A Sweetness to the Soul

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  With the rag wrapped around my finger, I gathered my strength, opened the door to the cold, and tossed the shards into the snow-filled trash bucket set on the back porch. Hound lay quietly beside the wooden bucket, one eye lifted to me as I broke the silence of the snow.

  Squatting, I scratched his ears and looked around. For the first time, I saw how much snow had already accumulated. The world beyond the porch was white, no difference between the sky and the land where they met at the horizon. I could barely see the barn through the wet, white curtain. If the snow stayed, we’d need to pull a rope from the house to the barn, to hang on to in the days ahead when we started feeding animals. October was early for feeding. Usually the animals could pasture on the sparse grasses until the hard freeze, often until late November. Snow in October meant we might not have enough feed for animals unless we were blessed with an early spring.

  I hugged myself with my arms, surprised that after our losses I would even consider something going well, having the blessing of a late winter and enough feed. I did not think we were within the realm of anyone’s blessing.

  Back inside, I prepared to face Mama and do what I could to bring back the mood where we had talked and shared like sisters for just a moment. Tears idled behind my eyes. I missed my sisters terribly right then. Especially Rachel. I wished that I could hear her tattle just once more, take back all the things I ever said that sent her scurrying away, just as I had sent Mama away just moments before. Rachel, the sassy one. Now I had taken on that part of her spirit whether I liked it or not.

  The cold wind whipped the door from my hands and it slammed against the wall as I opened it. With surprising speed, Hound brushed past me, scurrying beneath the table. I pulled the door from the wind’s grip and latched it from the inside pulling the string, brushing the snow from my skirt.

  Mama was nowhere in sight. Like the stillness of the white earth outside, everything inside was cold and quiet.

  I wondered all that afternoon as I set the lights against the growing darkness, kept the fire burning, talking quietly to Hound, why I said things to Mama to make her cry. I wondered if I would ever have children running about me, have guests to laugh and dance in my parlor. I wondered who would ever want to have me in their presence for a moment let alone a lifetime as a wife.

  My consolation was that Papa would be home soon. Perhaps he could tell me of his plans for my future. I thought of the tall stranger who had teased me and then rode out in the snow and wondered if he would return in three to four weeks as he promised.

  For the briefest of moments, as I watched the heavy white flakes fall with no indication they would ever stop, I wished I had a second chance to talk with him. And throwing guilt aside, for just an instant, I wished it was Mama making her way through the white and Papa here to comfort me in the storm and in the morning.

  UNEXPECTED

  It was not a freak storm that dropped its white that fall and quickly melted away. No, winter came prematurely in 1861 bringing with it the surprise of an expected guest arriving early and then staying late, making more demands, requiring more and more attention, giving the impression that they might never, ever leave. Everyone paid attention to that winter, Sunmiet included.

  Snow piled up at the agency where the two-story brick boarding school run by the government housed Sunmiet and the other girls. All children age five and older spent their winters as required in boarding school. They learned needlework there, as though their years of doing fine beadwork were wasted. They rubbed their knuckles raw cleaning and starching their handmade uniforms, as though the skill of tanning hides and turning them into soft clothes had no merit. The boys belonged to another building where they were taught to stand in straight lines inside and outside, to work stock or grow vegetables in the spring—depending on the interests of the Indian agent that year, hoping they’d forget the roots and berries that were provided for the people to harvest each year. And they all learned about God and Christ in ways that made them think God had not noticed them before.

  “Standing Tall worried for me at the school,” Sunmiet told me some years later when as a mother, she spoke sad goodbyes to her own children standing at the steps of that very school. “But it was my father’s desire I met that winter. He said for me to use what was not my choice and make it into something wise, to always look for the learning in a moment however much pain it carried also. At the school, I looked through my tears to learn non-Indian ways.” And so she yielded her own wishes to another.

  It seems to me the Warm Springs people often accommodate by sifting from non-Indians what they admire and weaving it into their own designs, making it an “Indian” way. Warm Springs horsemen kept their nomadic skills by becoming army scouts during the Snake and Bannock wars; good cattlemen have certainly risen from the reservation. And what would we Sherars have done without the Indian engineering skills, I’d like to know! But that speculation’s later.

  In the winter of 1861, we were all bending to the demands of another: the weather.

  As a boarding school student, Sunmiet found herself having to accept the thin moth-eaten blanket even though it did not take the chill from children. It offered no warmth as she lay in the narrow bed listening to the sounds of young girl’s breathing and the wind rattling against the glass windows. She tossed on her cot. It was her last year at boarding school. Next year she would be married, even with child if her body listened to the traditional ways of being pregnant by the time snow covered the ground and stayed.

  It was early, for no matron yet walked the aisle between the beds, clanging on the footrail with a stick to wake them before dawn, get them dressed and lined up for the meager breakfast. Auntie Lilie had been so kind to us that summer at the river, so gentle. But as a matron at the school, she became a second person, Sunmiet said: demanding, cranky. “She swallowed all the smiles she shared in the shadow of the river rocks,” Sunmiet told me sadly.

