A Sweetness to the Soul (10 page)

T
he mind sickness moved inside of me that summer and into the next. I could not walk or sit or sleep without the feeling that something was amiss, that some part of me no longer wandered on this earth. As I swept the house at Mama’s request, I’d turn, thinking I should check on Pauline. When I walked the cows home from the hills with a switch, I’d look ahead, to see if Rachel had opened up the gate, and then with a piercing pain of remembering, make my way through the herd to open it myself. Even Hound who was as old as I, abandoned me it seemed, preferring the quiet of the cabin and the closer huddling that my mother gave to her only surviving son.

Sunmiet and her family rescued me, pulled me from the pool of pain I’d fallen into. I doubt my parents would have noticed my sinking, so involved were they in the depth of their own grief. But nothing puts the salve to sorrow like the presence of an understanding friend, one who does not ask but is simply there. And Sunmiet and her family—all of them I soon considered as family—were there. That’s why when I encountered Joseph in the year to come, he saw my spunk and strength and not my sadness.

Sunmiet had risked something of herself to be with me that year. It marked a change in her life as well. I had seen little of her the
summer and winter following our losses. Then like the swallows that returned in the spring, she had come to the potato patch where we’d first met. She came alone.

I heard her approach and hid in the tall timber. I didn’t want to be seen, even after I recognized her.

Sunmiet stood as still as a blue heron beside the planted patch, her eyes narrow slits scanning the weaving rows of tiny plants poking up through the moist soil. Her slender hand shaded her brown eyes from the hot sun. Above her, wispy clouds streaked the June sky like a finger of vermilion swiped across a blue surface. A light breeze filtered through the junipers and firs, lifted strands of her dark hair which eased like spider webs across her face.

From a distance, I watched her pulling the wispy strands from her eyes. She told me later she felt eyes on her and hoped it wasn’t Standing Tall. “Ever since his name-giving, he seemed to think he could ‘stand tall’ over me whenever he wished, following me, telling me what to do, to think, expecting I will do it as if he were my father or my husband.”

She was excited that morning and wondered who was watching at the potato patch beneath the big fir where the
nanas
, “sisters,” had scratched the ground like raccoons and raised the big brown roots her ruler-teachers from the school called potatoes.

Sunmiet scowled. I heard her say something in the click-click swoosh language. Then louder so watching eyes could hear her, she spoke. “After all my efforts, my family will arrive and find me alone. Where are those
nanas
?”

Together, we heard the crows call and lift leaving the fir branches bobbing from their flight. Together, we watched
wilalík
, “rabbit,” scamper down one row, but she did not see me or my
nanas
.

“What could have happened to them?” she said to her pony but loud enough for me to hear. He shook his head as if he understood her, snot spraying from his nostrils. Sunmiet turned the spotted horse who pulled against his reins. He hopped and bucked once, kicking at the skinny-tailed dog who sniffed too close to his heels.
The pony walked slowly along the potato rows while Sunmiet concentrated on the ground. Her long braids hung suspended in the air, away from her as she leaned, looking for tracks or signs that I was near.

“If I do not find any sign,” she sang out, “I will follow the road to your house even though I do not wish it. Not without my father or my friend.” I think she spoke out loud as much for the courage of hearing her own conviction as to let me know what she had in mind.

She said something to the horse,
k’usi
, in Sahaptin, then to
k’usik’usi
, “dog,” who trotted beside them. “We will walk around the plants once more,
k’usik’usi
, and then we will ride to the house of Huckleberry Eyes.”

Sunmiet stopped suddenly, noticed the little weeds I’d pulled that morning. They lay still green between the rows, just beginning to wilt. She raised her eyes and looked around again, searching for me, her bare legs exposed beneath her skirt. She sat quietly, her eyes scanning.

I’m not sure why I kept myself hidden from her. It must have been my wish to avoid having to explain why I worked alone now, where the little ones had gone, what had happened to the beings that filled me up, gave me my spunk and spirit.

Sunmiet sat as though she would never move.

With a sigh, I took halting steps out through the buck brush snuggled in among the giant firs. Her horse startled, did not bolt, and Sunmiet turned to see me walking toward her.

