A Sweetness to the Soul (2 page)

L
ike the slow rising of the river after an early snow melt in the mountains, he seeped into my life, unhurried, almost without notice, until the strength and breadth of him covered everything that had once been familiar, made it different, new over old. It was the summer after the tragedy. I date everything from that time, but isn’t that often how it is with catastrophes? And I guess, for me, that’s when it all began.

I recall little of our initial encounter, really, though in years since he has told me details enough to make me think I remember it well. But I don’t. At least not his part in it. Lodenma says I was mourning grievous injustices that summer. At twelve, I doubt I’d have used those words, but Lodenma, my lifelong friend, who is still eight years older than I, had three years of marriage beneath her chemise by that year—1861 it was—so knew first hand about grievous injustices.

No, I would have used words such as “smoking mad” or “hotter than a hijacker’s pistol” or just plain “flamin’ furious,” words that fit my frustration with the mules refusing to enter the pole corral that day. That alone told Lodenma I was grieving or mad, for every Oregon Territory child knows mules will not go where there is danger
and attempting to force them is a waste of morning victuals. We should all be so wise.

The milling mules’ dust first attracted Mr. Sherar’s attention—that and the smoke from my small cooking fire. From a distance (he is fond of relating) he spied the powdery volcanic dust drifting like mist through the pines and firs and junipers. He wondered what created it. He stopped his horse, pulled his telescope from the saddlebags. Through the glass, he eyed a small boy, he thought, waving his arms while mules bolted on either side of the opening to a corral he could barely see for the dust.

“Surprised me,” he told me later. “Didn’t expect to see anyone so far from settlement, let alone a small boy pushing stock in the shadow of Captain Hood’s mountain. Wasn’t until I rode closer that I saw you were a little bit of a girl. Still are, just a bit of a thing.” He always shakes his head then, eyes atwinkle, and pulls on his grasshay-like beard in wonder, remembering.

That day, I’d pulled my skirt up between my legs and tucked the hem of the homespun into my yarn belt giving me more freedom to move while revealing two bony knees over bare feet.

“But it was your eyes,” he said, “that startled me. So dark, like obsidian globes nestled into white porcelain.” The Indians named them “huckleberry eyes” promising I’d be fruitful, which I guess I’ve been in a way.

Of course, I was flamin’ furious and I suspect my violet eyes, huckleberry or not, were as hard as black marble. And while I vaguely remember seeing a tall man on horseback off the trail holding a brass glass to his eye, I was more concerned with the mules.

Papa had sent me to fetch them. I was to bring the animals into the shady upper corrals, then ride one home. In the morning, he planned to return with me and push the small herd back to winter nearer our cabin named for the place along the Barlow Trail where those bound for Oregon crossed our creek. Fifteen Mile Crossing we lived at, in the valley of the Tygh people. Our old home is less than
a day’s ride from this home where we live now, but I have not seen it since the altercation with my mother over Ella all those years ago. It’s funny, the pleasures we deprive ourselves of rather than face our fears.

After several disastrous attempts that morning long ago, I stomped again to the corral gate trying to see what would keep the animals from passing through it, wishing just for the moment that I had a herd of horses to contend with. Horses can be convinced to enter in, so willing are they to give up good sense to loyalty and making humans happy. Not so with mules.

I ran my fingers over the poles worn smooth by animal hides rubbing past; couldn’t find any slivers or thorns or bees. I looked over the ground just inside the gate but saw nothing but a few pine needles scattered like dead grasshoppers in the dust. Nothing I could see in the corral opening should have bothered them. And beyond, the corral was empty, quiet, cool.

Miss Em, the biggest, darkest mule, stood well beyond the circle of poles, but had not run off. It was as though she wanted to go in but something kept her out. Not unlike some people, I suppose.

“Come on,” I pleaded, walking toward her, my palm open in begging. I was getting hungry and she was usually easily caught up. I thought I might tie her to the railing and then gather others up one by one and lead them through. But that day Miss Em jerked back, twisted and bucked her head, kicked out at the hot noon air, snorted, then burst toward an abrupt stop just beyond the gate. Dust spattered like buckshot into the still fall air.

