A Sweetness to the Soul (23 page)

Torn, Joseph stood a moment, watching the back of the lean man ease toward the door. When he saw Joseph would not pursue, he turned and adjusted his hat in triumph just before he left. Such contempt should not go unscathed, Joseph thought, though he could see Benito’s point. The man wasn’t worth it, even if Benito was.

Voices in the saloon resumed talking, forks scraped on plates at the nearby table. J. W. wore an embarrassed face as he stood and moved his bowed legs to another card game, looking at Joseph over the head of another player.

Joseph sat back down, leaning to retrieve his white linen napkin from the floor. Benson, the barkeep, brought another brew over and said something about the man losing an eye to a whip coming across the trail and grateful that Joseph had not pursued the bait.

“Good,” Benito said, as Benson left them. “Good you do not pursue. Men of little minds do not deserve the energy of greatness.”

“Greatness?” Joseph scoffed, tossing the napkin in a clump on his plate. “You, my friend, are even more tired than I if that’s what you think!”

Pleased the tension passed so quickly, Benito said: “Yes. And tired makes me say things out loud I sometimes only think. But I will not be so tired in the morning.” He smiled. “My bones will ache from keeping up with you on our
paseo
. They wonder why I take them from soft beds for all of this.” He stood and rubbed his backside as if to massage away the aches. “No,
crazy
will be the word I think to call you then.”

“And few would disagree,” Joseph said. “Only a few.”

When Joseph rode into our ranch at Fifteen Mile Creek the next morning, Mama and I were at the dying tubs, tending to yarn left long in the sheds. We stood with walnut husks and dried goldenrod in gourds at our feet ready to color the yarn, aware of the glorious day. Meadowlarks warbled away their cares, little songbirds and nuthatches bopped about bravely pecking at the nuts. In the pasture, tiny yellow butterflies rallied at the slowly drying mudholes. Fifteen thin mules grazed hungrily on the new shoots pushing through patches of old, melting snow. Though the cattle had not been so fortunate, the mules had all survived.

I almost didn’t recognize the Californian as I’d taken to thinking of him. His shoulders seemed wider, leaner. His face wore the bronze of a man who easily tanned or who by May had already spent hours in the sun. He sat taller astride a big bay gelding. A small, dark man with a mat of unruly hair rode beside him, a large hat held by a string at his throat bounced upon his back. They led no pack animals.

The kelpie barked back as Hound roused from his lounge on the
porch. I stopped my stirring and smoothed my dark skirt, tried to hike up my stockings with my shoeless feet and walked forward toward the gate.

Mama recognized him immediately.

“George!” She called out to Papa who was mending fence and nursing a headache near the barn. “We’ve company.” To me she said, “Hurry inside and put the bread and jam on the sideboard. We’ll take tea in the parlor.”

I must have looked surprised because she added, “Parlor sets a propensity for good business. Now go.” She watched the men tend to their horses and added more cautiously, “I’m not sure about his man …” She eyed Joseph’s darker companion and nodded her head with approval when he took the reins from Joseph and led both horses to the hitching post. “Yes. Well.” She said then, always carrying with her remnants of her Virginian past, “It’s his man-servant. He’ll most likely wait outside.” She walked forward to greet the Californian, wiping her hands on her always immaculate apron.

“Please forgive my appearance,” she said, touching the snood nervously at the back of her neck. “You’ve caught us unaware.” She seemed giddy, girlish, I thought, with some annoyance.

“It’s we who ask forgiveness,” Joseph said, bending at the waist to greet her. “For arriving unannounced. And not returning last fall. It was the winter. I wasn’t sure we’d even be welcome—”

“
You
certainly are …” Mama said. She eyed the darker man as he left the horses to stand beside Joseph.

“My friend and partner, Benito Donario,” Joseph said.

“Well. I’m pleased I’m sure,” Mama said, flustered by Benito’s offer to shake her hand. As her fingers adjusted her snood again, Benito awkwardly returned his work-stained fingers to the rim of his large hat now held in front of him. “My husband will join us shortly,” she said looking at Joseph. “Shall we go inside?”

