A Sweetness to the Soul (3 page)

Frederic’s strange meanderings into those early ventures were mere side trips along his path, it seems. While the ship’s oak creaked, he told Joseph over late-night brandies in the captain’s quarters what it was that truly captured him, heart and soul. Frederic shipped ice. From the frozen lakes and streams of New England to the hot ports of New Orleans and across the ocean, to the West Indies, he carried frozen water.

“But how did he keep the ice? Not deliver just puddles of water?” I asked my husband, skeptically.

“Wood chips. And sawdust from the ship yards. And a special cooling system designed by a friend. He had lots of help from friends,” Joseph told me.

That a man could see in the familiar and the every day something that could be uniquely rearranged fascinated Joseph, and me, when he told me of it and I finally believed. Frederic had viewed the ordinary and with vision, made it extraordinary! Joseph had seen those same lakes and rivers all his life, thought about them only as they fit into the scenes around him, the way they drained an area, what life teemed within the ponds. In the winter, he thought little of them as frozen except when he brushed snow off a circle to skate about, pulled a fish out through a jagged hole in January, or shortened a trip by horseback because the frozen rivers were easily crossed. It never occurred to him to capture the winter of New England and sell it in the summer. Why, who knew what other sort of ordinary things could be converted into challenges of elements and skill? Who knew how changing the way we see things could also rearrange our lives?

The odds against Frederic’s success were enormous! He had to find caves or warehouses close to the ice for storage; locate sawdust to cover the blocks; load the frozen cubes onto the ships and keep them cold while riding the waves through the heat and the humidity. Frederic gambled always with the elements. And people. He had
to rely on efficient and expert help at several steps to prevent the precious cargo from perishing before one’s eyes. Then arriving in the hot cities of the south, he must have raced the heat, finding buyers quickly enough to outwit the sun. So many things could go wrong! Chance—if you believed in it—had many opportunities to deal the man disaster, but I suspect Frederic liked the challenge most of all.

In its time—the late 1850s—it was a remarkable vision and it doesn’t surprise me that Frederic sometimes punctuated his stories with the slap of his head and his deprecating comments that he was a “dumme Hund.” Joseph could repeat the gesture, German accent and all. But Frederic’s ideas were dogs that did hunt!

“He told me something else that sticks,” Joseph said as he relayed their encounter to me years later. “He was a happy man though not so much from the money he made as the effect of his ideas on the folks around him. Said he liked the sparkle in the eyes of children first time they saw ice or the look of surprise when grown men and women felt the cool of another world against the hot skin of their own. He didn’t have a family, I guess. At least he never mentioned them, but those kids sure liked him. He warned me not to let little minds or discouragement make my choices. ‘Dream,’ he said, ‘then mit faith, do.’ ”

Their encounter those years ago impacted Joseph greatly. He was terribly taken with Frederic’s mind, the way he converted the ordinary into something extraordinary. Their encounter truly set him to considering his life in a different way. From that moment on, Joseph sought his own ice adventure and stopped looking and started doing the moment he found it those years later at the falls.

S
ISTERS

J
oseph had a passel of brothers and sisters, all older. I suspect they indulged the child which probably accounts for his belief that he could do anything if he set his mind to it. Initially, he figured his successes were all his, not allowing for any help from heaven.

I relied on heaven earlier. My own childhood began as the second of six born to my mother who did not marry until she was nearly thirty. By the time I was two, I was an only child. My parents kept the memories of their first-born, Ambrose, tightly refuged in their hearts. He lived before me and then died. Ambrose had moved with us to Oregon from Virginia, of course, but before Rachel arrived, he’d already been laid to rest in the Fort Dalles cemetery. “First child buried there,” Papa said once then set his jaws whenever anyone mentioned his son’s name, and I noticed over time that no one did.

My first memory is that of hearing a baby cry. Flames rippled shadows like water on the cabin walls while I huddled on my bed and watched. Like the call of a distant red-tailed hawk, the crying pierced my thinking, agitated my thumb-sucking. Shriveled and white, my stubby thumb resembled the tapered end of a tallow candle, but it tasted like security to me. I popped it into my five-year-old mouth, but it didn’t stop the crying. The harder I sucked, the more
that baby cried and there was nothing happening behind that second-room door.

I was hot, though it was cold outside in the April night. Behind me, a hide-covered window kept the night air from slipping like a cold shadow over my shoulders. Pungent resin beaded on the warmed cabin logs. My dark hair stuck to my face and got caught on my thumb, some. Hound moaned under the bed and I knew I’d be in trouble if Mama or anyone else discovered I’d snuck him in for the night.

I needn’t have worried over Mama, being she was the one preparing to deliver. But on any other night, I wouldn’t have tested her. She was a giving woman, looked often after others, but she rode life with a firm hand on the reins and one didn’t consider putting an obstacle in her path lightly. Hound under the bed would have been an obstacle.

Without warning, Lodenma, the midwife, scurried out through Mama’s door and into the main room of the log house Papa had built at Fifteen Mile Crossing the second year we homesteaded in Oregon. Lodenma’s bending to the fire made the room darker for a minute. She wiped her hands on the long apron and dipped water from the caldron steaming in the fireplace. The water hissed as it hit the colder pan Lodenma came to fill. Her knuckles were large and red; working knuckles.

She turned to me, her thick braid swinging. She said with sternness: “See what you can do about the crying, Jane.” It seemed every adult could direct a child in those days, even if the adult was only thirteen which was all Lodenma was.

I felt frozen to the bed. I could smell the dusty corn husks beneath the thin muslin cover I sat on. They scratched my sunburned legs. I could hear the hissing and steaming at the fireplace—but I didn’t want to hear Lodenma tell me to stop my sister from crying. I didn’t know how!