I started around her to herd all seven of them up and try once more to yell them through the gate when I saw movement from the corner of my eye. Just the glimmer of movement, near the center of the corral, almost like a bird’s shadow or like the seepage of water from a leather bag left lying in the dirt. But there was no bird, no bag. And no water in the dirt.

I turned slowly. The movement increased, in several directions
now, the ooze taking on familiar shape and multiplying. More than one. A den of them, in fact, writhing and turning over each other in the dirt just beyond the gate, making the dust move ever so slowly like the beginnings of an avalanche of snow. The movement formed into diamonds of brown and white and then I recognized them and their hiss.

Their presence incensed me, left me with an exaggerated sense of outrage, of invasion, that they should be there, in
my
corral. Childish fury propelled me toward revenge.

Charging to the fire, I grabbed a limb with flames burning at the end, then jerked the kerosene lamp I’d set quietly beside a sitting log. I gave no thought to the danger. I spun toward the reptile pile, sprayed the kerosene from the lamp over the writhing forms, and dropped the flaming stick.

Rattlesnakes never bothered me after that. At least not the legless kind.

The stench and the black smoke it billowed up into, the braying and snorting of mules, and the scorch of heat at my feet and my face are my strongest memories of that day, not that moments later I met the man sixteen years older than myself who had been staring at me from a distance and whom in less than twenty-four months I’d marry.

F
LUFFY
M
AN

J
oseph was totally taken with Frederic Tudor, and I suppose that’s when the dream really began though it must have been misting up over the lakes of New York long before he met that fluffy man.

I couldn’t believe it when Joseph first told me of this fluffy man’s wild scheme. We were lying side by side watching the December snow pile up against the isinglass, listening to the wind howl in outrage at our comfort and safety inside our small Oregon home. As the ice formed on the glass, Joseph told me.

“Ice? In the tropics? But how could that be?” I asked, propping myself up on one elbow, sure he was teasing me, something he could easily do with his sixteen years’ head start on my experience. But he wasn’t. He stretched his muscled arms behind his head. His blue eyes took on a faraway look as he remembered that strange little man who taught him about risk and dreaming.

He met Frederic the day he tried to leave New York, a place Joseph had no reason to desert. At least that’s what the family lore is. I’ve heard wide versions when we’ve ventured back east to sit around the family table with his brothers and sisters, nieces and nephew. They all say he had no reason to leave.

Joseph’s father owned a large farm near Nicholville in upstate
New York where Joseph once served as the family expert in stock handling. Though he could match a set of horses to the harness better than most around the county, by the time he was twenty-three he’d settled on his preference for mules over horses “because of their superior intelligence.” It’s a point he debates still over cards in the saloon.

His father ran a store that offered everything from garlic to harrow plows, pickles to pitchforks. They fed the store from the local produce, imports, and their own millinery and mantua-making operation. Not the flimsy over-garments of the French but American corsets, stiffened with whale bone, sturdy hemp, and flax. Those corsets cinched and shaped the women of an expanding nation. I always felt they cinched more than shaped, but no one ever asked those of us who wore them.

When I visited their store in later years, I was totally taken by the rainbow of colors of calico and the leather boots of Moroccan blue that stretched from counter to rafters. Barrels of pickles floating in salt brine and wire baskets of brown eggs and wheel axles and cooper’s rings shrunk the aisles requiring ladies of the day to walk sideways with their wide skirts, their cloth handbags dangling from their wrists rubbing against the bounty as they passed the clerks bent to their work. So much! Such luxuries! And Joseph left it all and had to argue with his father for the privilege.

