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 SEARCH OF THE HEART
The 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 tha
t 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.
Though Joseph tried to talk him out of going, Fish Man would not budge. He could be stubborn that way. His routine just simply included summer fishing on that northern river. “Will be hard winter, this one,” he had told Joseph. “Deer already have much fat close to their skin. Maybe next year, rivers too high and muddy, fish slip by. This year, good one.” He’d patted his belly approvingly and smiled. “So I will go.”
Fish Man told Joseph, too, of the narrow gorge where a massive falls forced the fish to jump above each other in the air making themselves vulnerable to the nets. And he described a log bridge where the white man named Lewis and his friend Clark had crossed it was said, saving days of travel. “Friends cross there, camp,” he’d said. “Few white man. If you come sometime, I show you how to fish.” He had grinned knowing such an offer would be a real lure for Joseph. “I be back before first snow.”
Fish Man left shortly after that and so Benito had arranged for a Eurok who knew the country and two of his own cousins to travel with the sheep as far as San Francisco. His cousins would continue east. It was all arranged. Joseph needed only to nod his approval.
The two men walked back toward the arches of Joseph’s stone home, the kelpie at his heels. Benito did not revisit the subject of change. The men walked by bougainvillea blooming profusely hanging from the clay pots and window boxes tended by the housemaids. Benito’s new wife managed the household with an iron hand, Joseph noted as they stepped into the cool of the tile entry, stepping around a young girl already scrubbing the floor on her knees. She laughed a tinkling laugh as the kelpie rushed to lick her face. The dog raised its eyebrows, two tan thumbprints above its eyes, delighted to find a human at his height. “Come, Bandit,” Joseph said to the kelpie and the dog trotted behind him, his cinnamon-colored coat disappearing into the cool darkness of the dining room.
Between Anna and Benito things were so well organized that despite the usual disasters common to all ranches, things did run smoothly. Joseph could even be gone for days at a time and return with all problems handled. With the government contracts for beef, the war in the east pushing up fleece sales, and now breeding stock being shipped east, he had no financial worries. In fact, he’d successfully shipped an entire shipload of wool around the horn to Boston markets making a killing while helping the north in the war. The only difficulty he’d faced in recent months seemed to be a growing resentment by some of the locals over his good fortune.
The weekly card game at Yreka had become troublesome. Riskier bets seemed to push him, make his heart pound and his face turn hot. He found himself alive in the challenges, reading men’s faces, anticipating their cards and their willingness to raise his bets, pushing his own limits to risk even larger sums. “The games really weren’t about them; they were about me,” he said, “about energy and intensity and taking greater chances.” He found himself excited after the games, alive. “I hated taking their money,” he told me years later. “But I hated more not playing to win.”
Joseph pulled the heavy oak chair from the table and sat his tall frame down on the wide leather strips forming the seat. Bandit slipped beneath the table and lay quietly on the tiles, panting at Joseph’s feet.
Benito excused himself, entered laughing to meet with his wife in the kitchen. Before Joseph could even ask, a kitchen maid swooshed out from the carved doors Benito had just gone through. She bent her bare shoulders near him, swishing her full striped skirt near his chair as she placed before him a cool glass of lemonade in a sweating clay mug. He lifted and drank. “I was so totally engaged in thinking about my future,” he lied to me years later, “that I was unaware of her sweet perfume.”
“Ha!” I said. “How did you know she wore any?”
He returned the subject to his year of change. He said he saw no need to travel into the gold mines of the Powder River country, no need to keep a pack string or to wheel and deal to bring luxuries in and carry gold out. He’d done that. His life was in California, organized, predictable.
Perhaps that was what Benito considered “boring,” that everything could be handled without effort.
But it was what he’d worked for all those years.
He pushed himself away from the table, still holding the mug to let a second kitchen maid put before him a platter of steaming huevos rancheros with its reds and greens and yellows. Next to it, she set a platter of tortillas, unfolding the linen that wrapped each one, keeping them hot and soft. She would watch and as he completed his meal, the kitchen maid would bring a hot cup of coffee with three clumps of sugar served in his favorite porcelain cup.
Joseph picked up his fork and began to eat, savoring the scents and aromas and tastes. Yes, this luxury was what it was all about. Hadn’t he enjoyed gloating just a bit when he returned to New York last year sharing some of his wealth? He brought with him a full, dark beard, a flat-brimmed leather hat with chin string, and California gifts for everyone. He remembered being a bit surprised when his older brother James, the other bachelor in the family, introduced his wife, Eliza. They beamed over three-year-old Carrie Ann, their pride and joy. He’d known of neither the marriage nor the niece. From a distance, he’d even seen Cherise, a girl he’d once courted, who was now a chubby matron with two tots at her side, and had felt a twinge of something.
But even watching love and family move past him did not cheat him of his moment of pride when he handed James a gold nugget worth several hundred dollars. The sense of delight he had at sharing his bounty with his oldest brother was fleeting. His elderly father had merely snorted and said something about making better use of his time and talents while his mother then herded them into the dining room for a less than jocular meal.
It had been a good decision to go back east for a visit, though the joy of it had not carried him as far as he had hoped. Even the excitement of the train trip across the country had not held the fascination for him it once might have. Oh, he kept notes of interesting sights: roads engineered in difficult places, tunnels bored into mountainsides, bridges over deep gorges, and drawings of unusual gradients in the tracks. Other than that, not much besides his little leather sketch book gave him delight. He didn’t call the feelings he had then boredom. A bit fatigued, maybe. And as the housemaids sometimes did, he might have lowered his energy by placing too many hand irons to heat in the fire. But he was almost thirty and a man of means, entitled to be tired. No, Benito had it wrong. He was fine. Not bored. He intended to live out his life in California and be happy.
The kelpie nudged close to his hand he let hang beside him. He scratched between the kelpie’s pointed ears, patted the lighter brown spots above the dog’s eyes and chest and sighed.
“Maybe you go north, to the Klamath this month?” Ben
ito asked returning from the kitchen.
“I could,” Joseph said, though the thought had not crossed his mind before. He stirred his spoon in his coffee idly. “Don’t want to make myself a nuisance.” He smiled.
He had purchased a ranch in the southern section of Oregon two years earlier, just before he’d sold the string. The small town growing there to serve the miners some 150 miles up the Klamath River seemed to appreciate the supplies freighted from the California coast into the mountains.
The ranch had been an afterthought, really, something to keep him connected to the little valley whose people had seemed so grateful each time he arrived with supplies. It was that part of packing that he liked best, seeing the look of pleasure when his string made it through, brought what was anticipated and needed.
Joseph had hired Philamon Lathrope, the son of a local rancher, to clear ground and build a small house on the donation land claim of 640 acres he’d purchased with a portion of the pack string sale proceeds.
He hadn’t seen it since.
“My friend and I could visit his ranch and ride a little farther. To the gold fields,” Benito suggested not disguising his interests at all.
Joseph sat quietly, the spoon tapping the side of the porcelain cup until the brown clumps dissolved. The distant chatter of Spanish drifted from the kitchen. “It might be good to check on my investment,” he said. “Maybe even go farther, to see about the gold strikes and what settlement they promise. I will go alone.” Benito dropped his lower lip in disappointment. “Anna would never forgive me if I took you from her for even a week, let alone several.”
“You are wise about this, my friend,” Benito sighed, pulling at his long mustache. “But if you like this place, or you have difficulty, you well send for me, yes?” he added hopefully.
“I will send for you. Yes,” Joseph said feeling a spark of energy he had not realized he’d been missing.
A Sweetness to the Soul Page 9