A Sweetness to the Soul (41 page)

“No doubt she could be happier,” I said, “without wolves at her door or the fear of some well-meaning person swooping in to take her children.” I didn’t mean to sound harsh nor to describe myself in the process, but there it was.

“You’re right on that,” Blivens said, contrite. He glanced at his wife who wore open trust on her face, looked adoringly at her husband. “And I would give what I could to make it different. But it isn’t.” He poured the tea for us in a single tin cup which we shared and passed between us. “So we will do what we can and hope the authorities will see our good intentions rather than our current circumstance.”

“They’re not likely to,” Joseph told him. “Word is, you’re risking your children to the elements. Especially with the babe. There’ll be a move to change that, with you or without. This weather shifts for worse and the sheriff’ll be here faster than a flash flood to separate your family.”

Benito spoke now, suggesting he bring in some of the foodstuffs in the wagon.

“Good idea,” Joseph said. “You’re welcome to spend time with us, till spring.” He looked across the small room at me, checking where my thoughts were.

“We don’t live that far away,” I added, “and it would only be for a short time.” My husband nodded his agreement to me. “We have plenty of room and love having children—and their parents—don’t we Joseph?”

“That we do,” he said softly, and I watched his face take on its idea look.

“We daren’t leave here,” Blivens said. “We risk losing the land.”

“Let the children come, then,” I said. “And Eleanor, with the baby.”

Into the silence that followed Joseph said: “We’ll bring some things in while you think on it.”

We three visitors bent through the tent flap and stepped out into the greater cold. “What they need,” Benito said as he pulled on his gloves, spit through his teeth, “is not all this food, but a safe roof.”

“Yes,” Joseph said, “and if he’ll let us, I know a way to give it. If you’ll agree, Janie,” he said, pulling me into his side as we walked.

And when I knew of it, I couldn’t help but agree.

So it came about that Eleanor Blivens and her husband, Ray, a former singing teacher from Illinois, and their five surprised children spent the next few weeks not in our home but in watching, and as they could, participating, in the raising of their own.

It took some convincing on Joseph’s part to get Blivens to accept our offer, pride holding him back, his disbelief that no conditions were attached to such generosity. But once accepted, Blivens was agush with appreciation, speaking, he said, for both him and his Eleanor. “We have never had such a gift,” he said. “And will never be able to repay you.”

“Not expected,” Joseph told him more than once. “We’ve the pleasure of giving and the hope that it will be returned, pressed down, shaken together, as Scripture says.”

It was a great event, the very best way to begin a new year.

Joseph had milled lumber delivered from Tygh Valley, carried by a string of double freighters that included J. W. as a driver, up the grade to Wamic.

Getting the lumber took the longest. We built the bunkhouse shelter first to house the men. Then with Joseph as their architect and guide, Ray and Benito and several of our buckaroos along with the Pratts and others from Tygh Valley who learned of the plan, formed the frame and stood the walls of the Blivenses’ two story, four bedroom home.

It was too far for us to travel back and forth, so Joseph dug out one of Strauss’s tents and he and I stayed not far from Three Mile Creek while Eleanor and I cooked in it on a sheepherder’s stove to feed the men who built the house.

We had a day or two of cold drizzle that sogged the lumber and slowed us, but then the sun came out and you would have thought it April instead of January so warm did it beat on the workmen and us.

I had not expected to experience such pride in watching the house go up. I had thought I’d feel sadness that my hope for the children to live with us had been so quickly dashed. To my credit, I was wrong about myself. Watching their faces as each square nail made its mark; laughing with them as we baked pasties in the small oven of their lean-to; holding baby Eleanor after her feeding, sinking into the liquid of her eyes, all gave me such richness of feeling I failed to notice what I thought I’d lost.

Joseph became thoroughly engaged in his own creation. And when he thought the building moved too slowly, he sent Benito to the reservation. His right-hand man returned with Peter and George and several other young men, eager to put their shoulders to the effort. Joseph paid them a fair wage as he did his own men who initially shied away from the Indians. Finding them hard workers and good followers of directions—with Peter and George to interpret from the common Chinookan language spoken by so many—the buckaroos formed a bond with the Warm Springs people and the Wascos who entered into change.

