A Sweetness to the Soul

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “There’ll be grandchildren,” Ella said. Then aware beyond her years of how I might take that promise—one I promised my own mother but had not achieved—she added, “And if not, we’ll have more time together, Monroe and I. Build a life as you and Father Sherar have, loving other people’s children.”

  Is that how she saw us? Loving other people’s children? I guessed that was so. Even Joseph had taken Monroe under his wing, referred to him as one of his boys and I suspected they shared a visionary mind. So Joseph, too, had found a son loaned him from another.

  “I don’t think a child can get too much, do you? Love, I mean,” Ella continued, looking at herself in the mirror. “There are always children enough to go around if you take a little time to find them. You always did.”

  I marveled that on the biggest day of her life, Ella could find the positive in someone else’s life. “And I’ll see you, though not like every day, like now.” She looked at me in the oak mirror, then at herself, checking her white dress, gloves. “You can come see us, too,” she reminded me, sticking the pearl hat pin through the pile of curls, adjusting the brim, the bird peeking out, resting her hands at her side.

  She turned from the mirror. “You can ride that same trail we did. Past your ‘green river.’ Or maybe Father Sherar will work a new grade and you can bring the buggy up it.” I nodded, swallowing back tears, not wanting to talk, fearful I might ruin her day. “Change isn’t the end,” she reminded me, softly, her dress swooshing on the floor as she kneeled beside me. “It’s an unfolding, the beginning of something different.”

  With that bit of wisdom, my bright-eyed, twenty-two-year-old daughter held me, dabbed my eyes with her hankie, adjusted my amethyst watch on my bodice, mothering the mother.

  “It’s time,” she sang, a child again, and she stepped out into the parlor of her future in-laws’ home, reached for the arm of her soon-to-be husband, and stood before the justice of the peace to become Mrs. Monroe Grimes.

  “It’s not the end,” I remembered her saying as she took her vows. Beside Joseph, watching the ceremony, I blinked away tears. “It’s the beginning of something different,” I repeated softly, to which Joseph responded in a whisper: “No doubt.”

  James’s death brought on a new drive for my husband, as though he had not yet challenged himself enough and perhaps that was how he grieved. He began constructing, putting his still firm brawn and muscle into barns. Huge barns, big enough to harbor four stage relief teams at a time; enough to feed fifty calves in winter; enough to nurture twice as many lambs. Along the White River Joseph built a three-story structure—a flour mill—to grind the wheat the rich land gave up to the ever-increasing homesteaders dotting the rolling hills above us. The construction had taken months and my husband had been energized each day he rode the three miles to supervise, consider problems, solve them, and ride back home.

  On our river, on the inn side of the bridge, he built storage sheds and from them more than once he ordered flour and salt dispensed to hungry settlers too poor to even pay the toll. But his pride and joy was the calf barn, a huge cavernous structure whose foundation was the river rock. To make walls perfectly straight, he sighted across his gold pan filled with water level to the brim. Then he and the crews stood the fir walls, carefully leaving less than six inches from the barn to the precipitous river’s edge.

  “Why so close?” I asked him. “What’s the point of having one side be that tight to the river?”

  “Only have to defend three sides?” he proposed.

  “Defend from what?”

  “It was a joke,” he said. “It’ll make it easier to build the corral toward the rocks. And be easier to clean it. Into the river.” I wondered what that practice might do to the salmon. I suspect that Joseph was driven by the challenge, to see how close his structures could be built to the edge of oblivion, how completely he could make his designs move from paper onto lava rock. I didn’t say that. Instead I offered: “You better hope no calves get shoveled out that door. Convenience has its drawbacks.” Of course, for some it’s the drawbacks that put the fire into life.

  When Alice surprised us with a relationship of her own the summer after Ella’s wedding, we found ourselves stunned by the irony of it. The real Dr. Crickett (Crickett Two, we called him) arrived with a mild manner, fishing rods, a bald head, and a ring of gray around the back and sides. His clothes fit him better than when squeezed onto the first Crickett. Their odd relationship blossomed into a stunning marriage made more so when Alice chose to remain with us, seeing her husband only infrequently on his rare visits to the inn and the once-yearly trips they made south, to Paiute country in Nevada. We were not privy to their negotiations, only accepting of the spoils they shared with us: Crickett’s fresh-caught trout, Alice’s sparkling eyes, and Spirit’s ever present purr.

