A Sweetness to the Soul (12 page)

I felt Sunmiet stiffen next to me. She wore a dress of tanned buckskin that pulled tightly across her young chest then dropped over her hips and stopped just inches above the already dusty earth and her beaded moccasins. Her eyelashes jumped with irritation on her cheeks, pink now. “I am someone more to be with than merely filling time,” she said to her father. “Huckleberry Eyes and I have things to do of value even if some do not.”

Standing Tall’s face flushed. Eagle Speaker looked at me and coughed and covered his mouth with his hand concealing a smile, eyes flashing quickly over his daughter’s head to Standing Tall.

The quick gesture seemed to make the men holders of some secret and I saw Sunmiet’s cheeks begin to burn.

“Oh, hayah!” she said, her voice strong, “Come Huckleberry Eyes. Surely my tall friend has more important work to do than ride with a mere girl-child.”

“You should not be alone with her,” Standing Tall said, moving to stand beside Sunmiet as though that were his right, his place. “The cloud-face children shoot the long rifles,” he said, scowling at me.

“Small boys learn to shoot the rifles here,” Sunmiet said, “Perhaps that is not so on the Big River where the Wascos live. Do you see her holding a rifle, Father?” She kept her eyes from Standing Tall’s. Her words were insults, reminding him he was a Wasco who did not know all the ways of the Warm Springs, Sahaptin-speaking people. “I do not need a boy’s protection from a small girl who is my friend.”

Sunmiet added: “I am my father’s daughter who knows well how to defend herself.”

Eagle Speaker smiled openly now as his daughter’s long braids bounced on her breasts as she turned. She straightened her shoulders in finality. She pushed herself to full height which still barely reached Standing Tall’s shoulder. “Come, Jane,” she said, deliberately using my English name, “we have things to do.”

Standing Tall seemed to know there was no recourse and he turned abruptly, his moccasins leaving a deep impression where he spun in the dirt. His black hair swung well below his waist as he stomped off. “He is a young eagle harassed by a mere magpie of a girl,” I heard Sunmiet’s father say to her mother.

“Later, we will clean the fish, roast the eels,” Sunmiet said, avoiding the encounter. “Now, the rocks call our name. Come. Put on moccasins I make for you. I show you my place.”

While the men set more platforms to jut out over the river, and Fish Man set his feet on solid rock, anticipating his next Chinook, I slipped the soft hide over my bare feet, laced them about my ankles and followed Sunmiet up the rimrocks. “Step carefully,” Sunmiet shouted, breathing hard, over her shoulder. “Father rattlesnake likes resting in the sun.” She grinned at my wide eyes reminding me, “We make too much noise. He moves.”

We climbed for more than an hour with
k’usik’usi
panting and bounding above us, then below, urging us on until we reached the top of the ridge on the east side of the river. Over rock outcroppings and shale slides of broken lava rocks, and past ravens’ nests, we climbed higher and higher until even the birds swooped and dipped below us. “There,” Sunmiet pointed. “See where the wagons made tracks in the earth?” Such a steep ridge to bring wagons down! No wonder the settlers were tired and got easily lost.

When we reached a swale near the top of a bare hill, we rested. There we sat, nestled into a hollow depression in the earth, protected from the cooling breezes with Captain Hood’s Mountain straight across from us, once again in view. In the quiet, with the river and the world of the band below us,
k’usik’usi
soon fell asleep at our feet.

I watched the men on the platforms, amazed at the streams of water that ran like braids over the rocks and around the stilts they’d lashed to hold them steady. The water poured across the flat rocks, poured back into the river. From our perch, the falls seems not as mighty until I imagined these men leaning out over it to net fish. I could not tell who was who as the tiny dark figures moved below us.
I could see them, standing close, the ropes and nets coiled like giant snakes beside them, as each family prepared their platform and planned how they would work together to net the fish, feed their families, stay alive.

