Clearing his throat, he gave me reasons we should travel back east now: before I became with child and couldn’t travel; to select furniture we might wish shipped out; to meet his family. Once he began speaking, I think he actually liked talking out loud to someone besides Bandit, exploring options this way and that. Unlike the dog, I talked back, and I could see by the look on his face that my opinions startled, often amused and always intrigued him. It was an auspicious beginning. I won the first round.
He learned I needed time: for explanation, answering questions, analyzing, so I could decide on my own. I learned I could sometimes get my way, though I didn’t know then it was less my skill at argument and more my husband’s fondness for me that set me on the upper step. However it came, I liked the feeling.
The land claim was one example of the shifting going on in our relationship. Our visit that May morning was the third trip to the site and I approached readiness for a decision.
“We have five years to build,” Joseph said. “But we do have to begin sometime before then.”
I scowled at his sarcasm.
“Five years,” he noted. “And then it’s ours. We can add what you might want. Don’t need a cat and clay chimney. We can use stone or even some bricks. Be safer.”
“I’m not worried over the construction,” I said. “You’ll handle that well.”
“What do you need to know then, to decide?” I sensed some exasperation in his voice.
The answer wasn’t easily brought forth. I had only that day understood that I dawdled because the site was barely five miles from Mama and Papa’s. I wasn’t sure if it was too close or too far away. Part of me kept thinking I would find the right and perfect answer to every big decision if I just waited, asked better questions; another part said “decide,” make corrections later.
Which is what I did, finally.
“Let’s build it here, then,” I said, and marked the dirt with the new boots Joseph had bought me at French & Gilman’s store in town. “So I’ll have a view of the streams and the wild roses.”
A blast of air exhaled from him. “My idea exactly,” Joseph said and smiled. “And I’ve something to honor the occasion,” he added, delight in his voice. “Wait here.”
With his slight limp, he hustled back to the horses switching their tails against flies. From the pack behind his saddle he pulled out a roll of white cloth the size of a linen napkin bound up with a burgundy bow. From behind my saddle, he untied a blanket roll and carried both back to me, a smile on his face.
“Hold this,” he said, giving me the linen package. “But don’t look.” He unfurled the blanket in the shade of the roses, away from the dust of the horses. Then he sat and reached for my hand, pulling me down beside him.
“Didn’t have time to get this before we were wed,” he told me, reaching for the package. He untied the dark ribbon that bound it. “Even ‘on the frontier’ as Benito calls it, a man can find a fitting present for his wife.”
The burgundy box he handed me fit in the palm of my hand, the name, “Cosner & Sons, Jewelers,” imprinted in gold letters across the top. My fingers lingered over the letters, wanting to savor the elegance of the box, anticipating the gift inside.
“Open it,” he said, his excitement more evident than my own.
A tiny hook and latch kept the box closed and I opened it, a gasp escaping my mouth as I peered inside.
“Do you like it?” Joseph said, eagerly. “When we go to New York, I’ll get another for you. A gold one, but I hope this one’s good for now.” He leaned closer to me, seeing my view. A certain anxiety came through his voice and I realized he wasn’t certain of what his young bride might like. “Go ahead. Take it out. Here, I’ll put it on you.” He reached for the silver chain.
“Wait,” I said holding his hand back. “I just want to look at it first, hold it.”
After a few seconds of pleasure, I reached inside and lifted from the box the most exquisite silver oval I had ever seen. Not much larger than Joseph’s thumb, the oval hung from a silver chain that draped like silky liquid between my fingers.
“Open it,” he urged.
I lifted the oval cover with my thumbnail and peered at a clock face surrounded by a dozen tiny diamonds. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered, feelings caught in my throat. “I’ve never had anything like it. So delicate and perfect.”
His voice was thick with emotion. “I wanted perfection for you. And a watch. So you’ll know I think of you with each minute of the day. And will, all the minutes of my life.”