  When we weren’t attending weddings, repairing roads, or serving guests, we were busy simply living. Our life along the river had taken on a rhythm, a giving back to travelers, Indians, children, and all. Accepted more and more by Sunmiet’s people, Joseph and I became the local midwives, dentist, and doctor. Along with Alice, we became quite adept at pulling loose teeth or scraping salmon scales from the women’s wide hands before binding up their cuts made while cleaning fish. Together, we fought the pesky head lice known to follow children everywhere, replacing kerosene with Sunmiet’s more effective bear grease.

  Sometimes Sunmiet and I sat near sun-heated water and bathed a young Inanuks, talking. I watched my friend of many years swirl the water so her daughter would not peer at her own reflection. “So she will not spend a lifetime searching for a reflected soul before she is old enough to recognize herself,” Sunmiet told me when I asked. I learned something new each day.

  And I marveled that it never failed to fill me up each time I held a yáiya or a nana in a crush of love and laughter, or wiped a child’s face of tears—tears from scraped knees or disappointment, tears of anger or of fear.

  In the evenings, Joseph and I would often walk arm in arm across the bridge to watch the Indians at their stick games. In the flickering firelight, they sat in teams of four or ten, sometimes even dozens, facing each other as though lining a road. I never grasped the game completely though I watched often, listening to the drumming and singing while the opposite team bet then guessed which hand held the prized sticks, the bleached bones. More than money was exchanged in the gamble. Coins and stones and cloth and personal treasures piled up in little mounds before the players. In the morning, someone would be sporting something new—clothing, beadwork, or a tool, and increased prestige. Card games persisted in the small barns too, according to Peter. We never tried to stop them. “I’ve more in common with them in there than not,” Joseph said once as a burst of laughter rose from the little shed in the night and I wondered if he missed the weekly games that once consumed his days.

  We were invited to the powwows, dances, weddings, and celebrations—George’s wedding, Anne’s too—and always the glorious meals. Greeted by “niix máicqi” we’d repeat the “good morning” phrase, then sit side by side on tule mats to celebrate the salmon’s return and the eels. “Chuus!” Each would say before we began feasts, holding up a cup containing just a sip. “Chuus,” a toast to honor God for giving us first and foremost the liquid of life.

  As for the eels, I never acquired a taste for them though roasted they could pass for chicken. Sunmiet said she’d share her roasting secrets with me but I never asked. Joseph hunted and fished with Peter, his men, and son, worked with the crews maintaining the roads. We helped pull soaking deer hides from the river and learned a thing or two about using deer brains to soften them, the art of tanning and smoking them into their distinctive scent.

  We were asked to settle simple disputes as outside but interested parties.

  It was as though we lived in a world all our own. All we needed was here, here on the edge of the river. And what we had would change. It was the only constant of our lives.

 
; The Bannock War of 1878 took place far from us near the Nevada border on the Paiute’s small reservation. Sunmiet worried over her sons and nephews as many Warm Springs and Wascos were conscripted to serve as scouts. Most returned and, shaking their heads in dismay, told stories of the innocent Paiutes caught up in the craziness of the war between the white soldiers, white settlers, and the more aggressive band of Nevada Bannocks. Koosh thought he might have seen Standing Tall somewhere in the distance.

  When it was over, Paiute men guilty only of their race and being present were imprisoned in Washington and their reservation land given away. Gradually, the Paiutes were released—having never really fought. Many sought permission to come to Warm Springs, to land that once, long ago, had been part of their gathering grounds along the Deschutes River. And the Warm Springs people and the Wascos who once fought with the Paiutes, expanded their large hearts and agreed to let them return to their place of belonging.

  It was a good way to end the decade.

