

“Good,” the Okanogan man told him when he helped pull a big salmon up the river bank.