Such a mixed crew made swift work of the Blivenses’ home.

Sunmiet rode over with her children, her latest bounced swaddled
in the cradleboard carried at the withers of her horse. She did not speak of Standing Tall and I did not mention him. She and Eleanor communicated with their hands while I shook my head in wonder. We laughed together, watching the Blivens children and her own make games and play together.

Sunmiet honored me with her observation: “You live always with children,” she said, “even if not of your own. Maybe you have more family than most.”

The day the Blivenses moved into their home, they prepared to spread blankets on the floor as beds for the children, but Joseph and I had another surprise for them. We unloaded from the freighters rope beds with down mattresses for each child and a double one for the Blivenses. Eleanor kept shaking her head in wonder, squeezing my hands in appreciation, almost floating as she spun around the wood floor of her home. “We did not get the cradle yet,” I told her, gently patting the infant snoozing on my shoulder as we stood in their home. “It was promised, not delivered.” She moved her hands in the air to mean, “Fine, fine, this is too much.”

“I have cradle,” Peter said, overhearing us as he carried items from their tent to home. “From my people. One like my mother make for me.”

He created for her a hammock, with two hemp ropes strung parallel across a corner of the kitchen. He wrapped a blanket around the lines in the center forming a child’s cradle. He kept the lines separated with a frame of willow in the shape of an oval, covered with the blankets. With some caution, Eleanor laid her baby in the center of the oval and its soft form sunk into the womb of the cloth. “Push,” Peter said, directing, and Eleanor gently pushed the ropes as the baby rocked at her mother’s shoulder height. She floated there, like a feather in the wind, hung above the clatter of children and activity but with a bird’s eye view of the world.

“Here,” Sunmiet said, putting the finishing touches on a memorable event. She reached for her own child’s cradleboard. “Hang this
from the hammock,” she said and removed the dreamcatcher with its oval frame. “For her bad dreams to be caught in the web and her good dreams to call to her in the morning.”

“And a prayer,” I said. “That God will honor her dreams and give her a sweetness to the soul.”

And so it was that Baby Eleanor spent her first night in the Blivenses’ new home asleep in the gift of the Warm Springs people with God’s blessings to keep her warm.

We did not give up on seeking a family of our own, but the pressure lessened. Joseph noticed my increased comfort. As if to honor it, in February he gifted me with my first Esther Howland handcrafted valentine, all covered with cut lace and flowers straight from Massachusetts. I’d had valentines from my school chums and little paper ones from my Joseph. But this one was elaborately designed, had been ordered up special, for me. I was delighted, a joy that continued when Joseph surprised me again later, with the rail tickets and my first visit to his New York.

“Is it a good time to leave?” I asked him, being practical when he would have me just accept. We sat in the dusk of the long July evening. I looked at my watch. Still light at 8:00
P.M
. We both rocked gently in the wicker chairs set on the porch to look onto the creek that disappeared toward the Deschutes in a tangle of willows and weeds.

“Benito can manage it. We’ll be gone but six weeks.”

“Maybe we should ask to take Anna’s children, or even Ella.”

Joseph shook his head. “You’d best put that girl from your mind. She belongs to your mother now and that’s how it’s to be.” He took my small hand in his, rubbed my palm gently. “This is our trip. The one I promised you the day we wed and you refused to take. Wanted Canyon City instead, remember?”

“I remember. It would be fun though, to see your world through a child’s eyes.” We sat serenaded by crickets. “Guess I’m a little wary
of meeting your brother after all these years, wondering what he’ll think of a mere girl but twenty-one. And all your other brothers and sisters.”

“Old enough to keep me in line,” Joseph said “so I imagine they’ll adore you as I do. Only way to find out is to go.”

And so we did, making our way with our leather satchels, riding all nature of vehicles from stagecoach to train including a nervous sleep in one of Mr. Pullman’s new cars. Joseph promised me tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an afternoon watching the newly formed Cincinnati Red Stockings play baseball against a New York team. He kept his promises.

