A Sweetness to the Soul (57 page)

Carrie saw his kindness and persistence, and when he finally got up his courage to ask her, into his clear blue eyes she said, “Yes! I thought you’d never!”

Her trousseau came from Lipman Wolfe, one of Portland’s finest stores. I packed our bags and Carrie, Joseph, and I left in the summer in 1889 for Nicholville, New York. Samuel joined us two months later. On August 15, surrounded by dozens of nieces and nephews, some brothers and sisters and his mother, Joseph and I were witnesses at the wedding of these two young people I knew would be forever in my life.

They honeymooned in Nova Scotia where Sam’s people came from, and stayed there, visiting, getting to know them and each other. Then they made their way to the high desert country of Reno. I wondered if they walked some of the same spots as Alice and Crickett when they made their yearly journey there. I never asked, though.

Mabel Jane was born in Reno, just nine months and one week after her parents were married.

Oh, how I missed them! I missed being there when Mabel Jane came. Missed spoiling as a
kása
should. Time with Ella and with Sunmiet and their children eased the distance, but I knew nothing would ever do until Carrie came back home. Here, to Sherar’s Bridge or at least close by.

I don’t think Carrie liked it much in Reno, living with her husband’s brothers, watching him see if he could make a stake by plastering houses in the growing town. So when word came that they planned to travel back, I knew they’d be staying, at least if I had my way.

Just a few months before Carrie came back home, Joseph reminded me of a warning I had given him about his calf barn. While shoveling out the manure one day, out through the open door
just six inches from the drop into the river, a curious calf wandered by. Before the stockman could deter it, the calf stepped out. It plunged thirty feet into the twisting water below, and was carried swiftly out of sight.

Joseph was distressed when told of the calf’s drowning, more for the animal than for any financial loss we suffered. There’d be no hope for it, as for anything—beast or man—who found itself in the boil of those swift, relentless waters. Lost bodies were rarely ever even recovered. The first Crickett’s hadn’t been.

So when Peter rode to tell us that a calf had been spotted bellowing from a cave up under the ridge beside the river, Joseph was elated. “Think it’s mine?” he asked Peter. “Could be one of yours.”

We ran our herds together, Peter and his son’s and the Sherar herd, separating them at round-up with the different brands. Ours is a single J, left hip. Peter’s is shaped like a wineglass, though I expect it has a different meaning for him. “Can’t see the brand on this one,” Peter said. “Will help get it, no matter.”

“Good!” Joseph said and organized a crew to do just that.

It was an event worth recording though some say it typified my husband’s lust for acquisition, counting up the cost of one small calf. I think the event better typifies his need for passion, for taking risks, for that’s exactly what it was, what his life has been.

With Peter, Joseph and several of his men crossed the bridge and looked back at the barn. Just below it, not far downstream, up under the cliff but still thirty feet down the side, sat a small red calf at the mouth of a shallow cave. “Sure enough there,” Joseph said. “What’d ye think?”

The men pondered the situation, considering this way and that, then returned to the barn side. Several of the Indians noticed the commotion of the gathering and coming away from their scaffoldings, offered their advice. While a mule team was harnessed, others gathered up rawhide and hemp ropes. They secured one rope to a boulder at the base of the rimrock in case the team faltered and the other end to my husband. Then with separate rawhide ropes, they
attached Joseph and the team, then lowered him inch by inch over the sheer face side.

“Back! Back!” the handler spoke to the mules. They twisted in their harness, wary about the roaring water and the closeness to the river’s edge.

The roar of the water at that site, still rolling and twisting some five hundred feet beyond the falls, made yelling directions difficult. Mist boiled up from the churning. A sea gull screeched. Some men stood on the bridge shouting, waving their arms; several more watched and counseled from the Buck Hollow side.

That’s where I stood, fingers to my mouth to keep from shouting, knowing there was nothing I could do. For it was Peter to whom Joseph entrusted his life that day. Peter, who gave the order to lower him over the side and huddled close to the edge, gave encouragement, looked back to the team, signaled, ordered, while his friend was lowered to the mist of the river. It was a mark of their devotion—the way Peter cared for Joseph, how Joseph trusted him—devotion begun when these two men had crossed that river together nearly thirty years before.

They had made a kind of chair for Joseph with the ropes. He carried a coil of rawhide draped over his head and his shoulder. I saw him signal with his arm to the men across from him who relayed the message back to Peter, above him, and his son. Peter’s grandsons, Frank and Young Peter, peered over the edge and I found myself worrying almost as much for people’s safety at the cliff side as for Joseph’s.

He pushed out from the rocks with his feet, the way a mountain climber might. The rocks were sharp and the rope tension severe, but Peter had doubled them, for extra safety, had several men on the ropes in addition to the team. Strapped and swinging like a pendulum, he made his way down the side. A slip, a gasp, caught ropes, a jerky drop, and Joseph stood, to cheers, at the cave’s floor. It was a shallow cave and didn’t permit my large husband to stand upright in it.

The calf was cold and frightened and did not dart or bound
from him as I thought it might. The men on our side signaled Peter who lowered another set of ropes. They tangled once on the knobby edge of a rock, jerked free and dropped down. Still, Joseph had to reach out and grab the lines and I held my breath as his bad leg buckled and he slipped, the rope around his middle holding him, strained against the side, as his legs went into the surging water.

A shout from our side signaled Peter who eased the team forward. The ropes jerked Joseph up like a marionette. “Not too far! He’ll hit his head!” someone yelled. We signaled. Peter stopped the team, and Joseph stood bent, head intact, once again.

“Ready!” he shouted when he’d wrapped the calf. He tugged a signal on the rope and those on my side signaled Peter who gave the order to bring the calf on up. It rose, stiff-legged, bawling as it bounced against the side, caught once on the same knobby rock and then was pulled free, settled on solid ground. A cheer rose up as one man carried the calf away from the river’s edge, walking it back to the barn.