  The 1880s began with trials. Banks closed and markets fell. Most in the West were hard hit even before the severe winter of 1884 and ’85. Because of some premonition Joseph had, we had bought the Finnigan Place before it happened. I never knew how Joseph came up with his ideas, perhaps only fluffy men such as Frederic could really understand. Whatever the reason, I showed him the Finnigan place on our way to visit Monroe and Ella and their little one, Roy. Joseph’s eyes scanned the lush green river and marked it for our future.

  The grass never seemed to stop growing there. We cut and hauled and piled several hay stacks that lined my green river like a picture frame before we even knew the fierceness of the winter we’d face.

  Joseph’s other big decision, to buy up sheep in the region, unnerved me. He had a scheme he did not initially share. Instead, he tied up all the cash we had to purchase sheep. He bought up more, actually, than we had cash for, giving notes to those who’d take them, payable in the spring. “Plenty of feed for ’em,” he said to my fears. We lugged baskets of peaches and pears from the ledge garden, stored them in one of the sinkholes we’d built a shed over beside the river.

  “Feed now, yes,” I said, “but if we have a rough winter …”

  “Ye’ve a mind to worry, woman,” he said biting into a peach, “This’ll work. I know it.”

  How often I’d heard those words.

  The sheep were fed from the Finnigan hay stacks by hardworking Mexican herders who kept the animals clustered in the valley. Snow fell and fell that winter and it was so cold that the herder’s camp stoves could barely keep water thawed though sitting on top the flame. An oppressive fog filled the canyon most of January. Even the Canada geese did not call to each other as they rose from the river, silent dark wing tips circling above the ridge through the fog. And what had looked like almost too much hay in late summer soon became rationed, to squeeze enough for the sheep and the cattle and horses and mules who scrounged the crusty, snow-covered hillsides for wispy blades of grass. Though Joseph never admitted it, I saw furrows appear in his wide forehead, his chin jutted out more as he clamped his teeth together even while he read his month-old paper filled with news of the east, something that always used to relax him.

  When word came that the cold took human lives as well as cattle, that the reservation was especially hard hit with rotten beef delivered by the agent (all that the unscrupulous contractors had to deliver), we bundled up the sleigh with loads of blankets, foodstuffs from the warehouse, and sides of frozen beef. We reached Simnasho too late to save an aging Kása, but in time to bring some small relief to those who mourned her. Her passing gave an answer to a question that had puzzled me for nearly thirty years.

  “At the give-away, for Kása’s passing on,” Sunmiet told me, “we set aside a basket of hers for you.”

  “Kása said you were to have it,” Bubbles said, the whine still in her voice. “We could not look. So look now.” She poked at me with her fat finger. “I want to see what’s in it.”

  Sunmiet gave her a scowl. “You picked up plenty of her things, Bubbles. No need to wish for more.” Bubbles snorted a cloud in the cold air of Sunmiet’s frame house. I tugged at the lid of the pine needle basket, brittle with age.

  Inside was the answer to my question of a day beneath the firs when I first met Sunmiet and her kása.

  “It’s one of Kása’s carvings.” Bubbles said, disappointed. “A woman, smiling, with a hole in her stomach. So small. You can put it in your hand.” She looked for more in the basket. Finding nothing, she lost interest.

  My interest increased. For wrapped in the bottom of my dresser drawer, tied into an old lace hankie, was the tiny bead Pauline once held. A bead, painted with the open mouth of a hungry baby. I knew without checking that Pauline’s bead would fill the hole in the carved mother, make Kasa’s carving complete.

  We lost many sheep and cows that winter though we fared better than many. And we did run out of hay—but just before the spring thaw and floods and so we were not ruined. Joseph’s bridge held in the heavy snow runoff, a testament to his vision and the men who made it happen. His was the only bridge across the Deschutes that survived the spring.

  With snow melted, we bought wool. We bought bundles some ranchers hoarded in years gone by, the fleeces marked by ding balls and rocks, but we took them anyway. We bought sheep from neighbors, loaded diamond-hitched six-foot fleece stacks from wherever we could get them. Then on to the Finnigan place, we brought a shearing crew for our own herds that numbered in the thousands. Mostly with Australian sheep dogs and heelers—who brought Bandit fondly to mind—the crews worked for days as other buckaroos scrounged the ravines bringing in the sheep. We women cooked and made stew until the very smell of mutton makes me sick to this day!

