That was Old Taylor’s father, or maybe his father’s father. Sarah’s grandfather, or great-grandfather. The same one who discovered the snake one dry summer in Cache Creek just north of the village. A snake a hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, pure white with the head of a deer. It filled the creek bed; it was stuck, unable to slide past the stone-dry creek walls. He sacrificed the snake, killed it with song. He called many people to see it, then ground its dried remains into a powder that he sold to all the neighboring tribes. It was a deadly poison, but he figured if everybody owned it, nobody could use it. You counteracted the poison with the poison. But things got mixed up. The white people came not long after. An awful time. The stories got mixed up. People were always suspicious of strangers, persons from other villages, and now they were forced to live with them, work with them. Sometimes entire villages disappeared. Maybe a few from here survived, a few from there. Smallpox left Lolsel with hardly a dozen people. Once a large village of five hundred, only a handful by 1871 when Richard preached his Dream. But someone remembered about the snake, and told it wrong. When Sarah moved into the small house in Rumsey, someone said, “She has that white snake poison. That old ancestor of hers didn’t sell it all. Why else does she look so good to the white people? She makes us look bad. It’s her poison.”
Sarah got a ride into the valley with the rancher. She stood outside the barn where he hitched the horses and she pointed to the road. He knew she was leaving the place. It wasn’t just the gunnysack of clothes at her feet, which she took with her whenever he gave her a ride anywhere. And it wasn’t just that she was pointing east toward the Sacramento Valley on the coldest day in winter, when snow was on the hilltops and there wasn’t an almond to crack or an apricot to pick anywhere in Rumsey. It was that a week before, her oldest children had come for her youngest. The older boys, young men really, Nelson, Anderson, and Dewey, who built the rancher’s stone fences and cleared the land for his cattle, came on a wagon of their own, a wagon with fine wheels and a long bed, and loaded up the younger brother, McKinley, and the girl, Daisy. How could he protest? There wasn’t really enough work for them, and now he couldn’t afford to feed them well. Game was scarce and his own family needed what supplies he could get in Rumsey. And now didn’t it make sense that the old woman would follow her children?
Sarah let the man with long red sideburns help her onto the wagon. His worn leather gloves felt cold, smooth. They started off then, past the barn and the rancher’s house, past where Sarah could see the Indian shacks by the creek. The half dozen or so places looked small, abandoned, except for where smoke rose from a single stovepipe. The wagon bumped and made the corner away from the ranch. Sarah turned in her seat, kept looking back after the barn and Indian places disappeared. She could still see the elderberry tree in the open, flat field. It was bare now, of course, but its drooping branches held full white flowers each spring and dark blue berries every summer.
It was the last miraculous thing to happen at Lolsel.
Richard Taylor, Sarah’s brother, died one late fall afternoon. The night before, he instructed his people to bury him in the Roundhouse, where he preached his Dream. After, they were to lock the Roundhouse, since no other Dreamer would live at Lolsel. He was the last. That was hard enough. But then the rancher, who bought the land from a white man, announced that he was going to move his family there. He wanted the land cleared, and he looked at the wide round rooftop rising out of the ground in the middle of the field. He said he would come back in the spring. That winter the creek flooded, the worst rains ever. People moved into the hills. When they returned, they found their places, all their possessions, in order. Everything except the largest structure on the land, the Roundhouse. It was gone, centerpole and all. Only the indentation in the earth where it once stood told anything of its ever having existed. And after the rains and flood, the large crater in the earth was dry. That next spring, where the entrance had been above ground, a lone elderberry grew. People said Richard Taylor ascended to the world above.
The rancher couldn’t have known what Sarah was seeing any more than he could’ve known all that was in her mind when he found her outside the barn. He knew Belle, Sarah’s sister, was left, that Belle would stay on to help his wife. He’d seen to that after the older boys moved to the valley. Belle and, now with Sarah and her younger kids gone, nobody on a regular basis. Maybe that old man from the lake someplace who had been around the last five years, that old man whom he couldn’t see Sarah thinking about that morning, talking to Sarah. “You got children to look after,” he told Sarah. “This is white man world. And the Indians down there aren’t always friendly. You go . . . stay together. There’s nothing for you here.” He was sitting up, his rattling chest heaving with each breath. “Go on,” he said, and looked to Belle. “She’ll come later. Then no Indians left of this place. But I’ll be here.” Sarah knew what he was saying. It was enough for him to die there. He didn’t need or want more from her. Except to leave him, to join her children. “You got a place down there,” he said. “Now go.” She figured, at her age, he would be her last husband. She just never figured it would end like this, at a time when the life ahead of her seemed so long.
She thought of things on the way to the valley. She thought of her mother, Mollie, who had come to Lolsel from a village far south, in the Napa Valley. She was a stranger; no one understood her language. She was alone, frightened, and her hair was singed close to the scalp, a sign she was in mourning. But she worked hard, and she made beautiful baskets. Once she wove a basket the size of a grown woman, another time she made a string of baskets tiny as beads, so tiny that people could hardly see them to know what they were. She gave each Lolsel person one of the little baskets. She was close to middle age, and still Old Taylor took her for his wife. After she learned to speak the Wild Tobacco language, she told how she fled north after the Mexicans kidnapped her children and burned her village on the Napa River. Sarah thought how she had never seen Mollie cry.
The ride down was slow. The ground was hard, slippery. In the valley, where the road was flat, the horses had an easier time. Rumsey wasn’t too far then, and Sarah tapped the rancher when she saw the house and barn on the other side of the general store. She got herself off the wagon, took up her gunnysack, and nodded to the rancher. Then she started up the narrow road past the large white ranch house with a picket fence to the smaller house behind the barn. Anderson was chopping wood, and he saw her right away. He called his sister and brothers out of the house to greet their mother.
Her children had done well for themselves. The place was small, two rooms, but it was clean and dry. It had a good stove, and there was enough food—flour, and even some canned goods from the store. The boys chopped wood for the local ranchers, sewed feed sacks at the granary, loaded and unloaded boxcars at the train stop. The girl cooked, washed clothes. But Sarah was still suspicious. Why did their distant cousin, who had Lolsel lineage, leave such a nice place? It was winter now, and even though they were only a few miles from the Wintun rancheria across the creek, they did not see other Indians too often. In the summer, the Indians would be everywhere.
Sarah thought through the situation. She knew most of the Wintun people, she had worked with them in the orchards for many years, and, as far as she knew, she had good relations with them. She would strengthen the ties, make sure none of them turned on her or her family now that she was settled in their territory. Marriage was the key. That summer in the orchards she nodded to every available Wintun woman she found. The boys knew to follow her chin. She instructed Daisy to comb her hair and keep her clothes clean at all times. She taught her how to make a good black pinole that she could share with people, not just men lest the women suspect her motives and become jealous. By fall, Nelson and Dewey had taken up with women, but it was not exactly as Sarah had wanted, no exchange of gifts, no formal marriages. Later, Anderson moved to Cortina with a woman. When the heavy rains came, Sarah found herself in the house with only McKinley and the girl.
By then the storekeeper’s talk of her excellent work