“I did not believe it could be you, Huckleberry Eyes,” Sunmiet told me later. “That girl with smudges on her face walked slowly, not with the bird-like quick-quick steps of my friend. That girl had heavy shoulders and she was very thin. Almost all bones. Her dark hair hung in clumps that once were braids. Now small sticks and fir needles stuck to them. And that bonnet and dirty string! Not like my friend!” She shook her head amazed.

I wore a faded, dirty dress with a tie belt that exposed my thinness and I did not care.

“And her eyes were dull, not pools of blue. But I knew those eyes,” Sunmiet told me nodding her head wisely. “Those eyes had been the watching eyes.”

I walked directly toward her and once my exposure was begun, I did not hesitate like most non-Indian children who had never seen a Warm Springs Indian before. Sunmiet’s pony flickered his chest to ward off a spring fly and stomped nervously.

On her horse, Sunmiet towered over me. She must have decided it was not wise to challenge an unknown, and so slipped off and stood, waiting to be equal.

I walked close, as we who know no Indians often do, until her moccasined feet stood rounded-toe to the bare toes of my feet. Sunmiet seemed confused by my boldness, standing closely, as family.

“Sunmiet,” I said, and then I knew she recognized me.

A gasp escaped her mouth before she could stop it. Her eyelashes fluttered nervously as she reached her slender hand out and touched my face. Her thumb slid across the sharp bones beneath my eyes and she cupped her fingers warmly over my small ear.

“Jane?” she whispered, her eyes searching my face.

I raised my shoulder to hold my friend’s hand at my cheek and sighed, the first touch I’d felt in months that did not carry sadness with it.

Sunmiet stepped around me, circling, still running her hand over my head to touch my other cheek, making sense of it. “Are your people gone? Did you not find land animals to eat? You are so thin!”

I shook my head, no.

“My uncles and father have success when they hunt,” she said with pride. “I will ask that they bring some meat for you and your family.”

Again I shook my head.

“But you cannot have eaten for many weeks,” she said, alarm in her voice. She stared at my meatless bones.

“We have venison,” I said, looking down. “I haven’t felt like eating.”

Sunmiet told me later she wondered why I did not wish to eat, but did not want to be rude. She had already been too bold. “I should have waited for Huckleberry Eyes to speak further,” she said, though questions filled her. What had happened? Where are the
nanas
? Why is she so thin if they hunted successfully?

I took comfort in the gentleness of her touch and her silence. Crows chattered. Sunmiet looked around.

“Who are you looking for?” I asked, wary. “Did someone come with you?”

“For the
nanas
. And Loyal, the one who looks like all the food he eats is sour.”

Tears pooled unbeckoned in my eyes. I blinked them onto my cheeks and looked away, wiping my face with a dirt-streaked hand. Her dog licked at the wetness of my fingers that I let hang loosely at my side. Sunmiet shifted uneasily on her feet. “Loyal did have a pinched look,” I said, trying to relieve her discomfort.

“My people come behind me,” Sunmiet said, straightening. “We wish you to come to the river, to fish for the Chinook and gather eels. Your
nanas
, too,” she added.

Again, my eyes filled with tears and Sunmiet spoke to her breath, as if chiding herself for saying things that distressed.

“We can go to your house,” Sunmiet said, motioning me up onto her horse. “I will speak my wish to the mother and the father.”

The year before, Sunmiet had ridden with me to our home where Mama nursed Baby George, my sisters and Loyal played, and Papa washed his hands in the store bowl on the plank table beside the house. Sunmiet told me then that she had two brothers, younger, who looked exactly alike. “Same-as-One” she called them though they had their own names. We spoke like older sisters, full of stories of our charges.

Mama and Papa had been wary at first when they met Sunmiet; pulled their children to them. Then, like a dog who sniffs a danger and discovers it of no harm, they lost their alarm. Mama even asked if Sunmiet would like some sweet-smelling tea before she went into
the house. Sunmiet had pressed the tin mug to her lips, drinking slowly, looking about.

“We will learn to hold the dip nets and help my uncles and Standing Tall,” Sunmiet told me as we approached the house. “Scrape the slimy eels from the rock walls near the falls. Hold the baskets for others at night.” Dismounting, we tied her pony. “We will laugh.” She looked at me out of the side of her eye. “If you wish it.”

