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child’s survival, didn’t I? I am shamed for not standing up and insisting she remain at home, with me. I didn’t stand that day; I let her go to Waiilatpu. One often never knows if what one stands for will in the end be for naught or be the bridge that gives a child a way to go forward.
    She mounts her horse, takes the reins. She looks back once and I see a small hand raised, waving.
    Forgive me, Lord, my own rambling. It will never be the same for any of us. Especially not for Eliza. Pray help me accept. Help me accept what I do not understand.

3
The River’s Edge
    Many things about my behavior I do not understand. My meetings with Mr. Warren, for example. By the spring of 1853 I’d been breathless with him, often, seated beside the Calapooia, at some risk. We’d catch each other on the way to Brown and Blakely’s or while riding to the Osborne farm. He’d come upon me as planned in the moist heat of blackberries ripening in July. He’d put his arm around me at the graveyard, comforting, my mother having been joined by another settler that year. The iris bloomed. I missed her so! Nothing would be the same with her gone, I knew that, but I kept imagining her with me, wondering what she’d say about Mr. Warren.
    I had been too young for my mother to talk to me of love between men and women. Only on that journey to school the fall before the killings did I gain some small insight into marital love. That wouldn’t have happened if my father hadn’t insisted I go to school, overruling my mother. Then at the last minutehe gave Matilda, a Nez Perce woman, a list of supplies to bring back and directed her to take me to the Whitmans at Waiilatpu. I adored the five-day journey with Matilda. I was nine years old, almost ten. At first I felt abandoned by my father for not riding with me. I also felt incomplete without my brother along; but after what happened, I was grateful he had not been sent to school with me and wasn’t there to spoil my time alone with Matilda either.
    Matilda had friends among the Cayuse, who often intermarried with the Nez Perce. She looked forward to a few days with them before returning, possibly bringing relatives back with her, a friend or two. We had five days together and they were precious. I’ve often thought since then that God gives us great joys that fill us so we can draw upon them like a well when times turn tough. I think that’s why after the massacre my mother often spoke of the arrival of the printing press, a remembered joy for when she suffered sorrow beyond words.
    Matilda didn’t treat me as a child who shouldn’t be going off to school, who needed me at home. That was how I saw my mother’s wish to keep me close then. Matilda treated me as her friend. She told stories of others who lived close to our Lapwai mission, of the trapper Mr. Craig and his sometimes sneaky ways, or of the arguments over men her aunties had. My mother would have called this gossip and forbidden it, but Matilda spoke of life, of how people got along—or didn’t; how they fell in love—or out; something my parents never spoke of.
    “Do you have a husband?” I asked Matilda. Birds hopped their way along the deer trail we followed beside the river. I watched the world between Tashe’s alert ears.
    “I did. He died. I might find another.”
    “Where do you look for husbands? Are they hiding?”
    She laughed. “Some do. Celebrations are good places. Singingand dancing and eating and game playing. One can find a good husband if one looks with clear eyes and is willing to haul them out of their activity.” She used the word hol , meaning to drag or pull. I imagined a husband stuck in a mud pile and laughed with her. Then she turned serious. “Aiat hayaksa.”
    “Women hunger?” I clarified. “I’m not hungry.”
    She smiled. “It will find you one day.”
    And so it did four years later. With Andrew Warren.

    Mr. Warren had begun attending my father’s church services in the fall of