I noticed at the service counter that Mabel was having a hard time holding her plate. Her wrists were swollen from a recent bout with arthritis. She mentioned her problem when we sat down.
“It’s catching up with me,” she said. “All my doctoring things. Some of the things that went wrong. These wrists. My knee, too.”
I had heard the stories. About the girl who started menstruating while Mabel was doctoring her. About the young man who had some illness with his knee that Mabel inherited and could not expel. I did not want to see her wrists. I avoided looking at them in the car. I didn’t want to know she was having a hard time weaving her baskets. I didn’t want to hear that the spirit said she would be retiring from her doctoring. This news created panic in me. Then frustration. I didn’t know what to do for her. Just a couple of months before, I had driven all over the valley in the over one-hundred-degree heat to find a doctor who might help her. Finally, we found a doctor who ordered large white pills for the pain in her swollen joints. I was relieved. Then, on the way home, Mabel informed me with her inimitable light chuckle that the white man’s medicine couldn’t help her. “It’s that moonsick girl who done me in like this,” she said, suddenly serious. Why in the world had I been driving all over the valley then, when she knew all along that my efforts wouldn’t do her any good? What was the point?
So, again, why the mention of her ailments? Was it to get me going on her book? What was this whole adventure to record and write her stories about? What was Mabel up to now? A joke? A trick to get a university person face-to-face with the impossible and ridiculous? Another white-pill story? Why pick on me? Someone who had known and cared about her all his life. Someone who is Indian.
“Mabel,” I said, “maybe we should start with your Dream.”
“Well,” she said, setting down a fried chicken leg and wiping her fingers on a napkin, “that’s what I mean. Dream says I’m getting to that point. No more doctoring. I can’t do much good anymore.”
“No, Mabel, I mean for your book. When did the Dream start?”
She laughed and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “It didn’t have no start. It goes on.”
“But I mean the Dream. Not the spirit.”
“Same thing. Well, it said to me when I was little, ‘I put these things to you, and you have to sort them out.’ It wasn’t always a good thing. It’s many. Then it’s saying, ‘You have to learn many bad things so you know what to do when the time comes . . .’ That’s why people say I’m poison. I don’t know. How can I be poison?”
“Maybe we should start with the baskets. That’s what people know you best for.”
“Well, same thing. Spirit show me everything. Each basket has Dream . . . I have rules for that. . .”
I got up and filled my plate again at the all-you-can-eat counter. Later, when she was sipping hot coffee, she said, “You’re kinda funny person. You try to do things white way. On account you’re mixed up. You don’t know who you are yet. But you’re part of my Dream. One day you’ll find out.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
She laughed and pulled out a cigarette from her purse. “That’s cute. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Nothing. How can anything be wrong with you? You’re young and healthy.”
So what was the point? I paid the bill and we left.
We drove west and then north on 16. She pointed out the prickly pear trees along the road that she remembered as a girl when she rode into Woodland with Sarah on the wagon. She mentioned a spot along the road where someone had been murdered, where the horses always shied. The same stories. Where clover once grew. Where Sarah picked almonds. A goat farm. Sheep. Buzzards feeding on a cow carcass. Oak trees. Ripe tomatoes. Long shadows crossed the road now, things felt cooler.
To my surprise, Mabel didn’t want to go straight home. When we came to the turnoff just beyond the Rumsey Wintun Bingo Hall, she motioned with her hand for me to drive on. I thought maybe with all my questions about how things started, Mabel got the idea to go to Lolsel again. Once before, after I had asked her about Lolsel, she directed me without any warning to the little valley in the hills above Clear Lake. She didn’t say where we were headed. In the middle of nowhere, we came to a stop sign and a 7-Eleven and a laundromat. Beyond the sign and rows of new prefab houses, we took a dirt road that opened on an empty field. Then I knew. I saw the ancient oak tree above the creek, and I saw the large craterlike indentation in the field. Nothing else was there. No barn or house. No shacks. It was drizzling, I remember, and Mabel stayed in the car and watched as I crawled through the barbed-wire fence, past the No Trespassing sign. I found junk—old mattress springs, clothes, a rusted refrigerator—people had dumped in the crater. There was no elderberry tree. Along the creek, I found one marked grave, a concrete block with the name Belle embossed on it.
But Mabel had no plans for going to Lolsel again. Not too far beyond the reservation, a good ways before the hills, she directed me off the highway. In a minute, we were on a dirt road, or rather a horse trail. Then, in my new car, we plunged down the rocky creek bank, crossed the water, and bounced up the other side. Dust swirled up, rocks thudded underneath. On a dry plateau beyond the creek, she said, “Stop, right here.”
She was gazing straight ahead to a wide smooth roll of packed dry earth. Something like the end of a rusted irrigation pipe stuck out of the ground. Piles of dried cow manure here and there marked the otherwise barren earth. “What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“There,” she said, nodding with her chin. “It’s where Grandma Sarah is buried. McKinley, too. Dewey, I think, too. The old graveyard.”
“But this is Wintun country,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mabel answered. “The old Wintun places was just down the creek there. . . After the white people pushed them up this far in the valley.”
I looked at the expanse of packed ground. “Well, where is Sarah’s grave? There’s no marker anywhere.”
“Hmm. I don’t remember. Somewhere in there, though.”
I jumped out and looked around. There wasn’t anything to see really. A warm breeze blew, and I could hear the low-running creek below. A lone cow bellowed in the distance.
“I can’t see anything,” I said, getting into the car.
“Oh,” Mabel said, as if I had just mentioned what I had eaten for breakfast.
I looked out at the empty ground. “So this is where it ended for Grandma Sarah Taylor,” I said.
Then all at once, Mabel burst into laughter. Not her light chuckle, but loud raucous laughing. She was looking at me sideways. I wondered what I had said or done that was so funny. How was she going to make fun of me this time? Then I heard it.
“No,” she said, barely able to contain her laughter. “Grandma didn’t end here. She didn’t die here. She’s just buried here. Who ever heard of a person dying in a cemetery? Well, I guess they could. It’s a good idea, anyway. Is that what you learn in the school?”
“No,” I answered. I felt angry. She knew what I meant. Then I looked down the creek, and over my shoulder to the highway. The old Wintun village. The dirt road where the highway is now. Grandma Sarah on the wagon with the sickly little girl. Grandma Sarah packing and washing clothes. The creek. The water that was still running clear from the hills above Lolsel to the big valley down below. Mabel. For the first time all day I thought I understood something she was trying to say. Of course, people didn’t die in cemeteries. They died when people forgot them.
I started the car