A Sweetness to the Soul (20 page)

I wanted to disagree with her about Papa’s only thinking of himself, but it was the first time we’d had a conversation about what my
future held, so disloyally, I thought of me instead. “Luther doesn’t interest me,” I said. “He’s just a boy.”

“Do you think you’ll have a choice?” she said, surprised. “Boy or no, if that’s what’s planned for you, it’s what you’ll do. It’s the way it is for girls. Women too.”

“When I get married,” I said, believing it was my turn to talk, “I want to live in a big house, with lots of rooms and a parlor that gets used for happy times. One big enough for dancing.” I swirled around the polished floors, dust rag in my hand, waving it at an imaginary man asking for my hand to dance. “People will come to visit and spend the night even,” I said, slightly giddy from my swirling. “And we’ll have parties, gatherings, the way you and Papa used to.”

Mama grunted. “Sounds like a hotel,” she said. “You’ll have pipe smoke and tobacco juice to contend with that’s for sure. And men believing they’re the biggest toads in the puddle.” She rubbed the globe harder, holding it up to the hazy light to check for smudges. “And tubs of laundry every week. Your knuckles will rub raw.” She replaced the globe and looked over her own knuckles before she gathered up another globe. “As for partying,” she sighed, “people in mourning don’t. Wouldn’t be proper.”

“And I’d like a big family,” I said wistfully, overlooking her reference to loss, “with lots of children.” I was totally absorbed by the joy of my future. “Maybe four or five. Like you, Mama.” I picked up Baby George’s toy and rolled it to him from across the room before I even thought of what I’d just said, what unspeakable I’d spoken of following her mention of mourning.

As if in slow motion, I saw the shards of glass burst into the air and fall like crystals around Baby George who in seconds sat like an island in a sea of broken glass. He looked more startled than damaged and then seeing Mama’s face—a grotesque mask of wrinkled pain—he began to cry.

I heard Mama moan and sob at the same time I heard the crash. My brother’s crying moved Mama, and she threw her cleaning rags
at me as she swished to pick him up, cuddle him, brush the shards of glass from his dark curls, and hold him while he howled, still more frightened than pained.

She glared at me as she faced me, as though her accident were my fault. “See what you’ve done to your brother, distracting me?” She pressed his face to her breast and his howling increased.

“But I didn’t!” I said, feeling the burning of tears behind my nose. “I didn’t do it!”

“You did!” she said. “You’re the cause of it all!”

Her accusation made no sense as I did not hear the real charge. “You dropped it,” I said, persisting in being right. “I didn’t touch it. And he’s not hurt anyway, Mama. Look.”

Her outrage grew. “Don’t sass me,” she warned. Like a strong storm rolling across the hills she drove toward me, Baby George in arms. “Or I’ll give you something to sass about.” She raised her arm as though she might strike, something she had never done. Instead, she hesitated then pushed by, still holding Baby George. Mama shouted: “Do something right! Clean up the glass!” then rushed through the bedroom door and slammed it, keeping her baby safely in, me securely out.

I heard her talking softly to him in the bedroom as I knelt to pick up the shards. When a sliver pierced my finger dripping dots of red on the cleaning rag I held, I swallowed my sobs knowing I’d be my only comforter. I sat whimpering, wishing my tongue did not bring pain, sorry and angry at the same time, feeling unjustly accused, secretly believing Mama was right.

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.

U
NEXPECTED

I
t 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?”