Joseph says his arguments with his oldest brother James sizzled like any youngster trying to best his older brother. But his arguments with his father burned. “His nostrils flared” with the mere mention of The West. Joseph reminds me that the Hebrew word for “wrath” is translated as “flared nostrils,” and I can almost see the old man’s outrage rolling up his Irish face, his thick white mustache bobbing as he spoke: “Ye’ve no need ta go like yer bro,” (Joseph could mimic well his father’s words). “Ye’ve all ye need ta here.” Then he’d slam his hand on the table and watch the pewter plates rearrange themselves as they often did around Joseph’s family table.

“Papa never did understand,” Joseph said. And he never crossed the divide to visit us in later years, either. That always bothered Joseph since he saw his father as a kindred spirit having immigrated to the new world from Ireland before Joseph was even born. Joseph saw himself as doing little different.

Maybe if James had not gone west first and done so well, it might have been less troublesome. But Joseph’s oldest brother had made the trip around the horn in forty-eight and hit the California gold fields like a hungry coyote in a rabbit warren. He returned four years later laden with a dishpan full of nuggets, treasure enough to last the family a lifetime. After that, his father could never understand why anyone—especially the baby—would want to leave New York.

Of course, my husband sought a different kind of treasure and his father couldn’t see the vision. Joseph acknowledges that inexperience hampered his ability to articulate well enough for his father to accept and understand his youngest son’s dreams. But I suspect parents never truly accept their children’s plans as real until they break out on their own and make them so, regardless of how well they speak their dreams.

Joseph’s articulation improved immensely after he met Frederic Tudor. Now there was a visionary! Joseph encountered him the day he walked into a saloon in Albany, New York. Joseph had just missed his intended ship, the ship he planned to take to the isthmus of Panama on his way west. No reason to have missed it. He just got distracted by the sights and sounds of a strange city. His only regret in missing the boat was that he also missed hearing the calliope. He’d paid extra for that music meant to entertain the deck passengers. He’d wanted to hear the pipe-machine press out happy notes as they sailed across the ocean. An extravagance to be sure. “But what’s money for if not to pay passage into interesting,” Joseph told me more than once. And then he missed that ship.

Having to wait for later passage, he slipped inside the cool, dark saloon and there met Frederic.

Surrounded by boisterous men with sweat stains streaking their hats, bearing calluses on their hands, Joseph spied that portly man almost as tall as he was wide who “looked like a ball of dough with legs.” My friend Sunmiet, a Sahaptin-speaking Indian, would say such a person was a “fluffy man,” round like a dandelion fluff, but she never met him. Neither did I though he touched my life.

Frederic impressed Joseph. He wore the finest cashmere suit, hand-tooled boots and a top hat. A red cravat pushed out of his vest like a biscuit pulled from yeast and he talked with his hands, swinging them about in wide arcs, and slapping the side of his head to make a joke referring to himself in German as “dumme Hund,” which I’ve since learned means “dumb dog,” a contradiction to be sure. But the most striking feature of the man according to Joseph—besides his ability to hold the attention of the entire room in the palm of his hand—was his beard. “Two white stripes on either side of his chin with a dark swatch in the center making him appear as the brother of a skunk. Which he wasn’t,” my husband reminds me, though there are others who might have debated that.

Frederic Tudor had a dream that seemed so bizarre and farfetched that when Joseph told me of it during the first years we were married, I simply thought he had cogitated on the memory too long and so had fouled it up. But he had actually worked with Frederic and helped him during those months aboard his ship, and so remembered well.

The visionary mind takes many turns before settling on any specific path. It’s been the experience of my husband at least and many others who set out to settle in Oregon Territory. Frederic told stories of his own detours into strange investments before he settled into success: selling a salve he acquired from an itinerant photographer said to heal the skin; creating a hotel in the hills near his home of Kircheim-Tech in northern Germany, and a summer on a tropical island spent making
Beches-de-mer
for export. Joseph said the latter sounded like some delicacy served in Portland’s finest restaurants. To me it sounded like what fills a baby’s under napkin in the morning,
but that was after Joseph told me that the “delicacy” Frederic shipped came from dried sea slugs sold as aphrodisiacs to the Chinese.