She didn’t wait for their answer. Instead, she lifted her crinolined skirts discreetly above her work shoes and walked toward the porch
steps. “Jane,” she said as she walked by me. “Let’s serve our guests.” She walked quickly inside.

My feet seemed sucked into mud; my hands stuck to each other like pitch to fingers behind my back. My smile worked and I gave it to Joseph as he removed his hat and stopped in front of me. His friend stood beside him, saying nothing. Joseph threaded his wide fingers through his thick brown hair, looking me over with the kind surprise a distant uncle shows for a niece not seen in years.

“You’re a tad taller,” he said, “and a whole lot prettier.”

His words embarrassed me, and so I did what I do best when someone does something out of my control: “Do mule skinners always travel without mules?” I said, with only a little lightness to my barb.

“Glad to see the winter didn’t freeze your sass,” he said. He smiled wide, revealing a softness that filled his full face, his kind eyes. “I figured what this mule skinner needs spent the winter here.”

“I did,” I said. Then, my face ablush: “I mean they did. Spend the winter here. The mules. Did.” His friend had a funny look on his face.

“Jane!” I heard Mama call out and for once I was grateful for her interruption.

“You’d best go on,” I said. “Papa’ll be along any minute.” Then I led Joseph, Benito, and the kelpie inside, waiting for Mama to shoo the latter two out, but she didn’t.

Later, I would try to reconstruct what happened, to see if a path through the tangle could have been hacked out some other way. Wisdom, of course, carries with her both the future and the past while we humans have mere memory.

My father entered next, stomping mud from his boots. Mama touched his arm as she began to introduce Joseph who had just turned to face him, eyes adjusting to my father’s form standing in the backlight of the door. The kelpie growled. Mama stepped back in surprise when Papa stiffened, recognizing Joseph first.

Papa held his hand to his side as Joseph offered his, not even looking at him, Papa’s eyes beyond. “We’ve a foreign guest,” he said
as he spied Benito standing next to the fabric chair, hat in hand. He had risen with Papa’s entrance.

Mama was soothing. “He is Mr. Sherar’s partner,” she said. Then moving quickly said, “Mr. Sherar has come for his mules. Remember, I told you. He left the deposit?” To Joseph she said, “We are so fortunate. My husband put up extra stocks of hay and our mules, while thin, will fatten nicely with this snow-stained grass.” She took my Papa’s arm more forcefully. “Let’s sit, George,” she said firmly.

At the sound of my father’s name, Joseph dropped the offer of his hand. I noticed caution now in his eyes. And then some kind of recognition.

Papa recognized him at that moment, too, though neither Mama nor I knew how until much later.

“The man who drinks with dogs,” Papa sneered.

I thought he was looking at the kelpie standing at Joseph’s feet, lips pulled back, teeth showing, no tail wagging.

Mama gasped at Papa’s poor manners. “George!” she said. “Yes. Well. I never—”

“Shall we have tea, then?” I said, interrupting with my tray of things, trying to move past this awkward moment, feeling more like my mother than I ever had till then.

“Yes. Tea, then. Here it is,” my mother said, her wide dress swirling about her legs as she turned to the sideboard, quickly, to help me.

Joseph’s words were deep, even, spoken with an Irish tinge to our backs. “I’ll not be drinking tea, then,” he said. “Not with a man who cannot bide his tongue.”

I turned to look at him and saw his neck was red and his eyes a stony blue directed at Papa.

“In a man’s home, he can say what he wants,” Papa said, and I was inclined to agree. “Have who he wants to tea,” Papa told him, spitting at the “tea.” “And even sober, I don’t want the greaser.”

Benito shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and said softly. “I will wait outside—”

“Sit!” Joseph said. “I’ll not walk away a second time.”

“Now, George,” Mama said, her voice higher pitched. “We have a business arrangement to complete. Surely we can do that without rancor.”

“I wait outside,” Benito said as he moved to pass Papa.

“We will both go outside,” Joseph said. His temper still ran his thinking as he pushed past my father, followed by Benito out onto the porch.