A great stillness filled the space between us. Even the kelpie sensed the moment and walked back quietly, not bothering us, lying with a soft “plump” at my feet.
“It’s more …” I said, wiping my eyes with my fingers, not making much sense. “Thank you. I’ve never …” I fingered the pendant. Something was coming to me from a far away place. “It wasn’t just a ‘deal’ then, like Mama said?” I asked him.
Joseph looked startled, having forgotten our discussion in the parlor. Then, “No deal,” he said firmly. “You must never think that.” He was thoughtful. “I loved you for longer than I knew. Perhaps from the moment I first saw you take on the snakes.” He smiled, folded my fingers over the watch, and held both of my hands, looking at me. “I didn’t recognize it, Jane. Not until I almost lost the chance to recognize anything, and then I had no way of knowing you might want me, too. There’s been no deal, no arrangement. I wanted you for my wife. It is my greatest luxury in life that you might want me, too.”
I didn’t tell him that I was a girl meant only for baubles, if my mama was right. For this moment, I would bask in the lavishness of his love. And perhaps as a woman, be worthy later of the luxury he offered.
“You can put a photograph in the frame,” he said, moving his eyes from mine. He pointed out the tiny silver frame across from the watch face. “Maybe of me. Or my dog,” he joked, “who seems to have transferred his loyalty quite readily.” Bandit wagged his tail, knew we spoke of him. “Now may I put it on you?” he asked, eager. I nodded and lifted my knotted hair at the bow from my neck while he moved behind me to catch the clasp. The watch hung perfectly over the tiny tucks of the burgundy store-bought dress I wore. It rose and fell with my breathing, resting at the crest of my emerging breasts.
Joseph pulled me back into his chest, his arms sweeping around me, holding me close. I felt his chin resting gently on my head as he rocked me, smelled the perfume of the laundry’s soap from his shirt. His breath was a sigh. “I love you,” he said, his voice a deep whisper. “And only hope someday you’ll feel the same.”
Looking down, I found the watch and rested it on his forearm. I lifted open the face cover again, to look at the dark hands, read the tiny diamonds that marked the hours. He had loved me for a long time, he’d said. And would with each passing minute. He’d placed no conditions as yet, nothing I needed to do to earn it except just be me. The feeling was foreign.
As if my heart had room for more, Joseph coughed nervously, moved me slightly to retrieve his sketch book from his red vest pocket. “Something I wrote while I was recuperating,” he told me. He took a deep breath and I knew he was sharing himself, heart and soul. “It’s about you,” he added hoarsely. Then he read the words that still tick away in my heart.
“To be so loved,
that time stands still
when I’m with you,
and does not start again
until you’ve gone away,
and I am left alone
to wonder
why the hours move so quickly
when you’re with me,
and so slowly when
you’ve gone.”
He turned the watch over to show me the engraving in tiny script on the back. “To Time Standing Still: All my love, JHS to JAS 1863.” The words marked the moment I truly fell in love.
I couldn’t have been more excited about the trip if it had been to someplace exotic like New York. Canyon City w
as the second largest town east of the Cascade mountains in the new Oregon State. Bigger and better gold strikes marked the news that came from there with each returning pack string and now people moved there, having discovered land ripe for sheep raising and for cattle and families too. Joseph said along with the gold, the Homestead Act would bring thousands into the area and if he planned things well, their hunger for land and riches could feed our dream at the falls.
“Our dream” he called it though it still seemed more his than mine. While I could be sassy about some things, I found myself holding back, not challenging him yet about things I didn’t understand.
It was the trip that interested me that June. We would be gone for several weeks, spending nights on the trail under one of Joseph’s San Francisco tents, seeing country I had never seen before. I imagined the hustle and bustle of the packers, listening to Benito and his wide wife, Anna, exchanging opinions in Spanish, watching Joseph work with his men, master the mules and the elements as we traveled the two hundred miles.
