A Sweetness to the Soul (37 page)

Bubbles snorted. “Your own house. Yes, so no one will hear your cries when he treats you like a slow horse.”

“Is that true, Sunmiet?” I asked, alarmed. “He beats you?”

Sunmiet looked away, her eyelashes fluttering in embarrassment or shame, I couldn’t be sure. “Only when he drinks the whiskey. He is always sad it happened when the night is over.” She looked up, defending. “It is so hard for him. The arguments over the fishing. The Wascos at the big river are of one family. They have fished there since time began, and now, they are told to stay away, come here, where other families care for fishing sites and he does not belong. It is too hard on him.”

“Does your father know?” I asked, missing again my own father.

Bubbles answered. “Everyone knows.”

She plopped onto a corn husk mattress spread across from Sunmiet and changed the subject as though we had been discussing choke cherries. “When did Kása give the hummingbird design to you?” she asked Sunmiet, too sweetly.

“Long ago,” Sunmiet said.

“She promised it to me before that,” Bubbles said, pouting. “Mother says you tricked her out of it. You are always there, being her hands. You never let the rest of us come around.”

Sunmiet set her jaw, as irritated as I’d seen her. Her eyelashes fluttered. “No tricks. She gave it to me. You might have had it. But you can never be found when Kása needs huckleberries picked or salmon dried or roots dug. She gave it to whom she wished. And so will I.”

“Can I persuade you to give it to me?” Bubbles asked, looking with envy on Sunmiet’s fine beadwork.

“I will think on it,” Sunmiet said. “As Huckleberry Eyes thinks on the sweat.”

Bubbles raised her eyebrows, surprised I’d been asked. “I need to
give it more time,” I said, uncertain. I wanted to confer with Joseph about it, and about Standing Tall’s behavior.

Sunmiet nodded, understanding that I needed to hang onto my wounds, for whatever reason, would let them go only when I was ready and in my own way. We shared in that, I think. She offered her healing with the sweat, and her willingness to wait.

Joseph stuck his head through the opening, Bandit pushed past him onto my lap. “Ready?” Joseph asked. I nodded, touched Sunmiet’s fingers lightly, told a lounging Bubbles goodbye, and with Bandit bouncing at my feet, we left the reservation, heading back home.

Joseph’s mood always lightened after time with Peter, chiding him about his eagle-feather, teasing, trying to trade him out of it even after all these years. They always spoke of cattle and sheep and change. Joseph found a fellow visionary in Peter and sharing his company proved ample reason to ride with me to the reservation even if he had little to say to my friend’s husband.

“Standing Tall …” I began as we rode, broaching the difficult subject with Joseph. I tried again, “Sunmiet says Standing Tall hurts her. Well, Bubbles said he did and Sunmiet didn’t deny it. Everyone supposedly knows. Why don’t they stop it?”

We rode side by side, mounted, watching the weaving grasses like waves of water through the ears of our horses.

“It’s their business,” Joseph said, uncomfortable with the subject. “They have their ways.”

“I don’t think we can dismiss it as
their
way. I mean, it’s a human way, the way we treat each other. It makes a difference, it seems to me, regardless of your race or family or tradition.”

“Don’t get involved in this, Janie,” he said. “It is something you don’t understand. We wouldn’t want someone telling us how to be with each other, would we?”

I thought for a moment. “If you were hurting me, I think I’d be very pleased to have someone stand beside me, help me fight back for what is right.”

“There’s the difference,” he said. “You’d fight back. Sunmiet won’t. It’s their way I’m telling you. Stay out of it.”

It made no sense to me: not Standing Tall’s behavior, not Sunmiet’s, and not my husband’s ability to dismiss the pain of someone else so easily. He always reached out to others. This time, he held back as though to honor Sunmiet’s people. I struggled with the quality of such honor.

“Sunmiet thinks the sweats might help me,” I said. “Even Kása said perhaps the Indian doctor could assist me. It’s a great honor, I think, that she would ask me.”

“Honor. Yes, it’s that, I suppose,” my husband said. His hands tightened on the reins. I could tell there was a hesitation for him.

“You’re reluctant? About the sweat?”

“Let’s see first about the Chinese doctor, Dr. Hey. We’ve not considered him.”

“What’s the difference?”