A million sights and sounds made their imprint on me, an impressionable young wife in the presence of her handsome, older husband. I even spent the money Joseph gave me to indulge myself finding first a dress salon that fitted my small body with the latest striped silk fashion adding an ostrich feather hat and parasol to match. Next, I kept an appointment with a photographer who made my likeness. Later in the week, with the new photograph in hand, I headed for Tiffany’s where the gentlest of men in a fine black suit with subdued ascot smiled profusely, spoke with the softest lisp, and patted my hand gently before he found me a silver watch to fit the picture. A chain and fob and the engraving completed my afternoon’s adventure.

“You look like the pupil who’s outsmarted her teacher,” Joseph said as he escorted me across a profusion of color and design into the dining room at the Grand Hotel.

His eyes admired me and he held my half-gloved hand just a moment before he kissed my fingers then helped me ease the fullness of my dress over the chair. “New York agrees with you,” he said, smiling. “I almost hate to take you north, afraid the distance will tarnish some of the glow.”

“Oh, pooh!” I said. “I’d glow wherever I’m with you. What are we having?” I asked, referring to the menu.

“Cracked crab, dipped in drawn butter. The perfect meal to test
a new whalebone corset. Though I can’t imagine why you didn’t wait until Nicholville. To have one made at the shop.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “I’d never ask your brother for such an item.” Then whispered, “How did you know?”

He returned my whisper, leaning toward me at the table. “Your waist is even smaller than when you left this morning. And you’re having trouble breathing.”

“The shallow breathing is because you would choose to bring up so delicate a subject in a public place,” I chided him. “And you should recognize the waist whether surrounded by whale bones or not.” I sat straight, away from his intimate posture. “You’ve held it often enough.”

“Ah, the sassy one is back,” he said, throwing his head back in laughter. “Let’s eat!”

Our trip was filled with the delights of a honeymooning couple, and several people commented to us about our “recent” marriage. At one cafe we took coffee, sat close together, our faces shadowed by the brim of my ostrich-plumed hat. A waiter brought us each a dish of ice cream, the vanilla bean so fragrant it must have just arrived from Mexico. “For the newly married,” he said in a loud voice. “Compliments of the gentleman at the far table.” He gestured and we both smiled appreciatively at the elderly man who sat behind a red checkered tablecloth and nodded our way. The small crowd had heard the waiter’s declaration and applauded lightly, their gloved hands the sounds of rain drops on the roof over our Oregon home.

Joseph said he felt like a young boy instead of a man approaching thirty-six. His eyes watered when I handed him the Tiffany box and with one thumb he opened it to see my likeness. He read the engraving, the opposite of the words he’d placed on mine. “Your wedding gift,” I said. “After all these years.”

“You’re the gift,” he told me. “I’ve never wanted for more.”

I savored his words and didn’t immediately notice that he looked hesitant.

“What is it?” I asked, fearing something.

“I had planned to wait,” he said. “To give this to you in Nicholville. But I think now’s the time.” From his pocket, he lifted a thin box wider than the palm of his large hand. It too, was embossed with “Tiffany’s.”

“What have you done?” I asked, pleased. He motioned me to open it and when I looked inside, my heart nearly stopped. There, wider than my thumb nail and half my height in length was a solid gold chain. A large purple amethyst intertwined it and moved up and down it like a bola. The chain held something else: a watch of heavy, shining gold that opened for two portraits.

“It can be pinned,” he said, excited about the engineering of it. “And then the watch hangs from it.” A smaller chain connected the watch to a dress pin over my pocket while my breast would be laced with links of gold.

“It’s stunning,” I said, breathless. “I … I don’t know what to say. It’s so lavish, so unique, so delicate, strong, all at once.”

“As are you,” he said.

I turned the watch over, sure there would be an inscription. “All my love, always, JHS to JAS.”

“I could find no stronger sentiments,” he said, “than love and truth.”

And so we spent our holiday lost in love and laughter. At least most of it.

We did venture into the wood-paneled offices of specialists in female disorders. Most prodded through my new silk clothes and asked questions. “You’re young,” they all said. “No reason for you not to conceive. Give it time. Take warm baths.” Others said the same about my youth, but told me to soak in cool water three times a day, take naps, and most definitely indulge less in physical labor. I did not ask them their opinions of regular riding in the rugged ravines of Tygh Ridge.