A Sweetness to the Soul (58 page)

They also planted trees about their house. Guess we all do that here, so few natural trees grow. Mrs. Moore had special problems what with her thirty-five cats and had to wrap the trunks in burlap to protect them. Spirit has left our trees alone so we have expanded our orchards.

Joseph wanted a fifty-room house. Fifty was the critical number for nurturing profits he told me. Fifty hardly sounded like a “home”
to me. So we settled for a house with a basement under dining rooms and kitchens, laundry rooms and pantries, an office and large saloon and guest rooms all with linen closets numbering thirty-three.

“I’ll not have this built as close to the river as your barn,” I said, firm.

“The rimrocks limit us,” he said, showing me as we walked beside the rope-like lava that had been the backdrop for our life. “And we can’t go up much past three stories I don’t believe. Guests won’t climb those stairs; help neither.”

But he agreed, we would not build right at the river’s edge though where the house sits there’s barely a wagon’s width distance from the porch to those turbulent river waters.

It is the largest house between California and the Columbia River, a fact that tickles my husband no end. But then, he does not have to clean it.

I do find pleasure in seeing a building rise from nothing. It is much like watching flowers grow. The ground is cleared, a seed is planted, and we await the push through earth. It appears, fresh with dew each morning, each day having changed it by another leaf or two. Sherar House rose from the flat rocks beside the river in much the same way.

The foundation is of native stones, three feet thick. The basement is the coolest place around on hot summer days though I confess, I always scan it well for reptiles before I step my moccasins on the floor. We keep ice there, under sawdust just as Frederic had, and chip away at it through the year. It serves us well for iced teas, lemonade and the ice-creams we often make. It’s almost too cold to store the peaches and apples in but is a good place to scuttle to during thunderstorms. We still keep the melons in the hay barn sunk into the grass from Finnigan, and when we pluck them out at Christmas time they’re just as pink and fresh as newly pulled.

All the lumber for Sherar House came from Redwood City, California. Joseph ordered horse teams loaded with redwood brought north to build our dream. We encountered our old friend J. W. in
the process, passed into his seventies and still traveling, now driving freighters instead of leading mules. “For something to do,” he said, adjusting his smudged spectacles, “since the wife died.”

If we could have constructed the hotel and done nothing else, our life would have been so simple. Why I should have expected such indicates I’m growing older, wanting life to sit beside me on a porch swing instead of pulling me into rough and tumble as it does, like children playing statue on a summer’s eve. Even with the means to pay others to perform the work, the building engaged us. Other constructing did too.

At Finnigan, Joseph built a massive hay barn. It also housed a hundred sheep, as many calves, and stood a team and wagon, too. When that was finished, he built a smaller barn across The Dalles Military Highway. It is my favorite of the barns he built. Twenty cows can stand and chew their cuds in stanchions while calves wear barbed blabs forged up by the farrier to keep them from nursing while we milk. I still consider Finnigan mine and do not mind at all the time it takes for me to ride there, check on cows or calves, confer with Jim Dennis, or eat his famous sour dough biscuits while we talk of bulls and calves. And while I would not change my living in the canyon of the falls, I do enjoy the mountains sparkling in the summer heat or watching the weather roll in across the wheatfields from a distance. These are views afforded only when I leave the river canyon of my belonging and travel up the twisting grade, following the ridgetop on the way to my green river.

Because of my traveling back and forth the fourteen miles or so between Sherar’s Bridge and Finnigan, Joseph decided that a decent road ought to be built up the grade, one that could still use the Buck Hollow bridge but take people north toward The Dalles Road better, let them use a buggy if they choose. Of course, he didn’t expect to be thanking the Lord over that bridge nor rebuilding it either.

Having thought about the road, he began it. A trained engineer from Oregon State came down to see the work my husband did and he was more than complimentary. “As good as with surveying instruments,”
he said. “Better in some places where you’ve followed the contours of the ridges but fixed the pitch better for horses and wagons.” He rode up the grade in a buggy, amazed that my husband and his crew of Indian workers had made this winding road ease its way up the ridge above Buck Hollow, rising like a lazy snake two thousand feet upward in just a mile or so. “Sure you’ve had no schooling in surveying?” he asked. My husband beamed.

His schooling has been seeing, walking, watching, learning from the land about him. He looks to work
with
the rocks and hills and natural grasses, not against them; ponders why a grade’s washed out then fixes it, being always gentle with the land leading to the falls he’s come to love.

So when I make my trips to Finnigan and on to visit Ella, I have the finest road. And two fine bridges to go across to reach Sherar House, though after the difficulty we had last spring I wasn’t sure if I would ever see again those bridges or our fine hotel.

Joseph oversaw construction even while we collected tolls, served meals, and performed those daily drudgeries of living.

Joseph wished the tightest house, so the hotel is held together with fine wood pegs. Redwood glows everywhere. The maids keep it all shiny—inside walls, wainscoting, even the shutters on the dozens of windows, and the porches—of which there are several. During the season, Joseph displays his largest antlers from the second-story porch facing the river. And on the Fourth of July, we shoot flares and Tai’s firecrackers out over the river to the delight of all the children.

At the toll paying end are bay windows. It’s inviting, I like to think, and folks stop and count their toll in the bucket. Some come inside for a shot of C. J. Stubling’s whiskey or a piece of fresh peach pie in season. They all don those buckskin moccasins.

I have weakened in my old age, and now let the setter sleep inside and sweep his tail across the hardwood floors. Spirit has managed to elude the coyotes and still be with us, a cat alone. “We live so far out we need our own tom cat,” my husband says.

We will have Tai cooking here until he dies I’m sure, having added
the latest cooking range to the large kitchen, boasting inside running water—enough to steam the plates. Two pantries, one dark one, to keep grains and flours in and all the weevils out. And a second dining room to seat all the help. Especially Anne who now directs their labors.

