A Sweetness to the Soul (29 page)

“Helps explain the ‘pressed down’ experience of the rock tomb then,” Joseph said, smiling.

Archibald gave him an irritated look, one allowed between men of shared respect but where one finds little humor in Scripture.

It was Francis who gave him real encouragement, helped heal his physical wounds and permitted him to look farther inward, to wounds he’d hung onto, some about his oldest brother and his father. “Keeps you from trusting, from knowing your own feelings and wishes when you give such power to others,” Francis told him. Their bond was unique, bred freedom in their thoughts and discussions.

“Will she have you?” Francis asked one day as she rippled the flax seed in the late afternoon cabin light. She lifted her eyes to supervise Susan Ella paddling the dry threads with the brake. The child was young to be so skilled, to take on so much work that her mother couldn’t.

Joseph picked up the silky thread, rolled it between his fingers, knew Francis spoke of me. He said the threads made him think of my dark hair with a hint of chestnut and the fact that he’d never touched it, might have died before he could. “Believe she will,” he said. “If I can get her past her sass.”

“She’s young?” Francis asked.

Joseph nodded. “But wise, I think. I’ll know, of course, if she takes me.”

J. W.’s unsettling news had the advantage of hurrying Joseph’s healing, so by March, he not only walked, but rode.

On that first crisp day Archibald handed the reins up to Joseph where he steadied himself on the horse Benito brought out for him. Archibald said to his wife, “You’ve done all you could. He lives, he walks, and now he rides, all from your care.”

“And God’s,” Francis answered looking up at Joseph. “God did the healing,” she said, and she coughed.

Archibald nodded agreement, slipped his arms around his wife’s thin shoulders, pulled her head to him, stroked her thick, gold hair. “Come on around now,” he said to the children. “Ella, step out of Mr. Sherar’s way. He wants to take a ride ’round the yard here, get a feel for it ’fore he leaves us in a day or two.”

“Take me?” Susan Ella asked, refusing to move from her stand beside the gelding’s withers.

“Susan Ella!” Francis scolded, pulling away from her husband, reaching for the child.

“In a bit,” Joseph said to her, not even thinking it a promise. “Move aside, now. Don’t want you getting hurt the last days of my stay.” Sweat from the exertion beaded on his forehead. He felt shaky in the saddle, concentrated on Ella to keep his mind from the discomfort.

He adored the child, her dimples sewn like tiny tucks taken in her plump cheeks. “Let’s try the kelpie first,” he told her and with that he slapped his thigh and the little dog squeezed through the legs of the Turners and leaped. “Hey!” Joseph said as the dog licked his master’s face, safe and secure once again from his perch on the horse. “You remembered what to do even though it’s been, what, five months?”

Then to the Turners he spoke of me and of our future and a hope: “My only prayer right now is that she remembers too.”

T
HE
G
IFT
H
IDE OF
M
Y
H
EART

K
oosh sat at the drums, beating with the hide-covered stick while beside him his father, uncles, and three cousins pounded the stretched hide and sang their high-pitched songs. The spring Root Feast had been celebrated for two days and the dancers and drummers and singers switched off to give themselves rest.

Sunmiet and I lounged together on the fur hide set in the shade of the old juniper near the Simnasho Longhouse. Our fingers were stained black from peeling the skin from roots. It was afternoon, April, the shadows growing longer. We were several miles from the falls, in the oldest encampment on the reservation. Kása lived here, away from the agency and its boarding school, Indian agent, and his meticulous wife. Morning Dove had grown up in the little cluster of buildings nestled in the dimples of sagebrush and juniper-dotted hills. Sunmiet spent her winters here and the Root Feast was always held here, where the elders announced that the earth said the roots were ready for digging.

Once again, Papa had consented to my time with Sunmiet. It would be the last for awhile. Mama said it was “unseemly for a wife to spend time with Indians. Better for her to be with her own kind,”
she’d said, “teaching her own children and not gathering wild ideas from Indians.”