  One day a week they bathed. The October morning of the storm was not bathing day, so even if Sunmiet had been the first to touch the steaming water—which she seldom was, now that she was almost an adult—there would be no bath that day. “It’s when I missed the hot springs and the sweat lodge the most,” she told me, “when I knew I could not have them.”

  It would have been enough, just getting through this last year, remembering not to speak Sahaptin in the daylight while refreshing herself with the language of Kása at night. It would have been enough, remembering to listen and watch, to learn what she could to bring back to her father. It would have been enough helping the little ones keep their fingers from the ruler-teacher’s cracks when they made the slightest error. All of that would have been enough to keep her busy her last year. But she had her future to think of, too, how to live with Standing Tall and still not lose herself.

  She tossed once on the cot then lay with her eyes open as a startling light flashed like lightning through the window, splashed against the bare walls of the dormitory.

  Sunmiet slipped from the bed, wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and padded quietly to the window, her bare feet chilled by the cold floor. “Even while I scraped away the frost with my fingernails,” she told me later, remembering the night she truly discovered Standing Tall’s poor judgment, “even while I breathed onto the cold glass so I could see out, I knew it was him. His actions were always forcing me to think of him, making me choose to do other than what I wished, for him.”

  Swirling white appeared when the light caught her eye again. Through the whiteness she finally saw it. A lantern swung methodically back and forth below her window. She could barely make out the face of the person holding the lantern, so shrouded in snow was the figure. “Then it waved at me and I knew.”

  She worried he would get them both in trouble and felt her heart almost stop when she heard a noise behind her and turned.

  Just Bubbles, sighing in her sleep.

  Surely Standing Tall would not come in the night, not in a storm, unless something
was wrong! But even then, her family would wait until morning before sending word, would not risk sending this wild boy out into the night to collect her. If they could wait. And that was why she risked the night and cold, because she worried about her family and what they might be needing. And because she longed for the touch of someone from home knowing it would be months before she could tussle the hair of Same-as-One or smell the herbs of her mother’s freshly washed hair.

  “I dressed quietly and went out into the storm. That has been my story with Standing Tall, always walking into storms.”

  “Why did you not come when you saw me?” Standing Tall hissed as her. “I have been waiting.”

  Sunmiet asked him what he was doing there besides making her feet get wet.

  “You should not question me,” he told her. “If I am here, there is good reason.”

  “I wait to hear your reason,” she said. If he bore difficult news, surely he would tell her at once. Instead he lectured her on her slowness, her right to question him.

  “Will I know why you’re here before we are discovered and you are forced to tell the ruler-teachers in front of everyone?”

  He smiled and then said lazily, “Are you not glad to see me?”

  It came to her then in a burst of fury. “You come in the cold to annoy me, set me in front of the ruler-teachers to be struck, just to tell me you are here?”

  “I annoy you?” he asked, grabbing at her arm.

  “He was suddenly very angry,” Sunmiet remembered, “and I was frightened.”

  He snapped at her. “I make a trip in the snow I did not expect to fall so soon so you would not forget me. And my presence annoys you? I see it takes little to make you forget those who care for you,” he sneered. “Perhaps you have become a forever child of the non-Indians.”

  He finished, letting the final insult sink in.

  “I could barely believe his poor judgment! Just to finish a badly started plan he had continued on through the night and the storm, called me out into risk for no reason but to announce himself! And I was foolish enough to believe he brought important news.” Sunmiet shook her head.

  It was the night she knew she would have to trust her own judgment or this Standing Tall, whom she did truly love and who said he cared for her, would bring her harm.

  Sunmiet wrapped the blanket around herself tightly, pushed away from him, and turned to make her way back to the door. “No,” Standing Tall said grabbing her arm. He saw the fire in her eyes and dropped his hand. “Stay just a minute. Give me warmth for my journey back,” he whined. He reached to rub the blanket draped across her back.

  “Your warmth will have to come from your lantern,” she told him. “Or the embers that burned up your wisdom.” She pulled away from him, leaping to find her tracks left earlier in the snow, hoping to make her way up the stairs to her cot before anyone would know.

  “He did not follow me,” Sunmiet said.

  She padded with wet shoes into the sleeping quarters, made her way through the shadows of the dressers and beds to her own. Lying there, her heart calm, undiscovered, she found a moment to worry about Standing Tall, where he might sleep this night, survive the storm. Why did he do such foolish things? Did she wish to spend the rest of her life with such a man? Would her father understand if she didn’t? “All questions I would have to answer before spring,” she told me.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the matron’s shoes walking crisply beside her bed, pausing.

  “I thought my shoes would give me away,” Sunmiet told me. “Auntie Lilie stood there while I pretended sleep. I could hear her breathing, smell the scent of cabbage left on her clothes from yesterday’s stew, but she moved on.”

  Sunmiet planned to take what lessons she could from the early storm. Perhaps it had been sent to warn her of this man’s thinking, give her time to prepare for a future with it.

  In the morning, her cold fingers fumbled with the tiny dress buttons that marched like the boarding school lines up to her throat. She buried her wet socks under the covers and found a dry pair to pull up over her knees. Her wet shoes tugged over the socks told her that her feet would be cold all day. “Oh, hayah, that man!” she said beneath her breath.