The water is a convenience found in few hotels. Each floor has a bathing room for tubbing privacy. And the latest in commodes. We’ve moved the outhouse seating in. No more rustling up moccasins for a night walk or creaking about in the dark for a thunder bucket. Most of the guests’ rooms are on the second level and the housekeepers and servers that don’t come across from the summer camps, sleep on the third.

When Joseph first showed me how the cliff orchard would be connected to the house, I was skeptical, but his design is perfect. He’s built a small bedroom with a porch facing the lava ledge. And from the porch my husband has created what has become his trademark: a bridge. We can cross from the hotel to our ledge garden, pick peaches and apples, and in the fall, gather sweetgrapes from Alice’s flourishing arbor.

That man and his bridges! Who could have known how those bridges would impact our lives, taking us from here to there, across difficult waters. Bridges are a part of us, my husband’s dreams, even our hopes for a family. God always provided someone or something along our path to make needed bridges across life’s paths.

At Sunmiet’s mother’s burial not long ago, the elder spoke of bridges, too. At the dressing, Morning Dove’s body was draped in white buckskins and wrapped in a colorful blanket. We mourners then each picked up handfuls of earth and dropped them on Morning Dove’s body, walking by the gravesite, women first, then men. And when we finished, the elder spoke his prayer. “Death is just a bridge between this world and the next,” Indian Peter said. “It is not to fear. We will not be on this bridge for as long as the eagle flies, but only for a moment. Then we will pass over to those waiting on the other side.” I could picture Rachel, Pauline, and Loyal, even Papa, arms outstretched, waiting.

I thought of those words earlier this June, too, when J. W. and I stood near the Buck Hollow bridge. I’d been at Finnigan with trusty Bandy, my bay gelding. Patsy, the Irish Setter, panted beside me on the buggy’s leather seat, her tongue dripping onto a bouquet of wildflowers that slowly wilted beside me—evidence I’d been dallying along the creek that perfect June day in 1893. High rimrocks lined the river canyon on either side and sliced cleanly into the royal lupine blue sky.

I took a brief midday break beneath the cottonwood trees and let my hat lie in the grassy shade. Even worked my knife on a soft wood block, carving. I didn’t stay long. Joseph would be coming back from the flour mill or perhaps return early from work on the grade and I could meet him at the house for supper if I hurried.

I met J. W. and his freighter at the Buck Hollow bridge, just before the place where the clear stream joins the river, below the twisting, swirling falls and below our own Sherar’s Bridge. Pure coincidence that I should meet him there beside the river. He was ahead of me on the grade. When he saw me behind him, he pulled up, motioned me beside his freighter, and we chatted a bit. He didn’t rub his eyes, not once.

I guess I’d forgotten how kind his leathered face was, how broad his smile. He squinted his sun-hardened eyes at me and I wondered if he still saw a sassy girl sitting beside a dog or if his memory had grown older too and so he saw me as the busy, bony matron I’ve become.

“Good timing, Missus,” he said, touching his fingers to his hat in greeting. “Go on ahead. No reason for you to ride drag.”

“Why, thank you, J. W.,” I said, still somewhat formal as his presence always made me think of Papa, too. “I’ve done my share of tasting dust today. We could certainly use some rain up the hollow, dry as it is.” I shaded my eyes with my hand, aware that the sun prepared to set behind the rimrocks as we spoke.

We chatted for a moment more. His gnarled hands crossed
gently over his knees, loosely holding reins. His bulky body covered in patched homespun shifted easily as the team stomped impatiently, rattled singletrees and loose tugs, flicked tails at flies. Bees still hummed in the June heat and the fragrance of late lilacs drifted to us in the light breeze. J. W. eventually got down to check the harness, then tipped his sweat-stained hat at me and waved me on. “Be straight behind you,” he said, “in a flash.”

I snapped the reins on Bandy’s back and started across the bridge, thinking the roar that rose behind me was the wind picking up as it always does in the river canyon at dusk.

J. W. and his team and wagon started across the bridge behind me, I thought, as Buck Hollow passed under me. I heard the clatter at a distance meant not to press me or the horse. And then the rising shout of men’s voices, shouting not in anticipation of reaching the inn for a good evening’s meal, but men in front of me waving frantically, swinging their arms to hurry me on. Peter ran toward me. Bandy, startled and confused by the running and the roaring, reared backward, stepped sideways.

I worked the reins, my knuckles white, calling to the horse to steady him as we rolled across the bridge. The dog barked close to my ear.

“Patsy! Quiet!” I snapped. She leaped forward, well beyond the frightened horse. I heard J. W.’s voice somewhere behind me, yelling, his words muffled, lifting now above a roar I just could not place. Peter ran, ran toward me. Behind him other wranglers, their faces masks of fright and terror.

I heard the roar and splinter of wood behind me and Patsy’s barking as she ran, scaring further my terrified horse charging toward safety at the toll bridge and the barn. Peter and the men stopped the buggy, lifted me out, swirling my skirt at my ankles as my feet touched the rocks.

I turned back to Buck Hollow bridge. A gasp caught in my throat. Instead of the bridge, I watched a wall of water fourteen feet high push the gentle little creek into a massive, rushing flood of roots
of trees and logs and twisted shrubs and branches. I stared at the brown legs of J. W.’s team rolling between frothy white and turquoise water, rolling over pots and pans and tiny cans of baking powder swirling up and over and beyond, pushing, pushing on into the Deschutes River, taking with it everything now in its way. It spared not even the splintering bridge I’d just been on.

The twisting, dirty water pulled the animals over and over. I simply stood and watched, spent by the energy of seeing so much loss in just a flash of seconds. J. W. stood forlorn but safely on this side.