  Mountains of wool grew on that green river place. Peter suggested we weigh each fleece after shearing, record the weight and mark the ewes so we could breed and cull for heavier fleeces year after year. He wanted to then sort the good fleeces into separate stacks and that way raise our prices. Joseph had looked at him askance, I thought, considering the time such ideas would take. But he laughed his deep, bottom-of-the-belly laugh. “Wish I’d a thought of it myself! Good idea, man!” And so it’s been. That year, Joseph had the wool tied in bundle after bundle as was the custom and then stacked. Like a clock I went from side to side, worried first that we’d not have enough to meet our contract, and then to the other side, that the market would drop. Joseph laughed at me. He seemed to spark to life with the uncertainty of it all, the requirement that everything would have to happen as he imagined or he’d be called upon to forge some strange solution if presented with an unplanned challenge. Or perhaps, like so many of our neighbors, we might lose it all.

  “It’s like a fire,” he told me once as we looked over the stacks of wool, patting the thick clumps, picking at twigs stuck in the fluff. He tried to reassure me of this risk. “You’ve got to take a deep breath, breathe slowly on the flame, add kindling to it but not so much you smother it. I’ve got the flame; think the kindling’s measured too.”

  I thought I saw a flame reflect inside of him. His was a risky plan I’d finally gone along with: to ship an entire trainload of wool to a Philadelphia market.

  On the final days, when our calculations indicated we had sufficient wool for the trainload, I counted as wagon load after wagon load left Finnigan. The double freighters with their teams headed toward the Buckley Place then north, twisting down the steep road west, to the falls. Across Buck Hollow bridge, then Sherar’s then up the other side, the wool to be delivered to Moody’s Warehouse in The Dalles. Bales of the stuff, some still sporting stickers of sage and weeds that the dogs had pushed the sheep through. Hoisted on board the railroad by brawny men, the piles filled up one entire train which chugged out under heavy steam back East. I sighed relief.

  Joseph followed by passenger train which now went all the way to Chicago. From there he transferred and was gone for several weeks. To Alice’s utter shock, I cheer
ed and danced around the room when his telegraph reached us. “Arrived safe in Philadelphia. Sale success. Tell Peter. Kindled just right. Home soon. Will bring surprise.”

  I imagined some new luxury to wear around my neck. Earrings perhaps to flash at the concert in The Dalles. A new hat, maybe, or something to swish through the dining room now seating more than two hundred at the third-time rebuilt Umatilla House. Perhaps a bingo game to play with Ella and Monroe, a new stereopticon to take us around the world, share with Ella’s boy, Roy. It didn’t really matter. I could relax and anticipate Joseph’s return.

  I found the separation soothing in a way. I did not need to wonder what time he would want supper, consider what new venture he was into. The road crews took direction well from Peter. John Suhr and Tai and Teddy, the blacksmith, seemed pleased to ask my outline for their days. I didn’t need to worry over whether or not I ate even when I wasn’t hungry because Joseph was not present to nudge me about “putting meat on my bones.”

  Alice and I nurtured ourselves at home, keeping things thriving. After we served our guests, Alice often lifted the bamboo fishing rods from their holders, grabbed the willow creel, and followed by Spirit, brought dinner home. I dropped in on the women drying fish, making cradleboards for their nieces and nephews; took a little more time visiting with Sunmiet at their camp across the river. One day we found a way to see each other even more.

  Anne, now twenty with children of her own, asked if she might help with laundry or cooking at the inn. “The men work,” she said. “We women too.”

  “And your husband?” I asked. “He will not object?”

  “He will not object,” Sunmiet answered for her. “He would like to own the cattle, like Peter and Mr. Sherar, not just look after other men’s.” Peter and George had been developing a herd of their own, taking payment each month not only in cash but in cattle. Apparently the plan was known and coveted. “Unlike her father,” Sunmiet said, “she is learning how to make the non-Indian way work for her.”