A Sweetness to the Soul (8 page)

Instead of firing, he turned, saw me with eyes pinched shut against the anticipated crack and brought the weapon down. “Won’t learn that way,” he said. “Don’t get soft on me now, Janie, and close your eyes before you shoot. Won’t hit nothin’ that way. Got to face what you fear. Here. Put your cheek to it.” I could tell that he would have rather shot the rifle himself.

With his arms around me, his bushy beard close to my face, I tried to line the bead at the end of the barrel in the notch closer to my eyes. Papa placed his arm over mine as I stretched my left arm along the barrel and with the right, placed my fingers over the cold metal of the trigger. It felt safe with him there, his wide hands over my smaller ones. He smelled of tobacco and gun powder, friendly scents that even today bring back memories of my childhood and sweet days with Papa and his children. I knew I could please him; I was sure.

In fact, the whole day pleased me. I’d helped Mama and kept her happy. I’d met an Indian named Sunmiet, shared a secret with Pauline, hid a treasured carving we could speak of (and tell Rachel about when she could keep a secret); now I was learning to shoot Papa’s Kentucky.

“Take a deep breath, child,” Papa said. “Pull the rear trigger till it clicks. Good. When I say so, let out part of your air. On three, stop breathin’, hold the rifle as still as a fishing-heron and squeeze the front trigger. Just a whisker of pressure on it now,” he said. “Ready?” And when I nodded he added, “All right, child, on three.”

Then, just before he began the count, he gave me one more instruction, one that distracted me though spoken in his softest voice. “Just pretend it’s an Injun’s head there in that circle on the tree,” he’d said. “When I say ‘three’ just aim for that Injun’s eyes.”

I don’t begrudge him his jaundiced view. It’s doubtful he would even have seen it as such what with Indians uprising, neighbors manning forts. It’s just that his image made me think of something I didn’t wish to.

I held my breath, blinked away an unplanned wetness in my eyes, let air out. Then with feather-light fingers, I touched the cold trigger.

“Papa! Papa!” Rachel interrupted, shouting, just as I sent an explosion and a cloud of dirt high into the air. Papa cursed. “Get Lodenma!” Rachel said, breathless, pulling at Papa’s sleeve. “Baby’s coming early!”

My shot ended up far right of the target. Papa jerked the rifle from my arms, turned to run toward the house, leaving me standing with the recoil of the Kentucky burning in my shoulder and the wonderment of another baby on its way.

I had so wanted to please Papa.

I knew it was not the distraction of Rachel sending Papa for the midwife that had taken my eye from the target. No, it was his last instruction. For the face of the only “Injun” I could imagine when Papa gave his direction was Sunmiet’s.

It was a face I simply couldn’t shoot at, not on that day, nor any other.

D
READS

T
he thing is, you cannot ease the pain of loss without enormous energy which you have already expended dealing with your grief. Memories flood up from everywhere to overcome you, the new never as good as the old. The smell of hollyhocks, the making of a doll, the sounds of fast-flowing water, none ever arrives from your memory without bringing a bittersweet pain. The pain does not disappear just because you wish it. That was part of the lesson being twelve taught me and I carried it well into my life.

For years I thought about it every day, wondered if the time would ever come when I could roll Pauline’s carving between my fingertips or listen to a child catch his breath in his sleep without remembering in great detail the events of one week of that year.

Those events changed my life. But then, it is rarely the event but our reactions to it that change our lives I’ve found. I know that now. That week changed what I thought I longed for.

Papa said 1860 was the “dawn of a new era” though South Carolina’s secession happened later. Of course, our year had already been mightily and irrevocably changed by then.

Mama was busier than ever, I remember. She ministered to the newcomers, helping them find shelter, baking and taking food to
them, acting as a midwife when she could. She often dragged us along “to entertain the little ones” while she helped some woman pound laundry on the rocks or skin a hog. I liked what she did to help, but felt green-eyed jealousy, too, over time that others got with her.