It would be my first trip away from the familiar setting of my childhood. Along the way, I would meet people who would only know me as I was beginning to see myself and as I was now introduced: Mrs. Joseph Sherar. At the end we’d meet the Turners, and I would come face to face with Francis—“the saint,” as I had taken to thinking of her since Joseph never spoke of her in less than heavenly terms.
While in Canyon City, Joseph planned to finalize the sale of his string and his “good luck” route to Robert Heppner. My Joseph had never had a loss in all his trips, had kept every agreement for the miners. While other men told of Indian raids, lost animals, and troubled hands, Joseph’s stories spoke truthfully of good fortune. “People think everything I touch turns to gold,” he said as we rode past the Meeker grave markers. “They don’t know how much gold I’ve already buried.”
“Not to mention your own burying for a time,” I reminded him.
“That didn’t involve the string, fortunately. So Heppner is buying my good reputation along with my mules.”
With the string of forty mules, we had ridden out from The Dalles on the west side of the Deschutes, past Fifteen Mile Creek to the Tygh Ridge and down the ravine where men worked on our house. If we had not wanted to monitor the building progress, we might have taken the steep route that crossed the Deschutes at Nix’s new bridge a few miles south of The Dalles. “Bridge won’t last there,” Joseph said. “Another winter like ’61 and it’ll be gone. And the roads are no good to and from. That’s the key to a route that will last.” He didn’t tell me which route he thought would.
At our homesite, we spent scant moments, just enough to answer simple questions about the barn going up first, confirm where the house would rise. I could tell Joseph wanted to be there, building, but he kept his promise for our wedding trip.
With impatient animals and energetic men, we moved on down the ravine on the old trail to the Deschutes with the plan to take the skimpy bridge that Todd had built.
“First day out, Missus, is always worst,” Benito told me. “Get kinks out of ropes and how you say, ‘routines.’ ” Everyone seemed relieved when we reached the river and I felt my own excitement growing as I heard the roar of the falls and wondered if I’d see Sunmiet.
We made camp that night with the Indians nestled in the shadow of the rocks. The spring salmon run was on. Fish charged up the falls, leapt unknowingly into the nets dipped from the scaffoldings. Taking only a moment for a fond reunion with Joseph, Fish Man, in his element, returned to spear salmon from the slippery rocks. Joseph traded for wind-dried Chinook to take with us into the mines, talked with Peter and others about the trail, the weather, the bridge. Benito directed the men to hobble the mules, unload and make camp, making plans for an early start in the morning.
Seeing Standing Tall, I assumed I’d find Sunmiet.
“She is still wearing her big stomach,” Bubbles told me from her squat in the shade of a juniper. She waved grasses to cool her chubby face though it seemed to me she had lost weight. “Kása says soon, very soon. The baby waits until he is ready to walk before he joins us.” She laughed. “He is not persuaded it is better here than there, that one.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
Bubbles shook her head. “She and Morning Dove stay at Simnasho. They will join us when the baby appears.” My face must have shown my disappointment, my wonder, too, at whether Mama would be with me at my first, whether Joseph would be like Standing Tall, not near his wife.
Bubbles shrugged her shoulders, scratched at her thick thigh. “I will say you asked of her,” she said. She noticed Joseph walking up behind me. “Ha!” she said, looking provocatively at him and then my flat stomach, slender hips. “And how goes your baby-making? Do I have something to tell Sunmiet when I see her?” Her grin was wicked.
“If it was your business to know I’d tell you,” I said, haughtily, hiding my own disappointment at having nothing to share even if it had been only two months. I turned my back on her to meet Joseph. He looked at Bubbles over the top of my head and at me with a question on his face.
“It’s nothing,” I lied.
In the morning, the June sun rose early on a hot, clear day. We took a trail along the east side of the river, south and then east, away from the water into the high, dry country. A slender line of green marked a stream in an area hot enough to bake bread on the rocks.
I wiped sweat from the band of the hat I had taken to wearing instead of my bonnet as we made our way up the single-lane road. It twisted and turned like a lazy snake and below us, we could watch mules loaded with packed panniers led by men on horseback as we inched our way toward the top.