A small smile formed on my face. Sunmiet returned it, lifted her eyebrows in a question.

I wondered if I wished it. I had not wished for anything for so long, except to be rid of the large hole in my chest that had once been my heart. For so long, nothing had mattered. Mama and Papa grieved apart from me and kept Baby George in their care and no one else’s. They wore black and spoke in whispers when I came into the room. I thought my face would not recognize any creases made in it from laughing.

A long summer of the same seemed overwhelming and I made a decision for myself.

“We can ask,” I said. “If you wish it.”

I heard the falls some distance from the river before I ever saw it. A roaring like the winter winds that surge through the tall firs filled my ears as the small band made its way over the ridge and began the steep switchback descent down the deer trails toward the white and turquoise water of the Deschutes. Captain Hood’s mountain with its south notch gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight.

This country between the mountains and the river, east, is difficult to describe. In tiny script I once read what a Surveyor General had written on a map across this large expanse of land: “Heavily timbered ridges separated by immense ravines,” he’d penned. We rode now into one of those “immense ravines.” A rock ripped loose from the horses’ feet and bounced, bounced, down the rocky ridge as we rode below the crestline.

My knees ached. I tightened them into Puddin’ Foot, my mule, as he made his way, far back in the line, in and out of the ravines of the canyon. Sometimes, I could see the wide eyes of a chubby baby looking through the wildrose brace of its cradleboard. It stared at me as it bounced on the side of the saddle of its mother riding several horses ahead and descending. A rawhide circle with a spider web mesh hung from the cradleboard. A feather attached to it shifted violently with the breeze and with each bounce of the board as the horse stepped. “Same-as-One” waddled side-by-side close to the horse of Sunmiet’s father, Eagle Speaker.

It surprised me that I rode here among these Indians. That they wanted my presence surprised me. That the old woman with the face of wrinkles did not spit in disgust at my arrival surprised me, though I noticed she also did not smile.

But my parents giving permission surprised me most of all. And yet it shouldn’t have. My parents had so many things to think about, had Baby George to care for, had other help to handle cattle and then crops. Papa’s tolerance for “Injuns” as he called them, had increased what with the calming of hostilities, their help with the harvests. And he sold cattle to the Indians, found several pleasant to deal with. So he’d agreed when Sunmiet’s parents caught up with her. If I wished it, I was free to go with her family to the river.

Thinking back, I might even say my parents looked relieved when I left.

Sunmiet looked over her shoulder at me as we rode. She smiled, her teeth displaying dusty grit collected from being close to the back of the line of horses and dogs and people making their way to the summer camp. Though the river was a half-day’s ride from our home, I had never seen the rush of white rapids known as “the falls” that raged through the lava rocks.

“You wished this?” I said, permitting my tongue to rearrange my grit, speaking the words loudly to my friend.

Sunmiet laughed. “I wished it! And what I wish, the ruler-teachers say happens.”

“Then wish us there, quickly,” I said tightening my knees into Puddin’s withers to keep from sliding forward over his neck. His sure-footed steps slid us down the hill while his round rump seemed to push up against my back. The trail crossed creeks at the end of spring runoff with just enough water to permit the dogs to lap and the horses to splash.

“Look!” Bubbles said, pointing to the silvery ribbon that twisted at the base of the breaks, where the high ridges broke out over the river. A squatty girl, Bubbles belonged to Sunmiet’s auntie and uncle. She rode just ahead of Sunmiet. She gripped the mane of her horse and slid off to walk beside him, shook her head. “Steeper each year,” she said. “I am persuaded to walk.”

The pack on her horse slid forward. Her animal hopped and bucked until she pushed the pack, her rearranging causing a delay in the line behind her.

“Hurry up!” a boy yelled from farther back. Bubbles shouted something in Sahaptin to him using the name “Koosh” then gripped her horse’s mane and swung up on its back. Sunmiet and Bubbles shared a joke and the girls laughed. Smaller children walked back and forth in the line. Dogs sniffed and darted after rabbits. The boy, Koosh, yelled something about dusty magpies. The girls laughed behind their fingers and I remember I felt something warm and familiar with no name.