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1852 shortly after I had turned fifteen. Perhaps to convince me of his faith or to convince Father that he was a worthy mate. Still too young and with the added responsibilities of the younger children, I hadn’t considered Mr. Warren’s earlier proposal much, instead enjoying the pleasantries of his company, not the least of which was a feeling of exuberance for doing so—taking his company—knowing that my father would object if he knew. I wanted a distraction from my father. He stayed up hours at night by candlelight writing long letters. He drank copious amounts of grain coffee and expended rare funds we didn’t have on elixirs he claimed built his concentration. He worked himself into a sweat chopping wood beside my brother, then forgot to bathe before the Sunday service. Several evenings former mission men came for meetings, and I heard them talking late into the night, sometimes my father shouting about Catholics causing all his troubles and shouting of justice “not being served until the Catholic part in this is understood far and wide.”
    “The hangings are enough, Spalding,” I heard one of the men say.
    “Never!”
    “Vengeance is not ours, Reverend.”
    “Don’t talk to me of vengeance. You still have a wife! You still have daughters not warped!”
    I’m warped? How was I twisted or deformed? Didn’t I do everything he asked me to do? Didn’t I fill my mother’s shoes as best I could? Didn’t I care for my baby sister, whom he teased while I prepared his meals? How was I misshapen?
    “Not all Indians are troublesome,” my father said. “The Board must come to understand that. Marcus is the one who created the issues and he paid the ultimate price at the Cayuse hands. But we were asked to come, begged to come by the Nez Perce. Why can’t we return? Why can’t the Mission Board see that?”
    His voice held a wail to it that made my heart ache for him. He and my mother had done so much with the people they served for ten years. I knew he longed to return to that Lapwai valley, to the work that had sustained him. But a part of me knew he could not go home again. My mother wouldn’t be with him. I wished he’d stop talking about it.
    He mourned, he did. He took Henry with him on road trips, leaving me to tend the girls. Then other times without warning he would change his mind, tell Henry he had to stay and take care of the little ones and that I should pack for two days. We’d be starting a new church, he’d tell me, in some far-off valley. “I can still save souls,” he’d say. “Regardless of what the Board says.” Yes, he grieved. And some of how he mourned—his unpredictability and frenzy—frightened me. Andrew Warren was a steadier stream.

    It was about this time that I began to hear rumors about Mr. Warren. Nancy Osborne told me one or two, that he met upwith fellow farmers—ranchers, he would call them—and they played cards. He sometimes lost “sums.” And he had a taste for liquor, I learned. I remembered Matilda’s stories, and thought these were just ways men played and kept their spirits up until they settled down to hearth and home. I did once venture a conversation with Mr. Warren about what I’d heard. He and I had made our way up the hill behind his parents’ farm; our horses were hobbled as we looked out over the valley below. There’d been some moments of holding, kissing, deep breathing, our bodies lying face-to-face along a quilt my mother set aside for picnics. I could stop the forward motion with my words and I did that now.
    “I hear you have a taste for liquor, Mr. Warren.” I sat up, brushed my bodice, and breathed in the scent of his cologne still lingering at my throat.
    He pushed his chin down and jerked away from me. “Whose lips are you listening to? Every man likes a little taste. Medicinal, that’s all I take it for. Helps me with the pining you’re putting me through.”
    “You are singled out for such behavior. At the back of Brown and