“Someday,” Joseph told me. “This road will be wide enough for wagons and stages. And they’ll stop at our rest stop, when we own the falls.”
I looked at him, askance. “Surely you jest,” I said, sounding as wise and old as I could to hide my disbelief.
“Nope. That’s the way it will be,” he said in a voice with no arguing.
When we reached Cross Hollows, a place where two dry ravines fed into each other, it was late and we camped immediately. “Named this myself,” Joseph told me. “First trip out. Be a good place for a stage stop, don’t you think?”
I had difficulty imagining a stage arriving on the road we’d just mastered.
The sunset on this high plateau was extravagant. Spears of light radiated from the fluffy clouds that hovered like dumplings over the mountain peaks on the horizon. Joseph took time from the string to walk with me in the dusk. White mountains dotted the horizon, as bright and brilliant as a necklace of pearls against a dark blue sea. Joseph pointed out the mountain’s names, gave words to the vast expanse that led from California to the lands north, toward the Columbia. A chill wind rose over our camp. By nine o’clock, dusk still hanging on to daylight, the two of us curled under blankets, savoring this bridal trip as my first real taste of being grown.
In the morning we headed toward a place Joseph called Antelope for the beige and white striped animals that roamed the area. That road was not for indecisive people as it permitted few changes in plans. With few turnouts, it offered limited places to pull aside to let another pass. We’d gotten an early start, hoping to reach the bottom before anyone else started up. Then at a particularly narrow section, just as the thought entered my head that we were fortunate to be the only pack string on the road, I noticed dust below us, coming our way. We had listened for the bells and heard nothing before we started out. I shouted to Joseph who had already seen the cloud of dust and signaled a halt to the string down the line, voices in English and Spanish rippling down the ridge like echoes. We waited, checking packs and cinches, our animals twisting their necks, biting at flies, stomping their impatience.
Finally, the dust below us coughed up one man and team in one unloaded wagon who pulled up facing the string.
The driver, wiry and worn, wiped his face with his bright-colored neck scarf. “This is a pi
ckle,” he said.
Joseph nodded his agreement.
No one could turn around. Fortunately, the freighter was a single wagon with only one team instead of the usual six or eight horses. Still, the wagon could not be backed up far enough to reach a turn out. There was no going around him or him bypassing the string. Benito made his way on foot toward the front of the line, weaving in and out beneath the necks of the mules to reach the front. No one seemed distressed though I couldn’t see a solution.
Finally, Benito signaled in Spanish and several hands made their way with effort through the ropes of mules and men to the front, listened carefully, and then spread out around the wagon where they promptly took it apart!
Perhaps the packers were pleased by the diversion though I wondered what might have happened if the mules had chosen that moment to protest. But they didn’t. Even the team of big horses with their bearded hoofs allowed themselves to be unhitched and led away from the wagon. The wagon dismantled, its parts stacked close to the inside bank, our string moved on down the road, inching past the wagon’s team where we stopped again, sending men back up the line to put the wagon back together.
“All in the day’s work,” Joseph mused as we continued and the hours wore on. “It’s exactly why the road is so critical, why what we build will bring them in. We’ll have wide turnouts and a solid base and people will choose to cross on our bridge, you wait and see.”
For me, it was watching the impossible become probable. The only ingredients needed were ingenuity, shared energy, and time.
A Brent’s Pony Express rider passed us not far from Canyon City. The rider waved, the only attention he paid us, so serious did he take his work. “Perhaps he carries some news written line by line then turned upside down,” I said.
“And more written between the lines and then diagonally, making three pages on a single side. Probably so important it will change a life,” Joseph said, just joking, not knowing. “Everyone now has news that can’t wait a week or two. Used to be we waited months. Even years! Now, got to be a day or two. World is moving faster, Janie,” he said, “we’ll have to get on board.”
A Sweetness to the Soul Page 24