For the first time, I let myself feel the sting of Standing Tall’s reaction to me. Having never met him, I could think of nothing I had done to upset him. Oh, I knew about people who disliked someone because he or she was Indian. But I didn’t think an Indian would see me the same as someone quite so small in their thinking. Even Papa clumped “Injuns” all as one in talking, though it seemed to me he treated several as unique. And here I was, among them, which was, perhaps, Standing Tall’s problem.

“Will my being here be bad for you and Standing Tall?” I asked Sunmiet. She lay in the grass beside me, eyes closed.

“He treats me like a child more than a future bride,” she said not opening her eyes. “I was promised to him in the month I was born,” she said. “So it will be. Do not worry,” she told me, turning, resting her head on hands folded beneath her cheek. Her brown eyes sparkled and she smiled. “A little magpie irritating the eagle is good, keeps him quick and alert. Standing Tall will be reminded that he will marry a wife with a mind separate from his own. Give him something to anticipate.” She grinned a wide smile that lit up the perfect features of her face.

I watched thin smoke from the family’s fires near the lodges rise in a straight line and then disappear into the higher breeze. An eagle screeched and soared out over the place we sat in quiet. Sunmiet seemed to sleep.

I laid back though I wasn’t tired. Instead, I felt the scratchy bunch-grass tickle my back as I watched fluffy clouds suspended like dumplings in the deep blue sky. The eagle entered my sight beneath the clouds and I watched him raise and lower his massive wings, pick up the currents from the ravines. The bird screeched again moving out over the river.

“The eagle honors us,” Sunmiet said through closed eyes. “He is
the only bird to move between the dream world and our own. His presence means he is pleased.”

I watched the eagle, his closeness. I could see the ruff of his thick throat, the white of his regal head, the sharpness of his eye. He flew so close above me I heard the mass of his wings cut the wind. But as he soared into the distance, lilting and resting on the currents of wind above the river, I noticed something more: the eagle soared not only by his own efforts but by the strength of something else, by the strength of the wind and his willingness to bend to it.

Something inside me shifted. For the first time in months I spoke a prayer, shared something besides my anger. Thank you, I said. For this place, this friend who sleeps beside me, and for whatever this is I am feeling.

What had once filled me up had been taken in a breath, taken my joy and my confidence with it. But like the eagle, I could rise and rest on the strength of something else. And I could bend to it while anticipation eased back into my life.

A S
EARCH OF THE
H
EART

T
he 1861 papers were full of it. Joseph had heard rumors beginning two years earlier. Now it seemed the stories were true.

Breaking into Spanish and English with equal ferocity, Benito chattered about it with his cousins and brothers, the younger men talking with their hands marking the air about how they might take advantage of it, whispering a bit when Joseph stepped near. As they rode the fence lines, marking and repairing the sections of land owned by Señor Sherar, they wondered out loud what they’d do if they were one of the lucky ones—to pick up their hat left lying on the ground and under it, discover gold in Eastern Oregon as the paper had reported.

“You could find out,” Benito said as he and Joseph walked together to the sheep corrals one July morning. The kelpie dog Joseph had recently purchased from some Australians—along with the Merino sheep—followed closely at their heels.

“Why change things?” Joseph asked. “Aren’t you the one who just takes it a day at a time?”

“Is not for me! No, for you!” Benito told him, patting him on the back as they walked. “You get bored here,” Benito said. “Lonely.
Spend too much time in Yreka. You sleep under stars or maybe have cold feet to truly live. Remember?”

Joseph did remember those years they’d packed into the northern gold fields of California and the southern Oregon Territory. A trial a minute, it seemed, requiring good wits and a strong stomach considering some of the characters and challenges they’d met. Nature, too, seemed less than encouraging those years as they fought their way through slippery thunderstorms, spring floods, and even encounters with Yuroks and Hupas and Klamath natives that were less than friendly. They had always come out on top, no shots ever fired.

But those years were past. He was settled now, mature, and so he said: “Just because you’re restless doesn’t mean I should be.” He picked up his pace. “And what makes you think I’m bored? I keep busy enough.”