“One to go!” Peter shouted and again the crews moved to Joseph’s line. The team pulled. The men watched the ropes strain and tug. The muscles of the fishermen, familiar with the power needed to lift a sixty-pound salmon from the boiling falls, felt the effort and exertion of lifting four times that weight—were glad the team was there to do it.

Coming up was twice as hard. The rope was slippery and even in that short time, showed signs of fraying from the sharp lava rocks. At the point I knew he was safe—men were cheering and clapping him and each other on the back—relief washed over me, then great joy.

His safety gave me pause as I watched the men peel off his ropes, hand him a blanket. Why would my husband risk his life for something that, while dear, did not compare with his worth, his value to me and to so many others?

I asked him that later when I walked with him to the calf barn to check on the other survivor.

“Better than robbing banks,” he said.

I missed his meaning. “No,” I corrected. “I want to know why you did that today, risked dying, just for a calf.”

“Better than robbing banks,” he repeated. “Or driving hell-bent down the ridge road on a wagon load of dynamite. Got the same inside push, same flood of energy that those might bring but with less danger, really gaining something for the risk.”

I was sorting out his words, keeping quiet for a change. “Would you have me take the risk of driving cattle from here to Utah? Suppose that would gain the feeling.” He ran his hands over the calf, checking for bruises, dabbed some liniment on an open wound. “There’s something rich,” he said holding his stomach, “inside. When you can do it together. Have something to accomplish, a goal, and then put your minds and muscles into one track and everyone gets there, together, at the end. Gets there because you were together and knew where you were going. There’s something really good about that feeling.”

Swallows nested in the barn pitch. They swooped and dipped, chattered above us. I was aware of warm animal smells, the presence of my husband. He took my hand and we walked out through the massive double doors left open in August to cool the barn. From the doorway we could see the bridge and the inn, the cliff orchard as we called it now, small trees dotting the red rocks with green. Indians were back on their scaffoldings, women off to the side next to their pink salmon halves turning red on the drying racks. The sun set and a pink glow hovered over the canyon.

“Even this,” he said. “We could have done none of this alone. Without others.”

“Without your energy and vision,” I said. “And God’s plan and blessing.”

“And it’s twice the blessing that he would give us this, all the people and resources we need, and then let us have it not just as paupers, barely scraping by, but richly, able to give to others. ‘Good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, running over.’ ” His eyes had a faraway look. “Turners gave me that verse, and I’ve hung on to it.”

At the bridge he stopped, looked up again at the cliff orchard. Alice still tended the sweetgrape arbor. It had become her favorite haunt when she wasn’t fishing. Joseph stared at it. “There’s one more thing,” he said, “that I promised we would do together. And we can now. No reason not to.”

“What?” I asked, not sure I wished to hear the answer. “I already have my family, everything I want.”

“Build that house,” he said, a catch in his throat. “I want to build a grand house to sleep fifty or more. Solid redwood, porches and gables and all the latest conveniences.” I stared at him, shook my head, and smiled. This man with his visions. “Most importantly,” he added, looking down at me with that twinkle in his blue eyes so I knew that it would happen, “I want a room large enough to hold a crowd, one for you and me to dance in.”

T
HE
D
ANCE

L
ike
spi’lya’s
, “coyote’s,” winter fur, his hair has grayed. It’s thinning, and what he’s missing from the top now cascades from his chin, a muffler for his mouth. His eyes droop a bit and his left hand has taken on a shake. But this November, when he turns sixty, I suspect he’ll load his new Winchester Model ’92 and ride the hills above Tygh Valley or scour the ravines of Buck Hollow and bring home another buck. He does so love to hunt. Still wears his red wool vest and turquoise bola for the occasion. Some things have not changed despite the years since first our paths crossed not far from here, near the reptile pile, just beyond these falls. I still marvel at how he has seeped into my life, like the snowmelt of the mountains, spreading new over old.

Challenge is still his constant companion, the very newest being this house or hotel some call it. “Sherar House” it’s known as. It took nearly a year to complete and it stands as a monument to his love of building. Risk, too, times being shaky now, in ’93. But mostly, Sherar House is a symbol of a man’s great love wrapped up in a promise kept.

Joseph began constructing it for real that very evening of the calf rescue. When we finished our walk, he dusted off his sketch book
and began drawing. He showed me designs of homes he once admired back east, doodles of ideas of his own.

A big home had always been a fantasy for me, one nurtured that one day of closeness with my mother where I danced alone and thought of marriage and my future children. I had never dreamed I’d see a home large enough to sleep one hundred, though after seeing what my husband could accomplish I should have been forewarned.

I wish that I could see as Joseph does, see the lines and angles set against a backdrop of his choosing. I close my eyes, imagine walls, a porch or roof. They never look the same to me as when the structure’s finished.

“We’ll visit places,” Joseph said. “Make a picnic of it.” And so before we asked the death-defying dynamite crew to blast the basement from the rocks, before Peter’s crew began framing up the walls, we visited other houses in the region. We made an adventure of our search, my husband honoring my need for information, my joy in anticipation almost greater than the thing itself.

A favorite house belonged to John Moore, just north of the Grass Valley country. Californians, they’d sold out an interest in a gold mine and arrived with $100,000 and a wish to stay. They bought land outright, brought their cattle, and built a two-story Italianate home with single bay windows on both stories and gables and a chandelier that would turn an Astor’s head. I especially liked the transoms over each door that twisted on a pin to help circulate the air and heat. Painted with sepia brown, they bore a spider web design and made me think immediately of Sunmiet and her dreamcatchers. They are repeated in our home.