  She heard the chatter of the girls as they made their way to the hall, pulled their long braids over the collars of their thin coats and lined up in their dark dresses to descend the stairs. Cold air rushed at them and Sunmiet shivered, knowing they were about to enter the snowy world between the dorm and the cafeteria. It was going to be a cold day.

  “But a good day,” Sunmiet told me, “for I had not been discovered.”

  In rigid silence, the girls began the walk down the hall. In the distance, beyond her daydreaming, Sunmiet heard the scrape of the heavy door as the matron opened it into the stairwell, and the shuffle of feet as the girls began descending the stairs. “Then suddenly, the line disintegrated into a cackle of surprise and chatter and I knew without even seeing,” Sunmiet said. “I pushed to the front of the line, closer to the confusion, and stared at the item of interest lying at the base of the steps. I barely heard the girls giggling. I realized in a quick moment that this would be a snowstorm to remember, one whose lessons I must quickly learn. For there at the bottom of the steps looking up at me from beneath a cozy blanket, bearing his sleepy, sheepish grin, and his lopsided look lay Standing Tall.”

  The storm taught Joseph lessons, too. He stayed a second day beneath his oiled skin, waiting for the snow to let up, hoping it would melt off once the accumulation stopped and the sun came out. He sketched some in his little book, read Hiawatha to Bandit once again. He said he’d wished he’d brought another book or two to read, perhaps the Bible his mother had given him when he’d left New York. Instead, he recalled favorite scriptures and then closed his eyes to memorize Longfellow’s cadence. He shared them all out loud with the dog.

  With the pile of dried branches he’d dragged close to his flames, he kept a small fire burning. Whenever he looked out, he noticed the soft pile of snow building up on the back of the mule as it stood, head drooped.

  Joseph had plenty of thinking time.

  It was his plan to send Fish Man on ahead while he checked out the mules, secured them for the spring, made inquiries about supply purchases, and returned himself to California. Now he wondered if he would be able to make the trip to California and return again before hard winter set in. In the spring, he hoped to arrive in the Oregon country with his own crew and assets to not only purchase the string but also buy his own supplies as well. He planned for forty mules and hoped to get them for slightly less than the going rate of $250 each. The cash would come from California. He could pull it all together as soon as he returned to the ranch. “I liked the rush of energy those thoughts of pulling it all together gave me,” he told me. “Almost as good as winning at cards.”

  Men’s plans easily find themselves diverted and Joseph did not return to Fifteen Mile Crossing in four weeks as he had planned and promised.

  On his third morning out, the snow stopped and a blinding bright sun glittered and glared off the white earth. The melted snow Joseph left in his cup the night before was frozen solid. The kelpie stepped gingerly from beneath the oil skin, then, with renewed courage, skidded on the hard white surface beyond their lean-to and dropped some pellets. With two kicks from his back paws on the crusty surface, Bandit revealed his futile effort at good hygiene. He trotted back to the fire, the melting snow close to the flames clogging his pads. Joseph picked up the dog, held his hands over Bandit’s paws and melted the frozen clumps. “Looks like you’ll be riding again today,” Joseph said, his breath forming icicles on his mustache and beard.

  They spent the next three days pushing into packed snow, crashing through the crust in places, making little headway. Joseph walked often, leading the gelding and packmule on foot, the man and animals sharing the hard labor of making a path through the unknown. Two feet of the white drifted into the ravines, more on the flat
surfaces on the ridgetops. Joseph kept the mountain range on his right, moved inland to find a narrow crossing of another river not yet frozen over, and continued south, into the tall timber. His thoughts were of the next ridge, the next ravine, how much stamina he and his animals had. He did not see another soul.

  His fourth day out, Joseph noticed sugar pine cones larger than his own two hands peaking up from the tree wells. This was Klamath country and Joseph was grateful the wind had found another playground. “Another night and we should share Philamon’s roof,” he said to the kelpie.

  It actually took two more nights before they spied the comforting smoke of Philamon’s fire. There were no signs of the garden now. Snow already covered the irrigation canals, corn stalks, and gate posts. For just a moment Joseph watched Philamon loading hay on the sled, ready to feed cattle. He shook off his uneasy feeling. Feeding hay in early November. It did not speak well for just how hard a winter lay ahead. He hoped things were better farther south.

  He clucked the gelding into pushing snow with his brisket one more time as they worked their way down the ridge to Philamon’s. “At least I can exchange more reading,” Joseph said to the kelpie trotting briskly beside him now along the crusty surface.

  He couldn’t know then that he would read all Philamon had, write words of his own, and forge a lifelong friendship with his renter. For Joseph never left the Klamath country until spring.

  At our end, Papa arrived home a day after the first storm stopped. I had already strung the rope to the barn as soon as the sky held off. More than two feet of snow drifted in the winds that began shortly after the snow ceased.

  Luther made his way over early on the first morning of clear sky, attempting to endear himself to me and Mama as he offered his help until Papa arrived. At least his presence brought Mama out of her silence and she began to speak with me again if only to give directions.