Papa surprised me by saying: “Warm Springs Injuns are all right. Peter’s a smart man, peaceable. George is good. Their folks volunteered as guides for the army to bring those Snake Paiutes down. Puts them in good stead. Not like those Yakimas, always arguing about this and that, squabbling over the treaty terms. Been almost ten years! They forget they’re lucky just to be left alone in their defeat. No. Warm Springs are all right.”

I had arrived in the company of Peter and George just as the ceremonial roots had been gathered by the seven selected to dig first. The blessings complete, we’d feasted and then the rest of the tribe could gather roots for their own family and for storage for winter. Kása had consented to taking me out with her after Sunmiet had pleaded with her to show me what to do.

“She has no grandmother to teach her these things,” Sunmiet told her sweetly.

“Oh, hayah!” Kása said, shaking her head in disgust, but she had taken me.

“Why did I agree to this? You stupid girl. Hold the
kápn
this way. As I tell you!” The old woman held the root digger made of antler and pushed the sharp point of it into the soft earth. “See. It is not so difficult even for an old woman. What is wrong with your hands?” she asked. “They don’t look puny.”

I had learned that she gave her tongue-strapping to everyone and did not sass her back. It was good practice for getting along with cantankerous people. That day, I simply picked up the antler and pushed again against the earth beneath the slender leaves.

“Deeper! Deeper!” Kása cackled. “Yes! Yes! That’s it,
piaxi,”
she said reverently, naming it as she reached down into the upturned earth to pluck the deep brown tuberous roots. “That is what we look for! Good!” She ripped the green from the roots I handed her and stuck the tubers into the woven corn husk
wapas
bag hanging from her skinny waist. “Maybe you are not so useless,” she cackled again.

Hearing a compliment from her was almost more frightening than bearing her irritation. I must have stood before her, dumfounded. “Oh, hayah!” she said, irritated. “Here.” She handed me the dark roots that stained my fingers the color of walnut. “We take some skin off in the bubbling water,” Kása said, teaching, “and dry in hot sun for four days. Did you taste ones we had for feast? You liked those?”

I liked their taste with the pinch of precious salt added and herbs. I liked the smell of spring earth and the companionship it took to gather them up. I had eaten my fill of the roots at the feast and now, on this second day after feasting and digging, I was ready to rest with my friend.

Sunmiet had not danced at all during the feast days. Her time for delivery was only a few months away though she was as large as some due soon. Instead, she watched the little ones, laughing when either “Same-As-One” ran by, their chubby legs carrying them through spears of blue lupine. Furballs of dogs chased after them into tall grass. When they were older, the twins would have their own names so the “wind will recognize them,” Sunmiet told me. “It will be a special ceremony to name them with Indian names, maybe even with names of the ancestors, if the family agrees. I have some names to recommend, when they pester me like ants,” she added, laughing.

Same-As-One always brought Loyal to mind. He would have been their age now, had he lived.

The feast days bristled with activity and I noticed riders coming and going from the paddock and now several walked to the small clapboard house of Peter Lahomesh and disappeared inside.

“I wish a boy for my husband’s pleasure,” Sunmiet said over the noise and activity that always amazed me at these feasts. The sounds of my life were quiet ones, of crows and meadowlarks, of geese calling or the Seth Thomas clock ticking in the parlor. Most often, my still days were broken only by my mother’s requests or directions, she and papa’s terse words. Rarely was I pleasured by the chatter of family, gossiping and laughing.

“But a girl for my own,” Sunmiet continued. “There is much work to do in my husband’s lodge,” she said, sighing, her voice breathy, like the whisper of wind in the tall firs. “A girl would help, someday. My husband’s mother makes a good ruler-teacher,” she said, looking at me with a wry smile. “She cracks my knuckles with her hide scraper if I do not work fast enough or hard enough to suit her. She gifts me with memories of the boarding school,” she said.

“Doesn’t Standing Tall complain?”