Papa, too, was busy and his interests turned to politics. There was war talk among the Paiutes far away but he worried some about “our Injuns” as he called them, wondering if they would shift their peaceful ways.

Papa expressed his views more stridently, getting louder when someone disagreed. Mama never hid the corn liquor when people stopped by but I heard her threaten to a time or two. I can still see them: Papa and Mr. Henderson—with his large stogie bobbing from the corner of his mouth—jawing, they called it, working hard to get the military to release some of their holdings, make them available for sale, so “The Dalles” as Dalles City was being called now, could grow. Settlers needed places to live beside the Columbia. “Why, the army even owns the docks!” Papa’d say, pounding his pipe against his brogans. “How can a river town grow with no right to own its docks?” Henderson and his cronies would murmur their assent while the heat rose from the fireplace and the fervor in their hearts.

Over cups of corn liquor, they talked of Indian uprisings, the unsettled Paiutes, the quiet Sahaptin people, the brassy Wascos who still demanded their fishing sites along the Columbia despite the treaty. “Those Wascos are a trial,” Henderson noted. “Acting like worldly traders, flashing their affluence, talking like they know what’s what. Even speaking French some of ’em.”

“It’s Chinookan jargon,” Papa told him. “And they know their way around their world; ours too.” He relit his pipe and smoked. “Negotiated a pretty fair treaty, you ask me. Got territory south of here not ever a part of their history.” He shook his head in a begrudging admiration.

The men spoke of settlement and growth and the need to “take advantage of both.”

Mama and Papa were both busy with the Methodist Church where we spent one Sunday in The Dalles each month. Other Sundays, we joined our neighbors at the Walker School for services.

I often watched the little ones while Mama looked after people or spent time with the Methodist Ladies’ Aid Society, or if Papa was busy, or when the neighbors came to sit a spell and jaw. Not smart enough, I remember thinking, to listen to the grown-ups, but wise enough to watch after all their children. Seemed a contradiction to me then as I thought the children the greater responsibility. And now, as I watch the mothers send their young daughters off to tend the little ones when they’re just little ones themselves. It is one of Sunmiet’s family’s qualities I most admire, that children are allowed to be a part of learning from adults, challenging themselves by watching and listening instead of being set aside.

I had no memory of Mama’s South and didn’t know what secession meant so would have stayed to listen and learned about the impending war if they had let me. When Mama and Papa and their friends began their “deliberations” as Mama called them, I rolled my eyes at Rachel knowing we’d soon be asked to step outside.

Often, we two herded Pauline and Loyal out the door before they asked, knowing it would come. Baby George could still sleep through it.

Yes, there were five of us Herbert children in 1860 and doing well. Until that April.

It was Pauline’s birthday. Mama and Papa and their neighbors, the prosperous Hendersons, and the up-and-coming Senior Mays sat inside, deliberating.

“Take the little ones with you when you go, will you please, Jane?” Mama said. Rachel and I headed toward the door. Mrs. Henderson fanned herself with a lace hankie and smiled her wooden-tooth smile at me as she sat on the parlor chair, her skirts flounced about her like bloomers on someone standing in a pond. She looked equally as out of place in our small parlor.

“Give Lodenma a break,” Mrs. Henderson said as was her way in her high pitched, little girl’s voice.

“When you come in later,” Mama continued, her voice hurried like she had little time to talk, “we’ll have peppermint tea and cut Pauline’s day of birth cake. Run along now.”

“Yes, run along now,” Mrs. Henderson added. She had an annoying habit of repeating what others said, as though to confirm my suspicion that she had not one original thought in her head.

It meant a few more little hands to hold, taking Lodenma’s girl, but I truly didn’t mind. Lodenma smiled and nodded her concurrence. Her eyes drooped tiredly, a young mother not roused by her children, but wearied.

“Let’s play statue,” Rachel said as soon as we left our clapboard house and stepped onto the grass lawn sliced out of the rolling hills. “I’ll swing first.”

It was like Rachel to think of something quickly, something that would put her in charge.