He was thoughtful. “One’s religion,” he said. “The other’s herbs. We could go to Canyon City in a week or two. Looks like an open winter.”

“It isn’t
my
religion,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing something that was sinful. Just seeing if the sweats could get me restful. Cleanse me.”

“You’re clean enough,” he said, irritated. I could tell the subject bothered him, something about the sweat. Or perhaps just the subject of my fertility itself distressed him. Or maybe his distress arose from the constant wondering of what part he might play in our inability to advance our family. “Suit yourself,” he said, dismissing it. Then he added more kindly, “As I’m sure you will.”

Since my marriage, the only children I’d spent time with belonged to someone else.

Lodenma had another. “Easy as a hog skinning,” she said, “long as you can stand the stench. Not to worry,” she added, her wide
hands patting mine kindly. “You’ll have one soon enough.” I felt her embarrassment at her fertility in the presence of my lack.

She was less hopeful, mentioned it less often as I turned twenty, still childless, with neither an Ella or my own. Sunmiet shared her children with me, helped fill my days. A natural mother, Sunmiet’s children each arrived larger than the one before. But she had no throwing fits. After Anne, she’d been healed enough within a day to move about. Of course, having her mother and auntie and Standing Tall’s family close by made nurturing as available as mother’s milk. I envied the family Sunmiet’s children were born into.

Even Bubbles delivered a healthy boy the summer of ’68. Still stocky though sporting a waist now, she had mended some of her ways which had persuaded a handsome Koosh to claim her. Their union seemed fitting since she’d once claimed him from the river.

For Joseph and me, there was no baby-planning, no vanilla-smelling toddler splashing in the copper boiler, no little voices crying in the night. I played catch with Benito and Anna’s children since they lived so close; took them on rides to spots where deer slept, even introduced them to my pistol, with their parents’ permission.

Joseph never spoke of our disappointment though he must have felt it. I’d see him watching Peter and his son riding together, their heads bent in planning, their voices raised in laughter and I knew he must have missed it terribly, that rawhide tightness that comes from well-matched strands.

We caught glimpses of Ella sometimes when the St. Mary’s girls went on outings near The Dalles and we happened to be near. From a distance, we watched Ella go from being a little girl to quite a proper young lady. Joseph and I did not discuss her, keeping what we felt for her inside, to not hurt the other.

I had not spoken with my mother since the day she shut Ella from us.

For Joseph and me, those were years of coping a marriage and a friendship rather than a family. And though we each took time when we could to be with Sunmiet’s children or made ourselves favorite
auntie and uncle for Benito and Anna’s two, Joseph and I mostly spent our time together, learning each other’s ways, not the ways of children.

I discovered how Joseph liked his venison fried (thin-sliced, lightly floured, and seared once on each side) and that he loved to give—gifts of silver, gifts of time, gifts made from wood. He discovered I liked the feel of things: rough wool woven into warmth, alder cut and carved into a child’s toy, and the grit of earth beneath my fingers and the vegetables and blooms that grew. On our rides together, Joseph often took the time to mark a flowering plant, promising to return later to transplant it in the fall. And this he did, expanding the variety of flowers that pushed up through the worked soil each spring creating splashes of color around the weathered wood of our home.

It turned out Joseph’s temper was for things that didn’t always work the way he wanted; he rarely used it against people. He demanded much but treated others with more tenderness than he did himself. He assigned work well, built on the strengths of his buckaroos.

Joseph also spent hours in quiet walking, sketching, allowing me to sometimes simply stroll beside him in the silence. I watched satisfaction appear readily on his face when he saw his sketches rise to real—to barns and smokehouses and especially to the pack trails he reinforced across meandering streams, up steep switchbacks. Trails that looked like some giant had dragged his finger across steep hillsides, cleared rock and ridges with his fingernail into narrow, twisting roads. Joseph loved seeing accomplishments where some said none could be. He was always a giant in my mind.

And like an attentive husband, he noticed and remembered things to make a difference. That I liked early morning rides regardless of the weather. That it would please me to have him ask permission to join me in them, honoring my privacy and my right to choose. And no gift he ever gave me had more meaning than one received each morning while I slowly met the day. Half asleep, his
arms around me, my head resting on his chest, I’d feel his lips upon my forehead, hear him whisper through my rest.