“Only about my laziness,” she said. “He would never complain about his mother.”

“J. W. has no mother, living,” I said, speaking louder, to be heard over the drums. “At least he’s never said anything of her. Or much else about himself, for that matter.” J. W.—with my Papa nearby—spent little time conversing with me on his visits. And I noticed that he lingered in the kitchen over Mama’s fresh cobbler topped with cow’s cream, often choosing that room over time in the parlor with me.

“His mother would be older than Kása!” Sunmiet said, laughing.

“So I won’t have a mother-in-law to contend with at least,” I said, thinking it small compensation for what I would have to face marrying a man who seemed more taken with my mother than with me.

Something about one of the riders going into Peter’s house looked vaguely familiar. Was that Fish Man, the Hupa, already heading for the falls? No, not fluffy enough, I decided.

“You’ll have other things,” Sunmiet said. “The worst is sharing a lodge with a man you have no feeling for except as
pimx
, ‘uncle.’ ”

“Mama says it could be worse.” I stood, put my hands on my hips, as Mama. “ ‘Yes. Well. You could be stuck with a drinker or a beater or one who never comes home except smelling of another’s perfume.’ ” I could imitate Mama pretty well and enjoyed seeing Sunmiet smile. “Course I can’t say any of those won’t be true once we’re wed.” It was an unnerving thought. I held my stomach, anticipating the pain.

“My life is not so difficult,” Sunmiet sighed, shifting awkwardly. “I see my mother and father each day, have time with my brothers. Sometimes I believe I have only moved into a new lodge, traded the kind words of my mother for the sharp tongue of Standing Tall’s.” She adjusted her bulky body, winced, leaned against the tree and rested her hands on the shelf of her belly. She took a large gulp of water from an old army canteen set beside her, then added, “This one will make it different.” She patted her stomach. “I will have more respect from my husband’s mother. I will be allowed to have time with my baby and not always be under the feet of his grandmother. And Standing Tall anticipates the baby. It will be better. It will be so for you also,” she said to encourage me. “You will see.”

I sat back down. Babies would make it different, I hoped. Perhaps they’d make me forget the dark hairs in J. W.’s nose, the pocks in his cheeks, the faceless stranger in my dreams. Taking off my bonnet, I leaned back onto my elbows, thinking. With a baby, I would have someone who loved me no matter what I did, what mistakes I might make. A baby would never, ever leave me. With a baby, I would be treated differently by Mama, have things to share with her, to talk about on equal terms.

It was the fanciful thinking of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Still, with a baby, I believed my life would begin again, with newness. This time, I’d let no harm befall them. That was my dream, my promise to myself and to God, though I doubted he was interested.

“But it would be better if the baby came into the arms of one who loved its father,” Sunmiet said breaking into my thoughts.

“ ‘Yes. Well. Love is a luxury,’ Mama says. And I’m not to have luxuries,” I told her wistfully. “Only baubles.”

The drums stopped abruptly as to me they always did. I could hear the stomp of horses in the corrals, some whinnying to another. Dogs barked and in small packs with their long tails wagging, roamed the grounds seeking leftovers. There were shouts in languages I did
not understand and some in words I did. Giggling bubbled up from a cluster of girls and young men near the Longhouse. I thought I saw Standing Tall there with his friends and some others, laughing loudly, passing something between them. Dancers quietly moved off from the grassy arena, drifting toward the gourds of cool water, snatching up mouthfuls of jerky and dried fish. It was a place of simple pleasures though I knew sadness and sorrow lived in these hearts as well as my own.

Sunmiet cleared her throat.

“Would you like more water, Sunmiet?” I asked, thinking I had heard her speak. When she did not answer, I turned to look at her.

She held her stomach, and I watched the color drain from her face. Her eyes were wide and I could not tell if it was in pain or surprise. “Is it the baby?” I asked, kneeling over her, the thump of my heart beating loud in my ears. A grimace of fear rippled across Sunmiet’s face.