“How is Mama?” I asked.

“She’s doing fine though she thinks not. Wish your Papa was here. Her harsh words are meant for him anyway.”

I thought about my Papa riding off on his big mule, dabbing
with a blue bandanna at his right eye socket. Water oozed from behind the marble that filled the space in his face that had once held an eye. “I wish Papa was here,” I said.

Lodenma grunted and redirected me to my crying little sister. “He’s not, so it’s up to you. Rachel’ll quiet. Just be with her.” Lodenma set the pan down for a minute then shooed her hands toward my direction, like clucking chickens into their pen. She watched me until I slid from the cornhusk mattress and began to move across the green and yellow planks of the floor that had once been our wagon bottom. I still sucked my thumb.

The sunburn stung. No one had thought to put bear grease on my legs. I was too tired after grubbing sagebrush all day to even notice that my dress had exposed my skinny legs to the hot Oregon sun. And Mama clearly had other things on her mind.

A little cloud of corn dust stirred around me as I waddled toward the cradle and the now hysterical toddler. Tears squeezed out from her eyes sealed in anger. Her face was chapped almost, from crying. I don’t think I ever saw such red, raw pain as I saw in my sister’s face, and I felt ashamed for my delay in coming to her aid. I gave her the only thing I could think of that might comfort her: my thumb.

Looking back, I realize Rachel was just then learning to drink cow’s milk instead of Mama’s which added to her distress. How hard it must have been to have regular suckling suddenly cease.

I bent to Rachel and talked in little sounds she always liked when Mama did it. “It’s a-right,” I said, “It’s a-right.” Leaning almost backward, I circled my arms around her, her face to mine. Despair dribbled from her nose. Her dress trailed down and caught between my legs and I barely made it to the bed before flopping her down. That startled her I think because she stopped crying, her brown eyes staring up into my blue ones. I always remembered that: Startling someone could bring them out of their fit.

So Rachel turned quiet when I dropped beside her and put my arm around her shoulder and we both sat staring at the closed door that kept us from our mother.

Lodenma grunted approval then left us girls to return to the matter at hand: My mother, Elizabeth Herbert, was about to give birth to her fourth child in six years.

Sister Pauline was born that April night of my first memory and it was her crying behind that closed door I remember next. I’d just settled one child down and another popped up distressed! When she scurried out of the second-room door, Lodenma told our wondering faces that the baby’s crying made good sense, told all of us she was alive.

By then, I wasn’t sure if Papa was. He wasn’t anywhere around. He said he had to ride to Dalles City, to talk with men about more land and whatnot. Mama said he was “barkin’ at a knot” with all that land talk, that he should just take care of the 639 acres we already had. But I suspect hearing her hurtin’ in childbirth might have sent him on his way. And he had “interests” he said, giving him an excuse to be gone.

Mama said men always had important, busy things to do and women were to help them, stand behind them. In return, men would provide for them. She said Scripture confirmed that.

I suppose I thought it wise counsel until I learned to read and found all those ads placed by husbands for their runaway wives who apparently now resided somewhere in the territory. They offered good money for their return! Some folks even made a living finding and returning them. And I wondered: If they were taking such good care of their women, why’d their women leave?

Mama never left Papa, of course. But he left her that night, though Lodenma said he laid the swaddling clothes out for the newborn just before he rode out, something I think a less loving man would fail to do.

Mama usually had the last word and did that day too before Papa headed out on the mule.

On the morning after Pauline’s arrival, Mama sent me out to gather up the milk cow. At dawn, when the earth has that murky underwater
look, I headed out. My bare feet left little impressions on the frosty ground. Precious, our old cow, let me catch her up after some deception on my part (I put pebbles in a bucket to let her think it was grain!). As I milked, the sun came up pink over the grasslands and sagebrush, spread like a blush toward the timbered hills behind our farm. I burrowed my head into the warmth of Precious’s side. She didn’t even kick or dance when I warmed my hands in the clammy space between her udder and her leg.

The rhythm of the liquid with its distinctive scent as it made its way up the sides of the pail almost put me to sleep. I was tired from having Rachel’s feet in my back most of the night. Precious woke me up. She swatted her manure-stained tail at my face and dropped a glob of green into the milk. “Precious!” I complained wiping the slime from my cheek, “now I’ll have to strain it!”

Whining at the cow about the extra work she’d given me made me miss what Rachel did. That little one slipped from the house in the dawn and headed to the paddock, toward the mules. I heard Miss Em, the big black mule, snort with flared nostrils then move with quick-quick trots across the field, her target sure. Only then did I see Rachel crawling, approaching the split rails. In slow motion I stood, yelled at her, my heart pounding against my ribs. “Rachel! Wait! Please don’t go in there!” I shouted. “Please, God, make her stop to think,” I prayed. She stopped just long enough to toss her sassy head at me then bent to slip between the rails. Miss Em, true to a mule’s nature of disliking little things, came charging toward the small intruder and I saw disaster in the making.

But Providence intervened where my short, skinny legs could not.

Rachel’s smock caught on the split rail bark long enough for me to catch her up and launch into a lecture, as I’d seen my mama do often enough, until we heard Papa’s mule. Miss Em tipped her ears toward her herd mate, no longer caring about the paddock’s threatened invasion by two little girls.

“Papa’s home. Maybe he brought us something,” I said to distract Rachel, relief gobbling up my scold.

She sniffled and we walked hand in hand to the milk pail and then to Papa as he tied his mule to the post. He didn’t ask why we were up so early. He said nothing even when I told him the good news that we had another sister. A funny look crossed his face, like the mule had just stepped on his toe. But he wiped his watery right eye and finally said: “A thorn I am among my roses.” He stroked my hair with his wide hands, absently, as though I wasn’t there.