“Please! George!” Mama pleaded. She twisted her fingers on Papa’s striped shirt sleeve. “For heaven’s sake! Control yourself!” Mama seemed frantic. “Complete the deal and then express your politics!”

Papa pulled away from her and out to the porch. I stood in the doorway, my stomach a knot of hornets.

Joseph and Benito digested the events near their horses, their faces close to each other with strong feeling but not in anger it didn’t seem to me. They were working something out between them.

Papa seethed at the gate. Having won his argument, he seemed uncertain about how to proceed. Mama pushed by him to stand before Joseph. I heard her express apologies and they exchanged some words and then Mama led him back toward Papa and the gate.

I’d never seen her quite so muddled. “None the worse for wear, shall we say, Mr. Sherar?” Mama smoothed and straightened her snood. “Mr. Sherar would like to complete his exchange,” Mama said, “and be on his way.”

“Mister Sheer,” Papa said, glad to have some steps to his uncertainty. He put a “sneer” into Joseph’s name and added, “has no reason to stay. There is no deal to ‘exchange’ as you put it, Elizabeth.”

“But he left the deposit—”

“Which shall not be returned as he did not keep his end of the bargain.” He looked at Mama now, daring her to challenge him. “He was to have brought the principal in three to four weeks. He did not.”

Mama gasped. I heard it from the porch. “Excuse us,” she said
to Joseph. “For the moment.” She tugged on Papa’s sleeve again. He brushed her off.

“There’s no need for privacy, Elizabeth. The deal’s done. When we didn’t hear, I sold them. J. W. bought the animals in March. Will be heading out momentarily, I expect.”

Mama looked genuinely pained. I didn’t know then of the debts adults incur or how relying on one thing to happen serves as hope and drops one deeply to despair when the thing is changed without recourse. She was so stunned she didn’t see Joseph walk closer to my father. “I had your word—”

“My wife’s word. You did not keep yours, sir. I’m not obligated to keep hers.”

They stood close, like two bulls who eye each other for one moment in honor before striking.

What possessed me to speak into that tense vibration still remains a mystery to this day. Perhaps I felt my mother’s humiliation, my father’s need for control. For whatever reason, I did and so entered into the fray adults call life.

“Puddin’ is mine,” I said, my voice cracking. And looking straight at Joseph added, “So at least one Herbert mule is still for sale.”

J
OINING

I
had never seen Sunmiet so still, standing in the shadows like a blue heron, steadfast in the water. It was summer and the tribe had gathered at He-He in the mountains for the celebration. In the distance, beyond the lodge at the cool mountain campsite, I could hear children laughing, men talking, drummers warming up.

Sunmiet reigned serene despite the chaos that drifted around her like the heady fragrance of honeysuckle.

“Hurry, Bubbles!” Sunmiet’s mother said. “We are almost ready, just waiting for your lazy body to find that bundle!” Morning Dove, Sunmiet’s mother, appeared the most unsettled I had ever seen her. “The one painted green and white with fresh buckskin laces,” she continued, chastising her niece in the midst of the excitement.

“Did I not tell you to guard it as though it was the summer’s roasted camas?” Sunmiet’s Auntie Magpie spoke to her daughter, Bubbles, without gentleness.

“You would not be careless if it was fit to eat!” Auntie Lilie said.

“My mother brings her beaded bags,” Bubbles said with some authority in her voice. “And the cornhusk ones you made last huckleberry time. The blankets are here. All the
shaptákai
are here.
Everything is here.…” Her voice always seemed to whine at the end, as though tired of having to defend herself each time she spoke.

“Not everything,” Magpie snapped. “It is the bundle I sent you to bring that worries me. It holds the beads of Sunmiet’s
kása
from the Spokane people of her father. Oh, what did you do with it?”

Morning Dove rustled around again in the blankets and bundles lining the floor of the anteroom of the longhouse, stirring up the pungent scents of alder-smoked buckskin mixed with wind-dried salmon. Her daughter stood quietly off to the side, seemingly patient. The drummers began a slow, heartbeat cadence and with the first high-pitched song of the wedding singers, Morning Dove’s frenzy increased. “Look! Look!” She said to Bubbles and me and her sister, Magpie. “Find it!”