“You’re always first,” Pauline complained. “You swing too hard. My arm hurts from last time.” She rubbed her elbow delicately, her lower lip ready to drop to the ground.

“Baby,” Rachel said. Her dark sausage curls flipped as she turned to me. “I want to be first,” she said. She always expected me to act as arbiter. The set jaw of stubbornness she was known for was just beginning, and I was deciding whether to let it grow into a full-fledged whine or let Rachel have her way when the Henderson boy interrupted.

He kicked a rock with his foot first. He was taller than me and at fourteen, more than two years older. I only saw him move fast at the butcher shop. On more than one occasion he waltzed into Twin Dika’s shop and while Twin’s back was bent to some carcass, Luther would grab the end of a spool of string and whiz out the door with it. The trick was to see how long a string he could get before Twin noticed and cut that umbilical cord—and the game—with his knife. It was a favorite competition with the boys and Luther always ended
with the longest string. Other than that, he moved slowly, like a summer sunset.

“S’pose Pauline should go first,” he offered lazily that day. “It’s her birthday.” He batted at a gnat before his face.

“Oh, poo,” said Rachel, quick to respond. Then, resigned, “Come here, Pauline.” She didn’t wait for my pronouncement, deciding Luther’s words held weight enough. She grabbed Pauline and clasped her hands around the child’s pudgy waist and swung her ever so carefully, releasing her arms and tossing her gently onto the grass kept clipped by Papa’s sheep. As she should, Pauline lay in a heap, pantaloon-covered bottom stuck up in the air, head and hands helping to balance herself in the bottoms-up position.

“Hurry,” Pauline cried out laughing, her voice muffled by the grass. “Before the hogs come round.”

“They’ll root you, thinking you’re a tater,” Luther teased as Pauline squealed anew.

Loyal, age two, lined up next and once again, Rachel was gentle, swinging the fragile boy by his bony arm. Giggling, he managed to stay standing when she released him and stood statue-still, one arm up in the air, the other held out behind him. I can see him yet! His effort lasted only a moment once an orange flicker flew by to distract him. He was easily distracted, I remember.

“You’re next, Luther,” Rachel called. “Come here.” She liked to boss the Henderson boy around.

I have never asked him about that afternoon, wondering if he remembered each detail as I, held himself at all accountable, not that he should. It was a subject rarely discussed, in fact, I only discussed it once with my mother, and that was years after.

“Bet you can’t toss me at all,” Luther said, sticking his stocky arm out for Rachel to grab.

Hound yelped, his long ears flopped joyously as Luther spun Rachel round and round, her pale skirt flying, ribbons slipping from the bow at the back of her dark curls. She squealed. “Told you,” Luther said.

Two of the hogs that acted more like pets heard her squealing and joined us, grunting.

“Hurry up!” Pauline wailed. “I can’t stay,” she added, and dropped to her side, laughing, the pigs getting closer to her tiny face.

Luther finished swirling Rachel, and she let herself be tossed into a half up, half down posture, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. The pigs came running to her. Loyal plunged into her, laughing. Luther shook his head. “Now you,” he said to the child sitting next to me on the grass. As he waved his arms, the pigs moved reluctantly off.

Lodenma’s little girl was Loyal’s age and she had been feeling hot of late, her mother said. Kind of listless and she leaned her head into my side and I felt the warmth and her reluctance to play statue. “Beatrice doesn’t want to. I’ll just keep her here by me,” I told him.

“Let me swing you, then,” Luther said to me, prodding. “I bet I can even if you are almost twelve.” He smiled his wide smile, his blue eyes twinkling in his mother’s horse-like face.

I ignored him. “I’d say you won, Rachel, even if you hadn’t planned to be spun.”

“I did, didn’t I,” Rachel said saucily. “I was the most interesting statue, and for the longest, at least ’til Loyal pushed me.” She ruffled his blunt cut hair good-naturedly. “Well, that didn’t take much time. What should we do now?”