“What is it?” I asked the first time it happened.

He was quiet. I felt him swallow, then he said, “I’m prayin’ on ye, darlin’. It’s how I start me day.”

Nothing ever lifted me on my sometimes weary way as remembering his lips against my skin asking for blessings on my day.

And we nurtured each other’s dreams: mine, to have a family still; Joseph’s, to own the falls, build a home there and a bridge, open up the interior of Oregon.

In all those years, I counted myself privileged to be married to my best friend.

“I don’t understand how you hope to bring a stagecoach down the ridge,” I told him one morning as we curled under the down comforter together. Dawn eased up the hollow like a lazy dog, slow but sure to arrive through the starched white curtains over the bedroom windows. Over the years, Joseph had shown me portions of his ideas in his sketch books. Still I struggled with understanding what he planned to really do.

“Let’s get up,” he said, impulsive. He pushed the down comforter away from our faces presenting us with a blast of November air. “Ride down to the falls so I can really show you.” Thinking further he added: “Pack a lunch and we’ll picnic. Make a day of it, ride up the other side where you can really see it.”

“It’s November!” I said. “Picnic?”

“Where’s your sense of adventure? Have you lost it with your youth?” He poked my midriff, still slender, showing no signs of aging. Or of birthing.

“Oh, pooh!” I told him. “I’ll always be younger than you, old man.” I poked him back, his small paunch showing the signs of regular food cooked with loving hands.

He laughed, pushing me out of bed, the rag rug delaying the
squeal I always made when my feet hit the cold floor beyond it.

“Bundle up,” he said, getting dressed. “I’ll bring up the mules.”

“O-o-o-h,” I said, “we really are going to ride up steep slopes if you’re bringing on the big guns.”

“Don’t want to take any chances on slick surfaces riding with an old woman on a skittish horse,” he assured me as he stomped into his boots. “Wear your fur boots. It’ll be warmer. And the split skirt.”

“I know, I know,” I told him. “I’m old enough to dress myself.”

I grabbed my clothes, bounced past him on tip toes into the main room to stand in front of the glowing embers of the fire. A shiver passed through me and I reached for the bellows to fan the flames. I still held them when Joseph came up behind me. He wrapped his arms around me, brushed his beard on my face. “I love you,” he said as he released me then shot out through the door, chanting, “old and aging as you are.”

I threw the bellows at him. They hit the closed door.

It was a wonderful trip! And for the first time I did truly see what he saw.

“And we’ll build a huge house here,” he said, “a hotel, two, three stories of the finest wood, with huge rooms and glass windows so people can look out onto the falls.” We were standing on the narrow strip of land that bordered the river, just beyond the crossing.

“They’ll practically step out onto the bridge,” I pointed out, “if you build so close.”

“There’ll be room,” he said, “for the road to run past the front and turn east, to cross the bridge. I’ve checked it. A big bridge, wide enough to accommodate wagons and stages and herds of cattle and sheep. That rope lava, over there will be the backdrop for the hotel.” He turned my shoulders around so I faced the row of rock posts Pastor Condon said were of the Clarno Period, unique in their thickness as they rose up from the river canyon forming a steep, flat ridge at the top. He spoke more loudly, to overcome the roar of the falls.

“What about my garden?” I said. “Where will that be? There isn’t even any soil here, just rock.” I was thinking of what I would
leave behind, the rich black soil that gave up fresh vegetables and good seeds for the drying gourds each year.

“Beside the ledge,” he said. “We’ll bring in earth, loads of it, enough for a garden and an orchard. And over there,” he pointed to the base of the Tygh Ridge, moving his finger and my eyes up to the top of the steep and dipping ravines dotted with sagebrush and junipers, “we’ll build up the pack trail. Bring it all the way down to the bridge. Improve the crossing then build a real road up the other side. Cut through that lava and open up the way to Bake Oven and Canyon City. Rocks and sagebrush roots as a base so the road’ll withstand the rain and snow. People will know it’s safe to go this way and take less time.” His enthusiasm grew with each shared detail.

“Who will build it all? It’ll take dozens of men, just for the buildings. And the roads … How do you propose to pay for these grand ideas,” I said, popping holes in his dreams. I’d become more familiar with our finances over the years and found that Joseph was never restricted by ordinary resources such as cash.