Written in Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

store. It kept my skin dry, but it left my heart cold.
    Aunt Susi came up behind me and gave my arm a squeeze. “I want you to wear this tonight for me,” she said.
    She unfolded her own button blanket. It was thick and heavy and reached to my feet. When Susi draped it over my shoulders, the firelight made the pearl buttons sparkle. It felt like putting on the stars.
    The songs began and the younger girls had the first dance. My littlest Quinault cousin, Esther, was going to dance for the first time. Every eye was on her, but she was looking at me. As usual, I counted down the last six beats, signaling with my hand so Esther would start on the right beat. She was a good little dancer as soon as she forgot the watching eyes and remembered her feet. She swirled into the circle of firelight, and all her sisters and cousins followed her around the fire, each one three beats behind the dancer in front of her. I had known this dance by heart since I was five years old.
    If my baby sister had lived, she would have danced it too. We would have practiced it over and over until every turn of the paddle and every swoosh of our robes matched perfectly. I remembered my father dancing the Raven stories in his carved cedar mask and feather-covered cape.He would soar and dive and bank. People sat perfectly still to watch him, almost believing he could fly. No one else danced the entire cycle of Raven stories, from Raven Releases the Sun to Raven Scatters the Salmon Eggs. I imagined my sons learning those dances. Henry would have to teach them, or Charlie. They were not a woman’s dances, but they would come to me to be sure every step was perfect. I was the one who would remember.

5
Gathering Wool
    Next morning, Aunt Susi led the way to the mountain meadows where trees grew waist-tall and mountain goats grazed. We walked together up an old hunting trail with two empty baskets and a long cotton sack. Susi was the oldest unmarried person I knew. The grandmothers shook their heads and clucked about how old she was. Twenty-five, at least, they said, as if she would turn gray any moment. But the young men watched her every step and swore she was in the bloom of nineteen years.
    I knew for a fact Susi would be twenty-three on the fifth of the next month. I knew every birth and marriage in the family. I could recite all of Grandma’s stories. I knew every dance and song my family owned, even theones girls were not allowed to do. People counted on my memory.
    Susi was the only auntie who could outrun me. I had to step lively to keep up with her, but she rested every time we crossed water so we could drink and I could bathe my blistered hands. She sat cross-legged on a rock in the kind of denim dungarees loggers wore. I just looked at her and laughed, a woman in pants. The uproar at the camp when she drove in that morning was worth a nickel to see.
    “What’s gotten into that Susi!” the aunts whispered to each other.
    “Is that girl looking for a wife or a husband?” Uncle Royal boomed out.
    Susi laughed. If she had a husband, they’d tease him for keeping an uppity woman. If she lived with family like a normal girl, her parents would get an earful on the subject of proper decorum. But Susi lived alone in the one-room apartment over the post office. She did all her own earning. It made the grown-ups crazy. I pictured myself wearing work pants to the schoolhouse up in Neah Bay. My teacher’s skinny head would pop right off his body from the shock of it.
    “Do you ever get lonely?” I asked. “Working at the post office by yourself?”
    I’d wanted to ask this for a long time. Susi’s man died in France in the war.
    “Sometimes,” Susi said. “If I think about it. If I try to hold on to what’s not there.”
    There wasn’t much in Kalaloch, the beach town where Susi lived, a few cottages for fishermen and their families, a bunkhouse for loggers, a sugar and flour store, and one farmer trying to keep pigs and chickens alive. I’d