Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry

the cracks around the windowpanes with rags. Rain whooshed against the dark windows, and we could hear the creak of trunks bending in the wind and the snap of broken branches. We ate smoked halibut and canned pears, and afterward, Susi pulled a drum out from under her cot. It was not a little hand drum either. It was a floor drum almost as big as Grandpa’s.
    “Whose is that?” I asked.
    “Mine,” she said.
    She pulled my crate up to one side and sat on her cot across from me.
    “Women don’t drum,” I said, and then I hated the sound of Grandpa in my voice.
    Susi smiled just enough to show dimples. “Women don’t
say
they drum.”
    She took drumsticks out from under her pillow,leaving one where I could reach it. She gave a few solid thumps to the middle of the drum. Then she picked up speed and beat steadily on the worn place along the rim.
    She began to hum with her eyes shut. When she opened her mouth to let the song out, no words came, only the rise and fall of her voice. The power of her singing made my hair stand up. I could feel in it the freedom of living on her own and the wail of grief from losing her man far away in the war.
    I leaned forward in my seat, closed my eyes, and rested my palms around the sides of the drum. I could feel Susi’s loneliness, but it wasn’t sad or even angry. There was strength in her voice and her drumming.
    I swayed my head forward and back and tapped with my fingers. The music stacked up inside me. I opened my mouth, but it wouldn’t come up. Just as sometimes the food wouldn’t go down.
    I picked up the drumstick and followed Susi’s rhythm, beating close to the rim on my side of the drum. I felt Grandpa’s stern gaze in my mind, and it stopped me. But I felt something else too. When I breathed in, my lungs felt larger.
    Susi caught my eye and smiled with more joy than I had ever seen in her. She didn’t have to say it. This is what Indians do—all of us. It doesn’t matter if we are cowboys or farmers or ironworkers or fishermen. We all drum. Ipicked up my drumstick again and followed Susi. The drumbeats grew harder, softer, faster, and then finally slower and deeper, moving to the middle of the drum. When we finished, we were sweating as if we’d run in the mountains.
    The next morning, I swept the lobby and dusted the counter of the post office, and Susi worked on the ledger while we waited for the mail to come up the beach at low tide. A stranger rode along on the mail truck.
    “Is it the tenth of October?” I asked Susi.
    She nodded. “So this must be the museum man who wrote to Grandpa back in August.”
    “Mr. Glen,” he announced, hopping off the truck. “From the Art Institute.” He stretched out a bony hand, connected to an even scrawnier arm, connected to a coat hanger holding up his jacket. I looked at Susi, and Susi looked at me, but she was older, so she had to shake the skeleton.
    “Someone has to take him to Grandpa’s house,” Susi said while he was out at the mail wagon bringing in his suitcase. “You’ve got the canoe.”
    I nodded, but something about that man made my skin crawl. Still, I’d promised Grandpa I would help.
    “May I offer you a ride, sir?”
    “Excellent,” Mr. Glen said. “My luggage will arrive presently.”
    It turned out “presently” meant right before dark. We spent the day waiting for the museum man’s luggage and hearing whole books full of what Mr. Glen called anthropology and we called neighbors. He had been with the Klamath and the Tillamook and half a dozen other tribes up the coast in Oregon and Washington. He had an opinion on each of them and their art. He went on at great length about how discriminating the Art Institute was and how they would pay handsomely for the right piece of carving.
    When the truck finally came with Mr. Glen’s luggage, Susi had to move all the postal files and her chair upstairs to make room in her little office for Mr. Glen’s boxes and shipping crates. He insisted on