“Your kind of busy is the warts on boring,” Benito said, not breathless despite the faster pace required to keep up with his long-legged friend and boss. He spit a stream into the dust. “I know you. You are busy with things others can do. Nothing here makes your heart pound as when we ran the mules. Yes,” he said as if to himself, “you are bored.” He rolled his ample lower lip over his upper and chewed on it in concentration. “I know you.”

“Not so well as you think,” Joseph said. A small irritation appeared in his voice. “I have what I wanted. This ranch. Good land, good stock. Even friends, who think they know me better than they do.” The last he spoke with finality, a sign he wished to put an end to their conversation.

Benito persisted. “You weary of all this.” He scanned the horizon glowing with signs of Joseph’s wealth. “You know what will happen next and so, you are bored. You want to be useful. As useful as pockets on longjohns,” he added with certainty. He easily climbed the railing when they reached it and sat at the top of the corral, watching Joseph’s latest acquisitions rip at the grass.

“Tell me how it happens,” Joseph said, his voice directed fully to
Benito. “It’s acceptable for you to get up every day, see the same scenery, kiss the same woman, ride the same canyons. That’s not bad for you. But I’m supposed to find fault with that routine, with all I have?”

“Yes,” Benito said, “except for the kissing part. You have not kissed the same woman for four years as I have. You should try it,” he added, winking, not in the least distressed by Joseph’s irritation. I think he must have understood that this was how Joseph worked things out: talking, arguing some. Instead he said: “The mules, they kept you guessing and so you looked to each day. Saw it different.” He grinned. “Now, you see each day the same.” He turned his mouth into a frown. “Familiar, like the hair that grows up from your big toe.”

Joseph pushed his hand against the air as if to say “enough” and dismissed his friend’s suggestions, turning instead to the sheep.

But he remembered Benito’s words. That’s what he told me. The words worked in his head as the men looked over the two rams and twelve ewes they planned to ship back east. Beyond, dotting the treeless hillsides like cotton fluffs against a homespun quilt, grazed three thousand sheep with their lambs suckling and romping. Prosperity spread before him. “If I’d been honest,” Joseph told me, “I’d have agreed with Benito. My life was a little boring.”

The man had plenty to do. His ranch had grown dramatically in the six years since they’d first stepped foot in California. The sea of sheep kept them busy along with the more than two hundred head of cow-calf pairs that roamed the redwood and fir trees of the Hupa Valley. Selling his forty mules and the pack string had saddened him at the time, he told me, but he liked not being gone so much despite what Benito thought. Here there were miles of fences that needed daily work, legal issues with neighbors over water and boundaries that needed tending to. Accounting challenges, shipping choices, management decisions about who to hire and who to let go. They all took their toll on his time.

Of course, he hired men, and some women, to do most of the work and even some of his thinking, leaving his task to be making
the choices. “That’s what prosperity’s about. Making decisions that others put into effect. Having time to do the things I wanted. Wasn’t that exactly what Frederic had come to?” I don’t think either Joseph or that fluffy man of his memory realized until later in their lives what was missing.

Leaning on the corral fence that day, Joseph and Benito discussed their plans, deciding first who would move the sheep to the railway. They’d need to arrange for food for the trip and travel with this investment of Merino sheep.

The shipment was a risk, sending breeding stock back east. They’d travel by rail to San Francisco and then by ship through the Isthmus. Much could happen and Joseph wanted good men with keen judgment and their wits about them to make the trip.

Joseph’s first choice had been for Benito to go with Fish Man, the Hupa who worked for them most of the year. But Fish Man had headed north to some river of falls, the Deschutes he called it, for all the white water, near the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. “Fishing good there,” Fish Man told him in his slow-talking English. He scratched his muscular arms then spread them wide, to mark the dip net’s size. “Dip in once, pull out huge Chinook. Maybe two. Me, I spear the fish.” He grinned, his perfect teeth flashing in his wide face. His eyes sparkled as he added, “Nice country to dry fish in. Hot. Women, too. You come see.” He’d laughed his infectious belly laugh and Joseph had grinned at the invitation.