0800722329 by Jane Kirkpatrick Read Free Book Online

would exist because of Mr. S. And yes, in no small part because of me. I hope I am not being prideful.
    Martha Jane, we call her, and Millie, my two youngest, play together today while Eliza and Mr. S are at the trial. Henry Hart, our one son, chops wood. I hear the distant chink-chink of the axe fall. He should be in school and would be if we had remained at Forest Grove. I sometimes wonder what tribe we displaced with the forming of a school and town, so many missionaries arriving on those plains at once. Maybe it too is sacred ground, as where the Whitmans chose their “place of the rye grass,” a field with meaning to those Cayuse people. I never took that love of landscape as a sacrilege as Dr. Whitman did. He recognized no sacred places of The People.
    But I felt God close in certain landscapes, heard him whisper to me in the wind, felt his warmth at an evening fire, in the blood red of the sun setting over the hills at Lapwai. The land gave up so much to sustain us there: shelter, food, clothing, even the skin pants I learned to make, the carrying of guns and riding horseback lethal to cloth pantaloons once worn by my husband. And later sheep my husband introduced to the region brought wool and spinning and weaving dresses and shirts that actually fit and hadn’t arrived inside a wooden barrel smelling of whiskey or the sea sent two years previous by the Mission Board. It gave us memories worthy of the telling, which Mr. S did in lengthy letters to the Mission Board that were printed in their newsletters, helping raise finances to support our work here. There.
    We are no longer there.
    Later, Mr. S wrote pleading letters, but that is for another day. In that land of rivers and rounded hills we were allowed a successful ministry with many souls seeing Jesus and accepting both his love for each of them and forgiveness, too. Our Nimíipuu believers at last held language in their hands. Books. It was a miracle of no small measure. That’s what I must hang on to, not what happened after.

4
Secrets
    My parents had shared a passion in their mission work. I doubt they had any secrets between them. Mr. Warren and I held nothing noble between us, though we did have a common goal of receiving my father’s permission for marriage. That challenge could bind us together like blackberry juice ink to paper, rarely fading.
    Nancy and I shared a bond like that, she who also survived the killings. She knew my secrets, too, of meeting with Mr. Warren when I ought to have been making soap. We also shared the secret of how we healed or tried to. We talked of it while she held a skein of yarn around her thin arms as I rolled it into a knitting ball. I remembered few survivors, except for Nancy and the Sager girl. She had once stayed with us in Forest Grove when orphans from the wagon trains and tragedy flooded onto that Tualatin Plain. Nancy had been there that day in November when our world changed forever.
    I barely knew Nancy then. She’d come overland in ’45 and stopped at Waiilatpu as so many immigrants did. But they rolled on into the Willamette Valley and returned in ’47 when Dr. Whitman needed a millwright. The Cayuse had burned his mill in that place of sweet grass where the Whitmans’ graves lie. Mr. Osborne, a big man with red hair that he gave to all his children, was a millwright, and so the family left their cattle and pigs in the valley and came back east across the mountains. “Going backwards” was how Nancy said her father spoke of their journey, but it promised to pay well and he had a contract for two years. And in his own way he hoped to contribute to the mission work by allowing Dr. Whitman more time to do what he was trained to do—treat people and share the gospel. Though my father once let slip that Dr. Whitman was never trained to deliver souls as my father had been.
    As she holds the yarn, Nancy sits in a precise way. Every time. Feet together, her seat forward on the rocking chair that she does